"AI is going to replace actual teaching & instructors & solve the problem of unplugging 20-25% of the entire budget of every research university in America" is an incredible revealed preference. I mistakenly believed we were trying to educate students & conduct actual research. How naive of me.

Bleed, bleed, poor country! Great tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure, For goodness dare not check thee

RIP Tony Harrison He was kind enough to let me use this poem in my Texture book - one of several of his that invariably make readers cry, specifically at exactly two and a half lines from the end

I'm not sure people are really clocking what the Epstein revelations show: Misogyny & the industrial-scale exploitation of women are so deeply embedded into the political-economic STRUCTURE of the world as to be inextricable. We live in societies run by rapists & rape apologists. Full stop.

Because MAGA is a political movement of men who like to hit women and call it "masculinity."

The thing regular people don’t often grasp about ‘academic freedom’ is that if you don’t allow experts to research & teach in their fields of expertise, guided by their professional judgment & decades of training, you have effectively given up on the concept of knowledge & shut down your university

MY PEOPLE

Remember 3 years ago when @malcolmnance.bsky.social wrote a whole book about this? The title says it all.

The South Korean Ministry of Defense has awarded medals of merit to 11 officers for disobeying direct orders of superiors during the martial law fiasco, orders that they deemed to be contrary to the constitution and endangerment to democracy. www.chosun.com/english/nati...

tl;dr: Fascism, in a very literal sense, is for dead-end losers.

This sperm-racing thing is like a mutant fusion of Mark Twain and Neal Stephenson. Somebody has to write "The Celebrated Racing Sperm of Santa Clara County." For those unfamiliar:

This is the Achilles heel of the RW elites, from randos on X to Elon Musk & his broligarch pals: tho many of them have everything money can buy, they're like middle schoolers inside, craving status & deference. Withholding it from them, shaming them, is incredibly effective for exactly this reason.

All over the world, there are young men who just want to kill: they seek a permission structure wherever it's convenient; doesn't matter much whether they pretend the permission comes from Islam or 4Chan, since the shooters have no real commitment except to violence.

Trying to buy a public bus pass in Italy via the required online process = (3 hrs struggling with the website) + (3 calls to customer support to find out the secret unpublished instructions to make the online registration work) + (2 more days to wait until my REQUEST TO BUY A BUS PASS is approved)

All we had to do was vote for the qualified Black lady :(

It's weird how Tylenol caused autism (first diagnosed in 1943) before it was even invented (1955). What a clever drug.

Got raptured but couldn't find any of my friends up there, so I came back.

Again, I note the huge overlap between 1) cancel culture terror about supposed totalitarian speech rules of the left, and 2) very rich, powerful men being enraged to discover that social media could be used to accuse them of the sex offences that they have in fact committed

Same. Watching a country commit suicide in the most painful, humiliating, public way possible. Excruciating.

Trump at the UN bears an alarming resemblance to the unfortunate lady in "Goldfinger." He's gilded himself just as he's gilded the Oval Office.

The offer made to women in the enticement to become trad wives is the same as the offer made to citizens in the enticement to embrace authoritarianism: give up. Abandon the aspiration to self rule. It’s imprisonment recast as rest and relief.

For 10s of millions of Americans, politics is just "shopping with your vote for people who will play pretend & act as if your preferred conspiracy theory is real." The fantasy could be "immigrants are taking our jobs" or "random chemical causes all our problems"--the process is the same.

the guys draped in skulls and psychotic gun imagery would like to have a word with you about your glorification of violence

Translation: "WE are the only rightful masters, WE are the only ones permitted to rape women." Just so we're clear: the problem being pointed out below is not rape or domination. It's that the WRONG PEOPLE might seize those "privileges."

One of the biggest challenges of moving to a foreign country: learning to operate clothes washing machines covered with mysterious symbols. Especially in the era before smartphones, it was like being told to lower the control rods on Reactor 4 without speaking a word of Russian.

If the tabloids had any spunk left in em, they'd headline this story: "Lumbering Lummox Lurches Thru Lavish Do"

What would happen if the question "What's the 411?" was posed to someone under 50 in this Year of Our Lord 2025? Wrong answers only.

Thus my repeated claim that MAGA is a war of men against women: misogyny is the DNA of fascism, worldwide. ⬇️ This thread about fascism's manifestations in the UK, and to a lesser extent the US, offers exemplars of what is happening in every country with fascists in charge.

"the freedom to speak becomes meaningless when disconnected from the possibility of being heard". This is a heartbreaking piece from @alondra.bsky.social on the regression of scientific progress and why she's resigning from the NSF and Library of Congress. time.com/7285045/resi...

Proust in Venice, 1900

A thought I keep returning to — and that’s underscored by today’s news — is that a legacy publication or a deep-pocketed investor could hire an astonishing array of talent right now and make the best newspaper in America overnight.

An ailing, dying populace can't rebel effectively against fascists.

remember this next time you meet a self-described libertarian like Rand Paul the only "liberties" that matter to them are their own--specifically to dodge taxes, have sex with teenagers, and use drugs that are currently illegal for recreational purposes crackdowns for thee, girls and coke for me

Not the most important difference between Canada and the USA in these hard times, but a spot of humo(u)r.

It's often not the case. In China, you'd likely end up not being able to find a job ever again. But, my American friends, you must be willing to take the risk of being fired TODAY -- and not landing on your feet -- so that you can have a FUTURE where your views no longer put your livelihood at risk.

SCOTUS: "Business owners who dislike homosexuals can refuse to bake a cake for a gay wedding." US DoJ: "Business owners who dislike Charlie Kirk cannot refuse to print materials memorializing him."

After decades of RWers invoking "having to sell the family farm" to scare Americans about having a functional inheritance tax in this country, turns out conservative immigration policies are forcing those sales instead. Every accusation is projection with RWers.

COLUMBO starring Peter Falk debuted as a series #OTD in 1971. “He was perfect,” co-creator William Link said. "And then he got better.” #TVSky #Columbo #ClassicTV

SISKEL & EBERT, which premiered #OTD in 1986, had a master class of an opening sequence. Thirty-five seconds, 21 shots, and a flawless establishment of the professional rivalry of two Chicago newspapermen who inspired a generation of film buffs. #FilmSky #TVSky

When Bank of America gets a CEO named Dean Athanasia, you can be certain we are living in the fever dreams of Thomas Pynchon. That would explain a lot, actually.

Musk trying to spread the paranoid seige mentality of South African apartheid like a plague-ridden zombie on a rampage to infect the world.

The type of speech most punished in this society is that which consists of telling the truth about how the powerful have harmed you

But hardly anyone cared because Gamergate was a gleeful romp of men hunting women for sport, driving them into hiding, and telling the world that the women deserved it for being frigid, uppity bitches--a line which the media, to the extent it noticed Gamergate at all, bought hook, line and sinker.

Oh noes, not a scolding for young men! Meanwhile, no one asks what it's like for young women in the US, where most voters TWICE picked a proud serial rapist to avoid having a woman POTUS, where the rapist now wants to decriminalize beating us & his pals talk about removing our right to vote.

There are plenty of places in the world where Stephen Miller could go to live at the whims of a despot--why does he have to ruin a country of 340 million people for the sake of his boot-licking fetish?

“Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.” Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom: A Pocket Oracle, 1647

"Freedom means we'll trap you in the US as punishment for thought crime." --MAEGA (Make America East Germany Again)

MAGA is a war of men against women. Not all men are participating in this war, but the millions who have united--across race, class & religion--to strip women of civil, economic & human rights? They're winning.