Historian, occasional anthropologist, working on disability, race and Empire; histories of public health. Eternal immigrant, writer, teacher. Indifferent cook. There will be many dogs on this feed. Luddite, yes, in the best way. Lives with epilepsy.
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'universities are not companies...their leaders do not play a direct role in fulfilling the academic mission. Their role is twofold: to ensure the financial solvency of the institution, and to create the conditions in which academic staff and students can pursue excellence. Both are essential.' 1/2
me, an expert in my field, analyzing outcomes: we led the world in vibes
economics not beating the “astrology for men” allegations with quotes like this
Worth noting that “Sean T at RCP” is Sean Trende, Senior Elections Analyst at RealClearPolitics More than a few prominent politicians consider this disinfo peddler to be credible.
The US right already didn’t trust vaccines and public health, it’s so disingenuous to excuse their long history of trying to dismantle public health and frame COVID as their ‘justifiably radicalizing’ moment. Like, please.
I've never seen such a disconnect between Dem elected/staff/consultants and actual Dem voters. The latter understand what's going on. The former are awash in right-wing brainrot, hence @schatz.bsky.social blaming COVID mitigation and BLM marches for the GOP's wanton destruction of public health.
![@EsotericCD It was in this moment that many of us hanging on to a thin sliver of trust in our institutions irrevocably lost faith in them. One of the most poisonous blows to public trust in living memory - worse than the effect of the Iraq War in many ways. RFK Jr is a direct result of this. Quote Steve Guest @SteveGuest · Aug 31 Politico 5 years ago: [screenshot of article falsely claiming public health officials lied about COVID measures then abandoned them for BLM protests] Views](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ddvus7otnqtlh7fdooxm6qat/bafkreihsypwydo5rcis7mc54cwct6h33l5co477nvh7g7hs7na2fz4jl3q@jpeg "Click to view full size")
What these Schatz posts say to me is that Dem elected officials like him seem incapable of perceiving the right as a *political movement.* The response to Covid mitigation and the Floyd protests was not a spontaneous reaction...it was a right wing backlash organized by a reactionary movement.
Extraordinary to be able to say this out loud
When your “superpower” as a country is self-delusion about upward mobility it enables the status quo. Because nobody is demanding substantive change if the majority believe they’re just temporarily embarrassed millionaires, as the saying goes.
I'm concerned about the multi-state outbreak of vibrio vulnificus (flesh-eating bacteria) in the Gulf, with 60+ cases across 5 states, & 10+ deaths. On my travels along the gulf states, I didn't see any additional information on how to stay safe. I wonder how CDC cuts have impacted this response.
no way he steps down, he's gonna be like I by executive order appoint stephen miller regent to the president or some shit
There’s a nonzero chance he’s decided to step down because he’s bored and also possibly dying
What the fuck is going on man this is insane shit. Is he taking a rocket to go live on the moon or something. Is that the Tuesday announcement
Otherwise known as realism.
Getting yelled at on the internet is not what turns people into fascists.
That cabin is alive and holds the spirit of the fae (actual folktale fae who will rip you from end to end with a smile and steal your children; not the Disney shit)
I took this picture 20 years ago and every so often I have to check on it to make sure that creepy ass shit didn’t escape the film and is like standing behind me or whatever
I worked at the Cincinnati Zoo, where the last passenger pigeon, Martha, lived until her death. The employee gate led to the memorial home, so I passed it multiple times a day at work.. its incredibly sad. Such hubris.
I wrote about how the sport of trap shooting contributed to their extinction here. Passenger pigeons gained an ironic sort of immortality in clay pigeons, which were invented to replace the real thing once they disappeared open.substack.com/pub/birdhist...
Corrections: -"whitewash to REPUTATION of" -"NOT as close" I focused only on the family stuff, but his crappiness did not end there. The podcast above is a wild ride.
Hank's public response to his son's suffering was "these things happen." There's so much crap that Hank Ketcham did that Behind The Bastards did a two part deep dive that's longer than they spent on some nazis. But suffice to say, bro sucks.
Hank had mansions on multiple continents. When reporters asked him about the real Dennis, he just said "I only hear from him when he needs money" as though the estrangement was Dennis' fault, or the money had not been made in his name.
