William Monk

So, so far we have:

1. Everyone except Israel agreeing there was no Iranian bomb, & that negotiations to stop enrichment were progressing;

2. Israel launching an attack on 13 June;

3. US DoD now saying THEY had been planning an attack for "weeks/months";

4. Everyone pretending there was a bomb.

If your business model doesn’t work without breaking the law, then you’re not in business.

You’re in organized crime.

I was reading Tim Winton's Eyrie at the time. A fine book, prima facie nothing to do with settler colonialism.

Yet there are passing references to Aboriginal people - begging, dying in custody.
There, the novel runs into the frame which contains all the rest: the dispossession that made Australia.

Can't wait to read it!

And even when settler colonialism is not the focus, the narrative consciously or otherwise often runs into that frame, with references, more or less passing, to the Indigenous people dispossessed by it (down to every reference to Thanksgiving or Indian burial grounds).

A shower thought that once came to me:

All Australian (and New Zealand, Canadian, US...) cinema and literature takes place within a settler-colonial frame.

There’s only one problem with Labour’s immigration plans: they’re completely untethered from reality | Jonathan Portes The government’s new policy will take us back to an uglier, more dangerous place – and it’s not even supported by the data, says professor of public policy Jonathan Portes

"The government's argument sounds plausible. There's just one problem. It doesn't fit the facts. And the government knows it."

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Describing the multicultural society you are supposedly leading with language like “squalid”, “failed experiment”, “island of strangers” is even with the most bend over backwards generous spin, just horrifyingly irresponsible and inflammatory

'Immigration bad'. Self-harming policies for a media spectacle of cruelty, just to flaunt some numbers in a spreadsheet and boast 'net migration down'.

@teamlabouruk.bsky.social is incompetent and worthless.

'Immigration bad'. Destroy universities destroy science, destroy social care, so they can flaunt some numbers in a spreadsheet and boast 'net migration down'.

@teamlabouruk.bsky.social are a totally incompetent, worthless government.

Sooner or later, another Behrouz Boochani will emerge from Rwanda or El Salvador to roar truth to this despicable regime.

The UK will survive US tarrifs. It will not survive the legitimisation of hate.

No to a trade deal with Trump and Vance's USA that is not a credible or reliable ally or friend.

No to a politics of cowardice dictated by net migration figures.

Yes to Europe.

Honestly the best analogy I've heard.

We're playing on Sid, with Most Aggressive AI and Raging barbarians.

I hate that 'immigration bad' is the fundament of all UK politics. Xenophobic, insular, arrogant politics have taken so many opportunities, so many richer lives that might have been lived, from me and so many others. Now Labour want to impoverish us further just so they can say 'net migration down'.

You cannot bomb and murder your way to the acceptance of occupation and apartheid in West Asia, to the acceptance of the subjugation of an entire people.

YouTube video by Fabrizio De André - Topic Canzone del maggio (Liberamente tratta da un canto del maggio francese 1968)

Dedicating Fabrizio de André's beautiful song about May 1968 to Mahmoud Khalil. With a warning to every spineless politician and administrator who let his disappearance happen:

'No matter how much you think you've absorbed yourselves, you'll always be complicit.'
youtu.be/l2D1lSLvo8c?...

The war on Palestinians' freedom and sovereignty is also a war on books, as on history, heritage, memory, and so much else besides.

Still this cheapness placed on Palestinian/Arab/Muslim lives. Still the arrogant assumption in the West that we can go into the Middle East at will and rearrange things to suit our interests, without a thought for Middle Eastern people, lives, let alone sovereignty.

It was always obvious that the right-wing moral panic around universities had nothing to do with "free speech". It was about delegitimising critical & dissenting intellectual activity, with a view to suppressing it altogether. Far too many liberals were taken in by this transparent, reactionary scam

The Internet Archive has to date downloaded 500 terabytes of US government websites, which it crawls at the end of every presidential term. The whole archive is fully searchable. This effort's housed by a donation-funded nonprofit, not a branch of the US government. blog.archive.org/2024/05/08/e...

And that Lee Carvallo never existed

I am here for this content.

Loved Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - the first 'adult' book I ever really enjoyed. Quite liked Edgar Allen Poe's stories, Death of A Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Macbeth. Don't think I hated anything, but found Romeo and Juliet tedious and never got what was going on in The Big Sleep.

There ain't no AI and there never was!

The last photo of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, detained after refusing to abandon his colleagues and patients.

In just one image, we see both the power of Palestinian humanity and the moral weakness of all those complicit in genocide.

End all arms sales to Israel, now.

Let Syrians have the chance to access these documents & understand decades of despotic rule. Let a generation of Syrian scholars study these documents & make sense of how the regime survived. Let the Assad regime, like other dictatorships, be reduced to an object of historical research.

Thoughts are with Syrians as the long nightmare of Assad's tyranny looks set finally to come to an end.

Let us hope that what comes next can be a flourishing, free, pluralist, sovereign Syria whose future is decided by and for Syrians alone, not by the geopolitical schemes and 'security' of others.

Thanks for putting this together!

Does anyone have suggestions for where to start reading about German colonialism as someone new to it?

I noticed that when I was in Australia in early 2023. Adelaide was shown as Kourna Country, right next to an advert from a mining company saying 'Make Lithium Your Future'. It made me wonder if cosmetic land acknowledgements are the latest phase in the 'logic of elimination'.