#300: Free WiFi Zone of Interest
They did it. The Fourth Reich rose, without its masks, and declared genocide JUST A SAD FACT OF LIFE.
Please take a moment to read what Amjad wrote to me a couple days ago:
My dear brother Michael, I miss you so much, and I sincerely hope you are healthy and safe. I wish I could tell you that things are getting better, but the truth is heartbreaking. With the latest developments, life in Gaza has become more unbearable than ever.
This may be my last real chance to escape Gaza, save my wife and myself, and give us an opportunity to live again. My wife is an engineer, just like me. We have dreams, ambitions, and a future we still hope to build together. We are exhausted, Michael. We have spent years trying to survive instead of living a normal life. All we want is a chance to study, work, and rebuild our lives somewhere safe.
There is now a possible opportunity for us to leave, but the cost is enormous. They are asking for around £7,000 per person. Imagine being asked to pay that much simply to escape a place where your life is constantly in danger. It feels as though even our lives have been given a price.
My brother, you know what is happening here. We are threatened by Israeli military attacks and bombardments, armed militias, including the Abu Shabab militia, hunger, and diseases spreading among people who cannot access proper medical treatment. Danger surrounds us from every direction. Even sleeping has become difficult because we never know what the next day will bring. We have tried everything we can to help others survive, but now we are struggling to save ourselves.
We no longer have enough food. Prices are unbearable, transportation has almost disappeared, universities remain closed, and our tents have been torn apart after nearly three years of displacement. We have lost our home, our belongings, our stability, and so much of our peace of mind. We are mentally exhausted, Michael. Sometimes, I honestly don’t know how much longer we can keep living this way.
I swear to God, my brother, I am not asking for luxury or a comfortable life. I am asking for a chance to live, to protect my wife, and to have a future beyond fear, hunger, and death.
To Michael’s beautiful audience: if you are reading this, please don’t forget me. My name is Amjad. I am a young engineer from Gaza who has spent these terrible years trying to help others while struggling to keep his own dreams alive. Today, I am asking for your help because I can no longer face all of this alone.
If you can donate any amount, please know that your support could bring me one step closer to saving my wife and myself. If you cannot donate, please share my story, spread my appeal, and keep us in your prayers. Every act of kindness means more to us than you can imagine. Please, don’t let our story disappear while we are still fighting for our lives.
Please, help me share my story with your audience one more time. Please remind them that I am still here, that my wife and I are still fighting for our future, and that this opportunity may be our last chance to escape this nightmare.
Whatever happens, my brother, you will always have a special place in my heart, and we will never stop praying for you. May God protect you, bless you, and reward you for every act of kindness you have shown us.
I love you, my brother. Thank you for being my support and my hope, and for being one of the kindest souls I have met during these three unbearable years.
Link: https://chuffed.org/project/support-my-family-in-gaza-you-are-our-only-hope
(And if, as mentioned in the episode, you have any academic connections that might help Rulin escape on the basis of her software engineering work, please contact her at rulin_altanani on Twitter, or DM me if her account has been forced go private.)
Comments (23)
Brother, friend: putting an extra, throaty, 'ch' sound on the front or back of Arabic words where it doesn't belong is literally what Israelis do with their signature pronunciation of Hamas as Kh/Chamas. Allah (of Ansar Allah) and Hezbollah are more or less* pronounced as written for us English speakers who rely on transliteration into our own alphabet. My apologies for the pedantry, but it had to be said. *= 2nd variant = Ansarallah, also Hamas is frequently said by native Arabic speakers with two short a's as in ham-ass (crude but accurate) as opposed to hohm-oss
I have had 38 native Arabic speakers give me advice along these lines, and nobody agrees with anybody. I've been told that every conceivable pronunciation of "Hezbollah" – Hizbullah? Hizbollah? – is right AND wrong. Our fuckin' press can't even decide how to spell it. Certain news outlets used "Usama bin Laden" for years after 9/11. And meanwhile half the people I know with any experience of Gaza pronounce it, with the "oo" as in "book," like "GOOZ-zuh," two separate Zs in a row, that dot-over-the-character thing. I'm all over the fuckin' shop. I'm waking up with my dick in the sink. I'm stuffing raw dough into a toaster. I'm whipping frozen shellfish at the windows. I don't know WHAT the fuck is going on
"go, go, go, said the bird: human kind cannot bear very much reality."
