"Plant medicines like psilocybin and ayahuasca... they are beautiful because they give you exactly what you need, even if you don’t know what it is you need."

Said Veronica Duron, chief of staff for Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), quoted in "AOC, Dan Crenshaw and the mellow struggle for psychedelic drug access/What do a democratic socialist, a Republican war veteran and a long-haired lobbyist from Montana have in common? They want the government to relax about certain mild-altering substances" (WaPo).

Duron, a user of plant medicines, added that she didn’t know whether her boss would ever personally partake but knows the senator often “hears from his wealthy friends and supporters who micro-dose every day and have these experiences. And he is like, ‘These healing experiences shouldn’t be just for rich White people.’” Booker has co-sponsored legislation with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) similar to Ocasio-Cortez’s amendment to study the medical benefits of certain psychedelics....

It's a racial justice issue — that's good political packaging for Booker (and others). Don't say it so it might be heard as: Let's get more drugs to black people. It has to be: If some people feel completely free and don't worry at all about criminal law enforcement, then let's make it equal. Or: It's a matter that inherently belongs to the individual, who gets to decide which of the possibly beneficial drugs to take. I wouldn't recommend calling psilocybin and ayahuasca "these healing experiences." Leave it to the (supposed) experts in the FDA to determine which which drugs are effective cures for diseases and disorders. You sound anti-science when you say "these healing experiences." You might as well start recommending religions if you're going to talk like that.

"Inside McCarthy’s conference, few if any members would say outright on Tuesday night that their speaker made a mistake by sharing the footage with Carlson..."

"... in fact, only a handful admitted to watching the segment at all. One of those is McCarthy himself, who defended the move in the name of transparency when pressed by reporters Tuesday night. But some House Republicans aired their displeasure with being forced to revisit the attack on their workplace. 'It’s definitely stupid to keep talking about this.… So what is the purpose of continuing to bring it up unless you’re trying to feed Democrat narratives even further?' Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) said in an interview, noting the videos didn’t show 'anything we don’t already know.' 'I don’t really have a problem with making it all public. But if your message is then to try and convince people that nothing bad happened, then it’s just gonna make us look silly.'"

 
From "House GOP faces a new Jan. 6 headache, courtesy of Tucker Carlson/The Capitol Police chief and Republican senators slammed the Fox News host for falsely characterizing the violent riot — using footage Speaker Kevin McCarthy provided him" (Politico).

Who thinks the message is "nothing bad happened"? Isn't it more about unskewing what had been a skewed message? I understand the urge to say let's just stop talking about it, but when your opponents are obviously not going to stop talking about it, why should you stand down? The answer seems to be, because that's what well-behaved Republicans traditionally do. 

"I have always firmly believed that most of a parent’s energy should be invested in making sure your kid is healthy and happy and putting one foot in front of the other..."

"... the idea that they have to meet some bullshit level of achievement or hit the threshold for performative political awareness (i.e., the type of cutesy anecdotes of toddlers referring to RBG as a 'princess' that get thousands of likes on Resistance Twitter) has always been anathema to me. Trying to indoctrinate your child with a set of abstruse political values, at a time when parents should simply be encouraging kids to learn the basic building blocks of empathy and friendship, is pretty gross. And liberalism or conservatism aside, oftentimes aggressively copy-pasting your own politics onto your small child serves your own ego far more than it’s likely to benefit them...."

Writes E.J. Dickson — "your standard Brooklyn millennial lefty mom" — in Rolling Stone....

"Calls for 'civility' in politics are as likely to elicit ridicule as they are plaudits these days..."

Oh, yes, I've been ridiculing what I call "civility bullshit" for years.

... due in large part to their repeated deployment in the face of escalating state violence. 

What?! I'm trying to read "Why ‘Civility’ Protects Dan Crenshaw But Not Ilhan Omar" by Zak Cheney-Rice (NY Magazine), which looked like it was right up my alley but up my alley and off somewhere I wouldn't go.

What "state violence" is Cheney-Rice talking about? His next paragraph is about whether harassing former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is acceptable because the government has been "locking children in cages." He weasels a semi-generalization:

Where one falls on this spectrum in any given instance is often, but not always, a partisan calculation.

My point is that it's always bullshit. "Civility" is not your value. It's a fake value, presented as real when it serves your partisan interests and subordinated whenever it doesn't.

Cheney-Rice has something to say about the Ilhan Omar business, and it's too complicated to attempt to excerpt here. Somehow "civility" is supposed to be in play when people are simply harshly criticizing Omar for sounding insufficiently somber about 9/11. There's a very strained effort to equate vigorous criticism with the incitement of violence, so that saying Omar sounded almost as though she were laughing at 9/11 is the same as saying that Omar ought to suffer physical attacks. We're told that she gets death threats, and that seems to be offered as a reason why she should be spared verbal attacks responding to the public statements that she chooses to make. Her antagonists would be fools to stand down either because of the phony "civility" argument or because her proponents display a willingness to connect public verbal opposition to her to these unsourced death threats.

Congressman Dan Crenshaw criticized Omar, and then Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized Crenshaw. Somebody else pushed Ocasio-Cortez back for incivility to Crenshaw, and Cheney-Rice says, "Bad-faith outcries about civility aimed at deflecting from Republican misdeeds are the order of the day." Yes, and what else is new? Bad-faith outcries about civility are the only kind of outcries about civility we ever get in American politics — this day or any other day, from Republicans or Democrats or anybody.

Cheney-Rice has not explained "Why ‘Civility’ Protects Dan Crenshaw But Not Ilhan Omar." Civility doesn't "protect" anyone. Civility is just a transitory condition that might make some people feel better when it's blowing in their direction, but it's nothing you can rely on, and you ought to assume it's there only because those who are blowing it think it's good for them. The prevailing winds of civility may favor Crenshaw over Omar at the moment, but civility bullshit is subject to constant change. I see that Cheney-Rice would like to force the change, and of course, he's free to bullshit about bullshit.

"Was I really outraged by SNL? Really offended? Or did I just think the comment about losing my eye was offensive?"

"There is a difference, after all. I have been literally shot at before, and I wasn’t outraged. Why start now? So I didn’t demand an apology and I didn’t call for anyone to be fired. That doesn’t mean the 'war . . . or whatever' line was acceptable, but I didn’t have to fan the flames of outrage, either.... How, then, do we live together in this world of differing ideas? For starters, let’s agree that the ideas are fair game. If you think my idea is awful, you should say as much. But there is a difference between attacking an idea and attacking the person behind that idea. Labeling someone as an '-ist' who believes in an '-ism' because of the person’s policy preference is just a shortcut to playground-style name-calling, cloaked in political terminology. It’s also generally a good indication that the attacker doesn’t have a solid argument and needs a way to end debate before it has even begun.... When all else fails, try asking for forgiveness, or granting it. On Saturday, Pete Davidson and SNL made amends. I had some fun. Everyone generally agreed that a veteran’s wounds aren’t fair game for comedy. Maybe now we should all try to work toward restoring civility to public debate."

From "SNL mocked my appearance. Here’s why I didn’t demand an apology" by Dan Crenshaw (WaPo).

This might be the first example I've found of a call to civility that I'm not going to immediately categorize as civility bullshit.