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Tobi Haslett Profile
Tobi Haslett

@tobihaslett

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Joined February 2014
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
10 months
In case you’re wondering what Berlin is like—someone messaged the group chat to say that the left wing cafe is having a chill clean up party because the cops ripped the place to pieces during a raid. They had been alerted to the presence of Palestine zines
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
9 months
Literally insane that Germany is gonna make you sign a fucking loyalty oath to Israel so you can do your angular little installation about how microplastics have agency
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
11 months
Imagine not quitting this job
@thehill
The Hill
11 months
White House rejects use of phrase "from the river to the sea"
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
11 months
Truly an epochal failure that almost nobody in the media suffered even minor, reputational consequences for parroting the lies that led to the Iraq invasion. Not the most important thing but—we really can’t let that happen again
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
1 year
The stunning lack of urgency in this piece by Judith Butler—published as Gazans flee for their lives—is its own form of moral failure
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
4 months
This is basically what she did to the entire Palestine solidarity movement
@lucydougtweets
Lucy Douglas
4 months
I have just witnessed the most egregious - violent! - example of “it’s more of a comment than a question”. A young man stood up and told Zadie Smith (!!) that he was having an identity crisis about being a writer and then ASKED HER TO READ HIS SHORT STORY
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
1 year
Turns out that in the zany funky freaky deaky international art world you’re free to express ANY opinion except that Palestinians shouldn’t be slaughtered en masse
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
11 months
A friend said that some Germans are in fact thrilled that everyone currently thinks they’re nuts. The “guilt” was often a seething, hateful resentment of the moral prestige of their historical victims, and a desire to reclaim it for themselves. And now THEY get to be—pariahs
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
19 days
They will kill the world’s poorest people, hundreds and hundreds per day, using the most advanced weapons, for refusing to kneel
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
6 months
Psychotically evil. Like when Garcetti shut down COVID testing sites in LA as punishment for the rebellion
@cityascanvass
Luca Saeed
6 months
🚨City College announces it is closing its food pantry as a result of the solidarity encampment. In 2022, 40% of CUNY students reported having low or very low food security. Thats 110,000 students.
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
11 months
My term for German culture/affect—now and always—is “hysterical obedience”
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
1 year
“That Palestinians must be patrolled and censured for their supposed anti-Semitism by the German state testifies to the perversity that now drives this national project: having committed genocide has become a claim to moral authority.” Glad that someone wrote this
@_thebadside
The Bad Side
1 year
From comrades in Berlin: “In Germany, anyone who dares to publicly oppose this carnage—at a rally or on the internet—faces the threat of ostracism, censorship, arrest, sacking by employers, and in the case of foreigners, deportation.”
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
6 months
RIP Jordan Neely. Killed a year ago today
@nplusonemag
n+1
6 months
“The voices of ‘law and order’ rushed to excuse a violent crime.” A year ago today, Daniel Penny killed Jordan Neely on the subway. Read @_thebadside on the city’s response:
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
1 year
I love that right now in Germany the far-right voting cops have carte blanche to beat the shit out of Arabs and patrol their neighborhoods, stopping kids in the street and asking for their papers—in the name of anti-fascism
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
25 days
If you’re among the sick idiots who insisted that the pager attack was in fact precise and targeted then you should be appalled by the carpet bombing of civilian infrastructure and hundreds of deaths in a single day. But of course you’re not
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
1 year
“What we see in Palestine will also be the suffering in the world of all the peoples of the south.” Petro on the catastrophe in Gaza as a sign of what’s to come
@petrogustavo
Gustavo Petro
1 year
La barbarie del consumo basado en la muerte de los demás nos lleva a un ascenso del fascismo sin precedente, y por tanto, a la muerte de la democracia y la libertad. Es la barbarie, o el 1933 global, como la llamo. 1933 fue año donde ascendió Hitler al poder. Lo que vemos en
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
1 year
Such an obvious, stupid, repulsive lie, uttered in the middle of a humanitarian catastrophe
@C_Sommerfeldt
Chris Sommerfeldt
1 year
On MSNBC, Mayor Adams says in NYC "you had the DSA and others carrying swastikas and calling for the extermination of Jewish people" following Hamas' attack on Israel.
