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Yascha Mounk Profile picture
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28 Feb, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Amazing, wonderful, amazing news:

Building on the success of RNA-vaccines in the fight against Covid, scientists are now developing promising RNA-vaccines against malaria.

If they pan out, the current pandemic could, bizarrely, end up saving lives.

academictimes.com/first-vaccine-…
It should also make us ask very hard questions about why it took a giant pandemic hitting the developed world for us to give a new technology that could potentially save humanity from one of its worst endemic diseases a try...
Also, there are obviously still a lot of obstacles here. I do not in any way mean to suggest that this vaccine is a done deal.

But, oh man, would it be wonderful news for humanity.
Btw, a big portion of the deaths predicted from climate change in the IPPC report come from malaria, on the assumption that global warming would expand the habitat of the disease vector.

So this vaccine would be a VERY important tool in containing the effects of climate change.

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More from @Yascha_Mounk

Yascha Mounk Profile picture
17 Feb
At the turn of the year, most commentators expected the current wave of the coronavirus to keep growing. Instead new cases have plummeted over the past six weeks.

Why? No one really knows.

A year into this, we remain strikingly bad at forecasting the trajectory of the pandemic.
There are lots of other puzzles around the world:

Why is India doing so much better than Europe or the United States?

Why are cases in Europe not falling nearly as quickly as in America?

Why did Manaus in Brazil do extremely well for a while and is now doing extremely badly?
After the fact, we can come up with all kinds of retrospective explanations for these events. I have potential explanations for all of them in my mind.

But the vexing fact remains that most did not think of those explanations beforehand. So we keep being incapable of prediction.
Read 6 tweets
Yascha Mounk Profile picture
15 Feb
If you spend a lot of time among highly political people, it's tempting to think that, say, ~60% of the country is liberal or progressive, and ~40% moderate or conservative.

The truth is very different:

Conservative: 36%
Moderate: 35%
Liberal: 25%
news.gallup.com/poll/328367/am…
Now, there are some things small groups can push through even though much of the population opposes it.

But I think that a lot of people currently overestimate how much the very small group of true progressives can accomplish against the will of the majority over the long run.
And, no, moderates are not a cohesive political group that are united in their love of Joe Biden or Mitt Romney.

But, no, the vast majority of them aren't secret progressives who love AOC either.
Read 5 tweets
Yascha Mounk Profile picture
14 Feb
Just "consequence culture," right?

If she happens to offend her peers, who are we to stop the university from expelling her, correct?

One more reason why we need a real *culture* of free speech—and why many cases should worry us even if they don't violate the First Amendment .
(Since this student goes to a state university, her case technically does fall under the First Amendment.

But if an influential private institution like Harvard University threw her out over these social media posts, I would find that similarly objectionable.)
Also, yet another reminder: Anyone who thinks that these irrational reprisals will always hit "the right people" is deeply naive.

This. Is. A. Zero. Sum. Game.
Read 4 tweets
Yascha Mounk Profile picture
13 Feb
The ending of the impeachment trial feels predictably anticlimactic. The idea that it would bring Trump to justice was always wishful thinking.

All the more reason to honor those Republican Senators who stood up to Trump today:

Burr
Cassidy
Collins
Murkowski
Romney
Sasse
Toomey
Part of a writer's job is to speak up when he disagrees with most of his friends and allies on an important issue.

So even though no one paid much attention to it, I remain proud of my article on the futility of a second impeachment.
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
Many people were angry with me because they thought I just didn't want to do the hard work of holding Trump to account.

I was always happy to do the hard work.

But I also worried that trying and failing to hold him to account would do nothing to strengthen our democratic norms.
Read 5 tweets
Yascha Mounk Profile picture
11 Feb
As many people believe QAnon is "at least somewhat" accurate today as believed that the moon landing was fake in 1999.

The lesson of QAnon is not that Americans have grown more willing to believe crazy stuff. It's that 6 percent have *always* been willing to believe crazy stuff. ImageImage
As Gallup wrote in 1999:

"Taken literally, 6% translates into millions of individuals. [But] it is not unusual to find that many people in the typical poll agree with almost any question... The best interpretation is that this particular conspiracy theory is not widespread."
"33% believe there’s a government conspiracy to cover up the truth about the North Dakota crash. There was no unusual crash in North Dakota. Researchers included it as a placebo to see if people would endorse a conspiracy theory that didn’t exist. 33% did"slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/28/bus…
Read 4 tweets
Yascha Mounk Profile picture
11 Feb
A Pakistani-American doctor was fired *and is being prosecuted* because he gave an opened vaccine to anyone he could find rather than letting it go to waste.

Apparently, it would have been more "equitable" to throw the vaccine out.

This is madness.

nytimes.com/2021/02/10/us/…
🤦‍♂️
"Too many Indian names."

Is this the society we are trying to build?

Will this sort of logic help us build a fair and tolerant society?

If you think the answer to that is "yes," I just really don't know what to tell you.
Read 4 tweets

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