Stay Sharp, Stay Soft

a new game and some news before May

The world is brutal! So let’s play some games, support each other, and also stay informed. Our next opportunity to burn down the temples of power won’t be too long in coming, so let’s make sure we’re as healthy and hopeful as we can be! We need to sow the seeds of the new world, cultivate imagination and inspiration, and get acquainted with the names, addresses, offices, and infrastructures of the Destroyers of the World.

Let’s play! Let’s thrive!

I made up a simple game called 3 T/Fs and I think you’ll find it fun! But first, here are a couple fundraisers and a couple book recommendations:

Let’s support radical fiction authors, cause we need free imaginations and smart artists, but it is f**king hard to make a living writing or to find enough free time to write a book while holding down a job and dealing with health problems and all that noise! Here are two new releases I’ve recently enjoyed, and they’re both debut novels!

Morsel, by Carter Keane

Murder Bimbo, by Rebecca Novack

Fundraisers

Got a decent paying job? Did your parents pay for college or help buy you a house? Have a trust fund or inheritance?* Throw some money this way:

Support anarchists in Sudan and the Resistance Committees they have helped to build as a form of neighborhood resistance and survival in the midst of a brutal civil war.

Support Cleveland Sex Workers Alliance as they face an increasingly hostile, dangerous environment under accelerating criminalization by Democrats and Republicans, and an unsurprising abandonment/betrayal by upper middle class/white branches of feminism.

Support people facing serious prison time for standing up against ICE in Texas.

Support a liberated social center in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. “For a decade, people and groups from Brazil and the world have been visiting Kasa Invisível, holding debates, workshops, movie screenings, concerts, courses, bookfairs and festivals. In addition to hosting events and meetings for unions and social movement groups, Kasa functions daily as a community kitchen, library, infoshop, screen printing workshop and vegan food cooperative. To keep the house open and safe, keep our mutual aid actions in the neighborhood, we invite everyone to make a donation of any amount.”

*Please forgive my gentle guilting aimed at those who have a little more money. I just find it to be true again and again that those in our movements from the poorest backgrounds are the most generous, while the wealthiest are frequently the stingiest, with comrades whose parents bought them houses calling themselves poor and trust fund kids asking comrades in poverty to do free labor for them while using their economic advantages to exercise power in their scenes. For an anticapitalist movement, we don’t talk nearly enough about our class backgrounds and present economic circumstances. No one should feel guilty for being born into one family or another, but what we do with our lives is on us. I think we can all get better at putting our communal and revolutionary ideas into daily practice.

Articles

Hanif Abdurraqib writes about a spreading nostalgia for inconvenient technologies of the past.

Elia Ayoub writes about Israel’s targeting of journalists in Lebanon, and turns to science fiction to imagine whether the occupations there might ever end.

Okay, here’s the game: 3 T/Fs !

It’s simple. Below are three statements. They might all be true, they might all be false, they might be a mix. To play, place your answer in the comments (in the format TFF, FFF, FTF, etc.) and within a month, when I publish the next round of the game, I’ll start off by sharing the answers for this round.

• “Shore” and “coast” can be considered antonyms

• Ivy (Hedera helix) and the plane tree (Platanus x hispanica) often spread through the same mechanism

• The purpose of genes is to produce more genes

Check out these assholes!

Guess what? AI is for the upper class! I was combing through the numbers in Harpers’ Index for May 2026 (they release it a little early I guess), and I saw that 46% of USians with postgraduate degrees use AI “almost constantly,” compared with only 20% of those with a high school degree or less. 19% of US corporate executives say AI saves them at least 12 hours of work a week. Only 2% of non-managerial workers say the same.

Major banks like JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Citibank, and Bank of America credited AI with bringing them billions in additional profits while laying off 15,000 workers.

Summary: AI is most useful for the rich, it’s making some people incredibly wealthy and stealing jobs from others (like me, a former professional translator), and it relies on huge data centers, which steal unconscionable amounts of water, require huge amounts of Earth-destroying open pit mines, require so much electricity they’re pushing an increase in fossil fuel usage around the world, and they don’t even create a significant amount of jobs.

Fuck AI! Turn it off, opt out of it in your search engine, your apps, and on your phone, write your own emails, and read articles yourself instead of getting them summarized.

AI has also been falsifying the history around resistance to slavery… Check it out in this recent Scalawag article by Sherronda Brown.

In the next months, I’m hoping to write an in-depth newsletter about some of this tech.

The FBI is investigating journalists critical of the Trump regime and the Justice Department is punishing the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit that researches and opposes white supremacist groups. Democrats have a high chance of taking back control of the government over the next two years, but the FBI and Justice Department are overwhelmingly made up of career agents and bureaucrats rather than political appointees. Under Republican and Democratic administrations, the federal government has used antiterrorism laws to target Muslims, environmental activists, anarchists, immigrants and their supporters, antiwar activists, privacy advocates, members of Black liberation groups, and people taking to the streets against the police, all in the last 25 years.

