Max J. Joseph

To make people without histories, to make them without futures. To make them prisoners of the present.

Keep lashing that back.

Busy night

Good time to remember that Google *deliberately* reduced contextual awareness in searches to drive higher search volume, meaning you would have to click more and stay on their website longer than you would normally have to - to increase their revenues. Big tech abandoned innovation as a means to improve quality of life long ago, but lawmakers steering failed economies are too slow, cowardly and unimaginative to really do anything about it.

The sheer volume of political ads in the US is overwhelming and really weird. Approaching the same tonality in Starship Troopers.

Beyond the fondly remembered films and shows, I will never forget watching him in the flesh alongside Ian Mckellen in Beckett's Waiting For Godot. Best live production I've ever seen. Nor will I forget approaching him with a group of friends in the cafeteria of my tiny college after he randomly finished a meeting there. An unbelievably warm and generous man even with giddy students mobbing him. RIP Sir Patrick Stewart ❤️💔

SOS need toom.

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.

Confused weirdo converted to Christianity and wants to rewrite 2,000 years of history to explain why.

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.

Other issues aside, if that means Elliot Anderson would have cost 40m instead of 116m - let them.

The main problem with the Internet today is that you only find what you're looking for.

Don't think you've seen me on Fridays after my office hours.

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.

Asterisk City @ManCity

In other words, need 20-30 more disillusioned young tech bros to quit their jobs and post about the apocalypse to maximize that $

Never known a country so intent on destroying itself.

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.

Nerds should never have this level of cultural influence.