I’m 50/50 bama/nyc but the two things that get my back up after two decades in NYC are people who wanna explain to me either 9/11 or Covid in the early days and weren’t here

https://twitter.com/espiers/status/1719568031599170001

With the former, I knew people who died and my apartment had a layer of ash and acrid smell that took months to get out. The latter same and just, everyone was affected directly

There are people I love talking about Covid lockdowns being horrible and pointing to children and none of them have children. Where now we know kids in states that were not locked down has equal learning loss. Because it turns out pandemics are stressful. Across the board. And probably low lockdown kids had to deal with more deaths so the dark version of this is that the misery evened out.

Conservatives on this website want to have everything both ways. If you disclose your professional affiliations and political orientations, it’s status mongering, virtue signaling. If you don’t you’re hiding something. Then they try to QT gotcha with “Spiers is a DEMOCRAT who works for the NYT and started GAWKER and she doesn’t want you to KNOW!!!” Can’t have it both ways, dudes.

Linda, Elon hasn’t even been able to deliver a functioning Twitter. He hasn’t made it profitable; it is far less usable than it was; and he has basically destroyed trust and safety—not just for users but for advertisers, too.

https://twitter.com/lindayacc/status/1683214311957594113

The idea that he’s going to suddenly stop destroying twitter and turn it into a near monopoly of everything you do on the internet is a joke. Let’s just take one claim: X will run half the global finance system.

Hi - I was a cashier at the only Walmart in Elmore County, Alabama, before they became big box stores. It’s also funny to me how many middle class white conservatives assume liberals they meet must not have working class backgrounds even though more Dems do than Rs.

https://twitter.com/sarahbeth345/status/1655711825672155136

And they’re happy to be disdainful of working class people if they’re not white. Single POCs moms on SNAP who work two jobs? Giant assholes!

New and improved Elon “free speech” twitter that definitely facilitates dialogue and not harassment I always get this kind of thing because I’ve been on the internet for 20 years and am liberal and a woman and have an opinion and so on, but the uptick on twitter has been exponential. This is not more and better dialogue; it’s more anonymous harassment.

After a day back here I’m pretty sure all the people driving traffic to this site who were not right wing influencers have left. We already know most of the country are not anti any form of gun control, anti abortion in all cases etc. The right has massively overshot And this is a dumb little indicator (the midterms should have been the big wake up call for them) but they just keep doubling down.

Raise your hand if you live in a place that’s not NYC and a guy has masturbated in front of you without your consent. It’s not okay to do that, and your wife can and should press charges, but lotta you don’t consider it a safety problem if it’s, like, Louis CK.

https://twitter.com/cgaunerd/status/1655662715602346003

The last time I guy did this to me it was in a nice bar and he was drunk and white and wearing a suit and no one said wow, the fancy bars are a safety problem for women. I’ve seen it on the subway once. I supposedly safe enclaves far more.

As a Rednexican who has actual sincere Latino for Trump family members, I cannot recommend this book highly enough: The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump a.co/d/0EW9Luj

https://twitter.com/owillis/status/1655649917241548823

If you do really want to understand why certain clusters of Hispanic populations embrace right wing ideologies, there’s a wealth of data and history. But any time you hear a singular explanation, you should distrust it because Hispanics are not a cultural monolith

The Venn diagram overlap between men who amass an arsenal of guns and talk about being a brave alpha male, and won’t take the subway in NYC because they once saw a homeless person peeing there and declare it “unsafe” is a perfect circle I’ve lived here for 23 years and grew up with guns in the nearly equal amount of time I spent in rural Alabama. I’m also 5’1” and some of you have pets that weigh more than me. And I am not afraid of the subway, big bad dudes.

Lotta conservatives in my feed arguing that homeless people who have substance abuse problems and make bad decisions deserve what they get. But I don’t see them arguing that rich people with substance abuse problems and bad judgment deserve to die for it. And the fact that so many of them (one in my feed is a public defender, appallingly) that poverty is *indicative* of bad decision making just tells you how much they’ve been brainwashed by the idea that anyone can be rich with hard work.

Wanna write about how shitty CEOs attract talent bc people get excited about ambitious moonshot (sometimes literally!) projects

https://twitter.com/espiers/status/1629284684306718721

And I understand this from personal experience a bit: I took the editor in chief job at the Observer because the NYO was a big deal to me. I knew Jared was a bad manager but it was like being asked to the drummer in your favorite band which was now under shitty management

Since i’m just endlessly tweeting about education and conservative claims of “indoctrination” today: I’m a progressive Democrat. I grew up in an Evangelical conservative household. My parents didn’t go to college and neither did any of their older siblings or parents. I was conservative then because I was an adopted part Latina kid who grew up in an all white community of mostly Southern Baptists. The reaction when I got into the only school I applied to (Duke) and got partial scholarships to cover it was not, “good job”.

LMAO - you and I went to the same selective college dude, and only one of us was dumb enough to work for Donald Trump, and it wasn’t me.

https://twitter.com/darrenjbeattie/status/1629227199046774785

I had two mentors in college at Duke. one was in the policy department and one in the poli sci department. She (policy) was liberal, we read Alinsky on top of the Econ work, which skewed Keynesian. She insisted that I would eventually be a writer, which had not occurred to me.

The refusal to even consider the possibility that women and minorities are outperforming white male applicants here is unsurprising.

https://twitter.com/fischerking64/status/1628906352386121729

Sort of like when people who object to diversity in hiring say it’s because they just want the best candidates. In their minds a workforce composed of the best candidates is more white and male, not less.

We live in a country where conservative policy makers attribute gun violence to mental health issues, homelessness to mental health issues, excuse police violence when the victims have mental health issues—and also ensure that treatment remains unaffordable.

https://twitter.com/jdesmondharris/status/1628510975984037890

If you have insurance you can get drugs that treat symptoms and not causes for low cost, but not therapy. I went back into therapy three months ago after 6 years of not and I have good insurance. I still pay $325 out of pocket per session.

Well I launched one company that was valued at around $250 million at one pint before one of Elon’s co founders sued it out of business. That said, market valuation often has nothing to do with managerial competence. #actualfact

https://twitter.com/rightyjim/status/1627408092509143041

And I guess if my dad had owned an emerald mine and i grew up rich and I got millions in government subsidies for my companies, I might own a $100 billion company! Or two.

I’ve said before that Elon reminds me of Jared Kushner but his continual elimination of mission critical stuff he doesn’t understand is like, 100% Jared School of Management. Tbt the time Verizon cut the phone service because Jared thought he could “age” the receivable and we only figured this out because no sources were calling back and finally a reporter called the Obs number to get a voicemail that the business was no longer in operation.

If you have anyone in your family who’s an antivaxxer as of 2020, you know why it matters. There is a problem with people who’ve only worked in politics thinking the political narrative is shaped primarily by party messaging and not the information ecosystem at large.

https://twitter.com/whstancil/status/1603816367492419585

And I like Crooked and enjoy the pod, but the most bizarre disconnect i see between political lifers and the electorate is thinking that they evaluate intentional political messaging on its own and don’t just form opinions based on the totality of what they consume media-wise

Kid had to fill in the blank re: tortoise and the _____ (hair, hare) earlier and he has never heard the story because publishers haven’t updated anything since the early 20th century but you wouldn’t just learn it casually in 2022 and had to explain that hare meant rabbit. And he says, rationally, I mean it could be a story about a tortoise and hair, and why would that be wrong? And I’m like, hey, we live in Brooklyn and I’m still annoyed you had to learn every farm animal at three but not “subway”.

Right wingers like GG are so accustomed to being able to work the refs that they go ballistic when someone like Ben refuses to both sides things—particularly when they work for mainstream outlets, which reliably both sides things. Some of this is generational. People Ben’s age see both sidesism for the dishonesty that it is, and people Glenn’s age think it should be built into the system. I think GG’s critiques are not in good faith but you see similar stuff from people who believe what they’re saying