Former First Things columnist, used to blog at Postmodern Conservative bylines @NRO https://t.co/v72t0cO3Hq…
Mar 1 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
1. It's the misalignment of means and ends that is so odd here. What is the goal. If it is: Russia returns to the 2021 borders + sanctions stay on + the Russian regime are effectively wanted criminals in the West, what does it take to get there and who pays for it?
2. Trump's a jerk and his public posture toward Ukraine is more harsh than i would prefer and his posture toward Putin more concilliatory, but what is an acceptable outcome for *us* give what we are able and willing to pay?
Feb 17 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
1. One way to understand is that, while millennials in general entered a job market damaged by the Great Recession, millennials who wanted to get into journalism entered into an apocalypse that encouraged them to embrace what was worst in their educations.
2. Journalism - especially newspaper journalism - had a lot of jobs in a lot of places. Those jobs created real social value covering city council meeting, murders, local and regional corruption.
Millennials were never gonna get those jobs at a living wage.
Jan 16 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
1. So I've been thinking about the ceasefire deal and, while it's a disappointment, it does have some vindication of Trump's overall approach. And the center-left and left interpretation is *very* wrong.
2. Firstly, this is basically the Biden proposal that Israel had already accepted and Hamas had rejected. It wasn't *Israel* that moved. And that shows how the incentives changed with the incoming administration.
Nov 30, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
1. In retrospectively, Hamas not jumping to totally accept the May Biden ceasefire proposal was such a disaster.
Had it been implemented, the fighting would have ended with their leadership alive and with their smuggling resupply lines to Egypt mostly intact.
2. Also, there is a good chance it would have brought down the Netanyahu government as the rightiwing parties quit.
I suspect Netanyahu only accepted the deal because he banked that Hamas arrogance and recklessness would lead them to effectively reject it.
Nov 17, 2024 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
1. My view is that, rather than being ignorant of the facts, Oliver is mostly *lying* and lying in the way that "it's just a stutter" was a lie. It's a *strategy* you see over and over again that's useful for institutional capture but poorly optimized for secret ballot elections.
A. An esoteric (Straussian?) approach to truth in the public square.
B. An attempt to leverage unanimity among the high status people and respectable institutions to intimidate/gaslight the low status majority into compliance.
Nov 6, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
1. It's so odd. Democrats knew - politics aside - that Biden shouldn't be president until 2029, but were caught in a prisoner's dilemma. Any Democrats who stepped out to say the obvious would be knifed by copartisans who privately agreed Biden was too old. They assumed defection.
2. And they were right. Dean Phillips is a nonperson for being too correct too early. Dems looked to events where they could safely coordinate to shove Biden out. The Midterms was one such event but Democrats overperformed... because Republicans nominated freaks in purple states.
Sep 25, 2024 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
1. This is a very interesting article by McArdle and especially it's insight in how the far left has "hacked" sociability for insane nonsense like the DiAngelo grift. It also helps explain why Republicans have drifted towards antisocial candidates that border on the psycopathic.
2. Bad Republican candidates aren't new, but, in the 2010-2012 Tea Party cycles, those candidates were bad because they were too enthusiastic about cutting spending or restricting abortion and lacked candidate skills. They were too conservative and too unpolished.
Jan 1, 2024 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
1. I think one lesson of experience of Greece in the 1960s is that, when constitutional processes are discredited, the beneficiaries won't be *any* of the gladhanders, crooks, and nerds that tend to dominate democratic politics and all factions lose.
2. Today's American left and right discredit democracy in different ways. The anticonstitutional right openly treats the rules as a joke by pretending the VP can decide the electoral count at his discretion.
Sep 6, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
1. I don't for a second believe that J6 riot and the Trump election steal attempt rise to insurrection or rebellion as those terms were understood in the 1860s and this left-Eastmanism could be dangerous *if* Democrats take it as seriously as Trump took Eastman.
2. If worst comes to worst, and one *does* establish that state secretaries of state have the discretionary, unreviewable power to bar candidates from office, you get the same problem you with Eastmanism.
Jul 2, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
1. Just to add to this, paying too close attention to the facts and arguments of a specific case is suspect behavior. It shows low intelligence, or bad character, or both. For them, when you know what side you're on, everything else falls into place regardless of the details.
2. It's about good guys and bad guys and if you want the bad guys to win you're a bad guy who wants bad things and anything goes in attacking you. You had your chance and you made your choice.
Jun 30, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
1. I don't think that's fair in that they are playing different games. To her, Gorsuch probably looks like Ben Shapiro using Facts and Logic while missing every point. Her goal is to impose morality and the appropriate progressive group hierarchy.
2. So for her, redressing racism against African Americans means that Asian Americans will get discriminated against by some institutions. Too bad. For her, African Americans come first and Asian Americans will just have to deal with it.
Nov 10, 2022 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
1. This isn't the whole story and it isn't even the biggest part of the story (which is Republican-identifiers and independents voting Democratic) but it is part of the story. Republicans in competitive races are routinely vastly outspent and go on the air much later.
2. This Democratic early spending advantage probably matter more now that there is more early voting locking in votes. Blake Masters was outsized 6 to 1 in Arizona. Bolduc was outraised 16 to 1 in New Hampshire.
May 26, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
1. This gets to Douthat's question about how liberals would have responded to support for masking from a President Cotton in February 2020.
Liberal journalists associate the lab leak hypothesis with the outgroup. That's what makes it - but not the wet market hypothesis - racist.
2. They don't hate the lab leak hypothesis. They hate Tom Cotton and the resulting abuse is scripted
If the outgroup is associated with opposing mask mandates, it's white privilege. If they are associated with supporting mask mandates, it is racist xenophobia.
Dec 18, 2020 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
1. For ten months we've turned our lives upside down because of the mortality of the coronnavirus and now, when effective vaccines are available, the scumbag bureaucrats at the CDC decide that saving lives is *no longer the priority*?
Go to Hell. All of you.
2. Our professional-managerial class -especially in tertiary education - is overrun with a self-perpetuating class of insane monsters who constantly look for the most socially destructive ways to act out their vanity.
Nov 23, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
1. The Sidney Powell media tour might in retrospect, be understood as the high point of the Q style in the present controversy. That style has multiple components:
A. The layering of ever-more-fantastical claims to cover for the evidentiary weaknesses of earlier claims.
2.
B. Orgasmic fantasies of complete political victory and the prosecution of an ever-expanding list of enemies.
C. Statements of blinds trust in obvious charlatans.
D. Reinterpretation of humiliating defeats as brilliant feints.
E. Demands to trust a nonexistent "plan."
Aug 1, 2019 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
1. The left-Democratic argument is that, given political polarization, Democrats can't and shouldn't go after swing voters and just mobilize low propensity Democratic partisans.
It isn't clear why an unpopular agenda makes that easier, but incorporates problems.
2. This is all an elaborate rationalization for not trying to win back the 8 million or so Obama-Trump voters (whose existence is a rebuke to partisan polarization.)
Woke leftists don't like these economically populist, socially conservative voters and...
Jul 22, 2019 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
1. I think Mayer's Al Franken article is best understood as a series of arguments by implication.
The first is that, as long as the left dominates the staffing of mainstream media, destruction by accusation works *better* on the basis of brazen, partisan, double standards.
2. The knowledge that anyone on *their* side can be destroyed by any accusation (no matter how poorly sourced) is combined with the knowledge that *your* side is safe because the media judges will protect you.
