Natalia Cecire

A beautiful, powerful essay

The idea that closed borders are necessary has been a forever pipe dream for the right but attempting to make it a reality is, like the DHS itself, relatively new. And it did not happen without bi-partisan political resistance from people who knew it would come at an economic cost.

Faculty did not ask for this. The chancellor did this while claiming austerity and collecting a million dollars in salary and benefits. While TAMU is closing women's and gender studies programs out of pointed cruelty, the CSU is doing the same out of willful starving of resources and layoffs.

it will be a minute before this is out, but I'm quite happy w how this is shaping up. Also William Wells Brown's work deserves 10000% more critical attention than it's received.

😮 exciting!

If you can substitute "hungry ghost trapped in a jar" for "AI" in a sentence it's probably a valid use case for LLMs. Take "I have a bunch of hungry ghosts in jars, they mainly write SQL queries for me". Sure. Reasonable use case.

"My girlfriend is a hungry ghost I trapped in a jar"? No. Deranged.

Can you imagine a world in which a teacher made $490k in overtime pay

"Race and gender ideology" are not real things. You are a free and independent newspaper owned by kajillionaires, you do not have to parrot the made-up, legally undefined phrasing of a fascist authoritarian regime.

ANYWAY. You do not have to accept their terminology when it is transparently manipulative, inaccurate, and designed to legalize their illegal crusades. You don't have to call it a Big Beautiful Bill. You do not have to pretend there is a thing called gender ideology just because they said it.

the time I assigned a *silent* film...on an elective 😱

#OtD 31 Jan 1957 350 Jewish bagel bakers went on strike in NYC. After damaging trucks and appealing to drivers, bakers persuaded drivers to strike with them. 385 more workers joined and after 33 days, 34 bakeries agreed to improved pay and benefits stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/1036...

I have to laugh

‘It’s like a gift from God’: undocumented foreign workers welcome Spanish amnesty Half a million migrants will be ‘regularised’ under plans to boost economic growth that have angered rightwing parties

Humane and sensible step move by Spain in facilitating irregular migrants and asylum seekers to move to work with decent pay, social security and tax payments. Predictably the right is grumbling - unlike the UK, the govt isn’t allowing this to set their policies www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

Consider the statement the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) made on October 8, 2023, in which it marshalled some of its distinctive linguistic tools to refuse engagement with the political rationalities of Palestinian resistance. It included the sentences: This brutal attack on helpless persons is a reminder of the darkest moments in human history when splitting and projection become so extreme that they lead to a complete demonization of civil populations as part of the "bad other." It is the unrestrained release of the death instinct to cause harm to the innocent with no regard for moral standards or other psychological balancing forces.

I needed to write about psychic life and Palestine because I remain so angry with how deeply psychoanalysis as institution has been implicated in the horrors of the last two-and-a-half years www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

ICE Begins Buying ‘Mega’ Warehouse Detention Centers Across US Plans for such centers and jails in nearly two dozen communities have sparked protests over suitability, proximity to homes and schools.

The largest infrastructure projects currently being built in the US appear to be data centers and detention centers. The AI boom has coincided with ICE becoming the most heavily funded government agency. It's hard not to see a connection: This is the architectures of digital fascism

Just in case there was any doubt left about what these engineers think of humanity. The fact that xAI is demanding absurd qualifications for such low pay is just the latest data point for how AI companies systematically devalue human labor and creativity. It should be a permanent scandal.

My fave is when you try to add a comment and the whole thing inexplicably scrolls several pages away, dropping your comment somewhere that makes absolutely no sense and is hard to find and delete

Philadelphia you ARE perfect! See you next Saturday, Philly people <3

Feb. 7th 6PM poetry and labor a reading and discussion Keegan Finberg, author of Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public Kristin Grogan, author of Stitch, Unstitch: Modernist Poetry and the World of Work Gina Myers, author of Works & Days Lot 49 Books 408 E Girard Philadelphia

One week from tomorrow, I’ll be reading and talking to Gina Meyers and Kristin Grogan about poetry and labor. We will be waxing on about the wageless and the low-waged labors that make up most of our lives. The bookstore is called Lot 49. Philadelphia, you are perfect!

Jim Pattison won't sell U.S. warehouse proposed as new ICE facility | CBC News Jim Pattison Developments has announced it will not sell an industrial building in Ashland, Va., that was set to be turned into an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) processing facility.

Turns out that you can simply chose not to sell your warehouse and prevent it from becoming a detention center

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Can hardly believe what I'm seeing here. No doubt there'll be time to add some more insult to injury every day next week, like every day this week, but surely it can't go on forever.

In 2021 I was telling people in my field of art history to stop legitimizing the use of image recognition, to stop applying for grants to use AI in identifying the subjects of portraiture bc this was what such work was being used to further. All this was obvious. theconversation.com/how-ai-is-hi...

Earned settlement: Activists warn Labour consultation is a stitch-up Migrants’ Rights Network is urging allies to flood Labour’s ‘earned settlement’ consultation — policy rooted in cruelty, racism and classism

Migrants’ Rights Network is urging allies to flood Labour’s ‘earned settlement’ consultation — policy rooted in cruelty, racism and classism

www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/...

This is terrible. I'm so sorry to hear it.

Far From Minneapolis, Memphis Remains Under a Different Federal Crackdown

The book will be written about geographies of authoritarianism and how this regime zeroed in on cities w/ large Black populations, African immigrant populations, Black leadership and histories of Black protest. That book has already been written many times over about US history, but history repeats

Facial Recognition Technology Is the New Rogues’ Gallery The problem with facial recognition technology isn’t just that you could be mistaken for a suspect—it’s that it means your government doesn’t trust you.

I wrote this piece in 2020--but given ICE's use of face recognition and Pam Bondi posting mugshots on X, I'll share that since the 1890s, there has been concerns about the constitutionality of mugshots taken before conviction. Police retaining your photo erodes your presumption of innocence.

ICE Out of Our Communities! Citywide Rally & Training Learn what to do if you see ICE & how to get your community prepared. Saturday, Jan. 31 | 3:30pm Baltimore City Hall With sponsorship by many local organizations and unions.

Hi Baltimore!

TIL that teenage Tupac won an award for a rap about the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Please nothing else happen for the rest of the day so I don't have to think about anything else

One reason you can't just tinker with ICE/CBP is the whole thing is facially illegitimate. The intent is rotten. It's run by a white supremacist maniac and will continue producing white supremacist maniac results

Every moment a person spends in custody endangers their life and health. Including being detained, when cops point weapons or put hands on you, and restraints.

Whether the systems are openly sadistic or seemingly disinterested, they're dangerous.

No kids should ever be kept there for safekeeping.