Hasta La Gadget!

(Warning! This post is dark and full of spoilers!)

NO-dorrrrrrr!!! If you have tissues, the time to get those is now.

In the waning moments of the fifth episode of “Game of Thrones” Season 6, “The Door,” we finally learn where Hodor comes from, and, sadly, it costs him his life. This post isn’t so much a recap as it is a tribute to a fallen hero.

So, how did we get here?

First, Bran learns that the Children of the Forest are responsible for creating the White Walkers. (Twist!) Then he gets touched by the Night’s King while in a vision, which we saw in a scene from the teasers. And after that, he learns from the Three-Eyed Raven that the Walkers are coming for him.

Later, Bran and the Three-Eyed Raven travel back in time in a vision of Winterfell, but the cave they’re in during the present is attacked. The Three-Eyed Raven and Summer, Bran’s direwolf, are both apparently killed. (Nooooo!)

Summer is over. And winter has come.

OK, stay with us here now, because this gets confusing. While still in the past, Bran seems to warg into young Hodor, then known as Willis. In the present, Hodor is being told to “hold the door” to hold back the wight attack. This link between past and present Hodor messes with Willis’ mind. Hodor in the present is being told to “hold the door,” so Willis of the past starts repeating that, which turns into “Hodor.” (Whoooooaaaa!)

Bran and Meera escape, but Hodor — our little, lovable Hodor, our precious, precious friend — appears to be torn apart by wights.

This episode literally changes everything. Yes, that’s a big statement, and, yes, it’s totally true.

It appears that everything that’s happening has already happened before. The Three-Eyed Raven must’ve known Willis needed to be turned into Hodor, which explains why Bran and the Raven stay in the vision during the wight attack. 

The sequence also confirms that Bran can influence the past. In fact, he might be the sole reason anything is happening at all. 

But none of this could’ve been possible if Hodor didn’t get Bran to the Three-Eyed Raven in the first place. Bran is everything he is because you loved him.

R.I.P. Hodor …

Hodor. Hodor, hodor.

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iPhone and iPad owners have been proud of how better the iOS update system is compared to Android’s fragmented diversity. With Apple in full control of updates, all supported devices are able to receive updates quickly and smoothly. That last bit, however, has lately become a bane more than a boon, with each update sometimes breaking things instead of fixing … Continue reading

Student Protest, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and the Rise of the Corporate University

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

During the past academic year, an upsurge of student activism, a movement of millennials, has swept campuses across the country and attracted the attention of the media. From coast to coast, from the Ivy League to state universities to small liberal arts colleges, a wave of student activism has focused on stopping climate change, promoting a living wage, fighting mass incarceration practices, supporting immigrant rights, and of course campaigning for Bernie Sanders.

Both the media and the schools that have been the targets of some of these protests have seized upon certain aspects of the upsurge for criticism or praise, while ignoring others. Commentators, pundits, and reporters have frequently trivialized and mocked the passion of the students and the ways in which it has been directed, even as universities have tried to appropriate it by promoting what some have called “neoliberal multiculturalism.” Think of this as a way, in particular, of taming the power of the present demands for racial justice and absorbing them into an increasingly market-oriented system of higher education.

In some of their most dramatic actions, students of color, inspired in part by the Black Lives Matter movement, have challenged the racial climate at their schools. In the process, they have launched a wave of campus activism, including sit-ins, hunger strikes, demonstrations, and petitions, as well as emotional, in-your-face demands of various sorts. One national coalition of student organizations, the Black Liberation Collective, has called for the percentage of black students and faculty on campus to approximate that of blacks in the society. It has also called for free tuition for black and Native American students, and demanded that schools divest from private prison corporations. Other student demands for racial justice have included promoting a living wage for college employees, reducing administrative salaries, lowering tuitions and fees, increasing financial aid, and reforming the practices of campus police. These are not, however, the issues that have generally attracted the attention either of media commentators or the colleges themselves.

