There's a bizarre theory gaining traction that Donald Trump was a dovish president vox.com/23677654/trump…

In just two countries, Iraq and Syria, his drone war killed three times as many civilians as the Gulf War, Kosovo intervention, and Libya wars *combined.* Trump personally loosened rules of engagement for US airstrikes, even bragging about it publicly. The result? The number of civilian casualties per year in Afghanistan increased by 95 percent over the Bush-Obama average motherjones.com/politics/2020/…

About this "military is too woke" meme on the right: there's actually good evidence that more socially egalitarian militaries are better at winning wars

https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/1646205509568020488

This book from @jaylyall_red5 looks at a large database covering 250 conventional wars, finding that "the higher an army’s inequality...the greater its rates of desertion, side-switching, casualties, and use of coercion to force soldiers to fight" press.princeton.edu/books/hardcove…

THREAD: At year's end, 2022 has turned out a lot better than many people expected. I want to talk about two of the deep reasons why — old knowledge, hard won in the 20th century, about the fundamental nature of democracy and authoritarianism vox.com/policy-and-pol… First, this was a year of policy failures for authoritarian governments. The war in Ukraine is the obvious example, but there were other important examples — like China's zero Covid policy — that blew up in various regime's faces.

One impression I get, reading today’s reactionary thinkers, is that their politics are driven by aesthetics. When they fail against “blue-hair people,” it’s not just a stand-in archetype for political enemies. They actually think the youth aesthetic is ugly, degrading, and evil. I know I’m just updating Benjamin here, you don’t need to tell me in the comments

Orbán's speech has, so far, mostly consisted of ripping into Democrats in pure partisan terms. "They hate me and slander my country, the same way they hate and slander you," he tells the CPAC crowd. Orbán: “A Christian politician cannot be racist.”

Orbán, two weeks ago:

"The level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen in 2021 is down to levels last registered in 1989. The last 30 years of democratic advances following the end of the Cold War have been eradicated." v-dem.net/media/publicat… These two charts are really telling. There's a notable increase in the percentage of countries that are autocratic, but a vastly bigger jump in the percentage of people living in an autocracy.

That's largely due V-Dem's judgment that India under Modi is no longer democratic.

I'm really proud of this big piece we put out this morning — an effort to go through the biggest issues in the Ukraine war and provide accessible (if tentative) explanations. Here's a thread on what I concluded vox.com/22989379/russi… I started with the long arc of Russian-Ukrainian history and used it to explain Russia behavior in the conflict. It is impossible to understand this war without grasping the political and ideological background that shaped Putin's thinking; this section lays it out.

The past week of developments on the ground in Ukraine have convinced me that Russia may very well be losing this war vox.com/2022/3/18/2297… I want to talk about how I came to the conclusion in this piece. When I started reporting this earlier in the month, I expected to write a piece about how Russia was still heavily favored to triumph in conventional terms.

That wasn't what I found.

vox.com/2022/3/18/2297…

1. The debate surrounding Putin's "rationality" suffers from a serious conceptual problem that is leading many to dangerously alarmist conclusions. 2. In political science literature, "rationality" is not a word for thinking in general. It typically refers to an agent's ability to do means-ends reasoning: to identify their goals and whether or not their actions are likely to further those goals.

I am an optimist by nature. But I have spent the past few months digging into the research about democracy and civil conflict, and it has made me profoundly worried about where the country is heading.

Here's why. vox.com/policy-and-pol… First, we have to appreciate what's happening. The United States is in the throes of "pernicious polarization" — a term from @jlynnmccoy that refers to the division of society into hostile social camps.

This isn't normal. In fact, what's happening in the US is *unprecedented.*

I should probably read the book, but I find arguments like this repellant. US involvement in World War II is the only reason I'm alive, my grandparents not brutally murdered by the most evil government in history. We *should* mythologize that victory nytimes.com/2021/11/29/boo… These arguments always take the same form: the fighting was brutal, Allied troops committed atrocities, the US leadership didn't really care about the Holocaust.

Concede all of that, and the fact remains: absent US intervention, the Nazis would have completed their genocide.

"Unprecedented." "Beyond anything we've ever seen."

Inside the wave of death threats targeting the public servants who make our democracy work vox.com/22774745/death… 17 percent of election workers have been threatened due to their jobs. 24 percent of public health officials have felt "bullied, harassed, or threatened." And in the past months, the threats have started coming against school officials vox.com/22774745/death…

1. In light of this Washington Post mess, it occurs to me it might make sense to briefly explain what Kant's view of reason actually was — and why it matters that the American right is butchering it so badly 2. In "The Critique of Pure Reason," Kant argues that humans are not capable of perceiving the reality of the external world — that we only can only interact with the world we perceive, which is not (given our limits) the world as it necessarily is

I just can't get over this. It's a thing the Washington Post actually published — a thing that is so completely and indefensibly wrong that anyone who has taken a single intro to philosophy course could explain why washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/… Like yes, it's by Marc Thiessen who has been more wrong about more consequential things — like torture — but it really raises the question of what kind of minimum standards you need for columnists

Here's Marjorie Taylor Greene signal-boosting the viciously anti-Semitic Nation of Islam — because they both believe in Covid conspiracy theories

https://twitter.com/mtgreenee/status/1457727381628760068

It's pernicious than that, as Greene is standing up the Nation of Islam as an authentic voice of black America as opposed to "the party of identity politics"

https://twitter.com/mtgreenee/status/1457727398942740483

Two things that are both true:

1) There have been real changes in how liberals talk about race and education policy — some good, some bad

2) Republican attacks on "critical race theory" distort and manipulate said changes to gin up racial resentment and censor history curricula Asserting 2) is not a useful response to people concerned with the bad part of 1).

But at the same time, asserting 1) is not a useful response to people concerned with the political consequences of 2).

This by @schraubd is a knockout punch on why the Sunrise DC statement was, in fact, clear cut anti-Semitism dsadevil.blogspot.com/2021/10/sunris… One other point I'd like to make, that I haven't seen in most places, is that one of Sunrise DC's boycott — the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism (RAC) — is distinct in ways that make the action even more clearly anti-Semitic.

This is a very funny article that lists a series of things that mostly seem unobjectionable and good as if they were bad and nefarious city-journal.org/dc-prep-school… Another way to summarize these grafs are "students at elite institutions reported a series of racist incidents and the schools took it seriously"

I've been on vacation since Friday, so I've been trying not to get sucked into Hungary discourse.

But I recently had a second to catch up on the conversation and, as someone who knows quite a lot about the subject matter, it's pretty depressing. I have some thoughts about why. The biggest problem is that Hungary's democratic status is being treated as an open question or a secondary one, less important than its GDP or immigration policy.

This is wrong. The Orbán regime is authoritarian and that is by far the most important thing about it.

Lot going on in this @lionel_trolling piece on the CRT debate, which is very worth your time johnganz.substack.com/p/were-all-pos… On the other side of the argument, this @olivertraldi piece is worth your time as well arcdigital.media/p/whats-in-a-n…

The panic over "critical race theory" is ginned up and silly. At the same time, it's clear that there are real problems with the way that certain ideas about race are operationalized in corporate DEI programs.

This Stanford incident, for example, is awful jweekly.com/2021/06/15/sta… I know that "higher ed" and "corporate" are different things. But the example speaks to the problems of the "diversity industry" that turns racial justice into an HR issue, which IMO is extremely deserving of the criticism it gets.