It is only when the crime is rape or sexual assault or harassment that suddenly, thinking people fail to understand that a woman's testimony is evidence. They say things like "there's no evidence!" Yes, there is. Her testimony is evidence.

A Brief History of Nobody Reads Anymore 🧵

The article is both important and depressing in drawing our attention to how much work there is still to do. And I am completely distracted because those are my students in the picture!

Yep. I said this last year and I think it still holds.

And the same is true for art too~

Shame is an unbearably difficult concept. Men with no shame, seemingly surgically removed, are a scourge upon the nation. Women who feel the social shame of being the victim of sexual aggression make it tragically underreported. The two things about shame are starkly united in the Platner story.

I have no idea what's going on with Mitch McConnell, but the phrase "rigor tortoise" just popped into my brain and I had to get it out. Thank you for your patience and my sincere apologies.

I'm not really worried that the backlash to Platner is going to endanger our ability to give folks second chances, because at no point did that man seem like he earnestly felt he was on his second chance. He made it pretty clear at every turn he thought he was still living large on his first one.

If AIPAC is the reason why we know Graham Platner is a rapist, that’s their most noble contribution to American politics in years. Cenk is such a dirtbag he doesn’t realize he’s paying AIPAC a compliment (albeit one they almost certainly don’t deserve, but still).

For the ppl saying that women are liars cause they only speak up when a man is running for office, consider that most victims are just happy to escape and our peace is more important to us than “justice” but if our abusers were about to gain power, we’d feel morally obliged to say something

This is true - and it's something that the newspaper should have noted in its story. It's relevant.

#ShareGoodNewsToo huge improvement in diagnosing a very painful and slow-to-diagnose condition

Knitting is wild because it's like 50% "Oh my gosh, that's so beautiful" and 50% "wait, I think I made a shawl with that colorway." (Also go check out romancing the vote!)

Your honor, I love them

Compelling essay by sci-fi writer Ted Chiang on why LLMs are nowhere near consciousness, but why it serves the interests of LLM companies to constantly suggest that they might be. I've pulled one quote below, but the whole article is worth reading.

Today in bad kashrut questions: In the musical Into the Woods (um, spoilers ahead), Milky White the cow dies, is brought back to life, and gives milk that the witch needs. Is the milk kosher? Which would depend on whether Milky White is a neveilah or a kosher living cow...

This is by far the most apologetic I've seen him be about this awful "theory" of his, but I sure do wish he could just admit that he screwed up, and consequentially caused many autistic people to go undiagnosed for decades, who didn't obviously fit the autistic cis hetero white man stereotypes.

There is no magic course of study that inherently creates good people. No discipline, no religion, no topic MAKES you good. The only way to be a good person is to choose to be good. Over and over again.

Pope Leo: i ask myself Pope Leo: would gandalf just let the necromancer secretly regain his orc-hold strength at dol Guldur after the downfall of númenor? Pope Leo: and i thought Pope Leo: no he wouldn't! JRR Tolkien: finally! someone who understands my work!

The dream of the US is a place that "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance". Another birthday, another opportunity to commit to making that ideal real for every single human being here. loeb.columbian.gwu.edu/george-washi...

I'll say this until I'm dead. The whole conservative project has been about the conversion of public spaces to private ones, ones where groups can be excluded all in the name of individual choice. And if you hear the phrase "tragedy of the commons," you know who you're talking to.

This mensch gets it.

what did the termite ask for in exchange for his labor room and a board

The image here borrows its title from Grant's 1868 presidential campaign slogan, "Let us have peace." Here's what Frederick Douglass had to say about that sentiment.

Very thankful for this letter to Becky Pepper-Jackson (the 16 year-old trans girl SCOTUS ruled against yesterday) from James Dale, a gay man whose expulsion from the Boy Scouts was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2000.

me talking to magically resurrected founding father: and so sir you can see how the supreme court has become a deeply illegitimate institution that threatens the very republic you created founding father: there are *how many* papists on it???

i am definitely up in my feelings about this one as someone who has survived several severe depressive episodes and grew up with a parent who was hospitalized/away from work for it multiple times he's been working to strip healthcare from people, and I would not be here without the ACA

We are going to make mistakes during this reconstruction, and we need to be more afraid of not doing anything than making those mistakes.

A line that stayed with me from an old hiking book: > The safest place to store water in hot weather is in your body. People have died of dehydration with water still in their canteens. this isn't a metaphor for anything. finish your water bottle.

We need to recognize what happened to Scott Wiener at the San Francisco Trans Pride March as antisemitism, and finally purge this poison from left wing movements. A new opinion piece by Evan Urquhart, @evanurquhart.bsky.social, only on Assigned Media. assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...

‘Say yes and never do it’ Mel Brooks knew how to deal with the studios

I know the list is endless but I genuinely think trashing the legitimate congressionally chartered org for celebrating the 250th to instead hijack our national assets and taxpayer funds for his personality cult grifter crap should, in and of itself, be fully sufficient to merit removal from office.

You limped your last bizkit.

We wanted to understand why a Jewish candidate defeated another Jewish candidate in one of America's most Jewish congressional districts. So we talked to three Evangelical Christians at a gun show in northern Idaho.

You’ve Fried your last Avraham.

"We don’t need to fight fatphobia and dangerous body standards! We can simply medicate those nonconforming bodies away! Assuming these drugs are safe, assuming they work for you, assuming you can afford them, assuming you can stay on them forever." I wrote about GLP-1s and eating disorders:

The law locks up the man or woman who steals the goose from off the common but leaves the greater villain loose who steals the common from the goose

air conditioning is good and right and a just climate future has zero emissions and also air conditioning and we should build a better world where people don’t die in heat waves

Musk says not a single person has died due to him axing USAID. Sadly, part of my job involves tracking aid spending. So here’s a thread with just some of the people who lost their lives because of USAID cuts

12/10, no noets

one thing you can see on TikTok etc is that there are a lot of young, low info people whose primary exposure to the concept of antisemitism is as a bad faith smear, and my guess is that’s not good.

BE NOT AFRAID

my unresearched, unscientific view is that all subspecies of short-beaked echidna are equally adorable 🥰

If it's a voting day for you, get out and vote and then get a sticker! This was a pretty good ballot; the Venn diagram of votes I case because I was excited for the person and votes I cast because I wanted the other person out of office was closer to a circle than usual.

Today is the day! Early shift captains are up and at it in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Info: vote.nyc Volunteer: jfrej.org/tjv Voter guide: jfrej.org/ballot

UGHHHHHHHHHH and yeah, so infuriating that the entirely predictable, & incredibly dangerous, tendency towards homogenization has been so widely and blatantly ignored

In the professional aid world this is phrased as "everyone deserves human dignity" and "unmaintainable dependencies create unintentional harm". It's not controversial, but let's break down what that means 🧵👇

Ye brynge to mynde the babe. What babe? That babe wyth the knowlech. What knowlech? The knowlech of sorcerye. Sorcerye? Assuredlye! Assuredlye what? Brynge to mynde the babe.

Both totally unnecessary and extremely funny that the Guardian has an interactive graphic for you to change the color of the US flag's blue to the color of the Reflecting Pool from 8 to 19 June and counting

evil often isn't that complicated.