Instead, the spotlight has been on student demands for cultural changes at their institutions that focus on deep-seated assumptions about whiteness, sexuality, and ability. At some universities, students have personalized these demands, insisting on the removal of specific faculty members and administrators. Emphasizing a politics of what they call “recognition,” they have also demanded that significant on-campus figures issue public apologies or acknowledge that “black lives matter.” Some want universities to implement in-class “trigger warnings” when difficult material is being presented and to create “safe spaces” for marginalized students as a sanctuary from the daily struggle with the mainstream culture. By seizing upon and responding to these (and only these) student demands, university administrators around the country are attempting to domesticate and appropriate this new wave of activism.

In the meantime, right-wing commentators have depicted students as coddled, entitled, and enemies of free speech. The libertarian right has launched a broad media critique of the current wave of student activism. Commentators have been quick to dismiss student protesters as over-sensitive and entitled purveyors of “academic victimology.” They lament the “coddling of the American mind.” The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf has termed students “misguided” in their protests against racist language, ideas, and assumptions, their targeting of “microaggression” (that is, unconscious offensive comments) and insensitivity, and their sometimes highly personal attacks against those they accuse. One of the most vocal critics of the new campus politics, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, argues that such rampant “liberalism” and “political correctness” violate academic freedom and freedom of speech. (In this, they are in accord with the liberal American Civil Liberties Union. Free speech advocates Daphne Patai and the ACLU’s Harvey Silvergate, for example, bemoan a new diversity requirement at the University of Massachusetts for its “politicization of education.”)

In a response that, under the circumstances, might at first seem surprising, college administrators have been been remarkably open to some of these student demands — often the very ones derided by the right. In this way, the commentators and the administrators have tended to shine a bright light on what is both personal and symbolic in the new politics of the student protesters, while ignoring or downplaying their more structural and economically challenging desires and demands.

The Neoliberal University

University administrators have been particularly amenable to student demands that fit with current trends in higher education. Today’s neoliberal university is increasingly facing market pressures like loss of state funding, privatization, rising tuition, and student debt, while promoting a business model that emphasizes the managerial control of faculty through constant “assessment,” emphasis on “accountability,” and rewards for “efficiency.” Meanwhile, in a society in which labor unions are constantly being weakened, the higher education labor force is similarly being — in the term of the moment — “flexibilized” through the weakening of tenure, that once ironclad guarantee of professorial lifetime employment, and the increased use of temporary adjunct faculty.

In this context, universities are scrambling to accommodate student activism for racial justice by incorporating the more individualized and personal side of it into increasingly depoliticized cultural studies programs and business-friendly, market-oriented academic ways of thinking. Not surprisingly, how today’s students frame their demands often reflects the environment in which they are being raised and educated. Postmodern theory, an approach which still reigns in so many liberal arts programs, encourages textual analysis that reveals hidden assumptions encoded in words; psychology has popularized the importance of individual trauma; and the neoliberal ideology that has come to permeate so many schools emphasizes individual behavior as the most important agent for social change. Add together these three strands of thought, now deeply embedded in a college education, and injustice becomes a matter of the wrongs individuals inflict on others at a deeply personal level. Deemphasized are the policies and structures that are built into how society (and the university) works.

For this reason, while schools have downplayed or ignored student demands for changes in admissions, tuition, union rights, pay scales, and management prerogatives, they have jumped into the heated debate the student movement has launched over “microaggressions” — pervasive, stereotypical remarks that assume whiteness as a norm and exoticize people of color, while taking for granted the white nature of institutions of higher learning. As part of the present wave of protest, students of color have, for instance, highlighted their daily experiences of casual and everyday racism — statements or questions like “where are you from?” (when the answer is: the same place you’re from) or “as a [fill in the blank], how do you feel about…” Student protests against such comments, especially when they are made by professors or school administrators, and the mindsets that go with them are precisely what the right is apt to dismiss as political correctness run wild and university administrations are embracing as the essence of the present on-campus movement.

