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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
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16 Dec, 4 tweets, 1 min read
These reports paint Xi Jinping as a mercurial, arrogant micromanager -- the kind of leader who is good at scaring everyone into saying he's a great leader, but who is bad at actually managing an organization.
Apparently Xi is personally responsible for China maintaining its "Zero Covid" policy in the face of new variants, even though everyone is advising him to scrap it. China's whole economy will probably suffer as a result.
I feel like I called this one.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/what-if-xi-j…
I really shouldn't be able to get so much mileage out of these China takes. It's just the old dumb trick of "Say the negative thing that no one else is allowing themselves to say yet, because they're all still so invested in the positive story". And yet, somehow, it's working.

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
17 Dec
The thing is, while I think activists, intellectuals, media figures and politicians would benefit from crafting patriotic narratives that fit the middle option in this poll, I myself am not sure which I would pick.
Eight years ago I was very sure that America was one of the best countries in the world. I couldn't say THE best, having been to countries that were in their own way just as good. But definitely one of the best.

Now, I am not sure anymore.
Our culture has become far less gentle, tolerant, and accepting - and, possibly as a result, less creative. Our institutions haven't collapsed as much as some believe, but many are cleaely dysfunctional in a way most other rich countries' institutions are not.
Read 8 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
16 Dec
This thread illustrates what always, to me, seemed like the fundamental problem with the BBB bill. No one could ever really decide what it was *about*. I had my own ideas for what it should be about, but everyone else had their own ideas.
For a long time the bill's main selling point was "it's big". That seemingly allowed every progressive to sort of graft their dreams onto the idea of the bill, even though it only really had the potential to be transformative in a couple of areas.
I feel like BBB has become a symbolic stand-in for the fact that a lot of progressives want America to change in a lot of different ways, all at once.

And the bill was just never going to be able to do that.
Read 15 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
14 Dec
Instead of canceling math because we think Americans don't have the IQ to handle it, how about we copy the math education systems of countries who do it better than we do?

usatoday.com/story/news/edu…
The frustrating thing about these math education debates is that the people trying to cancel math (yes, this is a loose figure of speech) seem to believe deeply and instinctively that American kids are dum-dums who can't learn math, so we should give up...
...But trying to convince these education policy people that IQ isn't the most important thing when it comes to math education (which is true) isn't super effective, because they already seem to spend all their time trying and failing to convince *themselves* of this very thing.
Read 6 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
13 Dec
Tether is what Bitcoin believers always thought Bitcoin was going to be.
Think about it. In crypto-land, Tether is the unit of account and the medium of exchange. Bitcoin is used a long-term store of value like gold, but Tether is money.
Tether is a free bank (because it prints its own dollars) that engages in fractional reserve banking (because its dollars are not actually backed 1-for-1 by USD asset reserves). It is the reinvention of the way we did money in the 19th century.
Read 9 tweets
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

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