Share this page!

Angus Johnston Profile picture
Twitter logo
Feb 1 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Everything sucks, nothing's getting better, and it increasingly feels to many people like nothing CAN get better. So OF COURSE if you ask people "how are you doing?" questions they're going to respond in tones of despair.
(To put it another way, if you click through to @Nate_Cohn's thread, I think he's got it mostly right, though I'd underscore existential despair more than he does.)
I also think Cohn is 100% right to say that how people respond to questions about the economy aren't solely, or in many cases even primarily, about how they feel about the economy right now.
Looking just at issues that motivate the Dem base, BBB and voting rights legislation imploded, Covid mitigation feels shambolic, there's little high-profile movement on Trump-admin accountability, 2022 and 2024 are looming ominously, and oh, yeah, the planet is burning.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Angus Johnston

Angus Johnston Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @studentactivism

Angus Johnston Profile picture
Feb 3
Lots of people confused by this claim, and with good reason—the data Yglesias used came from a study that estimated population once a century. His chart, and particularly his tweet, doesn't reflect that.
Here's the source for Yglesias's claim—it's the left hand column. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_l…
So yes, London was probably the biggest city in the world in 1900, but no, that doesn't mean it was the biggest from 1900 to 2000, or that Tokyo "suddenly" took over that year.
Read 14 tweets
Angus Johnston Profile picture
Jan 30
This question is grounded in pretended ignorance of the obvious reality that Biden had a list of potential justices available to him well before he won the nomination, and that his people have been refining and tweaking that list on an onging basis over the last year.
The Biden administration is considering all possible nominees. They've been considering all possible nominees since months before he won. Biden's longstanding commitment to putting a Black woman on the Court is not mutually exclusive with a consideration of all possible nominees.
It's just a profundly silly, disingenous, and destructive way of framing the question.
Read 6 tweets
Angus Johnston Profile picture
Jan 29
I was just looking up how many times humans have landed craft on the moon since Apollo, and stumbled across this—the first image ever made of the far side. Image
It literally is, old man.
Someone in replies to Candace Owens' moon-landing-is-a-hoax thread was asking why we'd never gone back since Apollo, and I was curious about the number.
Read 14 tweets
Angus Johnston Profile picture
Jan 28
The best, most enduring children's literature often has an anarchic, befuddling formal quality. It appears to embrace the structures of the lesser works that kids are immersed in, and then smashes them for no obvious reason.
Goodnight Moon is my favorite example of this. On its surface, it's a narrator listing the stuff that's in a room, then saying good night to each thing. The soil from which a zillion anodyne board books have sprung.
But hold the lists in Goodnight Moon up against each other, and you discover that they're not parallel at all. They clang and slip and bounce around in ways no modern editor would ever allow.
Read 7 tweets
Angus Johnston Profile picture
Jan 27
I see a lot of people say "if you haven't been vaccinated by now, you can't be convinced," but the numbers don't bear that out at all. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are getting their first shot EVERY DAY right now.
A quarter of a million Americans got their first Covid vaccine shot yesterday, and those numbers are consistent with where the stats have been since last summer.
In the first week of December, as the omicron surge hit, something like 4 million Americans got their first shot. But even in the pre-omicron lull, we were averaging well over a million new vaccinatees a week.
Read 23 tweets
Angus Johnston Profile picture
Jan 21
Seeing a lot of people assuming that the Trump "National Healing" speech and the EO seizing voting machines were part of the same plot, but it's the opposite. They were artifacts of two competing proposals within the administration. politico.com/news/2022/01/2…
The Executive Order was part of a planned strategy of escalation of the attempt to steal the election. It would have set the wheels in motion for an official process to discredit and repudiate Biden's victory.
But the "Remarks on National Healing" weren't part of that attempt to steal the election. Instead, if you read the speech, you can see it was drafted as part of a plan under which Trump would have repudiated the January 6 attack and conceded the election.
Read 8 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Like this author's thread?

Get emails when @studentactivism has new unrolls!

Check out other threads from @studentactivism!

Read all threads by @studentactivism

:(