The American Federation of Teachers said it would use the $23 million, including $500,000 from the A.I. start-up Anthropic, to create a national training center.

https://archive.is/GDMyT

The tech industry’s campaign to embed artificial intelligence chatbots in classrooms is accelerating.

You know, I'm very broadly against private schools and homeschooling, but honestly this is making at least reconsider homeschooling.

The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest U.S. teachers’ union, said on Tuesday that it would start an A.I. training hub for educators with $23 million in funding from three leading chatbot makers: Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic.

The union said it planned to open the National Academy for A.I. Instruction in New York City, starting with hands-on workshops for teachers this fall on how to use A.I. tools for tasks like generating lesson plans.

While it's good that teachers still retain oversight over the work they'll be doing its still a fucking mistake to incorporate a fucking tickle-me-Hal-9000 into the education of the youth of tomorrow.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the A.I. academy was inspired by other unions, like the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, that have worked with industry partners to set up high-tech training centers.

Carpentry. An industry that's been historically compared to education.

The New York hub will be “an innovative new training space where school staff and teachers will learn not just about how A.I. works, but how to use it wisely, safely and ethically,” Ms. Weingarten said in an interview. “It will be a place where tech developers and educators can talk with each other, not past each other.”

It would be infinitely better to just gut the chatbot industry and all the vipers in it.

The industry funding is part of a drive by U.S. tech companies to reshape education with generative A.I. chatbots. These tools, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot, can produce humanlike essays, research summaries and class quizzes.

Human-like essays such as how to iron the wrinkles out your ballsack, how may pebbles to you need to eat per day for a balanced diet, how smoking two-three cigarettes per day is healthy for pregnant women, etc. Great education for impressionable minds.

In February, California State University, the largest U.S. university system, said it would provide ChatGPT for some 460,000 students. This spring, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the third-largest U.S. school district, began rolling out Google’s Gemini A.I. for more than 100,000 high schoolers.

We're doooooooooooooooooooomed im feeling super whooooooooooo right now

The Trump administration, which recently froze nearly $7 billion in funding for schools, has called on industry to pony up for A.I. education. Last week, the White House urged American companies and nonprofit groups to provide A.I. grants, technology and training materials for schools, teachers and students. Since then, dozens of companies have signed on, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI.

Working on privatization of public services of course.

Some tech executives hope A.I. will become the fourth R.

Some communists hope ai tech executives will be the first to talk to the brick wall.

“Reading and writing and arithmetic and learning how to use A.I.,” said Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer. “You’re going to have to learn those skills over time, and I do think our education system is the best place to be able to do that.”

Why is learning how to manipulate a chatbot so important? I'll tell you why.

But some researchers have warned that generative A.I. tools are so new in schools that there is little evidence of concrete educational benefit — and significant concern about risk.

Zero benefits, all risk. It would be like making the titanic 2 but with a 16"/50 caliber Mark 7 United States Naval Gun loaded forward facing into the prow of the ship under the deck waterline for the express purpose of destroying ice bergs before they impact the ship. But a thousand times less funny to watch.

Chatbots can produce plausible-sounding misinformation, which could mislead students. A recent study by law school professors found that three popular A.I. tools made “significant” errors summarizing a law casebook and posed an “unacceptable risk of harm” to learning. Outsourcing tasks like research and writing to A.I. chatbots may also hinder critical thinking, a recent study from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found.

Corporate translation chatbots go when asked anything

“I do think that there is a risk,” said Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, noting that he frequently cited the critical thinking study to employees. He added that more rigorous academic research on the effects of generative A.I. was needed. “The lesson of social media is don’t dismiss problems or concerns.”

These fuckers know it's gonna just fuck shit up but who gives a shit when there's money involved

Union experts have also raised alarms about the industry’s practices. Some tech companies have trained their A.I. models on swaths of texts scraped from the internet, without compensating writers and other creators, or outsourced the labeling of training data to low-paid workers.

Yeah it's all stolen shit and they want you to pay them for doing it.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, over copyright infringement of news content. Both companies have denied wrongdoing.)

Lmao

Trevor Griffey, a lecturer in labor studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, also warned that tech firms could use A.I. deals with schools and the teachers’ union as marketing opportunities to make students lifetime chatbot customers.

