I keep watching a bunch of people blindly repeating "nothing ever happens" and "trust the plan" as a hand grenade slowly rolls into their lap.

The under-16s social media ban will inevitably foster a generation of incurious morons. Revolutionary politics and autodidacticism will become a strange quirk of a minority born between the late-90s and mid-10s. It has to be opposed at all costs.

It’s common to find explanations of China’s economic dynamism and harsh work culture in its supposed Confucian values. A new book reveals how much China has in common with the brutal capitalism of Victorian England and early 20th century America. jacobin.com/2026/06/literatu…

UPDATE: Former Obama officials slam war on Iran as 'reckless, costly debacle' 🔴 LIVE updates: aje.news/y3hc1w?update=46604…

A couple returning home from the bazaar. Dagestan, 1936.

All athiest arguements and arguements against islam come from personal experience and emotion rather than logic. Im sorry for what happened to you but “my muslim dad was bad so islam is false” is never ever a valid critique to anything

USA has Claude USA has ChatGPT USA has Gemini USA has Grok China has Qwen China has DeepSeek China has Kimi China has MiniMax Europe has?

This is probably the single feature that makes China most unique as a civilization in human history: it is pretty much the only one where religion never had a say in political affairs. We often wrongly believe that China's secularism came with Communism but this couldn't be more wrong. The roots are far, far more ancient than this. Think about any other civilization - India, Persia, ancient Egypt, European civilization, the Incas: they all had a priestly class that held considerable political power. China? Never. Never, ever? Actually China, in its very early history, had a brush with theocracy during the Shang dynasty in the 2nd millennium BC. And it is precisely this episode - or rather what came afterwards - that decisively de-linked religion from government affairs. How so? Because around 1046 BC, the Zhou overthrew the Shang and immediately faced a big problem of legitimacy. The Shang had claimed to rule because Heaven had chosen them. If that were true, then the Zhou had just committed the ultimate act of sacrilege. How do you justify going against God’s will? The answer the Duke of Zhou (who can thus be credited as the - perhaps unwitting - inventor of secularism) came up with was essentially to say that Heaven's mandate is not a birthright but a contract - conditional on the virtue of the ruler and good governance. It might not sound like much but this idea completely changed the whole equation: suddenly the legitimacy of power didn’t rest on God’s will but on man’s moral judgement, on whether the ruler had virtue (德, Dé) and governed well. Which meant that, ultimately, the people - as opposed to a God - became the arbiter of whether a ruler is legitimate. If there is one single decision that most shaped China's destiny as a civilization, it's probably this one. And, as I explain in my latest article, it ultimately shaped all of us in profound ways: through a chain of events involving Jesuit missionaries, Voltaire, and what French Enlightenment thinkers called "l'argument chinois" ("the Chinese argument"), it is this very idea that ended up secularizing Europe too and drove the Enlightenment movement. That's the topic of my latest article: the origins of China's secularism, how it shaped three thousand years of Chinese civilization, and why - far from being a belief in nothing or an absence of belief as it's all too often depicted - it's on the contrary a faith in humanity itself. Read it all here: open.substack.com/pub/arnaud…

🚨 EXCLUSIVE: EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas compared Israel to apartheid-era South Africa during high-level talks in Mexico – breaking ranks with the EU's official diplomatic line. This is bigger than a slip of the tongue. Here's why it matters. 🧵 1/6