Contemplating the 2020s: On Amazon Shopping, MSG, and Internet Nazis

We've reached the 2020s.

The start of a new decade is always a time when people reflect on the past and make predictions for the future. In peacetime, this is usually a happy and effervescent project. For more than a century, it has involved dreaming of flying cars, vacations in space, and robots that take care of us, instead of displacing us from our jobs. But 2020 arrives at a more anxious time. In the U.S., we may not be at war, but we don't feel at peace. This is the context in which I am contemplating our era and writing this post.

It will meander rather wryly, and discuss consumer goods, and then there will be a bonus Nazi appearance! Very 2020.

 

Like many of you, I work long hours. The winter holiday season, when it comes, is a nice respite from the usual hectic pace of work--but it's mostly another flavor of frenetic, traveling to see family, touching base with old friends, and catching up on projects postponed for the "break." I do try to set aside a little me time for self-care, though. After all, I am instructed to do this in the wellness guide on my health insurance website! Ah, contemporary American life. . .

What would really improve our collective wellness would be to receive a comfortable wage working a modest number of hours. I'd take 40--though predictions for the future of American employment written in the mid 20th century foresaw that we'd be working a mere 20 hours a week by now, due to technological improvements. Of course, those midcentury writers imagined a future where the benefits of greater productivity would be shared by all, rather than hoarded by the ultrawealthy. But all those increased corporate profits have gone to the one percent, and the rest of us are working more hours than the authors in the halcyon days of the 1960s. Back then, their great concern for the 21st century was how future Americans would avoid getting bored, with all those leisure hours to fill.

This hasn't proved to be the 21st century crisis.

So, instead of getting good pay for comfortable working hours, most of us are working long hours just to get by. It stresses people out, which makes us sick, and sick people don't give employers the 110% we're always being urged to put out. And so the corporate response has been "wellness programs," which make being healthy yet another employee responsibility. My employee wellness program includes such dubious benefits as installing an app on our personal cellphones so that the health insurer and employer can track every step of our locations, prompting us to "add more steps to our days," or public weigh-ins for competing employee weightloss groups. Frankly, having my employer monitor my every move or participating in group weight-shaming would not make me feel less stressed or more healthy. But I'm told that I'm going to be charged more for health insurance if I fail to participate in one of the wellness programs annually, so I reluctantly click on the wellness email updates I'm sent. And the holiday-season update urged me--between avoiding sugary holiday treats, or disturbing my sleep schedule, or engaging in family conflict--to take some "me time."

One of the suggested me-time options is to engage in a hobby. And on the last day of 2019, that is what I did. 

I have some standard hobbies, and some odd ones. During the afternoon, I indulged in one of my vaguely odd ones, researching what sociologists would call "the material cultural history of everyday life," and most other people would just call "stuff." Like: when a pair of pants became a single item instead of two pant legs; or the period in the 1950s when companies marketed atomic energy kits for kids containing actual radioactive ores. This time I was researching commercial seasoning products around the world.

What got me interested in the topic of commercial seasonings and their "secret ingredients" is MSG. Personally, I think MSG's problem in the West is that we don't have a friendly, everyday, nonchemical name for it. And when things are called by chemical names, people today presume they must be toxic. Consider the dihydrogen monoxide bans called for by various groups--this industrial solvent can be fatal if inhaled, can cause severe burns, and yet is found in many popular snacks and common medications! (Dihydorgen monoxide is the chemical name for water, H2O.) Outside the West, MSG is commonly called aji no moto, which basically means "savoriness essence" in Japanese. But we have no nice English name for it, and Americans have viewed MSG as both a suspicious chemical, and as dubiously "foreign." In reality, MSG is a simple amino acid found naturally in many foods, from mushrooms to parmesan cheese. But many Americans falsely believe they are allergic to MSG, that it will make them sick and give them a headache--referred to by the outrageous name of "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome." This has led to a disturbing racist outcome in which Chinese restaurants all over the U.S. are forced to put signs up promising they do not use the ingredient in cooking if they want white people to eat there--while those same white Americans happily consume added MSG all time time in their Pringles and Chick-Fil-A sandwiches.

And that's how I got interested in commercial seasonings around the world. Specifically, I became interested in those that were developed around the time that MSG was chemically isolated, and are full of MSG--but don't advertise that fact, or actively try to conceal it. Consider the Swiss company Maggi's line of seasonings, which started with Maggi-Würze.

