Simon Wenet

dont take my word for it

[Travis Couture @TravisSCouture]

Voter turnout in WA is low right now, this means if common sense people turn in their ballot that it has more weight to it.

… and before someone says “but it won’t count anyway”… it certainly will never count if you don’t turn it in. So I’m hoping you do so anyway.

[Simon Wenet @SimonWenet]

@CodifyBaseball Handshake gate will live in Mariners infamy

[Apple Lamps @lamps_apple]

It’s so strange how states like CA and NY can increase their spending 2x-3x, achieve worse outcomes for the people, then somehow convince millions of people they just need more money.

[Simon Wenet @SimonWenet]

@cig_onchain I love the husband arms folded tough talking and jumping on board with the host like he has no say in the matter 😅

[Simon Wenet @SimonWenet]

@nick_matau Fixing addiction using sound waves?! The conspiracy theories on this one are going to be truly epic. In fact, I am not entirely convinced this isn't just bait 😂

[Kristen Mag @kristenmag]

Dear Seattle leaders,

Friday was magical. I saw families bonding, children playing soccer in the street, strangers high-fiving, fans celebrating, and contagious camaraderie everywhere I walked.

You know this doesn’t have to be temporary, right? You really can choose to just keep our magnificent city a safe place for all of us to enjoy year round.

Enforce the laws. Clean the streets. Get the addicts into treatment and the mentally ill into compassionate care. It’s time to restore this broken city.

No more excuses. It’s really not complicated. 🇺🇸

[Siraj Hashmi @SirajAHashmi]

Counterpoint:

[Simon Wenet @SimonWenet]

@WallStreetApes Where does one learn about when/where these town halls are? Not seeing anything on the city / mayor sites.

[Simon Wenet @SimonWenet]

@thehoffather Income tax + top estate tax + cap gains + flirting with wealth tax... but yea. Expedia + Zillow have had a ton of presence here for decades. Sponsor local teams, host local events, very visible. For him to leave, he must be very bearish on Seattle/WA under current leadership.

[Simon Wenet @SimonWenet]

@Jack_Raines “Shout out King David” 🤣🙏��

[Simon Wenet @SimonWenet]

@PNWConservative Interestingly the budget of nearly every major blue city has also doubled in the last 5-7 years. Ask yourself if the quality of services has also doubled.

[Simon Wenet @SimonWenet]

@alx Yea... this is all terrible.

[Simon Wenet @SimonWenet]

@BleacherReport @TickPick @tacobell By the transitive property… Mamdani hugged Mr Met causing the Mets to suck so bad their tickets cost next to nothing… can we call this a successful example of government subsidized public services? 🤣

[Simon Wenet @SimonWenet]

@patfros65511313 @KingCountyWA @KCCouncil @GirmayZahilay How pissed are you if you’re brother #2?

[Simon Wenet @SimonWenet]

@ProfDBernstein @patrickc As someone generally grateful for the work you do bringing important awareness and challenging people where necessary, I think you’ve got it wrong here. I recently joined Stripe and think Patrick has a worldview that would, at least in some key ways, align with yours.

[Simon Wenet @SimonWenet]

@nypost How many first class tickets can you get on @TurkishAirlines for $30m?

[Simon Wenet @SimonWenet]

@avidseries @asphaltjungle45 Sometimes I wish radical centrists (🙋🏻‍♂️) were more… radical about their centrism. Would love your thoughts on how we win when things like nuance and thoughtfulness and disposition toward positive outcomes are not algorithmically rewarded.

[Simon Wenet @SimonWenet]

@avidseries +/- 80%. Grew up no question Dem. Now try to be about outcomes only. I’ve tried to detach from the political labels and attach to things like preserving lower case ‘l’ liberal values, defense of western civilization, empathy for victims of crimes over perpetrators of them.

[Moshe Emilio Lavi @MosheELavi]

There is a genre of October 7 commentary that works by constructing a historical arc so compressed and so selective that the conclusion becomes inevitable. A people wronged, hemmed in, their world dismantled across generations. Rage follows. What else would you expect?

The history offered in support of this arc is not really history. It begins where it needs to begin, omits what complicates it, and arrives at a destination that was chosen before the argument started.

The Arab population of Mandatory Palestine never held sovereignty that was taken from them. There was no state. A significant portion immigrated to the land only in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The land passed from Ottoman to British control, and two national movements competed within that framework. One of them, the Jewish national movement, was not a colonial project arriving from outside. Jewish communities had existed without interruption in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, Gaza, Tiberias, the Galilee and elsewhere, through centuries of pre-modern colonial empires, Roman, Byzantine, several Arab Caliphates, the Crusaders, and Ottoman, and long before any of them emerged.

The Zionist movement was a national liberation movement of a people with three thousand years of documented connection to that land, rejecting the exile that was imposed on many of them, and building upon a presence that had never left.

The other national movement, the Arab Palestinian one, crystallised largely in reaction to Zionism rather than predating it, which is why the sovereign state being projected backwards into history as ancient and continuous is itself part of the inversion, not a foundation for it. Arab leaders, who rarely called themselves Palestinians then and most of whom saw themselves as part of greater Syria, rejected partition in 1937 and again in 1947. That rejection, and the violence that accompanied it across the three decades of the Mandate period, is precisely what this genre of argument leaves out.

What does the enforcing are films like "Palestine 36," marketed as historical drama about the bloody Arab Revolt, but functioning as something closer to historical replacement. They strip Jewish indigeneity and continuity from the record, recast a people with millennia of connection to that land as recent colonial arrivals, and present the conflict as a simple story of indigenous resistance to foreign imposition.

The purpose is not to inform Western audiences about a complex national conflict. It is to recruit them to a conclusion: that Jews and Israel are an illegitimate implant in the region, that the appropriate remedy is dismantlement, and that what would follow, the imagined state from the river to the sea, would be a tolerant, secular, democratic alternative, where Jews can live in peace under their Arab Palestinian Muslim rulers, not as a national group but as a religious minority.

That last part is perhaps the most dishonest element of the entire narrative. The movements driving that agenda in the Middle East are neither democratic nor secular, and whatever secular veneer some of them maintain is precisely that, a veneer. The model being implicitly promised has no precedent among Muslim-majority states in the region, and sits in direct and unacknowledged tension with the political and religious character of the organisations whose cause these films are made to serve, like Hamas.

Without all of this, October 7 cannot be made to look like the inevitable product of accumulated injustice. It looks instead like what it was: a brutal, sadistic rampage by Arab Palestinian Islamist terrorist organisations, and the civilians who joined them, to murder, rape, and kidnap Israeli citizens, residents, and foreign nationals. No historical narrative, however artfully constructed, changes what happened that morning. It only changes who the audience is willing to hold responsible for it.

This is the genre James represents, and he is far from alone in it. It is not engagement with history. It is the use of a selective version of it to launder a conclusion that was held before the argument began.

[Simon Wenet @SimonWenet]

@phaltron @jasonrantz They’re… frying chickpeas… in the Pacific Northwest… of the United States…

Criticize the falafel all you want. But it’s excellent 🫶🏼