“When setting up my appointment, I asked about the out-of-pocket cost, and the staff looked at me like I had grown two heads. There was no cost, of course.”
1. “Credit scores. An arbitrary number that you have no control over can bar you from living in a decent area, landing a job, getting fair rates for insurance and loans, and even costing you opportunities to improve your life. Full disclosure: I left the US nearly 15 years ago. I now live in Poland and own my own business with full civil rights and privileges.”
2. “I lived in Northern England for a time on a student work abroad visa. I was in need of birth control, so I went to the doctor. I was offered an implant that wasn’t available in the US until years later. When setting up my appointment, I asked about the out-of-pocket cost, and the staff looked at me like I had grown two heads. There was no cost, of course. When my British roommate later became pregnant with her children years later, her doctor did house calls. She also received a year of maternity leave with a guarantee she could return to her job. Living abroad did a ton to break the spell of ‘American exceptionalism’ and showed me how a ‘we’re #1’ philosophy could blind us to subpar conditions. When I was young, I wanted to move from the US for positive reasons, like adventure. It saddens me that my desire for it is now due to a seemingly worsening quality of life and a tenuous political situation here at home.” —Anonymous
3. “I went to Panama on vacation and accidentally went without my asthma inhaler. I had to do was walk into a pharmacy — with no prescription required — and Albuterol was $11. In the US, with a required prescription, it’s about $150.”
Punishment by tar and feather of Thomas Ditson, who purchased a gun from a British soldier in Boston in March 1775. IMAGE/Interim Archives/Getty Images
Others similarly weighed in. Whoopi Goldberg on “The View” declared that Americans solve political disagreements peacefully: “This is not the way we do it.”
Yet other awful episodes come immediately to mind: President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed on Nov. 22, 1963. More recently, on June 14, 2025, Melissa Hortman, speaker emerita of the Minnesota House of Representatives, was shot and killed at her home, along with her husband and their golden retriever.
American politics has long personalized its violence. Time and again,
history’s advance has been imagined to depend on silencing or
destroying a single figure – the rival who becomes the ultimate,
despicable foe.
Hence, to claim that such shootings betray “who we are” is to forget
that the U.S. was founded upon – and has long been sustained by – this
very form of political violence.
First lady Jacqueline Kennedy leans
over to assist her husband, John F. Kennedy, just after he is shot in
Dallas, Texas, on Nov. 22, 1963.
Bettman/Getty Images
Revolutionary violence as political theater
The years of the American Revolution were incubated in violence. One
abominable practice used on political adversaries was tarring and
feathering. It was a punishment imported from Europe and popularized by
the Sons of Liberty in the late 1760s, Colonial activists who resisted British rule.
In seaport towns such as Boston and New York, mobs stripped political
enemies, usually suspected loyalists – supporters of British rule – or
officials representing the king, smeared them with hot tar, rolled them
in feathers, and paraded them through the streets.
The effects on bodies were devastating.
As the tar was peeled away, flesh came off in strips. People would
survive the punishment, but they would carry the scars for the rest of
their life.
By the late 1770s, the Revolution in what is known as the Middle Colonies
had become a brutal civil war. In New York and New Jersey, patriot
militias, loyalist partisans and British regulars raided across county
lines, targeting farms and neighbors. When patriot forces captured
loyalist irregulars – often called “Tories” or “refugees” – they
frequently treated them not as prisoners of war but as traitors,
executing them swiftly, usually by hanging.
In September 1779, six loyalists were caught near Hackensack, New
Jersey. They were hanged without trial by patriot militia. Similarly, in
October 1779, two suspected Tory spies captured in the Hudson Highlands
were shot on the spot, their execution justified as punishment for treason.
To patriots, these killings were deterrence; to loyalists, they were
murder. Either way, they were unmistakably political, eliminating
enemies whose “crime” was allegiance to the wrong side.
