Try to imagine yourself as an older Republican. (Obviously you are white and you have a penis.) You have long believed R's to be the responsible ones, the moral ones, the ones who will do the right thing even when it's hard.

You remember your heroes: Eisenhower and Reagan, the Bush's? Right? You knew that they would "take care of us" while all the crazy tree huggers and hippies wanted to buy the world a Coke and and give all your money to poor people and immigrants!
...and how was THAT gonna teach them to pull themselves up by the boot straps and make something of themselves like YOU DID??
After all, this is the land of opportunity, RIGHT? Everyone has the same chance to be successful and PROSPEROUS, right???
You did it all with NO HELP--ALL BY YOURSELF, DIDN'T YOU. I mean, the G.I. Bill didn't do all that MUCH!
Rich people were taxed at 70%, and that was OK with you because you weren't one. *YET*
Just because the cost of living was MINISCULE compared to now, and you got a spiffy new job with a company car and paid health insurance, and a freaking house you BOUGHT ALL BY YOURSELF for 25 thousand freaking dollars,
...and you had no damn cell phone bill!! You didn't have to PAY to watch TELEVISION, gas was $.40 a gallon, HELL, you could even drive around with a BEER in the evenings. Take your kids on a "ride" to look at the rich people's neighborhoods, because YOU were gonna be there too,
REALLY SOON! RIGHT??
In fact, things were going SO WELL, for SO LONG, you almost didn't even need to pay attention to POLITICS! BECAUSE REPUBLICANS ALWAYS DO THE RIGHT THING! They are the "Moral Majority" and things will be SO MUCH EASIER for you if you just
I mean--GET THE FUCK IN LINE and fly right!

JESUS! THIS IS NOT THAT HARD.

JUST DO IT. FFS!!
Have some SELF-DISCIPLINE!!!

Well. I hate to break it to you, but they weren't the good guys then, and they aren't now.
Now I'm not saying that conservatives haven't ever done anything good. They have! Lots of things! They were the yin to the liberal yang! Both equal! Both wanted a great country, they just had different ideas about how to get there and stay there!
Well I hate to break it to you, but it ain't like that. It wasn't even like that THEN. While your happy ass was building A Life, people were suffering and struggling. The whole time. Yep. But you didn't see them, and didn't have to worry about them, really--did you?
All your heroes told you that BOTH SIDES wanted to run shit in the USA, and they were pretty evenly matched. Evenly HUMAN, ultimately. Two sides of the same coin.
There were good and bad people on BOTH SIDES, but they were AMERICANS, AND WOULDN'T DO ANYTHING LIKE WHAT Y'ALL
ARE TALKING ABOUT. THEY JUST WOULDN'T.

Well guess what? People really are as evil as they are allowed to be, unchecked. They try to be good. They go to CHURCH, and pay their TAXES, and go the speed limit, and donate to THE SALVATION ARMY, OK???
But when stupid amounts of money and power are part of the equation, dangled enticingly just beyond your reach, you tell yourself that this one little thing can't be so bad if it helps you get there. Right?
Well, those little things that aren't "so bad" follow an exponential path. It starts off with a couple of little white lies on your tax return, and culminates with
--SUPPORTING A MOBSTER PRESIDENT WHO TRIED TO ASSASSINATE HIS OWN VICE PRESIDENT--
Now I won't re-hash how we got here. I'll just say we got here because you stopped paying attention, and THEY KNEW THIS.
They knew that you trusted then and believed in them NO MATTER WHAT.
So they decided to go for it. And here we are. These people have tasted the good life and endless power, and have been promised EVEN MORE if they just STAY IN LINE AND NEVER WAVER. TRUST THE PROCESS.
These people are dead inside. They are all in and can't get out. Their minds and their hearts are twisted, and the truth is do evil that they can't even acknowledge it anymore themselves. Not even in the deepest parts of their hearts and souls.
Because to to that, you'd have to admit, even if only to yourself, that THIS ISN'T RIGHT.

Here's the root of the root, and the bud of the bud: THEY CAN'T.

UNTIL THIS IS UNDERSTOOD, THEY WILL CONTINUE ALONG THEIR PATH,
AND FUCK ANYONE WHO STANDS IN THEIR WAY. FUCK. ANYONE.
I hope to God it's not too late. I think we still have a chance. We can DO THIS. We still can, if you will just WAKE UP.

PLEASE WAKE UP. WE NEED YOU.

Thanks in advance,
Sincerely,
The World

More from Life

THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)
1/“What would need to be true for you to….X”

Why is this the most powerful question you can ask when attempting to reach an agreement with another human being or organization?

A thread, co-written by @deanmbrody:


2/ First, “X” could be lots of things. Examples: What would need to be true for you to

- “Feel it's in our best interest for me to be CMO"
- “Feel that we’re in a good place as a company”
- “Feel that we’re on the same page”
- “Feel that we both got what we wanted from this deal

3/ Normally, we aren’t that direct. Example from startup/VC land:

Founders leave VC meetings thinking that every VC will invest, but they rarely do.

Worse over, the founders don’t know what they need to do in order to be fundable.

4/ So why should you ask the magic Q?

To get clarity.

You want to know where you stand, and what it takes to get what you want in a way that also gets them what they want.

It also holds them (mentally) accountable once the thing they need becomes true.

5/ Staying in the context of soliciting investors, the question is “what would need to be true for you to want to invest (or partner with us on this journey, etc)?”

Multiple responses to this question are likely to deliver a positive result.
"I lied about my basic beliefs in order to keep a prestigious job. Now that it will be zero-cost to me, I have a few things to say."


We know that elite institutions like the one Flier was in (partial) charge of rely on irrelevant status markers like private school education, whiteness, legacy, and ability to charm an old white guy at an interview.

Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)

It's refreshing to hear a senior administrator admits to personally opposing policies that attempt to remedy these basic flaws. These are flaws that harm his institution's ability to do cutting-edge research and to serve the public.

Harvard is being eclipsed by institutions that have different ideas about how to run a 21st Century institution. Stanford, for one; the UC system; the "public Ivys".

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