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    Category: anti-fascism

    • Even Foucault couldn’t make this up (hat-tip Rod Dreher)

      Why do things like "professional development," "continuing education," "team-building," and (yes, this too) "assessment" always have to tend towards infantalizing the poor people subjected to them? It's one thing to bureaucratically humiliate people by making them waste huge gobs of time. But this business of making them engage in ritualistic idiotic performances (which always involve…

    • Firing the Canon?

      With Robert Brandom (and for recognizably Hegelian reasons) I think that Whig histories are necessary. I also agree with conservative critics that American English departments damaged their own enrollments when the 1980s attacks on the canon led to too sweeping curricular changes. In every field, it's very important for students to master a Whig history…

    • Can someone please explain the publisher’s blurbs for Heidegger’s Black Notebooks

      Google translate gives me gibberish, but with the possible exception (I can't tell) of comments at the end of both blurbs the gibberish seemed to be downplaying the elephant in the dining room. My German is inexcusably (for someone who lived there for two years as a child) awful, so I'd be really interested to…

    • Is jury duty a trolley type problem? What should one do?

      Once again I've been called in for Jury Duty. It's nearly a priori that they won't impanel me for death penalty or war-on-drugs type cases, since I'm up front about exercising my right to jury nullify in the case of unjust laws or state sanctioned murder.* But I have no idea what to do with…

    • I’ve Been to the Mountaintop

    • Are the Gendered Conference Campaigns meant to apply to summer schools? Should They?

      There are two complimentary Gendered Conference Campaigns petitions,* Jennifer Saul's here and Eric Schliesser's here.  Saul's petition and and supporting material (e.g. how to avoid a gendered conference here) focus on helping organizers of conferences and edited anthologies avoid having an all male lineup. Schliesser's applies more leverage, also focusing on those who might present…

    • Free Your Screens and Your Mind Will Follow

      In the same manner that world history is a struggle between grasses and trees*,  the internet is a struggle between producers and consumers of media for control of the way in which media is displayed on the user's screen. The earliest versions of HTML were specifically designed so that the consumer had maximal control over…

    • My Dad went to LSU, and all I got was this lousy pee-cup

      A few days ago, while trying to open the interwebs thingy to allow me to start entering my grades, I was prevented from doing so by a pop-up menu that referenced LSU's Policy Statement 67. The text included unsubstantiated and highly dubious claims such as that most workplace problems are the result of drugs and alcohol…

    • “Now the Sith have returned to wage a new war against good in the university.”

      My six year old Thomas is reading Star Wars books designed for six year olds. He's actually very good at it, but he does consistently misread the word "universe" as "university." Since it occurs quite a lot in these books, he's constantly telling me things like the following: My name is Qui-Gon Jinn. I am…