Ron Pick

CMO @ Octopai, Formally VP of Marketing @ SimilarWeb, Co-Founder of Zoe, Lucca, Alexa, Leona Isabella

[Josh Wolfe @wolfejosh]

1/ Here are TWO of the most logical clips you'll ever see on the entire Palestinian problem by @havivrettiggur

AND

the ONE easy fix––(which all protestors make impossibly worse + real peace unachievable, by demanding disruptively with histrionics what they demand of Israel)

[Eylon Levy @EylonALevy]

#onlyinisrael An Ultra-Orthodox Jewish couple stages a wedding proposal for an Arab couple

via @ronazur on Instagram

[Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) @antoniogm]

These numbers are somewhat bogus (and I'm the first to claim Euro supremacy in some areas).

US institutions are far older than many European ones.

Spanish democracy is younger than me.
Florida is older than Italy, Germany, Norway, Finland, Hungary, Poland, etc.
France has had 15 or so constitutions or regimes in the time the US has had one.

You can cite micro-examples like San Marino or some deliberative body in some tiny ethnostate as examples of political continuity, but in the big-country leagues, there isn't much older than the US.

Yes, the church my grandmother was baptized in is much older than the US, as is Galician/Spanish culture itself. But in terms of political bodies or law, not so much really. The US has been shockingly stable...only one civil war! Spain has had four during the same time.

[Josh Wolfe @wolfejosh]

LGBT pronouns in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Qatar where being gay is punished by death: “WAS, WERE”

jew-hating propogandist liars spread lies + co-opted vulnerable LGBT supporters as useful idiots

only ONE free democracy in the middle east

[John Spencer @SpencerGuard]

100% there is no genocide in Gaza. No eradication project. People confused about what the word means is culturally appalling and dangerous for the future of western society. The confusion has indeed been engineered by people know what they are doing. No genocide does not mean simply too much death and destruction in war. It is about intent and action to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part. Sam Harris @MakingSenseHQ is spot on.

[Nuseir Yassin @nasdaily]

Narrative violation warning:

Elders in my Arab village in Israel told me the richest Palestinians sold their land and left first. 80 years later, their grandkids now claim to be displaced victims.

I am so allergic to victim mindset. It boils my blood. ~15 million displaced Hindus and Muslims in India-Pakistan around the SAME year. No one is trying to be a victim there. It's time to move on.

"You only get to be a victim once. After that, you’re a volunteer."

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

Iran and their proxies tried to destroy Israel, starting with Yahya Sinwar on Oct 7

Instead, despite the war, Israel’s economy crushed most of the world

Their unemployment is at 3.2%, inflation under 2%, and the Tel Aviv stock exchange is up 20% since January.

The shekel also gained 7% against the dollar during the war.

Say what you want about their Government and foreign policy, but Israeli innovation and business acumen is second to none

[Palantir @PalantirTech]

Because we get asked a lot.

The Technological Republic, in brief.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska

https://t.co/8igjazz1On

[Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) @antoniogm]

The point of declaring words violence was always to be able to use violence against words.

[Nuseir Yassin @nasdaily]

I was lied to my whole life.

They told me Israel can’t be a Jewish state - There are ~25 Muslim states.

Told me Jews only take care of themselves - a Jewish woman got this Arab Muslim kid to Harvard.

Told me before Israel, we all lived in peace - 1929 Hebron Massacre was 20 years before.

Told me all Palestinians were forced out - elders in the village said many people sold their lands…and left to the west

Told me “we love Palestinians” - yet all nearby Arab countries treat them like second class citizens.

Some people force you to join their political cause under the lie of morality, and justice.

Don’t fall for it like I did. Seek the truth.

