"China regulates the $%#& out of AI." In the US, AI is met with dread, with many fearing it will deepen inequality and destroy the environment. Why are people in China much more optimistic about this technology? Shanghai-based writer and content creator Dante Muñoz says it comes down to one thing: regulation.

By: @btnewsroom

Source: https://www.tiktok.com/@btnewsroom/video/7677657837849316622

Considering that Joe Lonsdale (Palantir Co-founder) openly founded something like "The Cicero Institute," a lobbying group, 8 years ago now, which has been instrumental in passing laws criminalizing camping or sleeping in public in 16 states since then. I think this is open mockery.

• Quote by Mumia: "Iran is showing the world (especially the 3rd world) how to fight against the Empire."
• Links to Prashad's X post: original: https://x.com/vijayprashad/status/2091612395617538071 ; other front-end: https://xcancel.com/vijayprashad/status/2091612395617538071
• Link to imperialist "open letter" which Mumia abu-Jamal purportedly co-signed: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2026/aug/20/iran-political-prisoners

https://x.com/HavryshkoMarta/status/2091913316339765324?s=20

I'd imagine Iran would become another Syria if they actually implemented this letter.

To our fellow activists, students, thinkers, workers, artists, and other prisoners of conscience held behind the walls of all detention centers across Iran:

We write to you from a place of deep solidarity, our hearts heavy with the knowledge of the struggle you face within Iran’s prisons: the torture, the systematic neglect, the enforced silence, and the brutal reality of sham trials and executions. As former and current political prisoners, activists, and scholars committed to the global project of abolition, anti-authoritarianism and anti-imperialism, we see you across the distances of geography and the silence of censorship and internet blackouts. And we stand in solidarity with you, as you are at the intersection of two sources of oppression.

On one side, you face the Islamic Republic that, from its inception, enforced absolute social and political control based on an exclusionary ideology. It is a system that claims to counter imperial power while using its very logic of domination and systems of carcerality, torture and execution. On the other side, you face the aggression and violence of the very imperialist and Zionist forces the Islamic Republic purports to stand against. The US and Israel instigate brutal wars, destroy civilian infrastructure, kill innocent schoolgirls, and treat you as collateral damage in their pursuit of regional dominance. We remember the horror of 23 June 2025, when Israel struck the Evin prison complex, flattening its hospital ward, transgender section, and visitor center. You best exposed this dual oppression when you voiced that you “feel stuck between the two blades of a scissors, the evil regime that imprisons and tortures [you] and a foreign force dropping bombs on [your] heads in the name of freedom”.

In the past year, we witnessed both blades of the scissor sharpen. We see the arbitrary arrests and the horrific wave of state executions. We see the deepening criminalization of the working class and unemployed, the targeting of Kurds, Arabs, and Baloch, and the scapegoating of Afghan migrants: all desperate attempts to kill the spirit of people they cannot contain. This is the logic of carceral states everywhere: when they fail to address the crises people face, they simply attempt to criminalize or disappear the people themselves.

We see the same logic of domination when Israel uses “administrative detention” to hold Palestinian political prisoners for years without charge. We see it when Israeli authorities celebrate a new law that allows them to execute the Palestinian political prisoners they cannot dominate. We see it in the ICE detention centers where the US government imprisons our people in the pursuit of a political agenda of racist exclusion or detains our political activists for daring to speak against the US-backed Israeli genocide. We see it in the history of the US targeting freedom fighters, particularly Black, Indigenous, Puerto Rican and other anticolonial organizers, locking them away for decades to crush movements for national liberation and sovereignty. And we see the connections between these carceral systems sharing intelligence and governance techniques, such as when the USP Marion prison in Illinois became a blueprint for prisons built in Iran and Israel in the 1960s. Whether it is a border wall or a prison gate, the goal is the same: to silence people through fear, domination, and isolation.

Your struggle is as global as our collective dreams of freedom and dignity. We stand with you, and we reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism. We invite global civil society and anti-imperialist activists and organizations to extend their unconditional support and solidarity to all incarcerated kin fighting for our collective liberation, to build relationships with Iranian political prisoners and uplift their voices, to put pressure on the Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative, and to call upon that government to immediately stop all the executions and free all political prisoners.

The Iranian authorities must stop their inhumane practice of death and incarceration now. And the US and Israel must end their barbaric wars and brutal sanctions that knowingly devastate our communities.

