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Warren Rhea 🌐 Profile picture
Warren Rhea 🌐
@EverydayWarren
Corporate attorney in America's natural gas industry. Chief Neoliberal Shill Emeritus. I argue for liberty, an open society, and the Constitution. Views my own.
May 11, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
It's wild watching Trump on CNN right now. Seeing posts here along the lines of "this was a mistake" on Twitter but it's clearly only a mistake if you're neither Trump nor CNN. Otherwise, I wonder if it even matters what Ron DeSantis does. All he'll get questioned about is Trump. "You once said that using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge just could not happen when you were in the Oval Office."
"That's when I was president."
"So why is it different now that you're out of office?"
"Because I'm not president."
The crowd (once again) roars in laughter.
May 10, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
I love how every year around this time, a bunch of apologists for Russia and various nostalgic communists crawl out from under their rocks to screech and bray about WWII, the war where Russia helped the Nazis invade Poland and fed their war machine while it overran all of Europe. Russia's government still uses this idea of its uniquely overwhelming sacrifice to justify its ongoing brutalization of its former colonial subjects who lost even larger shares of their own populations to the Nazis, like Ukraine and Belarus. It's all toxic authoritarian nonsense.
Apr 25, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
It will be interesting to see how tweets like mine age if the next election brings a change in administrations. ImageImageImage The idea is wild. And in between paragraphs I can't help but imagine all those folks praising Tucker's anti-war bona fides yesterday turning around and praising this idea - which he no doubt helped lay much of the foundation for - in two or three years.

americarenewing.com/issues/its-tim…
Apr 25, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
There's no better encapsulation of America's "antiwar" movement than this. Image Genuinely thankful every day for the courage of those Ukrainians who decided to defy the odds rather than give in to the terror. Just an incredible gift to the world to show that courage in defense of freedom and in defense of a better future can make so much of a difference.
Apr 22, 2023 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
I just can't believe that so many people really felt this way. ImageImageImageImage The counterrevolution is looking pretty cringe so far. ImageImage
Apr 22, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The checkmark discourse makes old classics like "Was Stalin a POC?" seem sane by comparison. I can't believe so many people really put so much emotional significance in checkmarks past and present. The only difference now is that they're even less functional and even less meaningful than they were before.
Apr 21, 2023 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Selections from the article quoted in the original tweet. The only difference appears to be that Trump is clear about his position on "no federal role" while DeSantis is keeping it vague. Neither of them seems to want to talk about the six-week ban in Florida, either. ImageImage Feels like the DeSantis camp might find themselves in a bit of a trap here. If the pro-life movement really is excited about him, it seems like this won't be a sustainable position for him for long. But can he back a federal ban and still be the most electable option of the two?
Feb 21, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
America maintains the most powerful thermonuclear deterrent in the world.

Fearmongers who ignore this truth and who claim that the Russian state will launch a murder-suicide if we help a democracy defend itself would give up our sovereignty - our freedom of action - for nothing. Image We have honored the precedent of the Cold War - no direct conflict with Russia. But we have the right to arm, equip, and train any democracy in the world who asks for it.

America has already been kind to the Russian state in not giving Ukraine the same protection it gave Kuwait.
Feb 5, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Authoritarians do not care about precedent except where it serves their ends, and the precedent in East Asia doesn't serve China's ends. The only thing keeping it from going "tit-for-tat" is the military superiority of America and its allies, which must be preserved indefinitely. Using the shootdown of a balloon located within what the entire world acknowledges are the territorial waters of the United States as a reason for firing on aircraft located within disputed areas which have been freely and consistently navigated for decades is clearly pretextual.
Feb 4, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I've missed you all so much 💖 I don't like complaining about the algorithm because sometimes I still get big hits like this. That makes me think it's mostly sour grapes.

But my engagement has cratered since Twitter banned me eight months ago for calling a white nationalist deranged.

Apr 27, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This story from @MaryEllenKlas is absolutely wild, and well worth your time - it's an incredible little tale about the perils of rushed and reactive legislation.

