I know we’re all enamored with the new Christmas tradition of blowing up an entire city block on Christmas Day, so I must join the chorus of concerned folks who worry that if we don’t provide a forum for people who want to blow up city blocks, a vital Xmas tradition will be lost.

If we don‘t let angry white men blow up city blocks, then we will lose so many other vital liberties. How can you connect with other people exploring gender, if your city blocks aren’t blowing up?
I’m here today to honor those dead in the latest Target mass shooting, a tragic but necessary cost of our freedoms, without their sacrifice we might not be able to express displeasure at our cable companies.
^ this is what y’all sound like
The digital freedom movement has not proposed a single solution for dealing with Nazi murder and has essentially decided that that is not its problem.
Meanwhile *every single* extremism researcher in *every single* threat domain has identified online radicalization as one of the key challenges and can clearly elaborate on the multifactorial challenges that one faces when addressing that
In other words, extremism research is a hell of a lot more thoughtful about intersectional digital freedom than digital freedom is about extremism.
You cannot study the historical consequences of violent fascism, fundamentalism, or authoritarianism without encountering the dynamics of the end state, but you can very easily talk in hypotheticals about speech online without ever having to give two shits about victims of terror
And rather than hear platitudes about “oh yeah well we get death threats, too”—setting aside the fact that I almost had a CAR DRIVEN INTO ME—it would be a lot nicer to just hear, “we don’t actually have a solution to the white dudes blowing up city blocks problem”
Here is a more thoughtful, less angry, more data driven look at this same thing: https://t.co/o94vpgjmDj

More from Emily of the State

Ok so there’s a conspiracy theory going around that this woman was faking her injury with an onion.

This is likely false. Onions are a folk remedy for pepper spray.


The theory, which has some merit, is that since onions make you cry, it helps flush the irritants from your eyes with natural tears.

However, this is not recommended as a treatment for pepper spray and is ultimately not very effective.

Pepper spray, tear gas, mace, CN, HC, and other agents are best removed with a flush of water or, if you have the proper mixture, saline. Nothing else.

We do not do chemistry in our eyeballs. We are not putting chemicals in our eyes. We are not putting produce in our eyes. We are removing the chemicals with safe, neutral water.

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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x