#liberal colleges

[dosesofcommonsense]

A dumbed down population will believe just about anything, even if it comes from Yale professor encouraging society to sacrifice the aging population…sounds like abortion on the other end of the spectrum…sounds paganistic and satanic CAUSE IT IS.

What’s your kid’s college “teaching” them about the wider world?

Liberal Arts used to mean knowledge about everything. Now a Liberal Arts degree is more akin to a political Dark Arts degree.

[mysharona1987]

What a nice lady.

[visenyaism]

an OUNCE of fucking decorum wyll?????

[corpsentry]

a glass sun 1/2

[thebellekeys]

And a reminder that higher education cannot be considered truly democratised if students can still be doomed to poverty with multiple or advanced arts and Humanities degrees...

[wathanism]

alright gang, let's do a fun little thought experiment.

which city would biden have to completely annihilate before you decide not to vote for him?

for the sake of this thought experiment, let's ignore actual real-world alliances between countries. it can be london, or paris, or athens, or barcelona, or rome, or berlin, or even an american city like new york or new orleans or los angeles or honolulu. this is all a hypothetical after all.

really consider it. if you're gonna bother to yap in my notes, at least try to engage with this question in good faith. imagine opening up the news, and you see that a bomb was dropped on this city, and then the bombs never stop. imagine you had a friend there. imagine you'd had a trip planned to meet them and see the sights. imagine every museum, every historical monument, every theatre, every university destroyed. imagine that one day, you lived in a world where this city existed, and the next, it has completely ceased to be. it's effectively been pompeii-ed out of our world entirely. there is no longer a big ben, or a parthenon, or a colosseum, or what have you. there is no longer that foreign musician you loved from this city. there are no longer sweet old grannies to share old family recipes from this part of the world. there is no longer the online friend you wanted to visit. there is no longer your vacation plans.

don't hit me with, "but it's netanyahu doing this," because israel would literally run out of ammunition in weeks without the US. don't hit me with, "but trump!" because that quite literally is not the fucking question.

which city has to completely cease to exist before you even consider that this system isn't ever going to work?

if you are still planning to vote for biden, then either a) biden could drop a nuke on any city on earth and it wouldn't be a dealbreaker for you, or b) in your mind, people and places are divided into ones that are acceptable to destroy and ones that are not. or at least, there are ones that are more acceptable to destroy than others.

come up with your answer and either realize you sound like a fascist and work to change it, or embrace that you are a fascist and stop lying to us about caring about people of color.

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

GIOVANNI BAPTISTA VERINI

Sometime between 1526 and 1527, Italian calligrapher and writer Giovanni Baptista Verini published his noted 4-part handwriting manual, Liber Elementorum Litterarum, probably at Toscolano on Lake Garda. This very rare book stands between the great manuals of Albrecht Dürer's Four Books on Measurement (1525) and Geoffroy Tory's Champfleury (1529).

The images shown here are from a 1947 printing of the third part of Varini's manual, published as Luminario or the Third Chapter of the Liber Elementorum Litterarum on the Construction of Roman Capitals, with an English translation by English librarian and typography expert Alfred F. Johnson (1884-1972) and an introduction by the master type historian and designer Stanley Morison (1889-1967). It was published in Cambridge by Harvard College Library and in Chicago by the Newberry Library, and printed in London by the Office of The Times in an edition of 510 copies.

Next to nothing is known about Verini himself. In his introduction, Morison writes:

The meagre details concerning the career of Giovanni Baptista Verini provide material for few positive statements. He was young, he was a citizen of Florence, . . . and a bookseller there. . . . If Verini's "Luminario" . . . was not reprinted, if was a disappointment he was prepared for, as witness the text he chose to place on the title page of part three, here reprinted after four hundred and score years: OMNIA LABUNTUR SED VIRTUS SOLA VIRESCIT [Everything slips away, but only virtue remains verdant].

View a post on Albrecht Dürer's manual.

View a post on Geoffroy Tory's Champfleury.

View more Typography Tuesday posts.

[leaves-lilies-and-esther]

Just found out that women have to borrow more to pay for college, and then take longer to pay back their loans. Parents save more money for their sons, because of the breadwinner gender role. Colleges avoid taking too many girls into their classes and give boys' applications a second look. Once in college, girls are more likely to send money back to their parents to help support them (the same parents who saved less for their college education, because sons are the breadwinners...). Lots of female dominated professions like nursing require degrees, but any field with 'too many women' pays less. Once they're in the field, even if it is male-dominated, women are again paid less than their male counterparts (women are more likely to be penalized for asking for raises etc, and more likely to be overlooked for promotions). If they become mothers, that sets them back even further.

But men still complain that there are special scholarships for women. Lol.

