How Syria became the battleground for Israeli and Turkish influenceWatching the geopolitical landscape in the Middle East in recent months, it would be tempting to conclude that Israel’s strategic position has improved. The same could be said for Turkey. Could this situation constitute a recipe for stability, or presage further troubles ahead? Although engaged in conflict on multiple fronts - Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran - Israel appears to have prevailed for the time being, while the Tehran-led “axis of resistance” seems in disarray. Iran’s military leadership and infrastructure were severely hit during the June war, which also damaged the state’s nuclear programme, although how much it has been set back remains unclear. The Iranian response was muted after the US bombed the Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites on 22 June. Syria, meanwhile, is now ruled by a former al-Qaeda militant whose reputation was laundered at record speed by western democracies. Decades of American and European mobilisation against extremist groups such as the Islamic State and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham were tossed into the garbage within days, further confirming western double standards. Iran’s main logistical route to support Hezbollah in Lebanon has thus been severed. As for the Lebanese movement itself, it has been severely weakened with the loss of leader Hassan Nasrallah and other top figures. It is now under strong pressure, both internal and international, to give up its military arsenal. At the same time, Israel’s ruthlessness in Gaza, which has been turned into a massive killing field as starving civilians queue to receive limited humanitarian aid, has degraded much of its international support. But Israel’s extremist government does not really care about the world’s opinion, as long as western nations continue to provide support (and others, such as Russia and China, remain inexplicably neutral). As for Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently succeeded in neutralising the main security threat along its southeastern border, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. It also prevailed in its long-sought objective to remove Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria, replacing him with Ahmed al-Sharaa. And last but not least, Ankara has bolstered its global reputation as the go-to mediator in the Russia-Ukraine war. Alongside Israel, Turkey has become a top regional actor. In this context, any path towards stability in such a volatile setting must now inevitably involve both Israel and Turkey - and both are prepared to rebuff US pressure, in ways few other American allies could dream of doing.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/how-syria-became-battleground-israeli-and-turkish-influenceCorporations Want to Prevent Workers From Leaving Their JobsA Texas nurse switched to a better-paying job at a nearby hospital only to wind up with debt collectors at her door demanding she pay her former employer back for a loan she didn’t know she owed. A cargo pilot faced a $20,000 lawsuit over job-training expenses at a commercial airline that had just fired him for refusing to fly a plane under unsafe conditions. After being promised college tuition relief paid for by Chipotle, fast-food workers can get stuck with the tuition bill. These are all examples of how millions of workers across the country are increasingly finding themselves bound by Training Repayment Agreement Provisions (TRAPs), a new form of “stay-or-pay” contract that indebts employees to their bosses. Often inserted into contracts without workers’ knowledge, these restrictive labor covenants turn employer-sponsored job training and education programs into conditional loans that must be paid back — sometimes at a premium — if employees leave before a set date. As regulators scrutinize similarly restrictive noncompete agreements for barring workers from obtaining better employment, a Lever review of class-action and state-level lawsuits reveals that employers in health care, retail, and transportation are turning to TRAPs to keep employees locked in their jobs and potentially evade law enforcement. “It’s student debt, but coming from employers in the workplace instead of in schools,” said Mike Pierce, the executive director and cofounder of the Student Borrower Protection Center, which has tracked the spread of TRAP contracts nationwide. Other labor leaders on the front lines of industries adopting these clauses have compared TRAPs to “indentured servitude.” Employers argue that these clauses are a way to recoup their investment in employees who decide to leave the company prematurely. But these contracts have come under fire from labor groups and regulators. Oftentimes, the amount of debt demanded under TRAP contracts — which can be upward of $50,000 — is far higher than the employer’s training costs.
https://jacobin.com/2025/08/corporate-america-noncompete-workers-trapsThe Obscenity of Human Rights: Violence as Symptom - Slavoj ŽižekThe anxious expectation that nothing will happen, that capitalism will go on indefinitely, the desperate demand to do something, to revolutionize capitalism, is a fake. The will to revolutionary change emerges as an urge, as an "I cannot do it otherwise," or it is worthless.
With regard to Bernard Williams's distinction between Ought and Must, an authentic revolution is by definition performed as a Must - it is not something we "ought to do" as an ideal we are striving for, but something we cannot but to, since we cannot do it otherwise. Which is why today's worry of the Leftists that revolution will not occur, that global capitalism will just go on indefinitely, is false insofar as it turns revolution into a moral obligation, into something we ought to do while we fight the inertia of the capitalist present. However, the ultimate argument against "big" political interventions which aim at a global transformation is, of course, the terrifying experience of the catastrophes of the XXth century, catastrophes which unleashed unheard-of modes of violence. There are three main versions of theorizing these catastrophes: (1) the one epitomized by the name of Habermas: Enlightenment is in itself a positive emancipatory process with no inherent "totalitarian" potentials, these catastrophies are merely an indicator that it remained an unfinished project, so our task should be to bring this project to completion; (2) the one associated with Adorno's and Horkheimer's "dialectic of Enlightenment," as well as, today, with Agamben: the "totalitarian" potentials of the Enlightenment are inherent and crucial, the "administered world" is the truth of Enlightenment, the XXth century concentration camps and genocides are a kind of negative-teleological endpoint of the entire history of the West; (3) the third one, developed, among others, in the works of Etienne Balibar: modernity opens up a field of new freedoms, but at the same time of new dangers, and there is no ultimate teleological guarantee of the outcome, the battle is open, undecided.
https://libcom.org/article/obscenity-human-rights-violence-symptom-slavoj-zizek