Maggi-Würze was invented around the turn of the last century. At about the same time that the Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda was isolating MSG from savory kombu seaweed soup, Swiss entrepreneur Julius Maggi, maker of dehydrated vegetable soups, began producing Maggi-Würze. Maggi-Würze is made rather like soy sauce, but from vegetable proteins. Hydrolyzed vegetable protein is high in MSG, which is why Maggi-Würzw imparts a very savory flavor to foods. Julius Maggi was trying to develop and sell vegetable-based foods for the working classes who could rarely afford meat, and his Würze was marketed as imparting a savory, meaty flavor to meatless meals.

Maggi-Würze is delicious stuff, which is why--like soy sauce--its popularity spread from Switzerland and Germany around the world. Ironically, today the sauce developed for those who couldn't afford meat is most popularly used as a sauce for meats and meat gravies. On vegetables and fries, the Maggi powdered seasoning Fondor is preferred.

Now here is the thing that really interests me about the Maggi seasonings: their major flavor components are salt and MSG, but they certainly aren't marketed that way. Instead, the focus is on unspecified, and hence mysterious, herbs and spices they contain. In Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, there is a specific widespread belief that the reason Maggi seasonings are so tasty is that they contain the herb lovage. (In fact, in an interesting backformation, people in the Netherlands now refer to the herb lovage as "maggiplant.") The Maggi company will neither confirm nor deny that their seasonings contain lovage, maintaining the "secret ingredient" mystique, but if they do, it is in infinitesimal amounts. The ingredients label on the Fondor container lists as the final, least prevalent ingredient "spice extracts," with the only one named being celery.

The question is, why all this fuss over the possibility that the "secret ingredient" in Maggi seasonings is lovage? I've tasted lovage, and it does in fact taste a good deal like celery leaves--perfectly pleasant, but not something I'd enthuse over as a secret ingredient for its flavor. Most Americans wouldn't know what lovage is if they suddenly found themselves with their mouths full of it, and don't feel any lack. It's still used widely in Eastern Europe, and less commonly, in Western Europe. But why the particular enthusiasm today for the rumor that Maggi seasonings are flavored with this herb?

I have a theory that the rumor has been cultivated in Europe to counter the resistance that was generated toward MSG starting in the 1970s. When the MSG panic started, Maggi seasonings were prime targets for resistance, as they are chock full of the substance. Maggi tried to counter the commotion by putting "no added MSG" on their labels, and labeling the ingredient "glutamates." Their claim was that a label should list MSG only if the substance is added as a pure chemical salt purchased from some other company. Instead, the MSG in Maggi seasonings was produced by the Maggi company by hyrdrolyzing and/or fermenting vegetable proteins, resulting in "natural glutamates." These glutamates, Maggi stated, were the same ones found in onions and tomatoes. Of course, the chemicals MSG and sodium chloride (table salt) are the same exact chemical whether present in their chemically pure form, or when found in a food like parmesan cheese. So protests were made against the "no added MSG" label claim, and popular consumption of the seasonings was at risk. The image of the familiar bottles and shakers as actually containing dangerous, alien chemicals was hazardous to Maggi's financial health.

And this explains why the rumor that Maggi seasonings are lovage-based was cultivated, by the company and by many fans of its seasonings. The rumor has served to counter the (racist) image of the seasonings as secretly containing chemicals produced by untrustworthy foreign scientists. Instead, Maggi seasonings are celebrated as containing a secret ingredient venerated in Western tradition. Because here's the thing: lovage isn't grown much today in the West, but in the Middle Ages, it was everywhere in Europe. It was found in every herb garden of every monastery, convent, estate, and midwife's home. And that was because the primary reason it was grown was as one of the most common herbal medicines of the time. It was used to relieve flatulence, to improve digestion, and to cure bad breath and foot odor. (To counter foot odor, it wasn't eaten--instead, lovage leaves were worn inside one's shoes.) Interestingly, it was considered both an aphrodisiac, and in combination with pennyroyal and rue, used as an abortifacient.

In the European imagination, lovage is associated with wholesome, local, ancient traditions. It evokes images of kindly old nuns and simple gardens. Framing lovage as giving Maggi seasonings their savor has made consumers feel they are flavoring their dishes with love and national pride, not "chemicals." As a marketing tactic, it's excellent! Empirically. . . well, they're full of MSG, and that makes food taste delicious.

So, given this background, I was interested in seeing how ordinary Americans described the flavor of Maggi seasonings. To do that I turned to that loved and hated behemoth, Amazon.com. I perused the American Amazon website, where an array of sellers offer imported Maggi-Würze and Fondor, along with international variants, like the French version of Maggi-Würze, Maggi Arome Saveur, or the Mexican Jugo Maggi. And each of these product pages features a set of reviews--on some pages, over a hundred of them. So I entertained myself by reading through them. I was curious to see if any mentioned lovage. Spoiler alert: they didn't. But see if you sense a theme to the reviews:

• "This is the magic European seasoning!"

• "My husband from Germany said it tasted just like home."

• "I'm Dutch. This is a staple in a Dutch home. Great for soups, croquettes and stews!"

• "Started using Maggi when I was a child with a Mutti from Germany. I haven't stopped using it since."

• "Found out about this on a recent trip to Paris, it was in the apartment we rented. Omg it’s so good, makes everything so much more flavorful. Made Beef Bourguignon it was amazing! Felt like I was back in France!" 

• "This is a hard to find item that has been used in my family for generations."

Over and over, reviewers on the American Amazon.com site made references to the seasonings tasting of European tradition. What came up rarely was any description of what the seasonings actually tasted like, other than Europe. While actual Europeans claim the Maggi condiments taste of lovage, Americans have no association with that herb, or even knowledge that it exists. So most of their flavor referents were vague superlatives (amazing flavor! uniquely delicious!). The Maggi-Würze reviews sometimes said it tasted like soy sauce, only better:

• "This sh*t is delicious! I love Maggi!!! For those of you not familiar, it's similar to soy sauce but maybe with a lil Worchestershire. Back to my German roots!"

•  "You can think of it as Swiss soy sauce, since it's the same idea, but made with other vegetable proteins. It's important to know that the other versions are NOT the same formulation and it varies around the world. I like this version best, because I use it in European-style dishes." 

I also noticed--bear in mind the racist history of the idea of MSG causing "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome"--a substantial number of reviews of the European Maggi sauces warning people not to buy the Asian variants.

• "A great addition to all kinds of dishes. I always keep some in my pantry. Make sure you buy the one that's imported from Switzerland. The one that's made in China doesn't have the same flavor."

• "Exactly what I was looking for. The bottles with the yellow caps are made in China and not even close to the original taste. This is NOT soy sauce. A dash of this goes a long way." 

Actually, Maggi seasoning variants are very popular around the world, from Mexico (where Jugo Maggi is key in making the beer cocktail, the Michelada) to Vietnam (where Maggi Nươc Tương is dashed onto bánh mì ). But for many Americans reviewing the European Maggi seasonings, the non-European Maggi seasonings are viewed as inferior to the "real" European Maggi products. They might debate whether the Swiss Maggi-Würze or the French Maggie Arome Saveur was most delectable, but if it wasn't a European variant, they tended to sneer at it. Often they complained that the "real thing" wasn't available in the U.S., and were so happy to have found imported European Maggi seasoning via Amazon.

• "My momma was a German lady who used Maggi in just about everything. I just found out, though, that the stuff I had been using for years was made in Japan or someplace like that and was not the same thing as the German kind. Guess I just got used to the taste and didn't question it. When I got this Wurze (maggi) I immediately knew that it was the same as what I grew up with. It is so much better than what is sold in the stores. The Maggi with the RED cap is the real thing. The Maggi with the YELLOW cap is the knock off."

By this point, my light-hearted search for how ordinary Americans described the taste of Maggi seasonings had filled me with a familiar and now-ubiquitous sense of unease, because the main flavors described seemed to be Eurocentrism and racism. In 2020, this evokes the swelling popularity of xenophobic Western nationalist movements, Brexit, Build-the-Wall, etc. 

And then I came upon this recent review for Maggi Fondor seasoning:

Now the stuff is good. I saw it in an old commercial from the 50s that I found online and I wondered what that magic is that makes everything taste better. Hell yeah, it does make everything taste better. I put that stuff on everything now short of candy. I gave it 5 stars because the product itself is good.That being said, I must say I am sorry I ordered it. I learned that German company Knorr makes the same product called "Aromat" and that it is available here in the USA, even for same day delivery by Amazon. In fact Fondor is a ripoff of the older Aromat if Wikipedia is to be believed.

