Fascist movements have always understood aesthetics as pedagogy—as a way of training people to feel power before they are allowed to think about it. It would be easy to dismiss (Trump) as a narcissistic clown. That would be a mistake. He is a demagogue who despises democracy, targets people of color, revels in violence, and… Read More Fascist Aesthetics Has Come Back Matching Fascist Politics
Lessons from the first year of Donald Trump’s second term The West’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal razing of Gaza and the impunity with which an allegedly isolationist Trump abducted Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, expropriated its oil, bombed Iran, and threatened to annex Greenland and Canada has, it’s fair to say, made international law a disreputable… Read More Moment of reckoning
NB: (The counter revolution) ‘…tried many forms and devices, but soon learned that it could come to power only with the help of the state machine and never against it… the Kapp Putsch of 1920 and the Hitler Pustch of 1923 had proved this.. In the centre of the counter revolution stood the judiciary. Unlike administrative… Read More Chris Hedges: The Machinery of Terror
Julian Borger The attack on Venezuela and the seizure of its president was a shocking enough start to 2026, but it was only the next day, when the smoke had dispersed and Donald Trump was flying from Florida to Washington DC in triumph, that it became clear the world had entered a new era. The US president… Read More Trump’s territorial ambition: new imperialism or a case of the emperor’s new clothes?
The president has vowed to kill off ‘woke’ in his second term in office, and the venerable cultural institution a few blocks from the White House is in his sights By Charlotte Higgins On 30 May last year, Kim Sajet was working in her office in the grandly porticoed National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. The gallery… Read More Trump’s assault on the Smithsonian: ‘The goal is to reframe the entire culture of the US’
Once humiliation is naturalised as a civilisational condition, violence no longer appears as aggression but as rectification. Anubhav Singh Cinema has never merely reflected political life; it has functioned as one of its most efficient laboratories. From its earliest mass forms, cinema has been a technology for organising affect, disciplining perception, and training populations to… Read More How Hindi Cinema is Preparing India for Violence
Opinion by Anne Applebaum In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the world is divided into three spheres of influence: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, all perpetually at war. Sometimes two of the states form an alliance against the third. Sometimes they abruptly switch sides. No reasons are given. Instead, the Party tells the proles, “We have always been at… Read More Trump’s ‘American dominance’ may leave the USA with nothing
Shobhit Mahajan The Tribune, 16 December, 2025 Chat GPT and Google Gemini are rapidly becoming the go-to places for students. That by itself is not surprising-after all generations of students have found ways to avoid rigor and skirt around academic engagement. Champion Guides (which condensed the whole course into a pocket-sized paperback) were followed by… Read More As AI replaces thinking, learning is eroding
Dr Rebecca Reich examines politics, culture and reality in the Soviet Union “Dissenters in the USSR responded by making literary use of psychiatric discourse to both validate themselves and challenge the authority of the state. “The impact of their essays, transcripts, poems and works of fiction may have seemed limited within the isolation and silence… Read More State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin
“Our study suggests that it is specifically social media that affects children’s ability to concentrate.” By Victor Tangermann A barrage of AI-generated brain rot is haunting children across numerous screens, from personal smartphones to school-issued laptops to televisions. Social media is adding significantly to that cacophony, making it harder than ever for kids to concentrate. Now, new research… Read More Social Media Is Absolutely Nuking Children’s Brains, New Research Finds
After the truth-shower 