Now that Google had released its Pervert Glasses, and knock off pervs can be bought cheaply via Temu or other outlets, are university colleagues aware of any policies anywhere to prevent their use in lectures or tutorials?
Bruce Buchan
@brucealexb.bsky.social
Scholar. Historian of ideas. Mostly Enlightenment & race, quite a bit on empire & colonisation, plus some corruption and a little piracy for good measure.
Australia’s #colonisation in 1788 was to be effected without #slavery, even as Britain’s exploitation of slave trading intensified. As thousands of African bodies were #enslaved, so too were Australia’s #Indigenous dead. Open access. @lindaaburnett.bsky.social www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Enlightenment enslavement and the Indigenous dead: trafficking slaves and skulls in the early colonisation of Australia
In 1787, as the First Fleet made its way across the Atlantic to colonise Australia, it traversed an ocean made synonymous with the violently forced mobility of enslavement, then reaching an unprece...
tandfonline.com
Precisely now, when the future being foisted upon us is entirely mediated by a welling tide of plausible yet thoroughly specious AI slop in service to corporate interests, why would we not choose this moment to invest in a species-centred, life-affirming, humanistic education for a humane future?
It is not irrational or in any way unreasonable to believe that AI has nothing to say to me worth reading, watching, or reflecting on, that any living (or once living) human could say with infinitely greater meaning or feeling. To believe this is simply to affirm our own humanity.
On the subject of AI, Australia’s politicians evince the almost unvaried gullibility of the true enthusiast. Some simple, unvarnished scepticism would be a blessed relief.
Since 2022 academics have been adapting to widespread AI cheating, even as managers actively encouraged its widespread misuse. If we want to protect university education academics needs more public funding to teach & research, as do our students to learn. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
ANU accused of ‘hysterical’ response to students using AI to cheat as unis scramble to ‘secure’ assessments
Australia risks ‘shipping’ intellectual capability overseas if educational rigour not restored, experts warn
theguardian.com
‘After the end of the world’ by Danie Mellor (Art Gallery of NSW) poignantly captures colonial necropolitics. First Nations ceremony and ancestral remains become matters for colonial curiosity and involuntary repossession. This is a continuing subject of my and my colleagues’ research.
I spoke today at the AHA conference on scientific enslavement in Australia, with @amywayness.bsky.social and Gemmia Burden. Calling stolen First Nations body parts enslavement is a provocation to rethink our colonial history. More on this with @lindaaburnett.bsky.social in History Australia soon!
Sharing the news of the Royal Society's Notes and Records Essay prize winner Maria Florutau. Her essay, ‘The manul or Pallas’s cat…’, was deemed by the judges as ‘outstanding’ and rich in primary sources that insightfully ‘encapsulates the entanglements of knowledge and empire in Eurasia’.
Notes and Records Essay Award | Royal Society
Open to early career researchers in the history of science.
royalsociety.org
A new front in the global war against the humanities “…although staff across the academic body were impacted, the cuts were "disproportionately concentrated in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS), where 85% of all staff placed at risk of redundancy (445 out of 523 FTE) are based".
Francesca Stavrakopoulou@proffrancesca.bsky.social · last mo.Guess what? I’m at risk of redundancy. My job - and those of my colleagues in my department and across our wider faculty of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences - is one of those currently targeted for cuts. I received a personal letter today. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
This should become an axiom in political science: a government is beyond all hope of survival when it begins arresting its citizens for publicly witnessing a metaphor of its own corruption.
Adam Cohen (My Personal Views Only)@axidentaliberal.bsky.social · 2mo agoTrump’s goons arrested David Carter Hearn, a three-time Olympian, for allegedly vandalizing the reflecting pool “Mr. Hearn..‘reached into the water to feel’..a dislodged paint piece ‘still attached to the bottom’” This case will probably go about as poorly as their prosecution of the sandwich guy
It’s a swamp. A stagnant pool of water filled with algae. Trump didn’t “drain the swamp.” He made one, right in from of everyone’s eyes.
