Favorite Rejects 2022-05-22

Indradeep Khan @indradeepkhan

@Noahpinion Found this quite an eye opener

foreignpolicy.comJapan Radically Increased Immigration—and No One ProtestedTo cope with demographic challenges and labor shortages, Japan’s right-wing government has boosted immigration. How did it avoid the political backlash plaguing the West?

Andrew Exum @ExumAM

This struck me as a very balanced assessment of the big @nytimes Haiti project. The Times does great work and could have benefited — not for the first time, or surely the last — from a little more humility.

Paul Cohen @Paul_E_Cohen

on the one hand, the @nytimes in-depth piece on Haitian 'reparations' to France brings much-needed attention onto a decisive moment in world history -- and its argument that the neocolonial constraints imposed by FR and US on Haiti has helped keep ... https://t.co/2Vovf1fkdo

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

This doesn't mean Russia is winning the soft-power war, but it's doing a hell of a lot better than it deserves to be doing, even as its armies flail ineffectually on the battlefield. (end)

Donald Shoup @DonaldShoup

Oregon Nears Green Light for Big Parking Reform “Rarely do we get a chance to do so much good for free.”sightline.org/2022/05/21/ore… @andersem via @Sightline

sightline.orgOregon Nears Green Light for Big Parking ReformThe state land use board provisionally approved the rules but left room for tweaks by July.

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

Left Twitter is an op

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

Antifa mostly disappeared when fascists mostly stopped marching in the streets, as one would expect from a group whose name specifies that it exists only to fight fascists.

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

This demonstrates that I was right to support antifa, and the cons who thought they were the vanguard of some kind of revolutionary force were wrong.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

I think when people leveled these criticisms of Bush they were worried about the invasion of Iraq and the global network of secret torture prisons, and Biden really hasn’t done anything like that.

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

The mainstream Democratic Party project has merged in every meaningful way with the militaristic, authoritarian, surveillance-heavy vision of the Bush presidency, with woke fundamentalism replacing Bush’s “faith-based” evangelism: https://t.co/puc60eGJfn

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

254. George W. Bush's idea to create an "ownership society" was a good one. What he got wrong was in thinking this could be accomplished through cheap loans, rather than through outright transfers (as the G.I. Bill did).

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

255. George W. Bush really did try to make "compassionate conservatism" a thing, in his own lame incompetent way. If he had been more competent at domestic policy he could have been the Republican LBJ - a president with good domestic accomplishments marred by an unjust war.