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Many major developments in American society happen because some group starts doing something that isn't really allowed and then blackmails the state into supporting it after the fact. On "filibusterism" in America:
Nick Burns
10K posts
Nick Burns
@NickBurns
Joined June 2016
- The Catholic Church has officially ruled that a white boy can get a little bit Peruvian with it if he wants to
- Why is everything in America like this. You walk into a grocery store in this country and it has a banner proclaiming it's more than a grocery store, it's a vision of a better future for everyone. Why do we have to lie like thisWhac-A-Mole is more than a game
- A/C is obviously necessary in hot, humid American summers and seems increasingly necessary for Europeans. But it does do something sad to summer, which is make it from an open, circulating, public season to a more closed, inward, private season, a second winter
- One thing I realized while writing for British outlets is that Americans are extremely careless with metaphorical language and often don't even realize they're using it
- Replying to @johnholowachThat would be why I say in the above post that it is necessary. I know this is a frightening level of moral complexity, but sometimes things that are necessary for us also have diffuse negative consequences
- The irony for Liz Bruenig is that if she was coming up now instead of ten years ago she would be hailed as the left's answer to the new right-wing sensibility: see, of course you can be Catholic and a mother in your 20s and still be a leftist. Instead everyone was really weird
- American sublimeFrito Lay truck crash in Crescent City, California.
- Replying to @NickBurnsAmerica's pilgrimage from northeast and midwest to the Sunbelt over the past half-century has been contingent on first making the Sunbelt into a second north - disconnected archipelago of private havens shored up against the hostile elements
- Replying to @NickBurnsI realized this writing for the British because my British editors would point out, with maximum discretion, that I had slipped in baseball and American football metaphors without realizing.
- When Tony Judt praised the miracle of America's great state schools, he thought first of all of IU Bloomington, where humanities programs are currently being blown to shreds
- All those stories about people “barely making ends meet” making 200k in NYC, et cetera - they don’t give me sympathy for the subjects, but they do make me impressed at how US culture and political economy is configured such that it’s so easy to be miserable at every income level.
- Replying to @NickBurnsEvery other country on earth is content for the most part with having grocery store chains just be what they are. Is this propagandistic instinct a sign of American "faith in capitalism" or evidence of the opposite?
