nerd teacher 🦇

Tangentially, I'm also tired of the whole "The fascists have taken the wrong lesson from dystopian fiction!" people. For the love of all of our mental healths, THEY DO NOT CARE. It's aesthetics to them. They do not give a single solitary shit that they don't understand the themes and morals of dystopian novels. Hell, we know they don't understand what they read; Elon Musk made a great display of entirely misunderstanding the point of Hitchhiker's Guide. He doesn't care that he doesn't know what it means; to him, it means what he says it means. It means what he forces it to mean. That is how he sees it. That is also not an education problem. That is a problem of how self-interested fascists (same thing) behave and believe the world to work. No amount of education is going to fix that.

@jonny Did... he run your thread through Claude to summarise it or...? That is the only explanation I can think of for his refusal to understand that this isn't yours, lmao.

Your 'gotcha' points aren't going to end the problems of the world, and you've gotta quit this shit.

@angelteeth I may sound somewhat heartless, but my sympathy with people who repeat the "if I do this, I'll get fired" mantra really decreased significantly when I did what I thought was right to protect my students. And effectively got fired (had my contracted reneged—I'm not even going to say withdrawn because that would be too polite for what they did to me). ... And that's as an immigrant who was on a fucking work visa, which also meant that my right to live where I am was directly impacted. Because my employer thought I caused too much trouble for the sake of making sure that students were safe (from a predatory teacher) and that their needs were being met so that they could successfully graduate (which was curiously a massive problem because of the people running the school, hmm). The only way I want to know these people were forced is if they literally actually were. Just being bystanders to an event and worrying that you'll be fired if you stop to help is grotesque.

@chu Also worth reminding people that those little old grannies? Can be their own family members, too. Which a lot of people just don't want to deal with. The number of times I hear this kind of garbage from my own mother is excruciatingly disgusting (and also my grandmother, aunt, cousins... and it used to be all of the men, too, but nature ensured that they're all unable to speak anymore). It's not just someone else's little old granny; it can even be your own.

@enby_of_the_apocalypse@social.treehouse.systems Oh, it pisses me off for those reasons, too. They always do that, though; they take things that have messages antithetical to their very existence, claim they love them (or I guess they do in the way an abuser can love the people they abuse—it's not the same, but the parallels are there... since they also happen to be abusers, too), and try to ruin them for the rest of us. But when I have to listen to people go "But that's not what it means!" at them, I'm just like... They don't care. They will never care. They want to ruin everything for the rest of us. That's part of their goal. (And there's one sure-fire way to stop a fascist from doing it, and a lot of the people who do this very thing? Also keep telling me we shouldn't do it because we have "rise above." Ugh.)

@elilla ... I want three separate stickers with each of them.

@young_harbinger@social.treehouse.systems This has been true from the very beginning of the compulsory project, if we're honest. There's an old but pretty good book on this one (Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes—this should be available on Internet Archive, but I've also got a PDF somewhere) that provides a good background, including on a lot of our own assumptions (and even if not applicable to everywhere, as the title makes evident, it still provides some good avenues of exploration for figuring out where to look for other geographical locations, especially as schooling systems are intricately connected to varying forms of colonialism and imperialism—and a lot of shifts in education reforms also are a result of additional forms of colonialism and imperialism, along with competing nationalisms).

@Haste I've run into a small handful of reporters and journalists who've done that, along with a few other content creators who... don't really engage with folks but are here to just drop self-promo and that's that. I don't really mind certain kinds of self-promo (e.g., "I wrote a thing!" or "I made a thing!"), especially when it's nested within genuine interaction or other interesting posts (even if it's shitposting with another person). I love seeing people drop their art (whatever it is) or writing, and it's given me a lot of cool and new perspectives I haven't otherwise found. But I think if more journalists and reporters actually engaged with people, it might alleviate (not solve) the issue of how a bunch of 'em forgot who they claim they write for and inform. It might even get a few to stop doing disinformation or strong one-sided perspectives of news stories (e.g., when all of their info for a story comes primarily from cops or corporate mouthpieces without further looking into it).

