We live in a time that people are more inclined to obey an unlawful executive order than they are to follow a court order 🤦🏾♀️.
Dictators are created due to cruelty, cowardice, & compliance! IF THEIR ASSES will ignore the Supreme Court, we can definitely IGNORE HIM!
🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻 MUST LISTEN
staffers are still cleaning up the Kristi Noem mess after she got gutted/filleted by Senator Chris Murphy
The elevation of Pope Leo XIV is a profound and historic occasion. Like so many around the world, I am praying for him and wishing him and the Church well as his papacy begins.
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So let me get this straight, we finally get an American pope, and some of the America first crowd is mad because he cares about the poor and immigrants. Am i missing something here?
Amazing the number of parallels to the present day.
Another thing that always amazed me about this essay was how modern so much of it sounds. Plain speaking, simple words, direct thoughts, rationally organized. The circumlocutions so often found in documents of the day are minimized here. Even the Declaration of Independence is not as easy to read as this essay. It’s brilliant. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
it's very deliberately written in the Plain Style of its era. the register is a lot less formal than, say, the Founding Documents because they deliberately utilize a much more formal (even ceremonial) style. Paine's works (especially "Common Sense") weren't bestsellers for no reason.
I suppose these parallels, which are very real, exist because some of these questions were never settled in their time.
but the main takeaway for me every time I read Paine is that the greatest number of potential readers would have real difficulty with this very plain prose. most high school kids I'm exposed to today might be extremely "bright," but have received too much of their "training" as readers from screens. I know some very bright kids in their early twenties who are well-informed and well-read but can count the number of physical, printed-on-paper books in a codex format on one or two hands.
we've gone over this territory so many times (and it's LATE), there's no reason to do so again right now.
but thanks for the reminder of how it used to be, Tom.