Another fun thing, futher fuckjng commodification of every aspect of our fucking lives

“It’s a long-game investment by companies to turn young people into consumers who identify with a particular brand,” said Dr. Griffey, a vice president of University Council-A.F.T. Local 1474, a union representing University of California librarians and lecturers.

Kinda like how Apple computers made a whole generation of easily gifted pseud-hipsters

Ms. Weingarten said that she was aware of the concerns and that her union, which represents 1.8 million members, had developed A.I. school use guidelines to address some of them.

Yeah bullshit

One of her main goals is to ensure that teachers have some input on how A.I. tools are developed for educational use, she said. In 2023, she began discussing the idea with Microsoft’s Mr. Smith.

Should've stonewalled the entire thing out Weingarten.

The union’s partnership with Microsoft formally began last summer with an A.I. symposium in Chicago where teachers learned chatbot basics and gave the company feedback on potential classroom uses. After Ms. Weingarten met last year with Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, the union also began working with OpenAI.

[The union’s new training hub will be in the downtown Manhattan headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers, which represents nearly 200,000 New York City teachers and other school employees.

Microsoft will provide $12.5 million for the A.I. training effort over the next five years, and OpenAI will contribute $8 million in funding and $2 million in technical resources. Anthropic will add $500,000 for the first year of the effort.

Go bust and sink the economy

On Monday, some 200 New York City teachers taking an A.I. workshop at their union headquarters got a glimpse of what the new national effort might look like. A presenter from Microsoft opened by showing an A.I. explainer video featuring Minecraft, the popular game owned by Microsoft.

Fucking gross

Next, the teachers tried generating emails and lesson plans using Khanmigo, an A.I. tool for schools for which Microsoft has provided support. Then they experimented with Copilot for similar tasks.

How fucking hard is it to write a fucking email

During the workshop, Peter Bass, a first-grade teacher in Manhattan who is an A.I. newbie, asked a chatbot to generate “an effective letter to parents on attendance.” He read the polite but firm email that resulted aloud — to laughter from teachers in the room.

“I’m very old school,” Mr. Bass said, noting that he typically drafted his own letters to “students individually, based on who they are.” Now, though, he said he was intrigued to see if he could streamline his process with A.I.

“If I could find a way of microwaving it a little,” Mr. Bass said, “it could be useful.”

Not gonna lie its a pretty fun list.

1. Enter the Dragon (1973)

2. The Beast to Die (1980)

3. Pierrot le Fou (1965)

4. Dirty Harry (1971)

5. Le Samouraï (1967)

6. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)

7. The Conformist (1970)

8. Blade Runner (1982)

9. A Better Tomorrow II (1987)

10. La Jetée (1962)

What do you call it when capitalists are taking direct command of the State? Any Germans or Italians in the audience that know the answer?

• Four tech execs joined the Army Reserve as lieutenant colonels in hopes of spurring tech transformation.

• The c-suite execs will bypass traditional basic training, serving around two weeks annually.

• The Army is pursuing a major transformation effort.

Four top tech execs from OpenAI, Meta, and Palantir have just joined the US Army — no obstacle courses, shouted orders, or grueling marches required.

The techbro fascism transformation of the Army is here.

The Army Reserve has commissioned these senior tech leaders to serve as mid-level officers, skipping tradition to pursue transformation. The newcomers won't attend any current version of the military's most basic and ingrained rite of passage— boot camp.

God forbid you actually make them get a bit of dirt on their suits.

Instead, they'll be ushered in through express training Army leaders are still hashing out, said Col. Dave Butler, a spokesman to the Chief of Staff of the Army, in a phone interview with Business Insider.

Here's a training exercise idea, make them do grenade and explosive training with live munitions and zero supervision. You might help them rapidly develop their own space agencies.

"They'll do marksmanship training, physical training, they'll learn the Army rank structure and history, and uniforms," Butler explained. Of the boot camp-lite plans, "you could think of it as a pilot," he said, adding that the new soldiers are a part of the Army's larger effort to rapidly modernize.

