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Will Stancil Profile picture
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2 Dec, 5 tweets, 2 min read
There's this predictable arc in American politics, where people get really famous and important, and suddenly are getting their wisdom from the incredibly narrow bubble of other famous and important people, and their ability to analyze things just tanks thehill.com/homenews/campa…
1. Activists use slogans for reasons other than convincing swing voters
2. There's no evidence that "defund the police" hurt Democrats anyway
3. It doesn't matter if it was effective or not, what matters is whether a tiny number of activists should subordinate their slogans to the national messaging prerogatives of a huge political party and whether that would make any difference to anything
4. Republicans spend millions of dollars on attack ads every single cycle, but that doesn't mean election results are directly attributable to the attacks, which change every cycle (Pelosi, the ACA, Obama, Clinton, the caravan, whatever)
"These things are correlated, therefore one caused the other"

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Will Stancil Profile picture
2 Dec
The other thing about “defund the police” is that even if you assume that it’s uniquely a killer for Democrats (something, to be clear, there’s literally zero actual evidence of), REPUBLICANS WOULD ACCUSE DEMOCRATS OF SUPPORTING IT REGARDLESS OF WHAT DEMS ACTUALLY SAY
I mean, is Obama just dense? “Oh if you describe this in nice, neutral terms you’ll get everyone to come along with you.”

Your landmark health care laws was demonizing as containing actual execution panels. There’s a lesson there, my man
Yeah, the key for winning swing voters is raising the portion of Democrats who refuse to say “defund the police” from 99% all the way to 100%, this makes sense
Read 7 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
2 Dec
the funny thing about centrist idiots claiming "defund the police" is a magic code phrase that uniquely loses elections is that essentially no democrats of any stature used or cared about that specific phrase until those exact same centrist idiots began losing their mind over it Image
anyway note the trick: they can't claim that police reform itself is difficult, because then they'd be in the awkward spot of telling civil rights advocates go away and shut up, so instead they're arguing that the exact, specific phrase "defund the police" has evil magic powers
"oh no, someone in our 85 million voter coalition used a phrase that polls badly, that's why we underperformed in the election! I am a very serious thinker about politics."
Read 4 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
1 Dec
Collective guilt is bad and incoherent, even when the collective group is white people! You are not responsible for failures of people who happen to share some of your artificial, socially-constructed demographic characteristics
The more fortunate along us, who usually have benefited from historic injustice and inequality, have a moral responsibility to remedy present-day injustice and inequality. That’s different from saying we are personally, directly culpable in some kind of racial or bloodline gullt
It’s perfectly coherent to believe, e.g., there is a collective RESPONSIBILITY to provide reparations while acknowledging that the people who face that responsibility are not personally culpable for the harms they should seek to remedy
Read 4 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
1 Dec
This is Democrats playing themselves. Not because they refuse to make a deal - McConnell hasn’t actually been interested in a deal! - but because, in their infinite short-sightedness, Pelosi’s decrepit leadership keeps pretending bipartisanship is possible
McConnell can’t even get support for a minor stimulus but in Pelosi’s addled head talking about obstructionism is admitting weakness or something, even when you are actually being obstructed. So she instead pretends a deal is plausible, ensuring Dems get blamed. ImageImage
Same thinking that led her to say the House had “arrows in the quiver” to use against Barrett, when she clearly believed there were none and certainly never tried to do anything about Barrett’s confirmation. If you take her words at face value she’s acquiescing to it!
Read 4 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
28 Nov
I'll be blunt here: this is stupid, the numbers don't support it, and you should reconsider it. It gets written after every election because it tickles some kind of liberal reporter fetish about recognizing their bubble, but the numbers do not support it.
This claim relies on the assumption that smaller states are less urban but that THAT CLAIM IS WRONG. Nor are large, highly urban states necessarily Democratic: both Texas and Florida fall into that category. It literally takes five minutes of data analysis to see this.
Why is the claim that liberals are politically weakened by their urban strength so irresistible?

Because if you DIDN'T somehow blame this on liberal insularity, people might recognize "Please subordinate your interests to rural white people" for what it is: politicized racism.
Read 7 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
28 Nov
honestly the underlying story, which ranges from an individual romance up to a pangalactic conflict, and twists around the roles of heroes and villains for the whole series in a dizzying and unexpected way, is epic in scope and has incredible potential
it's actually kind of daring to make imperial militarists the heroes of the whole thing, because you both end up cheering for them and you know how it turns out. it's genuinely political, even if the execution is deeply stupid
it firmly plants the seeds of space fascism in the flaws of space democracy! when I saw it back in theaters that completely blew mind, I didn't even notice the terrible, terrible, terrible other stuff

also the romance theme is one of the best pieces of music in the whole series
Read 4 tweets

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