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Yascha Mounk @Yascha_Mounk
, 4 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
Why, oh why, do even thoughtful commentators like @damonlinker find it so hard to criticize the status quo without cuddling up to extremists?

* Five Stars are pro-Kremlin anti-vaxxers doing the bidding of the openly racist Lega.

* Marion Le Pen is far more radical than Marine.
Also, portraying the German Green party as being anti-establishment at this point is a little bit like believing that Nancy Pelosi is a bomb-throwing socialist.
As for what's really going on with the new French right, read last year's important essay by @thomaschattwill (who can hardly be accused of leftist fear-mongering on the topic of racism.)

newyorker.com/magazine/2017/…
None of this should besmirch @DamonLinker. He's one of the most thoughtful commentators we have right now. All of us are wrong sometimes. In my opinion, he was very wrong on this one. But that doesn't mean I won't look forward to reading his next column!

theweek.com/articles/81056…
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Right now, Thailand and @KuwaitAirways are conspiring to return an 18 year-old girl to Saudi Arabia, where she will likely be imprisoned, and possibly killed, for the crime of escaping her "guardians" and renouncing her religion.

Please RT to help save @rahaf84427714.
(Here's more info.)

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6…
Care to comment, @ThaiEmbDC, @ThaiEmbLondon, @ThaiEmbOttawa?
Read 4 tweets
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.@Max_Fisher is a great journalist.

But it's incomprehensible to me how anybody could write a survey article on how western (?) populism fared in 2018 without mentioning the shock elections in Italy or Brazil.
--> This is just another round in the war between two simplistic positions:

1) Populism is on the rise, so it must win in *every* election!

2) Oh, but they didn't win in this particular election, so the wave has crested.

The aggregate data shows continued uneven growth.
Max also conflates two different trends:

1) Populists keep gaining in strength where (recently) in opposition.

2) Once populists take power, resistance to them will take shape.

If you want to tell an optimistic story about 2018, it's all about 2). See U.S., Poland, India.
Read 3 tweets
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It's amazing how painful dealing with health insurance in the U.S. is even for those privileged few who are a) mostly healthy and b) have excellent coverage.

[short, irate thread]
Why does it have to be so hard to figure out what's actually covered?

A few years ago, I spent a whole afternoon trying to figure out whether my vision insurance would cover a pair of Warby Parkers. How are people without a grad degree supposed to navigate this?
I'm not easily embarrassed. But when I go to a doctor and s/he gives me some treatment options, asking about what the comparative prices would be has about the same effect as farting for a whole minute.

Why can't doctors volunteer the costs of treatment?
Read 5 tweets

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Immigration is really the only issue that matters—but not in the way you might think.
We’ve got now a significant minority in the country—and a powerful majority in elite institutions like media and academia—that believes we don’t have a right to restrict immigration into the US at all, because it’s racist.
This loud minority is amplified on social media, sure—but conservatives understand that these are the people who’re teaching their children and creating the intellectual environment for them. They see, correctly, that it’s only a matter of time.
Read 13 tweets
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Hard recommend on therapy if the trouble is that you are confused about how to properly handle the feelings that naturally occur in most modern humans when they learn history in any true detail.
That people who historically have always taken the easy way out now look for straws to grasp doesn’t seem like a reason to stop explaining to people “here is the way systematic discrimination operates and what its effects look like” perhaps.
Guilty white liberals exist and are a thing we joke about and make whole tv shows about

But for my part, the joke is doubly funny because the people the joke is about are so utterly un-self-aware that they’re punishing themselves for it. They could stop at any time and don’t.
Read 11 tweets
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Pro tip if you find yourself in an urban fantasy setting and need to contact the authorities, don't say, eg, "It was a werewolf" say "It was a guy DRESSED as a werewolf", if you say the former they'll assume it's a prank call and you'll get et.
Sure, YOU saw that guy grow fur and fangs and leap 9 feet, but the authorities DIDN'T see that so to them it's not real. But really, all they need to know is "Scary violent guy at X place" and then it's their problem.
Most urban fantasy problems tend to slip away if loud flashing lights show up because then the world would find out that magic exists and the status quo would break and it'd be slightly harder on the writers so this is actually a great monster deterrent.
Read 7 tweets
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🦉🦉🦉Explaining #Kremlin #propaganda technique “political pluralism imitation.” The Russian-state owned and funded mass media has been employing this model in #Russia for a while. Lately, the Kremlin-linked agents are implementing it in the US and other Western countries. 👇
1. In Putin’s Russia, the political discourse is suppressed.
2. Unlike the USSR ideologists, the Kremlin propagandists understand the importance of the public opinion and positive image. “The sublimation of emotions on a political topic” is an important part of the engineered collective mentality.
Read 9 tweets
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THREAD

#Trump #Russia #MoneyLaundering #Mogilevich #RussianMafia
1 .In 1981, David #Bogatin arrived in #NewYorkCity, #Bogatin was a former pilot in the #Soviet Army, and shot down #USA planes during the #VietnamWar, he arrived in #NewYorkCity broke.
2. Three years later in 1984, David #Bogatin bought an apartment in #TrumpTower on Fifth Avenue, paying $6 million to buy five luxury condos. #Trump personally attended the closing, along with #Bogatin.

books.google.se/books?id=ZQ_9C…
Read 114 tweets
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The multipolar spin: how fascists operationalize left-wing resentment. Read what the @splcenter & @MaxBlumenthal don't want you to read here: web.archive.org/web/2018030922…
And download it here:
"​During his recent tour of Europe, disgraced former Trump strategist Steve Bannon declared “Italy is in the lead.” /1 #antifa #Fascism
Amid the historic resurgence of the Italian far right that returned right-wing populist Silvio Berlusconi to prominence, Bannon fantasized about “the ultimate dream” of unifying the anti-establishment Five Star Movement with the far-right League (formerly the Northern League)- /2
Read 92 tweets

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