Amazing. Corporatize the Army. American warfighting is already partially privatized, why not just go all the way and really bang the nails in the coffin of America's fighting capabilities.

The execs — Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer for Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, chief product officer at OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former chief research officer for OpenAI — are joining the Army as lieutenant colonels, according to an Army press statement as part of an effort to turbocharge tech innovation and adoption.

Jesus christ they're getting to skip to the top of the field officer ranks and are basically being given a free pass to get moved up the military's political-corporate structure to rapidly fuck it up with tech demonology.

The service's decision to allow the four to skip "direct commissioning" boot camp, a shortened version of regular officer boot camp, is unusual, though not without historical precedence, Butler said.

Lol fuck your "precedenes" this is literally unfucking precedenced.

"The Army has allowed the direct commission of civilians since 1861 to bring experts with critically needed skills into the force," he wrote in an email to BI.

In Wartime conditions

William Atterbury, the president of the American Railway Association, received a direct commission into the Army in 1917 and served as the director-general of transportation for Allied Expeditionary Forces in France.

Example 1 of wartime conditions

Other notable examples include the president of the Columbia Gas and Electric Corporation of New York, Edward Reynolds, who commissioned as an Army colonel to serve as chief of the Medical Supply Service during World War II, and General Motors leader, William Knudsen, who direct commissioned as a lieutenant general and became the director of production for the War Department.

Example 2 of wartime conditions.

The new tech lieutenant colonels will have to adhere to Army standards, Butler said, and will be expected to perform the service's annual fitness test to stay in good standing. They will spend around two weeks per year working, roughly the minimum required for military reservists.

What a fucking joke

The name of their unit, "Detachment 201" is named for the "201" status code generated when a new resource is created for Hyper Text Transfer Protocols in internet coding, Butler explained.

Should be codes fucking 409

"In this role they will work on targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems," read an Army press release. "By bringing private-sector know-how into uniform, Det. 201 is supercharging efforts like the Army Transformation Initiative, which aims to make the force leaner, smarter, and more lethal."

The only thing these fucking demons are gonna do is look at what the nazi German companies that conducted the Holocaust did then out-optimize and out-perform them.

Lethality, a vague Pentagon buzzword, has been at the heart of the massive modernization and transformation effort the Army is undergoing to build a force that is capable of fighting and winning 21st-century conflicts.

Only thing the u.s military's lethality is being sharpened towards is its own population. Every one of these tech demons are from privatized branches of the government that spies on the American people.

The Army isn't currently planning a second wave of direct commission industry leaders and still has to get these new additions through an express version of basic training, though more similar iterations are expected down the road, Butler said, noting increased interest from other private sector leaders.

Every CEO a soldier

It is common for the services to bring aboard officers at mid-level ranks — the vast majority of military officers join as second lieutenants, or at the rank of O-1. Historically, chaplains, veterinarians, and medical providers have been allowed to join the Army at slightly higher ranks. Other recent initiatives allow for a wider variety of commissions for highly skilled civilian workers from tech and cyber sectors, in some cases up to the rank of colonel, one level below a general.

No it is not fucking common for civilians to be commissioned at field officer ranks off of the fucking streets. Sure you can say they're not being put in actual field officer positions with the power of life and death over a bunch of dumbass grunts, but they're being railroaded to positions of power that'll affect actual field officers and enlisted, and even though this kind of shit pisses me off from the pearly gates straight to Satan's swimming pool, this slow enshitification of the military's actual fighting capabilities is ultimately for the better of humanity.

Fun and short little browser game letting you get a glimpse into how fucked and complicated the October Revolution was from the perspectives of the Mensheviks, the SRs, Kadets, or the Bolsheviks.

Game here

https://red-autumn.itch.io/petrograd-1917

The game starts out with a quote from Kropotkin.

In general, people do not see events concretely, solidly. They think more in words than in clearly-imagined pictures, and they have absolutely no idea what a revolution is, – of those many millions of causes which have gone to give it its present form, – and they are therefore inclined to exaggerate the importance in the progress of the revolution of their personality and of that attitude which they, their friends and co-thinkers will take up in this enormous upheaval. And of course they are absolutely incapable of understanding how powerless is any individual, whatever his intelligence and experience, in this whirlpool of hundreds of thousands of forces which have been put into motion by the upheaval.

