I've just published a detailed political/historical overview of the early phase of the #Yazidi Genocide, in the latest volume of the Iranica series. The volume can be purchased in print or e-book from @harrassowitz_v: harrassowitz-verlag.de/Yezid… #Sinjar

“A person’s whole life is in that place, their work, their memories, everything. Suddenly you see it exploding in front of you,” said Ahmad Abu Taam, a 56-year-old resident of Taybeh. “From that moment, I felt that I had become a refugee. I feel like I have no home.” “You feel a deep sense of frustration. Like someone has the power to erase you,” said Abu Taam.

Iran warns civilians to avoid American universities that it may target in retaliation for the recent U.S./Israeli bombings of Iranian universities. Did the U.S. provide Iranian civilians with a similar warning prior to bombing their universities? rudaw.net/english/middleeast…

Syria's Kurds caution Iran's Kurds against trusting America, following the U.S. abandonment of its allies in Rojava: "I hope that the Kurds of ​Iran will not ally themselves with America, because they will abandon them." "We Kurds… have had a negative experience with the Americans in ‌Syria, and ⁠their abandonment of Kurdish resistance movements." reuters.com/world/middle-eas…

Totalitarian bureaucracies destroy traditional modes of living, local economies, and our relationship with the earth. In "the land of the free," a farmer can't sell her own eggs.

Iraq and the Hashd al-Sha'bi have threatened to attack the Yazidi YBŞ in Shingal (Sinjar) after March 10. This is being instigated by Turkey while the world's eyes are focused on Iran. My explanation of the sensitive situation at @the_amargi: theamargi.com/posts/iraq-and…

I've been wanting to write this for a while: an article on the key characteristics of the Chinese health system, as a patient. It's something that I - perhaps unfortunately - have come to have a lot of experience with in my eight years in China. I've been to the doctor as a patient dozens of times. My wife delivered our first daughter in a Chinese hospital, and had cancer surgery in Shanghai. My younger daughter - who once completely severed her thumb in an unfortunate accident in rural Gansu - had emergency surgery in a small clinic there (her thumb is fine now!). We spent the entire covid episode in China. And, to this day, I still go back to China every year to do my routine health tests or the occasional procedure (like a thyroid biopsy in Harbin last year). In other words, when it comes to the Chinese health system, I've seen a lot. What's fascinating about the Chinese health system, and that's true in general about many things in China, is that it never inherited Western dogma about how things were supposed to work, it's completely unconstrained by what everyone else has decided is "normal". And, as a result, you end up with things that would simply sound impossible to any Western patient: a consultation with the head cardiologist of one of Shanghai's best hospitals for less than $10, blood test results in under 30 minutes, and a system where you can walk in, see three specialists and walk out with a diagnosis and your medicine - all before noon. As I argue in the article that's all enabled by 3 characteristics that sound super unorthodox: 1) extremely short consultation times, less than 5 minutes 2) no GP gatekeepers (you go straight to see specialists) 3) systematic testing for every patient, even if you just have a cold Each one sounds wrong. And in fact when I describe them to doctor friends in the West they immediately explain to me why that can't possibly work, and how their own system is far superior. Except that it does work, I checked the numbers (on top of my personal experience): the Chinese system handles close to 10 billion total outpatient visits a year (nhc.gov.cn/cms-search/downFi…), or about 7 visits per person per year on average, and the average wait time is only about 18 minutes (gov.cn/yaowen/shipin/202408/…). Contrast this with France, my country, where people already go to the doctor A LOT, but still less than in China: only 5.5 visits per person per year (evaluation.securite-sociale.…). And the French system can't even handle this lower volume: when you can see a specialist straight away in China - you don't even need to make an appointment in advance - you need to wait months to see one in France (50 days on average for a cardiologist, for instance: drees.solidarites-sante.gouv…). I've personally managed to see 3 specialists AND do all related tests AND get the test results AND get diagnoses AND buy the medicine to cure me - all in the space of a morning at a hospital in Shanghai. That would have undoubtedly taken me a whole year in the French system. My purpose here is not to argue that the West should replicate the Chinese health system wholesale, but to ask an honest question: what if some of the things we take for granted about healthcare aren't nearly as inevitable as we think? Is it completely unthinkable that we've developed some dogmas that are costing us - in money, in time, and occasionally in lives? That's the whole point of my article: describing a health system built from first principles by people who never assumed we in the West knew better - up to you to decide if they have a point. Enjoy the read here: open.substack.com/pub/arnaud…

Baghdad is on high alert after reported ISIS prison breaks in Syria. Sudani visited al-Qaim, raised border security to the highest level, and urged coordination with the SDF and Peshmerga to stop any spillover. Full story: theamargi.com/posts/iraq-on-…

What happened today in Silwan in East Jerusalem is unbelievable. A family had their home unjustly condemned by the municipality. Hours before a scheduled discussion between the city prosecutor and the residents' attorney—an eleventh-hour meeting that might have spared thirteen families from losing everything—the bulldozers were already on their way to Silwan. The families woke to the sound of fists and steel at 4:30 a.m., police and city-hired contractors forcing their way through doors in the dark, ordering everyone out. There was shouting and chaos in the narrow stairwells as residents begged for time to collect their belongings. Instead, they were told: Take only your money and gold. The rest—clothes, photographs, children’s toys, lifetimes of furniture and mementos—was left behind. If that isn't bad enough, the evicted family was attacked, by individuals working for teh city as contractors. They threw stones at neighbors and physically assaulting a man who tried to protest. The police came to break it up but only arrested Arabs, of course. The building’s four stories, where thirteen families had tried for years to earn a permit and build a future, were reduced to rubble. Those who beat them as they lost everything went home happy while those who tried to defend them were arrested. An apartheid state.

Major preprint just out! We compare how humans and LLMs form judgments across seven epistemological stages. We highlight seven fault lines, points at which humans and LLMs fundamentally diverge: The Grounding fault: Humans anchor judgment in perceptual, embodied, and social experience, whereas LLMs begin from text alone, reconstructing meaning indirectly from symbols. The Parsing fault: Humans parse situations through integrated perceptual and conceptual processes; LLMs perform mechanical tokenization that yields a structurally convenient but semantically thin representation. The Experience fault: Humans rely on episodic memory, intuitive physics and psychology, and learned concepts; LLMs rely solely on statistical associations encoded in embeddings. The Motivation fault: Human judgment is guided by emotions, goals, values, and evolutionarily shaped motivations; LLMs have no intrinsic preferences, aims, or affective significance. The Causality fault: Humans reason using causal models, counterfactuals, and principled evaluation; LLMs integrate textual context without constructing causal explanations, depending instead on surface correlations. The Metacognitive fault: Humans monitor uncertainty, detect errors, and can suspend judgment; LLMs lack metacognition and must always produce an output, making hallucinations structurally unavoidable. The Value fault: Human judgments reflect identity, morality, and real-world stakes; LLM "judgments" are probabilistic next-token predictions without intrinsic valuation or accountability. Despite these fault lines, humans systematically over-believe LLM outputs, because fluent and confident language produce a credibility bias. We argue that this creates a structural condition, Epistemia: linguistic plausibility substitutes for epistemic evaluation, producing the feeling of knowing without actually knowing. To address Epistemia, we propose three complementary strategies: epistemic evaluation, epistemic governance, and epistemic literacy. Full paper in the first reply. Joint with @Walter4C & @matjazperc

ICE arrested our beloved professor Vahid Abedini. He is Farzaneh Family Assistant Prof of Iranian Studies at the University of Oklahoma's @OklahomaU's Boren College of International Studies @oucis Dr. Abedini was boarding a flight on his way to attend the Middle East Studies Association (@MESA_1966) in Washington DC when he was detained and put to jail. Nov 22. He has been wrongfully detained because he has a valid H-1B visa —a non-immigrant work visa granted to individuals in “specialty occupations,” including higher education faculty. We are praying for his swift release.

In a normal world, this should be an immense scandal in Europe. Le Monde has a long article (lemonde.fr/international/art…) describing the hellish life of Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the ICC in The Hague, due to U.S. sanctions punishing him for authorizing arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes in Gaza. Guillou's daily existence has been transformed into a Kafkaesque nightmare. He cannot: open or maintain accounts with Google, Amazon, Apple, or any US company; make hotel reservations (Expedia canceled his booking in France hours after he made it); conduct online commerce, since he can't know if the packaging is American; use any major credit card (Visa, Mastercard, Amex are all American); access normal banking services, even with non-American banks, as banks worldwide close sanctioned accounts; conduct virtually any financial transaction. He describes it as being "economically banned across most of the planet," including in his own country, France, and where he works, the Netherlands. That's the real shocking aspect of this: the Americans are: - punishing a European citizen - for doing his job in Europe - applying laws Europe officially supports - at an institution based in Europe - that Europe helped create and fund and Europe is not only doing essentially nothing to protect him, they're actively enforcing America's sanctions against their own citizen - European banks closing his accounts, European companies refusing him service, European institutions standing by while Washington destroys a European judge's life on European soil. Again, in a normal world, European leaders and citizens should be absolutely outraged about this. But we've so normalized the hollowing out of European sovereignty that the sight of a European citizen being economically executed on European soil for upholding European law is treated, at best, as an unfortunate technical complication in transatlantic relations.

We are the last generation of intellectuals. compactmag.com/article/the-c… @compactmag

Over 60,000 Nigerian Christians reported massacred 2009-2023. If accurate, that figure is comparable to the Gazan genocide—though over 14 years instead of two. Sub-Saharan Africa's problems receive far less attention than those of the Arab World. genocidewatch.com/single-pos…

Definitely feels like this wording could convey something other than what was intended.

Today, Nadia Murad—Yazidi survivor of Islamic State enslavement—spoke on women's welfare at the UN General Assembly. Also today, Ahmad al-Sharaa "Jolani"—former head of an al-Qaida wing that targeted Yazidis and other non-Muslims—was welcomed by the same UNGA & U.S. Sec of State.