Sources:

Colleges avoid taking too many women:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/magazine/men-college-enrollment.html

All other statistics:

https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed/files/pdfs/iee/eei/wocstl-stlfed-03-nov-2022.pdf?sc_lang=en&hash=67A421B90B88E88EA3DF5FCBBFDCD4AE

[luckybyler]

This was a reply to someone else, but I'm making this its own post because so many people are being so evil right now re: Noah Schnapp.

You can find other, longer explanations with history and all, but all the places I've seen more or less agree with this:

So you're all calling people to cancel Noah because he's in favor of a Jewish nation in what is today Israel. Which is a perfectly reasonable, decent and educated opinion to have, especially when you, to use a trendy term, "educate yourself" and find out why the state of Israel was created.

11000 dead Palestinians, half of them children

According to Hamas. Don't forget that, ever. They're the current, official government of Gaza, thus they're the ones who give numbers. This means that the real number could be 10, 1 million, anything in between. What I've read is that they probably give more of less accurate total numbers. What they fail to do, however, is distinguish between Hamas militants and civilians, and beteween civilians killed by IDF strikes, civilians killed by failed Hamas or Palestininan Islamic Jihad's rockets (which happens a lot), and Palestinians murdered by Hamas/PIJ (which also happens, a whole damn lot). They also don't specify how many civilians they have prevented or tried to prevent from evacuating or receiving aid.

11k dead people is a horrible number. Even 1 dead person is a horrible number. However, urban warfare in such a densely populated area is its own kind of hell, especially when the other side is fond of using civilians as human shields in every way possible. The fact that the number is 11k and not 50k, 100k, and so on, indicates that the IDF have indeed done a lot to minimize deaths. You don't genocide people by doing roof knocks, opening evacuation lines, dropping guided bombs, putting up an Iron Dome to deal with rockets while avoiding escalation, etc. simply because actual genocide, while a lot worse, is also cheaper, easier and faster than what they're doing. This is important because caling every act of war genocide dilutes the word, and there are actual genocides happening around the world. Also, there is a difference between striking military targets and causing civilian deaths as a side effect (what the IDF is doing) and planning and carrying out a massacre deliberately targeting civilians and inflicting as much pain and humilliation as possible on them. And there is a difference between doing so by breaking a ceasefire (which is what Hamas did), and defending your country because if you don't do that a terrorist group will anhilate you (which is what the IDF is doing).

Back to Noah. So far, these are the things that people have tried to cancel him for:

Traveling to Israel (a completely normal thing)

Having Israeli friends (another completely normal thing)

Condemning Hamas' horrible attack on October 7th (the decent thing to do)

Posting a statement saying he feels unsafe as a Jewish person in the US (which, given the rise of antisemitic acts in the world, including the US, including where he lives and where he studies, is a valid feeling to have)

Signing a letter, along with Shawn Levy, Brett Gelman, Ross Duffer and I think Cara Buono, asking Biden to press for the liberation of every hostage by Hamas. This especially shows the utter ignorance of the cancellers because, as it turns out, caring about every hostage implies a slowdown of IDF's actions (and, at the time, a delay of a ground invasion).

Supporting the existence and preservation of the state of Israel (once again, a completely normal thing). The fact that people are turning against him for these things says to me that the real reason you are all hating Noah is beacuse:

He's Jewish. Like, really really Jewish.

And the fact that this all comes from a place of antisemitism isn't hidden at all: I've seen y'all on here, on Twitter, Reddit, every other social media calling him slurs (such as "cunt"), censoring his name, pretending he's not part of the cast, asking the Duffers/Netflix to fire him, wishing him failure, doxxing him, calling on his classmates to physically assault him, etc. He doesn't need to educate himself: you guys are already teaching him a great lesson on why a Jewish state is necessary. If that's the treament he gets from his own "fans", what can he expect from the world at large?

[readyforevolution]

Four-time NFL Pro Bowl quarterback @mikevick is set to take the helm as the next head coach of Norfolk State University. Vick revolutionized the quarterback position with his unparalleled rushing ability, amassing more yards on the ground than any other quarterback in history.

Drafted No. 1 overall by the Atlanta Falcons in 2001, Vick enjoyed a stellar 13-season NFL career, including standout performances with both the Falcons and the Philadelphia Eagles. His influence has inspired a new generation of dual-threat quarterbacks. Now, as he transitions into coaching, Vick joins the ranks of former NFL stars leading historically Black colleges and universities, bringing his wealth of experience and passion for the game to Norfolk State. Congratulations to Michael Vick on this exciting new chapter!

