Conservative "tough guys" are whiny bitches with adamantine victim complexes. All of them. Just whiny, whiny babies. God I wish I could just ignore them & leave them to their miserable lives .
The problem with whiny, unhappy men who think dominating other people & imposing cruelty on the weak will make them happy is that they won't just be miserable in obscurity. They are devoted to taking power & making others miserable.
If the last few generations of men had just hugged their sons more, we'd be in such a better place.
Hug your sons, guys. Tell them you love them. Make the future better.
One of the cool things about being a father in 2020 is that loving & hugging on your sons is a legitimately pro-social act & it's also the funnest, best, most satisfying experience available to a human being.
I mean, you get the smug satisfaction of being a Good Person & then as a bonus you also get to hug on your sons. Nowhere else in life will you find a deal this good.
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One key to understanding reactionaries is that horrible people believe, at a deep level, that everyone is horrible. Virtue & decency strike them as tricks, as someone trying to pull something over on them. They literally cannot imagine good people.
On this same theme, read this piece about the RW militia group Oath Keepers. They work each other up with scary tales about what the left & "antifa" are doing (or preparing to do), in order to ease the way for their own escalation. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
Early in the piece, Oath Keepers guy is like, "we're not going to start anything, we're just going to be ready when the left acts." But of course, everything they think about the left is fantasy & never comes to pass. So by the end of the piece ...
"Extremely narrow election outcomes...are likely to trigger dispute over the results. ... In this paper we evaluate the probability of such disputable US presidential elections under a hypothetical National Popular Vote versus the current EC system." nber.org/papers/w27993
"... in practice the Electoral College today is about 40 times as likely as a National Popular Vote to generate scenarios in which a small number of ballots in a pivotal voting unit determines the Presidency."
"This disputed-election risk is asymmetric across political parties. It is about twice as likely that a Democrat's Electoral College victory in a close election could be overturned by a judicial decision affecting less than 1K, 5K, or 10K ballots in a single, pivotal state."
My new post: I address the latest stupid controversy over Biden’s energy policy, which is about Republican attempts to make it sound abrupt & scary. Biden is reassuring voters it will be gradual. His allies on the left should give him room to maneuver. vox.com/energy-and-env…
I couldn't really figure out how to package today's piece to make it sound sexy & clicky, but there's some good stuff in there about the challenges of selling Big Change to America when the other side is laboring overtime to scare them. (Esp. where "them" = fossil fuel workers.)
Also, if you want to know why Biden has to be careful when addressing swing states, read @yayitsrob on the oddly disproportionate electoral power of fossil fuel communities. theatlantic.com/newsletters/ar…
Articles like this are so strange to me. Lots of thoughtful coverage of what various people are feeling & saying, but nothing on *what is true*, on whether any particular feeling or statement is justified. Just "the two sides" & their feelings, the end. washingtonpost.com/politics/end-o…
Like, the left's feelings about Trump are based on what he's done, and tried to do, and said he wants to do. They're based on the demonstrable, consistent direction of the US conservative movement for decades now. They are based on evidence!
Meanwhile, if you listen to Trump (or any conservative these days, really) about what the left is & wants to do, it sounds like overwrought, hackish genre fiction. In reality, the Dem Party is a boring center-left party -- less left than other center-left parties.
OK, thanks to the urging of my above-average followers, I've been prompted to check out Miley's covers of "Zombie," "Nothing Else Matters," and "Wish You Were Here," and now I'm afraid I must report that I'm genuinely looking forward to her album of Metallica covers.
It's partly that Miley's just a great singer, but it's also that when she's singing these covers she is so obviously a *fan*, like just delighted that somehow she's in a position where she gets to do her shower karaoke on stage. It is charming.