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
26 days
RIP Fredric Jameson
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
9 months
“Gaza is a real-time alarm bell that genocide may become a political tool in the decades to come for resolving capital’s intractable contradiction between surplus capital and surplus humanity.”
@alex_callinicos
Alex Callinicos
9 months
Another powerful piece by William Robinson offering a Marxist take on Gaza
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
3 months
The explicit equivalence between genocidal Serbian forces and Palestinians—in the middle of this genocide—is obscene. And there’s only passing mention of present claims that the Israeli assault on Gaza has included sexual violence. Only quotes from Israelis who can’t believe that
@NewYorker
The New Yorker
3 months
Rape is a shocking and sadly predictable feature of war. But, Masha Gessen writes, the nature of the crime makes it difficult to document and, consequently, to prosecute.
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
6 months
Really wish Mike Davis were here to see this
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
4 months
Turning down a prize—mid-genocide—as a tenured professor has got to be in the top ten easiest political decisions
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
1 year
As whole neighborhoods are blasted to pieces, the self-styled pragmatists look far more callous and pointless than the self-styled radicals. Even politicians who said and condemned what you wanted them to are getting smeared in the relentless bipartisan drive to annihilate Gaza
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
6 months
Oddly, I remember a piece, published by Jezebel, in 2015, that skillfully mapped the dynamics of backlash/offense/clickbait and women’s online writing—and the many paradoxes thereof. Didn’t answer any massive questions, but asked the right ones, well. It’s by Jia Tolentino lol
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
11 months
Refaat was a poet and professor of literature who adapted this classic poem by Jamaican writer Claude McKay:
@itranslate123
Refaat in Gaza 🇵🇸
1 year
If I must die, let it be a tale. #FreePalestine #Gaza
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
10 months
It was clear from reading Butler’s initial piece that they thought the real event, the only proper object of contemplation, was October 7. They don’t mistake 10/7 for the “start” of this historical sequence—but a kind of ending, or breaking off
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
1 year
“What we are witnessing, in other words, is perhaps the first fusion of old-school colonial and genocidal violence with advanced state-of-the-art heavy weapons; a twisted amalgamation of the 17th century and the 21st” Best, most harrowing account in English of what’s going on
@shaabiranks
dylan saba
1 year
This was far and away the best thing I’ve read since Oct 7. Read every word
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
3 months
If it ends up that both black US presidents had socialist economist dads from the third world—the Weltgeist is mooning us
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
9 months
“Author Annie Ernaux, Palestinian poet and activist Mohammed El-Kurd and actress Indya Moore call on artists to strike against German institutions.” Damn @strikegermany
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
1 year
The great-grandchild of a Nazi reaching out to the grandchild of one of the architects of the Nakba. Naturally, both are art dealers and hated the Artforum letter
@alexnpress
Alex Press
1 year
incredible
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
1 year
Cesaire was right, “Europe is indefensible”
@RnaudBertrand
Arnaud Bertrand
1 year
Beyond disgusted at the length French TV pundits go to to justify the murder of children. Listening to @celine_pina it's almost as if Palestinian children need to thank the IDF for killing them. Listen to this, it's absolutely unreal: "Crimes against humanity and war crimes are
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
17 days
You disgusting fucking worm
@BHL
Bernard-Henri Lévy
18 days
Israel is not invading Lebanon, it is liberating it. This is a historic moment, not only for the Israelis, but for the Lebanese, Arabs, and Eastern Christians. To not understand this is to have lost all moral and political compass. #StandWithIsrael #Lebanon #IDF
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
1 year
Feels ridiculous to have spent years trying to parse how “race” is mediated, contingent, intricately reproduced at the conjunction of capital and the state—only for global order to explode because of ethnic supremacism and a literal genocide
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
9 months
This year MLK day falls on the day Rosa Luxemburg was killed. His last ever piece of writing contains a nod to Rosa (in my opinion)
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
1 year
I would watch a Chinese remake of Arrested Development
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
1 year
A small point: This piece explicitly revives Michael Walzer’s plea for a “decent left.” The 2002 essay (also in Dissent) was not a call for peace, but part of Walzer’s infamous, full-throated defense of the Afghanistan invasion. Worth mentioning
@joshualeifer
Joshua Ort-Leifer
1 year
For @DissentMag , I wrote about why the left must be humane, or it is not a left at all.
