So my take on Kurt Cobain, as someone who has spent a lot of time researching him, reading everything he wrote, listening to his interviews, reading about him: he had severe mental illness that manifested very early in his life. He had depression that was exacerbated by ... ... severe addiction issues; both, in fact, ran on both sides of his family. All of this was of course compounded by a level of mass fame--and pressure--that is almost incomprehensible now. Moreover, the modalities of dealing with addiction and depression, to say nothing of ...

To my mind, Trump is the result of U.S. geopolitical and geoeconomic decline; the domestic militarism caused by the Global War on Terror; and the oligarchization caused by the neoliberal economy, especially a deregulatory project that enabled the conglomeration of business ... ... and the financialization of the economy. Now, while it is obvious that Trump is more dangerous than Kamala Harris, or any Democrat--I don't think a Democrat would have deployed ICE/CBP to U.S. cities--the Democrats ...

The United States has never been a democracy. There was a period in the 30s and into the 40s where it appeared that it would become one, but that was rapidly shut off by the anti-communist campaigns of the Cold War. In the modern era, the U.S. state has been designed ... ... to centralize power in the executive and to create a series of institutions that ensure the public (and in many instances Congress) can't affect policy. As this occurred, because governance still needed to happen, power accreted in the office of the presidency. ...

I rarely criticize the Blob because it's so obvious but it is extraordinarily frustrating to see people who came of professional age during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars--the 20 year period that demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that militarized counterinsurgency ... ... was effectively impossible (as was earlier shown in Vietnam)--advocate for Israel to "root out" or "defeat" Hamas. Even if one were to accept this position morally, which I assume they mostly do, as a matter of military strategy COIN is so obviously a failed approach that ...

The most bizarre thing about what Columbia is doing is that the encampment was so small, especially when compared to 1968. If Baroness Shafik had just let them sit on the lawn and basically ignored them, she would've won. But the neoliberal university can accept ... ... absolutely no, minor in the scheme of things, criticism. The students are ancillary to the project as a whole, to be disciplined when abrasive and otherwise generally ignored, except when they graduate and then the begging for money begins. I wish I could say I think ...

This is the common way it’s framed, but I actually don’t think bomb power is what changed the US state and the nature of power in the United States, especially bc the major structural transformations occurred before the bomb had really been incorporated as an …

https://twitter.com/matthewsitman/status/1741199891932610640

… existential weapon in the American mind. (Hard to believe but for longer than one would think m—late 40s at the earliest, early 50s at the latest—the bomb was, within strategic thought, kind of just viewed as a mega-air raid wrapped up in one weapon as opposed to thousands.)..