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Matthew Hickman
@matthickmannl
Serial entrepreneur, opinionated business theorist, lucky husband, caretaker for many cats and dogs, wine snob, and at times, a musician. GO OILERS!
ÜT: 47.562574,-52.70675
Joined November 2009
1.1K Following
313 Followers
4.5K Posts
It's almost as if they know rent freezes cause shortages.
Zero-sum thinking (the fixed-pie fallacy) is a blight on society.
When supply is limited, the answer isn't to make people suffer, deport immigrants, or freeze the economy in place.
It's to increase supply.
a tipsy young Pete Buttigieg stumbles into an obscure room during a Harvard final club party. He sees a book about Canadian bread price regulation, but when he tries to pull it off the bookcase swings open to reveal a secret compartment.
a monkey paw lies on a pedestal inscribed with a message: "make a wish"
"one day, America will have a gay president"
the monkey paw curls
a tipsy young Pete Buttigieg stumbles into an obscure room during a Harvard final club party. He sees a book about Canadian bread price regulation, but when he tries to pull it off the bookcase swings open to reveal a secret compartment.
a monkey paw lies on a pedestal inscribed with a message: "make a wish"
"one day, America will have a gay president"
the monkey paw curls
“If everyone gets off of needle drugs, what will the poor syringe makers do?!”
A decline in car break-ins across Oakland is being welcomed as a public safety win, but it is also contributing to a downturn for some local auto glass repair businesses. https://t.co/14r7UeCpS1
French President Emmanuel Macron pulls off what could be the greatest diplomatic troll of all time by getting Trump to sign the "$300 Billion US Surrender to Iran" deal in... Versailles. The ignoramus Trump will have been clueless as to the historical significance of the location
Greenland is now asking Trump to invade, hoping to secure a deal similar to the one Iran got.
@jasonhickman I’m just bitter about 2006, but maybe someday I’ll get over it.
Would have been funny if they gave the Cup to Anderson but part way through his skate they took it from him and gave it to Bussi #stanleycup
Supply management costs low-income households some $600 a year in excessive dairy and poultry prices.
If you think that doesn't matter but the imagined market power of grocery stores does, you are not a serious person, much less a serious government.
https://t.co/4yoWvOEkb1
People really underestimate the hustle……
Spoke to a DoorDash driver the other day
He makes $200k a year delivering food
Incredible
Asked him how (seemed way too high)
He makes about 20 deliveries a day
Gets paid an average of $7 per delivery
That’s $35k a year
Plus he delivers on a bicycle so his profit margin is basically 100%
So where’d the rest of the money come from?
Last month he got hit by a truck and got a $165k insurance payout
Love that income hack
Might have to try doing DoorDash myself
This is the dumbest tweet ever written by an American, an astonishing achievement given the depth of competition for that accolade.
It's hard to know where to even start.
I'll go from the top and try wade through it, to arrive at where the focus should already be. /1
@mattgurney @craig_d99 Ukraine, which seems to be the current gold-standard on drone deployment, has proven manned fighters to be so obsolete that they’re breaking their necks in a rush to get more …. manned fighter aircraft.
In spite of the obvious need, we refuse to act like a serious country.
Remember how excited everyone was a year ago to get rid of all these idiotic internal barriers? We flaked out. It was too hard or locally controversial.
We are our own worst enemies. Hands down. Trump is simply daring to jab at the wounds we’ve inflicted on ourselves.
He is not, in fact, better than this.
“Matt, Matt! No! You’re better than this, you’re better than this!”
- IIHF ref calls out Matthew Tkachuk for embellishing 🫣 #MensWorlds
I'm sorry, if you had pitched "Donald Trump will get Milli Vanilli to play in honor of America's 250th birthday" as a joke on Weekend Update they would have laughed you out of the room.
@JohnRiche Price, assuming Steve Penney is unavailable.
@MikePMoffatt My uncle referred to his current-and-only wife as “my first wife.” Went over well….
There’s no overstating how extraordinary this Atlantic article is, given the author and the outlet.
As a reminder Bob Kagan is:
- The co-founder of Project for the New American Century, probably the single most imperialist Think Tank in Washington (which is quite a feat)
- A man who spent his entire life advocating for American military interventions, especially in the Middle East, and a vocal advocate of the Iraq war. He started advocating for intervention in Iraq before 9/11, which speaks for itself...
- The husband of Victoria Nuland, an extremely hawkish former senior U.S. official (a key architect of U.S. policy in Ukraine, with the consequences we all witness today)
- The brother of Frederick Kagan, one of the key architects of the Iraq surge
In other words, we ain’t exactly looking at some sort of anti-imperialist peacenik. This is quite literally the guy Dick Cheney called when he needed a pep talk.
And the man is writing in The Atlantic, the most reliably pro-war mainstream media outlet in the U.S. (also quite a feat).
So when HE writes that the U.S. “suffered a total defeat” in Iran that has no precedent in U.S. history and can “neither be repaired nor ignored,” it’s the functional equivalent of Ronald McDonald telling you the burgers aren’t great: it means the burgers really, really aren't great.
Extraordinarily (and somewhat worryingly, for me), his arguments for why this is such a defeat are virtually the same as those I laid out in my article “The First Multipolar War” last month (https://t.co/tbnOpdYqux).
Here they are 👇
1) Vietnam/Afghanistan were survivable, this isn't
He agrees that this war - and the U.S. defeat - is fundamentally different in nature from previous U.S. interventions.
Where I wrote that the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan didn’t change the equation much in terms of power dynamics (“in the grand scheme of things, the giant walked away with little more than a bruised ego”), Kagan writes that “the defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan were costly but did not do lasting damage to America's overall position in the world.”
And when I wrote that “it’s painfully obvious that the Iran war is of a qualitatively different nature” from these, he writes that “defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character.”
Same point.
2) Iran will never relinquish Hormuz and uses it as selective leverage
When I wrote that Iran has turned “freedom of navigation” on its head by establishing “a permission-based regime” through the Strait of Hormuz, Kagan arrives at the same conclusion: “Iran will be able not only to demand tolls for passage, but to limit transit to those nations with which it has good relations.”
He also agrees that “Iran has no interest in returning to the status quo ante,” when I myself cited Iran’s parliament speaker Ghalibaf in my article, saying: “The Strait of Hormuz situation won’t return to its pre-war status.” Same point and virtually the same words.
3) Gulf states will have to accommodate Iran
He agrees that most Gulf states will have no choice but to accommodate Iran, effectively making Iran into a, if not THE, dominant regional power.
Kagan writes “the United States will have proved itself a paper tiger, forcing the Gulf and other Arab states to accommodate Iran.”
On my end, I wrote that “the Gulf monarchies will eventually have to choose between two security propositions. One where they stay aligned with a distant superpower that [can’t protect them]. The other proposition being: make peace with the regional power that just proved it can hit [them] whenever it wants.” Which is not much of a choice…
4) Military impossibility to reopen Hormuz
Kagan writes that “if the United States with its mighty Navy can't or won't open the strait, no coalition of forces with just a fraction of the Americans' capability will be able to, either.”
On my end, in my article I cited Germany’s defense minister Boris Pistorius: “What does Trump expect a handful of European frigates to do that the powerful US Navy cannot?”
The exact same argument.
5) Global chain reaction
Kagan agrees that this is a global strategic failure that fundamentally changes the U.S.’s position in the world. As he puts it: “America's once-dominant position in the Gulf is just the first of many casualties… America's allies in East Asia and Europe must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts.”
You’ll have guessed it, I wrote essentially the same thing: “Think about what it says if you’re Saudi Arabia, quietly watching your American-built defenses fail to protect your own refineries. Or any European country now facing the worst energy shock since 1973, caused not by your enemy but by your ally, and realizing that said ‘ally,’ supposedly in charge of ‘protecting’ you, couldn’t even protect Israel’s most strategic sites - when it’s the country with which it’s joined at the hip. I’m not even speaking about China or Russia who are seeing their worldview being validated on almost every axis simultaneously.”
6) Weapons stocks depleted, credibility shattered
Kagan: “just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels, with no quick remedy in sight.”
Me: “America’s most advanced weapons systems are much more vulnerable than previously thought - not theoretically, but in actual combat.”
Kagan: “America's allies… must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts.”
Me: “The U.S. security guarantee has been empirically falsified in real time.”
-----------
So, yup, Bob Kagan and I agree on nearly everything. I need a shower 🤢
Reassuringly though, we still differ on a few fundamental aspects.
First of all, arguably the most important one, the moral aspect. In typical neocon fashion, his article contains not a word about the human cost of this war - not the 165 schoolgirls, not the devastation inflicted on Iranians during 37 days of bombing, not the toll this war is taking on the entire world through its devastating economic consequences (the economic devastation on ordinary people worldwide is referenced only as a political problem for Trump). For him, this is purely a strategic chess problem, morality and people don’t figure in his mental map.
For me, the moral bankruptcy of this war isn't separate from the strategic failure - it is the strategic failure. Much like Gaza can only be a failure because of its sheer abjectness.
Secondly, there is not an instant of reflection in the article on how we got there. Which is unsurprising because he personally, alongside his wife, his brother, and every co-signatory of every PNAC letter, spent a generation pushing for exactly this kind of confrontation. The man spend 30 years advocating for military dominance in the Middle East and hostility towards Iran, thereby forging them as an adversary and facilitating this very war that he now says has “checkmated” America.
I know introspection has never been the neocon forte but at some point you have to stop setting houses on fire and then writing op-eds about how surprising the smoke is.
Last but not least, we differ on what should be done. This is the funniest part of Kagan’s article - showing that the man is decidedly beyond salvation. On one hand he calls this a “checkmate” by Iran, and a U.S. defeat that can “neither be repaired nor ignored,” yet an the other hand his solution for it is… surprise, surprise… a bigger war still!
He writes that what’s to be done is “engage in a full-scale ground and naval war to remove the current Iranian regime, and then to occupy Iran until a new government can take hold.”
The arsonist's solution to the fire is a bigger fire ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For my end, this was the conclusion of my previous article:
"There is almost a Greek tragedy quality to U.S. actions lately where every move taken to escape one’s fate becomes the mechanism that delivers it. The U.S. went to war to reassert dominance - and proved it could no longer dominate. It demanded allies send warships - and revealed it had no real allies. It waged forty years of maximum pressure to break Iran before this moment came - and instead forged the very adversary now capable of meeting it. It started the war in part to have additional leverage over China - and handed the world the spectacle of begging China for help. The prophecy was multipolarity. Every American action to prevent it reveals it instead."
I wouldn’t change a word. The only thing that's changed since I wrote it is that even the arsonists now smell the smoke.
Src for the Atlantic article: https://t.co/ItED9WS9Kn
![RnaudBertrand's tweet photo. There’s no overstating how extraordinary this Atlantic article is, given the author and the outlet.
As a reminder Bob Kagan is:
- The co-founder of Project for the New American Century, probably the single most imperialist Think Tank in Washington (which is quite a feat)
- A man who spent his entire life advocating for American military interventions, especially in the Middle East, and a vocal advocate of the Iraq war. He started advocating for intervention in Iraq before 9/11, which speaks for itself...
- The husband of Victoria Nuland, an extremely hawkish former senior U.S. official (a key architect of U.S. policy in Ukraine, with the consequences we all witness today)
- The brother of Frederick Kagan, one of the key architects of the Iraq surge
In other words, we ain’t exactly looking at some sort of anti-imperialist peacenik. This is quite literally the guy Dick Cheney called when he needed a pep talk.
And the man is writing in The Atlantic, the most reliably pro-war mainstream media outlet in the U.S. (also quite a feat).
So when HE writes that the U.S. “suffered a total defeat” in Iran that has no precedent in U.S. history and can “neither be repaired nor ignored,” it’s the functional equivalent of Ronald McDonald telling you the burgers aren’t great: it means the burgers really, really aren't great.
Extraordinarily (and somewhat worryingly, for me), his arguments for why this is such a defeat are virtually the same as those I laid out in my article “The First Multipolar War” last month (https://t.co/tbnOpdYqux).
Here they are 👇
1) Vietnam/Afghanistan were survivable, this isn't
He agrees that this war - and the U.S. defeat - is fundamentally different in nature from previous U.S. interventions.
Where I wrote that the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan didn’t change the equation much in terms of power dynamics (“in the grand scheme of things, the giant walked away with little more than a bruised ego”), Kagan writes that “the defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan were costly but did not do lasting damage to America's overall position in the world.”
And when I wrote that “it’s painfully obvious that the Iran war is of a qualitatively different nature” from these, he writes that “defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character.”
Same point.
2) Iran will never relinquish Hormuz and uses it as selective leverage
When I wrote that Iran has turned “freedom of navigation” on its head by establishing “a permission-based regime” through the Strait of Hormuz, Kagan arrives at the same conclusion: “Iran will be able not only to demand tolls for passage, but to limit transit to those nations with which it has good relations.”
He also agrees that “Iran has no interest in returning to the status quo ante,” when I myself cited Iran’s parliament speaker Ghalibaf in my article, saying: “The Strait of Hormuz situation won’t return to its pre-war status.” Same point and virtually the same words.
3) Gulf states will have to accommodate Iran
He agrees that most Gulf states will have no choice but to accommodate Iran, effectively making Iran into a, if not THE, dominant regional power.
Kagan writes “the United States will have proved itself a paper tiger, forcing the Gulf and other Arab states to accommodate Iran.”
On my end, I wrote that “the Gulf monarchies will eventually have to choose between two security propositions. One where they stay aligned with a distant superpower that [can’t protect them]. The other proposition being: make peace with the regional power that just proved it can hit [them] whenever it wants.” Which is not much of a choice…
4) Military impossibility to reopen Hormuz
Kagan writes that “if the United States with its mighty Navy can't or won't open the strait, no coalition of forces with just a fraction of the Americans' capability will be able to, either.”
On my end, in my article I cited Germany’s defense minister Boris Pistorius: “What does Trump expect a handful of European frigates to do that the powerful US Navy cannot?”
The exact same argument.
5) Global chain reaction
Kagan agrees that this is a global strategic failure that fundamentally changes the U.S.’s position in the world. As he puts it: “America's once-dominant position in the Gulf is just the first of many casualties… America's allies in East Asia and Europe must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts.”
You’ll have guessed it, I wrote essentially the same thing: “Think about what it says if you’re Saudi Arabia, quietly watching your American-built defenses fail to protect your own refineries. Or any European country now facing the worst energy shock since 1973, caused not by your enemy but by your ally, and realizing that said ‘ally,’ supposedly in charge of ‘protecting’ you, couldn’t even protect Israel’s most strategic sites - when it’s the country with which it’s joined at the hip. I’m not even speaking about China or Russia who are seeing their worldview being validated on almost every axis simultaneously.”
6) Weapons stocks depleted, credibility shattered
Kagan: “just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels, with no quick remedy in sight.”
Me: “America’s most advanced weapons systems are much more vulnerable than previously thought - not theoretically, but in actual combat.”
Kagan: “America's allies… must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts.”
Me: “The U.S. security guarantee has been empirically falsified in real time.”
-----------
So, yup, Bob Kagan and I agree on nearly everything. I need a shower 🤢
Reassuringly though, we still differ on a few fundamental aspects.
First of all, arguably the most important one, the moral aspect. In typical neocon fashion, his article contains not a word about the human cost of this war - not the 165 schoolgirls, not the devastation inflicted on Iranians during 37 days of bombing, not the toll this war is taking on the entire world through its devastating economic consequences (the economic devastation on ordinary people worldwide is referenced only as a political problem for Trump). For him, this is purely a strategic chess problem, morality and people don’t figure in his mental map.
For me, the moral bankruptcy of this war isn't separate from the strategic failure - it is the strategic failure. Much like Gaza can only be a failure because of its sheer abjectness.
Secondly, there is not an instant of reflection in the article on how we got there. Which is unsurprising because he personally, alongside his wife, his brother, and every co-signatory of every PNAC letter, spent a generation pushing for exactly this kind of confrontation. The man spend 30 years advocating for military dominance in the Middle East and hostility towards Iran, thereby forging them as an adversary and facilitating this very war that he now says has “checkmated” America.
I know introspection has never been the neocon forte but at some point you have to stop setting houses on fire and then writing op-eds about how surprising the smoke is.
Last but not least, we differ on what should be done. This is the funniest part of Kagan’s article - showing that the man is decidedly beyond salvation. On one hand he calls this a “checkmate” by Iran, and a U.S. defeat that can “neither be repaired nor ignored,” yet an the other hand his solution for it is… surprise, surprise… a bigger war still!
He writes that what’s to be done is “engage in a full-scale ground and naval war to remove the current Iranian regime, and then to occupy Iran until a new government can take hold.”
The arsonist's solution to the fire is a bigger fire ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For my end, this was the conclusion of my previous article:
"There is almost a Greek tragedy quality to U.S. actions lately where every move taken to escape one’s fate becomes the mechanism that delivers it. The U.S. went to war to reassert dominance - and proved it could no longer dominate. It demanded allies send warships - and revealed it had no real allies. It waged forty years of maximum pressure to break Iran before this moment came - and instead forged the very adversary now capable of meeting it. It started the war in part to have additional leverage over China - and handed the world the spectacle of begging China for help. The prophecy was multipolarity. Every American action to prevent it reveals it instead."
I wouldn’t change a word. The only thing that's changed since I wrote it is that even the arsonists now smell the smoke.
Src for the Atlantic article: https://t.co/ItED9WS9Kn](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HIBa-IQacAAr9O1.jpg)
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