They do not understand that once such a great natural phenomenon has begun, such as an earthquake, or, rather, such as a typhoon, separate individuals are powerless to exercise any kind of influence on the course of events. A party perhaps can do something, – far less than is usually thought, – and on the surface of the oncoming waves, its influence may, perhaps, be very slightly noticeable. But separate small aggregations not forming a fairly large mass are undoubtedly powerless – their Powers are certainly nil.

• Peter Kropotkin, The Russian Revolution and the Soviet Government, 1919

Game link below

https://red-autumn.itch.io/petrograd-1917

Also it seems like it runs fine on my phone browser so hey, time to do a revolution while on company time right?

If there was a country that should be permanently demilitarized, besides America and England, it's the fucking krauts.

G Gundam. I don't remember shit about it besides it being some kind of glorified tournament arc, the Japanese protagonists cockpit being wild looking to me, and one of the episodes with the American Gundam having some women sing "America the beautiful" while the u.s pilot was getting his ass beat I think.

https://x.com/MFA_Ukraine/status/1930577884889977099

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine considers the decision of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland to establish 11 July as a Day of Remembrance for the victims of the so-called “genocide committed by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in the eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic” to fly in the face of the spirit of good neighbourly relations between Ukraine and Poland.

In WW2, it is historically known that the OUN and UPA collaborated with Nazi Germany and engaged in genocidal campaigns of massacre against the Polish and their own people. While I'm not particularly fond of contemporary Poland, I fully support them in ensuring the truth of the crimes perpetrated against them by nazi Germany and their rabid Ukrainian fascist dogs isn't buried in the name of appeasing the modern Ukrainian fascist state.

Such unilateral steps do not contribute to achieving mutual understanding and reconciliation, which our countries have been working on for a long time, particularly in the format of the Joint Ukrainian-Polish Working Group on Historical Issues, which operates with the participation of the ministries of culture and national memory institutions from both countries.

Which constantly is having problems from what I hear through the grapevine, which isn't surprising concidering the representatives of the current Ukrainian government have been constantly engaging in fascist palingenetic ultranationalist historical revisionism in a vain attempt to turn their fascist national myth forgery into reality.

Ukraine consistently advocates for a scientific and unbiased study of the complex pages of our shared history. We are convinced that the path to true reconciliation lies through dialogue, mutual respect and joint work by historians, rather than through unilateral political assessments.

Never have I ever seen modern country actively use actual nazi race science (shut up I know you're about to snicker to yourself and say 'what about America'. I know!) To create a whole separate and distictive race of pure blue eyed blonde haired Ukrainians that's being contaminated by "filthy asiatics" of Russia. They literally use fucking skull calipers to differentiate between pure Ukrainian stock and barbaric spawn born from "miscegenation". The fucking Poles should call them out more openly.

We urge the Polish side to refrain from steps that could lead to increased tension in bilateral relations and undermine the achievements gained through constructive dialogue and cooperation between Ukraine and Poland.

Such as recognizing genocidal massacres done by the current Ukrainian regime's nazi heroes

Despite the bias and political context of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland's decision, we continue to conduct search and exhumation work in Ukraine and Poland, respectively. We have already achieved practical results in this area, which should be developed further in the future

Anti-fascism is completely unbiased and unpolitical. As far as I'm concerned it's simply a scientific process of sociological pathology.

Once again, we remind you that Poles should not look for enemies among Ukrainians, and Ukrainians should not look for enemies among Poles. We have a common enemy – Russia.

5 bucks for when Ukraine loses, there's gonna be acts of revanchist terrorism against the Polish People.

For the sake of the common strength, freedom and security of our two friendly countries, we must resolve problematic issues together, rather than exacerbating them.

Easy solution. Denounce your nazi ideology, purge the fascists from the government, then round up all the fascists and offer them to either die running into Russian machine gun fire or die running away from Ukrainian machine gun fire.

Family members of the man charged with Sunday's attack in Boulder, Colorado, have been taken into custody, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Tuesday.

