David Bernstein

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@ProfDBernstein

My views are my own and do not reflect the views of my university or the state of Virginia.

Arlington, VA amazon.com/Classified-Unt… Joined December 2013

736 Following 37K Followers 44K Posts

Latest posts 5

David Bernstein @ProfDBernstein 7h

It doesn't want to. Despite being the government of Gaza since 2006, it's leaders have publicly said that care of the civilian population is the UN's job, not theirs.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib Verified account @afalkhatib 1d

Hamas dug the world's most impressive tunnel network in Gaza for terror & pioneered the use of plumbing pipes to create tens of thousands of rockets, but it somehow can't dig trenches and basic public drainage to manage rainwater & push floods away from displacement tent zones?
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David Bernstein @ProfDBernstein 7h

Because Social Security is structured like a Ponzi scheme.

Bill Verified account @BillWiIdin 1d

CAN SOMEONE WALK ME THROUGH HOW THIS MAKES SENSE

By the time I retire at 65, I'll have paid roughly $480,000 into Social Security between my contributions and my employer's match.

If that same money had just sat in an index fund averaging 7%, it would be worth about $2.1M. The dividends alone off that would be $147,000 a year.

Instead, the government is projecting I'll get $2,600 a month at 65. That's about $31,200 a year.

Someone explain the gap between those two numbers, because I genuinely don't understand where the rest of it goes.
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David Bernstein @ProfDBernstein 11h

The idea that the debate on Israel was so constricted is a figment of the imagination. Indeed, for a long time the only left-leaning media publication sympathetic to Israel was The New Republic. Once Peretz sold that, we were down to none; The Atlantic was a rare one to publish some pro-Israel commentary.
And of course on elite campuses, sentiment was already overwhelmingly hostile to Israel going back quite a ways.
It's true that politicians felt constrained, but that was because Israel was still broadly popular.
But with essentially no intellectual support from liberal media or liberal college campuses, Israel was bound to run into trouble in Democratic politics eventually.
Unfortunately, the American Jewish establishment was largely blind to what was going on.

Philippe Lemoine Verified account @phl43 1d

Say what you want about me, but after more than 2,000 years of antisemitism (during which I dare say that the field has been explored quite thoroughly), not everybody can boast of having single-handedly created an entirely new form of antisemitism!

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David Bernstein @ProfDBernstein 12h

It occurred to me that Bundism actually kind of lives in, in an unexpected way. The way Israel chose to treat its Arab citizens--cultural, linguistic, and religious autonomy, no attempt at forced assimilation, but equal legal rights including parliamentary representation--is what the Bund advocated for Poland's Jews. 1/

David Bernstein @ProfDBernstein 12h

As an Egyptian...
I have a lot of experience with dual or multiple identities, and they don't generally bother me, but I nevertheless think it's odd that a US Senator born in the USA should be identifying himself as any nationality but American.
Now granted, this was 15 years ago, but if we had a functioning, skeptical mainstream media, someone would have asked him about this during the campaign.