everyone with real American manliness and a basic knowledge of military history knows that serious war efforts have never been derailed by such trifling matters as "communicable diseases"

more people probably died from diarrhea, malaria and typhoid during the civil war than actual fighting

British Counterterrorism Police Investigating Attacks Against Jewish Sites

Multiple attacks on London Jewish sites in the past week alone. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/w...

Wrong. Negotiators were not "bedeviled" by such things from 2015 to 2018 - because a deal was in place to address them. Trump left it. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04...

This:

i hate to be that person, but if you (the author of the piece) are so dumb that you think that someone asking for more sensitive language at an event is equivalent to the use of state power to curb speech maybe your stupidity is part of the problem with higher ed

like, academics who use conceptual analysis to flatten out power differences are REALLY part of the problem

Academia is uniquely open to self criticism, and academics are intensely critical of themselves and their institutions. Those who are our political enemies can and do usr that against us.

First, stop it. We are <constantly> looking in the mirror & if you haven’t done any of the trainings or gone to any of the talks/meeting about that, I can’t help you.

Second, we don’t have time. We’re constantly meeting about how to survive as 25% of our budget is illegally cut off by the fascists.

The premise of article itself is an exercise in the smugness that it purports to be against, though:

Articles like this remind me that there are people out there living in completely different experiential bubble. In my experience, academics are vulnerable to manipulation because of our tendency to want to self reflect and look inward.

The real failure to look in the mirror is academics falling back on comfortable “we’re partly responsible because we enforced left wing orthodoxy“ thinking rather than the less comfortable truth that Trump/MAGA are bad faith actors who will only be satisfied with resegregated MAGA academies

The article's existence negates its own argument. The fact that the easiest way for an academic to land an opinion piece in The Chronicle or Inside Higher Ed is by offering contrarian takes about how awful academia is suggests a strong desire to look in the mirror.

Attempts to appease political and pseudo intellectual critics has been a dominant trend in higher ed over the last decade—to the point of cooperating with unprecedented levels of state/federal censorship of teaching + research and political interference in university self-governance.

Getting a PhD and then working outside academia is dope. My advisees who’ve done that are more or less uniformly happy and feel that they’re using the skills they trained on. (I talked to one today who just landed a great gig). Just wanted to convey that to anyone it might benefit.

The Jewish students I’ve talked to all agree Jews as a group are not at the greatest risk from Trump, but they experience being forcibly turned into symbols without their consent as a form of antisemitism in its own right. And I don’t think they’re wrong about this.

Congress thinks my college is failing on antisemitism. My Jewish students disagree A new House report on campus antisemitism seems to have involved minimal engagement with actual Jews at actual universities

@joelhs.bsky.social writes, "Jewish students are not the constituency this campaign is designed to serve. They have been made instruments of a broader ideological battle against the liberal values that gain purchase when people are educated in environments that reward independent thought."

I think one of the most consistent forms of structural antisemitism, deeply baked into US politics, is this exploitation of Jewish people as signifiers. The dynamic resembles that of Native Americans when turned into mascots.

While actual antisemitism is rising, this current government's rhetoric about fighting antisemitism remains in the realm of floating signifiers and simulacra, a discourse that need not consult Jewish people living in the material world

Is the AI a robot? How is it conducting an ethnography and which hard to reach population is it reaching? I have so many questions because he’s full of shit, but he may also be making up research.

What Is ‘Clipping,’ the Viral Marketing Strategy That’s Taking Over the Music Biz? Over the past year, 'clipping' has grown from a promotional tool in the livestream space to a key strategy for promoting artist content.

Folks, beware of political commentary presented in the style and aesthetic of the "clipping" marketing campaigns the music industry uses to engineer viral moments on social media.

A Dark Money Group Is Secretly Funding High-Profile Democratic Influencers An initiative aimed at boosting Democrats online offers influencers up to $8,000 a month to push the party line. All they have to do is keep it secret—and agree to restrictions on their content.

Just leaving this here, and observing that some of the same influencers dunking on Mehdi Hasan right now are mentioned in this Wired article:

Paging @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social it is an epistemic deference politics emergency.

Gil Duran tweet: TLDR: Fascism in response to Palantir's long fascists screed on X.

"Your Account is Suspended" Message on X

The CEO of Palantir posted a fascist manifesto on X.

I pointed out that it was fascist—which resulted in a permanent suspension from X (my second time!).

So, when you hear the tweeters complaining that BlueSky is intolerant, remember why many of us came here in the first place.

personally while "force majeure" was on the bingo cards I wasn't expecting to see phrases like "piracy" or "letters of marque" in contemporary discourse quite this much. maybe there's still hope for me to try out a swashbuckling era as a privateer

Yeah I was also struck by how bizarre this line was (a moment later they are gonna complain about the libs being too tolerant of everything!) - I think the explanation for it is really as petty as they don't like everyone making fun of Peter Theil's weird anti-Christ schtick. Not deeper than that.

20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite's intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

This bullet point from Alex Karp/Palantir’s latest diatribe strikes me as the best representation of the whole project.

“The elite’s intolerance of religious beliefs…”

Let me stop you right there, Alex. You just made that up. That isn’t a thing in 2026 America.

plato alienated conservatives with progressive issue positions on gender and race

NYT & Atlantic tell US that the greatest threat to free speech is elite university students not wanting to be forced to listen to right-wing extremists, meanwhile Republicans are banning Plato & Shakespeare & any mention of history of racism in across public university systems for being too woke.

the most explicitly racist campaign I've ever SEEN by far and more than a comfortable amount of white people acted like it was just another Tucker Carlson broadcast. It was one of many chilling moments in 2024.