My main problem with Fondor is however that it is Maggi which belongs to Procter&Gamble which as many readers may know spit in their customer's face these days by being woke and pushing anti-masculine commercials through their Gillette brand. Me and many other people have decided to boycott P&G wherever possible. Knorr belongs to Unilever and thus far they have not tried to force me to give up my ways.
 
So, I think those here who have also decided to boycott P&G should be aware of this connection and of the fact that there is an alternative product from a different group. Yea 10 bucks won't bring P&G down but so far Gillette has already reported 8 billion $ loss last year which is a good sign. Lots of us together can make a difference.

Wow. Now we've really hit 2020 in America--by exiting reality and falling into some disturbing fever dream. Here we have some individual using the Amazon review field to try to rally people to boycott products sold by Procter & Gamble. Why? Because eight months before he wrote his review, a Gillette razor ad presented good men as loving fathers and opponents of bullying and sexual harassment. This reviewer is one of the denizens of the internet Manosphere who for some reason found this ad triggeringly "anti-masculine." Loving and kind men are not gentlemen--they are despicable "beta males" who have failed to "take the red pill" and are allowing feminists to emasculate them. Real men are "alpha males" who dominate others and view sexual encounters with women through the lens of conquest, not consent. Redpilled men have had the veil lifted from their eyes, and know that cis straight white men are America's most oppressed victims. Blah blah blah. All of this would have seemed parody mere years ago, but now, here we are. 

To make this review truly emblematic of the times, the author takes his obsession with fighting "wokeness" by opposing Proctor & Gamble into conspiracy theory la-la-land by bringing it up in the context of a Maggi seasoning review. Because he is wrong about Proctor & Gamble owning the Maggi company. That's simply not the case. Maggi is owned by Nestlé, a Swiss food and beverage conglomerate. Nestlé is a competitor of Proctor & Gamble's, so, by his quasi-logic, our reviewer should support Maggi and buy a ton of Fondor seasoning. 

But no, he urges readers to buy the Knorr seasoning Aromat instead. He claims that Aromat is a German spice--while in fact, it, like Nestlé and Maggi, is Swiss. (Aromat is another sprinkled seasoning that claims to be "a finely balanced blend of herbs and spices," while consisting mainly of salt and MSG. It differs slightly from Fondor by being sweetened with lactose.) As to which came first, Aromat or Fondor, I neither know nor care (and neither does Wikipedia, which does not claim that Fondor is a "ripoff" of Aromat). What I did find myself caring about was the language of "ripoffs" and the assertion that Aromat was German in this review. On one level, this was of a piece with other Maggi seasoning reviews by Americans that dissed non-European Maggi seasonings as inferior fakes. But in this case, both of the products, Fondor and Aromat, are made in Europe. Here, the reviewer was asserting that Aromat is German and thus good, while Maggi Fondor is bad because it is . . . American. Well, the wrong kind of American: the bad, supposedly "progressive" corporate side, instead of the good, right-wing corporate side.

In 2020, the "Germany good, progressive America bad" narrative, combined with a total lack of empirical truth, pinged my alt-right Nazi radar. So I decided to see what else this individual--for convenience's sake, I'm just going to name him Spice Conspiracy Man--had reviewed on Amazon. I went ahead and clicked on his profile.

The most recent couple of Spice Conspiracy Man's 185 Amazon reviews that I saw were innocuous--a cat litter mat, a callus-removing heel file. The third was. . . a German military equipment belt. Er, could that be innocuous as well? Well, it's not his first German military belt review. (He returned a different seller's German military belt that he bought because it had "a funky smell".) Also, the belt being reviewed here was specifically titled "German WWI Brown Leather Equipment Belt"--but Spice Conspiracy Man calls it a "WW1/WW2 German belt," strengthening the Nazi cosplay possibility.

I scrolled down some more. Spice Conspiracy Man next reviewed spray bottles he bought to spritz his plants with pesticide. He got a cat scratch pole. Then he got two sets of drinking glasses. The first set he reviewed as having a "nice ancient look" like a "Western saloon," and the second as "recreating the good old days" of the TV drama Mad Men. You can sense a definite flavor of Manosphere reverence for iconic patriarchy. He liked the thickness of the glasses. "My grandmother had a set of luxury alcohol glasses for wine, Champaign, Schnapps and whatnot and they were so thin that I was always afraid I would bite the glass off." Thin glasses are girly and elitist; real men like their glasses thick.