ABC News Australia@news.abc.net.au · 2mo agoTrump blames Reflecting Pool 'problems' on vandalism, multiple arrests made
I’m no psephologist, nor any kind of expert on British politics, I just hope these low figures indicate that voters for the Raving Loony Party and Count Binface have been strategically voting. And that British voters more generally have started composing the political epitaph for Reform and Restore.
The Age of Trump demonstrates the value of an education in the humanities every day. It poses hourly questions of ethics and epistemology, repeatedly shows the relevance of history, demonstrates distortions of language. Even the Reflecting Pool has become a gaping metaphor in paint and algae.
Australians have indulged Pauline Hanson’s public career for 30 years. She’s rusted into our political establishment. Yet in all that time she has only manifested a relentlessly sour, ignorant, resentful, narrow, and miserably bigoted point of view. What in heavens does that say of us as a nation?
Each year Griffith University campus becomes an arena for a struggle between males of two different species moved by bloody minded wilfulness as the hapless ground staff do battle with the male Brushturkeys assembling their incubating nests. The current score is 1 - nil to the Brushturkeys!
A new policy I’ll be adopting in my course in the coming months: if the student uses AI to produce their assignment, I will not provide any personalised feedback.
It’s is seriously beyond irony that as elected centrist governments face ever more stridently racist and fascist insurgencies, they are presiding over the wholesale destruction of universities, and making a university education prohibitive for those who most need it: their own citizens.
I firmly believe that what activates ordinary people politically is not ideology, justice, corruption, hate, or even patriotism. It’s aesthetics. That is why culture wars work. It’s also why Trump is losing.
Spencer Gray@spencerdgray.bsky.social · 2mo agoNothing says ‘freedom’ like burning taxpayer money on dirt bikes at the White House for a billionaire’s birthday party. Bread’s expensive, rent’s worse, but sure, let’s fund a midlife crisis with fireworks and motocross. Peak empire decay. America is not a serious country.
If algae in the Reflecting Pool is a metaphor, the removal of his name from the Kennedy Centre is an allegory.
Chris Wagnon@wags1680.bsky.social · 2mo agoWould be hilarious if this pulls in higher ratings than the UFC fight. #KennedyCenter
Australian universities are being driven off a cliff by an empowered managerial class with no accountability.
Ben Eltham@beneltham.bsky.social · 2mo agoDeakin University is doing a massive restructure with hundreds of jobs at risk — with zero consultation. In the middle of that, their vice-chancellor resigned effective immediately. Deakin is in crisis www.megaphone.org.au/petitions/do...
It only took 50 years of neoliberalism to rebuild the ancien régime. The billionaire class is not united, but they all know they are defined by their interests. They act accordingly. Their chief interest is to ensure that the populace remains unable to act in its own interests. They are succeeding…
Given the choice between doing that or hosting a tour with Richard Marles, I think I’d also choose resignation.
Replace Australia’s Productivity Commission with a Foreign Investment Commission. Every Australian company held accountable for investing in genocide, wars of aggression, ethnic cleansing, or breaches of international law. All hearings in public; penalties imposed on boards of directors, personally.
Look, the world is a mess and humanity faces enormous problems, but can there be any more catastrophic sign of our predicament than the pronunciation of the word “versus” as “verse”, “versed”, or “versing”?
All colonisation is a determined effort to realise fantasies of erasure. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...
‘They are disturbing the dead’: reconstructing the site of the forgotten first genocide of the 20th century
At least 3,000 Herero and Nama people died in a German concentration camp at Shark Island, Namibia. A new forensic exhibition in Berlin is using digital technology to unearth how colonisers scarred a ...
theguardian.com
The vacuity of ‘centrism’ among our political and media classes is that it was always premised on an explicit preference to work with whichever fascists, racists, bigots, or xenophobes most useful in the determined struggle to keep popular demands for social justice powerless.
Which country would be dumb enough to pay $58 billion for 3 used nuclear submarines to these guys?
