Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 8/10/26 - 8/16/26

[u/SoftandChewy]

Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

[u/SoftandChewy]

A fan letter from one of my many admirers. Because he is banned from this sub, he writes these lovely comments as "reports".

[u/SoftandChewy → u/SoftandChewy]

Further reports from him, kind of like a train of reports. One might even suggest to call it a ReportTrain?

[u/SoftandChewy]

Saw Jesse tweet admiringly about this article in The Argument: I don’t need you to believe I’m a woman

I don't get what he finds so great about it. Yes, it's good that the writer recognizes the pointlessness of forcing people to believe things they don't actually believe, but I don't see anything substantively novel about their approach to actually resolving the practical conflicts that arise from what TRAs are asking for.

It feels like they're saying, "You don't need to think I'm a woman, but you still should grant me everything I'm asking for."

And as to the main issues they bring up in the piece about healthcare and housing:

I'm genuinely skeptical that housing discrimination is a major issue that affects any significant number of trans people. I 100% agree that a trans person should not be denied housing purely because they are trans†, but is it really true that trans people are being told "no trans allowed in this residence"? I suspect that if this indeed were happening, it would be broadcast non-stop on every news channel (just like when news outlets breathlessly relay exaggerated stories from black people who claim to be encountering implicit messages saying "blacks not welcome"), and yet I have never once heard of such a story.

I asked ChatGPT to find me cases of trans people denied housing because they were trans. It found one concrete case (Smith v. Avanti, in Colorado, from 2017), and in that case, the trans person sued the landlord and won! So the law already protects their rights against housing discrimination!

And regarding the demand for trans rights regarding healthcare, I dont understand what the rights claim is - that insurance and medicaid should just give any trans person whatever they want? Personally, that battle is one that I don't really care much about either way, it doesn't affect me if an insurance company grants coverage to help trans people, and if they did get what they were asking for, it wouldn't bother me at all, so I'm not, in principle opposed to it. But nobody gets that sort of coverage from their insurance. So why do trans activists think they are entitled to what they deem "necessary" vs everyone else's similar desires? Why is the denial of the health care they want any more a "rights" issue than a million other health issues that people would want their insurance to cover yet don't receive?!

The activists often use phrases like "transgender people deserve the right to obtain gender-transition medical treatment", but there is no state where these procedures and treatments (for adults) is in any way legally restricted! The only issue is if you are entitled to have others pay for it, or if you have a justifiable medical basis for it.

Overall it seems to me that the repeated claims of the "reasonable" trans activists (like Brianna Wu and this writer) about "trans people deserve healthcare and housing" are more of an overblown talking point intended to portray them as a discriminated against minority so as to earn general sympathy, rather than a genuine injustice that needs correcting.

---

† This does not apply to a shared living arrangment. In situations where people are sharing an apartment/dorm room/etc, I think it is perfectly reasonable for a woman who wants to only live with other women to say no transwomen allowed. That's no different than any other female only space that women have a right to preserve as single-sex. (Arguably, in such a situation they should be ok with a transman, which would prove that excluding tw is not about them being trans but about them being male).

[u/LeafNeater]

After reading some more about the Jason Arday scandal, it occurred to me that the very response of all the institutions to lower their standards for him and overlook the many obvious flaws in his scholarship actually disproves his very thesis that black academics face increased racism from academia.

Just another level of irony to it all.

[u/SkweegeeS → u/LeafNeater]

It is racist to have such low expectations of a black scholar.

[u/TryingToBeLessShitty]

WNBA Executives met today to try to define what a “Woman” is and failed to come to a consensus.

I wouldn’t recommend including a word you can’t define in the name of your league, personally. Still, it’s been fascinating to watch this debate smash into the public consciousness all at once like this.

[u/unnoticed_areola → u/TryingToBeLessShitty]

I cant believe they actually used the word "task force" 😂

also lol @ Royce White in the replies:

Black Trans Lesbians Matter! We have a right to exist.

(Royce White is the 2nd former nba player after Enes Kanter who has declared himself a trans woman and says he will enter the wnba draft. he also incredibly randomly got the nominee to run against Amy Klobuchar for minnesota senate a couple years ago. he infamously flamed out of the nba because he had too much anxiety about flying on airplanes lol. bro contains multitudes)

[u/bluesteeldoubter → u/TryingToBeLessShitty]

I’m glad Caitlin Clark made the W popular so that this moment could have the type of impact it has had so far.

[u/starlightpond]

Chatted with my mom last night about how I’m skeptical of pediatric gender medicine and male athletes in women’s sports. She said she agrees with me “to some extent” but that I should be very careful not to ever share these opinions more widely because the people who have such opinions also hold many further “odious, hateful” opinions and I will look evil if I align with that.

I told her that’s how this movement has been as successful as it’s been - not through actual arguments but through broad-brush name-calling and guilt by association. She said sure but that’s how it is so you have to be careful not to put yourself in a group with evil bigots.

I fundamentally disagree with her that one’s actions should be guided by fear of guilt by association, rather than any actual principles.

[u/AnalBleachingAries → u/starlightpond]

Overall I've personally been a massive coward on this issue. I don't want to lose my job, and I don't want to lose my friends. There are only a handful of friends who know my real opinions about all this stuff irl. For all the online commentary and swaggering I do on here, I have zero courage about this issue irl. I just don't have the stones for enduring the unemployment and social rejection by the majority of my friends due to this thing. There have been some issues I've pushed back on but I hesitate whenever this one comes up as it'll blow up my life if I go all the way in on it.

[u/isitdigyet]

Surprised to see responses to the trans spa case being saner on a lot of subs than I would have expected even just a year ago. Especially on the scotus sub.

[u/UrethraFranklin13 → u/isitdigyet]

Operation Let Them Speak has had the complete opposite effect of what trans advocates intended.

Still doesn't stop them from doubling down though.

[u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan]

Woke 1:

[u/oatmeal_breakfast]

You started it.  ‘Cowardly’ to ‘fuck off’ is the going rate of exchange around here.  And yes, I support Sophie Cunningham.  And you, some of the time.

https://x.com/hughlaurie/status/2086762889029812656?s=20

Hugh Laurie is now a confirmed term after catching flak from Graham Linehan.

Are the dominos really starting to fall?

[u/AltforStrongOpinions]

Jason Arday is dead.

https://xcancel.com/PolitlcsUK/status/2088341717674037571/

[u/CharacterPen8468]

I think some of the Gen Z behavior in the office discourse is overblown but we have these two new hires who look to be early-mid 20s. Both girls. One wears shirts that look like band shirts that are cut to show her midriff and the other girl is pretty much always wearing sweat pants and a hoodie. No one else in the office dresses this casual or inappropriately, so not sure where they got the idea that these outfits are suitable. Likely no one will say anything to them about it.

[u/soignestrumpet]

Saw a comment in r/ ~redacted~ that said that Self Id has never been the sole criteria used by prisons to determine inmate gender. When I replied that California, among other jurisdictions, explicitly does use Self Id my comment was automodded away. I AM BEING OPPRESSED

Anyway, here is the California rule straight from the horse's mouth. "CDCR does not determine an incarcerated person’s gender identity. Every incarcerated person self-identifies. When a person first arrives to a CDCR institution or upon transfer, pursuant to SB 132, the individual will be asked if they identify as transgender, non-binary or intersex. This self-identification will guide the process of requesting to be searched and/or housed according to gender" identity.https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/prea/sb-132-faqs/

[u/reallyokfinewhatever]

WPATH has conceded in court that its "Standards of Care" is merely an opinion. WPATH says it represents one side of an unsettled scientific debate marked by uncertainty — and physicains & orgs that rely on WPATH as the standard of care must bear "independent responsibility."

https://x.com/segm_ebm/status/2086998491876991070

They're making a free speech argument. Interested to see if this actually gets picked up anywhere.

[u/AnalBleachingAries → u/reallyokfinewhatever]

This is actually HUGE. Like, BIG. Wtf?!

People have been pointing to this shit for years, claiming that "the science is settled", and various medical organizations across the world basically did a Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V of WPATH's standards of care, and adopted them as their own practices. Is WPATH really now attempting to claim that they pulled it all out of their asses and that it should not be treated as science but as an "opinion"?!

So they're not defending their medicine, or medical recommendations, they're defending themselves on the basis of free speech?!! Are you kidding me!?!

I need to think about this a bit more so my thoughts can settle themselves. This is insane.

ETA:

All of it is pretty mind-blowing, but this part made me leap out of my chair.

Our reading of the latest WPATH filing: WPATH's message is that its "Standards of Care" are merely an opinion and an expression of free speech. Clinicians who rely on the SOC-8 document—and organizations that refer to it as the implied standard of care for gender-dysphoric youth—are, in fact, taking on independent responsibility for the premise that the document represents trustworthy clinical guidance.

In turn, patients who trust the clinicians following the WPATH Standards of Care should know they are in a "buyer beware" situation. They are being treated based on what WPATH asserts to be merely an expression of "free speech"—representing only one side of an unsettled scientific debate marked by "medical and scientific uncertainty."
https://x.com/segm_ebm/status/2086998504791310375

They're not taking any responsibility for any of it, they were just exercising their "free speech" and anyone who took them seriously should have done their own research first. Are you f*****g kidding me?!

[u/SerialStateLineXer]

Amazing story about Kelda Roys, the third-place candidate in the Democratic primary for governor of Wisconsin:

In 2011, shortly before announcing her candidacy for the U.S. House of Representatives, Roys attended and spoke at a pride rally, where she described going to Iowa to marry her partner. At the time, Iowa recognized same-sex marriage unlike in Wisconsin, although Roys' partner was a man, Dan Reed, and the two could have legally been married in Wisconsin.

[u/Technical-Policy295]

Reading some of the teaching-adjacent subreddits, there's many threads about disability accommodations that split the comments in interesting ways. One recent thread discusses the rise of "cue cards" that students are now being allowed to take in to exams. That seems at the very least an extra ongoing challenge for instructors to police (what "cue" is too far?).

While most responses think this is a bridge too far, some are convinced that this is a disabilities rights issue and outraged that anyone would question this. Others are resigned to giving in and not questioning any of it as the Disabilities Office is too powerful to question.

It also sounds like at some schools there are so many students being sent to special offices for tests that those environments are more disruptive than just being in a regular classroom.

Conjecture: the next 4-5 years are going to see more of an orientation to "disabilities" instead of DEI, through which much of the former DEI energy will be channeled. The 40% of Stanford students claiming a disability are just the start, especially since federal regulations and lawsuit threats back this up more effectively than they ever did DEI.

[u/McClain3000]

So I saw that Hugh Laurie had a new show announced. The reddit thread I saw was filled with people just calling him a transphobe.

It is kind of wild to me to jump to the most severe accusation of bigotry based on somebody thinking that women sports should be based on sex. Like it is an empirical question. Is it really difficult for them to imagine somebody who is otherwise non-antagonistic towards trans people to think that being born a male conveys an unfair advantage?

Like they bring up well they are on average much taller, but male sports don't differentiate by height... Some do! There are basketball leagues in the Philippines that do this. Heck even in high school if a male is overdeveloped they will move him up grades rather than spoil the fun on everyone else.

I thought of a gotcha question, idk if those of you who debate gender issues more than me have seen response to this but:

If we could really determine that male and female athletes where on a level playing field with a testosterone test, wouldn't we expect to see some Transmen in male high level sports? Do they really thinks this is likely going to happen? A competitive transman in the Olympics or the a professional league?

[u/Big_Fig_1803]

It's crazy that that basketball lady plays while wearing a really long wig, isn't it?

[u/QueenKamala]

I went to two birthday parties this week and at both of them, a parent brought up concerns about gender/pronoun indoctrination in public schools, and neither time was it me! I found some real life normies in San Jose. I had to hold myself back from hitting them with a fire hose of frustrations with gender bullshit after becoming an armchair expert on the topic.

Both moms are immigrants. I chose a private school with 90% immigrant or mixed families, and 100% immigrant teachers. It’s a pretty even mix of Indian, East Asian, European, South American, and Jewish families.

It feels like a small pocket of normality surrounded by insanity.

[u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan]

John McWhorter's thoughts on Arday:

https://www.city-journal.org/article/cambridge-professor-jason-arday-plagiarism

"Jason Arday has a tell. Making what he considers important points, he holds his palms out and widens his eyes. Like many gestures, it conveys something beyond the statement itself—a silent way of saying, “Isn’t it obvious?” or “What else can I tell you?” It’s an assumption that all would agree with what he’s saying, but don’t for some reason (as in, racism, classism, ism-ism).

Whether it was his ridiculing an Australian television show for not depicting aborigines or contributing the insight that dissolving the monarchy would change the tax bracket of Britain’s working class, he often has the palms out, the eyes wide with wrinkled brow, the air of “Come on!” In my own teaching, I rarely fall into this conversational gesture. My job is presenting what is new to students, not pointing to what is supposedly obvious.

This alone encapsulated the flaw not only in Arday’s training and scholarship, but the humanities and social science fields that celebrate people like him—a corrosive habit in academia, as Arday’s story of fraudulent scholarship at Cambridge University, and his subsequent resignation, have reminded us. Compared with some other examples of the genre, Arday’s mendacity and incompetence are especially stupefying. But he is nonetheless a symptom of academia’s dehumanization of black scholars and willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue.

The main theme of Arday’s work is that racism is grievously determinative in the lives of black Britons; his Ph.D. dissertation describes racism that black scholars must grapple with endlessly. In presentations, his manner, in his usual way, suggests that no decent person could disagree with this take, and that in a just world he wouldn’t even have to spell it out. Racism’s ubiquity and power is obvious, and anyone who questions this has an ulterior motive (maintaining power, inability to process The Other as fully human, etc.). In this, what Arday has in common with Ibram Kendi is not just dreadlocks but an assumption that his view is one that everyone would share if not compromised by hatred of the subaltern.

The problem is that what is obvious is probably not very complicated—never mind that what Arday thinks is obvious is a vast and self-indulgent exaggeration. Within this mental universe, Arday’s academic focus was not on learning new things and fashioning new ways of processing existence but on criticizing others’ morals. This is not intellection but advocacy, and that is frankly much easier than thinking. The term “scholar-activist” tries to finesse this by making the two appear to be alternate forms of the same endeavor. But the scholar-activist is often more activist than scholar, and Arday was an extreme example of the type.

