I just learned yesterday that you wrote the screenplay to the 1998 adaptation of Les Miserables! I just wanted to tell you I absolutely loved that movie, I saw it when it first came out, I cried so hard at the end. It was brilliant. Thank you.
Meanwhile my daughter (13) has the same enjoyment of music from her father’s era (90’s and 00’s alternative) as i did at her age, when I just listened to classic rock.
Pretty amazing to learn that I'm old enough (69) to be @matt's father although I didn't start raising a family until I was about 10 years older.
As far as musical taste I appreciate some classic rock but mostly got into punk and new wave, jazz, and bluegrass but best described by one of my daughters "You see the thing about my Dad's music is that it doesn't go together."
Store radio is a great anti-indicator of taste: by the time it's pumped through Target or whatever, that tells me it's time to retire from my own public playlists, because it has become Officially Cringe. Which is a shame, because it's entirely possible to select actually-good stations on the typical corporate radio provider (Mood Media, the modern successor to Muzak), just no one ever does. All the old grads, and old undergrads, still wanna party like it's 19XX, each in his own key of course, until the whole place is just soggy with nostalgia. Which is incredibly embarrassing when it's schlock I already heard too many times as a highschooler. Teenage years were not, in fact, the best ones of my life! I don't want to be reminded of those days! You have access to all the world's art for pennies on the dollar, just play something fresh (or old enough to be cool again)!
I no longer remember exactly who I was reading on twitter (not "following", fuck your algorithm) in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But one contributor was some retired US Army general.
He pointed out that, in his experience, the Ukrainian military of 2014 was (my words, trying to paraphrase what I remember reading) woefully undertrained and obviously former East Bloc in anti-professionalism in a soldiering sense, and they would have had basically no shot in resisting what the Russians were up to at the time. After the Donestk-Luhansk operation, NATO (or maybe just the US) really stepped up how we were communicating/transmitting our understanding of how to maximize the effectiveness of soldiers and weaponry, rather than the Great Patriotic War meat-grinder approach. And it worked really, really well. All that is to say, the 2022-present Ukrainian resistance to Russian invasion would not have been possible without the post-2014 reforms.
NATO low ranking officers and NCOs are permitted to improvise and problem solve to a degree Eastern Bloc style troops aren't. That's what we started training the Ukrainians to do and it's part of why they were able to fight off the initial invasion. Local units had the autonomy to immediately take advantage of major Russian logistical failures (and just plain failure to anticipate resistance) instead of waiting for orders or doing things by the book regardless of whether it made sense for the situation.
When I took military history in college we talked about some (probably apocryphal) quote from the Germans or Russians about the futility of capturing American military manuals, as no one has actually read them.
More seriously this is consistent with Cold War strategy. The understanding was that if a fight on the European continent stayed conventional Allied forces would be significantly outnumbered and need to rely on technology and wits to defeat the Soviets. Their doctrine was designed to overwhelm with huge forces all acting in concert.
“After the 2016 election, Democrats got more hawkish on Russia and congressional Republicans continued to be hawkish, so suddenly Congress voted to provide Ukraine with more lethal aid. But that didn’t lead to Ukrainian victory in Donetsk — it led to Russia doubling down on its invasion of Ukraine. “
I don’t buy this. I think the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was the result of Putin growing older and impatient with incremental steps combined with confidence that he had built up the Russian military and economy well enough to make the move.
Yeah I don't see the counterfactual where they don't provide Ukraine the aid so Putin just relaxes. Especially since he didn't invade until 5 or 6 years later anyway.
This seems like an appropriate point to wonder what happened with Noah Smith. A year or two ago he was broadly similar to Matt in the moderate Dem heavily influenced by economics lane. But he seems to have really gone off the deep end in hatred of the Democrats/progressives (as seen in this comment about Obama) and general wild views.
There’s something to this, I was more right-wing in college because everyone else was so leftist… But he really needs to get out if that’s the case. As I quickly realized once I was out of school, in the real world the right has most of the power and causes most of the problems.
Sure, but at a certain point you have to take the W and come to terms with Lurie winning, and the current Board being (somewhat) less tankie, and the school board also being repeatedly rebuked, and the DA recall, and the decline in homelessness, and the (could be better but still real) drop in crime and disorder, and...etc, etc. There's still a lot of hole left to dig out of, but things actually are getting better, it's not 2020 anymore. And kicking the hippies while they're momentarily down probably is not best use of time and effort to ensure things stay this way.
(Maybe he could stop arguing for nationalization of AI labs too, that'd be a nice pro-San Francisco thing to do.)
His recent post highlighted the great progress SF made but also underlined the danger of backsliding it's now facing in the current Board of Supervisors election. And he literally put his money where his mouth is on this, contributing $10,000 (!) to a candidate who could keep the loonies from getting a majority.
Since bets are a tax on bullshit, I approve of this donation, and on Matt's theory of meaningfully donating to low-salience low-turnout key races, I wish I could match it. D11 is my sector, and we didn't get the absolute worst possible loony to replace former super Ahsha Safai, but she's still Not Great, Bob. Advocating for 100% affordable housing mandates and "increased community input" in a district that's already unattractive to developers because it's mostly working poors here...just shameful stuff.
That framing of NYT link about transit ridership is a bit misleading though...we're at something like 70-80% pre-pandemic Muni ridership, with the remaining missing chunk due to downtown hollowing out and the stubborn holdouts of disorder-tolerance still haunting some lines. Given that rider satisfaction is actually at one of the highest points in like a decade or two, I'm fully confident we could get back to 100% of the Before Times. Like, cmon Noah, I was there too in 2020-2023ish when every train and bus was empty and I was often the only non-homeless passenger, it's nothing like that anymore, we are absolutely so back. Note that unlike other areas he mentions as mostly being back to normal, transit ridership is explicitly left in the lurch, so a non-local reader could be forgiven for inferring that it's still a ghost train town in 2026.
The *actual* crash and burn has been BART, which has had an ongoing cavalcade of calamity to the point where there's serious talk of shutting the system down entirely. Which is kinda nuts, as an inter-regional transportation hub that includes SFO is just table stakes for a well-functioning economy and there should be plenty of money and demand. But once reliability craters far enough and you enter death spiral territory...it's just hard to recover from. Which gets back to Matt's other point, that commuter rail in America tends to be fairly nonsensically implemented if it didn't inherit legacy infrastructure, and maybe it does deserve to fail on the merits (and be replaced by bus bridges?)...still gonna be a lot of pain in the switch though.
Living in a West Coast city can be quite radicalizing. I still regularly encounter people who insist that "the data clearly shows that police don't prevent crime", or that "people can't commit crimes when they're in jail" is not enough of a reason to put people in jail. Or that mandatory drug treatment is never acceptable even if we have good quality data showing that people who undergo mandatory drug treament are more likely to be alive in 5 years. Even worse, people like that get elected. Seattle's Mayor is only now learning that when you clear out a homeless encampmen that's really a drug encampment, most of hte residents will turn down offers of housing.
So far Massachusetts has been able to escape the worst of the worst of Progressive Anarchism that the west coast is marinated in thanks to the general uptight DNA of the place. 🙏
I hope our mayor wakes up but not impressed is the polite way of saying what I think of her. That combined with the millionaire tax will not be good for Washington
If we're lucky, she's just hopelessly naive because she got all her information from activists and will change track as she's confronted with reality. If we're unlucky, she's a true believer and will double down or just do nothing.
Thus far, her proposals to get more shelter beds have been pretty unimpressive. It really does look like she thought that the reason prior mayors weren't making progress on homelessness was that they were refusing to do what they need to do rather than that the problem is genuinely hard.
Yeah, the charitable view is that she has a steep learning curve. But knowing that she was the major pusher of the head tax, and that she left Oxford 6 weeks before her final exams, just makes me think she’s a profoundly stupid person. The only arena I trust her is transit, and then not very. She probably thinks it should be free.
Well, it seems lots of people here hate Noah's AI takes but that seems heavily rooted in not liking his optimism on AI whereas it's become de rigeur amongst Lefty readerships to be pessismists.
While I am personally perhaps slightly more to the pessimistic or moderately paranoid side, I have appreciated his economic side AI reflections even when finding myself skeptical of some conclusions.
Generally his pattern is he is interesting and at least grounded if he is doing economics.
If he is venturing into social commentary and political or socio-political, even when I agree with him, I don't find he's particularly very sharp at it.
I can’t say I’ve ever read a column of his on AI and not been shocked at the poorly-thought-out quality of the writing and conclusions, and I’m certainly not on the left. I’m an economic analyst and I’ve been intimately familiar with the subject for years.
It’s bad enough for me to wonder if I’m getting Gell-Mann amnesia about the rest of his work… but then again, much of his economics, foreign policy, and especially Asia-focused writing is truly excellent.
I confess I do not read his non-econ AI reflections - his market structure reflections to me are quite sensible potential
As for his foreign policy, actually I think his FP comment ex-economic FP is generally not strong, although his Asia focused writing I do agree is very strong.
If you’re a moderate liberal and live in SF/CA, hatred of progressives is a very natural progression. I don’t think he hates Democrats more than MAGA Republicans.
The PNW is similar. Apparently I'm far right because I think that if you can't pay your rent, the government should pay it rather than just making it nearly impossible for the landlord to evict you.
SF progressives were too nice to homeless people causing some to move to SF and set up tent encampments…
Meanwhile Israel just forced millions of Lebanese to move making much larger tent encampments spring up all over Beirut…
If someone wants to minimize homelessness they should be supporting the most Israel-skeptical parties possible no matter what their positions are on just about anything else.
The local politics in SF spends an inappropriate amount of time and focus on international issues. The head of the teachers union was explicitly Maoist, Israel/gaza was a huge focus, the people involved in the party politics on the left side had plenty of “Stalin was good”/“stalin did nothing wrong”/“the USA needs to unilaterally surrender to Russia/china/third world countries today”/“our goal is to surrender turtle island to indigenous peoples and pay reparations forever” people. These all sound like small ball but they’d come up and dominate discourse in a purity spiral way. If you didn’t have these insane views you’d be treated like a George bush/trump republican by 1/2 the SF media and politics apparatus as a punishment for ideological impurity.
Since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Noah seems to have become much more invested in US military readiness and kinetic resources, which is something that pretty clearly wasn’t a big priority of the Obama admin. Matt seems to be more Obama-ish with a continued focus on microeconomic optimizations and economic policymaking generally, and less interested than Noah in the premise that WWIII is on the short-medium term horizon and thus needs preparation now.
Noah's comment on these areas when rooted in the technology and economics is quite interesting (e.g. the economics of the elec. tech stack as also a national security as well as econ competitiveness issue). Specific FP treaty comment etc. it's ... well a guy commenting, not comment from real expertise.
It's worth pointing out that Noah suffers from mental issues, which he's been open about.
When some Indian American college student did a speech about Gaza, he quoted it to make a comment about how sexually turned on he was. That just isn't normal, and his problems have clearly worsened since the start of Trump's second term. A lot of his posting is deeply unprofessional and out of the ordinary.
The story about his time in a London airport (Heathrow), and blaming the UK for him being unable to follow basic instructions on how to get to his connecting flight, was an embarassing meltdown too. Millions of people use Heathrow every year for connecting flights and face no issues. He's also increasingly become more racist too, just making bigoted comments about entire groups of people. I would just unfollow if I was you, he never used to be this bad in 2024 and before. Something has clearly degraded in his mental state at some point in early 2025.
Watching the world fall apart would make me go cuckoo too if it was my job to observe and comment on it. Luckily it's not my job so I can tune it out for 23 hours a day.
I know his comment section has chuds who get mad when Noah talks about the threat of MAGA to liberal order and how stupid most Trump economic policies are.
Did he say something about Shruthi Kumar? I see people talking about a bizarre discussion with JVL at the Bulwark but I can't find the actual text. It looks like his bio page is gone from the Bulwark.
I just felt pity for his Heathrow experience. Some things are better off posted to your spouse than to Twitter,
No idea what this is about. But Shruthi Kumar seems to be doing just fine. She’s working at Trilogy Partners and getting paid lots of money to live in San Francisco.
> The story about his time in a London airport (Heathrow), and blaming the UK for him being unable to follow basic instructions on how to get to his connecting flight
I don't know if there is a systematic way this sort of thing is tracked. I have heard from family and friends traveling through LHR that making a connection there is much more of a hassle compared to other airports.
Fair point, but Noah's reaction wasn't simply to describe an unfortunate experience and complain about Heathrow. That happens.
It was to complain about the UK as a whole, using that one story to make a whole point about the UK being some horrific third world country. He's just a mentally unwell guy and has been for a couple years now. I was a fan of his work and perspective in the 2010s and during the Biden Presidency. But just giving my take, fair enough if people still think he's a normal and impressive guy
I subscribe to Noah's substack, but I don't read everything he publishes and I'm not on twitter at all. I haven't seen anything like this. It would help if you could link to this stuff.
I like Noah but he's always seemed like a bit of an incel nerd who never had much success with women, probably until his 30's. Some of his posting on sex and dating is just odd.
