Favorite Rejects 2021-08-13
Gotta say I’d buy a pretty fancy house if I had $193 billion https://t.co/OaUclOzGQz
John Pompliano @JohnPompliano
Jeff Bezos owns the biggest house in DC and he also doesn’t live in DC.
That would be my approach to the billionaire lifestyle, fancy-ass houses everywhere you look.
An underrated aspect of rapid growth in market-rate housing is that you can cut property tax rates without cutting services.
This is rural/exurban Texas but it could be your blue city, too, if you YIMBYize.
Seems like sometime between Year 5 and Year 15 of the military op in Afghanistan someone should have either tried to make a sustainable Afghan force or else explicitly made the case to the public for a permanent US presence instead of sticking with the Friedman Unit routine.
It annoys me when people who advocate a strong posture of deterrence are called "hawks". A "hawk" sounds like someone who favors war. But the purpose of deterrence is to make war LESS likely.
WW2 taught us that appeasement can encourage war, and the Cold War taught us that deterrence can prevent war. But I feel like some of our commentators have unlearned those lessons; now, deterrence is often mischaracterized as warmongering, and appeasement praised as "restraint".
I feel like there’s actually very little partisan hypocrisy in Afghanistan — foreign policy elites across both parties oppose withdrawal, have said so across both Trump and Biden, and the public simply disagrees with them and both presidents have acted accordingly.
I think soon we will pivot to “we need to be in Country X because if we’re not the Chinese will be” as a new threat model and maybe people will find that persuasive. But right now I think most people would say that if the Chinese want to go fight the Taliban that’d be great!
I think there's a genuine conflict in life between good politics, which necessarily emphasizes structural factors and the importance of social change, and good advice (or good teaching or good therapy etc.) which emphasizes internal locus of control and making the best of things.
Derek Thompson @DKThomp
Like "really they ought to rezone for higher density housing across all expensive neighborhoods" is not a good answer to a friend seeking advice about how to think about tradeoffs when deciding which house to buy.
It's just different questions.
And while it's false — and politically pernicious — that "hard work" is the main thing determining who's successful and who isn't, it's still true that as an individual you'll raise your odds by working hard.
Haha nice try dude. Give us the dumplings or we ZAP YOU WITH THE SPACE LASER
Tuvia Gering 陶文亚 @GeringTuvia
Little do they know that we Jews have been cooperating with the Japanese pirates to develop the ultimate weapon!
Free dumplings every Christmas or Shanghai gets it!
Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion
Some subtle anti-Semitic tropes here https://t.co/qErIuxsqWw
Tuvia Gering 陶文亚 @GeringTuvia
Here's how this crazy "logic" works:
1. Housing is currently expensive
2. Therefore, any new housing we build will be expensive
3. Therefore, building any new housing raises prices
John Mirisch @JohnMirisch
dan holler @danholler
My take on Afghanistan is that we should have gotten out as soon as we got Bin Laden and the rest of the al-Qaeda leadership. It should have been viewed as a punitive expedition. The Taliban were always going to be in charge as soon as we left.
The day we killed Bin Laden was the peak of our success in Afghanistan. Had we left the next day, many would view it as a successful military effort. Every day we stayed after that made the expedition destined to seem less successful when we inevitably withdrew.
