I love this notion from @FrankBruni's book "The Beauty of Dusk": Everyone should carry a poster advertising their personal frailties: how genuinely sympathetic we'd be!
โImagine that our hardships, our hurdles, our demons, our pain were spelled out for everyone around us to see.โ
- Pro-Life will never concede that a mother's rights supersede her fetus's.
- Pro-Choice will never concede that a first-trimester fetus has rights.
- Irreconcilable because no agreement on definition of "personhood."
- Only resolution is abortion access legislation. Then vote.
Considering the reaction to the over-turning of Roe, the dearth of deep legal analysis and the scant attention paid to the urgent need to fill the legislative gap exposed by Roe's overturn, I love this line of @gerardtbaker in @WSJ:
"Demagogues gonna demagogue."
If legislation to guarantee access emboldens the anti-abortionists, bring it on - let's have that dialogue and let democracy dictate the result. America is a perfect example of what happens when a legislative gap is ignored by cowardly politicians.
#AbortionIsHealthcare
I rarely disagree with the brilliant @picardonhealth but I don't accept his premise that introducing legislation in Canada to guarantee access to abortion "can serve as a platform for opponents to launch attacks, and protections can be whittled down"...1/3
https://t.co/UTJ18NYAm9
While conceding that access is not consistent, he argues "when, where and how should be determined in a patient-practitioner dialogue." But why should women be captive to the morality of a particular doctor (since many don't accept abortion as a legit medical procedure)? 2/3
I wrote in @TorontoStar 7 mos ago:
"Letโs learn from the American experience...abortion should not be left to the courts to wrestle with...it should be governed by a clear legislative initiative to secure the right to abortion in statute."
#abortionrights
https://t.co/Kj88Lcfj0R
I like the balanced realism of @TheEconomist's entreaty for the climate change agenda:
"Politicians need to tell voters that their desire for an energy transition that eschews both fossil fuels and nuclear power is a dangerous illusion."
https://t.co/WrAlIgxWUt
"An unsurpassing self-assurance in their own moral and intellectual wisdom isnโt allowed to be punctured by the complex inexplicability of the real world. So to maintain the patina of omniscience they must fit the story into one of their narratives."
I'm truly sympathetic to the media's challenge of making sense of complicated issues. Nonetheless, I think @gerardtbaker nails the problem of grotesque oversimplification of extraordinarily complex phenomena in this harsh but eloquent quote ...
In a complex world, leadership is defined by the ability to orchestrate deep, revealing and generative discussion. In other words ...
#Leadership#Leaders#LeadershipDevelopment
Good point from @Peggynoonannyc: if the "gun lobby" argues that a mental illness crisis is the source of mass shootings (not guns per se), the question remains: why we would put an AR-15 in the hands of an 18-yr-old diagnosed with mental illness?
#TexasSchoolMassacre
"We expect the universe to at least be
co-operative, if not actually cater to our needs. But no such contract was ever signed, no verbal agreement was offered; in fact, the universe has never even hinted at caring, let alone compromising."
- from Hard To Be Human
The psychiatrist/author Mark Epstein (@Mepstein108) makes an important distinction: our complaints can be VALID but UNREALISTIC. I may legitimately feel entitled to more courtesy (or fairness or sympathy), but that doesn't mean it's realistic to expect it. So I need to calibrate.
Nice encapsulation of the American political landscape from @Peggynoonanny:
"Republicans are afraid of the Trumpers. Democrats are afraid of the progressives. Both parties fear large parts of their base."
Canadian politics not far off (eg. Conservative Party leadership race).
@Philosophos87 Superbly argued and superbly written. I've circulated to a number of colleagues. You've articulated the problem succinctly and convincingly. Congratulations.
"Idle talk was philosopher Martin Heideggerโs term for inauthentic discourse. It involves adopting and circulating othersโ opinions ... without personally engaging that thing for yourself, whatever that entails: researching a topic, thinking through an idea, or reading a book."
Excellent piece by Allen Porter (@Philosophos87) in @WSJ taking aim at why social discourse and much journalism is failing us today.
https://t.co/N8tuUTC9Ae