One of my meta-takes on Trump & the Trump years is that all your critiques of him do not put HIM in a bad light-- he is what he is, has been from the world go, is incapable of being different. They are are damning indictments of US politics & culture. He reflects our dysfunction.
It's not news that he a malignant narcissist who cares for nothing & is incapable of long-term thought. You're not revealing anything by pointing that out (again). What you're revealing is that US culture is so broken that it actively elevates, enables, & protects Trumps.
Trump is a theatrical case, but all across US culture, dumb, egotistical, rich white guys are doing dumb shit, being cruel, flailing & fucking up, and they're protected from consequences by the grifters, climbers, & mini-authoritarians around them.
There's no point in condemning Trump, I guess I'm saying, any more than there is condemning an amoeba, or a shark. The lessons of these years are about the system that elevates & empowers them -- a system that will still exist when Trump is gone.
Like, if you came into a friend's house & there was a grizzly bear smashing his stuff, you wouldn't say, "this grizzly is behaving inconsiderately! We must call on the bear to calm down." Nah. It's a bear. The problem is why/how it was let in! And how to keep the next bear out.
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Oh, ha, I see that my tweets from my phone went out without the attachments! The mysterious tweet above is in reference to this: npr.org/2020/12/15/946…
"Disparate factions on the right are coalescing into one side, analysts say, self-proclaimed 'real Americans' who are cocooned in their own news outlets, their own social media networks and, ultimately, their own 'truth.'"
Every major political journalist has heard the cries of protest about both-sides coverage. They're all aware of it & aware of the problems with it. But they also know that if they turn on it, they will face social & professional sanction from other journos, editors, VSPs.
The crappy truth is that, from a purely business point of view, both-sides is probably the smart strategy. Normies love it. More to the point, clearly identifying responsible parties would probably lose readers & generate political heat, and who needs that?
This is just a subset of a larger problem: journalism has been disaggregated & exposed more & more to market forces, and honest, in-depth, courageous journalism *is not a particularly smart biz strategy*.
We are watching the shit out of Wonder Woman 1984. I suggested merely watching it, but my family was insistent, no, we're watching the shit out of it.
OK, it took us two nights to get through WW 1984, and, uh ... what an utterly incoherent mess. What was this movie trying to say? What is the lesson? Don't ... wish for stuff? I could not be more baffled.
It can not be emphasized enough that a major plot thread in the movie is Steve's soul coming back, displacing some other dude's soul out of his body, and then Diana & Steve basically using the guy's body as a sex toy. It's so rapey ... & never addressed at all!
An infuriating thread about exclusionary zoning in all the places around Seattle. Everything about it is bad, but what is particularly maddening to me is jamming in density around arterials. It's so dumb, so classist & racist, so counter-productive economically, just ... argh.
Density should create walkable, pleasant communities. When density is just low-quality, ticky-tacky apartment buildings lining a giant car sewer (see: north Greenwood), you get none of the benefits. You're just creating a place to warehouse working class & low-income residents.
Go check out Phinney Ridge & Greenwood in Seattle some time. They are supposed to be "urban villages." Instead you have apartments, sidewalks, & bike lanes... wrapped around a car sewer with people driving 35mph. "Walkable"? It's a constant game of dodge-the-2-ton-death-machines.
One of my conservative dad's (& semi-conservative brother's) most enduring beliefs about liberals -- by which they mean everyone to the left of Rs -- is that they walk in lock step, all think the same, & are on a mission to make everyone in the US think the same.
Everyone on the left agreeing with how I think ... has not been my experience.
I think it is one of the weirder cases of projection on the right. Somehow, allowing multiple races, cultures, and belief systems to live side-by-side as equals under a set of neutral laws & principles is dogmatic & narrow ...
Nothing is more fundamental to the worldview of the Very Online, over-educated, hyper-verbal, A-student left than the notion that WORDS ("messaging") are the skeleton key to politics, the answer to every political challenge. Nothing can dissuade them from this belief.
All right I'm gonna stop tweeting today but I gotta clarify the above, since "messaging" tends to conflate two distinct things. On one hand there's message development -- finding clever/viral/sticky/effective combinations of words & phrases. On the other hand ...
... there's message distribution, i.e., the mechanics of getting the message to, & into the heads of, the public.
It is the first that lefties tend to fixate on. It's what they spend their time online doing & often mistake for actual politics. They're all experts at it.