One of the things that’s becoming clear is the determination of the Trump administration to divide humans living in the United States into two groups (to whom Wilhoit’s Law applies), citizens and immigrants. Actually it is a bit more complicated than that, because some of the legal citizens are, in reality, at best some sort of semi-citizen,¹ but let’s keep things simple for now. What I want to focus on is how incompatible this is with the notion of a free society, indeed with a free society even as those on the political right have historically seen it.

The Trumpists think they have a discretionary right to deport immigrants for wrongthink and wrongspeech, for taking part in a pro-Palestine demonstration, but also for writing a newspaper article, making a social media post, sharing a social media post, even liking one. They think that such people have no right not to be snatched off the street by goon squads. And they think that when immigrants face deportation for wrongthink they should have no right to contest the decisions made about them. The US courts may yet disagree with the Trumpists about these matters, but we’ll see.

Immigrants are people. Sorry for insisting on a truism, but I say it not just to argue that they have rights as humans, but also to make a point about their behaviour. US citizens are people too. And as people do, individuals in these two groups will barter and truck, fuck, form romantic ties, break bread, get drunk together, study together, worship together, share and dispute ideals, like and dislike books, operas, tv shows. Et cetera. You can’t monitor and control the activities of the individuals in one of these groups without monitoring and controlling the activities of the people in the other group who are in millions of cases the counterparties to their transactions and attachments.²

One of the marks of a free society, at least as many liberals and conservatives have insisted, is that it is composed of smaller societies through which much of its life is conducted.³ Associations, clubs, universities, schools, families, and so forth. Those societies have a life of their own and the wider society of which they form a part loses its own freedom and vitality when the state subordinates their inner life to its own purposes. Not that all such regulation is bad: some is necessary for justice and equality and even child protection (cf Brighouse and Swift)⁴. But overdo it and you create not a free society but a totalitarian one. Though immigrants may not be full legal and political members of the big society, they are often full and equal participants in the smaller ones and, as such, they need to be able to argue, express, consent, dissent, voice and exit just as the other members do. The smaller societies can’t function properly if they are composed of some people with rights and some people without them. Every member needs to hear what other members say and when some people can’t express themselves for fear of the consequences that not only destroys the inner life of society but also leaves individuals open to blackmail and exploitation.

As the United States slides into totalitarianism, there’s not much that anyone can say in a blog post that will prevent the worst. But if it is, at least, to stand as a warning to other societies that want to retain such freedom as they have, then we had better notice that the casual assumption that a neat quasi-natural divide can be drawn between citizens and immigrants isn’t limited to the US, it is the routine unthinking blather of politicians in Europe and elswhere, and not just on the extreme right. And if and when the bad times come and the immigrants get targeted, that will harm not just the direct objects of xenophobic policies but also all of the individuals who live lives entwined with theirs, some of whom will doubtless find their own status reclassified.

Today I’d like to talk about that delightful little companion of field and garden: the shrike.

[copyright Rosemary Mosco, 2024, birdandmoon.com]

If you know, you know.  And if you don’t know… well, let’s talk about shrikes.

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As universities worldwide face major cuts, especially to the humanities, this meme has been doing the rounds. So I thought I’d share my story about Indiana Jones’ last day of work, drawn in part from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Image: Pic of Indy punching a nazi with text: I came here to study the humanities and punch nazis. And they just cut funding for the humanities.

Indiana Jones, whose front row students once wrote “I love you” on their eyelids, now faced a half empty lecture theatre of students who hadn’t done the reading. OK, he says, let me tell you what was in the reading and then we will do the lecture. But shorter. Of course, Indy knew that the students hadn’t done the reading because they were all forced, under cost of living pressures, to work 12 hour days as disability support workers, supermarket shelf-stackers and Starbucks baristas.

Then Indy went to a Faculty meeting where management explained that “research showed” (cos if anyone cares passionately about painstaking, expensive high quality research, as we know, it is university management) that student consultation, individual feedback or indeed anything else that helps each student become the historian or archaeologist that only they can be, is useless and therefore not included in his workload.

A little dispirited, Indy returns to his desk. Sure, he has to find the desk under a large pile of carefully labelled artefacts that he insisted belongs in a museum. They are on his desk, however, because Indy can’t for the life of him find a museum that will take them. Funding cuts they all say, we can’t possible store, preserve or display anything else. We just don’t have the staff or equipment for proper conservation. Or the space! Who has space, anymore? Plus museum visitors these days really prefer to see Lego models of ancient artefacts. We have to go where the money is. Money is, after all, what museums are for.

