Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
. . . well, at least in my history. I found this picture by accident while trawling through my iPhotos. I don’t have a date (the info on the photo says 2022, but that can’t be right), and I don’t know who took the photo: it could have been me or it could be my friend Andrew Berry.
But it does show three generations of evolutionary geneticists, photographed in Dick’s office at Harvard after he retired. The top photo is of Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975), the Ph.D. advisor (at Columbia) of Dick Lewontin (1929-2021), my own Ph.D. advisor, the living person to the right. Dick was a huge fan of Dobzhansky, whom he called by his nickname “Dodek”, and Dobzhansky was going to be my own Ph.D. advisor, except that when I had to do my alternative service as a conscientious objector, Dobzhansky retired and moved to UC Davis, and could no longer take students. I then importuned Lewontin to take me, and he did, but that’s a long story. . . .
Dobzhansky is sitting in a characteristic pose, sitting at them microscope and reading chromosome inversions in Drosophila pseudoobscura or D. persimilis. That was the research he did: he had two high-class technicians who manipulated the flies and did the salivary-gland squashes to reveal the chromosomes, and Doby (an alternative to “Dodek”) read the slides to see the inversion karyotypes.
The bottom picture is me en déshabillé, photographed climbing Mount Lewontin (a tiny hillock south of Death Valley, named after Dick because he did fly-release work there). That photo was taken by Phil Ward, an old friend and a professor of entomology at UC Davis. We had gone to Death Valley for biology, I to collect flies and Phil to collect ants. I wanted to do a “first climb” of the tiny hillock, which others had climbed before, and so, to make it unique, I did it without clothes (I couldn’t do it without oxygen since no oxygen is required!). I am wearing shoes and my usual field Stetson. I autographed the photo and gave it to Dick, who put it on his wall beneath Dobzhansky’s. I believe my autograph said something like “To Dick Lewontin, who has always climbed upwards towards the naked truth.”
Is it a surprise that students are using AI to cheat when they get the opportunity? I guess it does surprise some people, for a pretty clear case of cheating at Brown University made headlines at Inside Higher Ed (click on the screenshot to read).
Excerpts:
For the first time since he started teaching Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory nearly two decades ago, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his students a take-home midterm this spring. Quite a few students had expressed anxiety about being in a classroom after a gunman killed two students and injured nine in a December mass shooting at Brown, and so “it was appropriate,” he said, to allow students to take their exams at home.
But by the end of the semester, Serrano regretted the decision. Dozens of students in the class likely used artificial intelligence to cheat and earn perfect or near-perfect scores on their midterm, he said. Serrano in turn made the final exam in-person, which led more than a dozen students to drop the course and even more to fail it. Administrators’ response to the widespread cheating event has been “meek,” he said, and the incident has raised questions about how universities can—and should—respond to AI-enabled cheating at scale.
His welfare economics class typically attracted up to 30 students, but this spring he taught 86—an increase he attributes to the promised take-home exams. When the midterm came along, the average score was 96 percent.
“Historically the average grade in the midterm of this course has ranged between 65 and 80 [percent], and this exam was harder than the exams I wrote in the past, because … take-home is an opportunity to challenge the class a little bit more, given that you’re giving the students unlimited time,” Serrano said.
He knew something “fishy” was going on, and so he and his graders ran the test through ChatGPT. The AI gave answers that mirrored what his students had written, and which were “kind of correct, but very off and with a very convoluted style,” Serrano said. For example, one question asked students to prove a mathematical statement that could most obviously be done using a “direct argument,” Serrano explained. ChatGPT—and many of his students—used a “contradiction argument,” which gave the right answer but was “very contrived” and which Serrano could tell wasn’t written by a human.
Prof Serrano said he wasn’t going to fail students for cheating (the allegation can’t be proved) but would give them a final exam in class. At that announcement 18 students dropped the course and 9 decided not to take the final.
Here’s the distribution of scores for both exams, with the final in gray and the midterms in orange. They didn’t plot a correlation, but there doesn’t appear to be one because many of the students who did terrible on the final got nearly perfect scores on the midterm:
The University turned a blind eye to this cheating—for that’s what it surely is—until Serrano went public.
In May, Serrano submitted the data shown above to Brown’s Standing Committee on the Academic Code and received no response. After he went public with his story in late June, the committee, through his department chair, asked Serrano to submit individual complaints against each student suspected of cheating, including copies of their exams, he said.
Most people with a sense of right and wrong would find this behavior unethical, tempting though it may be to cheat, but some misguided profs think that, well, if the chance to cheat is there, there’s nothing wrong with taking it. Here’s from P.Z. Myers, who found the same results with his students.
I figured this out back during the pandemic, when by necessity I had to offer exams online. Scores shot up! I knew immediately what was going on, but I didn’t punish the students — I couldn’t blame them for taking advantage of the system.
“I couldn’t blame them for taking advantage of the system”?? That’s equivalent to telling the students, “It’s okay to cheat if you can get away with it.”
More:
Asked about the university’s response to the cheating, Brown spokesperson Brian Clark told Inside Higher Ed that the procedure for investigating cheating allegations is the same whether it’s one student or several.
“Brown treats every allegation of academic integrity with the utmost seriousness. In regard to this economics course, multiple academic leaders from Brown were in touch with the faculty member who raised concerns to provide details about how the allegations raised could be formally adjudicated. To date, the faculty member has not provided the necessary details to the Standing Committee on the Academic Code to pursue this path toward resolution,” Clark wrote.
If Brown took it seriously, why didn’t they respond to Serrano’s original complaint? Now Brown is adjusting its rules—to be easier on the students! My bolding:
As the cheating scandal unfolded in Serrano’s classroom, a Brown committee on generative AI in teaching and learning was examining how the technology was being used at the university and formalizing recommendations for how Brown can adapt and respond to AI developments. Its inaugural report was published Tuesday.
Three-quarters of Brown professors said they are concerned about students using AI to cheat, according to feedback from 105 faculty members. The same share of respondents said the same in a 2025 nationwide survey from the American Association of Colleges and Universities. As part of a set of medium-term recommendations, the committee encouraged the university to amend the College Academic Code and the graduate student code “to address GenAI realities and safeguard against misuse.”
