Benjamin Kunkel
@kunktation
Followers
11,762
Following
1,411
Media
299
Statuses
8,229
Explore trending content on Musk Viewer
Happy Teachers
• 70331 Tweets
Rebecca Cheptegei
• 60586 Tweets
#GoodSoBad3rdWin
• 28369 Tweets
#ZEROBASEONE10thWin
• 25121 Tweets
#サッカー日本代表
• 24122 Tweets
LEGEND MEW
• 22384 Tweets
中国代表
• 18705 Tweets
ZB1 FIRST MCD WIN
• 15371 Tweets
amiibo
• 13305 Tweets
Patrick Midnight Photo
• 12735 Tweets
엠카 1위
• 11554 Tweets
Win Hashtag Legend TH
• 11500 Tweets
RIZIN
• 11191 Tweets
MGA ALBUM NI PABLO
• 11086 Tweets
FELIP'S MIC IS ON
• 11041 Tweets
When poor people die in fires it’s almost always a case of what Engels called social murder
35
4K
16K
I feel like this isn't really the behavior of a "contrarian"
58
688
6K
Whoever shuts his ears to the cry of the poor will also cry himself and not be heard.
Proverbs 21:13
DNC attendees cover their ears as the names of dead Palestinian children are read as they leave the convention
2K
12K
31K
9
664
6K
If you’re offended by a conventional oil painting of an exceptionally repugnant imperialist and antisemite getting slashed but not by the destruction of entire archives & universities in Gaza, along with dozens of mosques & churches, you don’t really care about culture, do you?
34
1K
4K
The phrase “a chaotic incident” compresses into three words the liberal method: allude to the complexity of the world not in order to confront reality, but to evade it
9
707
3K
This from Ross Douthat just isn’t true. The Iraq War, with a much higher body count than in Gaza so far, was very widely described by leftists as being unjust without being called a genocide. The war on Gaza is called genocidal because of its different—genocidal—character.
71
415
3K
One of the best things I’ve read since October 7th, and one of Mishra’s best essays over the years. Impossible to pluck out a line or two. Just read it:
58
738
2K
Isn’t the failure to waive COVID vaccine patents something like genocide via intellectual property?
13
316
2K
I like it that one of Chomsky's last sustained public statements was about what a wasteful, poor and pretentious rival to human language is ChatGTP etc.
7
289
2K
Probably every Easter I think of this communist resurrection mass from César Vallejo, written during the Spanish Civil War
4
287
1K
So American to say "Nowhere else on earth could someone from Scranton, PA become President of the US"—it's true, they don't have Pennsylvania or the US in other countries
10
76
1K
It’s really like struck me in recent years how little undergrads, grad students, non-teaching staff, contingent faculty & younger faculty regard college administrators as the enemy—intellectually, economically, and politically the enemy—and maybe that’s starting to change
19
115
1K
Not only reassuring, but pathbreaking and inspirational
7
89
817
Gaza Health Ministry figures—not disputed by Israel—have 16k killed by the Israeli assault, of which 6k are children & 5k women. The IDF meanwhile maintains that it has killed 5k Hamas militants. This suggests they regard all men as combatants: precisely the logic of Srebrenica
7
302
798
As always, liberals refer to the "complicated" nature of the world as if this were the conclusion of their analysis rather than the excuse for their never having undertaken one
4
171
800
The Angel of History much cuter & goofier than should be the case
15
53
688
The moral lexicon of a child
A very good president who’s also a very good man does the right thing. Will America vote for a bad man who was a terrible president?
0
933
7K
3
54
683
Pretty much any time you see “the banality of evil” cited you can tell the person hasn’t read past Arendt’s subtitle. It’s not about picking up the dry-cleaning while you’re committing genocide or whatever. It’s about letting your mental life consist of a mishmash of clichés!
9
44
588
This kind of doubling down on manifest error—this epistemological underdoggery of the exceptionally powerful fool—reminds me of someone
13
71
575
People like this appear sincerely to believe the meaning of the Shoah is that Adolf Hitler wrote Israel a blank check
1
77
558
(I gotta stop reading the Washington Post and the NY Times, it's harming my brain to read such prose, I plan to take up sniffing glue first thing in the morning instead)
3
14
474
"A new Ark will have to be constructed out of the materials that a desperate humanity finds at hand in insurgent communities, pirate technologies, bootlegged media, rebel science and forgotten utopias"
1
132
484
Machines will attain self-awareness before liberals do
Human rights belong to everyone.
They are universal, indivisible, and interrelated. Today, as we recognize 75 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the U.S. reaffirms our deep commitment to protect human rights and hold human rights abusers accountable.
