Geoffrey Hughes

@geofffhughes

Teacher, Ethnographer, Arabist; Author of Affection and Mercy (2021) and Social Media Tribes: Jordan's Bedouin and the Margins of the State (2026) ♥️🇯🇴♥️🇵🇸 (he/هو)

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Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· 14d

"Sure, you can automate writing an essay, but can you automate... Manufacturing?" -Something only an idiot or a charlatan would say

Andy Burnham in hi-viz cosplay saying "AI might be able to write an essay"

Andy Burnham in hi-viz cosplay saying "but it can't make a train like they do here"

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· 16d

Hard to even put your tongue in your cheek at this point. The culture is washed, cooked, enshittified.

What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· 16d

It's a clever bit of political jiu-jitsu because it plays into voter cynicism and uses his opponent's strength against them. But imagine if it works and corporations start realising that carpet bombing the airwaves makes voters like the target more rather than less?

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· 17d

The temptation of course is to see this through the lens of World War, but I wonder if the better analogy is the sort of war where centralised control breaks down and there's not so much a substantive disagreement between powers but rather a struggle to reintegrate men under arms into society...

Did this super rough map yesterday

Has anyone written on what happens when all these supposedly separate conflicts become a unified war?

A map showing interlinking conflicts across the Sahel, Middle East and Ukrained

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· 19d

I contrast this with a very different sort of commensality associated with Jordan's national dish, which is traditionally eaten collectively from a single platter by hand

A platter of meat and rice with a goat's head on top

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· 25d

Chat, is this good?

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· 25d

This article on human-Jinn marriage is off to a great start...

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· 25d

www.aa.com.tr/en/greenline...

Image showing Gulf dependence on desalination:

3 billion m3 for Saudi Arabia
.8 billion m3 for Kuwait
.3 billion m3 for Bahrain
.7 billion m3 for Qatar
1.9 billion m3 for UAE
.5 billion m3 for Oman

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· 27d

Chat, is this good?

Tuesday morning, U.S. forces radioed a message to ships gathered near the waterway. "U.S. forces are prepared to maintain freedom of navigation and safeguard lawful commerce in accordance with international law," the military said over marine radio, according to a recording reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. "The southern route of the strait remains open."

Seafarers, jaded by deadly attacks on vessels in recent days, were skeptical. "F off," one sailor is heard responding via his ship's radio.

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· 27d

Total vindication for the Immortal Science, tho...

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· Jul 8

I think a lot of them were looking for classes advertised as having take-home exams because they planned on cheating from the start? This is why I think it self-selected for cheaters.

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· Jul 4

I think it's an. impressive story of people organizing for justice under extremely adverse conditions, but I also note some contradictions and try to avoid getting too swept up in my admiration for what these activists have accomplished.

Business owners in tourist areas signal their sympathies with the Palestinian cause by posting notices like this, which reads, "You are not welcome here if you support "Israel", the state of terrorism, apartheid, and occupation! Free Palestine!"

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· Jul 4

This goes far beyond BDS. People aren't even boycotting Israel at this point--they're boycotting the West in general and the US in particular: McDonald's, Starbucks, Coke, Pepsi... I probe the sometimes conflicting sentiments and motivations here and also ask: why the focus on food?

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· Jun 30

Bordering practices

Passport control and a poster with the names of the traditional three cups of coffee served for guests

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· Jun 25

Here's a fun example I like to teach, which is admittedly a bit conjectural. It's an attempt by archaeologists to envision a self-sustaining system that doesn't really depend on anyone understanding how the system works. Surely many such cases...

From Henry Wright's Recent Research on the Origins of the State: A diagram of an aspect of regulation in a Hawaiian Chiefdom

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· Jun 23

Casually monstering Sudanese folks, is it?

“Monsters.” “Dark money.” A hidden hand “turning us against one another.”

Swap “AIPAC” for “Jews” and it’s the oldest antisemitic conspiracy theory in the books. That’s not criticizing a lobby. That’s laundering antisemitism from your podium as Mayor of a city with more than a million Jews. This bullshit is dangerous.

If you want to talk about real monsters let’s start with the North Koreans, Russians, Sudanese, the Iranian regime, and their proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, PIJ — and other terrorist groups who’ve killed scores of Americans.

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· Jun 22

Reminds me of this banger from 2021. Doesn't inspire much confidence that they've learned anything...

Keir Starmer asked for concrete policy changes Labour will now make in response to these election results, tells the BBC that he will "change the things that need changing and that is the change that I will bring about."

