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glyko.bsky.social
glykosymoritis
@glyko.bsky.social
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A political diary: For a democratic secular masterless and borderless world; for individual and social autonomy*; for lifelong democratic civic education with democratic aim, the creation of participatory democratic citizenry. (Castoriadis*) #glykoreads
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glyko.bsky.social
Why fallacies don’t exist
(except in textbooks) maartenboudry.substack.com/p/why-fallac... By @maartenboudry.bsky.social
February 14, 2026 at 9:50 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Have you ever wondered why people believe the moon landing was faked, vaccines secretly poison us, and Mercury in retrograde can ruin your love life? Why does irrationality seem so pervasive? A popular answer, beloved by academics and educators alike, points to fallacies…
(A) You define your fallacy using a neat deductive argument scheme. In a valid deductive argument, the conclusion must follow inexorably from the premises. If the premises are true yet the conclusion could still be false, the argument is invalid-case closed. The trouble is that, in real life, you almost never encounter such clean, airtight blunders. You can invent textbook examples, sure, but flesh-and-blood cases are surprisingly rare. (B) So you loosen things up and abandon the strict realm of deductive logic. You add some context and nuance. Now you can capture plenty of real-life arguments. Great. Except there's a catch: once you relax the standard, your "fallacy" stops being fallacious. It turns into a perfectly ordinary move in everyday reasoning-sometimes weak, sometimes strong, but not obviously irrational. So what do real-life post hoc arguments actually look like? More like this: "If B follows shortly after A, and there's some plausible causal mechanism linking A and B, then A is probably the cause of B." Many such arguments are entirely plausible—or at least not obviously wrong. Context is everything. Imagine you eat some mushrooms you picked in the forest. Half an hour later, you feel nauseated, so you put two and two together: "Ugh. That must have been the mushrooms." Are you committing a fallacy? Yes, says your logic textbook. No, says common sense—at least if your inference is meant to be probabilistic. Here, the inference is actually reasonable, assuming a few tacit things: 1. Some mushrooms are toxic. 2. It's easy for a layperson to mistake a poisonous mushroom for a harmless one. 3. Nausea is a common symptom of food poisoning. 4. You don't normally feel nauseated. If you want, you can even spell this out in probabilistic terms. Consider the last premise—the base rate. If you usually have a healthy stomach, the mushroom is the most likely culprit. If, on the other hand, you frequently suffer from gastrointestinal problems, the post hoc inference becomes much weaker.
February 14, 2026 at 9:49 AM
glyko.bsky.social
The thrust of Hazony’s argument is that combatting #antisemitism is as alienating or more alienating to voters than anti-Semitism itself. This reasoning is both morally and tactically wrong. Polls continue show that a large majority of conservatives support Israel and oppose anti-Semitism.
The rise in anti-Semitism on the right is attributable to a handful of individuals whom Hazony is too cowardly and embarrassed to condemn. Like a vengeful alcoholic at an intervention, he is lashing out and blaming everyone but himself for the wreckage he helped create —the mirror-image of the left-wing Jew who makes excuses for his anti-Semitic comrades. Imagining himself a world-class intellectual, he is, for lack of a better term, a moron. How else could he have thought that forging alliances with European-style blood-and-soil nationalists would be good for the Jews, or America? Hazony sees himself as a scholar-statesman on the level of a Jabotinsky or Ben-Gurion when he's really an arriviste. In a reprehensible attempt to protect his access to power, Hazony is willing to gainsay his American co-religionists, who know better than him the threats they face. Watching Hazony's Jerusalem speech reminded me of no one so much as Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf from Philip Roth's novel The Plot Against America, in which Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election and keeps the country out of World War II. The oleaginous Bengelsdorf, who supported Lindbergh, becomes the new president's court Jew. "I have encountered considerable hostility from members of the Jewish community for allying myself in the 1940 election with the Lindbergh campaign," Bengelsdorf tells a Jewish family, one of whose sons lost a leg fighting with the Canadian army against the Nazis. "I am pleased to tell you that it took no more than two or three sessions alone with the president to get him to relinquish his misconceptions and to appreciate the manifold nature of Jewish life in America."
February 14, 2026 at 9:03 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Iran’s government most likely tracked the protesters through location data emitting from their phones, researchers later concluded. The move was part of a new phase by the authorities to combat opposition by tapping a vast digital surveillance infrastructure to track down dissenters who participated in the recent antigovernment demonstrations, according to human rights groups, researchers and documents.
