Today, batshit jobs are more widespread than ever. You’re likely doing a batship job if you’re working in advertising trying to maintain mass consumption, in air traffic, industrial farming and forestry, in mining, in the car industry, and first of all if you’re working in oil drilling, fracking, coal mining.
To become dilligent batshit workers we have to be trained, and we have to be able to block out the harm that our work participates in. The beauty of the school strikes is that a generation of young people are preparing themselves to refuse batshit work.
Posts Tagged ‘Indiana Jones’
Thanksgiving Links!

* It’s been a time: Health experts monitor ‘tri-demic’ as respiratory viruses spread around US. Colorado River conditions are worsening quicker than expected. Competition between respiratory viruses may hold off a ‘tripledemic’ this winter. Children’s hospitals call on Biden to declare emergency in response to ‘unprecedented’ RSV surge. How long COVID ruined my life, from crushing fatigue to brain fog. About 37% of small businesses, which between them employ almost half of all Americans working in the private sector, were unable to pay their rent in full in October. Parents are buying fewer baby clothes, a sign of deep financial distress. The world’s baby shortfall is so bad that the labor shortage will last for years, major employment firms predict. Chris Hemsworth ‘Taking Time Off,’ Discovered Genetic Predisposition for Alzheimer’s Disease: ‘I’m Going to Just Simplify.’ Et tu, Coca-Cola? Massive flock of sheep has been walking in a circle for 12 days straight in China. The Problem With Letting Therapy-Speak Invade Everything. Inside the violent, misogynistic world of TikTok’s new star, Andrew Tate. A Quarter of Americans at Risk of Winter Power Blackouts, Grid Emergencies. Stock up on bottled water and canned food, official tells Germans. What if We Cancel the Apocalypse? this comic is almost 14 years old and could have been made yesterday
* A truly obscene trend in higher ed: How Colleges and Sports-Betting Companies ‘Caesarized’ Campus Life.
* ‘A Culture of Disposability’: New School Part-Time Faculty Go On Strike. Never Cross a Picket Line: A Primer for Solidarity in the Academic Workplace. The Academic Wheel of Privilege. The Cruelty of Faculty Churn. The Deadline Dilemma. The gutting of the liberal arts continues.
* Vulture had a nice Octavia Butler cluster this week: The Spectacular Life of Octavia Butler. Misreading Octavia Butler. How to Write Like Octavia E. Butler. The Butler Journal Entry I Always Return To. This one at the Times was beautiful, too, in more ways than one: The Visions of Octavia Butler. And just a few weeks away: ‘Kindred’ Trailer: Octavia Butler’s Time Travel Novel Comes to Terrifying Life.
* The new Science Fiction Film and Television is out, with articles on steampunk, cryonics, domestic violence in Tau and Upstream Color, and Marvel’s Agent Carter. I can’t tell for sure, but from where I am access to all issues of SFFTV is free right now. And so is the fall issue of SFRA Review! And Uneven Futures is almost here!
* Marxist Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide.
* One of last year’s student papers is already out in Games and Culture: “Go. Just take him.”: PTSD and the Player-Character Relationship in The Last of Us Part II.
* Marvel got trolled into losing one of its best assets to DC permanently. You hate to see it.
* I Don’t Worry About My Oeuvre: A Conversation with John Carpenter.
* I want Picardo back as the Doctor and I don’t really care how they do it. Just don’t let the Picard showrunners anywhere near it and we’re good to go.
* Online Speed Chess as Self-Soothing, Tetris, or Collaborative Troll Art.
* Middle schoolers tackle climate change in a new alternate reality game.
* The Incredibly Stupid Catastrophe Caused by Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. Tumblr Blog Linked to Ex-Alameda CEO Explored Race Science, ‘Imperial Chinese Harem’ Polyamory. Queen Caroline. Every Shady Thing Sam Bankman-Fried Has Confessed or Pseudo-Confessed to Since FTX Collapsed. Effective altruism gave rise to Sam Bankman-Fried. Now it’s facing a moral reckoning. Crypto Bro Sam Bankman-Fried Was the Perfect Liberal Hero. Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself.
* Larry David, Tom Brady, Stephen Curry, Other Celebs Sued Over FTX Crypto Exchange Collapse. Larry David was telling you not to buy, you just didn’t listen…
* Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take ‘control of human evolution.’ Jeff Bezos pledges to donate majority of his $124 billion fortune to fight climate change and unify humanity.
* In the end, Yuji Naka, creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, just couldn’t run fast enough.