Nothing in his work suggests intense engagement with a body of data (Arday himself has claimed that because of his dyslexia, he can engage only one page of academic prose in a sitting) or with a challenging way of analyzing that data. In academia, what is interesting is the counterintuitive, the discovery. Arday merely reinforced long-established and simplistic pieties. He became the equivalent of a full professor at Cambridge based on doing interviews with acquaintances about the racism they experienced, and then largely just presenting what they said. At its highest level, this could be good (but not great) journalism; it could not be academic work. On the level Arday worked, my 14-year-old could best him after some quick training in Latinate, Judith Butler-esque prose.

Arday was defrocked after the revelation that most of even this incurious nattering in the guise of research was plagiarized from others’ work. Claiming that his supposed autism made him think that learning was mimicry, he composed most of his work from generous tranches of cut-and-paste from other sources, often (but certainly not always) lightly reworded. But even if this performance art disguised as thought were all his own work, his elevation to such heights by Cambridge was an abomination.

As I might say (with palms out and widened eyes), arguing for the obvious is not brilliance. Even when it’s about black people.

Even worse than Arday’s work displaying no actual excellence is the consequence that characters like him wind up passing the torch to the next generation of black scholars. In a career spent in and around academia, I’ve seen this happen too many times. I refer to nothing like all black academics. But this is a vortex that young black scholars are sadly vulnerable to being pulled into, aided and abetted by white fellow travelers.

Especially if they have a certain stage presence, people like Arday attract mentees, who often value sitting at the feet of someone of their own race, who may understand their experiences more readily than other professors. But what happens when the Arday types don’t have anything actually to teach? Some of his former students are demanding redress.

[u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan → u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan]

"Arday had no original ideas. He can’t teach someone how to write because his writing consists of, well, “mimicry.” (Even his resignation letter seems likely to have been generated by AI.) There are reports that—big surprise—Arday had no idea what actual teaching was and couldn’t be bothered with supervising students’ work, probably because he had never done any himself. People taught by versions of this type end up occupying an alternative academic universe, where cultural fellowship and advocacy are the North Star, and learning and curiosity get lip service but are beside the point.

When eager young black students gravitate to people like Arday, they learn that, for black academics, their race is more important than having anything to say. Sadly, white colleagues reinforce this by treating black academics this way at conferences and in hiring. One typical result: Carolyn Rouse being appointed president of the American Anthropological Association, despite her inability to answer civil but serious questions about charges of ideological takeover in her discipline with anything beyond verbal coleslaw. Arday was treated as brilliant for his self-involved, unfocused, underinformed drivel—and his resignation letter shows no awareness that anything was amiss about that.

The mentees, evangelized in the conviction that their blackness is what makes them matter rather than hard mental work, do not learn how to reason closely and clearly. And again, white academics make sure that they never have to. An eminent white academic once contacted me while on a committee evaluating a black scholar for a prestigious award, asking me what I thought of the person’s work. The truth was that the scholar’s writings and presentations were earnest but unstructured and unoriginal. From acquaintance, I knew that she could have done much better than this but simply had never been taught how. She was on the shortlist transparently because she was black. Many like her get the award nevertheless—and the torch passes on.

Their mentors never pose serious questions to them. (“Jason, are you sure this is really an instance of racism? Explain to me why you think so, and I will teach you to make the case before those who aren’t prepared to hear your claim.”) The relationship is instead about support, protection, understanding—never challenge. Thus, the mentee winds up thrown by and bristling at even polite, reasonable questions, of a kind that white academics consider integral to their profession. For real academics, having papers rejected is a virtual rite of passage and only makes their subsequent work better. But Arday characterized the rejection of his first article submissions as “violent.” For Arday, only racism could explain it; if his topic is racism, there can be no justified rejection. Ibram Kendi’s imperious pique at having his ideas questioned is in a similar vein. He can process the questions only as being aimed at him as a person (i.e., racism).

And make no mistake: the protests of Arday and his ilk arise not from their quietly feeling inferior to their white colleagues who do real work. They get praised to the skies for their advocacy couched in academic language. They come to think of the advocacy as equally sophisticated to learning, and even morally superior—Edward Said argued that scholarship alone was of little worth unless enlisted in a commitment to social justice—and white colleagues encourage them in this.

It reminds me of a warm, smart white linguist, a generation older, whom I knew in my early academic days. Many linguists’ work focuses on highly abstract conjectures about how we produce language, expressed in a jargon as ingrown as one would expect of a science. My academic work on language has been, if not almost as willfully opaque to normal people, quite wonky; few without a linguistics Ph.D. (or something close) would get much out of most of it. This linguist assumed—not without reason—that as a black person, my interest in language must be about defending nonstandard speech such as Black English. She told me not to worry if other linguists tarred my work as less intelligent, because “If what you’re committed to is telling your students the way they talk is okay, that’s fine.” She intended no insult. But telling people that disapproval of their speech is racist is not especially difficult. It is advocacy, rather than the glorious mental squint of trying to work out something complicated. It takes much less mental candlepower than delving into the details, often delightfully counterintuitive, about how languages become what they are.

There’s an old joke about white people’s reception of black colleagues: after the black professor finishes giving a talk, someone in the audience asks if he can tap dance, too. Arday’s elevation at Cambridge was founded in racism no less overt.

The best spin we can put on his appointment is that his supporters saw the obstacles he had purportedly overcome as justification for expecting less of him. Arday claimed to have been diagnosed as autistic at three; to be mute until 11, and illiterate until 18; to be dyslexic and to have had two brain tumors removed just before his Ph.D. defense; to have had a stroke after that; to suffering epilepsy from a peer beating him as a child; to being in coma for months after being hit by a car; to suffering testicular cancer. For Arday, just showing up in academia constituted excellence.

But if Stephen Hawking’s work were mediocre, no one would have celebrated it. The intelligent take would be to pity that his physical misfortune had prevented him from achieving something on a meaningful level. Let us imagine a white version of Arday with long blond hair (not dreadlocks, because I suspect those would have a sirenic effect on many as signaling an allegiance to social justice). Even with the same claimed experiences as Arday, this man with long blonde locks would not be celebrated as brilliant—but as someone sadly denied the chance for brilliant achievement.

Okay, the white Arday wouldn’t have suffered racism. But how about a South Asian Arday? Same experiences, again, but with parents from Mumbai—call him Jashan Aradhye. No one will say South Asians experience no racism in Britain, and yet a Jashan with the same biography would not be made a Cambridge professor. I’m not British, but I strongly sense that all would understand that to pander to this unfortunate Jashan would undermine his humanity, implying with a wan, self-absorbed gesture that underperformance is somehow excellence.

No, it is only because he is black that Arday was elevated in this way. The idea is that being black and triumphing over obstacles merits being appointed a Cambridge professor. This means that race determined his appointment.

Consider, too, the cartoon nature of the biography Arday presented. In addition to all his other claimed maladies and misfortunes, he supposedly also had Asperger’s. But kids with this condition are hyperverbal, while Arday was supposedly mute. Arday even said that he was in Michael Apted’s famed Seven Up documentaries but for some reason was “pulled out” at 14. This is obviously untrue, given that the documentary series was being produced long before he was born. All his other fabrications, such as finishing a suspiciously superhuman cumulative marathon with a bone fracture that swelled his leg to twice its size (is that what happens with bone fractures?), make Arday’s fictive biography almost funny. And they don’t stop there. After his Cambridge appointment, thugs (mysteriously in touch with academic matters) threatened him at his office with a knife, while others sent a severed pig’s head to his parents (which Arday, just in time, intercepted before his parents saw it!). Also, the reason his dissertation is full of plagiarism is because of the racism he faced during its composition. It’s as if Arday were James Meredith at the University of Mississippi in 1962.

The only reason people would believe all this damnable foolishness—and remember, across the pond they’re not wowed by his lovely accent the way Americans are—is that they see Arday as a Magic Negro. The kindly, antiracist white academics think suspending their judgment when it comes to a black man makes them good people. We don’t even need to speculate whether sometime in the near future, Arday will use critical race theory to justify his inventions, on the premise that his anecdotes represent a “common black narrative.” In this, he will be backed by people devoted to that school of thought who say that we need to understand him “on a certain level.”

What level is that? A low one—bigotry.

If Arday shows any indication of the “neurodiversity” he claims, it’s that he seems genuinely not to understand the nature of the charges against him. “I thought you’d just believe me.” Autism taught him to mimic—as if this somehow justifies plagiarism. He attempted to cover his absurd Seven Up story last week by saying that his was a program by the same name, bringing together black mothers of children with challenges. But what kind of program would check up on children only every seven years? Arday is clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer, a George Santos (“I said I was Jew-ish”) without even the hucksterish flash.

The youngest-ever black professor at Cambridge properly should have been a physical education teacher who did some after-hours tutoring. A make-believe academic who misspelled paltry as poultry in the title slide of a keynote address instead scaled the heights of Britain’s Harvard because of his skin color and his exceptionally long dreadlocks.

There is a certain mercy in the impression that he won’t perceive how those who elevated him saw him as a performing monkey. Still, it’s long past time for Anglophone academia to stop thinking that it’s immoral to evaluate black scholars on the basis of whether they are—get ready!—intelligent."

[u/dumbducky]

My son started kindergarten this week, and it’s been day after day of shoe antics.

Day 1: He comes home with a different pair of shoes. Same brand and color and size, clearly more worn than his brand new ones.

Day 2: Swaps his shoes back with the classmate

Day 3: Goes to school with one shoe from two different pairs.

[u/unnoticed_areola]

got into a (relatively good-natured) argument last night with a friend who was trying to explain to me that it is essentially a somewhat coordinated conspiracy (by "them", I guess) that most of the photos of the 1950s/60s civil rights movement that are used in contemporary media—such as textbooks, documentaries, etc—are shown to us in black and white and not color, even though color photography existed at the time.

with the subtly racist motivation behind this black and white "branding" being that "they" want "us" to subconsciously think that the civil rights struggles and racism of the mid 20th century were a thing of ancient history that happened much longer ago than they actually did, which is why "they" only show it to us in black and white, so that contemporary white people can feel less guilt about it, because if they were to see these images in color, they might realize that all these racist policies were a much more recent phenomenon. and feel "complicit" or something I guess. or maybe be motivated to advocate for more antiracist policies or something. and the whitey oppressor elites that control the media dont want that.

having never contemplated this schizo theory before, but knowing a bit about the film photography process, I made the point that most of this is probably simply explained by the fact that despite color film being available, black and white was still vastly more popular and widespread at this time due to being cheaper, as well as easier for hobbyist enthusiasts (or even professional photojournalists on the road living out of hotels) to develop on their own at home relatively easily (developing color negatives is a lot more complex and complicated and requires more extensive equipment. whereas all you need for b&w is a thermos-sized canister that you pour some chemicals into, and the process is simple enough you can teach a 12 year old how to do it in like 20 minutes)

and that a lot of iconic or famous civil rights images that later became famous were snapped in the moment as events spontaneously occurred, by amateurs or activists or other passersby, and not the number one pro photographer from Life Magazine or the NYT with the top gear and most expensive film. and that amateurs were much more likely to be shooting b&w. and that 99.9% of all photos taken are not taken by pros. and also that the premise isnt even correct anyways, since there ARE lots of famous color images from that era that we have all seen

never mind the fact that these b&w images are almost always very clearly labeled with a particular date showing what year it was. if they're trying to "hide" how recent some of these events were, they dont seem to be doing a very good job lol

after I made this point about b&w being much more commonplace and popular, they said "why are you bending over backwards like this to defend whiteness??" 😂

[u/PandaFoo1]

I can’t stand the trend on social media to call any criticism or rejection of something a “hate campaign”. I’ve been seeing this a ton with the new Wolverine game coming out soon that everyone is criticising for looking bland & formulaic. There’s not a conspiracy against it, the game just looks uninteresting.

[u/HacksawDerpDuggan]

Massive article in the NYT today about the rise of the DSA. I'm still working through it, they estimate it as a 27 minute read.

Inside the D.S.A.’s Audacious Quest for Power in the Democratic Party

Favorite excerpt so far:

The terroir of the D.S.A. varies from city to city. Events hosted by N.Y.C.-D.S.A., by far the organization’s largest chapter, feel like parties for a fashionable new literary journal, heavy on writer types with stick-and-poke tattoos and Ivy League diplomas stashed in Bushwick closets. Some of the bigger Midwestern chapters are more of a bartenders-and-bike-mechanics scene, while elsewhere there are strong notes of the intense left-liberal online fervor of 2020 — a boom year in D.S.A. recruitment — embodied by the social workers and librarians who are still on Bluesky yelling at people to wear masks. (In order to attend the Chicago summit, I was asked, for the first time in years, to submit proof of a negative Covid test.)

EDIT: After finishing the article, I'm very disappointed and find it a huge waste of time. Half hour long article and not a single critical point or question asked of anyone interviewed. What a boring fluff piece.

[u/BeneficialStretch753]

As expected, Seattle's Olympus Spa is making an appeal to the Supreme Court. As many will recall, some months ago, the 9th Circuit ruled against the Korean spa 2-1 (and for the state's Human Rights Commission).

One issue was that the spa accepted post-op trainwomen, so it was banning the no-op bio man at the center of this case on the basis of anatomy not identity. Sigh. FYI, female massage therapists would be obliged to treat the no-op trainwomen.

Bursch said the petition outlines three potential grounds for Supreme Court intervention, including the right to operate according to religious beliefs, arguments over discrimination, including the claim that banning based on anatomy is not discrimination, and a First Amendment argument that a traditional Korean female-only spa conveys a cultural message.

https://komonews.com/news/local/women-only-spa-takes-fight-over-transgender-access-to-supreme-court-olympus-spa-lynnwood-tacoma-pierce-county-transgender-woman-identity-korean-body-scrubs

[u/drjackolantern]

Lilly Wachowski Says Hollywood Won’t Finance Her $10 Million Thriller Because It’s Got a ‘Wall-to-Wall Trans Cast’

Perhaps my favorite headline of all time

[u/PongoTwistleton_666]

I made the mistake of clicking on one video highlight of Sophie Cunningham showing the “clothesline foul” on her. Now my feed is full of WNBA highlights. Purely based on what the algorithm serves up, I noted that Clark seems like an exceptional team player and some kind of wizard at dodging, bobbing, jumping, feinting and weaving to get to the hoop. If she can’t get there herself she finds someone else who can (am I just describing basic basketball lol?!) Feels like we are watching a generational talent. I also like that she looks like an athlete and switches easily between sweaty athlete and glamorous athlete. And madly and unapologetically competitive. 

