Marc Ratkovic

Don't make them choose. That just puts them in an uncomfortable spot.

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21 years old. Still great advice #AcademicWriting #AcademicChatter #PhDComics

An ancient Kernos which is in the rough shape of a sheep

This sheep-like vessel dates back to the Early Cycladic I Period (c. 3100 - c. 2700 BCE)!

It is made from marble and measures 22cm in length. Holes at the neck and tail suggest that it was meant to be suspended, and the two hollowed out cups on its back were probably used as containers of some kind

As half-a-follow-up, the US would be better off politically if Silicon Valley floated into the ocean. Remember when a tech mogul took over public administration for 3 months? For kicks? Europe emulating the US in tech policy is *not* the answer. Grow up, differentiate, be yourself.

I'm happy to not have a trillion dollar European tech company. That's a fantastic one. Give me ten thousand hundred million ones! US massive tech size is a statement about capital accumulation, not innovation!

Are you gender fluid? No, that's just a water bed.

I'm waiting for foresight to get interesting again.

LOVED this book. Got me to read Saussure, Jakobson, Hjelmslev, and think properly about LLMs, cognition, culture. Buy one for you, then one for a friend.

New to Germany, still getting oriented, not a citizen. Outside looking in, the FDP does not worry me; the SPD does.

Awesome. Quite a pedigree! Great work.

Oh, ok, thank you for correcting me and point that out.

Horacio "Ernest" Graham, known lunatic at the street corner bar, former semi-successful insurance salesman before the plant closed? Please tell me this was not sitting-US-Senator-Lindsay-Graham?

Portrait of Lise Meitner taken in 1928. She is smoking a cigarette and looking impatient to get back to her experiments.

Last week, I mentioned this in passing in a workshop:

In 1938 Enrico Fermi won a Nobel Prize for discovering two new elements of the periodic table.

Lise Meitner shortly showed that Fermi was mistaken and instead had produced known lighter elements by fission.

She did not win a Nobel prize.

Wow. Really nice notes. Concise, clear, covers a lot. Where were you trained?

Those voters had agency as well. They decided not to vote for her. And as to plenty of voters on the left--the pattern of Nader/Stein making the capital-L Left inhospitable to Democrats (the DSA unendorsed AOC ferchrissake) sent a clear signal to the Harris campaign to look to the right.

I ❤️ intersectionality.

screenshot of text::"The United Nations instituted International Women’s Day (IWD) in 1975—or so the official story runs. Few remember not only that the origins of March 8 lie in the history of the international workers’ movement, but that it was the socialist movement in the United States that first launched the idea of a day devoted to women’s rights centered on working-class women. In fact, the Socialist Party USA first established a day of education and action around women’s rights called “Woman’s Day” in 1908, and the following year U.S. socialists held demonstrations in several cities to demand women’s suffrage. In 1910, German socialist Clara Zetkin proposed the transformation of the U.S. Woman’s Day into an international day of action—International Working Women’s Day—which, in 1914, started being celebrated on March 8. Three years later, on March 8, 1917, Russian women workers took to the streets in St. Petersburg, organizing a strike to demand bread and peace. It was the beginning of the Russian Revolution."

a useful explainer of International Women's Day by Cinzia Arruzza

This looks like an actual inequality, not in probability/almost surely or anything, right? If no time to reply....I'll head to the wikipedia in a bit.

While I have you, I'm giving a talk in Mannheim Tuesday, and among other things arguing that the Third Republic of France is a better historical analogy for contemporary US than post Weimar Germany. I'm mostly relying on Shirer. Any top-of-mind references? Honestly--if not--feel free to ignore.

Just subscribed. Great writing, insightful, highly recommended.

Gets environmental bacteria into the gut. Follow-up: maybe infants are right and we are wrong. Maybe we should be putting more things in our mouths! This would definitely impact my lectures; I would prefer rooms with chalk to whiteboard markers, for example.

If you are asking specifically re: hazing, I'm uninformed on that topic, and conflated ritual initiation and hazing, not knowing the former was a term. I thanked someone above for making the point, and informing me.

I cannot summon a definition top of head (at the gym). I'd rather stick to examples, see what coheres, back out a definition inductively--what is, what is not, what is negotiable based on culture, structure of capital, etc.

Monopoly-of-the-state-Tilly is definitionally legal. So, formal violence is used all the time. Imprisoning Ghislaine Maxwell was violence against her. I found that acceptable.

I thought I offered that. Happy to back and forth to clarify. In a culture that opposes fascism, punching nascent fascists is acceptable. In a culture that opposes violence against women, beating up those who beat women is acceptable. Informal violence can be acceptable to discipline.

Incorrect, yes. Dumb I do not know. But there has been a parade of errors, worth considering, to try to do better next time.

Is it ok to punch a fascist? That Lake Zurich high school kid who punched an ICE supporter? That got widespread acclaim on this site. Punching Richard Spencer, too, back in the day. I once saw a guy beating up another, I intervened, then he said the guy touched his daughter. I kept walking.

Preparing some notes/doing some reading, on this, but outside-looking-in the descendants of labor zionism need to reassert, in and outside Israel. The revisionist resurgence (Likud et al) is decades old, the new normal. Until zionism is leavened with decency, it will shed support from decent people.

Rod Serling is probably the coolest guy of the 20th century. Looked cool, sounded cool, fought Nazis, hated John Wayne, wrote the screenplay for Planet of the Apes. Honestly dunks all the hell over any male influencer guy.