Notices by Austin Kocher, PhD 🌎 (austinkocher@mastodon.social), page 2

Listening to understand instead of listening to respond is an underrated act of both professionalism in the workplace & act of love in our personal lives.

Two simple ways to check if you (or others) are listening to understand include:

- Can the speaker pause to think about what they are saying without being interrupted?

- Does the listener respond by summarizing what they heard & asking clarifying questions, or do they immediately turn it back on themselves?

Do you have other tips?

Weird how “I like that he always speaks his mind” always means “he’s constantly offensive and abusive toward others” but never seems to mean “he’s always giving people the nicest compliments and lots of positive reinforcement.” What a cynical & limiting view of thinking this is.

When a government deports immigrants to a country it considers too dangerous for its own citizens, it’s a reminder that not all lives are valued equally — and that fact alone is a powerful ethical indictment of deportation, borders, and the territorial state.

Xenophobes: Why don't illegal immigrants just follow the law?

Me: Why don't you try explaining one single thing about immigration law and let's see if you can get literally anything remotely correct.

Did that come out wrong or come out right, I wonder.

The Peabody Library in Baltimore, Maryland, is one of the most beautiful interior spaces I've ever seen. Worth the visit! #baltimore #architecture #library #maryland #books

The past three days were quite likely the hottest in Earth’s modern history, scientists said on Thursday, as an astonishing surge of heat across the globe continued to shatter temperature records from North America to Antarctica.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/climate/climate-change-record-heat.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

BlueSky is pausing new accounts due to tech issues. Interestingly, when the main Mastodon server was overwhelmed with new accounts (which obviously can happen to anyone), users could still create new account on other servers, or start their own servers, which demonstrated the advantages of a decentralized social network. #bluesky #mastodon

Congress needs to pass a nationwide bathroom bill.

It should be illegal for anyone of any gender to store national secrets in their bathroom.

Immigrants Will Start Wearing Electronic Monitoring Watches This Month

The watches are made by the contractor BI, which has managed ICE’s alternatives to detention (ATD) program since 2004. The BI VeriWatch serves a similar purpose as GPS ankle monitors except they are smaller and more discreet, but also capture much more data and uses biometric authentication.

Read more here: https://austinkocher.substack.com/p/ice-on-my-wrist-immigrants-will-start

The latest mass shooting at a bank with armed guards is the clearest evidence yet that guns are not enough, more Americans need sniper training, demolitions experience, and combat pilot certification. If teachers can’t fly an F-16 they don’t deserve to be in the classroom. ??

NPR quits Twitter to protect its credibility. Maybe the rest of us should, too.

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169269161/npr-leaves-twitter-government-funded-media-label

The only thing that will stop a bad guy in a dress is a good guy in a dress. #1A

PSA: I really like Mastodon (much more than Twitter) and I want to just make sure I'm finding the right audience here.

I'm an immigration researcher with a modest but not insignificant public profile. My goal is to make non-partisan immigration data available and accessible to the public, which is why I primarily post about immigration.

If you want to stay up-to-date with immigration, consider sharing this and giving me a follow. Thanks!

#immigration #asylum @immigration

I found this taped to the door of the geography department at GWU today and it brought me so much joy. A guide to figuring out when a map was made based on features. Zoom in. It’s amazing.

I don’t know if “climate activist” is really the right way to put it. Like, if I’m drowning and trying to come up for air, I’m not suddenly an “oxygen activist”—I’m literally just trying to stay alive. Maybe addressing climate change shouldn’t be viewed as an “activist” position.

Catholic Church: “We most certainly did NOT evolve from monkeys.”

Me: “Okay, what’s the official title of the Pope?”

Catholic Church: …

Me: “Say it.”

Catholic Church: “Primate of Italy.”

Elon Musk is the new Alex Jones.

Welcome to @Mastodon! I had to be on Twitter a bit this week for work, and in addition to more utter BS from the One Who Shall Not Be Named, I also saw a ton of new people fed up and joining the #TwitterMigration. I really think you're going to like it here!

Welcome to @Mastodon. Here’s a belated intro. I’m a professor at Syracuse University. I am a geographer that studies (and critiques) the deportation pipeline, policing, and the law. I use theoretical, qualitative, and quantitative methods, so lots of big data sets and lots of ethnography. I’ll post about that work here, and I’m in the news a bit. Born in Ohio, lived everywhere. I’m also a big traveler, reader, art fan, writer, multi-lingual, perpetually curious. I like it here. #introductionpost