Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Carolyn Ownbey, PhD @carolynownbey.bsky.social · 12h

The other reply w photos is here:

bsky.app/profile/caro...

Carolyn Ownbey, PhD @carolynownbey.bsky.social · 12h

Also in case anyone thinks “no, it wouldn’t look like this if Biden or Harris were president,” may I present to you photos from 4 different news outlets from DECEMBER 2023.

Who, exactly, was president (and vice president) in December 2023? WHO???

CNN World headline from December 5, 2023, that reads “More than 60% of homes in Gaza have been destroyed. Here’s what you should know”

Reuters photo dated December 17, 2023 showing a completely ruined landscape full of rubble and smoke.

A photo posted by Canadian media outlet The Walrus showing two Israeli soldiers standing in front of a completely devastated landscape full of rubble.

A photo posted by France24 on December 22, 2023 of an Israeli soldier walking through a completely destroyed urban area, with rubble and fires in the background.

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Carolyn Ownbey, PhD @carolynownbey.bsky.social · 12h

(A) please see my other reply with photos. (B) I am a scholar & historian of genocide, among other things, & I’m not on here to push an ahistorical political agenda, (C) it doesn’t follow that I support Trump an ounce. Harris would undoubtedly have been better in some ways, but NOT in this way.

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Carolyn Ownbey, PhD @carolynownbey.bsky.social · 12h

Also in case anyone thinks “no, it wouldn’t look like this if Biden or Harris were president,” may I present to you photos from 4 different news outlets from DECEMBER 2023.

Who, exactly, was president (and vice president) in December 2023? WHO???

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Carolyn Ownbey, PhD @carolynownbey.bsky.social · 12h

Also in case anyone thinks “no, it wouldn’t look like this if Biden or Harris were president,” may I present to you photos from 4 different news outlets from DECEMBER 2023.

Who, exactly, was president (and vice president) in December 2023? WHO???

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Carolyn Ownbey, PhD @carolynownbey.bsky.social · 12h

In case it needs to be said, my page is not a welcome space for Biden and Harris apologists when it comes to Palestine.

As I replied to this comment: Gaza ABSOLUTELY still would have looked like this if Kamala had won. THAT is the reason folks (including me) were mad at and about her.

Zelena Sage @zelenasage.blacksky.app · 13h

This was always the plan- that's why Biden was sabotaged so Trump got the "deal." Israel needed more time for demo.

Y'all hollered about Kamala Harris when Trump told you he was going to make this shit a parking lot. Now you still yell at HER. But you got no smoke for the person who did this.

Carolyn Ownbey, PhD @carolynownbey.bsky.social · 2d

If you haven’t seen it, this footage from @apnews.com is incredibly important.

The intent here seems unmistakable, in two ways: (1) just read the genocide convention, here it **absolutely** is, and (2) this level of infrastructural destruction is, no question, meant as pre-development demolition.

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Carolyn Ownbey, PhD @carolynownbey.bsky.social · 12h

Please let’s be clear: it ABSOLUTELY still would have looked like this if Kamala had won. I mean, really it’s looked like this since before the election, but she was clear that she wouldn’t change a thing. THAT was the reason folks were mad at her.

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Jill Twiss @jilltwiss.bsky.social · 2d

Just killed nine acres of trees and it told me to try saying "hi"

C. Buckthorn @cbuckthorn.bsky.social · 3d

This is amazing. I laughed out loud www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

As 32-year-old Rich points out, though, "it's not like using ChatGPT guarantees success".
When he met someone in a bar one Friday night and swapped social media handles, he asked AI what his next move should be.
ChatGPT discerned that sending an initial message on Monday midmorning would set the right pace. "Then it gave me some options for what the message could be," says Rich.
"Keep it light, warm, and low-stakes so it reads as genuine interest without urgency," the bot advised. "Something like: Hey Sarah, still laughing about [tiny shared moment/reference if you've got one] - good to meet you!" Rich went back and forth with ChatGPT until he felt they'd hit upon exactly the right message ("Hey Sarah, it was lovely to meet you") but sadly she never replied, he says. "It's been two weeks now."

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 1d

University leaders: [terminate programs, close campuses, cave in to political pressure from demagogues]

Faculty, students, staff: you’re killing the university

Management consultants: looks like you got a real comms challenge here

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Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social · 2d

Border Patrol “attempted to arrest a plumber working inside a Logan Heights home but left empty-handed after the homeowner refused them entry.

The homeowner told agents she would not allow them inside because the warrant they presented did not include her address and lacked a judge's signature.”

Federal immigration operations target San Diego neighborhoods, sparking community resistance

Federal immigration agents conducted operations in Logan Heights and Southeast San Diego on Friday, with community members capturing footage of the enforcement actions.

www.10news.com

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Neil Hillhouse (The Haunting Of) @nstenhouse.bsky.social · 1d

I’m guessing many academics will be interested in Qualtrics’s role in all this

Joshua Foust 🪖🎮 @joshuafoust.com · 1d

“As a fellow portfolio company of Silver Lake, EA is now, just like Qualtrics, best understood as a surveillance operation.”

When the Saudis backed EA’s acquisition, they bought both cultural power and a surveillance infrastructure. It’s weird to see so much official disinterest in this move.

Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 1d

Inspired by Northwestern students protesting EdTech-delivered loyalty oaths, by the student-led Luddite Renaissance, by Matthew Josephson, Connie Bruck & @tressiemcphd.bsky.social, I tried to track how kleptocratic antitrust policy enables a surveillance megalith.

open.substack.com/pub/theameri...