Locating his 1991 Apple Portable, which is the most recent computer that Indy’s Arts Faculty can afford, Indy endured the extremely slow campus wifi to check his email. While he waits for the emails to load, he stares out the window. Across the brand new paved corridor through campus, which management claims will soon be lined with groovy shops and cafes, the 24-storey administrative building named after the last Vice-Chancellor glimmers conspicuously in the sunlight. I bet they have newer computers over there, Indy reflects.

The emails load, finally. Indy has several very long emails explaining how he has to manually copy and paste last year’s learning outcomes into a new template even though nothing has changed, just in case one year they want to change one of the regulations no one reads. It is a legal thing.

Ping! Another meeting. This time by zoom. Naturally Indy’s internet connection is too slow, so he keeps his camera off. Actually, the camera doesn’t work at all, but Indy doesn’t realise that until the end of the meeting.

Leading the meeting is a former academic, a colleague of Indy’s, now a low level manager because her teaching load was deemed unnecessary (she only taught historical and archaeological ethics, no one needs that) and she never had a research workload anyway. Having valiantly taken what amounted to (so she was assured) a promotion, she informs the team that archaeological field work needs to be cut, because the latest educational research shows that archaeologists learn best by self directed quizzes and ten minute videos.

Indy can’t get his microphone to work and is unable to object.

Under Any Other Business, the scholar-turned-manager makes the gentle suggestion that team meetings should be ‘camera on’. Someone turns on their camera to remind the manager that cameras off can be important for neurodivergent people. Indy is unable to explain that his camera isn’t working because the manager, fearing staff dissent over the cutting of field work, selectively disabled chat. Actually, she just blocked Indy.

After enduring this ‘teamwork’, Indy crosses the paved thoroughfare to the new shiny building named after the last Vice-Chancellor to attend a consultation workshop. Seated in a plush meeting room with its own deluxe coffee machine, Indy is given an opportunity to ’ask questions’ as part of the staff centred consultation on authentic assessment and real work simulation in archaeological teaching. Shaken by the loss of fieldwork, Indy can’t quite imagine what questions he should ask, which the educational developer in charge of rolling out the expensive and completely unnecessary new eLearning tool (it was a friend’s pet project – they’d poured their third university redundancy payout into the start-up and definitely deserved support from well-placed friends across the sector) takes as enthusiastic support.

When he goes outside again, Indy has to fight Nazis who want him to acknowledge that he’s a secret agent for leftist woke thinking and has Soros sponsorship. It is Thursday, after all.

Finally, just when Indy is thinking about heading home, he’s confronted with urgent questions from his head of discipline, about whether a formula privileging real world application or field defining thinking is most important in deciding who gets the best classroom next year.

So Indy shakes his head and steps into the Room of Retirement, where he is predictably handed a clock as thanks for his – ahem – time teaching and fighting Nazis. Indy looks across to the brand new building named after the last Vice-Chancellor and thinks of all his colleagues whose redundancies went entirely unacknowledged, even by managers with whom they worked closely. He feels almost grateful.

A little woozy from the day’s dizzying lack of actual research or teaching, Indy steps outside. Handing the clock to a homeless person, he heads off purposefully. The Nazis still need fighting, after all.

Yesterday Columbia University gave in to blackmail by President Trump (see here the letter [HT: NYT]) in order to allow to begin negotiations over the recovery of $400 million in research funding. Its unsigned letter (here HT: Leiterreports) leaves ambiguous which potentially sensible elements they were planning to do anyway (“parts of our comprehensive strategy”) and which parts were added in light of the demands (“several additional actions.”)

The last sentence of the unsigned letter expresses commitment to the university’s mission, “while preserving our commitment to academic freedom and institutional integrity.” While I am no critic of judicious use of hypocrisy, this passage is also a nice example of what has come to be known as ‘performative contradiction.’ If government officials get to dictate to you that certain departments must be put into receivership, and you then go and promise to rejig the curriculum (for ‘balance’), perhaps you should not claim ‘institutional integrity’ or present yourself as a guardian of ‘academic freedom?’

I want to put this episode in a wider context. But before I get there, I make two of my background commitments explicit. First, there is no essential connection between the modern research university and the values of liberal democracy other than, as (recall) Michael Polanyi noted, that they can have the same enemies. The German research university with its cosmopolitan Humboldtian ideal rose and fell in the absence of liberal democracy. The very first modern research university Stateside, Hopkins, was a private institution that was, however, shaped by Jim Crow (and racially integrated rather late in its history).

