@jaketapper I hope you do understand the resentment. You're one of the people who is likely to. Even the best among your profession had to set a really, really low bar when discussing Trump activity in order to make any of it seem remotely normal. 1/2 @jaketapper As such, seeing you all return to normal standards after having abandoned them for four years without any acknowledgement of how badly you broke your own rules to pretend normal political coverage was possible when it wasn't, makes it very hard to deal with you now. 2/2

THREAD.

They staged two photo ops with trump pretending to be at work. OK. Staged photos are SOP for politicians.

But it's his 4th year and they still have not figured out what a president actually does. They think "work" means shuffling papers and writing his name. 1/

https://twitter.com/AndrewFeinberg/status/1312586796711149569

A real president's job involves conversation. Any real president in the hospital, if his people wanted to stage a photo op simulating the president being at work, would be surrounded, either physically or virtually, with aides. His job is to talk and listen. 2/

There are a bunch of popular TV shows about cops. Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Chicago PD, the Rookie, others.

When the pandemic allows it, they might resume production. But I won't be watching them anymore. I suspect I'm not alone.

They might feel like they can't continue either. 1/ If they do, if they are horrified by what we've been learning, I have a modest proposal or how they could go out with a bang and do some good.

This probably won't happen, but imagine if it did. It's my on a suggestion for how to end these shows now. 2/

Full disclosure: I know the author @ajbaime.

I'm no professional book reviewer. I know a bit about a bit, I think things through, I have my own opinions.

This is a pretty phenomenally timely book. 1/ I think most people have a kind of deadzone in their historical knowledge - more or less from twenty years before you're born to ten years after you're born: the period that hadn't yet become 'history' while you were growing up, so your history classes didn't teach it. 2/

There's an undeniable and ruinously increasing impact on both economy and mental health the longer covid-19 goes on - even as health, morbidity, and mortality numbers continue to worsen - which simply adds to the fury any rational person should feel... 1/11 ... for how abysmally this has been managed at the federal level - and at the level of most states (who have a much better excuse for failure given their constitutionally limited resources).
But "the longer this goes on" is not something we have a choice about... 2/11

This is getting dragged, but it makes a good point. While there are many inequalities of opportunity that a just Society should correct, true equality of opportunity would be a dystopian nightmare that no one wants.

https://twitter.com/Miss_Snuffy/status/1294545693810601984

I deliberately moved to the best school district I could afford as I started to raise my children. I have this in common with almost every parent. I wanted my kids to have advantages. Every parent does. On its own that isn't a problem you need to address.

Yes, some of the failure is pure evil. Yes, some of the failure is "permission not to care" because there are pure evil/foolish/mad leaders who say you don't have to care.

But I also wonder how much is this: people utterly unused to situations where you can't negotiate. The behavior of elected officials looks to me like they are attempting to negotiate with the virus.

They see "we need to do X" and their response is "well, what if we do 1/3 of X?"

And there's no response. So they try it. And it fails. And the virus gets worse.

Three little stories that relate today.

1) I had a "tragic uncle." I never knew his situation in detail, but he obviously was the least successful of my mom's family. Owned a home, but it was terribly run down. My aunt died when we cousins were around eleven. 1/ But I remember once he invited my parents and me, a couple years after her death, and had a little party, with expensive food and some work to spruce the house up. It couldn't hide, though, a strong smell of dog poop through the house, and he looked very concerned... 2/

It occurs to me, to those for whom This Thread is not terrifying enough, it seems likely that there are some Russian made videos available for free on PornHub for which reliable age data of the participants is not disclosed, or is falsified.

https://twitter.com/LincolnsBible/status/1285936449775300609

It is entirely possible some such videos are seeded deliberately and that those who view or download them have that data somehow make it back to databases in other countries.

The concern of the letter signers in Harper's is not entirely wrong, but it isn't the biggest problem we as a society face. It is just the biggest problem that they as prominent people face. Most people who are not prominent or influential have bigger problems. I am certain that some cancel movements get egged on by Russian bots. Of course they do. Cancel movements are discordant, whether the discord is good or necessary or not, and Russian bots are in favor of discord.

A president with the *unconditional* support of 34 Senators is not bound by the Constitution.