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· Jun 17

Ultimately, I suggest (a bit playfully) that the book succeeds at a sort of Abrahamic mode of imminent critique, which careful readers of the midrashim and the Qur'an will hopefully recognize:

Yet Husain is to be commended for meeting the moment with verve and moral clarity and using her research to trouble fables that we have become all too comfortable repeating to each other. As I read her, I was reminded of the story of young Abraham as related in both the Qur'an and the midrashim, though here I defer more to the Quranic telling. Finding the people worshipping idols that they had apparently fashioned for themselves, Abraham smashes all but the largest of them. When accused of having destroyed them himself, Abraham replies that it was the largest of the idols that smashed the others—and invites his audience to ask the idol if they doubt him. There is more to the story, and earlier pre-Quranic versions make a lot more of the enraged idolaters' unsuccessful attempts to burn him alive and the miracle of his survival. Yet it strikes me that Husain succeeds here in living up to the best in what we might call an Abrahamic mode of “immanent critique”: an argument by demonstration in which she destroys our idols by revealing them to be incapable of doing what we need them to do.

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· Jun 17

I find the critique of contemporary antiracism persuasive, but I'm less sanguine about the appeal to a liberatory monotheism--especially given the fact that the Gaza genocide has availed itself of both justifications:

What Husain is arguing for here as a positive political project is a return to the liberatory vision embodied in Shakur's turn towards Islam in the 1970s: a project that could “identify the figure of man without identifying with that figure” (130). I take this seriously as a project and see promise in it, but if the state of Israel has availed itself of racist and antiracist arguments to defend the indefensible, it has also increasingly availed itself of religious arguments as well. Most notable here is the chilling invocation by Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others of the biblical story of “Amalek” as the model for how Palestinians should be treated, in which “God instructed them … to wage an eternal war until no trace of Amalek's existence remained” (Gold and Hagler 2024, 9). More generally, however, Matan Kaminer has noted that the “Abraham Accords” represent an increasingly messianic construction of Israel as a political project that is heavily influenced by Christian Zionism and seeks to flatter its biases. Profoundly patriarchal, this strain of “Abrahamism” promotes territorial homogeneity and the relegation of all “others” to second-class status on the basis of genealogical claims to a shared covenant with God (Kaminer 2024). Thus, it is worth asking (as Husain does so effectively) whether we have ever really been secular—as well as whether the West's genocidal trajectory is really more a result of racial or religious thinking (or perhaps something else altogether). Of course, numerous religious Jews find this rhetoric at least as abhorrent as secular antiracists have found the use of antiracist rhetoric to justify atrocities. Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and Namod certainly come to mind here. One can easily argue that scripture here is being used much like a drunk uses a lamppost (or a charlatan uses statistics): more for support than illumination. If the language of antiracism and its intense overinvestment in the figure …

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· Jun 17

I argue in particular that the racist history of anthropometry and bertillonage could be augmented through greater attention to its antisemitic dimensions:

My point here is not to argue that Jewishness (rather than blackness) is the true foil for the “average man” or even to set up some sort of invidious comparison between two groups who have suffered unconscionably as a result of modernity's racial ordering. As Michael Hart notes, “Jews were hardly the major focus of most European statisticians' and social scientists' research into the nature and causes of crime,” a dubious “honor” that fell to “the poor and working classes, to women, immigrants” (2016, 98). Rather, I think the parallelism between Muslims and Jews and their struggles as faith communities to grapple with racism foisted upon them deserves more careful consideration in ways that Husain invites but does not fully explicate in this slim and focused volume. As with alleged Muslim “terrorists” whose targeting “allows for the killing of masses,” the “kinds of thinking sedimented in the form of the wanted poster” (3) here do not merely monster those individuals pictured but also fashion a permission structure for far more indiscriminate persecution and killing. More generally, Husain notes that race or raza originally referred to domesticated animals, Muslims (or “Moors”), and Jews. As she notes, in this conception of race, the natural and theological were still fused, and “race” was conceptualized as an outcome of human intervention (16). Drawing on the work of Cedric Robinson, Husain suggests that this conception of “race” harkens back to an earlier “moment” when Europe felt more vulnerable than dominant and still construed its constitutive racial others in terms of “rivalry and power” (as opposed to the figure of the “Negro” who is “already defeated”) (13–14).

