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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
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28 Sep, 4 tweets, 1 min read
How many rich people go to community college? Come on.
Americans are obsessed with the idea that some other American is getting something they don't deserve. Universal resentment leading to an attitude of artificial scarcity.
We always talk about this in terms of White Republicans terrified of Black people being "welfare queens". And of course that's the biggest single piece of it. But Americans' resentment of each other goes far beyond that. It's kaleidoscopic. It's fractal. It's everywhere.
Anyway I worry that this resentment is taking us back to the 70s...a grinding era of stasis and disillusionment leading to institutional unraveling.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/americas-sca…

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
29 Sep
The proposed benefits of less means-testing include:

* Popularity

* Avoidance of implicit taxation

* Administrative simplicity

If strict means testing is actually POPULAR, the first of these rationales goes out the window.
In addition, the seeming popularity of means-testing suggests that the suspicion and resentment that drive American politics are not aimed entirely at the poor.
The theory behind universality is that Americans don't like welfare because they imagine that it goes to undeserving poor people -- so if everyone gets the welfare, people will rest assured that their money isn't being redistributed to the undeserving poor.
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
28 Sep
PASS THE DAMN INFRASTRUCTURE BILL RIGHT NOW.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/pass-the-dam…
Are progressives really going to vote against taking the lead out of the drinking water of millions of poor and marginalized Americans?

Are they really going to vote against $105 billion in funding for public transit?

Don't play this goddamn 27-dimensional chess.

TAKE THE W.
Remember Flint?

The infrastructure bill would make sure that never happened again!

When a bill promises to get poison out of the drinking water of every poor person and every marginalized person in America, YOU VOTE FOR THAT BILL.

Read 5 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
28 Sep
Wow, first I'd seen of this. Pretty amazing. Kinda complicates the narrative that Ammon Bundy was a fascist stormtrooper...
What we're eventually going to realize is that 2014-whenever was a period of unrest, where a lot of people felt that they needed to make dramatic demonstrations and take dramatic actions, but not all of those people really knew what they wanted.
But we're not ready for that conversation, because we're still in the era of unrest, and so we still have to justify our own agitation to ourselves by telling ourselves that everyone has a very strict ideology.
Read 7 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
18 Sep
The political-partisan version of Great Replacement Theory is actually as old as the Republic. Federalists and Whigs worried that the Democrats were importing Irish votes!

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Here are some passages from Daniel Tichenor's "Dividing Lines" (2002). You can clearly see a partisan panic over Irish immigration that's essentially identical to what Tucker Carlson is saying now: ImageImage
But notice that Federalists and Whigs at first tried to restrict immigration, then gave up and started trying to woo the Irish and get them to switch parties!

Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
16 Sep
After watching many hours of sword comparison videos, I can now confidently state my assessment that a katana is, in fact, better than a medieval longsword, but a zweihander is better than a nodachi.
The reason for the former is that longswords were made to be highly versatile weapons, but this meant that you had to be an expert in each particular use (cutting, thrusting, close-in fighting) in order not to screw it up, which basically negated the benefit of versatility.
And the reason for the latter, ironically, is that zweihander were even more versatile, but since they were only used by a few specially trained troops, this was actually a strength rather than a weakness.
Read 5 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
15 Sep
Myanmar looks like it might be descending into civil war. Seems extremely unlikely the ruling military government could lose, though.

ft.com/content/492bd2…
Meanwhile, Ethiopia's civil war rages on...

bbc.com/news/world-afr…
The wars in the Middle East and North Africa -- and the Muslim world in general -- seem mostly to be winding down, and wars are springing up in other regions.
Read 4 tweets

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