Platner's sincerely asking Maine to not judge him for the worst thing that he ever posted on the worst day of his life. Why was it the worst day of his life and why did he respond to this horrible day by saying women should wear kevlar panties to not get raped?


Per Platner's own account, he wrote his rape comments on the worst day of his life. He doesn't want us to judge him for that day. Why was it the worst day and why did he respond to having such a bad day specifically by talking about what women should do to not get raped?

If we look at the electorate broadly--not the extremes--the clear picture is that voters do not want to hear about I/P anymore. Even if they tend to be vaguely anti-Israel, they don't want to hear about it. They find it confusing, depressing, & disconnected from their lives.

https://twitter.com/BarneyFlames/status/2034114050238615644

Americans have *never* liked hearing about foreign policy, for the record. Post-9/11 was a unique era and, I'll add, a time when what Americans heard about foreign policy was a bunch of bullshit w/ a subtext of jingoism.

spaniards always take issue when i talk about antisemitism in spain. i respect different personal experiences, but you will never be able to convince me that antisemitism is not a problem in a country where my own fiancé's grandmother told me, "you look less like a jew today."

https://twitter.com/magi_jay/status/2033627514053034129

i'm not even jewish, for the record. i insisted that despite my last name--'jacobs'--my father's family, as far as i knew--were protestants. what did these "fact" get me? people made jokes about my 'dirty blood'. a jew disguised as a protestant! the worst!

We've also never had a real convo about the fact that Biden really did try to go as progressive as he possibly could & not only did the center punish him, the left punished him too. B/c it was never enough. These people aren't just a curse on Dems. They're a curse on progress.

https://twitter.com/trouble_man90/status/2012227864268030118

If you actually go out & talk to voters, you will never hear the end of this sentiment: "Biden campaigned as a moderate; went too far left as POTUS." I'm talking about people who voted for Harris. It's what they believe.

This week I wrote an 11 page summary of violence my 6-yr-old stepson witnessed. I provided this to his biological mother. The bio parents each gave their accounts to the therapist. My stepson, based on my testimony, provided by bio mom, got enrolled into DV-specific therapy. It is such a strange, horrific experience. To document one's own abuse so extensively for another woman. In this case, my partner's ex-wife. The rewards can feel so small. But therapy is not small. I told the truth. To other adults. A child will not live in that darkness alone.

Extreme interpersonal psychological abuse is, I am coming to understand, something we don't at all have a good cultural handle on and also much more frequent than I would have previously assumed. The more I talk about psychological abuse--and I am cautious in speaking about it--the more people contact me & I realize it's something that has affected many lives. I wish I had been better educated on the matter.

Just as a matter of shared truth/history: there was a period in the Summer of 2024 when Black Democrats were begging "activists," et al. to vote for Kamala Harris for the good of Black Americans & others who would be especially vulnerable under Trump. They were met w/ racism. This is something that happened. Because it happened, we should acknowledge & document it, at the very least.

My mom had been pressuring me to try to engage w/ some community & her focus was on the Orthodox church. I told her I'd prefer to visit the Reform synagogue close by, which welcomes people of all backgrounds.

(The Orthodox church here is absolutely lovely and always welcomes me too, in the most wonderful way; but it's just not the same kind of thing, with the same kind of community activities; There's other Orthodox related stuff in my history that I won't get into; & I'm independently interested in learning more about Judaism).

So anyway my mom's happy about the idea of synagogue attendance, but did tease me when I snuck away during this convo. "YOU HAVE TO KNOW THIS STORY IF YOU'RE GOING TO GO TO SYNAGOGUE MAG!" She is probably right.

For the record!, my dad started giving his historically-informed 15 minute lecture on Uriah for an entirely different reason. We were watching a BBC adaptation of David Copperfield & one of the characters is named Uriah. Afterwards my dad was like, "Do we KNOW the story of Uriah the Hittite?"

My mom said to my dad, 'I know the story, but I'd like to hear you tell it again" and then snuggled down in her blanket for the long-haul. Knowing my Dad I already began to creep away, lol. His lectures are great, but it was like 11:00 at night. This is when my mother, probably appropriately, shamed me. I'll have to ask my father to tell the story again.

https://x.com/magi_jay/status/1994633995364286613

These kinds of interactions/transitions are the story of my life, lol. For example:

The Arab peoples in Gaza and the West Bank are not more indigenous to the area than the Jewish people of that same region. This isn't a commentary on gov't policy. (The Settlers are bad). I just don't know why we accept "indigenity" as a truthful premise when it's not one. People who practiced Judaism were in that region before people who practiced Christianity and both those people were there before the practice of Islam. This is a factual timeline. It should not be disputed. Or morally-repurposed. It's just what the timeline is.

It is fundamentally quite irritating that we allow anyone associated with "The Young Turks" lecture us about nation states or genocide. "Oh, I was UNAWARE of what The Young Turks did." If you were, why are you talking about Sykes-Picot & state-building in post-Ottoman lands?

https://twitter.com/magi_jay/status/1989760768297111778

If you were so naïve as to what the Young Turks did, why should we listen to you about Israel or anything else in the post-Ottoman world? Why, in particular, should we be forced to endure your rants about genocide?

In 2016, HRC said something along the lines of "My personal opinions are often different (more progressive) than my public opinions" & people acted like she'd just revealed herself to be Beelzebub. HRC wasn't alone in that approach. Dems acted w/ this separation for decades.

https://twitter.com/magi_jay/status/1987931202553082021

Joe Biden changed history on LGBTQ rights not because his opinion diverged that much from mainstream center-left Democrats *but* because he blurted out what many already believed: gay marriage was good. This worked out well for us. The time was right.

I really do think we are in a dangerous moment in terms of antisemitism. Yes, already dangerous. But a # of factors that are interacting & I think it will get worse. Dems aren't the only social force responsible for this, but they do need to get better on the issue as a group. I've talked about the rise of antisemitism in the U.S. quite a bit. I'm not trying to address that rise, now, specifically, though it is a constant. I am trying to identify a new specific danger with which the "rise" interacts.

Maybe it's 2 years of being told I love genocide, or maybe it's the fact that my ex- called Ted Kaszinski "Uncle Ted," endlessly ranted about ecoanarchism, & also orchestrated 2 false arrests & one 302 after beating me. Either way! Done w/ psychopaths masquerading as "Leftists." Like this is why "Leftists" on this website have no power over me, lol. Do you know how many monologues about Luigi Mangione I've had to listen to? Like, can you even imagine being like, "If I don't nod along to this Luigi Mangione rhapsody I MIGHT GET BEATEN AND THEN ARRESTED?"

John Thune is nervous. He just spread a bunch of lies on @pbsnewshour but I noticed one thing in particular: He reassured the audience that the underlying structure of ACA would be intact. He's lying. But I don't think I've heard a Repub make a promise about ACA like that before. Maybe it's happened & I just haven't noticed it. If you have, we should pinpoint the time when they shifted from full-frontal ACA attack to "Don't worry about the baseline of ACA." That's a shift. It's either new or it happened & we didn't notice. Either way. . . .

I've been sitting for a few minutes asking myself, "Do I look at Minneapolis? Do I not look? Is it wrong to choose not to & to do something else? What does that even mean? I don't think I have anything interesting to say about it. . ." I do think we should share grief. Emotions. I think it is a disservice to the issues we care about to constantly approach them as if we have to say something novel, or interesting, or pithy, or whatever. I think this is one of the worst effects of social media, in its current form. We can't just be regularly human.

Yes. I am finally done. After 9 months, I am done. I had a very good lawyer and he told me not to say a peep about the police to anyone because what they really needed to be was "soothed." That they needed time to calm down. That's what the police needed. And it worked.

https://twitter.com/tatertotsconor/status/1960151779099967918

I was arrested 13 days after the presidential election. I still had my Kamala Harris signs. When the police were typing up the false charges against me, & laughing to each other, they said, "Who's she gonna tell? Twitter?" Then: "Bet she's proud of those Kamala Harris signs now"

This is a photo of my mother's roommate, Jimmi, from when she lived in Paris in the 1960's. Jimmi was American, from California, & went by the stage name Mademoiselle Crème de Coco. Like many Black Americans, she recieved cultural appreciation in 1960's Paris, per my mom's memory Western societies' racism operates in different ways. France had--& has--a racism problem, largely directed to Arab ppl, Jewish ppl, & Black African immigrants. It is simultaneously true that the French revere Black Americans & Black American culture.

The last 2 years have been a lesson in how little Americans understand the world prior to the emergence of nation-states. In some sense, I think the rigidity of this anachronistic lens helps us remember facts of WWII much better than those of WWI. Obviously other things contribute to these differences in remembering fact/detail. WWII closer in time. My grandpa fought in it, whereas his father fought in the previous war. Nazis were almost incomprehensibly evil in their project. The very American story of D-Day. Etc.

Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, & Joe Biden would all know that such a statement was not only deeply disrespectful to Kamala Harris, but to Black women more broadly. And that is one of the reasons, in my view, Bernie Sanders is a two-time primary loser.

https://twitter.com/RichSementa/status/1954574675037557037

If you don't know how to go to a Black Church, you can shut the entire fuck up about the Democratic Party.

I think we need to say some things more plainly. It is not just wrong to tell Jews to "go back to Poland." It is an incredibly fucking awful thing to say. It is disgusting. The Germans viewed Poles (Slavs) as their lessers. The land of the east--Poland, Ukraine, etc. We can actually use the lens of "intersectionality" to understand. The Slavic lands--the East--that's where you brutalize people. That's where the Nazis made their death camps.

Alright, back to my position of not commenting on the Israel-Gaza conflict. I'll continue to comment on the "related" matter of rising antisemitism in the U.S. No comment on the conflict itself. There are too many people w/ bad motivations. We contribute to an abstraction. I say "related" because there is no real reason anymore to say these "protests" etc have any real connection to the conflict. They don't respond to events in real time. They're just Westerners getting their jollies out over demonizing Jews & turning Palestinians into symbols.