@JamesSurowiecki Thats because they sincerely believe that “merit” is not a quality of performance that anyone could potentially demonstrate, but an innate quality passed down genetically.
English
Dan Hauge
9K posts
Dan Hauge
@danhauge
Here for the discourse
Boston, MA Katılım Ağustos 2009
395 Takip Edilen513 Takipçiler
Of the many dumb ideas on the MAGA right, this may be the dumbest: People "earn" things they have literally no control over.
Jeremy Kauffman 🦔🌲🌕@jeremykauffman
@TrueSlazac My children are not "lucky". They have earned the life that they have by the nature of being my progeny.
English
@LauraPowellEsq It is honestly hilarious to me that after decades of the whole center-right doing a full court press to get teens to stop underage drinking they now do a full 180 in horror at what they put so much effort into accomplishing.
English
Everyone recognizes this as a symptom of something bad, right?
Grant Bailey@grantjbailey
Huge collapse in drinking among high schoolers 👀
English
@polanskydj Is your view that America is by definition not a nation but *necessarily* globally dominant and pre-eminent, so that without that dominance America could no longer exist?
This a a common sentiment among Americans but seems a bit restrictive if you press it.
English
I genuinely believe this is an un-American sentiment in a literal sense—like going to a jazz concert and wishing they played fewer chords.
Samuel Moyn 🔭@samuelmoyn
Another excellent piece. “One could be forgiven, these days, for wishing that the United States were a little less central in world affairs. That its inhabitants were one people among many, just like everyone else.” newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…
English
@facetedcarapace Im sure HBOMax is tracking how many people are still streaming the original series on the same platform in their decision to put this out there.
English
This seems crazy until you remember how wildly popular Big Bang Theory was. It is a seminal piece of media for Default America. It's Mao's Little Red Book for coworkers and cousins.
DiscussingFilm@DiscussingFilm
First trailer for the ‘Big Bang Theory’ spin-off series ‘STUART FAILS TO SAVE THE UNIVERSE’. The series follows Stuart who must restore reality after he breaks Sheldon & Leonard’s new device and causes a Multiversal Armageddon. Releasing July 23 on HBO Max.
English
@WhiteHouse Amazing, all the new immigrants you want to admit overnight. Feels like a fresh new direction.
English
@katrosenfield I thought it was awesome; if it wasn’t your cup of tea that’s fine.
The framing of “can we all admit” is admittedly just a rhetorical framing but it’s just so tiresome. Different people really like different things.
English
Apropos of nothing, has enough time passed that we can all admit the Bad Bunny halftime show was pretty underwhelming, and that the mass fawning over it was one of the sillier instances of fandom politics bandwagoning in recent memory
English
@KonstantinKisin The primary question should be “how do we continue to get better than we are?”
“Perfect” isn’t a workable standard, but “are we better than ——-“ isn’t a particularly interesting question either, unless the point is wanting to *feel* good about ourselves.
English
Utopia is not the standard. Reality is.
Every civilisation has sins if you judge it by today’s moral standards. You can build an entire career doing nothing but listing them. That is easy.
The harder question and the only one that matters is this: compared to actual, existing alternatives, who has done better?
I am not claiming the West is perfect. It is not. No society is. But if you are honest about measurable progress on rights, equality, and self-correction, it is still ahead of every other major system in the world today.
So stop asking "is it perfect?" That is a childish question.
Ask: "compared to what?"
English
@hemantmehta @IChotiner Actual lol at “I want you to go on the record”
English
Oh my god, MAGA pastor Mark Burns agreed to do an interview with @IChotiner and it went exactly how you'd expect.
newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/w…
English
@yhdistyminen I don’t think he’s talking about health care—I think he’s talking about “can’t you be more empathetic to someone who just doesn’t want to have to see brown people everywhere when he goes out shopping?”
