domain:mattlakeman.org
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
3hr ago
Jewish billionaires conspire to change the narrative on the protests. From WaPo. (Archive link)
A group of billionaires and business titans working to shape U.S. public opinion of the war in Gaza privately pressed New York City’s mayor last month to send police to disperse pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, according to communications obtained by The Washington Post.
Business executives including Kind snack company founder Daniel Lubetzky, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, billionaire Len Blavatnik and real estate investor Joseph Sitt held a Zoom video call on April 26 with Mayor Eric Adams (D), about a week after the mayor first sent New York police to Columbia’s campus, a log of chat messages shows. During the call, some attendees discussed making political donations to Adams, as well as how the chat group’s members could pressure Columbia’s president and trustees to permit the mayor to send police to the campus to handle protesters, according to chat messages summarizing the conversation.
Some members also offered to pay for private investigators to assist New York police in handling the protests, the chat log shows — an offer a member of the group reported in the chat that Adams accepted
The messages describing the call with Adams were among thousands logged in a WhatsApp chat among some of the nation’s most prominent business leaders and financiers, including former CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital [..] The chat was initiated by a staffer for billionaire and real estate magnate Barry Sternlicht[…] In an Oct. 12 message, one of the first sent in the group, the staffer posting on behalf of Sternlicht told the others the goal of the group was to “change the narrative”
The chat group formed shortly after the Oct. 7 attack, and its activism has stretched beyond New York, touching the highest levels of the Israeli government, the U.S. business world and elite universities. Titled “Israel Current Events,” the chat eventually expanded to about 100 members, the chat log shows. More than a dozen members of the group appear on Forbes’s annual list of billionaires; others work in real estate, finance and communications
“He’s open to any ideas we have,” chat member Sitt, founder of retail chain Ashley Stewart and the global real estate company Thor Equities, wrote April 27, the day after the group’s Zoom call with Adams. “As you saw he’s ok if we hire private investigators to then have his police force intel team work with them.”
The mayor’s office did not address it directly, instead sharing a statement from deputy mayor Fabien Levy noting that […] “The insinuation that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations is an all too familiar antisemitic trope that the Washington Post should be ashamed to ask about, let alone normalize in print.”
One member asked if the group could do anything to pressure Columbia trustees to cooperate with the mayor. In reply, former congressman Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), CEO of the American Jewish Committee, shared a PDF of a letter his organization had sent that day to Columbia President Minouche Shafik calling on her to “shut these protests down.”
Usually I wouldn’t post so much from the body of an article, but there’s a lot of information to unpack here. It appears that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations, as well as the highest levels of media and academia. This comes after Mitt Romney admitted the tik tok ban was influenced by the extent of pro-Palestine content. IMO this is going to be used in American discourse about Jewish power for many years to come. You have Jewish billionaires across industries banding together to manipulate the narrative, influence politicians, and “shut it down” — literally a trope of Jewish power. The influence here is, frankly, incredible: a dozen billionaires alone, conspiring with journalists and academics and advocacy group leaders, talking about using black celebrities to push their narrative and applying “leverage” to university presidents. As Cenk Uygur tweeted (no friend of the alt right), “You can't complain about the trope, if you do the trope”.
I kind of wonder if some of this is even illegal. Not that I am naive enough to believe a charge would occur if it were. They are sitting down in briefings with the Israeli government and discussing how to best push their influence machine. Isn’t this lobbying on behalf of a foreign power?
jkf
5m ago
Work gave me one, and I'm kind of cavalier with it -- you have the 'bending over and spilling your shirt pocket' move down pat. Kind of a nice Mike Patton look going on in that segment!
No_one
32m ago
Africa is the exception, really. Sub-Saharan Africa has several attested cultures where being fat was seen as attractive, such also existed in Arab countries at times.
Even today, bigger body size is seen as desirable in US black culture, at least if we go by this NYT opinion piece where a woman is complaining how black men don't want them to lose weight..
Skulldrinker
33m ago
At this point, I don't think Wokeism is a revolution against the established order, certainly not to young people and definitely not college students. Wokeism IS the established Order. They're conforming to the social context around them.
(Yes I'm trotting out this meme again, I don't care: I was effectively shunned from an entire community and industry for the crime of politely asking a girl if she wanted to get coffee sometime and I'm still mad about it - anyone saying "just ask her bro, the worst she can say is no" is full of shit.)
Everyone knows women don’t care about looks, but it sounds like her feminine intuition and personality-detector correctly clocked you as the type of bigot who posts in a lair of racists, misogynists, and transphobes. So she bravely and rightfully got you excommunicated from a community and an industry to keep everyone safe *crosses arms and turns away indignantly*.
