"What we are witnessing is the renewal of a nakedly imperial project: a politics of permanent siege, existential paranoia, and millenarian last stands." @joelleabirached.bsky.social on apocalyptic politics and the assault on Lebanon

Join us for Artificial Reason: A Conversation on AI, Rationality, and Violence on Tuesday, May 5 at 3pm ET. Contributing editor Lily Hu will talk with Kevin T. Baker, @sophiagoodfriend.bsky.social, & @beenwrekt.bsky.social. To learn more and register, go here: secure.givelively.org/event/boston...

“Anti-imperialism without feminism can easily collapse into support for authoritarianism, but feminism without anti-imperialism becomes cheerleading for empire. The record of Iranian history is very clear. There can be no freedom or democracy under the boot of empire.” —Manijeh Moradian

From me and @adambonica.bsky.social on Golden www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-no...

learning a lot from this over the last hour and a half about Iranian history, its social and worker movements, the multifold impact of sanctions, reactionary propaganda, the role of oil workers in Iranian labour movements, and more www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

“Police learned from—in some cases, literally stole ideas from—organized labor without preserving the fundamental principle of solidarity at the core of the labor movement.” @stschrader1.bsky.social on his new book, BLUE POWER: HOW POLICE ORGANIZED TO PROTECT AND SERVE THEMSELVES:

“Police learned from—in some cases, literally stole ideas from—organized labor without preserving the fundamental principle of solidarity at the core of the labor movement.” @stschrader1.bsky.social on his new book, BLUE POWER: HOW POLICE ORGANIZED TO PROTECT AND SERVE THEMSELVES:

“Anyone who has followed the serpentine trajectory of Hungarian politics since 1989 might be forgiven for throwing their hands up in confusion. For more than two and a half decades, Hungarian political life has been a story of reversals.” Historian Holly Case on the rise of Orbánism, from 2016:

“If any life’s work could be summed up by the mantra ‘We don’t know, but let’s give it a try,’ it was that of Albert O. Hirschman, one of the most prominent and original social scientists of the second half of the 20th century.” He was born this week in 1915. Simon Torracinta on a 2021 biography:

“Anti-imperialism without feminism can easily collapse into support for authoritarianism, but feminism without anti-imperialism becomes cheerleading for empire. The record of Iranian history is very clear. There can be no freedom or democracy under the boot of empire.” —Manijeh Moradian

“We hugely underestimate the impact of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The resulting perception of threat in Iran foreclosed reform and made it much harder for Iranian civil society to fight back and organize because of the militarization of Iranian politics.” @peymanjafari.bsky.social

“The wish that women’s care work be waged seems to have come true, albeit in a funhouse-mirror form: legions of women now work in low-paid roles caring for other peoples’ families, while the vast majority still take care of their own families for free.” www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

“Iran is not a totalitarian state; it never has been. It’s an authoritarian state. Those are very different things, and the most important difference is that in an authoritarian state there is space for people to claw space for themselves, to claw for their own rights.” @naghmehs.bsky.social

“The United States and Israel want to normalize this. They want the world to accept that this is the way it is. They can get away with it. They can do whatever they want. How do we reject this normalization? How do we refuse it? How do we interrupt it?” Manijeh Moradian in our recent roundtable:

“This is also about resurrecting American empire. We Iranians always think it is all about us, but I really think it has to do with the imperial anxieties of the American elite.” @peymanjafari.bsky.social in our recent conversation on the war on Iran:

...btw I link to evidence that the anti-trans backlash was a highly coordinated and well–funded (especially via right-wing orgs) movement in this essay: www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-no...

“This is also about resurrecting American empire. We Iranians always think it is all about us, but I really think it has to do with the imperial anxieties of the American elite.” @peymanjafari.bsky.social in our recent conversation on the war on Iran:

“In terms of immigration policy, this has meant a new interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which most legal thinkers believe grants ‘birthright citizenship’ to anyone born on U.S. soil. Yet starting in the 1990s, some conservatives began to coalesce around a new originalist position…”

“The messaging has not been only to Iran—that we will crush you, we will send you back to the Stone Age. It has been also to Europeans, to the allies: you will be disciplined.“ From our Monday event with @peymanjafari.bsky.social, Ali Kadivar, Manijeh Moradian, and @naghmehs.bsky.social:

"What we are witnessing is the renewal of a nakedly imperial project: a politics of permanent siege, existential paranoia, and millenarian last stands." @joelleabirached.bsky.social on apocalyptic politics and the assault on Lebanon

It would do (some) folks good to REALLY (and honestly) study The Nadir, more because that is where the regime is taking us. Not the 1960s, that' short-sighted, but to 1876. You can't fight the conditions of 1876 with 1963 strategies, they're incongruous. www.bostonreview.net/forum/walter...

Neoliberalism Needs Neofascists "The neofascist assault on democracy is a last-ditch effort on the part of neoliberal capitalism to rescue itself from crisis. Public opinion has to be mobilized decisively against neoliberalism. Only then will this breeding ground for neofascism at last be undone."

Read Theory www.bostonreview.net/articles/emp...

“With AI, we have envisioned—and are now trying to implement—our own obsolescence. There is one last human holdout. Even the singularity’s biggest boosters mostly concede that AI cannot create real works of art”

"Art is an effort to incorporate indeterminacy, irreducible complexity—otherness, what we can’t get a hold of... —into our lives. It is an attempt, in other words, to grow up: to acknwldg that the complexity + uncertainty in the 🌏 is not some foreign force..., something to be feared or defeated..."

A lengthy and fascinating and informative look at MLK complete with replies to the article. www.bostonreview.net/forum/brando...

"Indigenous and occupied peoples, then, are placed in an impossible position. If they resist with violence, they are violently put down. If they do not, states will overlook the lower-intensity but unrelenting violence to which they are subject." - Dirk Moses

MLK was assassinated on this day in 1968. He was 39 years old. On the fiftieth anniversary of his murder, Brandon M. Terry led a forum on King’s misunderstood legacy. Read it here, with responses from @keeanga.bsky.social @elizabethkai.bsky.social and others:

“The hills around Ramallah are becoming more militarized by the day, with settler outposts being erected on high grounds and masked settlers brandishing machine guns roaming the area, ready to attack anyone daring to take a walk.” Raja Shehadeh:

“Few literary figures living in the West are willing to confront war as directly as McCarthy did, and they, like her, are typically rewarded with the condescension of a loud and powerful segment of their peers.” Andrew Holter rereads McCarthy’s Vietnam writing in a new era of wartime illusions:

"Israel’s right wing, led by Itamar Ben-Gvir... unabashedly encourages the use of pogroms against villages spanning from the Jordan Valley to Israel’s 1948 border—acts that constitute the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians." www.bostonreview.net/articles/sta...

“The hills around Ramallah are becoming more militarized by the day, with settler outposts being erected on high grounds and masked settlers brandishing machine guns roaming the area, ready to attack anyone daring to take a walk.” Raja Shehadeh:

Today at 12:30 PM EDT! The Trump Doctrine: Aslı Ü. Bâli and Aziz Rana in conversation with @tparsi.bsky.social What does it means when great powers prioritize economic strangulation over diplomacy. How do such strategies reshape global norms—and who pays the human cost? @quincyinst.bsky.social

Palestinians living in the West Bank cannot feel safe anywhere. Raja Shehadeh reporting from Ramallah on the sharp rise of settler violence and IDF complicity since the start of the war.

Join us for an online event on Monday, April 6, 3pm-4pm Eastern, for a conversation about the war on Iran. Featuring @peymanjafari.bsky.social, Ali Kadivar, Manijeh Moradian, and @naghmehs.bsky.social, moderated by @alexshams.bsky.social. Register here: secure.givelively.org/event/boston...

This article is so important and should serve as a warning to not just migrants, but ppl with mental health issues. www.bostonreview.net/articles/poo...

“West Bank Palestinians are determined to stay. If they face a new catastrophe, it will not be one of exile.” Now online, Raja Shehadeh with a dispatch from Ramallah:

UCLA Gaza protests were the target of an insane physical attack by both SoCal neo-Nazis and purported Kahanists, none of whom were arrested even as the pro-Palestine activists were. Newsom's response was pathetic and close to Trump's after Charlottesville www.bostonreview.net/articles/ucl...

“West Bank Palestinians are determined to stay. If they face a new catastrophe, it will not be one of exile.” Now online, Raja Shehadeh with a dispatch from Ramallah:

This conversation will be great.

vice signaling with the US military is the destruction of any moral code that values human life, done in our name www.bostonreview.net/articles/emp...

Join us for an online event on Monday, April 6, 3pm-4pm Eastern, for a conversation about the war on Iran. Featuring @peymanjafari.bsky.social, Ali Kadivar, Manijeh Moradian, and @naghmehs.bsky.social, moderated by @alexshams.bsky.social. Register here: secure.givelively.org/event/boston...

Absolutely fantastic read. I’m learning something new nearly every sentence.

"If mobility was the means through which Black people could attain their freedom, controlling mobility became paramount for those who sought to deny it." Everyone interested in mobility justice needs to read this.

From me and @adambonica.bsky.social: the fact that so many voters trusted Trump over the Democratic Party on prices really shows the limits of swing voters’ understanding of public policy www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-no...

Learning from the Luddites “A still-underappreciated truism of our technological moment is that there is great solidarity to be found in refusing a technology—AI, mostly—that is used to exploit or replace a worker” www.bostonreview.net/forum/the-ai...

“the far right is less neoliberalism’s antithesis—a horde of enemies coming in from the countryside with torches and pitchforks—than neoliberalism’s children, nurtured from decades of conversations” www.bostonreview.net/articles/fre...

"Efforts to control Black mobility—from early passports to the Fugitive Slave Act—laid much of the groundwork for today’s border regimes..." www.bostonreview.net/articles/hun...

“War as prophecy, devastation as fulfilment, catastrophe as a necessary prelude to the Second Coming; the Third Temple rebuilt, history consumed by apocalyptic fantasy, & humanity somehow redeemed afterward.” www.bostonreview.net/articles/mil...

“I think we must recognize that democratizing tech means offering access to a kill switch—and that AI, in its current formation, may well be deemed too wasteful, too undermining of the creative trades, too polluting of the information ecosystem, and too toxic to stand.” @bcmerchant.bsky.social