Ibtissame Lachgar has reportedly been arrested for the t-shirt with the slogan: “Allah is a lesbian” IMAGE/@IbtissameBetty/Pink NewsThe largest human rights organisation in Morocco, the AMDH, condemned her detention as “a violation of freedom of expression.” IMAGE/Getty
In London, a protest was held at the Moroccan Embassy on the same day, calling for the immediate release of activist Lachgar amid her struggle with cancer.
A Moroccan court has denied the release of feminist activist Ibtissame Lachgar, keeping her behind bars despite serious health concerns, as her trial for “offending Islam” sparks national and international outrage.
On Wednesday, her defence team asked
Rabat’s first instance court to free the 50-year-old on medical grounds,
citing reports that she is undergoing cancer treatment and could face
an arm amputation if urgent surgery is not carried out.
The court denied the request and scheduled the next hearing for 3 September.
At the hearing, Lachgar appeared with her
left arm in a sling, briefly smiling at supporters in the room. She has
been held in solitary confinement at El Arjat prison near Rabat since
her arrest on 12 August.
The co-founder of the Alternative Movement
for Individual Freedoms (MALI) was detained after posting a photo on
social media wearing a T-shirt that read “Allah is lesbian.”
In the caption, she described Islam, “like all religions,” as “fascist, patriarchal, and misogynist.”
If convicted under Article 267-5 of
Morocco’s penal code, which criminalises publicly or online offending of
Islam, Lachgar faces up to five years in prison.
Her sister, Siam Lachgar, who was in
France at the time of the arrest, said she had been worried after seeing
a social media post in which Betty reported cyber harassment, death
threats, and threats of sexual violence.
“Put the T-shirt in the context of Betty’s
whole fight. Knowing her activism in Morocco… She fights for individual
freedoms and women’s rights,” she told French media.
Until now, Lachgar had never been
imprisoned, despite engaging in provocative actions such as distributing
abortion pills banned in Morocco through her collective, which she
co-founded in 2009.
She is a polarising figure in the North
African country, known for high-profile activism in support of women’s
and LGBTQ+ rights.
Her campaigns have included organising a
“kiss-in” outside parliament, advocating for abortion rights, and
challenging conservative religious norms.
Inspired by radical feminist movements
such as Femen, the trained psychologist turned activist has staged other
controversial actions, including supporting a Dutch boat offering
abortions and reclaiming public spaces through civil disobedience.
In 2020, she told Moroccan weekly TelQuel,
“Rights and freedoms have to be taken… It is not by acting cautiously,
politely, or politically correctly that progress will be made.”
Her first prominent action was a 2009 picnic during Ramadan, which led to her first detention.
Tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel is thinking a lot about the Antichrist. IMAGE/X Screengrab
Billionaire tech lord’s sermons warn of the Antichrist while building the surveillance systems that resemble it
Peter Thiel has always thrived on contradiction. The billionaire who built the tools of the modern surveillance state now wants to deliver a series of lectures on the Antichrist.
Four private sessions, sold out in San Francisco, devoted to a figure
long associated with deception and domination. The irony is only
possible to miss if you’ve had your common sense surgically removed.
For decades, Thiel has poured money into technologies that give
governments new powers to watch, measure, and predict the lives of
citizens.
His creations have been less about serving people and more about
sorting them. Databases replace dialogue. Algorithms replace trust. What
once felt like a town square begins to feel like a control grid.
Through Founders Fund,
his venture capital arm, the translucent technocrat bankrolls companies
that reach deep into daily life. From finance to biotech to defense,
the pattern is clear: invest in systems that categorize, codify, and
control.
These are not neutral tools. They shape how people shop, travel, speak, even think. They decide which risks are flagged, which behaviors are rewarded, and which choices are quietly closed off.
Now, Thiel wants to explain the Antichrist to his audience. He warns
that such a figure would not march with horns and firearms but slip in
quietly, using fear of catastrophe—nuclear war, artificial intelligence,
climate collapse—to justify tighter control. He suggests that endless
talk of apocalypse would pave the way for global domination.
