obviously the classwashing of Platner is especially egregious, yet it's endemic to electoral politics; Dubya, the failson Yale frat boy who once owned a baseball team, could steal a close election by cosplaying as a homespun, drawling, religious cowboy
List of multiple Guardian articles since 2017 involving UK Home Office attempts to deport academics employed at Oxford--or to deport their young children or spouses--on various pretexts.
There's a decade-long stack of articles abt this in the @theguardian.com, all involving the Home Office threatening different academics employed at the University of Oxford with either immediate deportation of themselves, or of their children, spouses, etc. It's not a one-off thing, but a pattern.
Startling conversation with a friend today. My parents, my partner and I are leaving Germany within two years, she said. My parents survived autocracy in Iraq, they aren’t going through that again. Feels like a different friend says something like this every other week.
As one of the fifteen or twenty genuine Liberal Internationalists in the US, all of whom are active on this site, I do think we really need to confront the fact that a genuine liberal-democratic "rules based" international order cannot be underpinned by arbitrary and hegemonic US military might.
"The wealthy Gulf states and their people had good reason to feel that they were detaching from the region’s problems... The human price of regional power politics was supposed to be paid by Syrians, Sudanese, Lebanese, and Yemenis—not by them."
“Iran has, for the first time, shattered the illusions of Gulf citizens about their immunity from regional politics… and brought them firmly, and likely permanently, back into geographical reality.“
@abuaardvark.bsky.social on Iran’s Gulf retaliation and the hollowness of US security guarantees:
“We are trapped between the regime that is killing us with machine guns, and a foreign power has likely decided that we are collateral damage.”
Perhaps diaspora communities should be given grace and also not granted the presumption of special knowledge or influence around shit happening in the old country, as a general matter.
"Jeremy Ben-Ami: I think it’s very important to make the case that when Zionism began, it was fundamentally liberal. There was no distinction. Zionism was inherently liberal, and it’s part and parcel of being a Zionist is to hold liberal values, in my view."
I think the people in J Street are good people, but part of why their worldview is incoherent is that this is a bad history of Zionism. Zionism was never rooted in liberalism. Liberal Zionist is an American invention imposed on it. There were leftist and labor Zionisms, but not "liberal Zionism."
Interesting that they never work out the logic of this....
Every single person in history who apes for a regime goes through this thought process: they, the submissive brute, love us and our domineering but just benevolent enough way. That other regime though? Too domineering.
Jewish establishment groups are backing a war Americans don’t want, and they’re setting up American Jews to take the blame, @joshnathankazis.bsky.social writes. jewishcurrents.org/jewish-group...
Every, Every, Every generation is the Me, Me, Me Generation
I will never understand people pretending to be offended by this shit--it is a biological fact that people in their late 70s and 80s TEND TO DECLINE AND DIE. There's certainly exceptions, some people perform well throughout old age, but the sense of entitlement from these people is enraging
I was thinking the same thing: the article expressed many similar sentiments I saw among my own Venezuelan relatives and contacts.
From @nargesbajoghli.bsky.social : "The fault line, crudely stated, runs between those who see this war as a long-overdue liberation—the regime finally falling, whatever the cost — and those who find something perverse, even obscene, in celebrating bombs falling on the country that made you."
He’s literally trying to use this war to *checks notes*...
Make us forget about the Epstein files, bait us into funding DHS without any guardrails on ICE’s lawless behavior...and now let Netanyahu off the hook.
No, no, and no.
kevinrkirk 2d @ Threads Why are we bothering with the Strait of Hormuz when we could simply do this? Explain it to me like l'm 5. (Drawing of chopping of part of land) suahuatica 2d MOUNTAIN HARD AND BIG, WATER NO UP. MANY MANY DIG DIG.
Happy Friday. Don’t skip school.
Now that they're trying to pretend their war is not a war, they've gone back to calling it the Defense Department.
Can someone check if they used the passive exculpatory voice for that Mamdani college application smear story?
"Slurs Filled a Chat Created by a Republican Party Official in Florida After the secretary of the Miami-Dade County Republican Party created the chat for college students, it devolved into slurs against Black and Jewish people."
"Slurs filled." "Devolved into." Even their coverage of blatant racism and antisemitism is done in the passive voice.
What MAGA sees vs. what the rest of the world sees
I think it is telling that the person in the OP (not the one in the screenshot) is an Iranian diaspora person who is not in favor of the MAGA war, and thinks that characterizing the politics of Persian Jews this ways is probably wrong/ a distraction
Once you recognize the New York Times special “exculpatory tense” for right wingers you see it CONSTANTLY
Sociology pulls back the curtain on power - how it's constructed, how it's maintained, and the (il)legitimacy of those in power - and that's why they're so afraid of it.
(It's also why Intro Soc is my favorite class to teach.)
FL deems intro textbooks in my discipline illegal.
It's bc Sociology analyzes systems...it gives people the practical thinking tools to dismantle the master's house.
As a fmr English Lit major, Sociology is the most powerful thing I've ever learned. I see why the Temu Savonarolas are scared of it.
The American political class is utterly delusional, adrift in a dream of normality, unable to process the actual reality of events on the ground, where the US just launched a completely unprovoked war against a massive country, murdered its leadership, and demanded its conversion to a vassal state.
Chancellor of the world's premier Do Nothing State which is the de facto leader of the Do Nothing Continent is now upset that Doing Nothing has enabled the US and Israel to do whatever they please to whoever they please
New post: Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? (No. No it can't. Come on, now.)
davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/can-ai-rep...
Florida’s Board of Governors is made up of “political appointees from the business world, from insurance executives to roofing contractors, who are dictating how professors must teach their courses and even providing state-created textbooks for doing so.”
My new piece in @truthout.bsky.social
