ᛟᛗᛖᚾᛋᛏᛁᛏᚳᚺᛖᚱ

I have written that the Israeli government is failing us and that the settlement project is a moral and strategic disaster. I have said harder things than that in public, under my own name, more than once.

Nobody called me an antisemite for it.

I bring this up because the claim of the season is that you cannot criticize Israel. It is a serious claim, and I am a useful test of it, because criticizing Israel is a big part of what I do in public. If the accusation were really triggered by criticism, I would be its most obvious target. I am not. So something else is going on.

Let me concede the real part first. Sometimes claims of antisemitism are thrown in bad faith. People have been smeared over ordinary political speech, and Jews who oppose the occupation or the war have been called nasty names by other Jews. That is wrong every time it happens. Anyone who reaches for this word to win an argument cheapens it for the day a real antisemite walks into the room.

Then there is the part almost nobody wants to look at.

This week, Britain barred streamer Hasan Piker and his uncle, commentator Cenk Uygur, from entering the country. The Home Office said that their presence would not be “conducive to the public good.” Both men went straight to audiences of millions and said the same thing: they were being silenced for criticizing Israel. Piker said it was done at Israel’s command.

But when you look at the facts, you get a different story. Besides saying that America deserved 9/11, Piker has also said he prefers Hamas to Israel, that he loves Hezbollah’s flag, and has no issue with them. Both are banned terror organizations under British law. He has compared Zionists to Nazis, said Israelis are Nazis, and called Orthodox Jews inbred. That is not criticism of a government, if you couldn’t tell. It is contempt for a people and admiration for the men who murder them. And the UK Home Secretary who signed off, Shabana Mahmood, is a British Muslim who has publicly criticized Israeli conduct in Gaza. Calling her a servant of Netanyahu is ridiculous.

Susan Sarandon tells a version of the same story. She says Hollywood blacklisted her for calling for a ceasefire. What actually happened is that she stood at a rally and said American Jews were getting a taste of what Muslims endure. She apologized for the line herself and called it a terrible mistake. Her agency dropped her over what she said at that rally. In the telling she gives now, the offense was the ceasefire comment. The blacklist did not keep her off the stage at Coachella two months ago, where Sabrina Carpenter cast her in what became the most talked-about moment of the festival's opening night.

The pattern holds every time you check it. The criticism of Israel is the alibi. The bad conduct is the actual offense. Everyone involved knows the difference and agrees to pretend they don’t.

Take the bad conduct away, and you are left with Ms. Rachel.

She is the biggest children’s entertainer in the world. Eighteen million YouTube subscribers and a Netflix show, and the Washington Post calls her the Mister Rogers of our era. For two years, she has used that platform to talk about Gaza without pause, in front of the most brand-skittish audience there is, the parents of toddlers. She is still doing it now. She has said she would risk her whole career to keep going. The career keeps growing. Netflix signed her up in the middle of it.

Which brings me to the strangest venue for a silencing campaign in history.

At Cannes last month, a member of the jury used the opening press conference to announce that Susan Sarandon, Javier Bardem, and Mark Ruffalo had been blacklisted by Hollywood. Hannah Einbinder, fresh off a standing ovation for her new film, told a packed panel she was not afraid of being blacklisted because the cost of staying quiet was higher. Months earlier, she had closed her Emmy speech with “Free Palestine,” on live television, to applause.

I want to be fair to her. She may actually believe that she is taking a risk. But a blacklist you can describe from a stage at Cannes, to a room of journalists who will quote you admiringly, is not a blacklist. The Hollywood Ten could not publish essays about being blacklisted. That was the entire point of the thing. The test of silence is whether you can still be heard, and every name on this list is heard constantly, by millions, with a publicist setting it up.

There is an actual, organized refusal-to-work list in film right now. It is called Film Workers for Palestine, and more than five thousand people have signed it, pledging not to work with Israeli film institutions they accuse of complicity in Gaza. Javier Bardem signed it. The man named at Cannes as a victim of blacklisting helped build one. The targets are Israelis and Zionist Jews.

The people who took a real risk in that room were the ones who refused. Debra Messing and Mayim Bialik put their names to a letter calling the boycott what it is, and got called McCarthyists for objecting to McCarthyism. They are not on Hollywood’s magazine covers for it.

