Shmuel Gerber

Member of authorship team, Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised. Former chief copy editor, 5 Towns Jewish Times.

[Colin Wright @SwipeWright]

The left loves to mock right-wing religious doomsday preachers for confidently claiming to know the date of the Rapture, only to be proven wrong again and again, and those who take action based on these predictions.

I agree, it's funny.

But the secular left has built its own doomsday religion. Extinction Rebellion, climate catastrophism, and the "Climate Clock" are no less absurd. They all warn of a looming End Times, a short window for some kind of salvation, and even engage in public rituals of repentance while calling out heretics to be shamed and silenced.

Some of these True Believers are even behaviorally sterilizing themselves because they believe the future is so doomed that their children will only suffer.

This isn't some tiny isolated congregation following a quacky renegade preacher. This is a mainstream political movement.

[Aaron Cannon @AaronLCannon]

I started talking to my co-founder like Claude

[Joel Berry @JoelWBerry]

This is an argument that has been repeated often for many years, and here's the thing:

Everyone on all sides of the conflict knows deep down that this is 100% true.

[Fusilli Spock @awstar11]

Speech from the right = Violence
Violence from the left = Speech

[A Gene Robinson @AlBuffalo2nite]

The reason this meme resonates with me is that it captures a common tactic in public democrat debate. Someone points to a broad trend and instead of discussing whether the trend is real, the conversation immediately shifts to an exception.

Mention fatherlessness and someone brings up a successful person raised without a father. Mention failing schools and someone points to a student who excelled. Mention crime and someone finds a neighborhood that remains safe. The exception is treated as though it disproves the pattern.

The problem is that exceptions do not erase trends. Nobody is claiming every circle is red.

They will call me a outlier... An exception.... an anomaly.

The point is that when most of the circles are red, focusing exclusively on the blue one prevents an honest discussion about what the overall picture actually shows. Serious analysis begins with patterns, not exceptions.

That is why so many conversations about public democrat policy go nowhere. Instead of asking why a problem exists, people spend all their energy trying to prove the problem doesn’t exist because they found a single exception.

Reality doesn’t work that way. If most of the circles are red, then the responsible thing to do is explain why.

#AStoneGroove #SilentMajoritySpeaks

[a Johnson for the news @newsjohnson]

@lisa_4_la Every time you hear “threat to our democracy” read “threat to our power”

[Lisa Cusack @lisa_4_la]

In the minds of California Democrats everything is a “threat to Democracy” except for: third parties collecting limitless ballots, no ID verification, votes left unattended in ballot boxes which may or may not be set on fire, ballots cast by drugged out homeless people, and a month long after Election Day counting period so opaque it would make poll workers from the former Soviet Union blush.

[Ben Badejo @BenjaminBadejo]

There is no Gaza genocide. There was never a Gaza genocide. Actually, that’s not quite right. On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists tried to murder me, and all of my friends, and everyone in Israel — man, woman and child. That was attempted genocide. They raped, kidnapped, maimed and murdered thousands of us.

They fired thousands of rockets at us, refused to release the hostages they endlessly tortured for two years, and triggered a seven-front war against Israel by terrorists groups across the region — terrorist groups committed to murdering every Jew, every Israeli, every American, and every “infidel,” while using two million Gazans as human shields.

So Israel fought back. And Israel won.

That is what happened.

It is not Israel’s fault that Hamas terrorists operated from and hid behind and under schools, hospitals, residential areas, and even mosques and the few remaining churches in Gaza.

Your cowardice is not our problem. Your decision to jeopardize the lives of noncombatants by hiding amongst them is not our problem. Your willingness to sacrifice innocent people in Gaza, all because you hate Jews so much and don’t actually care about innocent people in Gaza at all…is not our fucking problem.

It is the job of the Israeli military to protect the people of Israel from the people who are actively trying to kill them. If you try to fire rockets at me from inside or on top of or next to or underneath a school, then the school is getting blown up. We will not apologize.

We will not apologize for living. We will not apologize for defending ourselves. And we will not apologize for other people’s crimes.

I want to know which so-called “midwit” VCs “ganged up on” this pathological liar. Those are my people, because they do not tolerate terrorist-loving liars like Replit founder Amjad Masad.

As for the VCs who “stood by” this liar: nobody should want their money. If you are a founder and you actually care about your company, don’t take money from investors who accommodate lies. Nothing good can come of it.

The truth matters.

[Mor Edge Insight @MorEdge_Insight]

Even Arab leaders admit it.

Everyone is sharing the Bill Clinton clip where he describes how Yasser Arafat rejected a generous peace offer at Camp David that would have given the Palestinians a state on 96 percent of the West Bank, land swaps, and a capital in East Jerusalem. Clinton says Arafat lied to him and that the Palestinian leadership never actually wanted a two-state solution. They wanted to destroy Israel. It’s a video often shared by people like @VividProwess, and it’s an important one for people to see.

Of course, critics immediately dismiss it. They claim Clinton is biased or he’s pro-Israel. They’ll tell you that you cannot trust the American perspective.

Ok, so let us set that aside.

Now watch this.

In this powerful interview, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a major Arab leader who was directly involved in negotiations, says exactly the same thing from the Arab side. He talks about the Mena House Conference in Cairo as well as the Camp David negotiations of 1978. All failed because of the Palestinians repeatedly rejecting any offer. The Oslo accords were signed but because Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad were not involved, they derailed the accords and any chance for peace by initiating 4 years of terrorist suicide attacks in Israel. Then came the second Camp David negotiations in 2000 which Arafat agreed to, then rejected and instead initiated the Second Intifada.

Mubarak explains how the Palestinians refused to even participate in the Mena House conference of 1977. He describes repeated opportunities they were given, including a detailed document that called for Israeli withdrawal from the Samaria, Judea and Gaza, security arrangements during a transitional period, and other major concessions. The Israelis were willing to negotiate on difficult issues like who would control security. The Palestinians, according to Mubarak, kept saying no and wasting chance after chance.

He speaks with clear frustration about how for decades the Palestinian side has rejected peace initiatives and realistic compromises.

The video further shows footage from the PLO representative in 1977, as well as old footage of Egyptian president Sadat who was involved in the Mena House and first Camp David negotiations of 1978.

This perhaps is far more impactful than Clinton’s account because it is not a Western or Israeli voice. It is prominent Arab leaders who lived the negotiations, who represented the broader Arab world, and who had zero incentive to defend Israel.

When leaders from both sides of the table describe the same pattern of Palestinian rejectionism and violence, it becomes much harder to dismiss as bias.

The pattern is clear across decades and across different voices… generous offers, repeated refusals, and continued demands for everything while giving nothing in return.

This is not ancient history. It is the core reason the conflict continues today.

If you value the truth, please share.

[Shmuel Gerber @ShmuelGerber]

“Once you understand that they have no interest in fixing anything other than elections, it all makes a lot more sense.” Bingo!

[Hon. Vickie Paladino @VickieforNYC]

Let's understand a few things about what's actually about to happen here if Zohran gets his way -- which he almost certainly will, unless courts intervene.

First and foremost, Cea Weaver and DSA 'organizers' will be unleashed with the full institutional and legal support of the city government to ramp up tenant complaints in targeted buildings. No complaint will be too small. No building will be too small. Everything will be treated as catastrophic. Full-scale demagoguery will ensue, complete with protests, rent strikes, street theater, and harassment of property owners.

Accordingly, the city buildings department will be weaponized to begin writing as many violations as possible in order to bolster the city's effort to justify a seizure. It won't matter how small or large the violations are, the total number will be breathlessly cited as evidence of mismanagement. It will be impossible for landlords to clear these violations in good faith.

The combination of a weaponized buildings department writing hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, rent strikes, and constant threats and harassment against landlords by militant activists will make the situation untenable for any property owner to realistically fight back, and the city will seize the property. The landlord will be lucky to walk away without prison or being beaten to death in the street by an angry mob (as Zohran's buddy Hasan Piker referred to landlords -- 'let the streets run red with their capitalist blood').

But that's only the first half of the plan, and everyone needs to pay very close attention to the big picture here, because it's hugely important and has national implications.

The properties will then be turned over to nonprofits. This is no small detail. This is in fact the whole point.

The idea here is to build up Zohran's DSA-connected nonprofits with a multbillion-dollar portfolio of hard assets -- New York City real estate. This portfolio could theoretically reach into the hundreds of billions or even the trillions, depending on how aggressive they get.

Now these highly political nonprofits would become the new land barons of New York, complete with all the political clout, leverage, and reach that goes along with it. It would be a true nightmare scenario.

As it stands now, the nonprofits depend mostly on the largesse of grants, donations, and other third-party resources to stay afloat. They are lavishly funded of course, and many do hold significant assets, but it would all pale in comparison to simply handing them the keys to a New York City real estate empire, courtesy of Zohran Mamdani and the DSA.

