Campus @UChicago looking beautiful.

According to Professor Pape, Iran retrieving a small part of its own money seized by the American bandit empire is "extortion" and "fleecing." At the end of the day he's just another imperialist sad about how his declining empire isn't empiring enough.

This is a disgusting interview. Our money hungry tech overlords create systems that make it possible to kill at unprecedented speed & scale and then shift blame to “users” for making “mistakes” when they use those systems to do exactly what they were designed to do

⭕️ Jeremy Scahill on what Iranian sources told him about dealing with President Trump: “‘We’ve had senior psychologists work up a psychological profile of what they think is going on with Trump’s brain. And we started to cater our messages by running them past senior psychologists before delivering them to Trump.’ And they said that ‘we then started to see some progress.’ They almost talked about like a clinical sense, like they’re dealing with a patient.”

The sense of victimhood from countries that took part in launching the war against Iran on February 28 and then complained about being attacked in retaliation is incredible.

الانتقال من خطاب "تدمير إيران" إلى "اتفاق على الطاولة" أمريكياً لم يأتِ من فراغ. الشروط الإيرانية التي تم الاتفاق عليها مبدئياً في السابق لم تتح لترامب الخروج بصورة نصر، لذلك وبعد الاتفاق المبدئي، تراجع عنها وأرسل تعديلاته إلى طهران عبر الوسطاء. ولم تردَّ عليه إيران، بل أبقته في حالة تريُّث وانتظار طيلة الأيام الماضية، بل وأظهرت له الجهوزية لاستئناف الحرب بضرب إسرائيل أولاً وإسقاط الأباجي ثانياً—لتقول له في إشاراتها: إنك لا تستطيع تغيير واقع فشلك العسكري بالمراوحة. لذلك، حاول الضغط عليها عسكرياً بالتزامن مع وجود الوسطاء في طهران، فردت عليه طهران في ليلتَي التصعيد بضرب ضعف الأهداف التي ضربها في إيران. وبهذا فقد الأمل في حمل طهران على القبول بما يريد. أما الإعلان عن اتفاق بعد كل ذلك، فهو إعلان عن التراجع إلى ما اتُّفِق عليه سابقاً، وهو ترجمة دبلوماسية لفشله العسكري قبل كل شيء. إن وُقِّع الاتفاق الإطاري بالفعل—فنحن إزاء بداية حقبة جديدة في إيران والمنطقة. وهذا يُخيف البعض ويُفرح آخرين في المنطقة، إذ يُبدي الخاسر والرابح بوضوح. وللحديث تتمّة في الأيام القادمة.

A brief explainer of this week's US bombing of Iran's water facilities (in the middle of a multi-year drought). Can't let these crimes against the civilian population be normalized or forgotten aje.news/mx0ryd

Another reminder that there are hundreds of thousands of Palestinians unaccounted for, presumed dead, under rubble in the Gaza Strip. Gaza is an open-air extermination camp and Israel is attempting to kill those remaining via starvation, disease, airstrikes, and/or lack of care.

Trump is not inventing a new policy here. These war crimes and crime against humanity are core to U.S. military doctrine which treats so-called “war sustaining” civilian objects as military ones that are targetable. Yet again, Trump is not the exception: he is the uncensored norm

Brilliant essay. bostonreview.net/articles/ob…

“The IDF, a U.S.-backed genocidal group that controls much of Palestine, declare a ban on humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip” Why don’t you post that?

شب اول جنگ اسفند، با هر صدای انفجار خودم را حائل بچه کردم و دست و پایم لرزید. همان گیج و بیدار و خسته پای تختش نشسته بودم و فکر می‌کردم چقدر فاصله اجتماعی و عاطفی جدای از سیاسی میان من هست با آنکه در یکی از شهرهای دنیا با پرچم آنکه بمب روی سر من و بچه‌ام می‌ریزد، رقصیده است

RT @HamidRezaAz: Why is #Iran escalating in support of Hezbollah? I wrote two days ago: "The internal case being made to both supporters…

This “State of Scholarship” report alleges that “reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished” in anthropology. In 20 yrs in my field, I haven’t seen this. The authors provide no evidence to substantiate their extremely serious allegation

What Israel is doing in Lebanon is unambiguously genocidal against Shias. And it is unambiguously an attempt to reoccupy and even annex a huge part of the country. It’s infuriating that we’re pretending that there’s a ceasefire. And even more infuriating that Western media continues to turn a blind eye to Israel’s endless colonial expansion and insatiable hunger for Arab land.

