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David Roberts

@drvolts

Mar 10

Thinking about the "coddling of the American mind" & general cancel-culture panic, I feel like one pretty glaring truth often goes unarticulated: there is no group of people on the planet more prone to offense than contemporary US conservatives. None.

There's scarcely a discernible policy agenda on the US right any more. In their media, in elected office, even in "intellectual" circles, taking offense at something the left has (allegedly) said or done comprises about 98% of their output. It's all they do any more!

I was just thinking the other day about when Obama proposed mildly raising taxes on rich people & not one but *several* rich old white dudes took to RW media to compare themselves to Jews in Hitler's Germany.

I believe the term of art is "snowflakes."

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David Roberts

@drvolts

Mar 10

@brianbeutler

I know I say this every week, but you should read @brianbeutler's newsletter. He's absolutely right about the terrible politics underlying Biden's "tough on crime" DC bullshit. us19.campaign-archive.com/?u=8855a23519a…

The whole episode was just paradigmatic Dem weakness. Republicans lie about crime; Dems crumble, thereby conceding the lies; Dems do stupid "tough on crime" policy that won't help crime, thinking it will shield them from attacks; and of course, it never, ever does.

I was writing about this exact same shit back in 2010: "attempting to change perceptions by weakening policy is a category mistake." grist.org/article/2010-0…

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David Roberts

@drvolts

Mar 5

🧵So, the CPAC douchebag who called to "eliminate transgenderism" -- let's discuss. The discourse over this has been more heat than light, as usual, but it's worth probing a bit what he meant by this & what motivates him to say it. It really gets to the heart of things.

Obviously -- as dude himself is strenuously protesting -- he was not calling for transgender folk to be literally killed. He was careful to say transgenderISM, not the people themselves, should be eliminated. But what does that mean, to eliminate the -ism?

In every society there are explicit & implicit rules defining what is acceptable variation among people & what is unacceptable. People try to draft the terms "natural" & "unnatural" here, but it's worth emphasizing that nature can't tell us which is which ...

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David Roberts

@drvolts

Mar 1

Everyone's already had a go bashing this, for lots of great reasons, but I just want to highlight what a perfect example of Murc's Law it is.

Murc's Law says, basically: only the left has agency; the right is merely reacting, having its hand forced, being "pushed" or "shaped."

This is not some quirk, it is central to reactionary psychology. Every fascist (and fascist-adjacent) movement ever has told itself the same story: our opponents are destroying everything, they're forcing us to this, we have no choice but violence.

It is, at a base level, a way of denying responsibility, of saying, "we know the shit we're about to do is bad, but it's not our fault, you made us."

Once you recognize the pattern it shows up *everywhere*.

(If you know an abuser, you'll also find it in their rhetoric.)

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David Roberts

@drvolts

Mar 1

This image is a real political Rorschach test. What do you see?

Another one.

Wild: "Around 90% of the global population flies only 1X a year or not at all, whereas around 6% fly more than 2X a year & just 1% fly more than 5X a year. ...As such, in some regions, the top decile’s emissions from aviation are higher than the bottom decile’s entire footprint."

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David Roberts

@drvolts

Feb 28

When I was a young baby journalist, there was a set of pundits with a lock on the opinion pages & a similar perspective. (I always think in particular of Joe Klein.) These were people who had clearly grown up thinking of themselves as liberals, but at some point ...

... young liberals coming up after them started going beyond where they were comfortable, and criticizing them, and it clearly hurt their feelings. Deeply. Drove them *insane*, even, to the point that their careers basically became devoted to lecturing left.

It was very clear to me, & to other young lib journos, that a huge piece of this was ego & vanity. Guys like Klein basically became one-trick ponies, obsessively defending the idea that their amount of left was the correct amount & any more left was silly & "unserious."

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