Geoffrey Hughes

What on earth is this picture? Come on, guys.

Sorry to hear, but I hope you and your colleagues ask a bunch of really good questions that demoralize the people wasting your time and lead them to question their life choices.

A shepherd walks for days with his goats, fleeing Israeli bombardment in southern Lebanon, making his way toward the western Bekaa.

Syria, 2019

"The abandonment was not a miscommunication; it was a policy choice, made without consultation and executed without apology."

What this debate shouldn't obscure, though, is that if you're willing to use such an unreliable technology for target selection, then you're inviting people to imagine the most horrific mistake you could make and then telling them you don't care enough to make sure that doesn't happen.

Problem with such a sycophantic technology is that it's equally plausible that it would recommend that you bomb a school AND that it would apologize for doing so even if it hadn't...

Perhaps even more than other diasporas due to a combination of ideological self-selection, sanctions, and class differences, there's a real disconnect between the Iranian diaspora and the people who actually live there and any analysis needs to take this seriously.

The full video is here and of course the people they're asking who are in the streets and willing to talk on camera are more sympathetic to the regime than most, but the fact that so many monarchists in the diaspora would hand such an easy propaganda victory to their enemies says a lot...

A woman says "Do you expect a country..."

[continued] "that has brought prosperity to no one to bring it to you?"

A woman says, "People like these who sit in foreign countries..."

Same woman continued: "Living their comfortable lives"

Younger man says "I doubt they're even Iranian"

An older man says: "They're ignorant and senseless people"

Stills from a video of Iranians living in Iran responding to videos of Iranians in the diaspora cheering on the war:

I use a private school alumni labeler on my bluesky account and it never fails to produce the most fascinating insights.

Next Tuesday's session with Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis on their forthcoming book 'The Revolutionary Origins of Language' (Yale UP 2026)

Deep Dive: The CIA's Kurdish gambit and the war game with Iran When intelligence agencies leak information, it is rarely accidental. The CIA's recent disclosure of US involvement with Iranian Kurdish factions as a potential tool to pressure Iran, therefore, deman...

"So how does Washington move partners it cannot honestly reassure? By manufacturing public pressure. A leak that frames Kurdish engagement as already underway creates expectations among regional audiences, among Iranian intelligence, and critically, within Kurdish political communities themselves."

So I know the Gulf Countries are talking tough, but surely Iran actually unraveling into chaos would only open anyone who wants a tourism, shipping and finance sector up to more unpredictable forms of blackmail, right? And if so when do they try for a separate peace and what would that look like?

On the CIA backed coup in Iran in 1953: the flagship journal of Middle East Studies did a roundtable on the topic just two years ago, which includes authoritative summaries of the events, state of the field questions etc- and its all free and open access here:

not that this compares, really, but Heidegger and Arendt immediately came to mind here

then I thought about our current administration

The U.S./Israeli bombing of the school in Tehran is less the fault of AI than of the original decision to attack Iran. Targeting errors are entirely predictable in war, whether made by humans or by AI. Critique of operational flaws can inadvertently serve to cleanse a strategic choice of its evil

The guy is--as the drone's warnings make clear--just an architect trying to rebuild people's houses. But that's enough and such is the level of fear that he now has to live alone away from his family in Beirut... and as I said that's before things get really dystopian.

This piece starts with a vignette about an Israeli drone flying around broadcasting the message that “The architect Tarek Mazraani continues his conspiracies. Chase him. Drive him out so security returns and reconstruction begins" and then somehow manages to get MORE dystopian...

After Khamenei: War, Succession, and the Uncertain Future of Iran Pages from a War - Part I

Thread: In my latest, I reflect on the war with #Iran. I begin by examining the war’s early human cost, explore the uncertain succession process in Tehran after Khamenei's death, & discuss why the Islamic Republic may be more durable than many assume. guardeddomains.substack.com/p/after-kham... 1/6

There are also a huge number of Arabs and others from the global South still on Twitter and many of them seem to think the US is on the verge of collapse in ways that seem far fetched in the other direction. It's a true land of contrasts...

Nobody has understood the real, material nature of "modern civilisation" better than the Dirty Hippies, and everyone hates them for it.

We could have had cleaner air and water and a more livable biosphere AND lower energy prices, but here we are.

Not great that so much of the commentariat is absolutely dug in on the idea that advocating for a green transition was a sort of "luxury belief" and not the most hard-headed of realism and now that we're once again seeing how wrong this is, none of them want to draw attention to how wrong they were.

Incredible

Extremely on-brand for Tintin!

Source: read every single one multiple times as a child

‘Ancient hatreds’ and it’s Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot carving up the Middle East with a ruler in 1916

Would go so far as to suggest that the Middle East is the true heartland of realpolitik now while the self-styled "West" is mostly trapped in a malaise of ideology and the sunk cost fallacy.

A decade ago, Saudi Arabia was blockading Qatar for being too chummy with Iran and right now Iran is bombing both. The Houthis in Yemen were sworn foes of Saudi Arabia until very recently when MBS broke with the UAE and forced Emirati proxies out of the conflict there. I could go on.