JChoe Profile picture
Nov 26, 2022 9 tweets 6 min read Read on X
This is going to use politicized terms - especially with antisemitism lately - so, again, you've got to exercise a basic, basic skill of disinformation: holding an idea in your head without believing it

What you're seeing here is a sus #nafofella profile tying us to al-Qassam🧵
Again, this is heavily politicized, so let's go with what the U.S. government says.

The Director of Nat'l Intelligence website says al-Qassam is the militant wing of HAMAS.
dni.gov/nctc/groups/ha…

Per State, they're still a terrorist org (since '97)
state.gov/foreign-terror…
This is also timely given Israeli elections.

This is not the time nor place (and I'm not the author) for primer to Israeli politics, so:

Congressional Research Service says, it's chaotic, there's a LOT of different parties and it's very fractious.
crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL…
What just happened was a parliamentary shake-up - I'm not going to pretend to understand the details - that resulted in a very, very far-right government in Israel.

AP:
apnews.com/article/middle…

Guardian: theguardian.com/world/2022/nov…
So it shouldn't be a surprise how Ben-Gvir feels about HAMAS or for that matter al-Qassam.
m.facebook.com/ibengvir/photo…

Understanding the strategy he's using requires, again, suspending some level of whether or not you agree with Ben-Gvir or the US & Israel's treatment of HAMAS.
A direct juxtaposition makes it somewhat clearer.

The upshot here is that for some reason NAFO is becoming somewhat of a football - for at least one rather sus account - in Israeli right-wing politics' strategies of enemy-creation and "other"-ing.
By way of context here, Ben-Gvir saying Ha'aretz is a HAMAS rag is roughly equivalent to....

I don't know, Farage maybe?

...saying The Guardian is, like, a pinko commie rag

It's not very accurate. They're lefty, sure, but also very good factually.
mediabiasfactcheck.com/haaretz/
It's interesting in three ways here:

One, what this says about right-wing politics in general and Israeli right-wing politics,

Two, what this suggests about how the Israeli right feels about NAFO and, by extension, NATO and supporting Ukraine in Russia's war against it
Three, the way that NAFO is becoming - as other #nafoFellas have noted - like antifa or BlackLivesMatter, kind of a catch-all term for any digital grassroots anti-propaganda you don't like.

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More from @JoohnChoe

Jan 30
In 1956, a United Airlines DC-7 was involved in a midair collision with a Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation over the Grand Canyon, killing all 128 souls aboard. This is cited as a driving impetus behind the nationalization of American air traffic control.

🧵 Image
I was completely ignorant of all this, this morning, I just looked this up; but when you read about it, you can kind of see why this led to a nationalized air traffic control service.

It starts from just asking 'why' - the 'five whys' exercise, really.
Why did the planes collide?

Because they weren't being tracked in realtime.

Why weren't they being tracked in realtime?

Because they were 'off-airways', which meant, in 1956, in uncontrolled airspace.

Why was there uncontrolled airspace through which PASSENGER PLANES flew?
Read 12 tweets
Jan 25
The odds that we go to some kind of incredibly stupid war with a NATO ally and partner, Denmark, over Greenland, increases from "negligible" to "non-negligible" because our country just made an abusive, vapid, Deus-Vult-tattoo-having vetbro talkshow host into our SecDef

🧵 Image
The odds of nuclear weapons use within the next four years goes up, because consultation with SecDef is supposed to be a check on the President's authorization of nuclear launch, and it is laughable to think Hegseth will serve as any kind of check to Trump
At this point, if Trump had a senior moment and said "let's nuke Mexico!" it is difficult to envision a 25th-Amendment Cabinet majority, or any kind of internal check in the Defense command chain, that would actually stop him from doing that.
Read 14 tweets
Jan 16
So here's the deal with Facebook's new fact check & hate speech rules.

Let me explain who I am: from January to July of 2021, starting with the insurrection - actually, because of it - I co-led a team that deplatformed extremists for Facebook. These are our numbers.

