Notices by Preston Austin (gl33p@mastodon.social)

“when you engage in the collaboration, you actually encourage them to do even worse stuff.” concludes Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University

Robert Kuttner, co-founder at The American Prospect agrees:

“Universities are hiding in self-censorship...Former diversity offices have been remained offices of “Belonging” or “Collaboration,” as the University of Colorado calls its former diversity program.

Collaboration is all too apt a name.”

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-03-24-columbias-capitulation-wesleyans-pushback/

Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University:

“that’s the classic collaborationist dilemma, right? ... you collaborate with authoritarians who you know are in the wrong, in order to keep them from doing worse stuff”

“Like I have a restaurant and if I collaborate with the Nazis and don’t let any Jews eat here, then the guys who wash dishes will still have jobs. As you know, that slope is very slippery. Appeasement doesn't end well.”

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-03-24-columbias-capitulation-wesleyans-pushback/

“...how Fascist dictatorship works: first make an example of one person or institution, that will cow the others who will keep their mouths shut and hope they won’t become the next target.”

“What Columbia is doing is deeply shameful, but so is the silence of its peer institutions.”

“there has been zero support of any kind from other institutions”

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=14435

@selzero That's like the setup for a zombie movie 🍿

We switched to decaf once by accidently buying the wrong beans, and for a few days we thought maybe we had COVID before we figured it out.

@dalias Indeed. The whole "Look at them, having fun having power and not giving a fig about our notions of value consistent behavior." aspect of it is also...not great 🙄

Skewering right wing hypocrisy is at its absolute best an amusing waste of time. At its best. But wasting time is OK! It's good to have hobbies. And efficiency is, as everyone is learning, a false god.

But...when skewering hypocrisy: try not to run the sword through the social goods the baddies are supposedly hypocritically abusing.

People depend on welfare. It's a public and moral good. And spreading conservative framings of such goods and their beneficiaries into folks' brains? It's neither.

We do not know why folks think tossing public goods under a rhetorical bus to create clever English that fails to pin hypocrisy to oligarchs and conservatives is good.

We do not know who built this cognitive trap.

We do not know why getting out of it is impossible for so many.

We do not know when we will be able put this gross practice behind us.

We only know that that day is not this day over at forbes dot com /sites/alanohnsman/2025/02/21/elon-musk-is-a-billionaire-federal-welfare-vampire/

The opposite of harm and destruction isn't resistance or building. It's mending and care.

So, I guess what I'm saying is, don't let the bastards decide what you harden yourself to, or what you can care about. They can make it expensive, and they will make it more and more so, but they can't choose for you.

Hard things beget adjacent hard things. Being pushed by fascism is also being pushed to be fascist. To do its work.

Resistance shrinks what anyone can care about. Whiteness works to ensure one's cares harden them into a tool its violence can work with.

To my sweet siblings in left and liberal whiteness: Feel this being done to you. En la fedi. At work. In politics. By friends. By family. Know what you're supposed to care less about.

Lots of machines can kill fascists. Caring can kill fascism.

I fairly deeply hate the term "homeless camp" since generally speaking, they're not camping. Each "camp" is made of people's homes.

So when the monstrous need to "clear" a "camp" boils over among nice white progressive homeowners nearby, we owe them plain language about what we demand police and city employees, who should serve them equally, do to them for us.

We ask them to violently destroy a group of people's homes because we hate how they and their homes look, and what that says about us.

Free public transit is one of those topics that really gets the people who despise the poor and want them to suffer, somewhere out of view please, to tell on themselves.

I advocated for it in a newspaper interview and for quite some time people at events who seemed on the surface fairly decent would, unprompted, let me know it's bad when people with nothing have a way to get around and places to be warm in winter or cool in summer, to sit, to put down their bags, to talk and laugh, to eat, etc.

“When eugenics-obsessed billionaires try to sell me a new toy, I don’t ask how many keystrokes it will save me...It’s impossible for me to discuss the utility of a thing when I fundamentally disagree with the purpose”

“I don’t care how well their ‘AI’ works – or if you found a fancy fun use-case. It fucks me up watching peers treat this tech from people who want to eradicate me as a future worth considering.”

“I don’t need an agent, I want to maintain my own agency.”

https://www.miriamsuzanne.com/2025/02/12/tech-ai-wtf/

Too many folks on here clearly don't know anywhere near enough felons to safely use the word "felon" in a sentence.

Like, thinking one of the most unjust and racist systems of oppression ever to have existed in history is a reliable authority on who's a bad person? It's embarrassing to watch.

A reminder to myself: Be like water 🌊

Water gets where it's going. Water doesn't stay angry or get frustrated. It goes around and through obstacles via space where the obstacle isn't. It creates the space if none exists. It joins together to flood and drown what it can't break. Water pursues its end with infinite patience, solving any problem via thorough research. Its flow gently yet firmly blunts any momentum but its own, moving all things within its flow. Water has fun. Water gets it done.

@stux
“...are we alone in the universe?”

Efficiency is a false god.

I've been saying that for a while, possibly decades now. It's interesting because folks, especially technical folk, tend to interpret me to mean an efficiency is false (ie the cake is a lie, not truly efficient) which is broadly true but not what I mean, or that efficiency will be used to bad ends, which is almost always true but not what I mean.

What I mean is that efficiency is itself a bad end. It's not a broad value. It will not light our way along paths to good.

@goblinses Yeah I basically do all of the above for various projects and people, but for a long time (15 years or more??) I could just say to folks "OK, just get a domain or subdomain you have control over, map it to WordPress.com, get to work, use good slugs so your urls are not funky & never use a you.wordpress.com URL, and pour your posts into a to-go cup when and if it gets cramped in there, or a rug pull cometh along."

That feels wrong now, with no option as good for nontech folks. @dalias

@listrophy 😂 “Yes, a business like yours should _totally_ go all in on WordPress. Absolutely. I cannot think of a better match of values.” 🤞🏻

It's hard to envision an outcome of the WordPress nonsense that would leave me able to say "Yes, you should invest in a WordPress solution to your problem." to anyone who wasn't already invested in WordPress in some material way. I'm not even sure how it could get to me doing the work to figure out if I should be saying that. Recommending WordPress for whole huge class of problems went from a no brainer with some security footnotes to a not even worth considering unless nothing else makes sense.

“Simply do not break a glass, and it will last a thousand years. Smash it, and it will not last an instant. Democracy is like that: fragile, but only if you shatter it.”

“Trust is like that, too, as newspapers know.”

It has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/26/washington-post-endorses-kamala-harris-satire/