> I have been amazed, and also disappointed, by the amount of people that want this to be the fault of “stupid conservative Texas” and absolutely refuse to even entertain the idea that anything other than “Texas is dumb” could have been a contributor.
In my opinion this is the result of a mentality that sees the government as the obvious solution to problems, so when you see problems existing in a place where people seem to have a different philosophy of government, its clearly the fault of those morons who don’t realize that all problems can be solved by sufficient application of government force.
> if we actually want to fix things we need to stop playing these ridiculous partisan games and be honest with ourselves with the full picture of issues.
Some people actually do want to fix things on some level, but they are quite confident in their understanding of the problem and they believe that the indicated solution is clear, and anyone who doesn’t agree with them is either stupid, or evil, or both. So they’re unwilling to abandon what they see as a perfectly correct solution because a bunch of evil morons want to argue about “unintended consequences” or “agent-principal problems.”
Other people are more interested in signaling their ideological alignment with the above, and the object level issue provides them with opportunities to signal.