Writing on C19 Central America and also the US university | university lecturer, organizer & onetime union staffer | Go easy, step lightly, stay free. | he/him
For
@thebafflermag
I try to explain Staten Island, my hometown. It’s a story of migration, integration, secession, racism, violence, the Dump, and the new generation of demagogues who’ve emerged to capitalize on Islanders’ longstanding grudges.
Congratulations to England, who have won the Protestant semifinal, and to Spain, who have won the Catholic match. On Sunday we will see whether the true faith can prevail against the heretical reformers
It is a crime and a sin that the richest city in the richest empire in the history of the world can’t keep a public library open for its children to read, play, and learn in on their days off from school. Sick society
Thinking about the train derailment and the toxic plume in Ohio because when in 2001 my dad signed up to work at ground zero to help restore phone and cable service. The company and the authorities told him it was safe and that they had done testing.
Jen Psaki (sarcastically): What are we going to do, send every American to Margaritaville?
Joe Biden (three weeks later): Using the site , every American is now eligible to register for four passes to Margaritaville
As antiwar protests continued across Russia, the police detained at least 411 people in 13 cities on Monday, an activist group said.
The protests are a remarkable display of defiance in a country where prison terms are sometimes sought for demonstrators.
Turns out ChatGPT can’t write literature but it CAN easily replace businesspeople. I’m sure university leaders will adjust funding priorities accordingly
Professor
@ktulrich
at Wharton and his colleague pitted Wharton MBAs against ChatGPT in a competition for innovative ideas. The results weren’t even close, the machine won 35 to 5 😱
Lmao i defy you to find a single worker in any other sector of the economy, union or not, who’s getting 6 years of retro pay. This isn’t a contract. It’s a goddamn stick up job
Eric Adams and the PBA have negotiated a new NYPD contract that will cost the city $5.5 billion.
Pay raises are across the board and retroactive to 2017.
For example, cops who are 5 years in will now earn $130,000, a $40,000 increase. That's not including overtime.
.
@GavinNewsom
is in Mission Hills cleaning up a homeless encampment near the freeway.
He’s frustrated L.A. County leaders aren’t doing more to remove encampments.
I talk about that & the presidential race coming up on
@FOXLA
at 6p &
@TheIssueIsShow
This is the key for folks who say “just pay back the money you owe”: student loans are a textbook predatory financial product that traps ignorant borrowers into disastrous and usurious near-lifetime indebtedness. There can be no appeal to fairness in this reality
Believe it or not, the primary function of teachers' unions--or any other unions for that matter--is secure good, safe jobs with dignity in the public interest, not to protect the electoral performance of the national Democratic Party.
I honestly think we should just have sports analysts do political punditry for a while. Because ultimately they understand that winning is the goal and if you lose you are a loser
Stephen A. Smith on Hillary Clinton telling undecided voters to "get over yourself:"
"I don't think it was a very wise statement on her part. How did that work out for her in 2016?"
The orcas attacking boats after a female orca was injured by a rudder is fascinating but when you discover that what they're actually doing is tearing the rudders off the boats and leaving them to drift helpless to hurt another orca ever again it becomes the greatest thing ever
The shock of the Pelosi attack is that, again, Republicans are allowed to write off the most extreme elements of their coalition while Democrats become defined by Republican caricatures
When students at Brown occupied College Hall for divestment last semester, Mumia Abu Jamal called them from prison. Brown arrested those students. Today Brown again refused to drop the charges. Anyway here’s a replica of Mumia’s cell on exhibit at Brown’s John Hay library
Doubtless there will be many takes on the Amazon Labor Union's historic and little-anticipated victory in the election today. But I think it a lot of it boils down to this: for everyone in the labor movement, it's time to dramatically rethink what we imagine is possible.
Can’t make this up. Listening to Marketplace on NPR and they said that since it’s a day devoted to labor they want us to hear from an American laborer….and business owner lol. It ended up being a segment with a woman who literally owns a bed and breakfast in coastal Washington
Let’s review:
- NYPD under federal corruption investigation
- commissioner resigns after his phone seized
- cop opens fire on a *farebeater* inside a subway station, injures 4, including a cop and two bystanders
- “the suspect had a knife”
- they can’t find the knife
NYPD now says someone stole the knife "wielded by" the alleged farebeater they shot yesterday.