February 14, 2026 at 8:52 AM
glyko.bsky.social
#Iran turns to digital surveillance tools to track down protesters:
As Iranian authorities restore some online services after crushing antigovernment demonstrations, they are using a technological dragnet to target attendees of the protests. archive.ph/8BHsU #Islamism #authoritarianism #tech
Iran, like China, has some of the world's most expansive known surveillance abilities. Technology to monitor mobile devices, apps and web traffic has been integrated throughout communications and internet networks, along with facial recognition and other tracking methods, according to groups that have studied Iran's capabilities. These digital surveillance abilities have received less attention than the internet blackouts that the government imposed during the violent crackdown to end the protests last month. But as authorities slowly restore some online access, they have detained people who were believed to have attended protests and subjected them to hours of interrogation based on facial recognition and phone data, according to accounts from Iranians and a government security official in the country. Some people who posted on social media about the protests and other political topics have had their phone SIM cards suspended - effectively shutting off access to mobile networks - while others received warning phone calls and faced banking service interruptions, according to a report that was released this week by Holistic Resilience, a digital rights group focused on Iran. The authorities' hope was to hunt down the "leaders of the riots" and arrest them, according to the government security official, who declined to be identified.
February 14, 2026 at 8:51 AM
glyko.bsky.social
No one should be surprised by this: Israel tried to give the Palestinians their own state multiple times, and each time the Palestinians responded with outrage and violence. The world cannot make the Palestinian leadership want a state. But outside of whether the Palestinians want this state, the world should also ask itself whether it wants this Palestinian state—not some theoretical state that European leaders imagine, but this state that is on offer.
February 14, 2026 at 8:10 AM
glyko.bsky.social
#Palestine ’s anti-constitution: The Palestinians are “asking” for a genocidal state, one that is committed to the erasure of all Jews within its borders and also all the Jews in the one Jewish nation beyond its borders. www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/... #antisemitism
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's constitution-writing committee has produced a draft of what would theoretically be the basic-law document of the State of Palestine. The document is a major blow to anyone's hopes of a two-state solution, dwindling as those hopes already were. The "Palestine" "Constitution," as currently envisioned, seems to be Abbas's way of burning everything down behind him. In Princeton Professor Zaid Al-Ali's English translation of the document, there is no mention of Jews or Israel. Reporting confirms the same is true of the Arabic original. It's not that other religions are excluded-there are specific mentions of the rights of Christians, for example. But the State of Palestine declares itself judenrein. Are there other problems with the text? Sure, plenty. For example, it endorses the "right of return" for descendants of Arabs displaced in 1948, by which it means their return to Israel. That is, it is the principle of the State of Palestine that Palestinians go elsewhere. The obvious reason for this is that a state that grants citizenship to descendants of the displaced would thereby end the "refugee crisis." Solving problems is not in the interest of the State of Palestine, so there will be no State of Palestine. There's plenty more, but there's no reason to go into it. To get caught up in other details is a mistake because the discussion should go no further beyond its status as judenrein. The Palestinians are "asking" for a genocidal state, one that is committed to the erasure of all Jews within its borders and also all the Jews in the one Jewish nation beyond its borders. The original Hamas charter, it's worth noting, was straightforward in its "struggle against the Jews." The Palestinian Authority's own proposed constitution doesn't mention Jews at all. This is the problem when dealing with each of the Palestinian national movement's leaders in its century-old existence: Jews are either excluded entirely or they are mentioned only as the object of a genocidal raison d'etre. To these Palestinian nationalists, Jews either don't exist or else they must be made to not exist. This should take some of the pressure off of Israel. After all, if the Palestinians don't want self-determination then it shouldn't be forced on them. This document is an anti-constitution-it is intended to prevent the need for a Palestinian constitution in perpetuity.
February 14, 2026 at 8:09 AM
glyko.bsky.social
On Friday, Georgetown University will announce that Liz Magill, the former president of the University of Pennsylvania who resigned in December 2023 after a contentious congressional hearing on #antisemitism, has been named the new dean of its law school. www.politico.com/news/magazin...
She Resigned as Penn President After a Controversial Hearing. Now She’s Back.
