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And to be clear, the "noooo. He's NOTHING like a Rockefeller Republican!!!!" guys are also being very dumb here. They are obviously, for external reasons, arbitrarily, reactionarily, resistant to the mere ~association~ of Mamdani with the ~word~ Republican.

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Like. Guys. Please. Politicians are human beings existing in real-world political realities. Can we stop thinking it's some gatcha when a thousand-mile summary of a Zohran policy ~appears~ to contradict the sacrosanct tenets of Democratic Socialism as laid-out in a 1976 Intro to Poli Sci textbook?

Shocking: BlueSky users slowly beginning to understand that The Map is Not the Territory.

Partisan @partpartisan.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

"If you don't trade with the settlements that we ourselves classify as illegal, we will ban you from sending aid to Gaza" is genuinely evil shit.

Israel–United Kingdom relations, Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Legality of Israeli settlements
The United Kingdom announces it will ban imports of all goods from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, as well as some services, including financing, construction, infrastructure, real estate, and advertising. (Telegraph India)
To reciprocate the UK sanctions, Israel announces it will close the UK consulate in East Jerusalem. Israel also forbids the UK from participating in the U.S.-led mission for Gaza, and bans some British officials, including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, from entering the country. (The North West Star)

000

Conservative desperately rattling his brain for a nice thing to say about the Jews: "An attack on them is... an attack on the very concept of greed. (Nailed it!)"

Tweet:
Vivek Ramaswamy says antisemitism is an "attack on capitalism"

Partisan @partpartisan.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Fascinated by the way in which arguments from the anti-Bibi right-wing get laundered into the English-speaking center-left. Every time I look into "Bibi enabled Oct. 7th," the supporting evidence always ends up being insane hawk shit like "Oct. 7th happened cause Bibi let Gazans get work permits."

From a Haaretz article:

Let's not forget two key facts. The first is that the massacre was not some isolated event - it was planned over years by the very heads of Hamas who Netanyahu had refused to assassinate and conducted by a terror organizatior that Netanyahu insisted on strengthening and funding through the Qataris, who were paying the prime minister's advisers to provide them with services. The second fact is that Netanyahu has personally prevented all attempts to investigate the failings of that day through a state commission of inquiry that would uncover the facts

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Partisan @partpartisan.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

wat. that's literally the plot of the book.

Partisan @partpartisan.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

At least 5 units of shabbat I believe is what we decided at the last convention.

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Partisan @partpartisan.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

TIL that a Simeon Bar Yochai literally did the "if God has a million fans, I'm one of them. If God has 1 fan, that one is me" meme in the Talmud almost verbatim.

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Partisan @partpartisan.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Starbucks has never been on the BDS list.

Skeet one:
BREAKING: The union of Starbucks workers is officially calling for a boycott of the chain.

@sbworkersunited.org has over 12,000 unionized baristas, and they're calling on customers to stop visiting Starbucks until they get a fair union contract.

Skeet two:
Still boycotting due to bds, and i don't even know if they're still on the list lol but that goes to show there's usually more than one reason to abstain from these 🤡 ass corporations

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Partisan @partpartisan.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Get a case of these bad boys and trust me you won't have to pour out a single one.

000

Partisan @partpartisan.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Okay, maybe I was fibbing a bit there. Those aren't the *best* arguments mustered by scholars. There's also "well, how come they were only ritually burying SOME of their dead children, painstakingly fashioning stone death masks for them, and not ALL of their dead children?"

Many archaeologists argue that the ancient authors and the evidence of the Tophet indicates that all remains in the Tophet must have been sacrificed. Others argue that only some infants were sacrificed.[84] Paolo Xella argues that the weight of classical and biblical sources indicate that the sacrifices occurred.[98] He further argues that the number of children in the tophet is far smaller than the rate of natural infant mortality.

Partisan @partpartisan.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

The best arguments that can be mustered by scholars in support of Punic child sacrifice is "Well, it it wasn't at least a little true, then how come their enemies repeated it so much?" and "Occam's Razor dictates we trust blood libels."

Matthew McCarty argues that, even if the Greco-Roman testimonies are inaccurate "even the most fantastical slanders rely upon a germ of fact."[96]

Many archaeologists argue that the ancient authors and the evidence of the Tophet indicates that all remains in the Tophet must have been sacrificed. Others argue that only some infants were sacrificed.[84] Paolo Xella argues that the weight of classical and biblical sources indicate that the sacrifices occurred.

Partisan @partpartisan.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

I love Nikolaj, but this is maybe the most "I know nothing about the study of religion or sacrificial cult systems" tweet of all time.

Partisan @partpartisan.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Dear Emily Wilson: the point of focusing on "the mechanical challenge of moving objects through space" in Nolan's Odyssey is to demonstrate to the audience that all of these mere "logistics" problems involve human suffering. The horse is pulled by fucking slaves. People drown in it!

“What matters cinematically are the logistics: the rolling of the horse uphill and the claustrophobic, waterlogged interior. Once the ambush of the Trojans begins, the camera lingers repeatedly not on the human actors but on the enflamed, toppling buildings and the great gates of the city, whose slow-moving mechanism is observed at great length,” Wilson writes. “The script tells us loudly that people matter, but the camera shows us that what matters is the mechanical challenge of moving objects through space.”

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Dude, your DC suburb eruv is large enough to fit like 25 Zions in it what the fuck are we doing here?

Like, clearly Chazal's logic here is not "carrying the weapons is banned because it falls under the restriction of transfer between domains." No. They're pretty damn explicit here that weapons are a uniquely reprehensible desecration of the sabbath ("nothing other than reprehensible.").

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"I need to be able to carry my gun on the sabbath!" Carry. Your gun. On shabbes???!!!

Halachipedia:
Shemirat Shabbat Kehilchata ch. 20 fnt. 28 suggests that wearing a gun to scare of criminals is tzorech gufo and if that is the majority use it would be melachto lheter. Otherwise he implies it is melachto lheter. Orchot Shabbat 19:62 writes that in fact a gun that is mostly used to scare people is considered kli shemelachto lheter and even when it is used to shoot it is pikuach nefesh. But in America a gun is muktzeh machmat chisaron kis since they're dangerous and usually locked away. However, Shalmei Yohatan Muktzeh v. 1 p. 329 argues that a gun is a kli shemelachto lisur since it is used for melacha even though it is used for pikuach nefesh which is permitted. His proof is a milah knife which is kli shemelachto lisur (Pri Megadim M"Z 308:2). See Chazon Ish 49:9 as a proof for this.

Mishna Shabbat 6:4:

Just as it is prohibited for a woman to carry out certain items unique to a woman into the public
domain, the Sages said that a man may neither go out on Shabbat with a sword, nor with a bow, nor with a shield [teris|, nor with an alla nor with a spear. And if he unwittingly went out with one of these weapons ta the public domain he is liable to bring a sin-offering. Rabbi Eliezer says: These weapons are ornaments for him: just as a man is permitted to go out into the public domain with other ornaments, he is permitted to go out with weapons. And the Rabbis say: They are nothing other than reprehensible and in the future they will be eliminated, as it is written: "And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation will not raise sword against nation, neither will they learn war anymore" (Isaiah 2:4). With regard to women's ornaments, they added that a garter placed on her leg to hold up stockings is pure and cannot become ritually impure as a utensil, and she may even go out with it on Shabbat. However.
ankle chains, which were also women's ritually with impure, them on ornaments, can become and she may not go out Shabbat.

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This dude is so full of shit.

The lawsuit accuses the Montgomery County government of making it impossible for Shapiro to even walk to synagogue without potentially violating the law.

"The only path between his home and his synagogue requires him to walk within 100 yards of two public schools, two private schools, two parks, and three other houses of worship—each one a “place of public assembly,” the lawsuit states.

Shapiro specifically mentions how on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, he must walk to synagogue for communal prayer multiple times daily.

Rabbis used to do important shit.

Article:
55 Years Ago Today, 16 Rabbis Were Arrested Protesting Segregation. Read Their Story.

Article:
Ask a typical American Jew about Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement, and they’re likely to tell you about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching arm-in-arm with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma. A handful might recall Rabbi Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, who spoke immediately before King at the March on Washington.

