With so much going on in the world beyond our control and maybe more importantly our increased access to news about those events, we need a way to process things that we can’t influence, but that may impact us anyway. Stoicism can provide that in an increasingly secular society, where it used to be religion.

Well you got my entire backstory created. I’d ask you to roll me for stats now, but I don’t think you are playing with a full set of dice.

I can’t believe you spent that much energy creating an identity for me in your head.

Jews are native to that area and it’s not a race thing. If we can’t agree on those two facts then we have no basis for discussion.

But is that any worse than defaulting to the side with less power? At the end of the day if you have to side with one or the other, whoever happens to have power at the time seems like pretty arbitrary criteria. If instead Israel were the lesser power being bullied by a powerful Palestine, would you side with Israel? How about if Nazi Germany were getting bullied by Western powers, would you side with them? It wouldn’t make sense because Nazis are very obviously the bad guys. Anyway it’s not just about power.

Glad we can finally get back to hating big pharma. They are a bunch of greedy opportunists, and always were.

I hate smoking stock photos. Clearly she has never smoked in her life.

Hah! I remember reddit

Centrists exist because they listen to alternative views and can empathize with those views even if they don’t quite agree with them or if they can’t decide between the pros and cons. But to an extremist on either side, it looks like they are stupid, weak, or possibly just bad people, because if they were smart, Good people, then the centrists would OBVIOUSLY agree with THEM, and then they wouldn’t be centrists. This lacking of empathy or inability to understand opposing viewpoints, and therefore assuming malice or evil as the motive of anyone not WITH them, is the hallmark of all extremists.

Oh yeah, also people hate centrists because they come across as smug. Sorry about that.

Do you actually believe this? I know a lot of conservatives, some more extreme than others, but none of them envision this kind of world, not even the ones that wanted to be at the Capitol on Jan 6. It’s contrary to virtually all Christian, conservative values. The whole premise of this story wouldn’t even hold up unless there were an extreme event causing a massive shortage of fertile women. In that case, there is no telling what kind of dystopia would emerge. Frank Herbert wrote “The White plague” in 1982 (a couple years before the handmaid’s tale), where women were nearly wiped out altogether, and it plays out similar in some respects, wildly different in others. In any event, it’s not a “goal” of any sane person, and certainly not the goal of half of the country.

The main problem with this book is in how it is applied by various people to Christianity in general (as opposed to a fringe cult), or used as an analogy of events today. It might apply in some cases, but those are so rare and unusual (back woods polygamist cults and the like), that they really don’t deserve to be discussed in context of current politics.