Posts Tagged ‘Luddites’
Monday Night Links!
* Navajos on Mars: Native Sci-fi Film Futures.
* They’re renaming the Tiptree Award after all. From Julie Phillips: On Tiptree and naming.
* The Tragedy of GJ237b: A Role-Playing Game for No Players.
* Happy 82nd Birthday to The Hobbit. And from the archives, in celebration: The Most Metal Deaths in Middle-earth, Ranked.
Happy #HobbitDay! It’s the canonical birthday of Bilbo Baggins. Our collection includes the only known copy of a play adaptation of The Hobbit by Joanna Russ, written in 1959 when she was a playwriting grad student at Yale. pic.twitter.com/i5XQc1tZqV
— Browne Pop Culture Library @ BGSU (@BGSU_PopCultLib) September 22, 2019
* Students protest climate change, MU demonstration policy.
* Essay mills are using TurnItIn to prove they’re selling original content.
* Terrible, if inevitable: Grad Students at Private Colleges Could Lose the Right to Unionize.
* Got Shakespeare? What about Milton on Shakespeare?
* The university in ruins in Buffalo.
* Humanities ‘risk becoming cherry on top’ of other disciplines.
Thinking of writing a Chronicle op-ed claiming that the liberal arts are necessary because they cultivate habits of ironic critical distance from one's own convictions, which are necessary for future middle-managers to carry out their orders and still live with themselves.
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) September 18, 2019
* The Problem with Sugar-Daddy Science.
* Today in actual threats to free speech: U.S. Orders Duke and U.N.C. to Recast Tone in Mideast Studies.
* The Trump administration’s crackdown on campus criticism of Israel is Orwellian.
* New Mexico Announces Plan for Free College for State Residents.
* Johns Hopkins Ends ICE Contracts.
* Can’t believe MOOCs didn’t work.
* Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard.
* Is Meritocracy Hurting Higher Education?
* To Protect Your Faculty from Right-Wing Attacks, Follow the Money.
* US academic given two weeks to leave UK after eight years.
* Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe.
* A new issue of Analog Game Studies is up.
* On Dark Matter and White Empiricism.
* CFP: UW Women and Gender Studies Consortium Call for Proposals: Resistance and Reimagination. CFP: U Chicago Grad Student Symposium: Race and Capitalism Defined.
* Actually, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Can Change a Culture.
* A Brief History of Trans Philosophy.
* Dear Disgruntled White Plantation Visitors.
* We Didn’t Stand a Chance Against Opioids.
* Most American teens are frightened by climate change, poll finds, and about 1 in 4 are taking action. It’s right to be scared, says top UK scientist. Climate change is morally wrong. It is time for a carbon abolition movement. Millions Of Young People Around The World Are Leading Strikes To Call Attention To The Climate Crisis. ‘We will make them hear us.’ Best Protest Signs From the Global Youth Walkouts. How to be Young in a Climate Emergency. I have a dream that the powerful take the climate crisis seriously. The time for their fairytales is over. ‘You’re not trying hard enough. Sorry.’ This is all wrong. Why Greta is Good.
2018 | 2019 pic.twitter.com/zH0vNClPRQ
— James Shield (@jshield) September 20, 2019
Greta Thunberg at #UNGA: "This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words."
Via ABC pic.twitter.com/NudonxKNss— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 23, 2019
* Only a Green New Deal can douse the fires of eco-fascism.
* Hello From the Year 2050. We Avoided the Worst of Climate Change — But Everything Is Different.
* It’s Kids vs. the World in a Landmark New Climate Lawsuit.
* Does Science Fiction Have a Moral Imperative to Address Climate Change?
* To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution.
* Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns.
* Elsewhere in headlines from the Anthropocene: SF’s Treasure Island, poised for building boom, escaped listing as Superfund site.
* Faster Than We Thought: What Stories Will Survive Climate Change?
* ‘Worse Than Anyone Expected’: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions. Only 8 People in This Indigenous Tribe Still Speak Their Native Language. The Amazon Fires May Wipe It Out Completely. North America Has Lost a Quarter of Its Birds in Fifty Years. ‘Opening the Door to Hell Itself’: Bahamas Confronts Life After Hurricane Dorian. ‘This situation brings me to despair’: two reef scientists share their climate grief. Exposing The Myth Of Plastic Recycling: Why A Majority Is Burned Or Thrown In A Landfill. America’s Nuclear Power Plants Were Not Built for Climate Change. America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys. 9 Oldest Trees in Africa, Some Over 2,000-Years-Old, Now Dead. The Capitalocene.
sometimes I think the most fictive aspect of post-apocalyptic stories is the idea that we're going to have the benefit of a clear before and after rather than a perpetual enervating slide into more and more misery
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) September 17, 2019
Signs and impacts of climate change speeding up, latest science says:
-> Sea-level rise accelerating from 3.2mm per year since 1993 to 5mm per year
->5-year period from 2014 to 2019 warmest on record
->Temperatures up by 1.1°C since 1850, 0.2°C just between 2011 and 2015 pic.twitter.com/2O0OV0zAER— Assaad Razzouk (@AssaadRazzouk) September 22, 2019
What's striking is this younger generation seems to be arriving at "Oh, wait, how about instead we meet just outside the village, regroup, go back to Omelas and get that kid out of the fucking basement."
— John Rogers (@jonrog1) September 20, 2019
* That’ll solve it: Following the lead of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a former 2020 contender, many candidates have set a target date for, at minimum, requiring all new passenger vehicles be zero-emission: Sen. Kamala Harris of California and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg put it at 2035, for example, while Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts aim for 2030.
"Haven't you heard? Communism is awful, millions died."
"But haven't millions died under capitalism too?"
"Yes, but under capitalism poor people deserve to die."— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) September 18, 2019
* The Student Debt Problem Is a Family Crisis.
* The Case Against the Popular Vote.
* More voters are registering than dying — but differences by state could shape 2020.
* Elizabeth Warren’s Crusade Against Corruption.
found a good meme on facebook pic.twitter.com/7ArsBwe9o7
— whatever forever (@wrong_rachel) September 22, 2019
* It’s Not Just Millennials — Gen Z Is Dealing With A Lot Of Debt Now Too. Wisconsin remains in the top ten states in the nation for the percentage of graduates with student loan debt.
* Elsewhere in everyone being super broke. Millennials believe they’ll die before they retire. America has two economies—and they’re diverging fast.
