One More Josh

Pinned.

@DavidKlion It's hard to gauge her success to the extent to which I think tanking the networks was a primary goal of installing her. But if the goal was to win big ratings by taking The Free Press to a primetime audience then everyone involved is dumber than I thought.

Have been bearish on Bari and feeling pretty smug about it rn

@JonahDispatch Ah yes, this person basically nobody has ever heard of is obviously the equivalent of the leader of the Republican party and his army of sycophants. So well equivocated, such both-sides.

I do wish the broader left that dismisses this evil stuff could understand that it is as provocative as any of the rhetoric they deplore from the right and as morally indefensible.

@JonahDispatch So much of Serious Republican discourse is basically, "instead of adhering to core principles, Trump is not adhering to principles at all. Very interesting development to be sure."

When you listen to Trump talk about Taiwan (or many other topics) it’s the stuff he doesn’t say that is more revealing. Asked about Taiwan he blathers on about how big and strong China is, how tiny Taiwan is, about tariffs and dumb American presidents who didn’t use them. What doesn’t he talk about? Alliances, obligations, democracy, values, honor, etc. Keep in mind, if you don’t care whether Trump throws Taiwan under the bus, that wouldn’t be the only betrayal involved. We’d be screwing Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia too. I’m not saying we should get into a shooting war over Taiwan. I am saying Trump shouldn’t betray our allies, our values, and our national security and national honor just because he’s got a man crush on Xi.

@PhilWMagness @Nothingness_Mu "Free market economics" on the right has always meant two distinct things: 1) Laissez faire economic policies, and 2) Corruptly rewarding the wealthy with tax cuts and deregulation. The Trump administration has simply dropped all pretense of commitment to 1 when 2 is at stake.

@Nothingness_Mu The second half of that is basically a conspiracy theory - that's my point.

One of the most notable failures of the leftwing pundit and academic commentariat scene over the 15 years is how they completely misdiagnosed the dynamics of what was happening on the American right. They dreamt up fantastical conspiracy theories about the history of "neoliberalism" and "market fundamentalism," both pejorative caricatures. And they focused their energies on attempting to show how all of their own political grievances, which were mostly economic in nature, traced back to Mises, Hayek, Friedman, and/or Buckley. In the process, the left punditry almost entirely missed the emergence of the Postliberal right, which also shares their own animosity toward Mises, Hayek, Friedman, and Buckley. When Deneen's book appeared in print, they joined Obama in soft praise for its "provocative" thesis. When JD Vance burst onto the scene with Hillbilly Elegy, they accepted him as a respectable and perceptive critic of alleged free market "excesses" from the right (and only really soured on him when he became a Trumpist cultural warrior). They barely even noticed Adrian Vermeule's rehabilitation of Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, save to also afford it intellectual respectability since (a) he was a Harvard elite who coauthored with progressives and (b) there was also a progressive strain of Schmittian rehabilitation in this same period. The left-pundits of this era also spilled barrels of ink trying to prove that Pat Buchanan's cultural crankery transmitted to the present day via the late-life political alliances of Murray Rothbard. In reality, Rothbard was simply trying to latch himself onto Buchanan, whose movement predated and was much larger than the paleolibertarian scene. And now that Buchananite movement has grafted itself into Trumpism as well, without any discernible influence of Rothbard whatsoever. The result is that the left-pundit class of the 2010s now struggles to comprehend the divisions on the right, even though the evidence is all around them. They can't process how much Buckley's Fusionism is despised by the Postliberal & Buchananite crowds that migrated into Trumpism. They can't comprehend how Postliberals like Deneen, Vermeule, and Pappin embrace anti-capitalist economic narratives that are not far removed from their own positions. They don't understand how the same Postliberals have adopted their own narratives and pejorative screeds about "neoliberalism" and "market fundamentalism." All they can do is repeat the same old tropes of the 2010s "neoliberalism studies" genre, and hope that by repeating the name "Trump" enough they can somehow make it stick to a Postliberal intellectual scene that, just like the far left, also views what it calls "neoliberalism" as its primary enemy.

@JamesSurowiecki @mattyglesias @dbroockman @j_kalla Ellen can have a daytime show but not a sitcom. /s

@mattyglesias @dbroockman @j_kalla Serious question: What does moving to the middle on "gays and lesbians" mean?

@sharkweek0178 @jmart @JBPritzker I don't think any reasonable person objects to treating the people who fund Hamas as terrorist collaborators. Interesting sidenote: That includes Netanyahu's government. Source: timesofisrael.com/for-years-neta…

@jmart @JBPritzker Netanyahu and not say, the people who planned and executed an attack where paragliders flew into a music festival to murder concertgoers?

.@JBPritzker The summation of your views is you’re an unapologetic Zionist who is deeply, deeply uneasy about the current government in Israel. Is that fair? I’m unapologetically in favor of having a peaceful sanctuary that Jews can live in, in Israel. I’m also unapologetically in favor of a Palestinian State where Palestinians can live peacefully in the Middle East. And by the way, we’re never, ever gonna get to peace until we have that. But right now, I want to be clear, Netanyahu has made that near-impossible at the moment with his leadership. So we’ve gotta make sure that moving past Netanyahu... And FYI, let me just point out, there are a lot of people who don’t like Netanyahu, but you shouldn’t take it out on Israel. It’s a democracy that elected him. There are a lot of people who don’t like Trump. I mean, should we be tossed into the Hague as a country because of Trump? I’m just saying that we have to be careful about how we’re treating other countries when they elect somebody that we don’t like. You said Israel should be a safe haven for Jews. Yes. Do you think America is still a safe haven for Jews? It is. It’s just that, unfortunately, you’ve seen a rise of antisemitism, and that’s something terrible, and we’ve got to, again, push back. We’ve gotta speak out about it and do everything we can

@yeselson To the extent supporting Trump is the defining issue of our day, it seems he's already made his choice. The real question is whether his goal is to remain a Senator or would rather move on. If a Republican had a stroke and suddenly joined DSA, the mockery would be ceaseless.

Alienated, unhappy, troubled guy, seems to hate the job, wants to be see his family more. Pro Israel maniac (which he always was, btw, but nobody noticed before Gaza). But Dems better remind him that Rs *hate public health care/unions/voting rights*, stuff he still supports.

@EdwardGLuce @TedSmyth I'm torn between a Democratic nominee acknowledging reality vs running ads saying Trump's approval is now down 400%.

@TedSmyth Agree a thousand percent

Thank you Ed. And prices cannot decline 600 percent!

@MazMHussain @arash_tehran "Conquered it fair and square" is an odd phrase and I don't think it carries any moral weight.

@arash_tehran Surprising...British conquered it fair and square IMO and it hardly belonged to the people of the subcontinent in the first place it was merely the private possession of some aloof and distant royalty

Love to hear it

@aaba78 @JacobAShell Trump has run in 3 presidential elections. He won both when he was out of power. He lost the one when he was in the middle of bungling a global pandemic.

@JoshZ2012 @JacobAShell Trump lost in 2020 not sure that's a ls relevant as some think

The reason I've been very bullish on Harris as the '28 nominee is that though many Democrats are sick of the logic that elevated her in the first place, the fact is the old logic has not been dissolved at all, and in the late 2020s it still rules over and determines how Dem-to-Dem encounters tend to play out. This isn't just true of primaries btw, it's also true of meetings among all-Dem professionals, conversations among all-Dem friends, etc. If there's any competitive element whatsoever, the logic which determines the winner of the competition is...the old logic. There has been no "reckoning," so to speak.

@Timodc "I posted I preferred one American locale over another" vs "I went into reddit forums to angrily defend service members having nazi tattoos then claimed I didn't know I had one." I mean Tim, what a wild coincidence! He was just randomly defending nazi tattoos then looked down!

Bank shot attempt to get Platner influencers to rally to her side in solidarity over old posts about people sucking.

@RachelMoiselle @TheAkoFiles Getting people mad at women who are successful is as difficult as dropping coins down a mineshaft.

The hatred is coming primarily from women and I’m convinced it’s largely same-sex competition. I’ve never bought into obsessive hate campaigns against famous women (Anne Hathaway for example) and I’ve been vindicated every time. Sydney and her defenders will be vindicated similarly. The hatred is rooted in absolutely nothing substantive.

I’m a Sydney defender primarily because I think the hatred of her is rooted in intrasexual misogynistic jealousy, but also because she is a good actress whose ability to facially emote is unencumbered by plastic surgery or vanity. I can’t get Botox as it would impact my ability to sign (signed languages rely on facial expressions to portray meaning), but I like to think I wouldn’t do it anyway as this type of expressiveness is glorious.

@binarybits Asking someone to show ID in a convenience store has 0 long term ramifications for their data security. Asking people to upload IDs to websites in an age of widespread hacking is the opposite. I'm fine with the goal, but the method can't be "Trust us."

"Keeping kids away from porn is parents' responsibility" as an argument against age verification makes precisely as much sense as "keeping kids away from alcohol is parents' responsibility" does as an argument against age verification.

@TVietor08 @ElijahCone We've had several candidates in recent years who talk like great college professors (Obama, Warren, Buttigieg) and Obama was the only one who could do numbers with black voters. In 2008 this was described as wine-track vs beer-track, not a new insight.

@ElijahCone jesus christ people are such fucking babies sometimes its unbelievable

This was a segment about a '28 primary. It's not diminishing Pete to say he's an excellent communicator, but he hasn't gotten support of key parts of the Dem primary electorate. It's good analysis of the hurdles he faces. Maybe he will as the primary starts! We'll see!

@Techerous @JamesSurowiecki No - what we need is someone like FDR or Lincoln whose preternatural talent is not legislative but in maintaining public opinion against extremist opponents in the midst of national trials. LBJ handed the keys to Nixon, and Biden to Trump.

@JoshZ2012 @JamesSurowiecki But it's what we need.

As I said back in 2017, Trump is unusual because he's both a terrible person and a terrible president. Most presidents over the past 60 years have been basically good guys or good presidents: LBJ terrible person, pretty good prez; H.W. Bush and Carter good people, bad presidents, and so on. (Depending on your politics, the two presidents who were both are Reagan and Obama.) But Trump is both awful as a person and totally unprepared for and bad at being president. Great combination.

@HeerJeet @NewLeftEViews Trump needs to drop some Confucius just to even the score.

@NewLeftEViews I dunno, I think it's funny that Iranian and Chinese leaders allude to the classics of Western culture while US president is Trump. There's a piquant irony there.

OK everyone calm the hell down with this rhetoric.

I have the utmost respect for Senator Kaine and Senator Warner but we do not need “coaching” on redistricting coming from a cuck chair in the corner. How about you all stay focused on the fascist in the White House and let us handle redistricting in Virginia. 10-1

@Minot78364 @CentristAllWay @JonahDispatch "I would go out and deny the election results, but then you all would unfairly brand me as a person who denies election results. The world truly is unfair to me, a guy who denies election results.

@CentristAllWay @JonahDispatch Yes you are clearly an election denier, clearly.

I get being annoyed when Elizabeth Warren (who I find insufferable) or other Democrats play gotcha by asking “Do you believe Donald Trump lost in 2020?” You know what would have spared Republicans the embarrassment and annoyance of these questions? If Trump hasn’t lied about winning and hadn’t tried to steal the election.