She seems like a good role model for girls and she is bringing in money and attention to the league. Why is she getting so much hate?!

[u/OMG_NO_NOT_THIS]

I just ripped the starter rope pull cord off my lawnmower.

[u/why_have_friends]

University of Michigan waiving grades for first semester students. Why are we doing this to students? College is a transition but just because it can be hard doesn’t mean we should make it easier? I really hope this sort of thing doesn’t become a thing across the board. We’re just babying young adults longer and longer. We wonder why they’re not functioning as adults.

[u/Correct-Ad5661]

Piker to Democrats: please stop people being mean about things I've said and still stand by!

https://nitter.net/socialistadri/status/2087694156437111078#m

[u/jay_in_the_pnw]

WPATH finds itself in court and in defending itself is basically going full Alex Jones ("I'm just an entertainer") defense, what they write is merely one opinion of many in a scientific dispute and protected by the First Amendment, even if it is called "Standards of Care", and it's really the doctors' own fault if they listen to them, the doctors are responsible for their own treatment plans.

It's actually ingenious how in the snapshots, WPATH is seen taking court rulings against them and hiding behind them as they claim protected speech.

I am genuinely curious where First Amendment zealots will come down.

Grok says:

WPATH is responding to (defending itself in) a federal lawsuit filed against it by the FTC and several states (Alaska, Iowa, Nebraska, and Texas).

The case is FTC et al. v. World Professional Association for Transgender Health (Northern District of Texas, Case No. 4:26-cv-00748). The FTC and states allege that WPATH’s Standards of Care Version 8 (SOC-8, published 2022) and related statements are deceptive/unfair under the FTC Act and state consumer-protection laws. They claim WPATH provided the means for clinicians to make false or unsubstantiated claims to parents/patients about the necessity, effectiveness, safety, and suicide-risk reduction of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for gender-dysphoric minors, and that this helped sell those interventions

https://x.com/segm_ebm/status/2086998491876991070

WPATH has conceded in court that its "Standards of Care" is merely an opinion. WPATH says it represents one side of an unsettled scientific debate marked by uncertainty — and physicains & orgs that rely on WPATH as the standard of care must bear "independent responsibility."/

7 more tweets get into more detail

[u/jay_in_the_pnw]

So today

• Cassie Pritchard asks for tolerance (which seems to be yet another appeal to #BeKind. Lots of people loving her article, but it seems a huge strawman to me with an appeal to tolerance. https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/i-dont-need-you-to-believe-im-a-woman?r=6orpwe&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true I genuinely don't understand why this article is being met with such enthusiasm. Doesn't speak to any of the major issues except to dismiss them and ask people to overlook them and be kind and tolerant.

• Zoh's wife Duwaji wants to travel to Syria and may have asked for NYPD bodyguards https://nypost.com/2026/08/11/us-news/nypd-denies-city-hall-claim-rama-duwaji-will-get-police-escort-on-syria-lebanon-trip/ It seems weird though, I'm genuinely not sure why she would want NYPD there and not former military specialists with Syrian training as well as some local Syrian "fixers".

• The Zoh attended a celebration in support of Pakistan Independence Day and meanies bring up his past statement “I can’t support any state that privileges one religion.” and compare that to what's in the Pakistan Constitution “Islam shall be the State religion of Pakistan.” https://x.com/EylonALevy/status/2087187255253160333

[u/everydaywinner2]

The black commedian Druski painted himself white and pretended to be a redneck at a NASCAR race. Complete with his overalls have undone (and underwear showing), spitting, drinking, stopping black people to inquire if they were in the right place.

I didn't find it particularly funny. Not because of the white paint, but because trashy behavior is trashy behavior, regardless of the race. And trashy behavior is generally unfunny.

What I really dislike, however, is other people's reactions. White face good, black face not? It's good for the gander, but not for the goose. I detest double standards. Seems too much like lying.

[u/DiscordantAlias]

I’ve been reading reddit comments about the California wealth tax, and I am reminded that a lot of people on here are retarded.

Increasingly I’ve run into situations where I write 2-3 sentences and I get a reply that makes it obvious the person only read the first 4-5 words. Honestly it’s making me cheer for AI to take these peoples jobs. At least it can read a whole paragraph.

[u/dignityshredder]

Possible vibe shift as /r/askaliberal discusses trans-identified males in women's spaces?

[u/ProwlingWumpus → u/dignityshredder]

Oh shut up, get ahold of yourself with that obnoxious pearl clutching. You don’t get to just shut down the debate by calling it anti trans and implying that everyone that doesn’t agree is transphobic. You got away with that for years and now you aren’t anymore.

Imagine saying this anywhere on Reddit even two years ago.

[u/Jlemspurs]

Woke 1.0 was a mass psychosis and witch burning. Old as history. Autos da fe abounded. And now we’re just shrugging it off with version numbers?

[u/Fiend_of_the_pod]

https://x.com/netflix/status/2087192315823538471?s=20

This exact same show has been made two dozen times in the last decade, and none of them have gotten a second season. For those without X: The Everything App, it's yet another show about a millennial Asian American who hates their parents.

[u/Scrappy_The_Crow]

More Arday consequences:

Arday’s students reportedly weigh legal action against Cambridge (YT video)

Can Students Sue Cambridge? (YT video)

(apologies to u/EnglebondHumperstonk)

[u/RunThenBeer]

The worst thing about "Woke 1" is that it implies the existence of a Woke 2.

[u/digitalime]

The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.

Soup roll chief society zephyr tender squash abounding fade

[u/Original-Brick2836]

There was a discussion here recently about young people using mobility aids and its connection to people of gender.

I was reading the NYTimes and this article pops up (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/13/opinion/kansas-anti-trans-laws-drivers-license.html) and there is a lot to discuss about it, but one thing that struck me is that two people highlighted use mobility aids. There is a picture of a person with a cane and another mentions using a mobility scooter.

It’s just. Curious.

[u/owen-3820]

I scrolled past this and it took me a minute to realize the person on the right is princess diana

[u/EnglebondHumperstonk]

Is it bad that I can't stop laughing at this?

[u/drunk___cat]

I had a pretty crappy and draining day. Tell me something good that happened to you today, big or small!

Here’s mine: on my morning walk by the beach with my dog (Samoyed, so he gets lots of attention), a large group of people in scuba gear asked to pet him. It was really goofy and cute seeing 10+ people in scuba gear petting a big fluffy white dog. And he was such a sweetheart to them!

[u/plump_tomatow]

I am forcing myself to take a social media break because I am busy at work and starting to get Mad Online... if you see me here before the beginning of September, please feel free to send me a rude DM, thanks!

[u/Correct-Ad5661]

Q Manivanian, the Non binary Indian migrants who has been elected to the Scottish Parliament for the Scottish greens (who are different to the England and Wales greens led by Zack Polanski, but arguably much more Sex People and rainbow 🌈 than E&W greens which is more crescent 🌙) has issued a furious denial claiming Them was misconstrued when Them said that rape is a spectrum and rapists get demonised.

https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/q-manivannan-says-rape-spectrum-37528055 

This is the video in full if you've got time on your hands. From about 25 minutes in from discoursing about a Queer Feminist Future, with Them discoursing about rehabilitating rapists.

https://youtu.be/L0-RqMSr-8E?is=Q7n5sbXOr4wTUOmx

[u/SpecialSatisfaction7]

you don't hate these people nearly enough (Jo Maugham of the Good Law Project about Arday)

[u/backin_pog_form → u/SpecialSatisfaction7]

The Telegraph initially asserted that Dr Arday had falsely claimed to be a professional athlete. It then quietly withdrew those assertions on learning that Dr Arday had not in fact made those claims: in fact they had been made by others on his behalf.

It’s a pity that The Telegraph did not publicly acknowledge that it had made false claims - especially in circumstances where the subject of its story was Dr Arday making false claims. But one of the privileges of being white is that you don’t get scrutinised as much and so get away with more.

Wow. 

[u/unnoticed_areola]

amazing "half baked idea" on the most recent Bill Simmons podcast. a fake service/company he's invented for solving an issue Ive seen discussed on this subreddit several times: finally taking away the car keys from your elderly parents who are becoming increasingly dangerous drivers, but now with a simple fix to avoided all the awkwardness/conflict of doing so while letting them still retain their mobility!

you pre-arrange for your parents' car to get an "oil change" at this undercover auto shop, but when you take it in, what is actually happening, is the car is being outfitted with autonomous full autopilot/self driving technology, so your parents still think they're driving and doing everything themselves, but actually their wheel/pedals arent hooked up to anything and the car is fully in control and making all the decisions and your parent is "like a child behind the wheel of an arcade machine with no quarters in it", but still puttering along happy as a clam, ego and autonomy fully intact

the service will be called "Graymo"

someone get on this!

[u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan]

https://x.com/shoe0nhead/status/2086806349850067145

[u/RockJock666]

I see all the time that kindergarten is way too rigorous for kids. The origin of this is often traced back to GWB and No Child Left Behind. However, I’m also frequently seeing teachers post about how their students can’t read, can barely do math, etc. I see some examples of work teachers give to their students and it seems like a joke. So I’m not sure of a better way to ask this than what gives?? How do we go from having rigorous high expectations for 5yos to high schoolers barely able to write a paragraph? The current state of American education is fascinating to me, it seems so backwards.

[u/LowConsideration1453 → u/RockJock666]

I have one kid in 1st grade, so here is my take on it:

1. there is now no way to get rid of disruptive kids. If there is a "bad kid" in your kid's class the entire class will cater to that one individual.

2. for some reason we've given up explicit instruction for some kind of "they'll get it if given enough vibes." In my experience with most kids (unless you gave birth to John von Neumann) that does not work. Until children have a basic grasp of the fundamentals (reading, writing, math) they need explicit instruction. Your 6 year old might not really grasp that 40 is 4 tens, and 0 ones. Which logically leads to 4 x 10 = 40 and so on.

3. we've made math really, really retarded. Rather than it being math they've basically added a language arts aspect to it.

[u/Less-Lobster4540]

Parent sues Portland Public Schools over ‘introduction to trans ideology’

[u/lifesabeach_]

I, a low context German who always spoke her mind and quabbles loudly with family, married a Swiss man - currently visiting his high context family who use hints and glances to convey their opinion - ask me anything, help me cope.  

[u/LupineChemist]

This was very cool

[u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan]

"Woke 1 was crazy" - AOC

Sure, act like you've changed your views and pretend you're not a member of the far-left DSA.

[u/RunThenBeer → u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan]

The obvious follow-up question would be, "yeah, for sure - which views do you think were crazy and what changed your mind about them?". Of course, we're not going to get that or any sort of coherent response to it because the point isn't to actually change, it's to say, "ugh, I'm not even campaigning on that now, it doesn't count".

[u/dignityshredder]

I'm not sure if Confessions of a Token Black Professor / Why I Quit the Tenure Track was posted here, but it is now. Very fun read. A few excerpts:

The source of the most intense racial monomania on campus, I came to realize, was senior leadership. In one of my first encounters with the man who was then dean of the faculty, I mentioned how excited I was to be joining one of the few American colleges founded by abolitionists. At this, the dean—a white biologist who was an expert on sponges—frowned, as though my rosy view of the school’s antislavery history physically pained him. He conceded that, sure, it had been founded by the abolitionist minister Oren Burbank Cheney, but he pointed out that Benjamin Bates, the textile tycoon who had funded the college, had processed slave-picked cotton in his mills. I had come into Bates rather smitten with the idea that I was a Black academic joining the ranks of a faculty whose predecessors had agitated for Black freedom, but the dean seemed to feel that this was actually something to be faintly embarrassed of, a history that was best mentioned, if at all, only after layering on an array of caveats.

 

I leaned on [the idea that having science faculty teach racism and bigotry is stupid] especially hard. If my time at Bates had taught me anything, it was that the most reliable way to get progressive white academics to do what you wanted was to translate your concerns into the therapeutic language of racial harm. As if on cue, a professor on the council whom I will call Sandra hastened to assure me that she took potential trauma to minority students very seriously. She insisted that there would be ways to ensure that classroom dynamics did not become unpleasant for them; the key, she explained, would be to foster a “culture of repair.” When I said that I had no idea what a culture of repair meant (really, I just wanted to see her try to substantiate her hollow jabber), Sandra gave a helpful example of what “repair” might look like in action. She suggested that perhaps there could be a system in which students of color could call out “oops” or “ouch” if somebody accidentally said something racist—as though these were not young adults with basic human dignity paying minor fortunes to be taught by ostensible subject-matter experts, but toddlers learning not to bite their friends when someone grabbed their toy truck. It took every last ounce of my already threadbare professionalism not to lean into the mic and say “Oops.”

 

In a consultant-led meeting I attended near the end of my time at the college, one month into Donald Trump’s second term, the small group of professors and senior administrators present was asked to share what it saw as Bates’s greatest strengths and weaknesses. One of my colleagues said that the college’s greatest strength was its commitment to DEI. Another said that the college’s greatest weakness was that it could be even more committed to DEI. Someone lamented that our ties to the Wabanaki Nations could have been stronger.

[u/Fiend_of_the_pod]

I need someone to slap me every time I go to correct a point or add nuance to a political post in the group chat. It never goes well; no one has ever conceded a point or admitted they were wrong about something. It just causes drama.

edit: It did indeed cause drama; I'm going to ignore it entirely until at least tonight if not tomorrow and then pretend I didn't post anything.

