Reporters and writers who care about understanding the Trump era need to pay a lot closer attention to the role of self-imposed Democratic helplessness. There's a really stunning example of it going on right now. In the sweep of history it's minor but it's incredibly revealing.

If you urge Democrats to impeach before Monday, you'll probably get a bunch of responses shouting at you about the House rules, claiming Dems are moving as fast as possible and that it's impossible to reconvene before then.
These claims appear to be false - there are ways to end the House's recess. Besides, it's strange to claim the Dems are moving with urgency when Pelosi is the one who recessed the House in the first place.

But what's even stranger than these claims is where they're coming from.

You May Also Like

THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)