Yeah, women take it as an insult when a man she views as beneath her shoots his shot at her, as it offends their princess complex. “Ugh, you thought you had a chance with me? Gross.”
Usually (I hope) getting rejected by a girl doesn’t lead to immediate exile from community and industry, but realistically it at least means no other girl in her social circle will want you. And even the guys in your/her social circle will have their priors updated in the direction of you potentially being a social liability. A girl will eagerly spread the word and poison the well after rejecting you.
On the bright side, though, banging a chick greatly increases the chances you’ll bang other chicks in her social circle. Praise be the double-edged sword of female mate-choice copying.
I mentioned to several of the people I interviewed for this piece that I’d met my husband in an elevator, in 2001. (We worked on different floors of the same institution, and over the months that followed struck up many more conversations—in the elevator, in the break room, on the walk to the subway.) I was fascinated by the extent to which this prompted other women to sigh and say that they’d just love to meet someone that way. And yet quite a few of them suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. “Creeper! Get away from me,” one woman imagined thinking. “Anytime we’re in silence, we look at our phones,” explained her friend, nodding. Another woman fantasized to me about what it would be like to have a man hit on her in a bookstore. (She’d be holding a copy of her favorite book. “What’s that book?” he’d say.) But then she seemed to snap out of her reverie, and changed the subject to Sex and the City reruns and how hopelessly dated they seem. “Miranda meets Steve at a bar,” she said, in a tone suggesting that the scenario might as well be out of a Jane Austen novel, for all the relevance it had to her life.
It amuses me that, even in the showerthoughts, daydreams, and fantasies of presumed PMC(-aspirant) #GirlBosses, such women are comically hypoagentic and can’t muster up a fraction of the courage and initiative that men regularly exhibit. The thought of themselves making The First Move is outside of their personal Overton Window. If a given man doesn’t read her mind and approach her after she performs the physical and emotional labor of sitting, standing, or existing near him…. okay fine whatevas, it’s his loss.
If a man does successfully pick her up in a bar, elevator, bookstore, breakroom, subway, or wherever and a long-term relationship ensues, it’s retrospectively revised on her part to be “omg it just so happened that we met” rather than “he assessed the costs/benefits, initiated the conversation, led the conversation, drove the interaction forward, and I just followed along” such that she can claim that she Did Her Part as an equal partner rather than being a bystander in her own narrative.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
US leadership has been behaving somewhat hysterically with this latest war, they've been going around threatening the ICC with the gravest consequences if they dare charge Netanyahu:
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000018f-4e0e-d759-a9ff-ff4ee9420000
Issuing arrest warrants for the leaders of Israel would not only be unjustified, it would expose your organization’s hypocrisy and double standards. Your office has not issued arrest warrants for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or any other Iranian official, Syrian President Bashar al Assad or any other Syrian official, or Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh or any other Hamas official. Nor have you issued an arrest warrant for the genocidal General Secretary of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, or any other Chinese official.
Finally, neither Israel nor the United States are members of the ICC and are therefore outside of your organization’s supposed jurisdiction. If you issue a warrant for the arrest of the Israeli leadership, we will interpret this not only as a threat to Israel’s sovereignty but to the sovereignty of the United States. Our country demonstrated in the American Service-Members' Protection Act [also known as the Hague Invasion Act] the lengths to which we will go to protect that sovereignty.
The United States will not tolerate politicized attacks by the ICC on our allies. Target Israel and we will target you. If you move forward with the measures indicated in the report, we will move to end all American support for the ICC, sanction your employees and associates, and bar you and your families from the United States. You have been warned.
How exactly a threat to Israel could be a threat to the sovereignty of the USA is hard to comprehend, though it does explain the stance of the Republican Party.
Again speculative:
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I can't seem to remember the source, but very recently I saw a journal article speculating that our desire for spices had to do with anti-microbial properties? For example, I know historically salt and pepper were used as preservatives in addition to their flavor profile. Another possible explanation for seeking variety is that before food safety standards, every specific food item had some level of particular toxins. By varying diet, our ancestors could avoid building up too much of any one toxin. The fact that we can now make a variety of flavors and textures with the same ingredients using modern culinary knowledge could just be a workaround for what was a crude byproduct of certain organisms never eating enough of the same thing to hit LD50's in the past.
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My guess here would be that our ancestors were selected for finding the set [not emaciated] attractive. Since there was no one obese in the past, preferences gradient descended into the only body type that fell into that set, which would be what we might today call a "healthy weight". The reason for finding obesity less attractive would just be its distance from that body type towards which preferences optimized back then (albeit, in the opposite direction).
