S.A. Bach

ever-bewildered anti-folkie from LA-via-Branson-via-LA. musician's friend's friend. lucky fucker. my name is trademarked :(

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

The author of the article was correctly identified by childhood intelligence testing as good enough at writing to have a career as a journalist but too weak at logic to craft arguments that make sense. 😂

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

Note that the authors of the study in question do not share this interpretation of their findings.

https://t.co/rbkoaV6EDW

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

What kind of debunking is this? That is a very high rate of eminence!!

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

A lot of subscribers have asked what I made of the Nick Kristof oped.

So much has already been said. What more is there to say?

My first thought was everyone else's. Horrifying. Testimonies of pain and torture. We know that the Israeli Prisons Service is notoriously incompetent. There have been cases of Hamas prisoners abusing each other, and even famous cases of them abusing female Israeli guards. We know, too, that all prison systems struggle with the problem: New York prisons face 2,000 claims against them. So abuse of prisoners isn't merely possible, it's guaranteed. October 7 and the ensuing war sent thousands of detainees into the prisons. And in the early months, drafted into the system undertrained reservist guards. Guards who had seen Hamas's videos gleefully documenting their crimes.

I expected, therefore, a hard-hitting story of real abuse, something Israeli leaders must take notice of.

And then I came across the first obvious lie. And then the second. And then an odd claim -- maybe possible, but how exactly? -- and then another just like it. And a famed Hamas propagandist laundered as a reliable source. And then another.

Why, if there is no doubt that abuse occurred -- and there is no doubt -- was there so much obvious propaganda in Kristof's oped?

I won't pretend the lies weren't a relief. They were. It's agony to read about Israeli criminality, and the lies let me cast doubt on the whole narrative. There's an obvious propaganda campaign at work here.

But as claim followed claim, it became hard not to wonder: Despite the propaganda, what part is nevertheless true? How bad has it gotten?

So here's what we know, or at least what I think I know.

This is a campaign that seeks our destruction. Kristof quotes people who celebrated October 7 and want Israel destroyed, and will lie to achieve that goal. We know how the lies in this story made their way into it, where they came from and what purpose they serve.

Even so, I'm not willing to conclude there's no truth at all in there, just because there are lies.

Dogs did not rape anyone. The people who invented that particular inanity claimed it without evidence, knowing that no one, certainly not self-appointed moral arbiters like Nick Kristof, would ever bother checking the provenance of the claim.

Because they never, ever do. Because why would they?

So the claim spreads through the millions-strong activist network without investigation, exciting and mobilizing -- not because anyone understands how it might be possible but for the sheer thrill of it.

And it's cited by Kristof as a reliable report.

A recent report by a Norwegian NGO, also referenced, claimed "systemic sexual violence" in the West Bank by citing just 16 cases across three years in a geographic region containing as many as three million Palestinians and over half a million Israelis. And some of the examples scarcely cleared the bar for harassment.

But the NGO in question knew for a fact that no journalist would look too deeply into any of it. And indeed, no journalist did.

Because they never, ever do. Because why would they?

Friends, a paper trail is being created. Just like they created a paper trail on mass starvation in Gaza -- mass starvation first claimed in early 2024, and then claimed again and again by NGOs, the UN, everybody. Some were nuanced warnings of a "possibility," some declared it had arrived. The headlines from both were largely the same. And then, in thundering silence, the mass starvation claim just faded away, never having materialized -- while billions of ordinary people around the world who don't follow too closely remain convinced that countless Gazans died of starvation.

So they moved on. A Lancet letter claiming hundreds of thousands of deaths spread like wildfire, mostly because (a) nobody actually read or understood what it claimed and (b) nobody cared enough to check if it was remotely plausible. Then, just in case anyone forgot Lancet, came the claim by UN rapporteurs of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children -- 380,000 infants under five allegedly died, more than the entire population of infants in Gaza. Stupid, right? But it was repeated again and again by activists and protestors.

No one checks, no costs are exacted for the never-ending barrage of fakery. Because why would they?

A wild religious frenzy has taken hold. Hatred of Israel is now definitional to the left, and to parts of the right. Greta Thunberg has forgotten all about climate change. An enemy of humanity has been identified just in time to unleash all the pent-up religious rage that this troubled secular age won't allow against anyone else.

And by complete and utter coincidence, that enemy you're suddenly allowed to hate is vaguely associated with the Jews.

Yes, alas, it really is that simple.

But also, dear friends -- bear with me -- it isn't.

