@juliaboechat
PhD Candidate @historicalstudies.bsky.social researching Soviet #BookHistory | visiting in Mainz | Bibliography Editor @sharpnews.bsky.social | from 🇧🇷 lived in 🇮🇹🇧🇾🇦🇹🇸🇪🇩🇪| Passionate about books, traveling and swing dancing (she / her)
THREAD: Whenever imperialist governments go to war, they become more authoritarian at home.
That makes censorship bills like KOSA, ID checks, and attacks on Section 230 even more dangerous.
Online protest, documenting war crimes, even news articles could be suppressed.
www.badinternetbills.com
Let's take KOSA, for example.
The Kids Online Safety Act would require platforms to algorithmically suppress content that might cause young people to experience "anxiety" or "depression."
Videos and news about my government bombing a school in Iran makes me depressed and anxious... how about kids?
Modern Language Association Call for Papers. TEACHING DYSTOPIA IN DYSTOPIAN TIMES. This roundtable invites papers from educators at all levels who are working with dystopian texts or at restrictive institutions to share pedagogical, political, and interpretive strategies. 200-word abstracts due March 15 by email to alexander.manshel@mcgill.ca Deadline for submissions: Sunday, March 15, 2026
Calling all High School English Teachers, Professors, and Educators of all kinds!
Do you have thoughts on TEACHING DYSTOPIA IN DYSTOPIAN TIMES?
Then please join us for this roundtable at next January's MLA convention in Los Angeles!
Thanks for sharing + please get in touch with any questions!
Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
At CEU Vienna we just had a prof call the police on a staff member for distributing Free Palestine stickers. The police harassed inside the campus. The rector responded by suggesting a special contact person... on antisemitism. To protect professors from stickers, apparently.
> @covie93.bsky.social
I know it’s almost impossible to say this on Bluesky without getting a strike, but if you seriously cared about peace in the Middle East, it’s Israeli leadership that you need to remove — ideally by an international legal process — while keeping the US from destabilizing it even further.
"The Islamists oppose women getting an education," I mutter, as I aim my missile at the girls school
Maybe it’s because I’m a colonial historian but so many of these white nation states seem to behave exactly like they did in the 19th century: ‘your leaders aren’t right for you,’ ‘we’re only killing you/colonizing you/installing puppet leaders for your own good’
Hey @cqschneider.bsky.social if you want to defend academic freedom in the CEU campus after the Austrian police harassed a staff member for pro-Palestine speech, maybe look at what the Student Union is doing! I wish the "senior leadership" had half the courage and leadership that students have!
@cqschneider.bsky.social really gross that a staff member is harassed by a prof and by police inside the uni, you don't even have the guts to write Palestine in the email. Either have the courage to say this is what it is about, or never speak about CEU defending Academic Freedom again
A lot of AI safety is a grift and the moment they have to do anything that requires Anthropic to actually handle a safety issue that exists in the here and now they relent. They don’t care. They never have.
www.wheresyoured.at/ai-mythbuste...
Why don't you defend academic freedom inside of CEU, when the police enters the campus?
What about paying your PhDs above the at-risk of poverty line? I would like to be able to afford heating next winter!
@cqschneider.bsky.social embarrassed to study at CEU knowing you respond to a prof calling the police on staff distributing Free Palestine stickers by... creating a contact person on antisemitism. Really, islamophobia is not even mentioned? This is not "Strengthening Community", it's being feckless.
FYI, Academia.edu has changed its terms of service to give an irrevocable worldwide license for anything uploaded to its site to be used for generative AI. I do not consent to this and have pulled all my papers.
' #Google handed a British graduate student’s bank&credit card information over to... [ICE] after he was targeted by the agency for attending a pro-Palestine protest for just 5 minutes.
The tech giant fulfilled a subpoena request from ICE... on Amandla Thomas-Johnson... studying... at Cornell...'
In case Google missed me, Fuck ICE
Oops. Turns out Persona, Discord’s age-verification service, was secretly screening selfies against government watchlists AND accessible by the feds. It's backed by Peter Thiel.
“The state wants to see everything. The corporations want to see everything. And they've learned to work together.”
The Berlinale made itself irrelevant by refusing to condemn genocide. What a sad death
More than 80 filmmakers denounce 'censorship' over Gaza at Berlinale - https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/more-80-filmmakers-denounce-censorship-over-gaza-berlinale
History being erased
So, just to recap, we have two random DOGE bros with basically no knowledge or experience in the humanities (and at least one of whom is a college dropout), who just went around terminating grants that had gone through a full grant application process by feeding in a list of culture war grievance terms, selecting out the grant titles based on the appearance of seemingly “woke” words, then asking ChatGPT “yo, tell me this is DEI” and then sending termination emails the next day from a private server and forging the director’s signature. This is what “government efficiency” looks like in practice: two guys with zero relevant experience, a keyword list built on culture war grievances, and a chatbot confidently spitting out 120-character verdicts on federal grants that went through actual review processes. The experts who might have explained what these grants actually do? Locked out. The director whose signature appeared on termination letters? Couldn’t tell you which grants got cut or w
Ever wondered how your grant got cancelled? No we know. Some college dropout asked ChatGPT "is it DEI/woke"?
www.techdirt.com/202...
Okay, this is quite outstanding from Bedford Council.
Tired of people defending the new Wuthering Heights and saying "it's not that deep", that's a symptom of the anti-intellectualism of our times. Also tired of people calling the defenders "porn addicted", and think it's a symptom of modern puritanism. + the movie is vanilla af. In this ted talk...
“LeBron, we don’t need you to solve Gaza. We need you to see Gaza. We want you to acknowledge Palestinian lives as worthy of the same empathy you have so powerfully demanded for others.”
From my open letter to LeBron James:
Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania leaves film award on stage, demanding accountability for genocide in Gaza.
Hope he rots there. Hope there are more arrests soon.
I think this is part of it, but also Age Verification is great for surveillance. In the UK, a lot of people thought it was about keeping kids from porn, and only now, with Palestine Action members being accused of terrorism and people being asked for a pic to see political news, they see the danger.
I understand why people worry about kids online, and it's why tech orgs and politicians are using this facade. It's also why I think journalists have a duty of being skeptical of big tech doing charity, and follow the money. They would quickly realize this is neither pro-kids nor anti big-tech.