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Yes, I know I'm getting fed to Spidey for this one...

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someone draw this as gyatso and aang im begging you pleaseeee

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he also hangs out with antisemitic losers like hasan piker sooooo

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A lot of Mamdani's antisemitism makes sense when you realize his father is a professor of post-colonialism and was friends with Edward Said. When I said post-colonialism as a field was full of antisemites that are all connected back to Said I wasn't kidding.

His father being an ethnic Indian and scholar of post-colonialism, having been born and lived (and been later expelled) from Uganda is very interesting, and the implications for his antisemitic understanding of I/P even more so. I don't doubt Mamdani's antisemitism came from that environment.

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Not sure why anything related to cars is allowed to be shiny or reflective metal besides the literal mirrors. I'm going to be driving this 2 ton object at 50-90 mph; there should be as little chance as possible that something reflects the sun into my eyes!

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Awesome that we brought back mass lead poisoning. Everything that’s old is new again.

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A University of Florida law student who posted that Jews must be “abolished by any means necessary” won an award for a paper in which he argued that the Constitution applies solely to white people.

The honor for an avowed white supremacist and antisemite has roiled the campus at the public university, in a state where a 2023 law prevents state funding for university programs that advocate for “diversity, equity and inclusion or promote or engage in political or social activism.”

Preston Damsky, 29, received the “book award” for a paper he wrote for a class last fall. In the paper, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for non-white citizens and orders to kill “criminal infiltrators at the border,” according to the New York Times.

The award for the paper was given to Damsky by Federal Judge John L. Badalamenti, a Trump administration appointee who taught Damsky’s class.

The law school’s interim dean, Merritt McAlister, initially defended Damsky’s accolade, invoking “institutional neutrality,” arguing in an email to the law school community that professors must not engage in “viewpoint discrimination” according to the Times.

McAlister’s argument underscores a growing tension within academia as the Trump administration escalates its campaign against DEI with policies that have seen Holocaust remembrance pages stripped from government websites but allowed far-right sentiments to go unchecked.

After receiving the class award, Damsky, who told the Times that referring to him as a Nazi “would not be manifestly wrong,” doubled down on his incendiary messages. He opened an account on X in which he repeatedly posted antisemitic and white supremacist sentiments.

Carliss Chatman, a visiting law professor at the school during the spring semester, told the Times that she was struck by the response to Damsky’s essay in contrast to her experience at the school.

A class Chatman had proposed titled “Race, Entrepreneurship and Inequality” was renamed by the school’s administration to just “Entrepreneurship” before being added to the catalogue.

“I just find it fascinating that this student can write an article, a series of articles that are essentially manifestoes, and that’s free speech,” Chatman said. “But my class can’t be called ‘Race, Entrepreneurship and Inequality.’”

Shortly after arriving at the school, a number of Jewish and Black students approached Chatman with concerns about Damsky.

“We should not be giving awards to things that advocate for white supremacy and white power,” Chatman told the Times, adding that she believed the award had “emboldened” Damsky to begin posting his racist and antisemitic comments on social media.

In one post on X, Damsky argued that President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were “controlled by Jews,” a group that he called “the common enemy of humanity,” according to the Times.

In dozens of other posts Damsky made from February to April, he described Jewish people as “parasitizing the West,” described immigrants as “invaders” and advocated for a white ethnostate, according to University of Florida student paper The Independent Florida Alligator.

In a post in late March, Damsky wrote that Jews must be “abolished by any means necessary,” which prompted the school on April 3 to suspend him and issue a trespass order against him, barring him from the university property for three years.

The controversy over Damsky’s antisemitic and racist remarks comes as the Trump administration has cracked down on universities over alleged antisemitism on their campuses stemming from pro-Palestinian protests.

Earlier this month, Florida officials rejected a bid from the university to hire the former president of the University of Michigan to helm the school, citing his response to pro-Palestinian protests on his former campus.

The University of Florida has the highest number of Jewish undergraduate students of any public university in the country with a population of 6,500 Jewish students, or 19% of the student body, according to Hillel International.

