just moderated my first qualitative interview ever, and i LOVED it 🌷

Selfie by the ocean, smiling, wearing a black sleeveless shirt and strap bag. City skyline and ocean in the background, blue skies, and sunshine everywhere!

this fucking weather 🌱✨

“The analytic/continental divide created institutional conditions where continental philosophers had to materially ally themselves with African-American & Latin-American philosophy & with feminist philosophy to form a collective that could institutionally legitimize these philosophical traditions”

Selfie in a blue hammock, OP is smiling, throwing a peace sign above their head and wearing a grey tank top

finally: spring ☀️

I understand we are in a historical moment where resistance is a dominant political vernacular.

Still, we need to insist that some practices are about making and inhabiting the world we want. That they will persist after—and because of—resistance.

Nonfiction writers are commonly told to be accessible. Toni Morrison’s goal is more exciting.

“A very strong visceral and emotional response as well as a very clear intellectual response... I don’t want to give my readers something to swallow. I want to give them something to feel and think about.”

A shirtless bathroom mirror selfie, holding a pink glittery phone case, orange towel and tan shower curtain with patterns in the background

there’s a rhythm to reclaim

😘

the original purpose of academia was for rich white men to come up with reasons why they actually deserved the shit they stole and would definitely get into heaven

the Enlightenment is when they thought they proved it conclusively and would therefore always be protected by the divine/natural order

switched it up, 1st morning class 🏋🏽‍♂️

↕️

It‘d be absorbed same way slavery didnt (doesnt) cause a global ethical crisis, blackness is the necessary outside that coheres society/ the “huMan” (and its juridical, knowledge, political-economic systems)

Ramon Amaro saw same apparatus in technohuman relations: the “becoming-Black of technology”

there's a moment after slowly struggling through a scholar's dense prose/vision that suddenly it clicks, reading their work then quickly becomes fluent. like activating a new language.

i fucking love that moment; a beginning, an opening.

Command layer: 31 US nodes insulated by geography, institution architecture, racial solidarity, settler colonial structure
Processing layer: 22 East Asian nodes dependent on logistics corridors that pass through Iran, command layer just destroyed

Below both: majority of humanity connected as inputs

"countries that could are all in the American network/ leaving means losing access to the command infrastructure that makes their position possible, cost of leaving exceeds cost of staying/ Atlantic alliance is a white alliance/ "rules-based international order" is written/enforced by white nations

"European low inequality is the distribution of spoils among the colonizing population while extraction happens elsewhere/ Europe could invest in the commons bc was understood as “just us"— ethnically, racially, nationally coherent. Colonial extraction funded it. Postcolonial extraction maintains it

The Sound of Arrows - Into the Clouds YouTube video by N. K.

very sound of arrows coded

Poster of Project Hail Mary movie, a bright sun on lower portion, ryan gosling at the top, and in the center a silhouette of ryan gosling and the alien

magic, a reminder to whimsy ✨

“we, as Western and westernized intellectuals, continue to articulate, in however radically oppositional a manner, the rules of the social order and its sanctioned theories”

"the command pop's infrastructure does not end at the border/ they have infrastructure to reach everywhere in the world/ What they lack — public transit, universal healthcare, beautiful cities — they do not need, bc they have private substitutes at home and access to everyone else's commons abroad"

"command pop doesnt need public infrastructure. It needs the finance, insurance, real estate economy, the tech economy— venture funds, data centers, hospitals only enter w the right coverage. It needs roads b/w wealthy neighborhoods & corporate offices maintained, or private transport to bypass them

US "built most extensive territorial empire inside its own borders/ bc periphery is inside, state cannot build a shared commons without including the ppl it extracts from. So it does not. It builds private infrastructure for the command population & lets public layer rot/ maintains colonial boundary

"What the inequality index reads as a problem, the settler experiences as opportunity. The people for whom the same inequality is a permanent condition — the reservation, the prison, the deindustrialized Black city — experience it as a wall. The index cannot tell the difference."

Excerpt from linked title at top of thread. Text: Thirty-one American cities rank between positions 2 and 57, with dispensations between $32,984 and $130,815. This is not a country with one dominant capital. It is a distributed network of wealthy nodes. Silicon Valley ($130,815), the San Francisco Bay Area ($111,078), and Seattle ($82,301) control technology, design, and intellectual property. New York ($70,544) prices financial assets and clears the dollar. Washington ($66,844) commands the military and regulatory apparatus. Chicago ($58,608) is the continental hinge, connecting commodity, freight, and futures markets across the interior to global pricing. Houston ($57,164) manages energy. Los Angeles ($60,321) manufactures desire. Below these: Indianapolis, Atlanta, Baltimore, Charlotte, Dallas, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Portland — all between $50,000 and $56,000. Mid-sized cities each sharing more broadly distributed privilege than London, Paris, Tokyo, or any city in China. America's inequality — 0.398, the highest in the developed world — discounts every node by 40%. Rural America, the prison system, the deindustrialized interior absorb the cost. But per-person output is so high that even after the discount, the network averages around $57,000.

US = "network of wealthy nodes"

- SF/Seattle controls tech, IP
- NYC prices financial assets
- DC commands military apparatus
- Chicago is continental hinge
- Houston manages energy
- LA manufactures desire

"For white settler, high inequality is a landscape of possibility, steep but navigable”

"When war breaks out in a region with zero entries, a million can die and it will not make the front page, regardless of the region's strategic importance. The first tier [55K+] is where a handful of deaths reshapes foreign policy & a three-dollar increase at the pump registers as a global crisis"

A map titled The dispensation index, subtitle is "100 largest metropolitan economies ranked by what the system dispenses per person. Circle size = dispensation." The meaning of the index: Take each city's total annual economic value — what economists call GDP, the total value of all goods produced and services rendered within its borders in a year, which is to say the sum of everything claimed and counted there — divide by population to get the value per person, then discount by the national inequality index. That index, the Gini coefficient, runs from 0 (everyone shares equally) to 1 (one person takes everything). Multiply per-person economic value by one minus the Gini and you get what we'll call the dispensation — a proxy for what the system dispenses to the average person at each node. What is allotted, after the structure has sorted who gets what. In the map, only cities in The US, Europe, and scattered parts of Latin America, Asia, and Australia are colored (which higher indices in US and Europe). The rest of the map is bare.

"Africa has zero entries & 1/3 of the world's minerals. Those minerals flow into cities at the top of this list. The minerals arrive. The wealth does not return. The map shows where returns land. The absent regions are where the inputs come from. Their absence is the data's most important finding."

“Without a map of how the global system is actually structured — of who is insulated, who is exposed, where the corridors run, who depends on them — you cannot understand what the war is actually producing”