I read his blog and absolutely don't think he's becoming MAGA or conservative. He's still solidly liberal and a big defender of liberalism and Democrats winning imo. He's been more punchy towards left wing progressives over the past couple of years but I don't think he's been driving away per se... Then again I don't use Twitter. I only follow his Substack blog.
Yeah, this is the correct take. I subscribed to Noah because his economic analysis was interesting and not readily available elsewhere. These days he’s leaning more and more into generalist punditry where his VORP is nil.
I unsubbed when I got tired of him saying positive things about Elon Musk and AI. He’s too Stanford-brained. But he’s right about China, industrial policy, etc
that's a very unfortnate reason to unsubscribe from him. His observations on Elon were and are quite correct in re Elon historically in respect to what he achieved - Elon the human being at least of late is at best unfortunate. Elon the industrial scaler is someone pre-Twitter take over at minimum to study.
It wasn’t talking about Elon in the past, it was his grasping at straws to justify his more recent behavior iirc. As well as general pro-tech, pro-SV, pro-“creative destruction” and AI vile nonsense. That kind of thing shouldn’t be supported, China hawk though I may be
I'm a loyal Noah reader for over a decade now, so I'm not trying to dunk on him.
But he seems to have developed China-derangement-syndrome and is willing to support a number of reactionary views if it helps "defeat" them. It's possibly related to the fact that CCP intervention at Bloomberg made his situation untenable there, the timing lines up at least.
Part of it may be that he's quite a Japanophile, and I believe he feels CCP threats to that country a lot more viscerally and emotionally than most Americans.
Not just Japan - he was on the ground in Hong Kong for protests, and he has been to Taiwan quite a bit too. He really has been closer to Chinese influence than MattY or many other take-makers.
It’s kind of astounding that people take Japan’s side in these disputes, like just read about some of the things they did to China from the 1890s to WWII that they never paid any reparations for, while the CCP has never invaded Japan.
After WWII, Germany and Japan should’ve paid sufficient reparations to the USSR and China to equalize living standards between them (which would’ve also most likely prevented the CCP takeover in China).
As for why people take Japan's side…I don't think Japan's crimes in World War II are very relevant to the question of who we should support today, any more than our genocide of the Native Americans was relevant to whether we were the relative good guys in World War II. Geopolitics isn't making sure that the historical ledger comes out fair.
Nikuruga, I agree with you on most things, but "two countries that had been bombed to rubble [including one country that had TWO NUCLEAR BOMBS dropped on it] should have paid reparations" is, as the kids say, Certainly An Opinion.
Marshall Plan was the right way to go about it: pay those countries to rebuild themselves, and thereby turn them from enemies to allies.
I don't know what the Western world should have done* in the 1990s to support democracy in the former USSR, or whether things were doomed to go south regardless of what the West did.
*"give them money" is the easy answer, but how do you stop that money from going to some corrupt ex-Soviet apparatchik instead of helping the people?
Granted Japan's treatment of China in WW2 was abominable, but that's not a reason to be blase about Chinese dominance of the Pacific region. I don't trust China to be a benevolent hegemon.
It's not about taking Japan's side. It's about Taiwan's side. The CCPs stated policy is that they will murder the 23 million people on the island if they ever take formal steps to independence. (The PRC has never controlled Taiwan)
Good point, about a good 20% of his writings over the last couple of years imo seem to be talking about partnering with Japan and defeating China in various ways. I'm not saying he's off base with his ideas or takes. But I do think it has colored his opinions of what defines success from a foreign policy pov depending on the time period.
The consensus of the comments seems to be negative polarization based on bad tweets and the SF Board of Supervisors, plus hawkishness. Which makes me additionally grateful that our host has not fallen into either of those pits.
In some ways Noah was actually to the left of Matt, now he is significantly to the right. He used to be an Elizabeth Warren fan now he is very critical. Some people say he is hawkish but he seems more jingoistic than hawkish.
I follow people who have had a role in shaping US foreign policy and who has served in the military and compared to them Noah strikes me as an overeager college student or even high school student. He seems out of his depth.
Noah seems to lack emotional maturity that people like Matt and Ezra had even when they where younger than Noah.
Your opinions are shaped by who you hang out with and Noah seems to socialize with techno bros who think the world of Elon Musk.
I'm still very interested in what Noah has to say about macro economic policy, trade, technology and science fiction but when it comes to foreign policy and military issues I would rather listen to people who have expertise on the issue.
That's my take as well and I read Noah's blog, sometimes I think Noah is more chronically online that MY is and he seems to just like provoking leftist people for his own enjoyment.
I do think he is very worried about a foreign war with China because he loves Japan and Asia and so any President that basically doesn't do enough to move out military towards the most high technology and supply chain possible he thinks is a failure in some sense. In general he's also way more hawkish than your average economist and MY imo. He's especially hawkish for someone that doesn't seem to have any interest in serving in the military either.
Yup, I get annoyed by Matt's Twitter-brained takes at times, but at least he has a family and outside interests - even Noah's outside interest seem connected to his SV-aligned worldview. Like, I'm sure Matt has people he knows he just complains about the Wizards drafting with. I'm not sure Noah has anybody like that.
Which again, is why I pay Matt $5/month and OTOH, broadly agree w/ Bouie's dunks on Noah.
I think there are lots of pundits across the spectrum who are hawkish but have no interest in serving in the military and Noah is not an exception or in a small group on this issue.
I feel like Noah Smith was always highly committed to Western supremacy, which is in inherent tension with development economics and ideas like equality, democracy, etc. given that other countries catching up to the West was always going to lead to multipolarity given that most people are non-Western. “One Billion Americans” seems like it was the only serious effort to maintain Western supremacy without making the world look like the movie Elysium but since the immigration backlash seems like more people are going to be forced to take one side of the tension or another.
But you are just reframing the old neoliberal consensus as "Western supremacy"... I read Noah as supporting the global neoliberal order - which is actually very supportive of democracy and individual rights. But the neoliberal "End of History" POV has fallen on hard times in the Woke Era. As parts of the Left have focused more on oppressed communities and minority groups, they have sadly lost support for individual freedom.
(And perhaps the kicker has been that individual freedom and accountability in a globalized market system leads to somewhat homogenous optimal individual responses. Play the capitalism game or capitalism runs you over. Personally I'm in the game but I hear some people hate it.)
I actually thought the JCPOA was an ok deal, and Noah Smith (or more broadly almost all generalist pundits) should be ignored on foreign policy.
But I think the analysis of Obama’s foreign policy views (or more accurately, the views of key admin officials) retcons too much.
The views of people like Ben Rhodes were basically:
1. We need to pivot away from the Middle East (perhaps reasonable)
2. If we leave the Middle East, it will be destabilizing (again, maybe on the right track)
3. Why? Because the Palestinian issue is the main destabilizing force in the Middle East (!!!), and Israel/the Gulf, who don’t care enough about solving this issue, would be too empowered (stupid)
4. Therefore, we have a win-win available: negotiate to get rid of Iran’s nuclear ambitions and bolster Iran a bit to counterbalance Israel/the Gulf (ok…)
5. With Iran/its proxies hanging over their heads, Israel/the Gulf will have to be more reasonable on the Palestinian issue. As a bonus, Iran will become more normal (catastrophically moronic)
One key reason for Obama’s dovishness vis-a-vis Russia and Syria was that he thought he needed Russia for the JCPOA. So there’s that too.
Overall, the consequences weren’t terrible. Kicking the can down the road is sometimes the only good option. Moreover, exiting the deal made zero sense because the Iranians had already received their money!
But the Obama admin’s thinking was often based on completely wrongheaded models of the world. (Also seriously disagree with the take on Ukrainian aid.)
Ben Rhodes’ calling threats to Israel from Iran “perceived threats” was basically enough for me to want to stop listening to him. I spent 2 years running back and forth to bomb shelters with explosions overhead from missiles paid for by Iran (and some from Iran directly). Those missiles were largely aimed at cities with no legitimate military target. Iran constantly calls for the elimination of Israel, “Death to Israel”, and the regime maintains a doomsday clock in Tehran counting the days until Israel’s elimination. They pay for Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis and other militias in Syria and Iraq to try to terrorize and kill Israelis with the explicit aim of destroying the country.
These aren’t perceived threats. They are real threats. You can agree or disagree with Israeli policy or military campaigns, and you can agree or disagree with the US involvement, and I’m willing to listen to your perspective. But if you can’t admit that Israel faces very real threats, then you don’t understand the very basics of what is going on and thus your analysis will always be distorted. At some point it’s just gaslighting.
The extra-stupid bit is that Rhodes was claiming you’d be facing *fewer* rockets after an appropriate balance of power between Israel/Sunni/Shia had been achieved.
(Reminds me of another idea liberals hold about Middle East policy…)
Right. Ben and others like him really don’t want to engage with or have any curiosity about people’s actual ideologies. Ideology is something that you explain away, or suggest that it’s downstream of circumstance, or you just ignore. It’s easier to explain away what people actually say, rather than actually engage with it. It’s much more comforting that way than to realize that people are sometimes committed to ideas different than our own.
>> But if you can’t admit that Israel faces very real threats, then you don’t understand the very basics of what is going on and thus your analysis will always be distorted.>>
There are many things that could be said here I will say that I think the Israelis were, at best, *exceptionally* bad at communicating what they thought those threats to be, (although given Netanyahu's actions towards Obama crediting such representations with even basic good faith was difficult). In conventional war Israel is the overdog and has been for decades, and any serious attempt at force-mustering by hostile states would have provoked an immediate response from the U.S. and Israel wouldn't be fighting alone. Rocket attacks are no doubt highly stressful, but even if Iron Dome *didn't* exist they wouldn't constitute an "existential" threat to Israel, just objectively speaking. If the goal is "wipe out the Jews in Israel" the actual means by which that could most plausibly be accomplished are nuclear weapons, *which is exactly what the JCPOA was about keeping out of the hands of Iran.* So (from my US perspective) the Israeli position regarding threats is what came across as gaslighting during Obama's second term -- throwing around the term "existential" with respect to things that are clearly not, while opposing a non-proliferation deal oriented towards exactly those arms which actually *do* pose an existential threat. Iran's hostile intent was not at issue -- its capacities to act on it were.
Israel has been attacked with rockets every couple years by Hamas and PIJ for two decades. Hamas has spent 25% of its GDP on a tunnel system to hide its militants and weapons to use against Israel. It organized incendiary kites to burn Israeli farms. It ultimately invaded Israel, shot revelers at a music festival and shot families in their own home point blank and took 250 hostages. Hamas was funded by Iran.
Hezbollah bombed the Israeli embassy in Argentina. It organized cross border raids against Israel‘s north, and organized rocket attacks. It also bombed Israeli civilians overseas, and launched rockets, drones and missiles frequently at Israel. Hezbollah is directed by and funded by Iran.
The Houthi rebels, also directed and funded by Iran, have also been frequently launching cruise missiles at Israel.
Israel has been exceedingly and abundantly clear about this. A threat needn’t be existential to be a security threat. A country’s responsibility is to protect its population, not only to survive as an entity.
Let’s be clear, the only acceptable number of rockets to launch at Israeli population centers is zero. The only acceptable number of drones or incendiary kites to send to Israeli population centers is zero. The only acceptable number of buses to bomb or embassies to blow up is zero. The only acceptable number of hostages to take is zero.
Thus far Iran has funded tens of thousands of such attacks.
Furthermore it is not acceptable to call for another sovereign nation’s elimination or death. The standard of safety is not “will my population be wiped out and my country destroyed”. It’s “will my citizens face unacceptable threats to their security”.
I hope that is clear. The fact that Israel takes extraordinary steps to protect its civilian population with Iron Dome, or Arrow, safe rooms and shelters does not diminish this.
Furthermore, Iran is country 9 times bigger in population than Israel. It has a similar GDP to Israel. In PPP Iran has a much larger economy than Israel. While we know now how incompetent the Iranian regime is, their incompetence does not diminish the fact that they pose real security threat to Israel. I’d argue that a country 9x your size and of similar wealth threatening to eliminate you and funding groups that also aim to do so IS an existential threat, even if your country is (usually) more competently run than the one threatening to.
The JCPOA focused on the nuclear threat. It did so however in a way that enhanced Iran’s wealth and this their ability to generate conventional strength, both through its military and terror proxy groups that wage asymmetric warfare. This is a legitimately hard call about whether or not this trade off was worth it. Clearly the Americans thought yes and the Israelis thought no. This is a reasonable thing to disagree on, and there’s no perfect answer.
Israel has been very clear about the threats. Israel has been willing to absorb a tremendous number of attacks that very few countries would be able to absorb. The fault is not with Israel if you refuse to listen or pay attention.
I don’t think any of that Iranian activity (or its evilness) is under dispute.
The point is that the Israeli message at the time was not “vote against the JCPOA because we instead want the U.S. to destroy Iran and immiserate its populace to reduce its conventional power” —reasonable as that preference may be for ISRAELIS. It was instead JCPOA won’t work and you don’t need a war, do a secret third thing to solve the Iran problem and full on attack on the Obama administration for not buying that line.
Again the Israeli concern with the JCPOA is 1. that it was temporary and has sunset clauses, and 2. it didn’t do anything to prevent Iran from using the money it would gain from the deal on terror proxies. There was also concerns about monitoring.
The increased funding for terror was going to (and did) lead to the violent deaths of Israelis. Whether or not the trade off was worth it to get a two decade pause on the nuclear program, well that’s a tough one. And there’s no good answer. I can respect both the American view and the Israeli view here, and I respect your disagreement with the Israeli view, so long as you recognize that it indeed resulted in real (not perceived) security risks to Israelis that would be considered intolerable to nearly any other peer country.
The Israeli position HAS NEVER been that it wants to destroy Iran or immiserate its people. There’s some serious moral inversion here. Iran shouts “Death to Israel”, and has a doomsday clock counting the minutes to Israel’s elimination. Iran wants to destroy Israel. Iran objects to Israel‘s very existence as a country. Israel, by contrast, has no issue with the existence of Iran, or the existence of a Persian state within its sovereign boundaries and does not seek to destroy the country. Israel’s only interest in Iran is that they don’t use their resources to try to destroy Israel. In contrast, the Iranian regime believes the redemption of Islam can only come about when Israel and the Jews within it, the weakest people to ever hold Islam back, are destroyed. This will also lead to the ascendancy of Shia Islam, as Sunni Arab leaders have long failed in their quest to dismantle Israel.
Israel would be very happy if the Iranian regime would stop its nuclear program, its intercontinental ballistic missile program, its funding of terror proxies and its frequent calls for Israel’s destruction That has always been an option for Iran, and the best option for Iran, yet the Iranian regime has made other choices.
I agree that Israel would prefer that Iran turned into a peaceful neighbor, and would happily trade with and otherwise leave them alone if they did so. I also agree that this is an important moral distinction between the two regimes.
I disagree, just as a factual matter, that the Israeli government, having correctly concluded that this is not on the cards, doesn’t want the US to sanction their economy to death and blow them up, for the instrumental purpose of reducing the danger Iran poses to its citizens. I think that is likely why the US is at war with Iran right now, in fact.
The main destabilizing force in the Middle East is the Shia/Sunni conflict. A 1400 year fight is more significant than an 80 year fight. And now Pakistan is supporting Israel.
Also the criticism in Syria is thst he didnt get involved (he tried to convince congress instead of jumping headfirst) and the criticism of Libya is he did too much (and some say too little - both takes on Libya ring true in my mind). But in Syria, yes there was a brutal Civil War with the Russian backed leader in charge - but not getting directly involved actually ended up working and keeping us out of another MidEast quagmire, right?
I wonder if they just assumed Hillary Clinton would win in 2016? Trump overturned Obama's deals on Iran and Cuba, but that wasn't some unique thing to Trump. Any other Republican President like Rubio or Jeb also would have quickly exited those deals. A lot of time in his second term dedicated to achievements that never had bipartisan investment, so were never going to last if any Republican President succeeded him.
Say what you will about Bill Clinton, but Clinton and his team understood the importance of making sure you had some Republican buy-in to his achievements on both domestic and foreign policy.
Not totally clear others would have exited JCPOA. At the time Trump withdrew, most GOP foreign policy hands actually opposed withdrawing. (I think even Mitt Romney spoke out against it.)
I was wondering about this point in the last few weeks, so re-watched the foreign policy sections of a couple of the 2016 GOP primary debates. And it is actually striking that even Jeb and Rubio, both among the mainstream of the party at the time, were very strong on their opposition to the Iran Deal and committing to exiting it very early in their Presidency. Only Kasich among all the candidates gave a more nuanced answer.
I don't doubt that when Trump did exit it in 2018, there was more of a controversy, but that's likely because it's Trump and the effect he has in associating himself with a particular position. It's still the case that the mainstream of the GOP were fully opposed to it from day 1, same with the Cuba opening deal. It is a curious one to invest so much energy into two deals that relied on Hillary Clinton winning in 2016 for either to have a chance of surviving once Obama left office.
With TPP, I have far more sympathy for the Obama team. That was a good deal, which had support from Paul Ryan and other mainstream Republicans. The rise of bad faith populism on both extremes of the political spectrum ended up defeating it more than anything else.
Oh there was tons of GOP opposition to JCPOA - they would never have entered it into the first place and happily campaigned against it. But that's different than withdrawing once it was in place (despite what they campaigned on). Trump himself *did* stay in for 2 years and withdrew against the opinion of his officials. And at that point, most GOP foreign policy hands opposed withdrawing (because there was no upside to withdrawing after the fact). My guess is most alternative GOP presidents would have called it a bad deal, pursued maximum pressure on Iran on other fronts, but would have remained in it.
(That's especially true if Hillary *had* won in 2016 and the agreement had been in place for longer.)
I agree re JCPOA. Jeb! and that ilk would've been happy to trash it as a horrible screw up at every opportunity and might even try to "renegotiate" it in a superficial way, but there was really no upside to leaving it in the way trump did. A normal R would mostly have left it intact in substance.
And if there's another Hillary term, it might not even have been a thing by 2020.
Jeb would not have torn up the Iran treaty. He didn’t like it, but takes stuff like American credibility seriously. I do think he would have tried to shift us back hawkish in other ways though.
I'm not really well read on the Obama-- Cuba attempt at reconciliation but it seemed to be a good non-malicious approach(and we had cigars!). Now Trump is basically trying to achieve the same thing by strong arming Cuba with sanctions into being compliant to the US? This seems very Stalin-esque and doesn't foment any long lasting trust or respect.
They should choose Marvel. "Captain America, The Winter Soldier," "Guardians of the Galaxy 2," and "Black Panther" were all better than the actual best picture winners that came out that year.
>"Black Panther" were all better than the actual best picture winners that came out that year.
That is mostly because Green Book shouldn't have won. That was an insanely good year for film, and there were tons of better films, including all the foreign film nominees.
If The Shape of Water had not won, there are approximately 20 American films made in 2018 that would have made better winners than Guardians 2, including two MCU films.
The premise was really good but I found the constant rapid fire scene changes nauseating: a little goes a long way.... like the premise alone wasn't endearing enough to John Q Public and they had to water it down with hyper-action.
The 'Pulp Fiction of the 2020s' might not even be much like the actual movie. What I mean is something made with real studio dollars with real movie stars that challenges old conventions without disappearing up it's own ass with pretentiousness or heavy handed messaging.
Marty Supreme fits the bill (and would be my choice for best picture).
It might be fair to accuse Josh Safdie of being a one-trick pony: "Marty Supreme" basically has the same "After Hours" structure of "Good Time" and "Uncut Gems", but damn it's a good trick, and he reaches farther thematically every time.
The problem with Noah Smith’s formulation that the US “trusted” Iran’s leaders is that this was not the primary objections of opponents of the JCPOA.
The primary objections were that the limits on the nuclear program were temporary and had sunset clauses and that the JCPOA would help Iran’s conventional military capabilities, especially with respect to terrorist proxies, by providing them with more money. There was also skepticism about the monitoring of Iran. But the primary opposition wasn’t about trust.
I think this was indeed a tough question. Was a roughly two decade pause on Iran’s nuclear program worth the risk of bolstering Iran conventionally? I have some sympathy for Obama’s position. I also understand the concerns. It absolutely did help Iran cement its terror proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen. But it did actually have the potential to put a pause on Iran becoming nuclear, something definitely in the US’ and the world’s interest.
It was Biden, on the other hand, that unfroze assets to Iran, but for much much lower stakes. He did so for the release of 5 prisoners. He did so to make a waiver for Iraq to buy Iranian oil. His administration insisted that that money couldn’t be used for terror. But this ignores the most basic fact about money: that it is fungible. I’m pretty sure they understand that money is fungible, so the defense was not in good faith. As much sympathy as I have for the 5 prisoners and their families, this is much lower stakes than Iran’s nuclear program. This was clearly Biden not taking the Iranian threat, either conventional or nuclear, seriously.
I like and supported Joe Biden. He has several key accomplishments that I support. But while I can understand both sides of the JCPOA argument under Obama, I cannot see both sides of his foreign policy vis a vis Iran.
Wow, Matt Y, I like you, but your taste in movies couldn’t be more different from mine!
You went from “Ew, mainstream Oscar-winning movies are like, I want cool and edgy” to “oh no, Oscar-winning movies appeal to me now, does that make me lame?” I went from “I love these Oscar-nominated movies! I saw Titanic in theaters four times and bawled my eyes out at the end each time [I was a 15-year-old girl]” to “where did all the good Oscar-winning movies go? Anora who? I have no interest in seeing it.” In fairness, OBAA actually does sound interesting, I just didn’t get around to seeing it in theaters, will probably get around to streaming it sometime (as well as “Sinners”).
I guess this makes me lame, but I want movies with likable characters and a meaningful plot with high stakes, and an ending that, if not *happy,* is at least bittersweet. Like in “Shakespeare in Love,” the lovers are separated, but their romance will be an inspiration for Shakespeare’s plays. I do not want endings that say “everything sucks and everything is horrible,” like one of this year’s nominees I could mention (yeah, movie, you know which one you are and what you did!)
>I guess this makes me lame, but I want movies with likable characters and a meaningful plot with high stakes, and an ending that, if not *happy,* is at least bittersweet.
You would probably like Anora, then. The characters are flawed, because they are real, but likeable enough. The personal stakes are high, at least as high as those in Shakespeare in Love. And the ending is indeed bittersweet.
I could go either way with the type of movies u are describing but I agree with u in the sense that it feels like the movies competing for best picture are much more likely to be relevant at cannes than in past. Like u have to be an arthouse cinema lover to want to roll through all the best picture nominated movies last year.
I remain a huge fan of PTA’s first three movies. One Battle After Another was an enormously entertaining piece of far-left agitprop. PTA was careful to make Bob a buffoon and to force one of the sympathetic characters to commit, under intense pressure, a criminal error of judgment in the early bank scene, but mainly he presented them as noble, selfless, and cool. Meanwhile the right-wing forces were almost uniformly malevolent, horrifyingly racist, impossible to identify with, and so in control of the levers of power that violent revolution made narrative sense.
A non-trivial faction of the intellectual American right wing is intensely motivated by the sense of being under cultural siege in the universities and media by illiberal forces that do not fight fair within the bounds of the law and the Constitution. PTA made a movie that could not have done more to justify that perspective. I hate it and think all good liberals should join me.
>>but mainly he presented them as noble, selfless, and cool
I didn't interpret it this way, nor did most people I watched it with -- he seemed to hit "both sides". What really undermined this was the decision of the daughter at the end, which clearly expressed a preference. She should have become a lame centrist like the rest of us here!
I read the ending as a tragedy. That the daughter could have had a normal life but now she was on the same path as the older leftists, none of whom are presented as uncomplicated heroes.
Yeah the right wing forces are clearly worse in OBAA, but one of the main themes was that extremism on both sides feed one another.
When I saw it I thought the implication was that she was going to continue in the radical and violent acts of her parents (especially with the letter from her mother) but I suppose it is never explicitly stated.
My take is, unfortunately, complicated and hard to argue. I think he made a big show of both-sides-ism while forcefully stacking the deck in favor of left violent political action and against right nativism. His emotional loyalty to 1970s L.A. may have subconsciously pulled him that way.
A good way to put this is: would you be more ashamed to be Bob (a loving, loyal screwup), or to be Lockjaw (a man who disowns his great love and avows horrid racism to gain status)? I think the answer is *obviously* Lockjaw.
Don't disagree with any of that. But the left groups were presented as violent, disorganized and self righteous. I don't think it was a positive portrayal at all, even if the other side was comparatively worse.
Sympathy for 1970s terrorists is both common in the culture and really odd. They almost universally failed, were usually sadistic, pro-Soviet, pathetic and with odd ideologies few people support now.
I feel more like it glamorized the Lefty Terrorists but with plausible deniability. Like sure, the lefty terrorists were shown to be either incompetent or self-centered, but it’s still kind of cool and glamorized.
Yeah, because violence is exciting as hell! It’s the same thing as Goodfellas, when it’s going well you feel like you’re on top of the world, and then it falls apart hard.
What is a “cultural siege”? Making a movie is protected by the First Amendment so how is that outside the bounds of the law and Constitution?
And the movie is not attacking all right-wingers but a specific type of nativist who is in fact malevolent, racist, and in control of the levers of power. The main thing that was cartoonish about Lockjaw was how suddenly servile he was towards the Christmas Adventurer’s Club which made him look a little buffoonish too, but if not for that, many Americans would identify with him!
In world 1, ICE is engaging in lawless terrorism against us cities with the support of the president, Supreme Court, and congress. In the movies, I guess the libs portray them as such. A real head scratcher
I really enjoyed OBAA, but it's shrill, cartoonish, and then on top of all that it has no heart because the characters aren't drawn plausible psychologies.
It's fun to watch di Caprio bumble around, Benicio del Toro exudes infinite charm as a hyper-competent single-man sanctuary city, and the car chase at the end is unlike anything I've ever seen. But it doesn't add up, maybe because the source material kind of sucks. The Crying of Lot 49 was a fun paranoid rush, but only because it was so short. Thomas Pynchon's subject to intense diminishing returns.
I mean, I didn't catch it when it came out, so I ended up watching it during the siege in Minnesota, which made it look not parodic but prescient. It definitely was not "far left"—anti-authoritrian, yes.
I had to turn it off after the first 10 minutes because I got the exact same feeling. I think many people are blind to how partisan this movie is, but maybe I'm wrong because I didn't watch all of it.
I think he was trying to do a new type of “good” politically relevant auteur driven movie that’s widely watched. Or even prove he could do such a thing, this is his commercially biggest movie by far. Not as serious as Bicycle thieves or as topical and ideological as like Ken loach. I think this was pta saying I’m going to not avoid politics but I’m also trying to make a legit action family drama comedy mashup, I thought it was real ambitious and the use of the hills in the chase scene was great. All this on a background of I assume a sincere belief that the right wing is much more dangerous than the left wing. I thought obaa and licorice pizza were him stretching into new space thought they were very cool.
I think that neither assimilation nor multiculturalism should be immigration policy goals to explicitly support. The goal should be, as Matt laid out in the CSDM, is to have an immigration policy that best improves the quality of life for American citizens. Accomplishing that could require planks that could lean either into assimilation or multiculturalism as a side effect, depending on the plank.
Also, history shows that structurally, the first generation immigrants are going to lean more multicultural, the third generation more assimilated, and the second generation somewhere in between.
American national cohesiveness is built on shared civic values, of liberal democracy, personal liberty, rule of law, identification with the founding documents such as the Constitution, and loyalty to the country. The US overall does a good job of assimilating immigrants from different backgrounds into American life through these values, much better than many countries in Europe. And we should continue to strive to do so. We should not strive to be more like Europe.
That doesn’t mean we need to assimilate people away from their culture in terms of religion, cuisine, customs, artistic aesthetics, family composition, or lifestyle and towards “American culture”. Multiculturalism is definitely possible within a cohesive civic democracy.
Language is something a bit more sensitive that Americans debate about. Some people want immigrants to assimilate linguistically to use primarily English, while others celebrate linguistic diversity. We should be encouraging proficiency in English so that people can participate in the larger society, but celebrate linguistic diversity and multilingualism as well.
In Europe “multiculturalism” is happening in a different way. Some (not all) immigrants are settling in segregated neighborhoods. They are not learning the local language. They are not adopting local civic values. And they are not identifying with the history of the nation or demonstrating loyalty to or identification with the state to the same extent as immigrants to America. This leads to the kind of anti-immigrant politics and leads to significant clashes of culture.
Language is going to depend on the supply of people that can speak it. If there's an abundance of immigrant English speakers in certain professions, then an English requirement can be workable, but in other professions where aren't enough English speakers, then you have to trade off between having some non-English speakers, or having those jobs go unfilled.
And of course, the United States in its history has had plenty of ethnic neighborhoods in their own regard, and there were clashes over that as well, whether it's as fierce as what's going on in Europe right now.
I didn’t mean only allowing immigrants to already speak English. But we should be encouraging immigrants who are here to work on and develop their English proficiency.
This is always such a weird take to me. Immigrants are strongly encouraged to speak English by the very fact of living here, it's inescapable. And the longer they are here the better their comprehension is. There is certainly no one anywhere discouraging the learning of English. And the really important thing is that their kids, no matter how non English speaking their parents, are all perfectly fluent. No one who grows up here isn't a native English speaker.
It is really hard to learn a new language as an adult, almost no one that didn't have a strong background when they were young is ever going to end up with English as their true first or co-equal language. But as you are here 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, your ability to understand and make yourself understood in English grows and grows. But, unless you are truly bilingual, you are always going to speak your first language when the opportunity arises.
And I think that latter point is what people somehow don't understand or strangely object to. Two people who's native language is Spanish, are going to speak to each other in Spanish not English no matter how good their English becomes, whether that's just in public, or in the work place, or wherever. Why do people find that objectionable?
Nothing of what you said contradicts with what I said.
We were talking about assimilation vs multiculturalism. MY said that we should be multicultural while assimilating people into American civic democracy. I agreed.
One area of “multiculturalism” that is a bit different is language because I think there is an interest in getting immigrant populations proficient in English. Some people do not like immigrants speaking their home language, and I was clear that wasn’t my position. Others object to people being here a long time and never learning English. Learning a language is hard, and Americans are the worst at this when they live abroad. But we as a society can (and do) encourage immigrants to gain proficiency. We spend resources on making low cost English classes available and having ESL programs in schools to help children catch up with language skills in English (and we could do more). We do a better job of this than many peer countries in Europe.
My point is that "people being here a long time time and never learning the language" is just a myth. People are objecting to something that just doesn't happen (the rare exception is something like a grandparent brought over to maybe help with kids and live out their old age in the children's' home). But if you are working age and participating in the economy you cannot help but learn more and more English.
People hear folks speaking their native tongue with each other and think "those people are refusing to learn English", which is just kind of silly and ignorant.
People don't come here with the goal of isolating themselves away from the rest of American society, and our culture is so overwhelming, and the need to participate in it in order to feed mind and body is so central, that it would be nigh on impossible if anyone was trying.
Given your comment, “ proof of payment with spot checks rather than conductors to reduce operating costs”, you won’t be amused that the Seattle area light rail system abandoned precisely that system because authorities noted that cheaters were disproportionately poc. So now, everyone cheats and revenue disappears.
Am I like wrong to have a deep suspicion of the hawks constant need to hide the ball? Like at some level the people who say death to America and believe suicide bombers are rewarded in the afterlife are getting a nuclear bomb capable of reaching our shores shouldn't be so hard of a case to call for the United States to defend itself even at notable sacrifice. It doesn't seem like an unpersuadable case and their constant running from that case makes them seem like liars.
GOP/MAGA foreign policy for quite some time now hasn't been based on rational analysis of the national interest, but on emotion, and Iran is America's own Great Satan. Just listen to Pete Hegseth some time.
Matt seems to think Obama didn't make the pro JCPOA case to the opposition very forcefully, and maybe that's true. And/or maybe Republicans are just fucking idiots when it comes to foreign policy.
I'm confused. What is Trump hiding? He's been upfront about his desire to prevent an Iranian nuke since the 12 day war. And again in this one he mentioned it in the first press statement.
Edit: apparently he's been telling people he would do this since 1988
He hasn’t said like this is existential for the United States if we don’t act now there will be a mushroom cloud on the eastern seaboard and you should be willing to spend a long permanent effort on a fight to survive.
You wouldn’t be dancing around commitment beyond air strikes and special forces as a maximum limit you’d say here’s why you should be willing to pay whatever it takes to stop this.
If you believe Iran is going to get a bomb and can’t be deterred by mutually assured destruction it would be something you’re willing to pay any price for. It seems disingenuous.
I think Trump doesn't feel the need to make a case to the American people because he doesn't feel accountable to them and because he'll chicken out before he asks for any true hardship that will tank the midterms.
Politically, it makes very little sense to copy the Bush playbook here. That would surely tank his popularity too.
The Bush playbook won the 2004 elections! It worked! Ginning up fake wars and getting the populace hyped up and rabid behind them is an effective strategy until the bodies really start rolling in. (Which is why international response to such wars needs to be a lot more negative than it currently is.)
Trump is just very bad at politics, which keeps getting masked by the fact that the Dems are just as bad as he is. But a competent operator would wipe the floor with both of them.
If something is a near existential threat, than it is worth spending lives and treasure on, and you should be able to say that upfront there is going to be a high cost and we're all going to have to suffer some to pay it.
Trump didn't even bother telling us ahead of time why we were doing this at all. Remember, he obliterated their nuke capability last year. Let alone that we might have to hurt our economy and possibly send in ground troops.
Further, saying he wants to prevent their nuclear capability is not the same as convincing us with facts that that nuclear capability is a direct threat to us and we have to do something about it today.
These seem like 2 separate claims to me. OP said that conservatives are "hiding the ball". That seems false to me, everyone that pays attention knows how conservatives feel about Iran.
You seem to be arguing for "make a case, build consensus, formally declare war with clear objectives". Maybe that is the right way to go about this, but is separate in my eyes.
Where has he made the case that Iran was actually close to getting a nuke? And wouldn't that case be undermined by his earlier claim that the bombings of just over half a year ago obliterated their nuclear program?
The anti nuke justification was the central piece of his speech. He doesn't address whether they were "close" or not, but that's besides the point. And of course it means that the 12 day war was not successful.
"It has always been the policy of the United States, in particular my administration, that this terrorist regime can never have a nuclear weapon. I'll say it again, they can never have a nuclear weapon. That is why in Operation Midnight Hammer last June, we obliterated the regime's nuclear program at Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan. After that attack, we warned them never to resume their malicious pursuit of nuclear weapons, and we sought repeatedly to make a deal. We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn't want to do it. Again they wanted to do it. They didn't want to do it. They didn't know what was happening. They just wanted to practice evil. But Iran refused, just as it has for decades and decades.
They've rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can't take it anymore. Instead, they attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing the long range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas, and could soon reach the American homeland. Just imagine how emboldened this regime would be if they ever had, and actually were armed with nuclear weapons as a means to deliver their message.
For these reasons, the United States military is undertaking a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests. We're going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally again obliterated. We're going to annihilate their navy. We're going to ensure that the region's terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces, and no longer use their IEDs, or roadside bombs as they are sometimes called, to so gravely wound and kill thousands and thousands of people, including many Americans. And we will ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon. It's a very simple message. They will never have a nuclear weapon."
LOL the “gunboat diplomacy” of picking through Iranian leaders until we get one we want. I don’t have to wonder how we’d feel if Iran pursued this policy with our leadership.
And yet, this idea that we can bomb THEM into submission never asks whether you could bomb US into submission. To which we would always give the answer, hell no, Keep Calm and Carry On as the Brits said.
I haven't read the Frum take but what does "gunboat diplomacy" mean for a nation of over 90 million people with, I dunno, most of the country not being on the ocean?
You've finally realized the wisdom of your father's taste. Took a little too long, imo.
Hi Mr. Yglesias!
I just learned yesterday that you wrote the screenplay to the 1998 adaptation of Les Miserables! I just wanted to tell you I absolutely loved that movie, I saw it when it first came out, I cried so hard at the end. It was brilliant. Thank you.
Thank you. Kind of you to say.
Meanwhile my daughter (13) has the same enjoyment of music from her father’s era (90’s and 00’s alternative) as i did at her age, when I just listened to classic rock.
My 30 year old son recently asked me if I had heard Sting and The Police.
Pretty amazing to learn that I'm old enough (69) to be @matt's father although I didn't start raising a family until I was about 10 years older.
As far as musical taste I appreciate some classic rock but mostly got into punk and new wave, jazz, and bluegrass but best described by one of my daughters "You see the thing about my Dad's music is that it doesn't go together."
Store radio is a great anti-indicator of taste: by the time it's pumped through Target or whatever, that tells me it's time to retire from my own public playlists, because it has become Officially Cringe. Which is a shame, because it's entirely possible to select actually-good stations on the typical corporate radio provider (Mood Media, the modern successor to Muzak), just no one ever does. All the old grads, and old undergrads, still wanna party like it's 19XX, each in his own key of course, until the whole place is just soggy with nostalgia. Which is incredibly embarrassing when it's schlock I already heard too many times as a highschooler. Teenage years were not, in fact, the best ones of my life! I don't want to be reminded of those days! You have access to all the world's art for pennies on the dollar, just play something fresh (or old enough to be cool again)!
I no longer remember exactly who I was reading on twitter (not "following", fuck your algorithm) in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But one contributor was some retired US Army general.
He pointed out that, in his experience, the Ukrainian military of 2014 was (my words, trying to paraphrase what I remember reading) woefully undertrained and obviously former East Bloc in anti-professionalism in a soldiering sense, and they would have had basically no shot in resisting what the Russians were up to at the time. After the Donestk-Luhansk operation, NATO (or maybe just the US) really stepped up how we were communicating/transmitting our understanding of how to maximize the effectiveness of soldiers and weaponry, rather than the Great Patriotic War meat-grinder approach. And it worked really, really well. All that is to say, the 2022-present Ukrainian resistance to Russian invasion would not have been possible without the post-2014 reforms.
NATO low ranking officers and NCOs are permitted to improvise and problem solve to a degree Eastern Bloc style troops aren't. That's what we started training the Ukrainians to do and it's part of why they were able to fight off the initial invasion. Local units had the autonomy to immediately take advantage of major Russian logistical failures (and just plain failure to anticipate resistance) instead of waiting for orders or doing things by the book regardless of whether it made sense for the situation.
I think we may have been reading the same tweets. It's the NCOs, stupid.
When I took military history in college we talked about some (probably apocryphal) quote from the Germans or Russians about the futility of capturing American military manuals, as no one has actually read them.
More seriously this is consistent with Cold War strategy. The understanding was that if a fight on the European continent stayed conventional Allied forces would be significantly outnumbered and need to rely on technology and wits to defeat the Soviets. Their doctrine was designed to overwhelm with huge forces all acting in concert.
You’re probably thinking of General Mark Hertling, a Bulwark contributor.
Yep, that name sounds right.
“After the 2016 election, Democrats got more hawkish on Russia and congressional Republicans continued to be hawkish, so suddenly Congress voted to provide Ukraine with more lethal aid. But that didn’t lead to Ukrainian victory in Donetsk — it led to Russia doubling down on its invasion of Ukraine. “
I don’t buy this. I think the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was the result of Putin growing older and impatient with incremental steps combined with confidence that he had built up the Russian military and economy well enough to make the move.
Plus the continued turn of Ukraine towards the west and their EU and NATO ambitions. They were not going to tolerate Ukraine leaving their orbit.
Yeah I don't see the counterfactual where they don't provide Ukraine the aid so Putin just relaxes. Especially since he didn't invade until 5 or 6 years later anyway.
This seems like an appropriate point to wonder what happened with Noah Smith. A year or two ago he was broadly similar to Matt in the moderate Dem heavily influenced by economics lane. But he seems to have really gone off the deep end in hatred of the Democrats/progressives (as seen in this comment about Obama) and general wild views.
He lives in the epicenter of failed progressive governance. It isn’t too complicated to understand the reaction.
There’s something to this, I was more right-wing in college because everyone else was so leftist… But he really needs to get out if that’s the case. As I quickly realized once I was out of school, in the real world the right has most of the power and causes most of the problems.
I attribute a ton of trump success to the over reach of progressives in places like SF, Chicago, NYC, and LA. Thermostatic backlash is real.
Sure, but at a certain point you have to take the W and come to terms with Lurie winning, and the current Board being (somewhat) less tankie, and the school board also being repeatedly rebuked, and the DA recall, and the decline in homelessness, and the (could be better but still real) drop in crime and disorder, and...etc, etc. There's still a lot of hole left to dig out of, but things actually are getting better, it's not 2020 anymore. And kicking the hippies while they're momentarily down probably is not best use of time and effort to ensure things stay this way.
(Maybe he could stop arguing for nationalization of AI labs too, that'd be a nice pro-San Francisco thing to do.)
His recent post highlighted the great progress SF made but also underlined the danger of backsliding it's now facing in the current Board of Supervisors election. And he literally put his money where his mouth is on this, contributing $10,000 (!) to a candidate who could keep the loonies from getting a majority.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/san-franciscos-urban-revival-is-in
Since bets are a tax on bullshit, I approve of this donation, and on Matt's theory of meaningfully donating to low-salience low-turnout key races, I wish I could match it. D11 is my sector, and we didn't get the absolute worst possible loony to replace former super Ahsha Safai, but she's still Not Great, Bob. Advocating for 100% affordable housing mandates and "increased community input" in a district that's already unattractive to developers because it's mostly working poors here...just shameful stuff.
That framing of NYT link about transit ridership is a bit misleading though...we're at something like 70-80% pre-pandemic Muni ridership, with the remaining missing chunk due to downtown hollowing out and the stubborn holdouts of disorder-tolerance still haunting some lines. Given that rider satisfaction is actually at one of the highest points in like a decade or two, I'm fully confident we could get back to 100% of the Before Times. Like, cmon Noah, I was there too in 2020-2023ish when every train and bus was empty and I was often the only non-homeless passenger, it's nothing like that anymore, we are absolutely so back. Note that unlike other areas he mentions as mostly being back to normal, transit ridership is explicitly left in the lurch, so a non-local reader could be forgiven for inferring that it's still a ghost train town in 2026.
The *actual* crash and burn has been BART, which has had an ongoing cavalcade of calamity to the point where there's serious talk of shutting the system down entirely. Which is kinda nuts, as an inter-regional transportation hub that includes SFO is just table stakes for a well-functioning economy and there should be plenty of money and demand. But once reliability craters far enough and you enter death spiral territory...it's just hard to recover from. Which gets back to Matt's other point, that commuter rail in America tends to be fairly nonsensically implemented if it didn't inherit legacy infrastructure, and maybe it does deserve to fail on the merits (and be replaced by bus bridges?)...still gonna be a lot of pain in the switch though.
I’d like to see Marty Supreme win. It was just a really well done character- need to see it again.
Noah is a lot more hawkish than Matt. Also he deals with a lot of local SF issues where they really do have a hard Left that went off the rails.
BTW I am a big fan of both, but I think Matt's take on Obama's foreign policy is better.
Living in a West Coast city can be quite radicalizing. I still regularly encounter people who insist that "the data clearly shows that police don't prevent crime", or that "people can't commit crimes when they're in jail" is not enough of a reason to put people in jail. Or that mandatory drug treatment is never acceptable even if we have good quality data showing that people who undergo mandatory drug treament are more likely to be alive in 5 years. Even worse, people like that get elected. Seattle's Mayor is only now learning that when you clear out a homeless encampmen that's really a drug encampment, most of hte residents will turn down offers of housing.
So far Massachusetts has been able to escape the worst of the worst of Progressive Anarchism that the west coast is marinated in thanks to the general uptight DNA of the place. 🙏
Philly seems to have avoided the worst even with a progressive DA simply because we aren’t rich enough to believe in this shit.
I can't believe I'm saying this but that goodness for the Puritans.
We get punished in the localism and NIMBY scale though.
I hope our mayor wakes up but not impressed is the polite way of saying what I think of her. That combined with the millionaire tax will not be good for Washington
If we're lucky, she's just hopelessly naive because she got all her information from activists and will change track as she's confronted with reality. If we're unlucky, she's a true believer and will double down or just do nothing.
Thus far, her proposals to get more shelter beds have been pretty unimpressive. It really does look like she thought that the reason prior mayors weren't making progress on homelessness was that they were refusing to do what they need to do rather than that the problem is genuinely hard.
Yeah, the charitable view is that she has a steep learning curve. But knowing that she was the major pusher of the head tax, and that she left Oxford 6 weeks before her final exams, just makes me think she’s a profoundly stupid person. The only arena I trust her is transit, and then not very. She probably thinks it should be free.
I very much like Noah on where he has genuine knowledge - that is economics.
His comment on non-economic issues is not of same quality -even where I agree with him. He'd be better served to stay focused on that.
It’s very spiky; when it’s good, as with most of his insight on Japan, it’s usually extremely good. When it’s bad (AI), it’s often shockingly bad.
Well, it seems lots of people here hate Noah's AI takes but that seems heavily rooted in not liking his optimism on AI whereas it's become de rigeur amongst Lefty readerships to be pessismists.
While I am personally perhaps slightly more to the pessimistic or moderately paranoid side, I have appreciated his economic side AI reflections even when finding myself skeptical of some conclusions.
Generally his pattern is he is interesting and at least grounded if he is doing economics.
If he is venturing into social commentary and political or socio-political, even when I agree with him, I don't find he's particularly very sharp at it.
I can’t say I’ve ever read a column of his on AI and not been shocked at the poorly-thought-out quality of the writing and conclusions, and I’m certainly not on the left. I’m an economic analyst and I’ve been intimately familiar with the subject for years.
It’s bad enough for me to wonder if I’m getting Gell-Mann amnesia about the rest of his work… but then again, much of his economics, foreign policy, and especially Asia-focused writing is truly excellent.
I confess I do not read his non-econ AI reflections - his market structure reflections to me are quite sensible potential
As for his foreign policy, actually I think his FP comment ex-economic FP is generally not strong, although his Asia focused writing I do agree is very strong.
If you’re a moderate liberal and live in SF/CA, hatred of progressives is a very natural progression. I don’t think he hates Democrats more than MAGA Republicans.
The PNW is similar. Apparently I'm far right because I think that if you can't pay your rent, the government should pay it rather than just making it nearly impossible for the landlord to evict you.
I don’t agree. He writes about quality of life issues in SF quite often. He does tweet about left anti-semitism quite a bit.
SF progressives were too nice to homeless people causing some to move to SF and set up tent encampments…
Meanwhile Israel just forced millions of Lebanese to move making much larger tent encampments spring up all over Beirut…
If someone wants to minimize homelessness they should be supporting the most Israel-skeptical parties possible no matter what their positions are on just about anything else.
This rhetoric would be more effective if it was ever used for the numerous much worse refugee crises that Israel isn't involved with.
Someone whose primary concern is homelessness in southern Lebenon should really be opposed to Hezbollah above all else.
The local politics in SF spends an inappropriate amount of time and focus on international issues. The head of the teachers union was explicitly Maoist, Israel/gaza was a huge focus, the people involved in the party politics on the left side had plenty of “Stalin was good”/“stalin did nothing wrong”/“the USA needs to unilaterally surrender to Russia/china/third world countries today”/“our goal is to surrender turtle island to indigenous peoples and pay reparations forever” people. These all sound like small ball but they’d come up and dominate discourse in a purity spiral way. If you didn’t have these insane views you’d be treated like a George bush/trump republican by 1/2 the SF media and politics apparatus as a punishment for ideological impurity.
Noah Smith has lived in Taiwan and Japan, so he understands the cost of being a China dove.
Hating China really is the most important thing
Since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Noah seems to have become much more invested in US military readiness and kinetic resources, which is something that pretty clearly wasn’t a big priority of the Obama admin. Matt seems to be more Obama-ish with a continued focus on microeconomic optimizations and economic policymaking generally, and less interested than Noah in the premise that WWIII is on the short-medium term horizon and thus needs preparation now.
Noah's comment on these areas when rooted in the technology and economics is quite interesting (e.g. the economics of the elec. tech stack as also a national security as well as econ competitiveness issue). Specific FP treaty comment etc. it's ... well a guy commenting, not comment from real expertise.
It's worth pointing out that Noah suffers from mental issues, which he's been open about.
When some Indian American college student did a speech about Gaza, he quoted it to make a comment about how sexually turned on he was. That just isn't normal, and his problems have clearly worsened since the start of Trump's second term. A lot of his posting is deeply unprofessional and out of the ordinary.
The story about his time in a London airport (Heathrow), and blaming the UK for him being unable to follow basic instructions on how to get to his connecting flight, was an embarassing meltdown too. Millions of people use Heathrow every year for connecting flights and face no issues. He's also increasingly become more racist too, just making bigoted comments about entire groups of people. I would just unfollow if I was you, he never used to be this bad in 2024 and before. Something has clearly degraded in his mental state at some point in early 2025.
Watching the world fall apart would make me go cuckoo too if it was my job to observe and comment on it. Luckily it's not my job so I can tune it out for 23 hours a day.
Many people have ruined their lives by being on Twitter. Like gambling, some people just are too vulnerable to its dark side.
I didn't know about Noah's mental issues.
I know his comment section has chuds who get mad when Noah talks about the threat of MAGA to liberal order and how stupid most Trump economic policies are.
Did he say something about Shruthi Kumar? I see people talking about a bizarre discussion with JVL at the Bulwark but I can't find the actual text. It looks like his bio page is gone from the Bulwark.
I just felt pity for his Heathrow experience. Some things are better off posted to your spouse than to Twitter,
No idea what this is about. But Shruthi Kumar seems to be doing just fine. She’s working at Trilogy Partners and getting paid lots of money to live in San Francisco.
> The story about his time in a London airport (Heathrow), and blaming the UK for him being unable to follow basic instructions on how to get to his connecting flight
I don't know if there is a systematic way this sort of thing is tracked. I have heard from family and friends traveling through LHR that making a connection there is much more of a hassle compared to other airports.
Fair point, but Noah's reaction wasn't simply to describe an unfortunate experience and complain about Heathrow. That happens.
It was to complain about the UK as a whole, using that one story to make a whole point about the UK being some horrific third world country. He's just a mentally unwell guy and has been for a couple years now. I was a fan of his work and perspective in the 2010s and during the Biden Presidency. But just giving my take, fair enough if people still think he's a normal and impressive guy
I subscribe to Noah's substack, but I don't read everything he publishes and I'm not on twitter at all. I haven't seen anything like this. It would help if you could link to this stuff.
Yes this is my experience as well and I did unfollow but it's nonetheless weird enough to remark on.
I like Noah but he's always seemed like a bit of an incel nerd who never had much success with women, probably until his 30's. Some of his posting on sex and dating is just odd.
This is your brain. This is your brain on Twitter.
10/7 fried Noah’s brain in the same way that 9/11 fried many brains. He is permanently stuck in 2023. This is the key insight.
He chases pro-Palestine Twitter accounts with 300 followers like a cat chasing a laser pointer.
He has nearly lost all perspective and his “woke” obsession is 3-5 years behind reality.
Smart guy though. I hope he snaps out of it. I had to unsubscribe from his substack.
The left’s unhinged reaction to Israel’s response and the rise in antisemitism on the left also had something to do with it.
He takes Leftist anti-semitism a lot more seriously than Matt does. And thus has been driving away from the Left for some time now.
I read his blog and absolutely don't think he's becoming MAGA or conservative. He's still solidly liberal and a big defender of liberalism and Democrats winning imo. He's been more punchy towards left wing progressives over the past couple of years but I don't think he's been driving away per se... Then again I don't use Twitter. I only follow his Substack blog.
He also used to write a lot more economic analysis. Now he writes polemics responding to rando twitter accounts ... I un-subbed for this reason.
Yeah, this is the correct take. I subscribed to Noah because his economic analysis was interesting and not readily available elsewhere. These days he’s leaning more and more into generalist punditry where his VORP is nil.
I unsubbed when I got tired of him saying positive things about Elon Musk and AI. He’s too Stanford-brained. But he’s right about China, industrial policy, etc
that's a very unfortnate reason to unsubscribe from him. His observations on Elon were and are quite correct in re Elon historically in respect to what he achieved - Elon the human being at least of late is at best unfortunate. Elon the industrial scaler is someone pre-Twitter take over at minimum to study.
It wasn’t talking about Elon in the past, it was his grasping at straws to justify his more recent behavior iirc. As well as general pro-tech, pro-SV, pro-“creative destruction” and AI vile nonsense. That kind of thing shouldn’t be supported, China hawk though I may be
Nice username
I'm a loyal Noah reader for over a decade now, so I'm not trying to dunk on him.
But he seems to have developed China-derangement-syndrome and is willing to support a number of reactionary views if it helps "defeat" them. It's possibly related to the fact that CCP intervention at Bloomberg made his situation untenable there, the timing lines up at least.
Part of it may be that he's quite a Japanophile, and I believe he feels CCP threats to that country a lot more viscerally and emotionally than most Americans.
Not just Japan - he was on the ground in Hong Kong for protests, and he has been to Taiwan quite a bit too. He really has been closer to Chinese influence than MattY or many other take-makers.
It’s kind of astounding that people take Japan’s side in these disputes, like just read about some of the things they did to China from the 1890s to WWII that they never paid any reparations for, while the CCP has never invaded Japan.
After WWII, Germany and Japan should’ve paid sufficient reparations to the USSR and China to equalize living standards between them (which would’ve also most likely prevented the CCP takeover in China).
?? Paid with what?
As for why people take Japan's side…I don't think Japan's crimes in World War II are very relevant to the question of who we should support today, any more than our genocide of the Native Americans was relevant to whether we were the relative good guys in World War II. Geopolitics isn't making sure that the historical ledger comes out fair.
meh, all those individual people are gone and projections about the future matter more than some "sins of the past" framing
After WWII Germany and Japan couldn't feed themselves.
As I recall, post-WWI reparations didn't work out so hot.
Nikuruga, I agree with you on most things, but "two countries that had been bombed to rubble [including one country that had TWO NUCLEAR BOMBS dropped on it] should have paid reparations" is, as the kids say, Certainly An Opinion.
Marshall Plan was the right way to go about it: pay those countries to rebuild themselves, and thereby turn them from enemies to allies.
I don't know what the Western world should have done* in the 1990s to support democracy in the former USSR, or whether things were doomed to go south regardless of what the West did.
*"give them money" is the easy answer, but how do you stop that money from going to some corrupt ex-Soviet apparatchik instead of helping the people?
Granted Japan's treatment of China in WW2 was abominable, but that's not a reason to be blase about Chinese dominance of the Pacific region. I don't trust China to be a benevolent hegemon.
It's not about taking Japan's side. It's about Taiwan's side. The CCPs stated policy is that they will murder the 23 million people on the island if they ever take formal steps to independence. (The PRC has never controlled Taiwan)
China won
I think you are 100% on point here
On the other hand, I think his point that China's manufacturing advantages over the US raises military risks for us is sound.
He’s right about China
Good point, about a good 20% of his writings over the last couple of years imo seem to be talking about partnering with Japan and defeating China in various ways. I'm not saying he's off base with his ideas or takes. But I do think it has colored his opinions of what defines success from a foreign policy pov depending on the time period.
The consensus of the comments seems to be negative polarization based on bad tweets and the SF Board of Supervisors, plus hawkishness. Which makes me additionally grateful that our host has not fallen into either of those pits.
I agree that Noah has changed.
In some ways Noah was actually to the left of Matt, now he is significantly to the right. He used to be an Elizabeth Warren fan now he is very critical. Some people say he is hawkish but he seems more jingoistic than hawkish.
I follow people who have had a role in shaping US foreign policy and who has served in the military and compared to them Noah strikes me as an overeager college student or even high school student. He seems out of his depth.
Noah seems to lack emotional maturity that people like Matt and Ezra had even when they where younger than Noah.
Your opinions are shaped by who you hang out with and Noah seems to socialize with techno bros who think the world of Elon Musk.
I'm still very interested in what Noah has to say about macro economic policy, trade, technology and science fiction but when it comes to foreign policy and military issues I would rather listen to people who have expertise on the issue.
That's my take as well and I read Noah's blog, sometimes I think Noah is more chronically online that MY is and he seems to just like provoking leftist people for his own enjoyment.
I do think he is very worried about a foreign war with China because he loves Japan and Asia and so any President that basically doesn't do enough to move out military towards the most high technology and supply chain possible he thinks is a failure in some sense. In general he's also way more hawkish than your average economist and MY imo. He's especially hawkish for someone that doesn't seem to have any interest in serving in the military either.
Yup, I get annoyed by Matt's Twitter-brained takes at times, but at least he has a family and outside interests - even Noah's outside interest seem connected to his SV-aligned worldview. Like, I'm sure Matt has people he knows he just complains about the Wizards drafting with. I'm not sure Noah has anybody like that.
Which again, is why I pay Matt $5/month and OTOH, broadly agree w/ Bouie's dunks on Noah.
Well, he loves rabbits and that partially redeems his bad takes.
Agree with loving rabbits being a positive.
I think there are lots of pundits across the spectrum who are hawkish but have no interest in serving in the military and Noah is not an exception or in a small group on this issue.
I feel like Noah Smith was always highly committed to Western supremacy, which is in inherent tension with development economics and ideas like equality, democracy, etc. given that other countries catching up to the West was always going to lead to multipolarity given that most people are non-Western. “One Billion Americans” seems like it was the only serious effort to maintain Western supremacy without making the world look like the movie Elysium but since the immigration backlash seems like more people are going to be forced to take one side of the tension or another.
But you are just reframing the old neoliberal consensus as "Western supremacy"... I read Noah as supporting the global neoliberal order - which is actually very supportive of democracy and individual rights. But the neoliberal "End of History" POV has fallen on hard times in the Woke Era. As parts of the Left have focused more on oppressed communities and minority groups, they have sadly lost support for individual freedom.
(And perhaps the kicker has been that individual freedom and accountability in a globalized market system leads to somewhat homogenous optimal individual responses. Play the capitalism game or capitalism runs you over. Personally I'm in the game but I hear some people hate it.)
I actually thought the JCPOA was an ok deal, and Noah Smith (or more broadly almost all generalist pundits) should be ignored on foreign policy.
But I think the analysis of Obama’s foreign policy views (or more accurately, the views of key admin officials) retcons too much.
The views of people like Ben Rhodes were basically:
1. We need to pivot away from the Middle East (perhaps reasonable)
2. If we leave the Middle East, it will be destabilizing (again, maybe on the right track)
3. Why? Because the Palestinian issue is the main destabilizing force in the Middle East (!!!), and Israel/the Gulf, who don’t care enough about solving this issue, would be too empowered (stupid)
4. Therefore, we have a win-win available: negotiate to get rid of Iran’s nuclear ambitions and bolster Iran a bit to counterbalance Israel/the Gulf (ok…)
5. With Iran/its proxies hanging over their heads, Israel/the Gulf will have to be more reasonable on the Palestinian issue. As a bonus, Iran will become more normal (catastrophically moronic)
One key reason for Obama’s dovishness vis-a-vis Russia and Syria was that he thought he needed Russia for the JCPOA. So there’s that too.
Overall, the consequences weren’t terrible. Kicking the can down the road is sometimes the only good option. Moreover, exiting the deal made zero sense because the Iranians had already received their money!
But the Obama admin’s thinking was often based on completely wrongheaded models of the world. (Also seriously disagree with the take on Ukrainian aid.)
Ben Rhodes’ calling threats to Israel from Iran “perceived threats” was basically enough for me to want to stop listening to him. I spent 2 years running back and forth to bomb shelters with explosions overhead from missiles paid for by Iran (and some from Iran directly). Those missiles were largely aimed at cities with no legitimate military target. Iran constantly calls for the elimination of Israel, “Death to Israel”, and the regime maintains a doomsday clock in Tehran counting the days until Israel’s elimination. They pay for Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis and other militias in Syria and Iraq to try to terrorize and kill Israelis with the explicit aim of destroying the country.
These aren’t perceived threats. They are real threats. You can agree or disagree with Israeli policy or military campaigns, and you can agree or disagree with the US involvement, and I’m willing to listen to your perspective. But if you can’t admit that Israel faces very real threats, then you don’t understand the very basics of what is going on and thus your analysis will always be distorted. At some point it’s just gaslighting.
The extra-stupid bit is that Rhodes was claiming you’d be facing *fewer* rockets after an appropriate balance of power between Israel/Sunni/Shia had been achieved.
(Reminds me of another idea liberals hold about Middle East policy…)
Right. Ben and others like him really don’t want to engage with or have any curiosity about people’s actual ideologies. Ideology is something that you explain away, or suggest that it’s downstream of circumstance, or you just ignore. It’s easier to explain away what people actually say, rather than actually engage with it. It’s much more comforting that way than to realize that people are sometimes committed to ideas different than our own.
The Frontline on the rise of ISIS is very good. Ben Rhodes doesn’t come off as a rocket scientist. Sometimes you gotta say you screwed up
>> But if you can’t admit that Israel faces very real threats, then you don’t understand the very basics of what is going on and thus your analysis will always be distorted.>>
There are many things that could be said here I will say that I think the Israelis were, at best, *exceptionally* bad at communicating what they thought those threats to be, (although given Netanyahu's actions towards Obama crediting such representations with even basic good faith was difficult). In conventional war Israel is the overdog and has been for decades, and any serious attempt at force-mustering by hostile states would have provoked an immediate response from the U.S. and Israel wouldn't be fighting alone. Rocket attacks are no doubt highly stressful, but even if Iron Dome *didn't* exist they wouldn't constitute an "existential" threat to Israel, just objectively speaking. If the goal is "wipe out the Jews in Israel" the actual means by which that could most plausibly be accomplished are nuclear weapons, *which is exactly what the JCPOA was about keeping out of the hands of Iran.* So (from my US perspective) the Israeli position regarding threats is what came across as gaslighting during Obama's second term -- throwing around the term "existential" with respect to things that are clearly not, while opposing a non-proliferation deal oriented towards exactly those arms which actually *do* pose an existential threat. Iran's hostile intent was not at issue -- its capacities to act on it were.
Israel has been attacked with rockets every couple years by Hamas and PIJ for two decades. Hamas has spent 25% of its GDP on a tunnel system to hide its militants and weapons to use against Israel. It organized incendiary kites to burn Israeli farms. It ultimately invaded Israel, shot revelers at a music festival and shot families in their own home point blank and took 250 hostages. Hamas was funded by Iran.
Hezbollah bombed the Israeli embassy in Argentina. It organized cross border raids against Israel‘s north, and organized rocket attacks. It also bombed Israeli civilians overseas, and launched rockets, drones and missiles frequently at Israel. Hezbollah is directed by and funded by Iran.
The Houthi rebels, also directed and funded by Iran, have also been frequently launching cruise missiles at Israel.
Israel has been exceedingly and abundantly clear about this. A threat needn’t be existential to be a security threat. A country’s responsibility is to protect its population, not only to survive as an entity.
Let’s be clear, the only acceptable number of rockets to launch at Israeli population centers is zero. The only acceptable number of drones or incendiary kites to send to Israeli population centers is zero. The only acceptable number of buses to bomb or embassies to blow up is zero. The only acceptable number of hostages to take is zero.
Thus far Iran has funded tens of thousands of such attacks.
Furthermore it is not acceptable to call for another sovereign nation’s elimination or death. The standard of safety is not “will my population be wiped out and my country destroyed”. It’s “will my citizens face unacceptable threats to their security”.
I hope that is clear. The fact that Israel takes extraordinary steps to protect its civilian population with Iron Dome, or Arrow, safe rooms and shelters does not diminish this.
Furthermore, Iran is country 9 times bigger in population than Israel. It has a similar GDP to Israel. In PPP Iran has a much larger economy than Israel. While we know now how incompetent the Iranian regime is, their incompetence does not diminish the fact that they pose real security threat to Israel. I’d argue that a country 9x your size and of similar wealth threatening to eliminate you and funding groups that also aim to do so IS an existential threat, even if your country is (usually) more competently run than the one threatening to.
The JCPOA focused on the nuclear threat. It did so however in a way that enhanced Iran’s wealth and this their ability to generate conventional strength, both through its military and terror proxy groups that wage asymmetric warfare. This is a legitimately hard call about whether or not this trade off was worth it. Clearly the Americans thought yes and the Israelis thought no. This is a reasonable thing to disagree on, and there’s no perfect answer.
Israel has been very clear about the threats. Israel has been willing to absorb a tremendous number of attacks that very few countries would be able to absorb. The fault is not with Israel if you refuse to listen or pay attention.
I don’t think any of that Iranian activity (or its evilness) is under dispute.
The point is that the Israeli message at the time was not “vote against the JCPOA because we instead want the U.S. to destroy Iran and immiserate its populace to reduce its conventional power” —reasonable as that preference may be for ISRAELIS. It was instead JCPOA won’t work and you don’t need a war, do a secret third thing to solve the Iran problem and full on attack on the Obama administration for not buying that line.
That’s not what Israel said.
Again the Israeli concern with the JCPOA is 1. that it was temporary and has sunset clauses, and 2. it didn’t do anything to prevent Iran from using the money it would gain from the deal on terror proxies. There was also concerns about monitoring.
The increased funding for terror was going to (and did) lead to the violent deaths of Israelis. Whether or not the trade off was worth it to get a two decade pause on the nuclear program, well that’s a tough one. And there’s no good answer. I can respect both the American view and the Israeli view here, and I respect your disagreement with the Israeli view, so long as you recognize that it indeed resulted in real (not perceived) security risks to Israelis that would be considered intolerable to nearly any other peer country.
The Israeli position HAS NEVER been that it wants to destroy Iran or immiserate its people. There’s some serious moral inversion here. Iran shouts “Death to Israel”, and has a doomsday clock counting the minutes to Israel’s elimination. Iran wants to destroy Israel. Iran objects to Israel‘s very existence as a country. Israel, by contrast, has no issue with the existence of Iran, or the existence of a Persian state within its sovereign boundaries and does not seek to destroy the country. Israel’s only interest in Iran is that they don’t use their resources to try to destroy Israel. In contrast, the Iranian regime believes the redemption of Islam can only come about when Israel and the Jews within it, the weakest people to ever hold Islam back, are destroyed. This will also lead to the ascendancy of Shia Islam, as Sunni Arab leaders have long failed in their quest to dismantle Israel.
Israel would be very happy if the Iranian regime would stop its nuclear program, its intercontinental ballistic missile program, its funding of terror proxies and its frequent calls for Israel’s destruction That has always been an option for Iran, and the best option for Iran, yet the Iranian regime has made other choices.
I agree that Israel would prefer that Iran turned into a peaceful neighbor, and would happily trade with and otherwise leave them alone if they did so. I also agree that this is an important moral distinction between the two regimes.
I disagree, just as a factual matter, that the Israeli government, having correctly concluded that this is not on the cards, doesn’t want the US to sanction their economy to death and blow them up, for the instrumental purpose of reducing the danger Iran poses to its citizens. I think that is likely why the US is at war with Iran right now, in fact.
The main destabilizing force in the Middle East is the Shia/Sunni conflict. A 1400 year fight is more significant than an 80 year fight. And now Pakistan is supporting Israel.
Yes, I mean this was one of the main idiotic tenets of the Ben Rhodes view of the world.
Like, what was ISIS about???
Shia-Sunni tensions do vary over time, though I don't think US policy effects theological tensions.
You got sources for (4) and (5) as Obama policy/theory? Seems...unlikely to me?
Also the criticism in Syria is thst he didnt get involved (he tried to convince congress instead of jumping headfirst) and the criticism of Libya is he did too much (and some say too little - both takes on Libya ring true in my mind). But in Syria, yes there was a brutal Civil War with the Russian backed leader in charge - but not getting directly involved actually ended up working and keeping us out of another MidEast quagmire, right?
Excellent analysis on Obama's foreign policy.
I wonder if they just assumed Hillary Clinton would win in 2016? Trump overturned Obama's deals on Iran and Cuba, but that wasn't some unique thing to Trump. Any other Republican President like Rubio or Jeb also would have quickly exited those deals. A lot of time in his second term dedicated to achievements that never had bipartisan investment, so were never going to last if any Republican President succeeded him.
Say what you will about Bill Clinton, but Clinton and his team understood the importance of making sure you had some Republican buy-in to his achievements on both domestic and foreign policy.
It was a different time. Can you imagine a Clinton-era Bob Dole Senate refusing to vote on a Supreme Court vacancy?
You are forgetting how hard the Republicans leaned in to refusing to give him any bipartisan cover. The bipartisanship you refer to was not possible.
Not totally clear others would have exited JCPOA. At the time Trump withdrew, most GOP foreign policy hands actually opposed withdrawing. (I think even Mitt Romney spoke out against it.)
I was wondering about this point in the last few weeks, so re-watched the foreign policy sections of a couple of the 2016 GOP primary debates. And it is actually striking that even Jeb and Rubio, both among the mainstream of the party at the time, were very strong on their opposition to the Iran Deal and committing to exiting it very early in their Presidency. Only Kasich among all the candidates gave a more nuanced answer.
I don't doubt that when Trump did exit it in 2018, there was more of a controversy, but that's likely because it's Trump and the effect he has in associating himself with a particular position. It's still the case that the mainstream of the GOP were fully opposed to it from day 1, same with the Cuba opening deal. It is a curious one to invest so much energy into two deals that relied on Hillary Clinton winning in 2016 for either to have a chance of surviving once Obama left office.
With TPP, I have far more sympathy for the Obama team. That was a good deal, which had support from Paul Ryan and other mainstream Republicans. The rise of bad faith populism on both extremes of the political spectrum ended up defeating it more than anything else.
Oh there was tons of GOP opposition to JCPOA - they would never have entered it into the first place and happily campaigned against it. But that's different than withdrawing once it was in place (despite what they campaigned on). Trump himself *did* stay in for 2 years and withdrew against the opinion of his officials. And at that point, most GOP foreign policy hands opposed withdrawing (because there was no upside to withdrawing after the fact). My guess is most alternative GOP presidents would have called it a bad deal, pursued maximum pressure on Iran on other fronts, but would have remained in it.
(That's especially true if Hillary *had* won in 2016 and the agreement had been in place for longer.)
I agree re JCPOA. Jeb! and that ilk would've been happy to trash it as a horrible screw up at every opportunity and might even try to "renegotiate" it in a superficial way, but there was really no upside to leaving it in the way trump did. A normal R would mostly have left it intact in substance.
And if there's another Hillary term, it might not even have been a thing by 2020.
Jeb would not have torn up the Iran treaty. He didn’t like it, but takes stuff like American credibility seriously. I do think he would have tried to shift us back hawkish in other ways though.
I'm not really well read on the Obama-- Cuba attempt at reconciliation but it seemed to be a good non-malicious approach(and we had cigars!). Now Trump is basically trying to achieve the same thing by strong arming Cuba with sanctions into being compliant to the US? This seems very Stalin-esque and doesn't foment any long lasting trust or respect.
Alternately, the bottom has dropped out on non-serial hits leaving the Oscars to choose between Marvel and artsy fare.
GO AWAY, COMIC BOOKS
They should choose Marvel. "Captain America, The Winter Soldier," "Guardians of the Galaxy 2," and "Black Panther" were all better than the actual best picture winners that came out that year.
>"Black Panther" were all better than the actual best picture winners that came out that year.
That is mostly because Green Book shouldn't have won. That was an insanely good year for film, and there were tons of better films, including all the foreign film nominees.
If The Shape of Water had not won, there are approximately 20 American films made in 2018 that would have made better winners than Guardians 2, including two MCU films.
Like, what even is the Pulp Fiction equivalent for the 2020s?
Everything Everywhere All At Once?
But that did actually win best picture
The premise was really good but I found the constant rapid fire scene changes nauseating: a little goes a long way.... like the premise alone wasn't endearing enough to John Q Public and they had to water it down with hyper-action.
If it exists, I want to watch it, because Pulp Fiction is one of my all time favorite movies.
The 'Pulp Fiction of the 2020s' might not even be much like the actual movie. What I mean is something made with real studio dollars with real movie stars that challenges old conventions without disappearing up it's own ass with pretentiousness or heavy handed messaging.
Marty Supreme fits the bill (and would be my choice for best picture).
It might be fair to accuse Josh Safdie of being a one-trick pony: "Marty Supreme" basically has the same "After Hours" structure of "Good Time" and "Uncut Gems", but damn it's a good trick, and he reaches farther thematically every time.
From 2016 but the closest I've ever felt to when I walked out of Pulp Fiction was The Handmaiden. Just mindbending perfection.
Pulp Fiction is a rather sui generis, but maybe Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World?
I need to check that one out, but I was thinking of something coming out of Hollywood.
Maybe Zola?
I remain salty that not only did TPP not get done the whole party soured on it.
The problem with Noah Smith’s formulation that the US “trusted” Iran’s leaders is that this was not the primary objections of opponents of the JCPOA.
The primary objections were that the limits on the nuclear program were temporary and had sunset clauses and that the JCPOA would help Iran’s conventional military capabilities, especially with respect to terrorist proxies, by providing them with more money. There was also skepticism about the monitoring of Iran. But the primary opposition wasn’t about trust.
I think this was indeed a tough question. Was a roughly two decade pause on Iran’s nuclear program worth the risk of bolstering Iran conventionally? I have some sympathy for Obama’s position. I also understand the concerns. It absolutely did help Iran cement its terror proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen. But it did actually have the potential to put a pause on Iran becoming nuclear, something definitely in the US’ and the world’s interest.
It was Biden, on the other hand, that unfroze assets to Iran, but for much much lower stakes. He did so for the release of 5 prisoners. He did so to make a waiver for Iraq to buy Iranian oil. His administration insisted that that money couldn’t be used for terror. But this ignores the most basic fact about money: that it is fungible. I’m pretty sure they understand that money is fungible, so the defense was not in good faith. As much sympathy as I have for the 5 prisoners and their families, this is much lower stakes than Iran’s nuclear program. This was clearly Biden not taking the Iranian threat, either conventional or nuclear, seriously.
I like and supported Joe Biden. He has several key accomplishments that I support. But while I can understand both sides of the JCPOA argument under Obama, I cannot see both sides of his foreign policy vis a vis Iran.
Wow, Matt Y, I like you, but your taste in movies couldn’t be more different from mine!
You went from “Ew, mainstream Oscar-winning movies are like, I want cool and edgy” to “oh no, Oscar-winning movies appeal to me now, does that make me lame?” I went from “I love these Oscar-nominated movies! I saw Titanic in theaters four times and bawled my eyes out at the end each time [I was a 15-year-old girl]” to “where did all the good Oscar-winning movies go? Anora who? I have no interest in seeing it.” In fairness, OBAA actually does sound interesting, I just didn’t get around to seeing it in theaters, will probably get around to streaming it sometime (as well as “Sinners”).
I guess this makes me lame, but I want movies with likable characters and a meaningful plot with high stakes, and an ending that, if not *happy,* is at least bittersweet. Like in “Shakespeare in Love,” the lovers are separated, but their romance will be an inspiration for Shakespeare’s plays. I do not want endings that say “everything sucks and everything is horrible,” like one of this year’s nominees I could mention (yeah, movie, you know which one you are and what you did!)
>I guess this makes me lame, but I want movies with likable characters and a meaningful plot with high stakes, and an ending that, if not *happy,* is at least bittersweet.
You would probably like Anora, then. The characters are flawed, because they are real, but likeable enough. The personal stakes are high, at least as high as those in Shakespeare in Love. And the ending is indeed bittersweet.
Recent Oscar-winning movies are bad. Matt has lousy taste in movies. (Suggesting he was adopted and shares no genes with his father.)
Anora was good, but also the most overtly sexual movie I can remember winning the Oscar. Mikey Madison had enormous confidence pulling it off.
Project Hail Mary is coming out soon, I can’t wait!
𝗡𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 will ever compare to Highlander II: The Quickening.
This is true.
Perhaps not in the way you mean, though.
(Haven't seen it. I'm assuming.)
I could go either way with the type of movies u are describing but I agree with u in the sense that it feels like the movies competing for best picture are much more likely to be relevant at cannes than in past. Like u have to be an arthouse cinema lover to want to roll through all the best picture nominated movies last year.
I remain a huge fan of PTA’s first three movies. One Battle After Another was an enormously entertaining piece of far-left agitprop. PTA was careful to make Bob a buffoon and to force one of the sympathetic characters to commit, under intense pressure, a criminal error of judgment in the early bank scene, but mainly he presented them as noble, selfless, and cool. Meanwhile the right-wing forces were almost uniformly malevolent, horrifyingly racist, impossible to identify with, and so in control of the levers of power that violent revolution made narrative sense.
A non-trivial faction of the intellectual American right wing is intensely motivated by the sense of being under cultural siege in the universities and media by illiberal forces that do not fight fair within the bounds of the law and the Constitution. PTA made a movie that could not have done more to justify that perspective. I hate it and think all good liberals should join me.
>>but mainly he presented them as noble, selfless, and cool
I didn't interpret it this way, nor did most people I watched it with -- he seemed to hit "both sides". What really undermined this was the decision of the daughter at the end, which clearly expressed a preference. She should have become a lame centrist like the rest of us here!
I read the ending as a tragedy. That the daughter could have had a normal life but now she was on the same path as the older leftists, none of whom are presented as uncomplicated heroes.
Yeah the right wing forces are clearly worse in OBAA, but one of the main themes was that extremism on both sides feed one another.
Isn’t the positive takeaway at the end that she’s headed to a protest and not firebombing a Walmart?
When I saw it I thought the implication was that she was going to continue in the radical and violent acts of her parents (especially with the letter from her mother) but I suppose it is never explicitly stated.
My take is, unfortunately, complicated and hard to argue. I think he made a big show of both-sides-ism while forcefully stacking the deck in favor of left violent political action and against right nativism. His emotional loyalty to 1970s L.A. may have subconsciously pulled him that way.
A good way to put this is: would you be more ashamed to be Bob (a loving, loyal screwup), or to be Lockjaw (a man who disowns his great love and avows horrid racism to gain status)? I think the answer is *obviously* Lockjaw.
Don't disagree with any of that. But the left groups were presented as violent, disorganized and self righteous. I don't think it was a positive portrayal at all, even if the other side was comparatively worse.
Sympathy for 1970s terrorists is both common in the culture and really odd. They almost universally failed, were usually sadistic, pro-Soviet, pathetic and with odd ideologies few people support now.
For most of the movie, Bob wasn't representative of the left radicals though, he was the "everyman".
I feel more like it glamorized the Lefty Terrorists but with plausible deniability. Like sure, the lefty terrorists were shown to be either incompetent or self-centered, but it’s still kind of cool and glamorized.
Yeah, because violence is exciting as hell! It’s the same thing as Goodfellas, when it’s going well you feel like you’re on top of the world, and then it falls apart hard.
What is a “cultural siege”? Making a movie is protected by the First Amendment so how is that outside the bounds of the law and Constitution?
And the movie is not attacking all right-wingers but a specific type of nativist who is in fact malevolent, racist, and in control of the levers of power. The main thing that was cartoonish about Lockjaw was how suddenly servile he was towards the Christmas Adventurer’s Club which made him look a little buffoonish too, but if not for that, many Americans would identify with him!
“…forces that do not fight fair within the bounds of the law and the Constitution.”
EAIAC (Every Accusation Is A Confession)
In world 1, ICE is engaging in lawless terrorism against us cities with the support of the president, Supreme Court, and congress. In the movies, I guess the libs portray them as such. A real head scratcher
I really enjoyed OBAA, but it's shrill, cartoonish, and then on top of all that it has no heart because the characters aren't drawn plausible psychologies.
It's fun to watch di Caprio bumble around, Benicio del Toro exudes infinite charm as a hyper-competent single-man sanctuary city, and the car chase at the end is unlike anything I've ever seen. But it doesn't add up, maybe because the source material kind of sucks. The Crying of Lot 49 was a fun paranoid rush, but only because it was so short. Thomas Pynchon's subject to intense diminishing returns.
I mean, I didn't catch it when it came out, so I ended up watching it during the siege in Minnesota, which made it look not parodic but prescient. It definitely was not "far left"—anti-authoritrian, yes.
I had to turn it off after the first 10 minutes because I got the exact same feeling. I think many people are blind to how partisan this movie is, but maybe I'm wrong because I didn't watch all of it.
I enjoyed the movie but get that perspective. This was a pretty good write up:
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-soil-falling-over-my-head
I think he was trying to do a new type of “good” politically relevant auteur driven movie that’s widely watched. Or even prove he could do such a thing, this is his commercially biggest movie by far. Not as serious as Bicycle thieves or as topical and ideological as like Ken loach. I think this was pta saying I’m going to not avoid politics but I’m also trying to make a legit action family drama comedy mashup, I thought it was real ambitious and the use of the hills in the chase scene was great. All this on a background of I assume a sincere belief that the right wing is much more dangerous than the left wing. I thought obaa and licorice pizza were him stretching into new space thought they were very cool.
I think that neither assimilation nor multiculturalism should be immigration policy goals to explicitly support. The goal should be, as Matt laid out in the CSDM, is to have an immigration policy that best improves the quality of life for American citizens. Accomplishing that could require planks that could lean either into assimilation or multiculturalism as a side effect, depending on the plank.
Also, history shows that structurally, the first generation immigrants are going to lean more multicultural, the third generation more assimilated, and the second generation somewhere in between.
I agree with Matt on this one.
American national cohesiveness is built on shared civic values, of liberal democracy, personal liberty, rule of law, identification with the founding documents such as the Constitution, and loyalty to the country. The US overall does a good job of assimilating immigrants from different backgrounds into American life through these values, much better than many countries in Europe. And we should continue to strive to do so. We should not strive to be more like Europe.
That doesn’t mean we need to assimilate people away from their culture in terms of religion, cuisine, customs, artistic aesthetics, family composition, or lifestyle and towards “American culture”. Multiculturalism is definitely possible within a cohesive civic democracy.
Language is something a bit more sensitive that Americans debate about. Some people want immigrants to assimilate linguistically to use primarily English, while others celebrate linguistic diversity. We should be encouraging proficiency in English so that people can participate in the larger society, but celebrate linguistic diversity and multilingualism as well.
In Europe “multiculturalism” is happening in a different way. Some (not all) immigrants are settling in segregated neighborhoods. They are not learning the local language. They are not adopting local civic values. And they are not identifying with the history of the nation or demonstrating loyalty to or identification with the state to the same extent as immigrants to America. This leads to the kind of anti-immigrant politics and leads to significant clashes of culture.
Language is going to depend on the supply of people that can speak it. If there's an abundance of immigrant English speakers in certain professions, then an English requirement can be workable, but in other professions where aren't enough English speakers, then you have to trade off between having some non-English speakers, or having those jobs go unfilled.
And of course, the United States in its history has had plenty of ethnic neighborhoods in their own regard, and there were clashes over that as well, whether it's as fierce as what's going on in Europe right now.
I agree.
I didn’t mean only allowing immigrants to already speak English. But we should be encouraging immigrants who are here to work on and develop their English proficiency.
This is always such a weird take to me. Immigrants are strongly encouraged to speak English by the very fact of living here, it's inescapable. And the longer they are here the better their comprehension is. There is certainly no one anywhere discouraging the learning of English. And the really important thing is that their kids, no matter how non English speaking their parents, are all perfectly fluent. No one who grows up here isn't a native English speaker.
It is really hard to learn a new language as an adult, almost no one that didn't have a strong background when they were young is ever going to end up with English as their true first or co-equal language. But as you are here 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, your ability to understand and make yourself understood in English grows and grows. But, unless you are truly bilingual, you are always going to speak your first language when the opportunity arises.
And I think that latter point is what people somehow don't understand or strangely object to. Two people who's native language is Spanish, are going to speak to each other in Spanish not English no matter how good their English becomes, whether that's just in public, or in the work place, or wherever. Why do people find that objectionable?
Nothing of what you said contradicts with what I said.
We were talking about assimilation vs multiculturalism. MY said that we should be multicultural while assimilating people into American civic democracy. I agreed.
One area of “multiculturalism” that is a bit different is language because I think there is an interest in getting immigrant populations proficient in English. Some people do not like immigrants speaking their home language, and I was clear that wasn’t my position. Others object to people being here a long time and never learning English. Learning a language is hard, and Americans are the worst at this when they live abroad. But we as a society can (and do) encourage immigrants to gain proficiency. We spend resources on making low cost English classes available and having ESL programs in schools to help children catch up with language skills in English (and we could do more). We do a better job of this than many peer countries in Europe.
My point is that "people being here a long time time and never learning the language" is just a myth. People are objecting to something that just doesn't happen (the rare exception is something like a grandparent brought over to maybe help with kids and live out their old age in the children's' home). But if you are working age and participating in the economy you cannot help but learn more and more English.
People hear folks speaking their native tongue with each other and think "those people are refusing to learn English", which is just kind of silly and ignorant.
People don't come here with the goal of isolating themselves away from the rest of American society, and our culture is so overwhelming, and the need to participate in it in order to feed mind and body is so central, that it would be nigh on impossible if anyone was trying.
It seems like a good idea but I'm not sure what the effective policy for that would look like.
“Getting Israel to freeze settlements would have been great.”
Obama WAS able to get Israel to agree to a settlement freeze from 2009 to 2010.
Given your comment, “ proof of payment with spot checks rather than conductors to reduce operating costs”, you won’t be amused that the Seattle area light rail system abandoned precisely that system because authorities noted that cheaters were disproportionately poc. So now, everyone cheats and revenue disappears.
The soft bigotry of low expectations.
Am I like wrong to have a deep suspicion of the hawks constant need to hide the ball? Like at some level the people who say death to America and believe suicide bombers are rewarded in the afterlife are getting a nuclear bomb capable of reaching our shores shouldn't be so hard of a case to call for the United States to defend itself even at notable sacrifice. It doesn't seem like an unpersuadable case and their constant running from that case makes them seem like liars.
GOP/MAGA foreign policy for quite some time now hasn't been based on rational analysis of the national interest, but on emotion, and Iran is America's own Great Satan. Just listen to Pete Hegseth some time.
Matt seems to think Obama didn't make the pro JCPOA case to the opposition very forcefully, and maybe that's true. And/or maybe Republicans are just fucking idiots when it comes to foreign policy.
I'm confused. What is Trump hiding? He's been upfront about his desire to prevent an Iranian nuke since the 12 day war. And again in this one he mentioned it in the first press statement.
Edit: apparently he's been telling people he would do this since 1988
https://x.com/Geiger_Capital/status/2032619794805965217?s=20
He hasn’t said like this is existential for the United States if we don’t act now there will be a mushroom cloud on the eastern seaboard and you should be willing to spend a long permanent effort on a fight to survive.
You wouldn’t be dancing around commitment beyond air strikes and special forces as a maximum limit you’d say here’s why you should be willing to pay whatever it takes to stop this.
If you believe Iran is going to get a bomb and can’t be deterred by mutually assured destruction it would be something you’re willing to pay any price for. It seems disingenuous.
I think Trump doesn't feel the need to make a case to the American people because he doesn't feel accountable to them and because he'll chicken out before he asks for any true hardship that will tank the midterms.
Politically, it makes very little sense to copy the Bush playbook here. That would surely tank his popularity too.
The Bush playbook won the 2004 elections! It worked! Ginning up fake wars and getting the populace hyped up and rabid behind them is an effective strategy until the bodies really start rolling in. (Which is why international response to such wars needs to be a lot more negative than it currently is.)
Trump is just very bad at politics, which keeps getting masked by the fact that the Dems are just as bad as he is. But a competent operator would wipe the floor with both of them.
If something is a near existential threat, than it is worth spending lives and treasure on, and you should be able to say that upfront there is going to be a high cost and we're all going to have to suffer some to pay it.
Trump didn't even bother telling us ahead of time why we were doing this at all. Remember, he obliterated their nuke capability last year. Let alone that we might have to hurt our economy and possibly send in ground troops.
Further, saying he wants to prevent their nuclear capability is not the same as convincing us with facts that that nuclear capability is a direct threat to us and we have to do something about it today.
These seem like 2 separate claims to me. OP said that conservatives are "hiding the ball". That seems false to me, everyone that pays attention knows how conservatives feel about Iran.
You seem to be arguing for "make a case, build consensus, formally declare war with clear objectives". Maybe that is the right way to go about this, but is separate in my eyes.
Where has he made the case that Iran was actually close to getting a nuke? And wouldn't that case be undermined by his earlier claim that the bombings of just over half a year ago obliterated their nuclear program?
The anti nuke justification was the central piece of his speech. He doesn't address whether they were "close" or not, but that's besides the point. And of course it means that the 12 day war was not successful.
"It has always been the policy of the United States, in particular my administration, that this terrorist regime can never have a nuclear weapon. I'll say it again, they can never have a nuclear weapon. That is why in Operation Midnight Hammer last June, we obliterated the regime's nuclear program at Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan. After that attack, we warned them never to resume their malicious pursuit of nuclear weapons, and we sought repeatedly to make a deal. We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn't want to do it. Again they wanted to do it. They didn't want to do it. They didn't know what was happening. They just wanted to practice evil. But Iran refused, just as it has for decades and decades.
They've rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can't take it anymore. Instead, they attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing the long range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas, and could soon reach the American homeland. Just imagine how emboldened this regime would be if they ever had, and actually were armed with nuclear weapons as a means to deliver their message.
For these reasons, the United States military is undertaking a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests. We're going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally again obliterated. We're going to annihilate their navy. We're going to ensure that the region's terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces, and no longer use their IEDs, or roadside bombs as they are sometimes called, to so gravely wound and kill thousands and thousands of people, including many Americans. And we will ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon. It's a very simple message. They will never have a nuclear weapon."
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/read-trumps-full-statement-on-iran-attack
LOL the “gunboat diplomacy” of picking through Iranian leaders until we get one we want. I don’t have to wonder how we’d feel if Iran pursued this policy with our leadership.
And yet, this idea that we can bomb THEM into submission never asks whether you could bomb US into submission. To which we would always give the answer, hell no, Keep Calm and Carry On as the Brits said.
I haven't read the Frum take but what does "gunboat diplomacy" mean for a nation of over 90 million people with, I dunno, most of the country not being on the ocean?