Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘gaslighting

Mother’s Day Links!

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* Happy Mother’s Day! You Will Hate Your Husband After Your Kid Is Born.

* Humbled to be a finalist for a 2017 Locus Award.

I’d like to apologize in advance, but after consulting with my colleagues in other departments at Reality Publishing Corporation, I’m afraid we can’t publish your book, Zero Day: The Story of MS17-010, as things stand. However, I’d like to add that it was a gripping read, very well written, and we hope to see more from you in future! The World Is Getting Hacked. Why Don’t We Do More to Stop It?

It is the iPad that sits on a counter at the entrance, with a typed little note: “Here is a glimpse of what you’re missing over at the main terminal right now.”

* A pair of provocatively negative takes on Donna Haraway’s recent work.

Meet The Techno-Libertarians Praying for Dystopia.

Genetically engineered humans will arrive sooner than you think. And we’re not ready.

Transforming deaf culture at Gallaudet.

* The future is here, it just hasn’t been properly risk assessed yet.

* Teeth and the class struggle.

Why Milwaukee is among top cities for sex trafficking, what’s being done about it.

* Exploitation and Abuse at the Chicken Plant.

When Will Republicans Stand Up to Trump? Will they even ever criticize him on the record? Oh honey. No one in politics has less courage or shame than Paul Ryan. But the real heart of anti-anti-Trumpism is the delight in the frustration and anger of his opponents. Mr. Trump’s base is unlikely to hold him either to promises or tangible achievements, because conservative politics is now less about ideas or accomplishments than it is about making the right enemies cry out in anguish. How Worried Should I Be? And just in case you need the reminder: The FBI Is Not Your Friend.

* Cuomo 2020!

At 3 a.m., NC Senate GOP strips education funding from Democrats’ districts.

In Wisconsin, ID law proved insurmountable for many voters. Meet Trump’s voter suppression task force.

“The Rent Eats First”: Fighting Gentrification in California.

* Gaslighting and Dolezal/Tuvel (and academia more generally).

* Abolish Jeff Sessions.

Jason Chaffetz Has Been Telling House Republicans He Will Join Fox News. There should be a ten-year ban on politicians and political staff going to media (and vice versa), like with lobbying and the military.

* Man who doesn’t understand the first thing about diabetes says diabetics deserve to be sick.

For 15 years, Pixar was the best on the planet. Then Disney bought it.

Depletion of dissolved oxygen in our oceans, which can cause dead zones, is occurring much faster than expected, a new study finds.

New York Times publisher sends personal appeal to those who canceled over Bret Stephens, then publishes garbage column by Erick Ericsson for some reason. Six Ways The New York Times Could Genuinely Make Its Op-Ed More Representative of America.

* As far as I’m concerned they should do the whole movie this way.

* No! That’s not true! That’s impossible!

Yale History’s Major Comeback.

* The future looks bright. Hunt Tories, not foxes. Fandom, or, academia. Still one of my favorite sets of images on the Internet. Tumblr, perfected.

* And at least there’s something to look forward to.

Thnksgvn Links

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* Once again, this year as every year, we give thanks.

* CFP: SFRA 2016, in Liverpool, UK.

The first space age was about politics. The second space age was about science. The third space age is about money.

How to Read Žižek on the Refugee Crisis.

The basic dynamic here is that ostensibly left-wing parties have put the right wing in the driver’s seat and have no strategy other than to denounce the very right-wing racism that their preferred policies actually stoke. The refugee article aims to unmask a similar dynamic in more radical leftist circles. Among leftist commentators, academics, and online activists as well, there is an abdication of any responsible policy-making that takes actual-existing reality into account. In its place, we find only empty rhetoric aimed at guaranteeing the speaker’s ideological purity.

* xkcd has another supersize edition. Here’s what we know so far.

* Officially outsourcing all my political commentary to John Kasich.

* Some college activists think making the movement a nationally despised joke might be a tactical mistake, but opinions still differ.

