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David Roberts Profile picture
@drvolts
Feb 10, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
What's even more wild than some people continuing to wear masks during a pandemic is other people refusing to accept a free vaccine & thereby prolonging the pandemic.
It's very clear that, while the deliberately unvaxxed are worse on any conceivable metric (moral, social, epidemiological), it is people who insist on continuing to be cautious that truly BOTHER elite pundits, to the point of obsession.
It's worth thinking about why that is. I have my theories. But regardless of the reasons, I wish pundits would work a little harder to distinguish between "things that bother me" & "things that are of real social & political significance." Soooo much punditry consists of ...
... unconvincing attempts to puff the former up into the latter. IMO this explains 95% "cancel culture" hype. A set of people used to thinking of themselves as rebels & outsiders came under criticism from their left, hated it, & spun their butthurt into a grand nat'l conspiracy.

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More from @drvolts

David Roberts Profile picture
Nov 1
This is just one way that the entire system is set up to ensure 50/50 results. It's homeostatic -- if one side starts to do well, systems (journalism, polling, PAC money) move into action to balance it.
If you get a poll leaning in one direction, it prompts polls leaning in the other direction. If one side's rich people create a substantial spending advantage, the other side's rich people ratchet up their spending.
And above all: if there's a Puerto-Rico-joke PR disaster on one side, it prompts effusive "Biden gaffe" coverage on the other side.

This homeostasis is not the result of any grand conspiracy, it's just an outcome of politics infused with money & treated like a reality show.
Read 4 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
Oct 31
I'm glad I don't have to write an endorsement piece, because I really wouldn't know how to go about it. Ever since 2015, when Trump descended the escalator, I have had the same feeling, which I've never quite seen articulated, so I will briefly try:
It's basically this: Trump is so obviously, manifestly repugnant -- his words, his gestures, his behavior, his history -- that it strikes me like a tsunami. It's a kind of total, perfect, seamless repugnance that I've never witnessed before in my life. Which means ...
... pointing out some particular piece of the repugnance & arguing against it feels ... surreal, I guess. "He has regularly sexually assaulted women, almost certainly raped a few, and ... I think that's bad."

Yeah. I mean, I think rape is bad. But here's the thing ...
Read 13 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
Oct 30
Christ, reading anything about the rise of Hitler is so unsettling these days. The key thing is that there was nothing inevitable about it -- he rose to power thanks to a few thoughtless decisions by the small, feckless men around him. Sound familiar?

nybooks.com/articles/2024/…
Goebbels, 1928: "The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction."
It's also chilling to read how many times the Nazis failed before they succeeded -- they were broke & unpopular in the early 1930s -- and how many times they were written off. Hitler dismissed all these press reports as a "witch hunt." Sound familiar?
Read 10 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
Oct 29
Bezos is just doing what the entire US elite has done for years, what many many center-left pundits still do constantly: contemplate the results of a coordinated 60-year assault on media (& other mainstream institutions) from the right & conclude a) this is our fault, and ...
... b) if we cringe more, indulge in even more self-hatred, blunt accuracy even more in the name of "balance," bend over farther backward, we can reclaim the trust of people who have said, clearly, for decades now, that they want us dead & gone, not improved.
You see the heads of institution after institution -- social media, academia, etc. -- submit to this same shit. It's difficult to tell which of them are actually dumb enough to fall for it & which of them secretly agree with the RW, but either way the result is the same.
Read 4 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
Oct 18
Thank you @Mike_Podhorzer for writing this so that I feel slightly less insane. The US is on the verge of real, bona fide, violent fascism of the sort we gawk at in history books and, to a first approximation, our civic leaders don't seem that worried.
weekendreading.net/p/sleepwalking…
We are, in other words, sleepwalking our way into fascism *exactly the same way previous countries have sleepwalked their way into fascism*. Exactly. All the same beats, the same dynamics, the same rhetoric. We have learned NOTHING from history. It's just fucking amazing.
Nothing makes me want to simultaneously laugh & puke these days quite like the phrase "never again." Everyone says that in the wake of every fascist atrocity, with great solemnity, and yet we do it again. And again. We're doing it again right fucking now.
Read 6 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
Oct 15
This quote from Trump captures the beating heart of reactionary authoritarianism better than anything I've ever seen: "I think it is a threat. I think everything is a threat. There is nothing that is not a threat."

That is not a conclusion drawn from evidence, it is ...
... reflective of deep psychological, even neurological, structures. For whatever reason -- genetics, early childhood development, whatever -- Trump has been left with hyperactive "sensitivity to threat," as they call it. Everything else issues from that.
High sensitivity to threat yields the classic authoritarian personality: averse to ambiguity or uncertainty; attracted to simplicity & clear lines between in groups & out groups; selfishness & an assumption that *everyone* is selfish & only threat of punishment maintains order.
Read 8 tweets

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