Notices by Carrie Shanafelt (carrideen@c18.masto.host), page 4

Literally every queerdo in NYC is in this theater for I Saw the TV Glow rn

Maybe it wasn't a good idea to turn the police into the most overfunded and ignorant paramilitary organization in the world?

I grew up in the 90s when you could talk back to police. I grew up talking back to police. Learning how to refuse to obey police was one of my earliest lessons. (Talk about white privilege!) After 9/11, every single moron with a badge suddenly became a little god who must be obeyed, and now they're carrying machine guns for some reason and wearing camo for some reason, and driving miniature tanks for some reason, and they bark "you're welcome" at you for some reason. They *march* now.

One of the many many lessons of Abu Ghraib that we refuse to learn is that when you give people no training, no oversight, no consequences, no ethical boundaries, and tell them to get 100% compliance, especially from people they hate, they will become sadistic torturers and murderers. Human beings are not compliant. Anyone who knows about human beings understands this, and most of us face consequences for exercising authority with violence. The police are making little Abu Ghraibs, everywhere.

The only excuse I've heard for increased police power that makes any sense at all is that our gun laws in the US are so lax and useless that police are genuinely frightened out of their minds at all times. Hey, I have a very cool and ingenious solution for this that does *not* require every single person in the country to own multiple machine guns to be able to leave the house. In fact, hear me out, what if NO ONE had access to thousands of military-grade weapons?

In 2024, the NYPD budget was doubled from last year to $11B. We pay an average of over $1K per person in taxes to have these assholes harass us and hold our city hostage. Our public pool can't open because we can't afford lifeguards, but there are crowds of tooled-up cops in every subway station playing Candy Crush on their phones and forcing unhoused people to do tricks for them. And if anyone says a word about defunding, they get even more useless and violent to retaliate against the city.

All I'm saying is, if I were a university president and some unarmed undergrads were disagreeing with me about where their tuition dollars are spent to support a side of an international conflict, the very last people I would call for consultation and support are the NYPD, the world's worst-trained, dumbest, cruelest, richest, most racist militia, who are sitting on a pile of war machines they are sad about never getting to use on soft-bodied civilians.

There are a lot of universities that are a few pesky undergrads away from becoming a hedge fund. Students endure hours of classes taught by local community members with no degree who like making $1000 to do improv stand-up at captive young people for four months. They create clubs for people who like to read novels or learn about history or discuss philosophy or learn languages. Students mentor each other in programming, finance, and grad school exams, as well as justice. 5/

That also means that they get most of their information and direction from the internet--this crumbling, shitty, corrupted internet full of misinformation, scams, conspiracy theories, and some desperately earnest people--rather than from the mentors they have gone into nightmarish debt to learn from. Remember that they are every single bit as smart and capable as any other young people who have ever existed. They just haven't been taught much, and some have taught themselves well. 6/

They have paid more and received less than any other college students in history. Faculty have been complaining for 20 years and longer about universities being run "like a business" because universities don't work like businesses. But for the past 10 years, it's admins that haven't run the uni "like a business." They're not interested in providing a service for a consumer, or marketing that service effectively. They are making purely financial decisions regardless of consumer experience. 7/

I don't know if this is known outside of academic circles, but most universities are desperate for enrollments these days. Over the past 10ish years, unis changed tactics from attracting students with perks (some of them admittedly dumb) to slashing everything in sight--support staff, new faculty, majors, equipment, software, facilities, retirement plans, landscaping, even PR and marketing. Radical top-down decisions like "Who cares about foreign languages?" made whole divisions disappear. 1/

That is, universities used to be (well or badly) competing for students by offering something unique, promising extra career support or honors courses, competing in rare Div I sports, building a climbing wall, hosting ice cream or puppy therapy on the quad. But when the pivot to evisceration happened, it turned out there's nothing you can identify that is foundational enough to a liberal arts education that it can't be ruined and trashed tomorrow to save tens of thousands of $$. 2/

Meanwhile, all that axing has required unis to pay out absolutely shocking amounts, millions upon millions of $$, to forcibly retired admins who might have stood in the way of strangling the humanities or the lab sciences in the bathtub. (We all think it's just our discipline until the remaining handful of faculty get together and find out not even math or chemistry has a pot to piss in.) Students are paying more and more in tuition (and debt) for a product that is stunningly substandard. 3/

But at least the students can hang on to the community and vision of the university, its commitment to diversity and social justice, the boldly framed photos of students from all religions and races, giggling on the quad over books that no one is around to assign anymore? And that's where this protest season is different from the one in 2014 when Michael Brown's murderer was not indicted. Universities no longer promise free discourse, or community, or justice. They don't care if you go there. 4/

@tokyo_0 The kids call it "rizz"

@FlashMobOfOne Oh, and when Gary Lezak came out! That was huge. By that point, if you're a racist homophobe, you could hardly get ANY weather in KC.

@FlashMobOfOne I love him so much. He came to my elementary school and it was better than meeting a rock star.

One thing I miss about growing up in Kansas is that every network TV station had a top-tier meteorologist. They were local celebrites. Even kids knew their names, their dogs' names. They came to schools to give talks on weather science. When I left for college and found out that weather reports in other parts of the country are just *read* by randos? Thinking about them likely choking back excitement during this terrible tornado season in the Plains.

Trauma is information. Someone who has experienced violence knows more about violence than someone who has always been safe. Someone who has a disability knows more about disability than someone who has always been able. I think about this whenever big criminal trials are in the news, that they weed out jurors who have been assaulted, violated, attacked, discriminated against, because they can't be "objective" about violence. I don't trust anyone who thinks inexperience is objectivity.

@tokyo_0 Cassandra? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra