Rafael Khachaturian

t.co/0rBjC2tIHb

Syllabus writing for my upcoming @brooklyninstitute.bsky.social
course on the theory and practice of dictatorship.

A few spots are still available—we start on March 3! (Link below)

Feel pretty hopeful that Gen A countercultural and underground forms of life are going to be organized around analog tech, small scale farming, and the primacy of face to face interaction.

My toddler has picked up all the gesticulations of an intensely speaking adult without almost any of the vocabulary, leading to some hilarious gibberish monologues when upset. This is what happens when both of your parents come from hand talker cultures.

Toddlers are innately anti-capitalist because they have no conception of abstract time or private property.

The Andrea Mitchell Center Podcast: Episode 7.10: Democracy as Dispersion of Power: A Conversation with Samuel Bagg Interviewer: RAFAEL KHACHATURIAN. Over the past decade we have witnessed an unfolding global crisis of democracy, in its liberal-democratic, representative, capitalist form. As elite power has continu...

This may be the best interview I've done about my book. Many thanks to @rafkhach.bsky.social for sharp, insightful questions pressing me to relate normative theory to our big-picture historical situation. (Recorded in February, but no less relevant today.)

mitchellcenter.libsyn.com/episode-710-...

I think an NLR-type publication rather than an academic journal, but so much yes.

Curtis Sliwa looks like he is ready to negotiate the transition to democracy in a southern European country after the generalissimo has died.

Barack hitting the phones between now and November

The Andrea Mitchell Center Podcast: Episode 7.2: Brazil's Pink Tide and the Politics of Redistribution In this episode, host RAFAEL KHACHATURIAN speaks with sociologist and political theorist NARA ROBERTA SILVA about the trajectory of Brazil’s left over the past two decades. Together, they unpack the r...

I had the pleasure of joining @rafkhach.bsky.social for a convo on 20 years of Brazilian politics -- from the Workers’ Party and the Pink Tide, through the 2013 protests and Bolsonaro’s rise, to Lula’s current term and the Left’s contradictions in power. mitchellcenter.libsyn.com/episode-72-b...

buddy, I am not joking when I say I've been planning a whole Irishman themed day for us

Whenever my extended family asks me about @laurabucci.bsky.social

A New Deal for Higher Ed where you and all your academic friends go to work at community colleges.

Just the elite SLACs, I fear. Most others will begin to shutter.

A year ago, I'd have guessed that widespread AI adoption into white collar work is going to bifurcate the labor force, with only the most prestigious layers still getting meaningful training in reading and writing. Now, looking at the Ivies, I was probably way too optimistic.

It's weird when adults say hi to your baby but not to you. What are you supposed to do? Say hi for them? Say hi for yourself? Smile and keep walking??

One of the lasting insights from postwar scholarship on authoritarian regimes where the rule of law no longer holds up is that they encourage internal radicalization, as mid-tier operatives scramble to outdo each other to impress the leader.

Basically everyone who talks about 🇮🇱/🇵🇸 regularly ends up going insane because it is considered completely unacceptable to acknowledge things like "A country where some people are denied the right to vote based on their ethnicity is not a democracy" that are objectively true statements.

This is it, folks. Far larger than Harvard itself, as large as Harvard is. Every nonprofit from the center leftward is on notice for potential destruction.

When all is said and done, American fascism is going to be so much more profoundly stupid and tacky than anything the Europeans conjured.

If interwar fascism was a modernist phenomenon, turning to myth as a response to the uprooting of metaphysical foundations, its American cousin is thoroughly postmodernist, playfully and consciously embracing the lack of any meaning apart from that measured by capital.

Pulling up to the Capital reading group with this

my hope is that AI can empower the Dumbest, Least talented slobs i know to replace everything i ever loved with One Million Years of Content

Can you please think for a second how this data is about to be used by people without great intentions?

You’re playing with fire.

I am once again asking you to join @aaup.bsky.social

I never knew Michelle Trachtenberg, but she went to junior high in my neighborhood (Bay Academy) and we literally had common acquaintances/friends of friends. This, plus growing up a Nickelodeon kid, really does feel like hearing a former classmate died.

750 political scientists in support of democracy*

*unless there’s a networking event and you “have to” cross a picket line

Philly, come out to 2000 Market right now and say it loud: hands off our healthcare, hands off our research, hands off our jobs!

another Thing I Will Keep Saying: there is of course an important moral case for internationalism. but the practical case for it can start by simply noticing how internationalist the people robbing you are (however nationalist their rhetoric might be)