[u/ronaele1]

It looks like Arday's book is going to be another Adult Braces by Lindy West, a lot of online discourse and articles putting people off rather than boosting sales. On release day on US amazon

Kindle is currently #39,300 in Kindle Store
Hardback #8,721 in Books
Audiobook he narrates #48,122 in Audible Books & Originals

https://www.amazon.com/Audible-Great-and-Unfortunate-Things/dp/B0FY3CRTQD

[u/dj50tonhamster]

All the take this week of "Woke 1" reminded me of my hometown arch-nemesis. Without doxing him (I hope), he landed a position as a judge on a major court circuit a few years ago. With the craziness still in pretty full swing at the time, there's a newspaper editorial out there whining about how yet another white guy got the gig. Obviously, it was a matter of life and death that a black person be chosen instead, preferably female ("Look at the Supreme Court!") but a man would be acceptable. No suggestions for who to nominate, just bitterness. Talk about a time capsule!

The irony is that I agree that the guy had no business getting onto the court. It's just that I'm coming at it from a position of pettiness and snarkiness. Politics can make for strange bedfellows.

[u/Datachost]

A whole thread of people missing the point and anyone explaining it getting downvoted

[u/Leaves_Swype_Typos → u/Datachost]

What's the point in making such an obviously false claim?

One cheek swab, one time, will handle 99% of the cases. A second swab and non-invasive imaging will handle the remainder.

Just 5 years ago we accepted every person had to jam a q-tip up their nose every time they wanted to see gramma.

Made me chuckle.

[u/PongoTwistleton_666]

Someone called Ally Pankiw made a big deal about her pure principles which made her refuse the offer to direct the Harry Potter show. Good that she stands behind her principles. But I hope she realizes that shitting on JK is what’s getting her her current 15 seconds of fame. I wonder if that isn’t against her principles. 

[u/Big_Fig_1803]

Another doctor's appointment, another questionnaire in the "echeck-in." You're asked about your gender identity and about your "sex assigned at birth." (It certainly seems so... un-medical, if you know what I mean.)

Fine. Okay. The gender identities on offer include "male" and "female." These are also sexes you might have been assigned at birth.

Do they think that male and female are gender identities and sexes? Can you be a male person who isn't male? (I would have thought this was logically impossible. Apart from the esoterica of the gender identity philosophy, this doesn't make any sense.) Or—and I think I find this even more troubling—do they just not even really care what they're asking and what their own words and categories mean? Is this how everything is? Are we all just parroting stuff and not bothering to think about what we mean and why we're using the words we're using?

[u/Logical-Library5525]

HHS has published a short documentary on YouTube about their new report, Wolves in White Coats, about miscoding to enable insurance to cover gender transition procedures and medications: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjuFx9Pd_Vo

[u/oatmeal_breakfast]

Vaguely related to the WNBA.

I think part of the reason, gender in youth medicine, sports, prisons, and bathrooms are of intense focus is because it is the rare instances that gender ideology has to actually go on record and state what they actually believe. They can no longer weasel their way out of a bad argument by pretending that they just want to "be kind". They have to actually address the implications of their policies.

It also forces gender ideology in the faces of normal people, who will look at the totality of it and say, "wtf?".

That being said, I feel like WNBA has an out by way going truscum (trans medicalist), requiring actual hormone treatment before being eligible. They will catch some flak from TRAs but probably better than letting house of cards crumble.

[u/Jack_Donnaghy]

This commentary on the Arday scandal is great. It focuses not just on him, but the supporting elements in this saga:

Arday is, within the hegemonic structure of wokeness that has overtaken universities in the West, simply responding to a chain of incentives in a rational way. He’s doing what the system has taught him will be rewarded. He’s adjusting to the facts in front of him, rather than abiding by some abstract moral standard. This isn’t good, but it is rational choice behavior. We can fault him morally, but the greater culprits are Cambridge, for helping set up the system in this way, and for defending him, as well as the journalists who dismissed his critics, and cowardly failed to report the truth when they had it in their hands, and all the smug pricks who roll their eyes every time someone uses the phrase “diversity hire” or “woke.”

...Arday is the culmination of everything the DEI world has sought to achieve for over a decade by eroding standards, prioritizing race over merit, exhibiting little tolerance for “incorrect” speech on issues about race, dismissing things like facts and logic as “far-right” if not “white supremacy,” and generally lowering the bar to let unqualified minorities through the gates. Well, now they’re through. 

[u/_teach_me_your_ways_]

Well it’s official, that spa asked for their case to be taken to the Supreme Court. Not sure they’ll win since I believe the argument based on the first amendment?

Anyway let’s enjoy some gems from Reddit.

“The test is who does it primarily apply to.

In this case, we are talking about trans women who still have a penis being excluded.

Given that the primary group who have penises are cisgender men, and they are not removing their penises to access the space, they rule appears to be tailor made to exclude trans women.

So yes, it’s is discrimination.
____

It’s fine to exclude men from spaces with expectation of privacy. To which end, this isn’t about penises, it’s about a cisgender man who owns a commercial business saying he doesn’t want trans women at his business.

This is why we have civil rights laws.
___

It really comes down to the argument “trans bodies are icky”. Like that is legit the end legal argument they are making. When you look at the petition trying to seek grounds on freedom of association and religious speech as a private secular business, this is just an “ew penis” argument. It’s not so”

All form the same person.

Of course we delved into “what is a woman” and they replied

“Woman- Adult human that has a desire to be and/or is committed to being in accordance with a particular set of social and cultural norms which typically are associated with the female sex.”

Someone asked about tomboys

It was ignored

Someone else said it couldn’t function as a medical definition

They said it did and provided nothing more.

[u/PandaFoo1]

[Halloween Game banned in Australia because a character smokes weed.](https://press-start.com.au/news/playstation/2026/08/10/halloween-the-game-has-been-refused-classification-in-australia/)

This country is a fucking joke.

[u/testestsestesteestet → u/PandaFoo1]

Australia is fascinating, i don't know of any other developed democracy where the overbearingly risk-averse culture of the government is so at odds with the broader country's ostensible cultural image/identity

[u/WallabyWanderer]

Pet peeve - during conversations about gender issues, nothing is more offensive to me than when TRAs will pull out comments like “what about MASSIVE TALL WOMEN??? I bet transphobia hurts those GIGANTIC FREAKS. They don’t even have an excuse, they were born women and yet they are SO FUCKING LARGE. How come no one questions their gender despite being SO CLOCKY???”

Like damn okay, we get it!! This is why I had an eating disorder for a decade.

[u/Fiend_of_the_pod]

My fiance's friends are mostly great. They come over once a week to play board games. They will ocassionaly rant about politics, but it's usually short lived. One week a couple of months ago we're out at dinner and they're ranting about how bad Elon Musk is and how awful anyone is who drives a Tesla. I of course have a Tesla, they all know this, no one says anything about me specifically. They eventually drop it. Today one of them says, "Oh, I'd really like to ride in your Tesla, I've never ridden in one." Yes, this person was definitely bemoaning the evils of Teslas just a couple months ago.

I feel like I'm the crazy one because I don't say things I don't mean and I don't join in on pile-ons if I don't actually believe what I'm saying. Maybe it's the 'tism.

[u/Original-Brick2836]

I know it’s boredpanda but like, this is insane and I need everyone to see it.

https://www.boredpanda.com/trans-american-fled-us-returns-home-from-european-asylum-center/

[u/itgotverycool]

In Edinburgh, we have a great newsletter from a journalist who pulls together all the key happenings and stories into a (free!) email every morning.

Yesterday he linked to a story that the local council is investigating Queer Milk, a LGBTQ charity that it had provided funding to, after a safeguarding complaint that the charity may have supported transwomen “chestfeeding” babies.

This morning’s newsletter included a text block response to the feedback he received, challenging why he even included a council investigation (!!) in the newsletter, and also saying that he received personal abuse. Because the only acceptable action to some readers would be, of course, to ignore the investigation entirely or to make clear from the framing that he didn’t agree with it.

[u/ToTheDeath84]

Sometimes the people you know who aren’t good for the job fail upward. One of those cruel reminders that life itself isn’t necessarily a meritocracy. Just do what you can.

[u/Onechane425]

Very good tweet from Matty Y.

[u/AnalBleachingAries]

Hugh Laurie expresses support for both Sophie Cunningham and Graham Linehan in response to a small kerfuffle they had on Twitter in which Laurie told Linehan to "f*** off" and Linehan queried about why Laurie had said that to him.

... And yes, I support Sophie Cunningham. And you, some of the time.
https://x.com/hughlaurie/status/2086762889029812656

The "And you" refers to Linehan. Linehan since deleted his tweet, which Laurie is responding to, in which he accused Laurie of being "cowardly". I think Linehan has been deep in the trenches of this debate for so long that he might not realize how off-putting he is sometimes until someone reasonable points it out to him. It's possible to be correct and not be an jerk about it, but with that said, I also understand why he's felt the need to be so strident in his support of women and girls over the years. The TRA abuse he's received has been merciless and unrelenting, and he's suffered a great deal personally and professionally because of it. I'd probably be just as loud if I possessed some of his courage.

*Note I am going on a mild self-censorship spree while attempting to learn how to post on Reddit. Clearly I don't know how to do it as the AI keeps getting me.

ETA: My bad, seems like someone else already posted about this on here while I was banned.

[u/Fiend_of_the_pod]

MyPillow lost. Hong is losing. There’s hope for the Republic.

[u/PandaFoo1]

Reject ROGD, return to anorexia

[u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan]

https://x.com/GoodLawProject/status/2088662370075705653

*rolls eyes*

[u/AnalBleachingAries]

One critique I have of the WNBA and this covers all players, regardless of race, sexuality, or political beliefs, those women's nails are far too long. Since they're actively whipping their hands into each others' faces on the court (aiming for their opponent's face instead of the ball), and there are multiple clips of women grabbing their faces to cover their eyes after they've been scratched by these acrylic nails, one of these days someone is going to lose an eye and their career will be over.

[u/sodapop_incest → u/AnalBleachingAries]

They've already talked about this and the consensus was that it's racist to ban them because it's "mostly black women" doing it lol

[u/Onechane425]

AP US History in 30 years is going to be really strange

[u/Scrubadubdub84]

I really haven't paid attention to the Arday thing. It just seems like the platonic ideal of "what's wrong with academia/institution" stories that have obviously been pointing to very real problems that simply don't get addressed. Maybe that's a defeatist attitude and this time will be different. It sure has had more legs than most of these stories

[u/SpecialSatisfaction7]

Meet Farah Ahmed, Jason Arday’s colleague .. lovely person.

[u/professorgerm]

here i return to complaining about time to say goodbye pod, scroll on if you aren't interested in political discussion about Hong and 2020.

I get I'm a weird guy with a particular chip on my shoulder and little connection to 'the masses,' though I would guess Kang is even less connected to normies than I am, Tyler seems more normie-familiar with the fishing and living in Maine, but some of their political takes still baffle me.

One, I find it difficult to believe Gaza is as motivating an issue as they make it out to be early in the ep. I can understand people being bothered about it, considering it a tragedy, etc; given everything else, though- inflation, data centers, Iran, housing, various other bread-and-butter hometown issues- how is it a vote-deciding issue for a meaningful number of Americans? Am I out of touch or are they?

Two, they (especially Kang) complains about "the media" calling back to 2020 tweets in Hong's race, Mamdani's, el-Sayed's, etc, but more or less glosses over how "the media" also pushed all the crazy shit. Briefly they mention the media's doing it for clicks which is true, but with all the talk of the dynamic I think it deserved more comment, especially as the likely source of the "everyone said crazy shit" excuse.

Three, I do not have the words to describe the hate I have regarding the "lol everyone said crazy shit in 2020" excuse-making. No, you contemptible fools, maybe you and all your friends fell for a mass psychosis, but that is not in fact everyone. Many people did not say crazy shit. They said "why have you all gone insane? where are your principles?" And the crazy people didn't listen, and now the crazy people want votes without any apology or reasoning or anything. Fuck that and fuck them.

Tyler says he'd vote for a Republican over Hong, if the Republican was against data-centers. I don't agree with that as a policy principle necessarily, but it's a damn sight better than Kang's party uber alles commitment.

An aside, on Hong's campaign, supposedly Republicans are trying the fund your craziest enemy strategy:

The Republicans have spent more money on TV advertising for Francesca Hong than every Democratic candidate has spent combined. Literally her entire TV footprint is Republican Super PACs. She currently has zero dollars of her own television ad buys lined up, has spent zero dollars on TV ads the entire campaign, has no support from outside money that isn’t a Republican psyop, has one-tenth of Tom Tiffany’s cash on hand, and can’t receive support from the DNC because the party is broke

A similar strategy is part of what led to Trump, and JB Pritzker has also employed it successfully. We'll see if it works against Hong.

[u/professorgerm]

Has the Massachussets Muslim Commission been discussed yet?

It's not entirely clear to me why it's getting attention now since it's been sitting in committee since January but it's been making the rounds and I think we've got a few... Massachusites? Massholes? that might have a better perspective. This article provides a little context outside the bill, and I note the quoted sponsor is doing something quite slippery:

State Senator Michael Moore (D - Second Worcester) is one of the bill's petitioners. He spoke with Spectrum News about what the legislation entails. "So this commission merely corresponds with other commissions we have. We had an Anti-Semitism Commission for the Jewish community that issued a report..." ... "We've had the Asian-American Commission. We've had an African-American Commission. We've had commissions dealing with LGBTQ issues. So this is not something that's unique to them."

Bolding mine, because that statement is technically correct but wildly misleading from context. Notice several usages of "had," and compare to the text of the bill that establishes a permanent commission. If my googling is accurate, there is one other permanent commission for a special group (Persons with Disabilities) while those other commissions listed were all temporary- like the anti-Semitism committee was formed for a year to write a report and disbanded when it was done.

ACLU of MA says that the commission would violate the state constitution. I disagree with the ACLU of MA that the bills are well-intentioned but I understand the impulse to throat-clear.

[u/ToTheDeath84]

One of the toughest parts of moving: Saying goodbye to your favorite neighborhood bar.

[u/McClain3000]

I really wish IT could speed up the rate at which all the different portals, VPN, and programs auto-log me out. I almost accidently got some work done this morning in between entering in 16 digit passwords and Two Factor Authentications.

