Would you believe me if I said it's possible to: - cut the highest effective tax rates in the country below 50% - cut capital gains taxes by ~ 4% - have net income rise among the bottom 60% - AND raise > $600B revenue/year *very* progressively? @mattyglesias, @Noahpinion, @jdcmedlock

The absolute exhaustion of the profit engine. No policy tweak is fixing a 150-year terminal decline.

is it really so hard to understand why catastrophe is far more plausible than outright literal extinction? black plague killed about a third of the population, not all of it. and that was before sanitation. covid killed less than 1% even nuclear war would not lead to extinction. i have no idea why doomers harp on absolute extinction when even the mostly calamitous things humans ever experienced are nothing like that; stories about actual extinction seem like fairy tales that ignore history, human geographical spread, human genetic diversity, and above all us human resourcefulness and human diversity. they reduce human beings to helpless stick figures, we are not. they also abstract away from military strategy and the reality that no military attack against humanity on the scale doomers imagine would ever go perfectly on the first time, which means humans would launch mighty counterattacks and literal doomers just cloud thinking about the many serious - but not literally existential - threats that we do face.

It cut funding to IRS because the assumption that the way to catch tax fraud is to hire tens of thousands of auditors to look through paper tax returns by hand is insane

Abdul El-Sayed on Israel: My foreign policy views are very simple. I just think we should be the first among equals to enforce international law. I would argue that Israel is the greatest outlier when it comes to the behavior of the government of Israel relative to the approbation you would expect them to get versus what they actually get. They've been able to sustain an apartheid system, which is the only thing you can call sustained nearly six decade long occupation of a people in Gaza and the West Bank. They did a genocide in Gaza. They led us into a war. Benjamin Netanyahu came to the situation room, made the argument for a war. He finally had a dupe big enough who was willing to do it. But think about war aims. We had no clear war aims for that war. Israel had clear war aims. And one of those big war aims seems to be setting up for the annexation of southern Lebanon. And we do all of this and all of this has been done while our stated policy in the region is that we believe in a two-state solution, which is wild because we're aiding, arming, and abetting the very government that is attempting to foreclose on the possibility of a second state openly. And so I'm just saying that we should treat Israel the way we treat any other country that did the same stuff.

I can't put into words how much I want someone who prosecuted sex crimes and child abuse at the helm of this very rape-y country. I am willing to lose a battle or two to win the war. It's that important.

So I said Biden should apologize to Bork. Liberals are mocking me because the "smart" position is "duh Bork bad," but the Borking of Bork was an outrage and contributed to the f'd up politics of today. Bork was *immensely* qualified. You know who thought so? Joe Biden. 1/

Can profs actually fuck off with this

Sam Seder says Neera Tanden and Sarah Longwell are desperate for El-Sayed to lose They're using Hasan Piker now, as a function of Sarah Longwell's push to make Hasan a household name, which she did quite effectively. She just lifted it up and let the Republicans pick it up. It's either sheer ignorance of Longwell and Neera or just such a desperate desire to maintain their power They are desperate to have people like Abdul El-Sayed lose. Desperate. You can see it. They are white knuckled.

“the sand people” What the fuck is wrong with you

🇺🇸 Zuckerberg says that in 5 years you will have a personal AI that knows your life and does the work for you. "Everyone is going to have an agent that really intimately understands your goals and everything around you and can help you get stuff done." He means one assistant on money, health, the house, the calendar, running in the background all day. Meta wants that agent sitting inside the apps people already live in, so it becomes the way you get through a normal day. Writer: Lucas

He's from indiana, he thinks inner city crime is good

My honest reaction:

I have learned that I offended Croatians and I do feel the need to both explain and apologize. On @WhickTv, I was speaking off-the-cuff re: the implausibility of Graham Platner's claim that he had no idea he was getting an SS tattoo. I mentioned that he had gotten the tattoo in Split, Croatia, which I referred to as a "hotbed" for Nazism/Neo-Nazism. I believe I was imprecise in my language and it seemed I was demonizing the entirety of Split and Croatia. That was not my intent. For me, saying a city or region is a 'hotbed' for a specific fringe movement does not mean the general population aligns with it; rather, it means the environment contains a highly concentrated, active hub of that specific subculture. When such a subculture exists, there is also RESISTANCE to that subculture. Which I should have said. I should have said this re: "resistance" because it was a big part of what I meant when I said it is quite implausible to just randomly get an SS tattoo in Croatia, especially in 2007. Everyone knows what a Totenkopf means: both the people who espouse it (like tattoo artists) AND those who oppose it. Croatia is not the U.S. It's a place where the Ustasha/SS actively operated. The "plausible deniability" was always ridiculous for this reason. In 2007 there were still MANY survivors of the Ustasha and SS alive in Split, Croatia. It is also a historical reality that Split and the surrounding region have dealt with highly active, visible far-right and neo-Ustasha fringe groups. This includes specific subcultures--like factions of local football groups and the massive "protests" in the late 2000s--that co-opted Nazi, SS, and fascist iconography. As well as debates over the banning of such iconography. Given that specific climate, the idea that a local tattoo artist accidentally or unknowingly inked an SS Totenkopf onto someone as a 'generic scary skull' without recognizing its history is implausible. It is also implausible that anyone opposed to the Ustasha/SS/Nazism would not recognize the tattoo or the iconography in general. That's all I meant to say. Again: Split also has an incredible history of WWII anti-fascist resistance. An SS Totenkopf would NOT be okay for many within the populace. They would also recognize it immediately. I am sorry if, in my comments re: NeoNazis in the area, I cast any accidental aspersions on the entirety of Croatia. I have heard so many wonderful things about Croatia and have dreamed of one day visiting. Your history is complex and beautiful and I know you have been through a hell of a lot. I am sorry, again.