* Meanwhile! Arrests Made After Protesters Destroy Part of City Christmas Tree.

Police killings since Ferguson, in one map.

The Statue of Liberty Was Originally a Muslim Woman.

* Teach the controversy: Life on Mars was ‘destroyed by nuclear attack’, says physicist – and we could be next.

Baba Yaga’s Guide To Feminism.

* The Fragile Framework: Can Nations Unite to Save Earth’s Climate? Spoiler alert: I have some terrible news.

* Disability and science fiction fandom.

Jessica Jones is a Primer on Gaslighting, and How to Protect Yourself Against It. How Jessica JonesAbsorbed the Anxieties of Gamergate.

Internet trolls have learned to exploit our over-militarized police. It’s a crime that’s hard to stop — and hard to prosecute.

Kinsey Was Wrong: Sexuality Isn’t Fluid.

* How Chicago Tries to Cover Up a Police Execution.

* Against Ta-Nehisi Coates?

In a Crazy Turn of Events, Viral Sensation “Phuc Dat Bich” Says It Was All a Hoax. Is nothing sacred?

* Neil Blomkamp wants to fix the biggest mistake in the Aliens franchise: the death of Newt.

* The law, in its majestic equality, permits rich and poor alike to sleep outside.

Every Hint and Clue Hidden in the Captain America: Civil War Trailer.

* And today in data visualization: The Magnificent Bears of the Glorious Nation of Finland.

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Wherein a Former Academic Blogger Emerges from Book Jail, Weary and Bleary-Eyed, to Discover He Has 300 Open Tabs

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* I had a short interview with the writing center journal Praxis go up this week: “Working Out What’s True and What Isn’t.”

* Can Faculty Deal with Policy Drift? A List of Options.

We know what happened next. After 2008, this paradigm has made it easier for governors and legislatures to cut and not restore, since it established a “new normal” that defined down the limits of reasonable budget requests.  The results have been predictable.  A recent report concluded that “forty-seven states — all except Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming — are spending less per student in the 2014-15 school year than they did at the start of the recession.”

* University Bureaucracy as Organized Crime. An addendum.

Now That We Have Transformed Our Institutions to Compete with the University of Phoenix, It’s on Life Support.

* Academic Freedom among the Very Serious People.

If Colonialism Was The Apocalypse, What Comes Next?

* Digitizing the fanzine collection at the University of Iowa’s science fiction collection.

* Samuel Delany and the Past and Future of Science Fiction.

An Astrobiologist Asks a Sci-fi Novelist How to Survive the Anthropocene.

* Ursula K. Le Guin on China Miéville’s latest.

* “City of Ash,” by Paolo Bacigalupi. Part of a “cli-fi” series at Medium alongside this essay from Atwood: “It’s Not Climate Change, It’s Everything Change.”

19490141502_c48e8b967b_o* Modernist — really, brutalist — sandcastles.

* Early reports are calling Fantastic Four the worst superhero hero movie of all time. Grantland elegizes. Josh Trank points the finger.

* Steven Salaita has won a major victory against UIUC, on the same day that Chancellor Phyllis Rise resigns (to a $400K resignation bonus) amid the revelation that she misused her private email to secure his firing.

Fired University of Akron painter spills the details of president’s $951,824 house remodel. Meanwhile, on the other side of town…

Bullying, I propose, represents a kind of elementary structure of human domination. If we want to understand how everything goes wrong, this is where we should begin.

* The Problem We All Live With.

* This is the sort of adjunct-issue reporting that always frustrates me: it seems to me that it is engaging with the issue entirely on an emotional, rather than structural, basis, in the process more or less accepting entirely the think-like-an-administrator logic of forced choices that paints every laborer as the enemy of every other.

Refusing to foreground the actual monetary costs of academic labor in the current economy is a kind of grad-student gaslighting, and a form of abuse.

Why Your Rent Is So High and Your Pay Is So Low.

