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skort.bsky.social
Scott Ross, animate candy corn
@skort.bsky.social
300 followers 600 following 230 posts
lecturer, wustl | africanist anthro | humanitarianism, infrastructure, war, media, sound | gwu phd | hella left | he/him | arizonan in exile | wants to be your friend
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Reposted by Scott Ross, animate candy corn
stacyfmitchell.bsky.social
1. Amazon has become a major force in how cities, counties & schools buy basic supplies. Our new report finds Amazon is using opaque pricing algorithms to drive up costs and eliminate transparency—while harming competition by pushing out better-performing independent suppliers.
Turning Public Money into Amazon’s Profits | Independent Business
Amazon has quietly captured a growing share of government purchasing. This major report explains how, and what to do about it.
ilsr.org
December 4, 2025 at 2:28 PM
Reposted by Scott Ross, animate candy corn
joolia.bsky.social
it's not lowering the bar when you do it for men, it's actually a really important step toward addressing the male loneliness crisis
washingtonpost.com The Washington Post @washingtonpost.com · 23h
Brown University accepted nearly equal numbers of male and female students, but got almost twice as many female applicants. That math meant it was easier for men to get in.

Trump's DEI ban may end gender balancing efforts that often benefit men.
Trump’s attack on DEI may hurt college men, particularly White men
The Trump administration’s ban on diversity, equity and inclusion also targets gender. The ban may impact gender balancing practices that often benefit college men.
www.washingtonpost.com
December 4, 2025 at 6:47 PM
skort.bsky.social
Powerful piece about WashU international student frustrations with the university's lack of support in a time of immense uncertainty and potential danger: www.studlife.com/news/2025/12...
Graduate students call on WashU to expand support for immigrant students - Student Life
In the fall of 2024, Qimeng Duan, a third-year anthropology Ph.D. student, unknowingly reversed into a gate at an autoshop. As an international student, Duan was unfamiliar with U.S. reporting require...
www.studlife.com
December 4, 2025 at 6:53 PM
skort.bsky.social
A new pattern has emerged out of the repression of pro-Palestinian protests: "the Zionist provocateur spoiling for a fight, the police gunning for pro-Palestine students, a protester taken to the ER, and the university adopting wholesale the narrative spun by pro-Israel actors."
Jewish Currents article, "Portrait of a Campus in Crisis" UCLA capitulated to its own hardline pro-Israel activists long before Trump came calling. As a result, it's students hand repeatedly become targets of vigilante and police violence
December 2, 2025 at 4:58 PM
Reposted by Scott Ross, animate candy corn
parkermolloy.com
How do people not see that the entire OU essay thing is just an attempt by this girl and the Turning Point chapter to turn her into another Riley Gaines grifting on trying to push trans people out of society?
parkermolloy.com Parker Molloy @parkermolloy.com · 3d
Here's what this is actually about, dumbass
December 1, 2025 at 5:17 PM
skort.bsky.social
For Black Studies, Critical University Studies folks: Our AFAS Dept is looking for a postdoc (1 yr, maybe 2) as part of a seminar on “Black Studies, Academic Freedom, and the Future of the American University.” Due Feb 1, details here: apply.interfolio.com/177073
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
apply.interfolio.com
December 1, 2025 at 5:59 PM
skort.bsky.social
Some good news that shows faculty can still shape the university when they move and act together. This move would have consolidated AFAS, WGSS, Global Studies, American Studies, Jewish Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, and Education
ArtSci dissolves task force considering departmental reorganization after resignation of task force members
October 22, 2025 at 12:59 PM
Reposted by Scott Ross, animate candy corn
victoriascott.bsky.social
It’s kind of wild that after seven million people were in the streets protesting, the president posted a hallucinated video of himself wearing a crown and shitting on Americans and then proceeded to start demolishing parts of the White House
October 20, 2025 at 8:50 PM
skort.bsky.social
new zine circulating campus just hours after the Chancellor stated that WashU is engaged in "dialogue" with Trump admin about future of higher ed
Trump's Compact for higher education. What it is and why you should resist it Zine pages explaining that the Compact is "the Trump White House's attempt to reshape higher ed by offering preferential treatment to universities that agree with government demands." The demands include banning DEI in hiring and admissions, viewpoint diversity, cutting programs critical of conservative ideas, bans of disruptive protest, defining gender based on biology, and limiting international student admissions. No colleges have agreed to the Compact. MIT, Brown, Penn, USC, UVA, Dartmouth have publicly rejected it. WashU was invited to join the Compact on Friday. On Monday, Oct 20, WashU Chancellor Andrew Martin wrote to the university community stating that WashU had agreed to join conversations about higher education because "it is important to have a seat at the table." The table is rigged. The Trump admin is attempting to dismantle higher education and purge universities of critical thought, challenging analysis, and dissenting voices. The Trump admin is attempting to exert federal control over university policy, personnel decisions, and curricula, violating every tenet of academic freedom and free inquiry. Chancellor Martin wants to engage in dialog - it's not dialog if the terms are already set. The Compact is clear about interfering in higher education. We refuse any engagement with an administration that seeks to undermine higher education. We must reject Trump's vision for academia.
