Political Science & Asian/Asian American Studies, UConn, studying Asian American political thought & East Asian science fiction.
Joined October 2018
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363 Photos and videos
Jun 14
Conversations get started without reasons and keep going after reasons run out.
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Jun 13
This "totalitarian" talk can sound technical, but it's just politics. It's just one step away from the equally polemical "authoritarian" talk.
In reality, these polities are completely different types of regime. Applebaum herself defines them negatively, as "anti-liberal."
Jun 12
Applebaum: What binds Russia, China, Iran and North Korea is not religion or ideology.
China is communist, Russia nationalist, Iran theocratic. What binds them is fear of liberal language: rights, rule of law, separation of powers and independent courts. 1/
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Jun 13
Imagine slotting countries into two categories: "like us" and "not like us" (in a hostile way). This is Schmitt's way of thinking friend/enemy distinction in _the strictest sense_: it arises from the institutionalized possibility of armed collectivities going to war.
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Jun 13
The simplest explanation is the US is both democratic and Herrenvolk. When more egalitarian democratic forces challenged the Herrenvolk cast of that democracy, Americans who thought "if that's what democracy is..." dropped their democratic pretenses.
Jun 13
I want someone to explain to me who the 1/3 of Americans are who say that democracy is not important to America's identity as a nation.
What do these people think America even is?
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Jun 13
Well, better this than the Beverly Hills Institute of Marxology
The Palm Springs School for Social Research wants to revitalize historical materialism, revive ideology critique, and ask big questions about social life.
We talked to one of its founders, Catherine Liu, about gangster capitalism and the future of socialism. jacobin.com/2026/06/liu-cult…
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Jun 13
More seriously this is likely a good thing. The right had a whole infrastructure of well funded think tanks.
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Jun 12
So professors have had to adjust to this student infrapolitics, social non-movement, or what I call "the rebellion against homework." It's bad for faculty-student relations, but it's politically interesting.
Jun 12
A Berkeley history professor said he’s gone from assigning 100 pages of reading per week to 35.
Another “said the earliest version of the…course he taught required seven full books, while his most recent iteration exclusively consisted of excerpts.”
“We are now reaching a crisis point where if the number (of pages) goes down further, it’s unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught,” the first one said.
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Jun 12
Paradoxically, dehumanization is a thing, but humanity isn't. (It's a ghost.)
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Jun 11
Racist thinking proposes that bad races explain everything bad... that the country, the world, etc. is going wrong because "those [insert slur here]." It's a pseudo-justification ("realistic explanation") of a pseudo-politics ("race above all else").
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Jun 11
An actual explanation takes "race" not as the explanation, but rather "racism" as something to be explained. Something to be explained by state projects, cultural values, economic production, movement organizing, and broadly speaking politics.
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Jun 11
"Racial realism," it seems, is the folk social science of our times. Everything else is woke ideological slop!
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Jun 11
This whole "sexy vampire" genre is all about eroticizing exploitation/extraction.
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Jun 10
Almost makes up for that third-rate kung fu movie lol
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Jun 10
Managerial and market forces compelled moderate academic PMCs to pretend to take scholar activists, multiculturalism/anti-racism, and women's/gender studies seriously. Now the market has collapsed. Management is openly reactionary. So "Repressive desublimation" it is.
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Jun 10
Let's just keep this resentment politics under control and our eyes on the real power: data and money, bureaucracy and capital.
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Jun 10
Majoritarian traditions rarely recognize how major contributions come from minor literatures.
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Jun 9
Intellectual development means developing a new truth out of the confrontation with an old truth that, in this confrontation, becomes less true.
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Jun 9
In other words, "development" occurs when truth confronts truth. Truth confronting error is more like... "correction."
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Jun 9
Entire economies are built on the premise that we enjoy suffering.
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