My biggest concern about the bill is that a huge chunk of the revenue raised ($124 billion) is purportedly going to come from increased IRS enforcement — enforcement that requires an $80 billion investment. But the image of a super-IRS going after wealthy corporations and rich billionaires who skirt tax laws is not the reality. Instead, the IRS usually spends its money where it is most efficient: Auditing the middle class and the most economically vulnerable taxpayers who can't afford teams of lawyers. According to The Washington Post, More than 4 in 10 of its audits in 2021 targeted recipients of the earned income tax credit, one of the country’s main anti-poverty measures.

The bill is a climate change and health care bill with very clear direct tax hikes on profitable corporations to offset the spending. It will almost certainly reduce emissions and, in the long term, bring more green energy onto the grid. Health insurance and drug prices for Medicare recipients and people on the ACA will probably come down. They may go up for others, depending on how private insurers react. Some of the new revenue will come from increased IRS enforcement, which could hit middle and lower-income people hardest. And, of course, corporations are liable to pass on tax hikes with increased prices or layoffs, along with stock shares falling.

The goal? To make new green energy production cheaper for utilities to build than fossil fuel plants are.

Everyone can - and often does - have confident opinions about those questions. But you can't really answer them in any objective way unless we can agree on a definition of the word.There are basically two categories of definitions:The interpersonal definitions. Something like "Prejudice or antagonism directed against another person based on their membership in a racial group."The sociological definitions. Something like "A highly organized system of 'race'-based group privilege that operates at every level of society and is held together by a sophisticated ideology of color/'race' supremacy."

“Eliminated the idea of personal racism” is kinda an overstatement isn’t it? Like yeah, it exists, but interpersonal racism against white people just doesn’t do anything, or at least nothing worse than any other kind of insult like calling them an asshole. It maybe hurts white feelings a little and that’s it, but most white people don’t even seem offended by terms like “Mayo monkey” or “cracker” and I would guess it’s because those terms aren’t representative of white people being systemically oppressed for being white, since that’s never been a thing. There’s an important distinction in that things like N word or the propaganda trying to paint black and brown people as being criminals is literally tied to slavery

Basically, these kinds of disagreements boil down to there being two ways to define racism: a colloquial definition, where racism is just treating someone differently due to their race, and a more academic definition drawn from the social sciences and philosophy where racism is, to use the standard simplification "prejudice plus power."

You're using the first definition, on which you are correct that it appears to be possible to be racist against white people; and your sister is using the second, on which she is correct that it would seem impossible to be racist to white people, at least in the context of a society where whites are and have historically been in a position of power over other racial groups.

If you want a chance at changing minds, you need a new strategy: Stop using your values as a weapon, and start offering them as a gift.

One way the agency achieves its aim is the installation of hardware. Documents show Roskomnadzor mandated installation of “censorship boxes” by local internet providers. These devices allowed the Russian government to become the man-in-the-middle when public sentiment turned against it, giving it the power to throttle services utilized by government critics. They also allow the government to pull the plug on services whenever it deems it necessary. Twitter access has been repeatedly throttled. The agency has also completely blocked access to Facebook and Instagram and ensured VPN services are unusable by Russian citizens.

In some cases, censors recorded their screens showing detail down to the movements of their computer mouse as they watched over the internet. They monitored overtly political videos and, at other times, focused on less obviously worrisome content, like this viral song by the young rapper KEML. Bashkortostan is known as a hub for rap in Russia.

"People seek simple solutions [and] the truth is kind of boring sometimes. Anybody who's got good innovations on reducing polarization, getting the truth to be as interesting as the crazy stuff, that would be well worth investing in," Gates told Forbes.

“No Campus Free Speech Controversies at the Vast Majority of Colleges This Week” isn’t a headline that can exist.

I think that the difficulty in top-down moderation means that platforms have a great responsibility to provide users with tools to block, mute, go private, and avoid certain terms and topics.

Most of my own readers are disillusioned leftists and liberals, but certainly I host many conservatives here, and I’m fine with that. And, yes, it’s entirely possible for the anti-woke beat to become a shtick, and because there are financial incentives involved, for writers to dedicate more and more time to it. That in turn can provoke people to fixate on problems with language norms or minor culture war kerfuffles, to the detriment of bigger issues of greater intrinsic concern to the country.

Woke and anti-woke are not the same in a simplistic way, but it’s true that they’re caught in a mutually-reinforcing cycle.

Honestly, I’ve never thought of myself as a contrarian leftist at all; I just think of myself as an old-school materialist and civil libertarian leftist who’s unhappy with the evolution of contemporary liberalism. It’s perfectly fair, though, to argue that my priorities are off and that I spend too much time worrying over liberal culture than about structural injustice.

When I complain that there’s a strain of liberal historiography that seems to deny that people of color have ever had agency, and in doing so makes white people the protagonists of history, that doesn’t seem anti-woke to me; it seems to be an argument for a more expansive vision of what respect for people of color entails.

I think the woke/anti-woke binary is a dead end. Everyone has already taken their places on the stage, and the back-and-forth that exists feels tired and rehearsed. I am 100% open to the idea that the discursive and language controversies I talk about so often are of less importance to deeper issues of structural politics. I might have lost the plot. But as social justice politics have become the language of institutions, albeit opportunistically on the part of those institutions, the need for a vibrant counternarrative has only grown. I think for all of its pitfalls and susceptibility to corruption, “anti-woke” discourse is profoundly necessary. Critical thinking about cancel culture is necessary. A world where Goldman Sachs flies Pride flags outside its offices is a world where left-wing skepticism of woke morals is needed.

we need a mechanism when there is an emergency threat to human life for infrastructure providers to work expediently with legal authorities in order to ensure the decisions we make are grounded in due process. Unfortunately, that mechanism does not exist and so we are making this uncomfortable emergency decision alone.