Noem made the announcement on X, calling the suspect, Mohamed Soliman, an "illegal alien" and "terrorist." He is facing multiple counts of attempted murder and a federal hate crimes charge for the attack that injured 12 people at a march supporting Israeli hostages.

"We are investigating to what extent his family knew about this heinous attack, if they had knowledge of it, or if they provided support to it," Noem said. "I am continuing to pray for the victims of this attack and their families. Justice will be served."

A DHS official said six people — Soliman's wife and children — were taken into ICE custody and will now be processed under expedited removal, which allows the government to deport migrants in the U.S. illegally without holding a court hearing.

Soliman is an Egyptian national who arrived in California in 2022 on a non-immigrant visa that expired in 2023, the Department of Homeland Security said. Officials said he filed for asylum in 2022.

The family had been living in Colorado Springs. FBI agents searched the home Monday morning.

At a news conference Monday, Mike Michalek, FBI special agent in charge of the Denver field office, said the family had been cooperative in the investigation so far. Officials said after Soliman was arrested, his wife took her husband's iPhone to the Colorado Springs Police Department.

The 45-year-old Soliman is accused of using Molotov cocktails and "makeshift flamethrower" in Sunday's attack, burning multiple victims, police and the FBI said.

Witnesses told investigators that Soliman yelled "Free Palestine" and "End Zionist" during the attack.

The injured victims include an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor.

The group that came under attack, Run for Their Lives, has been gathering for a walk on Boulder's Pearl Street Mall every week for over a year to raise awareness about the dozens of Israeli hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza.

Soliman is expected to appear in federal court Friday afternoon.

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — U.S. officials are not attending the main public event commemorating the end of the Vietnam war in Ho Chi Minh City this week, according to a guest list released by the organizers and seen by NPR.

I wonder why the u.s isn't joining

Top of the list, announced at the final rehearsal for the April 30 military parade, are Vietnam's biggest friends — Laos, Cambodia, Cuba and China.

What a fun list of friends. Bet there's gonna be some fuckjng great food there

On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese troops stormed the Independence Palace in central Saigon — now known as Ho Chi Minh City — ending the almost 20-year war that caused great losses to both North and South Vietnam, as well as the South's ally the United States.

What a fun twisting of history. Anyways get fucked America, it's time to party!

https://archive.is/RsKZq

It may be set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but Tony Gilroy's Star Wars series takes a key plot from a real robbery masterminded by Stalin in an Imperial Russian city. And Andor has as much to do with our world as it has with Stalin's.

Do you think Stalin would've liked Star Wars? I think he'd probably be a bit boomerish with liking 4-5-6 over 1-2-3.

It has all the makings of the perfect heist. The scheme takes place far from the imperial seat of power, on the wild fringes of an empire almost too vast to comprehend. Fuelled with revolutionary zeal, the plotters are a rag-tag outfit of men and women that includes thieves, murderers and turncoats. Their prize? A treasure chest of cash that can fund ever-more-ambitious missions against the hated ruling elite.

Shame the modern era makes that kind of wild west bullshit obsolete

If you watched the first season of the Star Wars spin-off TV series Andor, you'll recognise this plot as one of the high points. Over three episodes, anti-hero Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and his band of accomplices hide out in mountain passes on the planet Aldhani, fine-tuning an audacious smash-and-grab from an Imperial garrison which is storing the wages of an entire sector.

The real-life theft that inspired it was also a long, long time ago, just not quite so far away.

I guess around a hundred years ago seems like a "long, long time ago" to some.

It took place in Yerevan Square in what was then the imperial Russian city of Tiflis, now the Georgian capital Tblisi, on 26 June 1907. A shipment of cash for the city's Russian state bank branch, amounting to some 300,000 roubles ($1m at the time), was stolen by a gang of robbers linked to the Bolshevik revolutionary movement. Using bombs and guns, the gang left a scene of utter devastation in their wake; some 40 people were killed and dozens more injured. The news of the brazen daylight attack made headlines across the world.

For a much more better examination of the 1907 robbery, Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov by james white, Stalin: Passage to Revolution by Ronald suny, or even kotkin's book would be infinitely better that whatever pigshit mintyfork writes.

