Favorite Rejects 2022-04-11

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

I used to think that people generally knew when their propaganda was lies. But ever since I saw the Russian soldiers bring dress uniforms to Ukraine, I'm starting to think that "getting high on their own supply" is far more common than I realized.

James Palmer @BeijingPalmer

I have a pet theory that one reason China hasn’t imported mRNA vaccines is because the smear campaign they ran against them convinced at least some of their own leaders.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Some people pushing doom believe very sincerely that it’s politically constructive, but I think the best evidence is that it isn’t — but that instead negativity is a good way to generate clicks.

slowboring.comAll news is bad newsAnd the really bad news is that it’s your fault

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

In today’s America they bill 10x, call it design-build, and it’s legit instead of fraud.

Ben Dreyfuss @bendreyfuss

The amount of fraud that took place building the transcontinental railroad is shocking even now. They billed almost twice as much as the actual cost of the railroad https://t.co/tr4poIspfP https://t.co/28wzo0nxQT

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Every day someone tells me that I’ve never specified what issues I think Democrats should moderate on and it never gets any truer. I 100% sympathize with the desire not to read Yglesias takes, but if you don’t read them then don’t complain you don’t know what they say.

Brian Tashman @briantashman

Another day of Twitter where centrist pundits demand that Democrats make concessions on issues, but refuse to specify what those issues are, or explain why all of the concessions they already made haven’t improved their poll numbers

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

What’s actually going on is people have convinced themselves Democrats are constantly moving right across the board when in reality Biden’s 2020 platform was to the left of Obama 2012 on almost every topic.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Part of what’s happened is that Democrats are still led by elderly figures who’ve been politically prominent since the 1990s so younger and more progressive people feel, rightly, that they have *personally* been denied their place in the sun — the worst of both the worlds.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Hiring a more diverse group of officers continues to strike me as an underrated policy (some of the authors of this paper have published great research on this so it's not underrated by them).

Omar Wasow @owasow

Who are the police? New study combines personnel, voter, census data on ~220,000 officers from 97 of 100 largest local US agencies and finds “officers skew more White, Republican, politically active, male, and high-income than their jurisdictions…” https://t.co/ADfq0SxlQQ https://t.co/31iQjuWNhz

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

This is a good point. We should adopt a position of neutrality in the Saudi-Iran conflict IMO

Mark Peckham @AK_Organizer

@Noahpinion Big L from the gulf states, really questioning what the US is getting out of those relationships. Been backing the Saudis for years in a cold war vs Iran, and they won't even pump more oil when we need them to.

SUGARPLUMVAMPIRE @BakuDreamer

@Ramsey_Campbell @cstross LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — The mayor of the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol said Monday that more than 10,000 civilians have died in the Russian siege of his city, and that the death toll could surpass 20,000, with corpses that were “carpeted through the streets.”

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

There’s a lot I agree with in this piece. But this is false and it highlights the tension between what progressive messaging gurus *say* they are advising Democrats to do and their practical first-order function of doing coalition duct tape. politico.com/news/magazine/…