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"Antifascist in critical condition as father delivers mass petition to German foreign ministry ~ Alisa-Ece Tohumcu ~ After forty days, Maja T has suspended their hunger strike due to deteriorating health conditions. According to the Budapest Antifascist Solidarity Committee, they have lost 14 kilograms, their
Industrial heat exchanger plays a critical role in maintaining energy efficiency and process performance across various sectors, including chemical processing, oil and gas, food manufacturing, and power generation. As energy costs rise and sustainability becomes a global imperative, optimizing these systems for maximum thermal efficiency is not only economically smart but also environmentally responsible.
At the core of heat exchanger efficiency is the ability to maximize heat transfer while minimizing losses. This begins with appropriate equipment selection. Choosing the right type of heat exchanger—be it shell-and-tube, plate, finned tube, or spiral—depends on factors like temperature range, pressure limits, fluid characteristics, and maintenance requirements.
Proper sizing is equally important. Oversized units may waste capital and operating expenses, while undersized ones can create bottlenecks and limit throughput. Engineers should perform detailed thermal and hydraulic calculations during the design phase, considering fouling factors and expected operational variations.
Material selection also influences performance. For instance, high thermal conductivity metals such as copper or aluminum can improve heat transfer, while corrosion-resistant alloys ensure long-term durability in aggressive environments.
Another crucial factor is flow arrangement. Counterflow configurations generally offer superior thermal performance compared to parallel flow or crossflow designs, as they allow greater temperature differentials. Optimizing flow paths and ensuring uniform distribution of fluids help avoid hot or cold spots and improve overall effectiveness.
Regular maintenance is vital to sustaining thermal efficiency. Fouling—caused by scale, sludge, or biological growth—can significantly degrade performance over time. Implementing cleaning protocols, either mechanically or chemically, and integrating monitoring systems to detect performance drops early can prevent costly downtime.
Advances in digitalization and automation have introduced new ways to optimize heat exchanger operations. Smart sensors, data analytics, and control algorithms can monitor real-time conditions and adjust operations dynamically to maintain peak efficiency. Digital twin models and predictive maintenance strategies allow facilities to simulate performance, anticipate failures, and optimize cleaning schedules.
Incorporating energy recovery systems, like economizers or heat recovery steam generators, can further increase thermal efficiency by capturing waste heat and reusing it elsewhere in the process.
Ultimately, achieving maximum thermal efficiency in industrial heat exchangers involves a balance of smart design, material science, proactive maintenance, and the integration of modern technologies. Investing in optimization strategies not only reduces operational costs but also supports sustainability goals and regulatory compliance.
From Voice of Korea. http://vok.rep.kp/index.php/detail_com/comde/iee250702001/57/en Ryanggang Province in the northern highlands of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a place of potato production.
Is gender agnostic a thing? I'm not rejecting the concept of gender I just don't understand it and want to stop thinking about it. Or is that just Being Cis?
Antiwar News with Dave DeCamp, 07/15/25: US Launches 51st Airstrike in Somalia of 2025, Trump Asks Zelensky If He Could Hit Moscow, and More youtube.com/watch?v=HyQiH66fhJ…
RPI Conference: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/blueprint-for-peace-tickets-1397170888739Phone bank for Defend the Guard: https://defendtheguard.us/phonebankSig...
In early April, the Philippines responded with “guarded optimism” to US President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, saying higher rates placed on its neighbors could present an opportunity.
For the first time in a generation, there was a national consensus in Iran that negotiations with the United States are necessary to resolve the issues over Iran’s nuclear program.
help fund the appeal process, deadline end of july
On June 30, 2025, at least 15 asylum seekers from #Afghanistan were notified that their applications had been rejected. This mass rejection appears to signal a de facto reclassification of Afghanistan as a "safe" country for the first time since its reoccupation by Taliban forces. It marks a further tightening of the #asylum process, in line with the policies of the Republic of #Cyprus, whose government takes pride in its harsh #deportation record and treats condemnation by the European Court of Human Rights as a badge of honour.
"In studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence as well as the absolutely central role that war and slavery played in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call ‘the economy.'
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. In an ever-changing world, the one constant in Universe USA is rising Pentagon budgets. For President Trump, a trillion-dollar war budget is something to crow about.
One of the coolest things I learned about the catacombs is that a significant amount of the bones come from the 4th-5th century. Some of these people were literally Roman, saw the fall of the Roman Empire, were alive for the Visigoth migration. Incredible.
Pepe Escobar- Desde Kazán hasta Río y más allá, ahora también está claro que el TTT fuera de control se dirigirá contra cualquier nación o socio que se alinee con los BRICS “antiestadounidense”.