Liz Magill, the former president of the University of Pennsylvania, will be the new dean of Georgetown University’s law school.
www.politico.com
February 14, 2026 at 8:00 AM
glyko.bsky.social
T-shirts displaying the poster of the Olympic games hosted in Nazi Germany have sold out on the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) website…
IOC defends ‘heritage’ shirt celebrating games used by Hitler to promote the idea of Aryan supremacy. archive.ph/Nq6yC #nazism #HistoricalPoliticalMemory
The 1936 Berlin Olympics, which took place under the reign of Adolf Hitler, were used as a propaganda tool to promote the idea of Aryan supremacy and the Third Reich. Figures in Germany have called on the IOC to stop selling the T-shirts on its website. The committee has defended the sale, however, saying the T-shirt is part of its heritage collection. The IOC also faced criticism this week for disqualifying a Ukrainian athlete who wore a helmet commemorating his fellow athletes killed in Russia's war, under rules that restrict political statements during the games. Despite the criticism, the men's shirts have sold out in all sizes. By comparison, T-shirts depicting the games in Rome in 1960, Tokyo in 1964 and London in 1908 all remain in stock. The shirt, which costs £34 and is part of the IOC's "heritage" collection, features the original poster design for the games by artist Franz Wurbel. The poster featured classical imagery to link symbols of the Third Reich with ancient Greece. A golden male figure, his arm stretched to the upper right out of frame, wears a laurel wreath under the Olympic Rings and above the quadriga chariot drawn by four houses atop the capital's Brandenburg Gate.
February 14, 2026 at 7:55 AM
glyko.bsky.social
The Pentagon has concluded that Alibaba and BYD should be added to a list of companies with alleged connections to the Chinese military…The companies are among a number the Pentagon believes could pose a threat to American national security. archive.ph/DOmlI #communism
When the Pentagon makes a "Chinese Military Companies" designation, it signals that the US believes the groups have direct ties to the People's Liberation Army or are involved in China's military-civil fusion programme, which requires them to share technology with the Chinese military. Inclusion on the Pentagon list does not have legal implications for most of the companies. But it creates reputational risk for them, particularly because it signals that the US may take punitive action in the future. However, the Pentagon also put Chinese biotechnology company WuXi AppTec on the list, which will affect its operations in the US. Under the Biosecure Act, which was passed in December, the federal government is restricted from doing business with "biotechnology companies of concern", which includes any entity on the 1260H list. The Pentagon does not publicly disclose many details about why a company has been added to the list. But the China committee in the House of Representatives last year called for WuXi to be added, saying its management committee included members of the PLA's Academy of Military Medical Sciences and PLA-run hospitals. The Pentagon also added RoboSense, which makes Al-powered robotic technology, saying the Shenzhen-based group is a military-civil fusion contributor to the Chinese defence industrial base. It also included BOE Technology, a maker of display panels for computers and smartphones. John Moolenaar, the chair of the House China committee, in 2024 urged the Pentagon to add BOE to the list.
February 14, 2026 at 7:44 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Iran wants him arrested. He’s going back anyway.
After Jafar Panahi is done promoting his Oscar-nominated film, “It Was Just an Accident”, he plans to return to his home country—despite the threat of a prison sentence. podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/r... Interview contacted by @hannarosin.bsky.social
The writer-director Jafar Panahi's new film, It Was Just an Accident, is the second Iranian film ever nominated for multiple Oscars. Panahi is in the United States for the awards season, but soon after, he plans to return to Iran, where he may well be arrested. His co-writer on the film was recently jailed after signing a letter objecting to the deadly crackdown on protests in Iran. Panahi, who also signed the letter, has been sentenced to one year in prison in absentia. His lawyer has said they plan to appeal the sentence. But Panahi doesn't seem afraid. (He made It Was Just an Accident in secret, as he has in the past with other films.) Even with the crackdown in Iran and violence against protesters here in the U.S., he says he still has reason to hope: "I see a greater future. I see from above."
February 13, 2026 at 7:24 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Carrie Prejean Boller is not going quietly: The former beauty queen, dismissed from Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, says that it’s “anti-Christian” to accuse her of anti-Semitism. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0... #conspiracism #antisemitism
I had hoped to ask Boller for her opinion about other claims made by Owens—that "Talmudic Jews" think "that we're animals, that they have a right to own us, that they have a right to make us worship them," and that Israel was complicit in the 9/11 attacks and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy—but she efused to engage and eventually ended the call. Rather than reckon with anti-Semitic statements from those she had defended at a hearing intended to confront anti-Semitism, she repeatedly attempted to reroute our conversation back to the safer ground of criticizing Israel. She either did not realize that she was using anti-Zionism as a pretext to launder vulgar anti-Semitism and its purveyors into the public square, or she did not care Although Boller may not be willing to answer such questions from a reporter, she is also not backing away from her views. Before our conversation concluded, she told me that she planned to show up at the Religious Liberty Commission's next meeting because, she argued, only President Trump himself has the authority to fire her. "I remain on this commission until I hear from the president," she said. "I want the president to admit: Is he 'America First' or 'Israel First'?"
