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"Once There Was a Tree" by Natalia Romanova, illustrations by Gennady Spirin. First published in the Soviet Union in 1983, Detskaya Literatura, Moscow. Adapted in English by Anne Schwartz, 1985, Dial Books, Penguin, NY. (with my minor edits) 
"Once there was a tree. It had grown for many years and now it was growing old."
"Dark clouds swept across the sky. Rain fell, thunder roared, and a lightning bolt split the tree in two."
In the last 4 years I've done several long threads about the system of US detention camps, and how they were built by Bush, Obama, and Trump is now using that infrastructure. This has been going on forever, and it is as American as the genocide and slavery the US was founded on.
The public outrage about US detention camps is late but good. But it needs history. It needs to be accompanied by an understanding that this exists now because the US tells itself lies every day, myths about its purpose and founding and activities at home and around the world.
The violence of the US is the violence of a settler-colonial state, a military empire, a nation of ongoing genocide and apartheid, and a machine of inequality. It is also bi-partisan violence, the underlying structures of that violence are enabled by Democrats and Republicans.
I suspect that like many others, I have so much to say about #HauTalk that I've said very little recently (though said and written a lot historically) because it can feel like it's all too painful, and starting to talk about my own experiences might mean reliving them.
My experience in anthro has been privileged as white and male, and also alternately privileged and marginalized as a queer person who learns differently (as a token, an object of fascination, a 'diversity' referent, an imagined source of all things stereotype). #HauTalk
The dominant forms of anthropology that I've encountered since my first cultural 101 class in 1995 are what I've called: Manthropology and Anthroperialism. But other anthropology has been there since my birth, when my parents were in grad school for archaeology. #HauTalk
coffee ($5) or help for the 
server cost ($10):
This has a lot of replies asking for more information, specifically in the context of SETI. I'll share some papers in this thread.
How did we end up talking about civilizations through these ideas of "primitive" up to "advanced"? There's a lot of history behind the construction of the ideas, but I trace the current popular use of these ideas through the history of anthropology to European colonialism.
SETI has historically drawn on analogies from anthropology to explain cultural change, technological change, and first contact scenarios, however these analogies often rely on outdated theories and ideas instead of the most recent scholarship.
Speculative fiction is one way to think about possible futures.
How does the problem of privacy play out in speculative fiction? What solutions have authors imagined for solving the issues of data, privacy, and power that we're facing now in our human techno-adolescence?
I wonder if the problem we're facing isn't really about technology, privacy, or data at all - but about capitalism, power, and inequality. Is the data problem only a problem because of artificially maintained scarcity?
With all the ranting and raving from the right-wing about the Totalitarian Neo-Marxist Postmodern University, you would think campuses are hotbeds of psychedelic seminars, Weather Underground tactics classes, and guillotines for the Campus Conservatives. Sadly, they are not.
Despite their claim to be the champions facts, reason, and evidence the right-wing and alt-liberal figures have failed to understand a simple fact about universities: they're not actually left-wing places at all.
The dominance of neoliberal and right-wing ideologies in most universities is precisely what student, faculty, and labour movements have been responding to for decades. Critics of 'university leftism' seem to be confusing these social movements for the universities themselves.
Common alt-lib tactic: tell us to accept "intellectual diversity" (i.e. more bigotry, white supremacy, etc.) but at the same time their entire schtick is telling everyone how dangerous "postmodernism" is and how it has to be vanquished from the university.
Read @nberlat on how, as I described above in this thread, Peterson says he opposes fascism and the alt-right but is often actually supporting foundational fascist and alt-right ideologies and arguments: psmag.com/education/jord…
A history of misogyny, sexism, harassment, and denialism in the so-called 'new atheist' and skeptic communities, which often overlaps with alt-liberalism. #AltLib salon.com/2018/03/02/for…
"The biggest myth is that racial groups – as they are categorized into Black, White, Asian, Latino – these divisions are genetic and some kind of evolutionary, biological division of humans across the planet. That is a myth. That is false." —@Anthrofuentes blog.castac.org/2018/03/myths/
Fuentes describes Myth #2: "if you rip off the sort of ‘veneer’ of cultural control, in our hearts, humans are these Hobbesian beasts.... it’s sort of every man for himself. Here I think we mean every man, meaning that by nature men are just aggressive and violent."
But Fuentes says: "This idea is based on erroneous assumptions and interpretations of the fossil, genetic, and behavioral data of humans and primates and other animals – and a very superficial re-imposition of contemporary gender stereotypes onto the past."
