Fun fact: there used to be a Facebook page for students going to CERN to talk about housing, Geneva life, and research, but then some members condemned the Gaza genocide, so Israel partisans threatened the admins with lawsuits until they shut the whole page down

Yeah, war criminals generally aren’t too excited about war crimes happening to *them*

Housing in Geneva is a joke, what do you mean your salary has to be three times the rent? What apartment there has rent less than 1/3 an American grad student’s salary like be so fr Anyway, if any moots happen to know anyone looking for a roommate in Geneva, hit me up!

Scholasticide is not the just the destruction of educational capacity; it is also the transformation of spaces of pedagogy and development into spaces of boundless trauma.

My annual traveling turkeys post! What do you do when a New World bird visits the Mughal court? Paint it in miniature, of course! This essay by Neha Vermani follows the Muslim reception of our feathered friends. www.folger.edu/blogs/shakes...

Liberated this one as well. Academia 👇, HCommons here: works.hcommons.org/records/b11j...

Story time! The star Betelgeuse gets its name from Arabic يد الجوزاء <Yad al-Jawzāʾ>: "Hand of Orion" (kind of, see below). In the 1200s this was misread as بد الجوزاء <Bad al-Jawzāʾ>, and was transliterated into Latin as "Bedalgeuze." 🧵 1/10

Also recognize that this unambiguous use of the military to commit murder of helpless noncombatants as they fought for life is a direct reflection of the virulent white supremacy that has seized our government, where every Latino man is a gangbanger in a de facto state of war against White America

Israel does not believe any other country in the region has any right to sovereignty, or borders, or airspace, or protection from the Israeli military. Israel's posture, aka Israel's illegal occupation of Syrian territory and its repeat attacks towards Syria, is entirely consistent with this.

May the Levant and all its people one day be free of this rogue state

Historians of the Sasanian empire: What do you make of the Roman historians who suggest that the early Sasanians were aware of the Achaemenids, unlike the later Sasanian historiography that had no place for them? bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/sites.uci.ed... @sasanianshah.bsky.social

They are literally firing all the judges they think might grant relief. They just fired a friend of mine a couple hours ago. They have no shame. The bastards want an assembly line for deportations and nothing more; rubber-stamping bootlickers who’ll yes’sir at every new diktat to deny.

Pre-Islamic Arabic and Greek! The #Safaitic abecedary we posted earlier this week was far more interesting than originally thought. A close re-reading of the stone revealed the entire Safaitic alphabet in the Greek letter order! See the study here: www.academia.edu/144853577/Al...

A brilliant thread by my brilliant friend @bnuyaminim.bsky.social. But let's think about this circumstantial evidence a bit more. Are names really indicative of one's language or ethnicity (hard to pin that down actually)? This Nabataean from NW Arabia belongs to the clan of Banī Baʿlnatan...

🗿NABATAEAN NEWS🗿 Recently (2024), Laïla Nehmé published four #Nabataean texts from a burial site in north-western Saudi Arabia. Three are very fragmentary, but the fourth is the longest Nabataean text on stone found so far! Two things that stood out to me: 1/6

More Numidian mysteries! Most Numidian stelae have at least two lines or (à la limite) one line containing several words. Only in one cemetery do we find a series of really short inscriptions (Mechta el Maza, near Bouchegouf, Guelma province, Algeria), esp. RIL 1085-1092. But…

Well I’m bookmarking this. Can’t wait to see the “surprise” 👀

Pizzagate: If you replace the word “hot dog” with “little boy” and “pizza party” with “child sex orgy,” you will see the lengths these elites go to cover up their crimes. Real elite emails: Send me nude pictures of those 8th graders we abused last weekend post-haste! I am the Ambassador to Turkey.

Biblia Hebraica Quinta publication moving slower than ASOIAF 😔

Anyone on here have institutional access to this article perchance? www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

On top of the raw cruelty and the lack of any reason for this beyond the GOP commitment to allowing every rip-off they can imagine, this is also a decision to make prison *worse* at reforming/rehabilitating people, because we're making it harder for them to stay connected with people outside.

Between the genocidal massacre by the UAE-backed RSF in El Fasher and Israel’s resumption of the genocide in violation of the ceasefire, today is one of the darkest days for humanity

The UAE is a parasitic state, an artifice built on the backs of slave labor and funded by stolen wealth obtained through genocide. The day it’s leveled to the ground can’t come fast enough

Hot take, but it feels like some continental European biblical scholarship just consists of coming up with just-so stories of biblical composition history, and declaring everything that contradicts those hypotheses to be late developments/insertions. I know that documentary textual criticism…

Congrats to Ireland on joining CERN! 🥳 Now (long past) time to kick out Israel. Genocide, occupation and apartheid should have no place in particle physics or any other science

Israel violating a ceasefire deal as a mob of Israeli settlers attack an American journalist and Palestinian grandma & an Israeli soccer match has to be cancelled because of violent fans is all the worse when you remember the deal calls to "de-radicalize" Palestinians and not Israelis

Question for Semiticists: The Semitic root ḥ-r-m (related to holiness, consecration, taboo) has a pharyngeal in West Semitic languages, even those that preserve velar/uvula fricatives. However, an apparent Akkadian cognate is ḫarmu. Why not the expected a>e coloring instead of a velar if this was…

immigrant grocery store owner who voted for Trump to lower grocery prices and then got wrecked by tariffs. mfer you run a business called "Wong Kai Imports" what the hell did you think was gonna happen

"In the West Bank and Jerusalem, far from Hamas-controlled Gaza, more than 19,000 Palestinians were swept up since Oct. 7. As of this month, more than 11,000 Palestinians were still locked up in Israeli prisons, almost a third of them under “administrative detention,” without charges or a trial."

It’s only a violation of the ceasefire when the subhuman side is the one that violates it. Otherwise it’s just a sparkling “test” and “fragile ceasefire holds”

I love that “breakfast” and “dinner” have the same etymology (literally “break-fast”), but one is Germanic and the other is Latin

Now that the Israeli POWs have been released, I’m really worried the Israelis will resume the genocide again now that they have nothing to lose. These next moments will be critical

When I’m giving an experimental particle physics presentation and inevitably get to the “results” section

I miss the age of electronic anarchy 😢

Someone once said that deities always answer prayers in the most ironic way possible, and they were not joking

A disaster that Starmer insists on ignoring the mountain of empirical evidence from across "Western" democracies that adopting rightwing positions and frameworks only ever helps the Right win legitimacy and votes. An utter disaster that so many Democrats in the U.S. insist on doing Starmerism.

There are a lot of things JD Vance does that are at odds with mainstream Catholicism, but lying is just something most humans do regardless of their professed dislike for it. Devout Christians lie all the time

By @koutchoukalimar.bsky.social

WORD

Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer’s poem “If I Must Die” has echoed across the world since his killing—translated by volunteers into dozens of languages. We share it here in English & Arabic. inthesetimes.com/article/refa...

Israeli activists including the conductor Ilan Volkov arrested at the Gaza border. They call for lifting the siege of Gaza and for a global boycott of Israel. www.instagram.com/reel/DO1H-Ec...

Breaking character: Ken White has a fantastic post about how "free speech culture" undermines free speech. It's something I've thought about a lot before, but Ken knows way more about it than I do and explains it really well. www.popehat.com/p/how-free-s...

Question for Arabicists, especially those who study Maghrebi Arabic: is it common for ع to be dropped or pronounced as a long vowel rather than a consonant in certain environments? I know a Moroccan named العسيري who pronounces their name in Arabic as [læːsiɾi]

Was having a conversation at the train station, and this random old guy approaches me and says everyone speaks in foreign languages at the station, and it’s such a pleasure to hear people speaking in English for once. I then speak in Arabic 😇

kinda wild that there were four years in power to safeguard against all of this happening and the threat was seen as defeated not imminent

The Department of Justice has removed a study showing that white supremacist and far-right violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States. 🔗 www.404media.co/doj-deletes-...

I see that besides the stupid “energy” downgrade, Duolingo is also making daily goals harder (i.e. requiring more lessons) and reducing the number of optional ads that give you XP boosts. They’re really desperate to make the app unusable without paying