AI and the crisis of meaning Alexander Stern “It isn’t absurd,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in 1947, “to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity.” The proposition is looking less absurd by the day: AI may eventually turn on us; industrialization has turned the planet… Read More Wittgenstein’s Apocalypse
Mukul Kesavan NB: The irredeemable racism of the Anglo-American establishment is on full display in the observations of the Chief Editor of The Economist. They remind me of the phrase “life unworthy of life” (Lebensunwertes Leben), the Nazi designation for those human beings who, according to Hitler and Co., had no right to live. Well… Read More Grotesque priorities
Ruling that Meta and YouTube deliberately designed addictive products marks possible watershed moment for social media Dan Milmo and Robert Booth The young woman at the heart of what has been called the tech industry’s “big tobacco” moment was on YouTube at six and Instagram by nine. More than a decade later, she says, she still can’t live without… Read More ‘The era of invincibility is over’: the week big tech was brought to heel
You can own the roof, but the guy in the basement has the shotgun, and the house is made of solid rock. by Mark A. Shryock – Copyright © Mark A. Shryock The history of modern warfare is defined by a persistent, expensive, and often fatal misunderstanding: the belief that controlling the sky is equivalent… Read More Vietnam, Afghanistan and the 2026 Iran meat grinder: Why owning the sky is a death trap – and how this war will end an Empire
Mehmet Rakipoglu Exeter, UK (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Debates about Palestine in the Western academia often portray contemporary Israeli policies as exceptional responses to security ‘threats’ or regional instability. Yet a longer historical perspective suggests a deeper structural continuity: the persistence of colonial logic under evolving institutional and discursive forms. From the British… Read More Israel’s Enduring Colonial Project in Palestine
A stiff drink is recommended It is a well-established fact that the universe has a sense of humour. It is less well-established, but increasingly obvious, that the humour is of the kind best enjoyed from a great distance, like, let’s say the moon. Three weeks into the Iran war, reality has passed through the looking… Read More Gold and Geopolitics – March, 19-21: God is a comedian
The Trump administration is embracing violence for the sake of violence Jan-Werner Müller It appears that members of Trump’s cabinet get chosen not despite their endorsements of violence, but because of them. Pete Hegseth was primarily known as a dapper TV host willing to defend war crimes. Markwayne Mullin is apparently still proud of challenging… Read More Pete Hegseth is promoting a nihilist cult of death
Governments that mutely line up behind the US as it prosecutes a sinister, illegal war that threatens to destroy their citizens’ ability to cook and eat aren’t rational actors, they are lemmings… Narendra Modi and his partymen are attracted to Israel’s fanatical, anti-Muslim Zionism because it has achieved the disenfranchisement and apartheid that Hindutva aspires… Read More A grey silence
I bow out of my role for the organisation at a perilous time for the international law. There are consequences not just for Palestinians, but the wider Middle East.. It is incomprehensible that a UN entity has been allowed to be crushed as Unrwa has, in violation of international law, with total impunity, and with… Read More Israel has crushed Unrwa in Gaza – and the rest of the world has done nothing
NB: ‘Lebensraum’ as national policy; racism, genocidal complicity amongst vast sections of the Western population; total contempt for both morality and international law; limitless expansion of territory by force; the politics of permanent emergency (as per Carl Schmitt); the embrace of bloodlust and cruelty as markers of virtue rather than emblems of evil – all… Read More Tearing up the map
After the truth-shower 