Josh Masur

Opinion | Why American Jews No Longer Understand One Another

Pretty spot on, IMNSHO.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/o...

I'm old enough to remember when making the point that genocide is bad suggested the opposite.

What a ‘Spiral of Silence’ Can Do to a Democracy Protests show people they are not alone in caring about an issue.

When people ask what protest accomplishes....

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Jesus. They're kids. Even assuming that they were uniformly privileged, that wasn't their choice.

Has anyone ever referred to anyone as "a spring chicken," or is spring-chickenhood defined entirely in the negative?

Daily Beans Fundraiser - Whistleblower Aid Daily Beans Listeners Fundraiser for Whistleblower Aid The American rule of law has survived many challenges, but now faces one of the most serious threats in our history. Checks and balances within o...

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NO KINGS Truckee · People for Democracy **In America, we don’t put up with would-be kings.** NO KINGS is a national day of action and mass mobilization in response to increasing authoritarian excesses and corruption from President Trump and...

Tahoe friends: See you Saturday.

mobilize.us/s/DWd3zV/r

Stephan Miller simultaneously puts the "creep" in "creeping fascism" and excludes the "slow moving" meaning of the word.

Is there any society without megalomaniacal men who perpetrate demonic acts in their name?

Seems like either no nation is truly free (in which case the concept has no utility) or we need to recognize the difference between degree and kind.

Incredible to get so many people on *Harvard’s* side, what’re they gonna do to get us all rooting for Duke basketball somehow

The bare fucking minimum *and only when he was personally attacked*.

Get it while there's still a Bill of Rights!

"You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."

Forget the Ten Plagues and Escaping, the Pharaoh and His Rich Friends Say They’re on Our Side Our tribe is facing an existential threat. Now is not the time for division. We must work together to protect our future. That’s why, instead of in...

Forget the Ten Plagues and Escaping, the Pharaoh and His Rich Friends Say They’re on Our Side www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/for...

Congratulations to my friend and colleague Brian Beck for obtaining terminating sanctions against a plaintiff who committed perjury and obtained his copyright registrations through fraud on the Copyright Office!

drive.google.com/file/d/1f4vB...

Whether it’s Donald Trump attack attacking Haitian refugees working blue-collar jobs in industrial Ohio cities or Tim Walz criticizing a South African billionaire working to install a fascist autocracy in Washington DC, members of both parties have adopted an anti-immigrant stance.

I had to double-check the GHWB. But yeah, she's been there since 1990.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Right now the rats have taken over the kitchen: yes. That's a problem. But don't start relating to them as anything other than cheap thugs who abuse women and brandish ersatz symbols of masculinity because they were never loved as child. Don't let them speak for you.

All the inventions, all the great works of art and science, all the bold ideas and playful exchanges between people from around the world: that's America. These assholes aren't America, any more than the rats under the kitchen are Michelin chefs.

5) REJECT THEIR MANDATE. One of the tricks of authoritarians is their saying they speak for the nation. No they don't. They're not America: YOU ARE. All the good people you know are America.

Choose one small act of defiance each day. Share it with your friends. It may not become iconic, but it will encourage others and reaffirm your sense of existence.

One day, he held his middle finger aloft and took a picture of it. "This unambiguously scornful gesture was my way of asserting the existence of self. I had no other resources-- all I could deploy was an attitude." That photo eventually became one of the most iconic pieces of modern political art.

4) COMMIT SMALL ACTS OF DEFIANCE: Ai Weiwei said he always felt a sense of helplessness and humiliation when visiting Tiananmen Square: the aggressive normalcy was a statement that the regime would erase the memory of the violence and the people that died in that place.

If something is bullshit, laugh and call it bullshit. People will thank you.

When it's treated like "just another perspective," it fucks with our sense of what is true. You must fight by constantly reaffirming rationality in your daily interactions: not just political conversations, ALL conversations. Insist on reason and evidence.

3) REAFFIRM RATIONALITY: One of the things they are trying to do is degrade your own sense of reality. When they come out and say something batshit insane, we expect to see sort of instant backlash or correction.

Remember: they really want you to take them seriously. They want you to be intimidated. You may not be able to stop them right now, but never stop laughing at them-- because they are ridiculous.

2) EMBRACE DARK HUMOR. People living under authoritarians find solace in dark humor. They will make jokes about very dark subjects, even things beyond the pale. It's a way of maintaining equilibrium and humanity even under terrible circumstances, and a small act of defiance.