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You are viewing stuff tagged with twitter.
If you attempt to explain why you should vote to help others while exempting morality and selflessness (which can quickly veer into the tautological) from your argument, you’d be left with an argument from selfishness:
Why are you “owed” a police force, why are you owed a fire department, why are you owed clean water or electricity, why are you owed laws that protect your ideas through patents or copyrights, why are you owed anything you enjoy through a civil society that makes your life demonstrably better than a libertarian wet dream like Zimbabwe?
I’ll tell you why. Because as a civil society we’ve decided what’s a part of the commons, that which we can not individually afford but whose existence we recognize, serves us all. I have news for you: my life is better and more secure if you and your kids aren’t bankrupted by medical bills. My life is better if everyone has safe streets and food. My life is better when the next generation is well-educated to continue the prosperity of this great nation. No one is owed, but it is a gift we give to each other as citizens and the price we pay to enjoy the blessings of our forefathers. And it is the height of hubris to presume to take that gift of a civic society and act as if it never existed before you showed up.
“Act with kindness. People return with good will to the place that has done them well.”
— Fortune cookie
I don’t really have the time to fully parse out “Solitude and Leadership” by William Deresiewicz at The American Scholar, but holy cow are there some good quotes in there. I’ll follow one of his trains of thought:
Gail Collins is quite funny; more so than I realized. Take a look at her recent column “The Wizard With a Bad Plan”
I would like to offer two comments about this. One is that professional athletes should not Twitter. I got this thought from Ashley Mayo, a student at the Columbia Journalism School, who showed me an essay that she had written on the subject, which included a tweet from one of the Indiana Pacers containing the good news that he had begun the day with a triumph over irregularity.
Eddie Izzard, the best comedian I’d never heard of until Chris introduced me, is running about 1,000 miles to raise money for a charity:
Izzard, 47, together with a tour manager, a sports therapist and the ice-cream van, left Trafalgar Square on July 26 after a snap decision — “all decisions are snap, aren’t they? You can’t have a bendy decision” — to run 30 miles a day in as many days around the country. The effort is for Sport Relief, the fundraising initiative by Comic Relief and BBC Sport.