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We should all just print the Marcus Aurelius quote and stick it to our bathroom mirrors and be done with it....

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Yet, as time went on (and were it not for J6 I'd have been more comfortable about expressing it) I sensed that Trump was the liberal choice last week. His not-so-quiet building of a multi-racial, working class coalition in opposition to the smug pieties of a self-anointed enlightened caste of educated Brahmin leftishists who expect intellectual and moral deference by dint of who they are will probably spawn hundreds of books in the next few years."

Hahaha. I agree! Much as I still loathe Trump I feel great relief that the Brahmin leftishists will no longer have much power to chemically abuse under-age people by mucking about with their sexual and personal development under the heading of Trans-whatever! Equal relief that the vote was decisive. Equal relief too for your article! And, strangely, I feel a lot more cheerful since the election albeit with some dread.

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"I must own this failing. Because the more dispassionate part of me sees The Need To Be Right About Things as a weakness rooted in sensing a threat to your identity when others see things differently. Argument and debate looks to me like self-comforting through identity-bolstering more than a search for insight and I'm consequently wary when I feel like arguing.

The urge to bend others to my will suggests that I'm losing contact with the qualities of curiosity and equanimity with contra-perspectives that actually make me a happier person."

This hits me closer to home than I'm comfortable with. I want to put it in my pocket and take it with me, a talisman against my more self-immiserating tendencies.

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