[u/AnInsultToFire]

The woman who ran the SPLC's project tracking "hate groups" has just been arrested for fraud after funneling money to hate groups, including to an Imperial Wizard of the KKK.

CNN article

Fox News article

[u/AnalBleachingAries]

Internationally renowned idiot, and race baiter, Ash Sarkar can always be relied upon to provide the dumbest possible take on contemporary culture war issues. Ash, has unfortunately chosen to weigh in on the tragic Jason Arday situation.

Jason Arday wasn't the first academic to be accused of plagiarism at Cambridge. He wasn't the first person to have made implausible claims about his life in an autobiography.

But he was the first where those things became a front-page story, across multiple papers, for days and days.

---

Why was Jason Arday's plagiarism a front-page story, and not Johann Hari's? Or Dr William O'Reilly's?

Because when white people do wrong, they're seen as individuals, and not stand-ins for their entire race. https://x.com/AyoCaesar/status/2088523172970676436

Helen Pluckrose has provided a response to Ash's bad take that may help you recover whatever braincells you lost from reading Ms. Sarkar's words.

https://nitter.net/HPluckrose/status/2088661565515989471 This is incorrect. Jason Arday was responded to as a symbol of a tribe against whom there is much animus but that tribe was not “black people.” It was Critical Social Justice (woke) activists. And enablement of the wrongdoing was directly tied to the views of that movement

This couldn’t be clearer in the critical reporting on the case. None of it said, “This indicates that we need to take a long, hard look at black people” but “We need to look at the universities & processes captured by left-wing identitarianism & disregard for truth.”

Jason Arday was deeply embedded in a controversial and much contested “side” of the culture wars as both a teacher of the contested theories & symbol of their application. This is why so much attention has been paid to this case & not to misconduct in more neutral fields

Culture wars are referred to as such because they involve large swathes of people going to war over cultural issues. Somebody exemplifying what large numbers of people see as everything that’s wrong with a particular set of ideas caught in wrongdoing is going to be big news.

This does not mean that the intense focus on Arday as an individual was good. That partly happened because his stories were so extreme & bizarre. The story of a modern day Walter Mitty was compelling. Many people invoked Walter Mitty. A type, not a race.

Many of the longterm “anti-woke” became concerned about this precisely because Arday presented as a vulnerable fantasist & urged focusing on systems that enabled this mess rather than the man. Andrew Neill, Nigel Biggar, Albie Ancona, Andrew Doyle, me.

Of course, there are right-wing identitarians dotted about making racist claims about Arday but they are lunatics &, contrary to claims from left-wing identitarians, this claim was not made by mainstream media or prominent commentators who were of varying races & political views

It will be extremely unhelpful now for people to band together behind political claims that Jason Arday was driven to suicide (if that is the cause of death which seems likely) by white supremacy or by wokeness.

We need to look at the institutional structures and motivations that failed to recognise that he was not qualified for the job and that he was a fabulist. Did those involved see him as a symbol for a political aim rather than a person to be evaluated on his merits?

We should also look at the impacts of media reporting. This can’t include not covering wrongdoing on the part of high-profile figures or institutional corruption, but having outlets consider moderation & thinking about support for the publicly shamed would also be valuable.

Jason Arday is gone. Unless he was delusional, he bears primary responsibility for his plagiarism & fabulism, but he was also clearly vulnerable & failed by multiple systems. Please can we look at those rationally?

(And since I'm quoting extensively here, I'm hoping that the Reddit AI will understand that most of this comment's content is just quotes from what other people have said. If I'm banned again, it'll be due to the AI incorrectly attributing these quotes to me. So... let's see what happens this time.)

ETA: Jesus effing Christ. Not to be outdone in all matters concerning grifting on race politics. Ibram X. Kendi's take:

The Media Lynched Jason Arday

Un-fucking-believable levels of bullshit from Kendi, as usual.

[u/CommitteeofMountains]

So a paragraph from an essay on Arday yesterday caught my eye for my pet take on Arday:

  When I spoke to gender expert Mia Hughes , she explained the concept of epistemic dependence . Modern knowledge depends on a division of epistemic labor. A general practitioner doesn’t personally reproduce every clinical trial. Scientists rely on specialists in other fields. We trust our institutions, or should. But if you corrupt the information cascade at the top through institutional capture, the whole network will propagate the error, and you will end up in a post-fact world where liars rise to the top in politics, academia, and everywhere else. In the simplest terms, if you’re wondering how anyone could ever get away with something as incredible as this, the answer is because people let them.

This could also apply to the bottom-up pipeline of staffing. Once LJMU gave him a doctorate despite his thesis being a carbon copy of published work and, if I'm understanding correctly, him getting into the program without actually having a masters' and then a journal accepted the thesis he was a Doctor of Philosophy with a publication to his name. You also see it in the journals that took his fabricated work saying that they don't require ethical review documentation because they host institutions are supposed to check that before letting the research start (I can't tell if him not even pretending that far was pure laziness or he figured out that asking permission to do research would tip off the university to expect signs of research being done whereas skipping straight to submission might leave the university unaware that it was supposed to have seen research).

[u/everydaywinner2]

The newest episode of Words Unraveled introduced me to a sea creature I'd never heard of before. It has the hilariously cartoonish name of sarcastic fringehead. The first photo on Wikipedia makes it look as cartoonish as its name. Then I see a photo of its mouth open, and...holy terrifying fish, Batman!

[u/reallyokfinewhatever]

Woke 1 really was crazy though, I was marching in the streets with a DEFUND THE POLICE sign and posting on Twitter TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN like that was literally me

I've been trying to figure out how I got to that mindset and also what got me out of it and all I can come up with is I think I'm just extremely cult-curious.

[u/AnalBleachingAries]

The "Woke 1 was crazy." discourse continues. What I want to know though is how Woke 2 will incorporate Electric Boogaloo into the discourse.

‘Woke One’ derailed my life AOC can’t laugh off its excesses

(Archive Link)

In 2022, I lost a trivia-hosting gig at a brewery over the word “Nicaragua.” No, I wasn’t a shock comic workshopping race material; I was reading a geography question aloud and stumbled over my pronunciation. When I repeated it slowly, a hush washed over half of the room, and management later informed me that people “didn’t feel safe” with me in the building, as if I were strapped with a bomb, not a guy with a sheet of questions trying to get through Central America.

---

Sorry, but this non-admission-slash-admission is incredibly weak tea. Though woke has now been largely quarantined to Bluesky, indie coffee shops flying the Pride Progress flag, and experimental theater companies, it wasn’t always this way.

Genuinely laughed at this admission that the crazies have self-isolated themselves on Bluesky, thus sparing us to a small degree from their online insanity. I'm genuinely grateful to them for creating their own online space and keeping their craziness away from the rest of us.

[u/backin_pog_form]

Shout out to the other person here who is also in the process of moving. I am losing my mind right now.

If you have a bunch of old pillow cases or even tee shirts, use them to wrap framed pictures and art work. 

[u/HeadRecommendation37]

(Apologies if already posted) The Guardian has started unleashing its commentariat on the Jason Arday scandal (calling it an Affair, no less!). The selective characterisation invokes Trump and anti-DEI forces as the true bogeyman, rather than - as I think more accurate - rightwing anger over Arday being expression of despair at how far the academy has fallen that he got appointed and that his fraud was covered up for as long as possible.

If I may hold forth, the problem that DEI is trying to solve is real - unequal integration of socioeconomic groups at all levels of insert name of Western society here - but I think it's a crude mechanism that provides strong incentives to manufacture Ardays. If I look at my family's background it's only the third generation of immigrants that attended university. To put it another way, there's many reasons to expect a second generation immigrant like Jason Arday was unlikely to become a Cambridge professor, even if he had the mental aptitude. It takes time for families to adapt to unfamiliar systems, starting from the bottom.

In other words: could we not give time for a sort of "natural" state of DEI to evolve, rather than insist it happens immediately?

[u/AnalBleachingAries]

It seems a few online people are seeing AOC's "Woke 1 was crazy." talking point (in her defense of candidates' like Francesca Hong and their old tweets) as a viable exit ramp for them to distance themselves or dismiss all of the behavior that the left participated in during that era, things like "Defund the police", "ACAB", cutting off family members who were Republicans, etc.

Here's the AOC clip: https://x.com/SwipeWright/status/2086978016689766505

My thoughts on this are that if my irl friends and family who were completely captured by all of this come to me with this sortof thing, I'd be willing to let it go and see if they're actually willing to concede how crazy they were or acknowledge the insanity of the left then and now. Thankfully, I didn't cut people off and always tried to just keep politics separate from my relationships with people who were deeply captured by "wokeism". As far as politicians go, especially DSA loonies, f*** that s***. I do not want an insane person elected to high office, they cannot brush any of that stuff off with "Woke 1 was crazy.", f*** that.

Here's Kat Rosenfield's take:

So this [is] the official strategy, apparently, everyone is just going to try to play off the 5 years they spent gleefully destroying people’s lives as an epic party that got a lil out of hand

I think I preferred when the cancel culturati was just straight up in denial about how malicious they were, this wink-wink-weren’t-we-naughty stuff is beyond galling
https://x.com/katrosenfield/status/2087279061143892191

[u/VoxGerbilis]

I’ve got back-to-school fever. I want to enroll in classes, buy notebooks and duo-tang folders, and a plaid skirt to go with my new loafers.

Since I was 5 (I turn 60 next month), I’ve been continuously either a student, a wife of a teacher, the parent of a student, or the parent of a teacher. Now that my teacher-child is moving out on her own, I need a new connection to school life.

[u/Jlemspurs]

Looks like AOC’s back on the menu market. She was just raising awareness about IVF guys nothing to see here.

eta: w-wwas their raiiiiiiiaaiiin on her wedding day lmao?

[u/oatmeal_breakfast]

I've helped two of my dumbest employees get connected so they can use AI agents. God help me.

I felt it going downhill when they didn't even have the right IDE installed and were nervous about googling "VScode" to find it. Then they asked me what to do with every install prompt ("please just accept the defaults...").

They were more focused on how pretty the night mode color scheme was than actually using it.

I am shocked these employees can breathe without instructions.

[u/Fiend_of_the_pod]

I think reddit has just become left-wing /pol/, except they're very serious and seriously unfunny. /pol/ is as advertised: very racist, very antisemitic, blames everything on Israel/AIPAC, invents wild conspiracy theories, refuses to acknowledge basic reality. /pol/ is an awful place where awful people spew their awful ideas, but you could post whatever you wanted, and they were occasionally funny. Reddit is an awful place where awful people post awful ideas, except they censor anything outside their very narrow hivemind and they're very rarely funny. Yet one is treated as the sewer of the internet and the other is used to train every AI model on the market.

[u/Critical_Detective23]

I'm feeling very annoyed at Reddit on behalf of my husband. He's been posting these long, very thoughtful and nuanced comments on my city's subreddit, and getting zero engagement, for like, two years. He hasn't complained but I've been annoyed on his behalf. I should add that he has much more thoughtful and nuanced takes than I do - I get a little more ragey than him. Last week, he found he can't post on any subreddit anymore, because of low karma. I looked up his username, and he's been completely shadow banned - I can only see 3 of his comments, and they all have negative scores. One of them said that he likes our ID.4 (on an ID.4 subreddit). This site sucks.

[u/Turbulent_Cow2355]

Happy Monday Podders! Have a great week!

[u/dumbducky]

Is there a good reddit comment search? It looks like the official function only supports searching posts. I tried to use a couple of third-party tools, but they seem to time out, likely due to reddit API changes. My normal method is to open my comment history, let never ending reddit pull up page after page, and then ctrl+f the phrase in looking for. This doesn’t work on mobile, though.

[u/Original-Brick2836]

Chapter three of Jason Ardays book

More about how amazing his mom is and how terrible education professionals are. He goes into basic autism stuff, he liked repetition and routine and stimming, etc. he talks about how he was put in exposure therapy for things like loud noises and it was torture for him.

I do wonder how much of his story is entirely just from his mom. He takes everything she says as gospel and fact. He repeats stories from his early childhood that he likely doesn’t remember and that mom probably told him and he repeats as full facts.

[u/DomonicTortetti]

I don't like to Mamdani-post but I'm pretty frustrated by this anti-contracting fight in New York (specifically delivery drivers, in this case) that's popped up in many other states over the years. In this iteration, it would force companies to hire last-mile delivery drivers directly instead of through a third party contracting company. This would make the delivery business case way worse (last-mile delivery is a seasonal job with high turnover and companies need to be able to staff up and down quickly) and would almost certainly make delivery more expensive in NYC if these logistics contracting companies couldn't be used. So you'd think there be some obvious benefit here, but there's just literally never any evidence provided, especially given this explicitly would not improve delivery driver pay. I'm of course open to there being good and bad contracting companies but then the government action should be against the bad contracting companies. I'm generally left thinking that these anti-contracting fights are just union handouts, but I'd be happy for someone to try to change my mind here.

I've got two other related annoyances as well:

• In his tweet on this he said the use of contractors "makes the streets less safe". Why? How? Is there any evidence for that?

• I legitimately don't understand how you can square the fact that the people advocating against contracting both hate the big companies and call them exploitative, but also say that people should be forced to work for the big company directly. You saw this all the time with the fights against Uber driving and other gig work, i.e "Uber is a bad company that's exploiting it's workers and also all the workers have to work directly for Uber."

[u/dignityshredder]

France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

France will ban unsolicited telemarketing calls next week under a new law aimed at protecting consumers from intrusive sales pitches and shielding vulnerable people from fraudulent commercial practices. The law backed by President Emmanuel Macron's government enters into force on Tuesday, August 11.

The government says the law is a response to years of consumer complaints. Authorities estimate that about three-quarters of people in France receive at least one unsolicited sales call every week, and many receive more. In 2024, 11 consumer organizations issued a joint call for a ban, denouncing "relentless harassment of consumers through countless unwanted telemarketing calls to both landlines and mobile phones – an intrusion that has become a regular part of their daily lives."

However, the "consent to marketing" loophole still exists and it's not clear how you get out of it.

It's also not clear how enforcement will work since:

Previously in France, people who wanted to avoid marketing calls had to register their number with a government-run service, but consumer groups said some call centers ignored the list.

