Forrest Sholars

My rules for staying sane on Twitter: 1) Block accounts who are jerks to you OR others in their mentions 2) Be polite (not a jerk!) to people in their mentions even when disagreeing 3) Try to follow people who have thoughtful/distinct takes, but also arnt jerks

@DCCyclone @NilesGApol @ASFleischman For better or worse, the average voter who participates in non-presidential elections, has a lot of faith in their local party (on both sides)

@fsholars @NilesGApol @ASFleischman Bingo, that's exactly what I just said about Fairfax County school board elections, where I live. Voters WANT the lit as they enter and rely on it.

Man this is a really good idea. It is not important to have a Democrat or a Republican. It is important to have someone competent.

@HistoryBoomer Millenial/genx: master and commander Boomer: band of brothers

Top Dad show/film?

@NilesGApol @ASFleischman Stuff like this is always less effective than people think. Local parties still will endorse, and hand out grip cards with their endorsements at polling stations

@ASFleischman Sure but why not just make it a statewide thing? This was 100% passed just to prove a political point

"500 homes by 2032" So Britain is just openly committing national suicide to appease the NIMBYs huh

This is probably sp6r's most repeated point, but there is a real divergence of interests between marginal renters and the median renter

@mattyglesias A lot of this depends what people mean by upper middle class and by when. College never reliably has been "150k at 24"

There’s more to life than getting a bachelor’s degree but honestly this seems like pretty good life advice especially if you’re smart enough to get good scores on AP tests.

@eaglesfan9181 @sp6runderrated I mean I care because the cost of labor directly goes into the cost of consumption! But I agree, the way we basically have the sub-premier level be college affiliated has all sorts of bad spillover effects.

@sp6runderrated Confusing pro sports and college sports/Amateur athletics just muddy the waters. I don’t care that pro sport athletes get paid. I don’t care that they get paid millions of dollars. They’re literally professionals, it’s literally their job.

A major reason salary caps, franchise tags, student-athletes and other anti-athlete policy exist is because lots of people, especially sports fans, do not regard athletics as a real job.

You need to both pay well and move along poor performers. It doesn’t work without both.

@KevinSabellico uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req… (f) a person of unknown parentage found in the United States while under the age of five years, until shown, prior to his attaining the age of twenty-one years, not to have been born in the United States

@KevinSabellico Generally babies found under 5 are presumed US citizens if not evidence to contrary. This can be revoked up to age 21 if evidence is found

Ok, serious question. Let’s say a baby was given up at a fire station and adopted. Then that baby runs for president. Then their opponent challenges their eligibility saying they can’t prove they were a citizen at birth. What happens? Take it further. Non-citizen enters witness protection as a child. Witness protection makes them a citizen at birth, fake birth certificates and all. They actually do this! Can that person run for president? Law school twitter please give this hypo widest possible circulation.

@CoreyWriting The American voter is woefully under informed about foreign policy, and yet they are still somehow ahead of policy makers because "war bad" is a better heuristic than US foreign policy over the last 30 years

Hot take: American public opinion should have minimal influence in foreign policy. The average American knows absolutely nothing about foreign issues outside of "war bad."

@dilanesper The more involved you are politically the more of a monoculture people you interact with are, so you really lose a theory of mind for casually engaged/swing voters

this is true but it's a bipartisan sickness. in every recent election, the party base has made this exact same mistake.

It's easy to mock the optics of the leftist activists' recent mission to Cuba. ("Fun, too!") But there's a more basic criticism that risks being overshadowed. I haven't seen a single participant — not the young activists who went, not politicians like Ilhan Omar who support them — so much as pretend to pay any lip service to most basic, fundamental fact about Cuba: It is an authoritarian state. The ruling Communists are the only legal political party; all others are outlawed. All candidates for office are nominated by the party, most run unopposed, and many get 99% of the vote. There is not a shred of independent media. The country has over 1,000 political prisoners, including — to take one at random — a woman sentenced to 15 years in prison for streaming images of protests on Facebook. I'm confident that mainstream economists are correct that Cuba's Communist economy is responsible for its poverty, and that the U.S. embargo is at best an aggravating factor. But YOU DON'T HAVE TO ACCEPT THAT to acknowledge the most basic political reality about the country. And that's simply something you have to do, if you speak publicly about Cuba, and you want what you say to have any shred of legitimacy or moral authority.

I lived in an apartment for many years. I considered it my home

@sp6runderrated @BarneyFlames Healthcare is so different because life is not a video game. You dont get to reroll your character, you dont get to replay. Its not like you are born with some disease and its a fun playthrough to see how life is with cerebral palsy and then again but with ALS

@BarneyFlames The least popular plank of economic conservatism/libertarianism is health care. Your health care preferences have no constituency because most people recognize something that conservatives/libertarians can't "I'll be sick/old someday too."

As a liberal here is my compromise offer to conservatives/libertarians who want health insurance debates to be focused on the libertarian friendly ground of tax/transfer rather than the morality of letting people go uninsured in a wealthy country:

People forget this - but part of reason why older millennials are/were so obsessed with harry potter, is that people started reading them when young, and had a new book come out every year or two that grew older with them (themes, complexity)

The portion of the entertainment industry that relies on being a franchise is going to have to clinge more and more to millennial and older generations because both TV and video games series basically come out so infrequently now have you can't "grow up with them"

@trumwill @dilanesper @BryanONolan I really miss 22-24 episode hour long shows. Sort of sad to know outside crime procedurals how basically no shows like that with an ongoing plot but have [villian/planet/problem] of the week episodes. Rewatching DS9 and dont think will ever see something like it again!

@dilanesper @BryanONolan I think that some of it is that when you made 22 episodes a year it was basically a full-time job for everybody. Fewer episodes means everybody is working on other projects, so coordinating everybody coming together is more difficult.

Anybody? @dilanesper, maybe?

@harrisonfinberg @sp6runderrated Are you a Risorgimentist!?

@sp6runderrated Yeah it’s really that bizarre. It’s like taking a position on the Italian unification in 2026. And clearly no one actually agrees what it means, it’s a useless term. For Jews Zionist means Israel should exist, for everyone else I have no idea what they’re trying to say..

The term Zionist is pretty outdated and it kind of accepts the framing that Israel is some intellectual idea that may go away one day. It’s a country, just deal with it like a country.