Dans cet article, j'examine comment le vieillissement de la population va affecter le financement du système de retraite. Je vous résume les points essentiels rapidement dans un fil 🧵

https://twitter.com/Hexagone_org/status/1983814793158078644

Dans un système par répartition, les pensions des retraités sont financés par les cotisations des actifs. En pratique, les cotisations ne couvrent qu'une partie des dépenses, mais le reste est financé par des taxes et impôts qui tombent essentiellement sur les revenus du travail.

This is really excellent and really makes clear how powerless Iran is at the moment. Once again, people got mad at me when I said at the beginning that Iran didn't have any good options to respond to Israel's attack because Israel had total escalation dominance over it, but that's obviously true and now they're going to get mercilessly pounded.

The question for me is really whether they will capitulate and, if they don't, whether it will get to the point where they're so desperate they do something crazy like attacking ships going through Hormuz or energy infrastructure in the Gulf. Another interesting possibility @shahpas hints at is that eventually the Artesh might stage some kind of military coup. I think there is a tendency, which you also see at work in the discourse about the Russo-Ukrainian War, to assume that the aggressor will always be defeated, but there is no case for such a Panglossian view and that's obviously not true.

In light of the debate about the SPD manifesto in Germany, I'd like to state the unpopular but historically correct opinion that Brandt's Ostpolitik actually did more to end the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe than Reagan's initial hawkishness, which if anything delayed it. Once again, we are back with the problem that people have a cartoonish understanding of the end of the Cold War, which is not only incorrect but is actually the opposite of the truth, because memes have become deeply entrenched and people don't read.

It's almost comical at this point that, with everything that is happening, propagandists like John Spencer continue to explain that Israel has created a "gold standard in urban warfare". They will continue to say that when there isn't a single house left standing in Gaza.

https://twitter.com/afalkhatib/status/1922533225013944672

I wrote this to someone a few months ago, but that's more or less what I was already writing in November 2023, because it was already obvious by that time what the dynamic of this thing was and it was only going to get worse because there never was any realistic exit plan.

The document in which the Romanian Constitutional Court justifies its decision to bar Georgescu, who already won the first round of the presidential election in December and was running ahead of everyone else in recent polls by a wide margin, from running for president is one of the most insane things I have ever read.

The text is very confused, the translation probably doesn't help, but the argument the Court seems to make is that, in deciding whether someone can run for president, it has to check whether that person would threaten the country's constitutional framework if he were elected and it claims that Georgescu will not defend democracy.

The only argument it gives to justify that claim is that the very same Court previously annulled the first round of the presidential election that Georgescu had won, which means that he didn't respect the electoral procedure and in turn this ipso facto demonstrates that he violates the obligation to defend democracy 🙃

But the December ruling to which it refers, which annulled the first round of the election, mostly didn't talk about Georgescu's alleged violations of electoral legislation to justify the decision, but instead made ridiculous arguments based on what supposedly happened on social media during the campaign, such as the claim that "equality of opportunity" was not ensured on social media due to the "exploitation" of algorithm.

(Of course, even putting aside that such a claim is so vague as to be meaningless, this argument is preposterous since, by the same logic, one could justify cancelling literally every election in history because "equality of opportunity" has never existed anywhere in the traditional media either. Do people think, for instance, that the traditional media treat every candidate equally well? There is no principled difference here.)

The only accusation made specifically against Georgescu in the December ruling is that he violated the electoral legislation by failing to disclose payments his campaign had allegedly made on social media, but the only evidence the Court cited in support of that claim was a report declassified by the Minister of Internal Affairs after the first round of the election, which claimed that Georgescu had benefited from a social media campaign that wasn't properly marked as electoral advertisement.

However, although the document in question did note that Georgescu had not declared any spending on electoral campaigning (which is obviously suspicious), at no point did it claim that his campaign had paid for those social media posts and in fact evidence has since then surfaced that the social media campaign in question was paid for by the liberal party!

(Let's put aside, because that's not truly relevant, the fact that even if Georgescu's campaign had in fact been behind that social media campaign, the idea that a $1 million dollar campaign on TikTok can swing millions of votes is nothing short of ridiculous. If this were true, the guys behind Georgescu's online operation should quit their current job, whether it's in the Kremlin or somewhere else, to create their own political advertisement company because they're apparently the most effective people in the field anywhere in the world by a very wide margin.)

