Yascha Mounk
@Yascha_Mounk
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The Identity Trap | Founder @JoinPersuasion | Professor @JohnsHopkins | Writer @TheAtlantic | Fellow @CFR_org | Moynihan Public Scholar @CCNY | Opinions mine
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Pinned Tweet
A wonderful way to finish a difficult year:
The Identity Trap was chosen as a Best Book of 2023 by publications including The Economist, The Financial Times, and Prospect Magazine.
If you want to understand the new ideology transforming our culture, please give it a look.
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Need a reminder of the human cost of dictatorship? All these are journalists who criticized Putin--and died under mysterious circumstances
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It’s not anti-Semitic to criticize the Israeli government.
It’s not anti-Semitic to put the current conflict in historical context.
It’s not anti-Semitic to mourn the death of Palestinian civilians.
But if you describe the slaughter of 1,400 civilians as “military action” or…
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The Italian College of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care just published the most extraordinary medical document I’ve ever seen.
To help people from Germany to America understand what we’re about to face, I am publishing translated extracts here.
[Thread.]
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Wow.
The German Embassy has just recommended that all German citizens who are currently in the United States return home as quickly as possible.
That... tells you a lot about how badly America is handling the pandemic.
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It’s not only
@Harvard
.
I have reviewed the Twitter and Instagram accounts of
@Yale
,
@Princeton
,
@Columbia
,
@Stanford
,
@Dartmouth
and
@JohnsHopkins
.
Not a single one of them has issued a statement about the atrocities committed by Hamas.
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The Taliban now require all women in the country to wear the burqa in public.
We have failed the women of Afghanistan.
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CNN, BBC and NYT all sent push alerts blaming Israel for killing hundreds of civilians at the hospital.
If, as now looks likely, it is confirmed that the cause was a misfired rocket from Islamic Jihad, will they send push alerts correcting the original story?
Of course not.
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Twitter has become terrible.
But the depressing truth of it is that anyone who spends five minutes of here gets a basic sense of the barbarity of what just happened in Israel.
Anyone who spends five minutes browsing the headlines of NYT, WaPo, WSJ and Guardian has no idea.
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If you think the United States is the same as Nazi Germany you have, with all due respect, completely and utterly lost the plot.
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Just watched a two-hour focus group about American politics.
Here's a few thoughts about it, in no particular order.
1) Twitter is not the real world. Twitter is not the real world. Twitter is not the real world. Don't believe me? Go talk (or listen) to some voters.
[Thread.]
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Holy s**t.
Over the course of three years, the number of Americans who say that they feel justified in using violence to achieve their political goals has gone up from 8 percent to over 33 percent.
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A Pakistani-American doctor was fired *and is being prosecuted* because he gave an opened vaccine to anyone he could find rather than letting it go to waste.
Apparently, it would have been more "equitable" to throw the vaccine out.
This is madness.
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If this doesn't make you angry, I don't know what will.
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A key indicator of an unhealthy intellectual atmosphere is when people hesitate to point out blatant factual inaccuracies because they worry that people with real political or cultural power will read this as evidence of insufficient ideological loyalty and punish them for it.
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Three intrepid academics just perpetrated a giant version of the Sokal Hoax, placing scores of fake papers in major academic journals. Call it Sokal Squared.
The result is hilarious and delightful. It also showcases a serious problem with big parts of academia.
(Thread.)
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The frontrunner to become the next mayor of Portland apparently wore a skirt with pictures of Mao and Che Guevara.
While campaigning for the position.
The incoherence and hypocrisy in what people get canceled for, and what we let pass without a word, remains astonishing.
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The moral choices involved in figuring out who gets care when hospitals do not have the resources to treat all critical patients are heart-breaking.
But the moral choices involved in doing what we can today to avert that situation are straightforward.
Cancel everything now.
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I don't care about Hunter Biden. Nor do I care about his laptop.
But that Twitter, under the aegis of fighting "misinformation," banned a major newspaper for reporting something that turned out to be true should seriously worry those still advocating similar forms of censorship.
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Russia just poisoned 500 people in the middle of the UK.
Jeremy Corbyn's response?
- Not a word of criticism.
- Blame Tories.
- UK "shouldn't let tensions get worse"
- We need "dialogue" with Russia.
Reminder for my lefty friends: Corbyn equals Jill Stein, not Bernie Sanders.
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Doctors and nurses in Italy face an impossible dilemma: who to treat and who to let die.
But the moral obligation we face is very clear: We must arrest the crisis before the impossible becomes unavoidable.
Cancel everything. Now.
Me
@TheAtlantic
.
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It's just astonishing how much of American culture is now consumed by attempts to get people punished, debates about people getting punished, and campaigns to stop people from getting punished.
The mark of a deeply sick society.
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Whatever happens, those of us who want to defeat Trumpism for the long haul will need to ask ourselves some very serious questions after tonight.
And no, "half of our compatriots are irredeemable bigots" is not going to cut it.
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No, Evo Morales' resignation is not a coup; it is one of the few big victories democracy has won in recent years.
Both leftist dictators, like Venezuela's Maduro, and far-right populists, like Hungary’s Orbán, should be terrified by it.
Me
@TheAtlantic
.
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"Mama?"
"Yes?"
"I don't feel so good."
"I know. It's over soon."
"I need water."
"You can drink soon."
"Mama?"
"What is it, my beauty?"
"Do you think they also killed other people in the kibbutz?"
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1) Cancel culture does exist.
2) People shouldn't be fired for bad tweets (even if they cheered on others being fired for similar offenses).
3) Anyone who thinks that cancel culture will always help to advance their political cause is deeply naive. It's a lose-lose proposition.
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It's amazing how long it has taken for people to feel comfortable saying the obvious: White Fragility is a terrible, terrible book, and no person who cares about building a fair or vibrant multiethnic democracy should ever have recommended it.
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BUT here’s the point I do want everyone to take away from this:
Doctors in America will likely be faced with similarly heartbreaking dilemmas very soon.
But we can avoid that if we:.
* Start engaging in extreme forms of social distancing
* Radically expand ICU capacities
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Dear
@Amazon
,
Yes, I recently bought a humidifier.
No, that doesn't mean I'm in the market for lots more humidifiers.
In fact, it means that I won't need another humidifier for a good number of years.
Thanks for reminding me that the AI apocalypse is a long way off,
Yascha
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I’ve been digging into some of the stories of people getting fired for supposed racism.
What I found was companies cravenly sacrificing employees—some of them working-class people of color—who did nothing wrong.
My latest
@TheAtlantic
.
[Thread]
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You can't win an election by telling voters that their concerns are imaginary.
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A striking contrast between German and American papers:
Der Spiegel: “A targeted massacre - at least 260 confirmed dead at festival near Gaza”
Die Zeit: “Hamas Now Has an Awful Ransom”
NYT: “Israel Battles Militants as Netanyahu Warns of Long War”
WaPo: “Both Sides Reeling.”
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Universities must protect free speech. This means they can’t punish students for saying stupid things, however offensive.
But part of protecting free speech is to punish students who violate the rules that make free speech possible for everyone else. This includes punishing…
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In 2016, a reporter asked me about some of the worst-case scenarios that a Trump presidency might bring.
"Trump could direct the Department of Justice to investigate his political opponents," I said, among other things.
The reporter looked at me like I was insane.
Trump told POLITICO on Friday that it would be “appropriate” for him to speak to Attorney General Bill Barr about launching an investigation into his potential 2020 rival, Joe Biden
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The Fake News awards are the Trump administration in a nutshell: A serious attack on America's founding principles--in this case, the freedom of the press--carried out in such a ludicrously ham-fisted manner that it's deceptively difficult to take it seriously.
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Three days ago, a 28-year old employee of the International Monetary Fund suggested that the cost social distancing is exacting "on the economy" might be more important than "the human aspect of the disease."
Today, he succumbed to CoViD-19.
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Czech flags. Ukrainian flags. EU flags.
Vladimir Putin is doing what nobody else could: He's uniting Europe.
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Background:
A week ago, Italy had so few cases of corona that it could give each stricken patient high-quality care.
Today, some hospitals are so overwhelmed that they simply cannot treat every patient. They are starting to do wartime triage.
Here’s the guidance for that.
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Don’t forget this moment.
I never want to hear that nice, sensible, reasonable people should just ignore bad ideas on the left ever again.
It’s time to fight back against the new ideology that ate big parts of the left—in a way that’s principled, gracious, and uncompromising.
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What if I told you that NATO is a social construct?
What if I told you that Russia is a social construct?
What if I told you that all kinds of things are social constructs, but that doesn't make them less real or scary when they're bombing your (socially constructed) country?
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I strongly disagree with some of Andy Ngo's work. But to suggest "he has a history of battling with anti-fascist groups" is slander.
Ngo criticizes Antifa. Antifa members assaulted him.
It's astonishing that this
@nytimes
report erases that difference.
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J. K. Rowling is not an anti-Semite.
And the ease with which major voices and legacy media outlets are smearing her as one because they dislike her stance on a different issue is truly dystopian.
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The boss of the NYT op-ed page was fired because he ran a controversial op-ed by a sitting U.S. Senator.
But a few months later, a propagandist for an authoritarian regime gets to argue that a violent putdown of peaceful protests was needed in the same pages.
This is just nuts.
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The editor has spoken: You cannot, in 2018, call the murder of Jews in the United States racist in a left-leaning publication, because apparently we're too white to be the victims of racism (but not too white to be murdered).
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3) The ads that most move people towards Biden aren't the glitzy, fast-moving, ominous voiceover ones.
They are a) simple clips of people talking about Trump's failures without undue hyperbole or b) Joe Biden talking about today's America with decency and humility.
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For the past years, Never Trumpers have been derided from both sides.
Trump mocked them for being powerless. The left mocked them for being ineffectual.
But at great personal cost, they showed that some principled conservatives knew they had to denounce Trump.
Thank you. ♥️
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The idea that the problem with apartheid South Africa was "unchecked speech"—rather than extreme censorship, propaganda, and oppression—is just remarkably ignorant.
And this is not from some rando on Twitter; it's from the New York Times' Johannesburg Bureau Chief!
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Academic freedom absolutely does *not* entail professors giving students better grades for parroting their political point of view.
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Remarkable how similarly, and how similarly inaccurate, all the major newspapers are describing what just happened in Israel on their front pages.
All are talking, vaguely, about “militants” who are “launching attacks”; not about the apparent murder and kidnapping of civilians.
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There's a lot going on in the world, I know.
But can we just take a moment to acknowledge how utterly nuts it is that the 33 year old lead witness in a trial against Silvio Berlusconi died under mysterious circumstances amidst signs that she was poisoned?
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I actually think universities should not be in the business of issuing these kinds of statements.
But since they do issue statements about all kinds of events all of the time, it sends a very clear message if they then happen to fall silent when the victims are Jews.
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In nearly every country, authoritarian populists managed to subvert electoral systems by stacking the electoral commission with loyalists—except here.
America's diversity of electoral rules breeds chaos and complexity. It is also the best defense against authoritarian takeover.
“No matter who ends up prevailing, it is clear that Congress needs to establish a federal elections agency to ensure that the voting process is fair, consistent, secure and legitimate,” write
@hill_charlotte
and
@leedrutman
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I don't think it's quite sunk in for most people that Russia is, by all appearances, planning a full-scale war in the middle of Europe.
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Harvard students: “Israel is solely responsible for Hamas brutally murdering 1,400 civilians.”
Writer for Vox and New York Magazine: 𝘏𝘰𝘭𝘥 𝘮𝘺 𝘣𝘦𝘦𝘳. 𝘏𝘮. 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘐 𝘣𝘦𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘱𝘳𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵. 𝘖𝘒, 𝘐 𝘨𝘰𝘵 𝘪𝘵: “‘Zionists’ are…
wait til they find out zionists couldve saved hundreds of thousands of Jews from the gas chambers and decided not to. the nuremberg trials revealed they actively negotiated with nazis and even helped SS officers in Hungary get off with mass murder. this is not about antisemitism.
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We don't have to choose between a version of America that whitewashes its injustices and one that casts the founding as fundamentally evil.
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4) None of the supposed negatives for Biden that are endlessly rehearsed in the press seemed to matter.
But voters who leaned towards Biden didn't have a strong sense of who he is. Instead of cutting more attacks on Trump, Dems need to invest in defining Biden.
Simple will do!
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If over half of the employees of the New York Times feel that they can't say what they think, why on earth should anyone trust what they write?
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Sooner or later, a deeply conservative black candidate will become the Republican nominee for President, and most American journalists simply won't have the language or conceptual tools to comprehend what's happening.
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Some hopeful news:
In Northern Italy, 60 volunteers who thought they'd never suffered COVID-19 gave blood. 40 of them tested positive for antibodies to the virus.
We URGENTLY need randomized testing to see how representative this finding is.
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In 1951, Bertrand Russel took to the
@nytimes
to argue that the best answer to fanaticism was a calm search for truth. His Ten Commandments of Liberal Inquiry could not be more relevant today.
(Number 6 will blow your mind! ;) )
Thread.
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If you think it's a problem for white people to have close friendships with non-white people (and their children), the problem might just be you.
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Are you fucking kidding me?
The motive may not yet be proven. But to claim that it is "unclear" is just absurd.
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The real reason for free speech is not that all opinions have value or are worth airing.
It's that there is no individual or institution whom I trust to make the decision as to *which* opinions are worthless on my behalf.
And nor should you.
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Italy today:
* Whole country in lockdown
* Hospitals completely overwhelmed
* Doctors forced to decide which patients get treatment based on who is most likely to survive
Italy today. Spain, Germany, America tomorrow.
Cancel everything.
Now.
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6) We would be spared a TON of bad scholarship if political scientists who work on voting behavior were forced to watch a focus group every month.
[The End.]
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"In a context of grave shortage of medical resources, the allocation criteria need to guarantee that those patients with the highest chance of therapeutic success will retain access to intensive care.
It's a matter of giving priority to 'the highest hope of life and survival.'"
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Just debated Ukraine on a big German-language TV show. Other guests included:
* A "peace activist" who says Ukraine should have laid down arms, prompting Russia to do the same
* A former Stasi informant who blamed Ukrainian neo-Nazis for "provoking" Putin so badly he had to act
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I'm sick and tired of the people making excuses for extremists indulging their puerile longing for political violence, whatever their motivations or rationalizations.
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Democrats have an absurd, denunciatory idea of what Republicans believe—and vice versa.
Worse, the institutions that are meant to remedy misperceptions, from universities to news outlets, may actually make them worse.
Me
@TheAtlantic
[Short Thread.]
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According to Robin DiAngelo, "'rationalism' is a white criterion for hiring, a white qualification that should be reconsidered."
If you think rationalism is a white trait, you are a racist.
The author of the bestselling book in the country is a racist.
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Michael Cohen's opening statement for tomorrow's testimony is extraordinary.
Cohen has a lot to answer for, as he clearly acknowledges. But if we want to beat and isolate Trump, we have good reason to encourage those who repent and turn their back on him.
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It now looks virtually certain that Viktor Orban has been reelected as Prime Minister of Hungary in elections that were dubiously free and barely fair.
It's a dark day for democracy, for Hungary, and for the EU.
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5) It is hard for people who live and breathe politics every day to understand to what extent most voters don't think in terms of the same clean ideological divisions.
But though voters are often ill-informed, their basic instincts are usually humane and sensible.
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A member of a NYC Community Education Council to a colleague: "It hurts people when they see a white man bouncing a brown baby on their lap."
"I would like to know how having my friend's nephew on my lap was racist."
"Read a book. Read White Fragility."
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A small ray of light at the end of a very bleak week:
89% (!) of Americans believe either that the charges against Derek Chauvin are appropriate, or that he should have been charged with a *more* serious crime.
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"It may be necessary to establish criteria of access to intensive care not just on the basis of clinical appropriateness but inspired by the most consensual criteria regarding distributive justice and the appropriate allocation of limited health resources."
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Twitter would solve a lot of problems if it just banned all of its users.
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I can't stomach the triumphalism of those who pretend a few airstrikes somehow make us Syria's saviors.
Nor can I stomach the smugness of those who pretend that doing nothing is obviously moral.
Given how bad all the options are, our main emotion should be humbled despair.
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2) People who voted for Trump in 2016 but are now somewhat skeptical are quite defensive of his record on the economy and even corona.
But they HATE how he handles race. This isn't mild "he should watch what he says a bit more" disagreement. They RECOIL from his divisiveness.
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Andrew Yang: Makes joke about Asian doctors.
Asian Twitter: Makes funny jokes about parents disappointed that they didn't become doctors.
White commentariat: Did Yang just say something offensive about Asians? How dare he?!
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In 1968, my parents were accused of having a secret allegiance to Israel—and hounded out of Poland.
Given Trump’s Islamophobia, I understand why some hesitate to criticize Ilhan Omar. But her comments were anti-Semitic.
And we just cannot let that pass.
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3)
"It may become necessary to establish an age limit for access to intensive care.
This is not a value judgments but a way to provide extremely scarce resources to those who have the highest likelihood of survival and could enjoy the largest number of life-years saved."
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I’ve been hesitant to post this thread.
But I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that we are significantly underestimating the likely impact of the corona virus—and what all of us should do RIGHT NOW to avoid a staggering number of preventable deaths.
[Thread.]
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Two random thoughts:
* Mormons are among the religious denominations against which I have, in educated circles, heard the most open prejudice.
* Both in personal and public life, Mormons are some of the most principled individuals I've encountered since coming to this country.
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"This scenario is substantially comparable to the field of 'catastrophe medicine,' for which ethical reflection has over time stipulated many concrete guidelines for doctors and nurses facing difficult choices."
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Any form of anti-racism which argues that individualism, objectivity or intellectualization are attributes that are somehow especially characteristic of whites is, in fact, a form or racism.
First, diversity trainers informed white participants that "objectivity," "individualism," "intellectualization," and "comfort" are all vestiges of internalized racial oppression.
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What happens if Donald Trump wins in 2020?
For
@TheAtlantic
, I looked at other countries, from India to Poland, in which populists got reelected. What I found is very worrying: Populists who win a second term become more radical and more dangerous.
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🚨Big News🚨
Alongside some of the world's most important writers and activists, I’m starting a new publication and community: Persuasion.
The values of a free society are under threat. The time to defend them is now.
Please join us.
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If the crazy attempts to shame and fire people for signing this reasonably anodyne letter don't convince you that our current intellectual atmosphere is deeply unhealthy, then you're more invested in parroting the propagandistic line of the moment than in acknowledging the truth.
"The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation."
Proud to sign this important open letter.
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The amount of vitriol directed at Hamilton on this website today is a reminder that, for some self-proclaimed radicals, the substance of their politics simply consists in disliking or denouncing anything that is widely beloved.
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There is a complacent faith that Putin's invasion of Ukraine has finally shocked Europeans out of their long-standing habit of appeasing dictators and prioritizing their economic self-interest.
I have long worried that this is naive. Tonight, my concern increased tenfold.
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Here is the full document.
(Undoubtedly imperfect) translation of it is by me.
[End.]
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I spent many years sitting in seminar rooms thinking about questions of distributive justice.
Let me be honest: It’s left me not one bit wiser about what to do in these kinds of dramatic circumstances. So I don’t don’t mean to pass judgment on the contents of this document.
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I will never get over the fact that a view according to which non-white people are somehow less intellectual or interested in scientific rigor than white people parades as progressive in the United States of 2021.
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Corbyn claimed that he could rebuild Labour by moving far to the left. He only succeeded in decimating his party and losing the working-class to the Tories.
Unless Democrats learn the lesson of the UK election, they will lose in 2020.
Me
@TheAtlantic
.
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A breathtaking assault on the most basic democratic norm: the willingness of the loser of an election to let the winner rule.
This does not bode well for 2020. And will likely provide a major test for the current state of judicial independence in this country.
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Just saw a prominent political scientist arguing that the lack of viewpoint diversity in academia is not a problem because (in so many words) all conservatives are racist.
An impressive way of proving the very point this person purports to contest.
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No pRoF hAs rEaSOn tO FeAR hAViNg rObUSt DeBAtEs oN cAMpUs.
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From the department of "You Can't Make This Sh*t Up," finding mixed-race people to be beautiful is, according to The Guardian, basically a form of white supremacy.
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