Sharing Your Lack
Security never seems to make any progress. Despite military investments, security reviews and ever more powerful technological surveillance, European and North American populations are continually represented as unsafe. The most powerful states in the world, enjoying historically unprecedented levels of health, prosperity and stability, are simultaneously the most hysterically possessed by security-related fears. The compulsion to experience the self as insecure, despite evidence to the contrary, is the starting point for this paper…This paper explores how that ambivalence to the individual threat object works, despite simultaneous securitisation processes. As I will show in this article, terrorist groups are over-signified in political rhetoric as embodiments of evil which must be destroyed to bring about peace and stability, yet paradoxically their individual destruction does not seem to matter. Just when progress might be made, another evil figure emerges. - TandFonline
Iran’s President Pezeshkian: “The enemy had crude misconceptions about my statements; the enemy wants us and neighboring countries to be at war. We will not allow even an inch of our country's soil to be seized. If they seek to attack and invade our soil from any country, we are compelled to respond to this aggression.”
Israel‘s strikes on 30 Iranian fuel depots Saturday went far beyond what the U.S. expected when Israel notified it in advance, sparking the first significant disagreement between the allies since the war began eight days ago, according to a U.S. official, Israeli official and a source with knowledge. - Axios
According to experts, Israel is capable of launching nuclear weapons by aircraft, land-based ballistic missiles, and sea-based cruise missiles. Israel’s strategic ambiguity over possessing nuclear weapons also extends to its nuclear doctrine; i.e., the circumstances under which Israel would or could use nuclear weapons. This is where the Samson Option comes into play. - Eurasian Times
Considering the immense destructive power of nuclear warheads and the almost unimaginable ruin they are bound to cause, Dupuy reaches a provocative conclusion: whether they bring about good or evil does not depend on the present or future intentions of those who are in a position to use them. The mere possession of nuclear weapons is a moral abomination. - JP Dupuy
Sally Rooney: "I would like to ask my fellow writers & artists.. not to dwell too exclusively on what we stand to lose. There is another more important side to the story. To join in something greater than ourselves, to participate in.. a struggle for human liberation.”
In my opinion, the Iranian military has the most stylish uniforms in the world. They come in a dizzying array of colours and prints. There are at least three different desert camouflage prints, each to distinguish between the regular army, the Revolutionary Guards, and the tarabaris who repair military cars and trucks. Each has a slightly different colour palette and blotch density. There’s an arctic blue camo for the air force, and a green and brown forest camo with splotches of electric blue for the Air Defence Force, which operates anti-aircraft guns. - Guardian
In May 1977, a young leftist guerrilla named Abdollah Panjehshahi was shot and killed. This fact alone was not newsworthy: In the decade preceding Iran’s 1979 revolution, the monarchist state began a ruthless campaign of repression against the burgeoning armed-struggle movement. What made Panjehshahi’s death remarkable was that he was reportedly killed not by the Shah’s forces but by his own comrades for falling in love with a fellow revolutionary, Edna Sabet. In this talk, Naghmeh Sohrabi reconstructs this story of love, death, and revolution to shed light on notions of heterosexual love and intimacy in 1970s Iran. She asks: Why, in an era shaped – at least on the Left – by political and sexual liberation, did Iran’s young fighters uphold the curious mantra that “love is forbidden?” - When Love Was Forbidden
Software for humans of indeterminate age. We don’t know how old you are. We don’t want to know. We are legally required to ask. We won’t. - Ageless Linux
Recent record-hot years have caused discussion over whether global warming has accelerated. Previous analysis found acceleration (i.e., increase in warming rate) has not yet reached a 95% confidence level, given natural temperature variability. We remove the estimated influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation. The resulting adjusted and thus less “noisy” data show that there has been acceleration with over 98% confidence, with faster warming over the last 10+ years than during any previous decade. - AGU
“If they can afford the price of oil at $200 per barrel, let them keep playing this game.” - IRGC, Ebrahim Zolfighari
Europe faces a choice: stay loyal to a transatlantic partnership that imposes a foreign policy based on war and fossil energy, costing it trillions of dollars, or build an independent strategy grounded in climate stability, the everyday safety of citizens and international solidarity. - Trillion Dollar Bills
Chris Smalls: "Billionaires are not going to wake up one day and say, you know what, we're going to give the people what they want. We have to force them"
NBC: The growing list of highly sensitive operations green-lit from Mar-a-Lago all but guarantees the private club will go down in U.S. history as more than just a glitzy, top-dollar Palm Beach oasis, but the site of high-stakes presidential decision-making.
“The primitive passions, which all directly tend towards our happiness, make us deal only with objects which relate to them, and whose principle is only amour de soi, are all in their essence lovable and tender; however, when, diverted from their objects by obstacles, they are more occupied with the obstacle they try to get rid of, than with the object they try to reach, they change their nature and become irascible and hateful. This is how amour de soi, which is a noble and absolute feeling, becomes amour-propre, that is to say, a relative feeling by means of which one compares oneself, a feeling which demands preferences, whose enjoyment is purely negative and which does not strive to find satisfaction in our own well-being, but only in the misfortune of others.” - Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques, first dialogue
Comprehensive data privacy legislation is the best way to hold tech companies accountable in our surveillance age, including for harm they do to children. Well-written privacy legislation has the added benefit of being constitutional—unlike the flurry of laws that restrict content behind age verification requirements that courts have recently blocked. Such misguided laws do little to protect kids while doing much to invade everyone’s privacy and speech. - EFF
(I)n a historical process, things never just happen at their proper time; they always happen earlier (with regard to our experience) and are experienced too late (when they are already decided). What one should take into account in the case of AI is also the precise temporal order of our fear: first, we—the users of AI—feared that, in using AI algorithms like ChatGPT, we would begin to talk like them; now, with ChatGPT 4 and 5, what we fear is that AI itself talks like a human being, so that we are often unable to know with whom we are communicating—another human being or an AI apparatus. - GOADS
Iran may be activating sleeper cells outside the country, alert says
When humans are confronted with the Real – anything that disrupts our illusion of total control, our false narrative that all things fall under our ability to mediate – they experience a desire to return to an imagined previous harmony with reality Lacan called “the death drive.” The death drive is so named because the only way for an individuated subject to ever become one with unmediated reality is to dissolve its own subjectivity. Since the subject, in order to truly obtain the end goal of this drive, would cease to be a subject entirely, the death drive manifests in humans and societies as “the pursuit of the ever-elusive Real through the Symbolic” (p. 17). The true goal of the death drive is always deferred, yet the subject gains pleasure from the feeling of faux obtainment. This explains why, even as the Bomb produces horror in its threat to kill humanity, to end subjectivity, it also produces a strange appeal – humans are drawn to the Bomb’s apparent purity. Since this pursuit occurs within the Symbolic order, it also explains fort-da; the Real is ultimately beyond human control and obtainability, so humans find ways to represent the Real within the Symbolic and feign control over it (here and gone at the snap of our fingers). - The Real, The Death Drive and The Bomb
Anthropic AI is suing the Trump administration over being blacklisted by the Pentagon and being designated a supply chain risk that threatens national security. - More Perfect Union
