Amid collapsing bridges and burning forests, I wish more people would realize that the ruling ideology of the last 40 years has wrought this for the same reason it cannot fight this: it doesn’t believe that government, the only system capable of addressing this, should address it The point being that this all isn’t happening for mysterious reasons and it isn’t impossible to avoid. We know what is happening and how to avoid it, our leaders just won’t do it because they don’t believe in addressing it. So it will just keep happening.

New forms of grievance are mutating in front of our very eyes. Oh you don’t need a checkmark? Must me nice. Regular people like me have to have them. Why? To be like you! But you don’t even have them! Do you have any idea how entitled you are?

Every album of Bowie’s from David Bowie aka Space Oddity (69) to Scary Monsters (80) is good to excellent, mostly the latter.

https://twitter.com/sotoalfred/status/1648361844585775105

That’s also 12 albums in 11 years, plus live albums!

The results are unambiguous: we can't draw any clear conclusions! "Do something" shouldn't be public policy. "Do nothing" should!

At last, Covid has ascended to the lofty level of problems that we “just don’t know what to do about!” Like homelessness, struggling schools and much else, it is simply a puzzle that can’t be solved, chiefly because the solutions are clear but the powers that be won’t do them. To be clear, I’m not saying “solving Covid” would be easy. It would be very difficult and take a lot of political will and bravery. But, as the piece admits about masks, we DO know what works against it. Whether we choose to implement those things is another question.

Seatbelts save a lot of lives. Which is why Here’s a less snarky way to think of this issue: sure, given a totally neutral choice, with no preconceptions, between gas and induction, maybe people will start to choose induction. But good induction ovens are much more expensive and less common than gas, so that’s hurdle one…

There are ways they could have fought Covid globally that would have made a big difference, and they didn’t. You can say you don’t care, but don’t act like it had to be this way. Seeing so many angles now that are like “yikes Covid is still around, much to our surprise” but this is no surprise and it’s no accident. They took this path and now we’re all on it.

This has accelerated my fake plan that will never happen by at least 3-5 years. Idiot mindset is making a stupid claim that will never happen.

Billionaire mindset is making a stupid claim that will never happen and offering a timeline.

Imagine this: a person knows a joke involving a car crash. It’s a little crass but often gets a laugh. They’re getting ready to tell it to a new group when they remember that someone in that group lost a family member in a car crash. They refrain from telling the joke. 1/ To most people this would seem like a completely understandable, likely admirable, decision. We might call it tact or decency. But to people like the NYTimes editorial board, this would be an example of troubling self-censorship. 2/

Speaking of: I always get into the big anniversary remixes that are all the rage these days, because I like to hear what they’ve changed and what’s revealed, but I’m trying to think of which remixes are actually better than or even as good as the originals.

https://twitter.com/jesse_brenneman/status/1425965254115270656

The two that come to mind immediately for me are the 2010 Harry Maslin remix of Station to Station, which I prefer to the original, and the 2017 Sgt. Pepper, which isn’t necessarily better than the original but which reveals substantial new dimensions to the songs.

This has been one of the most dangerous developments among voters and one of the major achievements of modern centrism: the total death of political imagination.

https://twitter.com/cwarzel/status/1425492341263978496

The self-censorship and limiting among liberals is especially staggering. So many now pride themselves on not thinking big, not even daring to imagine asking for what they want, what we need.

Cracking myself up imagining the coverage of a Popeye reboot. “In New Popeye, Gen Z See Themselves”

A through-line in pretty much very cancel culture/political correctness gone mad story—including the Disney man—is that the person complaining doesn’t like how the change makes them *feel.* Disney man can easily go on the rides and just ignore the things he doesn’t like, he can’t even point to anything concrete that has actually changed that is offensive, but he doesn’t like that it makes him feel some thing.

This is the end state of modern politics, where all causes and effects have been removed from politics--which is to say where all POLITICS have been removed from politics--and all we are left with is vague concerns about the soul and character of America.

https://twitter.com/RottenInDenmark/status/1363912956648460288

Yes, the terms get thrown around a lot, but this is the takeover of technocracy and neoliberalism, where the details of governance and society are more or less off the table. What is there left to think about? Why "the people" are the way they are.

The USPS is incredibly popular and it would be the easiest thing in the world to run an aggressive campaign defending its existence and making the case for public services. But the Dems won’t do it because, fundamentally, they don’t really believe in that. The guiding liberal ethos says that public services are a necessary evil and that, ideally, private businesses would get their act together and take over virtually everything. The market is more efficient, etc...

What I hope people are learning is that the US's supposedly dynamic, resilient, market-driven system is incredibly brittle, unimaginative and unresponsive to actual needs. Any action outside of, "Keep doing what you always do," is unthinkably ambitious.

https://twitter.com/hofrench/status/1291048566803369985

Closing schools for a year is an incredibly obvious choice and only crazy if you believe that the limits of our political system are the actual limits of the world, which is to say if you live in a world of complete denial.

It’s the replacement of the impulse for change or progress—something proactive—with the impulse to make someone feel humiliated and ashamed—something reactive, and corrosive. A sort of brief story:

https://twitter.com/cwarzel/status/1290668803202772992

A few years ago my sister was in the ICU, after being in a hit and run. She wouldn’t make it, which we didn’t know at the time, but things weren’t looking good. It had been about two weeks of her in an induced coma with no progress. One night we went out to dinner.

People like to point to the coronavirus chart and say “Wow look how dumb/bad/selfish Americans are.” But you know what happened when people were told to stay home, and paid to do so? They stayed home, and cases went down. People didn’t stop caring, the government just gave up. Wow people stopped staying home when they ran out of money/saw no end in sight and no possibility of long term assistance. Yeah, what monsters, feeding their families at a time like this.

As anyone who has ever tried to get unemployment or healthcare will tell you, our current system assumes that the worst possible outcome is not death or poverty but someone accidentally getting a little more than they deserve. “Deserve.”

Why are Americans so polarized? What really happened in the 2016 election? I’m leaving my liberal bubble to get some answers. Radio in Trump Country.