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Matthew Chapman Profile picture
Matthew Chapman
@fawfulfan
Game programmer, reporter @RawStory, author, elections nerd, devoted husband. Proudly on the spectrum. All opinions are my own.
13 subscribers
Oct 12 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
If you're still wondering, "How did we ever let politics derail the COVID response?" Well, we've let politics interfere with public health crises several times throughout history.

I'd like to tell the story of Dr. Joseph Goldberger — kind of the Anthony Fauci of his day. Image Goldberger was a Hungarian Jewish immigrant who became a renowned epidemiologist with the Public Health Service in 1899, screening new arrivals at Ellis Island, and doing research to fight infectious diseases all around the country.
Aug 26 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
So I've wondered for a while too how Starbucks become such a huge target of online Gaza boycotters, since they aren't on the BDS list and don't even operate any locations in Israel.

I've looked into it and it turns out there are two extremely silly reasons for this. First of all, it turns out that anti-Israel Starbucks boycotts didn't start with the Israel/Hamas war. In fact, it goes back WAY further than I ever imagined.

This started all the way back in 2006.
Aug 13 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
You know what? I'm going to set aside all my liberal arguments (we need affordable housing, segregation is bad) and libertarian arguments (zoning infringes on property rights) for why zoning reform is good, and I'm going to make a *conservative* argument for it.

Image
Image Car-dependent suburbs as they exist today were built at least partly for a good, well-intentioned reason, which is that many people who need big city jobs nonetheless want to live in a small, closely-knit community that shares values and takes care of each other.
Jul 28 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
There are a lot of reasons CAHSR has been so delayed and over budget, and a lot of them have been bad things — NIMBY lawsuits, grifting by contractors, the desire by politicians to use the project as a jobs program.

But I'd like to discuss one GOOD reason it's taken so long. Image And that reason is: California officials conceived of this project, from the start, as a core trunk service that will connect and modernize all the currently disjointed and outdated rail systems in Northern and Southern California.
Jul 4 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
All right. Here is my long, nuanced take on the last week of Biden panic and media chaos.

I'm probably going to make a lot of people on every side mad with at least part of what I have to say here. 1) Biden is genuinely older than he was, does not have the physical stamina he used to, and it is apparent in his speeches.

2) It is also apparent in his speeches he is cognitively fine. He answers questions sharply and with policy nuance. He just sounds tired doing it.
May 16 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
With Detroit seeing a population and economic rebound, it's worth exploring what exactly caused the city to fall so hard — because there are REALLY important lessons for a lot of other U.S. cities, some of which are making similar mistakes to Detroit and not realizing it. So why did Detroit go bankrupt?

The standard answer that politicians and economists will give you is "the auto industry changed, there weren't as many jobs as there used to be, so the population declined."

This is true, but it's really not the whole story.
May 9 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Biden gave Netanyahu months — literally months — to explain what his plan was for keeping the civilians he forcibly evacuated to Rafah safe if they bomb that area.

He was very clear they needed to have that plan or we'd cut him off.

Netanyahu ignored him. Totally blew him off. The U.S. has *already* at this point bent several of its own laws that require countries receiving our weapons sales to allow a certain level of humanitarian aid in, to keep Israel supplied for a war that it absolutely has the money and manufacturing to prosecute 100% on its own.
Apr 29 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Actually, it's bad that California's average property tax rate is that low. Really bad.

Excessively low property taxes is a big reason why California is so unaffordable for middle-class workers, and why so many of them are moving to Texas.

Let me explain. Ever since Proposition 13 set hard limits on property taxes in California, cities there have had a big problem. Previously when they had budget deficits on infrastructure, education and public services, they could raise property taxes to plug the gap. But now, they can't do that.
Feb 20 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Sigh... every year I have to explain this. THIS PART OF THE TAX CODE HAS A VERY GOOD REASON FOR EXISTING.

Of course the IRS doesn't expect criminals to follow it. The idea is that when they DON'T follow it, they can then get charged with tax evasion on top of their other crimes. Organized crime bosses are hard to prosecute because they can kill, threaten, or intimidate any witnesses to their crimes.

But it's MUCH harder for them to beat tax evasion. Because they clearly have the money, and clearly didn't file a tax return and declare how they earned it.
Feb 13 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Neither side wants "a secular binational one state solution for Jews AND Palestinians" because both sides are (rightly) terrified of what would happen if the other elected a majority to rule over that combined country.

The *only* path to peace is both of them getting a state. When either side says "one state solution," they mean the other side being ethnically cleansed.

They do not mean a heterodox secular state where everyone enjoys full and equal rights.