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
11 months
Today I acted on a perverse impulse and reread this 1976 Nadine Gordimer piece about South Africa and was struck anew by near-total inability of anyone on the white left-liberal spectrum to imagine that “one man one vote” could ever happen. Then it did
@BigMeanInternet
Malcolm Harris
11 months
Not sure on what grounds *American* *socialists* are supposed to tell Palestinian organizers that the demand "one person one vote" is too unrealistic to support
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
11 months
I ❤️ NY
@tracyrosenthal_
tracy rosenthal
11 months
Protesters block the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade and hold the street! No celebrating the genocide of the indigenous people of the americas, no funding genocide in Palestine
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
6 months
“To dominate without bearing the stain of evil: this is perhaps the ultimate fantasy of the dominant.” Frédéric Lordon on Gaza and “the West”
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
9 months
Kind of perfect to respond to the hypocrisy of the official German left by sounding exactly like Brecht
@Ruairi_Casey
Ruairí Casey
9 months
Remarkable exchange between Mustafa Barghouti and an interviewer from Taz, Germany's largest left-wing newspaper
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
1 year
Butler has a great book on speech acts, and a bad book on non-violence—so they have, with almost arithmetical exactitude, produced a totally whatever piece about the speech act of condemning violence
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
2 months
“At the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August 1968, when Hubert H. Humphrey’s nomination was announced, the enthusiasm of the American liberals—that sort of misty, Bavarian, psychedelic delirium—was so unbearable that I got up to leave.” Jean Genet
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
11 months
It also should be noted that this rabid official position is not actually THAT widely shared among most Germans—according to polls. It retains elements of bourgeois narcissism/neurosis
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
6 months
Her best
@me_im_chloe
chlobuchar
6 months
Anyways, was reading Susan Sontags trip to Hanoi for other reasons and this was beautiful
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
10 months
This Harvard thing should remind everyone that when push comes to shove, power will not reward your reasonable little compromises so you might as well have dignity. Saves time
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
11 months
An entire layer of the liberal journalistic establishment got to feel stern and pragmatic for supporting the war, then righteous and humane about the ensuing catastrophe. Having your cake and bombing it too! Anyway those guys are now everyone’s bosses
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
6 months
I’m sure many know this but it’s worth saying/repeating: administrations are trying to negotiate cynically with demonstrators in order to avoid a nationwide graduation showdown
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
9 months
These chin-stroking distinctions are so pathetically insubstantial. What do you call “ethnic cleansing” when it’s accomplished by a massive bombing campaign in a territory it’s literally impossible to flee?
@EricLevitz
Eric Levitz
9 months
@OsitaNwanevu I think it is useful to be able to linguistically distinguish between the act of attempting to systemically exterminate a people, and the act of waging a regime-change war with total disregard for civilian life (and/or, a hope of engineering ethnic cleansing via displacement)...
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
9 months
Can’t tell if it’s good or bad that MIA lost the plot completely but this is literally her entire project
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
10 months
Dissent this, Dissent that. Psychotic racism + sneering literary criticism suffused with a totally unearned sense of authority—that’s the REAL legacy of the New York Intellectuals! Kudos Tablet
@tabletmag
Tablet Magazine
10 months
"Alareer’s work, tenderly keening at its best and banal and formulaic at its average, relies on strained cultural and historical transpositions." On the intifada generation that sacrificed its poets, from @MaximDShrayer .