But listen closely, and the warning sounds like a self-portrait. Thiel often speaks of catastrophe. He has mused publicly about the inevitability of destruction.
Yet, at the same time, he funds the very machinery that turns dread
into dominion. The contradiction is anything but subtle. It is the
essence of his empire.
For Christians, the idea of the Antichrist carries particular significance. The gospel speaks of freedom, not fear. “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”
Those words from the apostle Paul stand in direct opposition to the
philosophy that governs Thiel’s thinking. Where Scripture emphasizes
love, Thiel emphasizes leverage. Where Christ promised mercy, Thiel
promises might.
Even for readers who don’t share the faith, the tension is impossible
to miss. America was built on suspicion of concentrated power, on the
belief that no man or institution should hold too much sway.
The system of checks and balances, the separation of powers, the
enshrined rights that no government can take away: all were designed to
keep tyranny at bay.
Thiel’s vision runs in the opposite direction. He does not dilute
power; he distills it. He backs systems that promise leaders the godlike
ability to see everything at once. What the founders feared, he builds,
then sells as progress.
Thiel frequently cites
the Ten Commandments, claiming that the first and last—worship God, do
not covet—are the most important. Yet in doing so, he skips past the
commands that bind people to one another: to love your neighbor, to
honor your parents, to reject lies, greed, and violence.
The omissions reveal a pattern. His creed looks upward and inward but
rarely outward. It prizes purity and possession, while neglecting the
call to kindness and kinship.
While the world debates whether
Palestinians deserve electricity, young people in Gaza are building tech
incubators from the rubble.
Not one. Three.
Taqat began with a single solar panel and a
car battery. A flicker of light in a blackout zone. Today it is Gaza’s
largest incubator: three hubs — Gaza City, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat —
sustaining more than 400 freelancers, creating over 100,000 hours of
work each month, and keeping alive the possibility of a future Israel is
determined to erase.
This is not “resilience.” This is refusal.
Empire’s Favorite Word
Western NGOs and donors love to say
“resilience.” It is how they launder complicity. It is how they
celebrate survival without ever naming the hand on the trigger.
But nothing about Taqat is resilience in
that empty sense. Taqat is resistance. It is infrastructure under siege.
It is solar panels standing in for a bombed-out grid. It is adolescents
coding while their schools lie in rubble. It is Gaza insisting: we will not disappear.
What They Built While the World Looked Away
The numbers themselves are an indictment:
$500,000+ in monthly earnings by Gaza freelancers.
100,000+ hours of digital work produced every month.
50+ new jobs created.
2,000 people on a waitlist, desperate to join.
All of this in a place where:
80% of the population is unemployed.
1.9 million people are living in tents.
70% of the internet and power grid lies in ruins.
The same governments that subsidize Silicon
Valley’s failure machines subsidize Israel’s war machine. One burns
capital on apps nobody needs. The other burns people. Gaza’s youth are
showing them both what innovation actually looks like.
Brick by Brick
Taqat’s timeline is the anatomy of defiance:
June 2024 — one solar panel. One battery. A single shared desk.
September 2024 — expansion into a second hub as more than a million people were displaced south.
December 2024 — training programs scaled to hundreds of youth.
February 2025 — a third branch opened.
Now — Gaza’s foremost incubator, with over 500 active members and an
ecosystem of training, mentorship, and global work opportunities.
“For us, Taqat symbolizes
perseverance and resistance in turning challenges into opportunities,
and remaining creative despite all circumstances. It is an expression of
dignity through work, productivity, and building a better future,” said Noor Nashwan, International Relations Coordinator at Taqat.
This article is part of an ongoing
collaboration with Taqat, who first reached out to me — and I take
seriously the responsibility of carrying their story with care, though
their determination to keep building under siege speaks louder than any
words of mine.
Where the occupation drops bombs, Palestinians drop fiber cables. Where schools collapse, adolescents join Taqat Hero—
a program teaching coding, design, and digital arts to teenagers who
have lost years of education but refuse to lose their futures.