* WeWork and the Great Unicorn Delusion.
* How Boeing’s Managerial Revolution Created the 737 Max Disaster.
* Sandy Hook parents release chilling ‘back to school’ PSA.
* ‘Fantasy Island’: How the American Dream fueled Puerto Rico’s decline.
* In 2007, 47 dogs were rescued from an illegal dogfighting ring organized by NFL quarterback Michael Vick. They could have been euthanized. Instead, they became family pets.
* She Quit Her Job. He Got Night Goggles. They Searched 57 Days for Their Dog.
* New York Judge Fines Landlord $17,000 for Threatening to Call ICE on Tenant.
* King of Kong sequel shaping up nicely.
* This game should be illegal.
* This question about art predicts Trump support better than educational attainment.
* There’s a shortage of perfect movies in this world. It would be a pity to damage this one.
* Emma Thompson’s new movie The Lost Girls paints Peter Pan as the villain he’s always been.
* Watching Toy Story 4 I simply assumed this was how the movie would end, and was shocked when it didn’t.
* Saved by the Bell: The New Class: The New Class.
* How Wes Anderson Makes Films.
* We needed the X-Men, and now — thank the mutant gods — they’re back.
Since the 1940s, professional clowns Copyright their faces by painting them on eggs. There's a Clown Egg Registry in London, England pic.twitter.com/h9eXthxbCC
— 41 Strange (@41Strange) September 18, 2019
* Why do people believe the Earth is flat?
Why don’t we agree on the urgency of climate change? Because of a moneyed conspiracy to make us doubt it. Why did we let a single family amass riches greater than the Rockefellers while peddling OxyContin and claiming it wasn’t addictive? Because of a moneyed conspiracy. Why do some 737s fall out of the sky? Why are our baby-bottles revealed to be lined with carcinogenic plastics? Why do corrupt companies get to profit by consorting with the world’s most despicable dictators? Conspiracies.
In other words: Big Tech doesn’t have a mind-control ray, but it does have an incredibly sophisticated people-finding machine, and if you’re looking for people who might believe in your conspiracy, it helps if there’s a massive pool of people around who’ve been battered (and had their lives irreparably harmed) by conspiracies.
* What the Apps That Bring Food to Your Door Mean for Delivery Workers.
* China forcefully harvests organs from detainees, tribunal concludes.
* Industrial agriculture and #MeToo.
* A 6-Year-Old Girl Was Arrested After Throwing A Tantrum.
* Look at this incredibly over-the-top unveiling for Staples new logo.
* How the Black Turtleneck Came to Represent Creative Genius.
* How TikTok Holds Our Attention.
* How a sneaky asteroid escaped detection.
* How we invest in our cities is broken.
* We’ve Reached Peak Wellness. Most of It Is Nonsense.
* Why Jeffrey Epstein Loved Evolutionary Psychology.
* Purdue Pharma, Maker of OxyContin, Files for Bankruptcy.
* Graffiti That Helps You See Through Walls.
* So, the Navy just admitted the Blink-182 guy leaked actual UFO footage.
* A Lunar Space Elevator Is Actually Feasible & Inexpensive, Scientists Find.
* The Socialists Who Think Revolution Will Come When the Aliens Get Here.
* How a ‘Sesame Street’ Muppet became embroiled in a controversy over autism.
* Artificial Intelligence Confronts a ‘Reproducibility’ Crisis.
* MIT Media Lab Kept Regulators in the Dark, Dumped Chemicals in Excess of Legal Limit.
* Impossible Burgers Aren’t Healthy, and That’s the Whole Point.
* Meet Shampoodler, the podcast and Twitch superfan who’s the future of fandom in interactive media.
* Frozen II just remains inscrutable to me.
Disney: Here's the Frozen 2 trailer! It starts with a flashback to Anna and Elsa's parents!
Me: Are they being chastised for years of emotional abuse?
Disney: …no, but here's a man who might be Elsa's love interest!
Me: pic.twitter.com/RpJeZzBZ79— Abigail Nussbaum (@NussbaumAbigail) September 23, 2019
* Aron Eisenberg, the Actor Who Played Nog on Deep Space Nine, Has Died.
* Hey, God, which beings are conscious?
* And I’ve been saying it for years: Scrabble is broken.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 23, 2019 at 3:28 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, 737 Max, academic freedom, Achille Mbembe, Africa, air travel, aliens, Alzheimer's disease, America, animal intelligence, animals, apocalypse, Area 51, artificial intelligence, asteroids, autism, Boeing, Buffalo, capitalism, Catholicism, CBP, CFPs, charter schools, China, class struggle, climate change, climate grief, climate strike, clowns, college footballs, college sports, comics, communism, consciousness, conspiracy theories, copyright, Cory Doctorow, cultural preservation, democracy, Democrats, deportation, Disney, dogs, Donald Trump, drugs, Duke, ecology, Electoral College, electric cars, Elizabeth Warren, English departments, essays, evolutionary psychology, fast food, film, first contact, flat Earthers, Florida, Florida Keys, Foxconn, free college, free speech, Frozen II, games, games studies, gender, Generation Z, genius, gig economy, graffiti, Green New Deal, Greta Thunberg, Groundhog Day, guns, Harvard, High Line, How the University Works, Hunter Biden, Hurricane Dorian, ice, Impossible Burger, indigenous futurism, industrial agriculture, Islamophobia, Israel, James Tiptree Jr., Jeffrey Epstein, Joanna Russ, Joe Biden, John Milton, Johns Hopkins, kids today, King of Kong, Koch brothers, language, legacy admissions, logos, Lord of the Rings, Luddites, Marquette, Marvel, mass shootings, meritocracy, Michael Vick, military-industrial complex, military-industrial-academic complex, millennials, Milwaukee, MIT Media Lab, modern art, MOOCs, Muppets, names, necropolitics, neoliberalism, New Mexico, New York, NLRB, nuclear power, opioids, organ theft, Orwell, over-educated literary theory PhDs, OxyContin, Palestine, pencils, Peter Pan, physics, plagiarism, plantations, podcasts, politics, popular vote, Posadism, Princess Bride, protest, Puerto Rico, race, racism, recycling, reproducibility crisis, Republicans, resistance, retirement, revolution, San Francisco, Sandy Hook, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Saved by the Bell, scams, school-to-prison pipeline, science, science fiction, Scrabble, sea level rise, Sesame Street, Shakespeare, Shampoodler, since the dawn of time man has yearned to destroy the sun, socialism, space elevator, standardized testing, Star Trek, Star Trek: Deep Space 9, strikes, student debt, student movements, Superfund sites, the afterlife, the Amazon, the Anthropocene, the Bahamas, the Capitalocene, The Hobbit, the humanities, the kids are all right, The Little Mermaid, The Lost Girls, The Princess Bride, The Simpsons, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, TikTok, Tiptree award, Tolkien, Toy Story 4, trans* issues, trees, TurnItIn, Two Americas, UFOs, Ukraine, UNC, unions, University of Buffalo, University of Texas, University of Wisconsin, vaccines, war on education, wellness, Wes Anderson, WeWork, white people, Wisconsin, X-Men
The Return of Sunday Reading! Just Kidding!