@passenger@kolektiva.social @julieofthespirits@kolektiva.social While I agree with the point, I'd argue that it'd be detrimental and actively harmful to do this in school at any level, and that's more down to the fact that the teachers and professors doing this are barely adequately able to engage in dismantling Nazi propaganda from the Holocaust (and in terms of compulsory schooling, there are a number of history teachers giving sympathy tasks to sympathise with both sides of this oppression while also actively misrepresenting the victims). Not to mention if it's in a compulsory space (which even tertiary is to an extent in its current structure), the act of doing this will usually fall upon people doing it through rote instruction to just get it done. Doing this in spaces where people know and agree with what the goal of the learning is (understanding the propaganda, contextualising it, dissecting and dismantling it, following the historical trajectory to modern times, etc) would be far more beneficial, and schools are not up to that task.

@passenger@kolektiva.social @julieofthespirits@kolektiva.social Society, as it currently stands, creates schools that support the goals of the state. They are literally silos for people (children and mostly young adults) until they are "ready" to participate in the world around them. I'd argue that part of what anarchists should be doing is working towards creating learning spaces (within multiple other community spaces) that are entirely separate from schools and function differently. Can we still utilise things from schools? Possibly, to varying degrees. But we have to create spaces with shared goals that are articulated by the members of them (part of freedom of association, btw). If a space wants to learn about right-wing propaganda so that it can better dismantle it, the people inhabiting it must all share that goal and work on multiple necessary skills (e.g., be able to recognise and handle someone who might start falling for that propaganda in the course of studying it). Schools don't have that shared goal in the same way. The goals they have are already established from the beginning and imposed upon all who enter it, whether they agree or not. Similarly, the procedures to handle people with detrimental views are all... well, I'd argue they're negligent and prone to allowing the harmful behaviours to perpetuate.

@angelteeth So much this. It's also about what people do with those protests. When these things are led and organised by people who have, for example, an electoral goal? It's likely not going to have the same impact as when people just straight up deny access to platforms to politicians and instead focus on both protesting and building connections between people. Also, also! It's about what people do to make these events accessible. Are there multilingual people in the organising that enable people who don't speak the dominant language of a place to participate and also stay safe so they know what's going on? Are there people in the whole crowd who are aware of what's happening so that chaos is less likely to occur (if cops or opposing protesters attack)? Are people ensuring that the event is safe for disabled people to exist in any capacity (masking, communication, etc)? (Part of the reason I will not go to protests where I live is both because I usually cannot hear any of the speakers, no one knows what's going on when cops choose to close in and scare people, and my language skills aren't that great. Plus, way too many citizens still love leaving immigrants to get caught so they escape, despite us being way more precarious in existing here than they are.) Because even if those events don't do something in the immediate, being very prominent about building communal care into something and pushing people to do it? Can be helpful, too. It might even shift the way people behave in other events or protests, making them easier to participate in for more people... which can only help them. (Side note: I keep wanting to call 'protests' as 'manifestations' because I keep hearing and seeing people use the closest English translation, lol.)

This isn't me saying that I or others cannot get something out of the work done by academics or that they are all inherently bad people. I don't think that. Suissa is very much a person who shouldn't be included anywhere, and she especially shouldn't be included in anything related to anarchism (I don't care if she wrote a fucking book, and I still wouldn't care even if that book was fabulous). The job of academics, whether they are people we like or people we oppose, is to extract things and place them squarely within a walled garden. It is to categorise and define the "proper" aspects of a thing while obfuscating the "improper." That is just part and parcel of academia. (There is a reason there are a handful of academics—not many—who try to make their work as widely available to those it is actually relevant for and why they have to fight to do that in a lot of cases.) And it is more true when people do fuck all to actually engage with and participate in the things they study and research and discuss and write about.

@elilla@transmom.love I will be so happy when Duolingo falls. While they could have made a somewhat useful vocabulary training app that would've worked alongside other strategies, even with the goofy-as-fuck sentences (oh yes, lesson one: La tua anatra e la mia cena... very helpful in any situation). But it was also fucking obnoxious how it'd just be like "No, this isn't how these people speak." Even if you knew that a) that is how they spoke and b) that there was more than one way to write a sentence of the same meaning (dialect/geography, different word choice). So you constantly got punished for it in the gamified setting, including being forced to go in and debate people on why something should exist. (Around the time I stopped using it, I was constantly marked down on using 'Yeah' instead of 'Yes' when translating to English. Even though I rarely use 'yes', and they have the same meaning.) It really brought out both an internal language prescriptivism and the language prescriptivists in its userbase. Like, if I wanted to go do courses that were forcing me into the already bullshit CEFR and the horrible class structures those lessons have, I could go do that... pretty much anywhere. I didn't need an app for that.

