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Mike Slaven

@mcslaven.bsky.social

2.3K followers 1.9K following 1.2K posts

Author of "Securing Borders, Securing Power" (Columbia UP, 2022) http://tinyurl.com/yeywvdaa Doing migration politics/policy research, currently @colmigproject.bsky.social. Political speechwriter of yore. Obscure academic in provincial England, AZ guy 🌵

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Mike Slaven @mcslaven.bsky.social · May 13

Does calling anti-immigrant policies racist work at opposing them? Much analysis (validly) says no, but I have a new 📖 article 📖 on why this was essential to changing immigration politics in Arizona 🌵. Sometimes the effective arguments aren't already popular! 1/ www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Saying racism: calling anti-immigration policies racist as effective pro-immigrant politics in Arizona

Identifying anti-immigration policies as racist commonly features in political discourse in many majority-white countries. Both behavioralist studies of voter attitudes and studies of party positio...

www.tandfonline.com

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 5h

If you make "controversial statements" outside of classroom, that the President of the university dislikes, you can be summarily fired even if you are tenured.

Julie Greene @greeneland.bsky.social · 6h

I just learned, Thomas Alter, tenured professor, has been terminated effective immediately. Shame on Texas State! We mst build support for Tom. spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/south-tex...

Texas State upholds the firing of associate history professor Thomas Alter

Alter’s termination occurred on Sept. 10, stemming from his remarks at the Revolutionary Socialism Conference on Sept. 7.

spectrumlocalnews.com

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George Gantsoudes @pedsortho.bsky.social · 15h

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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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 9h

Do you want to live in a "papers, please" country?

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Stephen West @stephenwest.bsky.social · 9h

How W. E. B. Du Bois responded to government policing of "anti-American" sentiment during the 1910s:

"I took great satisfaction in being able to sit back in my chair and answer blandly, 'We are seeking to have the Constitution of the United States thoroughly and completely enforced.' ”

Federal agents invaded even the offices of The Crisis and the National Association for the advancement of colored people and asked searching questions: " just what, after all, were our objects and activities?” I took great satisfaction in being able to sit back in my chair and answer blandly, “We are seeking to have the constitution of the United states thoroughly and completely enforced.” It took some ingenuity, even for Southerners, to make treason out of that.

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wesin-🎃a spooky version of 🎃-japan @wesinjapan.bsky.social · 9h

Kafkaesque does not even do this justice.

Keri Blakinger @keribla.bsky.social · 9h

A man was wrongfully imprisoned for a crime he did not commit for more than 40 years. As soon as he was exonerated, ICE picked him up to deport him to a country he has not lived in since he was a baby www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i...

He was wrongfully imprisoned for 43 years. Moments after being released, ICE took him

Subramanyam “Subu” Vedam now faces deportation.

www.miamiherald.com

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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 12h

Who would win a fight between a 280-pound slab of good ol' boy and a five-foot-10 guy from the end of the Princeton basketball bench

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Cas Ⓜ️udde @casmudde.bsky.social · 15h

Indeed! And while journalists, pundits obsess over the modest loss of SD voters to far-right parties, there is relatively little debate about the large loss of center-right voters to far-right parties.

Catherine E. de Vries @catherinedevries.bsky.social · 15h

Scholars & pundits have focussed a lot on the electoral demise of center left, but in doing so we paid to little attention to the electoral problems of the center right.

Case-in-points here not only British conservatives or center right in France, but increasingly also the center right in Spain.

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Mike Slaven @mcslaven.bsky.social · 15h

Constantly dangling a Nobel Peace Prize to get Donald Trump to do specific things is good, actually. Someone should convince him he should avoid deploying the military and masked goons in his own country if he wants to win one

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Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 17h

From Robert Jenrick's video - in which he did not see a single other white face on a brief trip to Birmingham, despite his video showing that he did.

"He must have been walking around Handsworth with his eyes closed" writes Dan Cave

www.birminghamdispatch.co.uk/a-notorious-...

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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 19h

'An idea all but guaranteed to founder on the rock of imperfect data, legal challenge, and the adverse consequences of institutions entering quality/funding death spirals all the way to disorderly market exit.' @wonkhe.bsky.social 's Monday Briefing succinctly anatomises proposal to tie fees to TEF.

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Will Jennings 🗳️ @drjennings.bsky.social · 1d

Anyone writing about the influence of these thinkers really needs to provide detail on what they have actually written. Most of it is incoherent, lacking any substance and often downright weird.

Huw C. Davies @huwcdavies.bsky.social · 1d

Reading Thiel, Yarvin, Peterson et al. makes you realise what passes for intellectual iconoclasm these days is all absolute bollocks. Why anyone gives any of these people the time of day let alone credibility is baffling.

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Chris Towers is in Offseason Mode @cptowers.bsky.social · 1d

How it started: How it’s going: