Riddle me this, electoralists: if the Bidenists, with a majority in both houses, refuse to pass a health care reform that would simply bring the US up to the level of social-democratic countries 70 years ago, how do you expect to get a Green New Deal in the next ten years?
Like, the strategy of the elected social democrats has been to kiss the asses of the Party leaders in exchange for bullshit committee seats & promises that get watered down to appease the GOP.
k...so what's the path from A (here) to B (5-year plans for a total green transition)?
I'm very vulgar and literalminded, a philistine habit I picked up from my reporter days, so maybe I'm missing something I'd understand if I Read The Right Theory (TM). But I'm just not seeing how the numbers add up. Climate doom is here. What is the game plan?
So as I understand it, the Jacobin Model is we elect more socdems...who then get elected...and capitulate to the Bidenists on the platform, with no organized caucus separate from the Dem establishment & no threatening the Dem majority to extract demands? Is that the plan?
Or wait wait don't tell me, is it actually, that 2024 is going to be the Most Important Election Ever, and we need to elect Bernie's decaying corpse so that he can, um, bypass Congress and rule by executive order, or something? And, um, totally not get overthrown by the military?
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Landlords are the death of cities. At this point even a capitalist from another sector ought to be able to admit (if they were honest) that the ridiculous rents which inevitably occur from unregulated absentee ownership of land & buildings have become an economic impediment.
You have a huge number of homeless people lining the avenues & drifting through subways (many of whom risk freezing to death in winter), and an even bigger number of empty apartments in the big ubiquitous luxury buildings, yet we somehow cannot fit the two together again.
Meanwhile, "market rate" housing so vastly exceeds the ability of people at the median income of many neighborhoods to afford it that even units advertised (incl by "progressives") as "below market rate" is effectively affordable only by someone making close to six figures.
The rebirth of public literary criticism & essays — and this, through the revival of the little magazines — is the defining US literary event of the past decade or so.
Writers no longer *must* be academics or “scholars”; or if they are, this often subsidizes their real career.
It’s interesting to see a consciousness of this material shift begin to arise in things like this fascinating interview series by @jessswoboda.
I think she’s much more generous than me on the possibilities of a healthy cross-pollination between public writing and scholarship.
@JessSwoboda Me, I’m toxic. I think the long march to tenure was mostly a Boomer & Gen X grift — a clever and at the time probably necessary one, to be fair — which allowed people to be artists & philosophers to exist in a society that despised them.
(1.) Follow your favorite writers on social media, if they have it. Don't start with DMs.
Instead, reply to a post that's interesting or moving for you with a smart question, a cool elaboration, a statement of common ground followed by a respectful disagreement, etc.
(i.e., start a conversation that they would find actually interesting to participate in -- not just an expression of praise, not just attack, but something added on, something they'd find interesting. Writers are just like you -- often bored, eager to discuss something new.)
To understand what's really going on in Cuba right now -- the massive protests across the country -- you have to grasp three things:
(1.) The Leninist government's years-long crisis of legitimacy;
(2.) the causes of recent hyper-inflation;
(3.) the mixed politics of dissidents
The first has been a slow-burning crisis for years. Fidel himself was legitimately popular; Raul less so; & Diez-Canal, not at all. Opposition to the party tends to be an ironic mix: resentment about the one-party state (shading into anticommunism), & resentment about austerity.
The reason the government had been imposing austerity in recent years -- cutting state services, privatizing parts of the economy, opening up a large foreigner-focused hotel sector -- was partly the hope of pulling a China, & partly a scheme to get dollars for imports via tourism
Nothing is so exhausting -- or so triggers my own self-loathing, when I replicate it -- as the sneering tone of smug, self-satisfied nihilism and ironic detachment from one's own moral commitments which is the house style of everyone on this stupid website.
It's interesting from a litcrit point of view. Through the later part of the last century & the start of this one, something like this register of writing -- DFW called it "postmodern irony" -- was used for a very different reason.
As he explains in his famous TV essay, the point of this obligatory, flat-affect, preening cynicism towards the idea that anybody could ever believe in anything was to reconcile oneself to the (false) notion that all previous attempts at earnest commitment failed and had to fail.
The destruction of the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico by neglect, with no plans to replace it, was just one of many tragedies last year, but it hit me personally very hard.
Now, China's FAST appears to have risen as a replacement -- a potent symbol.
Like much of the decaying infrastructure of the United States, the Arecibo telescope was built in the social-democratic period, before neoliberalism. It was not only a matter of pride for Puerto Rico, but also a tool used by scientists around the world.
What does it mean for the US empire that such infrastructure can, it seems, no longer be maintained? Or that no plan by which to systematically replace it is anywhere on the horizon?