Lev Bass

Freedom and reason advocate, Software Engineer, Photographer

[Lev Bass @lev888]

@omgsidewalks Because a lot of people with $1,510 in their bank account are guided by principles, not envy.

[Lev Bass @lev888]

@billbachan2 @boston25 Voters telling landlords what they can and cannot do is tyranny.

[Charles Murray @charlesmurray]

My daughter's friend in grad school, upon being asked by a member of her dissertation committee why she didn't include a Marxist perspective. "I grew up in the Soviet Union. I don't practice recreational Marxism."

[Lev Bass @lev888]

@DanielPriestley Screwing over individuals for the benefit of the collective is "the best sounding system"?

[Chris Freiman @cafreiman]

For Father’s Day, I’ll share this letter to Karl Marx from his dad

[Teddy - PolyBackTest.com @Bitcoin_Teddy]

Christopher Hitchens: ”In 1786, when the United States was barely a country, it was having its sailors taken as slaves by the Barbary states, the states of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Tripoli, shores of Tripoli. Ships stopped, its crews carried off into slavery. We estimate 1.5 million European and American slaves taken between 1750 and 1815.

Jefferson and Adams went to their ambassador in London and said, why do you do this to us? The United States has never had a quarrel with the Muslim world of any kind. We weren't in the crusades. We weren't at war with Spain. Why do you do this to our people and our ships? Why do you plunder and enslave our people? The ambassador said very plainly, Mr. Abdul Rahman said, because the Quran gives us permission to do so, because you are infidels, and that's our answer. Jefferson said, well, in that case, I will send a navy which will crush your state, which he did.

Islamic fundamentalism is not created by American democracy. It's a lie to say so. It's a masochistic lie, and it excuses those who are the real criminals, and blames us for the attacks made upon us.”

[Boston Herald @bostonherald]

Howie Carr | Yesterday, the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) removed a November ballot question that could have reduced the state income tax from 5% to 4%. Polls showed it would have passed easily, so it had to be stopped. https://t.co/WYhZxBDVcB

[Brian Shortsleeve for Massachusetts @ShortsleeveMA]

Massachusetts citizens rallied behind a ballot question to lower the income tax from 5% to 4%. More than 100,000 people signed petitions to put it before the voters.

Now, because of a flagrant and indefensible error by the Attorney General in describing the measure, those citizens have been disenfranchised.

I am stunned by this level of malpractice. Once again, Beacon Hill gets away with ignoring the people, and once again Massachusetts voters are the ones who pay the price.

[Nick Gillespie @nickgillespie]

'Why is a flat-screen TV affordable and a college education not?...Because Congress has spent 60 years trying to make college affordable and has spent zero years trying to make TVs affordable.' By @reason's Aaron Brown, Michael Mendelson, @CliffordAsness https://t.co/ffQC5XQmIy

[Lev Bass @lev888]

@NYTGames, could you fix this bug?

[Lev Bass @lev888]

@NathanJRobinson What exactly changes the result of your moral calculation when someone crosses the trillion dollar line? Which basic principle is involved?

[Lev Bass @lev888]

@NathanJRobinson @RockChartrand A capacity to help does not create an obligation to help.

[Lev Bass @lev888]

@SenSanders Lie by omission. There is a cap on benefits.

[Lev Bass @lev888]

@mcsquared34 Human rights apply to millions and to 2 people. If you tell the only other human that you have a right to food, it means you want to enslave him or her.

[Phil Magness @PhilWMagness]

Here's something many people don't know about me -

Before I publicly dissected the long list of problems in the 1619 Project, I contacted the New York Times through their official channels to request a series of corrections to unambiguous factual errors in its content. The editor - Jake Silverstein - brushed me off and refused any correction - a pattern he also exhibited toward other critics from across the spectrum.

Before I publicly broke the story about Kevin Kruse's plagiarism in Reason, I contacted Princeton's academic integrity officer and alerted him to the problems I had found, giving them a chance to respond and address it internally. They ignored my email and later claimed to have lost my email after I went public.

Before I published my findings on Quinn Slobodian's habitual manipulation of source materials to alter its plain meaning through misquotation, I submitted an article to Contemporary European History (the journal where the worst examples appeared), highlighting the problems with the passages and asking for a correction through their official process. They desk-rejected it, brushed me off, and falsely claimed that Slobodian's piece had been thoroughly vetted in peer review. In fact, one of their own referees had flagged the same problems over a year earlier and recommended rejection of the article.

Before I published an expose on Nancy MacLean & Sandy Darity's similar manipulation of W.H. Hutt quotations in their article for History of Economics Review, I (along with 2 coauthors) submitted a response comment to this journal asking for a correction through its official processes. The editor gave us a complete runaround where he imposed an arbitrary length limit requiring us to cut the content, sent the trimmed version to a referee, then rejected the piece because the referee said we didn't sufficiently address the very same things we were forced by the editor to cut. When I then asked the editor to issue a simple corrigendum to the most egregious misquotation (one that transformed Hutt's explicit attack on the racism of white Afrikaners into a defense of Apartheid), he refused and tried to pass it off as a difference of "interpretation."

Before I published an expose of a leading covid masking model in the Wall Street Journal, I sent a comment to the medical journal that published it alerting them to a math error that changed their entire set of results. The journal acknowledged the error was real but refused to publish my piece on the grounds that the "next release" of the model would be updated to reflect it - even as politicians up to and including Joe Biden were trumpeting the erroneous results all over the news.

[Lev Bass @lev888]

@brewerov Bad translation

[Lev Bass @lev888]

@sowelleconomics I rarely disagree with Sowell, but he is wrong here - Socialism is an awful idea.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Release the footage, you evil bastards!

[Lev Bass @lev888]

@UziCryptoo A promotion is not a loophole.

[Jeff Bezos @JeffBezos]

Please do a quick read of this. It’s short, well written, and will remove a bit of wool from over your eyes.