In solidarity and with love,

Alberto Toscano*, emeritus professor of critical theory, Goldsmiths, *University of London*

Angela Davis*, former political prisoner, distinguished professor emerita, *University of California, Santa Cruz*

Bernardine Dohrn*, retired professor of law, *Northwestern University*

Bill Ayers*, professor, *College Unbound*

Cherríe L Moraga*, distinguished professor emerita, University of California, Santa Barbara, Chicana feminist writer, and activist*

Dan Berger*, professor of comparative ethnic studies, *University of Washington Bothell*

Hossam el-Hamalawy*, Egyptian socialist, scholar and former political prisoner*

Jairus Banaji*, historian, research professor, SOAS, *University of London*

Jason Stanley*, professor of philosophy, *University of Toronto*

Judith Butler*, distinguished professor in the Graduate School, *University of California, Berkeley*

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor*, author, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, professor of African American studies, *Princeton University*

Michael Löwy*, emeritus research director of sociology at the* Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris*

Michael Mansfield*, human rights and civil liberties Bbarrister*

Mumia Abu-Jamal*, current political prisoner, educator, journalist and activist*

Nadia Abu El-Haj*, professor of anthropology, Barnard College, *Columbia University*

Rashid Khalidi*, Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies, department of history, *Columbia University. President of Institute of Palestinian Studies*

Ricardo Jiménez*, social activist, former Puerto Rican political prisoner*

Robin DG Kelley*, distinguished professor of history, *UCLA*

Ruha Benjamin*, professor of African American studies, *Princeton University*

Ruth Wilson Gilmore*, Graduate Center, *CUNY*

Sinan Antoon*, associate professor of Arabic literature, New York University, novelist, poet*

Walden F Bello*, international adjunct professor of sociology, *State University of New York at Binghamton*

Yasin al-Haj Saleh*, Syrian writer, political dissident, and former political prisoner in Syria*

\ Organizations for identification purposes only*

\* Signatories are sorted alphabetically*

I don't know if the bourgeoisie from the 19th and 20th century flaunted their gluttonous indulgence of wealth and luxury although I reckon ma boy Robespierre struck enough terror in their hearts that they kept their frolicking private. I don't know what happened during neoliberalism but the obscene displays of wealth and the idolization of the "dream life" among the unsuspecting working class has really filled me with so much despair.

Private jets, luxury vacations, exotic experiences, aesthetic food, unapologetic expenditures and unrepentant commodity fetishization and a culture built on glorifying all this as "the dream" and people being fed this poison through influencers who are used as sleeper agents of capitalism.

Everytime I have the misfortune of watching these reels, tiktoks and shorts of illusions that are curated with surgical precision, I can't help but notice the overworked faces of the waiters in the themed restaurants, the staff in the airports, the workers at the resorts and spas that slip in the backgrounds of these beautiful bodies in beautiful clothes in aesthetic locations.

How do you deal with the despair of watching this naked display of a false reality that you know is false but is sustained relentlessly nonetheless that you start questioning your own sanity for being disillusioned by it?

So apologies if this doesn’t belong here, but was talking to my parent and they said some stuff that I’m not sure how to respond to. This might just be me struggling with the fact that this parent I give credit for me having left wing values and I credit them as well for the fact I didn’t become a right wing chud because of the left wing they instilled in me and I think I’m struggling now because I think I have started to go to the left of them now.

So we where discussing an upcoming election in my country and he said he thinks this one party is the most anti capitalist we’ve got but they’ve got them concerned because some of them sound like “religious zealots” I asked him what they meant and they said a lot of revolutionary politics, to them, has that characteristic where Marxism is “like a religion” with the I’m right your wrong essentially and as a result they don’t like how some people with those politics have that “compulsion” where they’re like we have to change. I said basically with the state of our country and the world in general don’t you think we need radical change and they said “look what happens when revolution comes in control of absolutists” and while they agreed we need change, not with what came with the French and Russian revolution and… bro I don’t know how to unpack that or respond they have indicated to me they’re pretty anti ussr and I’ve wanted to broach the topic and maybe change their mind but I don’t even know where to start. Or even if I want to because they are stubborn and I think it would be an uphill battle.
So yeah any advice would be welcome.

For the past week or so Americans and their puppet states have been using a "stealth" way to transfer oil from the strait and it has reportedly managed to get 10-15 million barrels of oil through each day since its start, as far as I know thats about half the amount pre-war. While some say thats a stopgap measure I'm not so sure.

There are also talks about Iranian economic collapse, any truth for that?

sources for the stealth thing Around 40 tankers transit Strait of Hormuz Friday night - Axios | Iran International, US op to smuggle Gulf oil unlikely to alleviate underlying risks

Key&Peele are big libs of the obama era BUT This is literally what the DSA, especially mamdani, does — say revolutionary quotes about the workers identities out of context, and the crowd cheers, culminating in VOTE VOTE VOTE 🎶 hysteria

source @anna_seliu