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🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · 20d

the layers of chronically online context playing out here are fascinating - now we have a UAlberta prof put on leave for a bluesky post referencing a @dril.bsky.social tweet

nationalpost.com/news/canada/...

University of Alberta law professor put on leave amid review of online comments made after Charlie Kirk's death

“You do not ... ever have to hand it to the Nazis. I utterly do not care for any ‘virtues’ that someone may perceive in them,” they wrote.

nationalpost.com

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🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · 21d

My mom sometimes texts me book recommendations, and it’s so sweet of her to think I have time to read for fun 🥲

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🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · 21d

Anyone else remember this? Turns out it was all of 5 years ago.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Lette... (aka “the Harper’s letter”)

A Letter on Justice and Open Debate - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

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🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · 28d

The Onion headlines are writing themselves again

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🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · 28d

@toddthelinguist.bsky.social the way this exchange lives permanently rent-free in my brain

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🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · 28d

For reference, here’s how he handles being told his reporting on academic freedom of speech scandals is inaccurate

Screenshot of twitter exchange:
Todd Snider: “Okay, Michael. So you got that fact wrong some other way. I'm not really interested in how or why that came to be.

I would simply like for the record to be corrected, now that you can see that you were mistaken.”

Michael Powell: “No. Sorry Todd. I was not mistaken, the reporting stands. Best, Michael”

Todd: “The people you were reporting about say otherwise.”

Michael: “Cool”

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🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · 28d

Michael “Cool” Powell also posting lots on twitter, remarkably silent on this.

🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · 28d

I ventured over to twitter to see what Conor Friedersdorf has to say about this. In the last day he’s had time to post about Burger King and a 1907 car race, but has remained mysteriously silent on his favorite topic, suppression of academic freedom of speech.

Mike Boylan-Kolchin @mbkplus.bsky.social · 28d

Update on the Texas A&M professor / cell phone video situation: the professor has been fired by the A&M president
president.tamu.edu/messages/an-...

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🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · 28d

FIRE actually did post about it! And their message is being *very* well-received

Twitter post by FIRE: “Yesterday, after a video of a student complaining about discussions of gender identity in a Texas A&M “Literature for Children” class went viral, Governor Greg Abbott demanded on X that Texas A&M President Mark Welsh fire Professor Melissa McCoul for the content of her course. Welsh promptly announced that McCoul had been terminated.” (Post cuts off)

User reply: “Fire should be considered trans movement and intifada movement aligned.”

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🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · 28d

(He’s probably still workshopping how to make this the left’s fault.) @caitlinmoriah.bsky.social

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🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · 28d

I ventured over to twitter to see what Conor Friedersdorf has to say about this. In the last day he’s had time to post about Burger King and a 1907 car race, but has remained mysteriously silent on his favorite topic, suppression of academic freedom of speech.

Mike Boylan-Kolchin @mbkplus.bsky.social · 28d

Update on the Texas A&M professor / cell phone video situation: the professor has been fired by the A&M president
president.tamu.edu/messages/an-...

This afternoon, following full consideration of the facts related to this situation, I directed the Provost to terminate the professor involved, effective immediately. Please understand that these decisions were mine alone and were not
made lightly. While I cannot provide all the details at this time, I will share the following facts.

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Reposted by 🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁

dr. caitlin m. green @caitlinmoriah.bsky.social · 29d

it has been 4 years and these guys simply cannot stop acting like the LSA letter was the same thing as a McCarthy era black list or a maoist denunciation rally or some shit

Why Cancel Culture is
Fading
"Even when you take out the canines of a tiger, his heart remains that of a carnivore."
ROB HENDERSON
SEP 07, 2025

The strategy relied on punishing the powerful to terrify the rest. In 2020, hundreds of scholars urged the Linguistic Society of America to strip Harvard professor Steven Pinker of honours. But Pinker understood the real target--it was a warning shot aimed at every graduate student, junior academic, and untenured professor watching from the sidelines, telling them to keep their mouths shut.
As Pinker memorably put it, the atmosphere resembled The Sopranos: "Nice career you've got there. It would be a real shame if something happened to it." Often the problem wasn't that people were being cancelled for expressing outrageous views, but that they were cancelled for expressing views that might very well be correct.