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
Between this one and the Turbulence eps with Mamyrah Dougé-Prosper on Haiti over the past two weeks I'm so angry I can't see straight. I don't know if there are millions of people perpetrating this, but whatever the actual number it's apparently more than enough. Even in the 80's my idea of the banality of evil was this kind of gray overlap between helplessness and complicity, and the real monsters walking around weren't the drug dealers and petty criminals on the nightly news... It was in the air then too, whether it was South African apartheid or Iran Contra, and it can seem naive now, not to have realized that they were the same project, but this time around it feels like it's in the air and in every breath I fucking draw. Thinking about kids in Gaza breathing in the literal poison wrought from all of the destruction... I can't tell if the the metaphor is exploding or collapsing in on itself until, congratulations, the map is now the territory, and since suffering and death cannot be avoided, winning means administrating and coordinating them for others because it's the only way to maintain the illusion you have any control over your own, and I know the system is so perfected and refined at this point that it's creating the people who want to run it, but fuck all of them.
regarding Lavender, it effectively does not matter if it had human oversight or not because with any system doing otherwise human tasks at a superhuman speed, it reduces the human element to approving its work. This is because: machine systems have different failure modes than human ones making them much harder to check by people; humans become the bottleneck and get removed anyway; vigilance tends to decrease with the volume that automation enables (and this further erodes for the "human in the loop" over time). But as you say, the point is to do it at speed without responsibility. Related, I don't know if you caught the reporting about the Mossad attempts at "using AI" post Feb 28th to overthrow the Iranian government, but it was one of those rare stories that shed some light on the state of the israeli intelligence braintrust. I shit you not the plan was literally "use AI to convince Iranians to rise up."
I gotta admit: it warms my heart a little bit to see that AI has officially joined the list of "and then the people will rise up" failures. Although my GOAT is always going to be Ahmed Chalabi, because he convinced us TWICE that entirely different "people would rise up" in the 1990s alone, then thought he was going to be the functional Emperor of Iraq after we invaded, and when events failed thus to transpire, he spent 10+ years issuing manifesti on whose fault it was that the US lost Iraq. He did "but the REAL son of a bitch in this story, the man lurking behind the throne," to like 11 different people
I’m listening to this, doing my Sunday chores, living my life, and straight up WEEPING.
it's funny, when you have any kind of a "voice," people expect you to have something resembling a best and worst case for everything, and feel angry or betrayed when you don't, but it all seems pretty clear to me: either you'll be on a thin hard mattress at the St. James Infirmary, or you'll be looking out the window, wondering why nobody outside, in "the world," can tell that all the audio is dubbed on in post-production
Do you reckon James Angleton got Ezra Pound picked up because he admired him and had visited him as a young man (around the same time he got to know James Laughlin) or did he see him as an important player for the post-war revisionism of the modernist tradition / ongoing suppression of "left" cultural production that Al Filreis has written a lot about?
