1) Many have misconstrued this tweet as an apology for Hamas. It isn't; the tweet immediately follows one in which I highlight the fact that Hamas burned families alive. I recently wrote a piece expressing my moral revulsion at leftwing apologias for Hamas nymag.com/intelligencer/…

https://twitter.com/EricLevitz/status/1716118168526012839

2) For weeks, I have argued that the fixation of some leftists on whether Hamas cut off the heads of infants was bizarre, since it isn’t any less morally hideous to shoot or burn an infant to death than to cut off their heads. Here is an excerpt from one such exchange:

According to this report, which includes corroborating images, Hamas militants tied a parent and child together and then burned them alive.

https://twitter.com/mattgertz/status/1715848616059756720

Last night, I asserted that this report indicated that babies were beheaded. This was an overstatement. I should have said that the report established that babies were found headless, a fact that lends plausibility to claims of beheading, but which does not prove them.

1) I sympathize with @gabrielwinant's concerns here. But my position is not that leftists should prioritize public grieving above politics, but rather that they should prioritize both morality and politics above the performance of iconoclasm.
dissentmagazine.org/online_article…
2) Gabe’s view is that leftists expressing public grief and outrage at the slaughter of 1,000 Israeli Jews is politically counterproductive, as it helps Israel rationalize its war effort. After all, Jewish grief is the lifeblood of militant Zionism.

The far right gloating over the murder of a progressive young man on his way home from a wedding is among the most morally abominable things I've ever seen on this website. ...It should perhaps go without saying, but the "point" they think they are making is idiotic. No set of criminal justice policies could ever fully eliminate random homicides, and the right is committed to making it easy for criminals to access handguns.

College-educated voters now express more liberal views than working-class voters on economics (I.e. on questions of taxation, social insurance, redistribution and government intervention in the economy)

https://twitter.com/wpmarble/status/1703798638693212364

I suspect that the causal chain here is: socially conservative working-class voters become Republicans as culture war issues gain salience —> they adjust their economic views to match their partisanship (while socially liberal college grads took the opposite journey)

Wrote about why I think prisons and policing need to be radically reformed, but not abolished. TLDR on the latter point: nymag.com/intelligencer/…
I think prison abolitionists get a lot of things right. For one, retribution is not a legitimate function for a carceral system. We should punish people to prevent them from reoffending, or deter other offenders, not to make them suffer for its own sake nymag.com/intelligencer/…

@BenBurgis @ethicsenjoyer I agree that 1) is counterintuitive, but don't see how that is in tension with what I asserted. But I don't see how 2) is counterintuitive; I think it's potentially mistaken but quite intuitive that people do not have moral responsibility for their actions... @BenBurgis @ethicsenjoyer ...if those actions were determined by forces external to themselves; this is what the insanity plea rests on. Determinism arguably implies that there is no categorical distinction between the insane killer and sane one at the level of metaphysics...

1) One thought on the debate over Twitter and free speech: I think there’s a strong argument that, due to the central role that social media platforms like Twitter play in our civic discourse, we should want them to exercise political neutrality... 2)...w/r/t which forms of speech they promote or suppress. At the same time, when one thinks about what specific right you lose when Twitter limits the visibility of your tweets, it is not the right to free speech...

"There is currently only one pro-democracy party. So, if you value self-government - but dislike that party's other policies - you should still vote for them this time, and hope that defeat forces the other party to reform itself before the next election" is not paradoxical

https://twitter.com/shadihamid/status/1588142532457893891

2) One of the main points of democracy as a governing system is that it is an infinite game, in which the polity's losers can content themselves with the possibility of future victory.

@MelissannBee That's fair. I'd say two things: 1) Race is very much implicated in my analysis imo; if professionals are less attached to their inherited group identities (or invested in the status that membership in dominant groups provides), white college grads will be more racially liberal @MelissannBee 2) This said, it is not the case that the dynamics I point to are exclusive to white voters. On racial questions, working-class nonwhites obviously lean "socially liberal." But they are less likely to consistently subscribe to progressive positions on other social questions...

