University HR departments really forget what *H* in their name stands for, don't they? This gaming of the rules may be legally correct it definitely isn't morally. Much love to Wolverhampton colleagues and @plashingvole.bsky.social in particular.

Plashing Vole@plashingvole.bsky.social · yesterday

Sacking news: I scored 3rd out of 4 and therefore only qualify for a 0.5 post, with no redundancy payment because it's a contract variation rather than a dismissal. My 2.5 colleagues are thankfully therefore OK

⚠️ 🌍 ⚠️ We stand with humanity: A scientist statement to confront climate destruction⚠️ 🌍 ⚠️ ✒️ 🙏 If you are an academic or healthcare professional, please consider signing. 🙏✒️ framaforms.org/we-stand-wit...

The fruit of my postdoc academic labor (!) + that of my co-editors and 38 brilliant contributing authors... The Aesthetics of Machine Vision: Critical Terms and Ideas, published today by @mitpress.bsky.social open access 💕 mitpress.mit.edu/978026205417...

The Aesthetics of Machine Vision

The Aesthetics of Machine Vision brings together scholars, researchers, and artists who explore machine vision from various academic and nonacademic perspect...

mitpress.mit.edu

ALL ISRAELI SOLDIERS ARE WAR CRIMINALS

Movements to abolish police will have to transform the social, economic, and political conditions of capitalist relations, of which police are a linchpin. Socialists must be abolitionists, and abolitionists must be anti-capitalist.

Ends and Beginnings: An Abolitionist Manifesto

Their End is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition By brian bean Haymarket Books, 2025, 280 pages, $19.95 paper. IN MAY 2006 in Oaxaca, Mexico, teachers and their families assembled for a …

againstthecurrent.org

Google has now renamed Lake Ontario for US users. They don’t even show the real name in brackets. I used a VPN to compare: Apple hasn’t renamed it (at least not yet), nor has Dutch service Here WeGo or OpenStreetMap. Yet another reason to ditch Google, and US tech more broadly.

Paris Marx@parismarx.com · 3w ago

The United States is taking aim at Canada once again, with a crushing new set of tariffs. Ultimately, government will need to solve this. But in the same way Canadians are avoiding US alcohol, produce, and other goods, they should get off US tech products too. Luckily, I have a guide for that.

#⏰🐘🧵

-𝚖𝚘𝚡@moxiest.art · 2w ago

#⏰🐘🧵

The US is targeting the anarchist collective that hosts the popular Noblogs wordpress platform as terrorists. This is truly batshit (as are their various obvious lies about Rose City Antifa etc). This is a HUGE attack on basic free speech. www.state.gov/releases/off...

Designation of Autistici/Inventati as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist - United States Department of State

Today, the Department of State, in partnership with the Department of the Treasury, is announcing the designation of Autistici/Inventati as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. Autistici/Inventati...

state.gov

John, this article is a mess. You refer to Confas as a professor multiple times. He is not a professor, he's a postdoc. This is a not a nitpick, it's a real distinction with real differences in duties and privileges.

remember: its not a data center its a surveillance data processing complex

[Exit Queen.]

Please stop taking at face value what Cofnas says about anything including his own situation. He's not fired. He's not been suspended for being a whistleblower. He's suspended, yes, but for other important things, like bringing the university into disrepute.

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ@olivia.science · 4w ago

You read a time off a broken clock BECAUSE it's a broken clock and not a broken speedometer. A person who is a motivated reasoner about race is not a person to take lightly as a good source on anything a Black person does. This is literally one of the many reasons we cite sources, report CoIs, etc.

Me, a US-based academic: I don’t care what any scholar believes, we all need to stand up publicly whenever someone’s academic freedom is threatened Me, continuing: also, the first time this has happened, motivating me to sign my first ever open letter, is in late 2026, to a race scientist, in Ghent

Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon has reiterated that the West Bank is not Palestinian land occupied by Israel but rather land based on historical and biblical rights of Jewish people. It’s for this reason that he thought calling Jewish communities “settlers” in their “own land” was a disgrace.

