Wednesday Roundup

"It's Not Writer's Block, It's Responsibility" Edition

Yeah, things here at the Discourse v2 have had a slow start, too¹.

But no, seriously guys, work’s gonna get crazy for the next few weeks, and I’m also brainstorming a lot of articles, so just hold tight. I promise this is gonna be fun. But in the meantime, I’m absolutely going to keep up the Wednesday Roundup! Part of the reason why I started it was as a preparation for moving towards the more serious setting here on Substack - to get myself into the practice of regularly making a deadline.

So here goes!

• Free Language Lesson of the Week: “Obstinate” is an adjective. “Predominate” is not; it’s a verb, as in “gazelles predominate over lions, even as the latter clearly dominate the former in combat”.
  
  Thus, “obstinately” is an adverb.
  
  But “predominately” is absolutely. Not. A. Bleeping. Word.
  
  The word you’re looking for is “predominantly”, because its root “predominant” actually is an adjective.
  
  You’re welcome.
  

• Vax refusers are now the chief obstacle to overcoming the virus. It’s not hard to see that the next major political phase of the pandemic response is going to be for cities and states to have to decide whether to protect Trumpsters from themselves, or move on with the rest of our lives and lift restrictions.
  
  I’m getting my second shot next Tuesday. I’m down for some reasonable ongoing restrictions, especially protections and vaccine prioritization for nursing homes. But I’m not putting my life on hold for these holdouts as long as I’m safe from the bad decisions they’ve made out of a really sick sense of political spite.
  

• I was going to have a Ma’khia Bryant take, but I think what I was going to say has already been said: Even if the Blue Lives Matter crowd thinks that it was a “good shoot” in the moment, people don’t call the cops and then flip out like that for no good reason. I suspect bullying played a role here, but regardless, her death is a tragedy. If all you have to say is, “it’s a good shoot”, then you’re doing it wrong.
  

• Just want to emphasize something from last week’s Roundup: I genuinely am beginning to suspect that China is going through a similar stage of the totalitarian playbook as the Soviets under Stalin, as far as Xi’s use of hypernationalism goes.
  
  Now, I’ll admit, to other history fans, the sequencing of this parallel may appear confusing at first. Stalin consolidated his revolution far earlier than Xi has. But I think this is because China was so far behind industrially, that the first revolution industrialized and was consolidated under Mao, but without enough military capacity for the sort of nationalism Stalin benefited from to actually become something us foreigners would actually get scared about.
  
  The second “revolution” was sparked off by America’s opening to China, but because it was already occurring under a totalitarian regime, it was more or less orderly and not-a-civil-war for several decades until one of the factions (Xi’s) finally managed to win out. Unlike his predecessors, he’s bold and well-positioned enough to try and consolidate, so he’s been spending this past decade here in just such a consolidation phase, and he’s doing it primarily with all the hypernationalism.²
  
  I dunno. It’s a theory.
  

• Joe Biden’s American Families Plan is gonna be big, so expect a lot of zeitgeisty articles for the next several weeks. Sorry guys, but I’m my own assignment editor now! And that asshole of an editor has ADHD³.
  

• Reflection: On that assignment editor note, I realized that Quora really taught me to attack things, but not really to build them up. It’s a sad reflection on the place that there’s so much worth attacking and so little worth explaining.
  

• To The Left:⁴ Having difficulty with an issue is not a sign of treachery. It’s a sign that one is actually grappling with the position and making an honest effort to strengthen it, by questioning it.
  

• “Cancel Culture” Is A Result Of The Filibuster: Like Ezra Klein did for this podcast, let’s set aside the cringe-y Fox News crusade, and actually look at the underlying phenomenon Fox is demagoguing.
  
  It’s plain to see that when people can’t effect real political change with their votes - because change is impeded by the filibuster - then of course they’re going to naturally look to mob justice to get things done, on both sides. I mean, duh.
  

• H/T to Matthew Yglesias: A recent paper found that our GDP may have been reduced by as much as 36% by exclusionary zoning.
  
  Look, I’m trying not to cuss these days, but… Jesus Fucking Christ! This should be the top headline for all zoning reform advocates.
  

• Chris Christie is making 2024 noises. Peg him as a dark horse to buck the trend if Trump runs; he’s not as much of a coward as Haley, and more than most Republicans has a bone to pick with Trump.
  
  Plus, it’s kind of on-brand for his pre-Trump brand: “I ran in deep blue New Jersey, when they said I couldn’t win, and I won. I’ll run against Trump as a Real Conservative, and show these clowns how it’s done.”
  
  Admittedly, this flies in the face of his actual 2016 primary performance, but he announced in 2015 well before Trump did, and was playing by the rules of the previous game before Trump changed it. At the same time, though, I did say this was a “dark horse” for a reason - it’s still unlikely.
  
  As I continue to establish and hammer out the nature of narrative on this blog, it’s important to note that one doesn’t necessarily have to agree with that framing in order to believe that the individual actors might themselves find it credible.
  

• The officer in Virginia who got fired is going to become the next right-wing poster-child. I get the feeling, though, that there are a couple potential “hidden” explanations lying underneath the headline: (A) as an Internal Affairs officer, he was a thorn in someone’s side, and this was what some right-wing nutjob involved in the situation thought would be a decent opportunity to use leftist reasoning in order to burnish said nutjob’s “nonpartisan” credentials, or (B) he was simply unpopular even in IA, and the city wanted him out.
  
  Either way, I expect that this story is deeper than it seems, even if I honestly don’t care and hope to god that we don’t have to waste the next year hearing Fox complain about how victimized this guy is.

Upcoming Article Teaser: “How A ‘Prime Minister Manchin’ Would Actually Happen”

Happy Wednesday, folks.

1. Not that it’s remotely comparable to The Struggle, so don’t get me twisted.

2. Even the Uighurs make sense through this prism, as a scapegoat for the problems he’d like to distract people from. Just swap out “Uighurs” for Hitler’s “Jews”, and for Stalin’s… well, “Jews”… and the parallel becomes clear.

3. No, I really do.

4. I like this idea for a new Roundup segment: Messages we’d all like to say to our fellow Lefties, but in a relatively civil and nonconfrontational manner. Thoughts?