Rafael Khachaturian

Rafael Khachaturian

@rafkhach.bsky.social

Political theorist, educator, translator. Teaching at Penn and BISR. www.rafaelkhachaturian.com

3.9K followers1.4K following374 posts

Rafael Khachaturian reposted

BOOM! 💥💥💥 The U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals granted Penn-AAUP’s motion to vacate the bad district court opinion on Trump’s absurd demands. Trump tried to get a list of Jews from Penn & failed, & now, thanks to @aaup-penn.bsky.social, the admin leaves with nothing that it can use elsewhere.

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.

Rafael Khachaturian reposted

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.

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.

The New York Times@nytimes.com

Breaking News: Trump officials blame a mistake for setting off the tectonic confrontation with Harvard. nyti.ms/4ioHtIT

Rafael Khachaturian reposted

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.

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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.

Rafael Khachaturian reposted

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

Rafael Khachaturian reposted

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.

John Holbein@johnholbein1.bsky.social

Here are the party leanings of various universities. Look at how right-leaning BYU (my alma-mater) employees are! {BYU employees are significantly more to the right than even Liberty U. employees--wow!}

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.

Rafael Khachaturian reposted

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)

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Rafael Khachaturian reposted

Something that's central to (orthodox) economics' claim to be a science in its core domain is its ability to generate predictions based on systematic relationships (laws) of some kind. Yet what it actually has been very good at is translating non-systematic common-sense intuitions into its own terms

There's a historical dialectic where, while US racial politics anticipated European fascism, its course of development insulated from the interwar crisis, only for it to then facilitate the global right during the Cold War, whose neo-fascist descendants are now in turn influencing the US right.

Rafael Khachaturian reposted

As Biden is swept into the dustbin, Charlotte E. Rosen wonders: what was the Resistance “Twitterstorian”? Well-paid liberal “attack dogs” of democracy like Heather Cox Richardson proved to be all too willing to turn to Democratic Party apologia—especially on Gaza. proteanmag.com/2025/01/20/t...

proteanmag.comThe End of Resistance HistoryAs the Biden administration is swept into the dustbin, Charlotte Rosen wonders: what was the liberal Hashtag-Resistance "Twitterstorian"? And, as a product of the first Trump term, what did commentato...

This closeness to tech and finance capital is why I think dismissal of the fascism claim on the grounds of weakness, incoherence, minoritarianism, etc is too premature.

Tobita Chow@tobitac.bsky.social

4 years ago MAGA was vulnerable and isolated from vast majority of capital, most of GOP. Given time they would be able to reassemble their coalition in a now more radical form. They got that time; outside of some rhetoric Dem response was tepid