"This is not a third world country. This is Houston, Texas" is so precisely wrong in that "you're so close to getting it, please keep working on that thought" way
I think the most important part of my political education was learning, when I was barely a teenager, that West Virginia certainly WAS what the phrase "third world country" is supposed to signify, and spending my young adulthood wrapping my head around that fact
Red States tend to be places where government and institutions have been captured by the powerful corporate interests that reside there and fight for hegemony over it. That's 95% of it.
If you know what a "company town" is, just expand that to "company states" and add the interlocking effects of many different companies sharing/squabbling over governance
and from there, ooops, you're at *least* a socialist now
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
the thing about the librarian rap star at Smith is how many people are absolutely shocked and appalled (or pretend to be) that a supervisor would tell an employee not to do something when that employee wanted to do something, have these people ever experienced a workplace
Meanwhile, in WV, the Legislature is trying to prohibit the teaching of “divisive acts,” a transparent ruse to outlaw teaching about racism that literally copy-pastes language from a Trump executive order: wvlegislature.gov/Bill_Status/bi…
Bari Weiss is a mendacious clown (and has been since she switched from "Fire Palestinian professors" to "Defend Free Speech") but there are so shockingly many people that want to be told fairy tales about the woke-scold leftists at universities, and they're so silly and gullible
In our second to last episode-- before Grad School Vonnegut slouches roughly to be reborn-- we chatted about Kurt Vonnegut's version of the Soylent Green overpopulation story, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow": gradschoolvonnegut.libsyn.com/24-tomorrow-an…
You can read "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" here, if you like: wlps.org/files/page/462… It's a funny one.
If you think generational tension is bad now, wait til we invent immortality but still have capitalism!
This Ezra Klein column about California has some really weird framing; "California is so progressive, yet doesn't do progressive things!" is much less of a contradiction if you just start with the fact that the state is not that progressive
Why write a whole column about how the state isn't actually very progressive and then end with "If progressivism cannot work here, why should the country believe it can work anywhere else?"
And not to be like "everything is great!" but stuff like this is happening; if Klein were less interested in the SF school board renaming controversy, it might be worth looking at! berkeleyside.com/2021/02/11/opi…
So much cultural criticism boils down to chewing on the strange result of popular genre chum--guilty pleasure stuff--being taken more seriously than it was really designed for or capable of sustaining.
Im thinking about the furors around American Dirt, Bridgerton, and WW84, which, in different ways, are all objects meant to be consumed for pleasure without thinking too much about why and how. And then you think about them and you're like "wow, this sucks."
Scads of thrillers as bad or worse than American Dirt are published constantly, and no one but their readers notices, but THIS one got lots of "serious" attention, so it was held to real literary standards and eviscerated.
I regret to announce that I've started playing chess online. however I'm very bad at it, so that's some comfort
My opponents like to triumph over me by utilizing the fiendishly clever tactic of "me making a stupid move"
More bad news: this website makes it really easy to learn chess openings without having to set up a board and move the pieces yourself, am now learning even more chess chessstrategyonline.com/content/tutori…