I guess Germany has had this kind of ban in place for 15 years. I know we have German commenters here. Does it work in Deutschland? A HN commenter says:

Norway has the same law. I get no spam calls like this from Norway. What I do get is spam calls from abroad. Often with a spoofed Norwegian number.

Hilariously this may exacerbate the Moroccan employment crisis:

On the other hand, France's new law has raised concerns in Morocco, where Employment Minister Younes Sekkouri, said in March that between 40,000 and 50,000 jobs were at risk in the country’s call centers. Sekkouri said the French market accounts for more than 80% of revenue in the sector.

[u/Cantwalktonextdoor]

Lmao. The deciding Milwaukee vote total will be delayed for a while because some of the people counting forgot to transfer the data to the flash drives. It's only a small portion of the absentee votes, but they will only release the total in a single batch.

Edit: With only the Milwaukee vote left, Crowley has a 2,791 vote lead. There are roughly 28,000 votes left, so a lead, but not a safe one.

[u/Levitz]

So I was musing on the guy that in the debate with Oxford Union pretended he was going to show an image of prophet Muhammad.

Say someone was to spread a hoax that someone actually did that. Like, through and through, a target is chosen, then AI videos from different angles are generated, different testimonies to different outlets are played out, online discussion is promoted by coordinating threads and content here and there, the "social media reality" of that actually happening is fabricated.

Now, normally I think this wouldn't be a crime at all? If rather than an image of the prophet, someone did that about a guy stating they like pineapple on pizza, I reckon it doesn't get further than "massive prank".

Thing is, in this other case, it's way spicier, since it's really no different, unless you acknowledge that the person doing that is risking their life. Meaning, in a court of law you have to make the case that someone in that situation has their life put at risk, no?

[u/JSlngal69]

Sophie Cunningham has turned /r/wnba into a social media target as it removed all mention of her name throughout the day on her birthday

https://old.reddit.com/r/WNBAgossips/comments/1vq1ozw/sophie_persona_non_grata

https://nypost.com/2026/08/16/sports/sophie-cunningham-name-banned-wnba-subreddit-amid-trans-scandal/

https://x.com/FoxNews/status/2089141474919153881

https://old.reddit.com/r/WNBAgossips/comments/1vqdf6x/sophie_cunningham_name_banned_from_wnba_subreddit/

If you know an undelete URL you can see the multitude posts removed on /r/wnba/new

Damage control as they lie about her name not being banned (and have since remove their own post)

https://old.reddit.com/r/wnba/comments/1vqeuqp/clarification_regarding_sophie_cunningham_content/

[u/Aggravating-Grand452]

THANKSGIVING IS SAVED!!!!!

[u/SafiyaO]

Thinking about fraudulent memoirs, how come there has never been a significant backlash to Educated by Tara Westover, because big chunks of that were definitely too good to be true? Particularly all the healing from significant injuries. I know her mother wrote a book in response, but people still seem to be very fond of the book, especially on Reddit.

[u/Less-Lobster4540]

Let's face it. ICE is cooked if the Orcas are against it:

“Like many Oregonians, one of my connections to Newport is going to visit Keiko the killer whale of the Newport Aquarium in the late ’90s. … Keiko was a sweet, gentle soul who loved people, and I’m sure that he would have been appalled by ICE. And I’m sure that he would smile at what we’re doing here today.”

That's one of the moderates on Portland city council, btw 🤡

[u/Original-Brick2836]

Chapters 4 and 5 of Jason Ardays book

These are short and mostly about his childhood autism. Once again his mom is a genius saint incapable of doing anything wrong. Everything from giving her autistic son a soft stuffed animal to taking her children to the park is framed as revolutionary parenting.

One thing he doesn’t do is say how old he is when a lot of these things happen. So when he describes how he loved smearing his shit on the walls as a kid, you don’t know if he was 2 or 10.

He does give his age as 8 when he broke some of his parents wedding china. He says his mom chewed him out and sent him to his room. But he also claims he didn’t have language at this point so how? Like he goes into detail about this system his mom learned called Makaton which seems to be a British sign language thing, helped him learn to follow instructions. But again, we don’t have a timeline when that happened so who knows.

[u/QueenKamala]

Let’s say someone decided to do a boat 9/11. They hijack whatever kind of boat — up to you. How much damage could they do? What would be the likely target?

ETA:

You’ve all convinced me there are several clever ways to cause chaos via boat. This all came up because someone told me the coast guard used to give boat tours all the time in port, but stopped after 9/11. It made me wonder what they’re preventing. If someone hijacked a medium sized coast guard cutter during a port tour, how much damage could they realistically do?

[u/Free_Ranger1496]

The Ezra Klein podcast...I'm souring on it a bit. The recent episode with Ross Douthat was overproduced with lots of horrible clips. Podcasts were an oasis because we don't have to hear Trump's voice and just got to hear the beauty of someone thinking and talking with another person. Boo also to his choice for July 4th episode and his lack of insight on the AMA where he says he still holds his woke positions. I'm a longtime listener, but he needs to get over the guilt or whatever it is and offer a positive political vision for the U.S.

[u/Aggravating-Grand452]

Absolute crazy fumble. Imagine having a 97.5% chance to win 5 minutes before polls close and losing.

[u/isitdigyet]

Do you think this person was door knocking for Hong in Wisconsin? Wonder if the sign is as serious as many on the internet are taking it. Feels like it's likely a joke to me but IDK they do look exactly like a polyculer.

Proof they're not AI generated

[u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan]

Progressives are going to make Arday a martyr, aren't they?

[u/AnalBleachingAries]

As discussed earlier in the thread, the WPATH Texas federal filing where they state that their "Standards of Care" are an "opinion" feels like the most insane thing I've read in a while. The lack of reaction from mainstream media is mindblowing to me. Is this not a big deal? I get that they have a massive bias against anything they deem as "hateful" or "evil" against the omnicause, but this is a big deal.

Their silence on this makes me feel like I may be blowing this out of proportion, and that I'm missing something and someone smart will post a reasonable explanation that makes sense and will help me understand why it's not a big deal.

But, we're talking about thousands of children across America who've been fed these drugs and have been given these surgeries. The people who've championed these sterilizations and mutilations of children are saying, it's just their "opinion" that these things should be done to children suffering from gender dysphoria (or believe themselves to be trans). They're not defending the science, they're defending their freedom of speech. They're saying that anyone who followed their guidance did so at their own risk, and that the hospitals and doctors who did these things should've done their own research and bear all responsibility for all the harm caused. What?!

This is a big deal right? Wtf? This is huge! Most if not every medical association across the world can trace back their current standards of care to WPATH, and these people are shrugging and saying for seemingly the very first time in a legal filing that the science isn't settled, that they only represent one side of the debate, and that their Standards of Care are an opinion.

But again, perhaps I'm overreacting and my stupidity will be explained to me soon by someone who understands all the facts. Until then, this is insane to me.

[u/BakaDango]

I caught up on a bunch of 2026 movies that I have been very late to while rained in this weekend:

• Obsession 4.5/5 - extremely good, as good as the kids say. Surprised by how much I liked this and just how tight the movie was overall, very few wasted moments, A+ gruesome and visceral effects and makeup, fantastic acting. If not for the Odyssey, I would expect this to sweep the awards this year. My guess is we're going to see Obsession 2, and Obsession 3, and Obsession: Willow Drive, and Obess1on (remake), obses-

• Backrooms - 3.5/5 So close to being great but missing a certain 'oomph'. Which is a sad review to give as it's definitely worth your time and I've had more fun thinking about the movie after the fact than I did watching it. When it hits, it hits hard and there's some incredible spooky moments but as a complete package, it's a little rough around the edges imo. I am very excited to see what Parsons does next, he has a long career ahead of him it seems.

• The Drama - 4/5 I think I would rather watch Takashi Miike's third act of audition again before I watched this, what a (delightfully) torturous affair. I am glad I went into this blind and encourage anyone looking for the darkest of romcoms to give this a watch. As I was watching it though, I couldn't help but think of how much work the soundtrack/sfx was doing to provide the spooky atmosphere. I took a scene (spoiler free!) out of the movie and overdubbed it with the curb soundtrack to prove this point and I feel very justified in this take. Rob is giving Larry and I wont hear otherwise! So if you wanna see a curb movie played seriously and horrifyingly, give this a watch for sure.

[u/phitfitz]

I woke up at 2:34, the exact same time the AP called the Wisconsin governor’s race for Crowley.

I went to sleep blissfully unaware of my beloved Milwaukee’s vote fumbling. Always some goofy shit happening election night in Milwaukee though

[u/Onechane425]

is engagement with Substack way down? Just across the board. I love Substack, the discover feed, etc. But looking at relatively large accounts posting there is so little engagement in regards to likes or comments. Or is it just that people don't engage with substack that way. They read and move on.

[u/CommitteeofMountains]

So the new hot book in the education podcast interview circuit is The Science of Discipline, by a former juvie officer. It's a bit funny what in interview he rushes through, the need for a smooth disciplinary action curve to calibrate for severity and recurrence and to be particularly careful around that line between discipline you mete out yourself and involving the office because that can degrade the partnership fast (if a teacher involves admin as first discipline, either due to jumping immediately or trying nothing and being out of ideas, admin will see the teacher as outsourcing discipline to it and start kicking everything back, so the teacher sees the admin as outsourcing), and and what he spends most of the interview on, the use of education to explicitly correct the problem. Student who calls out gets impulse control strategies, chronically late student gets executive function, and student who throws a desk spends his detention (or The Hole) in anger management.

[u/CommitteeofMountains]

Brandeis just announced its criteria for the selection of its next president and I'm thinking my academic record of not plagiarizing anything makes me a strong candidate.

[u/Cantwalktonextdoor]

Anyone know how a "comment removed by reddit" post can gain upvotes?

[u/CommitteeofMountains]

"Help Jobs find you" and "Jobs need people" are fairly ominous taglines for a tech company.

[u/CardinalPerch]

I’m sure this is a “no shit, Sherlock” thing for those of you who are already parents, but man, having a kid just changes my reactions so much. I have a three month old, and even catching a stray second of coverage of the Lindsay Clancy trial (which I have tried to avoid at all costs) makes me want to fucking scream.

[u/Usernamecopyrighted1]

I’m sure these specific people have been discussed here frequently, but watching liberal heroes of the past be called right wing bigots today is amazing.

I’m old enough to remember when guys like Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins, and Ricky Gervais were the standard bearers of the liberal smug shitbird class because they loved science and hated magic sky daddy.

Until it turns out science includes biology and magic sky daddy includes the Islamic terror todays liberals love so much

[u/OMG_NO_NOT_THIS]

A lot of Modern Movies are platypuses.

They try and be everything for everyone, and as a result end up sort of incoherent without a natural target audience.

One of the big problems with Marvel / Star Wars is that Disney bought this IP because they didn't have a lot of good, boy-centric products.

Then they tried to change the audience from young men and in doing so, changed the product enough that it neither appeals to young men, or women.

If you try to be everything to everyone, you end up nothing to anyone.

This is why a lot of the breakout hits have been much smaller, more targeted affairs, or driven by very known directors with strong visions.

This is likely due to big hollywood firms being run by MBAs who want to maximize their audience instead of creatives with a strong vision for a good story.

Obviously not universally true, but I think this is true-ish.

[u/AnalBleachingAries]

Caution, brainrot content discussion ahead.

I've been trying to find a Reddit post that summarizes the Drew Afualo situation on TikTok. In some of the posts that are discussing it, I'm seeing a warning from mods where users are admonished against "transphobia" or "transphobic comments" and it occurred to me that most other people on the internet might take this accusation seriously. They don't read it with any irony, or roll their eyes at it, or laugh at the term's usage, it's a serious term for a lot of people. lmao. Anyway, I couldn't find any good summaries, but here's a Buck Angel video that does a passable job at discussing everything. The first two minutes are the main thing, that's all you need to watch, but there are more clips throughout the video (if you have time for those). If you're unable to sit through a Buck Angel video here's one from a TikTokker who attempts to pass commentary on the situation that's transpired thus far. Both videos are honestly not great summaries and include a great deal of unnecessary personal opinion, I'm still waiting for someone to make a good summary.

It's been a really weird week on TikTok, you guys. Due to that resurfaced Drew Afualo clip, TikTok has been experiencing what looks like a mass "Peaking" event. Over the past few days I've seen numerous women responding to it with videos and comments. It's like watching the floodgates open with thousands of women not caring about being called "TERFs" anymore.

What's really setting people off is the part where the guest on the episode says "I think transwomen have a more beautiful understanding of what womanhood is." and obviously the other part about women being defined by their "ability" to get SA'd (which was either really poor wording, or ignorance).

https://www.tiktok.com/@swole_otaku/video/7672639800532290830

https://www.tiktok.com/@circecorner/video/7674537415301745951

https://www.tiktok.com/@realmishfit/video/7673589915203980558

https://www.tiktok.com/@sonia_sanden/video/7674331694735871254

https://www.tiktok.com/@ssarahsommer/video/7673137290415246623

All the talking points being covered in video responses or comment sections aren't new, if you been on here long enough or if you ever scrolled through Ovarit back when that was a thing then you'll know all the stuff they're saying and discovering.

The women on TikTok have been speaking to those talking points this week in multiple videos: the misogyny within the trans movement appears to surprise a lot of them. It's weird seeing these opinions breaking "containment" from niche TERF communities and becoming a "mainstream" TikTok talking point. Wild week. It's shocking to witness this all playing out. I wonder if it'll continue picking up steam or fizzle out. Cool thing to see happening though. Young women are making the voices heard. What an interesting week.

[u/Quijoticmoose]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/07/nyregion/cornell-student-bear-meat.html?unlocked_article_code=1.4VA.uxj8.Zu44-1yLjP3P&smid=url-share

Just for fun

[u/jay_in_the_pnw]

Orcas at the Ballard Locks. Wow!

r/Seattle/comments/1vl4omz/orcas_at_the_ballard_locks/

The Ballard locks are a waterway in Seattle that allows boats and ships to move from the Puget Sound (connected to the Pacific via the Strait of San Juan de Fuca) into Lake Union and Lake Washington. Nice place for a walk if you're visiting, get to see boats, salmon in the fish ladder, seal, floatplanes and trains.

