Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 16h

Are we all living in secret mall apartments?

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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 2d

Congrats Hrag, Hakim, and hyperallergic!!

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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 4d

The WH wanting things to happen and the WH having the guts to do what they need to make it happen is… not clear in so many cases this far.

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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 4d

When you actually explain the scale of the genocide of indigenous Americans it hits students real hard. Then you give them Las Casas — for many of them the oldest non-scriptural text they’ve ever tried to read — and the light bulbs just start popping.

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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 4d

A point I am emphasizing to my World History since 1500 students constantly and from day one.

Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 4d

One of the things I always find telling is the idea that we have to judge past people by the standards of their time, as if the fact that they did bad things means that everyone thought it was okay. They didn't. Pretty much every obviously evil act had people saying that it was, in fact, bad.

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Reposted by James Ryan

Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 5d

Yes, New College is incredibly inefficient but it also dropped 60(!) spots on the US News & World Report rankings. Not easy!
Everytime Chris Rufo is introduced as an impt voice in higher ed, remember that the one time he had a hand in running an institution has been a disaster.
Competence matters.

Will Bunch @willbunch.bsky.social · 7d

You'll be shocked to learn New College of Florida is on the brink of implosion just a couple of years after DeSantis engineered an extreme right-wing takeover

Fun fact: NCF's new overlords spend $134K per student (!!...the average at other FL publics is $10K) www.insidehighered.com/news/governa...

Spending Soars, Rankings Fall at New College of Florida

Student outcomes and rankings are slipping at the liberal arts college while spending is up. Critics believe the college is at risk of implosion, and some are calling for privatization.

www.insidehighered.com

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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 6d

None to me, directly.

Reposted by James Ryan

Nate Schenkkan @nateschenkkan.bsky.social · 7d

New today: my essay in @jodemocracy.bsky.social on The Golden Age of Transnational Repression: www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the...

The Golden Age of Transnational Repression | Journal of Democracy

Authoritarian regimes are targeting exiles and diaspora communities in more places than ever before. Activists, journalists, and regular people living abroad must watch their backs…

www.journalofdemocracy.org

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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 6d

Tariq Dana does a fantastic job showing how the Abraham Accords provided autocratic governments more tools to repress their people, and new customers for the industries now trained on the genocide in Gaza.

Middle East Research and Information Project @merip.bsky.social · 7d

NEW: The Military-Industrial Backbone of the Abraham Accords, by Tariq Dana

In a preview of our forthcoming issue, Tariq Dana analyzes the industry of repression and militarization that underpinned the Abraham Accords.

The Military-Industrial Backbone of Normalization - MERIP

The booming weapons industry made possible by the Abraham Accords.

buff.ly

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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 7d

The writing is gorgeous, and the cartoons are so, so cutting.

A hand drawn cartoon in the style of the New Yorker showing five people in a business meeting next to a big window out on the city. There is a chart with a downward sloping graph. The caption reads “Have we considered localizing the intifada?”

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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 7d

Missed this when it came out, but man, what an essay. Ismail Ibrahim on his experience as the only Arab doing fact checking at the New Yorker after 10/7. bidoun.org/articles/hou...

House Arab

I was working at the magazine as a fact-checker and my parents no longer considered me a failure, not because they read or admired it, but because when they said its name to friends and relatives it s...

bidoun.org

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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 7d

Don’t sell yourself so short. The smart ones know you go to Baku for the real money.

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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 8d

Models, in terms of how administrations look and are meant to work, perhaps, but the logic underpinning all this is not so distant. I think we proclaim modernization theory-style colonial mindsets dead at our peril.

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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 8d

Of course true, and nevertheless they worked harder at the pretensions than these doofuses. Just goes to show how unserious this all is.

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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 8d

The reason this proposal is so fake is that it not only misapprehends Palestinian political movements and demands for sovereignty but it misapprehends Israeli ones, too.

James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 8d

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve privately and publicly heard neocon pontificators suggest “turn Gaza into the Singapore of the Med!” idea. What’s insane is not only is that now the official position of the Trump admin, but it is a relatively moderate position vis-a-vis Israel.

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Reposted by James Ryan

Travis @someforeignfield.bsky.social · 9d

Now that the dust has settled on Israel's strike on Qatar, I wanted to discuss some of the oddities of the story that has become the mainstream narrative- the alleged firing of missiles from over the Red Sea. I'm not saying that didn't happen, just that it's a bit weird. That and more here:

Israel's Strike on Qatar: What Actually Happened?

On September 9, 2025, Israel struck a residential compound in Doha, Qatar, killing six people.

open.substack.com

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Reposted by James Ryan

Aaron Stein @aaronstein1.bsky.social · 9d

I wasn't making it up:

US won't sell F110 w/out the F-16 and cannot sell F-110 to SSB w/out CAATSA being resolved. Can't resolve CAATSA w/out S-400 compromise. Tr also cannot "rejoin" the F-35 consortium. It can purchase F-35 but only w/ compromise on S-400. www.middleeasteye.net/news/turkey-...

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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 9d

To put a finer point on the Marx analogy — if the mandate was a tragedy that begat bloody competition between nationalist parties and organizations in Palestine, the farce, as in 1848, may produce something much more loathsome and terrible.

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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 9d

You absolutely do not have to hand one to the British Mandate, but they certainly tried a lot harder than this to understand the people they were ruling and, pretended they cared about self-rule a lot harder than this.

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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 9d

First time tragedy, second time farce and so on…

Shibley Telhami @stelhami.bsky.social · 9d

A century removed from Western colonial powers casually drawing Middle Eastern borders with a ruler while disregarding the will of local populations, the region gets Tony Blair to dream up schemes of governing Gaza with little say by its people.
www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

Draft of Tony Blair's Gaza plan: Remote governance, little Palestinian representation

Haaretz Reveals the Full Document Proposed by the Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for a Postwar Gaza Strip: A Regime Run by Affluent Foreigners With Palestinian Executives at the Bottom

www.haaretz.com

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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 10d

I was only introduced to this during the short time I worked at a think tank, but among the worst euphemisms of the modern age is the use of the word “kinetic” to describe military campaigns. Makes it sound like you’re 5 years old playing with toys in your bedroom, not executing a genocide.

Adil Haque @adhaque.bsky.social · 10d

Of course Biden and his team "ultimately ranked Israeli lives above Palestinian lives."

Does anyone think Israel's "kinetic campaign" saved 47,161 Israeli lives by January 2025?

Of course not. That's absurd.

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Reposted by James Ryan

Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 10d

With Pete Davidson getting a big check to do the Riyadh Comedy Festival, the Saudis are finally paying reparations for 9/11.

And jokes like that aren’t allowed at the Riyadh Comedy Festival.

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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 11d

For all its flaws, the PNC was an actually functioning transnational body of accountable authorities that could credibly speak on the behalf of Palestinians around the world. The mere thought that the PA, Hamas, or any other such body today could do that is laughable.

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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 11d

Arguably it produced less than nothing — Palestinian civil society, insofar as there is or was a body or network that was accountable to Palestinians as constituents, is arguably more degraded and disconnected that it was prior to Oslo being negotiated.

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