In short, any way you slice it, the mouse always wins. And if you enjoyed this, you'll almost certainly enjoy this tax commentary from @JacobJSchumer.

I've never laughed at a primer on state and local taxation before, but this cracked me up - even if the state just pays off the debts, it *still* can't win!

Apr 26, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
A world where autocratic empires can freely destroy and absorb their unwilling neighbors is a world where everyone's freedom is under threat.

Americans must either proactively help others defend themselves, or be dragged in directly in the years to come. There is no alternative. Isolationism is nonsense - every time we've tried it, from the Napoleonic Era through World War II, one empire after the next has eventually come crashing down against us. Democracies must either shape the world or accept the conditions of the autocrats who will shape it instead.
Apr 25, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Every citizen is equally subject to the law and so ought to have equal access to vote to shape that law.

The real challenge is in making consistent arguments beyond practicality for why noncitizens, prisoners, children, and people beyond the 50 states shouldn't get a vote too. Practicality is always extremely important - some arbitrary lines must inevitably be drawn in order for our systems to work. But when it comes to whether someone should be given an equal vote, I think the default answer should be "yes" unless there's a pretty good case otherwise.
Mar 20, 2022 • 21 tweets • 11 min read
Russia tried to plant its flag in Africa within living memory.

A thread on Russian colonialism. Stalin was interested in taking Italy's colony in Libya after WWII.

Reminiscent of Russia's false claim that America promised not to expand NATO eastward, Soviet Russia believed it had American support for a colony in Libya. It did not, and Soviet Russia never got this colony.
Mar 18, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
American tankies are by far the worst of them all. They're as hateful and thirsty for violence as the rest but they're further poisoned with their bizarro version of American exceptionalism, and they've been raised on years of America's rotten conspiratorial fringe. Red fascists. He's since deleted his post and blocked a bunch of people or gone private or both, but this is what the tankie in question decided to do and then share with the world.
Mar 18, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
RETVRN The civil justice gap is real and massive. No amount of pro-bono volunteer work will close it. But opening up the pool of people who can do civil legal work and letting people choose the professionals who are right for them could make a real difference.

lsc.gov/sites/default/… ImageImageImage
Mar 17, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
you rarely see this perspective because it is (tragically) wrong. loving this NATO outpost in beautiful pevek, russia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pevek Image
Mar 17, 2022 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
It is unreasonable to expect all Russian people to answer for their government. We all have an interest in opposing tyranny and a right to do so, but we also have the right to remain silent if we choose, and to live our own finite lives as we see fit. That's the point of freedom. It reminds me of the evil of the internment of the Japanese in our own country during World War II, when they were asked to renounce loyalty to the Emperor of Japan and were branded disloyal for refusing to do so. Many found the question wholly offensive.

encyclopedia.densho.org/Questions_27_a… ImageImage
Mar 1, 2022 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
This aged poorly, in typical Jacobin fashion. The javelins fly and Russian tanks fry and Ukraine still stands defiant. ImageImageImageImage I used to think the folks who write this sort of stuff were simply naïve, but now I think they may be reflexively self-hating Americans who would see anyone go under without giving them the weapons they ask to defend themselves with, because Lockheed Martin might profit from it. ImageImage
Mar 1, 2022 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
NATO's eastern members suffered under war and imperialism, and joined to ensure they'd never have to suffer it again.

But Chris Hedges uses war's gory detail to ignore this history, concluding that Russia is at fault - for overreacting to otherwise legitimate claims. Sick stuff. The people of Eastern Europe were crushed under one tyrannical empire after the next for the centuries before 1991. NATO is part of their answer to breaking this cycle for good.

Chris Hedges waves all these considerations aside as the stuff of warmongering defense contractors.
Feb 28, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
If you can't get your sympathies straight on an issue like Russia invading Ukraine, you should find no place in mainstream American politics. You should be cast aside to the fringes, selling dick pills to paranoid lunatics instead of having any influence over anything in America. If you're still trying to "both sides" this in some moral sense, you've already succumbed to the relativist sickness that says democracy and dictatorship have no moral difference, that free societies and autocratic regimes are always entitled to equal consideration. It is wrong.