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Ezra Klein Profile picture
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19 May, 4 tweets, 1 min read
This is completely insane. The FBI catfished a suicidally depressed pizza delivery guy. The agent catfishing him repeatedly tried to get him to commit a terrorist attack. He repeatedly talked her out of it. So they arrested him on gun possession. amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/11/29…
The judge gave him an unusually long sentence because of past homicidal fantasies he’d admitted to (or made up, who knows?) in his conversations, even though when the FBI agent tried to convince him to make them realities, he tried to talk her out of hurting other people.
So basically the FBI was looking for possible terrorists, found a guy who was committed - even under duress, even when mentally unstable and lonely and trying to impress a woman - to talking possible terrorists out of terrorist acts, and they arrested him. It’s lunacy.
Note that this is a 2017 story.

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More from @ezraklein

Ezra Klein Profile picture
21 May
Violent crime is spiking. Homicides in cities were up by 25-40 percent in 2020, the largest single-year increase since 1960. And 2021 isn’t looking any better.

This is a crisis on its own terms. But it’s also a crisis for the broader liberal project in two downstream ways.
First, violent crimes supercharges inequality. Families who can flee, do. Business close or never open. Banks won’t make loans. Property values plummet. Children are traumatized, with lifelong impacts on stress and cognition.

(@patrick_sharkey's work is great on this.)
Second, fear of violence undermines liberal politics. Just look at America post-9/11. Or after the crime surges of the 70s and 80s and 90s — strongmen politicians win, punitive responses like mass incarceration and warrior policing rise, social trust collapses.
Read 12 tweets
Ezra Klein Profile picture
14 May
Everything @AgnesCallard says in this podcast is interesting. Like here she is just casually reversing the normal story of what politics is for, and what society is designed to teach us. No big deal. nytimes.com//2021/05/14/po…
And why parenting should actually be called "childing — all our language suggests the parent is in control, and setting the path, but really children are:
And what a leftwing version of Jordan Peterson would look like:
Read 6 tweets
Ezra Klein Profile picture
11 May
My favorite podcasts are the ones where I find myself struggling with the book, or the guest, I'm talking to. This is one of those.

I think Michael Lewis is asking exactly the right questions. I'm not sure the answers his sources give him were workable. nytimes.com/2021/05/11/opi…
This gets at something I've been reporting on, and thinking about, a lot: What are the constraints the public places on "public health"?

Regulators overstate them. Critics of regulators often understate them. And there's huge geographic variance -- and viruses exploit that.
If you believe America is culturally resistant to some pandemic best practices — and I do, at least at the level Lewis's sources are calling for — could we invest in and deploy preventive technologies that would let us balance liberty and health better?
Read 5 tweets
Ezra Klein Profile picture
5 May
I liked this @jonathanchait piece on how the Congress's rules force the Congressional Budget Office to ignore the revenue from better IRS enforcement. But I'm also always caught on one thing here: nymag.com/intelligencer/…
As EVERYONE AT THE CBO WILL TELL YOU, they do not hold any ultimate power. They release reports. The reports are important exactly to the extent Congress listens to them. And this doesn't strike me as an example of a case where the CBO is the powerful actor.
Congress often ignores these reports. Lots of Republicans pretended to believe, or actually believed, the Trump tax cuts would pay for themselves.

Or Congress ignores the rule to offset spending. The Rescue Plan wasn't paid for, and the Jobs Plan pays for itself over 15 years.
Read 10 tweets
Ezra Klein Profile picture
5 May
Facebook's Oversight Board seems to me like an attempt to solve the problem of legitimacy without solving the problems of representation and voice.

But representation and voice are what give governmental decisions broad legitimacy!
This is hard to do well even in democratic systems, and our system, for instance, is constantly at war with itself over whether it really is representative (it isn't), and why some voices carry so much further than others.
But Zuckerberg is still the ultimate power at Facebook. The Board is still a Facebook creation. I take seriously that they take it seriously, and it may be an interesting model to insulate corporate decisionmaking from certain pressures.
Read 7 tweets
Ezra Klein Profile picture
3 May
So earlier today, in a thread about why it's great that Eleven Madison Park is going plant-based, I said being vegan comes at a cost in the food you eat.

That made some people I like mad, but I think it's important, and I want to defend it.

So: 🧵
Let me first be clear about where I’m coming from: I’ve been vegetarian for more than a decade, vegan (with a bit of cheese here and there) for about 7 years.

Reducing animal suffering is one of my core political commitments. I write and podcast about it all the time.
That’s why I was excited to see Eleven Madison Park going plant-based, which is the context for that tweet. The more restaurants and chefs and companies working on plant-based food, the better plant-based food will get.
Read 23 tweets

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