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Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
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Jan 28 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
When I was a kid, we had domestic terrorists killing hundreds of people and bombing the Olympics. We had 2200 murders in NYC in one year. We had 30,000 nukes pointed at us, on hair-trigger alert.

And this is what we now remember as a golden age.

So...maybe we'll be ok.
Three times as many people died in one single riot when I was a kid as died in an entire summer of nationwide George Floyd protests.

3x people died in one right-wing terrorist attack in the 90s than rightists killed during Trump's entire term in office.
The government laid siege to a cult just down the road from the town where I grew up. The cult burned down and like 80 people were killed.

Some guy stole a tank and rampaged through Los Angeles.

And it was just...stuff we saw on the news.
So before you think that America is about to disintegrate because we've fallen into a time of madness, violence, and chaos...realize that WE'RE ALWAYS JUST KIND OF LIKE THAT.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/do-we-stand-…

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 29
@popedum The U.S. elite becomes integrated through universities; these are where the top 1/3 of the economic pyramid learn to become one people (what the army did for the working class during WW2 and the Civil War but not usually)...
@popedum At these universities, elite Americans need something to unite them into one people. Perhaps 150 years ago, rigid ideological and identitarian conformity would have been enforced at universities, but certainly not now, and not for a very long time...
@popedum Instead, American universities teach young elite Americans to find unity in diversity -- to embrace their particular identities (racial, gender, sexual, religious, ethnic) while finding unity in the fact that they all value these same things.
Read 10 tweets
Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 28
1/Just for fun, let's go through the part of @RichardHanania's post where he talks about the likelihood of an insurgency in Ukraine, should Russia invade and seize the Eastern half of the country.

richardhanania.substack.com/p/russia-as-th…
2/The overall theme of the post is standard conservative stuff -- liberals are obsessed with Russia and with LGBT, etc. etc. Not super interesting.

But then he asserts that Ukrainians wouldn't fight an insurgency, and that this means Russia will prevail in this confrontation.
3/This argument -- Russia cares about Ukraine more than the U.S. does -- also applies to the USSR and Poland in the 80s. And yet Poland left Russia's orbit and joined the West.

What Poland wanted was more important than what the U.S. OR the USSR wanted.
Read 14 tweets
Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 27
It seemed that way in the 70s too, but in the end the choice was "neither", and the world sort of puttered along. More and more, I'm betting that that's basically what'll happen this time too.
Which is not to say that I'm not afraid of a dark fascist nightmare (I am!) or that I wouldn't like a transformative and new society (I would!). But I increasingly doubt that American society has the cohesion or the capacity to produce either of those.
In any case, I also recommend you read The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin. But -- spoiler! -- it's about a society that putters along, pulled by its radical dreams but always restrained by its complex, unwieldy reality.
Read 5 tweets
Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 24
The reason all sides seem so unreasonable in a Time of Unrest is that everyone is afraid of Passion For Change being monopolized by the opposing side, so they all try to summon unreasoning passion for one thing or another.
This is why unrest is a macro variable that modulates all the micro variables in politics and culture; when the music plays, everyone has to get up and dance.
This does not mean there is no good side and no bad side in a Time of Unrest; instead it means that when we look back at the period from a time of reasoned calm, even the side we eventually recognize as "good" will seem fairly wacko.
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 22
The critics of NATO expansion are overplaying their hand. We DID leave Russia a sphere of influence: Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Current and recent events are just the verification of that new sphere-of-influence equilibrium.
You can argue that we shouldn't have included the Baltics -- that all Soviet successor states should have been left within Russia's sphere of influence (though this would have sucked for the Baltics obviously).

But Poland? Romania? No, those were always going to join the West.
Russia invading Ukraine and Georgia and sending troops to Belarus and Kazakhstan is just the inevitable confirmation of the resolution of the Cold War -- that Europe gets to expand to include the old Warsaw Pact, but (mostly) not the old Soviet Union.
Read 6 tweets
Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 18
At age 6 I was obsessed with the idea that nuclear disarmament could be achieved by having Godzilla eat all the nuclear warheads.
Crazy thing is that I didn't even think of using Godzilla to make nuclear power more sustainable by feeding him all the radioactive waste.
I think growing up in a house with many pets makes one perceive any animal, even an imaginary 400-foot-tall fire-breathing monster, as a potential pet
Read 4 tweets

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