English
Ok, but the libs have been doing the "I want rural Appalachians to have good health insurance, too" thing for a long time
English
@UnderstanderArt Yeah it’s the “maybe it isn’t?” part that stands out the most, and I think is actually the most consistent with his thought. So many of his posts dance around “egalitarian values are actually bad, our ancestors were wiser before those values came along.”
English
Easily the most bizarre way I've ever seen to say "the past is a foreign country," bordering on "well because we're the only era that could possibly consider slavery wrong, maybe it isn't?"
English
@Clint_Davey1 They thought that setup would not conjure up the feels of the OT. And it’s true, you’d need to tell a different kind of story, like the prequels tried to do. It’s hard to do a classic Hero’s Journey when the evil forces aren’t dominant. But you could make it interesting.
English
Yes exactly.
What Star Wars should have done in the sequels is make the Imperial remnant faction the underdogs. Make them like rebels.
Have the heroes working for a new republic that is triumphant but still going through a kind of counter-insurgency phase.
Eve Keneinan 𝛗☦️ن@EveKeneinan
This was the trap Star Wars wrote itself into. Even after they defeated the Empire and took over ... they STILL had to be "the Resistance." Lukas himself, I believe, made a prequel largely because he had no idea how to CONTINUE the actual story. "We're the scrappy underdogs fighting the great monolithic and always Nazi-like evil" is the only narrative they know.
English
@ZaidJilani It really was just a matter of time before they got around to “MLK and the civil rights movement were bad for America, actually.”
English
Ben Shapiro is wondering why Daily Wire is losing audience
Matt Walsh@MattWalshBlog
The civil rights movement, as you know it, is a lie. Here’s the first 5 minutes of my new special:
English
@DamonLinker Can’t wait to hear the explanation why those citizens wouldn’t be able to travel outside their “state” to the rest of their new country.
English
Let me get this straight: The Trump administration has acted aggressively to kick out Venezuelan immigrants given special status by the Biden admin, but now it's proposing to transform the entire Venezuelan population of roughly 30 million into instant American citizens?
Bill Melugin@BillMelugin_
NEW: President Trump tells @FoxNews colleague @johnrobertsFox in a phone call just now that he is “seriously considering making Venezuela the 51st US state”, adding that there is $40 trillion in oil there and “Venezuela loves Trump”.
English
@RichardHanania USCIS system-wide slowdown of immigration applicants seems to be ramping up though—so they seem to be shifting their emphasis to reducing legal immigration.
English
Stephen Miller's influence is declining
Trump reversed his visa cuts for agriculture and hospitality workers.
ICE hiring is up, but arrests and prisoners are down.
Pragmatism and sanity are winning out.
English
@mattyglesias Many sincerely believe the main lesson we learned from the COVID pandemic is that we were overly cautious about stopping the spread and created a lot of unnecessary measures when we should have just let nature take its course and not overreact to large numbers of deaths.
English
I get that the pandemic risk is low but what are we doing here?
English
@tracewoodgrains He just devolved into monomania on this issue sometime during the late 2010s which has sustained him for around 10 years now.
English
word to the wise: if you ever respond to a single question from Wes Yang, he will ignore your actual response and then tag you every other day in rant threads presenting deranged strawmen
this is obsession, not Principled Heterodoxy, and it merits no respect
Wesley Yang@wesyang
They can just bring @tracewoodgrains in as an expert witness to explain that Harvey Marceline really was a woman when he was pretending to be one, and thus no harm was done to the female prison guard forced to strip search him. x.com/Cici_RNinNYC/s…
English
@SeanTrende I mean for Rs it would be great.
An ongoing race to the bottom is a nightmare from a legitimacy-of-our-democracy perspective but decreasing numbers of Americans care about that anymore—all that matters is who can keep winning the race to the bottom.
English
Because we live on the worst timeline, we should prepare for a situation where Rs lose the popular vote cleanly (i.e. 51-46, not the 49-48 situation from 2012) but keep the House. Which would be a nightmare.
English