Iran has included three important tests within the terms the MOU it is negotiating with the United States. These tests are intended to give Iran's leaders confidence that Trump, a counterparty they see as highly unreliable, is ready to make credible commitments, opening a pathway for further diplomacy. First, the Iranians are testing the credibility of American security commitments by insisting that the MOU encompasses a Lebanon ceasefire. They are not doing this for the sake of Hezbollah or Lebanese Shias. Rather, they want to see if Trump can restrain Israel in its own backyard. If Trump is able to do that, then he might be able to defend his own deal with Iran from further Israeli sabotage. Second, Iran is insisting on a nominal fee for vessels passing the Strait of Hormuz. This is not because they want more revenue, which would be negligible. They are insisting on this arrangement because they want to test whether Trump will endorse a deal that includes a clear instantiation of Iranian sovereignty and authority, especially one that did not exist before the war. Iran believes in the logic of a win-win agreement. Trump does not. Forcing him to accept a fee forces him to give Iran a "win" and to defend it as such from the Iran hawks in his circle. This is politically meaningful. Finally, Iran is insisting on a the release of frozen assets. The sums in question are a tiny fraction of the economic cost of the war and the release of assets is not as valuable as sanctions relief that Iran will also be targeting. But by insisting on the release of funds at an early stage of the negotiations, Iran can test whether broader economic commitments, such as sanctions relief, will be credible. Iran will only consider the promise of sanctions relief to be credible if Trump's sanctions bureaucracy allows Iran to move and spend its own money. The Iranian side will insist on transactions that push the Trump administration to set new precedents for how sanctions relief can be operationalized, especially through guidance to banks. For many in Washington, these demands seem unreasonable. But that is entirely the point. Iran's leadership won't tolerate a kind of narrow deal that allows U.S. policymakers to avoid putting political capital at stake. Iran wants a deal that reflects the unprecedented nature of the war and ensuing crisis. To meet the moment, the diplomacy has to be transformative. Iran's leaders don't trust Trump, so they are testing him. So far, he is failing these tests.

As the academic whose book is cited multiple times in this article, I want to make it clear: the data center revolt is great and we need more of it. (Getting a little sick of journalists purposefully misreading my arguments)

Incase people don’t connect the dots, he’s talking about helping Angola fight Apartheid South Africa.

RT @HamidRezaAz: The interpretation in Tehran is that Trump only responds to power. In this view, the more #Iran stands firm and demonstrat…

In this article Narges Bajoghli and I argue that the war has brought about a generational change in Iran’s leadership, bringing to the fore men with different experiences and outlook on state, society and foreign policy. This new generation is now confident that it ways has won significant strategic wins which it intends to translate not only into a new regional order but also a new domestic order and social contract with the population. The scale of the war and it took for Iran to survive it and fore the U.S. into a stalemate has also changed Iranian society in profound way. Social grievances remain but will express themselves in this new context. We explain why pre-war ways of understanding Iran don't explain it anymore. “The emergent Islamic Republic will remain highly authoritarian. But the categories that Western analysts have often used to describe the Islamic Republic’s various factions—hard-liner versus moderates, ideologues versus reformists—will be less accurate than ever. The new Islamic Republic’s priorities, and how it pursues them, will be shaped by the specific experiences of its two wars with the United States and Israel: the losses Iran sustained, the confidence its leadership gained, and the new social contract the fighting has made necessary and possible.” foreignaffairs.com/iran/iran…

The NYT describes Hezbollah drones "steadily hunting down Israeli soldiers and commanders... with often-lethal strikes" posted in "chilling videos." Israel has killed 115x more people in Lebanon (3,433 vs. 29) since the start of the war. The drones get "chilling." The 3,433 Lebanese dead don't even get a mention.