Dar Eliza

I was told not to teach a class on the intellectual histories of Zionism and Anti-Zionism next year - not because they doubted I could teach it fairly, but because it would attract too many politicians scrutinizing the syllabus.

A society where that is a valid fear is no longer fully democratic.

I'm worried about getting job offers pulled by admin bc I mention how my transness informs my work. Bc they're afraid of state retribution for hiring me.

I get advice to code switch.

The farther I get from full disclosure, the less genuine it reads & becomes.

This is not a free and open society.

The Bell Riots is a utopian vision of society compared to the IRL 2020s

It can be incredibly hard to see your progress when recovering from depression or burnout. The whole world keeps demanding certain benchmarks of you to the point that it’s easy to feel like a failure despite your hard work. Remember your progress is your own journey. Every win means something.

Leviathan @l3vlat4an X.com Greta Thunberg donned a keffiyeh with an "AUTISM" T-shirt that included an image of a skeleton dual wielding automatic rifles before she left on her flotilla. What do you think she was trying to convey with this t-shirt? AUTISM

That she's cool as fuck?

As the mod who tamed a big news site's notoriously annoying comment section that serially harassed many of the site's authors, it's 100 percent obvious that the problem here is the same problem I solved back then.

A moderation team can't earn buy in from a community they're openly contemptuous of.

your core users are people who have already demonstrated a willingness to abandon a more popular social media site for another, in the most part for disliking the politics of the people who run it. write this on a big whiteboard somewhere in the office

SNW’s approach trans people is a great metaphor for the show overall. When it used transness as a metaphor, it created one of the most powerful episodes in the franchise. And when they actually had a trans actress portraying a trans character, they leaned hard into old transmisogynist tropes.

Alt text: A screenshot of a New York Times article excerpt. The highlighted section reads: “And the diagnostic expansion has now become a flashpoint in a long-running debate over how autism should [be] defined, one that has divided parents and activists, ignited social media battles and grown fiercer with Mr. Kennedy’s laser focus on autism.” The surrounding unhighlighted text discusses the rise in autism diagnoses, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s statements calling it an “epidemic,” and his controversial remarks about autistic children.

This is basically line for line the exact same thing she said about gender dysphoria in trans youth right down to the divide between parents and activists along with social media battles.

Alt text: A screenshot of a New York Times article excerpt about autism and the neurodiversity movement. The text explains that autistic activists reframed autism as differences rather than a disease needing a cure. A highlighted section reads: “Activists called out what they saw as punitive therapies that tried to eliminate behaviors like fidgeting or avoiding eye contact, which they argued had little to do with their well-being and more to do with the discomfort of people around them.” The article also notes the rallying cry “Nothing about us without us” as autistic people demanded involvement in care decisions. A sidebar box in the middle of the page shows unrelated breaking news about the Trump administration and a government shutdown.

Of course people with autism who can speak for themselves and advocate for how they're treated are labeled activists. The mothers leading orgs pushing the manufactured controversy are profiled as parents rather than activists.

This is the same exact framing they used against trans people.

Alt text: A screenshot of a New York Times article excerpt discussing debates about autism diagnoses. The highlighted text is a quote from Jill Escher, founder of the National Council on Severe Autism, saying: “Autism has become so diluted, we can’t really tell what we’re talking about anymore.” The surrounding text explains that parents of children with severe autism say the broader diagnosis has come at a cost, as research on the most significantly impaired has declined despite overall funding increases. A survey of 800 families found 80% had been told their children were too disruptive for classrooms or services. Alison Singer is also quoted, saying: “The idea that Elon Musk has the same diagnosis as my daughter is ludicrous.” The excerpt notes that many autistic activists oppose splitting the diagnosis, fearing it invalidates their experiences.

This literally the same line for trans youth. The diagnosis is too watered down and we can't help the real "insert here" population and these others are ruining it for us.

Then the framing of pitting these parents against unnamed activists.

One reason the Dem establishment hates Mamdani is that he's just *better at this than they are*. He just talks like an authentic human about things that matter & people respond & it breaks their poll-tested, consultant-cooked brains.

