end colonialism and exploitation✊🏽✊🏿✊🏾🌈

I only (re-)tweet about politics and science. A bleeding-heart socialist with a resurgent chip on my shoulder. Prof @NorthwesternU. Opinions are my own.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

This part. Whenever the NATO left demand that a US-targeted government lay down its arms and transform itself into a soft cuddly wuddly liberal democracy, they need to be asked "What do you think would happen if they did that?" We all know what would happen, but make them say it.

[Jason Bassler @JasonBassler1]

Stop saying stupid stuff like:

"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."

And start saying instead:

"A free country doesn't track innocent citizens."

You could be anything.

Quit being a simp for the surveillance state.

[Steve Hall @ProfHall1955]

The Ghent professor who hired Cofnas through the back door has been part of what looks like a resurgence of 'race science' in various pockets across Europe. Belgian journalists have been onto this for a while. https://t.co/hpHqtRukkF

[Mukhtar @I_amMukhtar]

The professor who hired Nathan Cofnas, Prof. Bouke de Vries, is also an eugenicist.

There’s a whole eugenics network funding and promoting this.

It traces back to the Pioneer Fund, which was established in 1937 and distributed Nazi eugenics propaganda in the US.

[George Galloway @georgegalloway]

To hell with your “Founding Fathers”. I’m with Geronimo.

[Cora Harrington @CoraCHarrington]

Several people are saying the culture has always been this way, and that’s just not true. There’s always been ugliness, but the internet of 2006 & 2016 was not as bad as the internet of 2026. Twitter hasn’t even always been like this, much less eveywhere else. The degree matters.

[Nora Barrows-Friedman @norabf]

I think “the letter” feels like a betrayal on many levels; precisely because a few of the signatories were the very ones who taught us how to analyze imperialism and colonialism, and now, at the clearest moment of imperialist contradiction, they’re telling us “no, not here.”

[Jason Bassler @JasonBassler1]

Mass surveillance depends on one core idea:
*Privacy is suspicious.*

Reject it.

[ProPublica @propublica]

Stephen Miller said a Chicago apartment building raided by immigration agents was “filled with terrorists.”

So why is it that not a single person arrested that night was charged with a crime?

This is the real story behind the midnight raid: https://t.co/QMtw3OCEfi

[Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno]

BBC journalists have been banned from describing the kidnapped Venezuelan leader as having been kidnapped.

The BBC News Editor has sent this to BBC journalists.

[susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى @susanabulhawa]

I'm struggling with this open letter, signed by people I admire deeply—individuals who've dedicated their lives to Black liberation and anti-colonial struggles.

But I just can't reconcile my instinctive reaction to the letter with the respect I hold for the signatories. Prominent intellectuals in the imperial core are using their voice at this hour primarily to criticize a government under active bombardment. While I believe that no government is beyond reproach or criticism, I have a lot of questions and cautions about this open letter.

The overall framing of is of two equally opposing sides—two blades of the same scissors. This is a wholly unfair representation of what is in reality a profound asymmetry of power. On one hand, a country that has been subjected to crippling, decades-long economic sanctions, now fighting kinetically an existential anti-imperial struggle; on the other hand is nuclear, AI-powered empire, with its inexhaustible money, munitions, supply lines, coalitions, surveillance, and near total grip on international political, legal, information, and economic infrastructure.

The severity of the imperial onslaught seems to be minimized in the letter. This is perhaps for the sake of brevity, but it should not stand without critique. What the letter describes as "current, indiscriminate waves of US-Israeli military assaults" undersells what's actually happening in the "six months into a war". Unprovoked Tomahawk missiles and B-2 bombers that targeting a an elementary school that killed 180 children and teachers, the country's spiritual leader and his family, more than a third of the country's political, military, and scientific leadership, civilian infrastructure, including water, farmlands, electric grids and power plants, an unarmed navy ship at sea full of young cadets returning from a peacetime maritime exercise in international waters. This after decades of attacks that went unanswered by Iran, including Israel's repeated assassinations of Iranian scientists, assassination of Qasem Soleimani, strikes on Iranians generals in Syria, strike on Iranian consulate in Damascus, assassination of Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil; the US shot down civilian aircraft of Iran Air flight 655, killing 290 passengers and crew, including 66 children. There were endless cyber attacks, covert and overt naval sabotage and so much more—all of it without response from Tehran.

The letter does not identify who the prisoners are or why they were arrested. In neglecting to do so, there is no engagement with the very real security threats, proven foreign interference, terrorism, and espionage, which Iranian authorities cite as reasons for some arrests and prosecutions. I have no doubt there are some who've been wrongly imprisoned, but we also know that many of those who were rounded up confessed to working with the Mossad, and recently a group who gruesomely disembowled a young reciter of the Quran are among those who are imprisoned.

There are currently 2 million incarcerated people in the United States, the largest prison population anywhere on earth. It is estimated that 4-6% of them are innocent—that's 80,000-120,000, about two NFL stadiums full of innocent lives behind bars. Setting that percentage against Iran's estimated 15,000 political prisoners, that's roughly 600-900 individuals. They deserve fairness, but to center them in what is perhaps the most existential anti-colonial struggle of our lives feels misguided.

I would also argue that comparing Iran's prisons with Israel's decades-long, systematic, colonial detention of indigenous Palestinians is another form of false equivalence. So is the comparison with America's ICE detentions, separation of families and loss of children in the process (who are most likely trafficked). It is not remotely fair to put a revolutionary government, barely a few decades out from under colonial boots and still under sanctions, in the same "carceral" category as two settler colonial states. One cannot ignore the enormous disparity of political, military, and historical circumstances.

The people held in Iranian jails are overwhelmingly Iranian citizens, prosecuted under the state's own criminal and national security laws, regardless of whether one thinks the laws are unfair. Palestinians held in Israeli administrative detention are non-citizen subjects of a military occupation, detained and re-detained indefinitely under military decrees without charge or trial. People in US detentions are another category—non citizens held under civil immigration laws pending removal proceedings with access to immigration courts, however corrupt they may be. These are three distinct legal relationships—1) a state and it's own citizens; 2) a state and migrants crossing its borders, and; 3) an occupying power and a stateless occupied indigenous population. The letter collapses them all into a single architecture of "carceral states everywhere," creating an analysis that is not supported by the underlying facts. It creates rhetorical equivalence that treats "administrative detention," "political imprisonment," and "immigration detention" as though the political stakes of each were the same, when the questions of sovereignty, citizenship, and self-determination underneath them are not.

The phrase that knocked me off balance was this: "...we reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism." I note that @agent_of_change addressed this in a recent post, which he identified as the "load-bearing phrase" of the letter. Indeed, it does so much heavy lifting and I'm at a loss why the word "hollow" would have been inserted. It's so clearly deliberate, but why? How can Iran's insistence on sovereignty and dignity be called "hollow," despite the grave and terrible cost to themselves? They could have taken the easy path a long time ago and bowed to empire, like some of their Arab neighbors have done. They've chosen self-possession and loyalty to their ancestors and children instead. That can be called many things, but hollow is not it.

https://t.co/6w2XgYeV4i

[Ash J @AshAgony]

Whether it's Jay-Z, Nas, & Puffy supporting a Wall Street candidate for NYC mayor in 2021 or 50 Cent, Snoop, & Nelly performing for fascists or Lil Wayne badmouthing the BLM movement, so many of your favorite rappers from the 90s are counter-insurgents & counter-revolutionaries.

[Muhammad Mazen @mhmd_s09]

I will not stop posting appeals for the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safieh from his unjust imprisonment until he returns to his homeland.

Your support is essential to making our voices heard around the world.

[Craig Mokhiber @CraigMokhiber]

It turns out the man who disrupted services at a a synagogue in NYC on Friday was mentally ill, a Zionist fanatic, desperate to convert to Judaism, a rabid anti-Palestinian bigot, and an extreme critic of Mayor Mamdani. Will the parade of Zionist organizations & figures and AIPAC-owned politicians who tried to exploit this crime to advance their own bigoted, pro-Zionist, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Mamdani agendas now apologize and correct their public proclamations? Don’t hold your breath.

https://t.co/7kDYMmmbOK

[Diego A. Ballestero @InsurgentMemory]

11/ The supremacist/racist never comes with clean hands—they come with textbooks, guns, and the law, all twisted to justify subjugation. This network—from the U.S. Embassy in Brussels to the lecture halls of London—is the contemporary face of colonial violence

[🦋🦋🦋 @s_phia_]

Many socialists in the US admire and uplift Eugene Debs as a socialist hero but then forget he said this when they want to try and talk about PIC abolition as outlandish, crazy, etc.

[Dr. Deepti Gurdasani @dgurdasani1]

Even if by any chance Cofnas does get fired, he will simply fail upwards into a well-funded position in a right wing think tank or something like that. There is no reckoning for white mediocrity in academia. People like Cofnas just keep failing upwards. Have seen it again & again

[Diego A. Ballestero @InsurgentMemory]

1/ Yesterday Cofnas was supposedly an independent academic exposing corruption. Today the U.S. government is publicly threatening to review its relationship with Ghent on his behalf.

[Mel Andrews @bayesianboy]

Substack: do you want to use an AI tool for writing to check your writings about not writing with AI for AI-written writing?

[Palestine Culture @PalestineCultu1]

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