yunyun333
18d ago
a few hours ago: US approves Rafah op. in exchange for no Israeli counter-strikes on Iran
so maybe israel isn't going to go through with that. or they just really don't give a shit about what the US wants
yunyun333
1mo ago
caitlin clark is pretty fun to watch. the mens game this year doesn't have a similarly cool player, unless you like watching a 7'4 behemoth shoot free throws. 2024 is projected to be one of the weakest nba drafts in a long time.
It seems weirdly specific that people would be so into women's college basketball but not the WNBA.
college basketball at least can get alumni interested. the wnba has nothing of the sort
yunyun333
1mo ago
international happenings:
-princess Kate announced that she has cancer. for some reason it was such an important secret that she first released a doctored photo of her with her kids which only fed the rumor mill. kind of a letdown from the batshit crazy conspiracies the internet was cooking up
-after vetoing a bunch of gaza ceasefire proposals at the UN, the US finally put forward one of its own, and China and Russia promptly vetoed it back.
-mass shooting in a Russian concert hall. the US embassy was warning about an attack a couple of weeks ago. ukrainians, islamists, false flag, some other mystery group?
yunyun333
1mo ago
no one's mentioned kobe bryant, so i'll throw his name in here. cultural icon who also totally got away with raping a hotel clerk. no one really wanted to bring it up when he died because of how tragic it was.
yunyun333
7mo ago
The grace hopper conference is supposed to be for women and gender minorities. Since they have recruiters there, the job market is tight, and there's no explicit policy against men showing up, men have been showing up. It looks like a lot of people are unhappy about this. The csmajors sub banned discussion of it, but there are still plenty of juicy threads up; in addition to the gender wars, a lot of the guys being international students adds a 'they're taking our jobs' flair to the fire. Since it's basically impossible to gatekeep nonbinary-ness, the challenge for the organizers, if they choose to accept it, is to weed out the men without being accused of being TERFs.
yunyun333
6mo ago
younger generations are more pro palestine, but that's mostly because they see jews as white people.
But in the Hamas attacks, many saw an existential threat, evoking memories of the Holocaust and generations of antisemitism, and provoking anxiety about whether they could face attacks in the United States. And they were taken aback to discover that many of their ideological allies not only failed to perceive the same threats but also saw them as oppressors deserving of blame.
“I am in such a state of despair — in my generation, we have been warned how quickly people would turn on us and we just thought no way,” said Nick Melvoin, 38, a member of the Los Angeles Unified School Board who is now running for Congress and keeps a framed picture of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his office. “Now we see, this is how that happens: When you dehumanize the group. This indoctrination that many of us have been warned about hit us like a ton of bricks.”
Attitudes toward Jews’ place in the progressive firmament are intertwined with their understanding of race and power in America. More than 90 percent of American Jews are white, and the country remains among the safest places in the world for Jews, despite a well-documented rise in antisemitic incidents in recent years. Some Jews see their safety as precarious, but some of their allies focus on their privilege.
“The left doesn’t have a level of sophisticated understanding of antisemitism that we need if we are going to defeat white nationalism and fascism in this country,” said Joanna Ware, the executive director of the Jewish Liberation Fund, a philanthropic group created in 2020. “It has been painful to see some people I consider friends or comrades seeming to have a hard time empathizing with Israelis and, by extension, Jews in the United States.”
leopards, meet face
yunyun333
7mo ago
Following layoffs, Boston University announces ‘inquiry’ into Ibram Kendi’s Antiracist Center
During the heights of antiracism mania back in June of 2020, Boston University decided to show off their commitment by hiring noted antiracist Ibram Kendi to head their new "Antiracist Center", which raised tens of millions of dollars and included dozens of faculty members. Three years later, after failing to achieve such important objectives as a "Racial Data Tracker", complaints emerged about the center's management of funds and culture. For example, the former "assistant director of narrative" (incredible job title, btw) complained that Kendi was never available and shit didn't get done; he was busy producing important academic work such as a graphic novel, a podcast, and a TV show, and recently returned from several months of leave to tell half of the staff they were being laid off so they could switch to a "fellowship based model". Another professor wondered where grant money, that never seemed to be tied to any expectation of performing research, had gone. This article from the student paper goes into more detail on the allegations.
