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Jan 25 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Folks are hopping mad about this op-ed but Nick isn't really wrong, the train in particular is in a dire state. The problem (one of them) is that it doesn't take, in absolute terms, that many bad actors to make the entire system feel dangerous and almost unusable
Is the solution to arrest those people? I don't know, arrests cause lots of problems. But the solution is definitely to reestablish train spaces as, in some fashion, protected, places you should probably avoid if you want to deal drugs or generally act in antisocial ways
Although we should absolutely have more resources to help people with substance and mental health issues it seems hard to fix public transit on the back end like that. It doesn't take much to screw up transit so you'd have to reduce the problem behaviors to almost nothing
Basically, "making transit feel safe and welcoming" and "providing supports for people at the margins of society" are different problems, and at least in the short term, they probably need to be addressed separately.

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More from @whstancil

Will Stancil Profile picture
Jan 24
Given that Ruy Teixeira is again explaining to Dems how to win elections, let's revisit his proposals from Jan. 2021 (with a cameo from Derek Thompson):
-focus on winning working-class whites
-pass popular policy, make Biden popular
-move on from Trump
-have a strong economy
Look, I know the first rule of punditworld is that you're never held accountable for anything you've ever said before, but you could almost literally not be more wrong about how Dems defied the odds in the 2022 midterm than this.
Biden was very UNpopular for most of the runup to the election. His policy agenda made NO political waves. The election REAFFIRMED the Trump-era coalition; working-class whites stayed R. Dems won where they could connect their opponents to Trump. And everyone hated the economy.
Read 8 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
Jan 24
No. There’s no way to indirectly defeat the far right by mechanically arranging the government to be more local, centralized, or whatever. The far right isn’t a product of badly optimized government, but core human prejudices given political agency. It must be directly confronted
This has been a dream of liberal institutionalists since Trump first burst on to the scene. “Make the body politic healthier, and the far right will magically go away. We don’t have to argue it against it directly!” It has failed over and over because it’s wrong.
It’s like trying to cure a terrible virus with exercise. Ultimately the problem isn’t your health before falling ill - though maybe that contributed - but the virus itself. It is an independent menace with its own agency and it will continue spreading until stopped.
Read 4 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
Jan 23
Anti-vax ideas are spreading like wildfire because they draft off more reputable forms of COVID skepticism.

"Vaccine benefits are overstated" is an easy jump from wrong-but-very-mainstream views like "Masking is pointless." It stops sounding like crackpot conspiracy theory.
As someone who is now submerged in anti-vax nonsense 24/7 thanks to Musk's Twitter algorithms, you can see people sliding down the anti-vax slippery slope in real time. They'll talk about the pointlessness of lockdowns.

Then of masks.

Then they'll slip vaccines into the list.
The most toxic, dangerous anti-vaxxers aren't the frothing conspiracy nuts. They're the ones who know how to fully slip into the register of the Substack Pragmatist, who write "People should be allowed to weigh the risks of booster for themselves" like it's self-evident.
Read 4 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
Jan 23
To understand the irrepressibility of this sort of coverage I think you have to understand that indulging in prejudice is an enjoyable activity, but can be dangerous if the target hits back. Transphobia has the benefit of targeting a very tiny minority that is politically weak.
People LIKE discriminating, but DISLIKE being told they’re discriminatory, or even thinking it privately to themselves. Combine these dueling incentives and the obvious solution is to find weak targets and criticize them with the most plausibly deniable pretexts.
That’s why there’s such a huge audience for chin-stroking pieces that carefully raise “nuanced” questions about vulnerable social groups, even while no such audience exists for nuanced pieces about other subjects. People aren’t coming for the nuance, but the rationalization.
Read 4 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
Jan 21
The correct COVID approach was:
-vaccine mandates
-regularly update boosters to address new variants
-flexible mask mandates for waves
-prioritize high-risk areas and essential public spaces for mask mandates (e.g., planes during boarding)
-united-front messaging on mitigation
This would be a pretty reasonable, unobtrusive approach that basically preserves normal day-to-day life while making public spaces safer for vulnerable people who feel more cautious, especially during waves, and leaves space to deal with unforeseen future developments.
Of course, instead of any kind of coordinated transition to a functional, flexible system for managing the problem, we simply crashed out of COVID, because political actors were all either desperate to declare total victory or outright conspiracy theorists about the pandemic.
Read 7 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
Jan 20
A Times column that belongs in a museum. In one paragraph, Jonathan Alter states that any equivalence between Biden and Trump on documents is "phony."

In the next, he says it won't matter, because the press - OF WHICH HE IS PART - will cover them both as equally scandalous. Image
Incredibly, Alter literally compares what Biden is about to face to Benghazi, a ginned-up non-scandal that only gained mainstream purchase when the VERY PAPER IN WHICH THIS COLUMN IS BEING RUN decided to pick it up in foolhardy attempt to look nonpartisan.
nytimes.com/2023/01/20/opi… Image
What's Alter's takeaway here? That the collective political press is chock-full of suckers and hacks and should be ashamed? That maybe, after the disaster of 2016 coverage led to the disaster of Trump, he and his friends should all do better? Nope! It's that Biden should quit. Image
Read 4 tweets

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