The only reason jumblr is going after Mamdani so hard for his antisemitism is because he’s a Muslim man.
The only reason? It couldn’t be related to the naked antemitism you yourself readily acknowledged?
I’m not denying he’s antisemitic, but so is everyone fucking else in US politics. So is basically every fuckin goy in the world.
1. You’ve acknowledged he’s antisemitic, then suggest the ONLY reason Jews might dislike him is because he’s a Muslim.
I’ve seen plenty of bad arguments (because Tumblr), but this is a special kind of stupid.
2. The assertion that everyone in US politics and (checks notes) “every fucking goy in the world” is antisemitic is obviously false on its face.
Your argument: Because others are also antisemitic, Mamdani should somehow be beyond criticism because he’s a Muslim…despite the fact that you’ve explicitly acknowledged his hatred of Jews.
Repeating something is a conscious choice, child. Supporting a status quo is a position one decidesto hold.
Neither one is the unconscious, absorbed bias you spent the first half of the Ask describing.
You want to file his record under “stuff everyone passively soaks up from a goyish society” while also admitting he actively repeats and actively supports these things.
Those are what fans of reason call contradicting claims.
The bias you’re describing in paragraph one is real. People raised around Jews-as-abstraction absorb garbage they never consciously agreed to, and a lot of it never gets named because it’s wallpaper. Fine. That’s a thing. It’s also not the thing anyone is talking about with Mamdani.
Absorbed bias is the stray assumption you make without noticing. None of the above was made without noticing. Each one was a decision.
(I can’t tell if you’re intellectually dishonest, stupid, or if you were just stoned when you crapped out this Ask, but it’s the most self-contradicting thing I’ve seen on Tumblr this year. And that’s impressive, because TUMBLR.)
You don’t accidentally sign an executive order. The gap between “internalized a stereotype” and “used municipal authority to strip a protection his Jewish constituents asked for” isn’t a matter of degree.
You built a theory of why antisemitism slides past everyone, and then used it to argue this one should slide past too. The premise calls for vigilance, but you used it to ask for a pass and to call Jews bigots for objecting to antisemitism.
Think about what that requires you to believe. Every item on that list is something he did to Jews. None of it is about him being Muslim.
So to land your theory you have to throw out the entire actual content of the complaint and substitute a motive you assigned to people.
That’s telling hundreds of Jews that their reaction to antisemitism aimed at them is really just their own bigotry leaking out.
Listen to me very carefully: Jews noticing antisemitism is not evidence of anything except antisemitism being there to notice.
The “be honest with yourselves” at the end is revealing. It’s built so that any disagreement becomes proof of the bigotry you already assigned.
Criticize Mamdani and you’ve confirmed you’re Islamophobic, which means the criticism was never allowed to be about what he did.
Y'all are NOT calling out white democrat christians (cultural or otherwise) w this same fervor
For fuck’s sake. Way to tell us you don’t actually read Jumblr without telling us you don’t read Jumblr.
Your whole thesis is that if Jews complain about what you admit is antisemitism in Mamdani, they’re Islamophobes.
I don’t often get personal, @brainscrem, so it’s important to me that you understand I mean this from the bottom of my heart and the depths of my soul:
Fuck off. Fuck all the way off, then fuck off a little more. Then keep fucking off until you’re entirely fucked off and it’s impossible for you to fuck off any further, you execrable, half-witted poseur.
@jewish-hot-takes, you post a lot that isn’t edgy or controversial, it’s just antisemitic and wasn’t written by Jews.
You’re amplifying Judenhass, you should be ashamed of yourself for doing it, and you need to find a way to gain a smidgen of discretion and self-respect. If you can’t manage that, how about just not amplifying hatred against other Jews?
Okay so I really don't understand why IHRA is considered to have a good definition of antisemitism specifically because of the phrasing of "Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews" a phrase which is as such followed by examples but does not include any actual outlines for what the term would be covering. A "certain perception" could mean quite literally anything and the fact that the "certain perception" is not defined within the initial definition is a glaring issue that people who wish Jews harm may use to do the "you're the real antisemite" bullshit that they have always done.
On the contrary the IHRA does infact have one of the best definitions for antisemitic discrimination being "Antisemitic discrimination is the denial to Jews of opportunities or services available to others and is illegal in many countries."
I'm just confused by what the given definition is supposed to even convey due to it being so vague and universal to literally all instances ever.
a phrase which is as such followed by examples but does not include any actual outlines for what the term would be covering
You’re holding those two sentences to the standard of a closed legal definition, but that’s not what they are.
The IHRA text is an explicitly non-binding working definition, and the real content was always meant to live in the eleven examples attached to it.
The header is broad on purpose, so faulting it for not standing on its own is sort of silly. It was never meant to stand on its own. It was meant to lead to the eleven examples.
A “certain perception” could mean quite literally anything
You also quoted it incompletely. The full first sentence of the definition is:
Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.
“A certain perception” on its own could be any perception, so the second half of the sentence narrows it.
“…which may be expressed as hatred” tells you which kind.I don’t think that’s vacuous.
the IHRA does infact have one of the best definitions for antisemitic discrimination being “Antisemitic discrimination is the denial to Jews of opportunities or services available to others”
You’re comparing a behavior to a state of mind. The discrimination line reads cleaner because denying someone opportunities or services is a behavior, and behaviors can be seen and checked.
A perception can’t, so it’s never going to be as clear.
The two define different things for different reasons.
The discrimination line is precise because it only covers one thing - discrimination.
The broader definition of antisemitism could be that precise too, but only by picking a single form and ignoring all the others (the speech, the vandalism, the violence). That wouldn’t work here, because antisemitism isn’t one behavior, it’s a whole bunch of them, and the definition is trying to name what they all have in common.
The only thing they share is the attitude behind them, which is why it reaches for “perception” instead of naming an act. The vagueness you’re objecting to is the cost of covering the whole array rather than just one example of it.
a glaring issue that people who wish Jews harm may use to do the “you’re the real antisemite” bullshit
You believe that the “vagueness” in the first half of the first sentence is something antisemites can use to deflect, the “yOu’Re ThE rEaL aNtIsEmItE” move - but that half-sentence doesn’t give that move any traction.
The first sentence names a perception, and your objection is that “a certain perception” is too vague to mean anything, right?
Again, the real content is in the examples, and that’s what anyone making an accusation under IHRA actually points to.
So even if you want to insist that half-sentence is vague, it gives a bad actor nothing to use, because it does not, by itself, identify any antisemitism at all.
Your problem, Anon, is that you took half of the first sentence out of its context…and judged it alone, completely divorced from everything that followed.
For the last day of Pride Month, here's Sheikh Mohammed Saleem Ali giving the Friday sermon, streamed live on YouTube from Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem on July 1, 2022.
Since @closet-keys doesn’t have any of their own, let’s exercise our media literacy skills.
The claim:
Israel deliberately rotates which baby formula it lets into Gaza, banning each type right after infants become dependent on it, specifically to cause malabsorption.
The Source of the claim:
Truthout, June 2026, quoting Dr. Ahmad al-Farra, head of pediatrics at Nasser Hospital.
The framing:
This is a strategy of Israel to systematically “torture and kill Palestinian babies.”
The Template:
“Jews deliberately poison or torture children’s bodies as policy” is one of the oldest blood libel templates in existence, going back to medieval host desecration and well-poisoning accusations.
This post is built on that template and reskinned with the vocabulary of supply chains and pediatric malabsorption to disguise it as humanitarian reporting instead of the racist libel it is.
The nugget of truth:
Al-Farra is a real doctor describing a real shortage.
So what is Truthout, and what did it do with al-Farra’s words?
The motives:
Truthout is a nonprofit advocacy outlet that has run pieces attacking other publications for treating “Israel’s right to exist” as a legitimate editorial value, framing that position itself as disqualifying.
This is an outlet with an explicit institutional position that acknowledging Israel’s right to exist is a problem…reporting on Israel.
This isn’t journalism and it isn’t social justice activism.
Where did Truthout get al-Farra’s words?
In April, the New Arab quoted the same doctor on the same situation:
“the types available change constantly. One type lasts no more than two weeks before it runs out and is replaced by another, which negatively affects children’s health”
That’s describing chaos. Formula shows up inconsistently, brands run out, whatever’s available gets swapped in. No intent, no plan, and no attack on babies.
The New Arab is owned by Fadaat Media, a Qatari company. Qatar has spent two decades bankrolling Hamas’s government.
An outlet funded by Hamas’s primary patron covering Hamas’s war isn’t neutral either - but it’s less egregious than what Truthout did.
The method:
In June, Truthout turned the same observation into “one of the Israeli strategies,” turning a shortage into a malicious plan to attack babies.
They invented the idea that Israel maliciously executed a plan to let one brand in until babies depend on it, then ban it on purpose to cause malabsorption issues in infants.
The medical explanation is recycled almost word for word from April. The verb does all the dishonest work. “Runs out and gets replaced” became “is allowed in, then banned.”
