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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🧵 Let me, in the spirit of bipartisanship, make a genuinely bipartisan point: most politicians, even politicians who are excellent at other parts of the job, are bad at giving big speeches. Most *people* are bad at it & politicians are just people.
What's weird about it to me is that it's similar to PowerPoint presentations, in that everyone makes the same mistakes. The mistakes have been documented & discussed at *immense* length, and yet everyone keeps making them! Something about the mistakes is "sticky."
One big mistake: people think when they give a "big" speech, they need to use their "big" voice. So they just ... talk loud. They yell. But loud speech is monotonic & somewhat grating, especially at length. (Hillary Clinton does this, bless her heart.) They key thing is ...
On that I'd say two things. First, political reporters hate hearing this, but the public doesn't actually care that much about policy specifics. They want vibes. If she wants to *win*, she'll stay focused on vibes.
But second, if the goal is genuinely to *inform* ...
... then an interview w/ an MSM political reporter is one of the *worst* ways to do it. They'll ask about personal dramas & court intrigue. They'll try to get her to say something that can be spun as controversial, to get clicks. Their primary goal is not to inform!
The "cars = freedom" discourse seems to have kicked up again. It makes me think about the first time I visited Paris (on my honeymoon). I remember we walked out of our hotel & were discussing what to do & it sort of just hit me: we don't really need to plan. We can just go!
We didn't need to think about how to get a car from A to B, or how to park, or whether there was overnight parking at the hotel, etc. Anywhere you go, there's transit fairly accessible. Go wherever you want, whenever you want! It's always right there. Just go.
It was the first time I really felt, in my gut, the freedom that good transit brings. The freedom of unburdened, spontaneous movement through a city. It was revelatory.
Like so many things related to good urbanism, you really can't capture it in words. You have to feel it.
So, there are these "tipping points" -- points at which natural systems can, after a period of slow incremental change, suddenly "flip" to a new state. Scientists have identified a range, from coral bleaching to the collapse of various ice sheets. What they have in common ...
... is that crossing them would be *devastating* for humanity. Sci-fi apocalypse stuff, far beyond the damages projected from "normal" climate change (which are already cumulatively devastating).
Now, scientists have long cautioned against confident predictions ...
... about these tipping points. There's an element of stochasticity; it's very, very difficult to say exactly when they might happen. We *think* they're still a ways away, but we're definitely in the zone of danger & uncertainty. See this NYT piece: nytimes.com/interactive/20…
It might seem like kind of a trivial thing, but I think you can tell a *ton* about a person from how they interact with children. When you see Harris (and before her, Obama) interact with children or young people, you see a lot of what psychologists call "mirroring."
Mirroring is a fundamental part of child-rearing. The kid widens their eyes; you widen your eyes. The kid laughs; you laugh. What this teaches kids is that they are agents in the world. They can communicate their mental state & others will recognize & respond. Basic stuff!
It's most important when they are little babies, just learning about the world, but it's never *not* important. Even when they get older, it's incredibly important to emphasize that they have agency, that their mental states are significant, that they matter.
OK, one last 🧵on the Walz pick. To me, the question of why Harris chose Walz isn't that mysterious. He offered her something that none of the other candidates could offer. (This Politico story gets closest to it.) politico.com/news/2024/08/0…
All the other candidates are up-and-comers. They're plotting for their political futures. They would spend the campaign, and the presidency, *at least in part* trying to build their own independent power bases, prepping for when they step into the main spotlight.
There's nothing particularly nefarious about that, it's just the name of the game -- the same awkward position Harris herself has been in for the last four years. A VP who is thinking about their political ambitions, their future, is never 100% an ally.