A propos of nothing, a major throughline in the work of political theorist Mahmood Mamdani is that the modern imperial state is distinct from earlier empires in its desire not to eradicate difference, but to shape and define it, and then govern through those hierarchies.
A lot of anticolonial rhetoric and action is framed by the idea that imperialism can be peeled away, leaving behind what preceded it, the "traditional" that was disrupted by imperial modernity; his intervention is to say "no, modern imperialism INVENTED the traditional"

It feels relevant to observe that there is no box for "African" here. Presumably the thing Zohran was SUPPOSED to do was identify himself as ONLY Asian, because his father's family's century in Africa, and his own birth in Africa, do not count? Which is to say: the African-born son of an African-born scholar in African studies--who will go on to major in African studies--was OBVIOUSLY expected to identify himself only as Asian, the way Idi Amin did when he expelled Mamdani's dad from Uganda in the Asian expulsion

When it comes to settler colonialism, a lot of folks want the "so you want to expel every white person from the continent?!" conversation instead of a "most Western land is literally owned by the federal government, what if they just gave it back to the tribes" conversation "How are we going to know where in Europe to deport every last person of European-descent?" ok, well, great energy, but what if we had a conversation about mineral rights, political sovereignty, and land tenure instead

Stupid or bad-faithed people often conflate the overall drop in aggregate fertility--the total number of babies people are having--with the idea that Lots of People are Choosing To Be Childless. The former is a real thing; the latter is basically an ideological figment. As recently as 2016, the percentage of US women ages 40 to 44 that had already borne a child was up to almost 86 percent, only four percentage points lower than it was in 1976, forty years earlier.

The Acolyte is a show about what if a space cop killed a black woman because she made a furtive movement, while he was trying to steal her kid; Lee Jung-jae is so good--and the ending is so confused and fiddly--that you almost don't notice how basically monstrous this is The real problem with the show is that it's built around a "what really happened on that fateful day in the past" mystery that, because of the need to keep the viewer in false suspense, prevents the twins from being anything but trauma boxes waiting to be opened.

This Rebecca Solnit piece is premised on the idea that, without the media inventing and pushing the story, people would not look at Biden and see him as terrifyingly feeble, that the "pundit class" has created this impression theguardian.com/commentisfree/… I do think it's true that "The media"--by which is implicitly meant the kind of huge, heavily capitalized mainstream conglomerates that have the loudest megaphones--has a problem with addressing Trump's radicalism in the right perspective. This has been true for a decade.

Having kids has really helped me understand how much and how deeply we learn and internalize a hatred and contempt of so many of the traits that children have, precisely because we vest our self-worth and self-respect in the conceit that we have grown up and shed them. We have contempt for people who "behave like children" and we moralize--implicitly or explicitly--about the consequences of adults displaying the kind of disregulation, impropriety, and joyous unsocialized play that children naturally have; when an adult does it, we are angry

it is kind of funny that Powell tries so hard to say that settler colonialism is a new trendy theory and then has to admit the person he thinks is most responsible for founding it died seven years ago

https://twitter.com/zunguzungu/status/1743797348923506763

Anyway, there's something uniquely aggravating when this kind of centrist anti-intellectualism, because at least the right just makes everything up and makes no pretense of reading or citing; Powell reads and cites just enough to demonstrate that his own unwillingness to learn.

When people say that "Israel has a right to exist," they of course mean the specific form of its government--which views Palestinians as a demographic threat--must be preserved. Any other form of existence is unthinkable, and must not be imagined. White South Africans (like Elon) in the 80s believed that if apartheid fell, they would be massacred, that white supremacy was all that kept them safe. It's all over the literature, feverish apocalyptic dreams of the slaughter that he fall of apartheid would bring.