Israel has warned Gazans to stay out of the Mediterranean Sea or risk getting killed under wartime restrictions that critics say serve no security purpose and are meant to deprive Palestinians of a key source of sustenance – and respite from the horr…
So if you ever wondered how OpenBSD 7.7 (most recent one at the time of writing) works on 23-year old PC, I have recorded a boot process. CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (single-core 1.6 Ghz) from 2002. i386, of course RAM: 512 Mb DDR2 HDD: Some Western Digital 80Gb hard drive from ~2004 Fresh OpenBSD installation without any tweaks and tuning boots in 88 seconds. There's definitely a room for improvement such as turning off libraries reordering (we should't worry about security too much on such machine). Less then a minute is easily possible. But still, results are amazing, I think. It's a 23-year old PC! And it runs the most recent OS without any trouble. Try to do that with Windows 11 or any mainstream Linux distro. Also, #FVWM is pretty snappy and works just fine.
If you ever wondered how fast is OpenBSD, here's a video of OpenBSD 7.7 booting on a computer with AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (single-core 1.6Ghz from 2002) and 512...
"SYRIE – Les affrontements se poursuivent dans la ville druze de Soueïda où les gangs djihadistes syriens commettent des crimes de guerre, notamment des exécutions extrajudiciaires, des démolitions de maisons et des attaques contre des églises, des symboles et des personnalités nationales, signale l’agence
SYRIE – Les affrontements se poursuivent dans la ville druze de Soueïda où les gangs djihadistes syriens commettent des crimes de guerre, notamment des exécutions extrajudiciaires, des démolitions de maisons et des attaques contre des églises, des sy…
Zelensky, anti-Russian US hawks, Melania, and the Mainstream Media each exploited in their own way his false expectation that Putin would agree to a ceasefire-partnership deal.
"SYRIE / ROJAVA – La région du Nord – Est de la Syrie sous contrôle des forces arabo-kurdes est au bord d’une catastrophique humanitaire, sanitaire et écologique à cause du niveau de barrage de l’Euphrate qui a baissé dangereusement à cause de la rétention de l’eau du fleuve par la Turquie colonialiste grâce aux barrages […] L’article ROJAVA.
SYRIE / ROJAVA – La région du Nord – Est de la Syrie sous contrôle des forces arabo-kurdes est au bord d’une catastrophique humanitaire, sanitaire et écologique à cause du niveau de barrage de l’Euphrate qui a baissé dangereusement à cause de la réte…
"Ce projet de voie fluviale permettrait de relier la Seine aux grands fleuves du nord de l'Europe. Présenté comme écologique et bénéfique pour l'économie locale, il suscite une contestation croissante.
Written by Sharon Wilson Purdy, Planetary Geologist at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Earth planning date: Monday, July 14, 2025 The Curiosity rover continues to navigate through the region of Mount Sharp characterized by the boxwork terrain. After successfully completing a drive of about 34 meters over the weekend (about 112 feet), the […]
Leaders and delegates from 30 countries are meeting in Bogota to discuss how to stop Israel's assault on Gaza and its illegal occupation of Palestinian terri...
Heart-wrenching scenes after nine Palestinian aid seekers were shot dead by the Israeli army while waiting for desperately needed food aid at the U.S.-run aid distribution center on Al-Tina Street, southeast of Khan Younis.
Cuando activabas el internet en casa, porque no lo podías tener de forma permanente, la línea telefónica quedaba ocupada y no podías hacer ni recibir llamadas. RE: bsky.app/profile/did:plc:wxesy…
creo que más o menos salió a la vez; lo de la tarifa plana era una forma de time-shering, que se llevaba haciendo desde los 60, la idea era aprovechar que muchas compañías dejaban sus servidores ociosos al final de la jornada laboral, así que les salía más a cuenta alquilarlos esas horas para que gente como nosotros surfeara las superautopistas de la información
Y lo más fuerte de lo de Torre Pacheco, es esto que comenta Facu Díaz, y es que hay "influencers" fachas que después de convencer a un montón de críos a que vayan a defender "España" ellos se quedan detrás para monetizar el odio. Y es que es increíble que no se den cuenta.
After a string of controversies involving antisemitism, Hitler, and more, Grok will no longer call itself Hitler or base its opinions on Elon Musk’s, xAI promised.
‼️EILMELDUNG‼️ Das Berliner Verwaltungsgericht findet das Verbot der politischen Betätigung des Palästinensischen Chirurgen und Rektors der Uni von Glasgow @ghassanabusitt1 durch die Berliner Behörde rechtswidrig.
TEHRAN, Jul. 15 (MNA) – Iran has awarded a contract to a Chinese company to electrify its east-west railway amid plans to increase freight transit from China to other countries via the Iranian railway.
Λυπάμαι, αλλά δεν μπορούμε πλέον να θεωρούμε ότι είμαστε πολιτισμένοι. Ο δυτικός κόσμος έχει την ιδέα ότι είναι πολιτισμένοι. Οι πράξεις όμως δείχνουν διαφορετικά. Καλημέρα είπαμε;
Es stand schon als Vermutung in Raum, aber nun scheint es belegt zu sein. Ein brit.-isr. Anwalt, mit engen Verbindungen zu Netanyahu (aktuell Anwalt des Faschisten Duterte vor dem #ICC) hat den Chefankläger #KarimKhan erpresst. Er habe die Drohung übermittelt, dass Khan vernichtet werden würde, wenn er nicht darauf verzichte die Haftbefehle gegen #Netanyahu auszustellen.
