THREAD: On Jewish Atheism. People frequently ask whether you can be a Jew and be an atheist. When speaking to Jews about atheism, Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi would famously say “I don’t believe in the same God you don’t believe in.” This is the basis of my answer. 0/

I’m contemplating leaving @twitter. The platform has proven to be instrumental in harming people with marginalized identities, which normally I wouldn’t blame a media platform for except that @jack has demonstrated negative interest in doing anything about it.

in the past when I’ve thought about this I’ve thought about it from the perspective of my own safety/comfort. And I’m good on that front; I can handle it. But now I’m thinking about it differently: thinking about the people who tell me they join or stay on twitter because of me.

Every time someone in the press refers to me as a “twitter celebrity” (actual phrase that I don’t fully understand or subscribe to but this is what people say) it means that my presence and voice are adding social cachet to a company that I find to be quite terrible.

People tell me that they learn a lot from what I have to say here, and sometimes that it’s their first or only exposure to certain ideas, histories, perspectives, etc. and I have to weigh that too. But I could post that stuff elsewhere.

We’ll see. I’m just thinking aloud for now but I’m watching closely to see what @twitter and @jack do in the coming days and how they respond to what we now know about Cesar Sayoc (beyond one really stupid tweet). Because we know it’s not just him. Big changes need to happen.

Offered a guy a ride from Yaba to Obalende this morning. Just as we're approaching Alagomeji, uncle asked me if he can drive. Said he's not comfortable being driven by a woman. I parked and told him to come and take the wheel. Once he got down, I just zoomed off. Arrant nonsense

Funny thing is the guy is quite young. He can't be more than 25. How can someone that young have this sort of mentality?

I actually did not think that the guy could have wanted to get away with my car at the time. Now that I think of it though, that's a big possibility. We need to be careful out there. These thieves now have different ways of operating

Having spent 2020 telling covid denalists that they were overly optimistic about the pandemic, I now look forward to spending 2021 telling covid maximalists that they are overly pessimistic about the end of the pandemic.

Telling a denialist in May that we shouldn't open bars back up = telling a maximalist in February that we should open schools back up.

Look, folks, the math is straightforward. ~13% of Americans have been vaccinated as of this

And the 7 day average continues to rise; we're approach 2 million vaccine doses per day. Meaning that we'll double that ~13% much faster than the two months it took us to get there.

So it's entirely reasonable that absent any other intervention, we should expect to hit ~30% vaccinated by the end of March.

One wonders how long Lord Frost will retain his new position. The personnel decisions made by the PM are nothing if not frequent, ruthless and mercurial.

The whole affair is very curious. While I am sure that Lord Frost’s elevation owes much to his relationship with the PM and the perceived success of the Brexit negotiation, it is very curious indeed that allegedly it took a threat to resign to secure this new role.

A role which is needed (although might have been structured differently) but was to a large effect previously undertaken (with reasonable success) by Michael Gove who one might imagine may not be entirely happy with this diminishment of his responsibilities.

What might have happened to have resulted in this dramatic and to some extent destructive move (which appears to have been played out in the context of a wider struggle that saw Oliver Lewis (previously Lord Frost’s (LF) negotiation deputy)?

The original sin, of course, is the agreement to the Northern Ireland Protocol. Who knows who did what to who or thought what about what but my speculation is the PM either did not understand the consequences of the Protocol or was assured they could be successfully addressed.