Hi, everyone -
Watching this curiously as I re-acclimate to being back in the United States after 5 years based in the UAE, but engaged in thinking across the Caucusus, Turkey, Armenia/Azerbaijan, the I-place, and the Central Asian -Stans, and a tiny bit of China.
Being that I left in the general thought-cloud of Holmes/Kurtz/Sterling, I have this one look at this argument. On the other hand, in working with people like Kazakh indigenous activists, Persians, Azeris, Kurds, Emiratis (especially some of the LGBT subculture), I am having a Roy Batty moment in which it's hard for me to articulate some of the conversations I've been involved in, except that the world has changed radically around American hegemony in ways that I really don't think it understands yet, and the notion of left/right has heterogenized globally (not necessarily fragmented). One example is that I was interested that Indigenous Kazakhs often identify with the American Black Experience and BLM, although they experienced genocide and suppression under the Holodoror rather than slavery as such (and now autocratic suppression), but I see the way that this has been used as an affordance of solidarity of global oppression. Trumpism has been such a corrosive agent worldwide that despite the ills of American foreign policy, I see the power of the USA under a benevolent leadership, but as F-22s went over my head and my wife recounted her life growing up under the bombings of Hussein, I just sit here after 5 years in places deep in places where many Americans can't even pointo to on a map (not saying that about anyone here), just trying to think about how to think from the context of America.
I'm glad to be back, almost feel like Tocquevelle/ Oh my God.
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