15K
1K
5K
1
109
472
The pro-worker rhetoric of the GOP is palatable to the party's wealthy donors *precisely to the extent that those donors know the rhetoric is insincere*. This should be obvious
5
119
465
The Democrats outing themselves as the world’s most boring cult
7
54
460
I dunno, a meager US client state committing genocide against the indigenous population kind of sounds like a banana republic to me
9
83
452
The words of Prof. Israel Charney, director of Israel's Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, interviewed by Haaretz in 2006:
2
137
445
Random undergrad with no power (indefensibly) says “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and occasions a big NY Times story. Cabinet member of an well-armed Israeli government committing genocide for six months plus says Gaza should be completely destroyed and occasions no such story
הגיע הזמן שהמוסד יחזור לעסוק במה שהוא הוכשר לו - לחסל את ראשי החמאס בכל העולם ולא במו"מ שמנוהל בחוסר אחריות ופוגע בביטחון ישראל. עם חמאס צריך לדבר מכאן והלאה רק באמצעות פגזים ופצצות. רפיח הכי מהר והכי חזק שאפשר, ואח"כ להמשיך בכל הרצועה עד השמדתו המוחלטת.
119
10
169
4
92
425
Today, Jill and I join our fellow Christians in observing Good Friday – remembering Jesus’s sacrifice and holding those who are suffering close to our hearts.
8K
2K
18K
2
85
385
The constitution probably *is* a suicide pact
BREAKING: Supreme Court agrees to consider limiting EPA's authority to curb greenhouse gases from power plants, will hear appeals from coal-mining companies and Republican-led states
1K
2K
5K
6
57
368
This is how the regional Israeli consul characterized the self-immolation (by a woman whose name, as others have noted, is very hard to find online) that took place in Atlanta in December:
5
67
323
This Obama policy is the sort of thing that, if you run a different country, gets you dragged to the Hague
4
66
304
“A federal appeals court in the US has killed a ban on plastic containers contaminated with highly toxic PFAS ‘forever chemicals’ found to leach at alarming levels into food, cosmetics, household cleaners, pesticides and other products across the economy”
8
111
288
I don't tweet, much less thread, much anymore. But if you'll permit me a few words on Dan Menaker, whom I was lucky enough to know as an editor and friend, and whose death was announced today...
3
17
267
They should warn liberals that playing dumb will eventually make you that way
6
40
272
I myself do not believe that either Comrade Andropov or Comrade Chernenko is too old to serve, and more than this I believe that the state as a whole is in excellent condition
2
46
260
Why should it be the ambition of a presidential administration "to help the growth of [an] asset class," esp. if this is an asset class defined by ecological waste and pointless speculation?
14
61
242
I don’t expect it helps that police depts across the US, including those now brutalizing protesters, send officers to train with their Israeli counterparts & have been doing so for decades—in other words identifying with & learning from the police of an apartheid garrison state
3
59
221
Remarkable 1969 memo from Daniel Patrick Moynihan warning the Nixon Admin about excessive CO2 in the atmosphere "through the burning of fossil fuels": 'This could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter'
10
83
219
'A paradox of the age is that while the climate crisis represents the gravest threat to capitalism since its infancy, socialism has rarely been farther from realization'
An impressively hardheaded piece on various Green New Deal schemes from Tom Meaney:
1
37
206
Stricken with the fear that we’ll look back on these years as good times
1
18
207
For the
@thebafflermag
, I had the good fortune to talk with—mostly listen to—Melinda Cooper about her extraordinary book Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance:
2
49
205
In one news story, 212,000 Kenyans have been displaced from their homes by “unprecedented” flooding. In another story, filed a few days later, 164,000 Brazilians have been displaced for the same reason. (A few weeks ago it was Kazakhstan.) And this is at 1.4C of warming…
0
80
193
Since 2010 an esp. 2018
@NewLeftReview
has published a remarkable running debate on ecological and climate politics, which
@lola_seaton
& I have now edited into a single volume (out June 27th) called WHO WILL BUILD THE ARK? Please consider ordering a copy:
1
52
183
Quite offended that this guy thinks I live in Brooklyn
N+1 people sincerely believe they aren't pretentious Brooklyn clowns and people of deep moral unseriousness
26
0
20
5
3
177
Is there some term for the way in which near-universal endorsement of certain political goals—e.g., a two-state solution; keeping warming below 1.5C—in fact sets the seal on their abandonment and impossibility? “Hypocrisy” and “bad faith” seem too weak and un-satanic
10
13
167
This is pretty funny from the Sec. of State of a country with bases in 80 countries
'Once Russians are in your house, sometimes it is very difficult to get them to leave' - Blinken on Kazakhstan
835
181
725
2
20
162
My excellent approach to email is to generally take so long to reply that the relationship curdles into mutual embarrassment and then serve up such an elaborately wrought reply as to further disable correspondence
5
5
165
This on Biden's part is honestly Eichmannesque
President Biden: "By the way, I’m the guy who did more for the Palestinian community than anybody. I’m the guy that opened up all the assets. I’m the guy that made sure the Egyptians opened up the border to let goods through”
474
242
725
2
31
164
Indeed, how could someone pursuing truth and acquiring knowledge come to the conclusion that the system is rigged, and the US plagued by systemic racism and injustice?
