On a serious note, though: for most of human history, in most places, people lived in multi-generational households in walkable settlements that featured regular, unplanned interactions with neighbors. America's decision ...
... to glorify the nuclear family & to isolate each nuclear family in its own separate suburban castle, thus eliminating 98% of spontaneous community interactions ... is responsible for soooooo many of our current social & political dysfunctions.
This is probably bad of us, by my 17yo and I are reading this story & it is prompting gales of laughter. What do you do when "charismatic Christian revivalist prophets" disagree with one another? What are the criteria for evaluating such things? politico.com/news/magazine/…
Honestly, every paragraph feels like a perfect set-up and a punchline.
Sincerely: how does one "reform" a movement based on supposed religious revelations of prophecy? Testing prophecies agains reality? That sounds a little like science. So ... what? What exactly is the proposal to maintain "spiritual integrity"?
Wow this Politico piece about Marjorie Taylor Greene is so, so revealing -- not just about her, but about the kind of person who is drawn to (and becomes a star in) today's GOP. politico.com/news/magazine/…
Key line: "her seat in Congress is less the fulfillment of a dream than the culmination of a desperate, yearslong search for an identity that fulfilled a yearning for affirmation and attention."
It's getting to be a familiar story on the right, whether it's Madison Cawthorn, MTG, or even Trump himself: an insecure person in desperate need of ego reinforcement casts about for some way to be the center of attention, to get the affirmation they need. And then they find ...
Interesting Obama interview by @CitizenCohn, from his (essential) new book on the history & meaning of Obamacare. Dunno if he draws the same dire conclusions I do, but to me Obamacare symbolizes ... everything about current US politics, none of it good. huffpost.com/entry/obama-in…
Primarily, Obamacare illustrates that ALL the incentives in US politics have lined up against people trying to reform things. Obama was fighting a unified, nihilistic right. He was fighting a large group of (truly terrible) conservative Dem senators. And he was fighting ...
... against an activist left convinced that if the Bully Pulpited hard enough, he could force those conservative Dems to do what he wanted. That left him, & the Democrats pushing reform, with effectively no friends, no organized popular backing -- fighting everyone.
Sometimes I try to imagine what it's like, caring about who else uses the bathroom you use ... caring about how other people identify themselves, gender-wise ... caring about other people's domestic arrangements ... and I just can't get there.
Granted, no one targets their moral sentiments & advocacy purely toward issues they calculate involve the most objective harm. We're not robots.
Nonetheless, it is a moral failing to rank your social & political concerns *purely on the basis of what makes you uncomfortable*.
I mean, the entire conservative discussion of gender issues proceeds as follows: a) this makes me uncomfortable, b) therefore it's bad, c) I can't just say it's bad because it makes me uncomfortable, so d) let's create a cottage industry finding/inventing real harms.
Lemme try again: read @JillFilipovic's piece on Rush Limbaugh's misogyny. (Apologies to Jill & @JessicaValenti for getting my J-feminists mixed up, which they must find incredibly tiresome at this point.) nytimes.com/2021/02/20/opi…
All conservative rage & resentment come from fear, but nowhere is that more obvious than in Limbaugh-style sexism. At the very lizard brain core of these little boys is a desperate, desperate need for care & nurturing. They aren't allowed to articulate or even acknowledge it ...
... so when they enter puberty & beyond & find themselves without it -- clueless how to get it, unable to even ask for it -- they respond with the only emotion they've been taught is legitimate for a man: anger. They become furious at women for having this power over them.
Worth noting: the Texas mess wasn't a "grid crisis." The grid did just fine distributing the power it had available. It was a *generation crisis* -- thanks to inadequately weatherized natgas production facilities & power plants, there just wasn't enough power to go around.
The Texas grid certainly would have benefited from being bigger, from being connected to the other two US grids, but you would need a truly epic amount of line capacity to import enough power to cover that shortfall. Generation failure was the heart of the crisis.
Everyone keeps RTing these tweets, so I'll add to this thread: I wrote a post on all this! See here: volts.wtf/p/lessons-from…