* The art of the rejection letter. Personally I think the only thing that is ever going to approach “universally acceptable” here is a very short “We’re sorry, but the position has now been filled.”

* Shoutouts to my particular demographic: A paper forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Research identifies a segment of customers, dubbed the “harbingers of failure,” with an uncanny knack for buying new products that were likely to flop.

India’s Auroville was envisioned as an international community free of government, money, religion, and strife. It hasn’t exactly worked out quite as planned.

* Students under surveillance.

Instead of a multiple-choice test, try ending the semester with one last, memorable learning experience.

Nevada is the uncanny locus of disparate monuments all concerned with charting deep time, leaving messages for future generations of human beings to puzzle over the meaning of: a star map, a nuclear waste repository and a clock able to keep time for 10,000 years—all of them within a few hours drive of Las Vegas through the harsh desert.

The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here.

Startups have figured out how to remove carbon from the air. Will anyone pay them to do it?

California Has Lost the Equivalent of an Entire Year’s Worth of Rain.

* Ghost Town Emerges As Drought Makes Nevada’s Lake Mead Disappear.

The Bureaucrats Who Singled Out Hiroshima for Destruction.

* Going to give this effort a C-: Environmental Protection Agency Dumps a Million Gallons of Orange Mine Waste into a Colorado River.

Jimmy Carter: The U.S. Is an “Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery.”

Here Are the Internal Documents that Prove Uber Is a Money Loser. How Uber hides behind its algorithm.

iTunes Really Is That Bad.

* “You May Know Me from Such Roles as Terrorist #4.”

There have been 204 mass shootings — and 204 days — in 2015 so far.

Vermont Struggles With Renewables.

Eight Years After Student’s Unjust Expulsion from Valdosta State U., $900K Settlement Ends ‘Barnes v. Zaccari.’

Doug Williams used to give polygraph exams. Now he’s going to prison for teaching people how to beat them.

* Elsewhere on the legal beat: Lawyer seeks trial by combat to resolve lawsuit.

* Fitbit as confession.

No Charges For Two Officers Who Backed False Version Of University Of Cincinnati Shooting. Alabama officer kept job after proposal to murder black man and hide evidence. How a philosophy professor with ‘monklike tendencies’ became a radical advocate for prison reform. Univ. of California Academic Workers’ Union Calls on AFL-CIO To Terminate Police Union’s Membership.

* Instapundit is terrible, but I think he’s right about jury nullification. More here.

* Campus police, off campus. How the 1960s created campus cops.

* The Milwaukee Bucks boondoggle makes Last Week Tonight.

* Transportation research group discovers 46% of Milwaukee’s roads are in poor condition. I hope it studies the other 54% next.

* The Milwaukee Lion could be an escaped exotic pet rather than a wandering cougar.

MarshallProj_2015-Aug-07* Milwaukee cops are going to GPS-tag cars rather than engage in high-speed pursuit.

* Milverine: Behind the Brawn.

* Chomsky in Jacobin.

Watch what happens when regular people try to use handguns in self-defense.

* Tressie McMillan Cottom: “I Am Not Well.”

* Good kids make more money. Bad kids make more money. Losers make more money. So that should clear it up.

* Game of the weekend: Ennuigi.

* House of Picards.

* Vox interviews Bernie Sanders.

* Two centuries of Chicago’s rivers being super gross.

* On Clinton and Cosby. Speaking of which, my hiatus also covered the amazing New York Magazine spread of the accusers.

* On the other side of things, there’s this from Freddie deBoer, on sexual assault accusations and the left.

* Gambling! In a casino! Wealth doesn’t trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals.

* Gasp! Middle class parents use ‘glass floor’ to ensure their children succeed over poorer peers, report finds.

* What could explain it? Millennials Who Are Thriving Financially Have One Thing in Common.

At 12 years and 9 months, she remains the youngest girl ever executed in the United States.

* I shared What Happens One Hour After Drinking A Can Of Coke last week, now I’m duly shamed.