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George Gantsoudes @pedsortho.bsky.social · 1d

Please remember that the disgust people have over Christopher Columbus is not based on some modern, 21st century “woke” ideology, but rather on contemporaneous accounts of atrocities that make many modern genocides appear quaint in comparison.

Below, are the accounts of Bartlomé de las Casas.

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had in-vested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died.
While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.
Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides... they ceased to pro-create. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and fam-ished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desper-ation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fer-tile... was depopulated... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write....

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Tammi, yeah, that one. 2.1 @tammi.bsky.social · 2d

I found a 19th century Cat Villain!

A huge chonk of a fluffy cat sitting on a table near an open fire. The cat is cream and grey and appears to be shaped like a barrel in a fur coat. They are scowling fiercely with their moustache and bewhiskered ears apparently flowing back into the cold wind. There's a definite vibe that this villainous cat twirls their moustache as they evict orphans into the aforementioned blizzard and think Scrooge was an easy-going lightweight. They are magnificent.

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Hobby Drifter in Tokyo @hobbydrifter.bsky.social · 9d

White people who have spent decades thinking “Born in the USA” is patriotic and “Every Breath You Take” is a great wedding song are suddenly very concerned about not being able to understand lyrics to some songs at the Super Bowl halftime show.

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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 2d

they are not "trying" to exert influence, they ARE influencing elections already.

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Juno Rylee Schultz @junoryleejournalism.com · 6d

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems...
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: ...Or saying...
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

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Dan Sinykin @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social · 2d

know what's good? a great lecture by someone who really knows their shit

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 2d

flipped classrooms & the unquestioned shift toward “student-led learning” were also part of the deprofessionalization->adjunctification->mechanization program whose ultimate goal was a fully administrative university

John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 2d

The over-reliance on standardization as the mechanism for writing instruction really was a pretty unbeatable context to produce de-professionalized teachers okay with using AI to grade

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Carolyn Ownbey, PhD @carolynownbey.bsky.social · 2d

Please use alt text on photos! The disabled community will appreciate it.

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Carolyn Ownbey, PhD @carolynownbey.bsky.social · 2d

I made this point on TikTok in April (www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8AmJuBH/ c. 4:30) but it bears repeating: the point of this man, to the admin (& esp miller), is a v particular manipulation & evasion of intl law in the service of manufacturing consent. It didn’t work, so now they’re retaliating against him.

Julie DiCaro @juliedicaro.bsky.social · 2d

So Kilmer Abrego-Garcia will not challenge a deportation to Costa Rica, who has agreed to for him residency, but DHS won’t agree to send him there because it’s not cruel enough.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/u...

For weeks, Mr. Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who is married to a U.S. citizen, has made clear that he would not challenge his deportation if he were sent to Costa Rica, which has promised him legal residency and guaranteed that he would not be sent back to El Salvador.

But the Trump administration has refused to deport him to Costa Rica, and in an earlier hearing this week, Judge Xinis pressed the administration to consider the option or clarify why it was unacceptable.

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Julie DiCaro @juliedicaro.bsky.social · 2d

So Kilmer Abrego-Garcia will not challenge a deportation to Costa Rica, who has agreed to for him residency, but DHS won’t agree to send him there because it’s not cruel enough.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/u...

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 2d

bitch what

Onedrive settings. A toggle for using AI to detect and identify faces is set to on. The caption says, you can only turn off this setting 3 times per year.

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Ian Coldwater 👻🌿 @lookitup.baby · 2d

Boss, we’ve got a problem. Users don’t want this stuff! They keep wanting to turn it off, even when we keep turning it back on!

Boss: I have an idea

Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 2d

bitch what

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Joseph Morris @morris.cloud · 2d

Can't think of anything else that this looks like other than the aftermath of Hiroshima or Nagasaki (actually just looked at pictures of the fire bombing of Dresden, and there were more building standing after that that this)

Carolyn Ownbey, PhD @carolynownbey.bsky.social · 2d

If you haven’t seen it, this footage from @apnews.com is incredibly important.

The intent here seems unmistakable, in two ways: (1) just read the genocide convention, here it **absolutely** is, and (2) this level of infrastructural destruction is, no question, meant as pre-development demolition.

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Ryan Broderick @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social · 26d

In the 2010s, this country's elites were thrown onto social platforms with everyone else and could finally read what we all think about them and it caused them so much psychic damage that they decided to destroy both the internet and democracy to make sure nothing like it ever happened again.

Gillian Branstetter @gbbranstetter.bsky.social · 26d

If this is what it took for you to be pushed into fascism you were probably already there

This predates the social media wars of the late 2010s: One Trump appointee told me that a radicalizing experience was being booted out of the Gawker comments section, way back in the day. But as progressive movements swept through social media, others were tossed off Twitter and Facebook for stepping over a variety of lines, from allegations of harassment to claims of election misinformation. Pandemic era public health rules and fevered enforcement cost others their accounts.

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Carolyn Ownbey, PhD @carolynownbey.bsky.social · 2d

🧵

alec karakatsanis @equalityalec.bsky.social · 2d

THREAD. Did you know that at about 1/3 of all stranger homicides in the U.S. are perpetrated by police? But there's something hidden here that is important to understand in this authoritarian moment.

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Democracy Action Network @democracyactionnet.bsky.social · 2d

CajunBlueAZ ⚜️🇺🇸 🇺🇦 @cajunblue.bsky.social · 2d

🚨🚨🚨The intensity here is indescribable. The reference post (to follow) indicates the gravity being similar to that of “Bloody Sunday.” A harrowing parallel. 1/2

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