Arbella Bet-Shlimon

I think this deserves at least as much sustained attention from US media as Claudine Gay's dissertation

Though it is day, the sun cannot be seen in Tehran today because of all the smoke following the US and Israel bombing Tehran's oil refineries. People on the ground describe it as armageddon. History will not forgive Reza Pahlavi, Masih Alinejad, Nazanin Boniadi, and all other "leaders" who tricked Iranians into thinking this war would set them free.

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

“you need to go to school to learn how to use AI critically” is the academic version of “ICE agents just need better training”

Iran's parliament speaker said Saturday that the attack on a freshwater desalination plant on Qeshm Island was carried out with support from one of the airbases in a southern neighboring country. He did not name the country. "The crime will receive a proportionate response," he said.

The US doesn’t seem to understand how many targets there are for Iran in the Gulf.

Attacking the desalination plant in Iran is monstrous in itself as so many people depend on them, but it also opens up the way for Iran to target the Gulf’s desalination plants, which would also be monstrous

Floor of the US House Chyron: on motion to suspend the rules and agree H Res 1099 Republican: Yea, 215, Nay 0, Pres 0, NV 3 Democratic: Yea, 157. Nay 53, Pres 2, NV 2 Totals: Yea, 372, Nay 53, Pres 2, NV 5

157 Democratic members of the House just voted yea for a resolution that confirms they agree with the Trump administration's reasoning for starting with a war with Iran.

It passes 372-53-2

A screenshot of the Polymarket website showing a prediction market titled "Nuclear weapon detonation by...?" under the Geopolitics and Ukraine categories. The market displays three betting options with their current probabilities and "Buy Yes" or "Buy No" prices: "March 31" at 5%, "June 30" at 12%, and "Before 2027" at 22%. The total trading volume shown is over $843,000.

Polymarket has created a betting market on the use of nuclear weapons. Everyone involved in this should be put in prison for life.

Heartbreaking.
Infuriating.
Intolerable.

Yanar Mohammed runs a secret network of safe houses for women fleeing violence in Iraq

www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/w...

Yanar Mohammed is one of Iraq’s most prominent women’s rights activists and established the country’s first shelters for survivors of domestic violence and trafficking. She was assassinated outside her Baghdad home when two gunmen on motorcycles opened fire in the morning.

I don't care if Congress authorizes War on Iran. NO WAR ON IRAN. I want people to fucking reclaim their morality.

ai is a rhetorical technology.

when it produces a list of permissible targets, its value is not producing targets but producing permission

At least 148 dead after reported strike on school, Iran says Iran has blamed the US and Israel for the strike; the US is looking into reports of the incident, while the IDF says it is

The mass murder of civilians in Gaza, the brazen attacks on hospitals and schools, without any accountability has created a new kind of warfare that should terrify and enrage all of us.

Every child lost is someone’s whole world. Every life lost matters www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

“direct your anger at trump not the democrats” buddy you are severely underestimating the amount of anger i have available to me

Anyone who has been alive on this earth for more than 20 minutes has no excuse for not knowing that this is nothing but mass murder built on lies and is criminally arrogant, stupid, and cruel and will end badly for many, many thousands of people.

It is clear now that the Omani foreign minister's sudden media blitz last night was an attempt to shame the United States by putting into the public record how readily Iran was prepared to reach a deal.

> @covie93.bsky.social

The floor plan for the planned ICE concentration camp in Social Circle, Georgia:

I get that the usual “I hope this email finds you well” is awkward right now but increasingly all my colleagues writing with the most mundane requests are like “I hope you are holding on as we turn and turn in the widening gyre;”

Last month, University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin approved a proposal to establish a College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence funded by private corporations and philanthropy. Mnookin said the move was a response to the inevitable creep of artificial intelligence into all disciplines of academia. Rather than reject AI, she envisioned a university that capitalized on this change by making artificial intelligence a "hub" connecting the humanities to computer science.

On the first day of my economics elective this spring, my professor said we would be expected to use NotebookLM to pass his class. He had lengthened the coding assignments so that they would be doable only with the help of AI. The reading assignments were longer, too: ten 40-page papers per week, which he asked us to feed into AI for a summary rather than read ourselves. When it came to lectures, he told us to simply upload the slides to AI and ask it to teach us whatever he failed to explain properly in class.

BLEAK. Bleak. I’d been paying attention to Columbia selling out its governance to the Trump admin, not so much its stance on AI.
www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2026...

💔 yes - he’d attended departmental events and traveled to give a talk as recently as December so a lot of us didn’t know

The New York Review of Books: Massacre Under the Starry Flag Vicente L. Rafael The history of a single photograph reveals how an atrocity in the Philippines was forgotten by its American perpetrators. October 23, 2025 issue

We’ve lost Vince Rafael today. One of his last published works was this essay about the celebration and subsequent erasure of an atrocity in the U.S. colonization of the Philippines www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Tehran on edge as residents fear US attack Many in Iran’s capital think it is only a matter of time until war returns to their lives

“I’ll stay in Tehran,” said Homayoun, a retired civil servant...He said he was too exhausted to flee the city. “I’ll be killed either by the Islamic republic or by the US, but I won’t go anywhere. In this country, it seems you cannot even die a normal death.”

We can't even fast Ramadan in peace.

I'd like at add a few things to this. (1) humanists have not been able to convince any political party that curiosity-driven humanities research is a public good that should be funded using tax dollars. Republicans don't believe this, but neither do Democrats.

Handwritten cardboard sign resting on a children’s stroller at a park where families are hanging around and kids are playing on a sunny day. The sign says “GO HAWKS F*** ICE FREE PALESTINE”

#seattle

“But what deeply troubles me now is that for all the steps we've taken toward integration, I've come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house." 

Dr. King said this famous quote on March 27th, 1968, mere days before his murder. But the context around the quote is interesting...

This poll shows that 74% of Democrats support abolishing ICE, with 53% *strongly* supporting getting rid of the agency.

Any elected Democrat who wants ICE to exist is outside the mainstream of their party and the people they purport to represent.

The rise of AI denialism Computer scientist Louis Rosenberg argues that dismissing AI as a “bubble” or mere “slop” ignores the tectonic technological shift now unfolding.

Not sure why this dross, dated Dec 1, seems to be circulating now (and why it didn't cross my feed a month ago), but wow what a terrible essay.

A few comments, in a short 🧵>>

bigthink.com/the-present/...

Three million people live in Caracas, five million in the metro area. It's one of the densest cities in South America. Remember this in the morning when they try to spin this as anything other than a cold-blooded attack on a major civilian center.

They would need to have urgent surgical operations to install spines, balls, and moral compasses in them first.

Mona Damluji’s PIPELINE CINEMA, about the intersections of oil and film (or, as she puts it, the cultural infrastructure of extraction) in Iran and Iraq, is now out as an open access book and you must read it 🛢️📽️📚: luminosoa.org/books/m/10.1...