The Brandon Beane defensive teambuilding manual:

Negotiations take time. More than a weekend. You’d almost think they wanted them to fail.

If I understand this correctly, Donald Trump has announced that the United States will be blockading the Strait of Hormuz.

Still essential one day and one perilously fragile “ceasefire” later

The Pakistani PM, who was working closely with the U.S. behind the scenes, explicitly wrote that the ceasefire applied to Lebanon and all fronts.

1/ Hours after Iran and the U.S. reached a ceasefire deal, Israel launched one of its most devastating attacks on Lebanon to date. Over a hundred strikes in ten minutes - carnage in Beirut, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people are sheltering. www.cbc.ca/news/world/i...

Tomorrow is the pub day for Buffalo Free Rapid Transit which begins with a poem someone read and loved so hard it led them to buy my previous book, which made them mad b/c it was too politics so what I'm saying is why stand on ceremony? Buy now, money bags! www.blackocean.org/catalog1/buf...

I am genuinely baffled at the historical illiteracy on display here

I will be presenting a completed paper at ASECS in a few days. Many people are saying this, in fact.

I wonder if anyone has written about this recently…

“They said something about never again and then they made close to one million human beings homeless in less than three weeks and they killed or maimed 40,000 of your men and your women and your children”

This is a well trued tactic to prepare for the next stage, to say Iranians did not heed our word and failed to remove the government, so they must be happy with the IRI and are guilty by association and so, killing them and pummeling their lives is allowed.

BREAKING: The US has bombed Tehran’s main refinery and burning oil is now flooding down the streets into the city’s sewers. This is a vision from hell, unleashed by the US tonight. (🎥 Vahid Online)

March 8, 2026 - Tehran at sunrise today. But the sun is hidden behind a sky filled with smoke. After a night of intensive strikes on oil facilities, thick black clouds now hang over the city, turning morning into something that feels like night.

exceptionally chilling to watch (your) people get poisoned at such scale by the resource that empire has bled them to extract for more than a century

Oh my god: this is *daytime* in Tehran.

People in Tehran are breathing toxic air. Villagers have lost their potable water supply. A school full of girls are dead and buried. All while the Secretary of Defense continually boasts of eliminating restrictive rules of engagement. Hard to ignore the connection.

Your tax dollars at work in Iran. Israeli and US military attacked oil facilites in Tehran. Per CNN's Frederik Pleitgen this AM "It is raining oil in Tehran this morning after major airstrikes on oil facilities."

In this article, Salar Mohandesi argues that for leftists in North America and Europe, the most consequential response to Iran’s crisis is not choosing between “campist” and “anti-campist” abstractions, but organizing concretely against US- and Israeli-led imperial intervention and war.

A harrowing image from tonight’s bombing of Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport. This devastating and inhuman assault seeks to violate a nation’s sovereignty, shatter its infrastructure, and pummel its dignity. #Iran

The point of all this is to say that the situation in Iran, as far as “public opinion” goes, does not map easily onto the cultural and social categories immediately available to people in the United States, Iranian or otherwise.

Zia‑Ebrahimi’s “dislocative nationalism” helps us make sense of the diaspora/homeland divide. But what about difference within Iran? This is also complex: Iran is not homogenous. There are ethnic and religious minorities. There are profound regional divides. There are class stratifications.

What is conceptually or culturally “available” to an Iranian-American, *especially* for those who came to the U.S. *because* of the revolution, is simply not fungible with the lived political/spiritual/cultural realities of most Iranians currently living in Iran.

This does not change the fact that the Iranian regime, since 1979, has committed heinous crimes against its own population, as I discuss in this article. What is often forgotten is that the previous regime, under the Shah, tortured and disappeared both leftist and Islamist activists and students.

When contemporary monarchist or secular‑nationalist diaspora currents idealize the Pahlavi era, affirm Aryan exceptionalism, or depict Islam as an external stain on an otherwise Western‑adjacent nation, they are reactivating this dislocative repertoire refracted through exile & white racial orders.

The Pahlavi state then institutionalized this ideology through schooling + official historiography, making a particular pre‑Islamic nostalgia and racial imaginary central to hegemonic national identity.

He labels this “dislocative nationalism” because it symbolically lifts Iran out of its regional and Islamic embeddedness and ties it instead to an imagined Aryan, quasi‑European civilizational space.

Reza Zia‑Ebrahimi’s key claim is that certain Qajar‑era intellectuals (Akhundzadeh, Kermani) articulated a modern, racialized nationalism that casts pre‑Islamic Iran as a golden age, redefines Islam as an alien imposition, & figures Arabs as permanent others.

U.S. state structures then amplify those fractions whose narratives dovetail with broader projects of containment/sanctions/regime change, turning certain exile imaginaries into durable lobbying and media forces that can constrain policy at home and politics in the country of origin.

Class selection shapes what “home” they remember + which forms of state power appear normal or desirable. This (very often) filters down into the children of Iranian immigrants.

In both cases, the most politically visible diasporic actors are disproportionately drawn from strata that lost property, status, or political position in a revolutionary rupture and that entered the United States through relatively privileged migration channels.

This shit has to be outlawed. There's just no way to justify its existence. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Tehran today, under Israeli bombardment. According to Iranian monarchists in exile, only regime supporters are killed in these indiscriminate bombings...

The brutal, despicable, and grim side of war. The burial of the 150 elementary school girls killed in American-Israeli strikes on #Iran was today.

“The certainties of the United States’ hegemonic stewardship of the ‘international rules-based order’ have been deformed beyond recognition by the Gaza genocide . . . there is a politics of gangster imperialism that has neither international nor domestic consent.”

No war on Iran! The US & Israel are pursuing a campaign intended to nullify Iran’s vertical sovereignty and de-develop its economy & infrastructure; they do not care about anything else. The IR is a sclerotic & repressive state; but Iranians alone must choose their form of govt. Bombs free no one.

Israel’s military launched its first ground incursions in months into parts of southern Lebanon. Since agreeing to a cease-fire in November, Israel has been conducting near-daily strikes against what it says are Hezbollah targets. Hezbollah has not responded militarily since the truce.

"Israeli soldiers in Gaza told Haaretz that the army has deliberately fired at Palestinians near aid distribution sites..." www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

if i were a plant i think i’d like to have my leaves spritzed on hot days

Membership in knowledge communities is also restricted according to a racial/civilizational logic: if you’re part of that great exclusion zone known as the global south, your murder can always be retroactively justified as strategically necessary

This would've been a daily stormer thread a decade ago. Neo-nazi conspiracy theories are mainstream now.

ngl I think the idea that feelings don't need to be justified in order to be respected is one of the sicknesses of modern culture

Bill Clinton please endorse my enemies

Every day, starving Palestinians in Gaza have no choice but to try to get food for their families, knowing full well it’s a trap and they’re likely to be murdered. This bait-and-switch starvation/extermination move will be studied for decades, after it can’t matter. Unforgivable.

Kindly close the New York Times browser window, close your eyes, and ask yourself if you really are for U.S. bombs shredding human beings for the crime of living in a state that doesn't want to submit to U.S. hegemony.

CENTCOM cooked up a military operation independent of the president?

once sleeper cells infiltrate the brain they are virtually impossible to remove