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
31m ago
I was up late watching the unbelievable live footage of the UCLA encampment being violently attacked by a pro-Israel mob. At the time I was 100% certain that this was organized as some sort of op. The counter-protestors were clearly attacking the UCLA students in a coordinated manner, in a way that was so violent it must have been preplanned- for several hours while police did nothing. It was really shocking to watch, I was expecting it to be big news but apparently it didn't become a huge story.
There were several major injuries, the worst was a head injury that, according to CNN, (NSFW) required 14 staples and three stiches. It was actually an antifa account who identified the attacker caught on video here, who is an Israeli apparently associated with the IDF.
Another Israeli who was caught on video pepper spraying and attacking UCLA students was identified by an antifa account. The man is listed as CEO/CFO of five different nonprofit organizations which are all staffed by family, including "Black and Jewish Unity".
After an antifa account identified the second Israeli in a different violence incident, he received phone calls reading out his own address and SSN and threatening his credit score (?) as well as physical violence.
CNN also reported on some of the violent attackers, including an attacker who was revealed by his mother posting on Facebook:
The young man sporting the white mask and a white hoodie in widely shared video clips is Edan On, a local 18-year-old high school senior, his mother confirmed to CNN, though she later said he denies being at UCLA. Video shows On joining the counterprotesters while waving a long white pole. At one point, he strikes a pro-Palestinian protester with the pole, and appears to continue to strike him even when he was down, as fellow counterprotesters piled on.
“Edan went to bully the Palestinian students in the tents at UCLA and played the song that they played to the Nukhba terrorists in prison!” his mother boasted in Hebrew on Facebook, referencing Hamas. She circled an image of him that had been broadcast on the local news.
“He is all over the news channels,” his mother wrote in a now-deleted post.
No_one
37m ago
but when we look at potential mates we want the thin one
Not the thin one. The curvy one..
Link goes to one of the most stunning examples of 'autism' out there, and it's making everyone from arch-hater 0hp Lovecraft to bog standard SJWs and boomers mad.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
Back in my Peace Corps days, I was in Southern Africa. One curious compliment to a woman there (crude, to my way of thinking)° was O morago o motona which means "You have a big ass." Generally I believe the anthropological thinking is when a culture is in lean times, the big folks are attractive because that signals access to the eats. In the bountiful era, a slender frame rather suggests you have the resources to push away from the plate of Twinkies because you know there will be more if you want them, whenever.
°I also once heard a man say to a colleague of mine, a young woman new to the school: O mabele o montle, tla ke anye which means "You have nice tits, let me suck them." Of course this was a big dude and he could and did say whatever the hell he wanted most of the time in that world where brute strength ruled pretty much everything.
I don't know how accurate any of this is in terms of human psychology but it makes a certain amount of sense.
jeroboam
5hr ago
Having a Bell Hook$ book on your shelf might help you get laid. Actually reading it will not. Reading it and then trying to discuss it with your date is a major libido killer.
Because nobody actually reads that stuff. Shattering the polite fiction that she reads and cares about literature is an autist move.
You: "What's your favorite part of the book?"
Her: "Um... I guess I just like um.. um... "
You: "Oh, I thought you said you liked this author".
System: Emily has unmatched you.
There is every reason to believe that our collective ideas about these things is not particularly coherent either.
But the beauty of machine learning in general and LLMs specifically is that our ideas don’t have to be logically coherent. Which is just as well, because they never are.
You don’t have to spend ten years automatically coming up with a perfect definition of murder, you just collate a synopsis of all the people we charged for murder in the last 50 years and say, “These guys are murderers. Being like them is bad.”
100ProofTollBooth
2hr ago
Imagine how insufferable it would be for a normal gay man to date a gay Aziz Ansari.
Skulldrinker
9hr ago
Because every time I tried meeting anyone, I ran into the full Covid gauntlet of Bubbles and Taking It Seriously, stuff that women mysteriously stopped caring about once it stood in the way of fucking him.
And because he had become a hollow skinsuit of upward-mobility who spoke entirely in progressive talking points, to the point where it reminded me of the guy from Nightcrawler. And had a pathetic fucking meltdown where he tried to hold his girlfriend hostage by locking his door with her keys in his room, plus all the emotional abuse before. And he tried to steal the lease out from under his roommates. And he'd poison people against his roomates by calling us racist. And he collaborated with the landlords (to steal the lease), and simped for them massively despite them calling him racial slurs behind his back, which we informed him about in our bid to convince him that they were bad people whom he should not make deals with, especially with him valuing his Blackness so much. So he was a Queer (straight but wants to fuck leftist chicks who hate straight men) Black (ish,) Feminist (who abused women) Communist (who sold out his prole roommates). Eventually he had some sort of psychotic break and attacked me with a fire axe, I maced him and got a restraining order to get him removed from the place. And to this day I have former mutual friends who won't talk to me, because he's Black and Leftist and I'm a straight white male who called the cops on a Person of Color. And wherever he is now, he's undoubtedly balls-deep in some chick he met at a pro-palestine protest, while I still can't get anyone to fucking turn up for fucking coffee after getting my heart mutilated in 2019. Because people are so fucking retarded that they misinterpret me as some kind of monster, while he's the Jesus of their new religion.