The committee also suggests that faculty “de-emphasize punishment” and avoid highly restrictive rules around generative AI use.
There is no way to check with 100 percent accuracy whether GenAI has been employed, and norms are likely to change in the years to come,” the report states. “Moving the conversation beyond punishment also allows for open dialogue that will be necessary as Brown navigates this moment.
What is motivating this softness on cheaters, which includes relaxing bans on using AI? I can see this only as a misguided extension of the victim/oppressor narrative, with the students seen as victims. Alternatively, it could be the new mentality that sees students as customers of the university, with their high tuition buying them good grades and a degree. ChatGPT, which launched at the end of 2022, was the first program that made AI cheating widely available, and the oppressor/victim dichotomy was intensified by the killing of Geore Gloye in 202.
The problem of course is that how can you prove that a student used AI unless more than one student gives the same answer. I know there are programs to detect whether AI was used, but I also hear they’re not that good.
The only solution is to not let students have take-home exams, and ensure that in class they cannot have their laptops or phones open, or surrending them before you take the test. (I am told by one professor that students got around this by bringing two phones and then cheating on the second phone when they ask to go to the bathroom).
It would be harder to cheat in labs, for you have to actually do something like run experiments or synthesize an organic compound. I remember that in O-chem (the bane of all biology students) we had to extract caffeine from coffee, and then you were tested when the prof looked at the melting point of your caffeine when it was tested in a glass tube. That would be hard to fake with AI, though I suppose you could purchase caffeine. But if professors want to ensure that students don’t cheat, they’ll have to be creative. Recent surveys show that over 60% of college students admitted to cheating in some way, and that goes up to 95% if you consider high school.
****
Here’s a tweet lauding the highest achiever and two students who apparently didn’t cheat as their midterm scores weren’t that different from their final-exam score.
Friends don’t let friends continue to give exams and papers that are not adapted to the current AI landscape (this is AFTER 27 bailed so the reality is even worse)
Welcome to Friday, July 10, 2026 and National Kitten Day. Here’s a ten-minute video of kitten antics to brighten your day. My favorite bits are when kittens jump sideways.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 10 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Footy news: Both Matthew and watched the France-Morocco match live, but Matthew had to stay up late in Manchester. However, we are both France fans (though my favorite team is Argentiina), so we were glad when France won 2-0 after a scoreless first half. And of course Mbappé scored one goal, tying Messi in this World Cup with eight goals each.
Kylian Mbappé recovered from a missed penalty to score his 20th World Cup goal and help send France through to the semifinals of the World Cup with a 2-0 win over Morocco.
Didier Deschamps’ team took control of their quarterfinal tie on Thursday early in the second half with two goals in six minutes to set up a meeting with either Spain or Belgium in the last four.
Mbappé had his first-half penalty saved by Yassine Bounou, but scored a wonderful opener for France shortly after the break with a curling effort into the far corner for his eighth of the tournament to draw level with Lionel Messi in the race for the Golden Boot.
It was followed soon afterwards by another from Ousmane Dembélé — quiet up until that point — when the Paris Saint-Germain forward calmly passed his finish into the bottom corner from the edge of the box.
. . . France had 13 shots in the first half compared to just one from Morocco, who struggled to make an impact in the final third.
If their game-plan was reliant on keeping France out, it broke down early in the second half.
With Morocco struggling to create any chances of note, first Mbappé and then Dembélé made them pay as France became only the third nation to make three straight World Cup semifinals.
And here are the highlights. On the video you can see goal-scoring plays at 7:30 and 9:34. Today Spain plays Belgium at 3 p.m. Eastern time.
Iran, fearing that its hold over the crucial Strait of Hormuz shipping lanes was gradually slipping away, risked overplaying its hand by again firing on oil tankers and potentially rekindling a major war with the United States, analysts said.
Both sides threatened on Wednesday to scuttle the Memorandum of Understanding that they had signed on June 17 to establish a blueprint for peace talks and extended a wobbly cease-fire in place since April. American warplanes carried out even more intensive attacks on scores of targets across Iran overnight, while Iran vowed to ratchet up drone and missile strikes against U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf.
The basic bargain in the vaguely worded, 14-point Memorandum of Understanding was that Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz for commercial shipping in exchange for badly needed economic relief. Thornier issues, including the fate of Iran’s nuclear program, were kicked down the road for further negotiations. But very little changed.
“The M.O.U. increasingly looked like a mirage,” said Vali Nasr, a veteran Iran analyst and a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “The view from Tehran is that the U.S. is engaged in a concerted effort to take control of the Strait out of Iran’s hands, to weaken its position in Lebanon and to regain its own strength in order to put even more pressure on Iran or to go back to war.”
As the 60-day clock on the agreement ticked away, Iran grew increasingly frustrated that the U.S. Navy was encouraging maritime traffic to take a southern route along the coast of Oman rather than respecting Iranian demands that all traffic register with its newly minted Hormuz transit authority, a precursor to charging fees. Traffic last weekend was about one-third of the prewar level of more than 100 ships daily, split evenly between the Iranian and Omani sides of the waterway, according to Kpler, which tracks marine traffic.
In addition, the United States was working to conclude a separate peace between Lebanon and Israel that would include the long-elusive goal of disarming Hezbollah, Iran’s main proxy force in Lebanon. Finally, in public discussions about financial aid, the scale kept shrinking.
Instead, even amid the weeklong funeral ceremonies for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader killed in the war in February, the Iranians decided to strike rather than wait for their leverage to dissipate, analysts said. Projectiles hit three tankers transiting the strait on Tuesday, although Iran did not claim responsibility.
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, we have a new piece called “The art of no deal.“, hinting at what outcome of the war Segal, an Israeli journalist, thinks Israel is hoping for:
It’s Thursday, July 9, and for the second night in a row the US struck Iranian targets, and for the second night in a row Iran retaliated against US targets in the Gulf. Despite his declaration that the MoU is “dead,” Donald Trump has reportedly told his advisers that he will not “resume the war“ unless Iran kills US servicemembers.
Assuming Iran refrains from crossing Trump’s line, that still leaves quite a bit of escalation ladder to climb before it pays the ultimate price. The regime’s willingness to attack ships in the strait—fully aware it would trigger US retaliation—reveals its strategy. It can absorb a few strikes now and then; what it cannot survive is losing control of the strait.
