There's a moment in Steven Soderbergh's film Traffic where the newly freed drug boss says to the drug lawyer who had been working behind his back "do you know the difference between a reason and an excuse? Because I don't."

At this point the lawyer knows he is in deep shit. 🧵 (By the way this thread is part of a longer essay, but if I lead off the thread with a link to an outside source, it usually gets crushed by this site's dork owner and his algorithm shenanigans, so here you go.)

the-reframe.com/out-damned-spo…

One thing I’ve noticed is, the meanest tables are often popular ones. Sometimes they are the most popular. My observation here would be that bullies know that cultivating friendly relationships is useful and necessary for effective bullying. Any abuser knows they need accomplices. If dad is getting drunk and beating mom up he’s going to need everyone to keep nice and quiet about it, and if anybody squawks then it’s got to be quickly framed as something bad being done to him rather than the other way around.

I’d like to talk about what leadership is and what governance is. I’d like to talk about the compass, the navigation, the travel, and the corrections.

the-reframe.com/the-compass-an… When people decide to leave the place they are and move to a different place, there’s an observable order to it. The order is very important.

So, in movement, there is the moment of arrival at the destination.

There's so much scandal all the time, it can be hard to remember where we are, much less how we got here. But they say it's important remember the lessons of the past, or else we're fated to do...something, I forget what, I forget, I forget.

Full Essay: the-reframe.com/the-rot-goes-t… Where we are.

It's really hard to know where to begin when it comes to where we are. There's only so much sheer volume of blatant corruption and noxious hate that a person can stay aware of even if they're trying. Eventually something pushes out.

Conservatives keep telling us they're oppressed, and when they define what form the oppression takes, they explain that other kinds of people ... exist.

You know what? Let's do it. Let's actually do it. I think we ought to oppress conservatives.

Other people *should* exist. 🧵 Let's oppress conservatives with a kind and open and generous world that they will hate and fear specifically because it will care for everyone, even them, while it refuses any longer to accommodate the revenge fantasies that they call "self-defense."

Last Tuesday Donald Trump shat his pants on national TV. Ever since, he's been scooting his butt around on the national carpet to dislodge the detritus of loserdom. It's standard wounded narcissist self-care behavior, and it would be nice if all of this could be *only* funny. 🧵 Unfortunately, it can't be only funny; Trump and his gang are engaged in some shockingly evil rhetoric even for them—promising that, for the crime of existing while undesirable to conservatives, as many people as possible will be hurt, as soon and as badly as possible.

"The whole point of the post-menopausal female." It was an off-handed comment, I suppose. It was said in an off-handed way.

It was made by Peter Thiel VC guy and podcaster Eric Weinstein, and agreed to by Theil VP guy and flopsweat enthusiast JD Vance, and it reveals a lot.🧵 BTW, this thread is part of an essay I wrote for my newsletter, and if you like my stuff, this is the best way to find the latest weekly piece. It’s free for those who can’t pay, supported in pay-what-you want fashion by readers who can.

Check it out. the-reframe.com/the-whole-purp…

I can't get over the signs.

Republicans held their Nuremberg rally last month, and shook their official MASS DEPORTATION NOW signs representing accelerated atrocity against our neighbors on an unimaginable scale.

The choice this presents is stark. It should be starker. 🧵 Sure enough, the convention featured the usual gleeful celebration of cruelty and domination as virtues, and the usual eager expressions of desire to continue dismantling our shared society for profit, and the usual listing of the undesirable qualities of undesirable people.

Recent "what ever happened to 'when they go low we go high?'" hand-wringing puts me in mind of this essay I wrote in May. It's about the moral necessity of dealing in bad faith with fascists.

Thread and link below, but key parts here: the-reframe.com/lying-to-fasci…




Here's how fascism rises: on a tide of goodwill.

Here's what I want you to understand today: These Americans who want to kill Americans have, through their intent and actions, already destroyed the thing you want to protect. The norms you want to protect are already gone.

Not so very long ago, it wasn't "normal" to be trans or gay or even nonconforming to strict gender roles in any way. It wasn't normal to be a woman with a powerful job, or to be a woman with a paid job, or a woman with an opinion.

Not so long ago, all of this was *weird.* And it wasn't "normal" to be Jewish, it wasn't normal to be Muslim, it wasn't normal to be Hindu, it wasn't normal to be an atheist; nor to be Black, or Asian, or any identity in a category called "nonwhite" that people used without really thinking about it.

Again: weird.

Same people decided it was of utmost importance to call us disingenuous and foolish for thinking that “bloodbath” might mean “bloodbath” when coming from the lips of somebody who has spent 10 years both threatening and delivering bloodbaths.

https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1817518685059170636

A lot of media types are so attuned to the lesser dangers of alarmism that they maintain a vigilance not against dangers but against alarms, indifferent to the presence of greater dangers like smoke and fire, forgetting what alarms are for in the first place.

