Legs

Two of them, one of me.
Sock friendly, but only up to my heel.

[Brian Tyler Cohen @briantylercohen]

"These vandals remain unidentified even under the watch of National Guardsmen deployed to the Reflecting Pool. And they were apparently reckless enough to do their dirty work under 24/7 surveillance - there’s a permanent wide angle camera mounted atop the Washington Monument. You can drop in on the feed any time. Trump himself claims there are tapes. So this is a problem very easily solved. Just release the tapes, and we can clear this all up. (Not the water, of course; that much has proven impossible.)

Not gonna happen.

As erratic as Trump’s behavior can be, at the end of the day, he’s the most predictable guy there is. Because he’s been in this exact same kind of situation before - backed into a corner, attacked on some spurious claim that can be easily cleared up by evidence he confidently proclaims exists but never actually produces."

https://t.co/58q3NmptKI

[Magdi Jacobs @magi_jay]

Do you ever feel strangled by the discourse? Like you can't say what you believe to be true? That's intentional.

"AIPAC" is a genius semantic strategy for attacking Jews as a group. Why? Because most of the people who would stand up for Jews also don't like AIPAC, just as they don't like many PACs, or money in politics in general.

Then, you have the fact that most people who would stand up for Jews also dislike the current Israeli government, just as they don't like right-wing authoritarian governments in general.

So, people use "AIPAC" enough, while invoking centuries-old tropes of shadowy Jewish power--and it begins to just signal "Jews." This is happening on a linguistic level. "AIPAC" stands for something, in this usage, apart from the actions of a political action committee.

Then those who might otherwise defend Jews get "stuck." Because, if you're going to stand up against the nefarious linguistic use of "AIPAC," don't you risk also standing up for AIPAC itself?

It's a trap. And it's designed to be so. To defeat fascism and all the other harmful forces around us, we need clarity and truth. You should be suspicious of *anyone* who seeks to create a fog. Who makes you feel "strangled," rather than free to speak. Especially when your speech could be used to stand up for others. You should resent this strangulation. You should reject it.

Regardless of your feelings re: the political action committee itself, "AIPAC" is now a stand-in. A way to smuggle in age-old tropes about Jews and ostensible Jewish power. And if someone has made you confused about how to juggle this? You should be suspicious of that person. You should be suspicious of *anyone* who stands in the way of clarity and truth.

[Jessica Riedl 🧀 🇺🇦 @JessicaBRiedl]

No one who was actually alive back then would describe the 1970s as an era of such unchecked national abundance versus the 1980s as a national economic hellhole. Just more meme-driven, ahistorical silliness to make a lazy partisan point.

[Legs @Kyo9142]

@hutchinson These people will give Tucker more credit than they gave Liz Cheney even though she did a much harder, more anti-Trump thing.

[Hutch @hutchinson]

Just the same as with Marjorie Taylor Greene, anyone on the left who gives Tucker credit for fleeing a sinking ship due to historic unpopularity is a complete mark.

[Legs @Kyo9142]

@LinkofSunshine I'm sure all of those people feel very good about the SpaceX market cap, since there's no short activity on it yet.

[Kraut @The_Davos_Man]

"The Jews did all the bad things in communist regimes"

is one hell of a take

[Kareem Rifai 🌐 @KareemRifai]

Correct about Tulsi Gabbard all along award recipients:

[Hunter📈🌈📊 @StatisticUrban]

Utterly stupid, endorsing against Brown.

Brown is not only by far the most progressive person who could possibly win that seat, he's also been very supportive of labor and unions literally his entire career.

[Kareem Rifai 🌐 @KareemRifai]

Everyone involved in promoting this woman's political rise (from both parties) should be ashamed. Just an absolute aberration.

[Destiny | Steven Bonnell II @TheOmniLiberal]

The sad thing is that if you ARE a liberal and you want to criticize Israel, you have to be so careful because it's hard not to become instantly associated with anti-Semitic, anti-Western, anti-intellectual trash like @AnaKasparian.

[WhickTV - Bane of Christian Nationalists @WhickTv]

Content for the week!

Tues: Populism debate w/ @thesoypill and @RyanGeddie vs @BoxLoner and @ReasonRiffs

Wednesday: "State of Ukraine" panel discussion w/ @UkrainianAna , @The_Davos_Man , @KBP9a91 and @TheLastBasti0n

Thurs: Call ins!

Maybe a secret show friday we'll see

[Dan Saltman @dancantstream]

POV: You are a Hasan Piker fan in a private channel

[Ezra Klein @ezraklein]

Enough people have asked me about the Peter Thiel-Dialog story that I think it's worth saying what it is, or at least what I saw it to be. So:

–Dialog is a conference. I went once in 2018 and once in 2022. No one ever asked me to keep it or my presence a secret.

–My understanding was Thiel was one of its founders but no longer involved by the time I went. I never saw or talked to him in connection with Dialog.

–Nor did I see the other names I’ve heard mentioned, like Ted Cruz or Elon Musk or Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Jared Kushner. Dialog was not sold to me as a bunch of big names, which is part of why I went. I don’t need to go to a conference to hear what Ted Cruz thinks.

–You could be a Dialog member, but I wasn’t. I don’t think joining got you much except guaranteed invitations to future Dialogs. There were occasional dinners and webinars, but I never went to one. I would not have described it as a secret or a society.

–The panels were largely self-organized, so people would propose panels and hold them. I went to one on being a working parent and another on whether crypto had any real use cases and another on how to accelerate scientific breakthroughs. You’d usually have 8 or 10 people in a room. It was all very TED-talk adjacent.

–In 2018, I found it very optimistic, with an idealistic hacker-ish vibe. In 2022, I found the conversations and vibe more curdled and resentful. I didn’t enjoy it, and I didn’t go back. (That did prove a pretty good signal of where tech’s politics were going though, maybe I should’ve paid more attention.)

–That said, Dialog was a pretty ideologically diverse crowd. I met some people there who were *extremely* far left and far right. I met some real eccentrics and weirdos. I appreciated that about it.

– I’m a journalist, I go to lots of things in the hopes of getting to know people, hearing new ideas, finding podcast guests, etc.

–Being at something does not mean I endorse it, or everyone at it, or everyone who organized or founded it. I try to go to things where I don’t share the politics and perspectives of the crowd, for obvious reasons.

–I am surprised how credulous some people have been on this story. You have to believe some weird things about the world to believe Julián Castro and Peter Thiel are somehow engaged in a common project. Secret societies, I imagine, need a lot of trust to function, but the people being named here do not trust each other and do not have aligned agendas.

So that’s what I saw at Dialog. I’ll just end by saying it’s a weird experience to have a conference you haven’t thought about for years become the center of a new conspiracy theory.

https://t.co/bG2fPmE3ke

[Shanna✨ @shannasparkleof]

Je remercie Allah tous les jours de m'avoir donné un homme aussi obéissant, serviable et pieux Allahouma amine ❤️🫠 #hijabiman

[mona ⋆˚࿔ @monaishungry]

bro WHO are you 😭😭😭😭

[Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 @JeremiahDJohns]

The thing about electing an incompetent buffoon to own the libs is that sometimes, you know, on occasion, it's actually kind of important for the President to be competent.

[Legs @Kyo9142]

@GeneratorRando @mattyglesias You must be joking

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

Failing to achieve any of his goals in Iran is genuinely tragic given the lives lost, failing to achieve his promises to lower the cost of living in important, but failing to even achieve his goals around algae-removal is funny — that’s why we’re talking about it.

[Legs @Kyo9142]

@shannonrwatts Great progress! It felt so good when I was finally able to do a proper pull up after so many negatives.