* Are Trees Talking Underground? For Scientists, It’s in Dispute.
* If you’re keeping score, a guy made a homemade shotgun out of plumbing parts and iced a former PM with it in broad daylight and the Japanese govt is giving him everything he demanded because they realize he had a point. Utterly wild story.
* Federal judge strikes down Biden student debt relief program. What Went Wrong With Biden’s Student Loan Cancellation Plan— And How He Can Make It Right. Joe Biden Is Finally Moving Toward Allowing Bankruptcy to Eliminate Student Debt. Biden Administration Caves To Pressure On Student Debt Bankruptcy.
* Thousands were released from prison during covid. The results are shocking.
* The Bike Thieves of Burlington, Vermont.
* Elsewhere on the Milwaukee beat: The Landlord & the Tenant.
* The Race to Save Fanfiction History Before It’s Lost Forever.
* It’s that time of year. How to avoid gender bias when writing recommendation letters.
* How ‘Andor’ Drew from… Joseph Stalin? I Can’t Fucking Believe How Good ‘Andor’ Is.
* Multiculturalism in Middle-earth: On Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.”
* Yes, but: the comic.
* ‘Doing Nothing’ course helps students build skills to unplug, think deeply.
* Indy’s going to the Moon folks.
* ‘How Did This Man Think He Had the Right to Adopt This Baby?’
* Words Added to the Scrabble Dictionary.
* Might not make my traditional Thanksgiving post this year, so here it is a few days early.
* From the archives: “Utopia, LOL?”
* And in honor of the end of Twitter: one last Twitter roundup.
Tuesday Links, Plus a Very Canavan Podcast!
* There’s No Sheriff on This Planet: A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson. The latest in my irregular series of conversations with KSR. The transcript is just the highlights — for the full effect you’ll have to listen.
* Extrapolation 60.1 is out! Articles on rape motifs in contemporary fantasy, Japanese print SF, and Nihād Sharīf’s The Conqueror of Time.
* Endgame ephemera! Avengers: Endgame, or, why this is all your fault. Avengers and the Endgame of Liberalism. And the Russo brothers are on a quest to make sure you know that Endgame being good had nothing to do with them.
* The Night King? Never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened. Bonus appearance by the coffee cup! If these are the final two choices, the only way to win the Game may be not to play.
* Watch The Wandering Earth on Netflix!
* Ted Chiang has a new book, why haven’t you bought it yet?
* A new climate change story from Paolo Bacigalupi at MIT Technology Review. Killer ending.
* Human society under urgent threat from loss of Earth’s natural life. One million species at risk of extinction, UN report warns. Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace. An open letter to David Wallace-Wells. We are ruled by psychopaths.
* Greta Thunberg, autism, and climate activism.
* For roughly 18 months, AirPods play music, or podcasts, or make phone calls. Then the lithium-ion batteries will stop holding much of a charge, and the AirPods will slowly become unusable. They can’t be repaired because they’re glued together. They can’t be thrown out, or else the lithium-ion battery may start a fire in the garbage compactor. They can’t be easily recycled, because there’s no safe way to separate the lithium-ion battery from the plastic shell. Instead, the AirPods sit in your drawer forever. AirPods Are a Tragedy.
* It’s time to speak about batshit jobs.
* It seems to me that anyone who considers this for more than ten minutes has to recognize that “student demand” is a construct: it is the product of a pervasive, cross-institutional pedagogy in social and educational value in which students are immersed from (at least) primary school onward. If students are demanding STEM in record numbers, this is a because they have been systematically invited to embrace a number of interlocking beliefs: that
- STEM fields matter to the welfare and future of human societies more than other fields — that social problems respond best to technocratic solutions;
- college is a course of career training;
- college is an investment that ought to be maximized in order to yield the highest possible return in the form of lifelong higher income;
- STEM fields represent areas of continuing high-growth, recession-proof employment.
“Student demand” is a fact insofar as it reproduces these assumptions, which are already endemic to the privatized, market-driven university. Other forms of “student demand” (for example, demands for a more racially and ethnically diverse faculty that better reflects regional and national demographics) are routinely ignored.
* Marquette Academic Senate calls for administration neutrality on unionization.
* Measuring the tenure-track success of pre-2009 Ph.D.s is like measuring the ice stability of Greenland’s glaciers before industrialization. Researcher’s suicide reflects bleak prospects for post-Ph.D. life. Adjuncts and Freelancers: Reading Signs of Eventual Destruction.
* Turning Point USA’s dark coup on college campuses.
