DHS Facial Recognition Software Used Against Minnesota 15Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) has deployed an aggressive facial recognition apparatus for monitoring and tracking domestic political dissidents, raising questions about why an agency created after 9/11 to fight the global war on terrorism is now maintaining centralized dossiers on ordinary American protesters. Four days after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis during Operation Metro Surge, HSI began Operation Puppet Master, their undercover spying campaign that netted conspiracy charges against 15 people who allegedly took part in protesting against ICE. An HSI undercover agent, embedded inside the Signal group chat Whipple Watch, downloaded a selfie posted by Isaac Sant. The photo shows Sant’s face bruised from rubber bullets. The agent uploaded the selfie to Clearview AI’s facial recognition database that turned it into a dossier.
https://unicornriot.ninja/2026/dhs-facial-recognition-software-used-against-minnesota-15/The Marxist approach to warIn his Philosophy of History, Hegel remarked that “it was not so much from slavery as through slavery that humanity was emancipated.” A similar thing could be said about war, which – for all its horrors and barbarities – has shaped the world in ways good as well as bad. History almost appears to us as an endless series of armed conflicts: wars of imperialist domination; wars of national defence and liberation; colonial and slave wars; and, of course, civil wars. It could be said that wars provide the second most important impulse for historical development, behind revolutions – although even then, many revolutions are the result of wars, or evolve into wars in the course of their unfolding. Unlike the teary-eyed pacifists, Marxists recognise that war is a natural outgrowth of class society. We understand that no serious transformation of society can take place without a pitched battle between the contending classes. Leninism, Leon Trotsky once remarked, is “warlike from head to foot”. And yet, at the same time, we maintain that war is a stamp of barbarism; a black mark on humanity’s record, and a blight on our species. War is rightly reviled and hated by workers and young people – as barbaric, violent, backwards, and irrational. Over the past two years, the cry of the millions who took part in the global Palestine movement was for an end to the imperialist war and bloodshed, and the cruel killing of tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children. The vast majority of workers and youth oppose the wars and interventions in Ukraine, Latin America, and the Middle East. As Marxists, we share that sentiment. We are no more in favour of war than we are in favour of slavery. We are fighting for a future based on free and peaceful relations, without the need to settle differences with such brutal methods as rifles, drones, and poison gas. Therein lies the contradictory nature of war, which we must unravel.
https://communist.red/the-marxist-approach-to-war/Condition of the Working Class in England, by Engels, 1845 Cg4. The Great TownsWhat is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true of all great towns. Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, every man's house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state as they manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together.
Since capital, the direct or indirect control of the means of subsistence and production, is the weapon with which this social warfare is carried on, it is clear that all the disadvantages of such a state must fall upon the poor. For him no man has the slightest concern. Cast into the whirlpool, he must struggle through as well as he can. If he is so happy as to find work, i.e., if the bourgeoisie does him the favour to enrich itself by means of him, wages await him which scarcely suffice to keep body and soul together; if he can get no work he may steal, if he is not afraid of the police, or starve, in which case the police will take care that he does so in a quiet and inoffensive manner. During my residence in England, at least twenty or thirty persons have died of simple starvation under the most revolting circumstances, and a jury has rarely been found possessed of the courage to speak the plain truth in the matter. Let the testimony of the witnesses be never so clear and unequivocal, the bourgeoisie, from which the jury is selected, always finds some backdoor through which to escape the frightful verdict, death from starvation. The bourgeoisie dare not speak the truth in these cases, for it would speak its own condemnation. But indirectly, far more than directly, many have died of starvation, where long-continued want of proper nourishment has called forth fatal illness, when it has produced such debility that causes which might otherwise have remained inoperative brought on severe illness and death. The English working-men call this "social murder", and accuse our whole society of perpetrating this crime perpetually. Are they wrong?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch04.htm