Was just talking to a student yesterday about the internal tension in liberal, hyper-capitalized universities; they want to both protect free thought as an educational mandate and restrict or even punish free expression (beyond some invisible line) as an institutional mandate
If you look carefully at this photo you can see the patrons scowling or trying to ignore it completely. Who is this for
Some AI bots could function as a way to discover original materials that would otherwise be hard to find - but the hot idea is "converse with X!" which will go badly when they say weird/offensive/inaccurate things, and waste a lot of peoples' time and money. 3/3
Right now the hot thing among the middlemen is AI, specifically chatbots that imitate those historical figures, so you can "talk" to them, as if those figures didn't leave behind a body of work to be interrogated and explored 2/3
When you work with the archival papers of historical figures you get good at spotting the middlemen who make their careers out of repackaging others' life's work and reselling it, as opposed to historians who reinterpret and reintroduce the past to the present 1/3
Anyone who's ever been bullied or even discriminated against knows exactly how "humor" is a tactical weapon. It's all the GOP does now. So fuck you Dave et al, the blood's on your hands too
The Trump administration is officially more progressive in this specific area than the university where I work
when you talk to people dealing with these things up close you realize how radically fictive most of the world painted by public discussions of “higher ed” is and how long it has been
which is to be expected when it’s a niche thing but it’s been at the center of politics for years now
Funny thing about using the doomsday weapon is that whoever seriously threatens, let alone plans, to use it instantly disqualifies that person from being considered a rational actor. Dr. Strangelove covered this pretty well in 1964
Daughter failed her driving test on the first try b/c of nerves, felt like a failure b/c they want to be an adult. Had to explain that no one "is" a failure, we sometimes fail at things, and unfortunately the experience of failure is very much Being An Adult
general strike? turn around? would like to be wrong, but the litmus test for intolerable war crimes imo was gaza, and the crimes committed there and tolerated by vast majority of countries and individuals desensitised and dehumanised all of us against war crimes
This is an underrated decline-and-fall indicator btw. Basic management of fundamental natural resources is a baseline for nation-states & it looks like we're just not going to bother doing it anymore, replaced by extraction/looting
yeah man i'll circle back to you on that agenda item from yesterday's all hands in just a sec. our pedophile king just threatened to destroy a whole civilization
Sorry to be one of the Nothing Ever Happens guys but I just have a feeling that tonight Nothing Will Happen. Also Trump won't be removed because no one has the courage and/or stomach for it and the R's aren't going to rig the midterms, just pretend Congress doesn't matter (like they have been doing)
I've come around on the idea that there's basically nothing that policymakers can do to encourage an increase in marriage or birth rates other than "make the world a better place"
if you invented public libraries today, every opinion page in the country would be arguing for means tested subsidized Amazon Prime memberships
unsettling aside the intended effect of campus crackdowns: seeing a lot of posts on here about what levels of repression students ought to be willing to weather for the cause. I assume I'll be seeing these posters at the barricades
even setting aside the intended effect of campus crackdowns: one difference between now and two years ago is that half or so of them are gone, having received their four year degrees, and "students" (2026) and "students" (2024) refer to two largely different populations of people
I have the stomach to say one more thing: as meaningful as what students saw in response to their protests (repression) is what they didn't (US shifting away from support for genocide). describing this as *their* failure as opposed to the supposed adults in the room is a joke and not the funny kind
Just heard that whitey is back on the moon. cool. great
The viciousness of issuing this ruling on Trans Day of Visibility is so profound.
Just filled with anger and sorrow for kids across this country who deserve love, respect, and safety instead of this foul hatred.
US history heads will wonder if these are the same planes Reagan sold the Saudis back in the late 80s to the consternation of the Israelis en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US%E2%8...
What stage of hypernormalization is it where the President solely interacts with the wider world via his TV screen and its short form clips curated by his scheming viziers, or is that just old school end of empire come back around again
Speed Racer (2008) is like live-action anime + Fast and the Furious + last 20 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, prob the most visually anarchic big-screen movie I've seen except 4 House (1977). Came out the same year as Iron Man and now that capeshit is RIP maybe we can have fun again at the movies
BU like many higher ed institutions can get paranoiacally "risk averse" and Trump has them scared of their own shadow, so the "neutral" position becomes appeasement of homophobia. Pretty sure this approach was taken to prevent anyone from displaying Palestinian flags, originally
If I was paranoid I might think it was weird that the government was pushing the newest weight loss drugs on the general population right when the food supply chain was totally screwed up through my insane decisions
A screenshot with a block of text: Minister: The US is now a revisionist power. For 80 years, the US was the underwriter for a system of globalisation based on UN Charter principles, multilateralism, territorial integrity, sovereign equality. It actually heralded an unprecedented and unique period of global prosperity and peace. Of course there were exceptions. And of course, the Cold War was still in effect for at least half of the last 80 years. But generally, for those of us who were non-communists, who ran open economies, who provided first world infrastructure, together with a hardworking disciplined people, we had unprecedented opportunities. The story of Singapore, with a per capita GDP of 500 US dollars in 1965. Now, lit is| somewhere between 80,000 to 90,000 US dollars. It would not have happened if it had not been for this unprecedented period, basically Pax Americana and then turbocharged by the reform and opening of China for decades. It has been unprecedented. It has been great for many of us. In fact, I will say, for all of us, if you look back 80 years. But now, whether you like it or not, objectively, this period has ended. There is no point trying to assign blame or pejorative adjectives. That is not helpful. Basically, the underwriter of this world order has now become a revisionist power, and some people would even say a disruptor. But the larger point is that the erosion of norms, processes, and institutions that underpinned a remarkable period of peace and prosperity; that foundation has gone. What you are seeing now, whether you watch the war in Ukraine, in the Middle East or elsewhere, including in Asia, to me these are symptoms of the underlying tectonic rupture. Big powers and even lesser powers have a more narrow definition of national interest.
This is quite something from Singapore's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Vivian Balakrishnan, in an interview with Reuters. The end of the post-war order, diagnosed in technocratic language. www.mfa.gov.sg/newsroom/pre...
The US used to have a population of people much like the Israeli settlers in the West Bank. We used to call them "pioneers" & millions of Americans are proudly descended from them. These "heritage" Americans are the only people Steven Miller considers human, on the further condition they're white
The Harry Potter series has apparently been rectonned into a refuge for lonely nerds, not a global publishing/branding phenom so big it was once going to rescue the future of the printed word from the Internet etc. Rowling is a hateful bigot and her work is mediocre at best, time to grow as a person
if you watch and support the new harry potter show you are funding trans genocide globally by the way