@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock I guess I'd submit to you that, living in Florida and having some connections here, there's a pattern to the choices our governor has been making recently that are not consistent with "a person trying to govern well who sometimes makes mistakes", but are much more consistent with "a person using state power to take extreme sides in certain kinds of controversies, indifferent to the harms that it causes". 1/

@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock This is relatively new — for most of DeSantis' first term, he did in fact mostly build support by governing pretty well, making common cause especially with municipal officials across partisan lines. The controversy that surrounded him was over COVID, where, rightly or wrongly, most Floridians thought he chose well by erring on the side of individual liberty rather than community safety. 2/

@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock But current DeSantis is, literally, looking for certain kinds of trouble. It does in a way play to him, to make so strong an issue of controversies over book banning, because he is trying to make himself a champion for social conservatives, and any press there is good press. He solicited, then signed a 6-week abortion ban, is effectively banning gender-affirmative care for kids, whatever their parents think, and putting severe barriers for consenting trans adults. 3/

@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock You can accuse me, correctly, of having a personal stake in this. He is destroying the experimental college that gave me the richest years of my life, overtly trying to remake it using a conservative Christian college as a model, on the theory that it is too "woke" (I'm sure there's some of that, but it's mostly experimental and transgressive.) 4/

@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock In my view, DeSantis is a person not without talents, but he is a person who has self-consciously decided to deploy those talents in a manner indifferent to what would have been his own conception of the public good until very recently, because he is trying to make a case for himself to a Republican primary base. In doing so, he is doing a very great deal of harm, but does not care. 5/

@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock Sometimes it is wise to steelman. But as Dan Davies (quoted here on Mastodon today!) used to point out *ad hominem* argument is a bad habit, but so is credulously and laboriously taking at face value the arguments of people with a history of acting in bad faith. In my view, Ron DeSantis is a person who has demonstrated a very great deal of bad faith. (A year ago, I was interested in and somewhat open to him.) /fin