Also, reminder that we as a society should work toward making this tenable for the majority of people, if not everyone.

As I get older, the more and more convinced I am that the only metric of prosperity that really matters to me personally is how much leisure time people have.

There is a history here. Radical puppeteers also tend to be keenly aware that their art harkens back to the wickerwork giants and dragons, Gargantuas and Pantagruels, typical of medieval festivals. Even those who have not themselves
read Rabelais or Bakhtin are certainly familiar with the notion of the carnivalesque. Massive convergences are almost always framed as "carnivals against capitalism" or "festivals of resistance." The base-line reference seems to be the late Medieval world immediately before the emergence of capitalism, particularly the period after the Black Death when the sudden decline in population had the effect of putting unprecedented amounts of money into the hands of the laboring classes (see, e.g., Federici 2004). Most of it ended up being poured into popular festivals of one sort or another, which themselves began to multiply until they took up large parts of the calendar year. These were what nowadays might be called events of "collective consumption," celebrations of carnality and rowdy pleasures and - if Bakhtin (1984) is to be believed - tacit attacks on the principle of hierarchy itself. One might say that the first wave of capitalism, the Puritan moment as it's sometimes called, had to begin with a concerted assault on this world, which was condemned by improving landlords and nascent capitalists as pagan, immoral, and utterly unconducive to the maintenance of labor discipline. Of course, the movement to ban all moments of public festivity could not last forever; Cromwell's reign in England is reviled to this day on the grounds that he banned Christmas; more importantly, once moments of festive, collective consumption were eliminated, the nascent capitalism would be left with the obvious problem of how to sell its products, particularly in light of the need to constantly expand production. The result was what one might call a process of the privatiza­tion of desire: the creation of endless individual, familial, or semi-furtive forms of consumption, none of which, as we are so often reminded, could really be fully satisfying or else the whole logic of endless expansion wouldn't work. While one should hardly imagine that police strategists are fully aware of all this, the very existence of police is tied to a political cosmology which sees such forms of col­lective consumption as inherently disorderly, and (much like a medieval carnival) always brimming with the possibility of violent insurrection. Order means that citizens should go home and watch TV.

David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography

Someone remind me to drop my armchair analysis of holidays at some point, it kind of touches on this idea

This is not an isolated case.
There have been multiple reports in the US of trans people and people advocating for trans rights encountering issues with their passport, visa, and voter registration status.

This is an attack on trans people and trans rights' advocates' freedoms.
By targeting voter registration status, this fascistic government is preventing opposition through regular channels.
By targeting passport access or visas, it puts trans immigrants and trans US citizens into precarious and potentially life-threatening situations (facing deportation, being unable to travel, not having any valid ID).

The US government does not only aim to repress and silence trans people and activists. By framing them as terrorists, as shown in the memorandum issued by the US attorney general (source) when mentioning "radical gender ideology", Trump's government points them as an enemy of the state.

Keep in mind that if left unaddressed, these assaults on people's rights will keep escalating.

Original video source.

Start setting clear goals, friends. Things are only gonna get worse for a while, know what your demands are when the time comes to protest.

Here's something that might surprise some of you: I allow my students to use ai (with limits on what it can be used for) in my classes.

I'm sure you all are wondering why someone so seemingly anti-AI might do this. Well, it's quite simple, actually. I firmly believe that teaching people *how* these tools work and *why* they're prone to inadequate results is the best way to get them to second-guess whether they should be using them at all.

Plenty of folks are perfectly content to say "don't use that, it's bad," but all of that is an abstraction to most people. It's only going to stop them from using them for the run of your class. Now, if you give a lesson on how AI operates and then do in-class activities that demonstrate it's typically only *somewhat* competent at most of the work they might think to apply it to, they'll actually change their behavior.

The number of students I actually have using it in my class after this is typically at or below 10%.

An official from Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis told MPR News that armed U.S. Border Patrol officers came onto school property during dismissal Wednesday and began tackling people; they handcuffed two staff member…

I don't love sharing footage of these sorta of things, but sometimes you have to see the rise of fascism in the states first hand to recognize how bad it is. They're literally assaulting teenagers at high schools now.