Saudi Arabia better know what it's doing. If it's going to take over the South, it's gonna have to commit to the South. It's been able to coast the last decade by relying on the STC deferring to it as Yemen's natural arbiter. The Southerners are not gonna forget being bombed.

"I’m going to pause here just to review: an institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato." surreal times dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

one takeaway from the grok noncon porn thing is that much of the media just isn't interested in an issue they can't pretend has two sides or that doesn't give them an opportunity to shit on the left. Also it would be uncomfortable to justify remaining on twitter after acknowledging it

Given the fact economy seats are actually loss making for some flights and they make all their money on premium seats, this will require increased air ticket prices Not saying we shouldn't do it, but don't be surprised when a lot of middle class people get mad

Tbf, viewed from the first term (cuz the fascist project didn't stop during the Biden Interregnum) they're right on schedule!

Remember that thing I said I didn't want to happen in 2026? Yeah. Forget about what I said.

Senior level undergrads not being able to read 50 pages a week for an advanced class is...concerning

A month ago the eventual independence of South Yemen seemed inevitable, really Now, with Aydrus al-Zubaydi an outlaw, it seems further away than it has in years Stuff swings fast in Yemen. Who knows where it'll swing next?

Good read on the recent events in Yemen and their regional implications. Also iterates my ongoing concerns about Saudi commitments to actually investing in a durable solution in Yemen.

THUCYDIDES: In my book I described the Sicilian Expedition where you invade a basically random and sort of distant country to try to loot it as a cautionary tale DIPSHITS: At long last, we have done the Sicilian Expedition from the classic of military history Don't Do The Sicilian Expedition

They're doing this so they can call any government program that isn't ICE or the military "rife with fraud" and thus illegitimate. They are trying to manufacture consent to say any entitlement — from Medicare to social security — must be canceled because of extreme edge cases. Don't fall for it.

There is only one iron law of history and that is the Immortal Science of the Dialectic, and the main takeaway from that for IR practitioners is that for every stupid fucking use of raw power you use there's most likely gonna be something stupid coming back at you

I know Joss Whedon sucks, but Angel's finale still holds as a distillation of the show's philosophy that "fighting the good fight" even in the face of overwhelming odds is never over

People who fancy quoting the Melian Dialogue ("the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must") ignore the fact that Thucydides was clearly portraying this as the kind of hubris that squandered Athens' primacy and paved the way for a devastating peer war that it ultimately lost.

JESUS CHRIST!

I'm still shit at Thai, but I just wrote three shitty paragraphs in a language and script I had absolutely no knowledge of seven months ago, and that's pretty neat

In memory of: Sally Yousef Salah Krera / سالي يوسف صلاح كريره Age: 8 We will not forget you.

And over $3 billion more in cuts to child care and social service funds for these five states, which are home to some of the biggest programs in the country. This utterly illegal move would deny resources to literally millions of low-income families.

Just found out Roger Waters wrote Pink Floyd's song Time when he was 30 and daaamn

Policy by ChatGPT strikes again

Somalia data now reflects strikes over the holiday. The campaign has passed the 2010 peak in Pakistan by our data. Note multiple releases had unclear plural strikes so total may be higher. Our data includes 2 alleged unconfirmed strikes, 1 declared ground op. www.newamerica.org/future-secur...

This is a college freshman's conception of imperial power. Even taken on its own merits of selfishly running an empire, it's buff.

How it feels coming back to Yemen news after recovering from a week of jetlag

We have perfectly fine structured programs that people designed and whose inner workings are knowable but instead we're gonna pour a lot of money into a kind of really complicated random number generator

This is the ideal agitprop. You may not like it, but this is what the median American voter's mind looks like

Jesus. KSA is not messing around. Way more into this than I thought it'd be after neglecting Yemen for years I'm not sure replacing the STC with a bunch of NSF guys is gonna turn out well though

-Neighbor to the north with ~1/10 the population whose nationalism is in large part predicated on not being you -Aesthetically more progressive, but basically the same socioeconomically -Speaks the same language, but kinda different, with more French Laos really is Thailand's Canada huh

These fuckers were on top of the world and their grandfathers had managed to get much of that world to buy in to their being on top and they're now tearing apart the best deal America is ever going to get to make their dicks semi-hard

If the DEA had killed 80 innocent Americans in the course of apprehending one drug dealer, there would be riots. But we are so ghoulishly indifferent to the lives and humanity of people abroad that it's barely even part of the conversation.

A.Q. Khan: Francis Xavier of the Nuclear Gospel

Doing a Master's Thesis on the history of social service provision in Jordan was like looking into a bizarro mirror because the 70s were the golden age decade while the late 80s and 90s are remembered as having sucked massively

Tbf, the 1973 price shock fucked up basically *errybody*

The ghost of A.Q. Khan could do the funniest thing

"The issues" are not immutable. Americans do not come out of the womb arguing about trans girls in Division III volleyball. The issues are what you make them. The issues are what you're loudest about. Create the conversation around these murderers' war crimes, don't equivocate, and don't let up.

Pleased to speak to the BBC this evening about the damaging and destabilizing nature of the illegal US invasion of Venezuela AND the illegal US threats of the use of force—including against a NATO ally.

Do not pee on the egg it will call the cops on you Istg

"Fragmentary records indicate the emergence of a new fasting period known as 'Dry January' among the upper classes of the late imperial period. Although it has not been conclusively linked to a religious movement, it gives Protestant vibes."

Here's the link to the story

Amazon UK currently has this at £24 for pre-order, which isn't bad... www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=carruthe...

Everyone knows a Venezuela sour goes well with chicken piccata

I think it's really hard to understate how much the original Super Smash Bros. blew every 7-year old's mind Nowadays I gotta pick Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri Bonus take is The Legend of Dragoon (released in Japan in 1999, North America in 2000) could take both

Adding to my too-long and very disorganized to-read list, but given I want to jump back into reading ethnographies early in the new year this might get read sooner rather than later!

I extremely hate the policies and personality of Donald Trump to an insane degree but I’d be offended if China sent in team to kill a bunch of our civilians and military personnel and kidnap our leader and his wife and then declare that they now “ran” the United States, this isn’t hard

Why are people referring to it as Venezuela's interim government they took one guy literally the entire power apparatus seems still in play and independent

Colombian President Gustavo Petro just went after Trump:⁠ ⁠ “A clan of pedophiles wants to destroy our democracy. To keep (the Epstein) list from coming out, they send warships to kill fishermen and threaten our neighbor with invasion for their oil.”⁠

Were you on Bluesky 1.0? Do you have any idea what went on back there? It was chaos. Yeah, we weren't on X, but we didn't have time to be thankful. A 1,000 people in an iron box. No video, no content. After a month, we ate the weak. You know what I hate about myself? I know what Alf hog looks like.

WH sources say Venezuela's opposition leader committed the "ultimate sin": She accepted the Nobel Peace prize. “If she had turned it down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,’ she’d be the president of Venezuela today,” one said. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

American imperialism collapsing because the ruling oligarch wants to keep all the hollowed out participation trophies for himself is so goddamn funny.

TFW the elected leaders of the entire Western Hemisphere have to start rotating safe houses because Trump has decided rendition is the way to get whatever he wants