All the above is true. They're fucking liars and bigots. They marched in their millions, again and again and again, for weeks and months and years -- marches completely unprecedented in their size, regularity and duration in all the history of the West, in all the history of war, larger by orders of magnitude than all other marches for all other conflicts and wars and suffering combined, even those caused by their own governments. And no serious person pretends that anything similar could ever have coalesced or will ever coalesce again unless Israel is involved.

"But we fund you," shouts the American activist to explain this mind-numbing selectivity. Then why did one-third of the city of Amsterdam march? Or millions of Spaniards, Brazilians and Indonesians? It was unprecedented and it was everywhere.

And Kristof has joined the new religion. Not by being concerned about abuse, but by not caring one whit whether he's trafficking in truths or lies. Only the Jews will ask to distinguish between the two. He just needs to throw it all on the page, and his membership in the glorious crusade is assured.

Alas, the Jews are correct about the nature of this moment. Some things are so big and fundamental, so assumed and widespread, that they become hard to see. Fish don't notice the water. Activists who can only ever march against Jews are convinced they are merely righteous people enraged by war, without ever pausing to wonder why the only war that ever enraged them or ever made its way to their phones was one particular war, and not larger and deadlier wars also conducted with Western weapons and money.

And so the Jew is made fearful once more. Throughout Christendom and Islam, he is being returned to his proper place in the social hierarchies of old, complete with anxious conversos and ideological purity tests.

And yet, still, despite it all, their lies aren't the end of the story. Their lies are a separate story. A campaign of lies that constitutes a return to the mean for the Jewish condition in the West. A campaign meant to justify brutality against us, not to end war or suffering.

And despite all of it, dear Jews, there really is abuse.

It's nowhere near as much as the psychotic claims of these fantasists. Not by orders of magnitude. If it was, they wouldn't need to lie so much.

But it's there nonetheless. Many dozens of cases at least, probably in the low hundreds by now, most of them without any sexual aspect, but still wanton violence. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but the army gave a few estimates to the courts a couple of times over the past three years. There have been many indictments filed against soldiers, serious ones. I know something about a handful of those cases. I know that the problem is real.

It's there, it's real, and it doesn't seem to be stopping. And if it isn't stopped with an iron will and uncompromising hand, it will continue to fester and grow.

And it must be said: neither Ben Gvir nor Netanyahu are interested in fixing it. Nobody at the top cares about the rights of prisoners.

Let me be clear: For the first time in my life, I support a death penalty. No one who crossed over the border to massacre and kidnap on October 7 should be left alive; they came to kidnap children precisely because they sought the release of mass murderers kept alive in our prisons. Hamas, as always, in its totalizing brutality, forces the choice: If their murderers live, our children may die. I choose our children. And those who came for our children cannot be deterred, reformed or deradicalized. They murder their own to clear a path to murdering ours. And so I believe they must die. We must try, convict and destroy them.

And even I, radicalized in this narrow, specific way, say we cannot collapse into torture or abuse. That's not justice. It isn't even vengeance. It is participation in Hamas's way of war.

Nor do our leaders seem to care about the simple breakdown of discipline that these abuses represent, the kind of breakdown we saw again and again with the incidents of looting in Gaza and in the early cases of prisoner abuse that came to light.

No, dogs aren't being trained to systematically rape prisoners, you nattering halfwits. And no, Hamas propaganda operatives are not reliable sources on the question of Israeli crimes. The vast, vast majority of soldiers are honorable men who walked into fire so our families may live. The whole world may turn on them; I will stand with them, grateful for their sacrifice. And Kristof, a willing purveyor of propaganda happily feigning that he can't see the water and thrilling to a moral crusade engineered by would-be genocidaires he pretends not to understand -- is no messenger of moral reckoning.

But friends, so fucking what. Let the narcissistic guttersnipes strut their moral emotions before the world, let the UN publish endless reports that don't hold up to basic scrutiny, let the NGOs dream their rabid, sick dreams that no journalist ever fact-checks -- yes, they're lying. But so fucking what.

We still, for ourselves -- because fuck them -- must see that it isn't all fake. The problem is real. It's far smaller than they claim, but real nonetheless. And when discipline and morality break down, it can only get worse. We either crack down now or we watch it fester and grow.

And our own Ben Gvirs are stubbornly refusing to fix what is actually broken, the real thing in the real world.

And so we are caught in a strange sort of vise, the same vise we find ourselves in with the genocide lie: A vast propaganda machine that seeks to destroy us -- countless activists too high on their own self-regard to see the irony of raging against a "genocide" while calling for the erasure of a people -- all while our own incompetent, venal, self-absorbed political class insist in their mindless chatter on confirming every claim of our enemies for sheer, bald egomania.

