Julian Sanchez Profile picture
Feb 4 5 tweets 1 min read
It’s nice to hear Pence state clearly that he had no right to overturn the election; would’ve been nicer if he’d more strongly said there was no legitimate reason to question the result.
The cowardly dodge here is to make noises about “irregularities,” which is conveniently ambiguous between “real but ultimately trivial issues that arose as a byproduct of doing an election during a pandemic” and “the lunatic conspiracy theories the base now believes."
See, when your respectable friends ask what “irregularities” means, you can point out that the West Slothrop County Registrar authorized additional ballot dropboxes to be installed in a manner inconsistent with subsection B of section 243.2 of the state election code…
… and if the base hears “irregularities” & thinks you mean Venezuelan communists used the cybers to change all the Trump votes into Biden votes, well GOLLY, I never said that, did I? Surely I can’t be blamed for this totally predictable “misinterpetation”!
“Irregularities” is how R politicians who still feel some vestigial shame about lying can do so with plausible deniability. It lets you say something you can argue is technically true, even though you know that what your audience hears is something outrageously false.

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More from @normative

Jan 26
So, this sounds like the correct decision, but it’s a little weird that the court doesn’t seem all that interested in a question I’d have thought would be relevant to the analysis: What’s the normal level of traffic for that time and place?
Like, if the roads are normally dead at that hour and this was one of the only two cars anywhere in the vicinity, that seems less unreasonable than if there’s normally modest traffic…
…because it goes to the reasonableness of the antecedent inference “One of these two cars is very likely to contain the robbers.” The court notes that the stop location was “near” an interstate, but that doesn’t in itself tell you a whole lot.
Read 4 tweets
Jan 23
I saw this nonsense floating around a conspiracy nut board, and it made something click for me: These folks are basically operating on cinematic epistemology. They believe what would be true if the news were a Hollywood movie.
One of the most common refrains on Qanon forums is “we’re watching a movie” (like, they literally think major events are being faked by the White Hats as a kind of elaborate morality play to gradually “enlighten” the masses). But they’re more broadly operating on movie logic.
In the real world, a tiny handful of scientists (mostly undistinguished or long past their prime) loudly bucking an overwhelming consensus of experts are going to be cranks, grifters, or just plain wrong 99% of the time. But in a movie (cf. “Don’t Look Up”) that’s the hero!
Read 9 tweets
Jan 21
Trump’s MO since launching his political career has been to routinely accuse opponents of whatever he is most obviously guilty of, in hopes of getting the dual accusations treated as basically equivalent.
Republicans are currently systematically using hilariously obvious lies about fraud and election rigging as their pretext to actually rig elections. Now the savvy pose will be to treat it as hypocritical to make true claims that superficially resemble the lies.
So now if you notice that Republicans are using a completely imaginary problem as a pretext to push legislation that seems aimed at making it harder for minorities to vote, that’s exactly the same as utterly bats**t conspiracy theories about Dominion & Venezuelan communists.
Read 4 tweets
Jan 21
Music to my ears. Most film adaptations have given the “World’s Greatest Detective” aspect of the character pretty short shrift, so pleased to hear this version is leaning into it.
The Keaton version cracks the pattern to the Joker’s poisoned consumer products (offscreen), and the Bale version uses some fancy tech to reconstruct a fingerprint from bullet fragments, but otherwise film Batmen don’t do a whole lot of detecting.
I guess Bat-Kilmer solves some corny riddles, but I refuse to count that.
Read 4 tweets
Jan 14
I know this is the kind of prediction that can easily become embarrassing, but I really can't see the “metaverse" being that significant in the near term (~5-10yrs), and even beyond that I’d bet on it having relatively limited application.
For most functions—honestly, pretty much about every function other than gaming—navigating a virtual world is just a really bad, inconvenient UI. Wearing a visor so I can have a Zoom meeting in a virtual Shinto shrine might be a fun novelty, but it adds relatively little value.
Assume away the hardware clunkiness and stipulate that we’ve got VR/AR tech so compact it can be squeezed into something indistinguishable in form factor from ordinary glasses.
Read 10 tweets
Jan 12
I’ve seen this going around, and it’s like Dunning-Kruger incarnate in meme form. Like, to think this is remotely clever just requires staggering levels of ignorance and arrogance on multiple levels. Let’s count a few!
(1). You have to be so ignorant of the news you don’t realize that (like many vaccines) scientists understood perfectly well it was likely that the immunity conferred would wane over time, though not exactly how much over what period of time.
(2). You have to be so ignorant of biology that you don’t realize there are excellent theoretical and empirical reasons for thinking vaccines don’t have long-term side effects. Humans know some things. Not all aspects of the future are equally unknowable!
Read 6 tweets

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