October 20, 2025 at 9:52 PM
skort.bsky.social
Gross.
White House Meets With New Colleges About ‘Compact’ After Rejections Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Kansas and Arizona State are invited to weigh in after MIT, others turn down proposal
October 18, 2025 at 2:35 PM
Reposted by Scott Ross, animate candy corn
misterjayem.bsky.social
“They literally ushered us into the street to protest and immediately after started beating the shit out of us.”
State Police Led Broadview Protesters Into Street And Attacked Them, Demonstrators Say
Protesters have said state and local police officers have attacked them and tried to stifle their attempts to speak and protest freely outside the Broadview ICE facility. Police accused protesters of ...
blockclubchicago.org
October 17, 2025 at 11:49 PM
skort.bsky.social
"We now have armed soldiers from the state of Texas eagerly volunteered by their governor to impose the president’s will on the citizens of Illinois. I don’t want to be alarmist, but this is an emergency." www.thebulwark.com/p/emergency-...
Emergency Triad: The Chicago Rubicon and What Comes Next
We aren’t at the worst-case scenario yet. But if you squint, you can see it looming out there, just over the horizon.
www.thebulwark.com
October 8, 2025 at 4:40 PM
skort.bsky.social
Shit just comes coming
WashU Med labeled ‘DEI Indoctrination Training Camp,’ DOJ investigation requested | On Sept. 15, 2025, America First Legal (AFL) filed a complaint against WashU School of Medicine for its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) practices, asking the Department of Justice to issue an investigation into the medical school’s alleged “illegal DEI practices.”
October 2, 2025 at 9:06 PM
skort.bsky.social
"There is no doubt that the Trump administration has wielded Title VI with the goals of discrediting institutions of higher education, undermining academic freedom and institutional autonomy, and unmooring the Civil Rights Act from its foundational commitments to addressing structures...
September 24, 2025 at 1:58 PM
skort.bsky.social
Another must-read response to Ezra Klein's "Charlie Kirk did politics the right way" argument, this from @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social in @bostonreview.bsky.social on political correctness, stigma, and shame as fundamental to living together.
The challenge for Klein and his fellow travelers is to specify what sort of ground rules could make life livable and social situations manageable for such a wide array of people whose values, commitments, and interests differ so sharply—that is, on terms other than various sorts of segregation or the most naked forms of domination and subjugation—if not precisely “social shame and cultural pressure,” now contemptuously referred to as “political correctness” or “wokeness.” We might more accurately call it exactly the “civility” that centrists like Klein otherwise pretend to champion, even while they seek to hollow out even this meager social protection of its efficacy. These codes of neighborliness or of common decency are, in other words, the bare minimum for us to exist peacefully as profoundly different people who nevertheless share the same time and place. Common decency, then, stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association, as Russell exemplified. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply.
September 23, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Reposted by Scott Ross, animate candy corn
olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social
"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply."

me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually

www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...
How Can We Live Together? - Boston Review
Ezra Klein is wrong: shame is essential.
www.bostonreview.net
September 23, 2025 at 5:09 PM
skort.bsky.social
Oh nothing to see here, just a Missouri U.S. Senator spouting white and Christian nationalist rhetoric about how America is only for descendants of "Western" "European" "settlers" and non-white immigrants are not American: www.dailysignal.com/2025/09/02/s...
