Yes this is about the Slate review of Brandon’s novel, but also a desperate plea into the ether to please not let this become some kind of critical precedent

There’s something that feels a tiny bit parasocial à la “this is what someone actually sounds like” as though twitter isn’t as much of a façade or fabrication of one’s affect as whatever someone attempts in longform book writing or learnt in grad school.

I really feel like we shouldn’t use people’s tweet writing voices as the foil against which their fiction or non-fiction book is evaluated? In what universe is 280 char. bursts comparable to the language and pacing of an entire novel?

I tried to order an off-menu French 75 yesterday, but called it a French 66 and then a French 67 until the server realized what I was trying to get and put me out of my misery. Surely this is the kind of sophisticated cool that the NYT is trying to teach to us plebes 😎

Mbuya Nehanda is such a significant figure to us because she was both a spirit medium AND held an anti-imperial vision of the threat posed to our native livelihoods by the British. Even as there is always so much to critique, we can strategically disavow and still hold sacred.

I’m agnostic and deliberately left my church after I was confirmed as a teenager. The critiques of Christianity hold for me! But I’m also from a culture that practices forms of ancestor veneration, and ways of knowing ancestors are intrinsically linked to land & dispossession.

The spiritual becomes deeply entangled with the material (it’s land where you bury your dead, it’s lans that feeds you, etc.), they are not and can never be divisible. And yet that spiritual wounding animates a politic with very real material goals and impacts.

Idk I’ve encountered too many people from communities fighting for their ancestral land because of its spiritual significance. Someone would argue that’s not real revolutionary work or whatever, it’s also land that’s been under threat by colonial or capitalist interests for ages.

And it’s also like, there are many sociohistorical forces and dynamics and processes that are observable and measurable and empirical but reality is still subjective and subject to interpretation (and even what constitutes a force worth measuring and documenting is subjective!!)

Your attempts to claim “reality” is only fully knowable through anti-theism doesn’t distance you all that much from the grinding Islamophobia of New Atheism: you’re still operating in the same arrogant colonial episteme of scientism.

It isn’t just the New Atheists that put many of us off anti-theism despite the deeply useful critiques of religious institutions and their role in [racial] capitalist mystifications, colonialism, and extraction: it’s white zealotry in every direction.

When white people start talking about “reality” in their critiques of religion it’s a sign for me to bail. Some of our lifeworlds consist of metaphysical realities beyond the material and it doesn’t make us any less committed to materialism or anti-capitalism.

It’s tuck-friendly to accommodate your little demon tail, too :)

Being a police officer and a landlord are technically real jobs in that they aren’t imaginary, but the suggestion either conceivably fall under “we all need to work to survive” is bogus bc those jobs actively foment misery, violence, and deprivation.

Also the root of landlord practice is feudalism: they literally monetize land that has been enclosed and privatized. Rentier capitalism is a literal scourge on society and it is also enforced by, you guessed it, the police whose job it is to enforce violent capital relations.

Putting “sex work” and “police” next to each other is ironic because police actively try to ensure sex workers can’t do their jobs!

the syllabus was put together by Sawyer K Kemp (@hamlethologram), Ava L.J. Kim (@avaljk), Toby Beuchamp, Damian Vergara Bracamontes, and Mimi Thi Ngyuen

Up now @abusablepast a new syllabus 'Trans Studies for Bullshit Times' a timely and necessary curation and contexualization of trans studies scholarship that helps makes sense of the history and present moment of global anti-trans violence

Reads like an ethnic mapping of what’s implied by “sub-Saharan Africa” and the attendant geographies (and mythologies!) of purity

@_mwaseem_ boundary is a line: Some thinks it divides two Some thinks it joins two