Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Alexander Clarkson @aphclarkson.bsky.social · 5m

And if this really is the end of the phase of conflict in the Middle East that started on 7 October 2023 then perhaps the only clear winner is a once obscure insurgent leader called Ahmed al Sharaa.

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Alexander Clarkson @aphclarkson.bsky.social · 8m

There will be a lot of discussion about how far the Netanyahu has achieved his near genocidal war aims.

Nevertheless, Yahya Sinwar's delusional gamble destroyed Hamas's ability to pose a fundamental threat to Israel and pitched Hezbollah and Iran into disastrous strategic defeat.

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Alexander Clarkson @aphclarkson.bsky.social · 12m

Worth noting how irrelevant Iran seems to have been to the current negotiation processes around Gaza.

So much for the unity of fronts.

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James Austin @jamesdaustin.bsky.social · 14h

Everyone knows at least one person (normally, but not exclusively, a guy) whose gone properly mental due to net rabbit holes.

We see public figures regularly go mad and destroy themselves.

And we have, at a policy level, just decided to put our fingers in our ears and go nahnahnah

Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 14h

Last night I heard of another friend of a friend who has been lost to a rabbit hole of online propaganda. We need to start treating this as a serious public health concern.

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Alex von Tunzelmann @alexvont.bsky.social · 1h

I bang on about this a lot: I think the combination of a global pandemic, underregulated internet/SM, collapse/corruption of trustworthy media, plus now unregulated genAI, is a wildly toxic environment for radicalisation & mental health. We see the results of that in our politics & lives every day

James Austin @jamesdaustin.bsky.social · 14h

Everyone knows at least one person (normally, but not exclusively, a guy) whose gone properly mental due to net rabbit holes.

We see public figures regularly go mad and destroy themselves.

And we have, at a policy level, just decided to put our fingers in our ears and go nahnahnah

Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 14h

Last night I heard of another friend of a friend who has been lost to a rabbit hole of online propaganda. We need to start treating this as a serious public health concern.

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Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty @irhottakes.bsky.social · 9h

Imagine invading an American city for fascism then getting recalled because the dear leader saw you on TV and thought you were too fat and unattractive.

Nicholas Slayton @nslayton.bsky.social · 13h

The Texas Military Department confirmed to @taskandpurpose.com it had replaced some of the 200 National Guard troops sent to Chicago for not being "in compliance" with validation standards. This came after photos of heavyset NG members were widely mocked. taskandpurpose.com/news/texas-n...

Some Texas National Guard troops replaced in Illinois after failing to meet standards

An unspecified amount of Texas National Guard troops were replaced in Chicago, shortly after photos of their appearance were mocked.

taskandpurpose.com

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Holger Hestermeyer @hhesterm.bsky.social · 9h

But many cults serve their leaders in ways that are blatantly obvious for outsiders. /2

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Holger Hestermeyer @hhesterm.bsky.social · 9h

The ideas resemble a cult rather than a serious philosophical proposition /1
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist

The political svengali and investor has been giving lectures on ‘an evil king or tyrant … who appears in the end times’

www.theguardian.com

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Alexander Clarkson @aphclarkson.bsky.social · 9h

It's the same intellectual world that produced Dominic Cummings and Steve Hilton

Will Jennings 🗳️ @drjennings.bsky.social · 11h

Anyone writing about the influence of these thinkers really needs to provide detail on what they have actually written. Most of it is incoherent, lacking any substance and often downright weird.

Huw C. Davies @huwcdavies.bsky.social · 12h

Reading Thiel, Yarvin, Peterson et al. makes you realise what passes for intellectual iconoclasm these days is all absolute bollocks. Why anyone gives any of these people the time of day let alone credibility is baffling.

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Will Jennings 🗳️ @drjennings.bsky.social · 11h

Anyone writing about the influence of these thinkers really needs to provide detail on what they have actually written. Most of it is incoherent, lacking any substance and often downright weird.

Huw C. Davies @huwcdavies.bsky.social · 12h

Reading Thiel, Yarvin, Peterson et al. makes you realise what passes for intellectual iconoclasm these days is all absolute bollocks. Why anyone gives any of these people the time of day let alone credibility is baffling.

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Gregory Pratt @royalpratt.bsky.social · 9h

ICE/Border Patrol held a weapon on a guy who was demanding they show him their face in Rogers Park today

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Caitlin G. DeAngelis @caitlindeangelis.bsky.social · 10h

ICE kidnapped a 7th-grader with a pending asylum claim and spirited him out of state without notifying his parents, seemingly with the cooperation of the local police in Everett, MA.

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...

Everett 13-year-old arrested by ICE and sent to Virginia detention facility
By Marcela Rodrigues Globe Staff,Updated October 12, 2025, 44 minutes ago

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A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Everett after an interaction with members of the Everett Police Department and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia, according to his mother and immigration lawyer Andrew Lattarulo.

The boy’s mother, Josiele Berto, was called to pick her son up from the Everett Police Department on Thursday, the day he was arrested. After waiting for about an hour and a half, she was told her son was taken by ICE, Berto told the Globe in a phone interview.

“My world collapsed,” Berto said in Portuguese.

