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Angus Johnston Profile picture
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16 Mar, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Thread. This outrage over the Columbia graduation ceremonies is so silly, and much of it is absolutely misrepresenting what's actually going on.
A college is a community that is made up of smaller communities. Some events are for everybody, some events aren't. That's totally benign—and inevitable!
If you think it's fine that a college has a Black Student Union and an LGBTQ student organization, why would you think it was bad for there to be get-togethers associated with those communities to commemorate community members' graduation?
And yes, none of this is new, or elite-university specific. It's a kind of thing that's been going on in one form or another at colleges across the country for something like fifty years now.
A quick google confirmed that Cal State Northridge (to pick just one non-elite example) has had a ceremony for Black graduating students since 1972. csun.edu/blackgraduatio…

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More from @studentactivism

Angus Johnston Profile picture
12 Mar
People are mad about Eddie Izzard saying she's been "promoted to she" on the cover of The Guardian, but the actual quote is a bit different than that, and much more interesting.
What she says in the piece is that she'd initially intended to go back and forth between using he/him and she/her pronouns, but that once she said her pronouns were "she/her" one time, that stuck—it was out of her hands.
So the interviewer asked how she felt about losing that flexibility, and she responded: "Great. I’ve been promoted to she, and it’s a great honour."
Read 7 tweets
Angus Johnston Profile picture
7 Mar
Excel question for the hivemind: I've got a chart I update daily in which I input a value in a particular cell, and the value is then computed as an average in the next cell. There are a series of columns like this: Value, Average, Value, Average, and so on. (1/2)
Some columns, when I plug in the value on a given day, the next cell automatically fills with the appropriate formula. For others, I need to paste from the day before. The automatic ones just started doing it without me telling them to. How do I tell the others to do it? (2/2)
To clarify: The feature I'm trying to replicate is that sometimes Excel figures out that I'm going to want to put a specific formula in a certain cell, and auto-inserts that formula into a blank cell without me having to paste it in.
Read 7 tweets
Angus Johnston Profile picture
6 Mar
At the Javits Center for my first shot. Will update.
Arrived at the 36th Street Javits entrance at 2:42. Line extended past the entrance, but only barely—was in the building within about a minute.
About ten minutes after getting in the building, they checked my appointment sheet printout, then put me on the next line.
Read 33 tweets
Angus Johnston Profile picture
6 Mar
This amendment would have barred all federal funding to schools and colleges that let ANY trans women or girls participate in women and girls' sports under any circumstances. Needed 60 votes, got 49. Murkowski and Manchin were only two Senators to flip.
And please don't come into my mentions defending this proposal on the grounds that trans women and girls' participation in sports is a complicated or hard question, because this proposal doesn't treat it as a complicated or hard question.
The premise of the Tuberville amendment is that the exclusion of trans women and girls from women's sports in educational settings should be absolute, and that the budgetary power of the federal government should be used to police that exclusion.
Read 6 tweets
Angus Johnston Profile picture
3 Mar
Less than one percent of the cost of the bill. Manchin seems to be deciding that "occasionally being an asshole for no reason" is how he's going to make his mark between now and 2022.
And this really does seem to me to be a solid counterexample to the "Biden is using Manchin as a fig leaf to pursue his real goals" theory. (Which may well be legit in other contexts.)
There's no actual reason for anyone but Manchin to prefer the Manchin path here. It doesn't save money, create a better narrative, or target spending in any serious way. It's just a mechanism for Manchin to get a meaningless victory at the expense of Biden and the national party.
Read 4 tweets
Angus Johnston Profile picture
1 Mar
So since @conor64 has QTed this in a weird way, let me say a bit more about it. My claim isn't—I think CLEARLY isn't—that McNeil "harmed" the teenagers in any way. It's that he was a poor choice of ambassador because he's not good at communicating with young people of their ilk.
I don't think McNeil's big sin in the Peru story is being evil. I think that his big sin is being an out-of-touch self-satisfied old doofus. And I say that as someone with out-of-touch self-satisfied old doofus tendencies myself.
When McNeil showed up in Peru quoting Tom Lehrer, making Jewish mother jokes, and saying "but what about blackface when BLACK people use it in AFRICA?", it was pretty much inevitable that he was going to come off as an annoying old weirdo.
Read 4 tweets

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