»ICC lawyer linked to Netanyahu advisor warned Khan to drop war crimes probe or be 'destroyed'« middleeasteye.net/news/israeli…
The British chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court was warned in May that if arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant were not withdrawn, he and the ICC would be "destroyed".
»The warning was delivered to Karim Khan by Nicholas Kaufman, a British-Israeli defence lawyer at the court who told Khan he had spoken to Netanyahu’s legal advisor and, according to a note of the meeting lodged on file at the ICC and seen by Middle East Eye, was "authorised" to make him a proposal that would allow Khan to "climb down the tree"«
»But Kaufman warned that if it emerged the chief prosecutor was applying for more arrest warrants, for far-right ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich over their promotion of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, then "all options would be off the table".«
»Kaufman told Khan: "They will destroy you and they will destroy the court."
Khan and his wife, who also attended the meeting, both understood this to be a threat, according to the note of the meeting seen by MEE.«
»Kaufman asked Khan if a recent report that he was preparing warrant applications for Israeli suspects related to the West Bank was true.
The conversation took place before it was reported that Khan’s office was preparing further arrest warrants for far-right ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich over their promotion of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.«
»Khan did not respond to Kaufman's question but asked why Israel did not "proceed with complementarity", which would entail investigating the alleged war crimes in the domestic courts.
He said the Israeli attorney general "can easily look into this".
Kaufman said this was impossible, but told him there could be a "non-criminal, non-investigative process" and Khan could give the evidence he had to that "Israeli process".«
»But he warned that these options would be "off the table" if it emerged that Khan had applied for more warrants.
According to the note, Kaufman also told Khan that if the existing warrants were not withdrawn, or if he applied for more warrants, "they will destroy you and they will destroy the court".
The note records that after the meeting, Khan's wife, who is also a lawyer, said to him, "That was a clear threat." Khan agreed.«
»MEE has been told by multiple sources that on 16 March 2024, Khan's extensive team of lawyers and researchers had decided they would be in a position to apply for warrants by the end of April.
On 25 March, Khan informed the US administration of his decision and forewarned them the warrants would be applied for by the end of April.
Over the following two months, pressure on Khan mounted.«
»On 23 April David Cameron, then the British foreign secretary, threatened in a phone call with Khan that the UK would defund and withdraw from the ICC if the court issued arrest warrants for Israeli leaders.
Last month MEE revealed details of the call, in which Cameron told Khan applying for the warrants would be like "dropping a hydrogen bomb".«
»It was on 29 April 2024, over a month after the decision to apply for warrants was made, that one of Khan’s staff made harassment allegations against him.
The allegations were referred to the court’s Internal Oversight Mechanism (IOM), its investigative body, on 3 May.
But an investigation was closed days later after the woman said she did not want to cooperate with it.«
»This means that when Khan announced he was applying for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant on 20 May, there was no investigation against him.
Months later, in October, as speculation began to increase that ICC judges would soon issue arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, an anonymous account on social media platform X began circulating details of the sexual misconduct allegations against Khan.«
»According to the WSJ an anonymous source also sent information about the allegations to journalists in an email that contained the phone numbers of the complainant and an advisor to Khan, Thomas Lynch, next to the Hebrew word for telephones.
The IOM then opened another investigation, which was closed in early November.
Two investigations into the allegations had been opened and closed when the UN's Office of Internal Oversight Services opened its own external investigation, which is ongoing.«
»Since being subjected to sanctions by the US in February, Khan has had his American visa revoked and his wife and children have been banned from travelling to the country. His bank accounts have also been frozen in the UK.«
»If the US sanctions the court as an institution, as some experts believe it might, it would prevent many banks and software companies from dealing with it - potentially crippling the ICC's ability to function.«
...... Haphazard - often inspiring - sadly final - emails from 2013 to 2022 - between Loren Goldner and David & Stuart Wise plus (on an adjacent web page) Loren's lost text / critique of UK(PLC) over the last 50 years which was on the now mysteriousl…
Many children in the Gaza Strip are no longer matched with the years of education they are supposed to be, after the Israeli war machine prevented them from studying for two whole years. While the world’s children go to school every morning, childre
Die Berliner Ausländerbehörde hat einem palästinensischen Arzt im Mai 2024 zu Unrecht die Teilnahme an einem Palästina-Kongress in der Hauptstadt verboten.
@bifouba Ich erinnere mich. Es gab damals eine Pressekonferenz, auf der unter anderem die Anwältin Nadija Samour sehr eindrücklich berichtete: youtu.be/aVq0yJD4_l8?feature=s…
Palästina Kongress (12-14.4) - Wir klagen an!Die Palästinenser:innen erleiden einen Völkermord. Israel vernichtet Gaza und seine Bevölkerung. Bis Februar 202...