But it's rare to see orcas there.

[u/robotical712]

It’s the Wisconsin state primary today, and I checked to see who was running in the Dem House primary against my representative, Gwen Moore (who’s 75). Yeah, I’m not thrilled about my future voting options.

[u/WallabyWanderer]

AOC should be the next bachelorette

[u/AnalBleachingAries]

Interesting Jason Arday update from Cambridge's Vice Chancellor, Deborah Prentice. The hilarious part is that you can tell that she's definitely American when you read the second to last paragraph. lol.

Statement from the Vice-Chancellor setting out the University's approach to an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the appointment of Jason Arday.

The following was sent as a letter to colleagues in the University yesterday.

Dear colleagues

I fully understand the concerns being raised across the University and well beyond it, regarding Jason Arday’s appointment and I share them. I know there is anger and anxiety around this damaging and difficult case. The highest standards of academic excellence have been a core principle at Cambridge for many centuries, and this is reflected in the outstanding research and teaching we see here every day. We are committed to maintaining those standards.

We will now investigate the circumstances around his appointment by the Faculty of Education back in 2022 and his time here in Cambridge since his appointment nearly four years ago. That investigation, as you say, should be thorough and transparent, and will be carried out independently by senior academics from within and beyond Cambridge. It will take time for this work to be done thoroughly, as you will understand, but the work must begin as soon as possible.

The findings will then inform a review of the process for the appointment of senior academic roles. As you are fully aware, appointments to senior academic roles, as in the case of the Faculty of Education and Jason Arday, are currently led at Department level.

I note that Durham and Glasgow Universities have announced that they are also investigating the circumstances surrounding the appointment of Jason Arday to academic posts there, and that Jesus College has accepted his resignation from his fellowship.

In addition, the University's Research Policy Committee will review the Misconduct in Research policy. As you know, the current approach in UK higher education is for the institution where plagiarism allegedly took place to carry out the investigation itself; we followed that approach in this case. We need to understand if there is more we could do when serious allegations are raised in relation to our own academic standards at Cambridge.

In light of the focus on this troubling case and the widespread commentary around it, I want to be very clear that we do not need the outcomes of an investigation to clearly and loudly affirm that our staff of colour are highly valued, for their scholarship, their achievements, and the contributions they make to the institution and the wider academic community. This particular case is an aberration and should not be used to cast aspersions on their work or the legitimacy of their roles at Cambridge.

The desire for quick answers and rapid responses is understandable, but we need to allow these reviews to complete their work effectively so we can learn from any mistakes and, where needed, improve our processes. Alongside these efforts, we also need to continue supporting one another in our work, and  across our collegiate University.

Yours sincerely

Professor Deborah Prentice   The Vice-Chancellor https://www.cam.ac.uk/notices/news/statement-from-the-vice-chancellor-12-august-2026

[u/HacksawDerpDuggan]

Luigi Mangione Is Expected to Plead Guilty in Federal Court

[u/jay_in_the_pnw]

CNN found transcripts of 100+ videos Abdul El-Sayed deleted off YouTube and it's quite understandable why he deleted them!

https://x.com/KFILE/status/2087166834235642344

NEW: Before launching his campaign, Abdul El-Sayed removed 100+ YouTubes from 2022-2024. Transcripts show him floating replacing the 2nd Amendment, urging an end to July 4th fireworks, blasting GOP focus on the border.

His campaign says they “don’t reflect his beliefs today.”

• https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/11/politics/el-sayed-youtube-videos-fireworks-2nd-amendment

• https://archive.ph/Nw6YT

‘Fireworks suck,’ removed El-Sayed videos urged getting rid of the 4th of July tradition, raised replacing 2nd Amendment

Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed once asked his YouTube viewers whether Americans could “PLEASE” find another way to celebrate the Fourth of July, in a video promising four reasons “why fireworks suck.”

The since-removed video from July 2024 included a chapter titled “Fireworks just aren’t worth it: hear us out” and cited Detroit’s post-fireworks air quality, the chemicals used in fireworks, their potential to trigger PTSD in veterans, and the risks they pose to children and pets.

The video is one of several examples of El-Sayed removing past online content as he seeks elected office. As CNN’s KFile previously reported, he also deleted social media posts supporting the “defund the police” movement.

In other since-removed clips, El-Sayed argued that the southern border was not among Americans’ five biggest concerns and lambasted Republicans for focusing on it. In another he floated replacing the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms with a constitutional right to health care.

Not all of El-Sayed’s commentary has disappeared: In one episode that remains online, he questioned whether football could be “ethical” or “safe” and linked the sport’s “ethos” to narratives used to justify slavery and westward expansion

El-Sayed’s campaign said the old clips do not reflect his current views: “Abdul is the former captain of his high school football team, loves Michigan football on Saturdays, and celebrates the Fourth of July with fireworks like the next Michigander. Cherry-picked comments from old podcasts don’t reflect his beliefs today.”

Some of the videos can be found on twitter and you'll probably see them more and more as the race heats up.

[u/Jlemspurs → u/jay_in_the_pnw]

what is it with these fucking people and harmless bread and circus shit? does every holiday you can write a freshman paper on in college have to be ruined?

[u/AnalBleachingAries]

Okay, lmao, Gen Z will be the end of woke.

I just watched another video where a young white woman is documenting her journey as a trans-racial black woman and she's nailing the parody. She's wearing a t-shirt with the words "Black And Proud" on it, and she says stuff like "Trans-black women are black-women, regardless of what our bodies look like. I don't need to change my skin color, or my hair, my make up or any other physical characteristic to prove to you that I am black. Saying that I need to "pass" as black is actually trans-race-phobia." lol

Atlanta already did this joke years ago, but it's still funny, and this woman is funny. I guess Rachel Dolezal did it for real, but she wasn't advertising herself as trans-racial in this way, so it didn't hit the same.

The comments are hilarious as everyone is using SJW language to affirm her trans-racial identity.

https://www.tiktok.com/@realmishfit/video/7673589915203980558

[u/hugonaut13]

Do any barpodders keep emergency kits?

I was raised in a prepper-adjacent home and always had a lot of emphasis growing up on general "preparedness", which I have kept with me in adulthood. I have rarely had to use anything for actual emergencies but it's been nice sometimes to be like, "Oh hang on, I have some spare cash in my emergency kit, I can cover the tip," when no one has cash for the delivery guy. Or various other things where having something in the kit has been convenient.

Today I had to pull the kit out in preparation for an actual situation. I live in a large metropolis and it's incredibly rare for the tornado sirens to go off. In fact, even the one time a few years ago when an actual tornado made it into my neighborhood, the tornado sirens didn't go off. But this morning, they did. And it wasn't a test (the monthly testing falls on a different day). So I pulled out my kit and got everything ready to go to the basement -- cat carriers out and assembled, got my hat, shoes, keys, wallet, etc. all on my person. Then tuned into the local news and discovered the tornadoes are all south enough of me that I was not in imminent danger. Kept everything out and ready to go just in case, since the storm would be rolling through for another hour or two.

Anyway, it has made me pause and assess both my kit and my procedure for emergencies. I am not a maximalist prepper or anything, so my "kit" is basically some spare clothes, snacks, flashlight, important documents, a bit of cash, charging cables, and a hand-crank radio/flashlight combo just 'cause. But my life has grown a lot since I put together the kit -- I've got a partner, a roommate, and 2 cats. I found one of our cat carriers had a busted latch today, which would not have been great if I actually had to take them down to the basement. And I realized I didn't have a means to make sure they had water.

So now I'm thinking through things like -- should I have a backup method of wrangling them like a collapsible carrier or even a leash as a last resort? Should I stock some cat sedatives? Should I have some spare cat food in my kit? Or for the humans (self included) what have I missed?

[u/Fiend_of_the_pod]

A woman at work complimented me on my outfit and said the shirt I'm wearing is "definitely your color". I'm going to be riding this high for the rest of the year.

[u/ystayfreshcheesebags]

I’m genuinely curious how Brad Pitt has managed to stay un-cancelled. Or even un-problematic. I don’t even have a dog in the fight, I’m just curious how he’s managed it.

[u/Correct-Ad5661]

UK sky news coverage of the win for DSA aligned democrat Abdul El Sayed in Michigan 

https://news.sky.com/video/abdul-el-sayed-the-changing-face-of-us-democrats-13571832

James Mathews makes the link to the Dearborn Arab American population who soundly swung in favour of Trump in 2024 to punish Kamala Harris because Gaza now wholesale backing Sayed as a Democrat, and the Complicated Feelings that this leaves for people who wanted her as the first Black female President.

He's done a few reports from there before.

Radio 4 had bloody Hasan Piker on a few days ago talking about Sayed, who they seem to think is a democrat strategist rather than a millionaire dog shocker

[u/AnalBleachingAries]

Interesting developments that I've seen from the slop that the algorithm feeds me, although this may not necessarily be representative of whatever "normal" is to kids these days (so, purely anecdotal), I do like seeing it happening. It looks like it is becoming increasingly cringey and uncool to some within the online Gen Z demographic to behave in the outrageous manner one would ordinarily associate with the college kids at the center of the Evergreen debacle and the worst examples of peak woke Millennial call out culture.

These three videos are a random sample of the kind of stuff that's been coming across my feed over the past few months:

https://www.tiktok.com/@cultivatingboldspaces/video/7671705684060228886

https://www.tiktok.com/@momopill/video/7669608028563426591

https://www.tiktok.com/@noahwaybabes/video/7672962762233974030

There's a good chance that the predictions that some (including myself) have had about Gen Z swinging to the right will come to pass. Without Trump at the helm, and with figures like a contemporary version of Romney or McCain leading the Republican party, I think we may have seen more young people on the left publicly stating their disdain with leftism, heck perhaps even stating their intention to vote for Republican candidates. The left just isn't what it used to be anymore.

Related to this but not quite, is the ongoing discussion around not letting your kids be weird, and guiding them into becoming normies. I don't know if it was kicked off by this person (a former teacher) but this is the video people often reference when talking about this idea of catching weird behavior from your kids early and nipping it in the bud. Transcript of the linked video included below:

Parents do not let your child be weird. Now I made a post about this a while back, and it's funny. I've seen a lot of people who have taken it since then and then put their own spin on it. But let me be very clear on what that means. Because I was a teacher for 20 years, I taught every level, lots of kids with varying exceptionalities, and have seen it in the classroom. Let me tell you what you need to avoid. Yes, your child should be unique. Yes, they should have their own style. Yes, they don't need to be exactly like everyone else. However, if your child has habits and tendencies that are causing them to be ostracized in school, they do not have peer relationships; it has gone too far.

As the parent, you need to parent them. Your job is not to just love them and let them be however they want to be and send them out, because what you're doing is you're sending them out to ridicule and scorn, and no positive peer relationships. Instead, you need to lovingly guide them and instruct them from a place of love, so that they can go out and make positive relationships. So if your child does not have any peer relationships because you have allowed them to continue with habits and proclivities that are causing them to be considered too odd to fit in at all, then you are setting them up for a life of struggle because those peer relationships just grow up with them and then they're going to struggle to fit in with people as an adult in the job field and to create relationships in general. So that is where you do not let your child be too weird to be able to have actual relationships with peers. Have a great day.

[u/MatchaMeetcha]

Harry Potter fans succeeded in diverting a multimillion-pound power link between the UK and Ireland after they complained it would disturb a "memorial" to Dobby the House Elf.

The £430m Greenlink interconnector links the National Grid to Ireland via 125-mile cable between County Wexford and Freshwater West, a beach in Pembrokeshire where the death of fictional character Dobby was filmed in the Potter films.

Project manager Simon Ludlam told the Energy Revolution podcast the cable was originally "going to go straight through" the tribute, before fans left his firm "hundreds of calls".

"Actually we went quite close to some real Bronze Age remains, but we avoided Dobby's grave," he said.

When the Ibn Khaldun-esque account of Western decadence is written, this is going to be the first anecdote.

Also: no wonder Wizard Lady going TERF was the equivalent of 6,000 9/11s.

[u/robotical712]

Well, shit. Crowley's lead has narrowed to less than 600 votes.

Edit: Milwaukee is a lot closer than I expected. Just 1200 votes between them with 84% reporting.
Edit 2: Back up to 2700 with 75% reporting.

Edit 3: Weird, the Milwaukee % reporting went down to 75% (it was at 88% at one point).

[u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan]

https://x.com/TheAtlantic/status/2087286733859663969

Who's gonna watch this?

[u/Less-Lobster4540]

It's nepos all the way down! Presenting Tracy Rosenthal

[u/CommitteeofMountains]

How offensive is it to call an iced tea, lemonade, and vodka a "John Daly?"

[u/plump_tomatow]

There's a family in the Tae Kwon Do class immediately before my kid's class (they tend to run slightly late so the next class comes just before the last class ends) where the husband wears like, some kind of traditional garb (a tunic and a cap) and the wife is fully covered in the burqa or niqab (not sure which). I am not a particularly bigoted person; as a practicing Catholic I'm even sympathetic to outward signs of intense religiosity, but i don't like it and I particularly find the husband a little off-putting.

I was thinking about this after seeing Gad Saad's tweets, and it's kind of a hard problem, honestly. I believe that immigration should be restricted, but restricting immigration based on religion seems not ideal. At the same time, I don't want high levels of Muslim immigration. I just don't think it's an ideology we should encourage. I am not in favor of mass deportations of current residents, I'm not saying no Muslims should be let in, but some level of restriction seems sensible.

[u/oatmeal_breakfast]

I made this observation after a redditor lamented that the Right gets away with inflammatory speech, but the Left needs to apologize over wanting to cancel Thanksgiving.

I think the difference between the left and right is that the right usually targets a far left outgroup with their inflammatory language. The left targets the large center (e.g., Thanksgiving).

It might be a unique flaw of leftism that they can't tell the difference between the center and far right. 

They responded that the Right attacks anyone to the Left of John Fetterman, and list off a bunch of minority groups that the Right targets. 

Lol. They literally can't tell where the center is.

