Tatami Disco

Dunno how you could describe this as anything other than straight up Klan 3.0 shit, but, anyway, rest, peace, and comfort to the family and friends of this beloved man; keep Ezra Klein and Gavin Newsom in your thoughts a well.

Great thread.

This is why I don't understand the hagiography of him as a bastion of free speech. I agree that his murder was an assault on free speech as a principle of liberal democracy, but so was his politics. Condemning both is the only consistent position.

This one Dril tweet in December 2023 was a more accurate depiction of actual events than anything you’d have got off newsstands, from broadcast media or out of the mouths of politicians. It hasn’t got much better since.

Great piece

photo of Michel Callon

Together with his family, his cherished colleagues, many friends, admiring readers, and grateful students, we mourn the loss of Michel Callon, who passed away on July 28th. He was one of the intellectual giants of our era. See this insightful interview sociologica.unibo.it/article/view...

Street greening transformation before and after in Paris

New forest in front of Paris city hall

New “school street” with greening in central Paris

According to the City of Paris, in the last 10 years 150K trees have been planted & 45ha of parks created in the already hot city, all intended to not only improve quality-of-life today, but also help the city adapt to & manage summer heatwaves of 50℃ (122F) by 2050.

Just the start.

Common sense.

They just announced a new system of convict leasing. Trump uses the word ‘owners’ to describe the relationship between business owners and workers

Tellingly Glasman says nothing about what should actually happen on welfare because he can’t. His Farageism commits him to welfare spending but his ordoliberal anti-Keynesianism commits him to austerity. Utterly useless as a source of ideas.

This is pretty weak stuff. You'd think this was in a memoir, not a few weeks after the event

Worth a watch:

Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

the number of smug awful dipshits I hate who are having a bad night tonight lmao

There is good in the world after all...!

chuck schumer is mad at donald trump for starting the bombing without him. he’s got FOMO

Bill Mitchell @askbillmitchell.bsky.social • 20h Signal will some sort of LLM integration in it soon. Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.b... • 11h No •• • Bill Mitchell @askbillmitchell.bsky.social • 6h They will, likely be timing up with Anthropic's Claude or Perplexity, but its coming. The engineers have already began laying out the ground work for such support. ••• Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bs... • 5h ...he says to Signal's president

One of the things mentioned here is that they arrived in unmarked cars and wore casual clothing, so if staff hadn’t had the courage to tell them to go away, how would you know they were federal agents and not random adult men abducting children? This should be the biggest conservative mom panic ever

https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/385741/hold-the-mirror-up-to-his-gaze-the-early-history-of-photography-in-taiwan-1869-1949/387265

Day 168/195 of posting the oldest photo I could find from every country in the world
Today it's Taiwan🇹🇼
The oldest photo I could find taken in Taiwan is this one named "Indigenous Woman and Child" Taken by st. Julian Hugh Edwards in 1869
#photography #taiwan #photo #picture #photohistory #history

「五月五日天中節一切惡事盡消滅 急急如律令」

FIFTH DAY OF FIFTH LUNAR MONTH
ALL THINGS WICKED AND PESTILENT VANQUISHED INSTANTLY INSTANTLY WITH THIS SPELL

We could *really* do with such a 急急如律令 these days.
A peaceful #端午節 to all -

[Dunhuang fragment @britishlibrary.bsky.social S.799]

Likewise the 'green terror' trope trotted out by the KMT and their supporters. (Well, I guess you guys are the experts in that stuff!)

"The Nazi accusation exists to rally the base by recasting the KMT’s supporters, for so long pillars of authoritarianism, as victims of democracy."

Brilliant. Nails the self-pitying tone of the KMT.

Pasta Life Regression

City of sojourners versus city of settlers: transnationalism, location and identity among Taiwanese professionals in London and Toronto In this article I explore the impact of location on transnational identities through an ethnographic case study of Taiwanese professionals in London and Toronto. I argue, first, that both groups use ...

On the subject of migrant integration, this is a paper I wrote in 2016, comparing Taiwanese elite migrants in London and Toronto. The tl;dr is that migrants integrated much better in Toronto, and Keir Starmer might like to know that... 1/

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Perhaps more significant, the revolting word here - "squalid" - used in Starmer's speech today seems as provocative and as significant as Thatcher's notorious comment about Britain being "rather swamped" by migrants in 1978. Then, as now, it was a Powellite dog whistle. We are truly in hell.

You’ve driven away your traditional base, while sanitising the racism of the far right for low information voters, who now consider them more reasonable. You have moved the sensible middle position toward the far right — where you now stand, boxed in, by the ghouls you’ve just baptised as moderates. And the slide continues. Because you cannot placate these people. You cannot reach an end. Round up every refugee in camps and they’ll want the next cruelty. Their concerns are not about society, the economy or public safety, they’re an ever-moving target of fear and hatred that cannot be sated, it has to be challenged. And now it’s too late, because you thought that you — and you alone! — would be the first centrist to steal the fascist’s lunch by agreeing with them rather than fighting them with every fibre of your being.

Daily Mail headline NO CAP ON MIGRANTS IN LABOUR'S CRACKDOWN, in response to the most repulsively draconian statements about immigrants evere uttered by a Labour government.

No matter what you do, the far right will always want the next cruelty, and their torch-bearers in the press will attack you for not delivering it. All while priming voters to conceive of far right concerns as newly moderate.

Again, this has happened in every single place this has ever been tried.

You accept the far right’s entirely false premise that immigrants increase crime, that the housing crisis is due to migrants rather than your own bad policies, or that foreigners are swamping the health service, rather than holding it up with their bare hands in the face of your own drastic underfunding of the system. And you become less popular. You, the sensible moderate, continue to slide in the polls against the very parties whose policies you were trying to steal. A sizeable number of your own base are appalled, and you have failed to impress a single racist. Because everywhere, from France to Germany to the Netherlands to the UK, as with Fanta and its supermarket imitators, it turns out people prefer the original to the copy.

3 months ago, I wrote this about centrist parties aping the far right, and how it's not just immoral, but suicidal. This is not secret knowledge. It's the most reliable effect in world politics. It's watching 40 guys getting killed by the same gorilla, one by one, and stepping up to take your turn.

also, the government adopting an anti-immigration stance is more likely to harden public opinion against immigration than it is to make the public more positive towards the government, and immigration is where Labour’s big challenge in Reform are strongest!
totally self-defeating on top of evil

this is not an exaggeration

I'll just take this moment to point out that the US Institute of Peace, just a few weeks ago, contained one of the finest concentrations of US expertise on India and Pakistan, and crisis management in South Asia.

Transgender inmates in Georgia are going to be involuntarily detransitioned. Horrific.

archive.ph/9YAQa

A fantastic, collegial department (w/ the highest QS ranking in the Uni) just had the majority of Professors be threatened with redundancy.

Newcastle geographers will obvi fight for our colleagues & the future of higher ed (& geography!) with all we've got, but SUPPORT & SOLIDARITY VERY WELCOME!