Even Cambridge University is collaborating,
offering English training and mentorship. The irony is brutal: students
in Britain are shielded from the word Palestine, while
students in Gaza are denied schools altogether. And yet, it is Gazan
teenagers who are the ones coding their way into the world.
“What
criteria allow us to label a particular country as imperialist? What
should be the rule for measuring each state’s place in the international
system? Insisting on a defence of the ‘letter’ of Lenin’s work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,
rather than on his method of analysis, would amount to stubborn
dogmatism. There is much more Leninism in an update of his theory of
imperialism than in the obtuse defence of his 1916 book.”
— Valério Arcary
It is never as easy to get lost as when one thinks they know the way.
Popular Chinese proverb
1.
From Lenin we
inherited a theory concerning the nature of imperialism. It rested upon
three distinct, divergent ideas, even as they were intertwined. The
first was that imperialism marked a stage in capitalism’s unfolding, its
pinnacle of development, signaling, in dialectical terms, both its
zenith and the onset of its decline, or an age of revolution. In other
words, a criterion of historical periodisation was stratified under the
supremacy of the imperialist powers at the center, surrounded by a vast
periphery of dominated nations, integrated to sharply unequal degrees,
many colonies, some semi-colonies and very few independent countries,
meaning a rigid and hierarchical international state system, that is a
global order. The third was the constituing elements of an imperialist
state as it existed in the twentieth century. In essence, a standard of
measurement for determining the mode of incorporation into the world
market and the position occupied within the international state system.
2.
These three ideas, articulated across distinct
levels of abstraction, retain their full political and theoretical
power. The most radical proposition maintained that modern imperialism
ushered in an era in which capitalism reached its height even as it
entered a phase of decay. It remains unassailable, having withstood the
test of historical experience. The imperialist system led humanity into
two calamitous world wars. The twentieth century was one of revolutions
that uprooted capitalist domination in societies encompassing some 30%
of humanity. The preservation of an imperialist order threatens
humankind’s continued survival for no less than four compelling reasons:
(1) the menace of new destructive economic crises like those of 1929
and 2008; (2) the looming catastrophe of global warming and the systemic
incapacity of capitalism to effect an emergency energy transition; (3)
the global arms race and the military intimidation by the Triad, notably
the U.S., aimed to assert imperialist control over the world; (4) the
rise of a neo-fascist, nationalist far-right that fights for power,
overturning the democratic advances of the past three generations.
3.
Of course, Lenin was not a flawless prophet. His
work established solid methodological foundations, yet his legacy
fundamentally offered a conceptual framework for studying tendencies and
counter-tendencies, not a millenarian doctrine. A good Marxist engages
in prognostic assessment, but this should not be confused with mere
fortune-telling. Nor one can escape the need to revise the other two
theses. The world order is far from what it once was, having undergone
qualitative transformations more than once and the standards for
assessing what counts as an imperialist state have not remained intact.
Over a hundred years later, both the world market and the state system
have shifted. The structure of the imperialist order has evolved and
become increasingly intricate.
Criminal lawyer Nick Hanna investigates the Vice President of the International Court of Justice, Judge Julia Sebutinde, and how her extremist Christian Zionist beliefs have compromised her voting record. In doing so, Hanna exposes Sebutinde’s close ties to Watoto Church, and its funding of an Israeli organisation that provides material support to the IDF.
Judge Sebutinde and the ICJ’s INSANE ISRAEL SCANDAL
A research paper predicting that artificial intelligence will go rogue in 2027 and lead to humanity’s extinction within a decade is making waves in the tech world.
The detailed scenario, called AI2027, was published by a group of influential AI experts in the spring and has since spurred many viral videos as people debate its likelihood. The BBC has recreated scenes from the scenario using mainstream generative AI tools to illustrate the stark prediction and spoken to experts about the impact the paper is having.