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It’s been evident since Trump’s inauguration that the US, as we knew it, is over. I’ve been looking at some of the US-centred organisations and economic dependencies that will need to be rebuilt. But I hadn’t given much thought to the university sector, where I work, until I got an urgent email asking everyone at the University of Queensland to advise the uni admin if we had any projects involving US funding.

It turns out that Australian participants in such projects had received demands from the US to respond, at short notice, to a questionnaire asking if anything they were doing violated any of the long list of Trump taboos: contacts with China, transgender issues, persecution of Christians and so on.

This is front-page news in Australia but I couldn’t find anything else about it except for a brief story in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. Presumably, though, this is happening everywhere.

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Here are two groups of Western philosophers. We’ll call them Group A and Group B. Here’s Group A:

Plato, Epicurus, Plotinus, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Newton, Leibniz, David Hume, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Schopenhauer, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kurt Gödel, Karl Popper, Jeremy Bentham, Alan Turing, Saul Kripke.

And here’s Group B:

Aristotle, Socrates, Descartes, Bishop George Berkeley, Rousseau, Heidegger, Hegel, Marx, Frege, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon, John Rawls, Willard Quine.

Okay, so: what distinguishes these two groups?

Answer under the cut, but… stare at those two lists. Take a moment; give it a try. Do you see it?

Hints: It’s something pretty straightforward. Frege is an edge case. And while Rousseau is formally part of Group B, he really belongs with Group A.

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At the cutting edge of world history and industrial progress back when it was built in 1799, but now Ironbridge and nearby Coalbrookdale are bucolic backwaters where you struggle to get a decent phone signal.

The blue-ringed octopus! An elegant little creature, native to the southwest Pacific, particularly the waters around Australia. Pretty to look at… but mostly famous for being very, very venomous. The blue-ring’s bite is deadly.  A single sharp nip can kill an adult human in minutes.

But why? The blue-ring is a modest little creature that lives in shallow water, preying on small fish and crustaceans. A bite that can paralyze a 10 gram fish or a 20 gram crab, sure. A bite that can kill a 70 kilogram human dead? What’s the point of that?

Well: the good news is, a recent paper has discovered just why the blue-ringed octopus is so deadly. The bad news is… um, it’s kind of disturbing.

Trigger warning for sexual assault, cannibalism, and existential horror. I am not kidding.

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Every time I start writing something about The Situation, it seems pointless. Both the media environment and the world itself seem to be spinning out of control. The bubble of Boomer Realism has been popped. The weirdness which has been bubbling since 2008 has flooded the territory; old maps seem worse than useless. I’ve got nothing better than aphorisms to offer to understand the present.

Thankfully, my job interacting with students and colleagues forces me to be a bit more concrete. I’m very excited about the re-launch of the APSA Experiments Section Newsletter, which I’m editing along with Krissy Lunz Trujillo — check it out here.

But mostly today I want to talk about the graduate seminar I just finished teaching, about Media, Social Media and Politics. The syllabus is here. To summarize what we spent the most time talking about in class, I’ll quote a sentence from Green et al (2025): “The online information ecosystem in the early twenty-first century is characterized by unbundling and abundance.”

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A while ago, ALLEA (the alliance of European science academies) published a statement on ethical problems in collaborations between academia and commercial parties.*

With this post, I want to draw attention to this topic (my impression was that it got a bit overshadowed by all the horrible attacks on academic freedom and academic institutions that are currently happening in the US – ALLEA also published a statement on academic freedom in response), but also raise some more questions.

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A couple of weeks back, I wrote a post about some of the work that USAID did.  Now I’d like to drill down a bit and talk about some of the work that I personally did for USAID.

This runs a bit long, because this sort of thing is all about context.  But if you’re curious about what some of these people who just got fired from USAID actually did all day long?  Here’s one story.

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The Guardian reports on marches and protests across the globe to celebrate International Women’s Day. Three cheers for all feminists who took to the streets today to remind us that women’s rights should never be taken for granted; in fact, as The Guardian discusses, women’s rights are under severe pressure. And given the rise of fascism and other forms of authoritarianism everywhere, we have ample reasons to worry that they will be rolled back even further. After all, it is no coincidence that one of the first victims of Victor Orban’s rise to power in Hungary was gender studies; and that one of the first things Donald Trump did was to abolish all DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) policies. His vicious attacks on nonbinary and transpeople should be understood in the same light, because what nonbinary and transpeople do by claiming their identities, is to reject the traditional strict binary gender ideologies that anti-feminism requires, with clearly described roles for men and women. We are not only living in times of democratic decline; we are living in times of anti-feminist setbacks – and in those times, protests are vital to bring oxygen to organized resistance (feminist and otherwise). To all those who went on the streets today – thank you!