I'm sick of it all. I know you're all sick of it too.

And that, in a nutshell, is what I think about this.

Just because they're lying, just because a vast perfidious campaign has overwhelmed global elites in a bid to clear the way for our removal, just because they're still, after two millennia, building their visions of redemption on The Evil Jew -- doesn't mean there isn't also, separately, a problem on the ground.

So what do we do now?

Simple. We see it, we acknowledge it's happening, we bring our rage to our inept leaders until they bend to our will and act to stop the breakdown...

And we soldier on.

We soldier on because the enemy really is coming to murder us. Because Hamas must still go if Gaza is ever to rise to a new day. Because Hezbollah will yet destroy Lebanon on the altar of destroying us. Because the ayatollahs built their whole damn religion on the extermination of our children.

We fix the broken things within us as if the pogromists and their simpering Kristofs don't exist. We owe no answers to the propagandists who seek to clear a path to our deaths. But we do owe answers to ourselves.

Let the screaming mob rage and churn like so much sea-foam. Despite that raging mob, despite the enemy who still seeks our destruction, and yes, despite feckless incompetents like Ben Gvir, our minister of prisons, who claim to lead us -- we remain the strongest, freest Jews who ever lived, more capable and committed than our self-destructive enemies ever imagined. And the task is still before us, yet to be completed, the sacred duty given to our generation to ensure our children don't have to face the genocidaires who now surround us. We do not waver, we do not stumble. We soldier on.

Because fuck them all.

[Hussein Aboubakr Mansour @HusseinAboubak]

"We can build marvelous inventions and soaring cathedrals, for example, but not end war or cheat death. This ancient counsel of humility is also, counterintuitively, the only thing that will preserve our agency going forward. Nothing will ever replace us, and prudence in human affairs has always been an odd balancing act between treating this fact as both bad and good news. The age of AI will be no different in that key respect. It will really be, as every age before it has been, an age of humanity. We are, for the foreseeable future, in charge."

https://t.co/yey10XrWHb

[Paul Bronks @SlenderSherbet]

"LOOK AT ME I'M A PENGUIN, I'VE GOT A SILLY WALK AND I'M A BIRD BUT I CAN'T EVEN FLY"

"Just ignore him Tony"

[Jay in Kyiv @JayinKyiv]

Long unofficially banned from appearing on state TV, incoming Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar appears on a channel to which he was previously not allowed only to announce an end of "North Korean" style Orban media monopoly.

[Block Club Chicago @BlockClubCHI]

From early Nirvana to Phish, a Chicago fan’s secret recordings of 10,000 shows are now online. https://t.co/yfhmXPTYWt

[Jonas Čeika @Jonas_Ceika]

I sent ChatGPT an audio file of a series of FART sound effects and asked what it thinks of "my music" and this is what it said

[Darshak Rana ⚡️ @thedarshakrana]

🚨The most dangerous thing you can do to your consciousness is doomscrolling.

You think you’re observing reality. But, you’re actually living inside a simulation designed to make you forget what reality feels like.

Every time you scroll through curated feeds of global disasters, you’re witnessing a carefully constructed representation of the world, filtered through editorial decisions, engagement metrics, and profit motives you never see. The information flowing through your device carries the psychological fingerprints of every system designed to keep you scrolling.

You’ve never actually experienced 99% of the events that shape your worldview. Everything you “know” about reality beyond your immediate environment comes through screens controlled by corporations optimizing for your continued engagement, not your accurate understanding.

Your consciousness of global events gets entirely mediated by systems that make money when you feel anxious, angry, or obsessed. Your perception of reality becomes literally sponsored by entities whose business model requires your mental disturbance.

And…this artificial reality feels more real than actual reality. The curated stream of crises feels more urgent than the conversation with your friend. The distant disaster feels more important than the local problem you could actually solve. The virtual outrage feels more meaningful than the present moment you’re actually living.

Your consciousness gets trapped in a kind of meta-reality where consuming information about life replaces actually living life. Where reacting to representations of events replaces participating in actual events. Where feeling informed replaces being effective.

Ancient spiritual traditions warned about this exact trap. Maya in Hinduism. Samsara in Buddhism. The Cave in Plato’s Republic. All describe the same phenomenon: consciousness becoming so absorbed in illusions that it forgets its own direct experience of existence.

Doomscrolling represents the technological perfection of that ancient trap.

You scroll through disasters happening to other people and feel like you’re experiencing something important.

Meanwhile, you’re sitting in a chair, staring at light patterns on glass, having emotional reactions to stories about events you will never directly encounter involving people you will never meet in places you will never visit.