And then there is the kind of silence that does not come with a profile.

On a Sunday last June, a group of mostly older people walked through Boulder, Colorado, the way they did every week, carrying signs for the hostages still held in Gaza. A man threw firebombs into them while shouting, “Free Palestine!” He told police he wanted to kill every Zionist there. A dozen people were injured, the oldest in their eighties. One woman later died of her burns.

A few weeks before Boulder, two young Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead as they left a museum in Washington. The man who did it chanted the same words.

Those people were criticizing nothing. They stood in public as Jews who would not disown Israel, and that was enough. None of them will be asked by a magazine how it feels to be silenced. They already have been, in the older sense of the word.

So here is where I land. I criticize Israel constantly, and the sky stays up. The settlements and the men running the war are fair game, and saying so has never once cost me the thing these people insist it costs. Being argued with is not being silenced.

There is a harder question under all of this, and I think we keep avoiding it because the answer stings. You would believe every word of this if it were any other group. If a minority said its elderly were being burned at a weekly vigil and its kids shot leaving a museum, the response would be grief and alarm. When Jews say it, the response is a request to see our work. We are asked to prove that we are not exaggerating and that the dead were killed for the reason we name. I just spent this whole essay doing that. For any other group, the dead would have been enough.

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)

This, too, is a trashed bathroom; young queer people living through hell and having precious little control over their circumstances or the world in which they exist can affect something by using the language of social justice as a cudgel on their would-be allies, as well as getting a brief feeling of power over someone else by doing it.

Clothing company Patagonia is currently sueing drag queen Pattie Gonia for "irreparable” harm to their brand.

To be clear; Pattie named herself after the region in South America.

So Pattie is asking people to politely ask Patagonia to drop the lawsuit.

I'm extending the invitation to all of you, because sueing a drag queen for 'infringement' in the current political cultural landscape is vile. Especially a drag queen who has raised millions of dollars for non-profits, uses her platform to raise awareness for climate activism, and fully aligns with Patagonia's apparent climate-conscious mission statement.

They're claiming they're sueing for $1. They're actually asking her to stop using her name, and pay over $1 million in legal fees. They're straight up harassing her.

In contrast, drag queen Jan Sport has a Jansport bag line. It's that easy to just... work with a queen.

Anyway. Be respectful(ish), but feel free to be annoying on Patagnoia's socials, asking them to 'DROP THE LAWSUIT'

Some people in the notes are saying it's impossible to get unless you are licking infected objects, that you can't get it via respiratory droplets, and that you need to have extremely intimate contact for a prolonged time to catch it from another person, but I strongly recommend people read the Argentina birthday party case study from 2018-2019 where one person infected with the Andes strain infected 34 people at a birthday party, 11 of whom died, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2020:

“Super-Spreaders” and Person-to-Person Transmission of Andes Virus in Argentina

A local paper had some great photographs, all taken by Nicole Hester:

The day before, Rep. Justin Pearson tries to attend a Senate Committee meeting and is barred access by the Sergeant at Arms.

Lawmakers and protesters link arms as the descend the capitol steps.

Once inside the chamber, Democratic representatives continued to stand together with arms linked.

They continued standing together with arms linked as votes were cast.

Democratic representatives take a group photo protesting the redistricting.

Rep. Justin Jones burns a photo of the Confederate flag with the words, We will not go back.

And stomps the ashes.

KeShaun Pearson being escorted from the building by the Staties.

KeShaun Pearson (left) being taken into custody. Rep. Justin Pearson (right) showing his support of his brother.

Additional information: State lawmakers have been gunning for Pearson and Jones nearly their entire terms. Most notably, in 2023, the House expelled them for participating in a protest at the Capitol. Their districts had to have special elections to have them reinstated.

Pearson is one of the plaintiffs of a lawsuit seeking an injunction against the redistricting.

CeCe Rogers on Facebook writes: "Two Black Tennessee lawmakers were physically escorted out of chambers this week while Republicans quietly held a hearing to approve gerrymandered maps that would eliminate the state's only majority-Black congressional district.

No referendum. No special election. No public vote.

Because they know what happens when voters actually get a say — just look at Virginia, where the people spoke so loudly that Republicans had to drag the courts in to override them.

This isn't new. During Reconstruction, Black Americans held more congressional seats than at any point in the prior 90 years of American history. And white supremacists spent the next several decades tearing that down, through gerrymandering, poll taxes, and voter intimidation.

150 years later, the same tools. Different suits.

The audacity of escorting Black lawmakers out of their own chambers while dismantling Black political representation, and then telling us the courts aren't political, is breathtaking. These are the same courts they're counting on to make it stick.

Firstly, I found a data-focused analysis of the redistricting. The tl;dr is that Republicans claim the redistricting was done to balance urban/rural voting blocks, BUT the actual data indicates that urban voting power was ONLY broken up in Black-majority Memphis and other urban centers in east Tennessee were left alone (Nashville was also chopped up a bit, but my potentially flawed understanding is it was already divided up a lot from a previous redistricting). There's also statistical evidence that gerrymandering increased across the board. The NAACP of Tennessee has already filed a lawsuit.

Secondly, in a really heinous move, a bill was passed* that eliminates the requirement to inform voters of district changes. That means a lot of people are not going to know their voting place and/or precinct changed until they actually show up to vote because there's no legal obligation to tell them (they would have to know to go online and check), UNLESS everyone gets really loud about this. Also, learn this lesson: double and triple check your voter registration leading up to elections, because shit like this can happen. *All news coverage I found was written before it was passed, but this bill tracker indicates it was signed by the Governor May 7.

Finally, I wanted to note that the redistricting happened ultra fast and after some primary elections had occurred on May 5 (the new district map was adopted May 7). That means that: 1) the process of candidates qualifying and campaigning was already in full swing and now many candidates will have to scramble to either re-qualify or continue in a new area. I don't have any sources to back this up, but my hunch is that is will disproportionately affect Black candidates running in previously majority Black districts, whose entire voter base just changed overnight. And then 2) because this happened AFTER primaries, that means some voters will be forced to vote in a general election for candidates that were not in the primary they participated in. Both prospects are insanely undemocratic. (For further context, the May 5 primaries were only for a handful of smaller positions and primaries for bigger positions will be in August, so that's why a lot of coverage of this is sort of just ignoring some primaries already happened.)

Plenty of transphobic cis folks are green. Virtually every trans-positivity account is red except for the ones who are unapologetically transphobic to at least part of the community. Countless trans women who vocally uses the term transandrophobia are marked red. Several trans women who dont even use the term but have at least on one occasion defended or sympathized with trans men are red. Several trans women who are bigender/NB/Etc with inclusion of any "male" or masc terms are red regardless of whether they seem to have anything to say about trans men.

It is BLEAK. I've been trying to remove reds and greens as I assess, but it is really really gross that it was a pretty well-known soft rule a decade plus ago that you didn't mark trans people red at all even if they were shitheads, unless they were actual proud terfs, because the flagging was guaranteed to isolate them from community.

Inability to assess risk and a total aversion to narratives that contradict what you assume to be the case for others is getting people into a lot of trouble.

Hi there.

So I moved recently, and my benefits are being delayed because there's a review on the account and they need to recalculate based on my new rent amount.

I need help. I hate saying it but it's true.

My rent is £585, due on the first. It's a super short timeframe, literally one week, and of course the gov is totally unconcerned with helping out. I don't think I can really offer anything in return and I don't want to pressure anyone, but if you want to help someone survive terf island for a little longer then I'm right here and I'll kiss you on your face 🙏

My PayPal is @RAGSeers. If I can't make the deadline I'll still keep it up because unfortunately it's expensive to miss a rent payment too.

£170/585

35/400

Bonnie is getting older, and while I don't like the prospect of that, I still do need a service dog. Help me afford a puppy while she's still with me to pass along her skills and help show baby the ropes of what it takes to be a service dog!

so uh.... yeah... hi.... its me.... (': asking for some help to afford a puppy, or young dog! its totally fine if i can't drum up any help, i understand that times are tough right now for everyone

just know that i love you deeply from the bottom of my heart, whether you help or keep scrolling <3