Sam

I know a lot of people in the West are baffled by the Mbappé-Mao storm in China - which in itself shows that Mbappé's ignorance doesn't come out of nowhere... To understand it, here's the best analogy I could think of: imagine the biggest Chinese star in the NBA, with sponsorship deals all over the US. One day he's asked for his favorite meme of himself. He giggles: "the one where they put my face on some guy, I think he was an American slave owner." When the "some guy" in question is George Washington. Whatever you think of the label, you know exactly how that would land in the US: an ungrateful foreigner getting rich off Americans, laughing at the country's founding father in an offensive way - at least to a big share of the population - without even knowing his name. A founding father is the story a nation tells itself about where it comes from. Laugh at him as a foreigner while cashing in on that nation's consumers, and that's not going to go well in any country. The label is also extremely un-nuanced: yes, all important historical figures have their share of darkness and Washington and Mao are no exception. China actually recognizes this: the official line is that he was "70% right and 30% wrong," and the Party's 1981 resolution condemned how his "personal arbitrariness gradually undermined democratic centralism in Party life and the personality cult grew graver and graver" (marxists.org/subject/china/d…) Same for Washington: it's officially acknowledged too. Or at least it was until this year: in January, the National Park Service tore down an exhibit in Philadelphia about the people Washington enslaved there, under a Trump executive order targeting content that "inappropriately disparage[s]" Americans (associationforpublicart.org/…). Which goes to show China isn't uniquely touchy about its founding father...

This is the luckiest fucking team I’ve ever watched

Pointing out a genocide being conducted by a nation, not a faith group, isn’t hate or rhetoric, it’s speaking truth to an ongoing atrocity. Not speaking of Israel’s erasure of Palestinian people while admonishing those who do is truly “unfortunate and unforgivable.”

the cowardly thing about John Oliver in my opinion is that he never ever ever ever ever challenges the biases of his overwhelmingly liberal audience or presents them with any information that might cause them to question their existing beliefs. it’s all just partisan comfort food

Me: "Do you know how many times you've tweeted about Piker since you wrote that tweet [about not tweeting about him] on August 30th?" @mattyglesias: "Probably more than I intended to." Me: "8 times.... you tweeted about Mike Rogers 6 times. So you're tweeting about the streamer you didn't want to talk about more than the Republican candidate you say you want to defeat." Yglesias: "Yeah, that's fair." Me: "Why?" Yglesias: "What do you want me to say? You got me." From my new Zeteo interview with the top centrist pundit - on the left, Michigan, Gaza, immigration, polls, electability, and more: zeteo.com/p/matt-yglesias-me…

Entertaining myself by imagining the reaction had this same conversation taken place between two heterosexual men

I couldn't sleep, and wrote about this moment for Hockey in Heels. "We must exist only to serve a greater purpose for the nondisabled people around us, our lives as empty and blank as a canvas." 🔗: hockeyinheels.substack.com/p…

Shame on me for assuming people knew that Yglesias was just doing corporate lobbying for the airline industry. I generally thought readers understood that he's a liar, and not to take anything he says seriously. I guess not. So here's an explanation. In terms of safety, the 1500 hour requirement was put in place by the Obama administration after a series of deadly crashes due to pilot error, the last one being the 2009 Colgan crash. Since implementation of the rule, deaths from pilot error have dropped by 99.8%. There's plenty of evidence that the safety standard worked. Comparing raw hours in U.S. and European systems of pilot training doesn't make sense, they have different philosophies of how to build competency. Europeans do a lot more front-loading of testing and academic training, Americans rely more on flight experience. U.S. airlines want to cut wages and safety standards to juice returns, and have been pushing to roll back this safety rule ever since it was enacted. Since Yglesias's piece was on how to reduce prices, I think you can just logically deduce that it's done in bad faith. Does anyone really think airlines will cut prices if they are able to skimp on safety and wages? Of course not. The bottom line is pilot experience matters, as Captain Sully Sullenberger noted. Senator Tammy Baldwin, a military pilot who survived a crash only because of her experience, said the following: "Anyone who refuses to see sense here—anyone who votes to reduce the 1,500 hour rule for pilot training—will have blood on their hands when the inevitable accident occurs thanks to an inadequately trained flight crew." time.com/6309503/congress-ai…