The death penalty was the first policy question that forced me to grapple with the "run aground" problem. To me, saying "you shouldn't kill people" is to morality what, say, "there is a rock" is to epistemology. If someone responded, "no, there's no rock," you quickly realize ...
... there aren't a lot of *arguments* you can mount. You can only repeat, "no, look. A rock! Right there!" Maybe kick it. The sensory experience of the rock is the foundation of your case. You can't go further down, find deeper justification. You've run aground.
Similarly (to me anyway), "you shouldn't kill people" is just moral bedrock. I can make prudential or consequentialist arguments, but they aren't the real root of it. "You shouldn't kill people" is the basis of other arguments, but not the result of argument. It's self-evident.
It's what it means, for me, for there to *be* morality. That's where it has to start if there's to be any such thing. I've run aground.
So when I encounter people who *don't* experience it that way, who view it as a tendentious or arguable claim, I'm a bit flummoxed.
Sure, I can argue the death penalty is expensive, or inequitably applied, or whatever, if those arguments seem useful. But it always feels a little surreal, like we're standing around a rock arguing whether there's a rock. I just wanna say, "look! There's the damn rock."
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I feel like conservatives' demonstration of just how little they are willing to do to save the lives of people in their own communities -- masks are a bother, you know -- should cause us to reassess their level of discomfort with anti-racist language & how seriously to take it.
These are people who won't mask up to save their own grandmas. How much personal discomfort are they going to be willing to endure to make sure POC & other subaltern populations feel more at home in the US? None. Absolutely fuck all.
I don't know what to do about that, but it's not *evidence* of anything, certainly not evidence that anti-racism has gone "too far." A fucking millimeter is too far for these people. They won't even wear masks in a pandemic! That sounds like a damn joke, but we just lived it.
The skills necessary to be a good press secretary are so utterly, diametrically opposed to mine that I view it as a kind of dark magic. I just love watching Psaki work.
Be polite and indulgent when you're disgusted.
Say a thing without actually saying it.
Answer a question without actually answering it.
Burn someone to the ground while smiling & saying nice words.
Refuse distractions and repeat a small set of core messages.
On the remote-work controversy, I can't help but think that people who do actual work are more likely to enjoy remote work, where it's easier to concentrate, & managers, whose work is meetings, want to return to physical offices, where meetings aren't so obviously useless/dreary.
Still useless, just not as dreary!
One thing discussions around this topic always reveal is that I'm an extreme outlier. My appetite for solitude, and solitary work, is basically bottomless. This need or appetite people have for workaday interactions with co-workers ... I just don't have it. At all.
It's not that difficult. They're belligerent, xenophobic reactionaries who sole pursuit is political power & imposing suffering on outsiders & Others. But the whole US center-left/VSP apparatus has ruled that explanation out, so what's left is a mystery. washingtonpost.com/politics/biden…
It goes like this: if you say Republicans are in fact the terrible people they appear to be, you're "partisan." And it is deep, deep in the DNA of VSPs that they are not on any team -- they are above that, with refined sensibilities that appreciate both sides' perspectives. So...
... they can't say that. But then they're left with this endless puzzle, which is explaining endless ugly, ignorant, cruel behavior ... without attributing it to ugliness, ignorance, or cruelty. This is like the main intellectual job of VSPs: laundering that behavior.
Oil & gas will try to draw a false equivalence between the need for minerals & the need for fossil fuels, but there's a key difference. If you want more oil & gas, your only choice is to explore further, dig deeper, do more violence to 🌎. The minerals challenge is different ...
... in that minerals are not the ends, just the means. We can innovate around them. We can reduce the need, find benign substitutions, improve mining standards, figure out recycling at scale, etc. Oil & gas is a 20thC resource problem; minerals is more a 21stC innovation problem.
I had a thought I wanted to add to this piece, but it was a bit of a wonky diversion, so I left it out. I will instead tackle it here on Twitter, the ideal venue for complicated wonky diversions. 🤪 volts.wtf/p/america-is-m…
There's a concept in economics (from recently deceased Canadian economist Robert Mundell) of an "optimum currency area" (OCA). His idea was that common currencies should go beyond national borders to regions that share certain features. investopedia.com/terms/o/optimu…
The euro is the baby of this idea, though later some people (I think Krugman among them?) criticized it by saying that, in fact, countries like Germany & Greece are not similar enough, & do not share strong enough central gov't, for the euro to work well.