As with Labour and Keir Starmer in the May regional elections in the UK, I struggle to see how Friedrich Merz can survive as leader of the CDU after such a sign of strategic ineptitude as the election results in Sachsen Anhalt

Carl Schmitt oder Friedrich Merz - Hauptsache Sauerland.

The inherent modernism of Greek architecture

I note that the US is now redefining “democratic backsliding” as “the European Union” and “immigration”.

Sam@samd.bsky.social · 4d ago

jesus fucking christ Trump is using our taxpayer dollars to create a global fascist movement

Don’t threaten me wirh a good time

One of the reasons the US is going after Brazil: the Pix payment system.

The U.S.-Brazil Spat Is About More Than Just Trump and Lula

Trump and Lula’s spat is just the latest in a long battle for regional influence between the U.S. and Brazil. The next battleground may be over the U.S. dollar.

worldpoliticsreview.com

Hammer just released Four Sided Triangle for free on YouTube. It's an interesting ethical sci-fi drama about cloning, shot through with some very 1950s ideas about gender roles, but definitely worth 80 minutes of your time.

Four Sided Triangle (1953) | FULL FILM in 4K | Hammer's Cloning Sci-Fi Thriller

YouTube video by Hammer

youtube.com

As I board the ferry from Tallinn to Helsinki, I’m reminded yet again of three things about the EU: 1) You don’t sacrifice any of your national identity or culture by being part of the EU. Estonia remains Estonia. Finland remains Finland 2) Schengen is great. 3) Brexit was and is shit.

It really shouldn’t be a footnote, even after all this time, that the entire purported justification for these self-destructive tariffs is that the president is stupid, and his party refuses to stop him.

Peter Sagal@petersagal.bsky.social · 2w ago

In his speech yesterday, Canada PM Mark Carney seemed to try to explain to the President what a “trade deficit” is. You’re not just giving another country 100s of millions of dollars… You’re buying things from them! That you want!

Wie ein bedeutender deutscher Publizist einmal über NZZ-Chefredakteur Gujer sagte: „Als er noch Deutschlandkorrespondent war, ist er uns gar nicht so aufgefallen.“ www.woz.ch/!A1V313YTJD81

Auf allen Kanälen: Was heisst «liberal»?

woz.ch

Thinking about fighting the patriarchal roots of the concept of "patrimoine" with fancy theory merch

I think it's key to understanding their worldview that they imagine a world not *without* immigrants, but one in which immigrants' inferiority is permanently asserted and they become a subservient caste. All these people worship the Gulf States.

Jo Wolff@jowolff.bsky.social · 3w ago

What is the right-wing vision for a world where immigrants have been deported and public services cut? Care and other services would dry up. The return of living in squalor for those beyond working age? The workhouse? The pauper’s grave?

3. Why is DEI perceived by its "beneficiaries" within the academy as window dressing that failed to meaningfully address numerical disparities in hiring let alone their structural causes, and by others outside the academy as having transformed higher ed into a monolithic bastion of "DEI faculty"?

2. How do hiring practices in the DEI era compare to the postwar era, when a small caste of elite young white men were often installed in prominent positions on the basis of patronage by established mentors but little career achievement? Why is one so corrosive to meritocracy but not the other?

Some questions/thoughts on DEI in the academy as an informed but once-removed observer. 1. How do the infractions Jason Arday was guilty of compare to the longstanding pre-DEI tradition of high-value professors not crediting the work/co-authorship of their research assts, particularly women?

👇👇👇

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 3w ago

Plenty to reflect about re: the Arday affair, but I'm going to repeat this one thing. The playbook the right used here is effective even though it's not especially sophisticated, as it relies on the audience to do the dirty work. I've been calling it "Trojan horse propaganda", let's go with that. 1/

From this review- “Think of all the diligent, decent black academics who have been lumbered with the embarrassment of having Arday as a figurehead” - no, think of *why* black academics are held collectively responsible in ways that white academics are not

Stephen Bush@stephenkb.bsky.social · 3w ago

I think functionally all of the post-resignation coverage that was about him rather than Cambridge was excessive (e.g. this poisonous review of a book nobody is going to buy - why)

Reiche Leute ballen sich sn Schweizer Seeufern, nur nicht sm Murten-, Bieler- und Neuenburgersee (Quelle: Blick)

our entire global financial system is currently leveraged to the hilt on the premise that it was good and right for a small cadre of US companies to steal all of the intellectual work ever produced by humanity and sell its back to us without credit or remuneration to the authors (plagiarism)

Cows and communication; Chasseral

Short term/long term; Chasseral

Der Hinmel über Lugnorre

L'éclipse en Bretagne.

John Travolta Confused: What Huh

ALT: John Travolta Confused: What Huh

static.klipy.com

Anyway back to my ongoing theory that women use AI to get more done and men use AI to get out of doing more.

I realize these are all things that sex workers have told us and could tell us better. Consumer-facing AI is basically a sex worker so of course it’s personalizing various iterations of financial domination for men because that’s what they want.

Creating hybrid institutions that are strategically crucial to state capacity without any of the oversight structures of a civil service yet are expected to be run as businesses with sub-standard management frameworks that are 30 years out of date is a bad idea, actually.

BeijingPalmer@beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 4w ago

I have several friends who moved from academia (mostly scientists) into corporate life in the US or UK and every single one of them found corporate life superior in management, benefits, treatment of staff, and attitudes toward work.

Sind hinter dem Haus bei diesen Zelten

Anti-immigration movements in Europe and the US either don't realize it or don't care, but the day that South-to-North immigration ends is the day Europe and the US have locked in the decline those movements are obsessed with. And not just due to the demographic impact that pro-natalists fixate on.

Wir gedenken heute der hl. Edith Stein/Teresia Benedicta vom Kreuz OCD (1891–1942), die als jüdisch-katholische Philosophin und Ordensfrau in Auschwitz-Birkenau ermordet wurde: „Ist nicht der Vernichtungskampf gegen das jüdische Blut eine Schmähung […] unseres Erlösers […]?“

Red States: We're cutting the humanities at our public universities to spend more money on right-wing indoctrination Blue States: We're cutting the same programs, but to spend more money on AI and the business school.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks.org · last mo.

Centrist Democrats hate humanities scholarship just as much as Republicans do - the difference is that Democrats think humanities teaching is important in the elite private institutions they aspire to send their kids to, but not the actual laborers.