Polls show 2/3 of Republicans believe the insurrection was a false flag operation, which is psychologically no different than believing the Earth is flat or that highly evolved dinosaurs who survived the asteroid now control world governments from a secret base on the moon. 1/10

1/ Something strange is happening with people’s sex lives. 20-somethings are having sex later and less frequently than previous generations. I spent several months digging into this for @theatlantic. https://t.co/5ehzmWY9wi

2/ This phenomenon—I’m calling it a Sex Recession—really surprised me. It seemed improbable in the age of Tinder, digital porn, and attitudes that are generally permissive and sex-positive.

3/ What’s happening isn’t exclusively American: Similar trends are being observed in other countries, including Japan, Australia, the U.K., Finland, and the Netherlands.

4/ One cause is obvious: Adults under 35 are less likely to be living with a partner than in recent decades, and more likely to be living with their parents—which, it’s safe to say, isn’t great for one’s sex life.

5/ But I also found other explanations, each with profound implications. The first, unsurprisingly, has to do with internet enticements. Netflix and other online entertainment may be substituting for sex.

Real talk.

The right as spent years trying to paint @NancyPelosi & @HillaryClinton as extreme leftists who will take your guns, sterilize your sons, outlaw Christianity, and tax you at 80%.

Meanwhile...

The far left has tried to insist that they were both Republican-lite.

1/

Some on the far left call them war mongering neoliberal corporate owned whores.

That's on a good day, for both.

None of these charges, by either side, are remotely true of course. Not that this matters to the people putting this shit out there.

2/

The facts are these.

@HillaryClinton and @NancyPelosi have been fighting people, usually white men, for tnings their entire lives.

With little respite.

At times they have had to make impossible choices and compromises just to beo let in the door. Most women have.

3/

It must be easy to be some 26 yo white dude who has never had anyone tell him no his whole life to sit in judgement of women like them.

"How dare she..."

...do what was necessary to get a place at the table.

...do exactly what men have been doing w/o your disapproval.

4/

Let's face it, most men suck when it comes to issues that don't pertain directly to their own self interests. White men are even worse. We just are.

Most men especially suck when it comes to women's issues and I mean really suck.

How many left leaning men fell to #MeToo?

5/

Remember: Just because an idea is old doesn't mean it's good.

Knowing whether old ideas are more likely to be good requires understanding whether conditions have changed in important ways.

Horse archery was an amazing method of warfare for over a thousand years...then people invented guns, and suddenly this great idea that had stood the test of time became obsolete.

Then again, when underlying conditions don't change much, tried-and-true approaches are probably better.

"Learning the lessons of history" usually just means assuming ergodicity and stationarity in an informal time-series model...

(end)

Thread: Rush Limbaugh and the conservative Id

On the day of his passing, it's worth doing a brief retrospective on how Rush Limbaugh's personal life almost perfectly paralleled American conservatism...

One thing that's not commonly known about Rush Limbaugh is that he began his career in sports, doing sales for the Kansas City Royals baseball team. That's significant because much of the tribalism and dumbed-down rhetoric in American TV news directly came from sports media.

Television journalism in its earliest days was a fantastic product with real investigative reporting, no filibustering live interviews, and no soundbites. This began changing in the 1970s when ABC Sports president Roone Arledge was put in charge of ABC News.

Limbaugh tried to be a conventional FM deejay but kept getting fired because his personality was too abrasive. After working with the Royals, he began a small political talk show for a Sacremento station. The Reagan repeal of the Fairness Doctrine made his show possible.

Rush Limbaugh's Sacramento show started in 1984 (he replaced Morton Downey Jr) and after 5 years, he was picked up by ABC Radio which was trying to copy some of the sensationalism that ABC News television had started. It was a perfect fit.

Overall I think Labour will be a bit disappointed with how the ‘relaunch’ has started. Labour have given themselves a mountain to climb anyway through a year of inaction but the speech today lacked coherence, purpose and distinction from the government.

Starmer is (funnily enough) making a lot of the same mistakes Corbyn made in 2019. He is listing a ‘bold’ set of policy proposals that come across as disjointed and lacking connection to Britain’s priorities.

The policies themselves were basically good, I wouldn’t argue against them. But I would cringe whenever Labour came out with spending proposal after spending proposal in 2019 without any rationale or connection to a larger economic strategy. That’s what Starmer did today.

The questions that voters will have about Starmer’s speech are the same ones that voters will have had about Corbyn’s 2019 manifesto: why are these policies your priority, how can we afford them and why aren’t we doing these already?

The first one needs to be answered by diagnosing Britain’s problems and their causes. He doesn’t have to diagnose all of them. For the purpose of today he could have picked three that feed off each other: inequality, stagnant income growth and stagnant productivity.