HeavenlyPossum

Australia just granted asylum to five Iranian football players who faced credible death threats from Iranian officials for refusing to sing the Iranian national anthem at a match.

I’m very grateful that these women are safe. Good for them.

This is also a really good illustration of the capricious and arbitrary violence of borders. Australia maintains a concentration camp in the island country of Nauru where it holds refugees, *including Iranian refugees*, in atrocious and abusive conditions.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-16/iranian-asylum-seeker-exposed-to-torture-australian-detention-un/106234112

Well well well would you look at that:

“The low point in violent crime has arrived even though large police departments employed 6 percent fewer officers going into 2025 than they did at the beginning of 2020, according to a survey by the Police Executive Research Forum. Though they were mostly not in fact defunded, police forces were rocked by retirements and departures. New Orleans lost nearly a quarter of its officers in the years after the pandemic—and then recorded its lowest homicide rate since the 1970s in 2025. Philadelphia had its lowest per-capita police staffing since 1985—and just clocked its lowest murder rate since 1966.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/great-crime-decline/685695/?gift=1SbYZC9ibNUWbkW55Dp60vEhEml04LWtQPZJDK2f5XQ&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

Trump is considering a ground invasion of Iran. There are already indications that specific units have been identified as possible elements to deploy.

It’s hard to overstate what a disaster this would be for everyone involved. This is the sort of action that would quickly and permanently render the US defunct as the paramount player on the geopolitical stage.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-privately-shown-serious-interest-us-ground-troops-iran-rcna262176

As an anarchist, I often hear questions about how, exactly, we would stay safe in a world full of rapists and murderers without the state’s protective monopoly over violence. So I often have to remind people that not only does the state often decline to protect people facing harm… https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/mar/05/queensland-police-kelly-wilkinson-turned-away-murder-inquest-ntwnfb#:~:text=Kelly%20Wilkinson%20was%20turned%20away,2021%2C%20an%20inquest%20has%20heard

A US nuclear submarine sunk an Iranian destroyer and killed more than a hundred sailors in a surprise attack with a torpedo at periscope depth so that Pete Hegseth could get a boner and post cool war videos to his twitter feed.

This present reality is so hyperreal that I think it would kill Jean Baudrillard if he weren’t already dead.

Bahrain is a small island country in the Persian Gulf, just off the coast of Saudi Arabia. It’s only about 780 square kilometers in area, into which are packed about a million and a half people. Like the other Gulf states, it’s an absolute monarchy under the Khalifa dynasty and only about half the population are citizens, with the rest being foreign workers. Unlike the other Gulf states, though, the majority of the citizen population are Shia Muslims, while the Khalifa dynasty is Sunni.

Bahrain’s Shia are generally discriminated against, shut out from any positions of power and living in poverty. During the Arab Spring, Bahrain experienced massive but peaceful protests against the monarchy, mostly by its Shia majority. Saudi Arabia feared the possibility of a Shia-dominated state just off its coast and sent in military forces, massacring protesters and crushing the uprising.

There have been a few efforts to get protests started again, and a half-hearted Shia insurgency that never accomplished much, but the regime and its Saudi guarantors were too strong and ruthless to overcome.

I often like to point out that electoral republics—what most people might call “liberal democracies”—don’t actually reflect or act to achieve the preferences of their electorates.

And someone will inevitably chime in and claim that this might be true for places like the US, with its tortuously anti-democratic political system, but not for the enlightened democracies of, say, Europe.

But just the other day Kemi Badenoch, leader of the UK’s Conservative Party, said that the UK government didn’t need to hold even a parliamentary vote on whether the UK should join the US/Israeli war on Iran, because parliament is full of “extremely silly people” who are too left-wing to trust with a decision about war.

I cannot emphasize enough that the people who populate these institutions hold you in utter contempt and find the idea of you making decisions for yourself to be absurd.

https://thecritic.co.uk/bickering-as-the-bombs-fall/

Trump has announced that the US will insure maritime shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and escort vessels through the narrow waterway, which Iran has announced it has closed.

https://maritime-executive.com/article/trump-u-s-will-provide-risk-insurance-for-all-shipping-in-the-gulf

The US, of course, has no capacity to make good on this guarantee. It is, like everything Trump says, something he imagines will gain him personal advantage in that specific moment and which he expects his underlings will then scramble to turn into reality, or at least a superficial facsimile of reality that will allow him to plausibly claim victory.

