Jerry White

[Nick Field @nick_field90]

Obsessed with hypothetical trans athletes hurting kids, but when a father breaks his two year-old daughter's collarbone they can't be bothered
https://t.co/a58BzMztCv

[Secular Talk ([email protected]) @KyleKulinski]

Right wing scandal: they raped a toddler and bombed a school

Left wing "scandal": they said something accurate that hurts the feelings of the dumbest people in the country

[Secular Talk ([email protected]) @KyleKulinski]

Lets see if this generates 1/1,000th the outrage a twitch streamer did!!!

[arvo färt @arvofart]

The American Right has built its ideology in opposition to things that have never once occurred in world history

[Variety @Variety]

Mark Ruffalo is being defended by more than 170 Jewish entertainment figures in a new open letter rejecting Paramount's claim that Ruffalo fueled “antisemitic tropes”:

“The time is over for spurious charges of antisemitism to be trotted out, this time in the defense of war, oligarchy, and AI domination. That tired playbook has run its course. We stand proudly with Mark Ruffalo, and with all decent people who are bravely rising and speaking truth to power.”

Supporters include Hannah Einbinder, Joel Coen, Todd Haynes, Ilana Glazer, Tony Kushner, Emma Seligman, Jane Schoenbrun and Wallace Shawn.

The letter follows a heated week in which Ruffalo has been at the center of a growing confrontation over the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger. In a social media post on Aug. 21, the Marvel star attacked the deal over its potential consequences for Hollywood and accused the Ellison family of being complicit in the “genocide” against Palestinians, which he said “was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.” In the post, he highlighted Oracle’s ties to the Israeli military.

“Pointing out the crucial connections between what is happening in Gaza and what is happening in Hollywood is the exact opposite of antisemitism. It is, for us, the very essence of Jewish ethical duty," reads the open letter defending Ruffalo. "According to a recent Washington Post poll, 61% of American Jews now agree that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza; and four in ten even agree that these crimes amount to genocide. Do those attacking Mark Ruffalo as an antisemite seriously believe that all these American Jews are antisemites too? Or that we don’t see the connection between, on the one hand, the criminal impunities that have led the US and Israel into unending disaster and, on the other, the oligarchic powerplays of the Musks, Ellisons, Thiels and others who are working to dismantle our democracy?”

https://t.co/Y1nciNx0T2

[Emma Vigeland @EmmaVigeland]

Zionists are functionally Klansmen. Bari Weiss's CBS News is a racist, segregationist, genocidal propaganda rag.

[Adam Johnson @adamjohnsonCHI]

Hey guys check out this offensive tweet: [most morally normal sentiment imaginable]

[Adam Johnson @adamjohnsonCHI]

But remember it’s “antisemitism” for Mark Ruffalo to suggest CBS’s owner uses his media outlets to advocate for Israel (which he has specifically suggested he would do in a press release where he also noted his private donations to the IDF)

[Adam Johnson @adamjohnsonCHI]

If “decisively” ending the Iran war is one of Jeffries’ major items why did he appoint one of a handful of Democrats who voted against ending it to head the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East & North Africa? Hum. Not sure about the sincerity of this commitment

[layla, lmsw @itslaylas]

Since you asked, here is Adi Karni, blowing up a mosque in Gaza on video. He was wearing a keffiyeh and pretending to be Palestinian on @Columbia University’s campus. Meanwhile, Palestinian alumni like Mahmoud Khalil are barred from campus.

[Adam Johnson @adamjohnsonCHI]

Ok but Kushner doesn’t do anything remotely related to “affordability,” his domain is “peace envoy” which is to say working to maximize terms for Israel with respect to Iran and Gaza. Are these reporters ever going to follow up and point out this fairly glaring discrepancy?

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Israeli Officials Promote Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories About Israel

Benjamin Netanyahu boasted that he manipulated the United States into war with Iran, and Itamar Ben-Gvir shared an AI video of Palestinians being sent to Nazi-style concentration camps.

Reading by Tim Foley.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

People who believe capitalism is working out great are just sloppy thinkers who’ve fallen victim to survivorship bias and the just-world fallacy.

Survivorship bias is when your analysis focuses on those who made it while ignoring those who didn’t. You got a decent job, bought a house, and are now living comfortably, which means the system works fine and there must be something wrong with anyone who can’t thrive under it.

All the people who work just as hard as you do but still find themselves struggling go completely missing from your perspective. All the people who are just as clever and resourceful as you but haven’t found financial stability are conveniently overlooked. Everyone whose business venture failed instead of thriving, everyone who got laid off instead of promoted, everyone whose family circumstances were less fortunate than yours, everyone who has a race, gender, disability, or socioeconomic situation which makes their life harder than your own, simply doesn’t factor into your understanding of the way things work.

You got lucky, and you can point to other people who got lucky, and you use those examples to hide from the inconvenient reality that it could just as easily have been you who got the shit end of the capitalism stick. You see a guy out your window sleeping on the sidewalk and you tell yourself there’s a perfectly good reason why you’re in here while they’re out there, and in order to make that cognitive tango work inside your head you have to tell yourself a fairy tale.

That’s where the just-world fallacy comes in. The just-world fallacy is a cognitive bias which assumes that everyone gets what they deserve: that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.

The appeal of this fallacy is that it gives us a sense of control. It allows us to believe that nothing bad will happen to us if we just do the right thing and avoid making stupid mistakes. It also allows us to believe that we deserve all the good fortune life has brought us, and that the poor exist because they’re not as virtuous and wise as we are.

The trouble with the just-world fallacy is that it only works if you don’t think about it too hard. Anyone who’s been alive for a few years knows that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. We’ve all seen it countless times, with people we know personally. The world simply is not fair. If you are doing well under the current system, it’s only because your luck has held out. You have what you have because of sheer dumb luck.

If you can get real with yourself about this, you will understand why the system needs to change. A system which insists upon maintaining a very large tier of society who must stress and struggle throughout their lives is not a just or moral system. It cannot be defended by anyone with a rational mind and a well-formed conscience.

People who oppose the movement toward a more equitable society often accuse socialists of “jealousy” and “greed”, but that’s just projection; it is their own greed and selfishness which prevents them from sincerely reckoning with the unjust nature of the society they coincidentally wound up on top of. It is true that those who support socialism are frequently less economically privileged than the average capitalism proponent, but that’s only because they have a reality-based perspective on the abusive nature of the capitalist status quo.

Those who have been fortunate under capitalism often have a harder time forming a reality-based understanding of the system they live under, because they have to fight their way through all the comfortable cognitive biases which insist that everything’s more or less fine the way it is. If they still insist that capitalism is great, it’s only because their own intellectual laziness, ego, and moral cowardice have prevented them from getting real about their circumstances.

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

We are a broken nation. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians were living and working legally, paying taxes, and contributing. Haiti remains completely unsafe.

But Trump hates Haitians, and the White House wanted videos of Black people in chains, so they stripped them all of status.

[Rania Khalek @RaniaKhalek]

Paid crisis actors indeed!

[Rania Khalek @RaniaKhalek]

Disgusting racism

[Rania Khalek @RaniaKhalek]

“Liz Fried, of Ann Arbor, was one of the attendees who went up to speak to El-Sayed afterwards. She told him that her children were soon to fly to Israel, and asked if he would support funding for the Iron Dome defensive system.

He wouldn’t, she recalled to JTA — a position he has held in public.

“I was upset,” Fried said. “He doesn’t care about the safety of my children.””

YOU COULD JUST REFRAIN FROM SENDING YOUR KIDS TO A SETTLER COLONY THAT’S MURDERING ITS NEIGHBORS AND NATIVES.

OR MAYBE THE US TAXPAYER NEEDS TO FUND AN IRON DOME FOR EVERY COUNTRY AN AMERICAN CHILD VISITS.

however you look at this, it’s illogical

[PBS News @NewsHour]

A federal judge in California says the U.S. government is unconstitutionally silencing critics of Israel's war in Gaza and others as part of the Trump administration's quest to deport noncitizens who it says disrupted college campuses while expressing their views. https://t.co/OoX836goEv

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

Yeah, this is what a genocidal ghoul looks like

[Secular Talk ([email protected]) @KyleKulinski]

Oh my god she's amazing