February 13, 2026 at 6:49 AM
glyko.bsky.social
The Trump administration covertly sent thousands of Starlink terminals into Iran after the regime’s brutal crackdown on demonstrations last month, U.S. officials said, an effort to keep dissidents online following Tehran’s stifling of internet access. archive.ph/vcRUf #IranProtests #Islamism
Trump and Musk spoke in January about ensuring Iranians could use Starlink to access the internet during protests, the White House confirmed at the time. The administration's decision to procure Starlink systems came against the backdrop of internal debates over whether diverting funds to Starlink would undercut other important U.S. programs that fund internet access in Iran. For months, senior officials pushed Starlink as the best way to support antiregime movements inside Iran, alongside or instead of virtual private networks, known more commonly as VPNs. Mora Namdar, who until December led the State Department's Middle East bureau, in August sent a memo to Secretary of State Marco Rubio urging the acquisition of Starlink expressly for delivery to Iran. While her bureau "has funded a variety of VPNs and other internet freedom technologies, it is useless when the internet is shut down," she wrote. Namdar has long been an advocate for empowering Iranians to overthrow the regime. "The question has always been 'when' and not 'if the Islamic theocracy in Iran would meet its end," she wrote in Newsweek during another set of Iranian protests in 2022. The U.S., she continued, should "support the aspirations of the Iranian people for a secular democracy."
February 13, 2026 at 6:34 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Why the fall of Kurdish autonomy is Israel’s strategic nightmare:
Israel must now prepare for a reality where its northern border is contested by a regime that seeks to prove its Islamist credentials by succeeding where Assad failed. www.jpost.com/opinion/arti... #Kurds #Syria #Turkey
The end of the Kurdish buffer For nearly a decade, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) served as a vital, if unofficial, partner in the regional fight against radicalism. Its de facto autonomy provided a geographic and ideological break between the Mediterranean and the Iranian border and, more importantly, a bulwark against Turkish expansionism. That buffer has now evaporated. By moving Interior Ministry security units into Hasakah and Qamishli and forcing the integration of the Asayish (Kurdish security) into the state's central command, Damascus has reasserted a monopoly on sovereignty. But this is not the sovereignty of a neutral state. It is the consolidation of a regime dominated by former leaders of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a group whose DNA is rooted in Salafi jihadism, regardless of its recent pragmatic rebranding. Ankara's consent to the Damascus offensive against the SDF was no accident. It was a coordinated double win for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has effectively solved his "Kurdish problem" by proxy while strengthening a Damascus regime that looks increasingly like a Turkish protectorate. Israeli defense planners, who once viewed the decline of the "Shi'ite Crescent" (Iran-Hezbollah) as a strategic reprieve, must now contend with a rising Sunni axis that is equally, if not more, ideologically committed to the Palestinian cause as a pillar of its legitimacy. The danger for Israel lies in the shift from the devil you know to the zealot you don't. Bashar Assad was a brutal dictator, but he was a secular pragmatist. He understood the rules of the game; his primary goal was the survival of the Alawite minority. Consequently, the border on the Golan Heights remained the quietest in the region for 40 years.
February 13, 2026 at 6:25 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Zionism is a specific term that, at its core, revolves around one concept: Israel's existence. It can conjure all sorts of other ideas, emotions and affiliations. So for many Jews, belief in Israel's existence might be the necessary ingredient of Zionism but it isn't sufficient to describe their own worldview.