* I have a short piece on resistance to automation in the forum of the new issue of ASAP/Journal. Check it out!
* I’m really stunned to see that the Tiptree Award is on the verge of being renamed. The details of the end of her and her husband’s life are definitely troubling — but decanonizing Tiptree over this single ambiguous incident at the end of her life seems to me to be of a completely different order than the Campbell or the Lovecraft renamings, where the entire body of creative output is being reevaluated.
* Faith in science fiction and fantasy.
* 64% of Americans support labor unions but membership is at a record low.
* In academia we need unions more than ever—whether one is an adjunct or tenure track. Our higher education system is being hollowed out by administrators who see institutions of learning as businesses, and are making money at students’ & workers’ expense.
* How Far Does Your Tuition Dollar Go?
Marquette University
This institution spends $0.49 on instruction for every dollar it collects in tuition.
This is a Private Nonprofit Four-Year College, University, and/or Professional School and the tuition collected per full-time student or equivalent is $22,584.
How does this school stack up?
The average public institution spends $1.42 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.
The average private nonprofit institution spends $0.84 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.
The average for-profit institution spends $0.29 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.
* A Brief History of Academic Mysteries, Campus Thrillers, and Research Noir.
* Meritocracy Is Killing High-School Sports.
The book posits an Iron Law of Meritocracy, in which meritocratic systems will collapse in on themselves because eventually inequality of outcomes grow so vast, it's impossible to provide equality of opportunity. What you then get is something like aristocracy and oligarchy.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) August 30, 2019
* Adjunct Faculty in an Adjunct Country. Beatriz Llenín Figueroa on the situation at the University of Puerto Rico.
* Syllabus: Critical Algorithm Studies.
* Dialectics of the new Popeye’s chicken sandwich. Panera is losing nearly 100% of its workers every year as fast-food turnover crisis worsens. Waffle House has an official poet laureate.
* Amazon Is Looking More and More Like a Nation-State. Amazon is lying about Ring and facial recognition. Amazon’s Next-Day Delivery System Has Brought Chaos And Carnage To America’s Streets — But The World’s Biggest Retailer Has A System To Escape The Blame.
* YouTube reinstated these extremist and white nationalist channels, apologized to them.
* How 9 People Built an Illegal $5M Airbnb Empire in New York.
* The Plan to Use Fitbit Data to Stop Mass Shootings Is One of the Scariest Proposals Yet.
* “Hey, Google! Let me talk to my departed father.”
the idea that Omega Point aliens will someday be able to resurrect me on the basis of my public writing is 89% of the reason I’m still on Twitter https://t.co/l348wObaXp
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 31, 2019
to be perfectly honest I have a little bit of a Roko’s Basilisk fear that I’ve *already* been resurrected on the basis of my social media posts in some techno-gnostic simulation scenario and that’s why absolutely everything is garbage
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 31, 2019
* Twitter’s promise vs. Twitter’s reality.
* Immigration panic: how the west fell for manufactured rage. Trump administration seeks to deport children with life-threatening illnesses.
* It Is Very Bad That Our President Reportedly Lied About Trade Negotiations With China. Let’s Compare Donald Trump’s Week to the Impeachment Articles Brought Against Nixon, Clinton, and Johnson.
* There’s no FEC anymore. There’s not really an NLRB, either.
* Dear America, universal health care is what real freedom looks like.
* How Slavery Shaped American Capitalism.
* Capitalism Is Making Us Sick: A Q&A With Emily Guendelsberger About Her New Book, On the Clock.
* 7 ‘Left Wing’ Ideas (Almost) All Americans Can Get Behind.
* Liberalism in Theory and Practice.
Basically our – very neoliberal – plan for everything these days is to dump the consequences for contradictions we refuse to resolve on the most vulnerable, the over-stretched, and the future itself, and monetize every miserable step of it all the way down.
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) August 30, 2019
* The Children’s Crusade: This Colorado charter school is teaching 6th graders how to fight back against shooters.
* Well guys, I’m about to walk out the TNR office doors for the last time. But before I do, I want to share some hard truths about climate change I’ve learned in the last 2.5 yrs reporting here.
* North Carolina’s Climate Change Blind Spots Make Dorian More Dangerous. Rising seas ‘could displace 280m people,’ draft UN report warns. New Miami Hurricane Hazard: Dockless Scooters as Projectiles.
* On pregnancy in the Anthropocene.
* How to Win Wisconsin. And elsewhere on the Wisconsin beat: Wisconsin workers embedded with microchips.
* The rape charges were dropped because the victim’s credibility was “seriously, seriously questionable” and the charges could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt, said Justice Danny Chun. The agreed-upon facts are inarguably rape.
* Good news: Sacklers could hold on to most of personal fortune in proposed Purdue settlement.
* On the greatness of Peanuts (when it was good).
* In the age of the psychonauts.
* “Brain-reading tech is coming. The law is not ready to protect us.”
* First is third. Second is first. Third is second.
* The Longest Walkable Distance on Earth.
* Here’s a thing that no one asked for but that I think we all need: the style guide alignment chart.
Okay, folks. Here's a thing that no one asked for but that I think we all need: the style guide alignment chart. pic.twitter.com/fuqglnUEE6
— Jonathon Owen (@ArrantPedantry) August 30, 2019
* Compulsory homosexuality in Ireland! Marxist-lesbianism is the state ideology!
* DeepMind Can Now Beat Us at Multiplayer Games, Too.
* The Slinky was invented by accident.
* Jordan Peele drops a surprise flick.