Following a request for comment from JTA, the University of Florida replied that they could not provide information on student records or disciplinary processes, but shared that on April 3 the University of Florida Police Department issued a trespass warning to “the person in question.” Administrators haven’t said what led to Damsky’s trespass order, which came following scrutiny of his social media.

In a statement, the University of Florida Hillel condemned Damsky’s rhetoric and said that they hoped the school’s administration would review the policy that allowed him to receive the award for his paper.

“There is no place at UF for this type of hateful rhetoric. We are grateful that the university responded by suspending the student, barring him from campus, increasing police presence around the law school, and initiating disciplinary proceedings aimed at expulsion,” the statement read.

“This “book award” was presented automatically to the student with the top grade in the course, which creates a false impression of endorsement of the student’s work. We hope the administrators will take time to review this policy moving forward,” the statement continued.

On March 21, a University of Florida law professor replied to Damsky’s post calling for the elimination of Jewish people, and asked if he would murder her and her family, according to the Alligator.

In response, Damsky wrote, “surely a genocide of all whites should be an even greater outrage than a genocide of all Jews, given the far greater number of whites.”

One 24-year-old Jewish third-year law student who was only identified by his first name, Daniel, told the Alligator in April that he wanted the law school to denounce Damsky’s views and draw a line between offensive speech and calls for violence.

“From my perspective, it just looks like he got away with it for two years until he threatened a faculty member,” Daniel told the Alligator. “It’s been very concerning. It felt like the administration just thought that they could close their eyes and wait for it to go away.”

McAlister addressed communal outcry over the school’s response to Damsky at a town hall meeting in April in which she said that the law school’s reputation was a “foremost concern” and law school leaders were working with “main campus” to address Damsky’s case, according to the Alligator.

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if you’re someone who has to wear glasses every day that makes them basically the most important item you own which means you really gotta show those fuckers who’s boss just toss them everywhere and knock them off things and roll over them in bed at least twice a week

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“israel is a white supremacist ethnostate built on blood & soil ideology, anyways here’s some debunked race science proving israeli blood doesn’t belong on israeli soil because their genes aren’t indigenous enough”

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Im learning that way too many of you have no regard for your own safety or the safety of your data and also that you would be found by bailifs in a day

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ten years of obergefell today

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I'm horrified. Several people have already been executed by the regime in recent days for "Mossad collaboration". Please pray for the captive Jews, but also Kurds, Balochs, Baháʼís, Lurs and other minorities of Iran 💔💔💔🙏 source: Jerusalem Post

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Man I think there are two Great Tragedies of Tim Drake, and the second is how hard fandom refuses to engage with the first in favor of their own made-up fanon version of angst. There's plenty of angst in the actual text!

Like the thing about Tim -- actual, pre-Robin, training-to-be-Robin, start-of-his-Robin-run Tim -- is that he sets out on his vigilante journey with two things literally no other batfam member has had before. Tim is normal, and he is happy.

Early Tim, you'll hear a lot in some circles, is meant to be a bland self-insert: look at this kid, he's a Batman fan, just like you! Only he's got more money AND more freedom than you, which means that he gets to have the coolest hobby ever, and when Batman gets in trouble this kid can actually help him out. So cool!

Dick, Jason, Cass, Damian -- they all come to vigilantehood after backgrounds that're various levels of implausible, tragic, and traumatizing. Batman, and their ability to don a cape beside him, rescues them. Their lives get better when they put the uniform on.

Tim's doesn't. Through coincidence or fate or force of plot, Tim agrees to be Robin and his life immediately gets worse. Tim's mom (who canonically loves him and he loves dearly, who's gone more than maybe she should be but a good mom when she's there) dies. Tim's dad's in a coma. Tim's life is upended.

Tim gets strangled by Azbats. Tim almost dies of the Clench. Tim gets all the typical vigilante/sidekick suffering stuff. Tim gets fucked with and fucked over by an increasingly paranoid Bruce.