"A young man from nowhere with a revolutionary ideology, and a fight against a huge empire. I did think there was something interesting about the secret life of someone in that situation" – Simon Sebag Montefiore

Remember how I mentioned that sumy guy earlier? Here's what he says about shitbag Simon

I met Simon Sebag Montefiore in a café in Kensington, in London, once. He said, “So what are you interested in, and why are you writing this book?” This was before his book came out. And I said, “Oh, I’m interested in the labor movement, Marxism, social democracy, revolution.” And he said to me, “Oh, good. I’m interested in his women.” So I thought, “Well, okay, we have a nice division of labor.”

Montefiore wrote a very readable book. There’s lots of good stuff in it. He didn’t himself go into the archives, he doesn’t know Georgian, and I’m not sure how good his Russian is, even. But he did work there, and he got a lot of material, some of it brand new. That was good for me. But his book is a popular book. It’s a little bit, in my taste, sensationalist. Stalin is a bandit, a gangster, a womanizer, even a pedophile in the book. In all of these ways, it’s a different kind of book, and it doesn’t deal with Stalin’s journalistic writings, his theory of nationalities (which is key to his success), the intricacies and nuances of Russian social democracy.

My book is basically a scholarly book, but I tried to write it in an accessible way. Any intelligent person can read the book and understand what’s going on. But it’s based on the conventions of historical scholarship, which is looking for anomalies and dealing with contradictions. Everything is evidence-based.

Key fucking words: everything is evidence based. Even bourgeois historians have standards unlike shitbag simon

The heist was the brainchild of a charismatic cobbler's son-turned-revolutionary called Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili. He was a gifted public speaker, an ex-seminary student, a romantic poet rumoured to have left a string of broken hearts in his rakish wake. He often went by the name "Soso" (which he had used when writing poems for local publications), though in years to come he would become far better-known – and feared – as Joseph Stalin.

He was more nerdy than the image of stalin shitbag simon sensationalized. Like he was literally booted from church school for bad grades because he was too busy reading banned books. That's nerd shit.

Yes, the troubled outlaw beloved by Star Wars fans everywhere is based in part on one of history’s most notorious mass murderers, as the series' creator, Tony Gilroy, has acknowledged. "If you look at a picture of young Stalin, isn’t he glamorous," Gilroy said in an interview in Rolling Stone in 2022. "He looks like Diego!"

The only thing Stalin is notorious for in my heart was that he was too soft.

And hot.

Diego does kinda look like him.

Hotly.

Stalin took Russia from its war-ravaged imperial decline to a nuclear-armed superpower in just three decades, but also presided over a reign of authoritarian terror that starved, executed or imprisoned millions of its own citizens. Countless books had been written on his cruel years in power, but very little on his early years. Writer Simon Sebag Montefiore saw a gap, and began rifling through archives in post-Soviet countries to try and separate the truth from myth, and tell the little-known story of Stalin's early life.

And theyre all material heaping garbage piles of lies on his grave. And shitbags among the worst bullshitters.

A gangster and a killer

labels and all that, here's something that isn't examined closely about stalins life, how about looking into his stint as a general during the Revolution.

In 2007 – a century after the infamous heist in Tiflis – Young Stalin was published. It delved into the early life of the Soviet Union's dictatorial leader. "Should the life of a black-hearted ogre, a mass murderer who was the wickedest of the 20th-Century's monsters, be quite so entertaining," asked a review in The Observer at the time.

Oh shitbag you fucker, I didn't know you waited to perfectly seize good PR for your shitrag by publishing in '07. What a fucking roach.

One person who read Young Stalin was Gilroy. The writer and producer, who had scripted the first four Bourne films and the Andor-precursor film, Rogue One, was planning a TV series that would explore Cassian Andor's journey from casual thief to rebellious figurehead. The true story of a revolutionary movement on the far fringes of a real empire gave Gilroy his source material. "Literally, I’m the classic old white guy who just can’t get enough history," Gilroy said in Rolling Stone. "The last 15 years, I’ve been reading all non-fiction." He added that Young Stalin was "an amazing book" and that its account of the Tiflis bank robbery was an "incredible movie sequence".

Okay if there's only one thing I will give positive credit to shitbag simon, it's being the wind from butterfly wings - being Stalin - that cascaded to us today having a positive representation of Stalin, albeit indirectly, in mass culture. Still, fuck you shitbag.

