Looks like it’s time once again for a reminder that Larry Summers’ entire career is an unbroken string of failure and catastrophe
“This is a bad strategy for steering a country through a crisis” says the man who came up with the economic transition plan for post-Soviet Russia
“We have to spend money prudently” says the man who left a multibillion-dollar university unable to pay dining hall workers for the breakfast shift
Larry Summers has the same theory about politics and governing that Donald Trump has about physical exercise, that you have a limited lifetime supply of vitality and anything you put effort into doing will use it up faster, forever
Who better than an architect of the Obama recovery plan to be giving advice about what a presidency must do to protect its congressional majorities??
Anyway just because I let Politico’s new Playbook ghoul team successfully troll me on substance, don’t overlook that they also classify Larry Summers and the austerity creeps as “the left” because there is nothing in politics but a contest between two sports teams
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Facebook's new, sophisticated appeals system for content-removal decisions is telling people in Myanmar which ways of dehumanizing Muslims are acceptable, which should be helpful in the next round of Facebook-facilitated genocide there oversightboard.com/decision/FB-I2…
Don't see any genocidal red flags here, just a healthy Facebook user discussion about how the death of a toddler of a particular religious identity probably made the world a better place
Can't think of anything bad that happened to a Washington Post journalist in the past four years, certainly not like getting chopped to pieces on the orders of a dictator intimately allied with the president and his family
It's not as if the president inspired a supporter to mail pipe bombs to CNN or anything
Josh Hawley’s most damning indictment of liberal meritocracy is not any of his dumb culture-war speeches, it’s all the people in his wake who are baffled that someone who got good grades could be a vicious bigot
But Douthat's "There Will Be No Trump Coup" column didn't just offer a totally false account of the danger Trump posed. It also wound itself around to a very genteel version of the same resentful persecution myth that led the mob to the Capitol.
Violent revanchism—whether in the post-Reconstruction South or 1930s Germany or in the Capitol halls on Wednesday—draws on the brutal mob justifying its brutality by claiming they're the ones being victimized and dominated by an unaccountable elite.
How can a person possibly form this ridiculous thought privately, let alone express it where the public, which knows very well by now what kinds of things Donald Trump does and doesn’t do, can see it?
Who the fuck is history
History—in the sense of a recorded sequence of events available to be known and interpreted—says that Nixon’s pardon led directly to a series of ever more criminal presidencies, eventually bringing us Trump, with Nixon’s own henchmen actively supporting the new crimes!
Let me just look up "attempting to gain monopolistic power" using Google, which is the default search engine on my Apple iPhone, thanks to a multibillion-dollar access deal between two ostensible business rivals