🧵 Image
Our data is the subject of an SEC whistleblower complaint filed with the help of @wbaidlaw. This is why I can talk about it.

whistlebloweraid.org/new-disclosure…
There are multiple levels of content monitoring on Facebook by multiple departments, and while I can't speak to its 'in-line' fact-checking in detail or its larger-scale policy -
Read 22 tweets
Nov 16, 2024
(🧵) One assumption about disinformation that needs revision is the idea that older voters are more prone to believe disinformation.

Not only does new empirical work suggests this is no longer the case, other factors that usually determine the outcome of elections more than disinformation appear to be in question now - like who raises more money, Trump actually raised less than Harris despite running his campaign for several times longer.

In fact, if you look at the last few elections, what seems to happen is that whenever the economy is good, people elect a Republican President, and whenever it's bad, they elect a Democratic one.Image
In addition, a picture of what predisposes people to believe in disinfo/misinfo, as well as where they get that from, starts to illustrate what policy debaters might call "harms" - like, a clear picture of a (hopefully) addressable problem.

I hypothesized that disinformation belief was like having a disease that you never knew you had, until a stressor in your environment brought it out - a diathesis-stress phenomenon

This recent study gives some weight to that theoryImage
A really interesting finding that the Sultan, et al., meta-analysis finds is that age has at best a mixed effect on ability to discriminate between real and fake news.

You'd think younger people would be *better* at distinguishing fake news.

That isn't actually always the case. Image
Read 10 tweets
Nov 14, 2024
If you can stand to be clinical about things - which one needs to for survival purposes, though I understand if some people aren't there yet emotionally - this is an interesting equation we're seeing as far as recess appointments.

A thread (🧵)
First, let me answer the dumb questions if you're just, like, afraid to ask or not from here; this is actually something AI is pretty decent for

Dumb questions, that is Image
Image
Second, here are two fun facts about recess appointments, via Devin Dwyer at ABC News two days ago ():

1. you'd need both the House and the Senate to agree to recess more than 3 days (this is actually explicit in the Constitution)

2. they'd be temporaryabcnews.go.com/Politics/reces…
Read 13 tweets
Nov 9, 2024
A really interesting filter to understand the '24 election that I haven't seen people use is the Ukraine aid bill fight, which turned into the Lankford/Sinema/Murphy immigration bill fight.

From November 2023 - this time last year, actually - to April of 2024, when Johnson finally caved and passed the exact same Ukraine aid bill he'd been holding out for an immigration deal on, it seemed insane to outside observers that one House Representative from Louisiana could hold up the entire country's foreign policy.
🧵Image
Image
The Ukraine aid bill fight, and the utter disaster caused by how long it took, exposed three flaws in the American system, I'd argue:

1. hyper-partisan, "tribal" politics where no matter what, your team must win, even if it means starving Ukraine of aid for months, or failing to act on a "border invasion" that you yourself hyped up the urgency of for months,

2. thorough-going corruption and 'infestation' by domestic & foreign money - in Johnson's case, what people don't realize about the American Ethane matter is that American Ethane gave money to a lot of Louisiana Republicans.

That is, one of the reasons why it's fallacious bordering on silly to insist that American Ethane proves Johnson was manipulated to kill Ukraine aid, is that it was years before he became Speaker - and while everyone around Johnson was also paid, they didn't play the same role in killing Ukraine aid.

Johnson is 'exonerated', in other words, by the sheer, banal commonness of taking Russian moneyImage
Third, and worst, the Ukraine aid bill fight showed how fundamentally disconnected from reality Republicans and their voters were, to the point that a six-month insistence on "border is more important than Ukraine!" was undone by, of all things, a massed-missile attack by Iran that was almost entirely intercepted.

Johnson just caved, totally and completely, it surprised all of us who were at that point looking at a discharge petition that probably wouldn't work and expecting the aid delay to last until... well, now.

And no one thought that just giving Democrats everything they wanted on Ukraine was weird or bad - or, if they did, it didn't matter because people cited immigration and the border as a reason for voting Trump.
seattletimes.com/nation-world/n…
Read 6 tweets

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