Anyone (Keir Starmer, I’m looking in your direction) who expects Trump to deliver what he says he will is akin to the fool asking for wishes from one of those ironic, literally-minded genies. You’ll get what you asked for; it will just be the shittiest, most harmful version someone could imagine.

There’s an Australian influencer who posted a video of herself watching Iranian missiles being intercepted over Dubai and saying “It’s not meant to be happening here.”

And she’s getting dragged all over social media for demonstrating such thoughtless privilege, but I can’t really be mad at her: she was just giving voice to a feeling that I suspect SO MANY people are feeling or would be feeling in her situation.

When you’re taught, from the moment you’re born, by every piece of media and every person in a position of authority and every institution in your life, that the world works a certain way and will always act that way, it can be really, really hard to accept reality when things don’t work that way.

I wish desperately that all the US liberals fawning over Canadian and European leaders for “standing up to Trump” would learn a lesson now that those same leaders are all falling into line behind Trump’s war on Iran, but I do not have high hopes.

I hope we can finally put the “wisdom of the founders” trope to rest. Even if the framers of the US constitution had been attempting to create a sort of stable democracy—they weren’t, they were mostly slaver oligarchs—then their tricameral system of checks and balances has failed utterly and spectacularly.

It’s done, gone. The US political system has concentrated absolute power to launch global wars on a whim in the hands of a fascist pedophile who has probably also been suffering from frontotemporal dementia at least since his first term in office eight years ago.

RE: @rad@todon.eu

Comrades, if you have the means, please consider helping out Rad (and his little kitty) get through this month.

Special shout-out to the Democratic Party for spending decades working with Republicans to build an imperial presidency and then hand it over to a demented fascist pedophile to use as his personal toy.

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, hierarchies of power are bad not just for the people at the bottom, but also for the people at the top, and here is an excellent illustration of that principle:

https://www.thedial.world/articles/news/south-africa-apartheid-police-state

I think a lot about Joseph Tainter’s explanation for why societies collapse.

In his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Tainter argues that societies tend to add complexity to solve problems, but experience declining marginal returns to that complexity. If that additional complexity reaches a point where returns have stopped growing, the society becomes vulnerable to collapse; if those returns turn negative, it will probably collapse, a shedding of complexity that makes sense as an economizing response.

1/3

Someone tried to burn down a warehouse in Kansas City that ICE wanted to buy for its concentration camp system.

This person is now being hunted by police and will be arrested and prosecuted for a crime if caught.

If someone had burned down Auschwitz during its construction, that person would be remembered by history as a hero.

@rechelon@mastodon.social has done the world a tremendous service and put the Zinelibrary back online:

https://zinelibrary.org

It became quite popular in lefty circles to dismiss the Russiagate investigations, because we did not need foreign interference to explain a fully home-grown American fascism and political crisis that was entirely the making of US political systems and elites.

But, I think that missed something important about those investigations, which was the extent to which they revealed links between deeply corrupt Russian and US oligarchs who were interested in spreading Russian-style kleptocracy to places like the US.

I think this essay captures that really well:

https://hegemon.substack.com/p/the-epstein-files-and-russiagate

Critical support to the Venezuelan students protesting against the US-installed Chavismo puppet regime in Caracas.

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2026/2/12/protesters-march-in-venezuela-as-national-assembly-weighs-amnesty-bill

Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler are a pair of anarchist economists whose work I’ve plugged before. Their approach to capitalism draws on Marx’s previous work, but rejects his labor theory of value and concept of socially necessary labor time as ways of explaining capitalist exploitation of labor.

Instead, their work draws on Thorstein Veblen’s concept of industrial sabotage to explain exploitation. Capitalists are not just unnecessary for production, the argument goes, but actively hostile to it, because they can only collect income by threatening to interfere with, or to sabotage, production.

