Cutting across the forecourt on one occasion, as members of the college were entitled to do, he was accosted by a porter and escorted to the door. Only when Maley showed a matriculation card did the porter back down and apologise profusely. Maley was “uncertain as to whether I was more angry at being manhandled or at the grovelling that followed on from the revealing of my true identity as a future member of the ruling class”.

— It’s right posh in t’common room, innit? [via]

I think it is in some ways reassuring to continue reading one’s antenatal books during nursing. My anarchist activist-scholar friend in New York was photographed reading “Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory” while breastfeeding her son. He is named Leo after the Christian anarchist Tolstoy. I am sure she hopes that he absorbs the ideas through osmosis.
She has negotiated the complexities of transition to motherhood with extraordinary grace, joyfully mothering, finishing a doctorate and starting a new academic job in the impossible New York job market. And she reads anarchist theory not directly relevant to her research or her work but because inside her skin, alongside the breastfeeding mother, is still the same sassy radical woman.

— Intellectual sustenance

Everything I read about simultaneously being a woman, a mother and an academic just makes me feel tired. Or, I suppose a better word would be exhausted. I do not have any idea how I would be able to do it.

Everybody will eat you / Everybody robs graves

— “Grave Robbers” by Mount Eerie

I’m trying to think back to what I liked to do when I was 20, but I can’t really advise my friend to leave her cousin alone with a jumbo bottle of Gallo and a bunch of Smiths records.

— Help a Minor Out

As good as I could possibly imagine my life getting, it did / After I met you / The way you reached inside my chest and pulled out things and sent them off in breaths blew / And as good as it got with all the layers peeling off, and though I writhed / I could not upset you / With your hand down my throat you held on to my heart and pumped blood through

— “You Swan, Go On” by Mount Eerie, off Lost Wisdom

I love this album and obviously am feeling a little excessively romantic after having surprise time off to spend with Ryan this afternoon.

Is our suffering really that much greater? For decades now our city has struggled, constantly on what people nationwide like to intermittently call the brink of destruction, yet somehow we survive. Year after year, we survive. Our spirits are metal tempered in flame, and we love our city. We love our city, but are also realistic about it (ambivalence is perhaps the best way to describe our relationship with our city).

— Detroit vs. New Orleans

I suppose I just like this whole piece.

One thing I’ve always harped on the greatness that is Detroit is its unique and untamed spirit—how it is a blank slate, an empty canvas on which anyone can create anything. How Detroiters have passion and feeling, how we produce and create just as well if not better than anyone else because we do it out of love and need (because Lord knows we’re not doing it for the money).

— Detroit vs. New Orleans

I think this is true about a lot of michigan, not just detroit.

Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.

— Seymour Papert [via]

If you are reading this article and you have family and friends in the state of Michigan, ask yourself if MSU is serving those Michiganders that you are closest to? Have you heard any stories about friends or family that were turned away by MSU recently? Have any of these stories surprised you? Few MSU grads from the past would dispute that the entrance criteria for MSU has gotten tougher. Many will tell you based upon today’s criteria that they would not have gotten into MSU. I include myself as one of these people. Has MSU denied access to those that should receive a landgrant education? Has MSU denied access to people that would stay home and reinvest their education by creating jobs that would grow Michigan communities? The answer that I receive when talking to people is overwhelmingly yes. This is not only inconsistent with our landgrant charter; it is economically bad for the future of MSU.
So while society is brainwashed into believing that higher standardized test scores and GPA’s result in a higher quality graduate, does it benefit the state of Michigan? Are MSU graduates today better prepared to deal with the problems of tomorrow more than they were ten or even twenty years ago? Are MSU grads any smarter or more capable than they were ten or twenty years ago? I don’t think so.

— MSU is Playing a Dangerous Game that is NOT Sustainable [via]

while this is totally valid, lansing/east lansing also has the problem of a glut of college educated people without the jobs to support them. How many MSU-educated Michiganders will turn right around and leave Michigan? Even as someone that loves Michigan and hates not living there, that’s what I did. MSU needs to cater to Michigan, but I don’t see how they can do that without Michigan figuring out some way to bring in new kinds of jobs. It seems as though, to the rest of the country, the Midwest is becoming more and more irrelevant.

There are three major reasons why salaries secret are silly:

1. It frustrates employees because any unfairness (real or perceived) can’t be addressed directly.
2. They’re not secret anyway. People talk, you know.
3. It perpetuates unfair salaries which is bad for people and for the organization

1. Salaries will become more fair. The system gets a chance to adjust itself.
2. It will be easier to retain the best employees because they’re more likely to feel they’re getting a fair salary.
3. The pressure is on the people with the high salaries to earn their keep. Everybody has to pull their weight - the higher the salary, the larger the weight.

— Salaries, income and the wage gap [via]

Ever more on the importance of talking about what we make.

What we’re experiencing now is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds. The carpet’s squelching under our feet.
The only way to contain (it would be naïve to say end) terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We’re standing at a fork in the road. One sign says Justice, the other Civil War. There’s no third sign and there’s no going back. Choose.

— Arundhati Roy: Mumbai was not India’s 9/11[via]

If I told someone I rode the bus, they would assume I was either joking or was on some sociological do-gooder mission to see how losers live. This kind of attitude becomes a near-insuperable barrier to change. Grown-up people I knew in Tucson truly believed that it was “impossible” for them to ride the bus. Not only did they not know how it could be done, where the stops were or how to get a schedule, but it struck them as a physical impossibility—they would just as soon jump off the roof and start to fly to their destination.
But the independence implied by the car way of life, the class privilege it seems to codify and attribute to our own pluck or inborn entitlement, is illusory, since in reality, of course, it requires a massive infrastructure to allow us to get our motors running and head out on the highway. Politics must direct public funding in that direction, presumably at the expense of more social and collective modes of transit

— Lonely in traffic [via]

As someone who rides the bus on a regular basis, there are still some lines that I find it to be a physical impossibility to catch. But, that isn’t what this is about.

Many of the countries that continue to criminalise same-sex relationships are in Africa and Asia. Their anti-gay laws were, in fact, imposed by the European powers during the period of colonialism. With the backing of Christian churches and missionaries, the imperial states exported their homophobia to the rest of the world. In many of the conquered lands, little such prejudice had previously existed and, in some cases, same-sex relations were variously tolerated, accepted and even venerated. This importation of western homophobia happened in countries like Ghana, Jamaica, Nigeria and Uganda, which now absurdly decry homosexuality as a “white man’s disease” and “unAfrican”, while vehemently denying and suppressing all knowledge of their own pre-colonial era indigenous homosexualities.

— A watershed for gay rights [via]

The bulk of the stimulus program will provide jobs for men, because building projects generate jobs in construction, where women make up only 9 percent of the work force. It turns out that green jobs are almost entirely male as well, especially in the alternative energy area. A broad study by the United States Conference of Mayors found that half the projected new jobs in any green area are in engineering, a field that is only 12 percent female, or in the heavily male professions of law and consulting; the rest are in such traditional male areas as manufacturing, agriculture and forestry. And like companies that build roads, alternative energy firms also employ construction workers and engineers. Fortunately, jobs for women can be created by concentrating on professions that build the most important infrastructure — human capital. In 2007, women were 83 percent of social workers, 94 percent of child care workers, 74 percent of education, training and library workers (including 98 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers and 92 percent of teachers’ assistants).

— Where Are the New Jobs for Women? [via]

as opposed to officially incorporated and state-recognized anarchists?

— The Rage in Greece is a Global Rage