[trans-axolotl]

content note: discussion of suicide.

this next monday will be the six year anniversary of losing one of my friends to suicide.

when he died, my high school barely mentioned his death, even though for other students who died by things like car crashes or illness, there were so many public expressions of grief. they believed that having any memorials for a student who died by suicide would encourage other people to die the same way. in their rush to erase the circumstances of his death, they erased the memory of his life.

there are so many things i am angry at that high school about in terms of how they treated mental health (mandatory reporting and collaborating with cops, their refusal to recognize the ways in which that system led to peer-to-peer crisis support, their refusal to recognize the ways that trying to keep each other alive through trial and error was scary and exhausting, carceral disciplinary policies, etc etc etc). but i think one of the things i am still angriest about is the way they enforced shame around his death. it felt like they were retroactively blaming him for the constellation of circumstances that made suicide an option in his life. it felt like they were blaming those of us who missed him and cared about him and wanted to grieve him. it made those of us still there who were actively suicidal feel even more scared about the reaction if we did reach out for help from one of those mythical safe adults.

as an adult now involved in psych abolition/mad liberation work, it makes me so fucking mad to see the ways in which he was discarded by people in authority positions. and the older i get, the more options i have found in my life for making sense of the world and finding healing and community and support which were never available to him because he died when he was 16 and the only things offered to him were a carceral psychiatric system that blamed him for his own fucking death. it feels so incredibly unfair.

i miss him and i think i always will; i can't remember his laugh or the sound of his voice or his favorite color any more and that aches. this grief is so heavy and it feels harder in a new way each year, when i become older than he will ever be. sometimes meeting new comrades or seeing new anticarceral suicide support models hurts because i wish so fucking bad that we had that back then. i remember how close we came to losing even more people that year and i know it is simple fucking luck that i'm still here when he's not.

i remember another letter (never sent) that i wrote to a friend while they were in an ICU bed after a suicide attempt when i didn't know if they would live or not. i have spent so much time in the past 10 years begging for anything to keep me and my friends alive, but even in that letter i knew that there is so much fucking violence that is hidden beneath psychiatric logics of cure and safety that promise a "solution" to suicide. I knew that institutionalization, coercion, and shame would not have helped build a life more liveable for him or **** or any of the people i've loved and lost since.

there needs to be more fucking options for care and support that aren't so incredibly cruel to suicidal people. i know so many people doing incredible work in alternatives, peer respite, a million different frameworks for healing and liberation. but it makes me so mad every day i have to live in a world where there are still people restrained, locked up in psych wards, having all autonomy and personhood taken away from them. knowing there are dozens of people every day getting blamed for their deaths the same way he was blamed for his.

i miss him. i cared so fucking much for him. and he died by suicide, and all of those things are true. he has been dead for 6 years and he lived before that and the people who loved him want to remember all of him; our celebrations of his life should not require hiding the way that he died.

Image description: [1000 origami cranes in all different colors and patterns that are tied together in strings of 25]

(these were the 1000 cranes we made to give to his parents, in memorial and recognition of how much he meant to us.)

[unlirise]

i started using the pomodoro technique today and i'm proud of the amount of progress i made especially for the tasks i assigned myself. i'm still recovering from academic burnout so the progress i'm making with my thesis is slow. but, some progress is better than no progress at all!

i encountered some issues with my scope and limitations which forced me to re-pivot. as a result, i had to revise chapter 1 and 3, and i was able to do the former.

the university errand i had to run gave me an opportunity to go to the library. most of the time, a change of space is all i need to actually get some work done. it really is true that you associate certain spaces with rest and others with work. as much as i want the dorm to be a place of productivity for me, it just wasn't going to happen. i always play games, watch movies, and rest on my bed. the library and the dorm's study area, on the other hand, were places i always went to when i want to make significant progress on my academic commitments. those were the two places i mostly stayed in, which helped me to cross off those items on my daily to-do list. so now, this is what the list looks like:

rise's tuesday tasks:

ask for tutorial form from the registrar

finish revising chapter 1 of my thesis

annotate areas for revision in chapter 3

batch cook pasta for the week

on top of that, i was able to do some extra reading on the conventions of policy analysis! those are the notes that you see above. my thesis is essentially a policy analysis with how i'm looking at the effectiveness of the execution of national protocol. reading through it, it made me consider a career as a policy analyst. i want to practice writing policy-analytic papers and see if it's something that resonates with me. beyond graduation, i'm still majorly unsure about what i want to become. i want to keep my options open.

[visenyaism]

i KNOW jaheira feels some kind of way about getting tricked into babysitting a bhaalspawn for the third time in a row. she thought she was safe investigating a new seemingly unrelated cult and then little miss dark urge wandered onstage wearing a propeller hat carrying a comically oversized rainbow lollipop like of COURSE i can kill ketheric thorm for you ms. jaheira! i’m soooo good at killing. why? don’t worry about it, I can be trusted with weapons😇

[moonshynecybin]

in his overalls + the naked woman shirt he shares with celestino under them + holding hands with his pitbull at the dinner table. okay.

[thashining]

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