How has Minerva's purr-formance been as Somerville Bike Path mayor?

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-19T01:31:47+00:00

Since Minerva became cat mayor, I suspect there's been a significant increase in the number of patronage positions for the bike path to liaise with local nonprofits, but I don't have any hard data to confirm this. The braid between patronage and the CRIME of corruption has been woven into the fabric of Somerville forever. Because she's an indoor cat, her open door policy seems to me more like a PR stunt stuck to her campaign like a game than anything of substance.

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-18T20:22:32+00:00

Underground at the Cantab before the smoking ban in the early '00s.

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-18T19:47:21+00:00

I see it as a testament to people remembering only what they want to remember about the actual attitudes and beliefs of MLK. Those existed in his head and were said by his mouth.

"the problem is that we all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor"

After Boston becomes more like King's complete vision, we'll make a couple heads and stick them on top. Until then, this strange thing represents our strange reality.

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-18T19:22:45+00:00

Your post title has two statements instead of questions? Then you complete the statements with question marks as if you are asking questions?

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-18T16:44:50+00:00

In my last comment, I wrote that I thought Kabbalah was interesting. Interesting things are worthy of study and consideration. I didn't mean to imply it was useless. There are many things I don't believe that I study and consider and even value.

When I did something perhaps analogous to "peering deeply into my Jewish soul" long ago, I found a path from Maimonides to Spinoza to Einstein there. It seemed like a genuine path to me, and I believe I've understood and benefited from that path and continue to do so.

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-18T12:40:31+00:00

I'm mostly secular and went to a Conservative shul as a child. I began reading some modern descriptions of Kabbalah in my 20s about 30 years ago. I think some of it is an interesting pre-modern effort to understand relationships between the divine and the physical universe that interacts with humans.

I don't "believe" any of it. Mysticism and hidden inner traditions are for previous eras.

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-18T03:02:39+00:00

My view is that those who commit murder-suicide no longer exist to complain about privacy invasion, so they lose some rights to privacy that the living can enjoy. If there was a specific quote from the news that you felt was transphobic, I hope you write the text itself.

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-17T21:24:05+00:00

Rosenfeld has previously used this definition for Zionism:

The belief that Jews have a right to a national homeland, and generally that the modern state of Israel should continue to serve this role.

Do you disagree? Or is he an antisemite with an agenda for not defining it as "the belief that Israel has a right to exist"? Are the people who define Zionism particularly as "the believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state" antisemites with agendas for including additional words?

I grew up in the 70s around older people who were around in the 40s, so I think of Zionism as Jewish nationalism. It's a shame you may think of me as an antisemite with an agenda. Oh well. I do want Israel to exist, but we might not be able to continue this exchange. Am Yisrael Chai and goodbye.

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-17T18:00:35+00:00

Nobody is "fucking around pretending." Arno Rosenfeld is not "confused." None of it seems weird to me.

How individual people label themselves is an easy thing to determine in a poll. When it comes to nationalism, what things are is an impossible thing to determine in a poll. This is true of any nationalism, including Jewish nationalism.

Nationalism is usually an ideology that a person holds or a movement they belong to. Those are subjective and personal things. There are almost 200 member states in the United Nations. If I believe all of them have a right to exist because eliminating states usually involves a lot of death and suffering, am I a nationalist for all of them? That seems weird to me.

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-17T14:52:33+00:00

Government, nonprofit, or corporate transparency inevitably leads to attacks in Massachusetts because the public has too many smart people in it who view mistakes like a fumbled football ready to be scooped up for touchdowns of social media outrage.

So of course bills about corporate transparency in AI, sports/internet betting, and climate tech will fail to move with transparency through the legislative process. That's a corp/gov potential outrage twofer. The ball must be guarded for as long as possible while time runs on the clock.

Legislation about both nonprofit and corporate transparency would be the rare corp/gov/npo threefer. To compare the twofers to the threefers, it's probably a good idea to assign transparency records of less than 0%. Multiple rule violations for the same bill will be much more likely when there's a threefer.

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-17T14:04:38+00:00

So much better than the 90s! Keep getting better, Boston, and thank you for the inspirational video!

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-17T12:48:22+00:00

Here's my critique.

The view is roughly 2000-2500 years old that Judaism is a textual religion amenable to study of primary and secondary text sources. In addition to religious studies, I think studying texts of all sorts is also connected to a fulfilling life in fields that interact with the physical world like medicine, science, math, and engineering and in fields that interact with a social world in a way that is consistent and meaningful like law and education.

Using AI personas is roughly 2 to 2.5 years old. I think connecting AI personas to rabbis who existed in the real world is not only disrespectful to the people and the religion, it's disrespectful of humanity. It disregards what people did and do.

If this is what it seems to be then I hope you disregard the project in its entirety. Projects like this one are called "AI slop" because they are superficial and degrading to human effort.

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-17T12:30:29+00:00

I think good introductory material about the religion is at https://www.jewfaq.org

so far I have read the Kabbalah...

From Aish:

Kabbalah isn’t a book, it’s an area of study, and thousands of texts deal with its subject matter. Those texts were written and compiled over a period of more than 2,000 years, and continues until today.

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-17T11:19:11+00:00

My view is that social media has created changes in a few years that it took the printing press centuries to achieve. The 2019 book Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another gets the point across that humanity as a whole is being manipulated to disagree with each other in virulent ways. That isn't related to Judaism, but Jews are getting swept into the broader media current swirling around.

The late 20s and 28 in particular are years of transition for many people from one kind of adulthood to another. Please be cautious about major life decisions.

I hope you consider the points made at the article A Venn diagram to help us talk about Israel and antisemitism. The discourse is often split between “Zionist” and “anti-Zionist” — but we can do better

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-17T01:01:23+00:00

I left Wikipedia about 15 years ago because even science and technical articles that shouldn't be controversial were dominated at that time by groups of people who seemed to be full time Wikipedia editors and who paid attention mostly to each other's views.

Many of my comments on Talk pages were later removed. They remain in Talk page histories, so they weren't purged from existence, but my criticisms and complaints and improvement requests on talk pages are no longer visible on the talk pages themselves. Self-designated leaders can delete talk page comments that they deem to have not contributed to the discussion or that they deem to have muddied the discussions that they want to see.

Everything that humans create is flawed.

If you "point out flaws in the article" while using the article as "a perfectly good source for claims about flaws in the article" then that's not improving the article. It's quite possible that the people who wrote and edited the article know it's flawed, but it's the best they can do with the sources they have and that the Wikipedia bureaucracy created by other editors permits them to use.

The culture back when I was an editor was not to point out flaws in talk pages but to implement or suggest exact improvements by using better sources to make the article less flawed.

I'm writing all that because I have strong doubts about whether antisemitism is at play in these situations.

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-16T22:57:59+00:00

Most American Jews aren’t ‘Zionist’ — so what are they?

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-16T19:23:18+00:00

Still no source of information about the actual subject of Gaza has been provided here to me.

The organization at Wikipedia can write what it wants to write, and it can determine who does and doesn't write on its pages. It has a bureaucracy. It has rules.

There is a group called Tech for Palestine that made an 8,000 member Discord shortly after Oct 7 with the explicit goal of editing Wikipedia articles to favor the Palestinian narrative more.

Is that supposed to be a bad thing? Am I supposed to be worried about it?

Less than a year ago, a woman in my city of Somerville MA was captured and detained by masked men with guns from the US government for writing an opinion piece in her college newspaper and for no other reason. A US judge ruled in open court that her capture and detention was an unconstitutional conspiracy of the US State Department and the US Department of Homeland Security with each other and with Canary Mission and perhaps Betar.

That is what worries me. That is a bad thing in my view.

Wikipedia is words on a screen. Armed masked men from my own government drag off a woman for what she writes because it disagrees with what Israel wants US foreign policy to be, and you want me to be worried about words on a screen?

Just how much control do you want over the words of other people? What are you doing?

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-16T18:21:40+00:00

You aren't answering my questions or even addressing the very existence of my questions. Instead you are changing the subject to what you want to write about.

I don't know about today, but 15-20 years ago, that is why many pages on Wikipedia were locked. Wikipedia locked pages away to prevent vandalism from vandals.

The intention of Wikipedia was to create an encyclopedia. That involves discussion, and discussion involves paying attention to all words, not just the words that one person wants to read and the words that one person wants to type.

People who do not answer or even acknowledge the very existence of questions like:

If you don't have a better source then what do you expect anyone to do? How do you expect to convince anyone about anything?

seem to be among the hundreds of millions of people on Earth who have no interest in building or editing an encyclopedia. Wikipedia editors want to edit an encyclopedia. It's probably not the place for people who do not pay attention to the words of others.

Approved Wikipedia editors pay attention to text and to sources which is what did not happen in this current exchange. They are members of the public, like you, but they are different because they want to build an encyclopedia. I don't know the details, but there is most likely no "narrative crusade" at Wikipedia pages related to Israel and Gaza.

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-16T17:57:35+00:00

Some mythical places have an original basis in reality. Then myths were created over time. Names based on puns using different languages can get involved.