Pretty much 100% the first option. Ezra Pound had been nobody in any "poetic" or "artistic" avant-garde for 20 years by that point. If you'd asked his Paris or London friends, they would've tsk-tsk'd and said something between "A genius, but the first War cracked him, and he's now made a hopeless labyrinth of his own brain" (pretty much) or "A crank whose crankery was once mistaken for genius by people less DISCERNING than ME" (establishment dickhead position, and unchanged, as far as I can tell). Angleton was also much more than an "admirer" of the most famous modernists – he worshipped those guys, he wanted to be them, and I think it would be fair to say that accidentally got his wish: he too ended up as a cracked Minotaur in Hell, because he spent his entire life in "counterintelligence" concocting fictions which, don't you see, become real the instant the federal government spends a minute or a dollar on them, body weight more gin than bones, the NEXT great poet of the NEXT war – i.e., my profession is truly poetry, for you must undertand, I'm making all this shit up. I am Plato in his Republic, with a whole different code of context-specific verdicts upon what is and is not gay. He's the most genuinely spooky of the great spooks, like the one who actually scares me the most – others were a lot more consequential, but the newly-crowned Most Powerful Nation on Earth gives you an unlimited budget and no mandatory office hours and says, "Make shit up so we can tell the world it ALMOST happened," that's not a job I would *accept*, but it scares me to think of how well I could've done it. Same as L. Ron Hubbard, that if I completely abandoned any notion of right and wrong, and convinced myself that other people aren't QUITE real – I mean they're real enough, they're EXACTLY real enough, but not in the way I'M real – I do, from experience have this weird dreamy cult-leader way of getting a roomful of people swaying in time to music that isn't there. It's not interesting enough to recount in full, but one of the most frightening experiences of my life involved being rabidly psychotic, knowing I was out of my fucking mind, and still getting a big crowd of strangers to appear and encircle me as The Main Man, the guy YOU wanna be around tonight – I was insane, I probably should've been in a psych ward, I don't remember a word I said because I wasn't even listening to myself, and nobody could tell. Nobody knew that they were talking to an a missing person. It scared me to fucking death. That would've been 2011, like maybe October 11, and the last 15 years make a lot more sense if you know that a husked ghost can say things he can't even hear, and in the right place, at the right moment, everyone in the room will not only make what they want of it, they'll be giddily convinced that everyone ELSE made the same thing from the same nothing. Of course there's history and political economy and hm hmm hmmm, but nobody wants to touch the live wire: if enough people think they need to hear something, and have been waiting for so long that they despair of ever hearing it, you can say fucking ANYTHING, and as long as it's not the hopeless drone of their whole adult lives, people will believe you just gave them the True Name of God and the Secret of the Golden Chrysanthemum. Which is, inversely, to say: when you treat people like vermin, in the same way, for a long time, and their lives only change by getting regularly, incrementally worse, beware, O, BEWARE what those people will hear in the panicked songbook of the mockingbird
I had a look at Australia but the rules here for any likely visa are so stringent that less than 10% make it through approval after a years long process and even that seems to be less the issue than actually being granted permission to depart. Apparently the real departures are extremely low and scams that collect money promising them are rife. Unless someone can secure an actual offer of study, and demonstrate financial ability to pay for the study and living during the length of the visa I would look elsewhere. Visitor visas to humanitarian asylum deliberately target those who have lost their homes as "unlikely to stay temporarily". The country recognised palestine as a country in 2025 and says it is pushing for a two state solution which i guess is what they consider the best help they can offer. The Bondi Beach massacre as a media spectacle im sure did a lot to raise Australian wariness toward palestinian asylum seekers.
I need it
Thank you for posting Amjad’s words, Michael. Entering the fourth year of genocide in Gaza, from my perspective in England, was empty, silent, unremarked upon. A scar scorched into the Earth, now banalised to the extremes of children’s toys in malls, or rain falling downwards: “Yes, this is what simply is, what simply happens”. My friends in Gaza wring out an education in tent cities; queue for water rations scarcely able to cover a day’s drinking water; listen to aerial booms and drones that fray their muted nerves. Pay rent for dirt. The donations of this audience have been so generous, thank you to everyone who has donated, or will donate. Money is the language of the bloodied floor, yet somehow it resurrects a stainless, enduring hope, a frail thing in a weeping shadow, but there it is anyway, in the form of money. When people say “it means the world” they might mean that some word or action is so significant it transforms their world. In this case donations, and the attendant care and love inherent in their gift, “means the world” insofar as “this allows my world to continue”. No caesura. No ellipsis. Language and life continue. I don’t hear from Amjad too often because his internet coverage is poor, but earlier today he told me that he felt he was “flying with joy” when he checked his fundraiser. I have a photo of him sitting by the sea, holding a beautiful golden-black darbuka, its top of pelagic blue holding the symbol of perhaps a sun, or worshipped star, or some deferred divinity depicted but unnamed. He is smiling. Thank you again to every donor, everyone who shared the fundraising link, everyone who read what Amjad wrote. May God keep you in all your ways, and keep you far from the bloodied floor. Thank you again, Michael.