* Donald was the first child ever diagnosed with autism. Identified in the annals of autism as “Case 1 … Donald T,” he is the initial subject described in a 1943 medical article that announced the discovery of a condition unlike “anything reported so far,” the complex neurological ailment now most often called an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. At the time, the condition was considered exceedingly rare, limited to Donald and 10 other children—Cases 2 through 11—also cited in that first article.
* On precocious puberty, the hell you didn’t even know was possible.
* Sing to me, muse, of the man of twists and turns…
* My five-alarm-fire Star Wars 9 and Notorious RBG predictions, for the record.
* We’re all rooting for you, sweetie.
* And science has finally found the secret to happiness.
But, doctor, I am the Joker
— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) September 1, 2019
Written by gerrycanavan
September 1, 2019 at 9:17 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, accelerationism, adjunctification, adjuncts, Africa, Airbnb, algorithms, Amazon, America, animals, apocalypse, autism, automation, awards, capitalism, CBP, Charles Schultz, cheating, chicken sandwiches, children's crusade, chimpanzees, China, class struggle, climate change, comics, critical algorithm studies, dark side of the digital, deportation, Dicey Dungeons, Donald Trump, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, Episode 9, faith, fantasy, fast food, FEC, Fitbit, Florida, games, Google, grades, guns, happiness, health care, Hell, high school sports, homosexuality, horror, hurricanes, ice, immigration, immortality, impeachment, Ireland, James Mattis, James Tiptree Jr., labor, liberalism, Luddites, Marquette, Marxist-lesbianism, mass shootings, Mel Gibson, meritocracy, monkeys, morally odious monsters, myth, neoliberalism, neurocapitalism, NLRB, North Carolina, NYPD, Odysseus, Omega Point, Oregon Trail, Panera, Peanuts, politics, Popeye's, precocious puberty, pregnancy, psychedelics, puberty, Puerto Rico, rape, rape culture, religion, resistance, rising sea levels, Roko's Basilisk, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, science, science fiction, slavery, slinkies, Snoopy, social media, sports, Star Wars, style guides, surveillance society, tenure, the 1970s, the Anthropocene, The Joker, the Left, the Singularity, the wisdom of markets, Theranos, toys, true facts, tuition, Twitter, unions, Waffle House, walking, Wisconsin, work, writing, YouTube, zoos
In a Dark Time, The Blog Begins to Linkpost
* My chances have never been better.
* One of the highlights of my trip to ICFA this year was my exposure to some truly bonkers viral digital horror texts, like Doki Doki Literature Club! and Normal Porn for Normal People.
* Grooming Style: A conversation on how the Alt Lit scene’s documentation of sexual violence became a style of supposed sincerity. Infinite Jest isn’t mentioned but the critique seems potentially valid here as well.
* How Chinese novelists are reimagining science fiction. How Imagination Will Save Our Cities. When Science Fiction Comes True. Stacey Abrams, Star Trek Nerd, Is Traveling at Warp Speed.
* Climate Fiction: A Special Issue of Guernica.
* Sci-fi literature university seeks degree granting authority.
* Terrific video essay from Dan Golding on Hollywood franchises, nostalgia, and climate change. I’ve already been using it in presentations!
* The Pattern Podcast, from the masters of the OEB Legacy Network, Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey.
* Galaxy Simulations Offer a New Solution to the Fermi Paradox.
* Fantasy’s Widow: The Fight Over The Legacy Of Dungeons & Dragons.
* U.S. Army Assures Public That Robot Tank System Adheres to AI Murder Policy. Phew, that’s a relief.
* Why Self-Checkout Is and Has Always Been the Worst. Robot Workers Can’t Go on Strike But They Can Go Up in Flames.
* Twilight of the elites, college admissions edition. The College Admissions Ring Tells Us How Much Schoolwork Is Worth.
* How UT-Austin’s Innovation Boondoggle Went Belly Up.
The much-hyped MOOCS still have an astronomical dropout rate of about 96 per cent on average over five years – and this figure had not improved between 2013-14 and 2017-18.https://t.co/4U6F1jN1X6 #mooc #embarrassing #dropout #hype #online #HigherEducation @bureaucatliu @cnewf
— peter krapp (@pkrapp) March 4, 2019
* Seemingly deeply flawed study suggests trigger warnings have little effect.
* A bigger scandal at colleges — underpaid professors.
* Colleges gave their students’ work to TurnItIn and now it’s worth $1.75B. Why a Plagiarism-Detection Company Is Now a Billion-Dollar Business.
* I can’t wait to explore all the exciting exceptions to this free-speech proclamation.
a cool thing about the last few years is that the U.S. became the leading exporter of the intellectual machinery of western fascism and one of the leading domestic debates about it is whether undergrads are treating the people behind it politely enough
— chris hooks (@cd_hooks) March 15, 2019
There is virtually no institution in American public life where you have greater freedom of speech than the university. And the depressing corollary: you will probably never again be as free to express yourself in public as you were when you were a student.
— Jeffrey Sachs (@JeffreyASachs) March 4, 2019
* The costs of academic publishing are absurd. The University of California is fighting back.
* The group described training exercises in which “four teachers at a time were taken into a room, told to crouch down and were shot execution style with some sort of projectiles — resulting in injuries.”
The “terrified” teachers, ISTA added, were then instructed to not tell their colleagues what was in store for them. “Teachers waiting outside that heard the screaming were brought into the room four at a time and the shooting process was repeated.” We rehearse the coming trauma because we cannot stop it.
something something about how–because we cannot actually address the root causes of school shootings–we will instead ritualistically perform them https://t.co/llYZF6i8vf
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) March 21, 2019
* Rutgers faculty members authorize union to call a strike.
* ‘Change Is Closer Than We Think.’ Inside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Unlikely Rise.
* On Star Trek: Voyager and Trumpism.
* The neo-Nazi plot against America is much bigger than we realize. There’s No Such Thing as Nationalism Without Ethnic Cleansing. The Making of the Fox News White House. It’s time — high time — to take Fox News’s destructive role in America seriously. 78% of GOP Fox News Viewers Say Trump Is Best President Ever. Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes.
* How a black man says he ‘outsmarted’ a neo-Nazi group and became their new leader.
* Why Donald Trump could win again, by Dave Eggers. I’ve gathered that some people don’t like this piece for various reasons but if you don’t think Donald Trump is a very strong threat for reelection I think you are very wrong. He has a floor of 40% and seems utterly immune to negative press, plus a ton of Republicans who sat it out or got squeamish will come home. He “looks like a president” now, and will be completely unprincipled in abusing his position. It’s not a gimme. How Trump is on track for a 2020 landslide. Or, if you prefer: Republicans resigned to Trump losing 2020 popular vote but confident about Electoral College.
