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venustransiens · 1 year

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Week 5.5: We interrupt this broadcast

I was going to quietly post this on another blog/format and keep this blog “clean” and free of my complaints but it’s my thesis blog to show all the highs and lows of my last 6 months of grad school so why the hell shouldn’t I put this on here?

I don’t know if I am happy in academia in grad school or in anything like this. Every day I get on the internet(TM) and see someone talking about their work, studies, life being removed from syllabi or plans of study. I see students talking about entire degrees being dissolved or administration of liberal arts schools being literally fired by a governor??? or the collegeboard (the beast I hate so much) removing curricula from AP courses that is important for just basic human decency.

None of this is new and I know that. But it is getting worse and every time I try to be a part of the “change” or functionally fix aspects of academia it all blows up in my face. I have been invited to speak at conferences about public discussions on education only for the conferences to be paywalled, invite-only, and in person. I have submitted work to journals at the request of conference organizers and been rejected on minuscule criteria in, what I believe, is an attempt to justify rejecting my field of research. Every day I come across new takes and bullshit that is being uplifted by these same academic institutions that rejected or belittled me and quickly I learn that what they really want to focus on is sterilized, white, cishet, ablebodied stories of academia, history, literature, everything.

And what happens when we try to change it? In the US, at least, we get pushed under a rug, develop health issues over the stress that we cant afford to take care of, and die far too young either due to stress, poverty, or a field that doesn’t support us.

I love my studies and field so much it’s ridiculous and I want to stay connected to academia for my life and career (whatever career means now) but how can I want to do that when I am seeing the horrors of education at all levels in the US? How can anyone be expected to work in this field or study at these institutions now?

I will finish my degree because at this point its out of spite. But what I do after is genuinely unclear to me. I entered graduate school ready to take on a PhD after and help change academia but I am soon to leave it more hopeless than before. I don’t know what the point of this post is, partially a vent and record keeper for myself later, but if you make it to the end of this then I guess it’s a warning about the education system currently and how you need to prepare for the absolute worst before accepting admission to an advanced degree in the united states.

#michelle does grad school #or something like that #every day i think surely i am over this and i am still not #cant wait to be burned out of two industries by 30

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phenakistoskope · 4 years

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ok i did a deep dive into ~dark academia~ and I am seriously considering dropping out of mphil and becoming a rogue academic

#mphil is useless institutionally any way because of nep #and the institution of academia is literal bullshit #rogue! academics! only!#my bullshit

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codenamesazanka · 3 years

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one thing i can’t get over is how excellently Horikoshi tackles The Mutant Metaphor, a staple in science-fiction, especially superhero science-fiction, the idea of using mutants/super-powered power to stand in for an oppressed minority group. Which one? Any one you want: non-white people, queer people, Jewish people, disabled people, etc.

The issue with this metaphor, though, is that the creators often don’t think. They want to make an anti-discrimination statement (which is good), modeling the fictional oppression after irl oppression (which has always been what speculative fiction is about - holding up a mirror to our reality) but in doing so, they end up comparing a irl minority group to people who have supernatural and often destructive abilities - which is also often the reason they are feared and hated. Needless to say, that’s bad, because irl, oppressed minority groups aren’t different from everyone else, aren’t dangerous, and have done nothing to warrant fear and hate.

But here comes Horikoshi with his quirks and heteromorphs, making the metaphor his own, and doing it well. IMO, it’s one of the best of very few examples doing it right. He has thought it through; he delved into all the implications and consequences, big and small; he’s made it allegorical to real dynamics and experiences, while adding it’s own unique elements. He did this by simply making the majority of population in his universe superpowered, then followed the logics of how that would change society.

My favorite element of this logic, my fav aspect of his metaphor is how he’s made the differences between the people in his world a social construct, which I think is the root factor that many writers miss and why their metaphors fail. The problem isn’t that some people are inherently dangerous or bad or irreconcilably different - that’s bullshit, people simply aren’t; the problem is that they are wrongly perceived to be, and that perception is what allows for justifications of their oppression. That’s what a social construct is (in simplified terms): the way humans conceptualize a thing, the way humans invent arbitrary categories and classifications, rules grounded not in objective reality but in how people choose to view the world, shifting it to their liking, then structuring their lives, beliefs, and institutions based on it.

This might seem weird to say about My Hero Academia, where people do have wildly different types of abilities, whether it’s literally looking like a lizard or being able to kill with a touch. Quirks and the differences they make in people aren’t a social construct - they’re real. Yes, but see— when nearly everyone has a superpower, the standards change, the threshold is moved, a new norm is created. Building from that basis, what does become a social construct is how quirks are perceived, how they’re reacted to, how ‘human’ they’re believed to make someone, how they’re valued or not.

One way this manifest is the fuzzy borders of what make someone a heteromorph. We’ve seen the characters called heteromorphs - they have quirks that alter their bodies, making them look like cement, or have bright pink skin, or multiple arms. But how altered does an appearance have to be to make someone a heteromorph? Jirou looks ‘normal’, but her earlobes are jacks - does she count? What about ReDestro, who has a big nose and pointy ears (which, btw, doesn’t seem to have anything to do with his Stress quirk)? Is Hawks with his wings a heteromorph?

Moreover, this is all based on surface level traits. As i’ve pointed out in a previous essay: Spinner is called a heteromorph because he looks like a lizard man, and his skin is replaced by scales; but Endeavor has fireproof skin and organs like extremophile bacteria you find in a volcano, which is not ‘normal’ either. But one gets targeted by the CRC.

Heteromorphs are discriminated against in society, presumably because they don’t look “human”, and so some people just don’t considered them human. (There are other hints of these prejudiced criteria tho - the CRC uses the word 汚れ kegare which means “unclean, impurity” (translated in the official Viz version as “sin”), which is a concept often connected to the Japanese religion of Shintoism, and was/is used to discriminate against the irl minority of burakumin.)

But what is “human” in a superhuman world? Spinner is as human as Hawks, who is as human as quirkless Deku, who is as human as Iida - i’m pretty sure at a genetic level, none of them have more ‘human genes’ than the other. and yet the perception of how their quirks (or lack of) affect them is what informs their different experiences in life.

Anyways, i’m eager to see Spinner’s Heteromorphic Discriminatic Arc. Please, Horikoshi-sensei 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼

#i love u spinner #nalslastworkingbraincell #Heroes and Villains #Hero Society #bnha society #bnha #mha #heroaca #this is also why #to me personally imo i think #that i can call the heteromorph discrimination an allegory to racism #i just think the way things work #and everything about spinner’ story #is similar to my experiences #in regards to race #which is a social construct without basis in genetics or biology btw #hmmm i changed main points halfway through #sorry about that #heteromorphic discrimination arc let's go

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ablednt · 3 years

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Anyway academia is a deeply capitalist based institution. They intentionally complicate information and create fancy jargon to keep the lower classes (anyone who can't afford college which is in majority marginalized people) from sharing and accessing information. They also intentionally teach incorrect information at the expense of marginalized people. (Most notably people of color and disabled/mentally ill people but for everyone else too tbh)

Like not to be an anarchist on main but literally all materials from any college ever need to be free and open source. These self righteous fuckheads have the audacity to claim they have a love of learning and a drive for human progress but are the very ones impeding it through gatekeeping and capitalist bullshit.

If everything was accessible to every one how many more doctors and teachers and (actually capable!) psychologists and political activists would there be? Imagine if college as we knew it didn't exist, if instead they were more like public libraries (classes still exist but are either affordable for everyone or free) where anyone could come to study and access knowledge and learn.

If instead of pointless pieces of paper for clout jobs just tested to see if you could do the work.

Just can you imagine how, if academia as an institution was seized and made accessible that society would start to thrive actually?

Don't give academia a free pass just because it's not as in your face combative as other government entities. It's just as tied to fascism and tyranny as any of the other institutions under the governments influence.

Also this isn't just a pipe dream. If our tax money wasn't going to the military and police department and if privatization of colleges was made illegal/colleges were made non profit we could very feasibly do this.

Like y'all we need to start pushing for this shit it's obtainable! Things don't have to be so horrible and academia as an institution is so goddamn fragile! We could really do this!!

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howelljenkins · 3 years

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confession time: seeing ur posts about struggling w school but making it work has been so comforting as someone who approaches institutional academia in a VERY similar way

good to hear bc posting abt it helps me get through... sometimes it’s like u gotta just acknowledge it’s bullshit and unfair and a biased system and ridiculous before u can grumble ur way through.. but also so annoyed bc i could literally drop out and say i have a degree and get a job and literally no one would notice

#why do i know more than all these mfs i work w #and yet IM the one who needs to get through years of school. ok #whatever get this bag i guess #answered #anonymous #askgame

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fairycosmos · 3 years

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for your other anon talking about uni (and this convo in general) i totally get it, i had a major panic attack during an important project in uni that ruined my semester, so i took the next one slow. the only reason i didn’t drop out was because i was on scholarship and needed the money but my mental health was shit until i graduated and there was SO much hostility towards me because of it. the profs who knew my situation would pretend to have my back until i actually acted mentally ill™️ and they’d get irritated and it was just so shit. i think you’ve honestly just got to do what’s best for you, whether that’s pushing forward, working for accommodations, taking time off, etc. the whole culture around academia and mental health is fucked and needs to change and it is absolutely not anyone’s fault for feeling overwhelmed by higher education, especially w/ the lack of proper resources. i also totally agree with what you said, chloe, about everyone’s life having a different trajectory! I really had to learn to cope with that and adjust. but it’s so true, there is no set plan and it’s okay if things take you more time than planned or than they took other people. we’re all on our own path. and honestly i think once you realise that the world can open up in terms of possibilities. like maybe things are still a bit shit at first, but you aren’t confined to the life formula everyone expects from you, things can be a different way and still be ok. anyway hope everyone is well! much love <3 xx

omg so sorry to hear that!! it was extremely unprofessional of your profs to treat you like that but unfortunately it doesn't surprise me at alllll :( academia is so rife with ableism and faux sympathy - the system really isn't build to support or encourage learning in the vast majority of us. i can relate sm to ppl especially working professionals saying they'll make allowances for your health/extend some understanding and then just NOT doing that when it actually came down to it. so fucked up. like they wonder why college kids kill themselves and then they purposefully and carelessly push them when they're visibly already on the brink, if they even notice they're on the brink in the first place. i agree, it's honestly completely understandable that ppl esp mentally ill people would be easily overwhelmed while academia is breathing down their necks the way it does, especially because as an institute it's literally not equipped to deal with the health (mental or physical) crises of its students, bcoz the very nature of the way it currently works is like antithetical to developing stable mental health and a positive self image. ANYWAY i really hope that anon sees this message and that it helps them feel less alone!! you're so right like there really is no one size fits all when it comes to life. nd i really wish the whole school - college - post grad - work bullshit wasn't forced onto all of us like it holds the answers for everything, it doesn't really hold the answer for anything. things can be a different way and still be ok!!! wanna scream that one from the rooftops. anyway thank you sm for sending this in and for being so sweet and understanding abt it, you're a peach :) wish i had friends like you to talk this stuff through with ur insight is so comforting and niceto read. sending you a lot of love!! xx

#anon #talking

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obscuniverse · 4 years

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Obscu listens to: The Magnus Archives - Episode 1 ‘Angler Fish’

@derinthescarletpescatarian has been ranting at me about this series for what feels like a million years so here I am. Also apparently I’m the world’s biggest stereotype. Let’s roll, shall we?

Oooh, I do like spooky violin. Can’t have a horror anything without spooky violin.

Okay can we pause and talk about the symbolism of having ‘Angler Fish’ be your first episode title? Fun Fact! As you may recall, the angler fish is what happens when you ask any child to draw any animal that they imagine has teeth, and the teeth come out all different sizes and directions but they’re definitely spikes, and then they get so caught up with the teeth that they rush the rest of the body so it looks like a particularly carnivorous poop? That’s the one. The part that’s particularly relevant is the the bit where they’re a bunch of glowing knobheads; that is, they have a fleshy forehead appendage where the end is colonised by bioluminescent bacteria, which they use as a lure for smaller, less coprotype prey. So we’ve got some strong lure imagery, and it’s the first episode, so on one hand this is literally the lure that the series is using to draw us, the readers, into consuming (or, if you know @derinthescarletpescatarian, being consumed by) the series. Of course, it’s almost certainly referring to the content of the episode as well so I anticipate a protagonist (and possibly diverse other victims) to be _lured _into something bad for them.

Secondary Fun Fact! Anglerfish mating involve the male biting into the belly of the (several times larger in size) female and hanging on until their skin and blood vessels literally fuse together, with the anglerfish male being fed directly by nutrients from the blood of the female through their shared circulatory system. Will our protagonist bite off more than they can chew and become hopelessly, permanently enmeshed in something larger and more dangerous than they, so interwoven with it that they are unable to extricate themselves from it but also being given by it the means to survive? Will we the listeners? I guess we’ll just have to hit play because I’m only 36 seconds in. I do like the narrator’s voice though.

More spooky violin, can’t go wrong with that. Ooooh a crescendo. Hot fucking damn. Oh snap there was some sad tunelessness there!

Ohshit it’s a recorded diary! Every horror game I’ve ever played has prepared me for this moment.

Nothing spooky happens at a research institute named for strength or might in both Latin and Norse. Certainly not one that deals in esoterica. Okay, let’s see what Johnathan Sims (Simms?) gets up to at Swole Hogwarts.

What’s that? The previous Defense Against the Dark Arts Teacher Archivist is dead and you’ve been hired by Spooky French Dumbledore who is almost certainly a monster because of course he is to replace them? This will end only well and definitely not with a spiral into a mental breakdown culminating in some Here’s Johnny! shenanigans.

“There are very few genuine cases” and now that you’ve jinxed yourself every single genuine case in the world is going to be crawling out of the walls to say hello. You’d think after 4 years you would’ve learned not to say such things. It’s like watching D-Class personnel at the SCP foundation.

“When an investigation has gone as far as it can it goes to the archives” (emphasis mine). So you’re gonna be digging into a 200 years’ of spoopy cold cases that are gonna get real hot real quick. I’m down.

Ahahahaha. Oh academia. Even in Swole Hogwarts you can’t get away from theorists vs practicalists.

86-91-G/H is definitely going to come up again. I can vividly picture the wild strewn-about room of someone driven mad by the haunting nature of their job. Or of my own office because of who I am as a person. I wonder which file ate Gertrude. I also wonder if the lack of use of modern electronics is a safety measure that Old Mate Johnny has unknowingly violated.

“I have secured the services of two redshirts, and you can tell because they’re unnamed researchers” “I don’t expect Martin to secretly be the highly skilled wizard/creature manipulating events form their apparent background doddering disguised as a silly fool in keeping with long fairy-tale tradition contribute anything except delays” Martin is definitely Snape. OOOooooOOOooooOOH, attempting to digitise T̵̨̛͚͉̫̩̰͍̓̽̽̍̓͑̓̾͌͗̂̈́̉ḫ̸͈̪̉̆̓̀͌̓͒̈̋̐͝ĕ̵͉̻̻ ̷̜͙̤͎͈̝̮̘̄̅̓̆̿̕͝R̴̪͑̍̒̍̾̅̐́͘͠͠ę̸̞̪͕̠͍͉̝̀̈́́͌̽ͅc̴̟̱͈̦̎̅̋̏͆̌̇͘͠͠o̶͚̞͕̲͒̋r̷̲̟̭͚̠̾͑́͋̓̈́̎͒̾̚d̴̩͓́͑̀͊̂̿͛i̴̗͈̣̟̻̯̼̘̞͕̋͜ͅņ̶̡͍͚͙̩͇̟̝̩̬͍͖̳̓g̷̯̬̙̱͚̏͂̔͐̉̇̾̋̓̎̈́͘s̷̢̫̗͙̱̻̳̞̩̐͛͂̍̑̐̊̚ have been met with significant spooky magical fuckery distortion. Fancy that.