The knife they previously said they "recovered" and posted on social media is a "different knife."
It’s extremely funny to watch two prominent male journalists discover the two starting positions of historical interpretation in real time, as though they had just invented the study of history
In 2016 he developed the cancer that killed him at age 55. I think twice now when they say they’ve done testing after a disaster and it’s safe to go back.
I actually think caring about a political cause because your friends and peers introduce you to it is normal and probably explains a lot of how people’s politics gets formed
This is an admission that the Biden administration has the leverage to end the slaughter and has chosen to let it proceed in exchange for minimal humanitarian gestures. Nowhere near enough.
🚨 Israel now admits they are allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza BECAUSE OF PRESSURE FROM THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION.
Who the president is matters, folks. It's matters a lot.
I lost it last night thinking about that little girl who died alone and scared whose name now hangs over a building at Columbia. Thinking of my own little girl. Hind deserved to live. They all do. Free Palestine
After a while they didn’t even have to wear a respirator down there. We didn’t think much of it. They had done testing! Then years later the guys he had worked with started getting sick with different ailments and they all got enrolled in the medical monitoring program.
But it’s clear from the reporting of
@LeverNews
@MorePerfectUS
and others that the company and the government knew such an incident was likely and they worked to make it likelier at the expense of workers and residents. That much you don’t have to be an expert to know is wrong.
You can read 100 studies showing that giving people money improves health outcomes (and more!) and it's as effective in shaping policy as Vonnegut's custard pie.
What’s going on at WVU and elsewhere isn’t an absolute contraction of higher ed. Across the sector enrollments are lower but still historically high. Rather it’s the creation of a lower-tier higher ed product for poor students, students of color, and students from rural areas
14.5 million dollars spent to replace Bowman with a centrist goon, all to have one more pro Israel vote in chamber with hundreds of them. Money that could have been spent on literally anything else, including improving people’s lives. Disgusting
This is totally fine. I wouldn’t personally do it but it’s in line with how people have historically used books collectively. Fetishizing the book-object is just a symptom of our culture’s increasing turn away from literacy
It’s true that much of what’s unfolded over the last several days feels uncomfortably like a return to the bloodlust of the post 9/11 days. But it’s important to acknowledge, too, that there has never been this much open support for Palestine in the West, ever.
Exclusive: A pro-Palestine demonstration underway in Washington DC with participation of thousands of people from different walks of life.
#GazaGenocide
The trend towards turning all universities libraries into glorified weworks continues apace. Rather than desks, carrels, and books, most libraries are now kitted out with smart boards, collaboration rooms, and techified “learning commons” areas where students mill around
At what used to be a leading research library, where they moved all the books off-site, going from 2,4M volumes to 5,000. At this point you might just as well tear it down and build a coffee shop.
I will be praying a special intention that the Lord grants our champions victory and that He touches the heart of King Charles and returns the island kingdom to the Holy Mother Church
the test of whether biden walking a picket line is good isn't whether it's "pandering" or "performative," but whether it rachets up the workers' leverage over their bosses. If you don't get this you don't really get unions
Please think of those most affected by the death of Henry Kissinger today: centrist opinion writers who are going to stay up all night writing scolding columns about how the left will alienate decent people by celebrating too much
It seems clear that what President Shafik did when called the NYPD to campus (amid so many crocodile tears and so much professed regret) was license other schools across the country to use far greater police force on their own students, without regret or hesitation
I hope Americans watching Ukraine in horror understand that this is what we did to Iraq. A full-scale invasion of a country that had not aggressed us, preceded by a monthslong media campaign of lies, led by cowards who would never be dissuaded despite every effort at peace
This tweet has achieved escape velocity for some reason but for the record if you have anything nice to say about Rhodesia or anything its government did you’re a white supremacist
Not sure how many independent international organizations have to say this before it becomes politically possible for a single US senator to do so. The absolute shame
Give me the confidence of the 29 year old guy on the left who agreed to appear in this NYT home library photoshoot despite seemingly owning about 15 books
This is a far bigger deal than the Trump indictment in Fulton, and it’s part of the same authoritarian extremism that makes Trump possible. What prosecutors are doing here is making ordinary dissent and well-worn nonviolent protest techniques felonies. It’s chilling
The RICO indictment in Fulton County has been updated to include the Solidarity Fund organizers. They have also been charged with 15 counts of money laundering.