@Kraemer_HB Dass es als Teil des Urteils belastbare Vorgaben hätte geben sollen, da gebe ich dir völlig recht. Aber es ist doch wohl eher die Verwaltung, die durch offensichtlich rechtswidriges Verhalten das Vertrauen der Bürger zerstört, nicht das Gericht, dass das feststellt oder die Medien, die über die Feststellung berichten...
@Kraemer_HB Call me old-fashioned, but I believe in the distinction between news and opinion journalism.
Einfach trocken über das Urteil berichten geht völlig in Ordnung, und mit dem Urteil in der Hand können dann berufene public intellectuals aufzeigen, wie die Repression von Palästina-Solidarität und die faschistische Demontage des Rechtsstaats Hand in Hand gehen. Als Beispiel für diesen größeren Zusammenhang diskutiert wäre mir der Fall wichtiger als nur einen Schritt weiter zu fragen, was das jetzt konkret für den nächsten Kongress und den nächsten unliebsamen Besucher bedeutet.
An expansive look at working class conditions and class struggle in the UK in the last half of the 20th Century, through the lens of books by Nicholas Comfort and Owen Jones.
La loi Duplomb aura eu le mérite de clarifier les choses : plus une seule personne n'a osé dire depuis une semaine que "l'écologie c'est pas politique, c'est ni de gauche ni de droite". La droite et l'extrême droite votent systématiquement contre la santé des Français et la préservation de l'environnement.
Les chemins révolutionnaires et le marxisme aujourd’hui
Que nous apprend l’œuvre tardive de Marx sur le rôle des luttes anticoloniales et autochtones dans le dépassement du capitalisme ? Quelles sont les trajectoires révolutionnaires de notre époque ? Le sociologue et militant politique Kevin Anderson évoque son dernier livre et les récentes manifestations aux États-Unis.
Que nous apprend l’œuvre tardive de Marx sur le rôle des luttes anticoloniales et autochtones dans le dépassement du capitalisme ? Quelles sont les trajectoires révolutionnaires de notre époque ? L…
Yea tell that to the two million Bolsheviks who died under Communist rule, or the million or so that died during the Chinese cultural revolution, and why is it people are trying to escape from North Korea but not South? And when Germany was divided why did people try to escape from East to West Germany and not the reverse. Only thing Communism does is to insure death, starvation, for all and no freedoms from anyone because when you're 100% dependent upon government you have no freedom.
That's polemic. Provocation. China is not a communist country, just as the USA is not a free country. Besides, tell that to the 9 million people who starve to death every year because capitalists speculate on wheat. Fuck it, it's all shit...
@Reverend Elvis It is not today but it certainly was to a much greater degree during the cultural revolution. Although it's an odd-mix of capitalism and communism today it certain does much better under this mix than the more pure strain in the past.
The only reason that China works better than Germany or the US is because it is not a communist country like Germany. Communism does not work and when China ended communism it took off like a rocket and no one is close to catching up. The US is a capitalist country and is in a slow and inevitable decline similar to the UK last century. The US has nothing to offer its people except for the corruption that the elite receive so those that can are leaving as fast as they can. Anyone with a decent education knows that a tariff is a tax that the people of the country pay and that the US is quickly becoming the most heavily taxed country on earth. The UK is following quickly but those with enough money to leave do so and those are the wealth creators. Neither capitalism or communism can work and the real problem is that ideology is for the gullible. If you see either as a new religion then just as with a religion you only make those in charge wealthy. A good economy must be based on common sense and both socialism to aid those that require help and capitalism to aid the wealth generation. Communism normally focusing on keeping everyone equally poor with no benefit to put your head above the parapet and try to become wealthy so no wealth. Capitalism does not help those that for any reason cannot help themselves and everyone falls at some point, so you lose everything if you have a heart attack or something. The US has the shortest life spans in the 1st world by 10 years so they have the worst living standards.
It is necessary to start with a predefinition of terms. A commune is a family, a primary group. A very fair system. Everyone gives as much as they can and takes as much as they must. And prestige and power go to those who give more than they take. But the capitalists and the Bolsheviks changed the meaning of the concept. Communism works well in groups of up to about 150 people. There must be transparency in human behaviour. One must stick to the original meaning. If the definition does not fit the word then a new word must be invented. Because otherwise we will never communicate. The language of science and not the language of the street people. China today is extreme capitalism. Capitalism is good in the initial phase when there is fragmentation on the supply as well as the demand side. In its later form it leads to capital accumulation by the few. Which leads to oligarchy. Capitalism is like cannibalism, the strong feed on the weak. Capitalism takes away man's time, it takes away our lives. Freedom is the possibility to dispose of one's own time.
[apologies for any linguistic errors.] Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
And I think the best solution is humanitarianism + utilitarianism. But the original utilitarianism not the later one that ignored ethical principles. Apropos anarhia: The less the state interferes in public life the better. People create healthy social relations themselves. Provided they are not interfered with by the media.