February 13, 2026 at 6:11 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Russian war losses now exceed recruitment: Russia sustained around 9,000 more battlefield losses in Ukraine than it was able to replace last month; Russian forces were unable to achieve significant gains on the ground even as they sustained heavy losses. archive.ph/xhYG2 #RussiaUkraineWar
In December, Russian losses were about equal to Moscow's monthly recruitment, the officials said. The deficit faced by Moscow in January suggests Ukraine's strategy appeared to be having some success, the Western officials said, although it remains to be seen whether Kyiv is able to maintain the recent dynamics. Ukraine's top general, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said last week that the situation along the 1,200-kilometer (746-mile) front "remains difficult," with Russian forces launching attacks across the breadth of a contact line stretching from the Donbas region in the east to the mouth of the Dnipro river in the south. But advances remind grinding and sluggish, with Russian territorial gains amounting to less than 1% of Ukraine's land area over the last three years, according to data from DeepState, a conflict mapping service that cooperates with Ukraine's Defense Ministry. Syrskyi said that while Russia had appeared to exceed its goals for military recruitment, the number of its troops on the battlefield had remained steady for six months. He put the number at as many as 712,000. The increasing losses being sustained by Putin's forces complicate the narrative pushed by Moscow - and at times echoed by US President Donald Trump's administration - that Russia's advantage on the ground means that its victory is inevitable. At the current rate, it would still take Russian troops another two years to fully take the eastern Donetsk region, the officials said. The Kremlin has demanded full possession of Donetsk and neighboring Luhansk as part of peace talks. Putin would be unlikely to opt for such a mobilization, an option that's proved deeply unpopular within Russia. He's avoided any repeat of a September 2022 call-up of 300,000 reservists that prompted an exodus of hundreds of thousands from the country and triggered a spike in public discontent with the war.
February 13, 2026 at 6:01 AM
glyko.bsky.social
#Iran rushes to protect Natanz, its most crucial nuclear site, from potential US strike: Tehran may have used the delay in the US's potential strike to make the beneath-mountain facility nearly untouchable. www.jpost.com/middle-east/... #Islamism #nuclearweapons
High-resolution satellite imagery of Iran's largest and most crucial remaining nuclear facility shows a recent rush to protect it from potential US or Israeli aerial attack, according to the Institute for Science and International Security (the "good ISIS"). Satellite imagery on Tuesday appeared to show that Tehran has taken advantage of delays in any such attack since the December 28 protests started to better defend the facility. The nuclear facility in question is a large tunnel complex at Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La, aka Pickaxe Mountain. It is near a series of Natanz nuclear facilities that were the center of the Islamic Republic's nuclear program until the 12-day war between Israel and Iran last June. Most of the other numerous Natanz facilities, including existing centrifuges at the time, were destroyed in the conflict. For reasons that have not been fully explained, this facility was not struck. Construction at the site started by 2021, and the ISIS think tank and The Jerusalem Post revealed its existence to the public in early 2022. There are "ongoing efforts to harden and defensively strengthen two of the tunnel entrances into the facility," the think tank said in its latest report. "Imagery shows ongoing activity throughout the complex related to this effort, involving the movement of numerous vehicles, including dump trucks, cement mixers, and other heavy equipment like backhoes and truck-mounted cranes." "As of February 10, concrete is being poured on top of the Western tunnel entrance extension," the report said. "At one of the eastern tunnel entrances, rock and soil can be seen pushed back and leveled on top of the tunnel portal. Additionally, over the last month, a concrete-reinforced headworks for the tunnel entrance extension was added. This allows for additional overburden in the form of additional rock, soil, or concrete." "These efforts strengthen the tunnel portals and provide additional protection against an airstrike," the report added. "Nearby the eastern tunnel portals, piles of construction materials can be seen on the ground." "The ongoing presence of heavy construction machinery and materials around the site indicate that the facility is likely not yet ready for operations, however, over the last two months, smaller vehicles and closed-roof vehicles have also been observed near the entrances, indicating that Iran may be in the process of outfitting the interior of the tunnel complex," the ISIS report said.
February 13, 2026 at 5:53 AM
glyko.bsky.social
The Colors of Zion: Blacks, Jews, and Irish from 1845 to 1945.
By George Bornstein #glykoreads
February 12, 2026 at 10:04 PM
glyko.bsky.social
The Fall of Europe: From Paris to Birmingham to Brussels, antisemitism is the new normal—again www.tabletmag.com/sections/new... By @marcweitzmann.bsky.social #antisemitism #Islamism #Jihadism #authoritarianLeft #HistoricalPoliticalMemory
In a worldwide study of more than 10 million tweets and posts published between Oct. 7, 2023, and Oct. 7, 2024, the French researcher Hugo Micheron found that the number of shares and comments on the massacre swiftly reached a historic peak, higher than even the war in Ukraine, and remained abnormally high. All discussion groups across the globe were affected, even those having nothing to do with the Middle East, such as anti-vaxxers and climate skeptics. This is a new and unprecedented phenomenon, he told me. "With Oct.7, the very concept of war adds to its physical nature an informational component that touches everybody. We have entered the era of the First World War on information." What follows is an attempt to describe the effects of this information war launched by Hamas in Europe.
