Benjamin Balthaser

You are on your own in a very pleasant if subtly hostile post urban wild. Things have really changed since I left the Bay Area 25 years ago

Berkeleyites are funny. Two things are immediately apparent: everyone walks w giant backpacks on their shoulders as if they are scaling the Alps, and, there are no open bathrooms, even in coffee shops or sandwich shops. These seem discursively connected

Photo of Tehran.

When we said it would be socialism or barbarism some thought we exaggerated or were being figurative

I mean, this is literally the thesis of nearly all new left critical theory

going back to 1965, telling everyone that in the future both the soviet union and the united states will collapse under the leadership of men who were spokesmen for the same pizza restaurant, i am immediately sent to the nuthouse and lobotomized 2:21 AM - Mar 7, 2026 • 105.2K Views

When Marcuse said planned obsolescence, consumerism and post-Fordist embourgeoisement were “acts of mass violence” I’m almost certain he was staring in High Marxist German at the Pizza Hut just South of the UCSD campus

The NYT are the last true Kantians: there is an eternal category of experience named “US President at war” and anyone in the nominal office will achieve it if they drop enough bombs

Trump Echoes FD.R. and Grant in Calling for 'Unconditional Surrender' President Trump demanded that Iran capitulate in the war with the United States, invoking a phrase made famous by statesmen and generals.

not the pitchbot

“On Speaking Ice” by Benjamin Balthaser in my city, two fallen en route to a market, eight more at an intersection of a hospital, ice in their cheeks, hair, lips as if they said goodbye (poetry)

Happy to have a poem in Another Chicago Magazine. I wrote this several weeks ago at the height of the Minneapolis uprising, during a bitter cold snap, when DHS instructed state agencies to not use the word “ice” to describe weather events anotherchicagomagazine.net/2026/03/05/o...

🚨🚨 Operation Metro Surge is NOT over. ICE has received 4 large shipments of brand new vehicles in the past 24 hours. We urge everyone to continue to look out for their neighbors and supporting mutual aid efforts. We will not stop until ICE is OUT.

A lot of people say AI isn't very good for the world and its outputs are routinely unreliable, but these haters fail to see how it's revolutionizing how we incinerate schoolchildren.

Why do you love America so much

?

You can’t dupe someone who wants it

Exactly - that was a little npr-ism

For folks who think Israel duped Trump into an irrational, ill-advised war, it's good to remember that even "sane" members of the US establishment have wanted to obliterate Iran for decades: herethe "never Trump" McCain singing "bomb bomb Iran" to the tune of Barbara Ann more than once as candidate

But yes both are evil, either way

I think the US is also following the “failed state” model and I don’t buy Citrinowitz’s distinction or his rather outdated attachment to American cold war projects

Evil like this? Better or worse?

in v real time, on the world stage. Bombing Iran has been on the US imperial agenda for decades (remember McCain’s “bomb Iran” song?); Trump simply believed after the “success” of Maduro’s kidnapping & the destruction of Gaza, & European rebuild of NATO, that anything was possible 2/2

I put little past Netanyahu & the Israeli state, but the claim that Israel duped the US into a reckless war strikes me as the dissonance of a certain layer of the commentariat who cannot accept or process the meaning of American imperial arrogance, ignorance & violence & it’s v real decline 1/2

Didn’t he say he would condition aid to Israel and also support an arms embargo? He’s not an an anti Zionist but that’s better than crocketts position

Maybe? I wouldn’t discount voters’ racism. But Crockett also had really problematic stances — esp on Israel.

It seems the NYT is spinning Talarico’s popularity in TX as a sign of the “moderate” wing of the Democratic Party prevailing. What they didn’t mention is that Jasmine Crockett is a far more vocal supporter of Israel, which I wld argue may have cost her far more votes than her “radicalism.”

You do not, actually, have to offer nuance regarding a colonial invasion.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s long career was built on conflict avoidance—then, October 7 transformed and radicalized him, @Yair_Rosenberg argues:

OMFG they think we are the dumbest people who ever lived.

I assume there is a confluence of interests that are converging!

You really think Israel and/or Zionist money controls American imperialism?

I don’t think in the final analysis there is as much space btw these two pts as one might think