Aaron Bady Profile picture
A packaged bundle of content, services, and a polar vortex of meat blood full of bees. Writer and editor. zunguzungu on blue and elephant apps @gradschoolvonn
Jan 7 33 tweets 6 min read
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 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.
Oct 9, 2023 9 tweets 2 min read
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.
Aug 2, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
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
Jul 29, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
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) 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 Image
Jul 5, 2022 10 tweets 2 min read
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.
May 4, 2022 23 tweets 7 min read
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
Apr 17, 2022 7 tweets 2 min read
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.
Apr 17, 2022 30 tweets 6 min read
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.
Mar 17, 2022 7 tweets 2 min read
is this literally the worst poem ever written HOW IS IT THREE LIMERICKS, HOW DID THAT HAPPEN
Mar 17, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
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 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
Dec 31, 2021 10 tweets 2 min read
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"?
Dec 27, 2021 14 tweets 3 min read
"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?
Oct 13, 2021 5 tweets 2 min read
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.
Oct 2, 2021 18 tweets 3 min read
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?"
Aug 21, 2021 28 tweets 5 min read
At the level of character and dialogue, The Chair is excellently done; at the level of plot, however, I have a lot of questions about how power is supposed to work at this university. Everyone acts as if being chair of the department gives her a great deal of power--which allows everyone in the show to *blame* her for everything that goes wrong--but I honestly can't tell if the show thinks that being chair DOES give her any real power. If so, it is not shown.
Aug 20, 2021 7 tweets 1 min read
It's interesting that the pandemic remains essentially unrepresentable in narrative TV, film, and fiction. Creators are essentially producing narrative in an alternate timeline where the pandemic never happened. This made a kind of sense back when it seemed like the pandemic might last a year or two. (Remember all the people dreading The Pandemic Novels to come, and calling for escapist media to not go into it?)
Aug 19, 2021 4 tweets 1 min read
"in practice, “let people enjoy things” means something else: it is rude or inappropriate to dislike something." gawker.com/culture/let-pe… "criticism — by which I mean something that demands maintaining distance between the critic and the subject, not a negative or positive viewpoint — is, in a fandom world, an obsolete exercise."
Aug 12, 2021 6 tweets 2 min read
This is significant because the problem becomes something other than "how to persuade qanon addled reactionaries"; it becomes "how to do big government interventions that will succeed with disenfranchised populations" Our healthcare system presumes that your health is your problem, and you should pay for it, and you should also do the work to figure out how to access care; given this starting point, it's not surprising that the same people who are always poorly served, continue to be
Aug 11, 2021 6 tweets 2 min read
My sister in law, a coffee genius, has left me a complex treasure map for coffee deliciousness Bro do you even use science when making coffee
Aug 10, 2021 7 tweets 2 min read
This is the rational way we have learned to think, in the society that has produced the climate crisis: to chase well-being by picking up and moving to a new place, rather than thinking about the social connections and large-scale emergent properties that make life possible (Don't pretend this kind of thought hasn't crossed your mind/haunted you! We're all made by this world that makes our future impossible!)
Jun 8, 2021 9 tweets 2 min read
The GOP's war on trans athletes is about transphobia, yes, but I think it also very nicely demonstrates what so many people think youth sports are for: COMPETITION. Not a communal activity that brings people together; sports is a WAR for victory that trans kids are STEALING. For so many people, the idea that we have physical recreation for youth some reason other than a Nike-branded "SECOND PLACE IS FIRST LOSER" deathmatch is completely foreign to them