When Alice drank herself to death, Hank didn't even tell Dennis that his mother was dead. He moved to Switzerland, and remarried. Dennis grew up alone. Served in Vietnam and came back struggling with PTSD, poverty, and trauma only to see his own face in papers, tv shows, toys, and merchandise.
One day he created a new comic, about what a menace his son was. The comic was a huge success, and Hank now had a fictional family to love. Eventually, Hank sent his son off to boarding school, and separated from his wife, abandoning them both to revel in the success of their cartoon counterparts.
Hank, Alice, and Dennis were a real family, but as close as the comic, or promotional photos implied. Alice suffered from alcoholism, Dennis from learning disabilities. Rather than help in any way, Hank called them a drunk Irishwoman and a menace and ignored them to make his comics.
Who's the worst cartoon character? I vote Henry, the dad from Dennis the Menace. He's a mask deliberately invented to whitewash the identity of his creator, Hank Ketcham, one of the worst men to ever make comics. It's gonna take a thread.
these are not normal people: normal people do not talk like this, because wtf is "over-index on a news story"
This is a clip from Hell, not just an explosion. Beirut literally the world turns into a volcano of red, then in seconds the ground shakes beneath you, your body trembles, and you’re too embarrassed to hope it will stop. You feel as if your heart jumped outside your body, your ears ruptured!! Help 🙏🏽
Geoffrey.
Two of my motheres systeres lyve yn Trastevere and make jokes and jestes all the tyme except when thei playe yn their pop punke bande. Thei are My Comical Rome aunts.
Mass deportations led by mask wearing ICE goons in service of their fascist emperor will have that effect
Eugenics & race-based sciences like phrenology are “science”. They had/have methodologies, theories, & all the other infrastructure that legitimize findings & credibility. The diff is that they do not hold truth under even the slightest scrutiny. The problem is too many think science is neutral.
"It's just the science." They said. "It's just the science." They continue to say.
Including some of the ‘radical’ thinkers
It’s the epistemology of science, Charlie Brown!
It's pseudoscience to believe in eugenics now, but it is absolutely the case that legit scientists (including major contributors to my own field) held these views and thought they were valid. See, e.g., Sir Ronald Fisher, Sir Francis Galton, Charles Davenport, etc. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The number of replies by people who are like, yes, I agree, eugenics was pseudoscience. 🤦🏻♀️
Is your argument that it needed to be a joint letter in the NYT for it to matter? Many public health experts including former directors were shouting about this from the time DJT said he would put the guy forward. That’s why questioning during his confirmation hearings took the shape that it did.
Yes, I think this gets at the issue. Also, there’s been a widespread delegitimization of expertise & the work of thought. Hucksterism has become normalized in a way that feels new & has been hard to counter effectively.
i was vending at a flea market and both overheard younger people talking about how they couldn't get a job because of AI, and older people talking about how they use it all the time and think it's no big deal because they don't use image generation. never mind the stolen labor and environmental harm
YES. Whenever someone says [fascism, eugenics, RFK jr, etc.] is anti-science, it tells me they skipped the reading. Those racist and sexist losers thought they were being scientific, and presume they're doing good and true science. They're not correct: they do bad science, not fake science.
at this point, any people of color who work for this man should be ashamed of themselves. But sadly....
Musk now supporting the deportation of anyone who isn’t white. *Do not* use the term “remigration”. It’s an attempt to normalise Nazi hate.
its been my experience that people who describe college students this way seldom have anything interesting to say
Send this to all the genocide deniers in your life I’m sending it to my rabbi
i do, however, remember political party leadership doing essentially nothing to counter rfk jr.’s media blitz over the winter holidays when they needed to be countering that messaging. no one really cared about that outside public health
A Labor Day reminder: today there isn't a single city, metro area, or state in the U.S. where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a modest 2-bedroom apartment. Millions of people with jobs—even multiple jobs—aren't safe from homelessness in this country.
Almost every single public health account/prof/figure I follow has been publicly appalled by his nomination; the problem here is no one really cares about public health or how it works until the wheels fall off. Which in the US, is right now.
