I have known a handful of people in my life that I would characterize as truly strong & confident. The signal characteristic of such people is that they are at peace with themselves & thus direct their attention outward, at the world.
People who are insecure, self-loathing, or neurotic - who feel less like a coherent person than a jumble of person parts that don't fit together - spend a lot of time looking inward, preoccupied w/ what others think of them in part bc they're trying to figure themselves out.
I knew/dated this woman Cherise, back when I lived in Missoula, 1997ish. She had been kicked out of her house when she was 13, had a kid when she was 16 in juvie, got a job bagging groceries, scrabbled up from nothing w/ nobody's help.
If anyone had earned a right to have a chip on her shoulder, it was her. But she was just a force of nature, always drawing people out, *seeing* people, doing things for people, utterly engaged in the world. She attracted friends & moments & coincidences, everywhere she went.
Things would just happen, to her, for her, around her. She was the strongest & most confident person I ever knew & because of it she was able to fully live in the world. I was entranced & mystified & eventually felt totally inadequate, since I lived in my head 95% of the time.
Anyway, I feel like there used to be a version of masculinity in US culture built around this kind of strength. A man who is confident in himself & thus able to be a steady & reliable support for others, able to engage others with a generous spirit. A gentleman, I guess?
But the masculinity that seems to dominate today -- hamburgers, pickup trucks, guns, belligerence & dominance, constant desperate signaling -- is the opposite. These are people so desperate for affirmation that they can barely see the world at all.
It's weird that it needs saying, but strong people don't spend all their live-long days telling people how strong they are. They don't force themselves onto people, demanding acknowledgement of their strength. They don't measure their strength by who they can "own."
Here we come to Trump, of course, who is the opposite of Cherise. He lives 100% in his own head, in a tiny cave, seeing only a mirror, knowing the world only through how it makes him feel about himself, whether it feeds his bottomless need for affirmation & ego reinforcement.
Trump ceaselessly tries to tell everyone how strong he is. He demands tributes to his strength. He wards of his gnawing insecurity with acts of cruelty & dominance, which he mistakes for strength. Without continuous external reinforcement, his ego, his sense of self, crumbles.
He is, in every way, weak. The people all over US culture these days rolling coal & carrying assault rifles into grocery stores & cheering as protesters are beat & telling you that emojis are girly are signaling, in the clearest way possible, their fear & weakness.
The point of this thread, to summarize I guess, is that strong, confident, self-possessed people tend to be kind & care about other people. Assholes are assholes because they're weak & frightened. 😘 </fin>
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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.
Think about everything this snapshot captures: Big Oil shilling for Trump, Big Oil being corrupt AF, high oil prices being about *greed* rather than any Biden policy, the need for a clean energy future, etc.
In short, an episode that seems tailor-made to advance D narratives.
The right, of course, immediately leapt to the scumbag's defense, working to establish its own narrative -- to overwrite the natural, instinctive response that any decent human being would have to this.
When elites like the publisher of the NYT call something "partisan," they mean something very specific by it. To them, to be partisan, to choose a side & fight for it, is by definition unsophisticated. Brutish. To be on a side is to surrender your rational judgment.
The smart, sophisticated thing to do is to see both sides, to grasp all the contrasting points & nuances, to understand the big picture in a way that mere partisans, down in the ditches, never can.
Now obviously, there's an element of truth there. Partisans often *can* be irrational & they often *do* use motivated reasoning to support their positions. But if you take this nugget of insight & amplify it into a full life philosophy, you end up in an odd place ...
I've vowed not to rant about Kahn & the NYT all day, but one thing I'll say: Kahn sets up a false dichotomy b/t what he says NYT is doing (fair coverage) vs. what libs want (cheerleading for Biden). But even if you accept that dichotomy, *NYT isn't doing what it says it's doing.*
It's *not* fairly covering all issues based on what voters care about. That is simply not an accurate discussion of its current practice.
Put it this way: just because partisanship *isn't* your motivation doesn't mean that laudable journalistic values *are* your motivation. There are plenty of motivations more venal, petty, & misleading than partisanship!
Polls & surveys found that most Americans were amenable to civil rights back in the early 60s, but thought that *other* Americans *weren't*. Sociologists call this "pluralistic ignorance" -- ignorance about other people's views. Now pluralistic ignorance is back ...
... around climate change. A new study found that most people are willing to act to address climate change, but believe that *other* people *aren't* willing. "Respondents vastly underestimate the prevalence of climate-friendly behaviors and norms." papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
Now here's the good news: "Correcting these misperceptions in an experiment causally raises individual willingness to act against climate change as well as individual support for climate policies."
When people find out other people are on board, it strengthens their resolve!