* A lot of older academics will point to the 1970s or the 1990s to say that crisis has always been the default, and there’s truth to this. But they didn’t have the same debt loads back then.
* “Second Chance: Life without Student Debt.”
* For Colleges, Climate Change Means Making Tough Choices.
* People Are Clamoring to Buy Old Insulin Pumps.
* What Happened After My 13-Year-Old Son Joined the Alt-Right. As capitalism starts to crumble, hate finds a familiar foothold.
* Liberalism: the other God that failed. The Senate is a much bigger problem than the Electoral College. Here’s how many millennials get help from their parents to pay rent and other bills. Twitter users answer the question: “When did you become radicalized by the U.S. health care non-system?” 42% of Americans are at risk of retiring broke.
* If the president does it, it’s not obstruction.
* This seems heathy. This too! Things are great.
* The forgotten history of how Abraham Lincoln helped rig the Senate for Republicans.
* Dialectics of Milwaukee: ‘It’s clear that the secret is out about Milwaukee,’ increased tourism spending shows. There seems to be a surge of unsettling things happening on the Milwaukee education landscape, some of them just more of the same (low student achievement, divisive politics) and some of them not so typical (corruption). Glendale would provide $37 million to help redevelop struggling Bayshore — with $57 million debt paid off.
* Sandra Bland, It Turns Out, Recorded Her Own Video of Traffic Stop Confrontation. ICE provides local police a way to work around ‘sanctuary’ policies, act as immigration officers.
* On April 30, my Liberal Studies class, framed as Anthropology and Philosophy of Science, was the site of a horrific event. Two of my students were killed while four more were injured.
* Study: Therapy dogs reduce children’s fear, anxiety during dentist appointments.
* Aging baby boomers are about to push Alzheimer’s disease rates sky high.
* The Saga Of ‘Star Citizen,’ A Video Game That Raised $300 Million—But May Never Be Ready To Play.
* Dystopia watch: Oh Good, a Subway System Is Making Riders Stare at Ads Before They Can Buy a Ticket. Amazon’s staffing up a news vertical full of crime stories designed to scare you into buying a spying, snitching “smart” doorbell. We’ve lived so long that the founding of Amazon Prime is something we can be nostalgic about now.
* Who Owns the Moon Watch: Why the Moon Is Suddenly a Hot Commodity.
* How angry pilots got the Navy to stop dismissing UFO sightings.
Don’t Let Them Know What You’re Against or What You’re For
* Saturn devours his young: President Trump.
* So weird to see Donald Trump going through all the traditional rituals of assuming the presidency, like the ceremonial settling of your $25 million fraud cases.
* When Mike Pence Went To See Hamilton. (UPDATE: God forbid me, I don’t think this is absolutely insignificant.)
* The Problem of Judas in Amos Oz’s new novel.
* Film analysis minute: Indiana Jones and the collaborators.
* Dan Berger in Jacobin: This fall’s prison strikes are a model of how to both survive and challenge an authoritarian, racist order.
* Suicide contagion in the Age of Trump. The Banality of Trump. While You Weren’t Looking, Donald Trump Released a Plan to Privatize America’s Roads and Bridges. Hey, just out of curiosity, are there any checks in place to keep the US President from starting a nuclear war?
* Let me tell you a story about a major party’s nominee for President of the United States.
* I come to you now, at the turn of the tide: Finally, the MLA speaks.
* What the: Minnesota Woman Sues Her Trans Teenager for Transitioning Without Her Consent.
* Pokémon originalism is a thing now.
* What kind of New Jersey accent do you have? What’s the most New Jersey thing you can think of?
* Two days after Donald Trump was elected forty-fifth president of the United States, the Canadian government quietly tweaked our immigration system to make it easier for many Americans to move to Canada.
Meanwhile, Some Links
* Marquette has a new president, the first lay president in its history. His farewell message to UWM.
In closing, I would like to thank everyone at UWM for your efforts to make this a great university. I have been proud to serve as your leader for the last three and a half years, and I am confident that UWM will continue to make significant strides to become a top-tier research university that is a great place to learn and work. I will continue to promote UWM and spread the word about the great things being accomplished by our campus even after I am no longer Chancellor. I will also work hard to strengthen and build partnerships between UWM and Marquette, as I believe that by working together, Milwaukee’s two largest four-year academic institutions will help address many of Milwaukee’s problems, drive growth within the region and increase the prestige of both universities.
* Dia/lectics of Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
* It Seems More and More Certain That We Live in a Multiverse.