Tim tries to leave to go back to his normal civilian life but he can't any more, because he is the Normal One, he's been the Normal One for so long that he's missed how much he's changed until he has to fit all of himself inside one single box of normalcy. He tries to leave and it follows him. It haunts him. It stalks him. It kills his friend. It kills his girlfriend. It kills his dad.

(That's the Tim that Jason runs into in Titan's Tower, for fucksake. The orphan living alone in Bludhaven, who's been Robin for years, who left it and then came back because nobody else could live up to him, who's been taking care of himself for ages. The one with half his life and identity pinned not on being granted the opportunity to playact as impostor-syndrome Robin -- that's Tim of two or three or four years ago, just starting out, before he started accumulating loss -- but on being Robin, and being damn fucking good at it. Jason thinks Tim stole his job. Tim thinks he's been doing this goddamn job for four years and if one more person tells him that it's not his, he's going to show them why he doesn't need to turn into Gun Batman to be scary.)

His best friend dies. His other best friend dies. 16- to 17-year-old Tim McFucking Loses It, even before Bruce also dies and pushes him right over the edge, but the tragedy of the Red Robin run isn't just Tim's general sense of self-worth and belief in his ability to be loved. It's stepping back, looking at it in context, and realizing that this was all preventable.

Dick Grayson was never going to be normal, before or after his parents died. Jason was never going to be fine. Cass was doomed long before Bruce ever got to her. But Tim chose this shit. Twelve years old, looking at Batman, too smart for his own damn good but in a way that never once stopped him from making friends and fitting in just fine before -- Tim chose. And he kept choosing, until long after it stopped actually being a choice, until it became all he had, all he had left. Tim made himself into the sort of creature of power and grief that most of his teammates and family had no choice but to be.

What a cool story. (What a very Barbara Gordon story, but that's a conversation for another day.) What a goddamn shame fandom would rather give him the UwU Tragic Backstory and comically terrible parents than tell it.

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The reconstructed face of the “Cheddar Man” (c. 7,000 BCE) compared to his living descendant, Adrian Targett    

The Cheddar Man is a Mesolithic skeleton that was recovered from England’s Cheddar Gorge in 1903. At around 9,000 years old, the Cheddar Man is the oldest complete skeleton ever discovered in the UK, and has long been hailed as the “first Briton.” DNA analysis on the Cheddar man from 2018 indicated that he was lactose intolerant, had light-colored eyes, dark brown or black hair, and had a dark to black skin tone. Although the discovery of the Cheddar Man’s dark skin tone was surprising for both scientists and the public alike, it corresponds with recent research suggesting that genes linked to lighter skin only began to spread about 8,500 years ago - approximately 32,000 years later than what was previously believed.  

In addition to the development on his skin tone, the Cheddar Man surprised scientists in 1997 when DNA analysis revealed that he had a living descendant -  a retired history teacher named Adrian Targett. Targett and the Cheddar man share the same mtDNA, which is passed down from mother to daughter. In other words, they share a common maternal ancestor. What is even more remarkable is that Targett lives in Cheddar, only a half mile away where his 9,000-year-old ancestor was discovered.

Targett was not invited to the initial reveal of his ancestor’s new facial reconstruction, but he has since seen it and has commented on the family resemblance. “I do feel a bit more multicultural now,” he once joked in an interview “And I can definitely see that there is a family resemblance. That nose is similar to mine. And we have both got those blue eyes.”

The development of the Cheddar Man’s skin tone has generated resistance, especially among far-right and white supremacist circles. Targett, however, is unbothered by it, stating that it is “marvelous what scientists can reconstruct once they sequence the DNA.” When asked if he thought whether the findings affected the way people think about race, Targett responded: “Yes, I do think it’s significant. Not many people in Cheddar mind it. But the lesson is that we’re all immigrants, whether you’ve been in a place for 10 minutes or 9,000 years. We’ve all come from somewhere.”

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Dem NY Senator Kirsten Gillibrand gave a strong criticism of Mamdani and his refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada”

Thank you Senator Gillibrand!