A Boring Dystopia

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/64975432

But this isn’t just about professors; it’s about all of us. This is the most flagrant attack on higher education in my lifetime. Why are politicians reducing public colleges and universities to vehicles of state propaganda? Why are self-proclaimed proponents of free speech turning around and using state repression to enforce speech codes on our campuses? Why can’t we speak openly about our social world in sociology classes? Why are unqualified appointees from the business world dictating to Ph.D.-holding academics how they should teach and which textbooks they must use?

What we really need are people beyond the university itself — the general public — speaking out about how ludicrous this all is. We are now living through an era of state censorship, politically motivated firings, and state-produced propaganda materials. If this isn’t authoritarianism in higher education, I don’t know what is.

Opinion piece by Zachary Levenson is associate professor of sociology at Florida International University. 

EDITED TO ADD (in case some miss my comment)

Imagine the following scenario: You’re teaching Introduction to Sociology at a community college in Florida, and today, you’re trying to explain the well-documented pay gap between men and women in the United States. You check the guidance you just received from your dean, who received instructions via email from the executive vice chancellor of the Florida College System. The instructions state explicitly that explaining “unequal outcomes between men and women” in terms of “institutional sexism” would violate state law.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/35056444

In the last few days, Planet’s satellite imagery showed the aftermath of Iranian missile and drone strikes on US and allied bases in the region, including damage to the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain and to a $1 billion US-built early warning radar in Qatar used for tracking incoming projectiles. Planet said it wants to prevent “adversarial actors” from using its data for “Battle Damage Assessment (BDA)” purposes. In other words, the company doesn’t want to help Iran’s military know where it succeeded and where it failed.

We of the general public aren't hearing a lot about the success or failure of Iran's retaliatory attacks on US bases and logistics in the region, and this decision is putting us further in the dark.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/56346406

Republican senator joined Capitol Police as they violently ejected an anti-war protester and U.S. Marine veteran from an Armed Services subcommittee hearing on Wednesday, appearing to break his arm as the group tried to wrestle him out of the chamber.

Video of the incident shows Sen. Tim Sheehy, a Republican from Montana, rushing over to help police as they try to tug and push the protester out of the chamber, as the protester yells, “no one wants to fight for Israel.” The protester appears to be wearing a U.S. Marine Corps dress uniform.

The protester, Green Party candidate Brian McGinnis, has his hand stuck in the door frame, with his arm hooked around the adjacent open door panel as several police try to force him out of the room. Sheehy lifts up McGinnis’s leg as police officers grab his torso and tug.

As Sheehy is moving over to dislodge the protester’s hand and tug on his arm, McGinnis’s forearm can be seen appearing to snap in half. There is a loud cracking sound, and bystanders begin to yell at the police to stop. Shortly after, officers let up on their tugging, and begin to work to dislodge McGinnis’s hand, as Sheehy returns to the front of the room.

“The senator broke his hand. A sitting U.S. senator just broke the hand of a Marine,” one person yells. One bystander asks McGinnis, “is your hand ok?”

"No it’s not,” McGinnis responds. McGinnis is running for Senate in North Carolina, and is a Marine who fought in Iraq, according to his campaign website.

Police arrested McGinnis and have charged him with three counts of assault on a police officer, and three counts of resisting arrest and crowding, obstructing, and incommoding for his demonstration.

In a statement posted on McGinnis’s X account, his family expressed gratitude for the well wishes. “We are taking a necessary step back from the public eye to allow him to focus fully on his recovery in private,” the statement said.

The protest occurred during a hearing by the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support, held to hear testimony from military officials on the readiness of various military branches for combat. The hearing was scheduled before the U.S. and Israel launched their war on Iran on February 28.

“America does not want to send its sons and daughters to war for Israel,” McGinnis said as he protested the hearing. “This is wrong.”

Sheehy called McGinnis an “unhinged protester,” and claimed on social media that he was trying to “help out and deescalate the situation,” ignoring that he helped lift McGinnis off the ground, potentially helping to break his arm.

“This gentleman came to the Capitol looking for a confrontation, and he got one,” Sheehy said, though McGinnis was merely protesting the hearing.

https://fortune.com/2026/03/04/palantir-tech-companies-offices-vending-machines-tobacco-worker-productivity/

Free drugs for being a good cog? Man now we are talking business perks.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43905444

Responding to one critic who questioned why Glasco objected to an Iran-Israel storyline but had no issue with other conflicts featured in the series, he said: "My point is that the government would happily use entertainment, including video games, as a way to sway public opinion on major issues.

"There have been decades of pressure for a war with Iran across multiple administrations. The scenarios you mentioned, not so much."

The point of war video games is not to encourage real actual war, and it is an alarming indicator that this is how the ruling class thinks about media. Artists know intuitively until they are trained to forget, our job is not to feed into easy simple narratives for the powerful and naive, it is rather to smash problematic narratives apart into more nuanced, difficult and complex ones. Hopefully by doing this in a Sisphyean feat we approach an awareness of a truth beyond narrative bounds.

To the ruling class this perspective is a direct threat, the impetus for art is advertisement, the goal is a colonization of a corner of someone's mind in order to inject, replace and displace with a foreign narrative pure and uncontaminated by context or unwelcome nuance.

https://archive.is/XyQc9

Will the current turbulent situation lead to a third world war?

Nothing is more American than the Opossum! They only reside in North America.

https://archive.is/5iVOo

An account trading under the username "Magamyman" made more than $553,000 placing bets on the prediction market Polymarket that Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would be out of power just before an Israeli strike killed him on Saturday.

....Under U.S. commodity trading laws, making trades based on death and war are illegal, since those kinds of bets create a financial reward for violence, human suffering and geopolitical instability.