New article! Both by failing to back Ukraine and by tolerating Azerbaijani and Israeli expansionism, the U.S. has undermined the possibility of a global liberal order
I’m sure her audience is made up of people who weren’t born yet but the rest of us remember that this war in fact prompted the largest global protests in the history of the human race.
Lots of socialists really mad at The Atlantic for pointing out that the housing crisis is a result of *checks notes* entrenched class interests influencing government and not a single firm with a scary name
Just so we’re clear a whole lot of Republican governors believe it’s worth breaking up the union so Greg Abbot can drown little kids in the Rio Grande. That is the party right now
Botswana offers to donate 8,000 elephants to Angola for the repopulation of the national parks in the country.
Botswana has the highest number of elephants in the world with over 130,000.
“New England, historically part of England with a distinct culture & religion, was voting for pro-British candidates in 1800; this is why the U.S. is needs to make a peace with Britain that recognizes this reality”
-The Marquis de Musk, 1812
Weird how people rarely take the next logical step here, which is asking why so many countries near their favorite not-imperialist states are so keen on hosting US bases
The leftist tendency to discredit the entire field of economics is deeply misguided on a tactical level. Jettisoning academic economics won’t make people leftists, it will just make them fall back on ‘intuitive economics’, which are typically bad. For example:
People don’t seem to understand that ‘chronic malnourishment due to eating just a couple local crops’ is very much a default state for much of the world without international trade
@erichhartmann
No one normal views these men with disgust. The question is - do view this as an ideal, or should maybe they have some better safety protocols
“But Russian culture is so beautiful, I mean Tolstoy and…” I’m gonna stop you right there, Tolstoy’s whole point in every novel was that conservative, imperial Russian culture was rotten to the core and corrupted everything it exercised power over
The first “American Chinese food” restaurant opens in Beijing.
For Chinese like me who’ve only seen the oyster pail in TV series, the food is intriguing. For Americans in China, such Chinese takeaway may come with a sense of nostalgia.
@USA_BaoziLover
Hot take: Twitter employees aren’t quitting because they are white collar weaklings. In quitting & complaining about the new manager, they are acting like normal workers rather than some weird intrinsically motivated ‘work family’ of entrepreneurial fantasies
The idea that Ukraine is a 'puppet' of the US, carrying on this war because the US wants it to (not because the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians reject most Russian demands), just absolutely reeks of orientalism
The most absurd thing 'antiwar' journalists and analysts keep pretending to believe is that Putin is one bad battle away from using nuclear weapons but also can be trusted to honor a ceasefire if one is negotiated
Meghan Markle is one issue where I’ve formed my views almost entirely as a reaction to people I generally think are bad. I have no idea if she’s a good person but Piers Morgan and that terrible blond woman who put the target on her head hate her so I am passively pro-Meghan
There are at least 3 events:
-chattel Slavery
-the holocaust
-the genocides of Native Americans
That are so awful they are incomparable to almost anything in the 21st century US and USians would do well to stop comparing, like, building condos or vaccine mandates to them
What’s *actually* great and somewhat unique about the Hunger Games that it depicts a dystopia that experiences a revolution *and is still awful* which id pretty true to life but not often depicted
“Why do liberals punch left when fascism is the bigger threat?” Well I try not to but tons of Communists support the actual expansion of socially conservative authoritarianism so it’s hard to avoid
The number of devoted socialists, anarchists, and other leftists who lost everything to Communism is much higher than the number of cartoon villain royals and capitalists Bolsheviks claim are their victims
People are just being willfully stupid now. There is no way people actually can’t think for half a second “huh I wonder if there’s anywhere in the U.S. you aren’t allowed to go”. It’s demonstrative stupidity to show loyalty to the cause
Drone striking Mexico is a great way to accidentally murder some girl on her 15th birthday because you thought her second cousin was a cartel chief but really it was another guy he bought a car from, and manage to make cartels into anti-imperialist folk heroes
Baby formula/Ukraine aid discourse is a great example of the perils of using money as a stand in for resources.
