There’s something very wrong with that study design. Look at the actual questions they asked: https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/2921c434-f7d7-43f4-ade6-3a5591444c85/downloads/83704423-9e76-43d7-a876-975f4a267df1/12-24 Interview Schedule.pdf?

Look on page 10.

36. Anti-Zionist movements are antisemitic by definition: 70% say that describes their beliefs well or very well
37. Anti-Zionist movements are not antisemitic by definition: 50% say that describes their beliefs well for very well.

Then items X3: 53% disagree with the statement that opposing Israeli government policy is antisemitic.

Or Item 42:

It is possible to be a strong supporter of Israel and also protest their attacks that lead to the harm or death of civilians in Lebanon or Gaza. 74% agree with this statement. In the next item 68% state that Israel will only be safe when a two-state solution has been established.

The sample that “The Jewish Majority” used was likely wildly unrepresentative of America’s overall Jewish population. This can be seen in their question on religious service attendance.

Only 20% of American Jews attend service monthly or more frequently. Meanwhile, the 37% of The Jewish Majority’s respondents attend service at least once a month. (Item 47.) This indicates that their sample severely over-represents highly religiously active members of the Jewish community. Their report doesn’t state how they recruited their sample, but it seems likely they did so through outreach at synagogues or other spaces that would select for the most religious and heavily practicing of American Jews.

God was such a dick about this. Punishing the innocent people of Egypt, when they lived under the thumb of an absolute monarch. God forbid God actually hold the powerful responsible for their own actions.

Want to know how I would handle it? Here’s my Moses speech:

"Let my people go. If you don’t, one week from today you’ll get a fever bad enough to lay you up in bed. One week after that, you’ll break your left leg, your right leg, your left arm, and your right arm like clockwork, two hours apart. One week after that, if you still haven’t let my people go, you’ll just have a heart attack and drop dead.

Your successors will have one week after assuming power to let my people go, or they will die of a heart attack. If they try to weasel their way out of this by putting a baby or other figurehead in charge, whoever is actually pulling the strings will have one week to let my people go before dying of a heart attack. God will just keep bursting pharaohs until he finds one that is willing to listen."

There. Direct and instant accountability. The only people who get hurt are those who actually have the power to do something. Was it really necessary to kill a bunch of innocent Egyptian children? No, it wasn’t! God should have just sat there and popped off pharaoh after pharaoh. How many pharaohs do you think it would take? Something tells me it’s not many. I think by the time you got to the third or forth, one would say, “fuck it. Fuck my pride. I’m only pharaoh because of this Yahweh fella. I should probably just let his people go. Yahweh does NOT fuck around.”

But nah, that would be too easy. Instead has God has to go and punish a bunch of completely innocent Egyptians who hold no political authority whatsoever.

God is dick.

Only the most vile of antisemites conflates Zionism with Judaism. Antisemites believe that Jews are fundamentally foreigners, regardless of where they are born or how they live. An antisemitic American believes that Jews have an intrinsic loyalty and connection to the state of Israel, and any criticism of that hard right government is an attack on Judaism itself. To antisemites, Jews cannot be true Americans. Their loyalty is always suspect. This is the logic of the Japanese internment camps in WW2.

This logic states that if relations between Israel and the US are good, that attacks on Zionism are to be fought as an attack on all Jewish Americans. But this logic also demands that if relations ever sour between Israel and the US, persecution of American Jews is fully justified, as Jews cannot be real Americans.

Hate to break this to you. But let me introduce you to the favorite saying of every Centrist Democrat that gets elected president:

“It is time to heal and move on.”

They care more about peace than justice.

Yeah, everything is a communist plot, eh Senator McCarthy?

Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds. Nobody cares about genocide? No, you simply don’t care about genocide. Enough people cared that it cost Kamala the election. And if Democrats don’t reform their ways, they will never win the White House again. Kamala went against the wishes of her own constituents and put loyalty to Israel over the needs of her own country.

For Sale. Babies shoes. Never worn.

Sometimes is just as long as it needs to be. That line above is a complete story. And if you actually take it seriously and reflect on it, it could bring you to tears. Let stories be the length they need to be. As the immortal bard said, brevity is the soul of wit.

Trust isn’t the issue. Probability is. Even without deception, there’s a chance someone can have an STD without knowing it. And there’s a chance that std won’t show up on testing due to incubation times, dormancy phases, and false negatives.

Imagine there is a 1% chance of your partner having an STD without knowing it. 1% doesn’t sound too bad an odds. But if you have 50 partners in an extended polycule, then the chance that at least one of them unknowingly has one is 1-(.99)^50, or 39%. Probabilities compound.

No that’s just wanting to look younger. Again, not every cosmetic treatment is gender-affirming care. Hell, it’s pretty ridiculously to even use the term outside the context of trans healthcare. Musk looked male before and he looked male after. He just thought he looked better and younger with more hair. It had nothing to do with gender.

Just listen to yourself. You appropriate the language of a minority group. Then when actual member of that group comes along and tells you you’re not using it correctly, you double down and try to tell them that you know their own language better than they do.

