Mostly words and pictures. Assyrians, patronage systems, transnationalism. PhD Political Science⏳
Chicago | London
Joined July 2009
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To make people without histories, to make them without futures. To make them prisoners of the present.
Besides the whole "wellness" online culture being a lucrative scam, people forget that the beginning of being "well" just means living simply.
Fewer products; more presence. Recover a sense of serendipity.
92% of health and wellness influencers include promotions in their feeds at least occasionally.
And around a third do so in half or more of their posts.
#Health #InfluencerMarketing #Wellness
ALT Chart showing that a third of health and wellness influencers promote a product or service in a majority of their posts.
Confused weirdo converted to Christianity and wants to rewrite 2,000 years of history to explain why.
Mardin Protestan Kilisesi Pastörü Ender Peker:
“Hristiyan Kürtlerin tarihi Hristiyanlığın ilk dönemlerine kadar uzanıyor”
“Bugünkü bazı Asuri ve Keldanilerin kökeni Kürt aşiretlerine dayanıyor”
“Hakkari’deki Nasturilerin çoğu Kürttü”
rudaw.net/turkish/categories…
Side note: Assyrians, Chaldeans etc are not an "ethnoreligious" group. Almost no people in the world are.
This reductive classification is another structural leftover from the Ottoman millet system and its categorisation of non-Muslims.
This conversation makes no sense. Ethno-national groups come to be always by a process. Jews had theirs obviously as have similar small ethnoreligious groups such as Assyrians, Parsis, Chaldeans, etc. It would be very difficult to make a single ethno-national group out of a universal religion with more than 2 billion followers. So it’s really not clear wtf you are talking about lol
No one said anything about conquest etc. but you are just writing words now.
Peshmerga unification between KDP/PUK is little more than an accounting trick to placate external pressure from the US.
These announcements are primarily for English-speaking audiences, not locals who know that nothing has changed on the ground re: the partisan duopoly.
The Peshmerga is more than a military force. It is a symbol of the struggle, sacrifice and identity of the people of Kurdistan.
Today is a historic day for Kurdistan and the Peshmerga; the process of unifying and reorganizing the Peshmerga forces has been successfully completed.
This unification is the first step of a long process, and the next phase is even more important. It must focus on strengthening military capabilities, providing advanced weapons and air defense systems, developing competencies, and comprehensively advancing the Peshmerga forces.
gov.krd/english/government/t…
In other words, need 20-30 more disillusioned young tech bros to quit their jobs and post about the apocalypse to maximize that $
OpenAI IPO will not happen in 2026 amid AI safety fears, Altman says reut.rs/4xnexIG reut.rs/4xnexIG
Never known a country so intent on destroying itself.
Alpha opened the first school in Chicago that uses artificial intelligence and has no teachers. abc7chicago.com/post/alpha-c…
Humans will destroy themselves not out of ignorance or fear, but vanity. All is vanity.
"Jewish and Kurdish leaders gathered in London for a two day conference aimed at turning 2,700 years of shared history into stronger political, cultural, academic, and diaspora cooperation."
"2,700 years" is a bit arbitrary, no? It isn't.
It roughly corresponds to the forced relocation of thousands of Israelites within the Assyrian Empire after the Kingdom of Israel was conquered. These Israelites became Assyrian citizens, and subsequently, developed their own trajectory in terms of language and culture depending on successive rulers across the region and the cultural influences they exerted onto their subjects. On a macro level, this often meant massive Arabic and Persian influences etc, but on a local level, this usually meant Assyrian given demographic clustering (look up the dialect, 'Lishan Didan'). Instead, the implication is seemingly that those ancient Israelites found themselves in the vague geography of a primordial and unrealised Kurdistan with neighbouring Kurds for thousands of years.
Modern day geopolitics means riding roughshod over history to imbue intersecting current political interests with some kind of historical meaningfulness instead of the cold logic that makes up its core.
