Omedi Ochieng
@omediochieng.bsky.social
Critic, Student, Professor
Reposted by Omedi Ochieng
This ep does double duty as the afterword for Rhetoric Before and Beyond Post-Truth, a forthcoming collection from @upittpress.bsky.social, edited by Scott Sundvall, @caddiealford.bsky.social, & @rhetlab.bsky.social. Plus it’s the perfect companion for your travels to NCA 2025! #teamrhetoric
November 18, 2025 at 4:56 PM
This ep does double duty as the afterword for Rhetoric Before and Beyond Post-Truth, a forthcoming collection from @upittpress.bsky.social, edited by Scott Sundvall, @caddiealford.bsky.social, & @rhetlab.bsky.social. Plus it’s the perfect companion for your travels to NCA 2025! #teamrhetoric
Reposted by Omedi Ochieng
New ep of the Rhetoricity podcast! Super excited for this one: a roundtable on the “post-truth” world we are (or are we?) living in. Panelists include @jamesrball.com, @omediochieng.bsky.social, @rhetrickery.bsky.social, Barb Biesecker, & Robin Reames. rhetoricity.libsyn.com/rhetoric-bef... #NCA2025
Rhetoricity: Rhetoric Before and Beyond Post-Truth: Afterwords
This special episode of Rhetoricity features a roundtable that also serves as the "Afterwords" for a forthcoming collection entitled Rhetoric Before and Beyond Post-Truth. That collection is edited by...
rhetoricity.libsyn.com
November 18, 2025 at 4:54 PM
New ep of the Rhetoricity podcast! Super excited for this one: a roundtable on the “post-truth” world we are (or are we?) living in. Panelists include @jamesrball.com, @omediochieng.bsky.social, @rhetrickery.bsky.social, Barb Biesecker, & Robin Reames. rhetoricity.libsyn.com/rhetoric-bef... #NCA2025
Hard to believe, but there was a time such a thing as a useable search function existed
November 17, 2025 at 11:32 PM
Hard to believe, but there was a time such a thing as a useable search function existed
Pete Buttigieg promises "that our first gay first family might actually be a straight one.” lareviewofbooks.org/blog/essays/...
November 14, 2025 at 11:25 PM
Pete Buttigieg promises "that our first gay first family might actually be a straight one.” lareviewofbooks.org/blog/essays/...
USians grasping around for words to describe the Epstein predatory network (“elites," “bipartisan,” “class solidarity”) really is a reminder of the almost complete illegibility of “the social”—as an analytic for grasping totality—in U.S. discourse.
November 14, 2025 at 6:27 PM
USians grasping around for words to describe the Epstein predatory network (“elites," “bipartisan,” “class solidarity”) really is a reminder of the almost complete illegibility of “the social”—as an analytic for grasping totality—in U.S. discourse.
It worries me that technical psychoanalytic language—e.g. psychosis, perversion, hysteria— often have vulgarized valences in popular discourse because we really do need these analytic concepts to come to terms with Zionism in Israel, Germany, and the United States www.fr.de/kultur/gesel...
Faschismus-Experte Jason Stanley aus Synagoge in Frankfurt geworfen: Zum Schweigen gebracht
Nach kritischen Äußerungen zu Israel und Diskursklima wurde Jason Stanley am 9. November von der jüdischen Gemeinde Frankfurt ausgeschlossen.
www.fr.de
November 13, 2025 at 5:59 PM
It worries me that technical psychoanalytic language—e.g. psychosis, perversion, hysteria— often have vulgarized valences in popular discourse because we really do need these analytic concepts to come to terms with Zionism in Israel, Germany, and the United States www.fr.de/kultur/gesel...
Practicing breathing exercises as I listen to absolutely brilliant thinkers get interviewed by people completely out of their depth.
November 11, 2025 at 1:05 AM
Practicing breathing exercises as I listen to absolutely brilliant thinkers get interviewed by people completely out of their depth.
Second coming peeps, how’s the width of that gyre coming along?
November 10, 2025 at 5:41 PM
Second coming peeps, how’s the width of that gyre coming along?
Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote about what we should expect from the Trump regime omediochieng.substack.com/p/fascisms-p...
Fascism’s pedagogy
A time-lapse of late fascism
omediochieng.substack.com
November 8, 2025 at 8:05 PM
Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote about what we should expect from the Trump regime omediochieng.substack.com/p/fascisms-p...
Few things as symptomatic of how social democrats keep pining for the Keynesian order of post-war America than their hysterical(!!!) championing of an electoral politics that is supposed to transform "hysterical misery into common unhappiness.”
November 8, 2025 at 7:12 PM
Few things as symptomatic of how social democrats keep pining for the Keynesian order of post-war America than their hysterical(!!!) championing of an electoral politics that is supposed to transform "hysterical misery into common unhappiness.”
The present is a coalition of Facebook boomers, reddit moderators, Nazi bots on X, and bluesky libs collectively chanting, “Is it real?” at AI slop the day after the last data center has dried up all the fresh water in the world.
It is so interesting to me that we are living in an era when seemingly everything is irony-pilled, trolling abounds, deep fakes are everywhere and that somehow this has only created the most incredibly literalist reading publics in the world.
November 8, 2025 at 3:10 PM
The present is a coalition of Facebook boomers, reddit moderators, Nazi bots on X, and bluesky libs collectively chanting, “Is it real?” at AI slop the day after the last data center has dried up all the fresh water in the world.
It is so interesting to me that we are living in an era when seemingly everything is irony-pilled, trolling abounds, deep fakes are everywhere and that somehow this has only created the most incredibly literalist reading publics in the world.
November 8, 2025 at 2:29 PM
It is so interesting to me that we are living in an era when seemingly everything is irony-pilled, trolling abounds, deep fakes are everywhere and that somehow this has only created the most incredibly literalist reading publics in the world.
Finding a way of steering a student from vernacular gateways to fascism—a Joe Rogan podcast enthusiast; or a student on a Yuval Harari tear; or one who has been socialized in the ambient manosphere of Hillsong worship songs—is surely one of the most vexing pedagogical riddles.
November 7, 2025 at 3:58 PM
Finding a way of steering a student from vernacular gateways to fascism—a Joe Rogan podcast enthusiast; or a student on a Yuval Harari tear; or one who has been socialized in the ambient manosphere of Hillsong worship songs—is surely one of the most vexing pedagogical riddles.
One of the greatest pleasures in life must surely be re-rereading a text when you are finally, blessedly, ready for it.
October 26, 2025 at 7:02 PM
One of the greatest pleasures in life must surely be re-rereading a text when you are finally, blessedly, ready for it.
You'd think this would be the golden age of left moralist writers in the vein of Paul Goodman, James Baldwin, and Robert Coles but I think we won't see as much of the genre precisely because we're in the twilight of self-described "left-liberals."
October 25, 2025 at 6:52 PM
You'd think this would be the golden age of left moralist writers in the vein of Paul Goodman, James Baldwin, and Robert Coles but I think we won't see as much of the genre precisely because we're in the twilight of self-described "left-liberals."
If there is going to be an undercommons as the university crumbles, a huge task will be transforming the curdled ressentiment of post-academic cranks into something resembling a critical autodidacticism.
October 25, 2025 at 5:32 PM
If there is going to be an undercommons as the university crumbles, a huge task will be transforming the curdled ressentiment of post-academic cranks into something resembling a critical autodidacticism.
Freud wrote that when we dream, our dreams are very interesting to us and boring to everyone else. In the racial capitalocene, our lives are very real to us but unreal to everyone else.
Harper's "The Goon Squad" belongs to the same genre as CHE's deep dive into the inside politics of Pomona University's English department www.chronicle.com/podcast/coll...
Pomona’s Dirty Laundry
A feud among three professors inspired a debate over woke politics in academe.
www.chronicle.com
October 24, 2025 at 11:33 PM
Freud wrote that when we dream, our dreams are very interesting to us and boring to everyone else. In the racial capitalocene, our lives are very real to us but unreal to everyone else.
Harper's "The Goon Squad" belongs to the same genre as CHE's deep dive into the inside politics of Pomona University's English department www.chronicle.com/podcast/coll...
Pomona’s Dirty Laundry
A feud among three professors inspired a debate over woke politics in academe.
www.chronicle.com
October 24, 2025 at 7:31 PM
Harper's "The Goon Squad" belongs to the same genre as CHE's deep dive into the inside politics of Pomona University's English department www.chronicle.com/podcast/coll...
Grimly amused by the contradictions of social democracy, at once dependent on the frontier for the largesse it seeks to distribute and attached to whiteness as the marrow of the social.
Trump's re-election campaign is going to be running favorable quotes from ... [checks notes] ... Senator Bernie Sanders.
October 24, 2025 at 4:30 PM
Grimly amused by the contradictions of social democracy, at once dependent on the frontier for the largesse it seeks to distribute and attached to whiteness as the marrow of the social.
Writing a column for the New York Times and shaking my head so the readers know that I disagree with its support for genocide.
I wouldn’t characterize Jamelle Bouie's silence over Israel’s genocidal campaign as an absolute silence, but I would characterize it as a general silence.
October 24, 2025 at 2:58 PM
Writing a column for the New York Times and shaking my head so the readers know that I disagree with its support for genocide.
This reminds me of Brillat-Savarin’s question to Adam and Eve: “who ruined yourself for an apple, what might you not have done for a truffled turkey?”
October 23, 2025 at 12:48 AM
This reminds me of Brillat-Savarin’s question to Adam and Eve: “who ruined yourself for an apple, what might you not have done for a truffled turkey?”
I wouldn’t characterize Jamelle Bouie's silence over Israel’s genocidal campaign as an absolute silence, but I would characterize it as a general silence.
October 22, 2025 at 4:43 PM
I wouldn’t characterize Jamelle Bouie's silence over Israel’s genocidal campaign as an absolute silence, but I would characterize it as a general silence.
5 year old me didn't know that Artax sinking into the Swamp of Sadness was all the preparation I needed for life in the racial capitalocene.
October 18, 2025 at 1:37 AM
5 year old me didn't know that Artax sinking into the Swamp of Sadness was all the preparation I needed for life in the racial capitalocene.
Each generation of political theorists must, out of relative disciplinary solipsism, discover rhetoric, metabolize it, and compulsively reinvent its tropological taxonomy.
October 15, 2025 at 5:23 AM
Each generation of political theorists must, out of relative disciplinary solipsism, discover rhetoric, metabolize it, and compulsively reinvent its tropological taxonomy.