Zayphar Is Colorblind

#Colorblindness is the only rational way to live. Justice has no color. The cynical might call me naïve. I say #Justice is blind. I defend the principle of equal Justice under the Law, regardless of religion, ethnicity, and socio-economic status. youtube.com/watch?v=QxB3b7fx…

Disability Is Bad If we actually want to help vulnerable people, we need to start with the honest premise that disability is an impediment, a hindrance, a harm. Good intentions can become ugly realities. And nowhere is that clearer than in how we treat the mentally unwell. America closed an overwhelming number of its psychiatric hospitals, because surely its schizophrenics didn’t deserve to be locked up like they were in prison? And so, many of them ended up homeless on the street. An anxious mother hears her teenage daughter say she has developed multiple personality disorder, like the other girls on TikTok, and takes her to see a therapist. And so, pediatricians report, they’re overwhelmed with patients more likely to be suffering from social contagion than genuine illness. Disability activists encourage us to see autism as a “superpower,” to help erode stigma. And so, those with a profoundly life-inhibiting form of the disorder are erased from the awareness-raising conversation. “The rhetorical alchemy of recasting disability as something not bad, or even as a positive good, might serve the needs of relatively high-functioning people with relatively high-status disabilities, but this way of thinking utterly abandons those for whom disability is a daily assault on their ability to function.” The author has spent a lifetime suffering from bipolar disorder, and, he writes, “stigma has never been one of my top hundred biggest problems.” The same is true of most disabled people. “Talk to someone struggling to live with cystic fibrosis. Talk privately to the caretakers of severely autistic adolescents who are prone to violent outbursts. They don’t need euphemisms. They don’t want saccharine narratives.” They want society to recognize the painful realities of their lives—and offer material support. And therein lies a lesson for the newly empowered Democratic Party: A true politics of the left is not about shouting at people on social media, even if that’s more fun. It is about doing the hard, and not very sexy, work of legislating to make life in America fairer for the most vulnerable. thefp.com/p/disability-is-ba…

‘Fjord,’ and the Paradox of Tolerance This excellent movie explores what happens when liberal democracies welcome immigrants who don’t have liberal values. Fjord follows a devoutly Christian family that migrates from conservative Romania to very liberal Norway—only to have the state take their kids away from them because it doesn’t approve of their parenting. “This is the so-called paradox of tolerance. In an age where welcoming immigrants has become a fundamental tenet” on the left, the fact is that “new arrivals often come armed with values, beliefs, and practices that make progressives profoundly uncomfortable.” It never registers that the “In This House We Believe” yard sign is just a woke variation on the cross-stitch Bible sampler; that the No Kings rally they attend every Saturday is its own sort of megachurch. thefp.com/p/fjord-tolerance-…