Omair Ahmad

New York Daily News Flashback: “Ford to City: Drop Dead” In perhaps its most iconic front page, The News hit out at President Ford for saying he would veto any bill calling for a federal bailout of New York City and proposing legislation that would make …

50 years ago today:

The War Crimes are mine.

I was a soldier (for a lot longer than Platner was a Marine) so we disagree on what killing in war does; but for that killing to "work" it has to be targeted; not random (this is part of why the US failed in Vietnam).

What they did wasn't war, it was murder.

Culture clash It is extraordinary how the idea of the West is thrown around as if its meaning were obvious and stable, when it is nothing of the kind. The term can refer to anything from a geographic space to a civ...

“It is extraordinary how the idea of the West is thrown around as if its meaning were obvious and stable, when it is nothing of the kind,” writes Hans Kundnani in this review of Georgios Varouxakis’s ‘The West: the History of an Idea’.

www.the-tls.com/history/the-...

Slightly odd that he thinks early 19th century France is not a moment of high imperialism. That's when France was already in SE Asia and struggling against the British for S Asia. It seems very clearly part of the intellectual framework which would give us the White Man's Burden.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp laughs about profiting from killing Palestinians using AI.

He calls them 'Hamas' 'useful idiots' and 'mostly terrorists'.

But there is only one terrorist here, Palantir are war criminals.

A kettle on a stove that looks like a cat.

Kitteapot 😺

And please for the love of God stop quoting that damn poem.

We defend and fight for human rights because we defend and fight for human rights.

Do it because it's the ***only right thing to do***, not because you're hoping someone will be around to defend you when you and yours are the victims.

What Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign Says About the Quiet Erasure of Caste in US Politics As temples become key sites for candidates’ visits, New York’s mayoral race has revealed broader tensions between Dalit advocates and the rising Hindu right

From the excellent Yashica Dutt:

newlinesmag.com/argument/wha...

Hundreds of thousands of ultra-Orthodox men block entrance to Jerusalem in mass anti-draft rally Hamas says it is about to return two bodies of hostages * Construction to begin on Jordan-border security barrier * PM said to weigh action to weaken state probes * IDF demolishes 'terror infrastructu...

This is happening now.

Hundreds of thousands of ultra-Orthodox men block entrance to Jerusalem in mass anti-draft rally

www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog-oct...

Anyone still engaging with the UAE after the last two years, and what has just happened in El-Fasher, is someone comfortable abetting genocide.

Simply baffling to see the number of high profile media outlets presenting Gates's latest scribblings as a sea change in his thinking, when it is pretty much the same crap he's been pushing for the better part of 20 years.

Sharks absolutely get cancer, and people claiming otherwise are pseudoscientific grifters preying on the desperate.

Even if sharks did not get cancer, eating shark would not cure your cancer any more than eating LeBron James would make you better at basketball.

What's that quote?

"Pity the nation that needs heroes."

Ah, how neatly history undercuts the claims of nativist bigotry.

New York Times headline reads: Trump Hotel Workers Campaign for a Union, Over the Boss's Objections

New York Times headline reads: Trump Moves to Strip More Federal Workers of Union Protections.

But his assertion that diversity weakens unions ignores two things. First, labor unions have a long history of multiethnic coalitions. Second, it was the capitalists and political elites who tried to *exploit* ethnic divisions to maintain power. There is only one person here trying to stop unions:

A screenshot of a block of text with a black background and white serif font. The text reads: “I don’t particularly care about the symbols people use to signal their membership in a group. Maybe you do need a terrifying tattoo to be a real Marine. And maybe sometimes that terrifying tattoo might resemble Nazi iconography. If you are willing to accept that from a distance, as many Democrats say they are, a person may not be able to tell the real symbol of hate from its doppelgänger, that is for you to live with. But, I do care about the political trade-offs we will ask people to make in the name of pragmatism. If the Democratic future requires us to exchange our discomfort with casual Nazism to advance a political agenda, I am not interested. Maybe other voters are — some polling suggests that young voters still support Platner. And maybe Platner will find a way to redeem himself. No one owes him that chance, but there is still a way forward. It’s called doing the work. But don’t tell me that excusing that tattoo is good politics. It is the exact same politics that the right is selling, in a different outfit.”

A Nazi Tattoo Exposes Democrats’ Greatest Weakness www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/o...

@tressiemcphd.bsky.social is unmatched. Read her latest piece—and everything else she writes.

Really appalling to see the Post's coverage of the announcement skip over all the various threats to human life to land on the real stakes, "relations with adversaries." I guess politics is a sterile closed room with no real consequences!!

Resuming nuclear testing is a massive giveaway to China and Russia because we basically have the supercomputers to simulate them (look into why the DOE owns so many….) no and they don’t, so physical nuclear tests would give them a lot of data that they currently don’t have access to.

I think writer's block should be tackled the old-fashioned way. By cleaning the entire house to avoid writing a single sentence.

Let's play, "Who said it: Donald Trump, the Grand Wizard of the Klan, Pamela Geller, or Andrew Cuomo?"

Donate to Kat Abughazaleh Show your support with a contribution.

I have never done this before, but my partner has also never been politically persecuted by the government for protesting the secret police.

So, if you can, please donate to help with legal costs.

katforillinois.com/legal

Okay, see, this is the dual loyalty trope but directed against someone who is Muslim instead of someone who is Jewish.

Jeff Bezos Says He Doesn't Understand Why Anybody Alive Now Would Be 'Discouraged'—Because Soon, 'Millions Of People Will Be Living In Space' Jeff Bezos says the future is so bright, he "doesn't see how anybody can be discouraged who is alive right now." Speaking at Italian Tech Week 2025 earlier this month with Ferrari and Stellantis chair...

lol no they absolutely will not, for so many reasons

I'd bet everything I own that in 20 years there will never be more than 1000 people in space at any one time. (It'll probably be well under 100.) Nobody will be living there with their kids.

Tech billionaires don't know a damn thing about tech.

I would rather live next door to someone who speaks another language than live next door to someone who doesn’t want to live near people who speak other languages. I know nothing about Person A but I know person B is a shitbird.

There are signs that Morgan is becoming a cause célèbre for neo-Nazis in the United States. The white supremacist Paul Miller, who gained notoriety for making hate-filled videos while wearing Nazi garb, said on social media that he was working to secure Morgan’s release and directed followers to a crowdfunding campaign that he said was from Morgan directly. “I am in contact with @GasChambers_,” Miller tweeted on Sunday, referring to an X account that says it has raised money for Morgan. “We are going to pay the bail for Kenneth in the next few days he will be free. Gaschamber was very kind and gracious. We just spoke on the phone. We are going to get kenneth out very soon.”

From an article about the man in the SS uniform arrested for attacking the woman in Georgia. Just wild that we've accepted that there's a huge social media platform where an account called "@GasChambers" is allowed to openly do Nazi fundraising and that's fine, in fact all the reporters post there.

Japan anger over South Korea's shrimp surprise for Donald Trump Tokyo complains after menu served to US president includes shellfish from disputed island and wartime sex slave is invited to dinner

people are calling this menu trolling from south korea. I beg to differ. in the first trump administration, south korea served trump a dinner that included shrimp from dokdo island. now THAT is trolling. www.theguardian.com/world/2017/n...

Before a talk at NED, Frank Fukuyama said to us, "I'm so integrated that I don't even speak Japanese."

Unironically.

I've never been able to take him seriously since.

I've spent something like 10 years explaining to people "no, this type of politics isn't only a problem on the right, yes, it's important that we call it out and push it out among people who we would otherwise consider allies" - there's no surprise here, at all

In the Darfurian city of al-Fashir, captured by the genocidal UAE-backed RSF, satellite imagery is observing tens of thousands of corpses that have appeared in the streets in the last 48 hours. They aren't letting anyone leave the city and communications with the outside world have been cut off.

On Sunday, German police arrested a gang of weapons dealers and seized hundreds of machine guns, mortar shells, and bazookas. One of them had a basement full of Nazi artifacts - swastika flags, Wehrmacht uniforms, etc., like in a museum. The prosecutor told the press: "So far there are no signs of right-wing extremist views." The German state is beyond satire. A Jewish kid with a "Free Palestine" sign is a clear antisemite - but the guy with a machine gun and a swastika is just a hobbyist.

The 🇩🇪 state downplays Neo-Naziism antisemitism and disproportionately focus on/inflates left-wing antisemitism and outright manufactures 'Israel-related' antisemitism because Neo-Naziism is not a threat to its dysfunctional memory culture. It doesn't challenge it, it complements and justifies it.