Jonah R

[Nathan J Robinson @NathanJRobinson]

haunted by this painting from Palestinian artist Malak Mattar, "No Words, Only Scenes of Ruin," a modern-day Guernica for the Gaza genocide

[Jonah R @gimpybee]

I just hear Float On by the Floaters randomly in a cafe. I blame @ShadowTodd for reminding people this song exists. What have you done?

[Nathan J Robinson @NathanJRobinson]

A somewhat crucial difference between Benjamin Netanyahu and Hasan Piker is that one of them has murdered tens of thousands of people while the other is a Twitch streamer

[History Speaks @History__Speaks]

Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait):

"Pogroms by Israeli settlers in the West Bank have no defensive rationale, yet they have received a fraction of the attention bestowed on Gaza. The most convincing explanation for this selective attention is that Gaza . . . is controlled by Hamas, and the pro-Palestinian activist network in the U.S. is in solidarity with Hamas."

This is mental illness, Jonathan.

[Jonah R @gimpybee]

Poor Biden. Why won't anyone think of the real victims here

[Sam Stein @samstein]

Biden's presidency was tormented by campus protests over Israel's war in Gaza and his reluctance to push back on it. They shadowed him at events

Those protests have been virtually nonexistent with Trump amid the war in Iran. @Lauren_V_Egan looks into why

https://t.co/4XprvbQi2b

[Jeet Heer @HeerJeet]

Benjamin Netanyahu has been prime minister off and on for more than 17 years -- more than 20% of Israel's entire existence as a country and by far the longest serving prime minister in Israel's history. When he goes, there's every likelihood (given polling among young Israelis) that he'll be replaced by someone to the right of him, a Kahanist of some sort. That is what Israel is and any pretence otherwise is delusional.

[Cal @wyattyhalpert]

This is a little known piece of knowledge for the Reels generation, but scenes used to have many other scenes attached to them, and you were required to watch all of them - we called the combination ‘movies,’ and sometimes some scenes were good but more were bad.

[Shadi Hamid @shadihamid]

The views of @ishapiro on Palestinians — he openly and unapologetically says they're "subhuman" — are some of the most abhorrent I've seen from any mainstream commentator.

[Jenin Younes @JeninYounesEsq]

This piece is paywalled, and I would never ever give the Atlantic a dime, but the essay begins its claim that Canadian Jews are being "purged from public life" with the story of a Jewish professor of medicine who quit teaching because he was offended by students' and colleagues statements about Israel.

That's not being "purged from public life." That's deciding you can't tolerate criticism of a foreign country to which you have an irrational attachment. By the way, as a half Palestinian, I can assure you I've had to hear MUCH worse about Palestinians and Muslims at workplaces and at school, and it never occurred to me to quit and cry victim.

[Aaron Regunberg @AaronRegunberg]

lol Matt Yglesias published a whole article about a post I wrote saying the world right now makes me deeply sad and angry.

It's annoying to extol one's own virtues and this is a lame thing to post, but as someone who has founded and run a youth organizing nonprofit, recruited and helped a dozen progressive candidates win state and local office, served multiple terms as a state legislator during which I led passage of major laws like paid sick days and minimum wage hikes, founded a state WFP chapter, ran a successful effort to reform the Dem Party's superdelegate system, organized a broad array of local anti-Trump resistance efforts, launched a law student campaign to push Big Law to break up with Big Oil, helped organize the largest grassroots Dem campaign to push Biden off the ticket, and developed a new climate accountability legal program, it's cool to get a lecture about "getting help" so I can "go do something politically constructive" from a guy who spends his days writing blogs and appearing at fundraisers with Marc Andreessen.

[Heidi N. Moore @moorehn]

What I've noticed is that this Venezuela situation is really frying the brains of people in politics because it shows how much they have been focused on diplomatic interpretations of geopolitics -- which are generally about various parties saving face -- and they don't understand the profit-motivated thinking of finance and business.

This House staffer quoted here is a good example. They complain that it would take years to make Venezuelan oil profitable, so an invasion doesn't make sense.

That complaint itself makes no sense.

In business, oil companies don't think on a short-term political timeline. They plan everything out in decades. It's assumed that *all* projects will take years to develop.

The primary concern of oil companies, then, wouldn't be "this would take a long time so why bother." Everything they do takes a long time.

The companies' concern would be "We're used to working on timelines that are decades long. Can Trump's promises of a safe political environment for us last beyond the two years he has left in office?"

[Jonah R @gimpybee]

Yeah but how does it poll? These liberals pushing their unrealistic ideals just bed to understand how unpopular they are and shut up for the good of the party. Popularism ftw

[Jonathan Chait @jonathanchait]

A lovely manifesto for liberalism https://t.co/hQfMNYqb7T

[Beau DeMayo @BeauDemayo]

Also let’s just be real about #AvengersDoosmday

Trailer #1 — white male
Trailer # 2 - white male
Trailer # 3 - white male
Trailer #4 — a little sprinkle of black but also white male

The fact folks think this isn’t by design is the epitome of looking the other way.

Folks who look like me and those who don’t have penises are not being invited to this movie.

[Jonah R @gimpybee]

Wait. So your anecdote is that she did well in high school, poorly in the year, then succeeded in a difficult college class? I don't think this story is doing the work you think it is

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

When I was in college at UChicago, I dated another student from Appalachia. She once told me she had gotten straight As in high school calculus -- and when she took the AP exam, she got a 1, the worst possible grade. (And she was pretty talented, she later on pretty well at UChicago's math classes, which are not easy!)

It turned out, her school just didn't have the resources -- her high school calculus teacher had just not been qualified or capable of teaching the subject. And so, for years, her class was getting basically fictitious grades, losing time to god-knows-what in the classroom.

Of course, it's not possible to identify that this is occurring without standardized testing.

And when you remove standardized testing, you remove that basic barrier of accountability. It then takes all the way until college -- when the student is out of the educational pipeline -- that someone with a different set of incentives finally takes a look and then immediately discovers that the prior system has been essentially fraudulent, a potemkin village of academic performance.

[Jonah R @gimpybee]

Um... Are write ups usually "challenged." For a guy who works at CNN you seem pretty unfamiliar with how media works

[Edward-Isaac Dovere @IsaacDovere]

A week after appearing at the center of much media attention at Mamdani’s victory party, Hasan Piker gets an unchallenged and promoted write up in Variety writing off israel as “an ethno-fascist state” and saying Gal Gadot is part of a “sexualization” ploy by the Israeli army:

[Moshik Temkin @moshik_temkin]

To be clear, her "antisemitism" is considering Palestinian children to be as human as any other children. It's all she has done. Weaponizing accusations of "antisemitism" against people like Ms Rachel lets real antisemites off the hook and puts Jewish people in danger.

[Eoin Higgins @EoinHiggins_]

Chait, 2021: Eric Adams's victory has a lot to tell us about what's electorally viable.

Chait, 2025: Mamdani's victory has nothing to tell us about what's electorally viable.

[HalalFlow @halalflow]

Zohran Mamdani becomes the first Muslim mayor of NYC — and Jonathan Greenblatt already wants to monitor him, a familiar feeling for Muslims across New York and the world. This blatant Islamophobia should be widely condemned.

[Jonah R @gimpybee]

Um... Zionism is not a religion, though your blind devotion to it is making me question that. Do you worship Hashem or Bibi?

[Harvard Chabad @HarvardChabad]

Would the Crimson publish: “Should I let go of my Muslim friends?” or, “Should I let go of my gay friends?” If they would, read the published response to letting go of Zionist friends, and replace Zionism and Zionist with Islam and Muslim, ask yourself if the “Amateur Ethicist” would respond this way if it was about letting go of Muslim or gay friends?

(Many will try to argue that it’s not a fair comparison. I posit that it’s in their argument that the double standard and bias will further emerge.)

[Jonah R @gimpybee]

Yeah. Either that or the fact that this election was contested and the others were not. Transparent hackery

[Whitney Tilson @WhitneyTilson]

A long-time NYC resident, hard-core centrist Democrat friend’s comments on Mamdani and what his win means (and doesn’t/shouldn’t mean) for the Democratic party:

Adams won with 67% of the vote last time. Even widely unpopular de Blasio won re-election with 66% of the vote in 2017. In 2013, he had 72% of the vote. NYC is a deep-blue town so a Dem winning in this city with barely half (50.4%) of the vote is hardly a mandate or a loud and clear path forward for the party. Rather, that number shows a candidate who has alienated a big part of the base, not widened the tent (though Mamdani probably did widen it generationally… but that just means he turned off even more of the party faithful).

The talking heads trying to paint Mamdani as the future of the Democratic Party will doom the party. Spanberger and Sherrill should be the takeaway from Tuesday night, even if they are less exciting as clickbait, are bad at TikTok, and don’t have a million-dollar smile.

Here’s a hint: the 20%-ish of NYC Dem voters who disappeared did not turn MAGA. It’s easy and popular to say that… but it’s bullshit. We just don’t want to live on either end of the horseshoe.

Good luck to us NYC, we are going to need it. Going from managing 4 people to 300,000+ is quite a leap, and our budget is already in bad shape. The choices are going to be about what to cut, not what to add. People are not going to get a lot of the stuff they voted for. And they will probably get some things they didn’t vote for and won’t like.

As for the antisemitism, I will remember those who consistently gaslit us all election season with constant dismissive posts and quotes from token Jews. It was like if you asked Black people to vote for someone with a Confederate flag in their living room, and then if they objected, you trotted out Tim Scott to tell them racism doesn’t exist in America anymore.

I would love to be proven wrong about this guy. I would love, love, love to be wrong. But I don’t think I will be. NYC won’t fall… I don’t buy that hyperbole. But my bet is it’s going to get very bruised. Again, I hope I’m wrong.

But back to the first point, I’m hoping Dems take the right message from Tuesday night and not the BS I see being spun already by what is a very marginal Dem victory in a deep-blue town.

And by the way, it is totally consistent (and not uncommon) for people like me to be appalled by what is happening in DC and also be appalled by what happened in NYC Tuesday night.