Want to know more about how some of that repression has been showing up over the last few years? Check out this article of mine from Prism Reports, “The far-right and Trump administration are collaborating to target educators and marginalized communities.”

The Department of Homeland Security has technically faced a shutdown for over 70 days, though Trump’s advisers have found temporary funding for them, and they continue to torture and deport people, and to post neo-Nazi and other white supremacist memes online. The Republicans, meanwhile, might be angling for the Stupidest Politicians in History prize. They control all three branches of government, but they are breaking records for the fewest pieces of new legislation in decades, and Congress only has a 10% approval rating. Trump’s approval rating just fell to a new low of 32%, with 63% actively opposing him. His economic policy is only polling at 33%, and only 38% support his war against Iran.

I could not find a single poll that asked whether Americans thought the war against Iran was unethical, whether it’s wrong to try to change the governments of other countries through bombing and assassination campaigns, or whether the war was wrong for its impacts on people in Iran as a whole. Its well demonstrated that what questions are asked or not asked, and how they are phrased, affects the results of any poll. Beyond that, though, this erasure is consistent with the omnipresent media architecture that trains Americans to be good citizens of empire, to only think of their own interests, to believe in the nation-state, to believe their government is an extension of their own will and that the government is entitled to carry out regime change around the world, and to not care about noncitizens and people in other countries being killed and brutalized.

I found one poll with a single question that allowed for empathy with non-Americans, asking respondents to name their top concerns regarding the war. Out of nine options, only one was not selfishly geared towards US interests (as though the interests of the state line up with our own interests) : “it has resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians, including children.” This option ranked 4^th, at 25%, just below concern for US troops who signed up to kill people abroad (31%), and a good chunk below worries for gasoline prices and spending so much of the budget on a war (37 and 34%).

Those numbers are pretty grim. It’s even worse in Israel. After one week of the war against Iran, only 4% of Jewish Israelis opposed the war, and 93% supported it (including 76% of Israelis on the political Left). After one month, during which time more Iranian missiles started hitting home, that figure rose—but only to 11%.

(Regarding the phrase “Jewish Israelis,” unfortunately that’s the category used by Haaretz and other major media and polling organizations, not to denote practicing Jews, but to distinguish full citizens from the second class citizens or “Arab Israelis,” who are the descendants of the inhabitants of the land that settler militias were unable to expel in 1947-48.)

I want to quote at length from a report written by a progressive Jewish Israeli author for Haaretz, republished in Genocide Watch:

The survey conducted by Professor Tamir Sorek of Pennsylvania State University, published here in Haaretz together with Professor Shay Hazkani, examined what the authors called “eliminatory” attitudes among Jewish Israelis and their theological roots.

Within days I began receiving anguished inquiries about the results. Friends, colleagues, peace activists, journalists and strangers wrote in from Australia to Uruguay to down the block, asking if it could possibly be true that 82 percent of Israeli Jews support “the transfer (expulsion) of residents of the Gaza Strip to other countries?” No less than 54 percent of Jewish respondents were “very” supportive.

Other findings were grim: A majority of 56 percent of Jews supported the “transfer (forced expulsion) of Arab citizens of Israel to other countries.” And when asked directly whether they agreed with the position that the IDF, “when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, namely, to kill all its inhabitants?” nearly half, 47 percent, agreed.

The survey found a strong correlation between various indicators of religious identity and observance, and militant attitudes – a classic pattern in Israeli Jewish public opinion. But there was strikingly high support from secular Israelis for the expulsion questions too.

For more on the ongoing war, see “The Fourth Israeli War”

Israel has blown way past its norm of murdering at least 100 people for every Israeli soldier or civilian killed. This isn’t retaliation, since most of these deaths have been in wars started by Israel, and some Israeli military leaders and politicians have even explicitly advocated for this kill ratio.

Israel has murdered 2,300 people in Lebanon and is responsible for a large share of the 3,200 deaths (1,700 of them civilians) in Iran. During that time, only 23 Israelis have been killed, as of late April.

During its recent independence day celebrations, the Israeli government specifically honored a rabbi who has been calling for the military to completely “flatten” Gaza. Please remember that this is just one of literally thousands of documented examples of Israelis running the entire gamut from the highest leaders of government and military, to talk show hosts, celebrities, religious leaders, politicians in the opposition, soldiers, settlers, and regular citizens, advocating for genocide, justifying genocide, and joking about genocide. Protests against the genocide by Israelis have been few and far between, with turnouts in the low hundreds.

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The civil war is heating up in Mali again, and the war in Sudan isn’t abating. Many of the wars and atrocities in this region, the Sahel, an arid part of sub-Saharan Africa, are a continuation of the conflicts that were set in stone by the drawing of borders in the decolonization process of the 20^th century, and they are being exacerbated by climate change, global mining interests and other extractive industries, and the self-interested interventions of Russia, China, and the European Union.

I’ll be writing more about that as soon as I can. Buy a subscription or Paypal me some money so I can afford a couple hours off from my landscaping job?