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https://twitter.com/images_ai/status/1409083273834291202

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Philippe Lemoine

@phl43

Jun 19

This is really excellent and really makes clear how powerless Iran is at the moment. Once again, people got mad at me when I said at the beginning that Iran didn't have any good options to respond to Israel's attack because Israel had total escalation dominance over it, but that's obviously true and now they're going to get mercilessly pounded.

The question for me is really whether they will capitulate and, if they don't, whether it will get to the point where they're so desperate they do something crazy like attacking ships going through Hormuz or energy infrastructure in the Gulf. Another interesting possibility @shahpas hints at is that eventually the Artesh might stage some kind of military coup.

I think there is a tendency, which you also see at work in the discourse about the Russo-Ukrainian War, to assume that the aggressor will always be defeated, but there is no case for such a Panglossian view and that's obviously not true.

Once again, this doesn't mean that I support Israel's actions or even that I think it will be good for Israel in the long run (let alone for Iran and the rest of the world), just as the fact that I think Russia is going to win doesn't mean I support the invasion of Ukraine and think it will be good for Russia in the long run, but that's not a reason to deny reality and engage in magical thinking.

Read 5 tweets

Philippe Lemoine

@phl43

Jun 12

In light of the debate about the SPD manifesto in Germany, I'd like to state the unpopular but historically correct opinion that Brandt's Ostpolitik actually did more to end the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe than Reagan's initial hawkishness, which if anything delayed it.

Once again, we are back with the problem that people have a cartoonish understanding of the end of the Cold War, which is not only incorrect but is actually the opposite of the truth, because memes have become deeply entrenched and people don't read.

Now, whether Brandt's policy has anything useful to teach us about the current situation is a different question (I don't think it's very relevant because the situation is very different), but that's not a reason to repeat stupid memes that have been debunked over and over again.

Read 17 tweets

Philippe Lemoine

@phl43

May 17

https://twitter.com/afalkhatib/status/1922533225013944672

It's almost comical at this point that, with everything that is happening, propagandists like John Spencer continue to explain that Israel has created a "gold standard in urban warfare". They will continue to say that when there isn't a single house left standing in Gaza.

https://twitter.com/afalkhatib/status/1922533225013944672

I wrote this to someone a few months ago, but that's more or less what I was already writing in November 2023, because it was already obvious by that time what the dynamic of this thing was and it was only going to get worse because there never was any realistic exit plan.

Now Israeli officials are openly talking about how the end game is ethnic cleansing, but they don't have a realistic plan to do that either, because the countries that would take Palestinians are shitholes where they don't want to go and the other countries won't take them.

Read 9 tweets

Philippe Lemoine

@phl43

Mar 9

The document in which the Romanian Constitutional Court justifies its decision to bar Georgescu, who already won the first round of the presidential election in December and was running ahead of everyone else in recent polls by a wide margin, from running for president is one of the most insane things I have ever read.

The text is very confused, the translation probably doesn't help, but the argument the Court seems to make is that, in deciding whether someone can run for president, it has to check whether that person would threaten the country's constitutional framework if he were elected and it claims that Georgescu will not defend democracy.

The only argument it gives to justify that claim is that the very same Court previously annulled the first round of the presidential election that Georgescu had won, which means that he didn't respect the electoral procedure and in turn this ipso facto demonstrates that he violates the obligation to defend democracy 🙃

But the December ruling to which it refers, which annulled the first round of the election, mostly didn't talk about Georgescu's alleged violations of electoral legislation to justify the decision, but instead made ridiculous arguments based on what supposedly happened on social media during the campaign, such as the claim that "equality of opportunity" was not ensured on social media due to the "exploitation" of algorithm.

(Of course, even putting aside that such a claim is so vague as to be meaningless, this argument is preposterous since, by the same logic, one could justify cancelling literally every election in history because "equality of opportunity" has never existed anywhere in the traditional media either. Do people think, for instance, that the traditional media treat every candidate equally well? There is no principled difference here.)