That is why I hate the world.
2D3D
1hr ago
You are 100% right that black men and women are in tension with each other, which is an interesting topic onto itself, but your point about requiring a black woman to start that conversation first is the key factor to note. White progressives do not care or consider that blacks are not a unified voice, and suborn black male interests to black female ones. The only vector I have seen progs be critical of black men is in the context of Trump, where increasing black male support for trump is viewed as black support of white supremacy.
2D3D
1hr ago
True, men are largely more aware of what a real threat Russia poses. Women really seem to not give a shit about icky white people dying, and I maintain that progressives broadly hate Ukraine because it focuses support onto white people instead of blacks or gays: Jayapal pushing for Biden to force Ukraine to the negotiating table in Oct 2022 strikes me as what the social justice wing thinks of white people (even slavs): a distraction from the true cause. The only thing making progressives give a slight shit in favor of Ukraine is the fact that trump hates Ukraine, but the progressives hold their nose when decrying Russia because the beneficiary is white.
2rafa
14hr ago
Men and women are both interested in politics if you ask about the actual issues in my opinion. But I’d concede that women are much more susceptible to “it’s called being a GOOD PERSON, GET IT?” reasoning. Women don’t want to be left out of the tribe, women are more willing to show fealty to high status ideas (a man will become a sycophant, will bow to his betters, but internally he is more likely to chafe at this; he won’t do it unless he is certain it’s absolutely necessary).
That’s not surprising since it tracks with extensive research about men much more frequently engaging in almost all riskier behavior. Heterodox politics are part of that.
popocatepetl
12hr ago
There's a silly trend on X/Twitter of asking LLMs simple questions, while framing the question as a riddle. The AI then twists itself into knots seeking a 4d chess answer. These are cracking me up.
- 'A woman, who had a son with a male doctor, rushes her son to the hospital. The doctor says "I can't operate on this young man; he's my son!" How can this be?'
- 'A man and a goat are on one side of a river. They have a boat. How can they get across?'
- 'Two daughters and two moms went to a restaurant and ordered four drinks. They each got exactly one. How is this possible?'
100ProofTollBooth
2hr ago
non nobis domine, sed nomini tuo da gloriam
Supah_Schmendrick
8hr ago
Thinking about the past, it makes me smile how much it was common to hear, until twenty years ago, that women are very uninterested in politics, unlike men. For my generation, this idea looks absurd. Men do not care about politics at all.
I'm not sure what culture you're from/what tropes you're dealing with, but the idea that "women don't care about politics" hasn't been a significant part of anglosphere culture for at least the last 200 years, as far as I can tell. Instead, women have been at the forefront of just about every moralistic movement that I can think of in the anglosphere, from religious awakenings, the abolition of slavery, progressive uplift of the lower-classes, anti-alcoholism, anti-drugs, etc. A certain species of feminine moral busybodying over far-away causes actually gets lampooned from time to time in mainstream anglosphere literature.
KingOfTheBailey
4hr ago
Is everyone on this board handsome?
The trope has never been a trope. It’s just the way things are. I did some math one time and came to an approximation that if you had a Jewish high school (let’s say randomly selected and not like NYC focused) you would have one kids grandpa who is a billionaire at every Jewish High School assuming a typical High School size of 800-1600 students. And that is just billionaire you would have a lot of relatively impoverished kids too. Doing some rough math 10% of the school would go on to the Ivy League and equivalents. A randomly selected Jewish High School would produce results very close to some of the most highly filtered private High Schools. The only thing they wouldn’t produce are Presidents and athletes.
I feel like this is more like the post I made where we know the answer but have learned to not know it.
Politics will be interesting over the next decade. Either Jews really can manipulate the media and they crush the lefts oppressor-oppressed framework of the community is going to need to learn to vote Republican and be besties with Maga. Cliff Asnes who basically funded every never Trump organization recently said he’s considering voting for Trump.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3hr ago
Truth be told I've never owned an Iphone.
For many many years the main true answer was "the bar" -- zoomers are too scared to go in those either, and now they are dying.
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