"Two years of Switch-Off – an evaluation April 2024 It has been two years since we first spoke. The call was made in the middle of the ongoing strategy debate in the climate movement. At that time, after Hambi, Danni and directly after Lützerath, the potential of mass actions seemed to have been exhausted for … Continue reading Germany: Two years of
Are you tired of being misinformed and deceived? Yes, I can't change that either. But you can let the Undead Network deceive you. Music, digital sovereignty, international politics. D.I.Y. misinformation now available in English and German. #music #politics #diy #misinformation undeadnetwork.de/blog/
"A few words about the Exarchia riots on 12th April 2025 In the evening of April 12th, we chose to confront the forces of repression in the streets of Exarchia. This conflict erupted in a climate of intense police presence in the neighbourhood by the state and attempts to instill fear among those who resist.
Firms like OpenAI are developing AI in a way that has deeply ominous implications for workers in many different fields. The current trajectory of AI can only be changed through direct confrontation with the overweening power of the tech giants.
''THIS DESTROYS YOUR PANCREAS!'' | Barbara O'Neill EXPOSES Dangerous FoodsDiscover the shocking truth about pancreatic health with Barbara O'Neill. Learn whi...
Pars Today – The Zionist regime, in its 23rd month of war on Gaza – during which it has committed genocide against Palestinians in the Strip with unprecede...
Including: Durham miners manifesto, Kollonatai's Workers Opposition continued, Workers Opposition joins Fourth International, Luxemberg on the Russian Revolution continued, etc.
But this incident with the Irish gentleman illustrates a seeming paradox in criminal justice: why adding more US cops *cannot* reduce domestic violence.
1. Incidents of domestic violence involving Black women are under-reported.
2. Because Black women are *less likely* to call the police. But why?
The woman in this case called 911 on her Irish boyfriend. Because she thought cops were here to help.
But instead of helping, they started a nightmare spiral of false imprisonment, wearing unsanitary prison clothes with knife holes and blood stains from previous victims.
He could have died.
Her bar for calling 911 on her Irish boyfriend is now much higher. She's forced to make an awful choice between balancing her safety, and the safety of a potentially abusive domestic partner.
If she gets this balance wrong, and waits too long? The results for her own safety could be disastrous.
If you can understand why she would be less likely to call 911 on her Irish boyfriend in future, then you can understand why Black women in the US are less likely to call the cops on their Black boyfriends in similar situations.
(We haven't even talked about the dynamic of cops abusing their wives)
If you read the story carefully, you'll notice that his harshest and scariest treatment happened when he was transferred to... a bureau of prisons facility in Atlanta Georgia.
Basically, they treated him like a Black US citizen who is presumed innocent and is awaiting trial. 🤷🏿♂️
Like I said, there is no person that has been to ICE detention, and a US pretrial facility, be that federal or county jail or Rikers, that thinks that the ICE conditions are worse.
Roughly 1 in 5 Black men in the US will experience this Kafkaesque unfair imprisonment mistreatment in their lifetime.
a lot of people who voted biden over the kids in cages seem to forget the early biden administration simply left the treatment mostly intact, but stopped allowing journalists in to question it
ICE was born like this during bush jr. and there's never been any saving it
Face aux crimes israéliens, l’UE choisit l’inaction et le déshonneur
Le conseil européen des affaires étrangères de l’#UnionEuropéenne n’a finalement rien statué sur son accord d’association avec #Israël, pourtant bafoué. Les 27 se contentent d’un accord sans garantie sur l’aide humanitaire à #Gaza.
Le conseil européen des affaires étrangères de l’Union européenne n’a finalement rien statué sur son accord d’association avec Israël, pourtant bafoué. Les 27 se contentent d’un accord sans garantie sur l’aide humanitaire à Gaza.
M. Carney doit dénoncer le projet israélien de camps de concentration à Gaza : CJPMO
Montréal, le 10 juillet 2025 – Canadiens pour la justice et la paix au Moyen-Orient (CJPMO) tire la sonnette d’alarme concernant les derniers plans d’Israël visant à déplacer de force les Palestiniens de Gaza et à les concentrer dans une zone fermée à la frontière sud avec l’Égypte, en préparation de leur déportation vers d’autres pays. CJPMO se fait l’écho des préoccupations des fonctionnaires de l’ONU et des historiens de l’Holocauste, qui estiment que ces projets s’apparentent à des « camps de concentration massifs », et demande instamment au Premier ministre Carney de dénoncer ce crime contre l’humanité.
Le néolibéralisme comme stratégie coloniale en Palestine – conversation avec Toufic Haddad Lettre du Collectif national au ministre de l’Europe et des Affaires Etrangères : agissez pour la su…
Move over rock ‘n’ roll. The new cultural cutting edge is fandom — and it’s even eaten politics. Corbynism was a fandom, and so, too, is MAGA. But the most influential early innovators in this field came from the “alt-Right”, the online ecosystem that flourished from the mid-2010s until roughly the end of the first Trump presidency.