You have to feel for BU here - after all, the guy won a MacArthur genius grant and wrote a NYT bestseller. There was no way to predict he had no idea how to run an academically rigorous enterprise.
yunyun333
10mo ago
affirmative action is officially unconstitutional.
The majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, which all five of his fellow conservative justices joined in, said that both Harvard’s and UNC’s affirmative action programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”
“We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today,” Roberts wrote.
The majority said that the universities’ policies violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
the decision leaves open the ability for universities to consider how an applicant's race affected their life "concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university".
yunyun333
4mo ago
impose their will in what way? they can't just kill or expel millions of people. even the hardcore zionist bloc would be hard pressed to justify such a thing, it would instantly destroy their relationship with america.
the reason hamas launched this attack is because they were losing - israel was able to 'mow the grass' in gaza every few years, entrench its settlements in the west bank, and normalize relations with their arab neighbors. the status quo pre october 7 was totally fine for the israelis.
An interview with historian david garrow, who wrote a pulitzer prize winning biography of MLK and a biography of Obama several years ago. The central theme is how Obama created a fictional history and archetype for himself, exemplified in his own autobiography dreams from my father, which "is as much a work of dreamy literary fiction as it is an attempt to document Obama’s early life... Garrow’s biography of Obama’s early years is filled with such corrections of a historical record that Obama more or less invented himself".
Garrow draws several comparisons between MLK and Obama as two of the most publicized black leaders of the last half century. MLK lived "two separate lives" in public and private - he had problems with alcohol and womanizing, and Garrow recently came under fire for publicizing fbi transcripts that claimed that MLK had stood by while one of his friends committed rape - and he "always believed that he was not essential, that he was accidental" in history, and understood that the media's image of him was a projection outside of himself. With Obama, "There’s an extent of intertwining, there’s an absence of keeping the two selves separate".
Garrow also talked to three of Obama's exes, which of course leads to some hilarious stories:
So I emailed Harvey, said, “Go to the Emory archives.” He’s spent his whole life at Emory, but they won’t let him take pictures. So Harvey has to sit there with a pencil and copy out the graph where Barack writes to Alex about how he repeatedly fantasizes about making love to men.
It's emphasized repeatedly how performatively Obama behaved, with impersonal love letters and a giant pile of journals which Obama showed to Garrow to tell him that he couldn't look at them: "He wants people to believe his story. For me to conclude that dreams from my father was historical fiction—oh god, did that infuriate him... The pose of being a writer is actually one that he prefers in many ways to being a politician". While rereading Obama's memoir, the author realizes that "This is clearly a highly wrought literary work of self-fashioning by a person who is in dialogue with literary sources. Or, to put it another way: I’m watching this guy make himself up."And from when he interviewed Ben Rhodes, one of Obama's top staffers, in 2016, "One of the things that Rhodes was at pains to get across to me was that Obama wrote all of his speeches himself. There was obviously a need or an instruction that had been given that Barack Obama was always to be presented as the author of Barack Obama. And by his instruction, the only book that the speechwriters were to consult was the collected speeches of Abraham Lincoln, because he was the only other president who deserved to be on the same shelf as Obama."
The author's conclusion is that "The best way to understand Barack Obama is that he is a literary creation of Barack Obama, the writer, who authored the novel of his own life and then proceeded to live out this fictional character that he created for himself on the page." they trace this back to Obama's upbringing as someone who was separated from his parents and was shuttled between indonesia and hawaii, contrasting it with MLK who "had the most privileged life a black person could have in america in those years" and a solid understanding of his own identity: "Doc [MLK] has no choice to be black. Barack chooses to be black."
I haven't read either Garrow's book or Obama's autobiography, but these guys make out Obama to be such a fascinating personality that I'll have to give them a read.
yunyun333
5mo ago
re the hockey incident that was discussed here a few weeks ago, the player involved has been arrested for manslaughter. they haven't released his name yet, but there's no one else it could realistically be. just yesterday he was getting a standing ovation; life comes at you fast sometimes.
from a legal perspective, it looks like they'll argue for gross negligence, since your skates should never be that high intentionally, and he wasn't violently blind-side hip checked. it's unfortunate that the races of the players involved is turning online discussion about it into a shitshow.
yunyun333
8mo ago
tl;dr After initially donating Starlink terminals and providing free internet at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Musk realized that it's actually pretty expensive to keep it on in a warzone, and asked the Pentagon to help pay for it, or he would turn it off. Eventually they hammered out a contract. Also, he proposed a peace plan involving Russia keeping some territory, which was roundly booed.