The way the right has turned "homeless person" into a thing you are supposed to be afraid of, synonymous with crime--rather than feeling empathy for a human being who we have so comprehensively failed, as a society--is bad I remember walking to work once through the pre-dawn darkness--through the SCARY SCARY SF DOWNTOWN--and seeing a woman getting out of her tent, in nice normal clothes, clearly getting ready to go to her job, and I have not thought about "the homeless" the same since

not to be slavoj zizek but the thing here is that the peach is not the object of desire, the object of desire is the husband who can simply eat the peach (she is trapped in the need to be the martyr, thus cannot eat fruit)

https://twitter.com/detachment_red/status/1553102575645376512

this is why she made merch that says "eat the damn peach"; the desire is to desire the peach (instead of a desire for self-denial). she wants to be what she portrays the husband as being: enjoys things, doesn't stress, sorta lazy

That NY Times essay about how ectopic pregnancies are real babies is so unbelievably misguided that I don't even understand how to process it Women are going to die from ectopic pregnancies because of all the pseudo-religious zealots in state legislatures that insist an ectopic pregnancy is a baby, or don't care enough about the distinction, and they decided to run this.

Because I was a grad student working in African studies in 2012, I cannot help but be snotty about the fact that half of Kyrsten Sinema's dissertation is an incredibly lengthy paraphrase of like four books that everybody reads The part where she praises herself for "The study of little-known political theories such as Agamben's and Mbembe's" in the abstract, though, is maybe the chef's kiss moment

Believe it or not, I have a piece coming out tomorrow about Better Call Saul that isn't about the things I just did an 800-tweet on the OTHER different I could do a whole thing about BCS on would be the way the entire show is basically improvised on the fly, like a Cesar Aira novel (google "fuga hacia adelante"). Everything good in BB and BCS seems like something they put in the show and figured out later.

One of my favorite things about Better Call Saul is that the show is fundamentally very cynical about The Law, in a kind of implicit contradiction to the moralism of the Breaking Bad premise (where Walt turns evil by turning to crime). Breaking Bad may have Walt as the anti-hero, but the universe the show inhabits is still basically the usual one where cops are good (Hank is a moral center), crime is bad, drugs and Mexicans threaten the suburban family, etc. Basically familiar stuff.

is this literally the worst poem ever written HOW IS IT THREE LIMERICKS, HOW DID THAT HAPPEN

Yes, and what makes the movie version good is that it basically understands that. and so the ultimate moral of the story is that you need to just enjoy the show; the real charm of baseball is the experience, that statistics can't capture

https://twitter.com/mtsw/status/1504469202547081228

I disliked the book for so long that it took me a while to notice how cleverly the movie was critiquing some of its most economics-brain impulses

No one's up so my take is that Don't Look Up gets caught in the uncanny valley between "this is really how we as a society would respond to 'a planet-killer comet'" and "here's an intensified satirical version of how an even stupider version of us would respond" Which is another way of saying "how do you do satire of Trump and Elon Musk"?

"Unlike the marriage plot, the trauma plot does not direct our curiosity toward the future (Will they or won’t they?) but back into the past (What happened to her?)." newyorker.com/magazine/2022/… an interesting essay, but I'm not sure it ultimately does make a case against the trauma plot?

What is the genealogy of "white savior" as a term of discourse, is it Teju? Wikipedia blames Teju. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_sav… The classic examples of white saviorhood, as I understand the term, are acts of personal aggrandizement (and personal gain) undertaken by a white person under cover of goodness, that damage the non-white people who are being thus instrumentalized.

https://twitter.com/zunguzungu/status/1446970925727956992

In my opinion, the Sopranos movie had lots of smart touches and moments and as a fan of the show, I enjoyed the fan service; I was well-served. However, so many of the things that made the Sopranos show work were glaringly absent, and the decision to Take On Race was a mistake. The original show was so consistently clumsy about race that it feels like this writing choice was a penance of some kind, but after you've watched the movie, I challenge you to come up with what it's actually saying other than "also this stuff with Black people was happening?"