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David Roberts Profile picture
@drvolts
Sep 30, 2020 • 10 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
This is the dumbest fucking thing I've ever seen.
A quick word on WHY this is dumb, to connect it to something I've been thinking about. One thing you learn when you study religion & philosophy in school is, basically, how to argue. One of the key things to learn is that arguments, any argument, only make sense ...
... relative to shared premises. Part of arguing is digging down to find those shared premises & then figuring out where, downstream of them, you divert from your interlocutor. Without shared premises, you're literally not arguing, you're just saying words at each other.
Sometimes you have to go pretty far down to find those premises. "There is a world." "Human welfare is the goal of human society." Things like that.

It seems to me a big part of what's happened over the last few years/decades of US politics is that the left ...
... has slowly (SO slowly) come to the realization that the right does not share many of the premises it takes for granted. Democracy is good; voter participation should be maximized; rule of law is more important than the advantage of any particular faction; etc.
It can be extremely disorienting. Like, you're arguing about the details of some North Carolina voter disenfranchisement scheme, assuming that *of course* deliberate voter suppression is bad, *of course* it's better if every eligible voter votes, thinking your interlocutor...
...is just confused about the mechanisms of the law, or mistaken about the prevalence of voter fraud, or some such. It's vertiginous to realize that, no, they really don't think certain voters should vote; they really do think GOP victories are more important than full democracy.
You can kind of see this (*finally*) happening across the Dem establishment, the slow realization that what they had taken as fundamental precepts of the US political system are in fact *not* shared premises. The right is not unaware or mistaken about what it's doing.
Anyway, to bring this back around, the entire mental model of the US political parties as two sides, with a coherent middle, is based on this unspoken assumption of shared premises. But if there are no shared premises -- or rather, if the shared premises are so far down ...
... that they consist in things like "there is a world" -- then the "center" is vapor. It has no political content.

Shorter: in a fight between law-bound democracy & ethnonationalist minority rule, there is no coherent center. Pretending there is just obscures the truth. </fin>

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More from @drvolts

David Roberts Profile picture
Aug 20
🧵 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 ...
Read 13 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
Aug 13
I come out somewhere between @Sulliview and @jeffjarvis on this one. A short 🧵.

Let's distinguish between two reasons Harris might need to speak specifically with the US political press corps.

The first reason is: to inform the public what she's about.
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!
Read 13 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
Aug 12
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.
Read 4 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
Aug 12
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…
Read 6 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
Aug 10
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.
Read 11 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
Aug 7
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.
Read 8 tweets

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