"This election is about JD Vance."

William Lindsey :toad:

@drwho Absolutely. Teflon.

William Lindsey :toad:

@nosmaharba I would think so.

William Lindsey :toad:

@ZhiZhu Yes.

William Lindsey :toad:

@ZhiZhu "Trump is sundowning, and his handlers are trying to hide it": yes, I think that's exactly what's going on.

William Lindsey :toad:

@AmbularD Yes. When my generation is gone, a living link to that history will vanish. I grew up hearing stories from and about my uncles who helped liberate Europe from Nazi tyranny, and about my father and his service in the Pacific, including being at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed. The living link I provide as someone who heard the stories will be gone when I and my generation members are gone.

Snigdha

@wdlindsy I couldn't resist!

William Lindsey :toad:

@snigdha

Cindy Weinstein

@wdlindsy @ZhiZhu

When misfolded proteins spread.

Thad

@wdlindsy The part where it says "Such a huge mission will effectively redefine the purpose of law enforcement: the principle is no longer to make all people feel safe, but to make some people feel unsafe" would seem to imply that the purpose of law enforcement is to make all people feel safe, and if its purpose were to make some people unsafe, that would be a change.

If that's not what he meant, then fair enough.

Peter Brown

@wdlindsy if Biden had been forced to stand down after taking office, Harris would have taken over and the Republican reactionaries certainly didn’t want that.

But when Trump is declared unfit it will be Vance who takes over which is exactly what they want. Hence the howls of anguish about Biden and the studied silence over Trump..

AmbularD

@wdlindsy Some of us leading-edge Gen Xers who had older parents got the stories from our elders, too. But there aren't that many of us, I think. I do what I can.

William Lindsey :toad:

@AmbularD Yes, it's inevitable and also tragic that the passing of each generation removes the next generations a step further from the lived past. I grew up hearing my three grandparents who were living when I was a boy and teen tell me stories of their parents, which included their parents' memories of living through the Civil War. With the passing of my grandparents' generation, that living link to mid-19th-century history left us….

William Lindsey :toad:

@peterbrown Yes, so it seems to me — the game plan.

William Lindsey :toad:

@Thad To me, the operative word there is "purpose." The purpose for which something is created is often belied and contradicted by the practice to which that something is put. I would think that as an outstanding historian, Timothy Snyder knows very well that in practice, law has often been used in the US in precise contradiction of its purpose. This is why I think he's stressing and defending the purpose for which law exists.

William Lindsey :toad:

@cindyweinstein @ZhiZhu Interesting graphic. It makes me ask what my mother's brain looked like as her dementia increased. In her case, the cause was sadly apparent: she spent her final years moving into very serious alcoholism, suicidal alcoholism, and that lifestyle could not have any effect on the brain except a deleterious one.

Thad

@wdlindsy Perhaps. I would argue that what we like to tell each other the purpose of the police is, and what their purpose actually is, are very different things, that making a portion of the populace feel unsafe is and always has been their purpose and this isn't a change in purpose, just a removal of a fig leaf.

But maybe the distinction doesn't really matter for purposes of this discussion. The end result is the same. Overt white supremacist law enforcement.

William Lindsey :toad:

@Thad I continue to read Timothy Snyder with great interest because he's a highly informed, thoughtful historian who keeps sounding the siren on behalf of human liberation and against oppression.

Cindy Weinstein

@wdlindsy
@ZhiZhu

William, I am so sorry about your mother. I am not a neurologist (I studied it for a year to write the memoir of my father's early-onset Alzheimer's with Dr. Bruce Miller, a neurologist at UCSF), but I am aware of a kind of dementia that can be caused by alcoholism. Maybe you know about it? It's called Korsakoff's syndrome. But most importantly, I am sorry.

William Lindsey :toad:

@cindyweinstein @ZhiZhu You're right, Korsakoff's syndrome. Doctors told me her dementia was caused by multi-infarct episodes, but it was apparent to me that her self-destructive drinking, which accelerated so much in the final part of her life especially after my brother died of alcoholism in her care was at the root of it all. Thank you for your sympathy. I appreciate it.