Nobody found a new fact. Truthout invented a motive, bolted it onto an old quote, and kept the doctor’s name on it so it would appear to be damning testimony.
Writing “Jews poison children” might make someone hesitate. Instead, a real shortage gets a manufactured motive, attributed to a real doctor, published by an outlet that’s told you it considers Israel’s legitimacy itself the problem, and run through a wire from an outlet funded by the regime bankrolling the other side of the war.
Each layer gives the next one a laundered source to point at. By the time it’s a Tumblr infographic, suckers like @closet-keys feel confident saying it’s “confirmed repeatedly” without ONCE having actually examined the unconfirmed claims.
The reality check:
Who would actually run a “ban a formula brand every two weeks” policy?
COGAT, Israel’s aid office, has publicly denied restricting formula at all, ever - but Truthout doesn’t mention this. A journalist investigating an atrocity allegation talks to the accused. Truthout skipped that because engaging with it means admitting “strategy” is their word, not their source’s.
What’s invented is the accusation that Jews are running a calibrated infant-torture program. This accusation is disguised in the language of pediatrics and laundered through two outlets that each have a direct stake in the war they’re “covering.”
Have you noticed that a lot of people on social media don't ever feel compelled to explain themselves?
You've seen this, right?
The folks who proclaim a strong moral view on a controversial topic...then use any excuse to avoid supporting it when they get any polite pushback or questions? The way personal feelings are elevated above objective facts or reasoning? The way they avoid or shut down any meaningful discussion?
I think this is caused by a set of related ideas and biases which are in ascendence and I think younger generations are more vulnerable to being manipulated by bad actors who capitalize on them.
Before we get into that, let's look at some of the ways this phenomenon manifests on social media...and the sorts of biases/concepts at play.
___
"I’m just speaking my truth."
Translation: "Challenging the conclusions I draw from my emotional experience is immoral."
This converts subjective perception into absolute truth, which not only discourages fact-checking, counterpoints, or curiosity, but labels them as oppressive.
Translation:"I don’t want to explain, defend, or support my belief. That would risk them being challenged on their merits. I just want my feelings validated and for my community to affirm I have expressed the correct views."
This avoids meaningful dialogue by asserting moral high ground and demanding deference...without reciprocity.
Facts which conflict with feelings aren’t debated - they’re deemed hostile, even violent.
What all of these have in common is the primacy of emotion over reason.
Emotion isn’t the start of a thought for the people who make a habit of these behaviors - it's a substitute for thinking.
I don’t believe this shift is driven by malice or conscious dishonesty. Most people haven’t stopped caring about truth - they’ve simply come to discern what truth is through emotional resonance instead of through evidence or reasoning.
"Truth" now arrives on screens dressed in vibes and aesthetic cues tailored for their existing biases, bypassing critical thought and offering the dopamine-releasing comfort of certainty without the messy, time-consuming burden of understanding.
When Emotion Becomes Authority
Here's a recent example which is getting some deserved mockery in the last day or so:
I know, I know. listening to Theo Von talk about war is like listening a possum try to to sell you on cryptocurrency.
Scratch that - Theo Von is what we'd expect to see if a pair of Truck Nutz were to gain sentience in a laboratory accident.
Theo couldn't speak for his generation any more than a broken Roomba could speak for Artificial General Intelligence, but he's doing something here which is alarmingly and increasingly common for his generation of media personalities. He's using his feelings as a replacement for thinking.
...it feels to me...it just feels to me like it's a genocide that's happening...
Theo doesn’t check facts, definitions, sources, or context because he doesn’t have to. He just invokes a vibe, a moral mood. "It feels like genocide." That’s enough.
Theo has 3.9 million subscribers on YouTube. Estimates suggest his total reach is about 16.2 million people.
The Era of Vibe-Governed Reality
In 2025, truth is not discerned though evidence or reasoning, but through emotional resonance.
Feelings are like the new science, but they're peer-reviewed only by your immediate social circle and validated by the count of reshares.
This is NOT a crotchety right-wing Fox News viewer shaking his fist at clouds and ranting about "kids these days."
This isn't even a critique of liberalism or leftism (because I'm a lifelong left-leaning liberal who grew up in a liberal/socialist family).
It's an examination of what has become a common strategy for mass manipulation which is alarmingly effective, especially with younger generations.
The Water We Swim In
Political operatives and influlence campaigns from every perspective are capitalizing on it, too. Influence campaigns from Russia, Iran, and Qatar; PACs; lobbyist firms...everybody - and we don't really notice these maipulations any longer. Why don't we notice them?
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?
Every day, we see provocative social media posts which prioritize shock value and emotional impact, aiming to capture attention and convey political stances through intense feelings rather than through facts or reasoned arguments.
Appeals to emotion have been used to bypass logic and reasoning for millennia.
You're probably familiar with these:
Every time anyone ever said "think of the children," you're supposed to clutch your pearls in fear and horror.
US War propaganda in WWII used emotional appeals like "I WANT YOU" or addressed attrocities meant to hit Americans in their emotional center.
Joseph Goebbel's speaches and films used fear, disgust, and resentment to enflame existing negative German feelings against Jews and other minorities.
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe constructed scenes of immense emotional intensity to provoke outrage and sympathy, especially among white Northern readers in hopes of galvinizing anti-slavery sentiment.
So appeals to emotion aren't new and aren't always dishonest.
What's new is the increasing, overwhelming spread of this way of reaching conclusions in our public discourse replacing other modes of communication, other means of persuasion, and other ways of "knowing" anything.
What's new is that our post-truth, postmodern academic models validate this.
What's new is how this is being weaponized against us, especially younger generations.
How We Turned "I Feel" Into the New "I Know"
This shift didn’t happen overnight. It’s the product of decades of cultural, technological, and psychological changes converging to create a perfect storm where feelings have become a replacement for thinking.
First, there’s the growing cultural emphasis on authenticity and personal experience as the highest forms of truth. This began as a perfectly reasonable corrective to rigid institutional authority and exclusionary narratives but has morphed into a worldview where subjective emotion is treated as inherently more valid than objective evidence.
At the same time, therapeutic culture expanded its reach beyond therapy offices into everyday life, encouraging people to view disagreements as trauma, debates as emotional violence, and intellectual challenge as psychological harm. The result of this is a protective reflex to avoid uncomfortable facts or nuanced arguments that might trigger emotional distress.
If this sounds familiar, note that it's something I've touched on before. The people doing this habitually don't take their positions based on moral principles, facts, context, nuance or reasoning because what motivates them is emotional comfort.
(Experiment: Keep this idea in mind while you're scrolling online and see it that rings true when people will not or cannot support their assertions.)
Social media platforms are engineered to maximize engagement, right? The fastest way to do that is by appealing directly to emotion—especially outrage, fear, and identity affirmation. Algorithms reward the most emotionally charged content because it keeps users scrolling, sharing, and commenting. Nuance, complexity, or even honest uncertainty rarely go viral; they don’t light up dopamine circuits the same way.
That's bad enough for our mental health, our intellects, and our public discourse, but the greatest danger is in how these emotional shortcuts to baseless conclusions create fertile ground for bad actors who want to manipulate public opinion en masse.
Your Feels, Their Power: A Beginner’s Guide to Being Played
Whether it’s state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, political operatives, or interest groups, these manipulators know exactly how to weaponize the primacy of emotion.
In the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. elections, Russian state actors engaged in disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining Democratic candidates and bolstering Republican ones. These efforts included spreading false narratives about candidates Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, such as fabricated stories of personal misconduct. The campaigns utilized social media platforms to disseminate emotionally charged content that resonated with specific voter demographics.
A Russian disinformation campaign known as "Operation Overload" targeted the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) by producing AI-generated fake news videos. One such video falsely claimed that USAID paid Hollywood celebrities to promote Ukrainian President Zelensky. This content gained significant traction after being shared by high-profile individuals on social media, illustrating how emotional manipulation can amplify disinformation.
Far-right groups have effectively used platforms like Instagram and TikTok to disseminate emotionally charged content targeting young audiences. By leveraging visually engaging media and exploiting platform algorithms, these groups spread divisive messages that often go unchecked due to inadequate content moderation.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) networks spread anti-vaccine misinformation across social media platforms. These networks used fake and duplicate accounts to amplify emotionally charged narratives, undermining public health efforts and exploiting fears related to the pandemic.
Bad actors craft messages designed not to inform or persuade through reason but to resonateemotionally - often through fear, anger, or identity-based grievance.
These messages bypass critical thinking by activating deeply held feelings or tribal loyalties.
Younger generations, raised in a world flooded with emotional messaging and taught to prioritize feelings as a moral compass, are especially vulnerable.
Social media doesn’t just deliver content, it delivers community validation. Likes, shares, and emojis, no shit, reinforce emotional responses as truths.
This isn’t just an accidental byproduct. It’s a deliberate strategy and it's been developed to an art form.
Polarization: By amplifying outrage and framing complex issues as zero-sum battles of good vs. evil, manipulators ensure people become entrenched in their “side” and reject any nuance.