* Science ain’t an exact science with these clowns: When Researchers State Goals for Clinical Trials in Advance, Success Rates Plunge.

* Is fat a sixth taste?

What on Earth is Fake Cream Made Out Of?

Man born with “virtually no brain” has advanced math degree.

* Chaos on the Bridge: When Gene Roddenberry Almost Killed Star Trek.

A fucking interesting history of swearing on television.

* The prisoner’s dilemma as pedagogy.

* Class and free will.

Dystopic stories are attractive. They appeal to a readership that feels threatened — economically in an age of downward mobility, and politically in an age of terror. But we need to be asking what kinds of stories about living and working with media these influential narratives offer. How do the stories orient young peoples to the potential power and danger of media use? What kinds of literacy practices are sponsored in them?

Kids in the Aftermath: Katrina in Young Adult Fiction.

The Cherry’s on Top: Celibacies and Surface Reading.

 

* …there is a profound link between literature and evil.

* A brief history of Tijuana Bibles.

Man Creating Women’s-History Museum Decides Last Minute to Make It Serial-Killer Museum Instead.

Are you holding your own daughter back? Here are 5 ways to raise girls to be leaders.

* The cutthroat world of competitive bagpiping.

* The arc of history is long, but it bends towards degoogleplusification.

The long, repressed history of black leftism.

* The austerity delusion.

* Clickhole has the series bible for Breaking Bad. Amazing how much the series changed from its original conception.

* Also at Clickhole: 7 Words That Have No English Translation.

* A dark, gritty Little Women reboot.

* Another scene from the dark, gritty Subway reboot.

* A delightful pitch for a Matrix prequel.

* There is hope — plenty of hope, infinite hope — but not for us.

* The future looks great: Facebook patents technology to help lenders discriminate against borrowers based on social connections.

* Woody Allen finally found a way to characterize his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn that’s even more sickening than “the heart wants what it wants.”

Twitter Asks: What if Hogwarts Were an HBCU?

* #FreeJudyGreer.

* #FreeBritneySpears.

* #BanCarAlarms.

* Do people start off crazy, or just end up that way?

What’s it like to be a top Magic: The Gathering player?

How do you plan on spending the $1 tax cut WI Republicans gave you?

* Everyday evil.

* Review is back. Life is sweet again. Four and a half stars.

* PS: Andy Daly and Paul F. Tompkins interview each other in honor of the occasion.

When your self-driving car crashes, you could still be the one who gets sued.

* And don’t even get me started on what happens if your robot umpire crashes.

* The World Turned Upside Down, or, The Folly of Man Exemplified in Twelve Comical Relations upon Uncommon Subjects.

* The latest in Twitter’s executives working overtime to destroy it.

* Decadence watch: KFC’s new chicken bucket is also a Bluetooth photo printer.

* Decadence watch: Solitaire now has in-app purchases.

* statementofteachingphilosophy.pdf.

* Say goodbye to Jon Stewart the Adam Kotsko way.

* Because you demanded it! Soviet-era erotic alphabet book from 1931.

* And you don’t have to take my word for it! That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket.

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Written by gerrycanavan

August 8, 2015 at 2:32 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Weekend Mega-Links, Please Use Responsibly

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In 2015, we will open applications for Tiptree Fellowships. Fellowships will be $500 per recipient and will be awarded each year to two creators who are doing work that pushes forward the Tiptree mission. We hope to create a network of Fellows who will build connections, support one another, and find collaborators.

* It’s a small exhibit, but I really liked A Whole Other World: Sub-Culture Craft at the Racine Art Museum, as well as the Consumer Couture exhibit running at the same time.

A new economics paper has some old-fashioned advice for people navigating the stresses of life: Find a spouse who is also your best friend. Hey, it worked for me!

* I went off on a little bit of a tear about dissertation embargoes and grad-school gaslighting the other day: part 1, part 2. Some “highlights”:

* Next week in DC! Resolved: Technology Will Take All Our Jobs. A Future Tense Debate.

Will Your Job Be Done By A Machine? NPR has the official odds.

What If Everybody Didn’t Have to Work to Get Paid?

Shields said these perceptions of race were the focus of his work and he aimed to deconstruct them through imagery that reflected a striking role-reversal. Not only do the individuals in this particular lynching image reflect a distinct moment or period in history, they are positioned as opposing players in a way that delivers a different message than those previously shared. This one of a cop is amazing:

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19 Pop Songs Fact-Checked By Professors.

For those who didn’t go to prestigious schools, don’t come from money, and aren’t interested in sports and booze—it’s near impossible to gain access to the best paying jobs.

So, going by (17) and (18), we’re on the receiving end of a war fought for control of our societies by opposing forces that are increasingly more powerful than we are.

New Grads Can’t Really Afford To Live Anywhere, Report Finds.

Uber hard at work on effort to replace drivers with machine.

Uber: Disability Laws Don’t Apply to Us.

* The prison-industrial complex, by the numbers. Cleveland police accept DOJ rules you can’t believe they didn’t already have to follow. Charging Inmates Perpetuates Mass Incarceration. The Price of Jails: Measuring the Taxpayer Cost of Local Incarceration. How to lock up fewer people. The Myth of the Hero Cop.

* Poverty, by the numbers.

* Science Fiction: For Slackers?

CGI7dHpU0AAOtHr* Presenting Matt Weiner’s wish-list for the final season of Mad Men.

How to be a fan of problematic things.

* Bernie as the official opposition. And then there’s the issue of the bench.

* A new day for the culture war, or, the kids are all right.

* Can Americans update their ideas about war?

* “I often wonder if my forefathers were as filled with disgust and anger when they thought of the people they were fighting to protect as I am.” Would you like to know more?

The Political Economy of Enrollment.

Now, the UC administration claims that the cost of instruction is greater than in-state tuition. But these claims are at best debatable and at worst simply not credible, because as Chris Newfield and Bob Samuels have shown they include research and other non-educational expenses in order to inflate the alleged instructional cost. (It’s gotten to the point that, as Samuelsobserves, the administration literally claims it costs $342,500 to educate one medical student for one year.) According to Newfield, a more reasonable estimate of the cost of instruction for undergraduates would be somewhere between 40-80 percent of the administration’s figures. Even using the higher rate, then, the administration still generates a net profit for every extra student they bring in.

LIBOR for the universities?

UW System faculty’s role in chancellor picks could be diminished. Also let’s make tenure not a thing. Also, no standards for teachers, just while we’re at it.

* Meanwhile, Wisconsin to burn $250M on famously losing basketball team.

Board of Governors discontinues 46 degree programs across UNC system.

How Poor And Minority Students Are Shortchanged By Public Universities.

How NYU squeezes billions from its students—and where that money goes.

What’s Left After Higher Education Is Dismantled.

Midcareer Melancholy: life as an associate professor.

A Top Medical School Revamps Requirements To Lure English Majors.

* Academia and legitimation crisis. This situation (and distrust/abuses from both sides) is going to get worse yet.

* Parenthood (and especially motherhood) in the academy.

* The cost of an adjunct.

* On opposing capitalism on its good days, too.

This supposed opposition serves the interests of both sides, however violent their conflict may appear. Helped by their control of the means of communication, they appropriate the general interest, forcing each person to make a false choice between “the West or else Barbarism”. In so doing, they block the advent of the only global conviction that could save humanity from disaster. This conviction—which I have sometimes called the communist idea—declares that even in the movement of the break with tradition, we must work to create an egalitarian symbolisation that can guide, regulate, and form the stable subjective underpinning of the collectivisation of resources, the effective disappearance of inequalities, the recognition of differences—of equal subjective right—and, ultimately, the withering away of separate forms of authority in the manner of the state.

