I should be able to follow #Cara users from my Mastodon account. You can't convince me to make yet another account in a yet another silo, but I'd love to see and share more art in my home feed. Anyone have a connection to their team? Would love to chat about the #fediverse.
"We call upon our colleagues in the homeland and internationally to support our steadfast attempts to defend and preserve our universities for the sake of the future of our people, and our ability to remain on our Palestinian land in Gaza. We built these universities from tents. And from tents, with the support of our friends, we will rebuild them once again."
@immibis@academicchatter Western politicians love Israel, it is their favourite pet project that keeps the fantasies of colonisation and tech dystopia alive, so I have absolutely no faith in them. But as a scholar, the silence of universities that pride themselves over DEI and decolonisation, speaks volume about how empty all those words are, when acting on them means upsetting (white supremacist) funders.
International Criminal Court, last Monday: seeks arrest warrants for Benjamin #Netanyahu and Yoav #Gallant for criminal responsibility in starvation of civilians and crimes against humanity.
International Court of Justice, Friday: “Israel must immediately halt its military offensive and any other action in Rafah which may inflict on the Palestinian group in #Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”
Folks who might be looking to move from Windows to Linux: another option, if it’s financially feasible for you and you don’t want to mess with installing Linux, is to sell your Windows machine and buy a Linux one.
@aral I already have a spare Windows laptop that I wanted to use to install Linux and start exploring it. Any advice for a dummy non-developer like me to start (even just a link with instructions)
@furniturelink My spare laptop is HP 2015 and currently run on Windows 10, not eligible for Win 11 updates. It might also be good to replace it with an SSD and have a dual boot, so thank you for sharing your experience.
Brixham, a Devon harbour town, has been struck by an illness caused by a microscopic parasite - cryptosporidium - in the water!
About 16,000 households and businesses in the Brixham area have been told by South West Water (SWW) not to use their tap water for drinking without boiling and cooling it first.
Not an expert but it does strike me as symptomatic of the state of our water companies and water system. #Water#Sewage#ukpolitics
@pvonhellermannn I'm always amazed by the capacity of shifting the focus in our economic system that gets its priority completely wrong: a possible healthcare emergency due to a broken private water management and to contamination of rivers, but sure, let's focus on the lack of tourists.
Streaming now from Goldsmith, Dana Erekat (CEO of whyze) & Eyal Weizman (Forensic Architecture) open a symposium on the role of architecture and planning in colonialism (focused on Palestine, but it's a broader discussion architects refuse to have)
There is a level of discomfort and cognitive dissonance that keeps growing in me working in HE while scholasticide and ecocide (yes, they are part of the genocide or ethnic cleansing) committed in Gaza for more than half a year, and the deafening silence of Western universities completely ignoring it.
I truly believed that if there is any place in the world when dialogue should and must always be a priority, is in academic fora. Dialogue is the foundation of #academia
1/
The latter is a purposeful display of power, which only obtain to radicalise people even more, as it foster and enhances rage and anger. And exactly because of this, repression only leads to more violence and then more repression. It's a vicious cycle that moves away the attention from the original nature of the protest itself, and twist it into a violent mess of power display.
That #Academia, the place for dialogue, chose repression over negotiation is deeply disturbing
4/ #StudentProtest
Because what is the point of producing tons of research about social change, bottom-up strategies, community-led practice-based research, or student wellbeing, if then, when your own corpus of students (and staff) demands actual change based on that same body of research and knowledge production, on the same ethical principles ethics committees fill they mouths and h-index with, you just repress and shut them down, demonising them, and punishing them?
5/
How can we, as scholars, stand in front of the world, and defending our research as valuable, as something for the people, in service of our shared humanity, if then, Universities choose repression over dialogue?
I've been struggling with these questions for months, and tbh, I don't have a clear answers or solutions.
What I know, it is that repression, silencing, and criminalisation of anti-war and anti-genocide dissent is the antithesis of academic values.
6/
For those that prefer to parrot Biden's statements of 'you have the right to protest, but quietly, without disturbing the status quo', I think this article answer to it much better I can:
"Protest is never convenient, never comfortable and frequently unpopular. But dissent from indifference – and through the discomfort of disorder – is the work of choosing democracy."