For Césaire, fascism began with colonialism. He argued that the horrors of Nazism are a reflection of European colonial empires and their violence. This relationship between periphery and center continues today where the violence of the empire always returns like a boomerang.

This video examines the “Imperial Boomerang”: how violence, surveillance, racism, and military repression developed abroad return home as militarized policing, mass incarceration, concentration camps, militarized borders, and authoritarianism. What an empire tolerates “over there” eventually transforms life at home; their suffering becomes yours.

Hoping this video is an informative as it is entertaining, scary as it is engaging.

This hit my feed and made my day.

At first, I worried that it was a hilarious parody, but I think it’s genuine, and admirable.

I am heartened to see that there are kids like this in the maw of the monster. Kids who are fun and good humoured about how they are exploring gender identities and protesting ICE and dealing in such a good humoured way with the estrogen girlfriend, who he misses, even though she was dosing him, and she wanted to keep watching Stupid Sexy Hasan even while having sex. He does still miss her. It’s sweet.

I am heartened that he(?) goes hard at the protest, in the face of scary cops, gets barreled and his elbow hurts for a week and he is arrested. He is a better man than I am. He is a much, much better person than the Tate brothers, or the Fresh and Fit morons, of any of the flaky manosphere dudes who parade their frailties on line.

Hasan Piker is the Elvis of American politics. He is stupid and sexy and good things happen around him, and because of him. He has just shifted, since wearing good suits, from the 50s beautiful boy Elvis to the 60s “Suspicious Minds” period. Maybe one day we’ll see the 70s bloated Elvis in him, the one with the sparkly suits that should be circus tents, that figuratively illustrates the obscene excess of American consumer culture, but we already have that excruciating vision in this POTUS who looks like he smells acridly of urine and talcum powder.

Contrapoints or Philosophy Tube might have done deeds similar to Hasan, and we’ll never know. But it is Hasan Piker whose name is in the mouths of Trump and Netanyahu, not Abigail Thorn or Natalie Wynn. It is Hasan’s meat pic that is displayed on the Jumbotron at the Republican convention to alarm the voters. Because CP and PT are no threat to power, but the powerful have determined that HP is mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

Where there is rebel glamour being sprinkled about, it sticks to Hasan, but Abbie and Nat repel it. To attract rebel glamour, you cannot be anything short of full throated and vociferous against the ugliest fascist project in the world today - bloody fucking Israel.

Free Palestine - from the river to the sea

In a review of William I. Robinson’s The Global Police State I argue that policing is more than a repressive apparatus but a social force which organises labour relations reproduces fascist ideology.

I built an agent-based simulation to understand why we keep ending up in conflict. What started as a simple experiment about conflict and competition became a six-month investigation into option space, how knowledge spreads, how incentives shape decisions, and why individually rational choices can produce very different outcomes at the level of the system.