Did Sebag Montefiore ever think to himself, 'Here's the perfect setting for a Star Wars spin-off,' when he was researching his book? "No, I didn't ever think that when I was toiling in the archives in Moscow and Tbilisi," he tells the BBC. "But I did think that there was something pretty elemental about the life of Stalin, especially before 1917. It was a fascinating story, partly because no one knew about it."

Just a reminder he can't read Russian or Georgian.

The Tiflis heist was reported around the world and funded the revolutionaries' movement for years, says Sebag Montefiore. "Lenin and the whole Bolshevik Party lived off that money until the [1917] revolution."

That's more sensationalist bullshit because most of the money was marked and couldn't be cashed in. Hell, a lot of good communists were thrown in the clink because the Okhrana informed the internal security forces of the other European nations about the stolen cash and gave them the info to identify the marked rubles.

Sebag Montefiore says that the young Stalin and the troubled Andor bear striking similarities: "A young man from nowhere with a revolutionary ideology, and a fight against a huge empire," the writer says. "I did think there was something interesting about the secret life of someone in that situation. That's basically what Tony Gilroy has focused on in Andor."

More like Tony's focusing on what it takes to build a revolutionary movement and the people that make it. Shitbag simon drank the great man theory kool-aid hardcore.

Stalin was, of course, not the only figure fomenting turmoil in Tsarist Russia, and Andor fleshes out other characters with attributes from the young Georgian's contemporaries. Among Andor's co-conspirators in the Aldanhi heist is Karis Nemik (Alex Lawther), an idealist writing a high-minded manifesto for the emerging resistance, similar to Bolshevik Leon Trotsky's polemics amid the opulent decline of Romanov rule.

That's an insult to Nemik.

And if I'm being real, an insult to Trotsky's own history.

Stellan Skarsgård's character, Luthen Rael, is an analogue for Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader who was able to form a powerful movement from unlikely bedfellows. A wealthy art collector, Luthen's precise manners in front of his gilded customers hide an uncompromising hatred of the empire and a restless desire to fund a growing resistance. In Cassian's talented, taciturn thief he sees a useful tool; Lenin saw the same in Stalin. "In 1911, people said to Lenin, 'Why are you using this guy? He's a gangster. He's had people killed. He was involved in all these bank robberies,'" says Sebag Montefiore. "And Lenin replies, 'He's exactly the type we need.' Stalin could edit a paper. He could write and could read. And he was also someone who could arrange a hit on somebody and arrange a bank robbery. That was what Lenin talked about: some people were tea drinkers, and other people were thugs, Stalin could do both, and that's why Stalin won in the end."

That's all fucking sensationalist hearsay, shitbag. There's libraries worth of information on the Bolsheviks, and in no such was has anything you've done contributed to it. I could spend several posts going over every single load of shit lie you've been recorded saying in this article but that's not the point of this post.

The birth of an empire

The research into historical rebellions – Gilroy has said he studied other revolutions while writing Andor, as well – has no doubt helped create the show's oddly realistic feel. Andor feels more down to earth than anything the Star Wars universe has shown us before, if you'll excuse the occasional spaceship roaring overhead, or an alien or two sitting in the local bar. There are flashes of mundane detail rarely scene in big-budget sci-fi. People complain that Andor's mother Maarva's (Fiona Shaw) house is always too cold. Security officer Syril Karn's (Kyle Soller) petulant intensity even extends to tailoring his uniform to make him look smarter than his contemporaries. The Imperial Security Bureau hoping to root out the emerging rebellion is a nest of competing ambitions that feels as real as anything in a historical drama – or in everyday office politik. There are fewer blaster-toting Stormtroopers than there are in the Star Wars films, and more sadistic, trenchcoated officers who would have been right at home in the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, or its Soviet replacement, the Cheka.

Other than saying fuck off you British fop for that last minute jab at the Soviets, andor is indeed high quality slop. The best that's come from the Star Wars series.

