The more I think about the Bruce Springsteen Jeep ad, the more disgusted I get. It's allegedly a call for unity, but it is drenched in a very particular culture's iconography: a Christian church (that superimposes the cross on the US flag), farms, rural living, "the middle" ...

... it's all so white. This is the "America" of nationalist fairy tales: rural land, settled by self-reliant white farmers & good Christians. It's all trucks & dust & manual labor & squinting at the horizon while wiping sweat from your brow. This is the kind of "unity" ...

... designed to comfort (or at least not threaten) white people. It says, "let's unify by joining together to reaffirm America's mythical self-conception, despite the real-world violence & repression it has always entailed."

If I'm, I dunno, a latino housekeeper in Vegas or black Uber driver in Sacramento, what's in the commercial for me? What does this kind of "unity" promise me? What can I find in "the (mythical) middle"? Nothing. It's not for me.

If America ever does come together in some kind of social solidarity again (which looks pretty doubtful), it's not going to be around the myths & iconography of 20th century hegemonic white culture in the US. It's going to be around something NEW -- new stories, new icons.

It's a slow, snowy afternoon. How about a 🧵 on "rationalists" & "rationalism"? I want to talk about what real rationalism might look like & what people devoted to rationalism might actually behave like--and how that differs from what you often see from self-styled rationalists.

Caveat up front: this is not about Slate Star Codex, which I haven't read regularly enough to have an opinion on, or about the recent controversy between SSC & the NYT. I'm more interested in the *idea* of rationalism (vs. the practice).

The core premise of rationalism, as I understand it, is simply that humans' cognitive machinery was not designed by evolution to find truth, but rather to advance the interests & welfare of the collective -- a Venn overlap, but not the same thing. Therefore ...

... reasoning well, both individually & as groups, requires special effort. It requires consciously trying to set aside the parochialism, biases, & other distortions that typically characterize our thinking -- resisting, to some extent, the dynamics of group membership/welfare.

That's all fine. I agree entirely that we should make special effort to reason well & to guard against the typical failures of reasoning to which we humans are prone. I believe it's the best (maybe only) way forward as a species. So far so good.

Strongly endorse everything in this @OsitaNwanevu piece. One of the key mistakes I see among Dems, both online & in the real world, is thinking that people believe right-wing nonsense because they are unintelligent or uneducated.

In the area I know best, climate change, it's been found repeatedly that climate denialists & skeptics have, on average, MORE higher education than those who accept the science. They know MORE about climate science. They have, on average, HIGHER verbal intelligence.

What they do is adopt the conclusion that best serves their social tribe and then use their intelligence & education to build a case for it. It's called "motivated reasoning" & everyone is subject to it, very much including the smartest people.

OK, the GOP has *formally stated* that it believes political violence in service of conservative political power is legitimate.

Can we stop "debating" this shit now?

I'm on hold with the WA Dept. of Revenue -- have been for an hour! -- so I might as well tweet a thread while I wait. Let's talk about two different ways of conceiving legitimacy. What is its source? From whence does legitimacy derive?

One way to see it: moral & social legitimacy derive from a set of principles that apply to to all tribes & factions alike. A tribe's actions are legitimate insofar as they accord with those principles. So, eg, "it's bad to torture," no matter who's doing the torturing.

Another way to see it: moral & social legitimacy inhere *in the tribe itself*. Some tribes are "good" -- chosen by God, genetically superior, derived from the right bloodline, whatever -- & some aren't. The legitimacy of an act derives from *who did it*.

So in this latter way of thinking, if a bad tribe tortures members of a good tribe, it's bad. But if a good tribe tortures members of a bad tribe, it's ok, ie, legitimate, *because the tribe is good*. Actions in pursuit of the interests of the good tribe are inherently good.