iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

That worst case is a really bad worst case (and I'm not sure the metaphor of the hydra -- cut off one head and two regenerate in its place -- is doing you any favors either)!

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The Green Party's strategy is to say "Well, if we did the exact thing people are upset about but worded it slightly differently surely people would understand antisemitism isn't what we meant," and then refuse to even bother rewording it.

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The striking thing about this chart is how clearly it shows that, for many, "immigration" is primarily a means of rendering moral judgment about whole nationalities. Far more people are MAGA-on-Somalis than they'd ever admit (they just swap some countries around). h/t @jackkessler.bsky.social

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I would suggest that my original point -- that the solution isn't "obvious" -- also applies to Stalin's "no man, no problem" solution. "Just execute all the bad guys" is, in addition to whatever moral qualms we have, actually not a strategy with a spotless track record!

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So we *do* know what a totenkopf is.

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There may be good reasons to adopt these strategies anyway, but they’re not an auto-win button.

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lowtax speedrun enjoyer @rickywlmsbong.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

One of my least favorite political narratives is this weird idea that it’s *obvious* how to defeat the fascists and the only reason Democrats don’t do it is because they’re feckless/corrupt/cowards.

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Reposted by David Schraub

sitting in the vatican, full outfit, bottle of malort, yelling about the natives about their trash pizza

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David Schraub @schraubd.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

That’s called love of the game, baby.

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David Schraub @schraubd.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This is one of those things where you're going to tell us he's 33 years old, right?

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David Schraub @schraubd.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Is the problem with the article (and The New Yorker), or the book it is reviewing/critiquing?

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Reposted by David Schraub

Akiva Weisinger @misfittorah.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The fact that this idiocy got past an editor in a book on godamn punctuation shows how deep the ignorance of Judaism and Jewish history is in the wider culture and how that ignorance is being weaponized so as to create a better scapegoat for Western uses

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Horseshoe Theory of anti-antisemitism!

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tl;dr, it's not surprising that that thread got this reply, putatively in support.

Two posts by "Johnny Bravo", the first asking "what's an innocent Israeli", and the second answering "An Israeli child. An Israeli with mental health and learning disabilities so debilitating they could not possibly be of 'sound' mind. That's it."

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Is it possible to ask that w/out it being a backdoor way of saying "one cannot call Gaza a genocide even if it is?" It'll be hard. But if we are fearless about explaining social behavior, then we have to reckon w/this question too, and how it might prompt a different sort of "desperate" behavior.

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So if we're doing the pure cold-hearted causal explanation thing (with no normative apologia encoded into it, of course), then we also must coldly assess whether "genocide" allegations have served as a moral licensing regime legitimating (or at least making "understandable") violence against Jews.

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Closer to home it explains the blowback against the "hurt people hurt people" response the Temple Israel attack, and the whole discourse that puts Jewish life on a jeweler's scale to decide just how distant your family has to be from Israel before good people can mourn your death w/out complication.

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The Submission is the Point, Part II

This was literally the locus of the Rome Pride scandal--gay Italian Jews expressed solidarity with the suffering of Gazans, but declined a demand to use the word "genocide" bc of their experience of that term being used to impose collective responsibility on all Jews, and were dumped as a result.

dsadevil.blogspot.com

The Rome Pride Parade has banned Keshet, Italy's LGBTQ Jewish organization from having a float in their parade . They say it's because Keshe...

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But another reason is that many Jews have observed a straight line between using the term "genocide" and deciding that it is understandable, if perhaps sad and distasteful (or perhaps not!), if someone massacres your family. That is obviously going to be feverishly resisted.

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Regardless, the reasons why many Jews are so resistant to calling Gaza a "genocide" are multiple, and overdetermined. One of them really is, I think, simply that it is too horrible to contemplate that "we"--our people, a Jewish state--could do such a thing, and that is, to reiterate, a bad reason.

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"Is Gaza genocide" is a question that should be answered by the relevant legal principles. If a "yes" answer is wrong, it's not bc "yes" is a slur against Jews or Israelis or bc it disrespects the Holocaust; if a "no" answer is wrong, it's not bc "no" means one doesn't care about Palestinians.