1/4

Cops in Sydney assaulted people protesting against a state visit by Israeli President Isaac Herzog. They broke a 69-year-old woman’s back in four places. They accused the protesters of violence because the protesters marched *in the direction of police*.

I think it was just last month that some Australian lib was telling me that police are only bad in the US but fine everywhere else.

#ACAB

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/feb/10/woman-four-broken-vertebrae-sydney-protest-isaac-herzog-police-ntwnfb

Kier Starmer’s approach of “don’t blame me for appointing an Epstein accomplice as ambassador to the US, blame my scheming viziers whom I hand-selected” is a bold strategy, let’s see if it pays off for him.

I haven’t been able to corroborate this headline, but Rwandan press is reporting that the Rwanda-backed rebel group M23 has arrested Erik Prince, the founder of the mercenary group Blackwater, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Prince is also the brother of Betsy Devoss, Trump’s first secretary of education, because, you know, Epstein Class.

M23 is committing monstrous atrocities in DRC so that the Kagame regime in Rwanda can plunder mineral wealth in the DRC, so they’re not good guys to cheer for. But Prince is also a monster, so I will definitely celebrate bad things happening to bad people if this turns out to be true.

https://kigalidailynews.rw/reports-emerge-claiming-m23-detained-blackwater-founder-erik-prince-in-eastern-drc

It’s hard to read the sudden closure of El Paso’s airspace and shut-down of a major US city’s airport as anything other than incredibly ominous: https://elpasomatters.org/2026/02/11/unexplained-faa-order-shuts-down-el-paso-southern-new-mexico-airspace-for-10-days/

“New victories pour in daily”

Who said it better, Hitler in the bunker or the Trump regime in a press release

The next time you receive medical care, make sure to ask if the provider is relying on “AI” before they do anything to you:

“Cerebrospinal fluid reportedly leaked from one patient’s nose. In another reported case, a surgeon mistakenly punctured the base of a patient’s skull. In two other cases, patients each allegedly suffered strokes after a major artery was accidentally injured.”

…

“One FDA report in June 2025 alleged that AI software used for prenatal ultrasounds was misidentifying fetal body parts. Called Sonio Detect, it uses machine learning techniques to help analyze fetal images.”

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/ai-enters-operating-room-reports-arise-botched-surgeries-misidentified-body-2026-02-09/

The simplest explanation for Noam Chomsky’s enthusiastic embrace of Jeffrey Epstein is that Chomsky possessed wealth and prestige, and as a result experienced an affinity for other people with wealth and prestige and a desire for more wealth and prestige. That’s it, folks. People compartmentalize. Wealth and power are toxic and will corrupt even the most well-meaning person.

There has been a measles outbreak at an ICE concentration camp in Texas: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/measles-cases-prompt-quarantine-other-steps-ice-facility-texas-report-says-2026-02-02/ I’ve seen headlines reporting the same about a facility in Arizona. This seems particularly problematic in light of how little effort ICE is making to provide medical care to the people it had kidnapped: https://www.cbsnews.com/atlanta/news/ice-stopped-paying-for-detainee-medical-care-as-population-surged/ Most of the people who die in concentration camps, historically speaking, die from disease.

A lot of people are correctly noting the galling hypocrisy of US conservatives who spent decades fetishizing gun rights and specifically the insurrectionary theory of the 2nd amendment suddenly justifying a man’s public, summary execution on the grounds that he was (legally, non-threateningly) armed when he encountered police. And I get it. They are hypocrites. The hypocrisy is galling. I get it. But I am begging you to move rapidly past this realization to a place where you never, ever take this people seriously for even the tiniest moment. Everything they say, every single thing, is said instrumentally to achieve their goal of power in that particular moment. There are no principles. They will not feel shame when caught in the discrepancy. Do not waste time on it, do not entertain it, do not debate it, do not lend it credence as an idea that warrants a serious and considered rebuttal. Do not take them seriously ever again.

Anytime I say #AbolishThePolice someone inevitably comes along and asks “but who will keep us safe without the cops?” and meanwhile thousands of regular people in Minneapolis have spontaneously self-organized a round-the-clock patrol of the city, replete with a city-wide intelligence network and radio dispatch system, to keep themselves safe from violent assaults by the police.