Ben Dowsett

@bendowsett.bsky.social

5210 Followers 368 Following

sports & tech | regular contributor to WIRED | also: ESPN, Defector, Ringer, Scientific American | tips: bdowsett.nyfwc@gmail.com Signal: bdows.99 | leftist who does not stick to sports | Free Palestine

The cutest creature that has ever existed on this planet or any other
The share of wealth owned by the 1% of richest people in the United States has reached a new record of 31.7% in the third quarter of 2025, the highest since records began in 1989, according to figures published last week by the Federal Reserve. Q2 of 2025 and Q4 of 2024 had already seen new all-time highs set at or above 31%, as the wealth of the super-rich tends to recover quicker from setbacks like financial crises and global upheaval. Billionaire wealth around the world also reached a new record last year, accelerating its growth over previous years, according to recent calculations by Oxfam. The nonprofit cites tax breaks for the wealthy and unchecked monopoly power as reasons for this development. The net worth of the top 1% in the U.S. has been above a share of 30% almost consistently since 2014, while the top 10% currently own just over 68% of the country’s wealth. This is in stark contrast to just 2.5% of U.S. net worth in the hands of the 50% at the bottom of the wealth ladder.
Screenshot of an Instagram post showing that Team Norway donated its FIFA World Cup proceeds to Gaza humanitarian aid.
One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this. -Omar El Akkad
Senate schedule where they’re only in session for 5 total days in August.
World series of poker chips
Dave Matthews speaks out against ICE and in support of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo at his show tonight
A Ms. Rachel Instagram post: "I don't get your obsession with Gaza." I don't understand your silence as over 20,000 children were killed.
Drop Site news (via X): “The Egyptian Relief Committee in Gaza had been organizing public screenings of World Cup matches for displaced families across the Strip. About an hour before today’s Egypt-Argentina match, Israel killed the committee’s public relations director in a strike on his vehicle. Two others, including a child, were also killed.”
And as the ball went up, [a guy named] McCoy reached out to go get his arm up to the ball, and he hit me in the side of the head. Blood all over the place, I had a broken nose. After that, I had what golfers would call ‘the yips. -Ed Rush
Basic brain: Darryn Peterson should have gone #1 Advanced brain: Darryn Peterson could be a starter right away Mega brain: Darryn Peterson should be the ROY favorite Galaxy brain: Darryn Peterson will get All-NBA votes as a rookie
If the best a political party can do is a rapist with a Nazi tattoo, that party sucks
Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return...
Me and our new child
A tattoo of a tree with long roots, under which is inscribed "if at all god's gaze upon us falls, it's with a mischievous grin"
“She kept saying ‘no,’ ‘don’t do it.’” “I apologized afterwards.” “She said ‘no’ and ‘stop’ several times.” Those were statements made by Cristiano Ronaldo to his legal team in September 2009, as part of an internal questionnaire regarding accusations of rape against him. His accuser, Kathryn Mayorga, claimed he raped her in a Las Vegas hotel earlier that year. Mayorga initially settled with Ronaldo for $375,000, but in 2018 filed a lawsuit seeking a far greater sum while claiming Ronaldo’s lawyers had taken advantage of her fragile emotional state to coerce her into signing the settlement and a non-disclosure agreement (Der Spiegel also reported a number of disgusting details on how Ronaldo’s team attempted to smear and discredit Mayorga during initial proceedings, including shadowing her with a private investigator who went so far as to pull the number on her marriage certificate).
Carter Hart crying
Dave Matthews says "Let's Go Knicks" at his concert on June 10, 2026 in Forest Hills, NY.
Ben Dowse hadn’t expected to treat measles when he became a doctor, but there he was, examining a newborn exposed to the virus in the womb. The infected mother had given birth just hours earlier. The hospital had alerted Dowse to the case before delivery, and he’d braced himself for the worst.
