Max Taylor-Armstrong

“Where should we go after the last frontiers, where should the birds fly after the last sky?” -Mahmoud Darwish

[Louis Allday @Louis_Allday]

Please watch this profoundly moving and important short film by @Helyeh_Doutaghi:

[Sana Saeed @SanaSaeed]

Remember how everyone rushed to use his photo, of his walking toward an IDF tank to advocate for the lives of his patients? Rushed to plaster it everywhere, rushed to make AI edits, art, whatever. That was in December 2024.

How often is he mentioned today? He is alive, he is being tortured and slowly killed - he, alongside every Palestinian hostage, must be freed.

[Paweł Wargan @pawelwargan]

China’s “whole-process people’s democracy” is a far more robust democratic model than anything on offer in the West. Read the paper I wrote with @jasonhickel to see why: https://t.co/uRZq3LqUG8

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

Cuba helped several African countries in their liberation struggles against brutal colonial occupiers, including against the apartheid regime in South Africa which the US backed and supported. That’s what he means by “radical left-wing terrorism”, just to be clear.

[Paweł Wargan @pawelwargan]

Imperialists keep having to invent socialist massacres to deflect from the reality that capitalism is one continuous, world-spanning genocide.

We often hear about the 140 people who died trying to cross the Berlin Wall over a period spanning 28 years. But we never hear about the 9,900 people who die every single day because they lack access to healthcare — a direct outcome of imperialism's denial of sovereignty to the global periphery.

We often hear about some number of people who supposedly died at Tiananmen Square in 1989 — a highly-contested narrative. But we do not hear about the 1,545 people who die every single day because of Western sanctions — 38 million people in total over a fifty year period.

Given the sheer barbarism of the imperialist world system, we should marvel at how mild the actions of socialist and revolutionary projects are by the standards of the systemic and unrelenting violence they are forced to confront. And there is certainly no need for progressive forces to be apologetic or ashamed about these measures.

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

I spoke yesterday in Paris about how socialist policy can enable us to overcome social deprivation and ecological crisis, by aligning investment and production with democratically determined objectives.

I noticed that some people assume socialism necessarily means 100% public ownership, but this is not the case. Yes, for many important reasons, we need public ownership of public services, utilities and the commanding heights, and yes we need a public finance system, industrial policy and credit guidance...

But there's no reason we cannot have private firms producing consumer goods like watches, beer, etc - the key is that they should be democratically owned and managed, by workers or communities empowered to determine the objectives of investment and production.

We know that when people have democratic control over production they are more likely to align it with social and ecological needs.

Socialism is ultimately about economic democracy: extending the principle of democracy into the realm of production. Cooperatives are an important step in this direction.

[Farwa Sial @farwasial]

Excellent analysis @jinkydoo @bulatlat: #ASEAN speaks the language of multipolar cooperation while remaining deeply tethered to dollarized financial circuits, externally driven capital flows, & security arrangements calibrated to U.S. strategic interests. https://t.co/keSftdffXL

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

This is a really striking paper. It shows that vehicles "Made in Germany" are mostly not made in Germany at all. 

Only 46% of the labour that goes into producing "Made in Germany" vehicles occurs in Germany. The majority of the labour is performed elsewhere (with wages as low as one-fifth the level), and the majority of the emissions occur elsewhere, but the value is disproportionately captured in Germany.

The paper was led by our colleague Laura Pérez-Sánchez at ICTA.
https://t.co/HrGLgvwszN

[David Yambio @DavidYambio]

Deliberate reduction of human beings into nothingness.

For years, this is what we have fought to make visible: EU-funded concentration camps in Libya where enslaved “migrants” and “refugees” are detained en masse, shoulder against shoulder, body against body, with barely enough room to turn or sit upright. Exhaustion, dehydration, disorientation, heat, suffocation, darkness, sheer collapse—you name it.

One does not need visible blood for violence to be present. Sometimes violence is architectural, administrative, and above all a decision to place hundreds of enslaved people in a room never meant to contain them and then call it “migration management.”

My outrage comes from the fact that such scenes have become normalised both in Libya, Europe and around the globe. The world has slowly learned to consume the dehumanisation of “migrants” as recurring theme instead of evidence of ongoing crimes against human beings that concerns all of humanity.

And while this reality is already unbearable, this morning a document leaked to @StatewatchEU confirmed that the EU has begun collaborating with Haftar’s forces in eastern Libya on “migration control.”

The result will be worse than what is happening in this footage.

This is a condition that no court, parliament, humanitarian institution, or democratic society should tolerate for a single hour, let alone for years that has passed.

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

On this day in 1830, the US ruling class passed the Indian Removal Act, legalising the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Americans from their ancestral homelands. Thousands were killed as this crime was carried out. One of the most evil and disgraceful acts in US history.

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

Absolute horror. Prominent Dr. Nick Maynard confirms the Zionist military systematically executed over 300 civilians and medical staff at Shifa Hospital.

He reveals his own colleague was found handcuffed and shot in the head. Washington is funding pure state terrorism!

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

Horrific videos from Gaza have been circulating for hours after israel struck a residential building.

I don’t know what’s more disturbing, the image of children’s bodies torn apart (again) or the fact that it’s barely considered newsworthy because the children are Palestinian.

[Mohammed El-Kurd @m7mdkurd]

You know, the killing is so relentless that you almost get used to it. A classroom of children killed every single day. You write about it, you read about it. Someone’s mother digs herself up from the rubble. Someone’s father is split in half. There was a video of wounded man using his arms to crawl across the road. Another man is so hungry he weeps. You read the stories. Each one is more brutal than the next and somehow the brutality is banal. You are numb, for better or for worse. But there are moments in the day, maybe just a singular moment, when you actually contend with the magnitude of the tragedy, when you are able to quantify the loss and in those moments you feel crushed—there are no adjectives. There are people mourning their lovers. Students missing their teachers. Orphans. Widowers. Grandmothers who look just like your own. I cry when I think about the people who were martyred just hours before they could apologize for something, or confess to something, or have something to eat. Or the slain who believed they would survive. And as the rancid rotten people of the world pontificate and debate the definition of genocide, you are at war with yourself, trying desperately to ignore the material meaning of the word. You read the news and you read the news and it is so hard to accept that the dead, the thousands of people they are slaughtering, they are your loved ones and your loved ones’ loved ones. This isn’t just a bad dream.

[Ali Abutalebi @AliAbutalebi]

این‌که براساس مهملات/تبلیغات/تحریکات آکسیوس و نیویورک تایمز و مانند این‌ها «تحلیل سیاسی» می‌کنید و موضع می‌گیرید نشان می‌دهد عقلتان پس کله‌تان است عزیزان.

[Power to the People ☭🕊 @ProudSocialist]

US billionaires keep spewing the same lie about how the US needs more data centers to “compete with China,” so I’m going to keep repeating the truth:

The US already has 5,381 data centers to China’s 449 and has more data centers than nearly every other country combined.

The US needs social housing, universal health care, and modern infrastructure to compete with China, not data centers.

That’s how China surpassed the US by investing in its people instead of wars, data centers, and oligarchs like the US.

[David Adler @davidrkadler]

I simply do not understand how we, as a country, tolerate the hypocrisy of indicting Raúl Castro for defending Cuban airspace — while our own government celebrates the extrajudicial assassinations of innocent fishermen sailing across the sea below.

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

AI is going to make a lot of people more sociopathic... but it's particularly troubling to consider how many men are likely using it to justify misogynistic and abusive behaviour in their relationships.

[Sana Saeed @SanaSaeed]

A core part of Israel’s genocide has been to completely destroy life-sustaining infrastructure in Gaza. Despite the continued slaughter, Palestinians are resisting in every way, including by rebuilding the very things the Israelis and Americans sought to destroy.

[Helyeh Doutaghi | حليا دوطاقي @Helyeh_Doutaghi]

“Still, Minab”, Episode 3: The Last Dance

The Rahsepar family lost Hossein, their 11-year-old boy who loved to play and ride his motorcycle. He is survived by Mohanna, his sister, who sat before me—elegant, shy, and brave—with what I can only describe as unprocessed grief, to speak about the school she had left just minutes before it was bombed.

The aunt told me that this atrocity forced them to understand the genocide in Gaza in a way they had not before. It revealed, with painful clarity, how essential it is to recognize that if the US-Zionist forces are not stopped, their violence will extend across borders and into the lives of children in other nations. She stressed that this is not a distant concern, but one that must be understood as urgent—as something we must grasp as if our own lives depend on it, because they do.

The Rahsepar family was clear and unambiguous about what they want: the complete and total dismantling of what they described as the US-Zionist death machine. In their pursuit of justice, they did not turn to the UN or the ICC. Instead, they called upon the Iranian armed forces as the institution they trust to hold perpetrators of child killing to account.

As always, grateful to @alinoyal, @bikrumsinghgill, and Ali Alizadeh for their commitment to preserving Minab's dignity in memory, language, and witness.

#Minab

https://t.co/u1RyHTvUia

[SHAV★ @shavnyuy]

60km from Dakar, in the middle of the Senegalese bush, this is what Atelier KOE does with earth brick

Al Hamra, Arabic for “the red” came from a meeting between a young client tired of Dakar’s bustle and Atelier KOE. The question was simple: how do you build and live comfortably in a seemingly hostile arid environment?

The answer was the earth beneath the site. The 400m² residence is built entirely from stabilized earth bricks, six suites, a large living area, kitchen, dining room, and an open peristyle with a central fountain. A 12-metre wind tower pulls hot air upward and draws cooler air through the interior. No mechanical cooling. The building regulates itself.

Earth walls thicker than standard construction absorb humidity and moderate interior temperatures as the Senegalese climate swings between dry and humid seasons throughout the year.

The house also functions as a working farm, fruit trees, grains, peanuts, vegetables, livestock. Architecture and agriculture as one system.

“The history of this building technique is 5,000 years old. Concrete construction is very new.” ~Richard Rowland

Alhamra, Senegal. Atelier KOE / Richard Rowland. 📷 Règis l’Hostis