“We hugely underestimate the impact of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The resulting perception of threat in Iran foreclosed reform and made it much harder for Iranian civil society to fight back and organize because of the militarization of Iranian politics.” @peymanjafari.bsky.social
“Police learned from—and in some cases, literally stole ideas from—organized labor without preserving the fundamental principle of solidarity at the core of the labor movement.”
...
“A strike at a factory is meant to hurt the boss’s wallet, but a police strike is meant to hold a city hostage.”
📆 Weds. 4/22 @ 7PM: We join the "Boston Review" in welcoming Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff for a discussion of their new book, "Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed". They will be joined in conversation by MIT's Jason Jackson. Learn more: buff.ly/nQpkKrG
Recording of the panel I moderated for the Boston Review with four distinguished scholars—Peyman Jafari, Ali Kadivar, Manijeh Moradian, and Naghmeh Sohrabi—to discuss the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran:
www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...
Join us for Artificial Reason: A Conversation on AI, Rationality, and Violence on Tuesday, May 5 at 3pm ET. BR contributing editor Lily Hu will talk with Kevin T. Baker, Sophia Goodfriend, and Benjamin Recht about the way AI is changing the way societies, individuals, and governments make decisions. The panelists will discuss the nature and meaning of rationality, how new technology is interfacing with old institutions, what popular AI discourses get wrong, and the consequences for politics, war, and social life in general. Register at https://secure.givelively.org/event/boston-critic-inc/artificial-reason-a-conversation-on-ai-rationality-and-violence
Join us for Artificial Reason: A Conversation on AI, Rationality, and Violence on Tuesday, May 5 at 3pm ET.
Contributing editor Lily Hu will talk with Kevin T. Baker, @sophiagoodfriend.bsky.social, & @beenwrekt.bsky.social.
To learn more and register, go here: secure.givelively.org/event/boston...
"What we are witnessing is the renewal of a nakedly imperial project: a politics of permanent siege, existential paranoia, and millenarian last stands."
@joelleabirached.bsky.social
on apocalyptic politics and the assault on Lebanon
Join us for Artificial Reason: A Conversation on AI, Rationality, and Violence on Tuesday, May 5 at 3pm ET. BR contributing editor Lily Hu will talk with Kevin T. Baker, Sophia Goodfriend, and Benjamin Recht about the way AI is changing the way societies, individuals, and governments make decisions. The panelists will discuss the nature and meaning of rationality, how new technology is interfacing with old institutions, what popular AI discourses get wrong, and the consequences for politics, war, and social life in general. Register at https://secure.givelively.org/event/boston-critic-inc/artificial-reason-a-conversation-on-ai-rationality-and-violence
Join us for Artificial Reason: A Conversation on AI, Rationality, and Violence on Tuesday, May 5 at 3pm ET.
Contributing editor Lily Hu will talk with Kevin T. Baker, @sophiagoodfriend.bsky.social, & @beenwrekt.bsky.social.
To learn more and register, go here: secure.givelively.org/event/boston...
“Anti-imperialism without feminism can easily collapse into support for authoritarianism, but feminism without anti-imperialism becomes cheerleading for empire. The record of Iranian history is very clear. There can be no freedom or democracy under the boot of empire.” —Manijeh Moradian
From me and @adambonica.bsky.social on Golden
www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-no...
learning a lot from this over the last hour and a half about Iranian history, its social and worker movements, the multifold impact of sanctions, reactionary propaganda, the role of oil workers in Iranian labour movements, and more
www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...
“Police learned from—in some cases, literally stole ideas from—organized labor without preserving the fundamental principle of solidarity at the core of the labor movement.”
@stschrader1.bsky.social on his new book, BLUE POWER: HOW POLICE ORGANIZED TO PROTECT AND SERVE THEMSELVES:
“Police learned from—in some cases, literally stole ideas from—organized labor without preserving the fundamental principle of solidarity at the core of the labor movement.”
@stschrader1.bsky.social on his new book, BLUE POWER: HOW POLICE ORGANIZED TO PROTECT AND SERVE THEMSELVES:
“Anyone who has followed the serpentine trajectory of Hungarian politics since 1989 might be forgiven for throwing their hands up in confusion. For more than two and a half decades, Hungarian political life has been a story of reversals.”
Historian Holly Case on the rise of Orbánism, from 2016:
“If any life’s work could be summed up by the mantra ‘We don’t know, but let’s give it a try,’ it was that of Albert O. Hirschman, one of the most prominent and original social scientists of the second half of the 20th century.” He was born this week in 1915.
Simon Torracinta on a 2021 biography:
“Anti-imperialism without feminism can easily collapse into support for authoritarianism, but feminism without anti-imperialism becomes cheerleading for empire. The record of Iranian history is very clear. There can be no freedom or democracy under the boot of empire.” —Manijeh Moradian
“We hugely underestimate the impact of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The resulting perception of threat in Iran foreclosed reform and made it much harder for Iranian civil society to fight back and organize because of the militarization of Iranian politics.” @peymanjafari.bsky.social
“The wish that women’s care work be waged seems to have come true, albeit in a funhouse-mirror form: legions of women now work in low-paid roles caring for other peoples’ families, while the vast majority still take care of their own families for free.”
www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...
“Iran is not a totalitarian state; it never has been. It’s an authoritarian state. Those are very different things, and the most important difference is that in an authoritarian state there is space for people to claw space for themselves, to claw for their own rights.” @naghmehs.bsky.social
“The United States and Israel want to normalize this. They want the world to accept that this is the way it is. They can get away with it. They can do whatever they want. How do we reject this normalization? How do we refuse it? How do we interrupt it?”
Manijeh Moradian in our recent roundtable:
“This is also about resurrecting American empire. We Iranians always think it is all about us, but I really think it has to do with the imperial anxieties of the American elite.”
@peymanjafari.bsky.social in our recent conversation on the war on Iran:
screenshot from linked to essay that reads: What is new is that, starting around 2015—in the wake of increased trans visibility in the media (sometimes called the “transgender tipping point”) and the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell legalizing same-sex marriage—social conservatives began shifting their efforts toward targeting trans people instead. The attacks have since grown into a highly coordinated and well–funded movement that churns out both anti-trans and broader anti-LGBTQ legislation at unprecedented levels. This is the real reason why Republicans have become obsessed with “fairness in women’s sports,” “biological sex,” “social contagion,” “restrooms,” “grooming,” and other soundbites that didn’t exist ten or fifteen years ago. In other words, there hasn’t been an organic shift in public opinion on trans people but rather a massive astroturfing campaign against us.
...btw I link to evidence that the anti-trans backlash was a highly coordinated and well–funded (especially via right-wing orgs) movement in this essay: www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-no...
“This is also about resurrecting American empire. We Iranians always think it is all about us, but I really think it has to do with the imperial anxieties of the American elite.”
@peymanjafari.bsky.social in our recent conversation on the war on Iran:
“In terms of immigration policy, this has meant a new interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which most legal thinkers believe grants ‘birthright citizenship’ to anyone born on U.S. soil. Yet starting in the 1990s, some conservatives began to coalesce around a new originalist position…”
“The messaging has not been only to Iran—that we will crush you, we will send you back to the Stone Age. It has been also to Europeans, to the allies: you will be disciplined.“
From our Monday event with @peymanjafari.bsky.social, Ali Kadivar, Manijeh Moradian, and @naghmehs.bsky.social:
"What we are witnessing is the renewal of a nakedly imperial project: a politics of permanent siege, existential paranoia, and millenarian last stands."
@joelleabirached.bsky.social
on apocalyptic politics and the assault on Lebanon
It would do (some) folks good to REALLY (and honestly) study The Nadir, more because that is where the regime is taking us. Not the 1960s, that' short-sighted, but to 1876. You can't fight the conditions of 1876 with 1963 strategies, they're incongruous.
www.bostonreview.net/forum/walter...
Neoliberalism Needs Neofascists
"The neofascist assault on democracy is a last-ditch effort on the part of neoliberal capitalism to rescue itself from crisis. Public opinion has to be mobilized decisively against neoliberalism. Only then will this breeding ground for neofascism at last be undone."
“With AI, we have envisioned—and are now trying to implement—our own obsolescence.
There is one last human holdout. Even the singularity’s biggest boosters mostly concede that AI cannot create real works of art”
