Conservative mediocrity is not a metaphor

Zionist shame at this image says so much about the combined and uneven political economy of Ashkenazi whiteness

There's no single atrocity that one can imagine that the Zionists are incapable of perpetrating, no depravity that they are yet to revel in. In that sense—in finally exhausting language and fantasy—it truly is fitting that they represent the last of Western humanism.

Genuinely mystified by the large Iranian delegation to Islamabad. It seems obvious to me that the U.S. and Israel will murder them on their way back if there’s no deal?

The sadism-sentimental complex

Wait… why isn’t typing an Olympic sport?

Every generation gets the thought it experiment it deserves: 19th century: is it better to be a human being unhappy than a happy pig (John Stuart Mill) 20th century: the experience machine (Nozick), Wachowski sisters 21st century: His dead body is in Walter Reed if you just keep scrolling Bluesky

Just now looked up the latest developments in the 2025 Louvre heist, as one does.

Midway across the river, the scorpion delivered prime-time address.

Everything human alienized me.

From each according to their libidinal economy, to each according to their political economy.

Are action movies primarily responsible for making slow motion techniques in film kitsch?

punctuated disequilibrium

Salman Rushdie's "Outside the Whale" reads even more astonishingly bracing given the trajectory his life took granta.com/outside-the-...

"Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some discount Foucault.”

They hate “didactic art” for the very same reasons that they all think they have a book in them

USians are probably the most preachy, pedantic, drillmasterish, “let me speak to the manager” people in the world so it makes perfect sense that they derive inordinate pleasure from pretending that they love art for art’s sake.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for a counterpublic sphere.

Habermas’s support for the genocidal Israeli state in some ways rung the death knell for North Atlantic political liberalism far more than almost any other development in the intellectual history of the 21st century.

My favourite assignment to grade this semester is the annotation assignment. Students actually read, offer their thoughts, and I am able to glean how well they are able to process this, and then apply to writing assignments. Cannot recommend it enough!

Punctum, for Mikaeil Mirdoraghi I'll tarry in this—your—aperture

The United States is an antidialectical state, but with typical American extravagance, they have "two things can be true" antidialectics.

The burial site of the 165 girls killed when the US/zionist dropped a bomb on their elementary school in Iran

Yesterday, I came up with a brilliant, rigorous, and pathbreaking answer to a question put to me in 2016. Interviewers, colleagues, and students of 2026, I’d invite you to keep refreshing this page in 2036.

When I hear the word “we” from the mouth of a USian—even and especially those who labor under the delusion that they are merely taking responsibility for the actions of their genocidal government—I reach for my gun www.yahoo.com/news/article...

Arguably, one of the weakest features of state (Iran, Venezuela, Cuba) and para-state (Hezbollah) leadership formations in the crosshairs of NATO and Zionist terrorism has been their pragmatism.

When was hyperbole?

One can tell the U.S. is an empire of evangelicals, salespeople, agony aunts, and pedagogues because they find unthinkable the very idea of utterances not intended to persuade, communicate, connect, or influence.

YOU DON'T FUCKING SAY. It's not like MANY MANY voters TOLD YOU they wouldn't vote for you if you didn't fucking DO SOMETHING about the genocide.

Let's help Sameer Project feed 2,500 families this Ramadan. Can you donate and repost? chuffed.org/project/1666... For $32 they can provide 1 family with: 1kg orzo 1pack pasta 1kg sugar 1kg dates 2kg rice 1can ghee 1 l oil 450g tahini 3packs cheese 2cans tomato sauce 1pack spaghetti 2cans beans

Did analytical Marxism arrive too early or too late?

It’s delightful when students want me to get out of the way so that they can think collectively.

I once went to a Bruce Hornsby concert and I loved the way he refused to perform his signature hits no matter how loudly the crowd bayed for it.

The genocidal stuplime

The perennial Bluesky sniping between the “I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win” true believers and what they perceive to be their antagonists—pessimists, doomers, and catastrophists—is a baked in feature of affirmative culture.

Spectacularly evil buffoonery of the likes of Trump and Milei should not make us lose sight of the unfathomably evil vapidity of a Keir Starmer or Jared Polis.

You won't get the analytic philosophers to let go of their epistemic + noun fetish. The best you can do is steer them to another word they can obsess over. What word should that be?

It’s very funny to me that centuries into the future when scholars attempt to recover the lost knowledges destroyed in The Great Agnotology of 2025, their minds will be blown by basic analytic insights like: “Think relationally, not essentially.” “Always historicize.”

It is very much a part of the rightwing’s anti-politics to declare the political a brute, emotive, non-cognitive zone of indistinction.

I think one of the most important lessons humanists impart to undergrads is why a statement like “this is political” is not some thought-terminating moral judgment but rather an invitation—the beginning, even—of critical inquiry.

I think a distinctive weirdness with fascism is its obsessiveness and yet you need a single-minded obsessiveness to offer any kind of adequate response.

I don’t think we talk enough about how the differences between academic and journalist epistemes is part the dynamic driving the woke/anti-woke social media/little magazine wars. Especially true as these differences have become even more blurred as the university and media industries collapse.

I simply can’t overemphasize enough that the single most important requirement that'll earn you a commission to write books in and around African political and intellectual history in North Atlantic literary pubs is that you have to be utterly and irredeemably asinine.

Kudos to the Boulder Valley School District for putting the interests of its students above profits by blocking access to ChatGPT on school networks

I have spoken with faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder who frequently donate blood to pay rent but here is the University of Colorado Boulder siphoning 2 million dollars a year to Open AI www.axios.com/local/boulde...

There are any number of things a person can say about the uses and abuses of AI, but any honest engagement must start by acknowledging and working through the implications of the actually existing forces, structures, and magnates that run and control universities.