Echo Chambers: Algorithms funnel users into filter bubbles where their emotional beliefs are constantly reinforced and opposing views are demonized or erased.
Identity Weaponization: Bad actors exploit identity politics to turn social groups into ideological fortresses where dissent is branded as betrayal or bigotry, shutting down dialogue and scrutiny.
Emotional Hijacking: They flood social feeds with rapid-fire emotional content, making thoughtful reflection impossible and replacing reasoned debate with knee-jerk reactions.
The result is a feedback loop. Emotional responses breed more emotional content, which breeds more disengagement from facts, nuance, or evidence...and the cycle repeats.
If you wonder why almost every attempt to have honest conversations about politics, culture, or identity have become so fraught and fractious, this is why.
So what can we do about it?
We’re definitely not going to get the platofrms to change their algorithms.
We’re not going to manage to out-meme every bit of authoritarian / antisemitic / bigoted propaganda.
We can't stop people from replacing thinking with feeling.
Maybe, though, we can push back in meaningful ways by starting with how we think, speak, and engage.
Feelings Are Real - But They’re Not Facts
Start with yourself. Recognize that emotions matter, but they don’t get the final word. Treat your emotional reactions as data, not conclusions.
Ask: Why am I reacting this way? Is there more to the story? Your habitual curiosity can interrupt the feedback loop.
Seek Discomfort (The Good Kind)
If everything you read confirms what you already believe, you’re not learning, you’re marinating. Deliberately engage with credible voices you disagree with. Not to convert, but to understand. Intellectual discomfort isn't harm, it’s a way to grow.
Don’t Outsource Your Thinking
If your arguments are mostly reshares and TikTok duets, you might be mistaking social validation for understanding. Read full articles. Watch entire interviews. When an assertion really appeals to you, ask yourself: "What evidence is this based on?" Then fact-check the evidence.
Value Nuance - Even When It’s Boring
Nuance doesn’t trend. It’s slow, hard, and less emotionally satisfying than hot takes.
It's’s also where truth lives. Learn to sit with complexity. Practice saying things like "It’s complicated," "I’m not sure yet," or "Both things can be true.
Stop Feeding the Rage Machine
Every time you rage-share a headline without reading it, or dunk on someone for clout, you are feeding the same system you claim to hate. Don’t give your attention to people or platforms that reward outrage over insight. (I need to work on this.)
Reward Substance Over Vibes
Like, comment on, and share posts that show integrity, humility, and reasoned thinking - even if they’re not flashy. That’s how we might tilt the algorithm. Influence is a numbers game. Elevate voices that model real thought.
Normalize Saying "I Don’t Know"
Admitting uncertainty isn't weakness, it’s maturity. It’s how real conversations happen. When someone asks for your take, it’s okay to say, "I’m still figuring it out" or "I want to learn more first." You're not required to have a take on everything.
Ask Better Questions
When someone makes an emotional claim, don’t attack - ask. Not "How could you believe that?" but "What led you to that view?"
Good faith questions can defuse bad faith conversations.
Protect Conversations Like They Matter (Because They Do)
Modeling intellectual honesty and emotional maturity in your own circles has a ripple effect. Be the one who brings it back to evidence, back to reason, back to shared humanity. Conversations are culture-shaping.
Remember That Culture Is a Team Sport
We got into this mess together, and we’ll get out the same way. Culture is just the cumulative effect of individual choices repeated at scale. Choose better. Think better. Talk better.
Genuine question: I've seen multiple people, including Jews and leftists who refer to what's going on between Israel and Palestine as a genocide, call the current war between Russia and Ukraine a genocide. Is that in any way accurate? I know about the Holodomor, which was horrific, but I haven't seen any evidence of current genocide or even genocidal intentions (in the sense of intentions+plans to wholesale murder Ukrainians for being Ukrainian); the most I can name is the displacement of Ukrainian children to Russian familiea, which is horrific, but not what I understand to be sufficient to define the conflict as a genocide. Thanks in advance.
It got that definition in 1948, in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which exists largely because Raphael Lemkin (the Polish Jewish lawyer who coined the word in 1944, and who lost most of his family in the Holocaust) spent years pushing the world into writing it down.
Article II lists five acts, any one of which is genocide when it’s done “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
Notice that only (a) is the mass murder you’re picturing.
Russia hauling Ukrainian kids to Russian families, issuing them Russian passports, changing their names, and raising them as Russians is item (e), the literal fifth entry.
The drafters put child transfer on the list because you can erase a people without a single mass grave if you take their next generation and raise them as someone else.
Put another way, stealing the future is a recognized way to destroy a people.
The genuinely hard question always seems to sit in that intent clause every time the ICJ seeks to determine if genocide has taken place..
Can one prove the transfers were carried out “with intent to destroy” Ukrainians as a group, rather than the cynical nonsense Russia actually claims (that it’s a “humanitarian evacuation”)?
(“Humanitarian evacuation” is a strange label for shipping children to military-patriotic camps to be deprogrammed of their Ukrainian-ness. If it was humanitarian, Russia would return these children to their families.)
Proving that special intent is the hard part of every genocide case ever tried, which is why these things crawl through courts for years.
Your Holodomor reflex is telling, Anon.
You’ve anchored on an extreme case (millions deliberately starved) and quietly turned that into the minimum bar. Mass death shows up in almost every genocide, so it’s easy to mistake it for the requirement - but the Convention doesn’t require it.
No court has yet ruled that Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine.
The people calling it genocide aren’t reaching past the definition, they’re pointing at one of the acts that’s sitting inside it. Whether it will eventually earn the formal label will come down to intent, and the fight to define/determine that intent is ongoing.
“I would like to emphasize that the wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine… to my mind is our great common misfortune and tragedy.”
Putin claimed that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people” and that “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia”
For what it’s worth, Anon, asking instead of assuming is everything and a sign of healthy thinking.
You’re asking good questions - the next step is to habitually ask yourself if you actually understand the definitions of the words you’re using. Genocide is a word with a well-established and firm meaning.
Words mean things. Specific things. That’s what words are for.
Because “genocide” has a firm definition and because the case of Russia’s actions in Ukraine has not been litigated, we must be careful about using that word carelessly. There’s nothing wrong with discussing the question, but we can’t slap that label on Russia’s actions yet.
To any Ukrainians who may be reading:
This was a legal question, not a moral one.
Just so I’m clear about my moral positions:
Putin is, in my view, a war criminal and a monster.
It is my sincere hope that Putin will die alone and in pain before his name is erased.
Ukrainians should rule themselves and be very proud of how they’ve fought repeatedly for democratic self-rule.
I know you didn’t choose this war, but your courageous fight against a monstrous aggressor benefits the entire civilized world - and it takes a special kind of malice or stupidity to support Russia in this war.
I’ve been arguing with someone regarding the latest rumours that the IDF is rigging toys with explosives.
They keep bringing up the 1974 Nabetiah camp, but a preliminary google showed that reporting said the toys were clean and intact rather than dirty like the area they were in.
I’m just curious if you know the history of this claim?
They’re conflating two claims and got both of them wrong.
Claim one is based a real event: the Israeli reprisal after the Ma'alot massacre.
On May 15, 1974, three DFLP terrorists crossed into Israel from Lebanon, murdered a family in Ma'alot, then seized a school and took 115 hostages, most of them teenagers. 22 students were killed.
In response, Israel bombed 7 DFLP bases, including the one at Nabatieh.
An estimated 27 people were killed and over 100 were injured.
That’s the entire 1974 Nabatieh story. Terrorists attacked a school, Israel bombed the bases the attack was launched from. There are no toys in it. Nobody in 1974 alleged toys.The word “toy” appears in no contemporaneous account of that raid.
Claim two is a blood libel that didn’t exist yet in 1974.
In 1998, Lebanon’s permanent mission to the UN sent the Secretary-General a letter alleging Israel had dropped thousands of booby-trapped toys on Lebanese towns, and it named Nabatieh as one of them.That, in 1998, 24 years later, is where “toys” and “Nabatieh” first show up together as an allegation.
Look closely at what that document is, because the people making the allegation never do. It is a Lebanese government submission that got assigned a UN document number, A/53/677, not a UN investigation, finding, or verification of anything. Getting circulated as a General Assembly document means someone filed it. That is the entire bar.
Consequently, the claim gets laundered downstream into “even the UN confirmed it.”
The UN confirmed that Lebanon mailed them a letter. The letter also says the toys were dropped by fighter planes, which contradicts the 1990s field reporting that said helicopters. The allegation can’t keep its own delivery method straight and dropping toys from jets is aerodynamically impossible.
Someone later took the location from the 1998 libel, stapled it to the date of the real 1974 raid, and out comes the meme your friend is quoting: booby-trapped toys, Nabatieh, 1974. Two unrelated things fused into one fake citation. The 1974 raid had no toys and the 1998 toy claim had no 1974.
The 1998 allegation never had any evidence at all.
In September 2000, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office sent the Foreign Affairs Committee a memorandum on landmines in South Lebanon, which the committee then published. Among real hazards like cluster bombs and shells, it lists “even booby trapped toys, allegedly dropped by the Israeli airforce.”