Ecology against Mother Nature: Slavoj Žižek on Molecular Red.

* Stunning photos of the California drought.

The Secret History of Ultimate Marvel, the Experiment That Changed Superheroes Forever.

Why Are You Still Washing Your Clothes In Warm Water?

Rickrolling is sexist, racist and often transphobic in context.

Carbon Nanotubes Were An Ancient Superweapon.

Amazon rolls out free same-day delivery for Prime members.

* Breaking: The Web is not a post-racial utopia.

* Breaking: it’s all downhill from 29.

* The waning thrills of CGI.

* Horrible: DC to Begin Placing Ads on Story Pages. Even more horrible: the end of Convergence is the dumbest universal reboot yet.

* The science of awe.

The Best and Worst Places to Grow Up: How Your Area Compares. Interesting, but really flattens a lot. It’s not geography that constrains kids’ futures, it’s class.

* The World Cup and prison labor. The World Cup and slavery. The World Cup and total universal corruption.

* They say Charter Cable is even worse than Time Warner. I don’t believe such a thing is possible.

Five hundred new fairytales discovered in Germany.

U.S. Preparation Lagging to Battle Potentially Devastating EMP.

The Ethical Game: Morality in Postapocalyptic Fictions from Cormac McCarthy to Video Games.

10 bizarre baseball rules you won’t believe actually existed.

* Congrats to John Scalzi.

So you’re related to Charlemagne? You and every other living European…

Timeline of the American Transgender Movement.

* Judith Butler: I do know that some people believe that I see gender as a “choice” rather than as an essential and firmly fixed sense of self. My view is actually not that. No matter whether one feels one’s gendered and sexed reality to be firmly fixed or less so, every person should have the right to determine the legal and linguistic terms of their embodied lives. So whether one wants to be free to live out a “hard-wired” sense of sex or a more fluid sense of gender, is less important than the right to be free to live it out, without discrimination, harassment, injury, pathologization or criminalization – and with full institutional and community support. That is most important in my view.

* The PhD: wake up sheeple! Still more links after the image, believe it or not.

phd052215s* Muppet Babies and Philosophy.

* Broken clock watch: Instapundit says fire administrators to fix higher ed.

* Became self-aware, etc: campus climate surveys said to be triggering.

Penn State administrators announced Wednesday that a fraternity that maintained a well-curated secret Facebook page full of pictures of unconscious, naked women will lose its official recognition until 2018, pretty much ruining senior year.

The Proof That Centrism is Dead.

* Against consensus.

* Understanding Sad Girl Theory.

* Dialectics of union activism. I’ve been really fascinated by what’s been going on at Gawker Media.

Someone Has Done A Statistical Analysis Of Rape In Game Of Thrones.

* The arc of history is long, but that Florida community college will no longer force its students to practice transvaginal ultrasounds on each other.

* Trigger warnings, still good pedagogy, still bad administrative policy.

* A fetish is born: Porn actors must wear protective goggles during shoots.

* Ring Theory: The Hidden Artistry of the Star Wars Prequels.

* This roundtable from Amy Schumer, Lena Dunham, and others on sexism and comedy is pretty dynamite.

* The age of miracles: New Alzheimer’s treatment fully restores memory function.

* How to Bash Bureaucracy: Evan Kindley on David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules.

The ongoing legacy of the great satanic sex abuse panic.

* Teaching pro-tips from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

* Google Drought Truth.

Moore’s Law Keeps Going, Defying Expectations.

* The morality of robot war. Counterpoint: Killer robots will leave humans ‘utterly defenceless’ warns professor.

* Parental leave policies don’t solve capitalism. You need to solve capitalism.

* Against Mars.

The Nuclear Freeze campaign prevented an apocalypse, so can the climate movement.

* Honestly, you get used to the taste after a while.

* And at last it can be told! The real story behind the Bill Murray movie you’ve never seen.

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Written by gerrycanavan

May 29, 2015 at 2:54 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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