Absolutely the situation here. The 3 out of 12 people who survive (we find out next week, probably) will be faced with teaching departing colleagues’ modules or finding and supporting underpaid hourly staff to do so in 3 weeks’ time. It can’t go well for anyone at all.

University and College Union (UCU)@ucu.org.uk · 3w ago

Universities across the UK are calling their redundancy programmes ‘voluntary’. In today’s Sunday Times a Senior Lecturer in Humanities completely exposes that lie.

My husband Drew wrote this at breakneck speed while moving cross-country and caring for an 8 month old, bc he felt it was necessary, ethically and politically, to correct the record. If you read Tyler Austin Harper's piece, I hope you'll read this.

The Drift@thedriftmag.com · 4w ago

Andrew Baker was also a “token black professor” at Bates College. But his perspective on the events Tyler Austin Harper recounts in his Atlantic cover story is very different. Read Baker’s side of the story online today. newsletter.thedriftmag.com/p/racism-and...

I don't think people understand the extent to which this has been a decade plus long billionaire funded campaign (obviously Thiel is involved). We've tried to ring the alarm about these eugenicists but it is too easy for them to get parroted by the mainstream media. bylinetimes.com/2026/08/18/t...

The Peter Thiel-Linked Race Science Network that Penetrated Cambridge University and Targeted Jason Arday

The media's coverage of the academic's life was fuelled by the campaign of an established far-right network

bylinetimes.com

My favourite post today

A great example of what always happens when the lads are asked to consider their own deep, immediately obvious guilt: like the Iraq War or austerity or Brexit, it turns out it was everybody’s fault. And if it’s everybody’s fault, nobody is really to blame www.thetimes.com/article/aadd...

Jason Arday was failed by the system — and by me

The academic my sister knew was ‘kind, wise, warm and fun’, if also deeply flawed. The system that overpromoted him should have been the target, not him

thetimes.com

‘The opacity around finances is astonishing given the sums involved: according to the 𝘍𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘛𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘴, the US has collected $13 billion of Venezuela’s oil revenue, yet no one seems able to say where those billions are.’ Tony Wood on US imperialism in the Americas. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Tony Wood · Maximum Pressure: Cuba on the Brink

If every accusation is a confession, then the US State Department report released on 20 July, which describes Cuba as...

lrb.co.uk

If there’s one thing @moneyontheleft.bsky.social is really great at, it’s not “paywalling” the revolution. First class in that shit.

47' GOAL!!! From the resulting corner, Junia Charlton heads in the equaliser Sporting Bengal 1 Clapton CFC 1

And so the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank accelerates against the backdrop of the never-ending genocide in Gaza

Looks like some folk have got the idea that it’s time to hound Them out of the profession. “Them” simply being people with e.g. problematic Twitter likes or out of context quotes, of course, nothing more sinister than that. Just as it always is, when the lads really fire up the hate machine.

On the witch hunt (academic lynching?) of Jason Arday: "The demand is not for a corrected record; it is for a person to be unmade." www.linkedin.com/pulse/jason-...

Vice-Chancellor of University of Bristol (salary £312,251): “I take a really personal view on this. My oldest daughter is the only child in my family who really is making a very significant amount of money.”

Elspeth Van Veeren@evanveeren.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Another excellent example of just how incurious and limited the UK press has been about this crisis. Not one mention of the cuts to humanities that Bristol’s own VC is trying to push through at the moment in this article about her position on the cuts 🤔🙄. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

"The only AI I support is Abolish ICE" Sticker spotted in NYC

The Church of the Martyrs, Westcotes Drive, Leicester Number 111 of 310 Leicester Diocese churches

Dumping Big Tech isn't just a matter of personal politics or even of tech sovereignty (which is a con anway) it's a matter of survival. Big Tech is the latest flag bearer for civilisation-ending extractivism and all the delusions about progress that keep us addicted to it.

"Every Flock license plate reader camera operated by the Winona Police Department has been sawed off and stolen in what investigators believe was a coordinated [act of civic duty]." Blinding the cyclops, wrecking the panopticon. crimethinc.com/blindingthec...

All of Winona Police Department’s Flock cameras cut down and stolen

Lost cameras valued at about $24,000

valleynewslive.com