Confronted with the past remarks of Clinton and Abrams, large portions of lefty twitter have started insisted that Trump's major violation is the lawsuit--which is the most normal, acceptable thing he is doing. It's his extrajudicial activities that are unprecedented and horrific
The problem is not that Trump is going to court. The problem is that he is stating, as a fact, that a vast electoral fraud occurred in order to avoid admitting he lost the election by the rules then in place for holding the election.
(And also that this vast electoral fraud did not occur, or if we want to go all "You can't prove a negative", that he has offered no good evidence it did.)
The duty to concede is separate from the structure of the system, in a way too few people seem to be appreciating.
It was a serious, undemocratic structural flaw in the system that women could not vote in the 1900 election. William McKinley was nonetheless the duly elected, legitimate president of the United States. This sounds like a small thing; it is everything.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
So Democrats are going to be tempted to be quiet about the prior antics of Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams, on the (absolutely true) grounds that what Trump is doing is so much worse, and how dare you take the focus off him?
Understandable instinct, but a disastrous mistake.
The correct move here, both politically and ethically, is to utterly repudiate those earlier, dangerous flirtations with refusing to accept the legitimacy of a democratic election, and do your best to force the perpetrators to do so as well.
Undercut the best rejoinder Republicans have, which is that Democrats don't care about the norms of democratic legitimacy, and will hypocritically tolerate abuses from their own side.
So I'm advising people to skip the big Thanksgiving, even though yes, most people who go to a big family Thanksgiving dinner will not die! washingtonpost.com/opinions/my-no…
I think it's worth talking about how I came to that conclusion, even though I understand that turkey day is super important to a whole lot of people.
Basically, it boiled down to: when I described a "safe" dinner, everyone asked "But then, what's the point?"
People don't want to wave at their relatives from a comfortably distanced chair on the driveway while eating the food they brought in their own cooler.
Greenwald, Sullivan and Yglesias got so big by starting blogs that they could sell to traditional publications. They are not monetizing an audience they acquired through larger institutions, but reclaiming one they created themselves. pllqt.it/lJGvqe
Maybe being a white dude advantages you in blogging, though I did all right. But my observation as someone who did it is that the qualities that make you a great blogger are much, much more specific.
Basically, absolutely voracious information consumption, very fast reaction time, the ability to write quickly and coherently, the ability to cover a broad range of topics, and the ability to keep it up over weeks, months, years. Most people--even most writers--just can't do it.
In 2004, when I was living in London, I watched, with increasing hilarity, a news panel spend *20 minutes* discussing whether a non-Christian could be elected to higher office in the United States.
My companions didn't get the joke, and answering it made me laugh harder, until finally I was able to wipe the tears away and say "I don't know, perhaps we could ask Senator Lieberman for his thoughts."
It is weird to see common english words in quotes, or used as if they were a specific kind of the thing, instead of a general equivalent to that word in French or Spanish.
Well said. Novel crises end up with suboptimal responses because while custom is usually better than government, "Unfamiliar problem with large spillover effects" is one of the few areas where government will, on average, be more flexible than the average citizen's intuitions.
Like I'm super sympathetic to the folks arguing we shouldn't give government new powers just because there is a temporary crisis only 99.9999% of those folks also get really mad when you suggest using peer pressure to induce desirable reductions in spread.
In fact, what a large number of them seem to want--I'm tempted to say a majority--is that we use peer pressure to coerce everyone into ignoring the virus unless they're, like, 80. I mean, these people seem genuinely mad that I am not fulfilling my moral obligation to dine out.
Okay, all of you folks yelling IF YOU THINK ISOLATED CASES OF FRAUD OCCUR, WHY ARE YOU SO SANGUINE? HOW ARE YOU COMFORTABLE WITH FRAUD?
I need to tell you guys a story. About ballpoint pens.
Readers of my columns have heard this one before. Sorry. Bear with me.
So when I was just a young slip of a girl, making my way in the Big City by doing temp work, I got a multi-week gig at a moderately sized office that was, I infer, having some financial problems.