2
37
158
@_ryanruby_
@JaredMPollen
As Richard Dawkins awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic ass.
3
2
148
Horrifying as this is—and it really is—it’s not too dissimilar to Obama’s more analogue “disposition matrix” for probabilistic identification of enemies for elimination by drone even at the expense of many civilian casualties
6
42
142
As part of
@NewLeftReview
’s informal symposium on (literary) criticism I waded into the question of whether there’s too much or too little historicism among critics and other readers these days:
7
30
138
This means Germans are required to say it upon greeting one another, right?
0
26
132
Since it's Jameson's 90th birthday, here's a tribute to his work from yrs truly from way back when
3
32
133
I have nothing to add to the Jeremy Strong discourse except that he was born to star in an Igor Stravinsky biopic
2
5
131
This good & depressing essay reminds of me, mutatis mutandis, of Adorno’s description of radio as aural wallpaper
8
18
127
Are we producing too many elites—or not consuming enough of them?
3
8
126
"A flagrantly looking Jew" is a pretty funny phrase to use in an open letter complaining about antisemitism
0
19
127
This argument would have more purchase if we lived in a democratic society
Andreas Malm’s call for activists to use violence to force upon democratic society his preferred set of climate policies regardless of the majority’s wishes demonstrates a wildly anti-democratic, authoritarian impulse that the rest of the left should reject without qualification.
94
39
155
2
1
122
One day nothing will be left on earth but cockroaches, jellyfish, and the filibuster
4
12
121
In
@NewLeftReview
Fredric Jameson's work receives a pretty majestic vindication, against the claims of "post-critique," from
@leorobsonwriter
(including the fact that Jameson seems to take plenty of pleasure in what he reads):
2
20
121
But those people aren't listening, and, really, can't listen, so long as they want to guard their capital and/or political power. The great task is to start dealing with them not through persuasion but through coercion and defeat. They are not interlocutors but enemies.
4
10
114
US conservatives on hearing of the death of a Palestinian:
0
1
114
On Commentary’s “About Us” page it says how a big part of the magazine’s mission is “the preservation of high culture in an age of political correctness and the collapse of critical standards”
Jonathan Glazer, you can go fuck yourself and stuff your Oscar up your ass.
2K
375
4K
1
12
115
'"Comparison of Marxism with religion is a two-way street,” Jameson argued; religion might have its real prophetic truth in Marxism, as messianism, providence, and primitive magic become “foreshadowings” of their discovered true form in class struggle'
1
25
118
Few if any lies more fundamental to imperialist violence than that the other side has always initiated any harm and the harm we do, by contrast, is always defensive
2
28
113
I feel like this has come to be the prevailing etiquette around “climate”
1
20
108
Enough discussion of Malm on blowing up pipelines lately than I'm gonna re-up my piece on the subject not b/c it's the most ambitious—it's not—but b/c as a modest piece of ecoterrorist service journalism it maybe most thoroughly explains what's in the book
2
17
109
A great short essay from
@hamrahrama
about the rise of "product movies" (about, e.g., Pop-Tarts, Air Jordans, etc.)
1
18
110
Biden would become an instantly (if undeservedly—but never mind) beloved figure if he said, “Now, folks, this is the best job in the world, and it’s been the great honor of my life to do it, which makes it a hard job to leave, but I’m just not up to it anymore…”
6
5
109
Why it's important to read authors besides Edith Wharton
3
3
106
If you say the word "terrorist" three times in quick succession it completes your divorce from reality
Iran is a terrorist nation. They have just launched a disproportionate terrorist attack against our ally Israel. The free world and the United States will stand against this terrorist nation and the tyranny that it promotes.
12K
903
9K
3
16
105
I don’t really tweet anymore on execrable “X,” not out of principle, just disinclination. Still, please read this by
@gabrielwinant
, abt the indecent uses to which calls for “decency” are invariably put as Israel ramps up the murder of its Gazan captives:
7
22
105
The 20th century would have been so much better if Adorno had written an essay in praise of Ornette Coleman
6
11
106
If it were still possible to use "terrorism" in any meaningful neutral sense—rather than as a catch-all designation for what the bad guys do, of which the good guys can never be guilty—this IDF practice would have to count as an example of pure terrorism
2
30
104
Much of my frustration with sensible (which is to say alarmist) commentary—including mine—on the planetary ecological crisis has to do with the implicit premise that it's addressing the people who, as things are currently arranged, decide matters. 1/2
2
13
101
The "US heading toward civil war" discourse seems to me to err in presuming that liberals won't take tyranny lying down
3
11
103
A devastating account of Germany's genocide habit from Eyal Weizman in the LRB
0
32
102