* Meanwhile, he gets to poison all our water.
* In this, the best of all possible countries, in this, the best of all possible worlds.
* Among NYC Students, 1 In 8 Is Homeless Before 5th Grade: Study.
* Leaked Documents Show the U.S. Government Tracking Journalists and Immigration Advocates Through a Secret Database. 4 women fined, sentenced to probation for leaving water for migrants crossing US-Mexico border. 12 detained babies have been released from ICE custody in Dilley, Texas. Immigrant Miscarriages in ICE Detention Have Nearly Doubled Under Trump. ICE Is Detaining 50,000 People, an All-Time High.Young US Citizen Detained at Border Gave ‘Inconsistent Info,’ CBP Says. US government uses several clandestine shelters to detain immigrant children. Supreme Court rules, 5-4, you can hold an immigrant indefinitely for jaywalking.
* The demobilization of the resistance is a dangerous mistake. If Trump is a national emergency, it’s time for Democrats to act like it. The Cowardice of the Cover-Your-Ass Memo. Understanding Ilhan Omar. The Obama Boys.
so about fifty days in and it’s very clear that the story of the Dem Resistance Congress is going to be about the party’s decrepit leadership scuttling any positive movement on any subject and then demanding to be thanked for it
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 11, 2019
* Activists will never design good strategy on the basis of bad history. The reality is that the Good Sixties civil rights movement was most successful when it operated with a de facto diversity of tactics. Francis Fox Piven has noted that civil rights progress only really occurred when self-defense against white incursions escalated into black aggression against the symbols and agents of white domination—notably the white police, merchants, and landlords.
* Activism and the Catholic tradition.
* Nihilist in chief: On Mitch McConnell.
* Children of the Industrocene. Students share motivations ahead of Youth Climate Strike. The Hip New Teen Trend Is Leading the Climate Movement to Save the World. Climate Change Is This Generation’s Vietnam War. Study shows IPCC is underselling climate change. The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It’s Sending People to Therapy. The Rapid Decline Of The Natural World Is A Crisis Even Bigger Than Climate Change. Sharp rise in Arctic temperatures now inevitable. Non-survivable humid heatwaves for over 500 million people. It’s raining on Greenland’s ice sheet. That’s a big problem. Scientists aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer watch a 25-mile-wide section of ice crumble into the sea. The Arctic’s ticking ‘carbon bomb’ could blow up the Paris Agreement. Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature.’ The Other Kind of Climate Denial. Climate Change Is Here—and It Looks Like Starvation. California’s Wildfires Burn Through America’s Climate Illusions. Nebraska floods have broken records in 17 places across the state. A Light Installation in a Scottish Coastal Town Vividly Shows Future Sea Level Rise. Coastal Flooding Is Erasing Billions in Property Value as Sea Level Rises. That’s Bad News for Cities. Climate change scientists look to Māori and other indigenous people for answers. Indigenous knowledge has been warning us about climate change for centuries. Rethink Activism in the Face of Catastrophic Biological Collapse. Here’s How Much Climate Change Could Cost the U.S. Bill To Keep Coal Plants Open Nears Finish Line.
* Far-Right Climate Denial Is Scary. Far-Right Climate Acceptance Might Be Scarier.
* The WWF’s secret war: The World Wide Fund for Nature funds vicious paramilitary forces to fight poaching.
* Chimpanzees Are Going Through a Tragic Loss: By fragmenting forests and killing off individuals, humans are stopping the flow of ideas among our closest relatives.
* We Know How to Cut Child Poverty in Half. Will We Do It? Oh, honey.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* Life in Prison for Selling $20 of Weed.
* The rich are different! Massive study finds strong correlation between “early affluence” and “faster cognitive drop” in old age.
* Only 7 Black Students Got Into Stuyvesant, N.Y.’s Most Selective High School, Out of 895 Spots.
* Ramsey Orta filmed the killing of Eric Garner. The video traveled far, but it wouldn’t get justice for his dead friend. Instead, the NYPD would exact their revenge through targeted harassment and eventually imprisonment — Orta’s punishment for daring to show the world police brutality.
* Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit.
* Roughly 60 years after the abolition of slavery, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston made an incredible connection: She located the last surviving captive of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the United States.
* Understanding privilege: a thread.
* In 1998, I helped convict two men of murder. I’ve regretted it ever since.
* On Disability and on Facebook? Uncle Sam Wants to Watch What You Post.
* A room of one’s own white colleagues.
you (stupid, hasnt read foucault): haha i hope i dont get thrown in prison for my tweets )
me (wise, has read foucault): twitter is the prison— Comrade Valentina ☭ (@leftistthot420) March 6, 2019
* The Max-8 chronicles: The world pulls the Andon cord on the 737 Max. Doomed Boeing Jets Lacked 2 Safety Features That Company Sold Only as Extras. Pilot Who Hitched a Ride Saved Lion Air 737 Day Before Deadly Crash. Essentially, this plane could try to crash itself because of a single faulty sensor. Aviation Experts Have Predicted Automation Will Lead to Disasters Like the Boeing Max Crashes for 15 Years.
* US citizens will need to register to visit parts of Europe starting in 2021.
* How The Very Hungry Caterpillar Became a Classic.
* Suicide contagion and the MPAA.
* More from the Michael Jackson revision beat: Is Pedophilia a Crime or an Illness?
* Netflix’s Bright Future Looks A Lot Like Television’s Dim Past.
As a professional television critic, I am living there already. Netflix is now effectively my whole field of coverage. It’s increasingly difficult for me to place coverage of non-Netflix shows; all but the biggest “event” shows on other networks are passed over for regular reviews, and those on rival streaming services are afterthoughts at best. This is true even of Amazon Prime, the TV and film branch of the mind-bogglingly lucrative corporation after which New York Governor Amazon Cuomo was named. (Don’t feel too bad for Amazon, though: “Netflix Delivers Billions of Content Globally by Running on Amazon Web Services.”)