State AGs Defend Trans Americans in Stunning Rebuke to Trump’s FTC — Assigned Eighteen state Attorneys General unite to stand up in defense of trans Americans, in opposition to a Federal Trade Commission investigation into trans healthcare.

On Friday 18 blue state attorneys general BLASTED the Federal Trade Commission, telling it to back off trans youth healthcare and warning of an insidious attempt to reshape the regulation of medicine in the US.

And nobody covered it.

www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...

Pete Hegseth yesterday: "You are not politically correct and don't necessarily belong always in polite society."

He's talking about his "warrior ethos." What he doesn't understand is that the contrast between war and peacetime society has been considered in literature for centuries. 1/

ChatGPT was bad enough when it was a disembodied voice in text that reflected a user's worst impulses and intuitions back to them through word association. Using that to make video is simply inviting the untethered to hallucinate a shallow dreamstate without the joy or biochemical repair of drugs.

Most of the power authoritarians have is freely given. We should not comply with them in advance.

Trump is far weaker than he looks. So is the GOP. We should draw them out, drain them at every opportunity, and fight for people’s wellbeing at every turn.

We have been sent here to fight for people.

Even a passing knowledge of Black history will make clear that not only was this level of destruction possible, it was inevitable. “Did you know they’d shut down US AID?” I mean these are the same people who closed all public schools in a county rather than desegregate. Yes. Yes I did.

I reference this early in The Originalism Trap's chapter on elections bc it perfectly illustrates the dynamic we're still dealing with today

as some white people thought no education was preferable to integrated schools, some white people think no democracy is preferable to an integrated electorate

If the govt shuts down, I could lose work.

If it stays open at the cost of gender-affirming care, I could lose my child.

I can replace lost income. I can't replace my daughter.

@gallego.senate.gov @captmarkkelly.bsky.social, don't sacrifice trans people on the altar of political convenience.

A chart of "Major concerns of PhD candidates." The top text says, "Financial pressures top the list of concerns faced by PhD candidates, but concerns differ among the sexes. Those studying in the United States rank the political landscape as their main worry." The chart shows that in the full survey, political landscape is the biggest concern for about 20% of students (a bit higher for women than men) but there's an annotation saying "In US PhD students, this rose to 64%". Overall, the highest-rated concern was financial pressures at around 40%.

That's quite the chart annotation.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

No one up in here with The Talos Principle?

And apparently I'm sitting on that divide, because which one applies is contextual for me.

The real generational divide is people who refuse to watch a video if it could be an article versus people who refuse to read an article if it could be a video

I cannot express how tired i am of thinking about, worrying about, talking about, and stressing about whether it's time for me to flee the United States while I have the means and opportunity to do so.

What Happened to the University’s Commitment to Free Expression? Charley Kirk, uAlberta, and Me | Centre for Free Expression I was shocked when the University of Alberta administration informed me, one of its law professors, that I was being placed on non-disciplinary leave for my social media comments in the wake of Charli...

"Why would it bow to antidemocratic pressures by placing a professor on leave without their request, consent, or involvement? That any university would do this is beyond comprehension and is cause for alarm about the future of academic freedom in Canada."

One of the many, many reasons I left academia was the realization that, if you're accidentally too successful (or just in the wrong place at the wrong time) as a queer or a feminist, you can look forward to death threats or feces in the mail or organized media smear campaigns or, well, this:

I'm so glad you said this, because about 30 seconds ago, I published a newsletter piece detailing how conservatives have dump-trucked through all of the previously established common sense, nuanced, compromise positions on trans rights to get here: burns-notice.ghost.io/what-would-t...

Coates says Black Americans have stories about relatives who were lynched or had to flee and that a life free of political violence is not in reach in his time

Klein:
"Sometimes I think that having a historical scope that wide can make the present too deterministic."

They lynched a kid last week.

We don't, there will be a new (and hopefully better) normal after this, that said, for the rest of our lives we'll have to be aware a non-trivial number of neighbors and fellows voted for actual fascism, and that's always going to be a bummer

This is why I keep saying we must never forget and never forgive the people who did this to us.

We have to learn from the failure of Reconstruction, and punish them, so it never happens again. We can't let them just move on, and pretend that they never did any of this.