The alt-Right was never a well-defined ideology or campaign, so much as an edgy, transgressive vibe. Just as rock music scandalised society when it detonated in the comfortable, well-behaved pop world, the alt-Right similarly shifted perceptions and created new celebrities. And according to a new memoir by one of its most controversial stars, just as with rock music the alt-Right ended up being devoured by the same vested interests it set out to disrupt.
Lauren Southern was catapulted to viral notoriety by an anti-feminist video she made in 2015 at the age of 19, instantly becoming the pretty, blonde face of Right-wing radicalism. She supported European anti-immigration activists obstructing the arrival of migrants by boat; she headlined a speaking tour with white nationalist Stefan Molyneux; she defended EDL founder Tommy Robinson. She was also accused of promoting conspiracy theories about “white genocide” and “the great replacement”.
Then, in 2018, she announced she was quitting YouTube to make documentaries; in 2019, she announced her retirement altogether, to focus on her marriage and family. Within a year she was back creating content again. Rumours began to circulate about her marriage; in 2023 she revealed that this had ended and she was living in Canada again. Last year, she told me the story of how her beliefs about family and marriage, shaped by Right-wing online memes, collided with the messy and complicated reality of life when her marriage turned abusive, leaving her questioning everything she’d believed and advocated to that point.
Now, she’s written a memoir. Like all Southern’s content, This Is Not Real Life is compelling, accessible, intimate, and unabashedly partial: in other words, perfectly calibrated for fandom consumption. It reads, in fact, like a rock memoir, because it is a rock memoir. Alongside this, depending on your own affiliations, it could read as confessional, political bridge-burning, or whitewash for a toxic career inciting political hatred and division. But the most curious feature of the book is the way it is both written for her fandom, and also as a critique of political fandom as such.
She dishes the dirt — and what dirt! — on Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate: the former appears as a coke-snorting scammer, while she alleges that the latter is a financial criminal and rapist. She also documents her own journey from teenage ingénue to media veteran, via a political content ecosystem that provided an intoxicating thrill of celebrity but, in her telling, ran less on ideals or principles than money, drugs, and celebrity. The title, This Is Not Real Life, captures Southern’s own gradual realisation that what looked from the outside like activism was actually mostly a show; it also captures the broader digital-era sense that politics has steadily abandoned truth in favour of competing perspectives. The memoir itself occupies an ambiguous position in this: it’s both a confessional and also, avowedly, a skewed one, that has deliberately omitted many details. So is it an intervention in the unreality, or an effort to transcend it?
Following her first viral video, Southern swiftly became an intense object of parasocial (and sometimes sexual) interest to countless fans and followers. Her fandom was huge. But when we talk about parasocial relationships, we tend to be describing the attachment fans have for the object of their fascination. And yet, as Southern tells it, this really is a two-way street: “The energy around each video was intoxicating. Watching the views climb, the comments pour in, the reaction videos roll back. It was a rush. And it wasn’t just the public we were working into a frenzy. It felt even better when we provoked the police or the government.” The high of internet acclaim was compulsive: “We’d built a little digital crack house.” Why, she asks rhetorically, would “this clueless girl” put herself in so much danger, surrounded by such dodgy people? If you ask this, she says, “you might not grasp the power of hundreds of thousands of people telling you you’re saving the West”.
But even as the comments and likes poured in, she describes this as conditioning her in turn. The responses she received shaped a “people-pleasing kid who craved approval and guidance” into “an AI bot programmed with everything I could find to thrive in the conservative media landscape”: mimetically adopting everything that worked, reinforced by comment-section feedback, viral numbers, and the intoxicating high of online social approval. In response to fan feedback, her content got more and more extreme.
She’d attend feminist protests, cherry-pick protesters’ stupidest assertions, and feed her audience’s most uncharitable stereotypes, pioneering what she describes as “a Pandora’s box of stupidity”. As her fame grew, she expanded from anti-feminism to immigration. She travelled around Europe, filming at anti-immigration protests. Some of them became riots or pitched battles between anti-migration protesters and antifa. She was kettled and gassed. She filmed provocative stunts, such as declaring “ALLAH IS GAY” in heavily Muslim Luton, which got her deported from the UK. She became perhaps the best-known face of the alt-Right during the first Trump presidency, aided — as she acknowledges — by her youth, sex, and appearance.
And even if the nominal aim was conservative politics, the real driver seems to have been less conservatism in practice, than the same kind of raw, furious energy that drove the rock and punk movements. And much as rock and punk were swiftly devoured by showbiz, so too was this new ecosystem of politics-as-showbiz. In tandem, too, as they became more heavily mediated, protests also became unreal, taking on a quality of live-action roleplay with the added buzz of occasional real violence. It was all wildly, transgressively fun, from pitched battles between black-clad Antifa and Right-wingers dressed as Roman gladiators, to finding herself in the Arctic Circle in a bullet-pocked warehouse full of Finnish Nazis.
