@inquiline I know there’s people here who think Amrika gonna Amrika no matter what, but on the basis of harm reduction alone I think it’s better when Democrats are in the Oval Office, and I have always held this manifest sack of shit responsible for George W. Bush.
@inquiline Joe Lieberman was up there with Kamala Harris so far as terrible running mate choices go. I sure hope selecting him wasn’t some kind of cynical ploy to lock in the Jewish vote – all the Jews I know despise him on GP, and always have.
Half thinking of starting an #AcademicVenting hashtag here, about the dire, dire state of UK (global?) higher education. Sharing nuggets of senior management decisions, neoliberal language, and overall slow collapse.
Won’t work of course because most of us can’t risk honesty, but honestly: the everyday reality of what is happening deserves recording in all its depressing and damning detail. #Universities#AcademicChatter#neoliberalism
@pvonhellermannn In a class on the architecture of public participation I once taught at [institution], I had cause to show the famous image of the Tiananmen Square “tank man.” Not a single one of the Chinese students in the unit, which was 11 of the 14, recognized the image (or would admit to recognizing it in front of their peers, which is another kind of problem but with the same effect on in-class discussion).
@pvonhellermannn I felt that by far the better part of the 11 were not prepared to discuss or do work relating to public dissensus at the graduate level they were ostensibly there to pursue, and that we were sandbagging the one or two who were really into it by facilitating their enthusiasm & then sending them back into the maw of a context where they had no way to act on it.
A friend spotted this in Hackney this morning. Just putting folks on notice that if I encounter one of these, I will take preemptive countermeasures, believe it.
What made this even creepier (given its obvious video-capture capability, the propensity for children to be attracted to it, etc.) was that it was being operated by a middle-aged dude between two schoolyards. I dislike stranger-danger hysteria as much as anyone sane, but sometimes the red flags wave harder than the Brezhnev-era Kremlin on May Day.
Heya! I’m really grateful for your interest in the question of a diligence spectrum, but for those of you who have asked or suggested, I’m afraid there’s no real way one could quantify the appearance of this quality in a culture – other, I suppose, than doing the kind of thing that brash and overconfident management consultants do, i.e. collating a few proxy statistics, and calling it a finding. These are simply anecdotal and partial observations, drawn from my own experience.
@Loukas I think that’s absolutely correct. It’s a stretch, but I wouldn’t be surprised either if some everyday solidaristic institutions here (and here I’m thinking primarily of pubs) derive some of their motive power from the fact that they offer a platform for commiseration and low-key mutual aid in the face of it.
Missed this Sunday. I think some sorts of engineering projects are very hard to make welcoming in this way, but I should probably still sit with the challenge rather than rejecting it out of hand.
@cfiesler@edsu@ldodds@luis_in_brief See, I don’t understand what that means. And I’m someone who tried to contribute locational information for 12,000 Chicago bus stops to the project, unsuccessfully.