Jay Bopane

Ancient Greece having a Black queen doesn't make sense historically, even if the story is fictional. When I first saw the casting for The Odyssey, I thought the movie would explain it at some point, but there isn't any explanation for it anywhere in the film.

A plane in the United States was forced to land after the sound of the adhan was heard from a passenger's phone. A Southwest Airlines flight traveling from Tennessee to Florida was forced to make an emergency landing in Atlanta. Upon landing, a SWAT team boarded the aircraft and detained one of the passengers, accusing him of terrorism and posing a bomb threat. It was later revealed that the detained passenger was a Muslim. During the flight, his prayer-time app activated and played the adhan (the Islamic call to prayer). The crew reportedly interpreted the sound as a potential security threat, notified dispatchers, and decided to make an emergency landing.

Trump lost fair and square in 2020. Only women can get pregnant. The Trump assassination attempts were real. Mitch McConnell is alive. Michelle Obama is not a man. Barack Obama is a citizen. America is less racist than most countries. Police stop crime. Tariffs hurt the economy.

Axios: "Do you consider Israel an apartheid state?" Gavin Newsom: "I said that was directional as it relates to what Tom Friedman was arguing about the annexation of the West Bank... so no." "My biggest concern—my red flag—is Netanyahu, period… I've been very critical of him." "I've long supported the state of Israel."

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but as a Moroccan Jew, I am not closer to being Arab than my Ashkenazi Jewish brethren. My family’s diaspora passed through North Africa. That does not make us Arab Jews. Jews in Arab and Muslim countries were not treated as Arabs. They were treated as Jews with a different community, different legal status, and different rules. This included the jizya tax under Islamic law. Moroccan Jews have a deep and particular connection to Morocco. Many also hold a deep loyalty to the Moroccan Crown. Yet that connection exists not because we were Arabs. It exists because Morocco, at its best, gathered its citizens under the banner of Moroccan nationality. When the King famously said during the Vichy period that there were no Jews or Muslims, only Moroccans, that was precisely the point. Nationality served to protect a people who were otherwise seen as distinct. Being a Jew from Morocco does not make me Arab any more than being a Jew from Poland makes an Ashkenazi Jew Polish in the ethnic sense. We are Jews from different diasporas but the same people.

I think ordinary liberals underrate the extent to which progressive arguments have totally won the day. Pretty large shares of the population believe that we have something like mass incarceration, that the police are racist, that the criminal justice system is racist, that therefore there are lots of Black people in prison for crimes they didn’t commit (or that at least would not result in the imprisonment of a white person). And of course they all start from the position that to be racist is the worst possible thing you could ever be, so if our system is racist, then that basically means that it’s entirely illegitimate. People believe this stuff to varying degrees and of course it’s not literally everybody, but a pretty large share of the population has this stuff in the back of their head and more or less agrees that it’s an important feature of our system. The difference between a progressive and a squishy liberal is just that the squishy liberal somehow doesn’t allow themselves to take it completely seriously and follow all these beliefs through to their logical conclusions. But these beliefs are obviously influencing what people think about policy. Progressivism won. What you’re seeing is what happens when these ideas win. Even people who don’t say we should, like, abolish prisons or whatever, when asked that question directly, still hold all the ideas above in their head. And that has consequences!

Mamdani: AIPAC, for whom the only thing more frightening than democracy being allowed to run its course is an end to genocide in Netanyahu's wars.

oh hey, the paper of record (Asterisk Magazine) ran a fascinating article about why the rationalist community seems to be a fertile ground for weird cults

True ??