Mike Craig

GenX. Wears flannel.

[Alice Smith @TheAliceSmith]

The Left rage against Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire because according to their system wealth can only be seized from others.

The idea that wealth is created by serving others is an alien concept to the Left.

[David Zagaynov @DavidZagaynov]

The sheer scale of a trillion dollars can be hard to comprehend. Let me put it in perspective. You would be able to buy 42 miles of high speed rail in California with that much money.

[Claire Lehmann @clairlemon]

Most people don't understand the difference between having billions in the bank, liquid, & having ownership shares in companies worth billions. And I think it would behoove the media to explain this once in a while.

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

The deliberate inability of people to understand — on the day of SpaceX’s IPO no less — that Musk doesn’t actually have $1 trillion in cash to be grabbed by the revenuers and redistributors is kind of amazing.

[Mike Dudas @mdudas]

i see people are upset that elon didn't generate his wealth the right way, drawing a 7 figure annual salary from a prestigious washington dc based ngo with a 25% program expense ratio

[Mike Craig @ADozenToGo]

@globeandmail Has the headline writer been replaced?

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

Yes, it's kind of amazing how the socialist pitch shifted from "socialism will make you richer" to "socialism will make you poor, which is good because you deserve to be poor"

[Mike Craig @ADozenToGo]

@JasonKPargin thanks for mentioning Scavengers Reign. It’s like the first time I watched Fantastic Planet on Night Flight.

[Zineb Riboua @zriboua]

Marjane Satrapi died today.

Her work incredibly matters, she showed millions of people what the regime hides.

In fact, Persepolis was so controversial that Iran’s government sent a letter to the French embassy in Tehran to protest it and pressured organizers of the 2007 Bangkok Film Festival to remove it from the lineup.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

I have found it, the Platonic form of every New York Times op-ed.

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

Victimhood has become a moral currency.

We’ve built a culture that ranks people by oppression, then mistakes that ranking for understanding. But people aren’t categories. They’re individuals.

And once you lose that, you stop seeing what actually drives success and better outcomes in the real world and instead promote mediocrity and grievance-mongering.

[Kennedy @KennedyNation]

When American POWs tried to sneak her notes with their personal information to tell their families they were still alive, she gave them to the North Vietnamese. Some of them were beaten to death. You are both commies and you can both fuck off.

[Thomas Sowell Daily @DailySowell]

“One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans—anything except reason.”

— Thomas Sowell

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Les gauchistes sont les platistes de l'économie.

Même déni d'une science établie depuis 250 ans.
Même mépris pour les preuves empiriques.
Même conviction d'être plus malins que des siècles de travaux.

[Community Notes & Violations @CNviolations]

There are over 12 hours of film footage explaining why you should put it back

[David Burge @iowahawkblog]

Dave's List of the Top 20 Worst Punk Rock Bands of All Time

20. Steely Dan
19. The Osmonds
18. The Glenn Miller Orchestra
17. Peter Paul & Mary
16. Yes
15. Flatt & Scruggs
14. Nat King Cole Trio
13. Mormon Tabernacle Choir
12. NSYNC
11. Diana Ross & the Supremes
10. Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys
9T. The Partridge Family
9T. The Monkees
7. Ray Conniff Singers
6. The Harmonicats
5. Mel Torme & the Mel-Tones
4. Sinatra & the Rat Pack
3. Lawrence Welk Orchestra
2. The Carpenters
1. Green Day

[Ahmed Al-Khalidi @khalidi79397]

So why does "indigenous vs. colonizer" almost always mean Europeans, and almost never Bantu, Turks, Arabs, Slavs, or Han Chinese?

A few reasons, in descending order of how much they actually explain:

1. Recency and documentation. European expansion happened in the era of the printing press, photography, census records, and treaties. The Bantu expansion left no paperwork. The Arab conquests are 1,300 years old and mythologized as religious destiny rather than conquest. When the receipts exist, the case is easier to make, and Europeans left receipts.

2. The winners wrote the framework. Modern human-rights language, postcolonial theory, and the very category of "indigenous peoples" were built in Western universities after WWII, primarily to process European guilt over European empires. The tool was designed for one job. Asking it to evaluate the Arab conquest of Egypt or the Turkic conquest of Anatolia is like asking a tax form to diagnose a disease. It wasn't built for that.

3. Christendom is critique-able; other civilizations aren't. You can write a bestseller attacking Western Christian civilization from inside a Western university and win awards for it. Try writing the equivalent book about Arab-Islamic conquest from inside Cairo or Istanbul. The asymmetry isn't about history. It's about which societies tolerate self-criticism and which punish it. So the critical literature piles up on one side and barely exists on the other.

4. The Soviet inheritance. Cold War-era anti-colonial framing was deliberately shaped by Moscow to delegitimize the West while giving its own empire and its allies' conquests, a pass. That framework outlived the USSR and still structures a lot of academic and activist vocabulary today.

5. Race makes it legible. European colonizers usually looked different from the colonized. Turkic conquerors of Anatolia, Arab conquerors of the Levant, and Bantu expansionists in Africa generally didn't look dramatically different from the populations they absorbed. The visual contrast made European empire easier to narrate as racial, and once a story has a clean visual, it travels.

6. And finally, Jews. The framework's selective application reaches its most absurd point when a people indigenous to a specific land, with continuous presence, language, religion, and archaeological record tying them to it for three thousand years, get labeled "colonial settlers", while the actual seventh-century conquerors who Arabized the region get labeled "indigenous." At that point the framework isn't describing reality. It's laundering a conclusion.

The label isn't tracking who got there first. It's tracking who it's currently fashionable to blame.

[Quick Thoughts @lthlnkso]

Why are so many people afraid of data centers?

[Mike Craig @ADozenToGo]

@cafreiman Lol…they spend that entire conversation showing why central planning always fails and at the end just say ‘as The Left we just need to come up with something better that works…like markets’

[Kyle Mann @The_Kyle_Mann]

🚨 BREAKING: The New York Times reveals that Israel has successfully trained a dog to take over Nakatomi Plaza and steal $640 million in negotiable bearer bonds