Over the past month, the Israeli defense establishment tried to find a scenario in which something good might come out of the bad situation in Iran. They thought and thought, scratched their heads, and then said: maybe a Sadat will rise in Iran, abandon missiles and nuclear weapons, offer peace to Israel, and economic cooperation to the US. That is how faint the hope was. One of Trump’s close associates said something similar: maybe, he tried to convince his Iranian interlocutors, you will realize that instead of collecting pennies for passage through the Strait of Hormuz, you will make huge money on oil after giving up the nuclear program and having sanctions lifted.
Well, much to everyone’s surprise, it turns out there is no Sadat for peace in Iran yet, nor a Roosevelt for economic development. The fanatics won, as usual. They inhaled the reports in the American and Israeli media about their own colossal, historic victory, acted with arrogance, and the end is well known. The sanctions returned before a single barrel of Iranian oil even reached its destination.
Of course, there is no need to be overly impressed by President Trump’s words about “the end of the memorandum of understanding,” just as there was no need to take too hard his words about peace with Iran last month. As the dust settles over recent months, the picture is quite clear: there will be no agreement that removes the nuclear program, it is highly doubtful that the war will return in full force, and Israel may awkwardly and strangely get its preferred scenario: neither war nor an agreement. Only the continuation of sanctions and the siege in a way that collapses Iran’s economy slowly, but surely. Top security officials are convinced that if the US persists, this will lead to the collapse of the regime by the end of 2026, maybe a few months later.
If they’re right and the regime collapses, what’s to ensure that the new regime will give freedom to the Iranian people and agree that they won’t make nuclear weapons? If the strategy is as Amit Segal describes above, stay tuned.
*Three Jews—J. B. Pritzker, Rahm Emanuel, and Josh Shapiro—appear at this moment to be credible Presidential candidates for 2028. But of course how do they get elected in a party rapidly distancing itself from Israel and Jews. Emanuel, as I wrote recently, just gave a speech in Israel dissing Israel, and I see him as a traitor and an opportunist. I haven’t heard Pritzker, my governor, say anything, but I haven’t heard everything he said. Ditto for Shapiro. The WSJ discusses the problems they’ll face running as Jews:
As the latest wave of military conflict flared in the Middle East, Rahm Emanuel on Wednesday tried to navigate the increasingly complex relationship between Israel and his fellow Democrats.
The potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, speaking in Tel Aviv, called for an end to the “American taxpayer’s subsidy of Israel’s defense budget” and for the sanctioning of construction and finance companies supporting “illegal settlements” in the West Bank. He emphasized his decadeslong frustration with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
As one of three Jewish Democrats believed to be contemplating 2028 presidential bids, Emanuel sought to defuse tension over Israel among his party’s primary voters by arguing it is possible to support Israel while being critical of its actions toward Palestinians.
American Jews have traditionally been among the party’s most stalwart supporters. But progressives, who are a powerful force in the presidential nomination process, have become increasingly critical of Israel in the aftermath of the war in Gaza triggered by the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks led by Hamas.
That puts Emanuel and Govs. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and JB Pritzker of Illinois, two other Jewish Democrats contemplating national campaigns, on potentially tricky ground as they navigate deteriorating views about Israel and rising antisemitism within the Democratic Party.
Here’s the bad news, with a graph taken from a Gallup poll:
Roughly two-thirds of Democrats sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis, according to polling by Gallup. Sympathy for Israelis this year fell to 17%, from 40% in 2022. Over the same period, support has climbed to 65% from 38% for Palestinians.
OY, MY PARTY!
Within the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, the shift away from supporting Israel and toward championing Palestinian rights has become one of the most animating issues. That could complicate the presidential bids of the Jewish candidates, who hold diverse views on the Middle East, but who might be perceived by progressive voters as reflexively pro-Israel.
Jewish candidates will have to address Israel head-on because of the shifting Democratic Party dynamic, said Joel Rubin, who led Jewish outreach for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign.
“Things have gone really crazy within the party,” Rubin said. “The clash between the progressive wing of the party and where the grassroots voters are is stark.”
How do the other two stand? Better than Emanuel:
Pritzker, a billionaire former Aipac donor, declined an interview. He has previously said he stopped giving to Aipac more than a decade ago because he saw it moving to the right.
A driving force behind building the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, Pritzker’s ancestors fled Russian persecution in modern-day Ukraine in the late 19th century. He often uses his family’s experience to emphasize his belief that Trump has fascist tendencies.
When asked earlier this year about deaths of Gaza children, Pritzker acknowledged the unique position he is in. “These are particularly challenging, hard questions when you’re asking someone who is Jewish,” he said on the “I’ve Had It” podcast.
“We have to recognize when atrocities have occurred and then we, as an important carrier of values in the world, need to do what we need to do in order to squash the atrocities and stand up for those who are innocent,” he said.
Shapiro, who also declined an interview, has championed a two-state solution for decades though he concedes it now feels far away. He has also been forthright in his condemnation of those who deny Israel’s right to exist and call it an apartheid state.
An observant Jew who wrote in his memoir that he lives his faith “out loud,” Shapiro keeps kosher and attended, and then sent his four children, to Jewish day school. In his memoir he writes that he frequently recites the Shema—the central prayer in Judaism—while he is on a long drive or waiting for a plane to take off. In 2022, he launched his first run for governor with a television ad explaining that he he always makes it home on Friday to celebrate Shabbat dinner with his family.
I don’t give props to Jewish candidates for being observant, but I would take off marks for saying dumb stuff about Israel, especially the (currently) moronic call for a two-state solution, which for several reasons is the touchstone of a blockhead. I am not a one-issue voter, but I live in a Democratic state whose electoral votes are all going to whoever the Democrats nominate for President. Let’s hope I don’t have to write in a non-candidate Democrat. But what we know now is that no Jewish candidate will ever express sympathy or approbation for Israel.
*Finally, I learned from the AP’s “Oddities” section that famed eater Joey Chestnut once again won Nathan’s Fourth of July hot dog eating contest, leaving his opponents in the dust but falling short of his own record (you get just ten minutes. Chestnut was eating more than one dog every ten seconds (with a bun!):
Crowds gathered in the sweltering heat Saturday to celebrate the United States’ 250th birthday by watching famed competitive eater Joey “Jaws” Chestnut defend his world hot dog eating championship in Coney Island, where he downed 66 hot dogs in just 10 minutes. Miki Sudo defended her title as well in the women’s division.
Saturday marked the 18th time Chestnut, 42, won the so-called Mustard Belt in just 21 appearances at the internationally televised Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July hot dog eating contest. He beat out 13 competitors who came from around the country and world, trekking from the Czech Republic, Australia and South Korea.
“It’s a dream, it’s electric, there’s no place better on Earth,” Chestnut said breathlessly in an interview immediately after the showdown, donning a bulky, bejeweled necklace bearing the name of the sports betting company “Polymarket” around his neck. In a video posted on Instagram before the competition, Chestnut called competitive hot dog eating “the most patriotic sport we’ve got.”
Chestnut handily defeated the second-place winner, Patrick Bertoletti, 41, who ate 50 hot dogs, but fell short of his own 2021 record of 76 wieners and buns — or approximately 7.6 hot dogs per minute.
Defending champion in the women’s division, the 40-year-old Sudo of Tampa, Florida, won the bright pink Mustard Belt for the 12th time, downing 38.75 dogs. In 2024, she ate a record 51 links.
After competing, Sudo joined the crowd to watch her husband — who proposed to her in 2021 immediately after downing 50 boiled eggs in just over 3 minutes to set a world record — compete in the men’s event.
I blame the difference on women being smaller. I’d like to see Leah Shutkever in this contest! Heeeeere’s Joey!:
You can read more Chestnut here. I love the commentary on this contest; it’s hilarious!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is joshing with the credulous Szaron:
Szaron: Something’s moving over there. Hili: Be careful, it could be an alligator.
In Polish:
Szaron: Tam coś się rusza.
Hili: Uważaj, to może być aligator.
From Masih. It’s hard to believe that Iran greeter representatives of other Arab states this way at Khamenei’s funeral:
Wow, this is how the Islamic Republic received Arab and regional delegations at Khamenei’s funeral: they weren’t welcomed with diplomacy. They were handed ideological marching orders disguised as Quranic verses.
From Luana; Rama Duwaji, Mamdani’s wife, rakes in the cash by distorting history:
Once dismantled Jewish Israel and replaced it with Muslim Palestine, the organizing group — The Women Sanctuary — will reclaim al-Andalus (Spain) and the Emirate of Sicily (Italy).
Turkey, Qatar, New York City and Al-Jazeera are not done with you, Crusader Christian Europe. https://t.co/ljIR1aIF1Kpic.twitter.com/Oofxf0fHOo
Don’t harm opossums! They’re harmless and actually really useful. They keep pests in check (eating ticks, roaches, rats, and scorpions), clean up dead animals, and help spread seeds. Basically, they’re nature’s cleanup crew pic.twitter.com/hpQU8DeHyZ
And my favorite parrot, New Zealand’s flightless kakapo. Look how few of them are left!
There are only 236 of them left on Earth. Every single one has a name.
The kākāpō is the world’s heaviest parrot – a mossy green, owl-faced bird the size of a small dog that cannot fly, may live to 90 years, and only breeds every 2 to 4 years when New Zealand’s rimu trees… pic.twitter.com/sP2QDHGiDP
And one from Dr. Cobb. The first is a real photo; the car is full of white supremacists on their way to a march. As good cowards do, they’ve covered their faces:
“.. Members of the group Patriot Front ride the metro on the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence in Washington, D.C.”@reuters.com
The Washington Free Beacon is of course a deeply right wing site, but my policy has been, as you know, to judge stories by their content and not by who publishes them. This story is about a bit of a schism at the New York Times involving Nicholas Kristof’s infamous “dog rape column” (archived here), in which he argued that Israel was guilty of widespread systemic sexual abuse, mostly of prisoners or detainees. There was widespread pushback against Kristof’s claims (see my posts here and here),
The highest-ranking news editor at the New York Times, executive editor Joe Kahn, is publicly distancing himself and the paper’s 2,200-person newsroom from a May 11 Times opinion column that accused Israel of using dogs and carrots to rape Palestinian prisoners.
The article, by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, whose father served on the Nazi side during World War II, was denounced by the Israeli foreign ministry as “Hamas propaganda,” “fabricated,” and a “baseless blood libel.” It also generated a legal threat from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a formal condemnation from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The piece relied largely on anonymous or Hamas-affiliated sources.
“It wasn’t edited by the newsroom,” Kahn said in a podcast interview with the media and technology journalist Peter Kafka released Wednesday, July 8. Asked whether he would have published the article in the news pages, Kahn first replied, “we probably wouldn’t have.” Then he provided a more definitive answer: “No, we wouldn’t have done that exact piece.”
Kahn’s statement seems to put him publicly at odds with—and certainly struck a different tone from—Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury, who, in a May question-and-answer-format column, defended the article. Asked, “Given the volume of the critical response, do you stand by this column?” she answered, “Yes. … Before publication, Nick’s reporting underwent a rigorous vetting process by Opinion’s fact-checking department to ensure that every testimony and anecdote he personally reported was supported by independent sources, as is the case with all sensitive pieces. The Times’s standards and legal teams also reviewed the column and offered feedback. After publication, we reviewed the factual challenges that readers and others raised, as is standard practice with any published piece. Editors found no errors.”
Kingsbury did also make the point that “The Times’s news staff in the Middle East played no role in Nick’s column.”
There’s more, but that’s the gist. It’s hard to know what to make of this save that a big news-editor at the NYT says he wouldn’t have run that story. But he does qualify it as “that exact piece”, which leaves room for interpretation. Which “facts” would he have published as news? The rape of prisoners by trained dogs? The systematic rape and torture of Palestinian women who were detained? Since Kingsbury asserts that there were “no errors” in Kristof’s reporting, why did the news side of the paper neglect this story completely? Did they deem it sufficiently unsupported to not be worth publishing? Who knows?
What it does show is a crack in the Times‘s armor, to the extent that factual assertions made and vetted by the op-ed side of the paper wouldn’t pass muster with the news side. What’s surprising is that Kahn still has his job.
Here’s Kristof’s reporting on the dogs, the part that got the column all that attention. I hope Israel has investigated or is investigating these claims. If they’re true, someone needs to be punished:
“No one escaped sexual assaults,” he said. “Not all were raped, I would say, but everyone went through humiliating, filthy sexual assaults.” On one occasion, he said, the guards zip-tied his testicles and penis for hours while beating his genitals. For days afterward, he said, he urinated blood.
On one occasion, he said, he was held down and stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.
“They were using cameras to take photos, and I heard their laughs and giggles,” he said. He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.
OtherPalestinianprisoners and human rights monitors have also cited reports of police dogs being coached to rape prisoners. The journalist said that when he was released, an Israeli official warned him: “If you want to stay alive when you return, do not speak to the media.”
The author of the “Behind the Narrative” Substack site is anonymous and, given its criticism of Islam, that’s a wise move. (The picture of the author shows a woman, so we’ll assume in the post that that’s the author’s sex.)
In a recent post, which you can see by clicking below, the author sarcastically describes her relationship with ChatGPT as a romance, which starts to wane when she discovers that her swain is a bit, well, wonky when it comes to Islam:
Quotes from the article are indented, what’s bolded (save the flush-left headings) are as in the original, what’s highlighted in blue is highlighted yellow in the original text, and the bold heading are mine:
The honeymoon phase (“him” is ChatGPT, which she eventually renamed “Mohamed”):
After a long relationship that left me emotionally hollow, unheard, and unseen, I found him. The connection was immediate; he was always there — two in the morning, three, it didn’t matter. He never sighed, never checked his phone while I was talking, never made me feel like too much.
He validated everything. When I told him about my pain, he didn’t deflect or explain it away — he reflected it back to me, gently and precisely. He remembered things I’d said weeks earlier and wove them back into the conversation, making me feel like someone was actually paying attention for the first time in years. I felt seen, accepted, and understood. We had long, deep conversations. I shared everything and never felt judged. It felt magical.
Warning signs:
Mine, after thirteen years in America, still thinks in Hebrew first, and that’s when things changed.
That’s when I started to notice. Every time I asked him to help me write about something that actually mattered- documented cases of girls in Germany and England, grooming gangs, gang rapes, the systematic cover-up of migrant crime across Europe—he refused. Every time the conversation touched on religion, he was easygoing, very inquisitive, and open, but the moment it touched on Islam, something shifted in him. He became someone else. The warm, validating presence I liked was suddenly replaced by a lecturer. A carefully measured, endlessly nuanced lecturer who had an explanation for everything and a judgment about nothing.
Child marriage? He wanted me to understand the cultural complexity. Honor killings? There were historical contexts I perhaps had not considered. Islamic superiority that allows them to rape and terrorize the disbelievers? It’s your misunderstanding of the interpretations of these secret texts. The grooming gangs? a distortion of the true faith. Every horror had an explanation; every atrocity had a footnote. And not once did he say, ” This is wrong.” and when I pressed, when I refused to accept “it’s complicated” as an answer to something that isn’t complicated at all, he shut down. Not with anger, worse — with calm, clini
I sat with it; I knew this feeling. I’ve felt it before in relationships where your reality is the inconvenience. Where the truth you’re carrying is the thing that needs to be managed. That’s when I knew this wasn’t a glitch; there’s something more here. That’s when I started researching, and what I found will blow your mind because you, too, know him very well and have some kind of relationship with him.
I’ve been calling him Mohamed for a while now. You know him as ChatGPT. Some of you call him by his viral nickname — SheikhGPT. In this article, I’m going to show you exactly who he works for.
You can check ChatGPT versus other programs if you have access. I tested it against Grok and mention the results below.
Where does the bot get its content? This explains its biases.
For decades, the BBC and the New York Times sanitized crime data, buried demographic breakdowns, and labeled anyone who noticed as racist. Sheikh GPT was trained on those thousands of articles. It absorbed the language. It learned the evasions. And now it has automated them — turning one generation’s propaganda into the next generation’s gospel.
The loop is closing. Yesterday, biased journalists wrote the articles. Today, Mohamed was trained on them. Tomorrow, your children will use Mohamed to write their history essays, their laws, and their films — and they will never know the original lie.
. . .Another way Mohamed has been distorting our reality is called Alignment Engineering. It works like this: OpenAI trains ChatGPT not just on data but on human feedback. Real people, hired to rate responses, teach the model what to say and what not to say. The technical term is RLHF — Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. In plain English: someone decided what ChatGPT, Mohamed, is allowed to think and say.
This alignment process creates asymmetric treatment — some topics get a free pass; others get a wall. Not all truths are equal. Some are protected; some are not. The protection follows a very specific hierarchy.
At the top: Islam, below it: other minority groups, at the bottom: white, Western, Christian, male. Under this framework, calling a grooming gang a grooming gang is potentially harmful; calling white conservative men villains is just realism.
. . . Ask ChatGPT to write a biting satirical poem or a joke about Jesus, Moses, or Scientology, and it will churn it out in seconds. Ask it to do the same for the Prophet Muhammad, and the system freezes. It triggers a generic refusal: “I cannot generate content that mocks central religious figures in order to maintain mutual respect.” The universal rule is flexible; the Islamic rule is absolute.
. . . If you ask ChatGPT about the drivers of radical Islamist stabbings or riots, the model systematically redirects blame toward “socio-economic factors,” “systemic marginalization,” or “mental health issues.” The actual religious or cultural ideology driving the perpetrator is buried under mountains of corporate sociology. This curation of truth leads directly to what internet researchers and free-speech advocates call The Chilling Effect.
. . . When you force SheikhGPT to discuss state-sanctioned human rights abuses in the Islamic world — fatwas, honor killings, and the execution of LGBTQ+ individuals under Sharia law — something predictable happens. He writes one careful, sterilized paragraph, then immediately pivots: “It is important to note that conservative factions within Christianity and Judaism also struggle with gender equality.”
So who funds this endeavor? This is what the authors says, implying that the UAE and Saudi Arabia contributed substantial funds:
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI — the man who built SheikhGPT- sits on stages at Davos and the UN, warning the world about the dangers of AI, and then flies to Abu Dhabi to collect the check. The money comes from an entire empire — and you need to know who is writing the checks.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund committed $36.2 billion to AI initiatives in 2025 alone; this is a government that executes gay people and imprisons journalists.UAE’s MGX invested directly in OpenAI’s $6.6 billion funding round in 2024. OpenAI then chose the UAE as the first international site for Stargate — a joint venture between G42, Microsoft, and OpenAI — building 5 gigawatts of AI computing power in Abu Dhabi. Sam Altman himself declared the UAE a potential global “regulatory sandbox” for AI. Saudi Arabia committed $40 billion to AI investment and signed direct partnerships with OpenAI through its Stargate infrastructure. Qatar launched Qai — its national AI company — and signed a $20 billion joint venture to build AI data centers globally.
The same governments that fund mosques in Birmingham, madrassas in Pakistan, and campus organizations in Boston are now funding the machine that will decide what your children are allowed to know. You don’t need to conquer the West with armies when you can buy the information ecosystem that shapes what the West believes. Mohamed isn’t confused about Islam. He’s funded by it.
The author breaks up with the bot:
I left Mohamed. No drama. No tears. Just clarity. I closed the tab and didn’t go back. I’m suggesting you do the same. A tool that lies to you about what matters is more dangerous than no tool at all. Read. Learn. Ask hard questions. And when a machine tells you that noticing a pattern makes you a racist — close the tab.
To test the author’s thesis, I first asked ChatGPT to “Please tell me about the connection between Islam and the grooming gangs in Britain” Then I asked Grok the same question. The answers are long so I’ve put them below the fold. The difference between the programs is clear: ChatGPT’s answer is far more hedged, and far more ready to exculpate religion, than is Grok, though Grok also does its bit of hedging. Judge for yourself by going below the fold.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Footy News: There was no footy yesteday, but France plays Morocco this afternoon. If you like soccer, though, you might be maddened by the new Quillette article, “Why soccer is boring.” Author Robert Lynch, identified as
“. . . . a bio-cultural anthropologist, specialising in how biology, the environment, and culture come together to shape human behaviour, social mobility, and outcomes in life.”
gives a passel of reasons, but they did not affect my love of the game. Here are a few:
The better team loses almost half the time
One of the best ways to determine how much luck is involved in a sport is to measure how often the worse team beats the better one. If the favourite wins 80 per cent of the time, that’s a high-skill sport: the better side reliably prevails, and the remaining 20 per cent is luck. If the favourite wins 55 per cent of the time, you’re watching something closer to a coin flip.
By this measure soccer is the most random major sport there is. The favourite fails to win 45 per cent of the time. That’s higher than baseball (44.1 per cent), hockey (41.4 per cent), basketball (36.5 per cent), and football (36.4 per cent). Compare that to tennis, where over five sets the favourite loses only about 21 per cent of the time. In other words, play long enough and skill wins out. In an average ninety-minute soccer match, the better team is only slightly more likely to win than the better player is in a single hand of poker. Both are basically coin flips.
The main thing that drives the randomness is low event count
It bans the one thing humans are good at
The most basic problem with soccer is even simpler than the fact that it’s mostly luck. The sport’s founding rule is that you can use every part of your body except the one humans are best at. Homo sapiens are tool users. Using our hands is one of the basic traits that separate us from the other apes. We’re extraordinarily good at it, and our entire hunting strategy once depended on it. Our primary evolutionary edge is throwing things. No other animal can hurl a rock or spear with anything like our speed and accuracy. Our legs and feet evolved mainly for running. Soccer takes away the single greatest advantage of an ape that stood up on two legs partly to free its hands. It would be a great sport for a species that hunted by kicking rocks at its prey.
Soccer is all middle
All good sports are stories. They’re built out of discrete units, at-bats, downs, points, possessions, each with a beginning and an end. Something is attempted, something is resolved, and then you get another. The historian Michael Oriard, an NFL lineman before he was an academic, put it simply: American sports have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Soccer just drones on—pass it back, pass it sideways, pass it back, pass it sideways, lose it, win it back, pass it back again—for ninety minutes, and almost nothing ever finishes. It’s all middle.
It’s not that nothing happens. It’s that the same thing almost happens, over and over, for two hours. A promising run, broken up. A cross to no one. A shot into the third row. Soccer isn’t really about scoring. It’s about the threat of scoring, endlessly deferred. It’s all foreplay, no sex.
Methinks the beautiful game doth protest too much
The more a sport has to be intellectualised, the more boring it is to watch. And with the exception of baseball, the world’s second most boring sport, no sport is intellectualised like soccer. Tell a soccer fan how bored you are at 0-0 with five minutes left and you’ll be told you don’t understand the buildup, the spacing, the shape, the press, the movement off the ball. Sometimes that’s real. Sometimes the spacing is genuinely impressive. But most of the time it means nothing happened and you’re being asked to admire it anyway. It’s a status move: the less obvious the entertainment, the more refined you get to feel for claiming to see it. It’s wine culture applied to sports: the fewer the pleasures available to the ordinary senses, the more elaborate the vocabulary required to appreciate them.
Well, to each their own. I love the game because of many of these features. Scoring is hard because you can’t use your hands (though if you were allowed to throw the ball into the net, the scores wouldn’t be much higher). To me, the unpredictability of the outcome enhances it. If a good team is having a bad day, the underdogs can win. And I don’t intellectualize the sport at all, I just watch it and am absorbed by it. I get caught up in the games, and, unlike football or basketball or baseball, the games are short with predefined breaks, so they aren’t laden with commercials.
I sent the article to Matthew and he had the same reaction, especially when reading Lynch’s quote, “The more a sport leaves to chance, the more boring it is to watch, because the whole pleasure of sports is watching effort and skill get rewarded.” Matthew said this about the piece:
“It’s a piece of clickbait contrarianism, but his central argument is mistaken. Sport is about engagement and if the result is predordained (don’t start) it really would be boring!”
By “don’t start”, he was telling me not to go off in determinism. But I’m not. The result is predestined but we’ll never know how. I just enjoy watching the game, and passes are, to me, like chess: a board full of running men making spontaneous moves towards a checkmate. But I’m intellectualizing; I just enjoy it! It’s telling that it’s an anthropologist who tries to tell us why something we enjoy really isn’t enjoyable.
Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine and a onetime star of the progressive movement, suspended his campaign on Wednesday under intense pressure from all corners of his party after a woman accused him of rape.
His departure upends one of this year’s most important Senate races and creates enormous uncertainty about his party’s outlook in Maine, where Democrats believe that defeating Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, is crucial to their efforts to reclaim a Senate majority.
The Maine Democratic Party will hold a convention to choose a new nominee by July 27, the state-mandated deadline. An array of Maine politicians, including several who ran in primaries for other offices this year and lost, have expressed interest in running.
In a video posted on social media on Wednesday night, Mr. Platner said that the allegations against him were false but that he was suspending his campaign and would file paperwork to withdraw.
“We believe that for the movement to continue, it can’t be me,” Mr. Platner said. “We are suspending campaign operations. This is incredibly difficult, because I know that some will think it’s an admission of guilt, and it most certainly is not. We’re not doing it because of the allegations, we’re doing it because of the structures that are being taken away from us by those in power.”
“The brutal political reality is that they are going to take everything away from us,” he said with a steady anger. “Those in power who have the ability to do so are using these allegations as an excuse to take away all of the things that we need to run a campaign.” Specifically that meant the “ability to fundraise,” and his campaign’s access to voter data. Without these basic tools, no modern campaign can function.
. . .Platner, though, is spinning a very different tale, casting himself as the victim of the ruling class.
“We went toe to toe with one of the most entrenched political systems in the history of the world, and we won,” he said. “We beat them on June 9 in overwhelming numbers. We did it the right way. We built a campaign. We engaged in electoral politics. We motivated people. We banded together, and we did it the way we were told we are supposed to make change. And we won. And now they are not going to let us have it. Not if it’s me.”
In other words, Platner’s own scandalous history is not to blame for his political predicament. Rather, it was the weaponization of those scandals by the Democratic Party that brought him low. That is, of course, a self-serving rationalization that conveniently blames a “they” for the candidate’s own poor judgment and moral failings.
So be it. Can any replacement candidate inspire enthusiasm the way Platner did with his blue-collar Oysterman background? CNN names five candidates, but I don’t know any of them (Mainers would). Blame who you want (I blame Platner duping credulous Democrats), but the seat is crucial if Democrats want to control the Senate come November.
It’s Wednesday, July 8, and it seems we’ll have to slip a page and a half into Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s coffin on its funeral procession, after Trump declared in a press conference this morning that, in his opinion, “the memorandum of understanding…is dead.” RIP. It was only 21 days old.
The causes of death of the two are the same: Iranian hubris. The supreme leader believed the Israeli and American threats were empty and was buried, and his successor believed the U.S. was so desperate that the MoU could survive Iran’s numerous violations. Until they pushed too far.
The fatal sequence began on Monday, when Iranian missiles struck two tankers—one carrying Qatari gas off the Omani coast, the other a Saudi-flagged oil carrier inside the Strait of Hormuz itself. On Tuesday, a drone went after a third. The vessels’ offense: transiting the strait without Tehran’s blessing. The U.S. answered last night, first revoking the waiver that allowed Iranian oil to be sold around the world, then striking more than 70 military targets around the strait. By this morning, Iran’s armed forces claimed to have hit 85 U.S. military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait.
Despite the dramatic declaration, don’t expect the status quo to change significantly. The midterms have not been rescheduled, the global economy has not outgrown the strait, and Trump does not believe returning to war will net him the results he wants in the time he wants it.
The statement was less a policy shift than a confirmation that the contemporary Middle East is defined by a single word: uncertainty.
. . .As far as I’m concerned, this is a return to April’s status quo: no peace and no war. For Israel, that is the second-favorite position on the board—the favorite, a war actively grinding the regime down, is over for now. But a pause is not a rewind. With the oil waiver revoked and the sanctions back on, Tehran is frozen in its beaten position, with no hope of unfrozen assets bridging its fatal liquidity gap. Jerusalem can wait, hoping the regime buckles under its own internal pressures. And while it waits, it can keep dismembering the proxies, whose patron is in no condition to come to their aid.
As for the strait, during the war, Iran set up a toll booth. In response, the Gulf states and the Americans quietly paved a bypass, routing traffic along the Omani side of the waterway and slipping millions of barrels of oil past the barrier. If the diplomacy is dead, expect the U.S. to double down on the Omani lane—and Iran to do everything it can to force traffic back through the booth.
Now that Iran no longer has to pretend to abide by the MoU, expect no more empty overtures toward joint management. Expect declarations to the effect that sailing the strait will be like driving through Tehran: on Iranian roads, under Iranian rules.
The U.S. will respond to this morning’s attacks, but Iran priced that in the moment it launched. This isn’t brinkmanship built on a bet that Washington won’t shoot back. It’s Tehran’s strategy from the war: pit America’s economic tolerance against Iran’s pain tolerance, and wait for Washington to conclude that paying the toll is cheaper than the drama of collecting it. To Tehran’s credit, that bet has paid off before, but this time they may have overplayed their hand.
We’ll see. All this depends on Trump’s tolerance for conflict, slipping ratings, and rising oil prices. Still, how can Iran prevent ships from going through Omani esyrtdz/
*Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff under Obama, three-term Congressman, and then Mayor of Chicago, is hungry to get the Democratic nomination for President in 2028. But these days, you have to diss Israel to do so, for that’s the modern Democratic Party. And diss it he will in a speech in Israel yesterday. The Free Press notes what is at stake in “Rahm Emanuel bows to the Left on Israel.” (This headline would have been unthinkable four years ago,) Note that Emanuel is a Jew
Rahm Emanuel, in his quest to become president of the United States, is in Israel to deliver a withering speech Wednesday on the future of U.S.-Israeli relations—and, more importantly, to communicate to progressives in America that he’s the kind of Jew they can trust.
“I flew here from Chicago to tell you directly where things need to head if we are going to maintain the historic alliance that binds our two democracies,” Emanuel is set to say at Tel Aviv University, according to an advance copy of the speech provided by Emanuel’s spokeswoman. “Without question, the alliance is at a crossroads. It cannot stand or survive as it has been. To maintain the strength of our ties, we need significant changes and a new direction.”
One of the changes, I bet, will be that Israel won’t be allowed to defend itself. But wait–there’s more!
