Alex Luke

This is real

I wonder what language the tests there are in? I'm guessing English

Ya don't say 🫩

They should have just got these guys in for the Michael Caine voice youtu.be/HFIQIpC5_wY

I haven't had grader's block but I think it's important to remember that grading can quickly cause decision fatigue as you need to make lots of small decisions. Break down the marking into small chunks and do 2-3 papers at a time. If you can't do that you might have a workload issue so join a union

I think the belief by the powerful that "people will put up with many things if you are excellent at math" is incredibly revealing in terms of understanding How We Got Here

Yes we’ve had §230 debates about social media, but have we tried “the user is the one who is liable for perceiving online harms” yet?

Chicagoans Refuse to Be Cowed in the Face of Unrelenting State Violence Chicago is giving the US “a stellar example of how to fight back against these xenophobic pogroms,” said one organizer.

My latest reprinted in @truthout.org. "If you’re hurting, struggling, or sputtering inside right now, I want you to take a moment to see what I see."

Motivations for Refusal In Motivations for Refusal: Work, Value, and the Limits of Postworkerism, Mark Gawne develops a critical account of how the affective politics of capital and class are formed and contested in contempo...

Reading this, written by a comrade, and it's ace books.google.com.au/books/about/...

Ben Rampton's 'Language in Late Modernity' can help here

I loathe the discourse of 'psychosocial risks/hazards', and while I can see how it might be beneficial in some lines of work I believe that overall it will only do harm to the labour movement

Disco

In amongst all the terrible news in this world, here is a singular, shining piece of good fortune for you: I have made the ultimate disco playlist open.spotify.com/playlist/2qO...

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge Cite as: van Rooij, I. (2025) AI slop and the destruction of knowledge. This week I was looking for info on what cognitive scientists mean when they speak of ‘domain-general’ cognition. I was curio…

just ScienceDirect promoting uncorrected ai-generated phrenology-sounding slop (that UGs would likely not notice is phrenology-sounding slop).

irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...

Great line: a single-use plastic of the mind

Vance says it is "totally reasonable and acceptable" for people to not want to live next door to people who speak a different language than they do

Language in Culture | Cambridge Aspire website Discover Language in Culture, 1st Edition, Michael Silverstein, HB ISBN: 9781009198837 on Cambridge Aspire website

Hey I'm actually reading in my discipline again

Propagandists at the Pentagon: After Pete Hegseth booted all major news organizations from the Pentagon, the Department of Defense announced Wednesday it would welcome a slew of MAGA mouthpieces in their place. Among them are Tim Pool, LindellTV, TPUSA, Gateway Pundit, and Jack Posobiec. Which is to say that the “next generation” of the Pentagon press corps, as spokesperson Sean Parnell is calling it, will be comprised not of journalists, but those willing to distribute propaganda on the government’s behalf. Several of the outlets and figures have a lengthy history promoting corrosive conspiracy theories to their audiences, such as the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. “It makes me sick,” one Pentagon reporter told Status.

Via Status:

ignoring the fact that race, class, and language all overdetermine each other within the capitalist totality. The real solution to 'linguistic racism' is ending colonial capitalism, but that solution isn't apparent when thought is mediated through reified disciplines

Take, for example in my discipline, 'linguistic racism'. The solution to this issue is so often 'don't be racist to speakers of different language',

The problem with the bourgeois reification into academic 'disciplines' is that the solutions proposed are in answer to the narrowly defined issues mediated through that discipline

The Real Digital Revolution At Work: Why Platformisation Matters More Than Robots The digital transformation of work isn't destroying jobs through automation—it's fundamentally reshaping how work is organised, managed and controlled.

New piece on Social Europe, on the impact of the digital revolution on work and why platformisation ultimately matters more than automation #EconSky #sociology @lauranurski.bsky.social @sergiotorrejon.com

AI boosters keep saying, in the face of what is clearly a bubble, that perhaps it will be like the dot com bubble, and that longer term the technology will prove itself, much like profit-making from the internet. But why assume that AI is following a similar track to internet platforms?

I expected Keir Starmer to be a bland, middle-management, platitudinous, tediously disappointing Prime Minister, which is why it’s been such a surprise to find out he’s actually a stupid, incompetent, vindictive, reactionary and outright dismaying Prime Minister.

Even those in the non-electoral left should mobilise because otherwise Mamdani will just get coopted - it's already started happening. They need a force in the streets to pull things to the left

Matt Myers - The Halted March of the European Left: The Working Class in Britain, France, and Italy, 1968–1989 (OUP, March 2025)

I'm currently dipping into this, and it seems very good

Marxism and Antitrust: A Provocation How should we understand the relationship between Marxism and antitrust? To what extent do these traditions involve conflicting methods and assumptions? And, despite their differences…

This had such a good explanation and application of Marxist thinking. Winant's work is so good

Apart from reading on subsumption for something I've been working on, I've been reading these recently:

I teach a history of antifascism course @ruhistorydept.bsky.social and figured I'd start an ongoing thread this semester to share some insights from course readings and recommend some great works on antifascism.

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A picture of a woman pretending to be shocked

Revealed: NSW Police ‘significantly’ overstated antisemitic attacks
www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw...