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I’ve warmed up significantly towards the concept of small talk ever since I learned that it’s so purpose is to make friendly noises. As long as you smile and nod, people are satisfied. It’s just a show that you are nice and there with good intentions. we’re small in a big world and have to rely on other people to be decent to us. So we do our little human dance to each other to say, “ I’m not here to hurt you. There’s something we have in common, like that it is rainy or that being itchy is uncomfortable, in this proves we can get along. I’m being lighthearted and non-threatening right now.” small talk isn’t to get to know a person. It’s just a greeting to affirm your buddies in the universe. I am motivated by wanting the other person to know I am friendly, so I have gone pretty decent at small talk when i used to hate it.

in Uzbek we have this concept of the divine dark, the darkness from which all things came. So there’s this idea that shows up in a lot of our literature that when the world was first made it was like a gentle night, peaceful and pitch-black. The night is when creation started and the night is when you’re closest to glimpsing what it was like at the very start of the world.

I think a lot about how whiteness needs to develop a deeper and more appreciative relationship with blackness.

We can’t develop care and cultural exchange without a deep sense of love for difference itself.

Blackness is a source of creation. It is the sign of healthy soil, and so wealth.

okay, yes.

You are not compelled to form any opinion about this matter before you, nor to disturb your peace of mind at all. Things in themselves have no power to extort a verdict from you. (- Marcus Aurelius)

As someone who does not live in NYC, I am grateful this week for this teaching from Marcus Aurelius.

Building things consistently shittier has a ceiling. We’re making things like dishwashers to break in under 5 years. Where do they think they all go?

Say goodbye to rent control, indefinite leases if Ontario passes housing proposal: advocates | CBC News Ontario's planned new housing legislation could open the door to ending rent control and indefinite leases across the province, advocates warn after a recent proposal by Premier Doug Ford's government...

This will be devastating, and during a housing crisis. Contact your MPP.

I don’t know how many graduate students have told me in private that they need to keep their head down and repeat information they know is not only wrong, but unethical, in the hopes of someday getting a job.

If I critique the system so effectively that I become un-hireable, do I at least get brownie points?

We often equate mutual aid to finances, but what if, especially in these cash strapped times, we saw opportunities as “mutual aid”? Offering professional services pro-bono Teaching a skill you know well for free Hair care/barber services Preparing meals Delivering food Running other folk’s errands Offering translation/interpretation Few child care Elder care Shoveling snow Raking leaves Home repairs Community cleanups Vehicle maintenance Laundry Service Whatever you can do.

How many people’s mental health diagnoses are really just them struggling to function in a capitalist system that is amoral, destructive, overwhelming, overbearing, unsatisfying, and bereft of meaning? It’s surely one of the most unexamined questions in the field of modern psychology. People in general and researchers in particular all too rarely think to take a step back from the data they are looking at and consider the large-scale framework within which that data is materializing, and to consider whether there’s anything about the particular framework which is giving rise to the particular data sets they are seeing.

While more than half of Canadians report living paycheque to paycheque, 47% of workers surveyed reported their pay was late, creating financial difficulties.

Over 1 in 4 workers report having to borrow money to pay the bills due to wage theft

Over 60% of people working overtime report never receiving OT premium pay or time off in lieu of ot pay

46% of workers reported that they did not get public holidays off with pay.

20% faced wage theft of over $5,000, while 50% of workers lost wages between $500 and $5,000.

This is a resource from the Worker’s Action Centre, containing data on corporate wage theft.

calling the cops on an unhoused person for being weird/rude/“scary” in public is so weird to me on such a fundamental level…like even before you get to political beliefs about jail and homelessness, you are beefing with a dude who has to live on the sidewalk. like sorry if he was rude to you dude sorry if he lives and sleeps in the fucking sidewalk. sorry if he seems a bit “of today dude i think maybe its because he lives on the fucking goddamn sidewalk.

White words on a black background read: 50+ Immigration agents have the authority to detain whom they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally. We found more than 50 Americans who were held after agents questioned their citizenship. They were almost all Latino. ~130 Agents also can arrest citizens who allegedly interfered with or assaulted officers. We compiled cases of about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, accused of assaulting or impeding officers. ~20 Among the citizens detained are nearly 20 children, including two with cancer.

Hi, I'm the ProPublica reporter who's been tracking an unusual stat: U.S. citizens grabbed by immigration agents.

I did it because the government isn’t.

This is what I found.

This makes me think that they don’t see these folks as real people, just numbers or sacks of potatoes they are shifting around. It’s as if having a family and connections to a community doesn’t matter.

Then they got real mad at me for asking them if they wanted to make students feel like they were living in N*zi Germany.

These guys are so sensitive and it would actually be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

They cited how it was also hard in N*zi Germany. This was in relation to a discussion around cutting students slack on late submissions.

I kinda think teachers during WWII might have had the common sense to realize that this piddly sh*t doesn’t matter.

I have a bit of an unhealthy habit of arguing with old men on Reddit.

r/professors is a bit of a cesspit, where folks shake their fists at the sky. They called me dramatic for daring to claim that young people have it rough nowadays.

cherish your comrades. the time is gonna one when you need a spare bed or a couch, or someone to pick you up at 2 in the morning because you’re in a fucked up spot. shit’s rough and getting rougher. You’re gonna need somebody. The Underground Railroad, The French Resistance, every underground network. All relied on comrades helping comrades without question. “You pick me up in Sunday, I make sure you eat in Monday.” You’re gonna need that for what’s to come.

For thousands of years people have known how to grow food, sew clothing, treat sickness with food & herbs, build shelters & survive. It only took 2 generations to all but erase those skills from humanity & make us completely dependent on & at the mercy of the system.

It’s a strange paradox: we fund the public treasury with our taxes, yet we’re gaslit into feeling entitled for wanting the money spent on public goods like healthcare and housing. The system frames it as a gift from the government, when in fact, it’s our money being returned to us.

Maybe we could try to innovate, to meet young people where they are and instead of blaming them for our own insufficiencies, admit that we are not prepared to deal with the effects of the systems we are creating and sustaining.

maybe instead of trying to punish the youth into understanding, we could try educating them, but our university systems are full of people without any pedagogical skills. The lack of respect for teaching as a profession is going to sink us.

The subreddit r/Professors continually bemoans the passivity, laziness, and lack of follow through of students coming up through the pandemic and blame the students for the ways we have failed them as a society.

American Library Association poster against censorship Books are weapons in the war of ideas.

Not as powerful as cans of soup, depending on the volume, but in the right hands. 📚

Life of a philosopher in a nutshell 1. Birth 2. Painting of Pope Leo X (after Raphael) by Fernando Botero ( a very chubby baby pope) with text "y tho" 3. Death

dash it, mane

words to consider.