Don't miss this chipper @JaxAlemany piece about the bright political future ahead for the daughter of an aspiring despot, who got to the WH through nepotism & has accomplished nothing in 4 years but eliciting fawning profiles from gullible journalists. washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/…
"I think she's impressive and most people see she's impressive and if she wants to stay involved with politics, people will take her with open arms." For this searing insight, a "former White House official" was granted anonymity.
To imagine Ivanka Trump "impressive," one has to find being a soft-spoken, physically attractive white lady impressive *in & of itself*. It's like performance art: how minimal in substance & accomplishment can a white lady be & still be deemed impressive by white men? Very!
These puff pieces about the unqualified, corrupt, nepotistically elevated heirs to power are being written *while their father is still in the WH trying to steal an election*. Not shortly after. WHILE. How can you even mock this? It's so fucking decadent & gross.
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I was just reminded that technically I'm still on vacation for two more days. Based on that info, should I:
All right, I have heard your counsel, and I am ignoring it. Instead, here's another thread on carbon capture & sequestration. (I know this gets tedious, feel free to mute me, but I'm determined to articulate this properly so I shall keep trying.)
Negative emissions technologies (NETs) are absolutely serving as a permission structure to continue emitting GHGs. Just as CCS subsidies in the US will serve as a permission structure to continue politics/business as usual.
All right fine a quick thread on this. The main job of reducing emissions is substituting clean techs for their dirty counterparts -- techs that produce the same goods & services, w/out the CO2 emissions. Some of those alternatives are mature & cheaper already (RE) ...
... while some are at the demonstration or even lab phase. But *even the techs that are mature & cheaper* are proving a challenge to substitute fast enough, because of politics. Again: we're having trouble *substituting something cleaner & cheaper* for the same work.
Extremely feeling this and the entire rant that precedes it. I don't think Tom is fluent in Woke, but the phenomena he's talking about here have names: white innocence & white fragility. Patterns of behavior & rhetoric familiar from, eg, Confederate states in the runup to the CW.
It's always the same. No matter how much cruelty & suffering they impose, however unjust the cultures they build, they are always the victims -- of misunderstanding, of condescension -- and it is always everyone else who's obliged to "reach out" & understand them better.
That's the dumbest part of it. "We need to understand Trump voters better." Guess what? They aren't that fucking complicated! They've told us, through their words & behavior, what motivates them. It's a group dynamic as old as humanity; it dominates US history. We get it!
Among the many reasons this is horseshit, this whole genre of liberal-scolding rests on the premise that the offended heartlanders are responding to what Dems actually say -- the intramural debates in which people like Dowd are involved. They're not!
By & large, Trump's base has no idea what Dems actually say or do. They are responding to a ludicrous caricature they see on RW media (& RW social media). They are responding to lies & conspiracy theories. Dems changing how they talk *won't change any of that*.
Just got done reading The Cold Millions, the newish book by @1JessWalter. It is set amidst the labor struggles of the early 20th century, out west (Spokane & Seattle). It hit me so hard; then as now, the fight for social justice is bloody & frustrating & often seems futile.
But it also shows that all these futile actions, all these frustrations & lost battles, somehow, over time, add up to progress, thanks to people who fight no matter what, even in the face of violence & loss. Couldn't be more timely.
Should also add: it's a fantastic read! I'd place it a notch beneath Beautiful Ruins (my favorite audiobook ever), but completely worth your time. bookshop.org/books/the-cold…
Sorry, commenters, you're wrong: Rise of Skywalker is the worst Star Wars movie & the worst movie of the modern era. The prequels were extremely bad, but TRoS was extremely bad in a *worse way*. It was the worst in the worst way one can be worst.
The sequels were bad in a "auteur with no ear for dialogue & no feeling for actors is given way too much money & freedom & creates a towering, relentlessly clunky, narratively overpacked oddity." I don't wanna watch them, but I can forgive, or at least live with, them.