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David Roberts Profile picture
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4 Oct, 5 tweets, 2 min read
This is good, and gets at the same thing I was trying to get at in this thread:
To wit: everything Trump and his administration do telegraphs weakness. They are constantly terrified & thus constantly shouting about their own strength. A bunch of soft, privileged hacks & crooks groping for football & war analogies. It's embarrassing.
You've got @greggutfeld out there saying that Trump was being a brave general by galloping out onto the battlefield to ... hold fundraisers & superspreader events for his own political benefit. It's like we've got a whole generation of men who've never even SEEN strength.
Actually, I take that back: Barack Obama had exactly the kind of inner strength that @Timodc describes, which manifested as *calm & steadiness*, not manic belligerence. It laid bare the weakness of the right's Tough Guys & they hated, hated, hated it.
You have to remember that the US conservative movement idolizes, as the ultimate in manhood, Ronald Reagan, a guy who was quite literally *an actor performing a tough guy*. An actor! Performing! A tough guy! I can't get over it.

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More from @drvox

David Roberts Profile picture
5 Oct
Trump fundraising emails make it sound like Trump has mild symptoms because he's uniquely tough -- as though people who succumb to Covid do so because they're weak. The right-wing obsession with signaling masculinity is so sweaty & desperate. Image
How can you even make fun of this? Satire has been weirdly neutralized by this crew.
Again: how can you even mock this? It is so thoroughly self-mocking that there's no room for satire.
Read 6 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
1 Oct
Anyone pretending to be confused about Biden's policies based on whatever jumbled phrases he was able to insert between Trump interruptions can just ... go to his website, where all the policies are written down, in words.
The alleged confusion last night was about whether Biden supports the Green New Deal, about which he said some confusing things. A few points about this. First, there is no official GND. The term does not describe any particular policy agenda. It has become ...
... entirely a culture-war symbol. Cons project a bunch of fears on it; progs project a bunch of hopes on it. When Biden says he doesn't support the GND, it's the culture-war symbol -- particularly the ludicrous caricature the right has created -- that he's disavowing.
Read 6 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
30 Sep
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.
Read 10 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
29 Sep
An indulgent thread:

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.
Read 12 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
28 Sep
I am not exaggerating when I say that reading this story caused me physical pain. washingtonpost.com/politics/undec…
“I’ll decide based on the debates,” said George Cottingham, a 25-year-old music production student in Racine, Wis. “I want to see a sense of purpose. I always can tell if someone’s competent by seeing how they present themselves.”

[receding scream as Dave self-defenestrates]
"The Boltzes, lifelong Republicans, want the debates to reveal what they say news coverage of the campaign has not: Who will address the cost of health care? Who will support protests for racial justice but stand firm against violence? Who can actually bring people together?" 😱
Read 6 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
28 Sep
Trump is too lazy & undisciplined to actually prepare for the debates & his flacks are trying to cover for him & it is hilarious. cbsnews.com/news/biden-tru… Image
"The president prepares by being president" will be the epitaph of the Trump administration.
"Sometimes you can go to deep into that stuff" is also a viable epitaph. abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireS… Image
Read 4 tweets

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