Shelly Penton

America speedrunning the Troubles

oh trust me i have not forgotten about the way that national press fluff this guy up. this was the lede of a time profile of youngkin just a few months after running the most race-baiting campaign in recent virginia history.

Envisioning the most tedious possible dystopia where academics are forced to pay academia websites to own their own work like Taylor Swift.

ummmmm....

This is not what we meant when we said our public-facing scholarship should be considered.

This is an embarrassingly false take. Applicants to places like Yale, Harvard, Chicago (as well as UVA!) come from evangelical undergrads in droves, and those applicants are often admitted.

I'm speaking as someone from a fundamentalist Xian undergrad with PhD friends who also came from such places.

he thinks he’s a dictator and he wants to be a dictator but administrative capacity is not keeping pace with his ambitions

PS and also, I will probably re-post anything with a solid Toast of London gif reaction

(Humanities professors after decades of STEM pushes)

“A legitimate PhD-level expert in anything,” they said.

“Show me a diagram of the US presidents since FDR, with their names and years in office under their photos,” I said.

This is real I shit you not

*deep breath* MY DAY HAS COME

I'm confused by the inclusion of "(locust)" here. Does it mean that "locust" is another word for "cicada" or that the wasp also goes after locusts?

Or did we switch to biblical language for the gravitas? 😂

Did UVa and the DOJ cut a 'backroom' deal to push out Jim Ryan? UVa students and faculty say their trust in the school's governing board is "waning" after a state official suggested the board negotiated Jim Ryan's exit with the Trump DOJ.

“Let us be clear, this is not a legitimate process. It is a backroom consolidation of power by a politicized Board of Visitors, installed and embodied or emboldened by Gov. Youngkin’s partisan agenda.”

dailyprogress.com/news/local/e...

This video is just incredible, a bunch of guys whose favorite movie is Boondock Saints in eBay tacticool gear doing their personal imaginary version of charging out of the LSTs onto Omaha beach but they’re in a Penske truck in a Home Depot parking lot and they’re the Nazis.

NEW YORK, NY – Today, the New York Times reported that Andrew Cuomo is coordinating with President Donald Trump ahead of the upcoming New York City mayoral election to help billionaires buy this race and steal it from the very New Yorkers on the frontlines against Trump's authoritarianism. Andrew Cuomo tried to hide this from the public because he knew how damaging it would be. In response, Zohran Mamdani released the following statement: “Andrew Cuomo has spent his career governing for the powerful and prioritizing his own self-interests over those of the people he was sworn to serve. This is not just a shady backroom deal by a cynical politician, it is disqualifying. It is a betrayal. Donald Trump is sending masked agents to rip our neighbors off the street, gutting the social services so many New Yorkers rely on, and threatening to deport me for having the audacity to stand up to him and his billionaire friends. The job of New York City Mayor is not to be jester for a wannabe king, it is to protect the people of this city.”

Zohran Mamdani just released a statement about Cuomo working with Trump:

Thankfully the result was that the guy was merely shocked, not gravely injured. (Well, and our entire electric system in the house was SOL.)

I have a very specific complaint about how a city contractor redoing water pipes in our neighborhood didn't know enough about standards of 1950s houses, and it almost resulted in someone on his crew dying of electrocution.

I guess the only people Democratic Party leaders hate more than fascists are....progressive and idealistic young people.

I am convinced the people whose job is explaining the benefits of AI are double agents

bsky.app/profile/seem...

Get 'em, Sally

I’m at the BOS meeting, listening to the start of the work session on Data Centers. The information is here - albemarle.legistar.com/LegislationD...

I’m interested to see how the discussion goes, but I am firmly against large data centers.

Patrick Deneen + Adrian, 2015-2025:

Going to start introducing my eight-month-old son as the laziest roommate I've ever had.

Misogyny question mark

I'm hoping the change back to HBO from Max signals the end of the era where the entire aesthetic of big tech was defined mostly by an obsession with the letter "X."

I'm mostly re-posting this because the whole thread would be a great source for conversation(s) in an undergrad class on, say, religion and globalism, or secularism and ethnicity, etc.

Even if I don't use it, some of y'all (my religious studies colleagues) should.

This is why Charlottesville melted down its Lee statue. If the statue is removed and simply put in storage, it remains what @artcrimeprof.bsky.social calls “America’s strategic racism reserve.”

RASHID: The liberal arts are not optional — and we need to start treating them as such Departmental budgets, staff and course offerings in the humanities will be tightened, while curricular innovation moves elsewhere. This shift tilts the University’s identity away from its liberal arts...

Nice op-Ed from a student: www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2025... (Note: the liberal arts are imo still very strong at UVa, but obviously it’s gonna take effort to keep it that way in the coming months and years.)

"Chow(TM)" sign from Famine's restaurant in the Good Omens TV series.