February 12, 2026 at 7:35 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Senior Iranian diplomats transported large amounts of cash to Beirut in recent months, using diplomatic passports to move funds to Lebanon’s #Hezbollah.
The transfers involved at least six Iranian diplomats who carried suitcases filled with US dollars on commercial flights to Lebanon. #IranProxies
Iranian diplomats ferrying millions in cash to Hezbollah
Iran International has obtained information alleging that senior Iranian diplomats transported large amounts of cash to Beirut in recent months, using diplomatic passports to move funds to Lebanon’s H...
www.iranintl.com
February 12, 2026 at 6:49 AM
glyko.bsky.social
#India seizes three tankers in first action against Dark Fleet: It’s the first time New Delhi has taken such action…and comes as the US and Europe lead an effort to get tougher on vessels moving sanctioned oil. archive.ph/YY1HL #DarkFleet #sanctions
The seizures are also happening as Washington pressures New Delhi to stop taking Russian crude, as part of a deal to cut import tariffs on the South Asian nation. India said early last year that it wouldn't allow sanctioned tankers to discharge at its ports. The coast guard didn't name the vessels it had seized, but shared photos of them in its post. The pictures matched past images of the Chiltern, Asphalt Star and Stellar Ruby that can be found on MarineTraffic, a ship-tracking intelligence platform. Ship-intelligence platform TankerTracker.com identified the same vessels through their unique seven-digit IMO numbers. All three ships were sanctioned by Washington last year for links to the Iranian oil trade. Nobody responded to emails seeking comment at offices of the registered owners of the tankers as listed on the Equasis database. Calls made to the owners and manager of Chiltern and Asphalt Star were directed to voice mail. Calls made to the owner and manager of Stellar Ruby were not answered. The three vessels seized by the Indian Coast Guard were being escorted to Mumbai for further investigation, a spokesperson said on Monday. The so-called shadow, or dark, fleet is a group of around 1,500 tankers that carry Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan oil around the world. Malaysian authorities released two aging tankers earlier this month that it had detained for conducting a ship-to-ship transfer of oil without permission.
February 12, 2026 at 6:45 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Life in Cuba is grinding to a halt under U.S. oil blockade: The island is in crisis as airlines cancel flights, hotels close and authorities furlough workers www.wsj.com/world/life-i... #authoritarianism #communism #Cuba
Daily life in Cuba is grinding to a halt under a U.S. campaign to block the island's oil imports, drawing international criticism that the Trump administration is pushing the island toward a humanitarian crisis with no clear endgame. The Caribbean island's Communist authorities are rationing dwindling fuel supplies, curtailing public transportation and furloughing workers. Children are being sent home from school early, people can barely afford basic food like milk and chicken, and long lines have sprung up at gas stations. Cuba's crucial tourism industry is paralyzed. Some popular hotels, crippled by ongoing blackouts, have begun to shut down, ferrying remaining guests to other lodging, according to Russia's tour-operator agency. With more than 4,000 Russian tourists in Cuba, Moscow-backed state airline Aeroflot said it was restricting service and flying an empty plane to pick up tourists. Air Canada, which said it had 3,000 customers in Cuba, said it was suspending service to the country because of the fuel shortage. Other airlines said they would refuel in neighboring islands for now. The swiftly deteriorating conditions in Cuba come after the Trump administration effectively set up an oil blockade last month. The last oil delivery to the country was a Jan. 9 shipment from Mexico, which has since halted supplies under U.S. pressure. Cuba has also lost crude deliveries from Venezuela since the U.S. raid on Jan. 3 that captured authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro, ending all support for Cuba from its biggest backer.
