Friday, July 9, 2021

Friday Tweets





This is an extremely useful framing.



It also goes along with one of our long-running threads.
We’ve discussed this before, but the pandemic has given us a wealth of new examples.

What possible ideological basis is there for arguing for the relative contagiousness of one virus over another? Or of insisting on the efficacy of a particular drug? And yet, how one answers questions like these have become arguably the defining political positions of the day, particularly in conservative media and the far right.

I’m certain someone out there is working on a painfully epicyclic model to explain this (does R have a spirograph package?), but the picture becomes remarkably straightforward if you approach it in partisan terms.

From a conservative/Republican standpoint, when it comes to a potential collapse in support for President Trump, timing matters more than magnitude. A bad Q3 is worse for them than a terrible 2021 would be. Prematurely lifting lock downs is unlikely to buy them more than a dead cat bounce, but might be enough to avert a GOP bloodbath.

Add to that the constraint of not infuriating Trump. The base is (for the moment at least) personally loyal to him, not to the party, and temperamentally he is more than willing to bring the temple down with him.

Obviously, the memes and narratives of Fox et al. are often ideological and partisan, but when you look at the odd quadrants, you see lots of stories that advance a partisan aim with no significant ideological component, relatively few that go the other way.




Moviepass





"...longer than you can stay liquid."




The legacy of Silicon Valley




Beter red and dead




If they would have tried really hard, they could have worked in a vampire reference.




One for the secular evangelicalism thread.




For the life of me, I can't think of a JIT pun




And one for the OTA television thread.




Voter suppression file.






Vaccines and variants




Unlike Western megafires, the relationship between tropical cyclones and climate change is direct and undeniable.




Crypto




A tale of two cults and one very unlucky woman.




Follow Mayer.




Yep.




Epic nerd thread. 




The Wages of Strauss




As someone actually from the Ozarks, I can't believe anyone actually fell for this fake.




And in closing.


1 comment:

  1. When I was a kid my sister had a Spirograph and I was sooo envious. All I had was a Spirotot, which as you can imagine is a baby version of Spirograph that doesn't do much at all.

    ReplyDelete