They believed they were forging a nation—a homeland for themselves and their descendants. They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us. America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, our heritage, our destiny. If America is everything and everyone, then it is nothing and no one at all. But we know that’s not true. America is not a “universal nation.” It is something distinctive, unique, and real—unlike any other place or people in the history of mankind.
September 23, 2025 at 6:46 PM
Reposted by Scott Ross, animate candy corn
informative.ink
In Pam Bondi's America bakers may refuse to make cakes for gay or trans people, medical pros may refuse to provide women with complete healthcare, military personnel may refuse vaccination orders—all for "religous" or "conscience" reasons—but an Office Depot employee may not refuse to print a flyer.
September 16, 2025 at 2:59 AM
skort.bsky.social
"Over the past 23 months, Israeli forces have killed nearly 3,000 people attempting to get aid in the Gaza Strip and wounded almost 20,000 others." New @newhumanitarian report with open database and timeline of aid killings in Gaza: www.thenewhumanitarian.org/investigatio...
EXCLUSIVE: Israel has killed nearly 3,000 Gaza aid seekers
Our interactive database shows nearly 200 attacks, and a sharp uptick since the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began operations on 27 May.
www.thenewhumanitarian.org
September 15, 2025 at 5:40 PM
skort.bsky.social
"Many of the facile defenses of Kirk and his legacy are predicated on the idea that it’s acceptable to spread hateful ideas advocating for the persecution of perceived enemies as long you dress them up in a posture of debate. This is just class privilege." www.thenation.com/article/poli...
www.thenation.com
September 13, 2025 at 3:09 PM
skort.bsky.social
Israeli commander says that the IDF has killed more than 200,000 people in Gaza - 10% of its population - and has not been constrained by the law one time: www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...
‘We took the gloves off’: ex-IDF chief confirms Gaza casualties over 200,000
Retired general Herzi Halevi says ‘not once’ had legal advice constrained Israel’s military decisions in the strip
www.theguardian.com
September 12, 2025 at 9:22 PM
skort.bsky.social
Charlie Kirk Was Not Practicing Politics the Right Way: www.404media.co/charlie-kirk...
This does not mean Kirk deserved to die or that political violence is ever justified. What happened to Kirk is horrifying, and we fear deeply for whatever will happen next. But it is undeniable that Kirk was not just a part of the extremely tense, very dangerous national dialogue, he was an accelerationist force whose work to dehumanize LGBTQ+ people and threaten the free speech of professors, teachers, and school board members around the country has directly put the livelihoods and physical safety of many people in danger. We do no one any favors by ignoring this, even in the immediate aftermath of an assassination like this. Kirk claimed that his Turning Point USA sent “80+ buses full of patriots” to the January 6 insurrection. Turning Point USA has also run a “Professor Watchlist,”and a “School Board Watchlist” for nearly a decade.
September 11, 2025 at 8:46 PM
skort.bsky.social
Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity: www.aaup.org/seven-theses...
Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity
Demands for “viewpoint diversity,” a pillar of the Right’s strategy to remake higher education, collide with the pursuit of truth.
www.aaup.org
September 11, 2025 at 8:41 PM
Reposted by Scott Ross, animate candy corn
faineg.bsky.social
this is such a grotesquely cynical excuse for letting both gigantic tech companies and Donald Trump's MAGA aristocracy run rough-shod over the interests of everyone else
lawfaremedia.org Lawfare @lawfaremedia.org · Sep 8
Last Fri., Anthropic paid $1.5B to settle a copyright case. Stewart Baker argues that this type of litigation could hinder AI innovation and looks at how President Trump could invoke the Defense Production Act to ensure the U.S. wins the AI race against China.
Anthropic’s Settlement Shows the U.S. Can’t Afford AI Copyright Lawsuits
Copyright plaintiffs are squeezing enormous sums from AI companies. That's bad for the US and great for China. It's time for President Trump to invoke the Defense Production Act and resolve the…
www.lawfaremedia.org
September 8, 2025 at 4:21 PM