Defend any other reading of the last 3.5 years. If the President ignores a Supreme Court ruling and directs the various elements of the executive branch to ignore it, it is ignored.

If the President ignores budget limits and directs the Treasury to spend as he directs, money is spent as he directs.

The reason the @ProjectLincoln ads are so effective, the reason why the media has to talk about their content and impact, is that they demolish the specious position that all political argument is assumed to be disingenuous and done for partisan reasons. It is for this reason that it is equally specious to complain that Democrats aren't making ads as good as the Lincoln Project's. If Democrats made the ads they would be "controversial." There would be arguments that they "stepped over the line." They would be microanalyzed.

It is so weird. I was raised Catholic. Catholics, as you probably know, have statues everywhere. My Salvation Army Brigadier grandfather called us all 'idolaters.' And so, today, I have questions. 1/ You know the Ten Commandments are different for Catholics and Protestants, right? Because there are really 11 (as well as a different set of 10 a few chapters away) and editors had to condense it to 10 oh, and they did it two different ways. 2/

OK, magat.

You think I'm trying to make you wear a mask because I care about you and don't want you to catch covid. Wrong.

If you're a magat, I don't give a shit if you die of covid. One less Trump voter. I'm okay with that. Just so we're clear.

Still need you to wear it. 1/ And yeah, I say that for a reason. You've been mocking liberals for caring about people like you. You don't need it. You don't want it. So you convinced me. I don't give a shit about you.

I really don't. Die for all I care.

Still need you to wear a mask. 2/

We have strict guidelines for opening up, but *no guidelines for closing down again* when things get worse.

You all realize this is fucking insane, right?

I know, I know, white guys with rights whose noses are so delicate they can't wear a mask.

But there's a way to do this. Look. It's simple.

Set up cameras at *every public venue*.

Each day, randomly select venues. Hire a ton of observers to watch the feed and count mask compilance percentage.

If you "can't wear a maks for reasons", just hope there aren't that many like you.

<continue>

I'm Californian.

140K Californians have tested positive. 5K have died.

If you hold a straightedge up to the log plot of total cases, you can see the doubling rate: 2x every 25 days.

40M people in CA. 140K cases have to double eight times to infect everybody.

So. 1/ Now, the doubling rate slows when it gets close to infecting everybody. So let's just look at "double every 25 days" until half the state is infected.

That happens right around the end of December 2020: half of CA will have COVID by then. 2/

Man, you know, at some point --

-- I do enjoy hearing stories of people who voted for Trump in 2016 and who are voting for Biden in 2020 (the political equivalent of "I am a student at a small Northeastern college and I never thought I'd be writing to you..") ... 1/14 Better late than never, I guess; at least they're voting to save the world now, and there's still a possibility it'll work.

But there's this thing - there's the people who voted third party in 2016, because, as they said, they "couldn't bring themselves to" vote for HRC... 2/14

Why would anyone call this jaw-dropping? It is banal in its predictability. If Trump doesn't like something, he attacks it as corrupt and fraudulent. He is a thoroughly artless about this. 1/

cnn.com/2020/05/10/opi… He is unpopular in California, therefore any time Californians vote, it is bad and he will attack it as corrupt. Of course the attack has no basis. You should not expect a trump attack to have basis. He is simply expressing that he doesn't like it when California votes. 2/

I cannot wrap my head around the claims that this has only a 1% death rate. Somebody provide an explanation?

We have one million infected people and sixty thousand dead people in this country - and some of those million infected people are still going to die. 1/ How do we get only a 1% death rate if we have one million infected people and sixty thousand of them are dead? And 40% of that million have been diagnosed for less than two weeks? 2/

The thing that directs a population's overall behavior, more than anything else, is their confidence - or lack of confidence - in one another. 1/ What drives hoarding is, virtually without exception, the belief that others are going to hoard, (or that supply chains will break down, or that hyperinflation is coming), so if you don't buy whatever you can now, you can't buy later. 2/

Some of you older computer nerds might remember Eliza - the very simple text-based early "AI" expert system that simulated (very badly) a therapist; it would key on a few specific words or word patterns and ask you basic questions... 1/ ... ("I want to X" would prompt Eliza to respond "Why do you think you want to X?" and so on.) For a while in the late 70s it was a popular nerd program; there were people who seemed to find it authentically cathartic to chat with. 2/