Like most 2020 Americans, Spice Conspiracy Man has dreams of, and brags about, elite consumer goods. He reviewed--but did not purchase--a $1600 steampunk computer keyboard. He claimed "it's kind of my design," and that he had a keyboard that was basically the prototype of the $1600 one, because he was in communication with the original designer before his death. He wasn't using this claimed prototype, but saving it "to put in in my future office to be used on a special computer." This review, claiming he had "kind of" designed a fancy keyboard that was way more expensive than his actual Amazon purchases, gave me what the Germans call fremdschamen--vicarious embarrassment. Wikipedia informs me this is a prosocial emotion indicating empathy. And it's true--scrolling through the surrounding reviews for a plain flexible ice cube tray and the replacement bathroom faucet he bought because it was very cheap , while he felt the ones available at his local hardware store were outside his price range, I empathized with Spice Conspiracy Man's everyday material reality. It's relatable.

But right below was his negative review for the comic scifi movie Iron Sky: The Coming Race. (The plot involves nuclear holocaust survivors traveling to the center of the hollow Earth to rescue the holy grail from a dinosaur-riding Adolf Hitler. . .) Spice Conspiracy Man states that he didn't watch the movie, he just read the reviews. I went and read some reviews, and they mostly reported that it was terribly silly. But that's not why Spice Conspiracy Man warns us away. No, his beef was, "It's one gigantic woke ad campaign for diversity (the lead is a colored woman), anti male (the sidekick is some emasculated Russian) and globohomo agenda ( the bulky Hulk Hogan sidekick turns out to be gay and allergic to shellfish)." And there went my empathy, washed away by the flood of racism, misogyny, and anti-queer conspiracy theory packed into a a single sentence. Movies that mock Adolph Hitler while having leads who are not cishet white men enrage Spice Conspiracy Man, and that combination of rage, bigotry and fragility is . . . super unappealing.

The fact that we encounter it so often today is what makes me approach the 2020s with trepidation.

My intellectual curiosity about the type of person who creates a conspiracy theory about seasonings was dulled by this point, so I scrolled though more rapidly. Between reviews of computer components and oatmeal, I found that Spice Conspiracy Man was angry at an edition of Martin Luther's The Jews and Their Lies, because it is an abridged version that doesn't list all of Luther's cited scripture passages. How was Spice Conspiracy Man to gain all of Luther's wisdom about "the Jewish problem" without that? This was Spice Conspiracy Man's most liked review, with 68 people agreeing they needed every scriptural citation Luther gave about why the Jews are evil and their homes and synagogues should be burned and they should be shown no mercy or kindness. Ughh.

Yep, Spice Conspiracy Man is a Nazi. He liked the dystopian alternate-history show The Man in the High Castle, in which the Axis powers win WWII and Japan and Germany divide America in half and rule it . He claimed it will "really turn your sympathy to the Nazis," who keep America clean and orderly, while the "American resistance is a vile bunch of murderous thugs without any purpose or fundamental values, just fighting for a goal they don't even understand." Can't get any clearer about being pro-Nazi than that.

While he griped about The Jews and Their Lies being an abridged version, Spice Conspiracy Man was miffed that the 68-page book Facts the Historians Leave Out: A Confederate Primer wasn't longer or more detailed, though he guessed it was useful "if you want your child to learn about the war." On the other hand, he seems to have wished the edition of Nazi propaganda officer Goebbels' diaries that he got had been deeply abridged. While he claims reading the diaries is "a must" in order to avoid the anti-Nazi "historical propaganda that has permeated our every day education since 1945," he finds Goebbels' writing to be long-winded and whiney. He complains, "you want to smack the guy in the face sometimes and yell 'Pull yourself together and be a man, girl!'." Yay, bonus misogyny on your pro-Nazism. . .

And that's how I spent my free time at the outset of 2020: encountering the banality of evil. Everywhere you wander on the internet today, you encounter Spice Conspiracy Man and his ilk. It's not limited to obscure corners of 8chan or creepy subreddits you have to choose to visit. It's not found just in the YouTube comments we've all been cautioned never to read. It's in the everyday public forums we all come across, like Amazon reviews. 

It leads to complicated feelings, when you encounter a person who hates people like you on principle, and tells you all about it--and yet is clearly also a human being, with sympathetic characteristics. Spice Conspiracy Man loves his cat. He buys her toys, and special nail clippers and mats. He keeps her litter box in his room now, "since my cat is very old and can't walk very far anymore." It's poignant.

