Jérôme Melançon

Maybe it’s because I’m a colonial historian but so many of these white nation states seem to behave exactly like they did in the 19th century: ‘your leaders aren’t right for you,’ ‘we’re only killing you/colonizing you/installing puppet leaders for your own good’

A thread to read

I was born in an Iranian prison. My parents were held in their jails. My uncles lie in their mass graves. Nothing you can tell me about the crimes of the Iranian regime that I haven't lived in blood and bone. That doesn't mean I want my people bombed, maimed, killed, their homes in ruins. If your vision of liberation comes only through the destruction of innocent lives, then it's not freedom you're after. Sahar Delijani, Iranian author

I am pro Iranian people. I stand with them against their own government’s repression AND against the imperial violence in the form of bombs dropped from the sky from Israel & the US who have already killed hundreds.

I support neither imperialism or dictatorship.

Sahar Delijani said it best:

We need our eyes on Iran of course

But just like we need to blink

I'm happy there is Polcasan

Canada condemns Iran's retaliatory attacks Justin Li Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand said in a statement that Canada "strongly condemns the attacks of the Iranian regime against our partners in the Middle East." Anand further urged Canadians in Iran to shelter in place and said Ottawa will "provide all possible support to Canadians throughout the region." Canada currently has no diplomatic relations with Iran, nor does it have an embassy there.

The United States and Israel have the right to bomb and murder whoever they please.

The countries they attack have no right to fight back.

This is the exact double standard on international law Mark Carney was praised for calling out at Davos, but which he continues to participate in.

They're trying to prop up a monarchy, aren't they?

Oh! I love this. I'm starting with my next posting with research assistants!

I see the 5h45 gap between this and the next post and thank you for your service on short sleep!

The updated total of children killed is 57.

Anyone thinking that US-Israel massacres of Iranian people will "liberate" anything but markets & resources must contend with the reality that they are cheerleaders for the world's villains. No war with Iran.

I despise this government that gives itself the right to rule me, and to cheer at terror from the sidelines.

What kind of society can we hope to build keeping taxes artificially low, landlords artificially rich, and real human beings dying from neglect?

Asking the leaders of my city, my province, and my country. Why no housing?

What are we doing?

Are AI-generated summaries suitable for studying and research? Despite didactic, ethical, and environmental concerns, the use of GenAI is on the rise in academia. For most applications, the jury is still out on whether and how they will benefit education and rese...

Tired of AI hype posts? You might like my sober assessment of whether AI-generated summaries are suitable for studying and research. Spoiler alert, they are not.

The text is primarily aimed at students and researchers, but has much broader relevance. So share freely!: www.tue.nl/en/our-unive...

Truthout is grateful to open submissions for the sixth annual Keeley Schenwar Memorial Essay Prize. The prize is awarded for essays authored by currently incarcerated and formerly incarcerated writers. bit.ly/KeeleyPrize

Profit motives in education were a mistake and structures whereby educational institutions end up entirely dependent on third-party for-profit vendors for mission critical services and thus begin to view the world in terms of their vendors' rather than their students' needs were likely a worse one.

We call upon you to: • Resist the introduction of AI in our own software systems, from Microsoft to OpenAI to Apple. It is not in our interests to let our processes be corrupted and give away our data to be used to train models that are not only useless to us, but also harmful. • Ban AI use in the classroom for student assignments, in the same way we ban essay mills and other forms of plagiarism. Students must be protected from de-skilling and allowed space and time to perform their assignments themselves.

• Cease normalising the AI hype and the lies which are prevalent in the technology industry's framing of these technologies. The technologies do not have the advertised capacities and their adoption puts students and academics at risk of violating ethical, legal, scholarly, and scientific standards of reliability, sustainability, and safety. • Fortify our academic freedom as university staff to enforce these principles and standards in our classrooms and our research as well as on the computer systems we are obliged to use as part of our work. We as academics have the right to our own spaces. • Sustain critical thinking on AI and promote critical engagement with technology on a firm academic footing. Scholarly discussion must be free from the conflicts of interest caused by industry funding, and reasoned resistance must always be an option.

More people need to make these open letters to find their local allies (feel free to sign ours too ofc)

openletter.earth/open-letter-...

The Suggested for you section, featurinf Flavor Flav and Mayor Zohran Mamdani

None, Bluesky, I did NOT need this feature.

A man with Coprolaliac Tourette’s Syndrome (award-nominated for a film about his disorder) yelling the N-word at Black actors on stage, is an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. A trolley problem for a new era. It’s a Woke 2.0 cosmic test of some kind. Too on the nose to engage with.

FBI once again (!) confirming, in public, that they plan to make being transgender a federal crime - and it's crickets at best from the Democrats and the media.

Usenet assemble!

Here’s an LLM anecdote for all my fellow AI-haters:

Last night I met a lawyer who has started using billable hours to research and rebut the fake laws and cases her clients procure via Chat-GPT & bring into strategy meetings.

She now spends *less* time preparing cases themselves 🙃

Sometimes an argument just cannot be the answer... because the position is indefensible from every perspective.

Advertisement for How to Not Do Eugenics with Speculative Biology through the Ad Astra Institute, with a headshot of the instructor, the beautiful and talented Kristen Koopman. It will be on Saturday, February 21 at 2pm Eastern via Zoom. You can register at www.adastra-sf.com

I'm going to be doing some short classes for the Ad Astra Institute! First up, How to Not Do Eugenics with Speculative Biology! It's a brief primer on the history of race science and eugenics with suggestions on how to avoid fantasy or science fiction racism. adastra-sf.com/courses.htm#...

I mean, we've heard about TXT right?

Rappel amical

In the concentration camp universe, this is what's known as a filtration camp. A government preemptively takes a whole class of people to interrogate and detain extrajudicially in order to inflict duress on them while arbitrarily assessing their (supposed) culpability.

Summer School: Critical AI Literacies for Resisting and Reclaiming Marcela Suarez, Olivia Guest and I co-organise a Summer School Critical AI Literacies for Resisting and Reclaiming, June 22-26, 2026, at Radboud University, in The Netherlands. The Summer School is…

Summer School: Critical AI Literacies for Resisting and Reclaiming irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/02/18/s... cc @olivia.science @marentierra.bsky.social

But we should be concerned that Conservatives are moving over so easily to the Liberal party.

Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.

Of course we're just following the logic of automation here, with machine supervision as an apparently human task. Except that these machines do not have the capacity to do the tasks we have them do.

This is the fear of every one of my colleagues all over the world who believes we need to teach "AI skills" or "AI literacy" to prepare students for the job market.