Assesseth The Oracular @assesseth

There is something darkly amusing about the fact that selling victimhood to the most privileged people in history has become such a lucrative and big business. When I was on tour with @jordanbpeterson he talked about many things, but probably the most common recurring theme was the "Spirit of Cain". It seems our ancient and sacred texts tell these stories for a reason: victimhood is easy, seductive and addictive. And now profitable too. We are living through a perpetual victimhood escalation battle where people (and groups) now compete not on merit, but on the supposed disadvantages they face. Which makes perfect sense since this is the incentive structure our societies have been encouraged and forced to adopt.

The October 7th did not end with Hamas. It continued in UN reports. A rigorous review of UN documentation reveals a pattern of systemic bias: laundered data, distorted statistics & the systematic omission of Hamas' conduct - Read the Full Report

The progressive idea of "Let's make everyone equal at math by just not making anyone learn math" is going just about as well as you'd expect

San Francisco Chronicle @sfchronicle

a week ago

More than five years after the UC system lifted its standardized testing requirement, a coalition led by UC Berkeley math professors argues the drop in students’ math levels is “severe.” sfchronicle.com/california/art…

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It’s one thing to call for a two-state solution. It’s another thing to present Israel as the sole obstacle to that solution. This is what it looks like when an elected official works to actively misinform the American public. A 🧵…

Senator Chris Van Hollen @ChrisVanHollen

a week ago

Democrats have provided reflexive & unconditional support to Netanyahu & Israeli governments, even as they undermined the values we claimed to stand for.   It's time to end taxpayer-funded support & condition arms sales to end the occupation & salvage a 2-state solution.

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@elonmusk Yes. Price discovery (self-organizing) is one of the pillars of free markets

Umm...

UN Watch @UNWatch

a week ago

🚨 BREAKING: New report by UN Watch reveals UN “experts” accepted millions of dollars from China, Russia, and Qatar before attacking the U.S., Israel, and the West. 🧵 See the report’s most striking findings:

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Western civilization is amazing

Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin

2 weeks ago

What if the west isn't the villain they told you it was? We’ve spent years accepting accusations about racism, intolerance, and slavery without challenging the bigger historical reality: The societies most condemned today are also the ones that led the world in ending slavery,

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@NickKristof @4Bassam They say they’ve been raped by Zionist elephants is what I’m hearing

Tu confonds deux choses, et c'est exactement le piège que la French Theory a tendu. Liberté, égalité, fraternité — égalité *de droits*, égalité *devant la loi*, égalité *de dignité*. C'est la promesse républicaine, et personne ici ne l'attaque. Le wokisme, ce n'est pas ça. C'est l'égalitarisme des résultats. Et l'égalitarisme des résultats, contrairement à l'égalité des droits, n'est pas un élargissement de la liberté — c'est sa négation. Quelques exemples concrets : — San Francisco supprime les classes de maths avancées au collège pour "réduire les inégalités". Résultat : les écarts entre élèves explosent, les familles aisées prennent des cours privés, les pauvres se font enterrer. L'égalitarisme a creusé l'inégalité. — Les politiques de discrimination positive à Harvard : étudiants admis avec des scores très en dessous de leurs camarades, taux d'échec dispropportionné, sentiment d'imposture, ressentiment généralisé. On a saboté ceux qu'on voulait aider. — L'aide humanitaire qui distribue du riz gratuit pendant 30 ans en Afrique : effondrement des filières agricoles locales, dépendance institutionnalisée. Donner un poisson, c'est empêcher d'apprendre à pêcher. Le wokisme ne détruit pas l'humanité dans le sens dramatique. Il fait pire : il dessert systématiquement ceux qu'il prétend protéger, et il génère du ressentiment des deux côtés — ceux qu'on infantilise et ceux qu'on culpabilise. La fraternité républicaine dit : tu es mon égal, donc je te traite en adulte capable. Le wokisme dit : tu es ma victime, donc je dois te protéger de toi-même. L'un élève. L'autre infantilise. Ce n'est pas la même chose, et confondre les deux est exactement le tour de passe-passe qu'on dénonce.