The word “allegedly” is the FCO’s own hedge. They were not asserting it, just logging an unverified category in passing, in the same memo that elsewhere insists Israel’s minefield data still needed independent verification.
Later writers deleted “allegedly” and promoted a hedged line in a government department’s memo into a verified British intelligence finding. It was the opposite of verified. Note that this is not even a Foreign Affairs Committee conclusion, which is the way it gets cited. It’s a government department answering the committee’s mail.
Set those clean toys against what the allegation actually claims, that aircraft dropped these toys onto Lebanese and Gazan towns.
Objects dropped from a plane or a helicopter onto rubble and left outdoors do not photograph shelf-fresh.
So the claim has to choose - either the toys were dropped, and the pristine ones are props, or the toys are pristine because a hand placed them there, and nothing was dropped from anything. The reply your friend reaches for, that this is just what a planted lure looks like, doesn’t save the allegation. It concedes the toys were set down by hand, which means no aircraft dropped anything, which was the entire claim. Clean toys can only decide here which half of this story is the lie - it’s one or the other.
(Kudos, by the way - you clocked the forensic problem much faster than the people circulating the images ever did.)
A shred of truth: South Lebanon was/is genuinely saturated with unexploded ordnance that children can mistake for toys.
That specific claim, purpose-built toys deployed to target children, has never been forensically verified by a single independent body. Not UNMAS, not the demining NGOs working those exact hills, not Human Rights Watch, not Amnesty.
Even the alleged mechanics don’t survive contact. The 1990s versions said the toys were dropped by helicopter, and a UNIFIL officer told AFP the objects could look like a toy “or have the shape of an ordinary stone,”but no independent investigator has ever recovered, defused, and documented one of these purpose-built toy-bombs. Hezbollah showed local media a rigged Snoopy doll and some golden eggs. Nobody neutral was ever allowed to examine them.
The 2025 Gaza version is the same template. A Facebook post from a Gaza health official, sourced to unnamed police, no photographic evidence, and a viral image that traces back to a 2018 video from Yemen.
A real 1974 airstrike with no toys + a 1998 toy libel with no verification + a meme that grafts the date of one onto the lie of the other = modern blood libel.
You don’t need anyone to deny this for it to fall apart:
The date comes from one event, the toys from another.
The letter says fighter planes, the field reports said helicopters.
The photos have no date, no source, no chain of custody and show neat, clean toys.
The claim can’t agree with itself about when it happened, who dropped it, or how.
If you want to push back, ask which it is: 1974 or 1998, planes or helicopters, and where is a single dated, sourced photograph of one of these toys.
They won’t have an answer, because the claim was never built to survive questions. It was built to be forwarded, retweeted, and reposted without thinking.
That, Anon, is an important difference between you and the person you’re arguing with - you can think - and you asked questions.
The article misleadingly attributes the report broadly to “the UN.”
It omits that the report comes specifically from a 3-person commissioncreated by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), an entity with a wildly disproportionate and undeniable structural focus on Israel.
The UNHRC has a permanent 10-item agenda for its regular sessions. Under this framework, Israel is the only country in the world with a dedicated, permanent agenda item (“Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories”). Human rights situations in all other 192 UN member states (including notorious human rights violators like North Korea, Syria, Iran, and South Sudan) are grouped together and debated under a single, general category, Agenda Item 4. As of recent counts, the UNHRC has passed over 110 condemnatory resolutions against Israel.
For context, this is more than double the number passed against Syria (the second-most condemned country at around 45), and vastly outnumbers resolutions targeting Iran, Russia, or North Korea.
The article fails to mention that this specific commission operates under an unprecedented, permanent, open-ended mandate. The founding resolution for this inquiry omitted any mention of Hamas or its terrorism.
The article names the chair, Srinivasan Muralidhar, but omits the names (and thereby the partisan backgrounds) of panel members like Chris Sidoti. Sidoti has a history of pro-Palestinian advocacy and previously accused Jewish organizations of “throwing around accusations of antisemitism like rice at a wedding,” breaching UN requirements for strict impartiality.
The article uses judicial language (“independent inquiry,” “findings”) to dishonestly frame a deeply contested, political document as an undisputed judicial truth while framing the Israeli rebuttal as a simple, defensive dismissal.
Then there’s the excremental “report” itself.
The “report” relies on loose images of bullet fragments as definitive proof of IDF responsibility without providing anything like a documented chain of custody or independent forensic verification.
The report routinely uses medical doctors and hospital staff as expert witnesses on military tactics, ballistics, and weapon systems - subjects completely outside their medical training.
The commission relies on family members to determine the tactical intent of a military strike, asking civilians to verify whether an attack was “deliberately targeted” against a child.
The report erases Hamas’s 17-year history of embedding military infrastructure inside civilian areas. Further, it fails to investigate or account for the documented deployment of minors as active combatants by Palestinian armed groups.
The report invents its own interpretation of international law, claiming that if a military executes a strike knowing civilians are present, the attack is automatically an intentional war crime. This completely erases the standard legal doctrine of military proportionality.
This isn’t bias, this is deliberate deception by both the UNHRC and the Guardian - neither of which are hated anywhere near sufficiently.
Gentle, short introductions to media literacy and information literacy
(I keep kvetching about the absence of media literacy and information literacy...and kvetching is useless.
Signal > Noise will be the tag I use for short, digestible intros to concepts in both media literacy and information literacy.
Asks are open if there are specific topics you want covered.)
------
2025-06-18
[Topic: Bias vs Lying]
Our discourse has gotten so ridiculous that we've mostly lost the ability to disagree constructively, think critically, or benefit from the work of smart people with whom we disagree.
We're so fractured and polarized that we routinely say stupid things like:
That source is biased, so it's not valid and nothing it says is true.
If everything is dismissed as bias, and bias is treated as dishonesty, then truth has nowhere to live - leaving us well and truly fucked.
Confusing bias with lying makes us cynical instead of smart. It turns healthy skepticism into hopeless nihilism
"All media is corrupt" isn't enlightenment - it's intellectual surrender and cowardice.
Bias ≠ Lying
A perspective does not prevent a piece of information from being true or useful.
What Bias Is
Bias is all but inevitable and unavoidable, even for those operating at the highest levels of journalistic integrity and discipline. It's baked into how we work.
Below are two paintings of Daniel in the Lion's Den. Same subject, radically different paintings. Is one of them more true? Is one of them less biased?
Maybe photography provides a better analogy. The angle, lighting, composition, saturation, brightness, contrast, and cropping all affect the final image. But the photo is still of a real object, isn't it? Is one of these six photos of the same man in the same room more valid than the other 5?
That's how all media works.
All media selects, frames, and focuses utilizing both conscious and unconscious biases.
That's not inherently deceptive - it's how all storytelling functions. Our brains are wired for narrative, it's how our minds work.
Bias can emerge from:
Cultural worldview (like Western vs. Eastern framing)
Political orientation (like left vs. right vs. authoritarian)
Institutional interest (like corporate vs. activist vs. governmental)
Professional constraints (like time limits, editorial priorities, sensationalism for clicks)
A liberal news outlet might cover climate change in terms of justice and inequality. A conservative outlet might instead focus on economic cost and individual freedoms.
Both might be factually accurate. Both are biased. Both have value.
More examples:
A conservative media outlet may emphasize crime statistics.
A progressive media outlet may focus on police accountability.
A US media outlet might frame a Middle Eastern conflict through geopolitics
A local media outlet might highlight the conflict through individual suffering.
All may very well be reporting true facts, but they frame those facts differently.
If you see journalism without bias, let me know - because that's what I'll read when I need to be put to sleep without learning a single thing.
Lying is a completely different animal.
What a Lie Is
Lying goes well beyond having a perspective. Lying is a choice to mislead - an intentional, deliberate falsehood.
Humans can lie with all media: words, pictures, headlines, graphs, statistics...even silence can deceive.
The key ingredient is always intent. Lies are designed to obscure the truth.
Deceptive omissions: Leaving out exculpatory evidence to frame someone unfairly.
Fake sources or data: Citing studies that don’t exist, or misrepresenting real ones.
Image manipulation: Using photos or videos out of context, or editing them deceptively.
A biased report might emphasize some facts over others, but a deceptive one tries to convince you of something the producer of that media knows to be false.
Framing = Bias ≠ Lying
Framing is one of the most common and most misunderstood forms of media bias.
It's not lying - It's the rhetorical and narrative choices that shape how every story is told.
Examples of framing in headlines:
"Unarmed man shot by police" vs. "Suspect neutralized in police operation"
"Protesters clash with police" vs. "Police attack peaceful demonstrators"
"Israel retaliates after attack" vs. "Israeli airstrikes kill civilians"
The facts might not be in dispute. Someone was shot, a protest occurred, airstrikes happened, etc - but how those facts are framed shapes how we interpret them.
Framing isn't necessarily dishonest. It reflects the values and assumptions of the writer or publication. Understanding framing is essential for media literacy. When you learn to spot frames, you can wring an additional layer of information from the story.