A Jewish Voice for Peace poster that says No War, No ICE, Free Palestine, The Long Road Ahead
RALEIGH, N.C. — In October 2025, three months after he and four other players on Canada’s 2018 world junior hockey team were found not guilty of sexual assault, Carter Hart spoke for the first time as a member of the Vegas Golden Knights. At the time, Hart was ineligible to play in the NHL, part of a punishment the league applied to all five players for what it had determined was “deeply troubling and unacceptable” behavior, regardless of the Ontario Superior Court’s decision. Hart spoke non-specifically about how he’d learned and grown during his 20-month suspension, and about his plans “to show the community my true character, who I really am and what I’m about.” Eight months later, Hart’s career trajectory has shot skyward, positioning him as the starting goaltender for the Western Conference champions. He’s in the hunt for a Stanley Cup title and in the running for the Conn Smythe Trophy as the playoff MVP. Yet Hart’s media availability this season was limited largely to postgame appearances, and he has shared little about the follow-up to those plans from October.
Oklahoman opinion article: The parallels between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the nation of Israel are difficult to ignore. Neither was supposed to become what it is.
Enhanced Games at Resorts World Las Vegas
I’m not falling for that hot take. That’s clearly someone with a fetish for getting yelled at. I refuse to participate in that kind of perversion
Dave Matthews holding his usual post-show signs saying “Stop Killing Children” and “Stop the Genocide”
You'll often hear from Zionists, especially supposed "liberal" Zionists, that the *FOUNDATIONS* of Zionism are good and pure - that before people like Netanyahu came along and ruined it, Zionism was purely a positive force for Jewish statehood. But that's simply false. The architects of Zionism were committing brutal violence against multiple groups (Palestinian Arabs, the British, and even OTHER JEWS!!!) as early as the 1920s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionist_political_violence Early Zionists regularly collaborated with known anti-Semitic groups, including - wait for it - THE NAZIS! Here, look: https://www.aljazeera.com/.../zionism-anti-semitism-and... And of course, every Zionist wants you to simply forget about how Israel became a state in the first place: Via the Nakba, where 750,000 (three quarters of a million!) Palestinians were ethnically cleansed and violently displaced from their homes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba Zionism was never pure. Zionism has been violent at its core from the beginning. Zionism was never about a safe place for ALL Jews - only some Jews, only the "right" Jews.
One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this. -Omar El Akkad
I am posting on my Facebook account because I know that most of you reading this will know me. I hope you hold me as companionate and thoughtful. I've spent a lifetime knowing each and every one of you, so please, hear me out, even if this feels hard. Today a person came to my office, saw my Israeli flag and immediately had a reaction. I didn't know at first because they did not talk to me, but I felt something was off. I learned about it later from a colleague "He isn't a Zionist is he?!" I am finding my circle of peers slowly dwindling over the past years, people I know, or don't, who have decided that affiliation with me is not worth it because of what I represent to them. I've learned what they have come to believe about me is horrific, I've been blamed by association for every conceivable crime against humanity. I know this feeling, it's been hard-coded into my DNA from generations of isolation, of being held accountable for the sins of the world, and punished as a proxy for internalized guilt and shame. I've mostly stayed silent over the years, mindful of the context of who am I what I might represent. But as my world grows quiet around me, I think It's time to speak up. Whatever your opinions you are probably wrong. This is not a knock at you, or anyone, it's a truth we need to all hold, none of us, me included, has authority over the truth, the best we can do is keep learning and listening and accepting our imperfection. I am probably wrong. I will do my best to be accurate and kind, hold fast to my values, and assume there is always something I do not yet know. Certainty is a feeling, not a truth - believing something with conviction is not the same as it being true. Poeple lie to you, sometimes you can see it, sometimes you cannot. I fall for this too. The majority rules is not a moral statement, it's mob mentality. The more people around you agree with you, the more skeptical you should be. Now lets talk about anti-Zionism
A tweet: 🚨NEW: CNN's Van Jones calls on "progressives" to "GET ON BOARD" with Trump's stance that Iran *can't* have nuclear weapon🚨 "I think progressives underestimate how dangerous Iran is. Iran is not a normal country. Normal countries don‘t blind women because they showed some hair...
sad dave portnoy
In NHL history, there have been 29 instances of a team trailing in the 3rd period in each of the first 5 games of a playoff series. Of those 29 teams, 28 were behind in the series or had already lost the series after 5 games. The lone exception is this year's @GoldenKnights.
