I think this is bad, but also think it's a sign of something I thought a lot about after 1/6: it's really important for elites to uphold election norms precisely because normies won't. They'll be happy to indulge in election denial if the political elite goes along.

https://twitter.com/DeanObeidallah/status/1854862864797798715

Democratic norms aren't a bedrock fact of democracy. They're a truce between opposing groups of political elites. Which is why it is in fact extremely important to have elites who are committed to those norms, and will swiftly crush even minor violations.

If you are making fun of how terrible all the food was in the 1950s, some things to keep in mind 🧵:

1) Many of the worst recipes are from cookbooks created to promote various foodstuffs, and probably no one except the poor domestic scientist who created them ever made them. 2) Most jello salad isn't as bad as you think.

3) People were much, much poorer--1950s housewives also preferred steak to spam, but their budget didn't.

4) Chicken and eggs used to be more expensive than beef, not a cheap weeknight staple.

I think the way to square this circle is to think of this not as a matter of people rejecting the moral values you care about, but as emphasizing different values that you both care about.

https://twitter.com/joshchafetz/status/1849632944790315095

Abortion is a good example of this; people tend to think of others as not caring about [the life of the baby/the autonomy of the mother] but in fact most people care about both. They're just choosing which they care about more.

So I wrote a column on my Dad's last year, and the brutal math of caring for the elderly. The column is here. I wrote it because many folks assume that we could save $$$$ by using home care to keep folks out of nursing homes, which is not really true. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/…

I don't know all the reasons for the Secret Service failures in Butler. But having written a book about failure (she said, demurely pointing to the link: ) I'm pretty sure that one problem was that ... it had been a long time since anything went wrong.amazon.com/Up-Side-Down-F… Everything the secret service does is a tradeoff: between false positives and false negatives; between safety, and the cost that must be imposed on everyone else to make incremental safety gains; between ensuring nothing bad happens and ensuring that *nothing* happens.

Since the debate, people outside of Washington have been asking me the same question over and over: how did the media miss the Biden story?

So I asked a bunch of savvy political reporters that question, and wrote a column on it I know, conservatives, you think you know the answer: Democratic journalists were covering for a Democratic president. But that's not quite right, as I wrote in my column:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/…

Fair critique, but a couple of counterpoints:

1) Pandemic has shifted residential demand outward from urban cores in cities generally thanks to hybrid work. Maybe companies will get most employees back in the office most of the time, but it hasn’t happened yet.

https://twitter.com/aaron_renn/status/1799997435890024888

2) Remote work has also shifted demand towards better weather and cheaper real estate, dimensions along which Chicago’s not super competitive.

I'm about to stop talking about the Trump conviction because no one is going to change their mind, but a final few thoughts: 1) I see a fair number of Trump haters who are dubious about the Bragg prosecution while supporting others. Last time I saw that was Kavanaugh and that didn't go the way the Indigo Blob thought it was going to play out.

Well, my man v. bear column (link in the thread below) has generated a lot of comments--predictably, given that the question was created by an engagement-baiting influencer in the first place. So it's time for another tweetstorm in which I answer the most common objections that were raised to the column, which is here: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/…

I’m sympathetic to protesters who are bewildered by the abrupt volte face, but as I lay out in todays column, think the reason it’s happening is that our civil rights regime is not designed to handle issues that produced conflicts between protected classes, rather than the clean “oppressor/oppressed “ frame our laws and customs assumed. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/… “Die, Zionist” has a disproportionate impact on Jewish students (as everyone would readily recognize if it was the Unite the Right folks camped in Columbia’s quad. This makes it challenging to adopt a posture of benign neglect towards clear rule violations

For whatever reason this post from 2022 went re-viral just as I was reading about various plans to make data more portable and it reminded me of how nerds simply cannot wrap their mind around the fact that most people simply do not want more granular control over their tech.

https://twitter.com/nathan_culley/status/1521927810809569281

Many years ago, I unwisely embroiled myself in the Linux wars, making the same point over and over: end users do not want a more flexible, customizable system. They want to trade power for simplicity and convenience.

Bunch of people assuming that the reason I am harping on the Biden age issue is that I want him to lose to Donald Trump. This is wrong; I'm voting for Biden, or whoever the non-Trump candidate is.

So why am I talking about it? Three reasons. First, Biden's obvious decline is a Thing That is True. My job is Saying Things That Are True (And Explaining What Follows). "Why are you saying this thing that is true?" is a dumb question to ask a journalist. It is particularly distressing when it comes from other journalists.

Conservatives who are reveling in Claudine Gay schadenfreude might pause to notice that Harvard eventually realized that protecting an insider who had violated institutional norms was destroying the institution, and course-corrected, while the GOP is still saddled with Trump. This makes an excellent lead-in to my column on that very topic: how progressives trying to fend off conservative attacks on academia instead ending up aping their opponent's worst mistakes: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/…

Well, Trump has endorsed Jim Jordan for Speaker, which should make things interesting, and provides a nice hook to discuss my column on why the Democrats made a mistake helping Gaetz oust McCarthy. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/… As you might imagine this was very unpopular with my readers, who made various versions of the same arguments I was tackling in the column: that Republicans are bad, that they don't deserve Democratic help, that voters need to understand how bad they are.

Why your theory of how to punish Republicans out of acting bonkers is incorrect, a thread. Here is the mental model of many people on Twitter today: "GOP is acting bonkers! They are demanding bad things! They reneged on their budget deal! They coddle Trump! We must punish them until they stop this outrageous behavior! Thus, help Gaetz vote out McCarthy!"

So @AlyssaRosenberg and I both wrote columns today about work by @kearney_melissa and @BradWilcoxIFS about the importance of family structure to kids.

SPOILER ALERT: It's really important. Specifically, two parent families are important--which in the US, means marriage. @AlyssaRosenberg and I agree on a lot, but she focused on policy and framing--how liberals might build on the victories of the gay marriage movement by talking about access to marriage rather than what feels like finger wagging, and what sorts of policies they might pursue.

A lot of people are misreading this story, believing that this means the case was based on a lie.

To be clear: the lawsuit was filed BEFORE this request, and does not rest on it, because the state of Colorado helpfully stipulated that it would do exactly as Lorie Smith feared.

https://twitter.com/AP/status/1675276896110510083

It was not critical to the lawsuit, and if the plaintiff had made it up, I doubt she would have selected a random web designer in San Francisco, rather than just, you know, making up a name. Seems more likely that it was a prank.

I take the point but I think there's a valid concern that DeSantis is hammering hardest on the notes which play to a small minority of primary voters who want to rehearse old grievances, rather than those that appeal to a broad selection of voters.

https://twitter.com/ZacBissonnette/status/1661515783480958980

Was DeSantis right about re-opening schools? Yes, and blue states were wrong wrong wrong. But is rehashing policy arguments from 2021 really the ticket to the presidency in 2024?

New study on a sample of 1000 transitions that began under the US military's health system finds a 30 percent detransition rate.

Expect this to be a bit of a Rorschach, for reasons I will explain in the next tweet.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35452119/#full… For gender critical folks, this is strong evidence that detransition is not, as previously suggested, rare. One third of your study subjects going off hormones is 4-30x higher than the numbers usually bandied about.

One way to think about the mistake that I think Bud Light made giving money to Dylan Mulvaney is to talk about a more effective ad, like Olay's Mulvaney collaboration. Many of Mulvaney's followers moisturize, and might well use Olay. However, many of them probably already do use Olay products. What if instead they had decided to do a partnership with Stephen Crowder? I mean, *there's* an untouched demographic for Olay!

I wrote about the Dylan Mulvaney/Bud Light fracas a few weeks ago, but I confess I'm surprised how durable the backlash has proven; a month in, sales still seem to be down about 20%.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/… A point that I originally made, but cut for space, is that Mulvaney was simply a very odd choice by marketing execs. Not because she's trans, but because her "wacky Audrey Hepburn" persona doesn't doesn't fit any plausible target demographic.