Because we are all invited by the media environment to be pundits rather than participants in the democratic process, here are my 10 predictions for the election.

1) There will be an election.

(This is my boldest prediction.)
🧵 2) There will be, practically speaking, two choices at the top. One choice will be an open fascist, at the head of a party that intends to control our bodies and our lives, and is eager to harm and kill in order to do it. This choice will almost certainly be Donald Trump

My book is about the tradition of American supremacy & the ways it shapes all of our lives, sabotages our natural shared society in order to steal all value from it for a few, makes others pay its unnaturally high costs ... and what we can do about it. armoxon.com/books/very-fin… I find it useful to begin with art—with the idea that humans are art. The idea that to be a human is to be a unique expression of unsurpassable worth, whose worth is natural and inherent.

Focusing on this truth makes it easier to spot supremacy's anti-human lies.

Well I'm given to understand that today & for a VERY limited time, our nation's political violence party is shocked—shocked!—to learn that we currently live in a world of normalized political violence, and would like very much to know who is to blame.

(link to essay in thread) I'm kidding, of course. They've already decided who is to blame. It's the same culprit they hold at fault for every other real and imaginary problem in their lives: Everybody except them.

LOST is streaming on Netflix—an excellent time to revisit the show, using the viewing guide I'm publishing in my newsletter (link in thread).

Many think the story isn't coherent. I think it was. My lens is the one the show itself suggests: a dialectic of observation and belief. This dialectic isn’t too tough to detect. There’s even an episode called “Man of Science, Man of Faith.” In a dialectic, the opposing ideas operate in concert with one another. While these ideas are oppositional within the artistic work, they aren’t opposites.

I've been thinking of American conservatism—which has proved itself irreducible from American fascism—in terms of burdens.

I find burdens an apt metaphor, because christian fascists claim to worship a Jewish rabbi from antiquity named Yeshu ben Yosef (Mr. Jesus if you're nasty). Interesting thing about young Mr. Jesus: He was very sharp-tongued with the politically influential religious hypocrites of his day. There's a whole chapter of him reading them the riot act, calling them whitewashed tombs and broods of vipers and blind guides etc etc.

I want to dig into this, since my book VERY FINE PEOPLE comes out tomorrow, and it's in large part about precisely this sort of polemic trickery in service of bullshit apologia of supremacy.

There's a slight of hand at the start that catapults us into the massive lie.

https://twitter.com/_cingraham/status/1804238081131974873

Let's do the slight of hand, first. The article presupposes to answer the question "Did Trump call Neo-Nazis and white supremacists 'very fine people'?

This is savvy if what you want to exonerate the comments, because it answers the wrong question, and dismisses the right one.

THE HUMAN PROBLEM
Last week an image went viral online. It was generated by a computer from the classic movie 12 Angry Men. It added no value, and it was being used for no good reason.

It's a perfect encapsulation of where our dominant cultural narrative has brought us. It's my belief that things that provide positive value to humans are good, and that those who make good things should be compensated for it.

I also believe that people should have access to good things whether or not they can pay. It's the reason I love libraries, for example.

It seems certain people insist that we all as a society pay the cost of a serious problem they are creating, just so that they can imagine themselves to be the solution to it.

For example: the Prosper TX police and their brand new murder tank.

the-reframe.com/cruel-luxuries/ The tank is a MRAP, which stands for Mine Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle. The MRAP has an MSRP of $689,000, which in case you didn't know is a lot of money—about a fifth of the school lunch debt for the whole state, to give a totally random example of another type of expense.

It seems to me that this is a nation mediated by fear—by who is permitted to feel it and who is permitted to spread it, and who gets to claim they are frightened or threatened, and who gets to define those parameters.

To explain, let me tell you about the trails I run. When I run trails, I sometimes encounter people in twos or threes but mostly ones, and sometimes, as you might expect, some of those people are women.

I’ve seen pictures of me when I’m jogging; I’m 6’2” 230 lbs. and even if I’m trying to smile, exertion turns it into a scowl.

They found him guilty. The pig president I mean. White evangelical Christianity's bronzed calf. They found him guilty. That's good.

The funny thing is, he didn't even have to do the crimes. The bullshitter believed his cult's bullshit.

Full essay: the-reframe.com/not-better-but… I'll admit I'm surprised they found him guilty. The pig president hasn't seen a lot of direct consequences, despite a lifetime of flagrant infractions against law and basic human decency.

In this immunity he is an extension of his cult.

It's worth detailing how how this works.