LONDON LAUNCH ANNOUNCEMENT! 23 September, @burleyfisher.bsky.social with Nathalie Olah - tickets here!!! burleyfisherbooks.com/products/lau...

Just FYI to fellow rapidly aging academics attempting to hold onto cultural references our students understand. College seniors this year were born after all three Lord of the Rings movies.

Maybe there are still a few Labour MP’s who remember that the left used to be against racism

I shouldn't be shocked, but I'm still always brought up short to realize how many people think "civility" means "white people speaking in relatively calm voices" no matter what vile shit they say.

What an expertly called shot

857 people arrested in a single day in London for holding signs opposing Israel’s genocide in Palestine These include Holocaust survivors, vicars, retired nurses and teachers. So many of them are elderly. Labour is dead www.instagram.com/p/DOTb3nIjYIS/

Most activities in universities do not produce easily measurable outputs, which is a massive problem for everyone because politics and policy can no longer cope with intangible long term strategic interest. Hence [gestures in despair at … everything].

'Anything an instructor can do to promote acquisition of skills over acquisition of certification is pedagogically sound practice, obviously, but is also disruptive to the technofeudal model of education, at least as it is currently constructed.'

No difference in your day to day if you're worth $30B vs $60B. But there's a big noticeable difference if there's 3% unemployment and anyone you treat like shit can tell you to fuck off and 10% unemployment and people desperately cling to their jobs even if it means being abused.

And this is another useful reflection on which protests are publicized internationally.

Just sharing the “Xtreme endnotes” assignment @parisnoire.bsky.social mentions here in case anyone else finds it helpful as we begin a new academic year. FWIW, it’s a purely analog exercise in an AI-freaky world & my students have never not had fun doing it.✌🏽 www.historians.org/perspectives...

good things to read - academic, journalistic - about whether commodity aesthetics are taking on neofeudal characteristics / what the neofeudal hypothesis looks like in the register of culture?

Age verification and data collection require there be no slippage between who governments think we are and who we want ourselves to be – which was the whole point of the internet in the first place artreview.com/why-do-we-ha...

MIT’s NANDA initiative found that 95% of generative AI deployments fail after interviewing 150 execs, surveying 350 workers, and analyzing 300 projects. The real “productivity gains” seem to come from layoffs and squeezing more work from fewer people not AI.

One of my biggest takeaways from today’s webinar is that administrators are asking for more & more granular surveillance privileges. Instructure is only to happy to grant them. As @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social has testified, such privileges are designed to reduce bargaining power of academic labor

my dudes I just realized we're building square-miles sized multi story datacenters packed to the brim with rack mounted servers and theyre all just reading reddit

"An academic institution that responds to reasonable criticisms by asking the courts to imprison the students who make them has made itself a supporter of authoritarianism" What is the meaning of support? www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

This discourse is like a race to the progressive sexist bottom Like are gay guys falling for it? Say it’s hetcis men Then talk about what in society is encouraging hetcis boys to think this is ok It’s not a leftist failure they got us here

The BBC News website has pages & pages of coverage related to farmers protesting inheritance tax, including events where only a few hundred turn out. In London yesterday 100,000 people marched for trans rights, and nothing. Imagine if it was 100,000 anti immigrant activists, they'd cover that.

I have said this many many times. When Israel's official policy, is "from the river to the sea", when there are Israeli bulldozers and military working hard every day to make this policy a reality, complaining that university students use these words is ridiculous at best.

have these men tried being better at their jobs

“I’m not political / Im just doing my job”

They always meant *their freedom*, not yours. And to a large extent their freedom to do exactly what they want unimpeded by public disapproval has always been dependent on sending the cops to batter and/or remove people who tell the public what they are doing. And this isn’t contradictory at all.

There's something about the way men use LLMs that feel like those men at the strip club who believe that the dancers like them for their personality and wit. They just want a toy that makes them feel good.

I can’t figure out why more people aren’t freaking out about this. Especially because the New Yorker @newyorker.com has been the only big publication to publish an anti-genocide POV, and @wired.com has done such great work exposing DOGE.

