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7 Feb, 6 tweets, 1 min read
I guess I really am Gen X because watching Daveed Diggs & Sesame Street shill for f'ing Doordash gives me the hurls.
Wow I was kind of kidding before, but watching these ads ... there really is zero compunction about selling out any more. Any old actor will reprise/exploit any old role, any artist will sell any song, all IP is up for grabs. Am I silly to be a little bummed out by this?
Oh god and I hadn't even seen the Bruce Jeep ad when I wrote this ... 🤮
To round out my unsolicited and widely panned Super Bowl commentary: my overwhelming impression from the evening is that America is tired & out of ideas & increasingly committed to telling itself fairy tales.
Almost every commercial was recycling old IP -- frantically pushing our nostalgia buttons. Even the Bud Light commercial was about previous Bud Light commercials. What are people in 10 years going to recycle?

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David Roberts Profile picture
8 Feb
The more I think about the Bruce Springsteen Jeep ad, the more disgusted I get. It's allegedly a call for unity, but it is drenched in a very particular culture's iconography: a Christian church (that superimposes the cross on the US flag), farms, rural living, "the middle" ...
... it's all so white. This is the "America" of nationalist fairy tales: rural land, settled by self-reliant white farmers & good Christians. It's all trucks & dust & manual labor & squinting at the horizon while wiping sweat from your brow. This is the kind of "unity" ...
... designed to comfort (or at least not threaten) white people. It says, "let's unify by joining together to reaffirm America's mythical self-conception, despite the real-world violence & repression it has always entailed."
Read 6 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
6 Feb
Strongly endorse everything in this @OsitaNwanevu piece. One of the key mistakes I see among Dems, both online & in the real world, is thinking that people believe right-wing nonsense because they are unintelligent or uneducated. newrepublic.com/article/161266…
In the area I know best, climate change, it's been found repeatedly that climate denialists & skeptics have, on average, MORE higher education than those who accept the science. They know MORE about climate science. They have, on average, HIGHER verbal intelligence.
What they do is adopt the conclusion that best serves their social tribe and then use their intelligence & education to build a case for it. It's called "motivated reasoning" & everyone is subject to it, very much including the smartest people.
Read 8 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
2 Feb
1. I'm listening to a presentation on this big new report from the National Academies on decarbonizing the US by 2050, focused on policy recommendations. Worth checking out the whole thing, but I just want to emphasize one point. nationalacademies.org/news/2021/02/n…
2. There are lots of disputes & open questions about how to get from, say, 70/80 percent decarbonized to 100%. How much nuclear or CCS will be needed? Hydrogen something? Bioenergy something? Plenty of open tech questions that need to be settled by R&D, etc.

HOWEVER.
3. There is, as Steve Pacala said in his intro, an "island of certainty," which is to say, ALL the models, ALL the different plans & approaches, agree that ***for the next 10 years, the top priority is clean electrification using wind, solar, & batteries***.
Read 5 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
1 Feb
Murc's Law: Only Democrats have agency. Everything Republicans do, they were made to do by Democrats. Democrats made them vote for Trump, made them be racist, made them elect Qanon lunatics, made them assault the capitol.
Ask a Republican a moral question & you will never, ever get a first-order answer, about the actual morality of the acts in question. It's "Dems did something worse." It's "Dems made us do it." It's endless variants of, "It's not our fault!" The moral worldview of an adolescent.
An adolescent doesn't care whether or not what he did was wrong, he just doesn't want it pinned on him. He doesn't want the blame, or any responsibility. If he can escape accountability by pointing to someone else who allegedly did something worse, that's enough.
Read 5 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
31 Jan
There is a sociological tale to be told about a certain kind of person who had some intensely negative personal interactions with snooty liberals in college, or in their youth, & have transmuted the resulting resentment into a full-on cosmology.
I'm not talking about conservatives (though they share the obsession). I'm talking about people who ideologically incline toward liberalism but view annoying liberals as an overriding national emergency, to the point it occludes all their other political instincts.
Greenwald, Taibbi, that Conceptual James guy, lots of the IDW & Quillette & Persuasion types -- it's clear reading them that their personal resentment is so intense that they feel the need to build these giant theoretical sand castles around it, to lend it deep significance.
Read 10 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
31 Jan
This is a familiar tactic from the Obama years. They want Dems to agree that a) it's good to "compromise" on helping people, b) the absurd GOP number is a reasonable "other side" of negotiations. And if Dems engage in good faith? The GOP votes will vanish.
This happened over & over under Obama. Dems would negotiate their own bills down to nothing and then *Republicans would oppose them anyway*. Christ I hope they learned something and won't fall for this again. The right response to this pathetic gambit is: "fuck off."
Something else I'm sure will give me Obama flashbacks: the press will report this as "more partisan squabbling." Somehow they'll never make it clear that one party is fighting to give Americans more help & one party is fighting to give them less.
Read 5 tweets

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