I keep thinking about the Iranian people trying to live normal lives in the movie It Was Just an Accident, opposed to the regime but doing the best they can. And I think about Anthony Bourdain's episode of No Reservations in Tehran, where he met and ate with so many smart, lovely Iranians.

The only country that cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons is the only country that has used them before, apparently, shocking no one, the country that elected a fascist for a second time to destroy the world.

"But no Republicans will support impeachment" then they should be dead to you, no more discussion with them on any topic, ever, move on as if they are the American Nazi Party. I don't know what to tell you, Democrats, try being an opposition party?

War crime tribunals aren’t enough we gotta put him in a Harlan Ellison short story.

In 1953 Iran had a functioning democracy. A free press. Seven political parties. Women in universities. Women granted voting rights in municipal councils in 1952. A secular prime minister named Mosaddegh who believed Iran's oil belonged to Iran. The US and Britain decided he had to go.

it's really nice that we got one last photo

Armenian & Georgian are in the family of “scripts ultimately derived from Greek but radically transformed & expanded by an idiosyncratic monk” along w/ Glagolitic and Caucasian Albanian (my favorite of the bunch).

let's be clear about what's happening: donald trump and benjamin netanyahu, whose countries have been committing genocide in gaza since 2023, unilaterally started a war with iran, and are now threatening genocide there.

i've thinking about this for several days straight

Increasingly sympathetic to the view that the "war crimes" lens is insufficient, that creating the legalistic distinction acts to legitimise a broad swathe of "legal" excessive violence AND is not at all constraining to immoral actors who don't care about committing crimes.

Trump today vs Hitler’s infamous Reichstag speech in 1939

Love to see the head of a major teacher's union coming out in favor of the most anti-labor, anti-educational technology to appear this century

Horrific. Both the dehumanization of the Other and the dehumanization of their own selves are horrifying.

Donald Trump just posted a video of Somali people enjoying the Mall of America to the soundtrack of “Mad World” because he is a bigoted POS

The correct response when someone right in front of you tells you another country’s citizens are animals and they’re going to commit war crimes against them is to break their neck.

Canadians are boycotting American goods and buying Canadian. Like this potato.

A nuclear armed United States is now an existential threat to the rest of the world

Werner Herzog's "Lessons of Darkness"(1995) is free on Tubi. tubitv.com/movies/26890...

Sitting down to watch the greatest Easter movie of all time. Will you be watching too, @seanferrick.bsky.social @trekranks.com @gaghyogi49.bsky.social?

Imagine the swift calls for impeachment if any other president in our history spoke thus. The cacophonous outrage would be deafening. The slack he's cut - by media and far too many citizens - is a distinctly American obscenity in 2026.

In Vulcan, it’s known as >steh-leh-rau’rak snagel< seven-ten-third contact “73rd Contact” since they’d been sneaking around Earth for centuries.

It’s pretty interesting to compare Easter messages from political leaders and then consider which ones the media treats as being out of the mainstream or dangerous

When we talk about what the NYT is up to now, it’s actually helpful to be attentive to the fact that they have *always* done shit like this

Actually we should just give citizenship to every undocumented person in the United States who wants it. Walking over an imaginary line isn't some great moral atrocity. Making people live in the shadows as a permanent underclass absolutely IS.

Massive attacks tonight on central Isfahan, a sacred and stunning city in Iran of 2.3 million people. The city is on fire. The deaths and damage will be catastrophic. It would be like someone blowing up the Vatican, for comparison. May those responsible burn in hell. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isfahan

The fuck do you mean withdrawal and escalation are equally bad? One would mean we stop killing people, the other would mean we kill countless more.

“The Klan monument is run by slave labor” is a little too on the fucking nose

Israel’s new death penalty law, which exclusively targets Palestinians, did not come out of nowhere. It's passed down from scaffold the British built under military courts established by British Mandate in 1937, after 1936 uprising. The rope, as it always has been in Palestine, is for Arabs only.

The "anti-war president" now says the only thing the federal government should do is war. Definitely not child care. Or medicaid/medicare. Or science. freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2... www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gpx...

voters elected decadent money man to make them rich, what they've gotten is warmongering fanatic who wants to cut their health care to pay for more bombs

The obscenity of a budget that cuts the forest service to fund the re-opening of Alcatraz as a prison.

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (Francis Bacon, 1944) www.francis-bacon.com/artworks/pai...

The world looks on and shrugs as over half a million people are expelled from their homes - again - in clear disregard and violation of every relevant norm. Larger in scale than what Russia did in Mariupol (which the whole Western world condemned).

Somebody! Help!

At the beginning of the war all Ghalibaf’s posts were principled arguments ornamented with verses from the Quran or from the Shahnameh; now it’s all LLMslop and everyone’s going crazy for it. Whatever happens in the field, we’ve already failed to be the kind of enemy one can quote poetry to.

What’s wild is people will get snitty if you point out there hasn’t been nearly enough pushback on this.

The horse op-ed is an instant classic. I can't tell you how much joy this piece gives me. It should be taught in every introductory writing class in no small part because the horse arguments are so compelling. "I have noticed that human children get to eat cake. But I am bigger than the children."

In Memoriam Wolfgang Schenkel (1936–2026). #Egyptology aaew.bbaw.de/projekt/nach...

I just saw Happy Feet for the first time and if you asked me three hours ago what genre the movie is I never ever ever would have correctly guessed “cosmic horror”

New pics from the bombed Beylaqan Bridge showing the ordinary people who were celebrating the Iranian national picnic day (13 Bedar) in its vicinity.

Good Friday viewing

Amidst everything else, the Trump regime has quietly killed off the U.S. Forest Service 🌲 “One hundred and ninety-three million acres of your national forests… just handed, on a silver platter, to the people who’ve spent their entire careers trying to destroy it.” www.hatchmag.com/articles/tru...

another issue with this headline is that it acts like the world is divided in half, rich and poor. But this is not in fact true. The vast majority of people are poor. Like, an incomparably vast majority. A majority which is almost impossible for us to comprehend.

For Good Friday, I give my strongest possible recommendation to The Last Temptation of Christ. It's one of the only portrayals of Jesus Christ on film that conveys a true humanity, and the struggles and temptations that come with it. A beautiful and compassionate film with incredible performances.

If the wealthy can get you thinking about who deserves basic needs and who doesn't, they win. They don't care if you think wealthy people are the ones who don't deserve; establishing that it must be earned is the key. With that done, they can just keep expanding the definition of "undeserving."

there are two absolutely canonical Good Friday posts

This reminded me that I wrote something about kissoori/khichuri/khichdi/khicṛī a few years ago

This quote from Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell has been in my head the last few days

Ilhan Omar is actually one of the best elected officials in America - 1+ open public Town Hall every month, takes all of the questions, even weird ones, gives real answers. Imagine what would happen if Donald Trump, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries - insert politician here, really - tried to do that.

Reminds me of this from Hamilton Nolan