Parked on account on Bluesky; seems a lot of old Twitter going there. So you may find me at https://bsky.app/profile/baporter.bsky.social
Paint CHiPs
@paintchips
- 17 Followers
- 157 Following
- 497 Posts
Aw hell
"He ran on a platform of punishing his enemies, and his voters' imagined enemies, and they turned out in droves to give him that power even at the expense of making their own lives worse. One cannot say broadly of Americans We're better than this, because we're not. A plurality of Americans hate women or people of color or immigrants or trans people enough for this to be the result. "
https://defector.com/this-place-is-all-fucked-up?ref=welcometohellworld.com
This Place Is All Fucked Up | Defector
It doesn’t appear to have been close. Georgia flipped for Trump. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, too. The Blue Wall crumbled like Jericho’s. Just about everywhere voted redder than in 2020. Young people went right. New York City went right. The polls said what they said, but then Americans went to the voting booth and said what […]
I could live to be a thousand years old and you will never be able to talk me into a charitable interpretation of why any individual voted for Trump. Economic anxiety, "the left's gone too far!", tax cuts, inflation, whatever rationalization people want to use as cover—for themselves or others—it's all horseshit.
It's just bigotry. Naked animus. Punching down on outgroups bc they need to made felt lesser and know that they're outside the circle.
That's it. That's all it is. All it ever was.
Four years. We had four years to shore up our system. To go balls to the wall for ethics reform, protecting the vote, disabling the filibuster, holding people criminally accountable, institutional checks and balances, reinforcing laws, everything. Four years and we squandered it because, just like the four years prior, the people who were ostensibly the adults in the room kept just leaving it up to the next election.
Clive ThompsonAnd I'm thinking also of game theory -- which, when it emerged in the early-to-mid 20th century, predicted that people would behave as selfish maximizers
But when they started testing the theory with real people, it didn't work that way
real people were as liable to cooperate and give a fair shake to their supposed competitors
4/x
I hope we don't memory hole Robert Mueller, which for my money is one of the most infuriating footnotes in American civic history in terms of ethics/oversight/good governance, and a reeeeally important object lesson on the impulse to "trust the process" and assume somebody, somewhere will do something to protect us and our institutions because surely they wouldn't be able to just get away with it, right, so just be quiet and let the system work.
I am a big fan of not letting people get away with pretending like what they were suggesting weren't falsifiable predictions that were definitely falsified. Way too many people try to weasel out of it later. There needs to be a cosmic ledger that says in big bold letters "Nope; turns our you were wrong; incorrect; the thing you were suggesting did not happen; your information was bad and it made predictions that we know definitely never came true; the things you were saying were wrong and dumb."
Important periodic reminder:
We have now administered about 15 billion COVID vaccines; 70% of humans, 5.5 billion people, have received one. We have more data on it now than on just about any medical intervention in history.
Anti-vaxxers were demonstrably wrong about everything. Everything they told you and every "concern" they raised turned out to be horseshit.
Remember that. We told you they were idiots and we were right and they were wrong and they will always have been wrong.
@cshentrup no really, it's a month old post and I feel admit I haven't kept up with it and what I have heard has been murky. Did we find out that they were targeting specific, known individuals? Or people taking specific battlefield roles? All I heard was "if you use this technology in this region we say you're probably a terrorist we make go boom."