Eduardo Suarez @EduardoSuarez25

3 weeks ago

@brivael Francia exporta libertad, igualdad y fraternidad desde hace 237 años. Quienes invocan el "wokismo" como destrucción de la humanidad simplemente reflejan su falta de respeto de la identidad ajena, y su necedad de valores, mientras piden respeto a sus ideas niegan las de los demás.

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Not only is @AmyMek brilliant, but she is brave. While giving testimony, members of CAIR sat behind her in a show of intimidation. Be Amy Mek. Never back down.

The @nytopinion piece by @NickKristof successfully buried the coverage of the thorough Civil Commission report.

The Civil Commission @theCC07

3 weeks ago

After more than two years of independent investigation, the Civil Commission has released a comprehensive report documenting sexual and gender-based violence committed by Hamas on October 7 and during hostage captivity. The report is not only a historical record — it is a call

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Much has been written about @NickKristof's latest NYT opinion column over the past 24 hours, most of it focusing on the specific claims and their sourcing, but what I think deserves most attention is something broader: how this kind of journalism, whatever its intentions, ultimately makes accountability harder to achieve rather than easier, and harms the very people it claims to champion. The principle that Israeli abuses should be investigated and condemned is not in dispute, and nobody serious is arguing otherwise. Israel is not above scrutiny, and in fact it operates under more intense international scrutiny than almost any country on earth, routinely held to standards applied nowhere else. The problem here is something different entirely: the complete collapse of evidentiary standards the moment Israel is the subject. This piece reads less like rigorous reporting and more like a catalogue of hearsay, unverifiable allegations, and activist claims stitched together into a sweeping moral indictment. Its sourcing leans heavily on Euro Med Human Rights Monitor, an organisation repeatedly criticised over extremist ties, disinformation, and deeply questionable methodology, yet treated throughout as a credible authority while its leadership openly engages in pro Hamas propaganda on X. Worse, the same ecosystem of activists and self appointed “experts” that amplifies Euro Med’s claims online increasingly feeds narratives into more established organisations and media outlets, laundering deeply contested allegations into the appearance of institutional credibility. The most severe claims are anonymous, uncorroborated, and presented in the emotional register of established fact rather than allegation, despite lacking meaningful evidentiary backing. Yet Kristof largely adopts them without serious scrutiny, publishing the piece in the Opinion section because even the already diminished evidentiary standards often applied to reporting on the Israeli Palestinian conflict would likely not suffice for it to pass as straight news reporting. This approach doesn't strengthen accountability, it actively destroys it. When every allegation is immediately inflated into systematic rape and "standard operating procedure" before any serious verification, genuine investigation becomes harder rather than easier. Real abuses, if they occurred, get buried beneath maximalist narratives so extreme that large portions of the public simply stop trusting any of it, and the people who actually suffered pay that price. It also alienates the vast majority of Israelis and Jews worldwide, including the many who are perfectly capable of criticising Israeli policy and supporting investigations into misconduct, but who understandably recoil when accusations begin resembling modernised blood libels dressed up as human rights reporting. The framing matters enormously, and so does proportionality, and so does evidence. Nor does any of this serve Palestinians. Atrocity inflation entrenches both sides deeper into defensive tribalism, and every dubious claim amplified by a prestigious outlet makes legitimate criticism easier to dismiss when it actually matters. The timing compounds everything. On a day when documented reporting on Hamas sexual violence was again circulating, the NYT chose to run an opinion column built substantially on unverifiable anonymous testimony asserting that Israelis are conducting systemic rape campaigns, not as a rigorously evidenced investigative report but as an opinion piece with the imprimatur of the paper of record. Kristof is not a naive bystander in any of this. In 2014 he used the full credibility of the NYT to repeatedly platform Somaly Mam, a Cambodian anti-trafficking activist whose harrowing personal story he championed across multiple columns, until it emerged that her backstory was substantially fabricated and he was forced to issue a public correction. When challenged this time around on his sourcing, corroboration, and methodology, he defaulted to bad faith engagement on social media rather than addressing the underlying concerns seriously. It is the same pattern, playing out again in a different context. Real journalism requires skepticism, corroboration, and restraint applied consistently regardless of the subject, and when those standards disappear the moment Israel is involved, what remains is not human rights reporting but narrative activism wearing a journalist's costume that does far more harm than good to everyone it claims to serve.

Today, the Civil Commission released Silenced No More: Sexual Terror Unveiled: The Untold Atrocities of October 7 and Against Hostages in Captivity — the product of more than two years of documentation, legal analysis, archival work, and testimony collection. It is the most important work I have ever been part of. This report was born in the space between atrocity and denial. It documents patterns of sexual and gender-based violence committed during the October 7 attacks and in captivity, preserving evidence that too many sought to minimize, dismiss, or erase. The work demanded confronting materials and testimonies of extraordinary brutality. Justice cannot exist without recognition, and recognition cannot exist without people willing to preserve the truth with rigor, care, and moral clarity. What makes this report so significant is not only the scale of the investigation (hundreds of testimonies, thousands of visual records, years of analysis) but its insistence that these crimes be understood within the frameworks of international law, accountability, and human dignity. Contributing to this report has been one of the most meaningful and consequential responsibilities of my life. Working alongside an extraordinary team of lawyers, archivists, and documenters, I had the privilege of contributing to the report’s legal findings and analysis under international human rights and international criminal law, helping document and assess crimes that many sought to deny, minimize, or erase. I hope people will read the report in full, engage seriously with its findings, and understand what is at stake when sexual violence in conflict is denied, politicized, or ignored. The truth deserves a permanent place in the historical and legal record. Link to full report below. @CochavElkayam @theCC07

Seems inevitable for an open standard for browsers to emerge that lets websites use a user's LLM (e.g. via subscription or local model running via ollama) to decouple token economics from product innovation to some extent. In SaaS / business context this may carry even stronger implications. Is this being worked on anywhere yet?

@ylecun @eladgil SV is *at least* 6-12 months ahead of everyone else on hyping up what they are ahead of everyone else on, which may or may not be a significant chunk of SOTA AI.

@glukianoff @Google If it wasn’t tragic how naive most Westerners who fancy themselves activists are, it would be comic. SJP is strongly tied to Hamas, which in turn is a chapter of Muslim Brotherhood and receives funding and guidance from Iran’s IRGC as well, who in turn are in cahoots with…

I have observed Hamas conceal explosive charges in rooms, underground, in a washing machine and now between two floors in a building. The purpose, of course, was to ambush IDF troops who entered the building.

You may not agree with me, but you will always know where you stand with me. Today in Billericay, a heckler tried to shout me down as I spoke about the normalisation of hatred towards Jews. I did not back down, because it needs to be said. British Jews are being targeted and too many people are pretending this is the same experience of other minorities. This lady implied Muslims are being similarly targeted. This is simply not true. Let's be honest about what is happening. Certain groups (in particular but not solely Islamic Extremists) are creating a climate of fear and intimidation that is normalising Jew hatred. I will never stand for that. Governments have spent too long hand-wringing, making excuses and hoping it would go away. It is time to call this what it is: a national emergency in our attitude, our urgency and our response. I will always engage with people who disagree with me. That is politics. But there is a difference between argument and intimidation. Shouting does not make a bad case good. It's done to silence others. And it certainly does not change the truth. The truth is that British Jews have been made to feel less safe in their own country. Our country. They are being singled out, threatened and harassed in ways that should shame everyone in public life. If we do not stand up now and stop this rise in antisemitism, then why bother saying "Never Again" at Holocaust Memorial Day? Because this is how it starts. I am not prepared to play along with the pretence that this is normal, or manageable, or just another example of tension between groups. It really is not. It is targeted hatred and it is getting worse. So my message is simple. Not here. Not in Britain. And not on our watch. We need to stop the hand-wringing and start doing the right thing. That means standing with British Jews openly, unapologetically and without fear.

This is one of the most jaw-dropping, chilling interviews I have seen. Watch this Rabbi from London, respond to question about the terror stabbing in Golders Green!

I really appreciate Ahmed for saying this. As a strong supporter of a Palestinian state and Palestinian freedom, we need to recognise that there was a massive missed opportunity between 1948 and 1967.

Realign For Palestine @rfpalestine

a month ago

There was a period when a Palestinian state could have been declared: before 1967, when Gaza was under Egyptian control and the West Bank under Jordanian rule. There was no Israeli occupation of those territories and no settlements. East Jerusalem was not under Israeli control.

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