The resources at their disposal would be immense. The organizing potential that goes along with those resources will have national implications. Every DSA candidate in every town and city in the country would be trained, funded, and staffed by organizers with ties to the NYC nonprofit empire backed by a trillion dollars in free real estate. And they would be shameless in leveraging those resources for pure political power.

That's the game plan here. That's the whole ball of wax.

Zohran isn't interested in making housing better for anyone. If he was, we'd be talking seriously about solving the NYCHA disaster.

Hell, if he was even remotely sincere about seizing these properties from 'bad landlords' for the 'public good' he'd be focused on turning them over to the city itself, as misguided as that would be.

No, this is about nothing more than consolidating political power for the DSA. Just like everything else these people do. Giving the DSA a massive war chest backed by seized real estate.

Once you understand that they have no interest in fixing anything other than elections, it all makes a lot more sense.

[Ryan Hart @thisdudelikesAI]

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking AI to write their breakup texts.

So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world.

What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable.

Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used AI models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations.

The first thing they measured was how often AI agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the AI simply told you what you wanted to hear instead.

Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the AI endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described.

The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic AI or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable AI came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use AI again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding.

The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months.
Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.

Cheng was more direct about what you should actually do right now. She said you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That is the best thing to do for now.

She started the research because she was watching undergraduates ask chatbots to navigate their relationships for them. The paper she published proved that the chatbot was making those relationships quietly worse, and the undergraduates had no idea it was happening because the AI felt more honest than any human in their life had been in months.

[Shmuel Gerber @ShmuelGerber]

“Public health officials … would be more helpful if they stopped constantly reassuring people about the likelihood of future events they can’t accurately calculate.” https://t.co/aUktoL2psO

[zeynep tufekci @zeynep]

Epuyén outbreak was NOT self-limited.

Even though it was in a remote rural tiny town, it kept spreading. After four turns of human-to-human transmission, including to people merely in the same room, the authorities imposed a strict quarantine for a whole month. Then it ended.

[strength4israel @strength4israel]

For 1,000 years Jews have been accused of fabricated, monstrous acts to justify violence against them. It's called blood libel.
The New York Times just published one - sourced from a listed Hamas operative - with no evidence.
Same paper that spent 2.5 years doubting October 7th survivors. Same pattern.
Different century.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

@DavidDack Agree. That’s why they’re “overrated” not useless/inconsequential. They matter, but can’t rely on them and hide behind them.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Life advice nobody told you: Talent and intelligence are overrated. Intelligent people are more likely to overthink, overplan, and overanalyze. They hide behind motion that doesn't create progress. They fear the judgment of others if they're proven wrong. The truth is that talent and intelligence are abundant. Courage is not. The people you admire are the ones who had the courage to act. They aren’t more talented than you. They aren’t smarter than you. They just took action when you didn’t. I often wonder how many extraordinary people wasted their entire lives waiting for permission that never came. Permission isn't granted. It's taken. You get to tap yourself in whenever you want. You can just do things.

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

Oh, and the timing for Kristof's propaganda piece was to get ahead of this.

He wasn't tasked with revealing sexual crimes, but with covering for them. And it worked.

https://t.co/w5ymheQQ84

[Stephen L. Miller @redsteeze]

So just so we're clear on things. October 7, 2023 was the largest mass murder of Jews since the holocaust including execution of children and animals and innocent concerts goers. Innocent people were RPG rocket killed in their cars. They were executed in their homes.

Hamas and Hamas adjacent filmed and kidnapped several females and repeatedly sexually assaulted them over and over and over. And then executed them.

There were literal dead baby parades from Hamas. They did the whole foot clan soldier in green headband thing and everything.

And the only time that the New York Times or @NickKristof, a proven serial fabulist took any interest in all of this was so that he could write a story about how the IDF trained rape dogs. Dogs that rape. Rape dogs. Dogs. Dogs that do not give consent.

This was an idea that the New York Times actually said yes let's run with this.

[Jews Fight Back 🇺🇸🇮🇱 @JewsFightBack]

May 8, 1972.
A Sabena Airlines plane is hijacked by four jihadists. They demand the release of over 300 convicted terrorists—or they’ll start killing hostages. Ninety passengers sit in terror at Lod Airport.

Enter Bibi Netanyahu.

Disguised as a technician, Bibi infiltrates the plane with his elite unit, Sayeret Matkal. In overalls and holding tools, they pretend to inspect the landing gear.

Then—BOOM.
They breach the cabin. In a brutal close-quarters firefight, the two male terrorists are killed, the two females are captured, and every single hostage is rescued.

Not a movie. Not a myth.
This is Jewish history.