But if internet notoriety was as much about showbiz and parasocial buzz as ideals, and protest was as much thrill-seeking as principle, so too the stars and power-brokers of this emerging politics-as-entertainment scene turned out often to be less than sincere in their motives. The book opens with her embroiled in the fallout from her association with Tenet Media, a US-based platform later discovered to have taken funding from Russian state broadcaster Russia Today. She touches briefly, later in the story, on travelling to Russia in 2018, where she interviewed the hard-Right philosopher Aleksandr Dugin; she claims only to have realised much later that it was a PR exercise, brokered by a Belgian politician in the pay of the Russian government. But these were scarcely the only opportunities that turned out to come with ulterior motives.
Southern implies that her first employer, Rebel Media, took funding from the tobacco lobby and perhaps the Israeli government, circulated “petitions” that were really just tools to build mailing lists, and repeatedly fundraised ostensibly for named causes but in reality just for the company’s coffers. She also notes similar behaviour recently admitted by American alt-Right firebrand Steve Bannon, who pleaded guilty to “scamming his own base”, as Southern puts it, in a “Build The Wall” campaign that raised over $20 million but built only a few miles of fencing. Bannon was pardoned by Trump in February this year.
EDL founder and anti-immigration activist Tommy Robinson, meanwhile, is presented as having transitioned seamlessly into activism from Luton’s criminal underworld. As she tells it, he’s a cocaine-addicted “Peter Pan figure”, who fleeced his supporters for donations, ostensibly to campaign for the cause but in reality with “tens of thousands of these donations being pulled out of ATMs to pay for hookers, blow, and new flat-screen TVs”. By then, though, she and her crew were too deeply complicit to speak up. “Did we say anything? Not really. Not while staying silent benefited us.” And along with insider perks, there was also fear: anyone who tried to speak up would be smeared as “a far-left activist” and have “a mob of sycophantic fans unleashed on them”. Threats, intimidation, the online mob all helped ensure silence around his behaviour.
But that’s nothing on the allegations Southern makes against Andrew Tate — who, she alleges, raped her. (Tate has been charged with a number of similar offences in the UK and has denied all of them.) Southern describes, age 22, being taken by a gurning, coke-addled Robinson to visit Tate in his sleazy Romanian base, nominally to raise funds for a new media platform but — she alleges — really to serve as frontmen for a pump-and-dump crypto scam. Instead, Tate raped her. That’s the upshot of the account she gives: that after the initial meeting, which Robinson ruined by being obviously, incoherently high, she was invited back alone for a second meeting with Tate. Naïve and cocky, she imagined she could save the day; instead, Tate took her to a club, promising all along that the others were coming soon, then plied her with drink.
The two drinks he gave her affected her much more intensely than usual, she says. He took her back to her hotel room and asked to sleep next to her, then forced himself on her. In Southern’s words: “I said no, very clearly, multiple times, and tried to pull his hands off me. He began strangling me unconscious. He repeatedly strangled me every time I regained enough consciousness to pull at his arms. I’d prefer not to share the rest. It’s pretty obvious.”
Why, she reflects, did she not go public earlier, as the allegations against him began to mount up? Southern had no idea who he was, she says, when she first met him; in the light of her own anti-feminist pronouncements, she struggled to make sense of what he’d done. So she decided to pretend it hadn’t happened. She describes going completely off the rails after the rape, into a spiral of cocaine and alcohol. By now her notoriety swept her into a manic fugue of filming, media appearances, clubs, drugs, and transient accommodation. Reflecting on that time, she describes it as falling into a deep, dark abyss in which her idealism about “standing with the ‘good guys’” slowly gave way to a grim realisation that, for most, ideology was merely a hollow front for power. “The way we spoke as if we were rebuilding civilisation, positioning ourselves as the moral counterweight to a decaying world, all while living in quiet hypocrisy.”
But even after her first attempt at retiring from media, the pervasive unreality of her life continued. She details her whirlwind romance and marriage to “Mitch”, one of the men hired to work security for her migrant crisis documentary, and her decision to quit media in order to circumvent the ban on her travelling to Mitch’s home country, Australia. This happened in tandem, she recounts, with a hit-piece published by alt-Right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, that alleged Southern was “a secret leftist” who traded sex for video ideas and scripts.
The sense of unreality and malice compounded when, as Southern recounts, a friend tipped her off that Andrew Tate was fanning these false rumours in his “War Room” private group — a fact that, Southern suggests, served as a pre-emptive smear campaign lest she expose his assault on her. Meanwhile, her marriage swiftly deteriorated from giddy romance to domestic abuse. Isolated in Australia, locked down by Covid, she became increasingly desperate and alcohol-dependent. Finally she managed to obtain a plane ticket to visit family in Vancouver with her son — and never returned to Australia.
Anyone who tries to make sense of This Is Not Real Life without at least a working knowledge of its setting and principal characters is bound to find it confusing. The book skips back and forth across the timeline, blending Southern’s own reflections and her account of events in a loose narrative only occasionally anchored by dates. We can infer that Southern assumes her readers are already sufficiently marinaded in the relevant lore to know who figures such as Steve Bannon, Tommy Robinson, and Andrew Tate are. And while these have received enough mainstream press coverage to be well known even beyond political fandom, it takes someone truly up to the ears in online politics discourse to know who Steven Bonnell is — let alone grasp the significance of her having had a relationship with him.