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
11 days
Amiri Baraka would be 90 today. Happy birthday
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
9 months
“Palestinian martyrdom crosses the boundary between secular and theological, suffusing the gap left by the absence of the right to have rights.” @bassem__saad ’s incredible new essay on Palestinian martyrdom, ethics, and the limits of human rights
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
11 months
Since there’s a massive action today to #BlockCopCity —please read this masterful, panoramic, supremely affecting essay about what’s happening in ATL. It captures the scale of the phenomenon and the stakes of that place. An actual masterpiece @nplusonemag
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
26 days
Not his most awesome contribution but I’ve always appreciated that he referred so matter-of-factly to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers as “the single most significant political experience of the American 1960s”
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
3 months
Thinking about France today, just a year after the pension reform demos AND the uprising for Nahel: The conventional wisdom that riots/uprisings are a gift to right wing parties is starting to look…outdated
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
9 months
What’s more offensive, daring to protest an ongoing genocide wherever the President speaks—or speaking at the site of a white supremacist mass shooting to rustle up some votes
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
10 months
Germany has insanely strict defamation laws but is also full of liars who never shut the fuck up. Truly the land of Hegel
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
1 year
Part of the point of this piece was to take the epigraph to A Woman’s Story seriously, and to make the case for Ernaux as a speculative, dialectical writer—not just bravely authentic (though she can also be that)
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
1 year
I have written a piece about—Annie Ernaux. For the new @Harpers
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Tobi Haslett
1 year
Unbelievably daft. Cool that the project of liberal media is to take everything at face value except the suffering of Palestinians
@guardian
The Guardian
1 year
Marine Le Pen’s support of Israel seen as move away from party’s antisemitic past
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
6 months
The encampments are so cool and good jfc
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
2 months
Amanda Gorman is 26
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
9 months
We need to bring back the term “intellectual lightweight”
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
10 months
Reverting to third worldism because trying to treat white Europeans like adults is too exhausting
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
9 months
Marty Scorsese has the chance to be a hero. @strikegermany
@berlinale
Berlinale
10 months
The 74th Berlin International Film Festival will award US-director, producer and screenwriter Martin Scorsese the Honorary Golden Bear for his lifetime achievement in an award ceremony at the Berlinale Palast on February 20, 2024. Read all:
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Tobi Haslett
11 months
I hope Oscar Murillo starts hanging out with fewer psychotic racists
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
10 months
Actually incredible that the lesson she took from this humiliation is that she should have condemned “from the river to the sea” even harder
@najmamsharif
Najma Sharif Alawi
10 months
From Claudine Gay’s essay in the NYT today:
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
10 months
That’s why the piece ends with the wistfully fanciful call for “our poets and our dreamers, the untamed fools”—it simply did not occur to JB that the Hamas operation would have any significant political effect or expose the limits of Zionist ideology and military capacity
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
9 months
“You’re driving people to the right!!” shouts someone sprinting to the right
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Tobi Haslett
10 months
Which seems to be an instance of their ethical commitment to non-violence overtaking the descriptive/political capacity to assess the balance of forces. This rupture has resulted in mass bloodshed—as well as the reinvigoration of global sympathy for the Palestinian cause
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
4 months
Unfortunately I have developed extremely complex opinions about Kamala Harris’s persona, delivery, tone, and laugh
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
3 months
Donald Harris reading group when
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
26 days
“smothered under the realism of the reality principle and the massive weight of what is” Thank you FJ
@noapophasis
Harpo Marxism
26 days
rest in utopian desire, Fredric Jameson 💙
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Tobi Haslett
11 months
“performing edgy empathy” these fascists are just blowing spit bubbles now
@EliLake
Eli Lake
1 year
Most of the people saying Israel is committing a genocide are low information fools following a trend, performing edgy empathy, seeking social credit. Ignore them. If you’re feeling charitable, urge them to find another hobby.