[World of Statistics @stats_feed]

Number of foreign born founders who founded billion dollar American companies:

🇮🇳 India - 66
🇮🇱 Israel - 54
🇬🇧 United Kingdon - 27
🇨🇦 Canada - 22
🇨🇳 China - 21
🇫🇷 France - 18
🇩🇪 Germany - 15
🇷🇺 Russia - 11
🇺🇦 Ukraine - 10
🇮🇷 Iran - 8
🇦🇺 Australia - 7
🇮🇹 Italy - 6
🇳🇬 Nigeria - 6
🇵🇱 Poland - 6
🇷🇴 Romania - 6
🇦🇷 Argentina - 5
🇧🇷 Brazil - 5
🇳🇿 New Zealand - 5
🇵🇰 Pakistan - 5
🇰🇷 South Korea - 5
🇩🇰 Denmark - 4
🇵🇹 Portugal - 4
🇪🇸 Spain - 4
🇧🇾 Belarus - 3
🇧🇬 Bulgaria - 3
🇮🇪 Ireland - 3
🇰🇪 Kenya - 3
🇱🇧 Lebanon - 3
🇵🇭 Philippines - 3
🇿🇦 South Africa - 3
🇹🇼 Taiwan - 3
🇹🇷 Turkey - 3
🇦🇲 Armenia - 2
🇨🇿 Czech - 2
🇬🇷 Greece - 2
🇲🇽 Mexico - 2
🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia - 2
🇸🇬 Singapore - 2
🇨🇭 Switzerland - 2
🇺🇿 Uzbekistan - 2
🇦🇹 Austria - 1
🇧🇩 Bangladesh - 1
🇨🇴 Colombia - 1
🇪🇬 Egypt - 1

Sourse: NFAP data, as of May 2022.

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

a. Most Israelis don't believe the suffering is as bad as world media claims, and they're mostly right. It's very bad, as I've written and said on podcasts. But it's not as bad as claimed. And yes, the degree matters. Suffering is unavoidable in war. Deliberate mass-starvation isn't. If you believe the former, you have a higher tolerance for the current situation than if you believe the latter is taking place.

b. Most Israelis, around 90%, believe Palestinians and their political factions want them dead and gone, and that that's what this war is ultimately about.

They're mostly right, alas.

And when you think someone wants to kill you, you will struggle to summon sympathy for their suffering.

If you disagree with that statement, that's because you've never really believed that someone wants to kill you, or experienced the murder of your cousin or friend by them as evidence of this desire.

c. The numbers in reverse, the percentage of Palestinians who have ever felt any sympathy of any kind for Israelis, even when children were dying in bus bombings or civilians were murdered on October 7, are worse and have always been worse.

This is partly because of the ideology espoused by the likes of Arafat and Hamas for generations, and in part because roughly 90% of Palestinians think *Israelis* want them dead and gone - an almost perfect mirror image of the situation on the Israeli side.

And again, because Western journalists seem to be struggling to grasp this point, when you think someone wants to kill you, as Palestinians believe about Israelis and Israelis about Palestinians, you will struggle to summon sympathy for their suffering.

d. And in that context - and only in that context, because without that context this is just arrogant stupid moralizing by an ignorant foreigner - yes, there's a sympathy problem. And if we don't get serious about tackling it, about creating conditions for reconciliation, nothing will change.

This is true within Israeli society, and it's true within Palestinian society. I'm not saying it's possible, I'm just saying nothing gets better until it's accomplished. So maybe it's high time this becomes a priority.

Which brings us, inevitably, to Hamas. (We're almost done here, thank you for your patience.)

Every advocate for Palestinians who thinks pressuring Israelis is enough - who doesn't grasp that Hamas tells Israelis every day that it's going to murder them, and so constantly inures them to any pressure the international community can summon - is part of the problem. If you can't stand against Hamas in your advocacy for Palestinians, you're de facto propping up the sympathy gap that keeps the sides radicalized against each other.

There, I said it.

[Mosab Hassan Yousef @MosabHasanYOSEF]

The fastest way to end Gaza crisis:

-Global condemnation against Hamas
-Isolate civilians from Hamas
-Arrest top Hamas leaders abroad
-Locate and rescue the hostages
-Give Gazans the freedom to leave
-Ignore terror sympathizers
-Remove Hamas from existence.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

The media should not just correct the story, but apologize.

When was the last time the media apologized for the harm they have caused?

[Nuseir Yassin @nasdaily]

The most mysterious group of people.

The Druze. I grew up around them. They were family friends. As a kid, I didn't fully understand what they believed in and who they were. And they wouldn't share.

But I understood one thing: they were the most peaceful group of humans I met. Friendly. Positive. Enterprising.

We may have religious differences. But not once did that come in the way. Live, let live, and let's hang.

The Middle East will never thrive if it doesn't allow for difference of opinion and religion.

