Heavy Intel

Tacticool Liberal, Neera Tanden/Clinton Dem, Ally to Many, Enemy to a whole bunch, NY Hokie, #CovidisAirborne

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

Very, very important caveat:

[Everything Price Sufferer (but especially eggs) @agraybee]

I need non-Americans to understand that your view of America is being filtered through clinically depressed shut-ins. In real life we actually have lots of free time to spend with our friends and family.

[Centrism Fan Acct 🔹 @Wilson__Valdez]

Also very telling who Republican money always boosts; the Bernie Left. Every single time.

Arguably they helped elect the
progressive guy in Maine 2nd district, instead of the more moderate candidate that the DCCC wanted, and now the race is almost certainly just shot.

[Francis Fukuyama @FukuyamaFrancis]

The Myth of Authoritarian Efficiency https://t.co/GeN1TPGZwR

[Jason Ryan @jasonryanmd]

Whole body scans in asymptomatic people won't save lives overall. They will mostly find benign incidentalomas that cause anxiety for otherwise healthy people. Many of us have benign growths that mimic cancer but are harmless. These will be discovered leading to unnecessary panic and additional testing that causes harm.

If you want to live a long healthy life, skip the scan and instead go the gym and eat a salad.

[spor @sporadica]

i still haven't fully processed that this random German guy came to the US as a tourist for the World Cup, was simply so genuinely excited about the country that he live-tweeted himself into mega-virality and now every org in America is giving him free stuff, tours, housing, etc

never doubt the power of social media

[Tim @trouble_man90]

I remember during Biden, the press combed through hundreds of pages of White House visitor logs, found a guy that was a Parkinson’s specialist, then accused Biden of having Parkinson’s disease and hung it from the country.

Are they going to apply that same energy with these 22 mystery specialists??

[Centrism Fan Acct 🔹 @Wilson__Valdez]

So old I remember when inflation was literally the only thing the media talked about. Despite the US objectively having the best post-covid recovery in the world, the coverage was just searingly negative. Human interest stories of family's 'suffering.'

And now this will barely be a blip in the news cycle.

[Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 @JeremiahDJohns]

We should have listened

[Centrism Fan Acct 🔹 @Wilson__Valdez]

I mean, I know this gets said like every few days at this point, but this is easily the most corrupt, scandalous thing done by a president maybe...ever?

Not only did he grant full pardons and erase the (already watered down) criminal convictions of people who did violence on his behalf but now he is financially rewarding them.

The message is clear; if you do violence on behalf of Republicans, you will be treated as a hero!

[Nikolaj🇺🇦🇵🇸 @nikicaga]

Trump has a scandal that would end almost any other president in history like once a week

[Centrism Fan Acct 🔹 @Wilson__Valdez]

Somehow, media isn't seeking out 'sob' stories of families feeling the pain. Would be much easier than finding, say, a family who drinks 80 gallons of milk a week. Weird.

[Kyle Minogue @thegremylyn]

@JeremiahDJohns

[The Notorious S.E.B. @bigseb31213]

@ok_post_guy if you're in the club it genuinely does not matter what you do. zohran can raid the pensions of unionized city workers, get the city's credit downgraded, retreat from his signiature policy positions, yuk it up with trump, and none of it matters because the Cool Kids like him

[Swann Marcus @SwannMarcus89]

Like a party of Mary Peltola’s and Gluesenkamp Perez’s just straight up wins everywhere and gets more long term progressive wins at the federal level. There’s no universe where Platner’s a better candidate than Blue Dog Peltola. She’s won statewide elections in Alaska!

[Jessica Riedl 🧀 🇺🇦 @JessicaBRiedl]

My 2c on the "should Democrats move leftward after 2024" debate is that:
- When Democrats win, progressives say it proves that voters want far-left policies.
- When Democrats lose, progressives say it proves that voters want far-left policies (that the candidate failed to offer).

Can they provide any plausible election outcome that would show that voters reject far-leftism? If not, a hypothesis that is unfalsifiable is flawed and should be ignored.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

I'm glad that the author of "Rent Control Is Fine, Actually" calls themself Unlearning Economics, bc it's good to just state things clearly, such as the open animosity that many left economic populists have for the field of economics and economists themselves.

Economists aren't gods, and economics isn't a divine truth, but economists are good--better than most--at something critical for making public policy: They're good at identifying tradeoffs. "Rents are too high, so freeze them" is compelling politics. But in the absence of other pro-supply policies, if you make it illegal to increase rents, landlords will stop upgrading units and convert them to condos, which reduces the supply of units for rent, reduces mobility, and drives up rents for everybody else.

The left econ populists have some clear, and clearly stated, policy ideas:

- Rents are too high, so freeze them.
- Electricity is expensive, so stop rate increases.
- Homes are too expensive, so ban institutional investors.
- Power prices are rising, so ban data center construction.

... All these policies feel like solutions because they're brisk, they name enemies, and they take on the most visible source of frustration. But they are much better as villain-naming exercises than they are as a complete public policy. On their own, each creates other problems: less housing built, less clean electricity built, abdicating energy policy by encouraging AI firms to build data centers abroad in unsavory countries with more emissions, etc.

I can't think of a single economic populist idea that wouldn't be helped with a little dose of economics, which is why it's troubling when I see the left participating in, and even celebrating, the great unlearning of economics.

[NickFrank40 @NickyFrank30]

Ok but not for the reasons you think.

Trump did not win because Obama didn’t prosecute Wall Street. That’s just leftist cope.

He won because working class voters got annoyed with a bunch of college educated eggheads with wacky social and culture views being in charge for so long.

[constans @constans]

@NickyFrank30 “The billionaires are the ones causing your problems, not the immigrants” is a message very compelling to the downwardly mobile middle class young people. But the working class hates those downwardly mobile young people way more than billionaires or immigrants

[LoLNothingMatters @DastDn]

Francis Fukuyama is a fucking genius and a prophet.