At Yale, the Intercultural Affairs Committee advised students to avoid racially offensive Halloween costumes. When a faculty member and resident house adviser circulated an email critiquing the paternalism of such an administrative mandate, student protests erupted calling for her removal. While Yale declined to remove her from her post as a house adviser, she stepped down from her teaching position. At Emory, students protested the “pain” they experienced at seeing “Trump 2016” graffiti on campus, and the university president assured them that he “heard [their] message… about values regarding diversity and respect that clash with Emory’s own.” Administrators are scrambling to implement new diversity initiatives and on-campus training programs — and hiring expensive private consulting firms to help them do so.

At the University of Missouri, the president and chancellor both resigned in the face of student protests including a hunger strike and a football team game boycott in the wake of racial incidents on campus including public racist slurs and symbols. So did the dean of students at Claremont McKenna College (CMC), when protest erupted over her reference to students (implicitly of color) who “don’t fit our CMC mold.”

Historian and activist Robin Kelley suggests that today’s protests, even as they “push for measures that would make campuses more hospitable to students of color: greater diversity, inclusion, safety, and affordability,” operate under a contradictory logic that is seldom articulated. To what extent, he wonders, does the student goal of “leaning in” and creating more spaces for people of color at the top of an unequal and unjust social order clash with the urge of the same protesters to challenge that unjust social order?

Kelley argues that the language of “trauma” and mental health that has come to dominate campuses also works to individualize and depoliticize the very idea of racial oppression. The words “trauma, PTSD, micro-aggression, and triggers,” he points out, “have virtually replaced oppression, repression, and subjugation.” He explains that, “while trauma can be an entrance into activism, it is not in itself a destination and may even trick activists into adopting the language of the neoliberal institutions they are at pains to reject.” This is why, he adds, for university administrators, diversity and cultural competency initiatives have become go-to solutions that “shift race from the public sphere into the psyche” and strip the present round of demonstrations of some of their power.

Cultural Politics and Inequality

In recent years, cultural, or identity, politics has certainly challenged the ways that Marxist and other old and new left organizations of the past managed to ignore, or even help reproduce, racial and gender inequalities. It has questioned the value of class-only or class-first analysis on subjects as wide-ranging as the Cuban Revolution — did it successfully address racial inequality as it redistributed resources to the poor, or did it repress black identity by privileging class analysis? — and the Bernie Sanders campaign — will his social programs aimed at reducing economic inequality alleviate racial inequality by helping the poor, or will his class-based project leave the issue of racial inequality in the lurch? In other words, the question of whether a political project aimed at attacking the structures of economic inequality can also advance racial and gender equality is crucial to today’s campus politics.

Put another way, the question is: How political is the personal? Political scientist Adolph Reed argues that if class is left out, race politics on campus becomes “the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism.” As he puts it, race-first politics of the sort being pushed today by university administrators promotes a “moral economy… in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people.”

The student movement that has swept across the nation has challenged colleges and universities on the basics of their way of (quite literally) doing business. The question for these institutions now is: Can student demands largely be tamed and embedded inside an administration-sanctioned agenda that in no way undermines how schools now operate in the world?

Feminist theorist Nancy Fraser has shown how feminist ideas of a previous generation were successfully “recuperated by neoliberalism” — that is, how they were repurposed as rationales for greater inequality. “Feminist ideas that once formed part of a radical worldview,” she argues, are now “increasingly expressed in individualist terms.” Feminist demands for workplace access and equal pay have, for example, been used to undermine worker gains for a “family wage,” while a feminist emphasis on gender equality has similarly been used on campus to divert attention from growing class inequality.

Student demands for racial justice risk being absorbed into a comparable framework. University administrators have found many ways to use student demands for racial justice to strengthen their business model and so the micro-management of faculty. In one case seized upon by free-speech libertarians, the Brandeis administration placed an assistant provost in a classroom to monitor a professor after students accused him of using the word “wetback” in a Latin American politics class. More commonly, universities employ a plethora of consulting firms and create new administrative positions to manage “diversity” and “inclusion.” Workshops and training sessions proliferate, as do “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.” Such a vision of “diversity” is then promoted as a means to prepare students to compete in the “global marketplace.”