By all accounts Starlink has been a massive boon to the Ukrainians, since their ability to communicate basically hinges on starlink. But because he wasn't willing to keep providing it for free, he's a pro putin shill and a traitor to the US, and the service should be nationalized. It's not like the US and other governments haven't dragged their feet on providing the best firepower (ATACMS, for example).
Perhaps the counteroffensive grinding to a halt means a new scapegoat is needed.
yunyun333
9mo ago
Mandela Goes From Hero to Scapegoat as South Africa Struggles
10 years after his death, attitudes have changed. The party Mr. Mandela led after his release from prison, the African National Congress, is in serious danger of losing its outright majority for the first time since he became president in 1994 in the first free election after the fall of apartheid. Corruption, ineptitude and elitism have tarnished the A.N.C... Faith in the future is collapsing. Seventy percent of South Africans said in 2021 that the country is going in the wrong direction, up from 49 percent in 2010, according to the latest survey published by the country’s Human Sciences Research Council. Only 26 percent said they trusted the government, a huge decline from 2005, when it was 64 percent... The unemployment rate is 46 percent among South Africans aged 15 to 34. Millions more are underemployed, like Mr. Thebe. He studied computer science at the university level, never receiving a degree. The best job he said he could find was selling funeral policies to the staff of the court.
While Mr. Mandela is still lionized around the world, many South Africans, especially young people, believe that he did not do enough to create structural changes that would lift the fortunes of the country’s Black majority. White South Africans still hold a disproportionate share of the nation’s land, and earn three and a half times more than Black people. Mr. Vawda, 17, belongs to a generation that knows Mr. Mandela only as a historical figure in textbooks and films. To him, Mr. Mandela’s fight to end apartheid was admirable. But the huge economic gap between Black and white South Africans will be on his mind when he votes for the first time next year, he said. "He didn’t revolt against white people,” Mr. Vawda said. “I would have taken revenge.”
the truth and reconciliation commission led by mandela chose to pardon many perpetrators of crimes related to apartheid, such as the murderers of amy biehl, an anti-apartheid activist, in order to encourage, well, truth and reconciliation. young south africaners have identified that mandela and his friends didn't go far enough with their silly restorative justice ways - perhaps a nuremberg would have been more appropriate. if you were willing to necklace traitors of your own race, why not the enemy?
news from ukraine: the leader of wagner group has accused the russian military of bombing his forces. seems to be preparing some kind of coup special military operation. russian generals are asking mercenaries not to join in. prigozhin has vocally criticized russian military leaders recently, but this is a massive escalation. could we see a civil war break out in the middle of this war?
update: prigozhin claims that he has entered rostov without resistance. lots of unverified videos on twitter of wagner/russian convoy movements, and some combat footage; wagner claims to have shot down a russian helicopter.
video of supposedly wagner soldiers and tanks surrounding the MoD building in rostov.
yunyun333
6mo ago
random bullshit: activist greta thunberg posted a picture of herself supporting gaza. sharp eyed observers noticed the subtle dogwhistle in the background of a blue octopus plushie, and she's been forced to delete it and apologize for this dangerous display of antisemitism.
yunyun333
6mo ago
ongoing shooting in lewiston, maine
reportedly 22+ dead, 60+ shot. shooter is rumored to be an ex army guy. perhaps shaping up to be the next las vegas massacre. stay safe and prepare for the gun control debate to be revved up full force tomorrow
yunyun333
9mo ago
How corporate America is slashing DEI workers amid backlash to diversity programs
Years after the death of George Floyd shined a spotlight on societal inequities, diversity professionals say some companies are turning their backs on the progress that's been made to address them. DEI positions have been disproportionately hit by layoffs across industries, but particularly at tech companies, which have faced financial challenges as sales slowed from the blistering pace attained during the pandemic.
A LinkedIn study found that chief diversity and inclusion officer positions grew by 168.9% from 2019 to 2022.... Starting in late 2020 -- months after the killing of Floyd set off a racial reckoning -- a host of companies escalated cuts of DEI professionals, a survey of more than 600 companies from data firm Revelio Labs found. Last year, the layoffs accelerated significantly, the study found. One in three DEI professionals lost their roles over a one-year period ending in December, the survey said. Over that period, the study added, non-DEI workers experienced a relatively lower attrition rate of 21%.