The only accusation made specifically against Georgescu in the December ruling is that he violated the electoral legislation by failing to disclose payments his campaign had allegedly made on social media, but the only evidence the Court cited in support of that claim was a report declassified by the Minister of Internal Affairs after the first round of the election, which claimed that Georgescu had benefited from a social media campaign that wasn't properly marked as electoral advertisement.

However, although the document in question did note that Georgescu had not declared any spending on electoral campaigning (which is obviously suspicious), at no point did it claim that his campaign had paid for those social media posts and in fact evidence has since then surfaced that the social media campaign in question was paid for by the liberal party!

(Let's put aside, because that's not truly relevant, the fact that even if Georgescu's campaign had in fact been behind that social media campaign, the idea that a $1 million dollar campaign on TikTok can swing millions of votes is nothing short of ridiculous. If this were true, the guys behind Georgescu's online operation should quit their current job, whether it's in the Kremlin or somewhere else, to create their own political advertisement company because they're apparently the most effective people in the field anywhere in the world by a very wide margin.)

So the Constitutional Court barred from running for president the candidate who, according to the polls, was bound to win in a landslide, by arguing that its own decision to annul the first round of the election last December, justified by insane arguments about the general context in which the election took place and an accusation against that candidate for which it produced no evidence, showed that he could not be counted on to defend democracy 🤯

I'm sorry but this is nothing short of a legal coup and a denial of democracy. Anyone who defends that decision while claiming to support democracy and the rule of law is a clown. This is the same kind of arguments that dictatorships around the world use to prevent "dangerous" candidates from running and the fact that so many people who constantly pose as defenders of democracy are currently applauding the Court's decision speaks volumes about how deep their commitment to democracy actually runs.

SOURCES

- The latest decision by the Constitutional Court, barring Georgescu from running in the new presidential election: g4media.ro/document-candi… (thanks to @marginletter for telling me about this)

- The December ruling by the Court that annulled the first round of the election: legislatie.just.ro/Public/Detalii…

- The document on the social media campaign that was declassified by the Minister of Internal Affairs: s.iw.ro/gateway/g/Zmls…

(I used Google Translate to read all those documents.)

@marginletter I had forgotten to include an article on the report that linked the social media campaign that allegedly boosted Georgescu, again keep in mind that the claims people make about the effects it had are preposterous, to the liberal party, but here it is. politico.eu/article/invest…

Read 5 tweets

Philippe Lemoine

@phl43

Feb 19

https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1892273975977283948

Okay, let me reply to this thread, because I think it's actually very helpful to explain what is wrong with the argument in the paper I was criticizing 🧵

https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1892273975977283948

The point @lymanstoneky makes is that, since the longitudinal analysis in the paper only looks at the 2018-2023 period and immigrant flows during that period were dominated by low-crime propensity groups, it's plausible that immigration during that period didn't increase crime.

I obviously agree with that, but that's not a defense of the paper! In fact, not only is that not a defense of the paper, but that's actually one of the reasons why the argument made by the authors is so disingenuous, as even Lyman hints at toward the end of his thread.

Read 20 tweets

Philippe Lemoine

@phl43

Feb 19

https://twitter.com/derJamesJackson/status/1891792571682234805

Not only does it show no such thing, but it couldn't possibly show that, because that's obviously false. Immigration has a large impact on crime in Germany and this paper is just another example of politically-motivated academic malpractice. Let's take it apart 🧵

https://twitter.com/derJamesJackson/status/1891792571682234805

The key finding in the paper is that, when you control for the time-invariant characteristics of districts and year-specific effects that affect all district equally, a change in the proportion of foreigners in a district isn't associated with a change in the crime rate.

The authors interpret that as showing that, though foreigners are suspected of crimes at a higher rate than Germans, that’s because they live in deprived areas that turn them into criminals in the same way they do for Germans, so the crime rate is unaffected when they move there.

Read 45 tweets

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