Starting tomorrow, @pickathon -- the best music festival in the country -- is going to open its vaults & broadcast a concert a day, each day at 1pm PST. Things kick off tomorrow with the @drivebytruckers. A delightful respite from social isolation. mailchi.mp/hearthmusic.co…
You may not recognize their names on the list above 👆, but I'd particularly flag the shows from @TankandDaBangas and @DakhaBrakha. I saw both those shows & they were two of the most mind-blowing live music experience of my life. Highly, highly recommended.
Now, there are, of course, many in the MAGA base who will simply refuse to believe official statistics. ("You get to believe whatever you feel" is one of the benefits of membership.) But official statistics still carry weight with most media & most people. In other words ...
... the question of whether crime is down can -- perhaps not to the extent we'd like, but still to a substantial extent -- *be settled*. There's something approximating an official, objective answer. There's a fact of the matter.
To me one thing that the Hochul congestion-pricing fiasco illustrates is the importance of epistemic circles. She is practically drowning in empirical evidence and modeling, rigorous work done over years & years by professionals, but in the end ...
... what really *reached & moved* her was the testimony of the people around her. All that objective evidence ultimately could not overcome vibes. The people she hangs out with, the people she talks to, don't like it, and that's what mattered.
You can say -- as I do! -- that this is a dereliction of her duty, a total failure to approach the issue in a rigorous way. She deserves plenty of condemnation & contempt for the ridiculous way she made this decision. Nonetheless ...
Y'all, I just got back from a car dealership. Holy shit. I thought, "maybe my stereotypes are outdated, maybe it's not so bad any more."
It's ... so much worse. I couldn't believe it. I have to rant a bit.
We're thinking about leasing a RAV4 Prime -- the PHEV. We thought we should at least test drive one. Dealer didn't have a Prime, but they had a normal hybrid, fine. But of course, after the test drive, they drag us inside to talk about leasing.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that the guy we were forced to talk to knew *nothing*. "What's the difference between the trims?" "I don't know, let me go check." (He's gone for 10 minutes, during which time we look up the difference in trims online and read all about them.)
I spent considerable time trying to get through to McKay about what an extraordinary achievement IRA is in light of the constraints Dems faced. In the moment, I managed to get to some begrudging acknowledgment. See the pod: volts.wtf/p/talking-thro…
Ultimately, though, McKay--like many, many others--is more invested in maintaining his carefully constructed political identity than he is in adjusting to new information. He's a Radical calling out The System. That's the role he's going to act out no matter the circumstances.
It's disappointing, but it's disappointing in exactly the way that virtually every public commentator has been disappointing in our era: they stick with their identities, their narratives, no matter what happens in the actual world. (And of course social media helps them.)
Friends, let me tell you a story about the @seattlePD. 🧵
Our story begins in Tuscon, AZ, in the early 2010s. A young man named Kevin Dave is recruited into the Tuscon police. He does not do well. Several complaints are filed, including one involving a "preventable collision."
Dave was the subject of six separate investigations during his short stint with the Tuscon police -- firearm violations, avoidable collisions, and just general conduct unbecoming an officer.
This failure to meet basic standards led the Tuscon police to fire Dave. Eight months later, Dave was driving drunk, fled the police, & abandoned his pickup in an alley. When officers took him in he was belligerent & shouting that it was the police's fault for firing him.
Said it before, will say it again: in the current political/media climate, *any* Dem presidential candidate would face a fusillade of shit & quickly come to be seen among VSPs as "flawed." It is structural.
People want to think Her Emails was some unique Clinton flaw and His Age is some unique Biden flaw, but I promise you the combination of the RW shit machine & an artificially "balanced" MSM would find *something* to pin on anyone in that position.
I'll add (might as well make a wreck of my mentions): one of the dumbest pretenses re: 2016 is that the same thing wouldn't also have happened to Sanders. I promise you it would have. He would have been "uniquely flawed" before you could finish your first M4A tweet.