They say: "2 jews, 3 opinions".
But sadly, we are seeing a Middle East with 200 million people, 1 opinion, and 1 religion. This is not the way.

[Tyler Winklevoss @tyler]

A lot of people have asked me if I will get involved in the NYC mayor race by supporting a candidate that can defeat Zohran Mamdani. TBH, I’m torn and undecided. Like every other city run by democrats, NYC is a broken kleptocracy. Taxes are astronomical and services are pathetic to nonexistent. Anarchy and socialism are the next logical steps in this story arc. It's what the people of NYC have been asking for for years and it looks like it's what they are about to get. Trying to fight against this tide seems like throwing good money after bad.

It appears things will have to get worse in NYC before they get better. The Zoomers and Millennials need a refresher on the outcome of Marxism and socialism. They are too young to remember the crack and crime epidemic and murder sprees of the late 80's and early 90's. The squeegee men, graffiti, mugging, lawlessness, chaos, and pandemonium. Streets that were too unsafe to walk alone at night or even during the day. Getting mugged on the way to and from school was not just a rite of passage, it was an inevitability.

The Wall Streeters, financiers, and hedge funders have been too busy working on their fishponds and climbing the rungs of polite society to remember to protect the system that allowed them to achieve their success in the first place and allowed New York City to once become the greatest city in the world. Not ruffling feathers was more important than questioning the ideological insanity being taught in the private schools and universities that they sent their kids to. All that mattered was fitting in and getting invited to the right dinner parties.

Now their kids are indoctrinated NPCs, always protesting and supporting the current thing. Like their parents, they too want to fit in. To do so, they unironically exchange bromides and platitudes on the benefits of socialism over rosé brunches in the West Village. Because their friends hate America and capitalism, they do too. It never dawns on them that their lifestyle and studio apartment that their parents subsidize are all made possible because of capitalism.

This delusional thinking was ingrained in them at an early age by institutions that were captured by insane ideology and left unchecked by their grossly negligent parents. Instead of providing their children with immunity from stupid and provably bad ideas that have only led to misery and death throughout history, these parents shrugged it off as kids will be kids.

Now these kids are adults who can vote, but are totally unequipped to do so. In many ways it’s not their fault. From their parents, they learned some combination of magical thinking, preference falsification, and an inability to stand up for anything greater than themselves. As a result, they never learned how to think critically or independently. They never learned the value of Western civilization so they don't understand why, or know how, to fight for it.

Sometimes the only way to learn something is to learn it the hard way. Sometimes the only way to learn the value of what you have is to lose it. If that’s the case, Marxism and socialism might just be what the doctor ordered.

[Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) @antoniogm]

I think this is true of the 99.9%, not the 0.1%.

The ultimate luxury now is living in a reality so good it beats the digital simulacrum, and your livelihood isn't tied up with sharing that fact.

The wealthiest people I know engage with online maybe as a forum of ideas, but otherwise it absolutely does not supplant their 'real' lives (in which many rare, exclusive, non-digital things are very much happening).

Digital is for the proles: an analog world around you so good it's better than IG slop is the real luxury.

The ultimate privilege is 'reality privilege'. Everyone else gets the pixels.

[Sana Ebrahimi Ledene @SanaELedene]

Today, we Iranians are faced with something truly unbelievable:

Western, liberal, “woke” feminists, clueless about the brutal reality in our country, consistently stand with our oppressors under the delusion of saviorism. They have no understanding of the decades of humiliation, violence, and systemic oppression we’ve endured under the Islamic Republic.

Driven by their own need to feel morally superior, they claim to fight for justice while turning a blind eye to the suffering of millions. And let’s be honest, they are some of the most racist voices out there. They look at Iranians and other “brown people” as too backward, too uncivilized, too dumb to deserve real freedom or democracy. In their eyes, we’re wild animals, only manageable under tyranny.

But here’s the truth: we are the ones fighting for real freedom, the same freedom they weaponize to silence us. And we want absolutely nothing to do with their hypocrisy.

[Anish Acharya @illscience]

Impossible Tiny Desk🔈

Obviously this is not actually Christopher Wallace nor is it NPR

Instrumentation from the very talented The Frank White Experience via YouTube

4o / Kling via @krea_ai / @hedra_labs / demucs

[Luai Ahmed @JustLuai]

The most confused coalition in modern history.