If you write about television the way I mostly do, which is through reviews—recaps, if you insist—of individual episodes, even Netflix is difficult to write about. Netflix’s own business model ensures this. Weekly shotgun blasts of full seasons of half a dozen different shows are just how it operates, but it makes deciding what will hit and how and when to cover it absolutely maddening for every TV editor I’ve talked to. By design, Netflix shows are consumed in one or two sittings, within 72 hours of their small-hours Friday release. They are to be discussed intensely on Monday and Tuesday, and then swept aside by the next torrent of programming to come down the Netflix Original Sluice by the end of the week.
* Meet the bald Norwegians and other unknowns who actually create the songs that top the charts.
* White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest’s Mysterious Mound Cities.
* Marvel corner! Who’s the Baddie? Captain Marvel in the Age of American Empire. You’re blowing my mind, dude. Like so many characters in the MCU, Fury’s coolness only makes sense if you limit your perspective. And the arc of history is long, but.
As a result, the movie poses questions it can’t answer. When we see her show up in the present — played by the same actor who is the same age — do we ask what Captain Marvel has been doing for the last twenty-four years? What she has done and learned? How she has grown and changed? If she approves of Nick Fury’s “Avengers Initiative,” and of S.H.I.E.L.D.? Did she watch Captain America: The Winter Soldier where an American super-soldier with the name “Captain” discovered that the good guys had been secretly infiltrated by the bad guys since the beginning? There are obvious and inescapable political allegories here, but what is her position on the two-state solution, the right of return, and does she have any thoughts on Ilhan Omar? Who, precisely, are the Skrulls and the Kree meant to be?
If these are ridiculous questions, it’s because this is a Marvel movie, whose episodes always gesture at resolutions that the big team-up movies will cannibalize. Thor: Ragnarak ended with the population of Asgard become a rootless diaspora searching for a new home — an extremely resonant image — but when Avengers: Infinity War began, five minutes later, Thanos had already killed half of them, offscreen, and the MCU seemed to have completely lost interest in that story, as comprehensively as it does when Black Panther’s triumphantly concluding Afrocentrism becomes Infinity War’s “sure, we’ll sacrifice Wakanda, why not.” The ending of Captain Marvel gives us the same feeling of closure — she has stopped being a soldier who kills civilians and become the kind of soldier who saves them — but the MCU’s narrative engine will never sustain this transition; the real amnesia of this franchise is how single-character episodes discover things about their protagonists that have to be forgotten.
a fun thing about the next Avengers movie is that all the characters are going to spend the entirety of it being very very very sad
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) March 14, 2019
* What happens once Uber and Lyft kill off public transit.
* Hundreds of motel guests were secretly filmed and live-streamed online.
* Well, when you’re right, you’re right: “If someone is the enemy, it’s okay to kill endless numbers of them,” he continued. “Lord of the Rings is like that. If it’s the enemy, there’s killing without separation between civilians and soldiers. That falls within collateral damage. How many people are being killed in attacks in Afghanistan? The Lord of the Ringsis a movie that has no problem doing that [not separating civilians from enemies, apparently]. If you read the original work, you’ll understand, but in reality, the ones who were being killed are Asians and Africans. Those who don’t know that, yet say they love fantasy are idiots.” Hayao Miyazaki Seems To Hate Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones And Hollywood Movies.
* Counterpoint: I love playing pretend with my kids and the knowledge that someday they won’t want to do it anymore breaks my soul.
* Toxic parenting myths make life harder for people with autism. That must change.
* The real “Momo Challenge” is the terror of parenting in the age of YouTube. Here’s the truth of what we know.
* When r/DaystromInstitute just nails it.
* What we call a win-win: People in states where marijuana is legal are eating more cookies and ice cream.
* Automated reception kiosks are a security dumpster fire.
* Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information.
* Amazon and YouTube Are Making Money From the Dangerous QAnon Conspiracy Theory.
* Wisconsin’s nightmare roads cost drivers $6.8 billion each year, study says.
* An oral history of the greatest episode in television comedy history.
* J.K. Rowling was always this terrible.
* Lolita, My Love, the Musical Too Dark to Live.
* Finally, a job worth applying for.
* Could Walmart Be a Model for a Socialist Future?
* Singularity watch: Harvard University uncovers DNA switch that controls genes for whole-body regeneration.
* H.I.V. Is Reported Cured in a Second Patient, a Milestone in the Global AIDS Epidemic.
* Scientists Say They Can Recreate Living Dinosaurs Within the Next 5 Years. Can’t see any harm there.
* Even catching up on lost sleep is bad for you!
* On the value of education. On heartbreak. On friendship. On the value of never clicking.
* Just in time for my fall class: Netflix has acquired the rights to Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and will adapt it into a series.
* The Suffering Game (for 3+ players).
* Race, Asia, and Dungeons and Dragons.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 22, 2019 at 12:47 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, academia, academic freedom, academic job market, academic publishing, activism, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, adjuncts, AI murder policy, air travel, airplanes, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, algorithmic culture, aliens, alt lit, America, Andy Daly, animal intelligence, animal personhood, animals, Antarctica, artificial intelligence, Aunt Becky, autism, automation, Barack Obama, BethAnn McLaughlin, Boeing, books, Captain Marvel, catastrophe, Catholicism, CBP, chimpanzees, China, Chinese science fiction, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, college, college admissions, computers, creepypasta, data, David Foster Wallace, Daystrom Institute, dementia, Democrats, deportation, digital horror, dinosaurs, disability, Doki Doki Literature Club!, drugs, Duke, Dungeons and Dragons, eco-fascism, ecology, education, Electoral College, empire, EPA, equality, ethnic cleansing, Europe, Facebook, fascism, Fermi paradox, film, floods, Foucault, Fox News, fraud, free speech, Full House, fun, Gabriel García Márquez, games, Garret Hardin, gay marriage, general election 2020, guns, Harry Potter, Harvard, hateclicks, Hayao Miyazaki, heartbreak, HIV and AIDS, homelessness, horror, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, Indiana, Infinite Jest, innovation, J.K. Rowling, jobs, Jurassic Park, juries, kids, kids today, killer death robots, labor, legacy media, literature, Lolita, Lord of the Rings, Luddites, Lyft, marijuana, Marquette, Marvel, mass shootings, Max-8, MCU, medicine, Michael Jackson, Mitch McConnell, Momo, MOOCs, Mound builders, MPAA, my pedagogical empire, Nabokov, Native Americans, Nazis, Nebraska, Netflix, New Sincerity, New York, Nobel Prize, Normal Porn for Normal People, Norway, nuclearity, NYPD, Octavia Butler, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Open Access, Orientalism, parenting, pedagogy, pedophilia, plagiarism, playing, podcasts, police brutality, police corruption, politics, pon farr, potholes, poverty, prison-industrial complex, privilege, propaganda, public transportation, QAnon, Quentin Tarantino, rabbits, race, racism, ratings, recycling, religion, Review, rich people, robots, Rutgers, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, school shootings, science fiction, science fiction studies, science is magic, sea level rise, security, self-checkout, self-driving cars, slavery, sleep, small colleges, socialism, Spock, Stacey Abrams, Star Trek, Star Wars, strikes, Stuyvesant, suffering, suicide, surveillance society, teaching, television, tenure, the Anthropocene, the Arctic, the courts, the Democrats, the law, the Sixties, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Tolkien, tragedy of the commons, travel, trigger warnings, true crime, Trumpism, TurnItIn, Twilight of the Elites, Twitter, Uber, unions, University of California, UT Austin, Vanderbilt, Vietnam, visas, voting, Voyager, Vulcans, Wal-Mart, Waldo, water, wealth, where are they?, white nationalism, white settlers, white supremacy, wildfires, Wisconsin, work, World Wildlife Fund, writing, YouTube, zombie ethics, Zora Neale Hurston
Tuesday Shazbat
* The world is awash in Robin Williams remembrances today, but for my money I’d recommend his recent appearances on WTF and Harmontown. Louie. Longreads has also collected four essays and his appearance on Charlie Rose. Robin Williams’s Best Bad Movie. Suicide contagion and social media. How to report a suicide. The MetaFilter thread.
* It’s primary day in Wisconsin. Endorsements from Shepherd-Express.
* Eyewitness to Michael Brown shooting recounts his friend’s death. Police Reportedly Refused Offer to Interview Man Who Was With Michael Brown During Shooting. Police in Ferguson Fire Tear Gas on Protesters Standing in Their Own Backyard. Ferguson Police Cite Safety Risk in Decision Not to Name Officer in Shooting. Ferguson, MO, is 67 percent black, and its police force is 94 percent white. The FBI steps in to investigate ultimately sign off on everything’s that happened. Dystopia as how-to manual.
* Paramilitary Police Are Changing Law Enforcement in the Suburbs. Jon Burge, Torture, and the Militarization of the Police. American Gulag.
* Hillary Clinton’s campaign will be predicated on “peace, progress, and prosperity,” with “peace” defined as “forever war.”
* ISIS Post PR Photos They Took With John McCain.
* CFP: Mean Girls.
* Nnedi Okorafor’s syllabus for ENGL 254: Science Fiction.
* On the greatness of Metroid.
* What’s less known, however, is that in the 2012 constitutional case, these same challengers filed briefs describing Obamacare to the court in precisely the way they now say the statute cannot possibly be read. Namely, they assumed that the subsidies were available on the federal exchanges and went so far as to argue that the entire statute could not function as written without the subsidies. That’s a far cry from their argument now that the statute makes crystal clear that Congress intended to deny subsidies on the federal exchanges.
* Ursula K. Le Guin: About Anger, Part I.
* The City and the City watch: a proposal that Israel and Palestine become grosstopic, overlapping states.
* Cary Nelson keeps digging: Zionist groups planned to lobby Univ. of Illinois trustees over Salaita appointment. Corey Robin has been coordinating some boycott campaigning for English and Political Science / Philosophy, though personally I think the English statement’s extension to tenure review cases is just too self-undermining to commit to.
* Announcing The Daily Show Podcast, without Jon Stewart.
* Marquette will give John Lewis an honorary degree at the new student convocation on August 20.
* California debates ‘yes means yes’ sex assault law.
Legislation passed by California’s state Senate in May and coming before the Assembly this month would require all schools that receive public funds for student financial assistance to set a so-called “affirmative consent standard” that could be used in investigating and adjudicating sexual assault allegations. That would be defined as “an affirmative, unambiguous and conscious decision” by each party to engage in sexual activity.
Silence or lack of resistance does not constitute consent. The legislation says it’s also not consent if the person is drunk, drugged, unconscious or asleep.
For some reason that escapes me, this is hugely controversial.
* The time Bruce Wayne had an affair with Barbara Gordon while she was dating Dick Grayson, impregnated her, before prompting her to head out and have a miscarriage while crimefighting. You know, for kids.
* Uber vs. Lyft: whoever wins, we lose.
* Apple’s workforce after 30 years of operation is still 70% male. And that’s better than most of the tech sector.
* Hoarders are the new Luddites.
Help a hoarder consolidate and safe-keep their things today. Lend them money to rent a storage locker. Volunteer to help them keep their things at your place. Their stuff is the final shred of resistance to the destruction of all non-Apple-approved human endeavors.
* Activision is making a new King’s Quest. Space Quest and Quest for Glory next!
* How American Universities Have Destroyed Scholarship in the U.S.
* And because everything is a bummer today: Ponzi Scheme Capitalism: An Interview with David Harvey.
My question would be: can we not foresee a continuation of that ridiculousness for the foreseeable future, where you have one fiction built on another fiction, one crisis to the next?
Yes. I raise that question a bit in the book by saying there are these fictitious forms of capital that can continue to circulate and feed off each other, and they’re all Ponzi schemes, which can sometimes go on for a long time. Yes, there may be some possibility we’re moving into this era of fictitious capital formation and circulation, which is then managed by the central banks because they can just add zeros to the money supply at the drop of a hat, and have been doing so. First off, it seems to me increasingly senseless, and I suspect that people will start to say, well what’s the point of all of this? Secondly, I think the internal contradictions of that are that there’s going to be crashes, but then there have been financial crashes popping off all over the place for the last 20 years and capital has survived. For instance, there’s one in Indonesia, one in Argentina and then there’s one somewhere else. Dubai World goes bankrupt, somebody else goes bankrupt, there are all these asset bubbles popping up all over the place, and maybe we can continue in that vein for a while. But at some point, I think the possibilities will run out.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 12, 2014 at 3:29 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with "Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?", academia, academic freedom, adjunctification, adjuncts, affirmative consent, anger, Apple, Barack Obama, Batgirl, Batman, California, capitalism, Cary Nelson, CFPs, China Miéville, civil forfeiture, class struggle, comics, consent, corruption, Dan Harmon, David Harvey, Death to Smoochy, depression, disruptive innovation, drones, dystopia, feminism, Ferguson, forever war, games, Gaza, general election 2016, Harmontown, health care, Heroes, Hillary Clinton, hoarders, How the University Works, Iraq, ISIS, Israel, Jessica Williams, John Lewis, John McCain, King's Quest, Louie, Luddites, Lyft, malicious bullshitting, Marc Maron, Marquette, Marxism, Mean Girls, mental health, Metroid, Michael Brown, military-industrial complex, misogyny, Missouri, NCAA, Nintendo, Nnedi Okorafor, now we see the violence inherent in the system, obituary, Palestine, podcasts, police brutality, police state, politics, Ponzi schemes, primaries, prison, prison-industrial complex, public health, public transportation, race, racism, rape, rape culture, resistance, Robin Williams, scams, science fiction, sexism, Sierra, socialism, St. Louis, Steven Salaita, suburbs, suicide, syllabi, Syria, taxis, teaching, tenure, The City and the City, the courts, The Daily Show, the laws, Uber, UIUC, Ursula K. Le Guin, voting is the one and only solution to all problems big and small, Wisconsin, WTF, yes means yes, you know for kids, Zionism
AcaMOOCia RoundMOOC
* The New Faculty Minority: Tenured professors fight to retain control as their numbers shrink.
* Behind the scenes of the NYU “no confidence” vote.
* I hereby irrevocably grant the University the absolute right and permission to use, store, host, publicly broadcast, publicly display, public[sic] perform, distribute, reproduce and digitize any Content that I upload, share or otherwise provide in connection with the Course or my use of the Platform, including the full and absolute right to use my name, voice, image or likeness (whether still, photograph or video) in connection therewith, and to edit, modify, translate or adapt any such Content. The MOOC is hungry; the MOOC must be fed.
* MOOCs have become a straight business play.
The Steinberg legislation marks the synthesis of MOOC steps (3) and (4), in which large scale trials are being insured through a state-created artifical product market revolving around Udacity and Coursera in particular. The business problem is this: Large-scale trials must be had at any cost, or the product momentum will die, investors will have doubts, money will dry up, market penetration will fail. MOOCs have shown that lots of people will sign up for a free online course–and that a tiny proportion actually persist. If students are required to pay tuition, as with UC online, they currently don’t sign up in the first place.
Thus 2013 may not be Year of the MOOC II, in that it may reveal that MOOCs may have no large natural market of tuition-paying students. To head off this possibility, the firms have shifted focus to regulatory capture. This is what happened when Udacity was hired by San Jose State University to run 3 remedial courses. The formal signing ceremony put founder Sebastian Thrun on the same level as the governor of the state and the chancellor of the Cal State University system.
* The Chronicle surveys the professors behind the MOOCs.
* The for-profit college sector had a difficult time building a prestigious for-profit product – at least in the way that the elite private universities are prestigious. But perhaps the lines between for-profit and public higher education is about to disappear. The latest ads from the University of Phoenix do not sound markedly different than the public relations of the University of California at Berkeley. There’s a somber assessment of the competitiveness of the marketplace, a nod to the importance of market-relevant training, and a promise to provide opportunity for willing and able students, irrespective of background or academic preparation.
* Online education’s false promises.
For higher education, MOOCs have become fantasy household robots, doing the dishes, vacuuming, listening attentively. MOOCs are going to create students with job-ready skills, cater to individual learning styles, enable collaborations between students and faculty in different countries. Maybe they’ll even alleviate poverty as students in remote regions learn skills like computer programming and engineering.
* And @zunguzngu gets smashy: It is perhaps time to reconsider the problem of machine-wrecking in the early industrial history of Britain and other countries. Related:
Professors, as much as some of us want to deny it, are working class. We have rituals that seem bizarre to the uninitiated. We have long periods of apprenticeship in which we pick up these rituals. We have bosses that want to make us work harder for less pay. We even have common styles of dress. Academia is our house of labor, and MOOC providers are deliberately trying to tear down the door so that they can rush in and trash the place.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 18, 2013 at 9:11 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjuncts, austerity, Berkeley, California, capitalism, contingent faculty, copyright, faculty governance, flexible online degrees, for-profit schools, How the University Works, Luddites, Ludditism, neoliberalism, New Faculty Majority, NYU, online education, privatize everything, San Jose State, Sisyphus Q. Luddite, tenure, UCLA, University of Phoenix
Quick Links
Quick links.
* At a newly revitalized Bitter Laughter: 73% of American Medical Association doctors want a public option.
* In the New Yorker, two takedowns of GOP insanity and obstructionism.
* Wal-Mart: actually not so great. Via MeFi, which includes a bonus link to a nice take-off on Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced capitalism is indistinguishable from socialism Soviet-style state capitalism.
* Also via MeFi: The New York Times’s Toxic Waters: “A series about the worsening pollution in American waters and regulators’ response.”
* And the thing from my lists I most enjoyed reading today just happens to be online: Thomas Pynchon’s “Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?” (UPDATE: My drive towards procrastination compelled me to write a brief HASTAC post on this.)
By 1945, the factory system — which, more than any piece of machinery, was the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution — had been extended to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket program and the death camps, such as Auschwitz. It has taken no major gift of prophecy to see how these three curves of development might plausibly converge, and before too long. Since Hiroshima, we have watched nuclear weapons multiply out of control, and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes, unlimited range and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance of a holocaust running to seven- and eight-figure body counts has become — among those who, particularly since 1980, have been guiding our military policies — conventional wisdom.
To people who were writing science fiction in the 50’s, none of this was much of a surprise, though modern Luddite imaginations have yet to come up with any countercritter Bad and Big enough, even in the most irresponsible of fictions, to begin to compare with what would happen in a nuclear war. So, in the science fiction of the Atomic Age and the cold war, we see the Luddite impulse to deny the machine taking a different direction. The hardware angle got de-emphasized in favor of more humanistic concerns — exotic cultural evolutions and social scenarios, paradoxes and games with space/time, wild philosophical questions — most of it sharing, as the critical literature has amply discussed, a definition of “human” as particularly distinguished from “machine.” Like their earlier counterparts, 20th-century Luddites looked back yearningly to another age — curiously, the same Age of Reason which had forced the first Luddites into nostalgia for the Age of Miracles.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 15, 2009 at 3:34 am
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged with Arthur C. Clarke, blogs, capitalism, doctors, HASTAC, health care, Luddites, obstructionism, politics, pollution, public option, Pynchon, Republicans, science fiction, state capitalism, Wal-Mart