Emma Kennedy

Fluffy gray tabby with exceptional whiskers and ear tufts. He is upside down with his front feet up in bunny-mode, chin to the sky, a bristled white spray of whiskers rising up and his lone fag sticking out.

consider if you will: this cat and his fang

Martin Shuster sdSreptoon1hm9t97235g2u5796glgh0435l6iaf05it1l232lc20cllf4g0 · So apparently on Sunday Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, said in a press conference that "we have got children hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside ... many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.” Then on Monday--one day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day--the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tweeted in response that: "Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges." As someone who spent a year at the Museum as a fellow doing research, I feel embarrassed for the institution. First, it is very clear that Walz wasn't drawing an equivalence, he was drawing an analogy. So this kind of response reminds me of the atrocious positions that the ADL has started to carve out, and why it has become mostly a sycophantic joke, now seemingly mostly geared towards currying favor with MAGA.

Not unrelatedly, I am noticing that a lot of--oftentimes even well-intentioned--people are spending time trying to delineate exactly which historical referent best captures what's going on now, as if we have to pick only one. There is the now well-circulated meme that says: no, ICE isn't the Gestapo, it's actually American--it's slave catchers. But this is a kind of odd distinction: the Nazis were themselves influenced by the Americans (if you're curious read the excellent book by James Whitman, _Hitler's American Model_). Nazis came here and studied American legal systems and statutes ... and remarkably a group of "liberal" Nazis decided that they couldn't make German laws as *extreme* as American ones (and this "liberal" group in fact won the day; German laws weren't as extreme as many of ours). Equally, Nazi jurists and theorists like Carl Schmitt were deeply influenced by American notions of manifest destiny. So the Nazi and American contexts were already fused. The idea of foreign/domestic is already quite complex in this context. (And this is before we even speak of the many actual Nazis that existed here and the many people who materially supported Hitler and the regime). We can complicate this picture more by noting that Nazism itself, even apart from these American influences, wasn't something that sprouted up out of thin air: it, too, had a(n experimental) history. Many of its barbaric practices and aims were developed and tested on colonial and imperial victims (as I have written elsewhere: there is a direct line from Shark Island concentration camp [called frequently simply "Death Island" where the Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people] to the entire Nazi camp system). Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire drew our attention to this already in the middle of the last century.

In noting this, let me be clear that this does not erase or make less relevant the centuries of European antisemitism that fed into the Nazi project. That's the whole point: these are all related phenomena. European antisemitism influenced the way in which European colonialism and imperialism operated against indigenous populations in the Americas. Strikingly, as innovations mounted in "administering" the Americas, antisemitic policies also evolved in Europe. Administrators (oppressors) would sometimes even move from one sphere to the other and back. They were all synergistic (a brilliant examination of some of this is María Elena Martínez's _Genealogical Fictions_). (And one could, btw, also tell an important story about the development of Islamophobia in this very same orbit, since policies stumbled on in the Americas came back to oppress both Jews and Muslims in Europe). This is all to say: Walz's analogy is not at all far fetched. The history of oppression doesn't move in any kind of neat or purely linear fashion. It is oftentimes recursive, shifting, necessarily granular. Neither is it a competitive history. It is, in the words of Michael Rothberg, a *multidirectional* history. Drawing these analogies in fact *helps* us understand all the involved phenomena better. At least this is what "Never Again" has meant and means to me: it does not mean only never again for me or other Jews. And it does not mean never again only something that looks exactly like the Nazi genocide. I think also, btw, that this is what it meant for Otto Frank, who spent time *editing* his daughter's diary so that it could be available to anyone, not only to Jews.

For ultimately the Nazi genocide--any genocide--is a highly mediated phenomenon: it consists of many diffuse events, marshals an immense amount of people and institutions, relies on sometimes conflicting or contradictory cross-sections of society, and, indeed, emerges out of a process that does not neatly, especially as its happening, have a clear beginning, middle, and end, but rather arranges for itself a kind of constellation that harnesses a range of actors, perspectives, and also histories (this is one way to understand how German colonial projects or anti-communism or ableism were no less crucial to Nazism than European antisemitism). The genocidal outcomes emerge from the structural forms society adopts. And all of this without in any way eliding the special role that Jews played in the apocalyptic Nazi worldview.

Please read this extremely thoughtful & careful post on Tim Walz, Anne Frank, & the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from Martin Shuster, philosopher, Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, former Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellow, & scholar of genocide, the Holocaust, & authoritarianism:

IHR Low Countries programme 30 January David Hopkin: Christ in the Flemish Lace Schools: Craft, Gender and Religion 13 February Jeroen Puttevils: Back to the Future: What can we Learn about Future Thinking from Late Medieval and Early Modern Merchant Correspondences from the Low Countries 27 February Feike Dietz: Blindness, Writing and Knowing: Visually Impaired Female Authors in the Netherlands (1770-1840) 13 March Sam Geens: Reassessing the Little Divergence: Evidence from the Medieval Southern Low Countries 22 May Valika Smeulders: The Rijksmuseum: New Horizons

Come & learn all things #LowCountries @ihr.bsky.social this term! We've got lace! We've got the future! We've got disability history! We've got divergence! We've got museums! Everything happens in the #LowCountries!

Fridays, 17:30, in person & on zoom: www.history.ac.uk/news-events/... #SkyStorians

The civic equivalent of venmo requesting your friend for $1.89

It’ll never get to be a real fish 😔

I think I might take one of these "under 20 minutes" AI skills courses the UK Govt. seems very keen on everyone doing and live-post it here... Maybe we can all learn something together! The press release sends me to aiskillshub.org.uk/aiskillsboost/ - let's go and see!

