Arash Davari

Holding up a copy of ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS by Omar El Akkad

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad is very much worth your time.

Rather than doing space fascism the Imperium should try running a mixed economy social democratic welfare state.

"Actually I think my editor was right. The original word was the 'wrong' word. But I also know my friend was right: the 'wrong' word, in this case, was the only word. As you can see, my assertion of agency outside the raced house turned into a genuflection in its (familiar) more comfortable yard."

What Ulin misses is the book's point about home, its admonishments against 'the writer.' Ulin almost gets this, but ultimately his is the voice of the editor who compelled Morrison to change the last line of Beloved, a decision Morrison regretted in her 1994 speech at the Race Matters conference:

13 years late, I read Toni Morrison's Home, and then this awful review by @davidulin.bsky.social ---so awful it teaches what the book's about: www.latimes.com/entertainmen...

Senghor, Asilah and “Afro-Arab Civilization” - ROAPE Hisham Aidi offers a compelling account of how Morocco became a key site for competing political and cultural discourses in support of African and Arab pan-African solidarity. He shows that a…

American-Moroccan scholar @HishamAidi traces #Morocco’s role in Afro-Arab solidarity—first via the #Fanon-inspired Souffles publication (1966-72), then through the Afro-Arab Forum in Asilah (1980), grounded in Senghor’s vision of civilisational métissage. buff.ly/j3foTp6

Billboard with giant white letters on black background that say Abolish ICE

The message from Baltimore, where Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s detention odyssey began

"History shows that almost all tyrants have been demagogues who gained the favour of the people by their accusation of the notables" (Aristotle's Politics, Book 5)

“Where is Palestine?” by Siavash Saffari for The Korea Times

www.koreatimes.co.kr/opinion/colu...

📣 New Release📣

For our special issue on armed insurgency:

@sohampatel.bsky.social on Eqbal Ahmad and the duty of intellectuals in this era of authoritarianism, genocide and pacifist pathologies.

Agree.Which is why folks should be thinking abt what kinds of civil formations,institutions,&policies could be on offer when people are searching for a way out of this.New, bold,21st c solutions are necessary.Now’s the time to think through frameworks that are not yet possible but could be made so.

[on how the secular world fails to escape the grip of mythopoesis]

"we are not afraid of ghosts [or the gods for that matter] *in spite of the fact* that they do not exist, but precisely *because of the fact* that they do not exist."

--Miran Božovič

Mike Davis puts it succinctly in 1992, “this de facto war against cities has been one of the strategic pillars of modern conservative politics, embodying profound electoral & economic objectives.” He discusses how the American Enterprise Institute sought to cut urban aid & undo the Great Society.

This sentence from Mike Davis’s DEAD CITIES about the LA riots in 1992 reverberates into the present: “And inequality, as we all know, is Southern California’s most famous fire ecology.”

The call to bring the ghosts & hauntings of history to light is turning into a mechanism to control us, facilitated by our participation in the enterprise. What if meaningful human life today is in the beauty of keeping some things hidden? How to do that without turning ignorance into a cult object.

Opinion | AI Can Work for Us A.I. can be designed to dramatically enhance individual empowerment.

So much to say about this horrifying article, a look into the mind of the tech bro. I couldn’t help but think about the cow in Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations. Apparently, to make progress & attain individual autonomy, we must be ruled by our transparent past.

www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/o...

When I was living wage campaigning at UVA in college, they was a crew of right-wing students who would troll our events by chanting “Econ 101” at us (wages should be low cause if supply and demand, etc).

One time we chanted back “take a second class! take a second class!”

this dynamic—basic econ implying one conclusion, a detailed look at empirics complicating it to the point of overturning the previous answer—is pretty much all over our public policy of the last few decades and it is MADDENING for those of us trained in ways of knowing that aren't basic econ

The Walmart Effect New research suggests that the company makes the communities it operates in poorer—even taking into account its famous low prices.

If you made this argument back in the day you were smugly dismissed as an economically illiterate lefty.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Republicans have been making the case against birthright citizenship since at least the 80’s/90’s - it was a big concern of their 1996 convention, which tracked in my 2001 book, Democracy and the Foreigner. There are some firsts here, but this is also a long old story for Republicans.

Trump’s assault on immigrants is coming—here’s what you need to know As Chicago braces for an impending wave of raids, local activists discuss what rights and procedures immigrants in the Windy City and around the country need to know to protect themselves.

As Chicago braces for an impending wave of raids, local activists discuss what rights and procedures immigrants in the Windy City and around the country need to know to protect themselves.

Mississippi lawmaker files bill to create ‘bounty program’ for undocumented immigrants - SuperTalk Mississippi A Republican lawmaker from DeSoto County introduced a bill on Wednesday that would offer a cash reward to registered bounty hunters who turn in undocumented

A proposed bill in Mississippi would create the “Mississippi Illegal Alien Certified Bounty Hunter Program."

People who help arrest undocumented migrants would be given $1,000.

And the crime of "trespass by an illegal alien" would be punishable by life in prison.

www.supertalk.fm/mississippi-...

It amuses me in a very dark & bitter way that this alarm is coming from the NYT who have aided and abetted the cowing of academe in every way they possibly could.

U.S. Security Contractors Going to Gaza to Oversee Truce, Officials Say The contractors have been enlisted to do weapons checks on vehicles carrying displaced Palestinians back to their homes in the north under the terms of the new cease-fire.

I once thought everyone saw war in Iraq as a failure. @naomiaklein.bsky.social's book showed me that it was a success in the eyes of its architects--a sector that profits from creating chaos. Now US security firms will profit from the genocide the US funded in Gaza.

www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/w...

Left Organizing Is in Crisis. Philanthropy Is a Major Reason Why. Progressive philanthropy lacks good strategy, so too many of our organizations are hollow—and that left us unable to prevent a second Trump term.

"We must grapple with the reality that the current models we have for philanthropy are not up to the task of incubating, developing and supporting strategy on the left."

on the list of serious election post-mortems, highly worth your time to read

www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Its not the laziness that i take issue with, its the way that it encourages -in higher ed- the continued deskilling of the teaching/research profession, in line with managerial vision, at the same time that it encourages students’ worst tendencies. There is an overlap there.

Israeli forces have destroyed 80% of buildings north of the Gaza Strip, leaving 300,000 Palestinians homeless, says Gaza’s Ministry of Public Works.

🔴 Follow our LIVE coverage: https://aje.io/pr0pg9

This matters. Not because I think Trump is capable of mercy or empathy towards these vulnerable groups. But because it is a public act of defiance.

Contrast that with all these other powerful people in this country signaling nothing but appeasement and obedience.