The redshirts are named Tim and Sasha, and they will be doing some supplementary investigation suicidal monster hunting to fill in Blanks That No Man Was Meant To Fill. Maybe they’ll survive now that they have names, but they really should’ve saved the name for when one of them is mortally injured and the audience has to care enough about them for them to survive so you can reveal that they are in fact a person.

“I apologise to my eventual replacement after I am horribly eaten by/transformed into whatever is in 86-91-G/H any future researcher.”

Johnathan Sims is Niles Crane from Frasier and I will accept no word to the contrary.

Ah yes, the most esoteric and terrifying of eldritch phenomena; someone trying to bum a ciggy off you when you’re 80% scotch and 60% regret.

Ah, so “can I have a cigarette” with a human form ‘asking’ is the glowy knob on this ghost’s forehead. Completely without intonation because it’s just playing back a noise that attracts hammered people at night rather than understanding words that attract hammered people at night. Pretty sure I’ve seen this in an anime.

Apparently totally sloshed British students make better horror/urban fantasy protagonists than most movies would credit.

I take it back.

At least the spooky poopfish got some dinner.

I wonder if the missing student’s name also been John is a bit of tongue in cheek.

Oooh he’s created a “this is all bullshit” category into which he clearly intends to consign most of these. STOP PLAYING CHICKEN WITH THE UNFATHOMABLE HORRORS OF THE VOID BETWEEN THE STARS. Or, y’know, keep at it. This will not be hilarious and/or traumatic at all.

“Check out this photo of a spooky ghost if you run it through a sixth sense filter” That’s right Johnny, get beckoned.

I’m actually not 100% on this format but I’ll give it a few more tries.

#tma #the magnus archives #Swole Hogwarts #Spooky poopfish #86-91-G/H

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question-why-not · 4 years

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Disclaimer:

I’m not a historian by any means, and a lot of what I’m going to say here is probably wrong.

However, the overall message here isn’t wrong at all, unless I’ve been majorly lied to, which Idk, could be, but I at least don’t think that’s likely.

So, Idk who needs to hear this

But the scientific method isn’t a western invention

It’s an everywhere-invention.

Rudimentary science was developed independently in multiple places around the world

Europe just happened to be a place in which a couple specific scientific communities happened to survive long enough for science to become that much more useful for technology, and they also had the privilege of relying on literal thousands of years of work done by, you guessed it, numerous nations all across the world.

If the Mayans, for example, weren’t wacked by what, the Spanish, right? Then we may very well have been living in a world where people consider science as a Mayan invention.

Same thing for if a couple specific Arabic empires survived longer than they have, and once again same deal if a couple of the more far eastern nations didn’t have a massive regime change practically every 50 years

Even then, all of those nations made MASSIVE contributions to science, which was the vast basis European scientists built on, and the only reasons science is considered such a purely western thing are

Blatant erasure of the work done by so many non-western people

The modern notion of academia & universities as institutions were in fact a more western thing, at least in the last like 500 years

Studying science in the west & nations invaded by western nations was restricted to rich white men under the colonial regimes of the last couple of centuries, thus solidifying this bullshit idea of science being a purely western invention

I see this claim a lot,

both from white nationalists who use it to try & claim white ppl are somehow superior to PoC,

and from anti-intellectuals who try to claim science is just a western thing in an attempt to discredit it.

And I’m sick of ALL of these ridiculous claims.

Science belongs to all of humanity.

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words-writ-in-starlight · 5 years

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some s2 Magnus Archives comments

(and also a liiiiiittle bit of s3 because I had some insomnia last night so obviously I...listened to...this horror podcast full of creeping nightmare content)

JON!!! Oh my dude I’m pretty sure you’re...inexorably part of the Archives now! Like, you can run but you can’t hide from the elder god watching your every move, presumably determined to absorb you into itself as its latest earthly puppet/avatar/pawn/what have you. I am EQUALLY sure that if Jon tried to stop recording statements at this point he would like...lose his mind. He’s been injecting Elder God Juice directly into his spinal cord like some kind of supernatural epidural for too long, and now if he stops he’ll hit the worst withdrawal in the world. Enjoy those eldritch DT’s, Jon.

If this isn’t true please do not tell me, I love this concept and I will write an AU for it if it’s not true. I feel like the first s3 episode of him being sent a statement supports this, though, and also did he steal the Institute tape recorder or just buy his own? The Institute had two, so it’s possible Jon took his and they’re using the other one. I like that answer for comedy value, although it would beg the question of what happened to the tape. Probably Jon abandoned the Institute recorder, along with the tape (which Elias then Happened To, one assumes), and then went out and bought his own, which I feel only strengthens my stance that Jon is paranormally addicted to taking statements.

The Eye is about Knowing Stuff, right? I feel like that would scan.

Also, Jon, Jonathan, my dear Archivist, my best beloved paranoid moron, this is why we tell people things. This whole thing could have been So Different if he had eliminated suspects and then told those eliminated suspects things, although on the other hand NotSasha took a while to make the suspect list at all because Jon is a brilliant, brilliant idiot, so then again maybe not.

ELIAS!!! Oh my god I called this, I knew he was guilty of like...Everything. He’s too nice! He’s too good a boss! I have had some good bosses, I’ve even had good bosses in academia, but literally no academic is that calm about everything! CLEARLY A MURDERER. I also listened to the episode in s3 where he threatens Daisy and I love him, reader, I love him, he’s a monster and a murderer and I want Daisy to get the chance to kill him because it would make her happy, but I love him. Holy SHIT I love the trope of “Monster is very possessive and protective of its things, including the people who serve it” and I am super pumped to see Elias continue in that vein.

Also eventually my dream outcome here would be Elias and Jon being directly at odds, in some way that would mean the Eye would have to choose, because the many complex flavors of fucked up interpersonal dynamic there... *chef kiss* Perfect. If you “win,” then great! The nightmare monster of fear and eyes likes you best! What the fuck does that say? If you “lose,” well, you’ll probably be dead, so you won’t have long to feel betrayed or vindicated in your humanity or horrified to learn that you’re the replaceable piece of the machine. But those couple of seconds sure would suck.

MARTIN AND TIM!!! Hey listen, I would do absolutely anything for Martin Blackwood, literally anything under the sun, he’s so good and I love him so much, he deserves a different story than this clusterfuck. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure he’s much more vitally important to this team than anyone (certainly Tim or Jon) is necessarily prepared to admit, because, hey, folks? If Martin actually succeeded in leaving the Institute I’m absolutely positive that your currently precarious team would melt down in under a day. I love it so much when Martin loses his temper, it’s like a kitten biting someone. I will admit to wholly enjoying the bit where Martin ripped into Tim for his behavior, which brings me to Tim. Tim, my dude, you may believe that Jon is a murderer, you may even be genuinely furious that he accidentally trapped you in the Archives, but you still risked your life without a second thought to go after him in those tunnels, and I love you for being such a fucking trainwreck.

DAISY AND MELANIE!!! Hey! Remember a day or two ago when I was like “Melanie is so radical I want her and Jon to be grouchy best friends”? HEY!!! I love Melanie, I love that every time she and Jon have a conversation that should by all rights be totally civil they end up shouting at each other, I love that she keeps coming back to talk to him even though she thinks he’s a dick, I love that they’re suddenly on perfectly identical wavelengths as soon as Jon starts speculating about ghosts and research. (I bet Martin “Forged CV” Blackwood is furious that she just walked in and got offered a job, no bullshit Master’s required.) I am so thrilled that she’s Jon’s contact, this whole situation was created to be a gift for me specifically.

Also, Daisyyyyyy. Another monster I love. I don’t know that much about her except that one episode with Elias but I love her. She murders people and still clearly thinks she’s in the right and I love her for being a mystery and a monster and still clearly loving Basira so very much. Speaking of which, Basira, I’m so sorry that you’re...probably not going to get out of this situation. I am pretty sure you are going to end up back at the Institute pretty darn quick no matter how much you quit being a cop, this is your life now. As long as you keep Daisy pointed in the right direction, you might even survive it.

GEORGIE!!! I have heard two (2) episodes with this woman and I love her an unreasonable amount. I can’t believe Jon “Local Disaster” Sims dated her. I can’t believe he literally never mentioned this to Melanie. I can’t believe she went out with a dumb jock mountain climber just so someone else would buy her Hungarian food. We stan a legend.

#the magnus archives #tma #jon sims #elias bouchard #I LARGELY WROTE THIS TO GET MY FEELINGS ABOUT JON AND ELIAS OFF MY CHEST #AND ALSO DAISY #I LOVE DAISY #SHE'S A MURDERER!!! LOVE HER!!!#gonna continue listening to tma now!#also listen: tma au of the kencyrath #stay tuned

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schraubd · 5 years

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A Very Jewish Week Roundup

I'm having a very Jewish week. It started, mostly, with the column I published in Haaretz calling "bullshit" on the claim that the New York Times presents a greater antisemitism threat than contemporary mainstream conservatism. That led to a completely out-of-the-blue call from none other than ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt. Like, literally, I was sitting on my couch and the phone rang and it was him. We've never conversed or connected in any other way (I've bent the ear of the San Francisco ADL office more than a few times), and there didn't seem to be any other motive behind the call other than to say he liked the Haaretz piece. Then today, I had another phone call with a different prominent Jewish public figure -- I won't say who, since the project she was asking my take on isn't yet public, but let's just say that if Greenblatt is part of the "establishment" wing of the Jewish community, this person is more on the "insurgent" side. Somehow, I seem to be bridging that gap -- at least a little bit. Tomorrow, I have a conference call to discuss my participation on a panel at the Goethe-Institut on resurgent antisemitism and White nationalism. Then Friday, I'm meeting with a student who sought me out to discuss how one researches issues of antisemitism in contemporary academia. Oh, and Jill and I went to Talmud study for the first time last night. * * * Jews are the religious group most likely to view Muslims favorably. And wouldn't you know it -- but those positive sentiments are reflected right back at us -- Muslims also overwhelmingly view Jews favorably! Very interesting new article in the Yale Law Journal experimentally measures whether people feel free to refuse intrusive search requests. Answer: they don't, which doesn't surprise. What might surprise a little is that even explicitly telling people "you're free to refuse this search" doesn't move the needle much. Radical settler Rabbis caught on type expressing admiration for Hitler and racism. Nice. Robert Farley thinks Team Living actually had decent military strategy in the Battle for Winterfell. Trump pick Stephen Moore might not have the votes to get a Fed seat -- which is weird because, if he's a crank extremist too far gone to even get through this pliant GOP Senate, how did he occupy all these respectable conservative sinecures for all these years? Such a mystery. Artist behind NYT's antisemitic cartoon denies it's an antisemitic cartoon, says controversy is a product of the "Jewish propaganda machine." Checks out! via The Debate Link http://bit.ly/2UUZ9kK

#anti-semitism #economy #Islamophobia #Israel #Jews #Muslims #Personal #police #privacy #Stephen Moor

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laranjatoranjalaranja · 5 years

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The History of Art we need

Illustration by Renáta Fučíková

There is no possible way for me to discuss this without getting very openly political. I believe this can be a good thing since, ultimately, all history is written within a political context and absolute political neutrality, even in academic work, is an unattainable myth. So, if my politics affects my history, at least it will do so out in the open.

The left has been often criticised for neglecting and even disdaining what has been referred to as “optics” or “aesthetics”. Fascism’s aestheticisation of politics is a right-wing tactic that many left-wing academics are discussing today, mainly thanks to the very cited work of the philosopher Walter Benjamin. Briefly put, the question some of these people on the left are asking is: why is it that the right seems more capable of harnessing the political potential of our aesthetic sensibility today?

Capitalism has developed a series of its own aesthetic weapons that it uses to make itself stronger and more appealing. These include things like branding, marketing and, as I will argue further along the text, art.

The left, on the other hand, seems to have little more than old-fashioned ideas of communist propaganda that are literally from the last century. It has a persistent and well-known tendency to mistrust and demonise aesthetics as a whole. This makes complete sense if you are to understand aesthetics as this thing that makes everything it touches superficial and thoughtless, giving it an appeal that can go by unquestioned simply because it makes things ‘aesthetic’. Understood in this way, aesthetics becomes, like Benjamin argued, the perfect tool for fascism.

But, in my view, the aesthetic is neither evil, nor does this mean that the left should enter the same game of aestheticisation of politics, as if it were the only realistic way to ‘turn things around’. Instead of aestheticising politics, the answer might lie in politicising aesthetics, as Benjamin himself apparently also pointed out. Us leftists frequently like to remind ourselves of how EVERYTHING is political. Aesthetics is no exception. Our aesthetic soft-spots and inclinations also exist in specific political contexts. This means aesthetic preferences (which no one is immune to) do not exist in a vacuum, therefore, they are mutable. They are not ‘merely superficial’, they are grounded in our real lived experiences and it is possible to shape them and argue, rationally, for or against them.

The left cannot go on pretending like aesthetics is a dispensable, secondary issue. Aesthetics is not a distraction, it is an ESSENTIAL part of how we experience our lives and therefore it too deserves a pride of place in our political agenda. Ignoring it will clearly not make it suddenly irrelevant.

As someone that has been studying History of Art in academia for 5 years, it strikes me how, despite appearances, truly revolutionary History of Art barely exists. Despite the overwhelming number of so-called radical journals and other kinds of left-wing publications, I have realised that most of it is actually liberal. What I mean by this is that most of the people who write for these publications seem to share a common goal: to free art from the elites’ domination (a goal also shared by Benjamin). This is a liberal goal because it aims at REFORMING rather than revolutionising the existing system. Another striking problem is the subtle assumption that art and the elites are separable to begin with.

To clarify, art cannot be understood (especially within academic contexts) as a human constant. Studying the history of art implies that art has a history and, therefore, a historical origin. Humans are not ‘artistic’ by nature, since the begging of time. Art is a concept created by the modern West. There were no actual synonyms to the word Art in non-Western cultures and no one in Europe was even talking about such a thing until the 18th century (see Kristeller’s The Modern System of The Arts (pt. I and pt. II) and Shiner’s The Invention of Art*).

It is IRRESPONSIBLE and ANACHRONISTIC for Art HISTORIANS to say or imply that art is something that humans have always done. This is an imperialistic tendency that we need to, not only distance ourselves from, but also ACTIVELY fight against. And I stress actively fight against because these things I am writing about here have already been mentioned in academic publications from decades ago (Kristeller’s first article was published in 1951).

Since its creation, Art has existed to serve the capitalist elites (see Taylor’s Art, An Enemy of The People*). It was created by them, for them. To both serve and represent their interests. I say capitalist elites specifically because the works commissioned by the traditional nobility did not fit with our modern idea of art in their original contexts. The treasures of the French monarchy only became Art when the bourgeoisie took over and made them what they are today - the collection of an Art museum. These objects were stripped of their original meanings and became targets of ‘disinterested contemplation’ and those who see this as a revolutionary triumph over an oppressive regime conveniently forget that the reality is more complex and the same thing was also done with foreign objects stolen by the French colonisers, shortly after.

Today, many people are still asking questions like: why is Duchamp’s Fountain Art? The answer is, mainly, because this is what the elites behind our art institutions decided is art. The line between Art and non-Art is merely an institutional one. Art is an institutional system. And this is a system whose tables cannot simply be turned because, in order for Art to exist, it needs to distinguish itself from other modern categories like crafts and popular culture. The category of Art depends on this hierarchical distinction because, simply put, Art is High Culture.

This means that as long as art, as we understand it today, exists, there must also exist a privileged group that gets to draw the line between High and low culture. The cultural identity of these elites might change overtime, but their status as oppressors will always remain, within this structure. This is why the quest to ‘democratise’ art is merely reformist rather than revolutionary.

Now I am not advocating for the burning of museums, Futurism style. I do think museums are important sources of information that SHOULD BE FREE ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY ARE PUBLIC. What I am saying is that when these museums exhibit things that were not originally intended to be art as if they have always and unquestionably been so, they are making a serious mistake. They are silencing alternative narratives and disrespecting the people who created the objects they claim to be spreading knowledge about.

Regarding contemporary Art museums and galleries, I honestly think they are mostly bullshit and I make intentional efforts not to give any of my money to them (also applies to academic Art Schools). I sometimes visit them, when they are free, because I want my opinions to be informed. That said, I never pay for any tickets (they are usually even more expensive than regular museums anyway) nor do I let myself be troubled by those who think I cannot be an expert on Art with a proper opinion, if I don’t go to all these ‘landmark’ cultural events. I try not to let art snobs like Jonathan Jones dictate which cultural events are or aren’t worthy of my attention.

To conclude, History of Art as an academic discipline still has serious issues. Real History of Art should recognise that Art has a specific historical origin, and not treat it like a mysterious part of ‘human nature’.

To do leftist History of Art, nevertheless, we need to take this one step further and study the consequences of the capitalist origins of this phenomenon and how it developed from there. The impacts of its structure, the way it works, how it legitimises itself, its weaknesses, all these should be analysed in ways that will allow this phenomenon to be coherently perceived through a left-wing lens, subsequently enabling us to imagine viable alternatives to the current Art system (Richard Sennett does something like this in his book The Craftsman. If you don’t feel like reading, he also explains it beautifully in his lectures on craftsmanship available on youtube).

Also, I feel like I should mention that the mythical treatment these academics give their subject, either emphatically and intentionally or through the passive and implicit acceptance of this mythical definition, is probably one of the things that mostly contributes to the much criticised workings of our contemporary Art market. Surely, one of the reasons why artworks are sold at such exorbitant prices is because what these people are buying is not just good looking paintings. These objects are being sold as the latest, most recent pieces in the important puzzle that is Human History. Once gathered all in the correct order, these pieces are thought to reveal what it means to be Human. The ‘History’ of Art I’ve been criticising here is largely responsible for the maintenance of this profitable myth, that has been giving the powerful disproportionate control over the narratives of our collective existences.

Briefly put, there is one popular quote that nicely sums my thoughts on Art: “The Emperor has no clothes!”

Notes:

* If you don’t have access to it via your public libraries, genesis online library should have it for free download, just click here and try following the links presented (they are forced to keep changing domains because certain people don’t like it when information is too accessible).

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qqueenofhades · 6 years

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Mmmkay so it’s been A Week (From Hell) for various real life reasons and I keep trying to ignore it and do other things and surprisingly, this is... less than working. Anyway so, venting on the big blue hellsite is probably better than keeping it all in my head, because the anxiety + stress + general unfunness is pretty much tanking me right now. You are 0% obligated either to read this post or to do anything about it if you do, but yeah. There you have it?

(Rant about aforesaid shit below.)

Anyway so. I’ve mentioned the fact that I’m really close to submitting the first draft of my PhD dissertation, which is really cool and something that I’m definitely proud of. However, the finishing stress is basically The Worst and I am so exhausted because I’ve worked on this thing for literally three years now and I can barely summon up any desire to look at the damn thing, much less go through and do the final edits/etc before I send it off to my supervisors. I’m almost done and it’s close and there are like a few finicky things but... god I just can’t do it anymore? I just... am so done with it (as most PhD students are by this point) and can’t focus and don’t wantttt.

Plus, it will be submitted at the end of May, and because you have to allow two months for it to be read in the first instance, let alone any corrections etc after that, I will be graduating in December rather than July. This is... well, it is what it is and I can’t control that, and I want to do things properly and not half-ass it at the end, but it royally shits over my ability to apply for this year’s round of postdocs/early career fellowships/all the other bullshit roulette of applications that you have to do as an academic, because they basically want you to have the PhD in hand by September (when most of the deadlines are) and yeah, I won’t until December. So that basically fucks me out of a year of applications (I’ll see what I can do, but yeah), and pushes me back to where I can start looking for the next solid step. I’m essentially completely in limbo at the moment with zero certainty and no money and a shit ton of anxiety and nothing either secured or that I can really secure, and...

Yeah. The no money part. It’s been up and down for a while, because that’s just Da PhD student life, and my parents have helped out a lot over the last year, but for various reasons, including medical bills for my mom etc, they’re not really in a position to do that any more. I’m trying to be sensible about this but I’m basically also freaking out because I have enough money to pay like... one more month of rent (and maybe one bill after that) and then... zippo. I am working really hard trying to line up a summer job, but because I have work restrictions on my visa/am not a UK citizen, that is probably going to play havoc with who is willing to hire me (because Brexit! Take a shot). I have worked as much as I have been able over the last three years (teaching at the university + in the education outreach office + private tutoring), so it’s not like I have no UK work experience, but also even getting hired somewhere part-time may be a challenge. I can’t teach again until October, and even if I get two classes, that still leaves me with three months of... essentially zero income.

I am going to go to the university advice centre on Monday and basically explain my situation and see if they can point me in a useful direction, and make all other reasonable efforts to support myself. But I’m also just finishing a PhD dissertation and am ragged and exhausted and shot mentally, and this is just taking a lot of spoons to deal with (plus the imminent panic of probably being homeless...) so yeah. My parents are giving all this well-meant “just do your best!/things will work out!” advice and I am... well, I’ve had a complicated relationship with them, and it’s gotten a lot better, and as I said, they’ve done a lot for me already. But also I’m frustrated with them because WHAT I REALLY NEED IS MAYBE NOT TO BE FUCKING HOMELESS?? AND THAT WOULD BE NICE?? MAYBE??? ESPECIALLY TRYING TO FINISH A PHD AND REGRETTING ALL MY LIFE CHOICES TO GET INTO ACADEMIA BECAUSE IT’S TOTAL SHIT AND I WON’T GET AN APPOINTMENT ANYWHERE AND AM CLEARLY AN IDIOT AND...

(whoof okay. I just had to get that off my chest, apparently.)

I absolutely HATE having to ask people for anything, especially with things like money. I’ve had to do it a few times before, and the “you’re a burden”/”you’re greedy”/”you’re not working enough”/”you don’t deserve to be helped this much” voices are real, and it sucks. Because I’ve been working as much as I possibly can, and it never feels like enough, and I’ve had ten years of bad or at least very iffy mental health that is a struggle to live with, and it’s... anyway. I’ve spent this entire week basically crashing and trying to distract myself and do fannish stuff to keep my mind off it, and I’ve done a few things like look into options and apply for jobs and etc. There’s MAYBE the possibility of yet another student loan (I mean what the hell, I’ll be in debt until I die, what does it matter?) but that also involves having to ask people to be involved in it, and feeling like I’ve already asked enough, and...I honestly don’t know. It would be tricky as a PhD non-citizen student. I’ll try it if I have to, but... again, it’s so much extra stress and it’s just feeling incredibly, incredibly overwhelming and like I can see no path to the end of the year with my sanity and general basic everyday life intact. I’ve also applied for some other things that have not worked out, and some things that I was hoping would come through didn’t, and....

... Anyway. Well. I have a kofi account if you wanna toss some pennies at me, a patreon, and I also have a paypal. I don’t want to give that out publicly since it’s linked to my institutional email, but I can give it privately. Again, I hate, hate that being the fact, but...also, I have to try everything that I can think of, and I like to think I’m someone whose stuff is generally enjoyed, so there’s that.

If you read to the end of this, bless you. Have a cookie.

#hilary for ts #personal #school stuff #real life shit

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96thdayofrage · 3 years

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I’m not trying to hide my personal beliefs about these people in some pseudo high-minded analysis that purports to be about something else.

If, however, you’re looking for that sort of thing (that is, if you’re looking for an example of an actual hit piece!), you will surely find no greater example than the Harvard Kennedy School’s Disinformation creep: ADOS and the strategic weaponization of breaking news.

As far as hit pieces about the American Descendants of Slavery movement go, Disinformation creep is the one that really aspires to a kind of hang-that-sucker-up-on-the-refrigerator worthiness. It’s Harvard-certified, after all! And gosh, if there were ever an institutional badge with which all ten (ten!) authors of Disinformation creep could dazzle everyone in the rancid social-professional hierarchy they are all so obviously and desperately trying to climb, it’s certainly Harvard U.

But in fact the imprimatur of Harvard on Disinformation creep seems to serve exactly one function: to discourage the reader of the study from considering the fact that what he or she holds in their hands is utterly dishonest horseshit, a bizarre medley of unambiguous lies produced by people (again, ten people!) whose need to bathe in Harvard’s artificial validation seemingly trumped their felt responsibility to adhere to even the most basic and minimal set of ethics and standards in their chosen field of scholarly publishing.

I have literally no idea where to even begin in terms of communicating the enormity of Disinformation creep’s failure. Do you know the GIF where a cat tries to leap from a dresser to a bed and stalls out about midway and just sort of belly-flops onto the floor? That’s how Disinformation creep performs.

It is a monument to unsuccessfulness, and on every single one of its sixteen pages there is evidence of intellectual bankruptcy of the absolute highest order.

The forthcoming official rebuttal from the ADOS Advocacy Foundation does an excellent job at identifying each of these numerous lies and idiocies and countering them accordingly, but I think the report’s grand stupidity and essential hollowness can really be distilled to a single aspect of “Figure 1”.

The above graph from Disinformation creep provides a visual representation of the daily number of tweets “specifically using the #ADOS hashtag” over an 11-month period. These tweets are what the authors use to assert that there is an observable pattern of high Twitter activity within the ADOS ‘network’ around “real-world events” (e.g. MLK Day; Chadwick Boseman’s death; Kamala Harris announced as Biden’s VP pick, etc.), and that the content of the tweets on these days reveals how the “ADOS network strategically uses breaking news events to discourage Black voters from voting for the Democratic party.”

OK. Welp. By including screenshots of some of these tweets in the graph, the authors allow us to see for ourselves the kind of content they supposedly carefully analyzed in order to support their hypothesis. Notably, on August 2, the second largest spike in tweets using “#ADOS” is shown to have occurred. The authors identify a total of ~7,000 posts that day.

Incomprehensibly, the authors used a tweet about a cryptocurrency scam that translates to “‘The question is quickly answered’: many French #teens have dropped out of school, thinking to become [stock] #trader[s] in buying #formation kits. They fell into the trap of #Melius, based in #Dubai and known by other names. L’AMF and #Miviludes are seized.”

In French, “ados” means “teens”. And because the social media staffer at Mediavenir — when they were writing that tweet — slapped a hashtag in front of it, it eventually came to be swept up into Disinformation creep’s “dAtA sAmPLe sEt” despite having literally nothing what-so-fucking-ever to do with the actual #ADOS political movement which Harvard is asking the public to trust that they have specifically and diligently studied.

How does this happen? How does this glaringly and utterly irrelevant tweet manage to be not just included in the dataset but held up as somehow representative of the black-targeted misinformation content dump that the authors claim defines the ‘ADOS network’ on ‘high-activity days’? What about other tweets that include “#ADOS” and which similarly have absolutely no relation at all to the political movement, such as this one, or this one, or this one?

How many of those are part of the daily totals? I know the authors use a bunch of real fancy-sounding, applied science-y jargon in the report to describe their process (e.g .”computational grounded theory”; “structural topic modeling”; “inductive thematic analysis”), but like, despite these apparently sophisticated tools, there is still clearly a presence of laughably irrelevant tweets to be found among the collection of data.

Does it matter? Should it? Um, probably, yeah, if your intent is to not undermine your own work’s quality, to say nothing of your own dignity. More importantly, how did this get through a peer-review process? Who were the peers? Drooling invalids that were instructed to blink if they thought the study passed muster and was ready for publication? Some poor low-tier academic saps who were brought to a dingy basement somewhere in Kendall Square and made to strip down to their underwear while Harvard data experts stubbed out lit cigarettes all over their flesh and barked at them to sign off on Disinformation creep’s patently bunk methodology?

These sorts of scenarios rush in to try and explain the pure absurdity of the report, to fill in the vacuum occasioned by its vast gaping absence of basic evaluation standards in scholarly publishing, criteria that one might reasonably anticipate being insisted upon by an institution like Harvard which openly fancies itself as being like the sacred flame of academia or whatever.

Or maybe not.

Maybe you are actually not surprised at all. Maybe you know that since Disinformation creep aims to portray the #ADOS movement as irredeemably toxic simply because it represents the possibility of actual repair and freedom for the descendants of chattel slavery, Harvard would in fact happily become much more lenient and accommodating in their standards if it helps to kill the vehicle for that possibility.

After all, this is the same institution whose lawyers just successfully litigated the University’s retention of property rights to photographs of slaves following a lawsuit that was brought against Harvard by Tamara Lanier, a woman who — as a descendant of the father and daughter that are pictured — argued that she was the rightful owner of the images.

This is the same institution whose administrative staff just recently reminded the school’s highest-profile black faculty member that he could expect Harvard to extend him about as much freedom and protections in his work as a white landowner would have conferred upon his black sharecropper in the Mississippi delta in 1896.

This is Harvard, after all, and good old-fashioned racism is still very much alive and well in this vaunted cathedral of higher learning.

The hope is, I guess, that outward actions like the school’s appointment of a Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer will distract you from the institution’s complete inward deformities of racial injustice that have defined both its past and present. The hope is, I guess, that Harvard can just kind of jot off one of its total bullshit-y pronouncements of ‘solidarity’ whenever the continued fever of American racism spikes, as if the institution itself has not always been right there helping stoke the fire to its full strength in the body of society. The hope is, I guess (and Disinformation creep proves this), that Harvard will never have to confront a real, organized threat to the fact that the institution pretends not to continue to fatten itself on the misery of ADOS.

But which is why — with the abysmal failure of Disinformation creep — Harvard should be very worried. The timing of such a cack-handed, deeply stupid effort by ten writers united in their ineptness to make ADOS an object of reactionary horror could not be worse for the institution.

Let’s deny the descendants of slaves rights to photographs of their ancestors! Let’s refuse tenure consideration to one of the premiere black intellectuals in America who’s spent his career advocating for black people! Let’s mobilize in dishonesty *against* the movement now trying to secure justice for that very collective!

What a hapless, blinkered, and desperately clumsy bunch of white supremacists over there in Cambridge, huh? Pointy-headed ninnies all cloistered away from every conceivable brutal reality of ADOS life and who all seemingly decided one day that it was their God-given right to root out the seeds of possibility that the #ADOS movement is planting in this country.

This is what the academics at Harvard are doing to help America’s bottom caste as the world around these people skids into the abyss. They are publishing their little ‘scholarly articles’ replete with lies so vulgar and obvious that it stands to reason the authors involved in the writing undertook the project with one single expectation: that they would be able to freely invent whatever filth they wanted to about ADOS and no one would question a word of it simply because the report came out of Harvard.

Indeed it is a direct testament to how much contempt and disdain Harvard has for the plight of ADOS that they would even consider publishing such an obvious clown car of researchers in the first place. Fully six of these goblins have no previously published content that has been accepted into the Web of Science (which, to be kind of crude about it, you can think of as sort of like the IMDb of academics; WoS catalogues the number of citations, and thus, provides the basic metric of impact/importance of research).

In other words, these writers have about as much authority and credibility in this space as a group of elementary school children who were all collected at a rural bus stop, given pencils and notepads and juice boxes and told to ‘write about those baddies in the #ADOS movement’.

Who are these people? Are they just bored? Unloved? And how are they so very bad at what they do?

They should wake up embarrassed.

They were tasked with not even creating but just building upon one already existing lie: that the #ADOS movement is essentially an online factory of misinformation (indeed, the original architectress of that lie is Jess Aiwuyor, and Disinformation creep reads very much like a sad, dull and weird extension of her own body of work, which is essentially one sad, dull and weird neurotic meditation on ADOS).

People paid the scummy little clan of Disinformation creep writers handsomely to gussy up that original lie a little bit — to give it a little slick veneer of scientific observation — and in the end these pedantic cretins who evidently think they are so much smarter than everyone else couldn’t produce a remotely convincing or even vaguely entertaining case.

But of course Disinformation creep failed. Of course it did. And that’s because, at the end of the day, there are only so many ways to dress up what these people are really doing when they write shit like this, which is that they are trying to make the #ADOS movement the scapegoat for the deficiency-ridden politics of the Left.

That’s it.

You can distill the entire genre of anti-#ADOS ‘criticism’ down to that single impulse — that tightly wound coil of emotion, of melancholy that lives at the heart of these people’s obsessive determination to get rid of the movement. For them, #ADOS functions purely as a scapegoat for their own failed postwar utopias and workers’ revolutions. And what Disinformation creep proves is just how completely exhausted the genre already is after a mere two years. How utterly lacking it is in its efficacy.

What it proves is that the harder they try to hurriedly scuttle the most potent justice movement since the Civil Rights era off the scene, the more they manage only to reveal a basic, repugnant truth about themselves: their determination to further dispossess the very people whose suffering and deprivation they all spill so much ink over, and waste so much breath claiming to be so very outraged and heartbroken about. Just look at Harvard.

All Harvard succeeded in doing was exposing itself. It confirmed what’s becoming blindingly apparent about so very many of our elite liberal institutions in 2021: that these privilege farms don’t function all that differently than they did in the plantation days. They just as nonchalantly enrich themselves off the wholesale spoliation of ADOS, and they’ve been able to feign innocence because of a movement-free, symbolism-intoxicated climate that not just permits but encourages such despicable action.

Well, Harvard, the #ADOS Advocacy Foundation has three words for you: We’re here now.

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ithisatanytime · 3 years

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World record longest rant about jews

The differences between the genders and races make everyone uncomfortable to talk about (including myself) but they must be discussed. the people teaching you that there are no differences between the races and genders one hundred percent know that there are differences and what precisely those differences are and how to use that knowledge to shape society with the aim of causing the most damage to you and me as is possible. i know how that sounds, but its true. it starts simply enough when you hear \ some dipshit psychology professor telling you there are no biological differences between races or behavioral differences between men and women, this is so blatantly, and provably false that no one actually believes this, not even the professor xerself. at that point you might ask yourself why? this is where most people fuck up, they assume its to spare the feelings of black people or women, or transgender people, and they stop there, they dont examine whether or not thats where the motivation is coming from, if they did they would immediately realize its fucking absurd, saying that gender is a state of mind hurts a LOT of peoples feelings very badly, a lot of women dont want to change in front of a biological male or use the bathroom with one but they cannot say so in todays environment. fully half the country is christian and likely offended by this notion, why cater to such an unbelievably small portion of the populations feelings while hurting the majorities feelings? at this point you should ask where and when did these concepts emerge in america? and then you get your answer, jews. did you know that the first EVER gender re-assignment surgery was performed in germany right before the nazis rose to power? that there were books authored by jews all about transgender theory being published in the “german institute of sexology” (its real look it up), how did the german people go from being so very progressive, to literal actual nazis in the span of a few years? the answer is the german people hated all this shit, they saw little boys prostituting themselves in the city centers, medical horrors they had never dreamed possible, runaway inflation that rendered every german poor, all under the watchful eye of the jewish bolsheviks who OVERTHREW the german government and took over, the german revolution of 1919 and the birth of the weimar era, squeezed right in between world war 1 and world war 2. but apparently not worth talking about in history class. theres no way ALL THAT BULLSHIT was somehow causative for world war 2 right? i mean there’s just no way.

The jews fled to america, opened “The Frankfurt school” which was just jews handing their fellow jews masters degrees in the social sciences for a year a SINGLE YEAR of easy coursework. when one got hired onto a powerful board, like the board of psychology, he brought all of his friends in too. the rest is history, we are living in the second incarnation of the weimar era. you may be skeptical (you would be stupid not to be) but i am not just making assertions, there exists plenty of historical sources but they just didnt play this version tv or teach it in schools, because they fucking own both of those things. as far as the postwar frankfurt school stuff all that and more can be found in “the Culture of Critique” with more fucking citations than you could spin a dreidel on. in Culture of Critique the author kevin macdonal who was a psychology professor at the university of california for nine years and had already published two other widely cited books on judaism, shows how judaism is a group evolutionary strategy jews developed in diaspora (the two thousand years where they didnt steal their own country yet so they lived in other peoples) and that their evolutionary strategy is often VERY harmful to whatever people are unfortunate enough to be hosting them. seriously the book blows the whole fucking thing wide open, and every single point he makes is supported with dozens of examples and those examples are all sourced from mainstream JEWISH literature. they figured out early on that they have to control public opinion to thrive in other peoples countries (while taking advantage of them) they had thousands of years of trial and error to develop this (google “list of jewish expulsions” there are HUNDREDS) strategy and each time they were expelled from a country they tweaked the strategy a bit, its part cultural part instinctual, many of them have no idea they are even doing it! they took over the social sciences and academia in general, and they took over our mass media, from these powerful positions they shaped all of your deeply held values! so what im gonna say next will piss you off, because thats how TV raised you, and if you didnt watch tv your peers did or your parents, but they taught you that up was down, black is white, everything is an opinion except when its not!

There are measurable average differences in behavior and intelligence between both the genders and the races and no fucking shit there are, we all evolved with wildly different selection pressures! they did this in order to convince america to change its racial demographic make up and to push multiculturalism and diversity, why would they do that? because they can only thrive in multicultural societies. they look white, but they behave like jews, and as such they would stand out in an all white (or even majority white) or brown or black country, theyd be the odd man out and get caught with their hand in the cookie jar and evicted. they push the gender stuff to weaken our communities so they can outcompete us, its survival of the fittest and jewish people are one animal and everyone else is another. seriously we can measure the impact of “feminism” which was supposed to liberate women, we can measure the impact in tears, suicides, broken homes, poverty, the complete collapse of the family structure etc. women are LESS HAPPY NOW AND WE HAVE PROOF! there was at least one major study where tens of thousands of women rated their own happiness day by day over years and generations and the result might shock you, women are miserable. and even though YOU are miserable you would never agree with the data because you believe i want to take something from you. the only thing i want to take from women is the absurd expectation that they should be men, and compete with men, and derive satisfaction from the things that satisfy men. maybe one in one hundred women would be more satisfied as an aging CEO living alone with a cat, but ninety out of a hundred women will say that would satisfy them, but they wont even get that, instead they are subservient to their employer, their fucking MASTER. essentially what they did was study our psychology, and then use it to completely fuck up our mating rituals and it shows, white birth rates are WAYYYY DOWN, they arent even breeding fast enough to replace their DEATHS, in other words they are disappearing while simultaneously being replaced by non white immigrants who out breed them ten to one, not just in america but in every white western nation in the world SIMULTANEOUSLY. oh and you can just go see for yourself what groups specifically are funding these efforts, and guess what nearly ALL of them have the word jewish or israel somewhere right in the fucking name.

you were told that our gender roles and traditions were designed by the patriarchy to control you, that is FUCKING RETARDED, nearly every culture that has ever existed (there are always exceptions) has similar gender roles for men and women, and do you know why? because its evolution baby! if you were a tribe back then and you decided fuck it, women are in charge of handling war now, men stay home with the kids, what exactly do you think happened to that tribe? traditions EVOLVE, gender roles exist because THEY FUCKING WORK, if something worked better some tribe somewhere would have adopted that and owned all of our fucking asses and wed be living in a matriarchy.

The social “sciences” pay lip service to evolution but god as my witness they deny evolution more than the staunchest fundamentalist christian. the social sciences arent sciences at all in fact they are staging grounds for a venomous ideology that was designed to hurt you and it WORKED.

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femvulvaphile · 6 years

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let’s break that weird shit down, then

“We’ve been here since the beginning. I know your hate group, your little Nazi sub-sect, has this lie you like to spread that we suddenly spring into being from whole cloth in the 1970s, but that fighting all through history? WE’VE. BEEN THERE. FOR ALL OF IT.” cool but that’s literally not what I said. transwomen’s and women’s fights are inherently different. Sex-based oppression doesn’t DIRECTLY affect transwomen: you will never be shunned for menstruating, you will never be afraid of having your prepubescent vulva mutilated for the sick pleasure of a men five times your age, you will never be afraid of being impregnated against your will, or of miscarriage of a wanted child, or of all the pregnancy and birth complications who are still killing women all over the world. you will never know what it’s like to have men catcall and grope you when you’re nine years old just because your boobs already began to grow.

"The demonization of trans women is a relatively recent invention in the grand scheme of human history and it is one that you have helped re-surge into the modern world.” that’s bullshit. the “demonization” you’re talking about can refer to one of two things: either the conservative view that transwomen are “deviant men” (which I definitely agree is shitty), or the radical feminist view that transwomen retain their male socialization and so, as a group, can represent danger to women (which is backed up by research, btw, and the amount of “receipts” in the form of news reports of transwomen hurting and murdering cis women AND in the unending threats and harassment that radfems receive online and irl).

"The idea of ASAB and tying it to gender in some inviolate and unchangeable way is something colonizing white people brought to this country, and others they invaded.” cool but that’s bullshit? pretty much every culture on earth has a history of identifying biological sex and applying sociological roles to them. that’s not a white invention, that’s not the fruit of colonialism. the concept of “gender” as behaviors and roles based on reproductive function has existed for as long as people have existed. some cultures have stricter rules about them, others are more loose. some cultures refuse to acknowledge non-conforming people as their “original gender”, and then you have things like two-spirit or hijras.

"Whether you realize it or not, and…let’s be honest, you probably do, your actions, your hate group, is just a laser-guided subsection of what fascism and white supremacy stands for.” wtf tho. fascists and white supremacists and nazi want a “pure” world without “lesser” groups, like black people, jewish people, homosexuals, gnc people. how is female-only radical feminism the same? are you aware that plenty of radical feminists are woc themselves, and even jewish? are you aware that the vast majority of people you’d call “terfs” aren’t even american, or english speakers? we literally just want men to stop fucking murdering us.

“Without colonization, without white supremacy, your argument, your constant, hammering on “male” as if to conjure some demon from the word, would mean nothing.” male violence has been a reality in human history. it’s not a theory, it’s not up to debate. it’s a fact. you know it is, according to your original post talking about men posing the most danger to transwomen. women all over the world are victims of men. it doesn’t change whether we talk about it, or use the words male, men, amab.

"I don’t mean that in the rhetorical sense, I mean literally, your words would not have a cogent basis without that.” again, bullshit. male violence is everywhere, in every culture, in every part of the world, regardless of how much contact with europen colonization the culture has had. japanese men are violent, russian men are violent, french men are violent, english men are violent, american men are violent, cuban men are violent, argentinian men are violent, brazilian men are violent. nazis didn’t invent misogyny.

“How fucking dare you invoke my dead sisters, how fucking dare you bring up that most of us getting murdered are PoC, while peddling Nazi approved propaganda.” uh. it’s “nazi approved propaganda” to say that women face violence from men and therefore need safe spaces from them? and I brought up the groups that murdered transwomen belong to because YOUR GROUP likes using them, using your so-called dead sisters, as argument points, as proof that a white middle class educated men with a dress and lipstick is somehow more oppressed than any woman on earth.

“Meanwhile, asshole,” oh cool name calling when I wrote a relatively calm and non-offensive post. “I was talking about SHARED SPACES. LGBT focused communities, the ones you are perpetually try to focus trans lesbians out of because you view us as the worst of what you already consider the worst.” yeah, maybe we wouldn’t need to do that if “lesbian” transwomen could stop demanding so much from women, or if they’d stop claiming protagonism when they don’t even experience SAME-SEX ATTRACTION, which historically has been, you know, the entire defining poing for “lgbt” people.

“You didn’t even notice it, did you? You were just launching into Pre-Written Terf Rhetoric #5 without so much as reading what I actually. Fucking. Said.” dude, you’re calling me a nazi literally just because I said women deserve female-only spaces and transwomen should create their own safe spaces away from men instead of demanding entry and protection from women.

"Your insistence that we’re “straight men” only serves to try and push us out of those communities as well." you have more in common with straight men than with lesbians, tho. you don’t experience same-sex attraction, you’re not female, you can impregnate a female lesbian (depending on transition specifics, but let’s be honest: the big problem is the transwomen who claim “there’s no need to need to transition bc my dick is a woman’s dick”), if you’re not “passing” you don’t need to fear homophobic violence from strangers.

“Jesus fuck, like did you even notice that was the fucking point? Like your shoving us aside as non-women is already fucked up but that wasn’t even the point of this particular post.” the point of your post was vilifying women who question the notion that “transwomen are exactly the same as women”. the point of your post was putting the blame on women, “terfs”, for what men do.

"The idea that men view us as also men is so beyond laughable I can’t even properly convey it.” they view you as “DEFECTIVE” men. they definitely don’t view you as women. men are violent towards you as a result of toxic masculinity - a non-conforming male is a threat to their notion of rigid male-female roles. the violence towards you is closer in motivation to the violence towards gay men, rather than the one towards women.

"But I’m just going to say: You don’t live our lives. You don’t live our experiences.” yes. just like you don’t live the lives of women. which is exactly why I said transwomen do deserve safe spaces, but not by invading female-only safe spaces.

"If you don’t know how wrong you are it’s because you’re incapable of treating our words as anything but the words of the target of your hate and thus discarded.” you’re lumping me in with nazis (I’m a latina gender-non-conforming lesbian, I’d be raped and killed by actual nazis faster than you could type “op is a terf”), refusing to actually ACKNOWLEDGE the things I said, bringing up way more arguments than the ones on your original post, and then blaming me for not being able to read your mind.

“The power you hold is that you have been aligning yourself with right-wing christian groups,” bullshit. again: women can’t even get men to stop raping us. how exactly do you think we have any power, any voice, over THE most misogynistic men on the planet?

"the power you hold is that your ilk has been speaking to audiences wherever they can find them in academia for decades,” again, bullshit. women have been in academia for, like, two years, in comparison to how long men have been dominating every public and private space.

"the power you hold is that you went into the communities that might have helped us stay alive and sowed false accusations to turn others against us,” b u l l s h i t. YOU came into OUT communities demanding we treat you as equals, when we are observably NOT equals. sex-based oppression doesn’t affect transwomen the same way it does women. men’s violence is distinctly different based on your sex.

"the power you hold is in helping, insidiously, to uphold the institutional biases that keep us marginalized, alone, and dying.” the same can be said of modern trans rights activists, tho. you’re all contributing to the strengthening of gender as a hierarchy - and not because you need to conform to survive. no, your original message (the one we can still hear from drag queens and transvestites from stonewall, for instance, that your kind likes to claim as “transwomen”) has been corrupted to the point where people look at a feminine gay boy and tell him he must be trans, he must transition, he must be a woman because he likes makeup and is attracted to men. your kind tells parents of vulnerable children that their little boys and girls will KILL THEMSELVES if they don’t take hormones as soon as possible. your group tells lesbians they need to suck dick to be proper lesbians. your group supports (and breeds) more murderers, rapists, and pedophiles than radical feminism could. your group tells women of color, lesbians, survivors of all sorts of male violence, that they’re the problem. you tell us we’re even worse than men. you tell us to die, you threaten us with rape, with baseball bats. you punch sixty year old women who dare take a picture of people trying to silence women. you rape and murder a twelve year old girl. you rape and forcibly impregnate a female trans person, and then brag about it. you support rapists and pedophiles being housed in women’s prison because of their “gender feels”.

you tell women to shut up about their own experiences. you tell women they’re not the “right kind” of women. you tell women they’re not woman “enough”. you tell them to sacirfice themselves for yet another male.

“And yes, before you even start, I’m blocking you. I don’t debate Nazis or Nazi bootlicks.” still nowhere near being a nazi, but alright.

bonus:

“also do they just have a terf blog name generator somewhere, i swear all terf blogs read like a bunch of synonyms for vagina and spellings of rad and possibly a wolf reference or phile or fetishist, all put in a random name generator” that’s hilarious to men because I literally saved this url after I seeing an asshole claim that lesbians aren’t allowed to call themselves lesbians if they don’t suck dick, and that they’re actually vagina fetishists. the person used -phile on something, I can’t recall what, and I immediately thought “hmm, yes. I love vulvas. I’m a vulvaphile. A female vulvaphile.”

#I was gonna ignore it bc who cares #but the insistence on calling ''terfs'' nazis?#and the refusal to actually respond to what I said?#eh well #poppy tag

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