A4 The shadow systems that people build to get around existing problems that they don't feel can be resolved. A lot of collaboration (in HE we like to berate ourselves for working in silos but there's a lot of collaboration too). Small acts of kindness way beyond job descriptions. #LTHEChat

A3 Recognition - even the small things. So many people can feel like they're invisible in their roles. A culture of appreciation and respect is key too - where staff feel that bullying or undermining behaviour will be dealt with if reported. #LTHEChat

A2 I think so - and I like that this says 'people'. It's often assumed that wellbeing is a zero sum game, so student wellbeing must be prioritised at the expense of staff - but in my experience they're mutually sustaining. Burnt-out staff are less able to support students. #LTHEChat

A1 Feeling recognised and knowing that your contribution makes a difference; going into work every day not just knowing what deep values bring you there, but that you're supported in them by the organisation. #LTHEChat

Out of curiosity, I just ran a few paragraphs from The Butchering Art through an AI checker and it got flagged: 88% AI. This book was released in 2017, and AI machines were subsequently trained off it. How many writers are getting flagged for AI because of the literal theft of their work(s)? Insane.

So this was written by the person who oversees ministerial training for the URC. So that's great.

Bilbo looking at his phone top on bottom is ChatGPT After all, why not? Why shouldn't I keep it? You're absolutely right — you found it, it's been with you a long while, and it's only natural to feel fond of something that's served you so well, especially when someone like Gandalf suddenly seems to want it for himself.

UK loses measles elimination status Decision made after outbreaks in 2024, when there were nearly 3,000 cases in England and Wales.

The UK has lost its measles elimination status, the World Health Organization has announced.

Vaccine disinformation is a worldwide pandemic that is killing us.

📊 Just launched: An interactive dashboard for visualising UK university finance data published by HESA.

Compare universities. Explore key financial indicators, trends and correlations.

🔗 shiny.psychology.nottingham.ac.uk/lpzjd/uni-fi...

#UKHE #OpenData #rstats #AcademicSky

`for one of my wonderful dissertation students, who is writing about banlieue music, do you know of any work on fashion, especially bourgeois anxieties surrounding tracksuits and hijabs? I know of work in a UK context, but anything France-specific?

Someone on minimum wage is over the masters threshold.

Mine costs me £1300 a year. It's fucking disgusting.

You wanna look at why young people are poor? Student loans cost me £2600 a year. I can only dream of what I'd do with that money. Imagine if landlords were expected to pay £2.5k more in tax.

From BBC News analysis Shooting today again becomes a subject of sharply contradictory narratives David Willis North America Correspondent As with the death of Renee Good earlier this month, this latest incident involving federal agents on the streets of Minneapolis is the subject of sharply contradictory narratives. City leaders spoke of six masked agents pummelling a local man before shooting him multiple times and leaving him dead on the street. Homeland Security officials maintain the man approached them brandishing a semiautomatic handgun, and that a border patrol agent fired in self-defence after attempts to disarm the man had failed. They say the victim was planning a "massacre" of local law enforcement agents. Clearly frustrated by the fact that his deportation message is in danger of being drowned out by a steady stream of social media posts showing federal agents employing increasingly aggressive tactics against local protesters President Trump

I'm not American. Nobody needs my commentary on MN today

I am British, though. And our soft-serve-the-fascism, both-sides-at-all-costs-and-fuck-the-evidence national broadcaster is a fucking disgrace

and if such a thing should happen in our islands, I pray that we can show even half the courage that we've witnessed from the twin cities

AOC: "It is reported he had a permit. And this administration's response is that the very that he was a legal firearm owner was reason for them to shoot him in the street ... if we do not do something now, I do not what can happen afterward. We have to contain this chaos."

You can get details from this thread without watching any video

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‘I put all my work in a proprietary system not supported by my university and the terms of service fucked me right up.’ Dude. Have a word with yourself.

This is an excellent analogy, because my recollection from grade school is that the pen on the right looks fun and exciting, and then you play with it for a few minutes and realize it's not actually useful for anything and in fact makes some tasks more cumbersome, and never think about it again.

James Reed of recruiter Reed, which was founded by his father, has warned graduates that they should "think about a job that involves working with your hands" as AI takes on white-collar work.

Or consider being born to parents who can give you a role in the family firm?
www.ft.com/content/c894...

Grain of Terror Why is the Western world so afraid of reheating rice? Joe Zadeh reports. Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath

Fascinating essay on *why* some cultures are terrified of reheating rice and others just...do it every day.
The justification cycle - racialised thinking, call to science, appeal to long past and/or 'traditional' wisdom - seems universal for this sort of food story #histFood

Screenshot of email that reads: “This status will remain in place until the University receives notification that you are no longer participating in that action. During this period, any work undertaken will be regarded as voluntary.”

Well that’s me locked out. No pay for the foreseeable future, all because I refuse to reschedule lost teaching, for which I have already lost pay as part of the strike. Please donate to support @sheffielducu.bsky.social members like me at www.gofundme.com/f/heubvb-sup...

In a peculiar way, Trump is not that different in his mindset to old Soviet leaders. He cannot grasp the notion that something important would happen in a country that was not directed and approved by its leadership.

The Origins of the Word "Moron" Are Actually REALLY Sinister It's much more than just a casual insult.

I’m seeing increased use of this word and I just want to gently suggest that if there’s one word you can manage to remove from your vocabulary it should be this one.

It was coined by a eugenicist who used it as a diagnosis to forcibly institutionalize and sterilize mentally disabled people.