This is the part where we're supposed to get into separating the art from the artist, and people's personal histories with and feelings about certain music, and how we are to deal with thorny questions about what people make and what they do outside of that, and blah blah blah. Frankly, I'm burned out. Maybe you've noticed, but we are living in an age of nihilism. We're in an upside-down world, one where someone can be obsessed with uncovering Jeffrey Epstein and his pedophile cabal, then vote a member of the Epstein cabal into the highest office in the land, and then happily go see a new Michael Jackson hagiography. No one knows the line anymore between enjoyment and endorsement, and no one wants to think critically about their choices; they simply want satisfaction at all costs. The idea that we're all supposed to dutifully separate the art from the artist is complicated by the fact that our experience of art, particularly the popular, contemporary sort, is almost always mediated by our parasocial attachment to the artists who've made it. It's not enough to like Star Wars as a film—people want to be those characters, to dress like them, to speak in their quotes, to make their world like the movie, and to revere the mind that came up with it all. When Britney Spears or Rihanna changed their hair or adopted a new style, every middle-school girl followed in quick succession, not just because they liked the music and the look, but because they loved the person behind it. No one crafted a more intense parasocial relationship with fans than Michael Jackson, who coveted it not just as a lonely person, who grew up in isolation and was incapable of forming connections like a regular person, but also as a predator who cultivated deep personal relationships with young boys and their families for his own warped ends.
Kat Abughazaleh reposting my prior post
Devin Booker whining about refs
OKLAHOMA CITY -- Add the Phoenix Suns to the list of teams that have publicly complained about officiating after a loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder. "In my 11 years, I haven't called a ref out by name, but James [Williams] was terrible tonight through and through," Suns star Devin Booker said after a 120-107 loss in Wednesday's Game 2 that gave the defending champion Thunder a 2-0 series lead. "It's bad for the sport, bad for the integrity of the sport. People are going to start viewing this as a WWE if they're not held responsible.
Yamamoto-Cooley-Guenther has 89.6% of expected goals at 5 on 5 through 2 games of Utah-Vegas
A man makes a good point
First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then, shalt thou count to three. No more. No less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once at the number three, being the third number be reached, then, lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.
Girl he's looking at: Let's nominate a straight white man Guy looking: Dems trying to win an election Girlfriend he's not looking at: Basic decency + no more wars
Esses Magazine issue 5 cover
you follow me, dipshit. not the other way around lmao
The man who rammed his truck into a Michigan synagogue on Thursday lost four family members in an airstrike in Lebanon the week before, according to an imam in Dearborn Heights, Mich., and a Lebanese official who said he knew the man and his family. The attacker was identified by federal officials as Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a 41-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Lebanon. He lived outside Detroit, where a mosque held a memorial for his slain family members this week, according to the imam, Hassan Qazwini of the Islamic Institute of America, who performed the service but did not know Mr. Ghazali, he said. Mr. Ghazali was killed on Thursday after driving through the temple doors and down the hallway of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, Mich. He exchanged gunfire with security guards, officials said, though they added on Thursday that his cause of death of was not yet clear. No one else was killed in the attack, which set the building on fire and sent some 30 police officers to the hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation. One security guard was hit by the vehicle and injured. He is expected to recover.
An Amazon Prime NBA scorebug with no timeouts remaining or bonus info anywhere
133 wpm at 99% accuracy, good lord
I type 118 wpm at 96% accuracy lol
My little guy learning to ice skate
The reality is that the public is far more in favor of stopping arms sales to Israel than opposed,” Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel Program at Arab Center Washington D.C., told The Intercept. He pointed to a June poll from CBS that showed 61 percent of all Americans said the U.S. should not send weapons to Israel, including 77 percent of Democrats and nearly 40 percent of Republicans. Poll results have been consistent for months.