Just another day in the transcription mines

The Jewish Israeli woman who loved and was loved by Palestine’s most famous poet died this week. Their romance couldn’t survive politics, but the poetry it inspired is loved by millions. My article for @newlinesmag.bsky.social: newlinesmag.com/running-note...

Apparently Zohran Mamdani convinced the president to free Elmina Aghayeva. www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2026/02...

"Sectarian" is a new Labour dogwhistle for "Muslim voters." Reform is just calling them "Islamists," which is wrong in a different way, but at least they're being honest about it.

Quick which anglophone neoliberal party is he talking about

Labour doing their absolute best to make the Greens look even more cool: "the Greens are not the harmless environmentalists they pretend to be and their position on legalising all drugs"

Student newspapers are genuinely one of the last bastions of real journalism

Chinese Woodblock Print Advent Calendar 2024 - 10 December - Landscape Illustrations and Commentary, from the Kaibao Canon 開寶藏, 1108 - one survivor from the first printed Buddhist canon in China 🀄📚 #AdventCalendar2024 #WoodblockAdvent @thianun.bsky.social

Sometimes you catch a block from a theoretical ecologist but it's worth it

Tesco could pay every worker an extra £10,000 and still make a profit. British Gas could pay every worker an extra £35,000 and still make a profit. Shell could pay every worker an extra £300,000 and still make a profit. It is the billionaires who are ripping you off.

The coordinated sparklers from every floor of a destroyed apartment building were pretty cool.

I think Netanyahu’s war was about the expansion of the Israeli project of colonialism and also his own desire to deflect from corruption charges but sure I guess it could have been a long game to screw over his supporters in the US Democratic Party who have helped with that project for decades

Alysa Liu: انا احب الجهاد

“Everywhere here has heritage. It’s just an excuse to expand settlements and take Palestinian land,” says a human rights advocate.

This is an excerpt from the 10th-century Judaeo-Arabic translation of the Pentateuch by Rabbi Saadia Gaon. "Famine was upon the land, the first since Abraham's covenant, and Isaac went to Abimelek, King of Palestinians (פלסטיין), at Haluza." (Genesis 26:1) Stop repeating lies.

My second favorite thing about this story is learning that the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem is named Pierbattista Pizzaballa

Sorry what are we even doing here? novaramedia.com/2025/03/12/t...

My unpopular hot take is academics should do this at conferences

Top-level findings based on field survey of accessible populations; as of Jan 5 2025, Gaza had experienced an estimated: ~75,000 violent deaths (3.4% of 2023 pop.) ~8,500 non-violent excess deaths (disease, malnutrition, etc.) This was *before* the 2025 famine. And probably still an undercount.

Starting in about 90 minutes - you can still register if you want to listen in!

Ahh and the true "Gaza redevelopment" plan reveals itself

"Lavender assessed virtually the entire population of the Gaza Strip...assigning automated “risk scores”. Merely being in a WhatsApp group, maintaining frequent contact with someone already marked, or displaying digital patterns considered 'suspicious' was enough to be placed on execution lists."

Any attack now on Iran is stupid and racist. Also these other things.

Cool so the University of Cambridge is now employing a Shadow Minister of an ***allegedly*** fascist party. Not surprising honestly, after years of refusing to negotiate with staff unions, divest from arms manufacturers, or let members of the public walk on the grass.

The concentration camps will not only be for immigrants, documented or otherwise. They already aren't. They won't only be for brown and Black people. The targets will keep expanding. It will not end. The only way it will is if we stop it. Both in and out of the system. There is no other way.

This Thursday at 5pm CET, my friend and colleague, Dr. Shahrzad Irannejad, is giving a lecture titled "Diagrams of the Brain in the Medieval Islamicate Tradition" at the Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in Pisa. Free virtual registration here: csmbr.fondazionecomel.org/events/onlin...

those camps were built under obama and kept open under biden. ICE budgets increased every year under obama and biden. no one from the first trump term was prosecuted and biden told trump "welcome home" on inauguration day neo-liberalism doesn't fight fascism it enables it.

"The single deadliest conflict for journalists in all known conflicts in the history of the world." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

Remember whenever you see some news article cite an "official" Gaza death count, it only includes victims of violence. Deaths from infectious diseases, exposure, malnutrition, now these rare cancers - they're not included.

AI is the sputtering, belching engine of modern fascism. Do not use it, do not accept it.

Happy James got Cooked Day! And Valentines Day!

Funny that www.councilestatemedia.uk/p/high-court...

"Looking the other way" sure is a weird way to say "unconditionally arming and covering up"

Artists/writers/photographers/actors/teachers/historians: generative AI is stealing our work and undermining our entire fields, destroying our careers, livelihoods, and also the planet Some math nerd: but have you considered that it makes a niche data processing task faster

ID not showing but fits the profile. Just landing.

"Many organizers ... have drawn a comparison to Palestine, where the ceasefire with Israel did not mean an end to the bloodshed or a solution to the problem of Palestinian dispossession. They need a long-term investment in solidarity, connecting other social movements with [the] fight for a future."

"An FBI spokesperson initially said no restraints or rubber bullets were used on children but later amended that statement" (without the weird apple news link: www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...)

Same stories, different fonts.

This is straightforwardly antisemitic and anybody trying to argue that it isn't is either deliberately wasting your time, trying to normalise antisemitism and/or too pig ignorant to bother engaging with other than to tell them to shut the fuck up tbh.

It doesn't matter how many states you think there should be in the world. If you insist that any of them *must have* a majority of a certain race or religion, you're on the wrong side.

Today is the launch of the travelling exhibition, Picturing Scholasticide @unileiden.bsky.social. It raises awareness of Israel's destruction of Palestinian academic & intellectual life, & what can be done to support Palestinian scholars & institutions. www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/20...

These bombs don't just kill, they are literally *designed* to destroy all traces of a victim's body. If you're lucky, you might end up as a blood spatter or a scalp fagment. No way to mourn, no way to count the dead. They dropped them on schools and refugee camps.

At least these cops weren't wearing masks www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz2L...

ICE you say ? scalawagmagazine.org/2025/08/ice-...

Just as a historical thought experiment, at what point would you have considered it morally defensible for subjects of the Third Reich to attempt to physically dismantle Nazi concentration camps? 1933? 1939? 1944?