A writer of things – some literary, others political, all opinionated.
🇵🇷 🇨🇴
Co-editor @strange_matters
Lit editor @the_point_mag
Learning to plan.
Jun 20, 2022 • 40 tweets • 9 min read
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.
Jan 19, 2022 • 19 tweets • 11 min read
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.
(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.
Jul 12, 2021 • 103 tweets • 25 min read
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.
Jul 11, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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)?
Apr 21, 2021 • 89 tweets • 15 min read
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.
Apr 20, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
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.
undark.org/2021/04/13/chi…
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.
Jun 2, 2020 • 21 tweets • 5 min read
Conservatism was rich people telling small business owners that taxes are theft & govt bureaucrats are a ruling class.
"National" conservatism is @AmericanAffrs cryptofascists telling rural workers & small business owners that the ruling class is urban workers & PMC kids in DSA.
While it is perhaps salutary that the right has discovered class exists -- if only because it allows public discussion to finally approach honesty -- all it has to offer by way of class analysis is scapegoats. Immigrants. "The [middle] managerial overclass." Pick your outgroup.
Nov 18, 2019 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
"The Bolivian dictatorship has announced that starting Monday it will arrest legislators from [@evoespueblo's] Movement Towards Socialism Party. [Arturo] Murillo, [a govt minister] who days ago spoke of a "hunt" being on, says he has a list of MPs to detain. This is very grave."
@evoespueblo I'm somebody who's been critical of Evo's decision to defy the referendum & run again (among other sins), and have pointed out the involvement of many parts of the Bolivian Left in recent protests.
But this coup is obscene. The new govt is a dictatorship. It must be stopped.
Jun 12, 2019 • 22 tweets • 32 min read
After almost half a year of work, my 17,000 word essay on the socialist revival in America finally been published in @the_point_mag.
Each of the essay’s three sections can be read in ~30 minutes for 1 1/2 hours’ read overall.
Socialism was dead — and that wasn’t just an illusion.
So how has it suddenly returned in such force?
My youth was haunted by a narrative of inevitably failed revolutions (eg Orwell’s Animal Farm).
Now everything’s changed. Why?
Jan 20, 2019 • 16 tweets • 7 min read
Part of the reason the Russia story matters to the radical Left is that it’s helped reveal the extent to which Russian intelligence have been using sockpuppet accounts to promote both “Left” and fascist positions which benefit them.
We can’t ignore this.
medium.com/s/story/the-tr…
For example, take these charts of Twitter discussion surrounding Black Lives Matter.
Both charts show clusters of interlinked accounts, replying and retweeting each other.
The first shows the two big groups: left-wing and right-wing.
