it's going to take a while for Americans to fully realize the scale of the evil we're responsible for, if we ever do That ISIS attack in Moscow seems like the most depraved, despicable thing human beings are capable of... and then I remember that the carnage we've created in Gaza is hundreds of times worse.

Editorial board of Haaretz, Israel's leading newspaper, says Netanyahu himself is squarely responsible for the disaster, having ignored the potential consequences of escalating aggression toward Palestinians. In other words, this is not some "fringe leftist Hamas-sympathizing" take, but what reasonable Israeli observers see quite clearly. Right-wing policies escalate the cycle of violence and make Israel less secure.

Somehow in 2023, Foreign Policy continues to publish defenses of the totally unjustifiable US atrocities against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The argument is bullshit, though many Americans refuse to believe their country would have committed a horrible crime. The idea is that Japan would not have surrendered ON OUR TERMS without the bombings, not that they would still have been a threat, which they weren't.

Exciting @curaffairs news! We've got a new project, the Biweekly News Briefing. It's a fun but comprehensive analysis of global events, delivered to your inbox twice weekly. It costs a small monthly fee (to pay for research) but the 1st one is free here: currentaffairs.substack.com/p/thursday-jun… This is an experiment for us in doing things that are a little more topical. We need about 1,000 paid subscribers to sustain it at the quality it needs to have. You can get a two week free trial of it here: currentaffairs.substack.com/subscribe?coup…

Some people have too much goddamned money and it should be taxed away from them by the state and used to fund free medical services for the poor. I don't see how anyone can disagree with this. If you don't share this opinion, which strikes me as so basic that to deny it is to deny elementary morality, then I think you are a terrible person without a functioning conscience.

How does a “government funded media” label “call editorial independence into question” unless you hold negative views of public services? Why is NPR adopting the right wing stance that there’s something fishy about being funded by the government? Public media is good! You’re supposed to be National PUBLIC Radio for god’s sake. Why would you be arguing that being a public radio station is inherently editorially compromising???

Today in Newsweek, I make the case that leftists need to study and learn from horrible right-wing pundits like Shapiro and Carlson. Not their toxic ideologies or their propaganda, of course. But we need to get better at communicating to a mass audience.
newsweek.com/right-better-c… I think there is a widespread belief among progressives that the right succeeds just because it is shameless and appeals to people's worst instincts and self-interest. That certainly gives an advantage. But they also work hard on producing clear, simple, effective talking points.

If Seymour Hersh's reporting is correct that US blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, it's a major act of international terrorism (and would be labeled as such if Russia did it to us). His account is very specific, down to exactly how it was done:
seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-… The US government has adamantly denied the report. I hope the major papers are now forced to do the kind of investigative work they've conspicuously failed to do so far, and find out the truth. Hersh's report is extremely confident and detailed and he's a legend at this.

Today I asked the AI to interpret the phrase "Soviet Afrofuturism" and this is what it spat out

"they got you fighting a culture war to stop you from fighting a class war"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1596072934665240576

remember: he makes money when we fight

I realize JK Rowling's new novel might seem a little long at 1200 pages but a good portion of the space is taken up by fictitious mean tweets sample page from the novel

In 1981, there were 3.5 billion people living on less than $10 a day. In 2017 there were nearly 5 billion. The idea that global capitalism is eliminating extreme poverty is based on adopting an absurd threshold of 2 dollars a day, even though $10/day is still less than 4k a year. Do you think earning 3,600 dollars a year makes a person extremely poor? If so, then there are more extremely poor people in the world than ever before and all this stuff about the end of poverty is absolute horseshit.

Joe Rogan fans say that you need to listen to his show at length to have an informed opinion. Well, I've listened to hundreds of hours of it, & my informed opinion is that it's full of guys talking out of their asses on subjects they haven't researched.

currentaffairs.org/2022/02/on-exp… I do think trying to get Rogan booted from Spotify is a serious mistake, for several reasons: (1) his audience is actually smaller there (2) it makes the discussion about "censorship" & the right claims Silencing (3) it doesn't address the real problem, lack of good public media

An absolutely horrific humanitarian catastrophe that the Biden administration bears major responsibility for. This cruelty should be causing mass protest against the administration but most Americans are oblivious to the effects of our policies on other countries. Sanctions are a weapon. They aren’t usually thought of as a weapon, but they can destroy a country just as surely as bombs and bullets can. And while bombs and bullets can be aimed at purely military targets, sanctions attack the civilian population, starving babies to death.

The sad thing about becoming an antivaxxer, covid truther, or other conspiracy theorist is that the paranoid nonsense destroys not just your brain but also relationships.
Just got Alex Berenson’s book, he admits he trashed his relationship with his dying father over his crusade. Also: “My marriage staggered under the weight of my Twitter obsession.”
Probably Twitter taking away his account is the only thing that saved him from a divorce.

University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, who insisted she was not a racist despite praising the superiority of "European" culture, now argues that the US needs "fewer Asians" and we need to be asking "how many" Asians are too many. Can the people who portrayed her as a victim of "cancel culture" at least admit that she is a blatant racist? If you're going to defend the right of blatant racists to teach at prestigious law schools, fine, but don't pretend she's not openly bigoted.

Why are billionaires horrible people? Because only an obscenely selfish human could amass & keep that much for themselves. It's definitionally impossible to hoard that much wealth without being a sociopath because the very act of keeping it is sociopathy:
currentaffairs.org/2017/06/its-ba… This is why there are no good billionaires. Because moral goodness and the possession of a billion dollars are mutually exclusive. That's why all the ones who present themselves as "the good ones" also turn out to be assholes: currentaffairs.org/2016/08/the-go…

Nothing annoys me more than the way right-wingers pretend they want to have a debate & believe in Facts & Logic. I've spent the last five years meticulously debunking their claims and exposing their propaganda. They just never respond. Here's a few dozen examples: Shapiro: static.currentaffairs.org/2017/12/the-co…
Peterson: currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-in…
Tucker Carlson: currentaffairs.org/2018/11/what-t…
Donald Trump, Jr: currentaffairs.org/2019/12/review…
Abigail Shrier: currentaffairs.org/2021/04/why-th…
Charles Murray: currentaffairs.org/2017/07/why-is…
Dinesh D'Souza: currentaffairs.org/2020/08/is-soc…

Biden is just as blithering and incoherent in office as he was on campaign trail, but let us also remember that transcripts of Donald Trump's public speaking were often equally mystifying. Wondering if we'll have another president in my lifetime who speaks in sentences.

https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1418000816917594118

if I wanted to theorize this, I'd argue our politics has become so hollow & symbolic that actual meaning is no longer necessary to political communication. Obama was often just making sounds too. So were Bush and Clinton. They were more polished than this but no more substantive

I truly enjoyed co-writing this comic about Jeff Bezos w/ @lyta_gold, & delighted to have illustrated by great comics artist Jesse Rubenfeld. Bezos' space dreams have long struck me as the Walter Mitty-esque fantasies of a divorced shipping company exec. currentaffairs.org/2021/07/the-se… @lyta_gold he went to the very edge of space for under 10 minutes and thinks of himself as captain picard

Got around to reading "White Fragility." I don't like it. Advocates the kind of anti-racism that is focused more on improving interpersonal interactions than on joining a movement that will actually eliminate racial disparities. currentaffairs.org/2021/07/whats-… I don't actually think DiAngelo's core thesis is wrong—white people do indeed tend to be touchy about accusations of racism. Microaggressions are also quite real and pernicious. But she actually makes too few demands of white people because she mostly wants them to introspect.