At the same time, conservative elected officials such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began to target DEI initiatives. DeSantis last month signed into law a bill that prohibits state or federal spending on DEI programs at public universities in Florida. In February, Abbott's office ordered state agencies to stop using diversity, equity and inclusion programs in hiring, calling them "illegal." And in June, Abbott signed a ban on diversity offices in state-funded higher education institutions.
In addition, several DEI executives at major Hollywood corporations have left in recent weeks. A common theory is that DEI programs are a luxury program, the first to go when businesses look to trim fat. It looks like the diversity industry may simply be seeing its bubble pop, or the court's ruling on affirmative action may encourage further lawsuits focused on the workplace.
yunyun333
6mo ago
considering that egypt has had to ask israel to stop airstriking the crossing, it sounds like israel does have some part to play.
yunyun333
1yr ago
A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell
Very interesting longform article about how a professor had a summer seminar for high school students taken over by his radical TA, in a course focusing primarily on anti-blackness - this despite Dr. Vincent Lloyd's confused self description:
I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization.
What's striking about this is how miserable it seems to have made everyone involved:
Furthermore, in the 2022 community, afternoons and evenings would no longer be spent having fun and doing homework. Two college-age students called “factotums” (led by one I will call “Keisha”) were assigned to create anti-racism workshops to fill the afternoons. There were workshops on white supremacy, on privilege, on African independence movements, on the thought and activism of Angela Davis, and more, all of which followed an initial, day-long workshop on “transformative justice.” Students described the workshops as emotionally draining, forcing the high schoolers to confront tough issues and to be challenged in ways they had never been challenged before.
From the initial “transformative-justice” workshop, students learned to snap their fingers when they agreed with what a classmate was saying. This practice immediately entered the seminar and was weaponized. One student would try out a controversial (or just unusual) view. Silence. Then another student would repeat a piece of anti-racist dogma, and the room would be filled with the click-clack of snapping fingers.
hilariously, two of the asian students ended up being 'expelled' from the program, for reasons that were not shared with the professor.
During our discussion of incarceration, an Asian-American student cited federal inmate demographics: About 60 percent of those incarcerated are white. The black students said they were harmed. They had learned, in one of their workshops, that objective facts are a tool of white supremacy. Outside of the seminar, I was told, the black students had to devote a great deal of time to making right the harm that was inflicted on them by hearing prison statistics that were not about blacks. A few days later, the Asian-American student was expelled from the program.
Finally, about halfway through the seminar, the TA led a struggle session where all the students accused the professor of doing a lot of anti black harm to them, and then they all did their own thing without his involvement.
I emailed the students and Keisha with this decision, and with an offer to read and respond to any written work the students produced—and I never heard back. No one sent written work. None indicated a desire to attend a meeting where I would be a “guest speaker.” The students had almost two weeks left. With the seminar canceled, did they go home? Did they tell their parents? Did Keisha lecture to them all day? I don’t know. I had extricated myself from the abusive relationship, but nine students remained captive.
yunyun333
11mo ago
the endless shoving of emmett till in our faces means that a white woman crying or attempting to get help when being accosted by black men is equivalent to attempted murder.
yunyun333
6mo ago
Long article, but the meat of it is that Israel allowed Islamist groups in Gaza, which had been repressed under the Egyptian government, to grow in influence after the six-day war, opting to focus on secular groups like the PLO. The precursor to Hamas, Mujama al-Islamiya, was officially recognized by Israel. The Israelis stood by and watched while the Islamists fought the secularists for power in the early 80s, but they didn't actively support them. HAMAS officially formed in 1987 during the first intifada, started carrying out attacks, and the Israelis finally realized that they were dealing with a serious threat, while the PLO moved towards diplomacy.
In Gaza, Israel hunted down members of Fatah and other secular PLO factions, but it dropped harsh restrictions imposed on Islamic activists by the territory's previous Egyptian rulers. Fatah, set up in 1964, was the backbone of the PLO, which was responsible for hijackings, bombings and other violence against Israel. Arab states in 1974 declared the PLO the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people world-wide.