We are constantly urged to "reduce polarization," to have empathy for people whose politics differ from our own, to embrace compromise, and to find a middle ground. I do believe it is vital, if we want the U.S. to make it out of the 2020s as an intact and stable nation, for us to focus on what we have in common, to stop the incitement of hatred, and to have empathy for one another.

The problem is, I already do have empathy for people like Spice Conspiracy Man. And I'm hardly running around urging people to despise white men--I am white man. I'm just Jewish and trans.

I do believe we can and must focus on meeting the shared needs of all--for decent wages, access to health care, a sound education, all the things that give us "wellness." But this is not the same thing as agreeing that I have to compromise with Nazis. What would that even mean? I should agree that people of color and I as a Jew are subhuman? Shall we compromise by saying I'm half-subhuman? Two-thirds human? How do you compromise with people who deny that your gender is real? With white people who believe people of color are innately criminal and lazy? With men who believe that they have a right to a "hot" woman partner, and if no such woman volunteers to sleep with them, then they have a right to rape? 

There are lines we have to draw. There is real evil in the world.

We must resist evil. But at the same time, we have to fight the forces trying to push us to see anyone not like us as part of a great evil horde. That way lies madness. We know that it makes mass murderers and terrorists out of insecure men with a thirst for glory. And it leads to something much more pervasive and, frankly, dangerous. It leads to a widespread willingness to accept conspiracy theories and lies that affirm a belief that our neighbors who differ from us are our enemies. It leads to the conviction that the ends justify the means, framing some evils, like keeping refugee children in cages without clean clothes or toothbrushes, as tolerable in pursuit of a supposed greater good. It leads to the banal evils we already see around us--the incivility of our public spaces, especially our virtual ones; the widespread delight in schadenfreude, reveling in the "delicious tears" of our presumed opponents. It leads to the policing of community membership, and the quotidian anxiety we live with today that we could be ostracized for some moment of ignorance or rumored misdeed.

The problem, of course, is that generating hate has been monetized. Soon after we birthed social media and digital communications, our society chose to have them fueled by outrage. It's hardly a new model--you see it in a myriad of newspapers in the 19th century, in talk radio, in Fox News. But it is also just one model among many. It was just a short time ago when the barely-monetized young internet was populated by people who wanted to create a digital utopia of mutual trust, of shared efforts to generate knowledge and bring support to the isolated. There was nothing inevitable about the replacement of that model with the slide toward dystopia. We allowed technology corporations to build a business model where vast profits could be produced by getting as many clicks possible by any means they chose. They chose the low road, and we have done little to force them to take responsibility for this.

Consider, for example, that Amazon's stated review policy only bans reviews "designed to mislead or manipulate customers" regarding the quality of a product. As far as their policy is concerned, it would be fine for every review post to be like those of Spice Conspiracy Man's that talk about "the Jewish problem" and "colored" people and "the globohomo agenda." And that's a dystopic vision indeed.

So that brings me to my prediction for the 2020s. I predict that the central question for the decade will be whether we can find a way back toward a sense of shared destiny and shared values. This will require political action--not just presidential politics, although it's clear to almost everyone today how that matters, but political activism of many varieties by ordinary people. It will require us fighting for the necessity of rules regulating our media. It will require us to push back against the outrage machine, to insist upon the promulgation of facts over lies, and to stand up for our core values of equity, justice, respect and care for all. This is our message of unity: trying to move in the direction of utopia, not towards hell on earth.

In tandem with this, we have to be willing to name things as evil. My belief is that we must approach this as an act of love. I don't want to destroy the Spice Conspiracy Men of the world. I want to replace their ideologies of hate with ones of love. I do believe in reformation, and the necessity of offering a path for this, and the resources to walk that path. 

If we want to reverse the dystopian slide, we must embrace compassion. Forget "tolerance"--it's proved a negative model. Tolerance is compatible with ongoing bigotry, that is simply not acted upon. And it leads to the dangerous assertion that we must tolerate the intolerant. What we need to generate is actual empathy.

But don't confuse compassion with inaction, or a refusal to judge. We must judge carefully and with compassion, but when we encounter evil, we must be able to judge it and take a stand against it. Treating people who are are marginalized as less deserving of respect as human beings is evil. And evil acts cannot be tolerated. This includes the large evils, like racist mass murders, and the small ones, like racist narratives about a simple amino acid that tastes good.

And those are my meandering thoughts at the cusp of the 2020s. Peace to all!

Here, have the balm of our era, a cute photo of one of our guinea pigs, courtesy my spouse: