https://twitter.com/BerniceKing/stat...26062015315969

.

Ouch

The IRS has been doing their own version of civil forfeiture
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.8c575087a66d

I know jails and prisons are overcrowded, but anyone who supports civil forfeiture (IRS style or otherwise) should be in jail.

https://twitter.com/ira/status/849394186839367680

if anyone ever wondered whether ann coulter was a white supremacist, here's a pro-apartheid tweet

My first thought was that the fact that someone got paid to write this is peak male privilege, but then I realized that a thousand Jezebel staff writers writing for 100 years could never produce a parody this incredible.

http://thefederalist.com/2017/04/04/...-just-friends/

Why does Coulter have scuzzy immigrant as her Twitter avatar?

Today is the 100th anniversary of the U.S. declaration of war, quite possibly the greatest foreign policy blunder in American history. Enjoy!

Is the case against American involvement in World War 1 that strong? I don't think Hitler can be considered a reasonably foreseeable outcome.

What about the case against aiding Bin Laden against the Soviets? I think the whole problem with American foreign policy is that no one is able to predict the outcomes.

Reads like something out of The Departed.

That's usually the case when it dabbles in regions it has next to no understanding of.

Arming religious extremists can be reasonably predicted to produce armed religious extremists.

A stable, democratic Germany a la post world war 2 was a far more likely outcome than murderous dictator. Which is not necessarily an endorsement of American intervention but more a soft opinion that we've done much dumber things.

Well, good thing that non-intervention is consequence-free!

Of course WW1 leading to Hitler is largely true, but the Germans occupied Paris 45 years before WW1 and then 25 years after. Trying to take over Europe was their thing for quite a while. There's a reason "Prussian" is understood as militarism.

My vague recollections of WWI is that the Germans were (again and obviously) the jerks in the situation. Which makes it hard to imagine that opposing them would be some sort of moral failure.

Even without Hitler specifically, the outcome that we got from the war was extremely destabilizing. Blowing up the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires and replacing them with small, insecure ethnic states was obviously stupid, led instantly to war and genocide, and set the stage for the future wolves to be tempted to gobble up a bunch of weak helpless states. More specifically, Poland and Germany were set up as mortal enemies by giving them mutually indefensible borders.

Also, the (correct) post-war perception that Wilson got a bunch of Americans killed for no reason whatsoever led to isolationism and the Neutrality Acts, which prevented the U.S. from playing a more useful role in the run-up to WWII.

Even if you don't buy my story about the downsides of the war, what was accomplished?

Does the US staying out of it prevent these things? Not sure I see it.

On the flip side, the latter of those was responsible for the Armenian genocide before its dissolution.

I read a NYT article this morning arguing the US shouldn't have entered, suggesting it was plausible that the war didn't have to result in a drastic shakeup of the European order:

The Economist begs to differ.