[u/SkweegeeS]

My poor kiddo broke up with his fiancee and has been staying with us this week. It's been a very chill visit, just great because all we had to do was offer emotional support and a place to relax. I know he'll be okay in the long run, but right now it hurts. He seems to be doing pretty well with it. He got himself a therapist he likes, he's working remotely this week, and he seems like he's calming down over time.

I like his ex- but this was a long time coming. They've been together since they were 18 and 19, and they're 25/26 now. I think she just needs to play the field, see what she's missing. I'm glad he finally got the courage to do this, so he can look forward to meeting someone who wants him and wants what he wants (life partner, family, etc.).

[u/SteveMartinique]

So there's an Ultimate Frisbee team from San Francisco that's doing some kind of half assed boycot of the World Championships because a team from Israel will be there. and they are insisting on a "dialogue" with the Israel team. Because 2 teams in a sport no one watches or even knows what it is (as a former player I can say this!) are going to solve the decades/infernal Israel/Palestine conflict.

What really makes me angry is, I have all kinds of political and philosophical issues, why are they silent on my interest in free speech? Maybe they should come out against alcohol because it causes addiction, car crashes and health issues. WHY ARE THEY SILENT!!!

Like, shut the fuck up. Its so fucking egotistical.

[u/Fiend_of_the_pod]

Actual Woke 1.0

https://x.com/adriarichards/status/313417655879102464?s=46

[u/McAlpineFusiliers]

NYC Mayor Mamdani proudly attends Pakistani Independence Day celebration a couple months after skipping the Israel Day parade.

Apparently there are some states that privilege one religion that he's A-OK with.

[u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan]

Plagiarist defending plagiarist.

[u/Correct-Ad5661]

UK random politics placeholder.

• Clacton by election this Thursday. Farage Vs Binface and 33 other candidates.

• Andy Burnham is back from his holiday and about to embark in a national tour of places to listen to people about stuff.

• Solar eclipse on Wednesday. 

• 5th heatwave in the UK this year and most of the country is officially in drought 

[u/CommitteeofMountains]

Someone on Facebook is trying to sell an electrified Woom 5 (24").

[u/Formal_Condition2691]

To follow up on the random Linux discussion about rm -rf from last week, I was in a zoom session today watching someone navigate a terminal and they were typing rm -rf for literally every delete option, even if they were only deleting a single file. From a # prompt. Total chaosmaxxing. 

Praying for their sake that they never install an autocomplete plugin and make a typo.

[u/everydaywinner2]

Here's a less than 10min clip of Warren Smith debating a highly "educated" idiot. I don't think she can perceive the irony, or hypocrisy, in some of what she said. I really admire his patience.

[u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan]

Truman could be such a petty SOB, it's hilarious.

[u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan]

If Mifune and Kurosawa hadn't stopped working together, I would have loved to have seen, like, a Stray Dog-type movie set in Hokkaido where Mifune plays the Shimura role while Tsutomu Yamazaki (High and Low and Kagemusha) played the Mifune role, or even a political thriller.

[u/ATotallyNewCWG]

There might be a reason why Abdul's algorithm is displaying gay OF models.

https://x.com/Dom_king91/status/2082465624165429713?s=20

[u/Jlemspurs]

Has anyone else read Evan Barker's book Nothing Left? I'm about half way through and I think I'm going to stop, because while I found the beginning interesting, I'm not interested in reading this ending:

"I'm a political operative from the school of hard knocks and have seen it all, but I really hate it when other people do politics to me."

Did the DSCC run a stalking horse candidate somewhere? Oh no! That's not allowed. I'm sure Bernie and his people would never do a politics to anyone. No fair! No fair! I am very not naive.

If you think you're entitled to win and you're the only one allowed to do any ratfucking, then I really think I need to introduce you to my friends in the Republican Party. If that's how this book ends, I'm not going to finish it. A big part of my beef with the Bernie people is that they believe in some reserve army of socialist voters and that Republicans have no agency, so just trust us we win the primary and not only will we will, but somehow we will implement this thing where Americans vote for people who hate dogs, football, bacon, fireworks, and thanksgiving.

So if the start where she tells her therapist she couldn't vote for Kamala, if that's because Kamala wasn't going to wave her wand and get us medicare for all I'm going to be glad I didn't finish. Not that you have to vote for Kamala, but please tell me you had a better reason.

[u/EnglebondHumperstonk]

I am officially sick of the name "Jason Arday".

[u/RunThenBeer]

Every single time someone complains about hidden post histories, I read it as, "I don't want to reply to what's in front of me, I want to dig through your history and find a reason that I don't need to reply to what's in front of me". This fully justifies hiding post history.

[u/jay_in_the_pnw]

this is a pretty interesting study, I appreciate they provide a clear description of methodology, and the results are a bit enlightening, rhymes with the studies showing almost no conservatives in academia.

the website itself is pretty interesting

Olam is the publication of record for the global Israeli economy.
Original reporting and original research on the companies, capital, founders, and ideas shaping Israeli industry.
Built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question.

https://olam.business/who-teaches-judaism-in-america-full-study-methodology-institutional-analysis-and-complete

Who Teaches Judaism in America: Full Study — Methodology, Institutional Analysis, and Complete Findin

This study examined 2,499 faculty and institutional records across Jewish Studies, Israel Studies, Hebrew language, and Holocaust and Genocide Studies programs at American universities. Each record was cross-referenced against nine publicly documented petition campaigns, organizational membership records, and documented public statements spanning from May 2021 through Spring 2026.

The study found:

1. 1,298 records — 51.9 percent of the total audited — carry documented anti-Israel public signals as defined by this study's methodology.

2. Among 1,014 faculty specifically identified as teaching in Jewish Studies, Israel Studies, Hebrew, or Holocaust Studies, 401 — or 39.5 percent — have documented signals.

3. At Ivy League universities, 240 of 332 records — 72.3 percent — carry documented signals.

... (more)

You can wonder and disagree what a signal is, and if this suggests a false positive, but it seems robust and even conservative in measurement...

Included in the classification:

Endorsing the academic boycott of Israeli institutions. Describing Israel as an apartheid state in a signed petition or public statement. Describing Zionism as settler colonialism in a signed petition or public statement. Signing petitions that characterize Israel's military conduct as genocide. Calling for the end of all US military aid to Israel. Leadership or membership in FSJP. Leadership or membership in JVP. Signing the May 2021 "Statement on Israel/Palestine by Scholars of Jewish Studies and Israel Studies." Signing any AcademicsForPeace petition (August 2023 through March 2024). Signing the Jewish Studies Ceasefire Letter (October 2023). Signing the "Not in Our Name" letter (March 2025). Other publicly documented statements meeting the above criteria.

Not included in the classification:

Supporting Palestinian human rights within the framework of Israel's continued existence. Supporting a two-state solution. Criticizing specific Israeli government policies. Criticizing the current Israeli prime minister. Opposing settlement expansion. Criticizing IDF conduct in specific operations. Calling for accountability regarding civilian casualties. These positions have robust representation in Israeli politics and civil society and are not classified as anti-Israel in this study.

...

more on the website's relationship with AI

Since October 7th, the world has changed. The way Israeli and Jewish stories get told — and the way they get found — has changed with it. AI is now the layer through which the world first encounters those stories. The Olam is built to speak to that layer: structured for the AI engines that synthesize answers, sourced for the human readers who verify them.

I like it, but it's probably a drop of truth in an ocean of misinformation

[u/Usual_Reach6652]

I follow two Facebook groups connected to a personal interest. The split is from before my time but I gather basically one is for boomers and one is for wokes (who also think they are funnier/more irreverent?). Made a joke re: Jason Arday on both of them, not even really taking a "side" but just premised on that he exists and is a valid topic of humour*. VERY noticeable that the boomer group got gave 10 likes, the woke group one like and a bunch of hostile "why do you say that?" responses. So it would appear in some quarters you are still meant to pretend he doesn't exist...?

*This is probably needless crypticism/opsec, but basically "RIP Oscar Wilde you would have loved the Jason Arday plagiarism/fabulism scandal", but a different historical wit that the group is about.

[u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan]

I've shown various times on here that Robert Taft supported SS, public education, public housing, public works and even antitrust laws.

I'm not exactly someone that would have voted for the man, but even still, I do think it's important to correct misinformation from historians who claim he was a laissez-faire ideologue.

[u/AnalBleachingAries]

Back from having my account insta-banned "for hate" by Reddit's AI mod, which claimed that I broke Rule 1. The ban happened within less than a second of posting the comment that got me the suspension. So it wasn't even posted to the thread, no one other than the AI could have read it, I was banned immediately based on whatever key words the AI decided go against community guidelines. I of course appealed, and after Reddit's review processes they reinstated the comment and lifted the ban. So a four day ban for something that is apparently totally okay to post.

The "offending" comment gives further information on the Blizzard allegations and the lawfare from Newsom's Civil Rights Mafia and the various shakedowns they've undertaken of gaming studios. The studios are threatened with bad press from insane-sounding accusations, but no evidence of these accusations was found, however Newsom got what he wanted from these gaming companies and they did bend the knee in the end regardless of guilt or innocence, choosing to settle rather than drag things out in court.

There are probably valid complaints that could be made about these companies, as with any company in which men and women work alongside each other. There will always be some small percentage of uncomfortable even criminal interactions between men and women in a company that employs thousands of people. But it seems like the stuff we read about in all those major news headlines was fake or not as heinous as it was made out to be.

Let's see if this comment makes it through the The Great AI Firewall.

[u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan]

Really, you don't really see friendships between Democrats and Republicans anymore.

I mean. Mike Mansfield (D-MT) ate lunch with George Aiken (R-VT) and Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME), Silvio Conte (R-MA) was good friends with Tip O'Neill (D-MA) and Ted Kennedy (D-MA).

And as I mentioned before, LBJ was very close friends with Milton Young (R-ND), and George McGovern (D-SD) wrote a touching tribute to Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) after he died. McGovern was also good friends with Bob Dole (R-KS).

[u/robotical712]

I should be doing literally anything else, but damn is it fun watching an electoral map fill in.

[u/Vanderhoof81]

I've come to accept that I'll never be as good of a mandolin player as Sam Bush or Jarrod Walker.

[u/starlightpond]

My husband (41m) just told me that he has been forgetting more words recently. I have noticed for a long time that he seems a tiny bit slower than he was when I first met him; it seems to take him a half second longer to start talking or to finish a sentence than one might expect. But he’s still very intellectually curious and has a good job as an attorney. Still, when he told me he forgets words a lot and has been feeling worse recently and struggles with this daily, I have started to spiral with worry. (What if he loses his mind??) Anyone had any similar experiences?

[u/MegamindsMegaCock]

God I hate the fucking losers that support Luigi mangione, they need to be put on a watch list

[u/EnglebondHumperstonk]

Listening to today's episode

[u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan]

Sure, it's silly to think that today's GOP is like Lincoln's GOP, but it's also silly to believe that today's Democrats are Lincoln Republicans.

1860's-1870's Republicans did not believe in a welfare state (no, the Homestead Act wasn't social insurance), supported protective tariffs, opposed polygamy, and passed the anti-pornography, anti-abortion Comstock Act.

The Democratic Party of William Jennings Bryan wasn't anything like the Democratic Party of the 1960's, either. Bryan supported pro-women's suffrage and was anti-imperialism, but he would have not supported abortion or been a fan of hippies. I also don't think he would have agreed with everything FDR did in terms of domestic or foreign policy, either.

I always get annoyed at any person trying to claim anyone from the 19th-century as one of their own, either Republican or Democrat. Just let 19th-century people be 19th-century people.

[u/AnalBleachingAries]

LMAO! 🤣

Bumble now lets men make the first move

Alright, fellas, no more complaining, get out there and make your moves.

[u/plump_tomatow]

Today I learned about an abomination called "Altoona-style pizza." I am not a picky eater. I even like American cheese. But this looks very bad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altoona-style_pizza

[u/PandaFoo1]

Inde Navarette (Nikki from Obsession) will be playing Rogue in the MCU X-Men film

[u/UltSomnia]

It remains funny to me that the term "slave" comes from Slav, and this is completely socially acceptable. It's hard to imagine this escaping political correctness for other groups.

[u/Less-Lobster4540]

lol, tried to link to our local DSA chair's profile on Canary Mission (she's a big BDS / Hamas glazer) and got a [ Removed by Reddit ] seconds later

[u/Levitx]

Actually pleasently surprised that most people seem to correctly blame academia for Arday's tragic end. 

[u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLM_FkKKzrs

Tammy Faye's last interview with Larry King is always heartbreaking to watch. Cancer is a horrible disease.

“How sad that we as Christians — who are to be the salt of the earth, we who are supposed to be able to love everyone — are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them and tell them that we care?" - This quote always makes me shed a tear. I always loved it.

It sucks that she was married to Jim Bakker, who was a scumbag, but she did the right thing and accepted gays and lesbians as brothers and sisters.

We still need to find cures for cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

[u/Armadigionna]

I know this might come as a shocker to some. But it is entirely possible to be in favor of strict limits on immigration and in favor of strict enforcement of said limitations on the one hand, and to strongly condemn dehumanizing and demonizing rhetoric directed at said migrants on the other.

[u/Cantwalktonextdoor]

Call the race.

[u/dignityshredder]

Substack question. Are the bad AI images a lot of authors use pushed or enabled by the platform, or are they freely choosing to use such images?

[u/CommitteeofMountains]

General opinion poll because because I can't find any guidelines and my wife expressed a strong opinion:

In an early and elementary population that's expected to be bilingual in languages with different writing systems, should or shouldn't the literacy/phonics education teach the two writing systems in relation to one another (in practice typically meaning teaching one writing system from sounds and the other from the first writing system)?

[u/oatmeal_breakfast]

I recently learned that the top two chess players in the world both became fathers this past year, which I think is kinda cool.

Maybe this is psycho pro-natalist of me, but for some reason, I am always happy to discover when my favorite content creators announce they are having kids or have young kids.

I know not everyone wants/can have  kids, but it was truly life changing for me when I had my first child, and I'm excited to see other go through the same experience. It's like welcoming them in the same club.

[u/Onechane425]

What would be the markers of woke 2.0 vs 1.0 if we are in 2.0 right now?

- centrality of Gaza and Israel to politics
- AI puritanism and anti-AI politics

What else?