Apparatuses are "specific material-discursive practices," "produce differences that matter," are material and "dynamic reconfigurings of the world," are "phenomena," "have no intrinsic boundaries," and "re(con)figure spatiality", temporality and dynamics. (Barad 2007, 146) #STS
"Apparatuses are not only what has been traditionally understood as the mechanical parts of a system of measurement (Barad 1998). They include systems of thinking, objects, spatio-temporal properties, people, more-than-people," + are "extremely localized." newmaterialism.eu/almanac/a/appa…
“1) apparatuses are specific material-discursive practices (they are not merely laboratory setups that embody human concepts and take measurements)"
By looking at literature in science studies, philosophy of science, and history of science you can learn about many approaches to science, knowledge, and objectivity. Sometimes from scientists, from historians, from social scientists, from activists.
A lot of work in science studies has emerged from feminist critiques of and engagements with science, knowledge production, and objectivity. I want to introduce a few ideas from just one classic example, from Donna Haraway.
Donna Haraway studied zoology, philosophy and literature, and then earned a PhD in biology at Yale in 1970. Her dissertation was later published as "Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology" (1976) worldcat.org/title/crystals…
Now @Twitter has taken account access away from Anishinaabe scholar @VeldonCoburn while at the same time refusing to act against those threatening him. @Jack, this week has proven @TwitterSafety prioritizes the safety of harassers and white supremacists. This must stop now.
you cannot remain silent while your platform continues to punish people who are literally trying to save lives and stop violence.
👀 
FYI: Putin and Russia aren't running the US government, quintessentially American politicians are and always have been, and they are continuing centuries of quintessentially American abuse of the most marginalized people for their own power and profit.
We might call this an... inconvenient truth.
Once upon a time...
There was an innocent country founded on love who had never hurt anyone. But an evil foreign power convinced this peaceful nation to elect a bigoted, xenophobic, monster which was a complete surprise because they’d never elected anyone like that before...
There was an innocent country founded on love who had never hurt anyone. But an evil foreign power convinced this peaceful nation to elect a bigoted, xenophobic, monster which was a complete surprise because they’d never elected anyone like that before...
...All the citizens of Peaceful Love Nation had always lived without hate, racism, or inequality, so they were completely surprised and knew right away the evil they saw in Bad Leader couldn’t possibly be a mirror reflecting the worst of their own society, it had to be FOREIGN...
..But how could the Evil Foreign Boss convince the kind people of Peaceful Love Nation to support Bad Leader? After all, there were absolutely no examples ever in the history of Peaceful Love Nation of any leaders who were white supremacists, war mongers, bigots, or xenophobes…
I don’t think there’s a single variation of the post-mass-shooting-tweet we haven’t seen. Are there any questions we haven’t asked, framings we haven’t considered?
My first thought after a shooting in the US is always the fact that weapons exporting is a multi-billion dollar business for the US. We arm the world with weapons used to murder millions and US corporations profit from it. thehill.com/policy/defense…
My second thought after a shooting in the US is that our country is one of only a few so-called industrialized nations that still executes people. Our national ideology and culture says murder is an acceptable form of punishment. usnews.com/news/the-repor…
The next manifestation of the alt-right is the alt-lib - some will even talk about intersectionality and feminism, but underneath it's the same bigotry in the form of flowery fascism. They call themselves liberals, classical liberals, or cultural liberals, but make no mistake.
Here's something written by an alt-lib. If you only read this you might think the author was just another atheist Sagan fan. But dig into his tweets and you'll find him blaming Black people for racism, feminists for misogyny, trans people for transphobia. medium.com/@marknutter/hy…
Like the rest of the alt-libs he'll come across as polite, even sometimes reasonable. He seems to be interested in hearing your views, and will thank you for the information you share. But under it all is precisely the same bigotry of the alt-right, just in a "polite" package.
"Check out Judith Butler" is the best alt-lib come back. 
What do we call them? Anti-Trump but often islamophobic, not US right-wing per se, but religiously capitalist, anti-social justice, not all New Atheists, but some... They self-describe as Classical Liberals, Cultural Libertarians, etc. For now I'm going with the alt-libs. #AltLib
While there are plenty of explicitly right-wing groupies following people like Peterson, it's true that most aren't alt-right. The majority are a more insidious alt-lib population who say they dislike the alt-right but talk pejoratively about "SJWs."