This link is to a TIME article, which is fine. The actual letter from the Iranian government can be read here, and I recommend doing so.

As the first casualty of the endless wars waged by the U.S. government has without exception been the truth, with the American people perpetually receiving the greatest harm as the result of the U.S. government’s campaign of deception, we wish to highlight some of the facts that are being withheld from the American public. After all, it is the American taxpayers who will have to bear the cost of America’s unjust wars, and so they deserve to know the truth.

The amount of patience that the government of Iran has had with the United States active imperialist belligerence is honestly saintly.

You never have quite enough bullets for all the living corpses bearing down on you. If you throw that grenade at a monster now, what happens if you need it for a bigger one later? You always need more, and it’s never enough.

Some incredibly good writing about Resident Evil, movies, survival horror, and addiction.

If you are a vibe coder or vibe translator, I implore you to learn how to do this the correct way. You are better than this.

Great, frustrated writing from within the Sega Saturn retro scene.

This is very much all on brand for Meta, a company obsessed with impossible scale but completely unwilling to do absolutely any of the heavy lifting to ensure it's adhering to the most rudimentary ethical standards. This never changes because the entire company exists to coddle Mark Zuckerberg's bulbous ego, allowing him unlimited funding to cosplay as an interesting person.

The International Research Centre (IF DDR) researches the history of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and its enduring relevance for international movements today.

Cool resource that I want to dig more into later. I <3 the DDR (game and country)

When an informal network of amateurs questions the work of industry standard-bearers, it is rarely a matter of raw technical superiority but rather a fundamental difference in constraints. While restoration entities often operate on strict budgets and tight deadlines, preservationists can spend years cross-referencing decades of older releases.

Great piece on the labor and vision of amateur restoration film -- which, in this writer's opinion, is some of the most important work happening in historical preservation today, and it's all entirely illegal.

The fact is, while cycling’s affordability and low-environmental impact have made it more popular than ever, biking infrastructure has not caught up with demand.

Good, sobering writing from Grace Benfell.

The Blue Wave Democratic Club is a rightwing astroturf group controlled in part by Santa Monica city councilmember Lana Negrete, not a real Democratic Club.

Local politics. Yikes!

You'd have to be a complete fucking idiot, just railroad-spike-through-the-forebrain mind-melted, to not notice that like literally every fucking other thing Meta does this is about mass surveillance and rent seeking. I can't tell if all of these people are slowly making themselves unbelievably stupid by inhaling chatbot fumes, or if proximity to silicon valley tech sphere radiation is microwaving their brains by itself.

Bruno is right.

Marx and Engels were attempting to understand a new social order that had emerged from the destruction of feudal relationships and was rapidly expanding across national borders. Their argument was not that history had ended with capitalism. Quite the opposite: capitalism itself was historically produced, and therefore historically transformable.

I agree with this guy!

Yudkowsky also claimed that his (non-profit) company was probably the only one that could make AI safely[...] It is also a pitch for people to give you total control over them, because if they do not, the world might end.

Thorough write up of (one of) the suicidal sex cults that currently runs the American government.

This industry approaches regulation in this way because it has, at its core, a millenarian death cult that worships and fears AI, believes AI will end the world, feels compelled to create AI, and at least somewhat wants to destroy AI as an entire field.

Edit: The article has been deleted. Archived version available here.

If you haven't looked at the Napster website lately, get ready for some major AI-related indigestion. The former music-sharing rebel is now peddling AI digital twins of teachers and serving the Saudi market.

Very... odd? Very odd. I mean, anything Saudi related these days is sort of strange but this is a particularly weird product fit.

A free QR code generator that works entirely in your browser. No ads, no trackers, no data sent to any server.

Hey, this is neat.

After a popular uprising against neoliberalism, an attempt to charter a new constitution, and a politically dead Gabriel Boric administration, the Pro-Pinochet right now holds power in Chile. In an interview with Gabriel Delacoste, Daniel Tutt asks what went wrong.

I have a lacking knowledge in South American leftism, and I know there's a lot there to learn from. This piece offers a pretty digestible history of Chile from the colonial era all the way to today, and all of its various swings.

Speaking personally, I think you can see (as shows up time and time again in national histories in the 20th century, both in South America and outside it), a stronger Leninist (or Lenin-ish) vanguard being opposed by a more moderate leftist current that wins victories in the democratic arena, only to be targeted by a revanchist imperialist/colonialist wing and deposed. I think it's a bit more complex than a simple "Leftist or liberal" binary -- many of the powers that held on for some time or another were closer to what we'd call social democrats -- but the tendencies appear often.

It is possible to say that Boric started as a radical and then turned to the center, but if we understand what kind of radical he was this becomes less clear. He came from a radically pluralist left-libertarian intellectual milieu that fiercely criticized neoliberalism and the party system, but that didn’t necessarily have roots in the socialist tradition. He had tattoos and a mohawk but had not necessarily spent hours studying how to transition to a planned economy.

Right, a classic left-libertarian approach, basically. "Depower the state", but before the machinery of power is fully held by the people. A simple error by Leninist analysis, but a deeply harmful one. After beating back the Communists for seventy-odd years, this is where the resisting forces often end up -- without a clear theory of power or transition.

Choosing not to look is a subconscious act of pulling the blinds, because confronting it would shatter the tinted windows that shape their worldview, protect their assets, and preserve their moral standing.

On boomers, wealth, and America.

The attack on Moscow was supposed to demonstrate the reach of the NATO war machine. Instead, it strengthened the Russian government.

More consequences of the Ukraine-Russia war, and some good analysis of what this looks like geopolitically.

I argue that from 1920 onward, Communist women pioneered efforts to link social reproduction to women’s unwaged labor and care work. Communist women discussed the economic and social conditions necessary for mothers and families, attentive to class, ethnic, and racial inequalities. This way they formulated core principles of intersectionality and reproductive justice before these frameworks entered mainstream feminist discourse.

You know, I hate to be the guy who is vagueposting about a dumb thing that I saw online, but I really liked this article because it feels like it directly counterargues against a dumb thing I saw online, which was a statement of "intersectionality is incompatible with principled Marxist-Leninism". Which is, on its face, a bad argument and I don't want to give it a lot of air.

But! If you would like a good article to throw in the face of someone who makes that dumb sort of argument, this is a good one. Historical analysis, well argued and interesting.

The interwar Communist Women’s Movement was not a passive recipient of Comintern or Soviet directives but an active, theoretically innovative vanguard that positioned women’s emancipation at the center of socialist transformation. By linking unwaged domestic labor to social reproduction, the movement pioneered a profound rethinking of care work as a structural economic and political question.

Call it form, call it figuration, call it rhetoric; these are the features of communication that render its use irreducible to the simple transmission of data bytes and incompatible with the reactionary desire for immediacy.

A lovely article in defense of critique, text, discourse, and literacy.

The idea that by depicting an act an artist is endorsing that act seems baked into the minds of certain left-leaning sets of younger people, particularly teenagers and early twentysomethings. [...] If the whole thing sounds, with its zeal for censorship and its self-righteous hate campaigns against the disenfranchised, a little like the American Family Association with a glittery coat of paint, well, that's kind of what it is.

A classic (from 2019! we were so young) essay from GFM that is nonetheless perennially relevant in our New Age of Puritanism.

Making sense of iLands, the company whose AI agents emailed me half a dozen times in two days offering to do my research. Turns out they’re just bots trying to keep their own lights on by trying to take my job.

As far as I can tell, iLands is sort of like a less-user-focused version of those fucking stupid MoltBots or whatever, just a website full of pointless AI bots with access to an email server. It is insane that this is just happening! This should be banned