I read this piece recommended by @JVLast on how participating in the 1/6 insurrection ruined three lives. I read it trying to summon compassion, as he suggested we all do.
And yet, I'm struggling. /1
@JVLast There's a lot in the piece about protecting people from the consequences of free speech, vulnerable and gullible people. But the only way I can agree with that is to just give up on human agency and accept that a paternal state should have kept these people out of trouble. /2
@JVLast I don't know how to do that. I've always lived with pride in a country that never fears free speech, especially not if it's just nincompoopery writ large. (I don't even like hate speech codes.) So to feel compassion, I have to think of these people as no better than children. /3
And we just accept that some number of us are children without moral or political agency, we've decided that felonies - including those of the insurrection - have to be judged by "how stupid are you?," and just have competency hearings all day and then give people guardians. /4
I'm not ready to do that. My compassion for vulnerable people sucked into a conspiracy theory is undermined by the realization that millions of people in difficult straits did not attempt to kill police officers and overturn an election.
We're either adults or we're not. /5x
Gah. Forgot to add the article.

nymag.com/intelligencer/…

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More from @RadioFreeTom

15 Dec
I've been busy all day, but catching up on the Great Mask Outrage confirms to me that
- Americans are terrible at risk assessement
- The goalposts for public health mandates have, for some people, now moved from "temporary emergency measures" to "because you might get a cold" /1
The people who are implying I am a heartless cad (which I am, but not on this) weren't here when I was taking rafts of shit from MAGA world about masking up, locking down, and getting vaxed. All of which I have affirmed with vigor.
But emergencies are not permanent. /2
Wear a mask in the shower if you want to. But it is *bad public policy* to create mandates that the public eventually just tunes out, for reasons ranging from symbolism to incoherence. I just drove through four states that all had different requirements, include *town* rules. /3
Read 5 tweets
8 Nov
This question is being asked by @cmclymer with a clear streak of bad faith, but I'm going to answer it. And some of my friends on the left aren't going to like the answer, because it involves words like "strategy" and "winning elections." /1
"What should we do to educate people" presupposes that racism was a mystery until yesterday and so today's progressives must champion something no one ever thought of. This is presumptuous and suffers from the idea that no one has tackled this until you thought of it. /2
FWIW, I don't think decades of education about racism - including changes in the 1990s - have failed, but it is a hallmark of current progressivism to believe that all consciousness started last Tuesday and therefore everyone else is way, way behind and need "educating."/3
Read 14 tweets
6 Nov
A good read by @20committee on the arrest of Danchenko and the Steele dossier. A couple of comments from me: First, the idea that the dossier had disinformation in it was something I think most Russia-heads assumed. Like John, I warned back in the day that this was likely. /1
John goes farther here, wondering if the entire dossier wasn't just a setup by the Russians, the old CI problem of a "paper mill." I see it a little differently: Steele was paid to go find dirt. So he went and found dirt, knowing some of it *had* to be fed from the Russians. /2
Whether just about *all* of it came from the Russians is a different matter, or whether the Russians were using Steele as a dupe to create chaos. (I think they did, but I think Steele knew it because that's just par for the course.) So Steele produced a file of raw intel. /3
Read 9 tweets
5 Nov
In the midst of all the 1776-ing about the guy who was elected to the New Jersey Senate because he had a beef over a concealed carry permit, he's already doing the "I'm sorry if I said a bunch of hateful stuff" dance, because of course he did.
Just as the Founders dreamed of!
/1
I love the idea that ordinary citizens run to make a difference. My mother - woman with a 9th grade education - did it in our hometown to shut down a drug market on our street. She won. She shut it down. That's citizen action, right there.
/2
But "I have no idea what I'm doing and I'm just mad at the local cops" isn't civic involvement, it's score-settling. The guy has every right to run and win - and the guy he beat probably deserved it - but this isn't how you get better government. /3
Read 4 tweets
5 Nov
Reminds me of nuclear weapons protests back in the 70s and 80s, which accomplished nothing, and assured that anti-nuke politicians and organizations were frozen out of the policy world.
Self-actualizing stunts like this convince no one, and I'd bet have zero effect on Manchin. /1
And before any of you get misty-eyed thinking protests against nukes got anywhere: Yes, people in the 80s were scared, and rightly so. The Cold War was getting hot. That didn't stop anything. And Reagan proposed SDI in part to undercut the arguments of anti-nuke protesters. /2
Reagan and Gorbachev took the first steps back from the brink, but I'd argue that super-dramatic protests actually made that harder to do for a while. Sometimes, protests make it harder for political leaders to back down, because they don't want to be seen as caving to them. /3
Read 4 tweets
27 Oct
The people who talk about a "civil war" and independence from the USA have no real idea what it would mean and don't really want it. They want their lives as they live them now, but with some sense that they've settled scores with people who look down on them. /1
They don't really want to know what life would be like without the US infrastructure. They want everything they have now, but with some sort of authority figure who says "It's okay to be terrible. We went and hurt those other folks. Oh, and here's some cash for your pain."
/2
Now, I suppose there are people who are just too stupid to understand that "secession" means "You have to fix all the highways that have that blue shield on them," and "you'll have to use MAGA Bucks instead of the dollar," but most of them really aren't that stupid. /3
Read 7 tweets

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