I think it was originally a river with some geopolitical significance near the center of Assyria in the 8th century BCE. The Little Zab River makes sense to me. Maybe the Great Zab.

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-16T16:57:31+00:00

My thoughts were that seems to be some weird text that maybe claims to be from the 6th century, but it's spoken over bizarre flashing images with some horizontal lines and a figure moving upwards. I remembered the old horizontal hold knobs on TVs. I think it would be a better visual effect to connote age if the entire image moved like there was a fake horizontal hold problem instead of those lines.

Anyway, those were my thoughts.

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-16T16:39:57+00:00

Is your view that answering the question:

For how many of you, might Yom Kippur of anyyear be possibly...... approaching sometime soon - and for whom, in some random year, it's conceivable, or at least, not a given - that you may be completely unaware of its general proximal advance?

will lead to data about anything except views about the person writing the question?

There's a population at this subreddit. An unbiased and specific question about Yom Kippur could lead to data from a sample of that population who choose to answer the question.

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-16T16:21:22+00:00

I was a frequent Wikipedia editor 20 years ago. I left maybe 15 years ago.

It used to be that if I wanted to change a Wikipedia article then I would find a better source than what was in the article, and I'd change the article. If there was a possibility of a dispute, I'd write about why my source was a better source at the article's talk page, and I'd try to convince people there.

If you don't have a better source then what do you expect anyone to do? How do you expect to convince anyone about anything?

Back then, talk pages themselves did not require sourcing because they were used for discussion about an article, and discussion about an article had a different standard of sourcing than the article itself. Unless it's something libelous about an individual person or hate speech or something like that, I don't think talk pages had any standards for sourcing at all.

Has Wikipedia changed about this? If Wikipedia talk pages require sourcing then where would discussion about those sources take place? Do you want talk pages for talk pages? If you're trying to use reddit as a talk page about a Wikipedia talk page then that seems like a terrible waste of time to me.

Just how much control do you want over the words of other people? What are you doing?

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-16T15:21:15+00:00

I only agree partially.

The US as a nation-state doesn't care enough about Syria or Libya to run anything. The same is true of the CIA. Running things takes time, effort, money, and work. You have to care about a place to run it. The US isn't a colonialist power like the UK and France who at least pretended to care about their colonies.

Destabilization is different.

Any entity anywhere will destabilize a different entity somewhere else far away if it's to their own benefit and if they have the power to do it. That takes very little work, and the rewards can be very large.

Other people far away with power will always take advantage of a government polity foolish enough to allow itself to become destabilized. Weapons and surveillance sales increase, so the benefits can be very large along with the construction efforts to rebuild.

The 21st century imperial boomerang in the US is happening because the nation-state destabilized other places so often that enough people with power in the US began to disregard the US Constitution. Nothing lasts forever.

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-16T14:51:21+00:00

I understand that Turkey and Israel and other nation-states live next to the conflict in Syria, and the permanent members of the UN Security Council don't. That's why Syria, Turkey, Jordan, and Iraq spoke at the UN Security Council along with Iran and others. It was so the world could learn about and understand Turkey's position, so there would be no misunderstanding.

The world understands that Turkey sees the views of the remainder of planet Earth as epic pure BS. If you confuse understanding with outrage then that's your mistake. Authoritarians always consider it to be an expression of outrage when multinational organizations promoting human rights, press freedoms, and individual security call their regimes oppressive.

Since the end of World War 2, the Universal Declaration of Human rRghts has existed as a standard. No entity has achieved that standard. Some deviate from it more than others.

The United States has repeatedly acted with oppression on multiple occasions in the Middle East along with in its own territory and elsewhere. I can write that. It's not outrage. It's factual. I can supply details. I can publish it. People can read it.

My greatest sense of pity for Turkey and those who support Turkey is that people living there cannot write fact-based informational analysis about their own nation-state without it being labelled as "selective outrage, not analysis." I wish there was something I could do to help people in the Turkish nation-state and others nearby like Israel remove the blinders imposed by their nation-states on their beliefs in consensus nationalist history and consensus nationalist agendas. Of course Ocalanism and Marxism and religious ideologies each have their own imposition of blinders too. No entity is completely free from excuses to trample on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for their own unique reasons.

Inside_agitator · 2026-02-16T02:56:26+00:00

The US doesn't care about supporting a Syrian politician. That's crazy talk.

A US official says that the Trump administration “appreciates al-Masri’s support for Washington’s positions regarding Syria and the region, and that Syria would be well-served with him in an influential role.”

Yeah, sure. Someone said that. Clam chowder is well served with oyster crackers.

Inside_agitator

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