benevolent-blackhole

[benevolent-blackhole]

I’m not sure this place will still be here after next year. The specific space we’re in will likely not be, but I kept telling people I wasn’t worried because our funding is really diverse so we should be fine. And then the I said something like that to the vice-director and she was like uhhhhh????? Blue screen of death computer sounds.

And was like well. That’s not necessarily…true…

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When I applied for this job I saw that there was a separate application to apply to continue after your first year and I remembered that the deadline was January so I went to the website and the info is just gone? Nothing about continuing employees.

I had been planning to continue here as a backup, but I was also like. Well, the two people who were reappointed from last year crashed and burned, so maybe they just want new fresh blood

:(( Financial and career panic.

But I asked the vice-director person today and she was like “wait, you might want to stay??? Yay!!!”

So I guess I’m fine, actually

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by johnkucko

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The advice I’ve gotten forever as a historian is that I need to emphasize the relevance to questions of race and class because being a women’s historian is a dime a dozen, is not diverse at this point, and there’s more than enough of that and like. Looking at departments with openings or postdocs and really looking though while departments to see what’s missing…..there’s like, no gender history. Giant 40-person departments with none, or like one women’s historian. Tiny colleges typically have none. Meanwhile, sorry, but every third historian in these departments are working on race or colonialism.

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I’ve been thinking about getting an iPad for a few years and now I’m thinking about just doing it now/Black Friday because tariffs might really drive the price up. Maybe I should also think about replacing my three year old laptop….

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its funny that a lot of conservative cultural sticking points right now are just slightly more advanced versions of what they believed as somewhat dull children, like "teachers are evil actually" and "vegetables are poison"

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A fun fact about my Wicked phase is that after reading the book I got “really into” the musical by which I just mean the soundtrack because there wasn’t a movie and I couldn’t tolerate YouTube clips of Broadway. I could tell by the music that they changed some stuff from the book so I basically just made up my own story based on the book to go with the music and fell in love with that. And then got around to reading the musical and was disappointed that it was nothing like the story I made up lol

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“traumatized”

And it’s just an adult book where there’s some weird sex. And politics.

I read it when I was 11 and it was my favorite book for like 5 years. The kids yearn for a little moral ambiguity and political violence.

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I don’t hold anything against celebrities who want to get out of dodge. I mean, why not? We don’t know what’s going to happen.

If I had the kind of wealth that made it so I’d never doubt that I could get and maintain a visa in the UK or Canada…god, why not.

[benevolent-blackhole]

I really like my new hairstylist. She’s the first person I’ve been to who doesn’t seem disappointed that I want low maintenance cuts and don’t want or need anything fancy. I just want to come in every few months for layers and to trim edges.

[benevolent-blackhole]

Bernie is wrong. He has always been wrong and is still wrong. The flaw in his theory is what he deems the “wealthy elite” versus what everyday Americans consider them to be. Voters don’t see all billionaires as the elites. They see college-educated liberals on the coasts, some of whom are billionaires, as elites.

Bernie-style populism didn’t land because billionaires figured out long ago they could undermine it by being socially right-wing, and the working class would forgive their wealth and privilege. That’s why this same demographic is willing to make it rain for grifters like Joel Osteen and Pat Robertson. That’s why they worship the wealthiest man on the planet like a God and consider him some real-life Tony Stark. People dismissed Donald Trump as a shameless attention-hungry New York oligarch until he called Mexicans rapists. Then he shot up to the top of the GOP primary polls. The working class didn’t think much of Elon Musk until he said “pronouns suck.” Then he became their hero. A scion of working-class Pennsylvania lost his US Senate seat last week to a hedge fund manager from Connecticut. West Virginia elected their richest man to the Senate after electing him governor – as a Democrat and later a Republican. Ohio tossed out their longtime Democratic senator, known for his strong support of labor rights, for – literally, no joke – a used-car salesman.

You can’t tell me the working class in America thinks being a billionaire alone is what makes one a “wealthy elite.” There are significant factors at play here Bernie is either oblivious to or purposely ignorant of.

In college, a professor once told me that Communism never succeeded in the United States because we are too religious and proud as a country. Religion, traditions, and culture were never widely discredited the way they were in Europe and Asia, where the clergy and nobility kept the bourgeoisie in figurative chains for centuries. The relative ease of social mobility made America unique compared to its Western counterparts. Historically, American progressivism has been focused on expanding social mobility – initially limited to only white men – to identity groups who had been denied it at the start: blacks, women, and immigrants. We have done it, with various amounts of success. While it may seem counterintuitive, Americans pride themselves in being the nation that pioneered the idea that wealth and status can be achieved through ingenuity and hard work and not just based on a lucky roll of the genetic dice, as it was in the Old World. It doesn’t mean we don’t have generational wealth in our country; we do, but since it isn’t the sole way to achieve wealth and power, we don’t care nearly as much about destroying all of it. Further, we will happily endorse it if the oligarchs and the aristocrats vow to promote and protect the social values we care about and the social hierarchy that benefits us.

It’s one of the reasons I believe Bernie could never beat Trump. If you ask working-class people what they want: an anti-immigrant, anti-intellectual billionaire or a Vermont socialist backed by kids from Harvard and UC Berkeley who hate our traditions and customs, the working class will always back the billionaire.

–Nick Rafter, "Bernie Sanders Can Take a Seat"

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“18-29” is just not a meaningful age category right now. If you’re 26-29, you were fully out of college in a career when the pandemic hit. If you were 18-21, you had high school disrupted. 21-25, college was disrupted, much more so for the younger edge of that.

And it’s widely recognized that the pandemic impacted these age cohorts differently, probably to the point that we can even talk about micro-generations.

“18-29 went strongly for Harris”, for example, doesn’t really tell us anything.

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Wicked is one of my Dad’s favorite books and he’s been talking a lot about wanting to see the movie which surprised me a bit but. Not too crazy. But he only just realized that it’s based on the musical, not the book. “Oh. But they aren’t going to sing a lot, will they?”

Well

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what is the worst injury you’ve received from an animal? pets, domesticated, and wild animals included—no humans, even though theyre technically animals. if your particular wound isnt represented, please select according to the healing timeline

-an animal has never harmed me

-inconsequential scratches and/or bruises (a couples days to heal)

-minor cuts/bruises, blood drawn (around a week to heal)

-severe scratches/bites, blood pours (a couple weeks to a month)

-minor fractures (a couple weeks/months)

-broken bones (a couples months to a year)

-severely broken bones/missing limbs/permanent damage (a couple years/permanent)

-ive been killed by an animal

-i have never been around an animal

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I like Call the Midwife but I think it’s kinda funny that they’ve put themselves in this hole/corner where they have to resemble anti-hospital birth propaganda sometimes because they need there to keep being midwife nuns in the 1970s for the show to work