But fewer remember the St. Augustine 17—the 16 Reform rabbis and one lay leader who went down to protest segregation in St. Augustine, FL, in June 1964 at the express invitation of King. There, the group was arrested and jailed, in what was the largest mass arrest of rabbis in U.S. history. From their jail cell, they wrote a manifesto explaining the moral urgency behind their activism. Yet today, their story has largely been forgotten, or at least, sidelined.

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Dude, I hate the chud-ification of my religion so much.

YouTube video:
Rabbi challenged Monthomery gun restriction law

Biography of the rabbi suing Montgomery:

Rabbi J. Menashe Shapiro is a rising 3L at the Georgetown University Law Center. On campus, Menashe serves as the Submissions Editor for the Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy, a research assistant for Professor Stephanie Barclay, and the Vice President for Advocacy of the Jewish Law Students Association. Beyond Georgetown, Menashe is an active member of the Federalist Society and is an Executive Editor for the Symposia Volume of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. Menashe has interned for the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation, the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

Picture of Rabbi J. Menashem Shapiro smiling in front of a portrait of Ronald Reagan

THIS IS NOT THE "Background Context" YOU LEAD WITH.

Wiki page:

BACKGROUND:

Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 with the Edict of Milan. Persecuted under previous emperors, the new religion persecuted heterodox beliefs, such as Arianism, Manichaeism, Gnosticism, Adamites, Donatists, Pelagians, and Priscillianists.[

Like, we give people the impression of "Oh. The Inquisition was about suppressing science and preventing Catholic schisms through force" when it was actually the political campaign to unite Spain by ethnically cleansing Muslims and Jews, involving a literal blood quantum.

Conversos were subjected to blood purity statutes (limpieza de sangre), which introduced racially-based discrimination and antisemitism, lasting into the 19th and 20th centuries.

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The best piece of ouroborous-performance-art in this mess is when the producers all clapped themselves on the back for making people walk out, and then the only black woman in the cast went "I'm not sure what the point of being offensive is if the only people we're offending are marginalized queers"

One Friday afternoon before showtime, members of the cast were sitting in the theatre, talking about how there are two specific moments in the show when audience members sometimes walk out. “I love it, in a weird, twisted way,” Alex Lewis, who is a cast member and a producer of the show, told me. (He’s the one who gets to sing “Non-Binary.”) “There are parts of the show that are meant to not make you feel happy.”

Austen Horne, the Black woman who plays Anne’s mother, Edith, wasn’t so gleeful. “Not every offended person is created equal,” she said, quietly. When people talk about the value of offensive art, they’re usually talking about art that offends other people, like “Book of Mormon,” with its affectionate mockery of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (And, for that matter, its slightly less affectionate mockery of Uganda.) But Horne, whose big moment in the show is a marvellously overcooked slam poem about the patriarchy, said that she was still figuring out how to balance her enthusiasm for the production with the knowledge that many of the “young, queer, radical, leftist people” in her life felt differently. “I’ve had friends come to a show where there’s a standing ovation, and my friends are the only people not standing, because they’re so offended by some of the things that have happened,” she said. “It’s taking a strain on a lot of my personal relationships, and I don’t know what it will bring for my career in the future. But I’ve been so grateful to be a part of it.”

020

"The last good trigger-warning joke was made in, like, 2017." Dude, you wrote a song titled "Safe Space" where the thesis is "leftists CLAIM to like 'safe spaces,' but dislike West Bank Settlements. Ironic, isn't it?"

Margot finally speaks, proposing the creation of a safe space for people like them in Palestine ("Safe Space"). When Anita notes that people already live there, Margot dismisses the concern. They don black hats and exaggerated noses of antisemitic caricatures and sing about colonizing Palestine, extracting rent, conquering the Global South, and expanding empire. Margot urges Anita to remember her people.

020

And, like, when I say the problem is that Slam Frank is too self-aware, I MEAN SLAM FRANK IS TOO SELF-AWARE.

Even so, Fox knew that he didn’t want to rely on easy punch lines about safe spaces and trigger warnings. “The last good trigger-warning joke was made in, like, 2017,” he told me.

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What's crazy is that the cast and crew seemingly HAVE read People Love Dead Jews, and I guess their takeaway was "it's okay to appropriate Anne Frank's death if you're using it to call trans people cringe." bsky.app/profile/part...