Of course Israelis and Kurds - especially in Iraq - have a long history of working together to achieve mutual interests - both regional and local from the 20th Century onwards. Its no secret, for example, that most of the KDP's independent oil exports found their way to Israel (at its peak during the genocidal ISIS years, this represented 75%+ of Israel's oil imports, and up to 50% of the KDP's oil exports).
Because this isn't a state-state relationship, the usual norms don't apply. There has to be some projection of a noble quality to the relationship, where two groups of people - one with considerable state power and nuclear capabilities that is globally and tragically misunderstood and in desperate need of good PR and one without state power that was allegedly left behind by history despite developing billion dollar oil economies cocooned by foreign superpowers - can forge deeper material ties in a hostile region that go beyond this performance of 'commonality'.
The fact is that the material ties have existed for a while and make sense for both political actors respectively; what hasn't are these broad cultural ties that give them some kind of righteous and moral quality. This reality is seldom openly embraced but its there all the same: its modern political interests determining a cultural arrangement, not a cultural arrangement determining politics.
A conference bringing together Jewish and Kurdish leaders, scholars, journalists, activists, and civil society representatives opened in London on Sunday, marking a step in building strategic and grassroots solidarity between the two diasporas.
✍️ @alexbencarson
jpost.com/diaspora/article-9…
Nerds should never have this level of cultural influence.
"My prediction is that kids growing up won't be smarter than AI."
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, said that the world was yet to fully grasp how quickly AI could speed up development.
Speaking at North Carolina's G20 innovation Ministerial conference with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Mr Altman also urged governments to adopt the technology, saying doing otherwise would be comparable to rejecting electricity during the industrial era.
If I had a drink every time a book was published with the subtitle, 'The Making of the Modern Middle East', I’d be divorced with three kids by now.
It is immediately obvious from the first pages of this blisteringly superb book that a dominant undercurrent is the restrained exasperation of the teacher attempting to explain, to uncomprehending dolts, once again, that the earth moves around the Sun because of gravity. This is school teacher Sebag Montefiore at his absolute best. The story he tells is simple, yet complex. It needs, first & foremost, to be understood. To be understood, it needs to be explained.
It has been written to de-sting the viper of ignorance. It could be angry, but is not. Instead it oozes authoritative restraint, lubricated by the sublime use of language. I cannot emphasise enough how the author is the master swordsman of the English tongue.
It is not a dynastic narrative like ‘The Romanovs’, nor an historic travelogue like ‘Jerusalem’. It is, instead, a book written for recalcitrant learners by a still-patient teacher, restraining himself with the exasperated ‘have you not seen, have you not heard?’ of the prophet Isaiah. It’s telling us to ditch our preconceived certainties and embrace the complexity of a world that relishes too much its simplicities.
The narrative sweep is of the recent history of the Middle East (1909-2026), a region that is both the crucible (‘Cauldron’ even) of the world and the repository of its most ancient bigotries. The reshaping of the region following the demise of the Ottoman Empire has seen not merely expressions of power, local, regional and international, but the resurgence of the hatred of Jews, the restatement of Islamist certainties, the emergence of many new powers and, crucially, a rejection of both the idea and the reality of Israel. It also saw, from the ashes of both Constantinople in 1919 and New Delhi in 1947 a series of new & competing nationalisms that have blistered themselves to ancient certainties and prejudices that, alongside external meddling, keep the region in turmoil. Yet it has also seen pragmatism as well as religious certainty, idiocy as well as genius.
Is this a book about Israel? No, but overwhelmingly, Yes. Israel looms large in the whole. Although Sebag Montefiore’s story is focused on the broad sweep of leadership across the region’s 19 states the centrality of the Jewish question to the recent history of the region makes the book also the story of Israel, and its role in the creation of the region’s modern polity, rivalries and interests.