Love that their main example of these trickle down benefits we can hope to gain is they have deregulated high risk mortgages and now the government will back them. Subsidising housing demand without any provision for new houses, and done on high risk mortgage to poorer people - all the best things!

Thing I am an absolute complete total reactionary about: there has not actually been invented a better model of conveying information in a learning environment than the basic structure of a traditional lecture. A speaker standing in some sort of unique focal point for the attention of listeners...

Newspapers: "Donald Trump, the President of the United States" Adam Curtis: "A strange and mysterious President called Donald Trump" Johann Hari: "the most important President in the world right now is a good friend of mine called Donald Trump"

A main excuse for empire: some groups of people must be governed by outsiders for their own good; without outside help, they cannot act justly or wisely. If this justification works, it justifies imperial government of settler minorities.

‘As in other industries, the enormous wage disparity within universities distances the corporate leadership from the concerns of rank-and-file employees: it helps to steady the hand that wields the axe.’ Ed Kiely on Labour’s higher education reforms: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

I can’t compete with this

If you make me president of your university, I will find millions in cost savings by force-quitting shady EdTech contracts, & I will spend it all by giving faculty an annual budget to buy course books for their students.

but if i'm not allowed to feed artists into my artist killing machine it's going to be basically impossible for the machine to keep killing artists. is that what you want?? and before you answer keep in mind this is a very expensive machine

a forceful vector of its stressyness, a clear feature of its regionalism, is how many of the menaces, perpetrators, antagonists are self-declared tr*mpists. antix-vax, anti-woman, anti-poor, traffickers, hate crimers. the ER isn't just for illness and accidents, it's for regime victims.

Main character energy is OUT, this summer we’re bringing NPC energy. We’re posted up at the bar dropping lore and suggesting side quests. We’re leaning casually near a locked door and saying “I don’t think you have the key for that” when someone tries the handle. We’re staring at a tree.

joylandpublishing.com/fiction/long... Here, skeeple. Peep this

Amazing breakdown of the recent @newyorker.com piece that twists HIV/AIDS activist history to prop up the lab leak theory

Now here you see what Immerwahr is setting up: COVID skeptics were like Larry, why didn't we listen to them? This is the fatal flaw or perhaps deception in Immerwahr's argument. AIDS activists, including Larry, including me, challenged Fauci and others, but in the context of the existing science. 5/

Hard not to notice that ICE isn't breaking up drug rings or gangs (because we would ABSOLUTELY hear about it if they were), but instead are dressing up like bank robbers and doing the laziest shit possible, like hanging out at immigration court or grabbing people for busted taillights. Worthless

Combating anti-semitism by propagating the theory that left wing academic ideas are secretly attempts to undermine the sanctity of our native stock and its belief in its own righteousness being spread by foreign saboteurs to harm our womenfolk. Let's see where this one goes, see how it works out.

Everything appears to be white genocide except the nearly irreversible abolition of all of the stuff keeping white people alive. Like a Black woman having a visible job is white genocide but dismantling the FDA, removing fluoride, rampant deregulation & resurrecting old world diseases is freedom.

In one 24 hour period we've had the Health Secretary bathing in poo, the Transport Secretary secretly avoiding the unsafe airport and President Deals trying to tell us that accepting a bribe of a janky second hand plane is actually good for America...

New from Public Collectors: Why Self-Publish Under Fascism? This publication was prompted by an invitation from Mariame Kaba to join her in a discussion titled: Why Make Zines in 2025: Information Control Under Fascism. Short, sweet, tough and just $3.00 from: halfletterpress.com/why-self-pub...

These letters withdrawing grants are going out to artists and small arts orgs today. The new NEA priorities don’t seem to have much to do with actual art

This is sort of a reverse Turing Test: if an ai generated text can pass for something, that's not proof of its sophistication. It's an indicator that humans were being asked to generate worthless text

Utopian alternative universe where when some guy posted a bitter blogpost about how much he didn't like his game developer ex barely anyone read it and those who did were just like "sounds rough buddy" without really paying it much heed.

Because we stuff our public services with tax farmers - private companies in pseudo-markets - we pay European levels of tax and get American levels of service We should and could get better service and maybe even lower tax If local authorities ran their own childrens homes for example...