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Will Stancil Profile picture
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8 Jan, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Okay? So what? I don’t get this thing where a Republican will say “I want to you to die” and then scolds will come in to say “They’re trying to get a rise out of you, focus on their bad policies.”
Some people seem to think we give Republicans power if we react strongly to their ghoulish attention-seeking behavior, but that logic only works when you’re talking about groups (e.g., small children, Internet trolls) who have no power over us and we empower with our reactions.
“They go low, we go high”-style thinking has always relied on an unspoken assumption that liberals really are the adults in the room, and that the GOP only matters to the extent that we empower it. But it’s wrong! The GOP does not rely on us, and this is a contest of equals.
If someone openly wishes you harm and has the ability to cause it, only a dope would ignore it. That person is a threat! You must fight back! “Being the bigger man” is a luxury you no longer have!

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More from @whstancil

Will Stancil Profile picture
9 Jan
The charter school lobby here in Minnesota is shameless. Our charters are openly segregated - they’re much more segregated than traditional schools, and sell themselves as racially exclusive. They’ve adopted the Orwellian term “culturally affirming” to defend this practice. ImageImage
It has been clear since Brown v. Board of Education that you cannot operate public schools in the US and hang a sign over the door saying “This school is for black kids. That school is for white kids. This other school is for Asian kids.” But that’s what our charter schools do.
It’s a huge scandal happening in plain sight. Traditional MN K-12 education is segregated, and the state should be required to desegregate. But what’s happening with some charters is on another level entirely. It’s a restoration of Jim Crow thinking and astonishingly illegal.
Read 4 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
8 Jan
People were told over and over this would happen but turned "schools must stay open" into some kind of braindead crusade, and now it's just a unmanageable trainwreck that's worse than everyone going home and getting lessons on zoom.
The COVID school meltdown isn't being caused pressure from parents or anyone in schools, who never demanded this. It was almost entirely made up of a bunch of idiotic elites who read silly takes by Emily Oster and David Leonhardt and worked themselves into a frenzy over it.
It was compounded by an incredibly stupid political narrative that Democrats lost in Virginia because of the school closures. Nevermind that they had ended six months prior, had always polled above water, and didn't predict the swing. The narrative was just too clicky to ignore.
Read 4 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
7 Jan
Honestly I think the fact that people find this so hard to grasp is a symptom of Americentrism, where we treat politics as an extension of policy debate.
Mass politics is about group or caste affinity. Here in America that's incredibly racialized, although obviously it goes a long way past that. Mass radicalization happens when one of those groups or castes gets whipped up into a frenzy.
Mass radicalization can take many forms, the exact set of topics that get swept up into it is historically contingent, but at its heart is often a cultlike dynamic: people are encouraged to indulge in various lizard-brain whims in exchange for loyalty.
Read 6 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
6 Jan
"how is COVID any different from any other respiratory virus" is an extremely easy question to answer if spend two seconds thinking about it and haven't spent a year desperate seeking permission to stop worrying about it and go back to your happy place
"COVID is just like the common cold now, this is just like every winter when a new cold variant pops up and ten million people get it in a week and all the hospitals are at capacity and doctors are quitting and 10k are dying a week, just a normal respiratory virus"
if you, PERSONALLY, are low-risk and know people who are low-risk and live in areas where most people arelow risk and you are unlikely to need unrelated medical care, yep, you can kind of pretend things are normal.
Read 4 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
6 Jan
Ah, the one-year anniversary of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer watching a president attempt a coup, and then recessing for days so the coupists could get their story straight.
The still-ongoing Trump crisis has TWO faces: an authoritarian Republican Party, but also a calcified Democratic Party, the latter so wedded to a soothing fictions of normality that it is unable to vigorously confront existential threats. January 6 revealed both faces.
Too many Democrats appeared to see Jan. 6 not as an outrageous escalation of Trump's menace, but as the thing they'd always assumed would happen: Trump defeating himself. So they certified the election, went home, and waited for the problem to fix itself. Obviously it didn't.
Read 4 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
5 Jan
Nothing against Jake, but this argument for why trying to slow down Omicron is pointless illustrates how unintuitive exponential growth can be. The supposedly small reduction in spread here would reduce cases by 47% after six cycles of infection!
Exponential growth means that even relatively small reductions in the rate of spread will result in very significantly lower numbers of cases, which is why it’s absurd to simply throw our hands up and say “Masks and distancing are only partially effective so forget about them.”
Vaccine mandates are great! But there's not a finite amount of capital to be allocated between vaccines and NPIs; treating Omicron as an urgent crisis creates more political space for both. My point is that both help and we should attempt both.
Read 4 tweets

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