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And that raises something else: The line I've taken on "is Gaza genocide" is simple: "genocide" is a legal term w/legal criteria. It's not false bc one cannot bear to think "we" could do it. And it's not true bc no other term can mobilize as effectively or express the depths of your grief or rage.

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The "empathy" that seeks to elevate alternative explanations beyond the obvious almost never is actually universal, which is how one knows it is not actually about pure causal explanations of social phenomenon but justification (and minimization of hate) w/a sheen of plausible deniability.

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The most plausible "cause" of BG's massacre is that he hated Arabs, in a milieu that bent over to explain why such hate is "understandable". The most plausible "cause" of the pilot's mass murder attempt of Israelis is that he hated Israelis, in a milieu that likewise sees such hate as "explainable".

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Of course, in either case, what the purportedly "neutral" attempt at explanation is actually trying to bury are the far more obvious explanatory factors: the offender's hateful/dehumanizing view of the target population and the social architecture that generates and nurtures such views as valid.

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Baruch Goldstein was reportedly traumatized as a physician who saw injury & death during the First Intifada. And the people who use that fact to "explain" his massacre--"desperate people do desperate things"--are not doing so in service of cold, value-neutral social scientific causal explanation.

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There is a small, cold, dead-hearted social scientific part of me that thinks this sort of causal hypothesis (on why someone tried to crash an airplane full of Israeli civilians) is always legitimate and doesn't entail any normative apologia. But a larger part of me knows better than to be so naive.

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Matt Calcara @mattcalcara.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Ogunbowale is apparently incapable of missing.

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Reposted by David Schraub

My fave, tho, is this one. POTHOLES, people. This is totally normal.

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Reposted by David Schraub

Matt Calcara @mattcalcara.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

No, no, this is a totally normal way to talk about a mayor's accomplishments.

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Reposted by David Schraub

Vituperative Erb @vituperativeerb.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

It remains odd to me The Onion has decided the thing to do in 2026 is mislead people about Democrats The DNC and prominent Democrats like El-Sayed! This isn’t even a joke, it’s a poorly controlled reflex

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David Schraub @schraubd.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Guys they got the mayor of Keego Harbor! [checks earpiece] Former mayor. But still, we're talking Keego Harbor -- you can't expect the *sitting* mayor to get on this sort of thing!

Press release from "Nonnegotiable Michigan" headlined: "17 MICHIGAN JEWISH DEMOCRATIC ELECTED OFFICIALS, ACTIVISTS, PARTY LEADERS PUBLICLY SIGN “NONNEGOTIABLE MICHIGAN"

Text of some of "leaders" who signed, including Mark Bernstein – Regent, University of Michigan; former Chair, Michigan Civil Rights Commission; former Director of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s Transition Office

Rep. Noah Arbit – State Representative from West Bloomfield; Founder, Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus

Ellen Cogen Lipton – Former Democratic State Representative, MI House of Representatives

Rob Kalman – Former Mayor, Keego Harbor

Adam Duberstein – Clawson City Council Member; Executive Board, Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus

Text from the Wikipedia entry for Keego Harbor: "Keego Harbor is a city in Oakland County in the U.S. state of Michigan. A northern suburb of Detroit, Keego Harbor is located roughly 27 miles (43.5 km) from downtown Detroit, and about 3 miles (4.8 km) southwest of Pontiac. As of the 2020 census, Keego Harbor had a population of 2,764. With a land area of 0.50 square miles (1.29 km2), Keego Harbor is the third-smallest city by land area in the state of Michigan, after Petersburg and Clarkston."

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Reposted by David Schraub

Scott Lemieux @lemieuxlgm.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The greatest playoff performer in Atlanta Hawks history

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I thought it was coincidence that these were next to each other on my feed until I saw that @barrydeutsch.bsky.social had reposted this.

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Lawsuit of the Day - Lawyers, Guns & Money

This does somewhat remind me of the lawsuit against CERN alleging that (a) running its supercollider might produce a tiny black hole which would consume the Earth and (b) under NEPA, it failed to produce an adequate environmental impact statement regarding the above risk.

lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com

Funniest lawsuit I’ve heard about in a while: But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the c...

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I'm sorry, but I've never seen a poll question seemingly more designed to allow people to project a preferred meaning onto an insanely predictable result. Yes, this fits with folks wanting revolutionary political action. It also captures classic pox-on-both-houses low info independents.

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