We can send $10B worth of, say, artillery shells to Ukraine b/c they exist in warehouses. No amount of cash will bring a million tons of baby formula into existence
Every time you see pictures of Ukrainians relaxing, partying, etc remember that they are still living with the possibility that this happens and maybe don’t begrudge them moments of normalcy
Okay I have to take this moment to teach quick history fact -
In October of 1941, Germany was *already sinking* US ships in the Atlantic because the US was so obviously on the side of the allies
Even if you hate the guy this is hard to argue with. His singular decision to stay in Kyiv rather than run to Lviv or Kraków changed more this year than any other person
Counterpoint - it aged exceptionally well. Marin contested an election and will abide by the results. That’s what democracy is (one hopes that someday Zelensky will do the same)
Listen I hope I have some credibility as a) a Biden guy and b) a disliker of Hamas to say this:
The president needs to give some indication that the lives of Palestinian civilians have value and that there will be consequences for disregarding that completely
One year ago, our Congressional delegation’s arrival in Taiwan sent an unequivocal message: America stands with Taiwan as it defends itself and its freedom.
Solidarity with Taiwan is as important as ever, as our world faces a stark choice between democracy and autocracy.
Joe Biden is the most anti-war president of the war on terror, and probably the most peaceful since Carter. He's paying a political price among hawks, without much countervailing support from anti-war activists - which may discourage future doves
@mike10010100
consider this, mike: the article was sent out in mag pdf 2 months ago to subscribers. Not a single letter of complaint has reached our inbox. It went up *online* a few days ago, Chasten tweeted about it, and all these vicious responses have surfaced.
Twelve years after the Fukushima disaster, Japanese authorities have started pumping wastewater from the plant into the ocean. They insist there’s no danger to public health, but Japan’s neighbors are up in arms about the controversial plan.
Okay one more time: the top ‘company’ on here is an imaginary entity called “China coal” where they just lumped the Chinese coal industry into a ‘company’
The idea that there exist 'bullshit jobs' to placate the otherwise restive middle class runs into the obvious trouble: it hypothesizes that a wide variety of capitalist firms are spending substantial amounts of money to achieve a collective goal without any individual incentive
This is actually a brilliant way to be a reactionary ideologue. The scene has nothing to do with Nazism *except that* it presents an image of a better world. But that’s it’s sin - trying to show an actual vision of the future rather than just complaining
‘Even Kissinger agrees NATO expansion was bad’ Kissinger literally lives for facilitating human rights abuses, it’s what keeps his heart ticking at his age, I would not be citing him
“Actually more people died of colonial famines in India than in Ireland” would be a really good defense of the British Empire and I hope I get to hear it some say
This is one of the most backwards things I've ever seen. Poland in the 80s lived in fear of USSR intervention AND of NATO aggression. Poland is now among the most impactful members of NATO
My entire life the capital of Ukraine was Kiev. Now suddenly overnight it's "Kyiv."
The region of Calcutta in India is apparently now "Kolkata," and now Turkey is "Turkiye."
Can people piss off & stop changing place names for no reason whatsoever.
Intuitively statements like like ‘immigrants steal our jobs’, ‘minimum wage makes business cut jobs’, and ‘government should be run like a business’ make sense; the contribution of economics is to test them both theoretically and empirically
So months ago Alan MacLeod implied to his hundreds of thousands of followers that any concern for Ugandan human rights was a cynical plot to steal their gold. Then you see what’s people actually condemning and you see why MacLeod is so evil
If you separate cause and effect by 6 or 7 years a solid percentage of people will be unable to connect the dots and another group with be mendacious enough to manipulate them
Like if m sorry but people not that different from this family are exactly the rarely-votes who’re people that put Trump over the top in the primary & the general
If Ethiopia becomes a stable middle income country I’m calling it now that it’ll be a highly sought tourism destination. The culture, history, natural scenery, food, and moderate weather all seem amazing
This is perhaps the biggest ‘making up a guy’ of our time. No one is disgusted by these guys. Some people are a little weirdly into it, but no one is like ‘oh gross what dirty plebs’