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Tobi Haslett
8 months
We are (rightly) reaching for Vietnam as a point of comparison, only to be confronted with monstrous contemporary ignorance about what the US did in Vietnam
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Tobi Haslett
8 months
Advertising that you aren’t the least bit awed by Bushnell’s self-immolation is—ironically—deeply life-denying
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Tobi Haslett
11 months
Bitter irony that Shibli was censored in Frankfurt for her novel’s damning portrait of Zionists during the Nakba. The second half is (inter alia) about how a contemporary writer under apartheid can’t have a functional professional life because she’s banned from everything
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
9 months
It’s not my fault that you don’t have any fucking virtues of your own to signal!!
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Tobi Haslett
9 months
Germany has just gone to even greater lengths to punish pro-Palestine speech. If you live abroad and have gig or talk or DJ set or exhibition in Germany: DON’T DO IT. In the name of Palestine: STRIKE GERMANY @strikegermany
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Tobi Haslett
10 months
Whatever I’m not sure why I typed all of this. But I actually do believe them when they say that they didn’t foresee the campus crackdown. They were totally incapable of thinking through 10/7 as something other than the violation of a fundamental ethical principle
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
9 months
From the Standing Together socialists (!) interviewed in Dissent to Hito Steyerl in FAZ—everyone seems to think that boycotts are a way of shutting down otherwise valuable dialogue. How did self-professed leftists get so stupid so fast?
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Tobi Haslett
10 months
To someone like JB—a thinker whom I have learned a lot from, political differences notwithstanding—even to contemplate the strategic outcome of 10/7 is not just impossible but brutal, disgusting, and defeats the purpose of liberatory struggle
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
1 year
I DO think it’s important not to be glib, or to trivialize moments of brutal, world historical gravity like this one. But nothing is more trivializing than Democrats turning the bloodbath in Occupied Palestine into an excuse to bash the left
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
3 months
Nobody believed me when I said he was our first camp president. Now look
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Tobi Haslett
10 months
“We maintain that the total and complete journalistic malpractice we are witnessing is shocking, even by the standards of dehumanization and lies that have historically marked coverage of Palestine.”
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Tobi Haslett
10 months
In 2024 I need to find out what the point of writing is
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Tobi Haslett
11 months
V happy we have a new chant
@left_voice
Left Voice
11 months
BREAKING: NYC tree lighting ceremony is being disrupted by pro-Palestine protesters. 6th ave is shut down and NYPD is overwhelmed.
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Tobi Haslett
7 months
I’m a) glad David said this and b) convinced that this episode was a turning point in the asinine “discourse”—I think the public uproar/firing is one of the things that cemented this kind of ceremonial acknowledgment as an absolute prerequisite of liberal conversations re: Gaza
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Tobi Haslett
10 months
I’m so amazed by people who have followed the events of the past 3 months exclusively on Instagram, I would lose my mind
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
10 months
So Butler’s apology is also a kind of epistemological update, a reckoning with the fact that the political process that straddles every scale and locale (Gaza, Knesset, Congress, campus) wasn’t ended or even arrested but sprang back to life
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
17 days
Has any state ever bombed *refugee camps* with this frequency and intensity
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Tobi Haslett
5 months
Harmony Korine is from America
@Jake_Hanrahan
Jake Hanrahan
5 months
The American mind cannot comprehend this.
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Tobi Haslett
11 months
Part of me wants to sink my teeth into the violent, self-justifying inanity of US “left Zionism” but I know it’s a complete waste of time
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@tobihaslett
Tobi Haslett
17 days
Cynical, gloating war pig
@davidfrum
David Frum
18 days
It seems that Hamas and Hezbollah grossly over-estimated the deterrent capabilities of student protesters at elite college campuses.
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Tobi Haslett
7 months
One of the rare genuine pleasures of the recent past has been Wayne Koestenbaum’s new book. I wrote briefly about it and him for @4_columns :
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