So the Constitutional Court barred from running for president the candidate who, according to the polls, was bound to win in a landslide, by arguing that its own decision to annul the first round of the election last December, justified by insane arguments about the general context in which the election took place and an accusation against that candidate for which it produced no evidence, showed that he could not be counted on to defend democracy 🤯

I'm sorry but this is nothing short of a legal coup and a denial of democracy. Anyone who defends that decision while claiming to support democracy and the rule of law is a clown. This is the same kind of arguments that dictatorships around the world use to prevent "dangerous" candidates from running and the fact that so many people who constantly pose as defenders of democracy are currently applauding the Court's decision speaks volumes about how deep their commitment to democracy actually runs.


SOURCES

- The latest decision by the Constitutional Court, barring Georgescu from running in the new presidential election: g4media.ro/document-candi… (thanks to @marginletter for telling me about this)

- The December ruling by the Court that annulled the first round of the election: legislatie.just.ro/Public/Detalii…

- The document on the social media campaign that was declassified by the Minister of Internal Affairs: s.iw.ro/gateway/g/Zmls…

(I used Google Translate to read all those documents.)

Okay, let me reply to this thread, because I think it's actually very helpful to explain what is wrong with the argument in the paper I was criticizing 🧵

https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1892273975977283948

The point @lymanstoneky makes is that, since the longitudinal analysis in the paper only looks at the 2018-2023 period and immigrant flows during that period were dominated by low-crime propensity groups, it's plausible that immigration during that period didn't increase crime.

Not only does it show no such thing, but it couldn't possibly show that, because that's obviously false. Immigration has a large impact on crime in Germany and this paper is just another example of politically-motivated academic malpractice. Let's take it apart 🧵

https://twitter.com/derJamesJackson/status/1891792571682234805

The key finding in the paper is that, when you control for the time-invariant characteristics of districts and year-specific effects that affect all district equally, a change in the proportion of foreigners in a district isn't associated with a change in the crime rate.

This reminds me of the Reykjavik summit, which was supposed to be about making relatively small progress on arms control, but where Reagan and Gorbachev came very close to agreeing to the total elimination of nuclear weapons, to the horror of their respective advisers. Putin and Xi are no Gorbachev though, so I don't think it will play out in the same way 😅 The Gorbachev/Reagan dynamic at Reykjavik is fascinating, because they were both sincerely convinced that nuclear weapons were a moral abomination, but their advisers and allies clearly didn't share that conviction and freaked out upon realizing that they were serious about it.

I think it's not paradoxical when you remember that, compared to the West, the Soviet consumer market was extremely underdeveloped. When you don't live in a consumer society and don't have access to a lot of low-effort entertainment, you read a lot more and go to the opera.

https://twitter.com/alex_orlov_/status/1886983776674439292

The Soviet economy was a seller's market in general and this was particularly true of the consumer market, hence Soviet consumers just bought whatever was available and, when it came to entertainment and leisure, what was available was mostly traditional bourgeois pastimes.

In other news, it looks like the chickens are finally coming home to roost for Macron, as Le Pen seems to have decided to pull the plug on the government. Not only do we have no plan B to form another government, but we also don't know how we're going to vote a budget 🤷‍♂️ As I've been saying since last June, I'm really not sure that Macron will be able to finish his term. I know that everyone thinks I'm insane when I say that, although that's probably less true now than a few months ago, but I really think people underestimate the probability.

Okay, you're going to say that I say that because I'm a reactionary who hate protesters in general (which again is kind of true though besides the point here), but pro-Palestine protesters have to be some of the most retarded people on earth.

https://twitter.com/TimcastNews/status/1816193966985077106

It's true that the deck is stacked against the pro-Palestine side of this thing, but at the end of the day it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that, if they weren't so fucking stupid and unhinged, things would go a lot better for them.

We're at the point in France where, in most large cities, immigrants are responsible for between 1/3 and 1/2 of reported crime or even more than that, but there are people seriously explaining that Science has demonstrated immigration has no causal effect on crime because a paper using a shift-share instrument in Italy on data that are 20 years old found no statistically significant effect 🙃 We are truly reaching level of midwittery previously thought unimaginable. It's really hilarious that those people don't understand that, when some groups are overrepresented in reported crime by a factor of e. g. 5, if a paper using sophisticated statistical jujutsu finds no effect the rational thing is not to believe the paper.

https://x.com/NoahCarl90/status/1813215305029615850

Les instituts de sondage font des projections assez différentes, mais elles mettent toutes le RN beaucoup plus bas que mon modèle. Qu'est-ce qui explique cela ? Je voudrais explorer cette question, car je pense que ça éclaire les enjeux de la modélisation du second tour 🧵

https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1807784385468309598

Quand je modélise la probabilité de victoire au second tour en 2022 des candidats RN en fonction de leur avance ou retard au premier tour, lisez le tweet cité plus haut et le fil dans lequel j'explique la méthodologie pour comprendre ce que je fais exactement, ça donne ça.