Pay attention to what’s going on in Michigan right now: as worker militancy ramps up among higher ed workers and grad workers in particular, university repression is becoming far more open, coercive, and violent.
If "the left" sits out the 2024 election because they are mad that Biden isn't pure enough, they will help elect a Christo Fascist government that will waste no time turning this country into a Christian theocracy. So breathtakingly stupid, my teeth hurt.
The headline is so funny. He hasn't "been accused of it." It's what he did!! It's not a matter of opinion or interpretation! It's a fact! I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!
Feels like we’re really seeing the limits of what a system of government designed in the eighteenth century by slaveowners and genocidaires can be made to accomplish
Let us rightfully condemn Putin’s authoritarianism and his unjust war, and let us condemn authoritarianism here at home. We imprison more of our people than any other country on the planet
I love running my university like a business (loading it up with debt, spending borrowed money frivolously, using the debt as a pretext to ram through layoffs and restructuring, paying off creditors and executive leadership, taking a golden parachute as the whole thing burns)
It is sickening that the media has chosen to portray teachers unions generally and the CTU specifically as anti-in person learning absolutists when they are simply calling for the same public health measures that experts have recommended throughout this pandemic.
Been thinking about this & what I'm realizing is REI's choice to use land acknowledgements & have speakers specify pronouns is neither an instance of willful hypocrisy, nor cluelessness, nor winking self-parody. Rather its part of a canny anti-union strategy. Here's what I mean:
Of course I am rooting for Donald Trump to lose and to close the book on MAGA. But put simply: if Harris cannot stop the genocide in Palestine, it will stain her legacy, as it has stained Biden’s. There are no two sides and no halfway to genocide.
Adams is already calling this contract a victory for working people, but it’s nothing of the sort. City agencies everywhere, which, guess what, employ working people, are eating huge cuts to make this giveaway possible. Shameful
Important to recall that every last bit of her and her family’s wealth and power derives from centuries of conquest, pillage, and enslavement on a planetary scale. Make jokes or don’t but don’t forget who we’re talking about
@JortsTheCat
@JortsTheCat
please have your colleagues review osha guidelines for ladders, stools, and stairways so you can safely climb to the ledge and back down without injury!
There are two huge ongoing or imminent strikes among public university grad workers, at Indiana and UIC. But these public grad workers make much less than their counterparts at private schools. I’m posting links to their strike funds here.
The idea that college learning is somehow about debate is totally poisonous. Debate is about using rhetorical techniques to convince an audience of your position, irrespective of its merits. Learning is about finding out what is true
Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City last year involved just 327 people, the police said. Collectively, they were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times.
BREAKING:
@SpaceX
’s Starship rocket, the largest & most powerful rocket ever, successfully lifted off!
Stage sepration didn't work, but getting this far is an amazing success in and of itslef. Congrats SpaceX team!
What does it say about our society’s priorities when crowded bars remain open, sports stadiums are packed with tens of thousands, and we are once again talking about closing schools? Children and families should not have to continue paying the price.
There is no better proof of the limits of left electoral organizing in the imperial core than the failure of almost every progressive elected official to put out a statement recognizing the humanity of Palestinians or the ongoing human rights abuses of the Israeli state
I must not read the pdfs. Reading the pdfs is the mind-killer. Reading the pdfs is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will download more pdfs. I will permit them to pass over me and through me.
Finally: we must understand Putin’s authoritarian nationalism and the authoritarian nationalism of the GOP as part of the same trend, a tide of right wing revanchism sweeping the world in the wake of the failures of the liberal order. They are intertwined
All because we need to make sure every cop retires to his beach house down the shore after 20 long years of testilying, planting evidence, and beating the shit out of protesters. What good is all this bounty if we can only use it for violence?
I’m really excited to share that my dissertation, “The Queen of Two Worlds: Crisis and Creation in the Central American Transit Zones, 1848-1914” has been selected to receive Brown’s Joukowsky Outstanding Dissertation Prize in the humanities!!!
Something you learn to do early in grad school is read texts just to disagree. Pick them apart, find the mistakes, prove the author is wrong. Something you learn later in grad school is not to do that