Per the New Yorker:
Van Hoogstraten is not Jewish, and she spent a week asking people she knew whether or not it was a good idea to portray a Jewish character in a potentially incendiary production. Once she signed on, Fox told her to prepare for some online backlash, and he assigned her some reading, including “People Love Dead Jews,” by the Jewish scholar Dara Horn, which includes a chapter about the way that Anne Frank’s story has been reduced to a blandly universal tale of good and evil.

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If you need any other indication of what kind of people the Slam Frank guys are, look no further than the fact that on ~the day of the Bondi shooting~ their immediate response was to do a parody Instagram post about the massacre.

@slamfrankmusical, Dec. 14 2025:
"At least el*v*n folx were unalived at a H*nukkah celebration in "Australia""

"what did they expect, "partying" on STOLEN LAND?"

@slamfrankmusical, a little while later:
"On Sunday, I published a post that came far too soon, that didn't convey what I meant to convey, and that caused a lot of harm as a result."

"As soon as I realized that my attempt to channel my grief into a satirical post was only causing nore hurt to others, I took it down."

"The fact that it has been able to cause additional pain through the sharing of screenshots saddens us immensely."

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And what he didn't get is that when Brooks was in the army, he spent time in military prison for beating the shit out of his antisemitic brothers-in-arms.

Brooks spent time in the stockade after taking an anti-Semitic heckler's helmet off and smashing him in the head with his mess kit.[41] His unit constructed the first Bailey bridge over the Roer River,[28] later building bridges over the Rhine River.[29] In April 1945, Brooks's unit conducted its last reconnaissance missions in the Harz Mountains, Germany.[29] Brooks's brothers also served; Lenny spent 19 months in a POW camp after his plane was shot down.[42]

111

Like, the only genuinely funny parts of the play are the small bits where it commits to the bit of "Alexander Hamilton but it's about the murder of Anne Frank." Cause that's fucking hilarious, and it's actually kind of impressive.

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Partisan @partpartisan.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

It's just all the same tired 2014 jokes about SJW activists. "Wow, these guys are so woke, it's like they've gone full circle and become the REAL racists." Dude. It's fucking 2026. There's a song in your musical called "safe space." At the end you insinuate BLM protestors are Nazis.

Adolf Hitler appears from the audience, applauds, revives the cast, and announces that he has been inspired to transition into Adeleine Hitler and declares the Holocaust canceled. The attic residents express relief that they no longer need to confront Palestine. Hitler praises Anita for changing the world. The cast, excluding Margot, performs a final number, advocating an uncompromising pursuit of justice, including the suppression of dissent ("Justice"). They remove their costumes, piling their shoes onstage, and revealing shirts bearing activist slogans—some of which overlap with Nazi rhetoric—as a montage plays featuring diverse groups alongside footage of antisemitic attacks and the Nova music festival massacre.

2499

"Judaism doesn't have monasticism" is one of those things we Jees have made very ingrained in how we talk about ourselves, but it's also 100% false. We have monasteries, they're called yeshivas. We just don't put our monasteries in the middle of nowhere.

Reddit comment:

Judaism, in the normative sense at least, isn't really a faith that encourages monasticism or asceticism in general. The physical, material world is a good thing--that's why HaShem created it. The pleasures and sensations we can get in this world, within moderation and appropriately gotten, are good things, which is why HaShem created them. Fasting and other forms of self-denial have their places and their times, but these need to be moderated as well.

The goal of Judaism isn't to obtain personal salvation by sequestering oneself in a cell and denying oneself all earthly pleasures. The goal is to be a part of the broader community, to learn Torah so that we can teach it to others. The goal is to make the world around us holier, by performing the mitzvahs of the Torah, uniting the mundane world with the holiness of Heaven and thus creating something grander than both. The goal isn't to flee the world until the end of days, but to repair it ourselves as best we can.

I of course don't say any of this with the intent to disparage anyone who practices a monastic way of life, or who belongs to a faith or tradition where such ways of life are revered.

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Partisan @partpartisan.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

I'm not much of a crank about the U.S. adopting the metric system for temp, volume, etc. But I AM exceptionally angry that the U.S. doesn't follow the ISO 216 A-series standard for paper sizing.

Diagram of the ISO 216 A-series paper sizes from A0 to A8.

Partisan @partpartisan.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

People just fucking say shit istg.

"There is no continuous sit in the entire operatic canon that’s as long or demanding as the three hours of The Odyssey (the most even Wagner asks in a single session is the two-and-a-half hours of Das Rheingold). I promise you, if you can make it through [Robert Pattinson’s one-note scowl for 180 minutes] (emphasis my own), you are well-prepared for the demands, longueurs and joys of opera."

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Partisan @partpartisan.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Reading Emily Wilson's Odyssey review rn and I think her takes on the film are mostly bad, but I also think this line is maybe one of the best things I've ever seen. So, as with Nolan's movie, I give the bad parts a pass do I can appreciate the great stuff here.

The Homeric epic was already an adaptation. The poem used a relatively new technology – the written alphabet – to rework existing mythical traditions, reshaping the story of a veteran’s homecoming to resonate with the complex concerns of Greek-speakers in the archaic period, an era of migration, colonisation and urbanisation.

Partisan @partpartisan.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Call me crazy, but I don't think this guy was making a reference to an arcane piece of Israeli genocide rhetoric by claiming that potholes require routine maintenance.

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Partisan @partpartisan.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

His argument against Chartism btw was that poor people wouldn't be unhappy if only Britain had a ~stronger~ aristocracy. His obsession with "real aristocracy" was, of course, intimately related to his pro-slavery opinions.

Carlyle, who had studied extensively the causes of the French Revolution, was apprehensive about England's future. He presented Chartism as a symptom of a disease that affected England. The effect of it could be a revolution if government did not improve the living conditions of the labouring classes. A cure for this disease is, according to Carlyle, a "real aristocracy" which can lead the working class through the vicissitudes of modern history.

Carlyle argued that slavery was preferable to laissez-faire capitalism.[204] Henry Crabb Robinson heard Carlyle at dinner in 1837 speak approvingly of slavery. "It is a natural aristocracy, that of colour, and quite right that the stronger and better race should have dominion!"[241] The 1853 pamphlet "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question" expressed concern for the excesses of the practice, considering "How to abolish the abuses of slavery, and save the precious thing in it."[242] Carlyle's defences of slavery contributed to his enduring popularity among pro-slavery figures of the antebellum South.[204] But liberals in Britain and the American North disputed such arguments, and among the objectors was the abolitionist John Stuart Mill, in the anonymous essay "The Negro Question".

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Partisan @partpartisan.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

The irony here is that the argument "economics is an artless pseudoscience meant to justify a morally bankrupt ideology with its cooky concepts of 'supply and demand'" was first coined by race scientists who were very mad that economists kept producing charts that said "slavery bad for economy."

"The dismal science" is a derogatory name for the science of economics, coined by Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle in 1849.[1] It contrasts with "the gay science", a then-current name for poetry

The phrase first appeared in "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question" (1849), in which Carlyle claimed that emancipation had wrecked the economy of the West Indies by putting blacks in a position to demand unaffordable wages, thus depriving plantation owners of their labour supply. He argued for a return to some kind of forced labour system, albeit one more just than slavery. Economists of the time, following the principle of supply and demand, claimed that the labour problem could be resolved by opening the West Indies to African immigration, but Carlyle viewed this proposal with scorn, believing that it would lead to the development of "black Irelands" (i.e. impoverished, overpopulated islands liable to suffer terrible famines whenever crops failed). His contempt both for economists and the "Exeter Hall philanthropists" who had spearheaded emancipation moved him to write:

Truly, my philanthropic friends, Exeter Hall Philanthropy is wonderful; and the Social Science—not a "gay science", but a rueful—which finds the secret of this universe in "supply-and-demand", and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone, is also wonderful. Not a "gay science", I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.[2]

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Partisan @partpartisan.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Seeing self-proclaimed "libertarians" go to bat for a system of Car Dependency created by top-down federal and state-level mandates for highway expansions, parking minimums, and oil subsidies kinda gives way the whole charade.

"One of the more enduring myths about the mobility Americans have embraced and the freedom cars provide us is that its unsustainable because we can’t continue to pave over America. America has become an “Asphalt Nation.” It’s a nice bumper sticker but, like most bumper stickers, it’s wrong and even conveys bad information."

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Partisan @partpartisan.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

They in fact did this on multiple occassions. (Menachot 37a)