C'est Incroyable!

B R

05 May 2024 — 4 min read

Non, je ne comprends rien á propos de cette image.

I generally don't write directly about current events and I expect most people don't read this blog for that kind of content. That said, the brutal police crackdown - 2300 arrests at the time of this post - of students protesting the US support of a mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza is impossible to ignore.

Rather than add to the cacophony in the discourse, below are some things worth reading on the topic. You are welcome to skip past all this to the regular kind of stuff I write about if you have had enough of the news.

Our Campus, Our Crisis (New Yorker): A report by the staff of the Columbia Daily Spectator. Adam Tooze is quoted in here, a Columbia professor who's newsletter is worth a look, if you are interested in history and geopolitics.

The planning was super-confidential. If you wanted to let someone in on it, you had to swear them to secrecy, one-on-one. I went to my professor’s office, and I was like, “Put your phone on airplane mode. Disconnect from Wi-Fi. This is what’s happening.”

The security and message discipline exhibited by the student groups has been very impressive, as is their commitment to nonviolence - "oh they took over a hall" the students at Kent State burned the ROTC building to the ground protesting the Vietnam War.

Liberalism without Accountability (London Review of Books): my friends in Montreal - from Iran, Brazil, Wales - were a little incredulous when I described the nature of American private universities (e.g., hedge funds, often poorly run, that do some teaching on the side),

Liberalism has two core components: the protection of property rights and a notion of negative freedom grounded in human rights and political checks and balances. What we are now seeing in the US (and the UK, and elsewhere in Europe) is the defense of the former at the expense of the latter.

This was written before the Israeli Cabinet voted to shut down unfriendly press operations in their country.

Most of the posts on @ny_diff - a bot that tracks edits made to the New York Times website - are anodyne corrections. But occasionally you get to witness some consent manufacturing in real time.

Now for the stuff people probably read this blog about - my partner has returned from a long work trip to Europe! I was exceptionally happy to see them and my spending time with them is among the reasons why this post is so late.

And we have spend more time outdoors. It is now more obviously spring in Montreal and it feels a little like an alien planet - I've lived in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Phoenix and I've been lucky to see two seasons a year, much less four.

The local open air market is now actually open air - with more places and many more people.

The other thing going on around here, besides the student encampment at McGill, is a boycott of the stores owned by the Loblaws. No, this isn't an Arrested Development joke, the Loblaw family owns like half the grocery stores in the city.

CDN media — Why should you be boycotted for a price gouge someone else noticed?

This was actually briefly mentioned in my new French class. So how is the new French course?

The thing about the anime "One Piece" is that you don't have to watch it if you have even one friend who does.

The professor seems to use more of a Socratic method - which is to say almost the whole class is question-response, and an animator (animatrice, everything has to be gendered) dropped out before we even met her. We're only getting a replacement just now.

My principal complaint is we haven't done much dialog and my god does my listening comprehension need work. I could barely understand the horrible Joe Biden parody on Radio Canada: