"Donald Trump is a monster and we desperately want to work with him" is a batshit position to take, it makes you sound like an insincere and feckless empty suit
Bike-mounted historian specializing in medieval & early modern Sino-Iranian contact and Persianate political & cultural history. YIMBY, NUMTOT, and caregiver for undemanding plants. Chicago mostly-southsider. He/him.
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"Donald Trump is a monster and we desperately want to work with him" is a batshit position to take, it makes you sound like an insincere and feckless empty suit
I mean when was the last time anyone seriously believed more than a tiny fraction of the 2nd amendment people cared about authoritarianism?
I know it’s all bad faith bs BUT I keep thinking about how the whole “reason” we apparently can’t pass any effective gun control legislation to prevent mass shootings is the idea that we need an armed populace in case the federal government decides to invade our cities and towns. Like??????????
If scientists are loving Bluesky, but Glenn Greenwald and Matt Yglesias hate it, I know I’m in the right spot.
"History is literally the most important subject today." - Rutgers new president. 💪 www.northjersey.com/story/news/e...
Announcing EU / UK trade sanctions on Israel has a good chance of stopping the build-up towards the occupation+destruction of Gaza city and the expulsion of its residents. Blocking this manoeuvre would greatly reinforce demands to end the war. This genocide can be stopped. Today.
"we want you to think of this as an assistive aid that is neutral, and its outcomes depend entirely on how you use it, rather than a system of data capture, management, and inference with the biases of its developers baked in." 7/n
Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of...
I mean there's always How to stop fascism? That's always interesting and where most of my attention to intellectual-political topics goes.
American fascism first phase was always to resegregate society while rebuilding the systems of patriarchal control and violence used to subjugate women and those seen as a threat to the fascist vision of “normal” including the end of same sex marriage and the violent erasure of lgbtqia+ folks.
This site has no problem banning Palestinians within an hour of them trying to make another account as they are starved and bombed. Meanwhile they leave shit like this up for three hours and counting now
BREAKING: Bernie Sanders wants RFK Jr. under oath. He’s demanding a special Senate hearing on the CDC disaster RFK Jr. helped create. Go Bernie!
So Sierra-Rios did not say Free Palestine to Rosenfeld out of the blue, R. had made a hateful anti-Palestinian remark earlier and this was in response to that. Worse than tacky. (See reply w Facebook link to quoted post)
Elections don't *just* matter - they are literally life & death determinants. And not just national elections - local, rubber-meets-the-road elections... like this:
Wow. Check this out. Politicians actually trying to solve problems can achieve a lot! www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solu...
Just a heads up. I was able to schedule my COVID vaccine appointment. Online it will ask “do you have a condition that puts you at high risk for severe outcomes from COVID-19 virus.” Click yes and it will allow you to schedule an appointment. No questions asked. No proof required. Pass it on.
Four Seasons Total National Guard Landscaping
I would read an academic murder book in which the murder was solved by reading the syllabus
We still only have a handful politicians who speak out against the genocide in Gaza. Do people not see how crazy this is? Your representatives are not representing you. At all. news.gallup.com/poll/692948/...
one vote for future rep Abughazaleh is one vote for Heater being brave at the vet
Them: “Cities are all rotting hellscapes!” Cities:
"...if you are hit by an SUV compared to being hit by a passenger car you are 44% more likely to be killed. Among kids it's higher - it's 82%."
On a related topic, I received a marketing email from an audio-visual company called AVAG the other day, who had unaccountably bought the domain www.useavag.com. This probably made sense to the marketing department at some point.
Twenty years ago today, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans. At approximately 5:00 AM, the levees broke, flooding 80% of our city. As a result, an estimated 1400 people lost their lives, and hundreds of thousands lost their homes. Over half of the victims were Black.
In Third Rock from the Sun, the anthropology department looked pretty close (by sitcom standards) to academic departments as I knew them in my first couple years of grad school. Of course, it's been a while...
Chicago folks! chicago.suntimes.com/environment/...
RFK Jr is driving this country towards an almost certain public health disaster. If Democrats can’t stop it, at the very least they can get it on the record now that they wanted him gone and the GOP wanted him kept in. Underline how they own the disasters to come. It’s Politics 101.
At the end of the day, Israel is a country with a population and GDP per capita less than the State of Ohio Do you think Ohio could simultaneously and continuously bomb Michigan, Indiana, and Georgia while occupying Kentucky without the support of the world's most powerful empire?
#GlobalMiddleAges #MedievalSky You will want to read this amazing summary of new research on the khipu system used in the Andes.
"I am not here to make a careful comprehensive argument, because people have already done that. I am here to be rude, because this is a rude technology, and it deserves a rude response." anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/h...
70 years ago, on this date, Emmett Till was kidnapped and brutally murdered by white men. His family, including his cousin who was with him at the time, is repeating the train ride he took from Chicago to Mississippi in 1955 to mark the anniversary
Very informative thread for anyone wondering about all the things your university is probably paying large corporations for.
No offense to my classicist friends who are delightful but when random Serious White Men Of The Internet start talking about "Dark Ages" I assume they just love Rome because they want to own slaves and watch them kill each other for sport but don't want us to call them neo Confederates.
realistic Star Trek
And National Guard troops aren't getting paid right?
an appropriate response to your product killing a child after months of psychological manipulation and torture is to take the product off the market before it kills again and the fact that this isn’t universally accepted right now is incredibly frightening
While 52% of older Republicans (35+) sympathize more with Israelis, only 24% of younger Republicans (18-34) say the same - fewer than half!
Yeah but can he post in all caps
i think one of the reasons pritzker gets taken seriously is because he uses the same "democracy is at stake" language as the biden administration did, but governs like he believes it.
Illinois has a Democratic supermajority. There is no excuse for failing to keep basic transit service funded. Get it together.
Walz says Harris "would have been a fantastic president... we wouldn't wake up every day to a bunch of shit on TV. We would wake up to an adult w/ compassion & dignity doing the work, not a manchild crying about whatever is wrong with him. May his fat ankles find something today. Petty as hell."
Tim Walz: "Think of how easy it would be to be a damn Republican. 'Oh, what should I wear today? This stupid frickin' red hat. What should I say today? I don't know, just make sure it's cruel. Who do we listen to? That guy -- the felon in the White House.'"
Steve Shirley escaped the Holocaust as a child & went on to found one of the earliest software startups. The really impressive part? She employed women programmers who had been pushed out of the workforce after having kids, & allowed them flexible, family friendly, work from home jobs—in the 1960s!
This assumption has been built into actually existing liberalism so deeply, though, in so many ways, that I think it's a big part of why liberalism has suffered such big setbacks in the past 25 years.
It's actually the UK but it's telling that people can't tell starmer politics from Trump's
None of the fascists became more liberal but a lot of liberals have suddenly gone really soft on the ideas like immigrants being good, black people being productive and equal members of society, or white nationalism being a really big deal.
It is remarkably frustrating to me to watch a system break down against a kind of threat its systems were *designed* - reasonably well designed! - to defeat because everyone whose job it is to actually *do* that is busy hiding under their desks hoping against hope someone else will bell the cat.
Only thing more embarrassing than a network with results like this are politicians and agencies fighting tooth and nail to maintain it in its current form
College Democrats of America endorsed a forthcoming to-be-debated and voted upon DNC resolution calling for an arms embargo on Israel and for recognizing the State of Palestine
Almost all of the smartest liberal and left wing writers and reporters I know have basically been reduced to doing that work as a mostly-unpaid hobby in addition to their actual job (if they have a job). Just a few rich Democrats could put their money where their mouth is and fix this.
Ex-LASD Sheriff Alex Villanueva regularly used his power as law enforcement to raid the homes of those tasked with oversight of his department. He also operated a gang-plagued department and endorsed violence. As I wrote "Trump is the sheriff president."
This is what made the post-Floyd “no, still more policing” reactionary centrist punditry take so infuriating. Everything Trump is doing now was already being done somewhere locally. And the conventional wisdom’s absolute refusal to engage w it in 2020 helped normalize/solidify it all.
I imagine salience will be higher now, so the contradiction between party leadership and how members will actually vote for candidates is going to be much greater, and I'm curious to see how that will play out.
Brandon Johnson should take notes.
What Danielle said. According to the Yale Budget Lab, the average effective tariff rate in this economy right now is 18.2% Let me put that another way. President Trump has raised taxes on American businesses and consumers by -- on average -- 18.2%
The AI-creep continues. Academia.edu is now "offering" AI summaries of our posted work. We did not ask for this!
This is language that is used directly before genocidal violence is unleashed by the end group in power seeking domination and control over those. They see as inferior beingings. This is the language of the Rwandan genocide This is the language of death camps This is the language of mass murder
This is eliminationist language and a threat of violence by a known Nazi. Charlie Kirk is a Nazi and this is openly a call for violence against the population. The fascists are amp up their rhetoric and their violent theater because they want to kill American citizens in mass.
I'm not right wing but some of this "woke" stuff is a little over the top [6 months later] Slavery was fine. Your city is under martial law
"I won't call this genocide because that delegitimises the state, and I don't want to delegitimise the state" is an automatic admission you cannot be seen as an objective observer over whether it is genocide or not.
I wonder if anyone has tipped The Orb off that they’re playing at the same festival as Curtis Yarvin, which is akin to them consenting to do Glastonbury alongside Skrewdriver back in the day. And any speaker who doesn’t drop out is complicit in normalising fascism, too.
The Catholic Church in Rome has been insisting on calling attention to the suffering in Gaza, even if you don't hear much about it stateside. Seven hours of names: 16 Israeli children and 12,211 Palestinian children.
Yeah yeah yeah but but didn't Bernie Sanders like not want to assassinate Fidel Castro or something?
Baltimore, boycott this restaurant www.thebanner.com/culture/food...
Would any Xinjiang scholars be interested in chatting with me for a newsletter issue 👀
For context he is yet again claiming that Palestinians, as well as the notoriously pro-Israel New York Times, are making up MRI scans of children skulls with bullets lodged in them. He is promoting genocide denial. This is the kind of thing that is criminalized in Europe re the Holocaust.
Huh, so I guess they haven't all fled the state
I don't think people are concerned enough about the fact that the majority of people in the world have objected to this genocide for nearly 2 years and nobody in power cares one bit. They're conditioning us to do what we're told. This isn't just about Palestinians. Just wait until the next pandemic
The only poll anyone will ever need. Swing states voters were +11 on the economy they experienced locally and minus 27 (!!) on the national economy they only heard about.
Yup. One of the most successful propaganda campaigns of all time bsky.app/profile/grud...
There are also books specifically about imperial concubines and eunuchs if you're interested: Hsieh, Concubinage and Servitude in Late Imperial China (2014), McMahon, Celestial Women: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Song to Qing, (2016), and Tsai, The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty (1996).
If Democratic politicians do not fight this because it's a "distraction," it will simply happen. They need to get in front of every mic and say that we will not allow Trump to destroy American history. He wants a culture war? GIVE HIM ONE. There are no distractions. Have every fight.
i'm not even kidding - just one year of CA's cap and trade program could fund 3 million e-bike purchases and help households ditch second cars fewer cars = negative (avoided) emissions and less congestion theconversation.com/e-bikes-coul...
is it e-bike giveaways and building out bike infrastructure??
again, it cannot be emphasized enough that 5 years ago - unless you were an academic who studied antisemitism or the KKK, or maybe a fan of Jason Robert Brown’s musical Parade - the only people who posted about details of the Frank case this much were very online Nazis
A massive attack on several humanities units (Arabic Studies, Judaic Studies, Holocaust Studies, Classics, Religion, German & Scandinavian, Russian/East European/Eurasian Studies) *and* tenure now unfolding at the University of Oregon (a blue state!). Closure of units and faculty layoffs threatened.
Folks are terrified of the NYC subway, think DC is a gang ridden hellscape and have other often irrational fears, but here's the truth, other than disease or an abusive partner with a gun, you're most likely to be killed by a reckless driver, and we barely acknowledge it's a problem.
You almost never see/hear/read a person-on-the-street quote in which that person is saying "Yeah, immigrants are great." If it hates it rates just like if it bleeds it leads, and we get a disproportionate number of right-wingers sharing their hate and disinformation about immigration from msm.
Maryland state police should be ARRESTING ICE agents who do this. Impound the vehicles. Force the Trump admin to litigate. @raskin.house.gov lives here and should stand up and say this now. Along with @vanhollen.senate.gov and @alsobrooks.senate.gov.
The people dominating our political landscape, culture, and economy are just so stupid and full of shit it's almost impossible to describe
Finally, an outlet for 25 people who already write for national publications to say the exact same thing.
You mean you're not getting absolutely smoked by other workers more willing to harness the enormous benefits of AI? 3+ years post-impact, that should be starting to happen now right?
This seems like something with a pretty fixed answer that could be found. Not by me ofc.
I didn’t know until now that in the original Rosie the Riveter painting, she is crushing a copy of Mein Kampf under her foot. Happy feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, remembering all the women who crush the serpents of Satan under their heel.
I filled this out. It’s important we express ourselves while the decision is being made.
If I have a health emergency there's more likely people around who could call 911.
I feel safer here than when I'm outside the city: lots of ppl = less chance to be robbed etc. vs less crowded places, drivers are less dangerous than in the burbs, not driving makes me safer (compare traffic deaths to murders on trains), my high rise doesn't have windows a burglar can climb into.
This goes double for language training. Like one of these days I'm going to start running into people who learned, like, Greek from an AI program. People really seem to think AI is good at this and I can see how it might be, so these folks should start turning up soon.
I know other historians have been more open to using AI for our work than me--even if only to automate teaching tasks rather than research itself. So they should be producing just, massive amounts of scholarship with all this free time/thinking power AI has given them, right? Any time now...?
The adamant elite refusal to call bullshit is a big part of How We Got Here. The prevailing cultural attitude for years is you must not, under any circumstances, treat anything as bad faith. You are obligated to find some reasonable idea and engage with that, even if you distort to get there.
Being portrayed as an extremist makes a politician less popular. The media know this but like Trump and want him to win and they do not like Mamdani and want him to lose.
I can bike 10 minutes to where I can see original Monet and Van Gogh paintings and our family could afford to live here on a high 5-figure income.
Not needing to own a car is like having a part time job I don't have to show up to, and literally every daily errand makes me fitter and usually involves some fun biking.
I’ve said this before: We need some serious punitive case law creating civil liability for AI. Sec 230 protections do not apply to cases like that, and someone needs to win a massive judgment against Meta and xAI to make this point. The companies won’t stop until they know they’re vulnerable.
He has kept among us in times of peace Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution & unacknowledged by our laws.
When I was back home I spent an afternoon volunteering at the food bank my mom helps run. It’s in a mid sized Midwestern city. It was pretty eye opening. These are people who are really reliant on the social safety net that the BBB slashed. Here’s a list of observations 1/x
I'd like to see the ratings. It will be great to use as a basis for a consumer boycott list.
this is just straight-up dictatorship and it’s repulsive and pathetic our newspapers and TV stations still won’t say so. there is no emergency. there is no precedent for this in US history. Trump is establishing military and paramilitary control of the capital
How many issues that were dismissed as part of the lefty fringe - the militarization of police, abolishing ICE, rejecting Republican framing around immigration - would have directly prevented this?
Thought she had an emergency and that woman got on camera and said that she didn’t want to disturb her daughter’s camp plans at Martha’s Vineyard. Absurd times.