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· Jun 17

My review of Atiya Husain's No God But Man is up. It's an interesting little book that uses "wanted" photos of Assata Shakur as an entry point into the debate about the relationship between Islam, racialization and terrorology. Here are a few bits to entice:

It is the final two chapters (“Assata, Black Madonna” and “Race: Theirs and Ours”) that the argumentative threads of the book really slide into place. Taking Chapter Four's title from the writings of the political prisoner and revolutionary Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Husain notes a troubling tendency to render Shakur as a sort of innocent in ways that can depoliticize her struggle. Worse, Husain notes a tendency for blackness itself here to recapitulate (in inverted form) the basic logics of Quetelet's “Average Man” as the pinnacle of beauty and goodness. Intersectionality is especially significant here, with its appeal to various “identities” as a project of what Husain terms “infinite exclusion for inclusion” (110). In the guise of “centering” various identities or (one might add) appealing to the “global majority,” intersectionality might not be attempting anything so simple as substituting a new normative figure of “man” in place of an old one given blackness's abiding association with “the other.” Yet blackness might become a model of “the Human Other, to which something is owed” and thus “a symbolism that can be usurped for some benefit” (116). In this context, the claim that Muslims are “also black” starts to seem more like a “moral analogy” (Shryock 2008) than a neutral description. In the conclusion, Husain draws on some of the rhetoric justifying the destruction of Gaza to illustrate how this might play out with catastrophic effects. Mobilizing a combination of racial tropes like “the children of light and the children of darkness” and appeals to civilization, the extermination of Gaza is simultaneously marketed as a necessary part of the battle against antisemitism: the world's first antiracist genocide. Husain asks pointedly: “With antiracism like this, who needs racism?” (131–132).

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· Jun 16

Most self-aware proponent of the youth social media ban, right here:

"To put my cards on the table, I believe smartphones in general, and social media in particular, have been a deeply harmful societal innovation, at the ‘hey, let’s put lead in petrol’ scale of innovation."

Nodding in agreement as I read this on my smartphone instead of playing with my child.

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· Jun 14

Western social theory falls for this hook, line and sinker. One of the worst things Marshall Sahlins ever did to anthropology was to come up with this diagram. Not how it works at all:

Diagram mapping reciprocity along a social gradient, becoming more predatory as it grows more distant.

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· Jun 13

🔥🔥🔥

As a result, despite its roots in human discursive labour, as noted above, AI programs trained on LLMs tend to reinforce what Semel calls the neo-Platonic view of language as something self-contained and autonomous of people, the worlds they inhabit, and the histories with which they are entangled. This, in turn, can give plausibility to the appearance of truth-giving objectivity that algorithms encourage and even the temptation to treat AI as a divination tool or access to the god's eye view. Ironically, AI may even be inviting some users to reinvent the medieval scholastic and Enlightenment technique of seeking truths embedded ‘in’ language and its propositionality. More generally, the ubiquity of divination techniques shows that pattern-seeking in search of hidden truths has a very long history.

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· Jun 8

Me, when I call all the shots...

"He won't have any choice," Trump told the FT in a telephone interview.

"I call the shots. I call all the shots. He (Netanyahu) doesn't call the shots."

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· Jun 5

Every second you spend defending Platner from the consequences of his own choices is a moment you could be devoting to defending actual hero Adam Hamawy from vile smears about how he risked his life to heal civilians with horrific injuries inflicted on them by our tax dollars. Why do that?

New York Post Headline reading

Squad’-backed NJ Dem Adam Hamawy spent a month at Gaza hospital where Israelis later exposed tunnels and found Sinwar
By Ryan King

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· Jun 4

1982

What is it Sargent?

We just got the final count on the terrorist evacuees

Does this include the terrorist wounded from the terrorist hospitals?

Yes sir, along with the terrorist doctors and the terrorist nurses

Wait a minute. What's all this terrorist business? wasn't Begin a terrorist too?

No Begin was not a terrorist. He was a freedom fighter

Oh

How many terrorist relatives?

3000 terrorist wives and 1000 terrorist babies.

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· Jun 3

The judgment in the Nowak case is itself pretty racist. It basically says that Sikhs now deserve what they are going to get. Hard to imagine what would make the people mad about this happy...

In addition to killing Henry and the irreparable harm to those close to him, you
have also caused real suffering to others who knew him. You have brought
shame upon your family, your community and your religion. Your actions have
stirred up racial tension in Southampton and across the country which have
made many Sikhs worried about their own safety even though they have done
absolutely nothing wrong.

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· Jun 2

This guy laid people off and attempted to use AI to force a work speedup. Love this for him 🥰🥰

The bank version looks like this: an employee uses ChatGPT to draft a customer email, the email is technically grammatical but factually imprecise, the recipient takes the imprecision as a commitment, and the bank deals with the resulting complaint three weeks later at a substantially higher cost than the original work would have generated unaided.

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes· Jun 2

Exactly what you would expect from a country leaving a path of death and destruction from the Sahel to Yemen. Every accusation is a confession.