* Texas Congressman Wants National Parks Opened To Drilling. US House votes to allow dumping of coal mining waste into streams. Escape the Devastation of Future Earth on a Luxurious Space Mayflower.
* Roughly .02 Percent of Published Researchers Reject Global Warming.
* An American Utopia: Fredric Jameson in Conversation with Stanley Aronowitz. This is the army-as-utopia piece I was going on about last week, if you were curious about it.
* What Life Will Be Like for Girls’ Hannah at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
* What I’m Learning on a Simulated Mars Mission.
* Harvard University has discovered three books in its collection are bound in human hide. Come now, only three? Don’t be coy, Harvard…
* Amy Acker joins Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. because of course she is.
* Generations of political manipulation have finally turned that sense of solidarity into a scourge. Our caring has been weaponised against us. And so it is likely to remain until the left, which claims to speak for labourers, begins to think seriously and strategically about what most labour actually consists of, and what those who engage in it actually think is virtuous about it.
* Inside UFO 54-40, the Unwinnable “Choose Your Own Adventure.”
* In sum, this so-called “data-driven” website is significantly less data-driven (and less sophisticated) than Business Insider or Bloomberg View or The Atlantic. It consists nearly entirely of hedgehoggy posts supporting simplistic theories with sparse data and zero statistical analysis, making no quantitative predictions whatsoever. It has no relationship whatsoever to the sophisticated analysis of rich data sets for which Nate Silver himself has become famous. The problem with the new FiveThirtyEight is not one of data vs. theory. It is one of “data” the buzzword vs. data the actual thing. Nate Silver is a hero of mine, but this site is not living up to its billing at all.
* Why was Charlotte’s absurdly corrupt mayor doing the bag drops himself? Amateur hour. He’s going to be so mad when he finally gets around to seeing American Hustle.
* Clickbait publication says stop talking so much about clickbait.
* Garfield Minus Garfield Minus Jon Plus Jon Osterman AKA Dr. Manhattan.
* And nothing gold can stay: Bradley Cooper is rumored to take over Indiana Jones.
The Tuesday Links
* It is no place for children. Yet Dasani is among 280 children at the shelter. Beyond its walls, she belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America.
* So, to recap, nationalization of the health insurance industry in 2009 would have cost no more (and almost certainly a lot less) than $240 billion. The savings in waste resulting from replacing the health insurance racket with an extension of Medicare would have resulted in no less than $158 billion a year. That’s an annualized return on investment of 66 percent. The entire operation would have paid for itself in less than 18 months, and after that, an eternity of administrative efficiency for free. And, of course, happy shareholders.
* The owners of Kiko, Hercules and Leo could not be reached Monday night.
* Seven in 10 college seniors (71%) who graduated last year had student loan debt, with an average of $29,400 per borrower. From 2008 to 2012, debt at graduation (federal and private loans combined) increased an average of six percent each year.
* Academia as horror show: The Chronicle‘s 2013 “Influence” List.
* The end of tenure at Kean University?
* BREAKING: MOOCs don’t work.
* Brad DeLong says save Berkeley by “(partially) transforming it into a finishing school for the superrich of Asia.” What could go wrong?
* The latest numbers on PhDs with job commitments at graduation.
* A vote being held tomorrow and Wednesday could secure union recognition for New York University graduate students, which the administration withdrew and then withheld from them — with help from congressional Republicans and Obama’s now-Treasury Secretary — for the past eight years. If the United Auto Workers emerges victorious in the vote, NYU will become only private sector U.S. university to bargain collectively with graduate student teachers and researchers — though such workers will remain excluded from U.S. labor law.
* “This comic is shaping up to be, in many ways, a departure from the sometimes light-hearted series.” He’s taking, impossibly, about the Serenity comic followup Leaves on the Wind.
* There’s a 1,200-year-old Phone in the Smithsonian Collections.
* Good news! FBI can secretly turn on laptop cameras without the indicator light. 1984 as instruction manual.
* The NSA has been spying on World of Warcraft.
* Inept ATF Uses Children and People With Low IQs In Sting Operations.
* Texas Student Asks Campus Cop, “You Gonna Shoot Me?” So Cop Shoots Him. Dead.
* Novelist Kim Stanley Robinson (Red Mars, 2312, and Shaman) debates the merits of utopian thinking with Aeon Magazine’s Marina Benjamin and political theorist Alex Callinicos.
* Nice work if you can get it: Fox News Paid Fired Executive $8 Million to Keep Quiet.
* The trailer for season five of Community is out.
* And Disney can now ruin Indiana Jones, too. This is the darkest timeline.