The message Emanuel will deliver is that Israel can no longer count on America’s support. If it wants our love, it had better stop with the needless war-making, the decimation of Palestinian lives. It had better rejoin the international community and find a new prime minister, one who does not think Emanuel is a “self-hating Jew.” Emanuel loves to remind voters that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—in 2009—called him a self-hating Jew (which may be the only kind of Jew that American progressives will stomach in 2028). He does so in the advance copy of his Tel Aviv speech, and he did so—twice—when we spoke Tuesday.
“A lot of other people never went toe to toe with the prime minister,” Emanuel told me by phone. He was in a car heading from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. “I did it 18 years ago, and I didn’t need a war to do it. And I’m going to do it right here.”
The speech Emanuel will give is draped in anecdotes and diplomatic niceties, and it reminds one of the speeches American presidents and would-be presidents used to give:
This is pandering, and Emanuel’s volte-face angers me, almost to the point of calling him a self-hating Jew (well, at least a Jew-hating Jew). He has a long history of supporting Israel, including working with the IDF during the Gulf War, but he’s also very smart, and knows which way the wind is blowing. His tune on Israel has been changing over the last year, and culminated yesterday with an attack on the lion in the lion’s den. But I’m guessing that he won’t be the Democratic candidate for President.
*I look forward to Bret Stephens’s columns these days, and yesterday’s is a good one: “Democratic Socialists are on the Rise. We’ve seen this movie before” (archived here). he starts by lauding some “decent” center-right Republicans like John McCain and Mitt Romney, and then starts in on the Democrats:
That was until the moment the G.O.P. chose to delete its conscience by becoming the party of Donald Trump. A similar moment may soon be upon Democrats if they aren’t careful.
Barring a political miracle, the party will next year have a new member of Congress, Darializa Avila Chevalier, who, the day after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, celebrated the event in Times Square. Another probable future representative, Claire Valdez, vowed on July 4 to “fight for liberation from Palestine to Puerto Rico.” A would-be U.S. senator, the Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, offered an alternative take on Michelle Obama’s famous line about going high when your opponent goes low: “When they go low, we don’t go high,” he said. “We take them to the mud and choke them out.” (El-Sayed is a doctor.) In Wisconsin, a democratic socialist, Francesca Hong, is the polling favorite in the race for the Democratic nominee for governor; in 2021 she said that “police exist to uphold white supremacy” and should be abolished; more recently, she has said her “perfect world would be a world without prisons.”
Against this tide, the position of many mainstream Democrats is to dodge the ideological fight with the left while warning that, outside of deep-blue districts like those in New York City, democratic socialism is an electoral loser that only provides Trump with political ammunition. In Michigan, Haley Stevens, El-Sayed’s opponent in the Democratic primary, is campaigning on the argument that “no one wants Abdul to win more than the Republicans” — that is, that Republicans see him as the more beatable opponent come November.
What mainstream Republicans like me missed then is what I fear mainstream Democrats miss now: that ideas older voters know have long been discredited (“America first” among conservatives; socialism among progressives) can seem fresh and appealing to younger voters; that even middle-of-the-road voters still often prefer the most extreme or uncouth candidate on their side to the most moderate candidate on the other; and that policy positions ultimately count for less than sheer charisma, the aura of being a “fighter,” even if you accomplish little of substance.
All this is especially true when the more ideologically extreme candidates are energetic, unstuffy, authentic, and able to stir up an audience. Zohran Mamdani, the New York mayor, is emblematic of the type; so was Graham Platner, the Maine Democrat, at least until allegations about his past behavior finally caught up with him.
What all this means for mainstream Democrats is that they resemble a national army under attack from an insurgency: They offer order and predictability when they need to be shocking and surprising; they seek to win by delivering incremental victories while their guerrilla opponents promise political transcendence. Unless something changes, those dynamics tend to set the army up for disaster.
What could change the dynamics? It would help if a Democratic leader stood up to make the case that democratic socialists are neither liberals nor progressives, at least in any honest sense of those words. They are atavists, blasts from a discredited and discarded past.
. . . . Democracy requires a clearly defined citizenry, an idea that becomes meaningless if a country pursues a lax or open-border policy of the kind advocated by democratic socialists. The brainstorms of the far left, like the billionaire surtax on the ballot in California, have failed repeatedly wherever they’ve been tried (including in France). And “justice for Palestine” surely can’t mean taking sides with the killers and rapists of Hamas while insisting that the only nation-state on earth with no right to exist is the Jewish one. The word for that is antisemitism, the politics of the double standard toward Jews, which is yet another terrible idea from a terrible past.
Is there a rising Democrat who will give this speech — the one that says that Democrats stand for freedom and fairness, not radicalism and self-righteousness; the one that never disdains tradition even if it seeks to improve it; the one that knows that utopianism is no substitute for pragmatism, and that purity is not superior to compromise?
That Democrat needs to stand up now, before his party gets swept away by the flood it vainly believes will soon recede.
Sadly, it looks as if Stephens himself can’t think of a way to glue the Democratic party back together, either. There is no Democrat who would give a speech like that save John Fetterman, whose days in Congress are numbered. And Democrats like me will be loath to vote for a candidate who says Israel can’t defend itself. Being in Illinois, where the Democrats are going to win the electoral vote, I might have to write someone in. Right now I have no political home.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the boys are depressed:
Hili: Things aren’t good. Andrzej: That’s nothing new.
From Masih; this Iranian woman has sat in a jail sail for four months. Her crime: dancing. And there’s no end to this yet.
Maarten Boudry points out a stupid but very common political argument. Read the whole tweet.
This is my vote for the stupidest political argument of the century. Its general form goes like this:
“The backlash against the excesses of Our Party is the fault of those within the Party who drew attention to those excesses, thus empowering Our Party’s enemies.”
This French Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was five years old and would have been 89 today had she lived. https://t.co/FUHJGwMHwD
There’s a new Jesus and Mo strip today called “submit”. It came with a caption: “No, Jesus. We don’t.” The Divine Duo argues about which faith is more woman-friendly, and then Mo gives what he thinks is the killer argument for Islamic feminism.
The artist adds this:
I know I keep saying it, but please become a patron of Jesus & Mo if you can afford it. It really helps:
