Another framing: "tons of democrats showed up to vote because they hate Trump and want to stop him"

Politico@politico.com · 9h ago

Progressives didn’t get the big election night they wanted

Is "too close to call" an accurate headline if other outlets are literally calling it? (maybe they're wrong -- what mitigates against publishing a headline "Nearly all of the votes counted, El-Sayed is ahead by a smidge"?)

Maybe one can’t differentiate btw “because” and “in spite of” because one can’t actually divorce aesthetics from ethics, work from author, etc

aohsu@aohsusometimesy.bsky.social · yesterday

good _because_ they were bad (and deemed to have been bad @ time of writing) or good _in spite of_ their having been bad?

Is an Arab Egyptian-American “technically” an “African-American” or an “Asian-American”? (Or, like a Mamdani, can they claim both hyphenate identities?)

#tomes

Casaubon@zas.bsky.social · 6h ago

Dalloway done. Now middkemarch for real this time. My reading list is all behemoths. Quixote, Moby Dick, mason & dixon. Will try to break them up w Austen and Faulkner

Thanks to at least two of you who recommended checking this Brinkley Messick book from the early nineties out. Extremely my jam. Nice intro to Yemen and Islamic legal anthropology, as well as explaining how text, writing, voice work across multiple scales and genres.

Ideologies of Big Number: words lie, numbers can’t, they approximate ‘reality’ in ways that allow us to commensurate seemingly unlike, distinct things, and make safer, more accurate predictions.

Glenn Mackin@glennmackin.bsky.social · yesterday

Even without the AI crap, there is a strong tendency to substitute quantification for thinking, and exchanges of information for communication. And yes, it produces its own special form of stupidity

Really fun reading classic work from the 1980s and 1990s, about socio-political life in places that were not early modern France, and seeing how Foucault was cited when he was "new" or even contemporary. How exciting to have just read Foucault and immediately see its relevance!

What's good on the category of "brown people" in (but also beyond) the US? What does it mean for Latines, Indigenous folks, Arabs, desis, and Filipinos to see themselves through this broader umbrella category -- as much defined by what it ain't than what it is? www.npr.org/2017/12/11/5...

Ask Code Switch: Who Can Call Themselves 'Brown'?

A listener asks: Should light-skinned Asian-Americans — like some East Asians — be able to call themselves "brown"? The answer is complicated, and has to do with how diverse "Asian-Americans" are.

npr.org

If Trump is truly obsessed with Obama, a reporter should ask him to release his summer reads and what music he's listening to these days

Buddha: *blah blah blah middle path this middle path that* Me: *offstage* look at this radical centrist

Ambedkar on the Buddha's doctrine of karma: "He denied the fatalistic view of Karma. He replaced the view of Karma by a much more scientific view of Karma. He put new wine in old bottle[s]."

New job: History of Early Modern East Asia (c. 1400-1850) Brown University jobs.h-net.org/jobs/70189

Do researchers on antisemitism distinguish between local or national antisemitisms (tropes, stories, laws, etc.) that take form in the absence of Jews being around (demographic nonentity) versus those that take form where there are lots of Jews around?

I can think of a few different examples of mainstream economists colonizing the topics of other disciplines to "improve" their study and "make them more efficient" over the past century. Would be interested to read more history of disciplinary incursions/rebuff/battles for public attn...

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1.bsky.social · yesterday

"History involves sorting and organizing hundreds of thousands of facts" I remain astounded by how loud and wrong people are about what history actually is.

DJT more than BHO proves that “anybody could be president”

rich traditions@helldude.bsky.social · 2d ago

itll be interesting to see how it goes, but we've literally just proven conclusively that you can grab any old weirdo off the street and put them in charge and they will definitively try harder and be plainly more effective than at least one past president

and GOD IS EMPTY JUST LIKE ME

Toddler’s review of Smashing Punpkins’ “Tonight Tonight,” based solely on its orchestral overture: maniacal laughter

“Cinema Sinification”? Is there really a racist meme that Chinese film audiences hate identifying and enjoying tropes?

Movies Silently@moviessilently.bsky.social · 4d ago

Yep, the Cinema Sinification of moviegoing is truly depressing. Some genres, like the classic bedroom farce, are all about the audience recognizing tropes and conventions and merrily anticipating what comes next. I do love a "everyone hides behind the same screen and under the same bed" scene!

I wish I knew more about Israeli macroeconomic policy. A pro-Palestine leftie student could take a class where the whole point of the course is to single Israel out — what they’re often accused of doing in bad faith

Sean Tucker@seantucker.bsky.social · 4d ago

I invite you to examine the course description for this offering at the U of T: "ECO251 - Special Topics in Economics: Israeli Economy." This is shilling for Israel.

So it seems to me that he has made a very "democratic" Odyssey - one that is achieving a certain kind of universality - while structuring both character and casting to communicate that it is a universal story that belongs to everyone EXCEPT those who would use it for supremacist purposes

Reading the classics in the original Greek and Latin was part of the standard education for British and then American elites; in the 1950s, when the Great Books curriculum was being put together at the University of Chicago, it was explicitly imagined as a democratic cultural project

What’s good on “consciousness raising” as a historical practice? Does it have a present, and future, or can we only speak of it in the past tense? Is it related to practices of becoming or “staying” “woke”? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscio...

Logically deducing what to call dogs is how Claude Levi-Strauss developed structuralism incidentally

Dave Kellett@davekellett.bsky.social · 4d ago

COMIC: How to Name Your Dog

Was reading or writing the first target? I had a just so story for why college writing: tech bros hated writing/humanities class in school, thought it was bs, resented having to feel the discomfort of learning how to think for the themselves

Matt Seybold@mattseybold.bsky.social · 4d ago

It would perhaps be warranted that we take a sociological, or even occupational ethnographical approach to the question: Why has reading been chosen as the first thing commercial AI developers will try to automate out of existence?

The toddler figured out gender. “Mamas bellies have girls and babas bellies have boys” “would that be fair?” “That would be faaaaair”

Here’s an example of USian ethnocentrism that blows my fellow Americans’ minds: in Canada the little Caesar’s guy doesnt say “pizza pizza” he says “two pizzas”

What’s good on the relationship between anti-colonial Orwell and anti-“totalitarian” Orwell? Why do “we” read Animal Farm/Nineteen Eighty-Four as not having to do with shooting that Burmese elephant?

Amusing myself and my wife by referring to him as Peter Spiderman, like he's a guy we met once at Shul