This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while. There is no way it could function as that sentence implies, but it's still nice to have a thread.

Episode Kobe thirty one

I think this is really interesting:

How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many contemporaries blamed the Jews. Cities all over Germany witnessed mass killings of their Jewish population. At the same time, numerous Jewish communities were spared. We use plague pogroms as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism. Pogroms during the Black Death are a strong and robust predictor of violence against Jews in the 1920s, and of votes for the Nazi Party. In addition, cities that saw medieval anti-Semitic violence also had higher deportation rates for Jews after 1933, were more likely to see synagogues damaged or destroyed in the 'Night of Broken Glass' in 1938, and their inhabitants wrote more anti-Jewish letters to the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer.

Obviously I want to map it onto the white redneck southerners as proof that they're racist today for reasons that are continuously inherited all the way back to the Civil War. I don't know how to explain their presence in the rural part of every single state, though, so I guess I have to resort back to blaming Fox and the Republicans. I still think this paper (that I did not click through and actually read) is interesting.

via Michael Hobbes

I haven't really been following Alex Jones' trial, but he certainly deserves to gag on his own shit. Anyway, this is nice:

Wow. Sandy Hook parents' lawyer is revealing that Alex Jones' lawyers sent him the contents of Jones' phone BY MISTAKE.

"12 days ago, your attorneys messed up and sent me a digital copy of every text" Jones has sent for years.

"You know what perjury is?" the lawyer asks.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) August 3, 2022

The tweeter eventually writes and links a short article about the episode on NBC, but the twitter thread is more fun.

I'm feeling very bleak about Kansans voting on abortion today. I can't even find the swagger to make a bleeding Kansas joke.

I'm not sure if you'll have to have Instagram or not to open this, or not. It's a short NPR cartoon about how scientists that study Mars sometimes choose to live on Mars time, and the logistics of it. Brief but cute.

This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while. There is no way it could function as that sentence implies, but it's still nice to have a thread.

Episode Kobe thirty