Throughout the West, electorates have grown increasingly polarized along lines of educational attainment -- with educated professionals moving left, and working-class voters shifting right. I spent much of the past year trying to figure out why.
nymag.com/intelligencer/… 2) Imo, education polarization is a byproduct of transformations in the West's demographic, economic, civic, and media landscapes. At the heart of the phenomenon is divide in cultural values between voters with diplomas and without (in the aggregate). nymag.com/intelligencer/…

1) My belated take: Those British soup tossers are admirable. But their theory of climate action -- which deems "keeping fossil fuels in the ground" the primary goal, and "raising awareness" the primary means, seems unsound and overfunded. nymag.com/intelligencer/… 2) You are not going to make the general public more keenly aware of climate change than they are of their heating and gasoline costs, at least not in a context of high prices. nymag.com/intelligencer/…

Some of New York's premier environmental groups succeeded in shuttering the state's primary source of carbon-free electricity last year. Now, they're fighting to ensure that NYC replaces that lost energy with natural gas instead of hydropower. nymag.com/intelligencer/… 2) Of course, the environmentalists do not think about their campaign in these terms. But NYC can't build a renewables-intensive grid without *some* source of all-weather power. If it doesn't tap Canada's excesss hydroelectricity, it will need to burn more gas.

I don't think that I (or any other writer) at New York Magazine has "smeared" leftists for being "pro-Putin." If anyone in this argument is mendaciously projecting a straw-man position onto those he disagrees with, pretty sure it is @zevin_a newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/… @zevin_a (I also don't think this is a fair summary of my piece's argument, which specifically stipulates that the left's skepticism towards America's sanctions policy has been a vital contribution, and situates the West's response in the context of its broader post-Cold War policies)

1) "Russia deems hegemony over Ukraine a strategic priority, and NATO expansion up to its own borders, unacceptable. America's refusal to show deference to these interests contributed to today's crisis, and will leave Ukrainians worse off in the end" is a very plausible view imo 2) But "Russia's opposition to a Western-aligned Ukraine is a rational reflection of its defensive security interests, and Western imperialists engineered this conflict by imposing themselves on Eastern Europe/Ukraine" seems facially absurd...

I wrote a profile of Larry Summers (and of the inflation debate, and of the past half-century macroeconomic thought in the United States)
nymag.com/intelligencer/… In 2019, America embraced a new macroeconomic orthodoxy, one that put maximizing growth above minimizing inflation. Summers was one of the first mainstream economists to endorse this sea change. He would also be one of the first to disavow it.
nymag.com/intelligencer/…

Jotted down a few thoughts on the burgeoning debate over price controls/other unorthodox approaches to inflation management: 1) Price controls can produce negative, unintended consequences. But the same can be said of the orthodox approach to inflation management. That price controls *of any kind* are deemed absurd - and rate hikes, prudent - reflects custom more than reason. nymag.com/intelligencer/…

1) Some conservatives sharing this as evidence that DeMoCrAtS aRe ThE ReAl ThReAt To DeMoCrAcY. So a reminder: On Capitol Hill right now, Democrats are trying to pass a bill that would prohibit partisan gerrymandering, and Republicans have united in opposition to it.

https://twitter.com/EricLevitz/status/1475460150597238786

2) One side in this fight is pushing for a truce on gerrymandering that would establish rules of fair play nationwide, It even let its most moderate Senator author the legislation with an eye towards securing GOP support. It didn't work. vox.com/22537146/joe-m…

It looks like the new House map will be much less biased towards the GOP than the old one -- and if everything goes exactly right, the final map may even be tilted, ever so slightly, in the Democrats’ favor. nymag.com/intelligencer/… Contrary to party stereotypes, Democratic trifectas have arguably mustered more ruthless partisan discipline in redistricting than Republican ones have. nymag.com/intelligencer/…

If I had to guess, I'd say that Democrats will ultimately pass a Manchin-ified version of Build Back Better early next year.

But this is the strongest counterargument, imo
nymag.com/intelligencer/… Manchin's position on climate has long been that penalizing carbon energy is unacceptable, but subsidizing carbon's competitors is OK. That's a good bargain for climate hawks but not great for the coal industry. And Manchin might have figured that out.

nymag.com/intelligencer/…

I’m not sure folks appreciate how moderate the *progressive* position on reconciliation is -- or how procedurally extreme, and substantively conservative, the “moderate” one is. nymag.com/intelligencer/… 2) I think the way Democrats (and the media) have described the size of Biden's Build Back Better Act -- "a $3.5 trillion bill" -- has actually helped the party's right flank mislead the public about the legislation's true scale. nymag.com/intelligencer/…