Cling to their bibles? If only. They never comprehended their bibles. They cling to marketing: Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben and the Barrel Cracker etc. Their praxis is waiting in line for Chik Fil A. Their heritage is green bean casserole made with Campbell's cream of whatever soup. Embarrassing.
People obsessed with this country's "heritage" are violently opposed to ever actually addressing its real heritage, so all they're left with are consumerism and symbols chosen for their plausible deniability. Imagine claiming the Cracker Barrel logo as your birthright.
let’s hit pause here. rfk jr. wasn’t picked until november 14, 2024. most folks in politics thought it wouldn’t happen, while public health was ringing alarm bells many former cdc directors spoke out against him before before everyone else realized he was a serious threat
Sex Matters has deleted his page from its website - but the internet never forgets. web.archive.org/web/20241107...
Keir Starmer has appointed as his new Comms Director Tim Allan who was a board member of the hate group Sex Matters. It's no longer even pretending to adhere to its Manifesto promise to "remove indignities for trans people who deserve recognition and acceptance."
the problem is way too many people are far too comfortable with their own ableism--they see some "merit" in some of the eugenicist ideas and policies that frame disabled people as "burdens" and "costs." And then its a shock when they realize who exactly they're in bed with.
Every single thing, EVERY SINGLE THING, that RFK has done was predictable and predicted. He is doing what every other fascist eugenicist has done before him. The disability community has been warning about this for YEARS. It is not in any way shape or form mysterious and unknowable.
The paradox of the AI bro: simultaneously proposing and working towards the most anti-human cataclysmic scenarios on the planet, while whining endlessly about not getting the credit they deserve/being treated harshly by people around them.
Remember, kids: A real big goal of "AI" is to entirely sever capital from labor, and no, there will be no universal basic income, you can all just starve and die, thanks www.axios.com/2025/08/26/a...
First article on our Rural Racism reports, released this morning @jayrayner1.bsky.social www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
The Future, created by Betty Bebbington c.1965, in the art therapy studio at Netherne hospital in Surrey where she was compelled to live. This is one of a small number of her mostly abstract surviving works, several of which feature these drifts & vortices of darkness with notations in her own hand
Google developer #1: "That's it. Our search engine is simple, efficient, and reliable. It's perfect. We're done." Google developer #2, presumably: "But wouldn't it be *more* perfect if the first search result was always a robot who mansplained your search results to you incorrectly?"
More than 600 people have been killed and over 1,500 injured after a magnitude 6 earthquake struck just before midnight in eastern Afghanistan near the border with Pakistan. Several villages have reportedly been completely destroyed, as rescue efforts are underway.
UK to make it harder for refugees to bring family members to country
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
Morning Bluesky. China’s navy is now bigger than the US.
EXCLUSIVE: Pro-independence parties have reacted with outrage after a campaign organised by far-right agitators has led to the Saltire being co-opted as part of an anti-immigrant push 🗣️'Anyone using the Saltire to promote hate and prejudice does not represent Scottish interests or values.'
There are over 18,000 types of lichen in existence. My personal favourite is ‘village bench lichen’, which devotes its entire existence selflessly to gradually making communal public seating more furry and comfortable.
Remember this for when it all comes crashing down and former Republicans claim they never really supported Trump and they were horrified by what he was doing. The overwhelming majority of Republicans are getting exactly what they wanted.
Precisely—people knew for centuries how to create superior varieties of cattle and inferior varieties of dogs. Simple application to humans made difficult by figuring out what superior and inferior mean
To take the eugenics example, by the 1930s Fisher and Haldane and others showed just how shoddy a lot of the earlier work was, but they still believed feeblemindedness to be a simple Mendelian recessive and that we should direct human evolution to desired ends. Few scientists think that now tho.
I think the difference here is that any accepted field of scientific inquiry can have within it “bad science” that contemporaries will identify and call out. But pseudoscience is something after the fact that debunks the whole field for the vast majority of scientists
It’s a useful concept to scientists seeking to legitimize their own fields and distance themselves from the sins of their own intellectual ancestors
Imre Lakatos said back in the 1970s that demarcating any field as a pseudoscience is always done after the field has been debunked. It’s a useless concept to historians trying to contextualize eugenics (unless you’re studying the history of demarcating eugenics as pseudoscience)
This. Eugenics was built on centuries of known science: from agriculture and animal husbandry. Breed improvement over generations to get that large red tomato, or the milk-producing cow was well-established. The mechanism of eugenics wasn't the problem. The targets were.
It doesn't really matter what song it is, my favorite lyric is always "WHOO"
No, my colleagues in the sciences, they thought they were doing rational modern science. And loads of others shared that understanding.
I show parts of PBS's American Experience: The Eugenics Crusade in a number of my (religious studies) classes. I ask students to pay attention to the # of times different experts (esp. the scientists) in the documentary describe the scientific arguments made by eugenicists as "like a religion."
And post-WW2, too
It's why people like Bertrand Russell didn't even question the rationality of degeneration when he articulated eugenics views : it was a widely accepted medical fact and a tenet of psychiatry – which incidentally gave the latter its power.
Yep it’s always been about trivializing exactly what power eugenics held (and still holds)
Sometimes when discussing the historical influence of eugenics, scientific racism, etc., "pseudoscience" gets invoked as a kind of game of no true Scotsman so that we can effectively edit them out of the history of science as not being "real" and therefore trivial.
"Eugenics was rooted in rational modern science then" needs re-stating. Far too many people describe eugenics as a "pseudoscience", but it wasn't to those who studied it, wrote books and papers, formed societies and argued its benefits.
Yep. Eugenics never died, as I teach every student I can.. And when many vulnerable people pointed out how the pandemic had permitted a normalization of certain kinds of eugenicist rhetoric ("its only the sick and vulnerable dying") and that there would be consequences, most people brushed them off.
Because fascism doesn't emerge just out of/rely on racist logics of incarceration and extinction, it also deplores disability. All those perceived as unfit to live in this glorious New America are seen as fit to die; indeed, it is the DUTY of the administration to craft a "fitter" society.
Eugenics comes for you* all. (It was always already coming for some of us.)
I do sometimes wonder what my Twitter feed would look like during the Holocaust
yeeeeah a guy who dated a 19 year old while in his 30s has ZERO business saying trans people shouldn't transistion until they're 25. i mean NO ONE has any business saying that. but ESPECIALLY that guy.
Smashing the first A in ACAB so hard u can feel it in every country on Earth "Police reported that O'Brien "refused to comply and insulted verbally and offended physically, several police officers," alleging that O'Brien called police officers "genocide supporters" and "f*cking Nazis.""
The far right succeeded in this country in large part because adult men were angry about this supposed theft, and the Nazis learned to channel that rage. "[Marginalized group] stole your sex mommy!" is quite literally their rallying cry a lot of the time.
If you say 'heteronormative' or 'unhoused person' or 'food insecurity' you're basically talking gibberish and nobody can understand you but if you say you can see inflammation in children at the airport and that vaccines lower IQ or that germs are a myth you get to fire all the scientists.
Middle age really is every single organ and function of your body deciding its going through adolescence and refusing to do a single thing you say
I would recommend that Alex step to the right or left of the sourdough shelves in the bread aisles, where she will find her good old White bread, which is pale enough to make sure she isn't accidentally reminded that people not of her ethnicity/identity exist
i can't even see much mention of gen AI any more without flying into a near murderous rage against everyone who uses it and being pretty certain that's the correct response to have.
Once more: fuck OpenAI and fuck Sam Altman. The fact that this company has slithered its way into schools and universities across the world and might well be repeating this pattern with vulnerable students all over the world never fails to shock.
The entire goal of Musk, Zuckerberg, Andersen, Thiel and more: a world of people completely shut off from each other, relying on their tech products ALONE (sans human beings) for social interaction, sexual pleasure and more. We exist as nothing but fodder for their imagined AI juggernauts.
“When people suffer loneliness, the antidote will always and forever be other people. It is society’s job to grease the wheels for these interactions, not to muck up their gears with AI companions.”
Even before I lost my mother this year, these stories chilled me to the bone. A monstrous agglomeration of tech exploiting grief. The dead are meant to stay dead, they did all they were meant to; our grief aside. To provoke the dead to a form of ‘life’ with genAI is asking for trouble.
The digital afterlife industry may near $80 billion in a decade, fueled by AI "deadbots." Tech firms see profit. But experts warn of troubling consequences.