"In the past, Star Wars movies drop us in at a very big moment," says Walter Marsh, an Australian writer who praised Andor's grown-up worldview in The Guardian in 2022. "There's the big climactic battle, or Luke Skywalker's heroic journey, and they're these big themes of good versus evil. But as any historian will tell you, wars and empires and revolutions don't start and end overnight, and there's always this bigger backstory. There's this sort of long tail. It takes years for that kind of colonial rot, those systems of control, to set in."

I mean yeah, it's cinema. Not real life. Shit takes time.

Andor shows the corruption and brutal entitlement found at every layer of autocratic regimes: the guards drinking in a brothel while they're supposed to be on duty (and prepared to shake down anyone they don't like the look of); the prison industrial system that requires constant additions even if the new prisoners have done nothing wrong; the subtle sabotage of ethnic pilgrimages to sacred land that is earmarked for imperial development. And with authoritarianism on the rise around the globe, Andor has as much to say about today's world as it does about Stalin's.

One could even say it's a critique of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.

"When the show came out I think I was pleasantly surprised to see a story in that universe that was familiar, but which also approached this question of empire that's been so central to the whole franchise, but was never actually tackled in a really nuanced and human character-driven way," Marsh tells the BBC. "It's all well and good to have a big, evil Sith Lord achieve global, universal domination. But how does power assert itself on the street level, from one human to another?

Yep more andor glazing, love to see it. Probably the closest we'll get in America to seeing socialist realism in cinematic form before any revolutionary transformation.

"The Empire is this huge grinding, unthinking machine, but it's also a very human thing," Marsh continues. "Who are the people that find a place and thrive in those systems?" He remarks that in the original films the Imperials were little more than blank-and-you-miss-them pantomime villains: "British guys in suits getting choked by Darth Vader at some point, who are just fiddling with buttons in the background." Andor's strength is its "three-episode arcs that showed us the kind of death by a thousand cuts that it takes to achieve this sort of social, political and economic dominance", says Marsh. "The converse of that is it shows all the ways in which that kind of oppression inspires pushback and resistance in all kinds of different ways." From hero to villain?

Almost as if the empire takes inspiration from the United States of America. But who could really know what the authors intent was when he was creating the Empire. Certainly doesn't have anything to do with the fact that it was made during the Nixon Era when the Vietnam War was raging.

The new season, which begins on Tuesday 22 April, will develop the rebellion's story as it rushes towards the events seen in Rogue One: the scenes of brutal Imperial reactions to a demonstration shown in the trailer evoke the Tsarist crackdown on a St Petersburg march in 1905, which was a slow-burning contributor to the Bolshevik revolution.

Spread the word. Star Wars is marxist-leninist cinema.

"The scavenger who becomes a passionate revolutionary leader is kind of fascinating," says Sebag Montefiore of the troubled Cassian Andor. "That's a great trajectory, because that's exactly what Stalin did. And it'll be interesting to see how deep Gilroy uses that – how far he goes to create a character with both heroic and villainous features."

Fuck off shitbag

George Lucas's original film trilogy rooted the rebellion in the classic good-guys-versus-bad-guys dynamic of countless Saturday matinee cliffhangers, the resistance modelled after anti-Nazi opposition in occupied Europe.

The Rebel Alliance is modelled off of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front and the People's Army of Vietnam. Who are communists. Also the majority of the anti-fascist resistance in nazi-occupied europe were the communists. The original trilogy of 4-5-6 is communist in all but name

The rebels of Andor inhabit a much more compromised reality; like real-life revolutionary movements, they are much more complicated than the ones we usually see on screen. Luthen, Andor's Lenin proxy, considers it with chilling deliberation in one of the first season's standout scenes: "I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else's future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see."

Not chilling, determined. We all fight against the wretched darkness of ages long-past their expiration date for a red sunrise of a new world we may not see.

To quote a 1951 book, The life we prize, by the American novelist Elton Trueblood:

"A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit."

As Sebag Montefiore notes, the revolutionaries themselves knew deep down that if they took power, they themselves would have to use repression as a tool; they would become what they once despised. "Lenin himself said: 'A revolution without firing squads is meaningless.'"

Fuck you shitbag, he didn't say that. Also it's class war.

Fuck this writer sucks, he doesn't know how to finish an article in an actually meaningful manner.