Bonnell, also known as “Destiny”, is a Left-wing streamer of similar standing to Southern — but for the other team. Having met and debated a few times early in their careers, Southern recounts a friendship developing gradually between them, after her marriage ended — a relationship that eventually became intimate.
When, in late 2024, their relationship was leaked, fans were shocked and bewildered. From a fan perspective, it was unthinkable to consider any kind of relationship developing, between the respective foci of two fandoms so diametrically opposed as Southern’s and Destiny’s. But in Southern’s telling, having both grown up in the digital panopticon and served as the avatar for huge fan communities, they had a surprising amount in common.
Even so, as Southern tells it, even the camaraderie occasioned by their shared experience of life in the digital fishbowl eventually fell victim to the relentless incentive to take ever more polarised positions. In a scene surely too out there to be fabricated, she recounts her final showdown with Bonnell as taking place on the night Donald Trump was shot, in the apartment of Southern’s friend, MAGA influencer Ashley St Clair — who was then pregnant with Elon Musk’s baby. Bonnell made several provocative posts about the assassination attempt, which prompted a bitter stand-up row and the irreparable rupture of their friendship. Her sorrow is palpable: “I’d come here hoping for clarity about my work, about the internet, maybe even about whether I still had a friend. But now I just felt more fractured than before. More alone. Everything felt impossibly fucked.”
The dissonance between fans’ reaction to the Destiny revelations, and Southern’s own account of it, cuts to the heart of what her memoir reveals. Digital fandom is a very different experience for those on the receiving end of parasocial attachment. How far is it all just showbiz, in which people fraternise cheerfully across supposedly insuperable political divides? Or, as Southern’s bust-up with Bonnell suggests, do the incentives of clickbait-posting sometimes make those divides insuperable?
A cynic might say of her latest retirement announcement that this isn’t the first one she’s made, and each time she’s come back. We might also note, given the lopsided nature of the dirt-dishing exposés in This Is Not Real Life, that not all bridges seem to have been burned. For all the detail on Tate, Robinson and Bonnell, plenty of other notables are by contrast very lightly treated. Despite his notoriety, Stefan Molyneux is mentioned only in passing. Brittany Martinez and Martin Sellner, leading lights of the Generation Identity radicals, make only the briefest cameo appearances. Critics will doubtless accuse Southern of whitewashing a career as a political extremist; but she is frank about the partiality of her account, explaining that she wished to expose her own shortcomings, not humiliate friends.
Nor does This Is Not Real Life describe any kind of political Damascene conversion. But this isn’t a memoir about leaving the Right behind, nor deciding her political views were wrong. Southern may have somewhat moderated her simplistic youthful opinions, but it’s clear she has not recanted. Rather, it’s about coming of age alongside a new celebrity ecosystem, and discovering that — much as rock ‘n’ roll did — it’s possible to be profoundly corrupted by the experience.
And much as rock music ended up central to the establishment, the clear inference of Southern’s story is that politics-as-fandom today is less a dissident force than a tool wielded by the real engines of power and influence. This Is Not Real Life recounts the mess and chaos of growing up alongside, and in, digital showbiz even as this ecosystem consolidated. Now, Southern writes, she fears it has mutated into a new mechanism of control, disguised as freedom, heralding “An era of technofascism, algorithmic control, data and digital systems”.
“Politics-as-fandom today is less a dissident force than a tool wielded by the real engines of power and influence.”
But while nothing in this brave new-media world can be taken wholly at face value, including perhaps Southern’s memoir, my sense is that if she does make a comeback it will be in a more reflective capacity. The book is peppered with reflections on her Evangelical childhood, contrasted with adult reconsiderations of Christianity — not least a reference to the gnostic experience of digital life that feels unmistakably Catholic. One clear and moving subtext concerns Southern’s spiritual journey: an ongoing arc evidently far from complete, but already bearing surprising fruit. (Southern informed me, at the time of writing, that she is pursuing graduate studies in theology.)
The final chapters describe repeated efforts by well-meaning friends to tempt her back into social media; efforts she characterises as like encouraging an alcoholic to just have one glass of wine. The whole spectacle, she suggests, serves to fill the gap where true spirituality should be: “we all want heroes to be real because we all want to be saved.” The parasocial deities of the online firmament are, as she puts it, like “little Greek gods running around with their worshippers”, poor substitutes for “connection with divinity and a higher purpose”. The end of Lauren Southern’s journey, it seems, is a new but also timeless discovery. Namely: that whether you’re worshipper or deity, the parasocial pantheons of the digital realm are thin substitutes for the real thing.
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My brother in Christ, do I really have to remind you of this?
> A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good things, and an evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth evil things. > But I say to you that for every idle word men may speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment. > For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.
聖騎士
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