Since it's Unavoidable, Make Bias Work for You
Expecting media to be perfectly neutral is like expecting food to be completely flavorless. It's neither realistic nor desirable. Without a perspective and a framing, a story ceases to be storytelling and our brains...mostly stop processing it.
Every outlet has an editorial mission, an audience, a funding model, a history - so bias is always baked in. That doesn't mean you discard the source. It means you read it strategically, looking for and identifying those biases.
Instead of asking, "Is this source biased?" know in advance that it definitely is.
Instead of asking yourself "should I read this news outlet and regard everything it presents as objective truth"...know that it definitely doesn't, you definitely shouldn't.
Instead, ask yourself questions like:
What kinds of stories does this outlet consistentlychoose to tell?
Who does the outlet consider trustworthy or quotable?
What kind of loaded language does this outlet use for different groups or events?
Who funds this outlet? Who is its audience? What agenda are they likely to have based on that funding model and target audience?
Bias isn't a disqualifier. It's a clue which tells you more about what you're reading.
Use Biased Sources Without Getting Played
You don't need to trust a source completely to learn something from it. In fact, the most valuable sources are often obviously biased.
1. Identify the Bias
Before even reading, know what kind of outlet you're dealing with. Look at its about page, ownership, funding/revenue model, recurring columnists, and core audience. Does it lean left? Right? Is it globalist? Nationalist? Religious? Secular?
Knowing this lets you anticipate the angle and spot distortions more easily. The more you do it, the easier it gets. After a little practice, you'll see clearly (for example) the huge right wing bias of the Jerusalem Post, the huge left wing bias of Ha'aretz, and how The Times of Israel is mostly pretty disciplined (in their news gathering and framing) about minimizing left/right political biases.
None of these three is perfect, but seeing their usual, institutional biases lets you read them against each other.
2. Use It for Contrast
Biased outlets often highlight stories others avoid or ignore. Fox News may underplay climate change but overplay immigration crime. Al Jazeera will underplay Hamas human rights abuses but spotlight in depth the most embarrassing moments in Israeli politics. The Jerusalem Post will underplay corruption charges against Netanyahu and spotlight the most depraved behaviors committed in the name of Hamas.
Use this to your advantage. Compare coverage across ideological lines. The contrast tells you volumes about outfit AND audience.
3. Look for Hard Facts
Don't quote the adjectives. Quote the data. What happened? When? Where? Who said it? What did the video actually show?
Stop taking an analyst's word as truth - see it as a lens to try on at look at the facts through. If the lens helps it make sense, put it in your back pocket for later use.
Strip away the spin, extract the structure.
4. Cross-Reference Across Angles
Treat each biased source as one side of a triangle. To understand the shape of a thing, you need multiple sides. Balance a left-wing story with a right-wing one. Add an international perspective. Compare them.
Over time, you start seeing the shape of the event instead of the biases of each outfit.
(If you're anything like me, you never want to see or hear another advertisement for Ground News...but still use it sometimes to do exactly this.)
When Bias Becomes Lying
Bias turns into lying when it refuses to admit its own existence or crosses into manipulation. You're dealing with deceptive bias when:
It claims neutrality while advancing a clear agenda
It actively suppresses or distorts opposing views
It refuses to promptly issue corrections or acknowledge errors
It flattens complexity into false binaries like good guys vs. bad guys
It consistently omits key information that would challenge its narrative
It's part of a disinformation campaign (state media, bad actors, bots)
Ask yourself these questions:
Does the outlet ever challenge its own side?
Does it interview or quote those it disagrees with...without distortion?
Does it foster critical thinking or does it push tribal loyalty?
Thesl answers will let you see lying much more quickly.
When evaluating a media claim, ask:
Is this verifiable?
Does this trigger a strong emotional reaction? Was that the goal?
What's missing?
Does this match the tone of propaganda? (overly simplified, emotionally charged, black-and-white framing?)
Recognizing your own bias is more critical than spotting it in others. We are all vulnerable to confirmation bias, and most of us seek out what feels good while avoiding what challenges us.
Practice pausing. Breathe a few times between the click and the share. (Confirmation bias will be the topic of a future Signal > Noise.)
Vary Your Media Diet
To understand a complex world, you need inputs from multiple angles.
If you only get your information from one side, you're not informed - you're enlisted.
Real media literacy is not about being neutral. It's about navigating bias with awareness, curiosity, and courage.
That means reading:
Across ideological lines
Across national borders
Across formats (print, visual, audio)
It's not always fun, it takes some time, but it's essential and cwn dramatically reduce your susceptibility to propaganda -
...so go read smart, articulate people you disagree with!
Instead of avoiding bias, learn to read it. Recognize it. Use it. Balance it. Counter it. Triangulate past it.
And when you find actual deception? Name it and reject it.
As a reporter, I love this and support 99% of it. The only thing I disagree with is that Al Jazeera isn't just heavily bias, it regularly fabricates reports.
Today’s example comes from Colombia’s Gustavo Petro:
“I warned that the Bautista brothers’ software was vulnerable, according to the 2018 State Council ruling, and that it should be replaced with publicly available software,” Petro wrote on X, adding that he had requested an audit of the software ahead of the elections, but that it had not been allowed.
“Well, today we have evidence of a change in the IP addresses of several servers belonging to the National Registry. This means that the software was compromised, and others entered data for polling stations and voting centers,” he said. “The only entity in the world capable of doing that is the State of Israel.”
sexism in medicine kills people. racism in medicine kills people. fatphobia in medicine kills people. queerphobia in medicine kills people. classism in medicine kills people. ableism in medicine kills people.
do not downplay people’s fears about being mistreated because they are a part of a marginalised group. it is a matter of life and death and you should be angry about it.
I don't know if you're the right person to be asking, but I was hoping you could help me out with a question. Just saw an article on a Spanish town that was named "Fort Kill the Jews" and how a Jewish family moving in was "greeted" with bigoted graffiti. It brought to mind some old comments I had heard from some Jewish people on here (I think), which is that Spain has a very long history of antisemitism. Like, such a bad history with the Jewish people that antisemitism is baked into their actual culture (the tons and tons of pork dishes was one of the examples I got when I asked.)
I was wanting to know if you could provide any background to that, or confirm if there is any truth to it. Obviously, there is antisemitism there, considering a town with that name not only exists, but was allowed to stand with that name for 400 years. But as for the sheer volume and history of Spain's antisemitism, I haven't been able to find anything that provides a clear answer when I've Googled it. Mostly, it just pulls up articles of this current event and nothing else.
TLDR: my question is, I guess, is Spain as steeped in cultural antisemitism as I've been told?
Spain has a long, long history of antisemitism, spanning not just from Christian rule but to even Muslim rule.
You may or may not have heard of the term “Sephardi Jews”. Sephardi Jews are Jews who are descendents of those whose ancestors once made a home in the Iberian peninsula after the Jews were expelled from the land of Israel. “Sephardi” literally means “Spanish”. Now, most Sephardi Jews today live in North Africa, West Asia, South West Asia, France, England, Israel, and the US. You may notice that Spain is not on the list. Why?
Well let me tell you about the Spanish Inquisition.
The Spanish Inquisition hit it’s height in 1492, when the Alhambra Decree was enacted expelling all Jews and Muslims from Spain under the threat of death. Before that, Jews had slowly been being put in ghettos and restricted from public life across Spain.
But things didn’t end once the Jews were purged in 1492. No, for the next few centuries, crypto-Jews, Jews who converted to Christianity but maintained their Jewish heritage, were persecuted and killed by the Spanish Inquisition. Many fled to the Americas and established communities in the Caribbean, South America, and Central America. But they still weren’t safe from the Inquisition, because the Inquisition had control over the colonies as well. Many Jews died.
But there was antisemitism in Spain even before Christians took over. Jewish culture thrived in Al Andalus, but that doesn’t mean antisemitism wasn’t still a threat. Jewish people were at the mercy of whoever ruled at the time. Sometimes, they were friendly to the Jews. Sometimes, they weren’t. And Jews were always subject to dhimmi laws which placed them as second-class citizens. Many people have heard of Samuel Ibn Naghrillah, the Jewish vizier and general to to King Badis Ibn Habus during the 10th century. He was regarded as one of the most influential Jews in Muslim Spain. But while he may have been able to attain great status despite his Dhimmitude, and was able to strengthen Jewish morale, there was still a lot of intense antisemitism within the people. When Samuel’s son Joseph succeeded him, people let out their pent-up antisemitism. They were incensed that a Jew could hold such a high office. They crucified him on the city gates of Grenada, and massacred most of the Jewish population in the city.
But let’s jump back to more recent times. During the Holocaust, Francisco Franco was the fascist ruler of Spain. While he may not have formally joined the Axis, he was a fascist and was sympathetic towards the Nazi movement. Under Franco, Jews were required to be registered to the government, and faced both governmental and social antisemitism.
And on a cultural level…..did you know that the reason Spanish food has so much pork and shellfish is because the Spanish would use it as a way to “sniff out” secret Jews and Muslims? Yeah. Let that sink in. It’s that pervasive.
So yes, Spain is steeped in cultural and historic antisemitism.
This isn't just historical antisemitism, either. I was visiting Spain in 2017 with my mom, and (being Argentine Jews) we wanted to go to a lot of Jewish heritage sites in Spain. Mind you, Spain heavily markets itself as the "land of three cultures" (Christian, Muslim, and Jewish) and they make a bunch of tourism dollars off of that marketing.
We went to Jewish sites in Girona and Toledo, and later while I was traveling with a friend I saw some additional sites in Córdoba and Seville. In Girona we went to the Nachmanides synagogue, which was the home synagogue of a really important rabbi from the 1200s. The synagogue has been turned into a "Jewish museum" and one of its notable exhibits consists of three separate rooms of Jewish tombstones. The museum inscriptions say they were "gifted" to the Spanish rulers of the area. This is an obvious lie, as this would be considered desecrating a grave. In no universe would a Jewish community give Jewish headstones to Christian overlords as a gift. This is an exhibit of violence, and it isn't even recognized as such. The other exhibit was about the Spanish inquisition. The whole museum was clearly talking about us without ever talking with us, designed to explain dead people's dead culture as told by their murderers. It's absolutely ghoulish to do this at all, let alone in a sacred space.
In Toledo one of the synagogues we saw is called Santa María la Blanca, which you might recognize as a fucking weird name for a synagogue. This is possibly the oldest standing synagogue building in Europe, and its name happened to it because it was stolen from the community during the pogroms of 1391 and turned into a Catholic church. The Catholic church *still owns this building* and *will not give it back*.
The Jewish quarter of Seville is barely visible anymore due to all of the pogroms. There's a sign up, and a section of a ghetto wall, and that's all that's recognizable anymore of this community.
The Jewish heritage sites in Córdoba are much better, but clearly it's the outlier among all the rest of the Jewish quarters I saw. But I cannot stress this enough: the Spanish government desecrates and monetizes the corpse of its Jewish community all these centuries after expulsion. It's disgusting.
I’d also like to add how Spanish antisemitism affected Mexican antisemitism:
Even before Spain conquered what is now Latin America, Jews fleeing the aftermath of the 1492 decree were obviously interested in travelling west if it meant escaping poverty and state-sanctioned antisemitism in Iberia…except that the official policy of the conquistadores was to execute anyone even rumoured of being a jew. And once the collection of mesoamerican city-states fell under Spanish control and became New Spain, Jews were effectively outlawed across the entire colony. The founder of Nuevo León, Luís Carvajal, was a converso who was discovered by the inquisition, and his punishment was to languish away in jail (where he eventually died) while several members of his family were burned alive.
I’ve had several otherwise smart and nice people argue vehemently with me that the inquisition was not an antisemitic institution and that its purpose lay solely in “rooting out heretics.”
Throughout the entire colonial/viceroyalty period, it was effectively illegal to be jewish in New Spain, though a few families did manage to slip under the radar and live in relative peace. Bear in mind that socially, Jews were ranked near the bottom of the official caste system, and their entry to the country was barred.
The office of the inquisition remained in existence in Mexico until 1821, the year of its independence; even so, the short-lived government installed by Vicente Guerrero and Augustín de Iturbide (who later crowned himself emperor) espoused three main tenets, one of which was stating that Catholicism was to be the only recognised religion in mexico- A lot of his governance was based upon trying to prevent the liberal-minded reforms currently being enacted in a post-napoleon spain. Jews were not allowed citizenship until decades later when Benito Juárez started a series of reforms to liberalise the country (including stripping power and land from the church in a bid to formally separate church and state, a sore point for many hardcore catholics almost two centuries later) and grant people freedom of worship; the jewish community here regard him fondly but the catholic curch does not, and a common sentiment at the time was accusing Juárez of selling out to the Jews; conservative sentiments plotting to return mexico to spanish rule didn’t really fizzle out until this period.
In fact, Jews weren’t granted formal rights fully until the rule of Maximilian I, who not only explicitly wrote in reforms guaranteeing freedom of religion and expression, but who pushed to open the country to immigrants and refugees from all over the world, including Jews, which was frowned upon by his political opponents.
Official antisemitism related to spain wasn’t even just restricted to the 19th century: president Cardenas was very keen on helping Spaniards flee the civil war and even personally helped organise transports for refugees, but took a dimmer view on Jews being allowed the same help and refused entry for several boats (despite raking the us ove the calls for doing the same thing) even as his ambassadors in Spain and Vichy France practically begged him to take action; this held true even though mexico officially broke relations with spain and didn’t resume them until after Francisco Franco’s death.
If a Mexican flies the spanish flag outside of normal football fandom, is very committed to being a practicing catholic, talks a lot about their spanish ancestry if they’re white, say mexico was better off as a spanish territory, and is a panista, it’s pretty much 110% guaranteed that not only are they an antisemite, but also a francoist with fascist sympathies.
I spent weeks in Spain while reading about its history. I learned a lot of appreciation for Juan Carlos, I thought Cordoba and Sevilla were particularly beautiful, and there was much I loved about Barcelona.
I did not volunteer to any strangers that I was a Jew - because I was reading about Spain’s history.
If I’d done the reading in advance, I may not have gone at all.
It hasn’t gotten any better. This is from the last couple weeks, June 10th, 2026.
Gentle, short introductions to media literacy and information literacy
(I keep kvetching about the absence of media literacy and information literacy...and kvetching is useless.
Signal > Noise will be the tag I use for short, digestible intros to concepts in both media literacy and information literacy.
Asks are open if there are specific topics you want covered.)
------
2025-06-18
[Topic: Bias vs Lying]
Our discourse has gotten so ridiculous that we've mostly lost the ability to disagree constructively, think critically, or benefit from the work of smart people with whom we disagree.
We're so fractured and polarized that we routinely say stupid things like:
That source is biased, so it's not valid and nothing it says is true.
If everything is dismissed as bias, and bias is treated as dishonesty, then truth has nowhere to live - leaving us well and truly fucked.
Confusing bias with lying makes us cynical instead of smart. It turns healthy skepticism into hopeless nihilism
"All media is corrupt" isn't enlightenment - it's intellectual surrender and cowardice.
Bias ≠ Lying
A perspective does not prevent a piece of information from being true or useful.
What Bias Is
Bias is all but inevitable and unavoidable, even for those operating at the highest levels of journalistic integrity and discipline. It's baked into how we work.
Below are two paintings of Daniel in the Lion's Den. Same subject, radically different paintings. Is one of them more true? Is one of them less biased?
Maybe photography provides a better analogy. The angle, lighting, composition, saturation, brightness, contrast, and cropping all affect the final image. But the photo is still of a real object, isn't it? Is one of these six photos of the same man in the same room more valid than the other 5?
That's how all media works.
All media selects, frames, and focuses utilizing both conscious and unconscious biases.
That's not inherently deceptive - it's how all storytelling functions. Our brains are wired for narrative, it's how our minds work.
Bias can emerge from:
Cultural worldview (like Western vs. Eastern framing)
Political orientation (like left vs. right vs. authoritarian)
Institutional interest (like corporate vs. activist vs. governmental)
Professional constraints (like time limits, editorial priorities, sensationalism for clicks)
A liberal news outlet might cover climate change in terms of justice and inequality. A conservative outlet might instead focus on economic cost and individual freedoms.
Both might be factually accurate. Both are biased. Both have value.
More examples:
A conservative media outlet may emphasize crime statistics.
A progressive media outlet may focus on police accountability.
A US media outlet might frame a Middle Eastern conflict through geopolitics
A local media outlet might highlight the conflict through individual suffering.
All may very well be reporting true facts, but they frame those facts differently.
If you see journalism without bias, let me know - because that's what I'll read when I need to be put to sleep without learning a single thing.
Lying is a completely different animal.
What a Lie Is
Lying goes well beyond having a perspective. Lying is a choice to mislead - an intentional, deliberate falsehood.
Humans can lie with all media: words, pictures, headlines, graphs, statistics...even silence can deceive.
The key ingredient is always intent. Lies are designed to obscure the truth.
Deceptive omissions: Leaving out exculpatory evidence to frame someone unfairly.
Fake sources or data: Citing studies that don’t exist, or misrepresenting real ones.
Image manipulation: Using photos or videos out of context, or editing them deceptively.
A biased report might emphasize some facts over others, but a deceptive one tries to convince you of something the producer of that media knows to be false.
Framing = Bias ≠ Lying
Framing is one of the most common and most misunderstood forms of media bias.
It's not lying - It's the rhetorical and narrative choices that shape how every story is told.
Examples of framing in headlines:
"Unarmed man shot by police" vs. "Suspect neutralized in police operation"
"Protesters clash with police" vs. "Police attack peaceful demonstrators"
"Israel retaliates after attack" vs. "Israeli airstrikes kill civilians"
The facts might not be in dispute. Someone was shot, a protest occurred, airstrikes happened, etc - but how those facts are framed shapes how we interpret them.
Framing isn't necessarily dishonest. It reflects the values and assumptions of the writer or publication. Understanding framing is essential for media literacy. When you learn to spot frames, you can wring an additional layer of information from the story.
Since it's Unavoidable, Make Bias Work for You
Expecting media to be perfectly neutral is like expecting food to be completely flavorless. It's neither realistic nor desirable. Without a perspective and a framing, a story ceases to be storytelling and our brains...mostly stop processing it.
Every outlet has an editorial mission, an audience, a funding model, a history - so bias is always baked in. That doesn't mean you discard the source. It means you read it strategically, looking for and identifying those biases.
Instead of asking, "Is this source biased?" know in advance that it definitely is.
Instead of asking yourself "should I read this news outlet and regard everything it presents as objective truth"...know that it definitely doesn't, you definitely shouldn't.
Instead, ask yourself questions like:
What kinds of stories does this outlet consistentlychoose to tell?
Who does the outlet consider trustworthy or quotable?
What kind of loaded language does this outlet use for different groups or events?
Who funds this outlet? Who is its audience? What agenda are they likely to have based on that funding model and target audience?
Bias isn't a disqualifier. It's a clue which tells you more about what you're reading.
Use Biased Sources Without Getting Played
You don't need to trust a source completely to learn something from it. In fact, the most valuable sources are often obviously biased.
1. Identify the Bias
Before even reading, know what kind of outlet you're dealing with. Look at its about page, ownership, funding/revenue model, recurring columnists, and core audience. Does it lean left? Right? Is it globalist? Nationalist? Religious? Secular?
Knowing this lets you anticipate the angle and spot distortions more easily. The more you do it, the easier it gets. After a little practice, you'll see clearly (for example) the huge right wing bias of the Jerusalem Post, the huge left wing bias of Ha'aretz, and how The Times of Israel is mostly pretty disciplined (in their news gathering and framing) about minimizing left/right political biases.
None of these three is perfect, but seeing their usual, institutional biases lets you read them against each other.
2. Use It for Contrast
Biased outlets often highlight stories others avoid or ignore. Fox News may underplay climate change but overplay immigration crime. Al Jazeera will underplay Hamas human rights abuses but spotlight in depth the most embarrassing moments in Israeli politics. The Jerusalem Post will underplay corruption charges against Netanyahu and spotlight the most depraved behaviors committed in the name of Hamas.
Use this to your advantage. Compare coverage across ideological lines. The contrast tells you volumes about outfit AND audience.
3. Look for Hard Facts
Don't quote the adjectives. Quote the data. What happened? When? Where? Who said it? What did the video actually show?
Stop taking an analyst's word as truth - see it as a lens to try on at look at the facts through. If the lens helps it make sense, put it in your back pocket for later use.
Strip away the spin, extract the structure.
4. Cross-Reference Across Angles
Treat each biased source as one side of a triangle. To understand the shape of a thing, you need multiple sides. Balance a left-wing story with a right-wing one. Add an international perspective. Compare them.
Over time, you start seeing the shape of the event instead of the biases of each outfit.
(If you're anything like me, you never want to see or hear another advertisement for Ground News...but still use it sometimes to do exactly this.)
When Bias Becomes Lying
Bias turns into lying when it refuses to admit its own existence or crosses into manipulation. You're dealing with deceptive bias when:
It claims neutrality while advancing a clear agenda
It actively suppresses or distorts opposing views
It refuses to promptly issue corrections or acknowledge errors
It flattens complexity into false binaries like good guys vs. bad guys
It consistently omits key information that would challenge its narrative
It's part of a disinformation campaign (state media, bad actors, bots)
Ask yourself these questions:
Does the outlet ever challenge its own side?
Does it interview or quote those it disagrees with...without distortion?
Does it foster critical thinking or does it push tribal loyalty?
Thesl answers will let you see lying much more quickly.
When evaluating a media claim, ask:
Is this verifiable?
Does this trigger a strong emotional reaction? Was that the goal?
What's missing?
Does this match the tone of propaganda? (overly simplified, emotionally charged, black-and-white framing?)
Recognizing your own bias is more critical than spotting it in others. We are all vulnerable to confirmation bias, and most of us seek out what feels good while avoiding what challenges us.
Practice pausing. Breathe a few times between the click and the share. (Confirmation bias will be the topic of a future Signal > Noise.)
Vary Your Media Diet
To understand a complex world, you need inputs from multiple angles.
If you only get your information from one side, you're not informed - you're enlisted.
Real media literacy is not about being neutral. It's about navigating bias with awareness, curiosity, and courage.
That means reading:
Across ideological lines
Across national borders
Across formats (print, visual, audio)
It's not always fun, it takes some time, but it's essential and cwn dramatically reduce your susceptibility to propaganda -
...so go read smart, articulate people you disagree with!
Instead of avoiding bias, learn to read it. Recognize it. Use it. Balance it. Counter it. Triangulate past it.
And when you find actual deception? Name it and reject it.
If a doctor proposed banning all antibiotics but refused to answer “What about sepsis?”, you’d rightly walk out of the room.
Of course the ideal should be a world without prisons. In a perfect utopian future, we would have no need for cages because we would have successfully dismantled the root causes of crime, poverty, and harm. But this smug, dismissive refusal to engage with the grittiest realities of human behavior helps absolutely nothing and actively works against her goals.
It treats a foundational question of public safety as a tiresome “gotcha” rather than a deeply legitimate human concern.
When activists retreat into pure idealism and dismiss the public’s valid fears about violent crime as unworthy of a response, they don’t look visionary. They look condescending, elitist, and entirely disconnected from the reality of human nature.
The underlying logic of this deflection relies on a false dichotomy - the idea that if you dare to ask how an abolitionist world handles a rapist or a murderer, you must be a blanket defender of mass incarceration.
Over here in reality, you can fully recognize that our current justice system is deeply flawed, broken, and failing survivors, while still demanding to know what replaces the physical containment of dangerous individuals.
To frame a question about immediate physical safety as a structural roadblock is an intellectual bait-and-switch. It assumes that anyone asking for a practical plan just “doesn’t get it,” when in reality they just want to know how you plan to keep their loved ones safe.
The comics series “Who’s Left” is garbage.
Here’s how it dismisses people who lived through the communist (authoritarian) regimes of the 20gh century: by calling them old and xenophobic.
And here’s how it defends those regimes:
Speaking as a lifelong left-leaning liberal: this is tankie bullshit and it deserves your contempt.
Idealism is great. Pretending idealism is a suitable replacement for realism or pragmatism is idiocy.
If BDS is literally making maps to target Jewish/Jew-owned businesses, could they be considered a terrorist organization? I doubt it is that simple, but how else to describe such a malicious organization? I don't THINK they do the attacks themselves but it feels like they're encouraging it by basically giving a map publicly to their already violently antisemitic audience.
The Mapping Project launched in June 2022 courtesy of anonymous organizers, but it was promoted repeatedly by the douchebags at BDS Boston, a regional chapter.
No evidence has emerged tying BDS Boston to its creation, but it’s hard to imagine they weren’t in the room.
We have shown physical addresses, named officers and leaders, and mapped connections. These entities exist in the physical world and can be disrupted in the physical world. We hope people will use our map to help figure out how to push back effectively.
This disavowal from Nawajaa was PR damage control, not conscience or decency.
The people who built the site had run the same calculation - and that’s why no one was charged.
Terrorism is the word everyone reaches for here. It’s the wrong one because the federal terrorism statutes are narrow and the mappers knew just how wide their project could be.
“We hope this helps people figure out how to push back” is vague and future-tense on purpose. It was written specifically to fail that test.
True threats fall under Counterman v. Colorado, which asks whether a statement reads as serious intent to commit violence. “Every entity has an address, every network can be disrupted” gets close.
The congressional letter called the map a potential roadmap for violent attacks by foreign terrorist organizations and domestic extremists, but warning that strangers might misuse your map is not the same as threatening anyone yourself, and the law holds that line even when it feels like a technicality.
Material support for terrorism (18 U.S.C. § 2339B) is the last reach, and it requires coordination with or benefit to a specific designated terrorist organization. A public map that any Jew-hater with a grudge and a car could act on doesn’t qualify. The statute targets funding real networks and wasn’t built for stochastic terrorism.
So nothing stuck. Authorities didn’t decide the map was fine, but the people who made it framed it as “research and political organizing” and stopped one careful inch short of the intent and imminence the law recognizes as incitement.
Nawajaa knew. BDS Boston knew. The mappers knew. The only thing nobody could prove is the one thing everybody understood.
So it isn’t legally a terrorist organization, Anon.
They don’t do the attacks, they just pick the targets, publish them to an audience they know is violent, and frame it carefully enough to call it research. That’s what stochastic terrorism is, your instinct to call it terrorism makes sense, and the reason it isn’t a chargeable crime is the same reason it works.
The map does the targeting. The crowd does the rest. Nobody has to give an order- and that was the entire point of drawing the map this way.
