"Whatever God is and however it moves through people’s lives, I don’t know. But it’s important to hear others’ stories even in they don’t confirm your own. Reality is terribly complex, and faith lives in the least definitive wing of reality. Good faith should bring more questions than answers."

~ Holly Berkley Fletcher

#facts #literacy #empathy
/9

https://hollyberkleyfletcher.substack.com/p/my-new-favorite-thing

"Facts are inconvenient. They complicate the narrative. They remind us that actions have consequences, that history has context, that rights weren’t handed down by magic but fought for by real people with real stakes. Facts don’t care if they ruin your argument or even your day, and they especially don’t care if they make your favorite politician, artist, philosopher or scientist look bad.

Which is exactly why fact matter."

~ Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

#facts #literacy
/8

https://kareem.substack.com/p/the-houthis-didnt-suddenly-materialize

"That is the illiteracy of this war."

#Trump #Republicans #empathy #Iran #war #literacy #history
/7

"The more technologically sophisticated war becomes, the more dangerous it is to place it in the hands of people untrained in irony, contingency and the darker constants of human nature. Such leaders will speak fluently of capabilities, timelines and kill chains. They will have no language for resentment, dishonor, loyalty or grief — and they will discover, too late, that wars are made of these as much as of steel and fire."

#Trump #Republicans #empathy #Iran #war #literacy #history
/6

"Literature and history, at their most serious, train precisely the faculties these leaders lack: the capacity to grant that other minds are not transparent to us, and are governed by purposes not our own. A mind tutored by history and literature knows that actors in the grip of a sacred cause tend to mean what they say — and that bombing a founding myth is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it."

#Trump #Republicans #empathy #Iran #war #literacy #history
/5

"Four weeks into the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, one conclusion is already difficult to avoid. Our leaders preside over an extraordinary machinery of destruction, but they remain strikingly obtuse about human beings — about their pride, shame, convictions and historical memory. ...

What this war exposes, then, is a failure not only of strategy but of literacy."

~ Yonatan Touval

#Trump #Republicans #empathy #Iran #war #literacy #history
/4

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/opinion/israel-us-war-iran-literature.html