Neelofer Qadir

Really necessary set of essay about this moment:

www.jadaliyya.com/Details/47192

Who speaks for Iran?—and from where? – Spectre Journal Nazanin Shahrokni rethinks the meaning of transnational solidarity, understood as a political intervention stretched across an uneven geopolitical landscape.

The brilliant Nazanin Shahrokni on who speaks for Iran:

spectrejournal.com/who-speaks-f...

The oral histories of Palestinians who survived the slaughter by the Yishuv has borne witness to this bloodshed for decades, and the archival material now catches up.

Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need A new season of what haters have called a "capitalist-hating, Trump-hating, NFL protest-loving group of far-Left women."

Our @burnitalldownpod.com Kickstarter ends in 10 hours and we are so close to reaching $29K (less than $1900 to go! what???). That number means we can make 7 episodes (maybe more, we’ll know for sure once fees are paid): www.kickstarter.com/projects/bur...

Antiwar Rap - YouTube

Since I've abandoned Spotify, I've been recreating some of the playlists that were in my account. Thought it was a good time to reassemble my Antiwar Rap playlist on YouTube:

youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Tired of relentless boosterism and narratives of inevitability? Worried about the thoughtless outsourcing of our universities' work and mission? We got you. 👊

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

You know, there's the joke ("joke") that universities are real estate ventures with a side hustle in education. Turns out that the reality of that claim is even more horrifying because of whom they're selling their real estate to. /6

Many alleged suicides of Black trans women are in fact modern-day lynchings, report finds Jill Collen Jefferson, the founder of JULIAN, explains what happens when a transgender woman’s death is ruled a suicide and a community calls it something else.

"The mechanisms... are bureaucratic as much as they are violent: crime scenes left unsecured, witnesses uninterviewed... cause of death determinations entered before investigators have spoken to anyone."

I wish I was surprised.

#lynchings
#extrajudicialmurder

www.advocate.com/news/crime/b...

In 2024 the San Francisco-based Anthropic deployed its model across the US Department of War and other national security agencies to speed up war planning. Claude became part of a system developed by the war-tech company Palantir with the Pentagon to “dramatically improve intelligence analysis and enable officials in their decision-making processes”. “The AI machine is making recommendations for what to target, which is actually much quicker in some ways than the speed of thought,” said Craig Jones, a senior lecturer in political geography at Newcastle University and an expert in kill chains. “So you’ve got scale and you’ve got speed, you’re [carrying out the] assassination-style strikes at the same time as you’re decapitating the regime’s ability to respond with all the aerial ballistic missiles. That might have taken days or weeks in historic wars. [Now] you’re doing everything at once.” The latest AI systems can rapidly analyse mountains of information on potential targets from drone footage to telecommunications interceptions as well as human intelligence. Palantir’s system uses machine learning to identify and prioritise targets and recommend weaponry, accounting for stockpiles and previous performance against similar targets. It also uses automated reasoning to evaluate legal grounds for a strike.

“This is the next era of military strategy and military technology,” said David Leslie, professor of ethics, technology and society at Queen Mary University of London, who has observed demonstrations of AI military systems. He also warned that reliance on AI can result in “cognitive off-loading”. Humans tasked with making a strike decision can feel detached from its consequences because the effort to think it through has been made by a machine. On Saturday 165 people, many children, were killed in a missile strike that hit a school in southern Iran, according to state media. It appeared to be close to a military barracks and the UN called it “a grave violation of humanitarian law”. The US military has said it is looking into the reports.

In the days before the Iran strikes, the US administration had said it would banish Anthropic from its systems after it refused to allow its AI to be used for fully autonomous weapons or surveillance of US citizens. But it remains in use until it is phased out. Anthropic’s rival, OpenAI, quickly signed its own deal with the Pentagon for military use of its models. “The advantage is in the speed of decision-making, the collapsing of planning from what might have taken days or weeks before to minutes or seconds,” said Leslie. “These systems produce a set of options for human decision makers but [they’ve] got a much narrower time band … to evaluate the recommendation.” “The deployment of AI is expanding,” said Prerana Joshi, research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a defence thinktank. “It is being done across countries’ defence estates … across logistics, training, decision management, maintenance.” She added: “AI is a technology that will allow decision makers, and anyone in that chain, to improve the productivity and efficiency of what they do. It’s a way of synthesising data at a much faster pace that is helpful to decision makers.”

This article and the academics quoted are a stunning illustration of how both media and academia have fundamentally failed to recognise how a random number generator is being used to widen the already-fucking-wide permission space for mass murder

Both now helping that project

archive.ph/wip/RlMO5

Reminder that The Cloud *does* have a physical infrastructure.

“We thought we were living in a politically neutral slave state.”

Major container shipping company Maersk halts passage through the Suez Canal and the narrow Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf, next to Iran, for "safety" reasons

u.afp.com/SucK

Death toll from school bombing in southern Iran reportedly rises to 165 Strike on girls’ elementary school in south of Iran has killed 148 people and injured 95 others, according to Iran state media

Israeli-US strike on girls’ elementary school in Minab killed 165 people and injured 96 others

Kids.

www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

Who bombed the school?

'Terror was needed to make Arabs leave': What Israel's army did in '48, revealed Thousands of Newly Discovered Documents Now Make It Possible to Tell the True Story of Israel's Expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 – and to Begin to Grasp Its Bitter Implications, post-October 7

“Thousands of newly discovered documents now make it possible to tell the true story of Israel's expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 – and to begin to grasp its bitter implications, post-October 7.”

Starting today 🌊🌊🌊

Years ago our admin did a red and black report. It took salaries & how much $ each instructor made in tuition $ for classes we taught-you were in the red or black. They released numbers once & shut it down bc humanities were producing huge $ for uni & engineers, business and scientists were losing $

again saying the political response of local police depts probably worth following given Trump's efforts to federalize policing

This Trinidad Express front page shows a photo of protestors gathering for a Black solidarity march outside the Chamber of Commerce in South Quay on March 4th 1970. It is courtesy of the Trinidad Express, published on Thursday 5th March, 1990.

On this day in 1970, protests in Trinidad and Tobago lead to the Black Power Revolution. Students in Port-of-Spain took to the streets in support of Black students (including Trinidadians) in Montreal, Canada.

anticolonialhistory.com/event/329/

February 26, 2026 Dear members of the Columbia community: This morning at approximately 6:30 a.m., federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security entered a Columbia Residential building and detained a student. We are working to gather more information, working to reach the family, and providing legal support. Our understanding at this time is that the federal agents made misrepresentations to gain entry to the building to search for a "missing person." We are working to gather more details. It is important to reiterate that all law enforcement agents must have a judicial warrant or judicial subpoena to access non-public areas of the University, including

It is important to reiterate that all law enforcement agents must have a judicial warrant or judicial subpoena to access non-public areas of the University, including housing, classrooms, and areas requiring CUID swipe access. An administrative warrant is not sufficient. If law enforcement agents seek entry to non-public areas of the University, ask the agents to wait to enter any non-public areas until contacting Public Safety. Public Safety will contact the Office of the General Counsel to coordinate the University's response. Do not allow them to enter or accept service of a warrant or subpoena. We will update our community as additional information becomes available. Sincerely,

BREAKING: Columbia President Claire Shipman says DHS agents entered a residential buliding this morning and detained a student.

"Our understanding at this time is that the federal agents made misrepresentations to gain entry to the building to search for a 'missing person.'"

Overnight this aircraft completed its deportation trip to India. The migrant passengers were likely shackled for at least 59 hours.

This is an excellent video by a librarian about the NYC public libraries budget situation. Everyone in NYC should watch it because it lays out the issues that @nycplan.org has been raising in a concise and good way.

Next week we welcome Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social to give a lecture on "How academia is facilitating the 21st century resurgence of eugenics and scientific racism". We're proud to have prof. Sear, a renowned expert on the topic, on the bill. The lecture is also livestreamed, cf. post below

Very belated congratulations on this! I missed the original publication in the move from Academic Twitter to Bluesky.

Not that I care about being fair to that author since I didn’t even bother to read his piece — smell of garbage coming from it was too strong — but seeing folks talk about it made it sound like it was written using GenAI.

Letter | No, Mellon Is Not Part of Some Woke Conspiracy Tyler Austin Harper mischaracterizes good grantmaking, writes Michael S. Roth.

Borrowing the phrase “incites the spleen of ___” from Wesleyan President Michael S Roth for future dismissals of people.

www.chronicle.com/blogs/letter...

It takes no “deeply reported” essay or “vulgarly Marxist” fantasies to recognize that grant applicants often inflect their applications to appeal to a funder. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The same can be said for former professors who inflect their articles to get attention. Sometimes it works, as it has for Harper on social media and in The Chronicle.

I WOULD LIKE TO REPORT A MURDER 😂😂😂😂😂

www.chronicle.com/blogs/letter...

I will be in conversation w/ the AMAZING Adom Getachew, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, & Camille Robcis, w/ Kate Redburn moderating, on my new book, *The Future That Was*, at Columbia Law School on March 24th at 6 PM.

(thanks to Madhav Khosla for the invite)

Register here:

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Notice the nature of the changes: "How does Einstein *access* my Canvas?" has become the superficially more benign "How does Einstein *connect to* my Canvas?"; all discussion of Einstein using users' Canvas credentials has simply been removed because it was evidently too honest