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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
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11 Dec, 4 tweets, 2 min read
My video interview with @ThePlumLineGS is out! We talk about the threat of election subversion/denial in 2024, and what can be done to prevent it.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/video-interv…
Key takeaways Image
Key implications for progressives: Image
Progressives, bluntly, need to be worrying less about voting access right now and much much more.about whether votes will actually end up mattering.

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
13 Dec
This guy isn't a tankie, but this kind of thinking -- we all have to just let (insert communist empire here) conquer whatever they want, because anything else equals full-scale nuclear annihilation -- pretty quickly leads to tankie conclusions.
It's just "better red than dead"
The tankies themselves are this tiny irrelevant cabal of sickos. But there are a much larger number of leftists out there who are susceptible to the idea that the U.S. is the source of all conflict, that conquest by "communist" empires is actually resistance or liberation, etc.
Read 7 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
13 Dec
Ideology is an intellectual muscle suit that people can strap on to feel smarter than they really are.
There are several reasons for this.

First, ideologies are group endeavors. When confronted with something you can't explain, you can usually find some co-ideologue who has "explained" it in ways that support the ideology. So you have a ton of off-the-shelf arguments.
Second, ideology provides psychic comfort that's similar to the feeling of actually getting something right. So you don't have to think too hard about stuff in order to get that good feeling of understanding it; you just repeat the catechism, and everything seems warm and truthy.
Read 6 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
11 Dec
Another small sign of tankie ideas slipping into the mainstream socialist movement in America:
I mean, partly this is tankie ideas infecting mainstream socialism, but also partly this is the general American tendency to analyze foreign policy like a 12-year-old, saying "Hee hee, wouldn't it be cool if country X invaded country Y" because to you they're just lines on a map.
"Oh of course I'm antiwar, because all my friends are antiwar, and war is, like, so lame, you know, but like, wouldn't it also be cool if Country X totally invaded and conquered Country Y? I mean, Country Y has weird food, they kinda deserve it. Anyway let's go to the mall!"
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
10 Dec
29% of Americans are either Hispanic, Asian, or Middle Eastern -- more than double the percentage of Black Americans and about half the percentage of White Americans who are neither Hispanic nor Middle Eastern.
This third of America constitutes a "third race" that does not fit cleanly into America's traditional racial schema. It would be a grave mistake to assume that these folks will eventually become White; instead, I am betting that America's racial schema will bend and change.
Our media and our national narratives tend to ignore this "third race", except in very circumscribed cases. If anything, the push is to disaggregate each of these groups into their constituent ethnicities, instead of aggregating them as a big group that will change America.
Read 6 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
10 Dec
:-(

I would have liked to have seen more.
I think the mistake people make is to expect anime adaptations to be like anime. Live-action can't be like animation; it's an uncanny valley situation. It has to be substantially different if it's going to be good. But some fans feel that makes it unfaithful.
The Cowboy Bebop adaptation wasn't much like the anime; it was more like Firefly, TBH. But people who were expecting to see the animated original Bebop recreated on screen didn't like that. Oh well.
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
9 Dec
And just to be a little incendiary, I think progressives' failure to understand the Hispanic success story is that they've Twitter-angsted themselves into the belief that no one can move up and better themselves in America.

Wrong!
Yes, there is structural racism in America, and yes, the system gives a lot of advantages to the kids of the rich.

But "unequal opportunity" doesn't mean "no opportunity", and in fact there is LOTS of opportunity still out there in this country, and it matters a lot.
Trump came in telling a negativistic scare story about Hispanic immigrants. But progressives' obsession with catastrophizing everything about America made them unable to respond with a positive success story about Hispanics -- even though the success is real and obvious.
Read 16 tweets

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