@skinnylatte Well, I've been middle aged since I was a teenager, lmao. Glad to know I'm beyond ancient now!

Like seriously, search Judith Suissa and look at her recent work. It's literally transphobic trash. And she's worked with Women's Place UK and in seminars/events with fucking Kathleen Stock. Stop including Judith Suissa. Burn her (and people like her!) out of your spaces if you have to. I swear, I say this every year because people never look deeper than book titles. Please start looking deeper than book titles!

Like, the only reason that piece of shit's book is so well-known is because she is "the expert" in academia and other well-known anarchist academics constantly reference her, and her position in academia gives her time to "research" (lol) and write. And the anarchist (or anarchist adjacent) press houses we have often operate on principles that enable people like her (not anyone who has to struggle in any capacity to live, btw) to produce work.

@shimon@kolektiva.social Judith Suissa can take her TERF shit and fuck off forever. And anyone still referencing her despite years of her TERF bullshit can also leave me alone. Non-negotiable.

@mycorrhiza@post.lurk.org Please, please, please just let me exist within my own time and largely on my own schedule. Everything about life is so much better—and I'm so much healthier in so many ways, including my normally garbage immune system—when I can exist on my own schedule. I'd also really, really, really like some more exploration of nighttime society. Like, why can't I do basic shit in the middle of the night when other weirdos with odd schedules are around?

Here, here's a quick look at her publications that are listed on UCL: https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/48632-judith-suissa/publications Edit to expand on the pronoun quip: The one about pronouns is literally a bio-essentialist argument for how people (and cats?) with certain genitalia are what they are and there's no changing it.

@mooncake@ni.hil.ist I unfortunately do because another well-known anarchist academic working out of Loughborough kept referring me to her despite my repeated complaints that I (a non-binary person) would not feel safe working with someone like her. But am always happy to help inform!

@EeveeEuphoria@social.translunar.academy The thing is that she doesn't actually attribute "being anarchist" to herself. A lot of anarchists do, and she merely never corrects that (nor does she even confirm it... she merely says nothing); this actually gives her a lot of space in places that she'd consider 'niche', helping to promote her materials within them. And I (personally) think that a lot of anarchists have felt starved for materials (especially those wanting things like anarchist education, since there's... not much available there), so they kind of... latch onto things that have the word "anarchism" written on them. And a lot of those same anarchists also really seem to hold academia in such high regard (much to my own, again, personal dismay), which helps promote these materials coming out of anarcho-curious academics (most of whom, from my own interactions and conversations with them, see anarchism as an "untapped area" of exploration, which gives them the much needed "special" research topics to get into PhD programs and be seen as an "expert" in such things). I'm sure there are people who, like... aren't that. But that has been a lot of my own interactions with the very people who continually recommend the same handfuls of books like this. And sadly, they often overlook people *outside* academia who have been working in these areas, and they tend to overlook a lot of anarchist (and anarchist-adjacent) spaces that are fighting to get things like this running. But yes, her position is antithetical to anarchism and has been for quite a long time because this has always been kind of bubbling under the surface.

@wruffian@bark.lgbt Seriously. This is something I've really been noticing with someone who I generally kind of liked while he was alive (but do still have a lot of issues with because of what he routinely left out in his work despite everyone around him basically going "Hey, uh... what about...?"), and it really starts feeling like we're overemphasising the attribution of these ideas to the *one* person, as if they're the *only* person who has anything to say about it. But also, I like the point you make about how people recommend things rather than talking about the ideas (and it really feels like a replacement, rather than using the recommended thing as a shared experience + jumping-off point). Definitely agree there.

@plantfeest@mastodon.social I wouldn't equate them to toddlers, as that demeans toddlers (and being a toddler shouldn't be an insult). They are self-serving, greedy adult men who have been allowed to behave like this with no repercussions. And it is time that the consequences came with interest.

@a@social.wikimedia.de Yeaaah, that book would probably take me ages to get through... even if I could find it, lol. (But if you've got a link to a downloadable, I'm sure I could give it a very slow-go.) But no worries! It's been a while that people've known about it, but every time I see her name pop up in something... I just make it known again. I need to go back through other spaces I've been in and grab the folks who keep trying to launder her into anarchist spaces, even those she knows she's not welcome in. (Because even as a non-anarchist, she loves finding ways to extract from us for her niche subjects when she's not writing TERF articles.)