The (apparently former) mayor of Colorado City, TX, got into a little hot water over these remarks directed at his constituents who are without power and water in the middle of a blizzard.

Let's have a fireside chat about this. Image
Bad Political Cliché #1: It's all about individuals.

Contrary to the famous Margaret Thatcher line (though it is sometimes taken out of context), there is such a thing as society. What is happening in Texas right now is a failure of institutions, first and foremost... Image
So it's more than a little tin-eared to talk about "laziness" being the problem when the power grid has failed due to lack of preparation and the streets are being ploughed due to lack of resources.
Yikes moment # 2: Asserting that social Darwinism has something to do with Christianity.

"The strong will survive and the weak will parish (sic.)," we are told.

That ain't a conservative sentiment, folks at least not in any sense we should respect.
To his credit, the mayor is also willing to admit, in passing, that some people truly can't help themselves and need help from others.

Which is of course incoherent, but at least he's not a monster.
Here's the thing: of course people should help themselves and their families, to the extent they can.

He doesn't mention this at all, but they should also help their neighbors and communities.
Not only that, but (Bad Political Cliché #3) they should help their neighbors, individually or collectively, without obsessively judging them for whether or not they have somehow morally merited help. They question is whether they need it.
The "deserving vs. undeserving poor" distinction is mostly a way to wash our hands of our other people's problems.

Personal responsibility matters.

Repeating mantras about personal responsibility does not help your neighbor with no heat or water.
*not ploughed, of course
It's true that government can't do everything for people. They need other resources.

More than anything, they need people in their communities they can draw on.
The "Cajun Navy" volunteers showed us how powerful people working for the good of their own neighbors can be.

But the "every man for himself" attitude isn't just anti-government. It's corrosive to that kind strength of community as well. Image
Ironically, the attitude that I don't owe anything to my neighbor results in more big government. If there's nothing standing between me and the corporate marketplace (or a blizzard), then of course we need powerful institutions to prevent atomized individuals from being crushed.
...but simply cutting people loose to sink or swim (or freeze) isn't going to restore the thick social relationships that make a decent community life possible.

We need government, in its place, and individuals, in theirs. But we also need a whole lot more in between.

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More from @AmSolidarity

18 Feb
Looks like PragerU didn't catch our thread yesterday.

It's kinda weird, though, that a group that praises Judeo-Christian values so much is also pushing this sort of content, which equates morality with pure liberalism, in the classical sense of the word.
Then again this is the same group that made a video with Jesus helping a homeless guy become an entrepreneur, so we probably shouldn't be surprised. Image
Markets are useful things. We like markets.

The fact that market transaction takes place without physical force or fraud doesn't make its results *good*, though.
Read 15 tweets
18 Feb
Past a certain point, being unimaginably rich is no longer useful for improving anyone's material comfort. It's a form of power.

Bezos didn't buy the Washington Post so he could make a nice return on his investment and buy another jet.
When you understand this, you can still argue about ways to respond to inequality. But it's an inescapably political question. The problem with billionaires is not how much money they have or have not "earned." It's the unaccountable power they wield over society.
Glad you brought this up. Yes, when you have enormous concentration of economic power, you need government power to regulate it, and that creates its own problems.

This is why we think we need policies that disperse economic power in the first place.

Read 4 tweets
18 Feb
One of Rush Limbaugh's better traits was a certain wry self-awareness: in the 1980's he started calling his loyal fans "ditto heads" because of how many of them would call in just to say they agreed with him or with the previous callers.

(thread) Image
It's hard to remember in the hyper-fragmented media landscape we live in now, but one of the reasons for that reaction is that many of those listeners really didn't see their views represented in the media landscape of the day, in the big networks and newspapers.
Those establishment sources of news and opinion had a certain sense of gravity and responsibility as the go-to-sources for Americans of all walks of life, but they were indeed pretty reliably liberal, if not especially radical.
Read 7 tweets
26 Jan
Let's talk about "social justice."

The phrase, that is.

Social justice has always been one of our party's core commitments. Occasionally, however, we hear from people who like our platform but get squirrely about the term.

(Thread)
(The ASP Polandball is unrelated, we just think it's cute.)
Anyway, some people tend to associate social justice with "cancel culture" or with policy positions like abortion-on-demand that we oppose.

(Abortion is a social justice issue, by the way, just not the way its proponents think it is).
Read 18 tweets
25 Jan
Apple doesn't want you to be able to repair your iPhone.

This is a good example of how corporations often look to increase their profit in ways that don't actually create value for consumers, and lobby governments to help them do it.
Aside from costing consumers' extra money, this kind of drive toward endless sale of new products is tremendously wasteful and environmentally costly.
One particularly crazy example: Clothing manufacturers literally shred or burn billions of dollars worth of clothes every year in order to prop up the prices for "fast fashion" lines they churn out every season.

vox.com/the-goods/2018…
Read 5 tweets
9 Dec 20
We're getting close to a full tally of the votes the Carroll-Patel campaign received. Nearly half of our votes were write-ins, and those often take a long time to tally as well as, in some cases, some prodding of the election authorities.

Here's what we have:
Here we list our results in each state where we received votes and compare results to 2016.

NR = Not recorded last time.

Wisconsin- 5,259 votes, 0.159%; 284 in 2016 as write-in
Illinois- 9,548 votes, 0.158%; NR in 2016
Rhode Island= 767 votes, 0.148%; 46 in 2016 as write-in
Kansas- 583 votes, 0.042%; 214 in 2016
Minnesota- 1,037 votes, 0.032%; 244 in 2016
Tennessee- 762 votes*, 0.031%; NR in 2016
Indiana- 893 votes, 0.029%; NR in 2016
Texas- 3,207 votes, 0.028%; 1401 in 2016
Maryland- 1,588 votes, 0.026%; 504 in 2016
Read 9 tweets

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