I don't think I'm informing anyone, but I since there are literally no places where I can say this anymore: all I did as a real human was post about Gaza as an American, and I was banned from Twitter 3 times, then locked out of my account I had for 12 years, then banned from Reddit, 2 times, and the chilling effect isn't a chill it's a LOCK. And the banned content were words like: Pushy or Lynching.
I think you’re right about xi and the prc. They don’t give a shit they’re just as complicit as say Azerbaijan.
Just from my very limited inputs, I would guess that a lot of China and its most powerful actors consider it useless to engage in what they might call "activist politics," because that just slows down the massive development of surplus value that makes communism possible. IMO, there is, at whatever depth, a lot more sincere Dengism than you might think, and a lot more belief in the basic, prototypical progression of Marxist history. Do you want us to bomb Israel, achieve nothing, and possibly start a gigantic war, or to achieve communism as the most powerful nation on Earth? Whether they "care," I have no idea. They're a massive Israeli trading partner, and Chinese companies have the contracts for the actual operation of huge chunks of Israeli transportation infrastructure. Shit's running cool lately, but of course it is. I think China actually believes in something and has a plan for its achievement; I also think it's not just going to drop all these relationships when it's "communism time," not least because that surplus value depends on extended business with the people who would most hate and hear actual communism if it could happen. If things basically keep going right in the same way for China and wrong in the same way for the US, I think we basically get inverse Yeltsinism, where WE'RE Russia in the ’90s. I also know that, unlike the USA, China has demonstrated the ability to learn anything at all from history, so we're not getting stripped bare enough for renascent populism or whatever shit. Just the Yeltsin Deluxe, where we're allowed to have our cute deals and spats as long as they don't fuck things up, and we're increasingly incapable of actually DOING anything. But if there's a single thing to learn from the last 10 years – I mean, Epstein for fuck's sake, something people would not listen to me talk about 10 years ago, has received a more thorough airing than I EVER would've believed, and the answer is "doesn't matter" – I think it bears upon the province of CARING. People care, less and less, but sometimes, and not only about themselves. People are also the smallest, least powerful, least capable unit of human organization. And when you reach a level of organization that CAN make things happen, it does not "care." It's never "cared" about anything. It's an abstraction; it doesn't have a heart or brain to appeal to. Governments, corporations, "International institutions," NGOs, they do not and cannot care. A few of their employees might be allowed to care, up to the EXACT moment at which they endanger the premise of their employer's businesses, whereby it doesn't fuckin' care, because that would make it a charity, and we're not working for a charity. There's probably a mathematically precise proportion between the ability to care and the power to do anything about it. It'll shift around, but for any several years, you could actually put a dot on the coordinate system, a very literal (x,y) numeration, for the point below which you "care," and above which you can do anything that "caring"-type people "care" about. And this, in part, is what I mean when I talk about Loving the Alien, which seemed to confuse some people: the Alien wants to live and eat. It needs you as its proxies, so it goes along with "prevailing trends" I've called the Fourth Reich, and it evolves into a biomechanical plasm that will promise you a certain kind of life if you're chemically capable of passing through its membrane. But some people try to pass and instead die in a shrieking agony of enzymes, because they thought they could Care while Loving the Alien. They lied on the test, they didn't open the telegram, and look at them now, hanging from the Sun by a butcher's hook, reminding you that Jesus Christ Himself said "Pay your taxes."
thinking of this line off the song ‘lavender-gospel’ from the latest album by one of the last good bands working in a rock band formation, protomartyr, about lavender: “with no reason, no causе, no guilt, no touch You're a target if you're frightеned You're a target if you're afraid”
one of them might be here, because I'm pretty sure "Lavender Gospel" is my phrase
"ask an armenian about it" yup!
“Why haven’t you heard of the Armenian genocide? Boyfuckin’ mostly.”
fucking hell
The opening was a flashback for me- I remember watching Strangelove as a kid… and then the Zorro ranch revelations trickled in through the giggles I remembered as a high school kid at the “10:1” women to men ratio comment landed in the blue butterfly garden of required sacrifice….