Avec les résultats du premier tour, le modèle donne ça :
- RN et LR-Ciotti : 274 (263 - 284)
- NFP : 126 (120 - 132)
- Ensemble : 102 (96 - 109)
- Divers Droite : 20 (17 - 23)
- LR et UDI : 19 (16 - 23)
- Divers Gauche : 15 (12 - 16)

Autrement dit on se dirige vers le chaos 🤷‍♂️

https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1804405828926988433

Encore une fois, c'est à prendre avec des pincettes, puisque c'est basé sur l'association entre les écart au premier tour entre les candidats qualifiés pour le second et la victoire au second en 2022, mais cette association pourrait être très différente cette fois-ci.

We're at the point where Serge Klarsfeld, the most famous French Nazi hunter (who also wrote a very important book about the role of France in the Holocaust), explains that if he has to choose between the far-left and Le Pen's party he'll vote for the latter "without hesitation".

https://twitter.com/Frontieresmedia/status/1802063786729259515

It's really hard to convey to a non-French person how revolutionary this is. If you had told that to someone 30 years ago, he would have thought you had completely lost your mind and laughed to your face.

So many Arabic speakers have reported that the translation was grossly inaccurate without anyone even trying to deny it that, at this point, I no longer have any doubt that it's true.

You can learn a lot about people's intellectual honesty or lack thereof by looking at who shares this video and doesn't take it down even after the issues with the translation have been pointed out to them. I've read all the community notes and checked dozens of replies to this tweet and others sharing the video, so I know some claim ISIS used the word to talk about sex slaves, but even if that's true that's not a defense of the translation since nobody is talking about pregnancy.

A French journalist asked an IDF spokesman whether they still believed there was a Hamas command center under al-Shifa Hospital, pointing out that the evidence presented after the IDF seized it didn't match the original claims made by Israel.

He replied that it was "unacceptable" for "a democracy like yours to ask another democracy a question" and added that such a question was "extremely weird or even nauseating" (if you see what I mean).

The journalist was almost apologetic and tried to argued that it was normal practice, but the IDF spokesman was having none of it. For some reason I'm supposed to give those people the benefit of the doubt though 🤷‍♂️ In case you have forgotten, let me remind you what the IDF originally claimed was under al-Shifa Hospital.

https://twitter.com/IDF/status/1718010359397634252

I have already retweeted this paper, but I'm doing it again because I think it's fascinating. It suggests that most of the differences in economic policy between mature developed economies that people constantly argue about are second-order relative to demography.

https://twitter.com/MoreBirths/status/1727059812746199301

To be clear, this does not mean that economic policy doesn't matter and couldn't make a substantial difference, because the range of variation in economic policy among mature developed economies is limited.

I'll probably write about this because it keeps coming up and there is a lot to say about the "offer" made at Camp David, starting with the fact that technically a comprehensive offer was never actually made, but for now here's what this amazing "offer" looked like in practice 🙃

https://twitter.com/daddykool/status/1716286595194917178

First, if people are going to make this argument, then they should say that and not constantly repeat the talking point that Barak made a super-generous offer at Camp David. This is a lie.

https://twitter.com/DamonLinker/status/1716472769745916069

The mandatory reference to Munich and reductio at Chamberlain in foreign policy discussions is not just stupid because a comparison with the crisis over Czechoslovakia in 1938 almost never makes sense, but also because people have a very dumb understanding of that crisis. It's not that blaming European statesmen at the time is not appropriate, there is plenty of blame to go around in that episode, but people are always very selective in who they blame and thinking about the crisis primarily in moral terms prevents them from truly understanding it.

This stuff only saves lives *given current incentives*, but it affects incentives by making it more rational for people to get on those boats. If you want to save lives, as opposed to virtue signal, you should either lift restrictions on immigration or do what Australia does.

https://twitter.com/GermanyDiplo/status/1707783245171978250

Of course, the German Foreign Office isn't going to advocate lifting restrictions on immigration if only because it knows that's politically impossible, but it also doesn't want to push for Australia's solution for ideological reasons, so instead it virtue signals on Twitter 🤷‍♂️