From the police department, the boy was taken to ICE’s holding facility in Burlington on Thursday evening, where he spent a night before being transferred by car to the Northwestern Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Winchester, Va., on Friday morning, his mother said. The juvenile facility is more than 500 miles away from Everett.

The boy is a 7th-grader at Albert N. Parlin School in Everett, his mother said. The teen and his family, who are Brazilian nationals, have a pending asylum case and are authorized to work legally in the United States, Lattarulo said.

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Alexander Clarkson @aphclarkson.bsky.social · 9h

Though the currency effects might be diminishing as the dollar slides, perhaps future economic historians will view the last decade as an era during which overdependence on the tech sector led the US economy to be consumed by Dutch Disease

Justin Wolfers @justinwolfers.bsky.social · 10h

"The U.S. is two economies. There's an enormous AI boom going on, huge investments, particularly in data centers. If you took that out of the numbers and you just looked at the non-AI parts of the economy, it's basically flatlining. We're on the cusp of a non-AI recession."
-- Me

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Alexander Clarkson @aphclarkson.bsky.social · 11h

If this was any other country you would have analysts and journalists discussing potential for state failure

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Alexander Clarkson @aphclarkson.bsky.social · 15h

This is best understood as the start of MAGA's post-Trump succession struggle

The Bulwark @thebulwark.com · 1d

Tim Dillon: "If you don't see a Republican candidate in 2028 that has the values that you think matter, will you throw your hat in the ring?"

Marjorie Taylor Greene: "I very much want to fix problems. That's honestly all I care about. And I am genuinely angry on behalf of every American."

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ceej @ceej.online · 17h

the disastrous refusal of the self-styled silicon valley technokings to keep anyone in their lives capable of questioning their increasingly incomprehensible politics has lead to a crisis of thinking so severe that a fifty-eight year old man believes something is important because he knows about it

Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · 20h

thiel, man, what the fuck are you talking about

He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:

The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.

Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.

Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month.

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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 16h

My version of this is that Vought, Yarvin etc represent a kind of braindead right-Gramscianism, which leaves out all the interesting subtleties and treats civil society _only_ as a realm of indoctrination, where one ideological master-narrative can readily be substituted for another.

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 17h

a key thing about vought — and all of these guys — is that they have a totally top down and hierarchical vision of the world. they believe that the cultural changes they hate can be turned off by destroying the federal government because they can’t imagine that they emerged bottom-up in society

Thomas Zimmer @thomaszimmer.bsky.social · 18h

What he’s railing against is a profound shift in culture, status… He’s obsessed with the idea that America is controlled by a leftist “ruling elite” - but “elite” isn’t defined socio-economically or by political power, it means something like: Getting to define “real America” and who gets to belong.

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Matthew Gault @mjgault.bsky.social · 16h

destroyed digital media so he can force you to attend an in-person lecture and listen to his half-baked 2004-era AV Club essays

Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · 20h

thiel, man, what the fuck are you talking about

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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 16h

Pritzker: "If the Constitution means anything -- and I guess we all are questioning that right now -- the Insurrection Act cannot be invoked ... they just want troops on the ground because they want to militarize especially blue cities in blue states."

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David Higham @oldtrotter.bsky.social · 16h

The whole strategy is a joke. They doomed themselves when they made those tax pledges and nothing is going to change until they admit their mistake and make the case for higher taxes as a way of delivering a fairer and more growth friendly system. They might even find people support it.

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David Higham @oldtrotter.bsky.social · 16h

More from the briefing to the Times. An oasis of political stability? A government with a massive majority being unable to get changes to WFA and welfare through the Commons , a PM with historic low levels of popularity and Reform ahead in the polls? That government?

The message is simple: Farage is ultimately to blame, as the man who de-livered Brexit with "easy sloganeering" then walked away from the aftermath rather than putting in the hard yards.

Or to put it another way: Farage, not us, is responsible for putting up your taxes.

The theme will tie to the main thrust of Starmer's argument at conference, that the Reform leader is selling easy solutions that are just a fantasy.

The other approach deployed by Starmer and Reeves will be to present Britain as a bastion of political stability.

Reeves will head to the International Monetary Fund in Washington on Wednesday where she is expected to argue that Britain is a sanctuary of eco-nomic responsibility in an increasingly unstable world, and open to business. She will nod to the political turmoil engulfing France as a counterfactual.

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Chrononaut @chrononaut.bsky.social · 16h

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 17h

a key thing about vought — and all of these guys — is that they have a totally top down and hierarchical vision of the world. they believe that the cultural changes they hate can be turned off by destroying the federal government because they can’t imagine that they emerged bottom-up in society

Thomas Zimmer @thomaszimmer.bsky.social · 18h

What he’s railing against is a profound shift in culture, status… He’s obsessed with the idea that America is controlled by a leftist “ruling elite” - but “elite” isn’t defined socio-economically or by political power, it means something like: Getting to define “real America” and who gets to belong.

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Shiv Ramdas Mens Rice Activist @nameshiv.bsky.social · 17h

the real takeaway here is even vance is on national tv saying that its totally fair to ask why trump sucks at making deals

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 17h

JD Vance: "We want to make sure that they skyrocketing healthcare costs of the Biden administration start to level off and hopefully come down."

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