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🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · Sep 6

New Zealand marked safe

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Reposted by 🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁

The Louvre of Bluesky @thelouvreof.bsky.social · Sep 4

Merriam-Webster
Merriam-Webster
@merriam-webster.c... • 17h
enshittification noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits

...
Gold Yoshi @goldyoshi.bsky.social
[Screenshot of the enshittification page on Merriam Websters website. It says where does enshittification come from and the entire page is covered in ads]

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Alex de Campi @alexdecampi.bsky.social · Aug 27

There are tons of graphic novels, academic papers, film and TV scripts, & prose novels/nonfiction on the LibGen list Anthropic used.

As settlement approaches, make it easy for the class action lawyers to contact you! Here’s how

Part 1: is your work in Libgen?

www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI

Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

www.theatlantic.com

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🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · Aug 12

I am pleased to report I successfully flew into and back out of the coal mine

🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · Mar 20

I’m an American citizen living/working in Canada, scheduled to present a paper on religion metaphors in climate change communication/denialism at a conference in the US this summer. Kind of feel like I’m the canary willingly flying into the coal mine here

Sarah Shulist (she/her) @sarahling.bsky.social · Mar 20

Yeah I think it’s really hitting white academics in countries like Canada to have their exceptional status removed. *At best* I feel like they’re going to search my phone and question the politics of an anthro conference, and even that makes me not want to engage with the border

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🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · Aug 12

What is the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything?

🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · Jul 28

Holy false equivalences, Batman!

🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · Jul 28

I’m descended from those who were fortunate enough to escape the pogroms and come to America in the early 1900s.

My Bubbe (z’’l) would be roiling, roiling, roiling today.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg @theradr.bsky.social · Jul 28

Sweet cheese on a stick every time I read
@joellenovey.bsky.social
spit devastating truth about how far our community has fallen from who we are supposed to be it breaks me even more:

(link seems to be back online:)

Corrections · Jewschool

Three decades after my bat mitzvah, All of my Hebrew school teachers, youth group counselors, rabbis, and that lady with the guitar from camp. They got us all back together to issue some corrections. ...

jewschool.com

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Sam Wilson @samwilson.bsky.social · Jul 28

Can’t wait to introduce bird-based storage into my backup system

A twitter post explaining how you can “save PNGs to birds” by converting a drawing of a bird into a spectrogram then playing it to a starling who sung it back, reproducing the PNG.

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🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · Jul 27

One of the first CDs I bought as a kid (and anyone who remembers how expensive they were, knows that was no easy decision) - and now we can all enjoy his work for free in the public domain.

That CD was later possibly the only reason I passed 10th grade chemistry…

Al Yankovic @alyankovic.bsky.social · Jul 27

My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living. RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Lehrer.

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Dr. Rebecca J. Epstein-Levi @rjelevi.bsky.social · Jul 27

Tom Lehrer outlived Kissinger, and I think that is evidence that there are at least some good forces in the universe.

“I do have a cause, though. It is obscenity. I’m for it.”
-from the intro to “Smut”

Jay Thurber Show @jaythurber.bsky.social · Jul 27

"It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year."

—Tom Lehrer, 1928-2025

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/a...

Tom Lehrer, Musical Satirist With a Dark Streak, Dies at 97

www.nytimes.com

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🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · Jul 26

I posted a picture on the internet and it made you have some big feelings. But language changes, dude. Sorry not sorry.

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🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · Jul 26

You've written so many responses to this from every angle (legal, historical, strawman arguments like "perrx" and "Anglx", criticizing fields of study that you don't even understand just from...vibes...alone?, citing irrelevant studies) in attempt to make something stick.

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🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · Jul 26

So if you get that it's a "thing", and it's not even your language/culture that's being "messed with" then why do you have such issue with it? Clearly some Spanish speakers are ok with it. Some aren't. That's how language change works. It's slow, takes generations, and variable from place to place.

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🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁 @elisestickles.bsky.social · Jul 26

and I think we all know that legalese is the furthest thing from natural language (for good reason) so it's really irrelevant to a discussion of how people use language in their everyday lives.

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