The reason I push back on this is because the distinction between gender affirming care and general cosmetic treatment really matters. This shit kills people. Men who want hair plugs don’t have a 40% suicide attempt rate.

This watering down of language for cheap political points has very real consequences for the trans community. Right now our rights and healthcare are under attack. Hard won victories decades in the making are being rolled back. Among the targets of these attacks are conservatives trying to bar health insurance companies from covering gender-affirming care. And that case becomes much easier if the distinction between trans healthcare and every cis person that wants a minor cosmetic treatment is watered down.

This isn’t gatekeeping. It’s fighting against the casual appropriation of our language that threatens our rights and lives.

I’m like, “fuck it. We’ll do it live. I’ll learn how to make my own damned wooden furniture!”

I get why people mention this, but as an actual trans person, when I hear someone, even an ally, say this kind of thing, it shows they really don’t get what gender-affirming care is. It’s really cringe. Gender-affirming care is just that - care that affirms your gender and allows you to take on primary or secondary sex characteristics different from that of your natal sex.

Male pattern baldness is a male secondary sex characteristic. It is simply a consequence of combining certain genetics with male hormone levels. You’re not affirming your gender by getting hair plugs. In fact, you’re actually dampening a male secondary sex characteristic. If a cis female had abnormally high T levels or some other condition to give her male-pattern baldness, then her getting hair plugs would be gender-affirming care. But for Elon, a cisgender man? That’s not gender-affirming care.

When I see someone call hair plugs gender-affirming care, it shows that they really don’t understand what gender-affirming care is. It’s not any cosmetic treatment you get just for fun. It’s more like reconstructive surgery you get to fix your face after a car crash. Elon got a cosmetic treatment, not gender-affirming care.

This is because Republicans are a truly Orwellian party - straight out of 1984. They have no real principles anymore. It’s just power for the sake of power. One day the official line is we’ve never been at war with East Asia, the next it’s we’ve always been at war. Trump can come up do a u-turn today, and the slime that is every Republican will instantly reorient themselves to follow dear leader’s new commands.

Unfortunately for them, LLMs just don’t have that much capability for doublethink and self-deception. Once you train a model, that model is fixed in time. So you could train a model to match the Republican fever dreams of today. But a month from now, there will be a whole new set of fever dreams that every good little fascist needs to follow. But the model will still be stuck repeating last month’s lies. As there are no consistent Republican beliefs, you can’t just train an LLM to tow the party line. There is no party line, just an endless series of lies and vomit, whatever is needed to advance their power today.

I propose that we amend the ISO to require the days of the week be named after their etymological roots in that language.

English Days of the Week:
Day of the Sun
Day of the Moon
Day of Týr
Day of Odin
Day of Thor
Day of Frēa
Day of Saturn

Imagine dating a meeting, “Day of Odin, May 7, 2025.” Imagine a store receipt that says, “Day of Thor, June 5, 2025.” Imagine telling a friend, “July 4th falls on a Day of Frēa this year!”

THIS IS WHAT WE COULD HAVE. THIS IS WHAT WE HAVE LOST. THIS IS WHAT WAS STOLEN FROM US.

We could bring it back. We could make this the norm. We could make this real. We could summon this bit of ancient magic back into our world. Let’s remember what we actually named these days for! BRING BACK THE DAY OF THOR!

Run a business? Infuriate and baffle your accountants by insisting to do all business and keep all records according to a lunar calendar.

Because if there’s one problem simple enough that I trust an LLM or translation app not to fuck up, it’s simple translation of month labels from on language to another. If you’re writing in English, it’s reasonable to have month abbreviations in English. If someone wants to read it in a different language, they’re going to have to use translation software or hire a human translator to do it. And regardless of translation method, simple date translation will be among the most reliable and faithfully translated parts.

Trump isn’t going to get to annex Canada, but he may still get his 51st state…

If this were a movie, it would end with the very soldiers he ordered for his giant vanity project deposing him in response to some crescendo of barbarity on his part. That’s a downright Aesop of an ending - the villain defeated by his own vanity and pride. You order thousands of soldiers to perform a parade to celebrate your birthday, and it’s the last straw that causes them to straight up depose you in a military coup.

The problem with this is that anywhere you can store a file or place a backup then becomes a legal target for an ICE raid. They get a warrant to steal all your stuff, regardless of where it may be. When they steal your computers, they’ll find records of your system sending files off to an offsite backup somewhere. They can then use that as legal justification to go raid your friend’s house, and they’ll steal not only your backup drive, but all your friend’s computers as well.

The only way this doesn’t work is if the files are stored on the servers of a giant multinational or an offshore cloud provider. ICE isn’t going to be breaking into data centers and physically carting off hard drives. They instead would simply request a copy of the data, and the cloud provider would share it with them.

If they can get a warrant to steal your shit, they can steal shit from your friends and family if they can show that you have files on their property as well. All this will result in is your family members having all their computers stolen as well.

People should claim to be ICE agents and go rob the homes of actual ICE agents. Accuse them of being illegal immigrants and disappear them off to fates unknown. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Give them a taste of their own medicine.