Luke Baumgartner

Poor Little Marco is walking around in shoes too big.

I’m consistently baffled reading recipes sometimes and get told only to use two cloves for 4-6 servings. No. Wrong. I need Korean food levels of garlic.

The correct amount of garlic is usually 2-3 times whatever the recipe calls for.

I went through some of her recent posts and she's running the usual script: shilling for Iran, clearly singling out anyone prominent and happens to be Jewish, 9/11 conspiracy theories, and claims Mossad instigated the Iranian protests the other month.

I have undertaken the unfortunate project of finding every Com-related case in the US since 2021, summarizing them, and putting them on a pretty color-coded map. I need a shower.

It's even worse because a few older arrests were mentioned in the thread that I wasn't previously aware of.

In a cursed series of words that I hoped I would never have to write: there's a thread on kiwifarms where a guy in InjektDivision is doxxing people in 764.

The guy pardoned from a 22 year sentence for sedition. The coup succeeded.

And this isn’t to say that there aren’t conservatives in the field who don’t care about right-wing extremism—I personally know many who recognize the threat. It just isn’t their primary area of focus, much like there are flavors of extremism I don’t spend as much time on.

They have no trouble doing so with neo-Nazis, Christian nationalists, or any other violent rightist. In essence, I don’t think enough on the left engage with the study of jihadism, and we’ve allowed it to become dominated by a lot of islamophobic actors. Like, Pamela Geller got too much attention.

What I mean is that much of the rhetoric focuses on blaming jihadism on imperialism, capitalism, etc. etc. While I agree that those definitely contribute, I fear many on the left fail to comprehend the level of religious devotion that drives someone to become a jihadist.

I think that imbued the field with a certain ideological bias, given most of the attention was directed towards jihadism and Islamism. The discourse I see on Bluesky, which I’m aware isn’t the dominant conversation generally, about jihadism is largely through a myopic lens of removing agency.

I could very well be ignorant to the history of the field, but it certainly exploded after 9/11 and during the GWOT era, fundamentally warping our understanding of terrorism and extremism as phenomena. Many, including myself, got interested as a result of 9/11, the GWOT, and the rise of ISIS.

An observation that I’ve had in my time studying terrorism and extremism—and working in the space professionally—is that short of critical terrorism studies, the field is almost completely dominated by conservatives and/or right-leaning people.

Apparently Bo Gritz died last week?

If you fancy yourself a progressive, maybe don’t collaborate on IG reels that repackage antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Delete your account.

One of Shawn Ryan’s episodes from last month has a former Marine Corps pilot pushing ZOG. I’m going to scream.

Pete, I’m begging you — please read Clausewitz.

Me to my family whenever they ask me if I'm ever going to tell them how I really feel about things:

Putting my "Middle East regional concentration" hat from grad school back on.

Question: what the fuck is a "radical" liberal? Do those even exist?

One of these days I’m going to write a book about how the GWOT broke an entire generation of veterans’ brains and turned them into out-and-out racists.

The biggest supporters of war are either:

A) the ones who have never fought in one
B) the ones who did fight in one and thought, “Wow, that sucked. Better have someone else do it now.”
C) the ones who stand to monetarily benefit

3 dead, 14 injured in Sixth Street mass shooting; FBI investigating potential terrorism Three people are dead and 14 others were injured following a mass shooting at Buford's on West 6th Street early Sunday, officials said.

Interesting development. I think this place has the propensity to diminish the actual reach of Iran and its fanboys and dismiss it as right wing hysteria. There is a grain of truth to the right weaponizing the threat, but is indeed very real.

Well would you look at that?

People really struggling with the idea that the Iranian government sucks but we shouldn't be bombing them can both be true, eh?

Iran's "terrorism for hire" network is a live threat. Organised crime groups across Europe, including Foxtrot, Rumba, Hell's Angels, and Mocro-Mafia-linked networks, have been operationally directed by Iranian intelligence. With the regime on "death ground," previous restraint may no longer apply.

I was born in an Iranian prison. My parents were held in their jails. My uncles lie in their mass graves. Nothing you can tell me about the crimes of the Iranian regime that I haven't lived in blood and bone. That doesn't mean I want my people bombed, maimed, killed, their homes in ruins. If your vision of liberation comes only through the destruction of innocent lives, then it's not freedom you're after. Sahar Delijani, Iranian author

I am pro Iranian people. I stand with them against their own government’s repression AND against the imperial violence in the form of bombs dropped from the sky from Israel & the US who have already killed hundreds.

I support neither imperialism or dictatorship.

Sahar Delijani said it best:

I wrote a term paper on their activities in the tri-border area in grad school. Wild shit goes on down there.