The place Israel occupies in these people’s imagination is ridiculous. Israel as the linchpin of colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, ecological devastation - whatever bugs you most, Israel does it worst. Get rid of Israel, save the entire world.
It is much bigger than Rooney. Over the last few years, artists, activists, and academics have repeatedly advanced versions of the same claim: Israel as humanity’s arch-nemesis, the disappearance would somehow solve everything.
Example: Jason Hickel, visiting professor at the London School of Economics, claimed that “A liberated Palestine means a liberated Middle East. A liberated Middle East means capitalism in the core really faces a crisis.” Because why not.
Israel has become a western totem, personifying the cumulative sins of the West’s entire history. In an incredible historical irony, the Jews are now not an oriental, semitic pariah nation nor a degenerate sub-human race, but the purest representatives of the West and the most atrocious white supremacists.
As the West’s original essence Israel naturally carries the West’s original sins: colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, etc. Because the Jews are now considered the very essence of the West, Israel’s sins are understood as the carrying the collective blame of all westerners. Making Israel pay is thus not only a step on the long arch towards justice, but serves as a purgative practice for all westerners.
As the effigy of the West, burning Israel will cleanse the West from its past transgressions. The wish to eradicate Israel is therapeutic, salvific: the sins of all western forefathers, those imperialist, colonialist, slave-holding Europeans, will finally be atoned. Capitalism will fall, the environment will be saved. Redemption is nigh, we just have to eradicate that wart of a nation.
As the eternal alter-ego of the West, Jews will always function as its scapegoats. When the West loved itself, we were the alien element supposedly defiling it. Now that the West despises itself, we have become its distilled essence: the figure through whose destruction it fantasizes about purification.
The line I’ve heard from Jewish Trump supporters for the last 3 years is that he’s good at diplomacy with dictators in the Middle East because he “speaks their language”.
And no shit he does. Because he’s one of them. He “speaks the language” of authoritarian dictators with no regard for human rights because he’s a mobbed-up authoritarian wannabe dictator with no regard for human rights.
And what you need to understand is that this also goes the other way: they speak his language. They can get him to fold as long as they give him big flashy airplanes, and stroke his ego and pad his wallet enough.
He talks rough, and he’ll bulldoze anyone who gets in the way of what he wants, not because he’s actually strong, but because he’s an infantile spoiled brat who demands his way. This is exactly the same reason he also rolls over and barks like a dog the second he’s promised a treat.
What he wants is not what you want, no matter how much he tries to sell you that line. He is out for himself, the rest of us be damned.
He’s not the Ayatollah whisperer. He just wants to be a member of whatever club the Ayatollah is in.
In 2019, Benjamin Netanyahu draped buildings with giant banners that depicted him shaking hands with a grinning Donald Trump. Captioned with the words Another League, the posters presented Netanyahu’s ties with the American president as an argument for the Israeli prime minister’s reelection. No one else, Netanyahu’s campaign implied, could deliver the mercurial man in the White House.
That was then. Today, Netanyahu’s boast has boomeranged, transformed from an electoral asset into an advertisement of his diminished influence. In June alone, Trump has labeled him “fucking crazy” and said that he has “no fucking judgment.” The reprimands have gone beyond rhetoric. According to Israeli and American reports, over the past week, the president forced Israel to abort imminent retaliatory strikes on Iran and demanded that the country restrict its response to Hezbollah fire from Lebanon that has pummeled the Israeli north. Trump also reportedly denied Israel’s request to view the memorandum of understanding that his administration negotiated with Iran until it was already a fait accompli. Desperate for a deal to wind down his ill-conceived war, the president effectively offered Israeli concessions to his Iranian interlocutors.
Trump has railed against Netanyahu in the past, most famously after the Israeli leader congratulated Joe Biden on his 2020 election victory. But the current contretemps has much higher stakes and comes at the worst possible time for Netanyahu. Israel’s elections are slated for either September or October, and Trump has placed the Israeli prime minister in a fiendish vise that jeopardizes his political future.
For years, Netanyahu has built his brand on two promises to the Israeli electorate: that he alone could withstand international pressure to compromise on Israeli security, and that he alone could handle Trump. Now the president is forcing Netanyahu to choose between the two. Either he defies Trump’s diktats about Lebanon and Iran to save his reputation as a stalwart security hawk, or he folds to preserve the perception of his alliance with the president. Whatever path Netanyahu picks, he will imperil Israel’s geopolitical standing and undermine his own case to Israeli voters.
Those voters already aren’t buying what Bibi has been selling. Netanyahu’s coalition of far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties received just 48.4 percent of the vote in Israel’s last election and obtained a parliamentary majority only due to a quirk of the country’s electoral system. Even before the horrors of October 7, 2023, polls had showed Netanyahu and his allies losing the next election. For years after, about two-thirds of Israelis regularly told pollsters that they wanted the prime minister to resign. A similar number today don’t want him to run for reelection. Israel’s opposition is leaderless and fragmented—but nonetheless projected to win markedly more seats than the current government. (Whether it can cobble together a viable coalition is another question.)
Israel’s failed forever wars in Iran and Lebanon have further eroded Netanyahu’s prospects. At the outset of the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran, the Israel Democracy Institute found that some 70 percent of Israeli Jews believed that the operation could succeed in destroying Iran’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs, and 61 percent thought that it would topple the Iranian regime. These expectations, stoked by Netanyahu and his media allies, were always unrealistic and have predictably curdled into disillusionment. The institute’s most recent survey found that less than a third of Israeli Jews expected a U.S.-Iran agreement to dismantle the ballistic-missile program or the Iranian regime, and just 29 percent believed that ending the war under current conditions was compatible with Israel’s security interests.
According to Amit Segal, a journalist well sourced on the Israeli right, Netanyahu had hoped to host Trump in Israel before the looming election, in what would essentially have been a campaign rally in diplomatic disguise. Today, such festivities seem fantastical. After the interim Iran accord was announced, the Likud party reportedly canceled a planned electoral blitz meant to highlight its leader’s close ties to Trump. But as a student of power who has done everything he can to hoard it, Netanyahu should have seen this rug pull coming.
As the president has demonstrated time and again, the only person whose interests matter to Trump is Trump. Those interests have often aligned with Netanyahu’s, but this was always a marriage of convenience. Like many of his party and generation, Trump has long held generally pro-Israel inclinations. He cares little for the aspirations of the Palestinian people and has openly fantasized about invading Iran since the 1980s. Tilting toward Israel played to the president’s evangelical-Christian base, as Trump noted when he declared that he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital “for the evangelicals.”
But Trump’s interests were bound to diverge from Netanyahu’s as the Iran war stretched on without resolution. Netanyahu needed military achievements to pitch to voters at the ballot box; Trump needed the markets to calm before the midterms. And so when the campaign failed to produce quick results, Trump pulled the plug, first acceding to a cease-fire in early April, then restraining Israel from bombing Iran and Lebanon this month, and today moving toward an interim accord that lifts sanctions on Iran even as it does little about its nuclear program and says nothing about its ballistic missiles or support for terrorist proxies. That 60-day accord is tentative and fragile and may yet collapse into renewed hostilities. But if the president chooses to see it through, the Israeli leader can do very little about it. As Trump put it today, “We’re the big partner, and he’s the very small partner.”
For Netanyahu, who is finally facing a reckoning before the Israeli electorate, this is a disaster on his doorstep. For Trump, it’s someone else’s problem.
What forensic evidence from oct 7th? didnt khamas destroy most of the evidence with missles from the helicopters they flew in on?
I’m sorry. Hold on. I need a little time before tackling this one.
Checks blood pressure.
Does breathing exercises for 30 minutes.
Checks blood pressure again.
Pours two fingers of bourbon and sips it slowly for an hour
Checks blood pressure again.
Returns to Tumblr
I can now offer something more than expletives.
Anon, you’re suggesting that Hamas helicopters flew in and launched missiles to destroy the evidence of it’s crimes.
There were no helicopters. Hamas came through the fence mostly on the ground, with bulldozers and motorbikes and a few paragliders.
I can guess where the helicopter thing got into your head, because there’s a whole conspiracy theory about an Apache supposedly firing on the Nova festival (which is a variation on the Hannibal Directive lie).
It’s false (wrong day, miles from the site), but even the fake version is about Israeli helicopters.
You heard a debunked claim, lost track of whose helicopters it was about, and handed the imaginary air force to Hamas.
There is no shortage of evidence.
Hamas filmed it.They wore GoPros and livestreamed the massacre to their own families. The single largest source of documentation here is the gunmen’s home movies.
So the people who supposedly erased all the evidence are also the people who shot most of it and posted it online.
There’s no missing evidence. There are perpetrators who filmed their own crimes, and there are Western deniers who refuse to witness it, sometimes literally.
We know that happened because they filmed themselves doing it, they livestreamed it, they called their families to brag about it, they celebrated it in Gaza, their leaders praised it and promised to repeat it.
They want the credit for their massacre.
Denying them that credit takes either shameful, willful ignorance or open sympathy for people who are loudly, consistently proud of what they did.