Brig. General Yosef Kastel, Gaza's Israeli governor at the time, is too ill to comment, says his wife. But Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who took over as governor in Gaza in late 1979, says he had no illusions about Sheikh Yassin's long-term intentions or the perils of political Islam. As Israel's former military attache in Iran, he'd watched Islamic fervor topple the Shah. However, in Gaza, says Mr. Segev, "our main enemy was Fatah," and the cleric "was still 100% peaceful" towards Israel. Former officials say Israel was also at the time wary of being viewed as an enemy of Islam.
As the fighting between rival student factions at Birzeit grew more violent, Brig. Gen. Shalom Harari, then a military intelligence officer in Gaza, says he received a call from Israeli soldiers manning a checkpoint on the road out of Gaza. They had stopped a bus carrying Islamic activists who wanted to join the battle against Fatah at Birzeit. "I said: 'If they want to burn each other let them go,'" recalls Mr. Harari.
A leader of Birzeit's Islamist faction at the time was Mahmoud Musleh, now a pro-Hamas member of a Palestinian legislature elected in 2006. He recalls how usually aggressive Israeli security forces stood back and let conflagration develop. He denies any collusion between his own camp and the Israelis, but says "they hoped we would become an alternative to the PLO."
"I believe that by continuing to turn away our eyes, our lenient approach to Mujama will in the future harm us. I therefore suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face," Mr. Cohen wrote.
Mr. Harari, the military intelligence officer, says this and other warnings were ignored. But, he says, the reason for this was neglect, not a desire to fortify the Islamists: "Israel never financed Hamas. Israel never armed Hamas."
yunyun333
6mo ago
White House scrambles to repair relations with Arab, Muslim Americans
One ripple effect of the Israel-Gaza war is the warp-speed unraveling of relations between President Biden and some of his most loyal voters: Muslims and Arab Americans. The open disdain toward Biden from many in a reliably Democratic bloc is among the many signs the conflict is quickly remaking U.S. domestic politics, with public fury over a Hamas attack that killed 1,400 Israelis colliding with the horror of entire families in the Gaza Strip being wiped out in Israel’s retaliatory strikes.
“It’s really crazy to me that the Democratic party destroyed 20-years … worth of good will with Muslims and Arabs in just 2 weeks, losing an entire generation that was raised in the progressive coalition, possibly forever,” Eman Abdelhadi, a University of Chicago professor of comparative human development who studies Palestinian Americans, wrote Thursday on X, formerly Twitter.
In an interview, Abdelhadi said community members weren’t surprised Biden was supportive of Israel. But “the degree, the blank check,” is scary, she said, especially given the mounting civilian casualty toll. Young people already are talking about sitting out the election in protest, she said. At a recent campus event that drew hundreds of students, Abdelhadi said, she told the audience, “I think Biden has lost the Muslim vote.”
“The entire room erupted into clapping,” she recalled. “This generation was raised in a time when Muslims and Arabs were constantly in contact with Democrats, felt and were part of the progressive coalition. Now that is completely disillusioned.”
Gallup polling showed that in early 2022, for the first time in more than 20 years, more Democrats said that “their sympathies” lie with the Palestinians than with the Israelis, 49 percent to 38 percent.
Publicly the administration has been fully supportive of Israel, while behind the scenes they're attempting to restrain them; the blackout in Gaza ended after barely over a day because US officials pressured the Israelis. Biden's response has been pretty reasonable, but this may turn into a bigger domestic issue if the invasion drags on.
yunyun333
7mo ago
the yom kippur war was 50 years ago to the day, and the IDF gets caught with its pants down again like this? netanyahu and his entire government's days are numbered.
yunyun333
1yr ago
another article about this from oakland schools
As a teacher in Oakland, Calif., Kareem Weaver helped struggling fourth- and fifth-grade kids learn to read by using a very structured, phonics-based reading curriculum called Open Court. It worked for the students, but not so much for the teachers. “For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,” recalls Weaver. And we hated it.
The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says.
Now Weaver is heading up a campaign to get his old school district to reinstate many of the methods that teachers resisted so strongly: specifically, systematic and consistent instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics. “In Oakland, when you have 19% of Black kids reading—that can’t be maintained in the society,” says Weaver
on the bright side, this guy belatedly realized that he was destroying kids' futures for the sake of sticking it to the man
divestment is a pretty clear goal. it's worked before
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