Your nervous system responds as if these stories are your lived reality. Your consciousness accepts these mediated experiences as genuine knowledge. Your identity becomes shaped by your reactions to simulations rather than your engagement with actual existence.

The matrix exists every moment you choose the feed over the present, the screen over the room, the story about life over life itself.
The red pill? Simply turning off the device and remembering that your consciousness exists independent of any information system designed to capture it.

Reality doesn’t need updates. Consciousness doesn’t need feeds. Existence doesn’t require commentary.

The world you can touch, smell, and directly influence has always been more real than the world you can only scroll through.

[Shnayor Burton 🇺🇸 🇮🇱 @shnayor]

https://t.co/N1IxcXfmKl

[Alexei Arora @AlexeiArora]

If 10 years ago you told someone that

1) a Jewish comedian who depicted himself on live TV playing a piano with his wiener
2) And a former Syrian Al Qaeda commander

Would
1) lead their respective nations
2) hug it out openly as allies

They’d consider you schizophrenic

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Warm colors increase your heart rate. Cool, washed-out tones lower it. Every remake you’ve watched in the last decade has been deliberately color-graded to flatten that signal.

It started in 2000. The Coen Brothers shot O Brother, Where Art Thou? in Mississippi during summer, when everything was, in Joel Coen’s words, “greener than Ireland.” They wanted a dusty Depression-era look. Cinematographer Roger Deakins tried every trick in the book: chemical treatments, lens filters, old darkroom techniques. Nothing worked. So they did something no one had done before: digitally scanned the entire film and recolored it frame by frame. Deakins spent 11 weeks turning lush greens into burnt yellows. No feature film had ever been entirely digitally color graded before.

Every major studio adopted the technique within a few years. And then the problems started.

Modern film cameras don’t capture what your eyes actually see. They intentionally record flat, grey, washed-out footage to capture as much detail as possible. The plan is for the color team to add vibrant color back in later. But the people doing that work stare at grey footage for weeks. Their eyes adjust. One filmmaker admitted he’d bring saturation up to 120% and feel satisfied, then realized the image still looked desaturated to everyone else. He had to crank it to 200% before it looked normal.

That’s just eye fatigue. The color draining also happens on purpose.

Muting colors hides bad CGI. If a computer-generated background doesn’t quite match the actors, draining the color smooths over the mismatch. The Lord of the Rings extended editions look flatter than the theatrical cuts for exactly this reason: the added scenes had less polished effects, so they were washed out to cover it.

Then streaming made it permanent. Bright colors look messy when video gets compressed for phones and laptops. Dull colors look consistent whether you’re watching on a 75-inch TV or a 6-inch phone screen. So studios color their movies for the smallest screen in the room.

Your brain registers the difference even if you can’t name it. Your eyes are wired to perceive warm, rich colors as closer and more immediate. Washed-out tones create emotional distance. When a studio drains color from a scene, they’re dampening the emotional signal the image sends to your brain.

Old film stock didn’t have this problem. Kodak and Fuji films had rich, punchy color built into the physical chemistry of the film itself. Each brand had a distinct look you could recognize. Digital cameras capture flat, neutral data by default. Getting that warm, vivid “film look” from digital requires skilled work that costs time and money. Most productions don’t invest enough of either.

Modern cameras can capture a wider range of colors than film ever could. The technology has never been better. The choices have never been lazier.

[Coleman Hughes @coldxman]

https://t.co/qAeeVIk31m

[The Free Press @TheFP]

The ’90s comedy rapper used the First Amendment to peacefully fight back against police overreach—he should inspire us all, writes Josh Kaplan. https://t.co/rQGwYOLKfx

[Alana Newhouse @alananewhouse]

Years from now, it will be obvious why, in this specific moment in human history, as we faced high-powered technologies and political ideologies aimed at paving the way for their dominance over humans, what emerged—what had to emerge—was an intense, global debate about, of all things, Zionism.

https://t.co/5I5u55WFoY

[David Shor @davidshor]

Credit to @alapshah1 for having the most original/creative AI take I’ve heard in years

[S.A. Bach @loafofjoy]

The stupidest of many unfathomably stupid things about my life is that there is a city that is known as “Music City,” and I’ve never been.

[mrinank @MrinankSharma]

Today is my last day at Anthropic. I resigned.

Here is the letter I shared with my colleagues, explaining my decision.

[Dr. Dominic Ng @DrDominicNg]

As a neuroscientist, here are 8 ways to maximise misery:
1. Check your phone immediately after waking.
Flood your brain with news designed to make you anxious and angry.