c.z. marks

@HistoryBoomer Yeah, I’d also do Ireland for your kid. Don’t know your kid, but I’m tired of listening to those ginger prats whine about St. Patrick’s Day.

These parents who claim they'd kill half the world to save one of their children are ridiculous. That's horrible! 4.1 billion people?!? My kid is great, but I'm not doing that! Now Ireland. I'd wipe out Ireland for my kid. Only 5.4 million. And what have they done since Joyce?

@HistoryBoomer @dahliasc I don’t doubt it because “my side” wouldn’t commit horrors. I doubt it because Palestenians and their Western apologists lie as easily as they breathe.

I can't know how accurate Kristof's piece on sexual violence is, but American-Israeli journalist @dahliasc calls it "heavily researched" and says we can't ignore it based on the idea that "my side" wouldn't commit horrors. Every side commits horrors. Just read up on American troops at My Lai (300-500 dead, many rapes, including of a 10-year-old) or Abu Ghraib (torture, including sexual assault, photographed by the participants). And, of course, there were the nightmarish horrors of October 7, 2023, inflicted on Israeli civilians by Hamas. I find the allegations of using dogs hard to believe, but it has precedents. Americans at Abu Ghraib used dogs to threaten naked prisoners' genitals. Nazi Klaus Barbie was alleged to have used dogs in sexual assaults (described in "One by One" by Judith Miller), as were Chilean General Pinochet's torturers (Ingrid Olderock, who carried out the torture, is described in Nancy Guzmán's "Ingrid Olderock: La mujer de los perros"), so I withhold final judgment. Critics are right to question Kristof's sources. Euro-Med, for example, seems to have questionable reliability. But the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem is not a fringe source, and they describe "a grave pattern of sexual violence." Likewise, there is the testimony IDF soldiers gathered by the well-regarded Breaking the Silence. Israel's prisons are overseen by far-right Itamar Ben-Gvir, a past supporter of Meir Kahane, who wants the West Bank absorbed by Israel and Palestinians encouraged to emigrate elsewhere. Ben-Gvir condemned the 2024 arrest of Israeli soldiers accused of raping a Palestinian prisoner at Sde Teiman detention camp, calling it "shameful." That kind of leadership does not inspire confidence that the human rights of Palestinian detainees are being protected. Important to note, a key part of Scheindlin's piece is making it clear that these kinds of accusations are not unique to Israel or Hamas. Sexual assault is common in war zones around the world. "Tigray. Sudan. Indonesia. Kosovo. Bosnia. I could go on; Kristof has covered these issues for a lifetime, and reading his work over the years has contributed to my own understanding of conflict atrocities. If any of the detractors today had done so, they might not have conjured the notion that he woke up one day and decided to slander Israel. Sexual violence that includes physical mutilation, desecration, torture, family assault, humiliation, infection and destruction mean that any assertion that Israeli- or Palestinian-perpetrated crimes are especially brutal simply dismisses or denies the horrors suffered by multitudes of victims around the world." A friend asked me what I thought of the Kristof piece, and I said I didn't know. I found the allegations disturbing, but some seemed too over-the-top to be believed. On the other hand, I know unimaginable evil has been committed by humans throughout recorded history. Under the leadership of Netanyahu, supported by men like Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, my confidence in Israel's ability to root out wrongdoing has been sinking. And I've never had any faith in the murderers of Hamas. These days, I'm with Israeli novelist Amos Oz, who called the story of Israel and Palestine "a tragedy," and a tragedy which is growing even darker. I generally avoid posting on Israel because the issues are so messy and impossible to parse in a few tweets. I expect some people to be angry at this post, seeing it as an attack on Israel. It's not. I believe Israel has the right to exist, and that Hamas's call of "from the river to the sea" is a call for genocide. But war can lead people down terrible paths. I hope Israelis like Dahlia Scheindlin and Yair Lapid can lead their country to a more peaceful destination.

@PeloSwing Easier when you can just steal.

Trump: I'm Outperforming Warren Buffett & Nancy Pelosi😆

@Noahpinion This isn’t really contradictory to what he said. We have no way to bring down the government (or open Hormuz) because we won’t commit to the ground war that would be required to do that.

We're losing to Iran because we have no way to bring down their government, and they can inflict economic damage on us by closing the Strait of Hormuz, which we are powerless to prevent them from doing.

@jessesingal I mean, 100% chance either the dolphin or the terrorists are getting raped in that situation.

If you don't find this image hilarious, regardless of your stance on the underlying conflict, you have lost your humanity and should figure out how and when that happened

@lttlefoot @abc20254 @econoadabsurdam @DrewPavlou That’s a problem, but what does it have to do with Laffer? Laffer is much more relevant to people who think we can cut taxes without cutting spending because tax cuts will just pay for themselves.

@czmarks @abc20254 @econoadabsurdam @DrewPavlou Looking for explicit mentions of laffer is not really the idea here. It’s more about finding people who’ve never heard of it and think that if we just raised tax rates, the govt could pay for all the things we want

Y'all laughed at Arthur Laffer, but the Australian Treasury proved him right with cigarettes

@abc20254 @econoadabsurdam @DrewPavlou The reason people (correctly) ridicule the Laffer curve is that it is almost exclusively cited by politicians who want to pretend tax cuts will pay for themselves, when that is very rarely the case.

@czmarks @econoadabsurdam @DrewPavlou Took about 10 seconds to find this. "Laffer curve" was my search term. Then viewed comments. Simples. It's fucking insane to think there are not retards that think it's all wrong, given "tax on unrealised assets" is in vogue. Bloody hell...

@abc20254 @econoadabsurdam @DrewPavlou I’m sure plenty of people don’t understand the Laffer curve. But the original post was “look: Laffer was right.” Nobody who understands it argues Laffer was wrong about there being SOME level of taxation that suppresses economic activity. That’s just trivially true.

@abc20254 @econoadabsurdam @DrewPavlou Oh sorry for asking you to do the hard labor of providing any evidence at all for your bullshit claim. I just assumed you'd give it away for free because of your mother.

@czmarks @econoadabsurdam @DrewPavlou Plenty on this very platform. Use the search function. My labour isn't gratis. All the best!

@abc20254 @econoadabsurdam @DrewPavlou Do you have an example of that? Because it is pretty easy to find the counterexample of “conservatives” citing Laffer to argue that any tax cut will pay for itself with increased revenue. Even if you restrict the search to elected officials.

@czmarks @econoadabsurdam @DrewPavlou "Nobody thinks the Laffer curve is wrong in general" - unfortunately, many do. You seem to be forgetting that we have a lot of fucking retards in the world. Left wing retards have a propensity to believe the laffer curve is wrong.

@econoadabsurdam @DrewPavlou I guess there is another curve showing that fewer people go out of their way to illicitly obtain items. And another showing that illicit prices also rise when the legal price goes up. You can present all sorts of obvious things in curve form.

@czmarks @DrewPavlou but it's not supressing smoking, it's incentivising illicit smoking

@SpectreProXy @mattyglesias @hecubian_devil Many relevant minority groups, e.g., blacks, Muslims, Latinos, are pretty conservative culturally.

@mattyglesias @hecubian_devil does cultural conservatism create contentment, though? I think that would be a hard bargain for e.g. most relevant minority groups today.

A lot of libs lately grappling with the political crisis liberalism presently faces (and that’s basically a good impulse), but I haven’t seen anybody *really* get down to brass tacks about the assumptions baked in. Much discussion of “we are so vastly wealthier then even our very recent ancestors, so much healthier, so much less subject to the grief of loss from disease or starvation, etc, yet people don’t seem to be crediting liberalism for delivering it,” but not a lot of questioning the basic premise that this glorious increase in material abundance *on a fundamental level* may not optimize for happiness and contentment. In other words, I see a lot of libs getting halfway there, trying to figure out “how do we get people to appreciate what we’ve accomplished?” but very little serious consideration of whether the project itself is critically flawed, if the things liberalism and capitalism optimize for are *not actually what drives contentment*—at least not on balance. I don’t think they’ll be able to really address the crisis of liberalism without thinking this through deeply

@Noahpinion What if we kept Israel as an ally and just stopped electing incompetent dipshits to the presidency? I really feel like the dipshit thing is a bigger problem.

Israel is technologically very capable, and militarily incredibly effective. The reason they're a bad ally is that they dragged us into the disastrous Iran War. We can't have that.

@CrypticTrades_ This time is different.

Warren Buffet’s Indicator is adjusted to an old economic system and environment that no longer exists because of AI. Few understand this.

@jessesingal The main reason I m skeptical about this article is that Palestenians and their supporters lie about literally everything all the time.

2/ Here's a gift link nytimes.com/2026/05/11/opi…

Anyway yeah this seems bad nytimes.com/2026/05/11/opi…

@WarMonitor3 Oh please.

Trump is seriously considering making Venezuela the 51st state of the United States-FOX Wow...

@asymmetricinfo This is an ignorant take.

People who want to blow off Hantavirus because COVID turned out to be no big deal: COVID had a fatality rate of 1%, concentrated among the elderly. Hantavirus has an incubation period of up to 8 weeks and kills 30-40% of people who show symptoms. Whole different beast. It’s not pandemic yet and probably won’t be, but if it were, the rational action would be—lockdown

My “this is not a golden calf” t-shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.

@waldenpod It’s only more economical if you (1) accept “god did it” as an explanation and (2) don’t bother trying to explain the existence of god. If you take the god hypothesis seriously, it’s just an extra thing you can’t explain.

Because God can explain why some things in nature are the way they are (fine-tuning, psychophysical harmony, moral knowledge, etc.) and atheistic alternatives have a harder time doing it as economically as theism