nathan breedlove

in china they revere mao, but they eat because of deng better to be forgotten and do good than commit evil but be remembered reverently. that is true virtue

@mattyglesias Romney ran "hard right" ? Is this retcon?

This is also the flipside of a point I keep urging on Democrats about the importance of policy. Mitt Romney *really is* a nice guy and thoughtful and exhibits real wisdom and moral courage, but he chose to run on the most hard-right platform of any candidate ever.

@RichardHanania I think markets adapt, countries don't wait, don't think AI juice has done much to alleviate Regardless closing the straight is a card they can only play once, because after everyone knows they can't rely on it, so it will lose status/volume (it hurts them more than anyone else)

Basically, the outcome of the war with Iran has been 1) Hormuz remains closed 2) The economy (stock market) is doing fine I didn't see anyone predicting this. People critical of Trump said Hormuz would stay closed and it would be a disaster. His defenders also assumed he needed to open it. Is the lesson just that markets are much more resilient than we think, and the AI boom is so powerful we can withstand anything?

@razibkhan Wasn't there also a fad of having Greek slaves?

@mattyglesias Same vibes as jd vance and Ukraine

@mattyglesias Post hoc rationalization You share the moral intuition of progressives, we know

@razibkhan Yeah the whole thing awoke a sort of "crusader" spirit in me

@razibkhan @jimmygandhi

@WackySmak @mnolangray Ok man, I listed them out, if u don't get it that's fine Star wars has always had these problems (entire army of clones funded somehow no one notices, each planet has 1 geological feature, etc/

@nathanbreedlov1 @mnolangray I really don't understand the confusion, the bad guys in the movie are pawns of Palpatine who take Faustian bargains with space Satan that ultimately gives them short term benefits while long term benefiting Palapatine. Thats kinda the entirety of the prequels.

Yeah, that's the whole point of the film: that surface level baddies, the Trade Federation and Maul, actually serve a deeper, unseen threat, i.e. a phantom menace. It's literally in the name.

@mattyglesias @phl43 It's not about the land, it's west vs islam

Once again, pro-Palestine people keep talking as if Israel were in the same position as South Africa toward the end of Apartheid, but that's very misleading and mostly wishful thinking. I don't say that because I think Israel treats Palestinians better than South Africa treated Blacks under Apartheid, which it doesn't, but because the demographic situation is very different and that makes the current power arrangement in Israel/Palestine viable in a way Apartheid wasn't. Whites in South Africa were a small minority and the economy and they were entirely dependent on Black labor, whereas Jews have achieved demographic parity in Palestine and their dependence on Palestinian labor is much smaller. Ultimately, it is this which forced them to end Apartheid, much more than international sanctions, which only worked insofar as they made an already untenable arrangement even harder to sustain. In a way, Apartheid failed because it rested on a separation between Whites and Blacks that, for economic reasons, wasn't possible. The Israelis on the other hand can absolutely maintain this separation.

@WackySmak @mnolangray What was the goal though? Get naboo to pay some due sum? Why would you risk war/conflict with the Republic, when it legally allows for the federation to siege planets? It felt like none of this is ever answered it's just "bad guy orders wealthy bad people"

@nathanbreedlov1 @mnolangray They were ordered to by palaptine. Jedi are a 10000 year old ancient order of highly respected space wizards and the Techno guys are clearly cowardly bottom feeders who were gonna crack if Palapatine didn't push them. They captured the capital to force their own goals.

@mattyglesias @DrewPavlou It's kind of sad that center left position is literally to abandon sections of the western empire Like who cares anymore about their moral principals (it's not just that they're pussies, bad enough on cusp of WW3, but they're like dodo birds, they weren't made for this world)

@razibkhan Gandalf dying and resurrecting The fact that most important people happen to be the lowest among them (hobbits) Im not sure people can imagine pagan anymore, it's too remote It's hard to explain aztecs or romans to generations that don't know anything about them

@AlanMCole @CoreyWriting What about when James hangs him upside near a tree? Making it a little weird now...

@CoreyWriting There's specifically a very funny interaction effect between Essiedu as good-looking black man, and Snape as an ugly white man specifically mentioned to have bad skin, nose, and hair. Are the white characters going to say they don't like Essiedu's skin, nose, or hair? lmao

Paapa Essiedu is a great actor. I wish they gave him an appropriate role. He is not Snape. Making Snape black transforms the character and story in unsavory and ridiculous ways.

From THE GOD DEBATE: Me: Why should you care for the needy? Why should you donate blood? Why should you refrain from murder and robbery? You can't possibly say that the only reason to do it is because God will punish you in an afterlife. If God's back was turned, does that mean it would be okay to kill and rob or let people drown or starve? I can think of plenty of secular reasons to do it. Namely, I would not want to be left to starve or drown or die of lack of blood. I would not want to be the victim of murder or robbery. There's nothing special about me, and therefore what I demand of everyone else, I have to accept for myself. It is clear that we would all be better off in a world where everyone helped each other and refrained from hurting each other compared to a society where everyone was a rapacious psychopath. That's why we should be moral. God has nothing to do with it. Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT): What happens in Dr. Pinker's argument is that as an heir of Jewish and Christian civilization, he imports, as this kind of commonsensical position, metaphysical propositions about the existence of these human rights that no one has ever seen of or heard of. He cannot show me a human right under a microscope. He cannot prove to me in a mathematical theorem why segregation was wrong, why it was wrong to murder people in the gulag or the concentration camp for the sake of a better tomorrow. He asserts that it's necessary for, again, sort of decency and order and so on, and often it is, but there has to be a stronger reason when you find yourself in a position where what the society says is out of joint with what you think are the fundamental truths about the universe.

@SarahTheHaider The best part is the people who look like a clown chimera rebus are always the ones correcting you

@mattyglesias Bemoans the end of pax Americana while advocating for it

@mattyglesias This isn't hard, "we can't fight the Nazis cause of economics" is not the right take

@RichardHanania Know thy enemy

Paul Ehrlich has passed away, and I wanted to see whether he was as bad as his quotes and short clips suggest. Surely, there might be some nuance or careful thought in his worldview. Nobody is that purely evil. So I picked up The Population Bomb and started reading. It turns out, he's even worse than you think! I’m putting together a thread below. Quotes taken out of context don't get at the degree to which he is consistently evil and misanthropic. He had an entire system that he pursued in which human life was constantly denigrated and devalued, with an eye toward elimination. You’re left wondering what you’re even reducing human population for, since every form of life seems to be not worth living. Some people are racist and just hate poor and brown people. Some hate the rich. Paul Ehrlich doesn't discriminate. He wants you not to exist if he can get away with it. But if he can't stop you from living, he wants you to have a much worse quality of life. Ehrlich has a plan for both advanced and poor countries. He has blueprints for entire regions of the globe. Humans do not have agency in Ehrlich’s world. They’re simple consumers of resources, with no ability to create, better their circumstances, or exert individual agency to make the world a better place, except to the extent that they ensure fellow humans no longer exist. You might find all of this depressing. But I’ve found reading Ehrlich invigorating. It is a reminder of how much evil there is in the world. Recall that Ehrlich was not some guy in his room putting out diatribes. He was a professor at Stanford, a highly decorated scientist, and one of the most prominent public intellectuals of his generation. While reading Ehrlich today, know that he has intellectual descendants in the form of degrowthers and other environmental extremists, along with anti-capitalists who don’t understand the basis of prosperity and prioritize redistributing wealth over all else.