Jason Read

@jasonread.bsky.social

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Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine, Author of The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work from Verso Books:
https://www.versobooks.com/products/2920-the-double-shift
More here:
http://www.unemployednegativity.com

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Jason Read

Psst: Project 2025 is terrifying for a lot of reasons but also because on page 5 it calls for teachers and librarians who grant access to books that are maligned as pornography (which just means anything LGBTQ) to be registered as sex offenders. Pass it on.

www.e-flux.com/shop/605705-...

e-flux Index #2 - Indexwww.e-flux.com e-flux Index is a new print journal surveying the breadth of contemporary culture through e-flux’s publishing on art, theory, architecture, f…

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Jason Read

open.spotify.com/episode/7oKZ...

Breaking News Re-Release: "Hillbilly Elegy"open.spotify.com Listen to this episode from If Books Could Kill on Spotify. To celebrate ("celebrate") Donald Trump choosing JD Vance as his running mate we are re-releasing our "Hillbilly Elegy" episode. Enjoy!

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Jason Read

It's hard to convey how dead-on this essay is unless you watch a metric fuckton of television. But if you do, oh baby, reading this is like putting on the glasses from They Live.

In which I convert my longstanding beef with TV's excessive reliance on traumatic backstories into an essay! The first installment of our new Screen Shots column for the LA Review of Books:

The Past Is Never Dead: On TV’s Backstory Problem | Los Angeles Review of Bookslareviewofbooks.org Elizabeth Alsop explores the ubiquity—and limitations—of the “trauma backstory.”...

Tomorrow 7/17 at 19:30 BST/2:30 EST From Marx to Spinoza: Affect, Ideology, Materiality will be glad to welcome Warren Montag to the seminar to talk about Spinoza, Althusser, and the critique of ideology. Details in first comment.

Vance basically taking racist culture of poverty arguments and applying them to the white working class remind me of the statement that fascism is just colonialism brought back into the homeland.

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Jason Read

Kind of amazing to see the press still talking about polarization and “dangerous rhetoric,” when every piece of information we have suggests none of those things influenced the shooter. Or if they did, certainly not in the fashion the press suggests.

Fog dog

Corn dog

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Jason Read

A good time to revisit @gabrielwinant.bsky.social 's 2023 essay on J.D. Vance's class politics @nplusonemag.bsky.social

J. D. Vance Changes the Subject | Gabriel Winantwww.nplusonemag.com Vance’s form of far-right politics is so ominous because it responds in a primal, perverted way to something actual. We are caught under a heap of wreckage, an accumulation of social and historical tr...

It is Walter Benjamin's birthday. He famously wrote that "The work is the death mask of its conception." By that standard LLMs like ChatGPT are quite literally zombies, reanimating the dead letter of the works without the lifeblood of thought.

Reposted for Walter Benjamin’s birthday. www.e-flux.com/notes/590427...

What Taylor Swift Taught Me About Fascism - Notes - e-fluxwww.e-flux.com Jason Read on Alberto Toscano and micro-fascism.

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Jason Read

This is deranged. The press has just decided that criticizing Trump is no longer okay. www.cnn.com/2024/07/14/m...

This just makes me think of John Locke (or, rather his servant)

Today is Walter Benjamin's birthday, an important reminder that you can be unemployable for most of your life, die while trying to flee fascist persecution, and still become an entire publishing niche decades after your death. There is hope, just not for us.

I wrote about Hegel, Kojève, and Renault’s weird little book www.unemployednegativity.com/2024/07/fun-...

Fun with Hegel and Kojève: On Matthieu Renault's Maîtres et Esclaves: Archives du Laboratoire de Mythologiques de la Modernitéwww.unemployednegativity.com

All this Reichstag stuff made me totally forget that it is Bastille Day.

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Jason Read

Evict the Landlord Inside Your Head

why wouldn’t something live rent-free in my head? what do you think I am, a landlord?

"So we are condemning political violence, you mean like war, prisons, mass starvation, and genocide?" "No, not that stuff, we are generally okay with that."

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Jason Read

If I have one strong recommendation, it's that you should hastily draw extremely firm conclusions about the probability of unforeseeable future outcomes based on rare present events about which you have markedly little verifiable information.

Cleansing my timeline

My brother has a new single out just in time for bandcamp Friday. thewiggins.bandcamp.com/album/best-s...

Best Served Cold(Babylon), by The Wigginsthewiggins.bandcamp.com 1 track album

Fun drinking game: watch any Hollywood film made in the 40s to the 70s and drink whenever charge drink something that is not coffee or alcohol and you will be stone cold sober (maybe slightly buzzed if you watch a western).

The contrast between talking to my brother who lives in Houston and looking at the news is striking. Millions without power in Texas heat and barely a word. As my brother says Katrina was just the start. Ignore, abandon, and carry on is the strategy for climate change disasters.

Reposted in memory of Shelley Duvall. RIP www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/11/shin...

Shine On: We Are All in Room 237 Nowwww.unemployednegativity.com

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Jason Read

Book

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Jason Read

So I want to talk about this from the perspective of someone who does professional fact checking as part of my work. For some years now I have been paid to check TV and written content themed around animals to make sure it is factually accurate. Chat GPT & AI has made that job so much harder.

Uhhhh… this is probably bad 😬😬

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Jason Read

lmao FUCK THIS. Trump's Project 2025 wants to take money out of your wallet and give it to your boss

Project 2025, page 592: make it harder for employees to be paid at overtime rates by allowing employers to average the number of hours worked over 2-4 weeks

It is not that the Democrats don’t know that one of the best ways to fight fascism is with a broad popular front encompassing leftist reforms. They know, that is why they are not fighting.

I included this footnote in The Double Shift because I did want to give credit where credit was due, and One Dimensional Woman was an influential book for me. I knew that Nina had changed quite a bit then, but if I knew what I know now I would have cited someone else.