Pleasingly, one can see how this is a book designed to demonstrate to the dunces in the class the fervency of the Dalrymple and the simplicities of the Lineker simply do not work. It’s not hard to see its origins in the futile exchanges on Twitter/X in the years since 7 Oct 2023. It will do nothing to change the minds of those cursed with the vilest of hatreds, the warriors of anti-semitism who, like Miller and Albanese, are the cavalry of the apocalypse, bloody swords aloft, calling civilisation to its doom, but perhaps it will do something to teach the rest of us that Israel, for example, is the product not of Zionism, but of the very hatreds that fuel the anti-Semitic narrative. Jews of the diaspora came back together for the first time in 2,000 years to secure precisely the protection and freedom that the world had refused to give them and wishes still to dismantle. It was fuelled by the forced exodus of Jews from their Babylonian exile across the Middle East, the product of the very exclusionary hatreds that diminished the countries that expelled them and helped create an Israel that was anchored not in the ghettos of Lvov, but in the Middle East. 1948 was an expression of self-determination, not of colonialism, an end to victimhood and a determination by the world’s most persecuted minority to take their destiny in their own hands, not to allow it to be subject any longer to the ridiculous hatreds of others.
I cannot describe how beautifully this book is written. You’ll need to read it for yourselves to see what I mean.
If people thought social media was a big experiment re: human development, wait until sizeable research emerges on the effects of outsourcing almost every decision young people make and the ability to think through problems in all realms - social, educational and political - to LLM's. Social media just becomes a secondary venue for observing the effects of this phenomena rather than the primary staging ground.
In terms of its impact on psychology, its parasitic. The loss of confidence in one's own faculties to register a problem, let alone mentally and emotionally navigate it; the ability to produce volumes of text without ever having read a single page of original writing - never has so much been 'written' without ever having to read original words in the process; the narrowing of intellectual horizons through source uniformity and the effects that has on judgement, negotiation, and individual value systems.
The journey is now inconvenient, taxing, superfluous; all that matters is constantly arriving. But how can you really arrive anywhere without first having to take real risks?
And that's the main threat. Programming more young people to become increasingly risk-averse by eliminating struggle (even the tedious kind) and replacing it with a one-track ability to enslave a machine creates a sterile society of anonymous weirdos online who talk 'big' (in reality: nonsense) and produce nothing because there is nothing left to do except reinforce this stultifying process. Human imagination - or the magic dust that enables unpredictable, uncurated, and chaotic development in genuinely interesting directions across society - is being fatally eroded for ordinary people and kept inside a closed circle.
Everyone knows something is deeply wrong with all of this - what is being gradually lost is the ability to articulate what that is in an original and personal way. Now imagine the consequences that has for relationships, education and politics. Some people will read the inevitable research produced, sure, but fewer and fewer still will have any compulsion or ability to actually do anything about it.
So, to live 'simply' now (without using the machine as your primary brain) means to live in an uncomfortable, complex and interesting way. That's what 'simple' means now - funny, no? Sure, that may sap your already plummeting levels of energy through routine dopamine abuse but you can't solve this problem or the problem of life with it because life isn't a problem. Viewing it as such means accepting the insidious premise that spurred its creation while surrendering the limits of your own happiness and fulfillment. Life's conclusion is death - that is your 'arrival'. Why hasten it?
Realised recently that I pronounce "cicada" in a full American accent because nobody else I know has ever said that word, so I'm going to pioneer "ci-kay-ah" 🇬🇧
Max J. Joseph retweeted
" “Shimane ‘d Bakthathe”, meaning “names of women”, is an ongoing series of crocheted cotton tapestries, each embedded with the name of a woman in my lineage. It is a slow archive honouring the Assyrian women in my lineage by remembering and knowing their names."
"Shimane ‘d Bakhtathe: A slow archive of Assyrian women’s names" - Sara Jajou for @garlandmag
Story: garlandmag.com/article/shima…
"Shimane ‘d Bakhtathe: A slow archive of Assyrian women’s names" - Sara Jajou for @garlandmag
Story: garlandmag.com/article/shima…