Even *if* such a state were created, it would only last a few years and plunge into civil war.
Dec 20, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
What's maddening about the whole Colorado decision is that tons of people aren't even trying to argue the court erred — they're just saying, "we should ignore what the plain text of the Constitution says and let Trump run anyway for the sake of avoiding political controversy." If you want to argue Trump didn't really participate in an insurrection, go for it — the trial court found mountains of evidence that he did, and even Trump's *own lawyers* have called January 6 an insurrection, but you're welcome to argue why the trial court is wrong.
Dec 7, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Caroline, Hamas *filmed themselves* committing rape. They are literally boasting about doing it. And many of the recovered bodies of women from 10/7 show clear sexual trauma.

I don't know what to say if you're going to deny this. nbcnews.com/news/rcna122564
Okay but... "a terrorist organization well-established to have committed mass rape violated its ceasefire agreement to return all the women in its captivity" is in fact already reason enough to continue war operations against them. We don't need "proof" they're still being raped.
Jul 23, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
In summary: at least half the people Florida's new education standards cite as slaves who learned useful skills in slavery weren't even slaves, and most of the rest didn't learn their skills from slavery.

What a surprise. Also, as I pointed out yesterday, even if some slaves DID learn skills from slavery, this whole framing misses the point: Skills or no, Black people had little freedom in labor in the South post-Emancipation, and many effectively were kept in slave-like states by the Black Codes.
Jul 21, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Let me simplify this:

DeSantis is saying any corporation that does anything Republicans don't like, will now be investigated by the state for supposedly breaching responsibility to shareholders, because of potential revenue loss from Republicans not buying their products. This is a psychotically authoritarian attack on free enterprise.

And it also doesn't have any basis in law. Companies are not liable for breach of fiduciary responsibility for literally any single thing they do that fails to turn a profit. That's not how it works.
Jul 2, 2023 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
So how DID it become so expensive to go to college in America?

How did a degree go from being a few-thousand dollar commitment you could pay off with a part-time job on days you didn't have class, to something you need to take out tens of thousands of dollars for?

Well... It turns out there is not one single problem or bad guy behind this. Higher education and the economy and culture around it have changed in a LOT of ways in the last 50 years, that each individually contributed to making it more expensive to go to college.
Jun 25, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
True non-violent mass civil disobedience is *much* more effective at paralyzing oppressors than violence.

However, the catch is that this is only true in a country that has some semblance of a rule of law that the oppressors themselves stand to suffer from losing. Democracies simply produce much more wealth than dictatorships. Violence on a large scale would destroy that wealth for everyone.

Therefore in democracies, oppressors lose when peaceful resistance is so widespread the violence necessary to stop it would destroy their own power.
Jun 22, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I keep seeing people post this graph, but nobody seems to understand what it actually means.

It doesn't indicate workers are paid too little, or corporations are getting greedier.

It actually indicates something else bad about the economy. The key thing to understand about this graph is that these two trends are indexed to different ways of calculating inflation.

Hourly compensation is indexed to the Consumer Price Index, which is a measure of the inflation of goods a typical household buys.
Jun 21, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
We actually do know who paid off Kavanaugh's credit card debt: at least some of it was his parents.

He was pretty opaque about it with the Senate Judiciary Committee, but the financial paper trail makes it pretty clear that's what happened. https://t.co/huDnRPFgqQmotherjones.com/politics/2021/…
One thing that isn't talked about enough, though, is Kavanaugh was such a bad financial planner he put a six-figure home reno on his *credit cards*.

Why didn't he just take out a HELOC or something? There are a million ways he could have financed that and paid less interest?
Jun 18, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
USPS is a state monopoly for a good reason: it's simply not profitable to deliver to many remote rural areas. Even private couriers like FedEx and UPS rely on USPS for last-mile delivery in these areas. Without a nationalized USPS, people would be essentially unable to live in many remote places, including places with land that's vital for farming and ranching.

Or at least, we'd need an extremely strict regulatory scheme on private couriers that basically makes them utilities.
Jun 17, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Hi Ian, please tell me of these other countries where paying taxes is optional. I'd love to learn more about this. There are certainly some countries out there that have huge loopholes in their tax codes that let millionaires around the world hide money there. But as far as I'm aware, every country has some kind of tax code for residents and will prosecute people who don't pay it.
Jun 17, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
One big underlying problem is, there is no national standard for rehab treatment, and many programs calling themselves "rehab" have no evidence-based medical care at all. Some are religious programs. Some are nature retreats. Of course these won't cure drug addiction. Compound that with the fact that in many states, there are barely any rules on who's even allowed to open a rehab facility!