February 12, 2026 at 6:35 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Even the hospitals aren’t safe in Iran: As the regime imposes a forced forgetting of the massacres in January, it has begun targeting not only wounded protesters but medical workers, who have borne witness to some of the worst atrocities. archive.ph/n9sjw #Islamism #Iran
Once it became clear that the emergency wards themselves weren't safe, "many colleagues started calling in sick—or not showing up for their shifts," Anush said. He began volunteering at a privately owned clinic, which was filled with injured people. And yet word of the clinic's existence soon reached security officers, who vandalized it and interrogated the doctor who ran it. For many of the wounded, the threat of disappearing into Iran's prisons far outweighs the risks of forgoing medical help. The problem has been especially grim in remote regions, where private clinics are scarce, and patients must travel long distances to get care. Volunteers have organized medical convoys and ferried patients across the country to safe operating rooms.
February 12, 2026 at 6:28 AM
glyko.bsky.social
The Brotherhood-Hezbollah Axis: The capture of a senior Muslim Brotherhood figure in southern Lebanon exposes Sunni-Shiite cooperation on the battlefield, shattering Western assumptions and forcing Washington to confront a unified Islamist war effort tied to Iran www.ynetnews.com/opinions-ana...
The recent operation carried out by the ID's special forces in the rugged terrain of southern Lebanon was more than a tactical success; it was a profound intelligence revelation that should fundamentally reshape Western security doctrine. The target was Atwi Atwi, a senior official and former mayor from the village of Hebbarieh, who served as a high-ranking operative for al-Jamaa al-Islamiya -the Lebanese branch of the international Muslim Brotherhood. While many in the West have spent years clinging to the comforting myth of a permanent, unbridgeable sectarian divide between Sunni and Shiite Islamists, the capture of Atwi Atwi provides the smoking gun that proves the existence of a unified, kinetic Jihadi High Command. This operation effectively dismantles the outdated notion that theological differences prevent a cohesive military alliance between the Sunni "Ikhwan" and the Shiite "Resistance Axis" led by Tehran. For decades, the Western diplomatic core has been held hostage by a worldview that assumes Sunni groups like the Brotherhood would naturally act as a bulwark against Iranian expansionism. This was a lethal miscalculation. As the reality on the ground in southern Lebanon shows, the shared obsession with dismantling the Western-led regional order and the destruction of the Jewish state far outweighs any internal disputes over historical caliphates. Atwi Atwi was not plucked from a legislative chamber or a religious school; he was taken from a building in the Mount Dov area where intelligence indicates he was coordinating active military operations in seamless integration with Hezbollah. This is the crucial point that policymakers must internalize: al-Jamaa al-Islamiya has successfully transitioned from a fringe political entity into a vital kinetic adjunct of Iran's war machine. By providing a Sunni face to the Iranian-backed struggle through its armed wing, the Fajr Forces, the Brotherhood offers Tehran a degree of "pan-Islamic" legitimacy that it could ne… Washington must now face a long-overdue policy reckoning. The U.S. government took a significant step in January 2026 by formally designating the Lebanese, Jordanian, and Egyptian branches of the Muslim Brotherhood as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOS). This designation was not an act of political theater; it was an acknowledgment of the ground truth that Atwi Atwi's capture has now confirmed. To treat these groups as anything less than full-fledged combatants is to effectively subsidize the very infrastructure that Tehran uses to bypass sanctions and expand its regional footprint. If a group shares intelligence, coordinates logistics, and executes military operations alongside Hezbollah, it is a terrorist organization by any functional or legal definition. The time for nuanced academic distinctions between "moderate" and "radical" Islamists has ended; the time for kinetic consequences has arrived. The security implications of the Brotherhood-Hezbollah axis extend far beyond the borders of Lebanon. This alliance serves as a blueprint for a "new" Middle East—a region where radicalism is no longer siloed by sect but unified by objective. When the international community allows these groups to operate in the gray zones of domestic politics, it is providing oxygen to a fire designed to consume the entire regional security architecture. The capture of Atwi Atwi should trigger an immediate and aggressive freeze on all assets and entities linked to the Lebanese Brotherhood across all jurisdictions, mirroring the rigorous sanctions regime currently applied to Hezbollah and Hamas. Furthermore, the international community must signal to the Lebanese state that its continued "cohabitation" with Brotherhood-linked militias will no longer be tolerated under the guise of national unity. If the official security structures of Lebanon cannot or will not distinguish themselves from the Jihadi High Command, then they must be treated as part of the problem rather than the solution…
February 11, 2026 at 6:50 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Tibet’s forgotten independence: China’s biggest historical lie www.eurasiareview.com/09022026-tib... #communism #HistoricalPoliticalMemory
February 11, 2026 at 6:40 AM