72 Comments

MW, great rant on Sonmez. Another great Fifth Column bumper sticker: "Shut the fuck up, you have to adult now."

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Jun 9, 2022Liked by Matt Welch

"Time is a scarce fucking resource."

Stated at the 1 hour and 49 minute mark of the podcast...

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Jun 8, 2022Liked by Matt Welch

Michael Moynihan is on a podcast hosted by Peter McCormack - came out today https://overcast.fm/+LCsG-X0Rs

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As a lawyer, I very much appreciate the recurring point (made in several episodes now) that law students need to get their heads around advocating for people and companies they don’t 100% agree with. JFC, that is the entire point.

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On San Francisco, I recommend reading Nellie Bowles recent piece in The Atlantic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-francisco-became-failed-city/661199/

I actually found it pretty sobering from a libertarian perspective.

Any plans to have her on the show to talk about it?

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Jun 9, 2022Liked by Matt Welch

Rosa Brooks is GREAT. Used to listen to her a few years back now on Foreign Policy’s The E.R. podcast. Very considered and interesting. Would be a good guest on the Fifth.

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The Weigel/Somnez thing has been so painful to watch. Literally every one of Somnez' tweets is doing exactly what she's accusing others of in terms of harassment, hostile environment, etc. and I'm baffled that she hasn't been struck by lightning due to sheery hypocrisy.

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The whole not having children because of “climate change” is a real topic of conversation with lots of very sad 30 something people who want to pseudo-intellectualize why they don’t have kids.

The truth often is they are stable enough to know they should not have kids while not being stable enough to actually have kids. It’s a copping mechanism for people who don’t want to face their reality and personal choices. It has the nice side effect of turning their personal failures into a virtue.

So much of the online political discourse can be summed up as sad millennials avoiding or justifying their personal issues based on current events.

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Brad Dourif also known as the voice of... Chucky!

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Re: population crisis. It actually is a potential crisis. But the crisis is under population. First part of it would be a population that skews too old, and doesn’t have enough productive, tax paying members of the workforce. Could happen quicker than we think. This epic piece on Mike Solana’s Substack gets into it -

https://www.piratewires.com/p/vanishing-people-the-population-crisis?r=7yndb&utm_medium=ios

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“Maybe in Hebrew it made sense” is the name of my memoir

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Sure enough, there is a Wikipedia page on the “Water Buffalo” incident

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_buffalo_incident

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We should never use reasonable and Ezra Klein in the same paragraph, besides him being a condescending prick.

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Seeing as Chesa came up for the third or fourth time in a row of this pod, I just want to steelman the categorical, anti-recall sentiment. I spend a lot of time being the lone person in the room who does not have progressive instincts on certain topics, so I hear the arguments. The best one is that most campaign finance laws do not apply to the process of signature gathering needed to whip up a recall campaign. This argument has not convinced me personally, but I’m not sure I’ve heard it mentioned on any episodes. FWIW.

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Pull out for climate change

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