There are even deeper ways in which a diversity agenda aligns with neoliberal politics. Literary theorist Walter Benn Michaels argues, for example, that diversity can give a veneer of social justice to ideas about market competition and meritocracy that in reality promote inequality. “The rule in neoliberal economies is that the difference between the rich and the poor gets wider rather than shrinks — but that no culture should be treated invidiously,” he explains. “It’s basically OK if economic differences widen as long as the increasingly successful elites come to look like the increasingly unsuccessful non-elites. So the model of social justice is not that the rich don’t make as much and the poor make more, the model of social justice is that the rich make whatever they make, but an appropriate percentage of them are minorities or women.” Or as Forbes Magazine put it, “Businesses need to vastly increase their ability to sense new opportunities, develop creative solutions, and move on them with much greater speed. The only way to accomplish these changes is through a revamped workplace culture that embraces diversity so that sensing, creativity, and speed are all vastly improved.”

Clearly, university administrators prefer student demands that can be coopted or absorbed into their current business model. Allowing the prevailing culture to define the parameters of their protest has left the burgeoning Millennial Movement in a precarious position. The more that students — with the support of college and university administrations — accept the individualized cultural path to social change while forgoing the possibility of anything greater than cosmetic changes to prevailing hierarchies, on campus and beyond, the more they face ridicule from those on the right who present them as fragile, coddled, privileged whiners.

Still, this young, vibrant movement has momentum and will continue to evolve. In this time of great social and political flux, it’s possible that its many constituencies — fighting for racial justice, economic justice, and climate justice — will use their growing clout to build on recent victories, no matter how limited.

Keep an eye on college campuses. The battle for the soul of American higher education being fought there today is going to matter for the wider world tomorrow. Whether that future will be defined by a culture of trigger warnings and safe spaces or by democratized education and radical efforts to fight inequality may be won or lost in the shadow of the Ivory Tower. The Millennial Movement matters. Our future is in their hands.

Aviva Chomsky is professor of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts and a TomDispatch regular. Her most recent book is Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

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We all know the feeling — that daily trance you’re in as you approach the elevator doors, headed to your office. It’s an awkward journey until you step off at your destination floor. You probably already know the classic elevator protocol: ladies first, stand toward the back upon entering, and of course, politely move out of the way when people need to exit.

But what about the “unspoken” elevator manners that nobody wants to discuss? I think it’s time to set the record straight.

1) Meaningless small talk: Let’s face it. We’d all rather be millionaires who no longer needed weekly paychecks, but in the real world we’ll probably be working until retirement age. That being said, most of us are a little grumpy when confined to a small space with a bunch of strangers. Once in a while, you’ll get that cheerful optimist who wants to steer up two minutes of pointless conversation such as, “Sooo, are you ready for the holidays?” I’m already thinking, “Do you really care?” Imagine if I told the truth. “No, I’m not ready for the holidays. My dog puked all over my carpet last night, and I awoke to a killer headache this morning.” Realistically speaking, most strangers don’t care to know “what’s new in our world” or if we’re ready for any occasion so let’s stop pretending.

2) Marinating in fragrance: It’s bad enough being stuck standing in a limited space let alone gagging over someone’s overbearing “scent.” You might think your smell is beautiful but trust me, it’s not. I’ve nearly passed out trying to hold my breath to escape another person’s overwhelming aroma. It smelt as if I had just been bombed by a ninja-florist during peak flower season. Stop the madness. Spray your fragrance on lightly, or marinate in it at home where your family can appreciate it.

3) Taking a whiff of the smokers: Just when you thought the last of the crowd had entered the elevator, you were mistaken. A few stragglers who just finished a long smoke break hop on with you. The stench is evident, and then they release a nice big breath of charcoal air as they start chatting with each other. It’s like one smokestack talking to another. There is a difference between courteous, and rude, smokers. I have friends you’d never guess were smokers.

4) Getting off on the first floor: it’s acceptable to take the elevator to the first floor if you’re dealing with bodily pain, or a condition that prevents you from taking the stairs. Otherwise, you can expect some eyeball rolls if you’re going to press “1” on the button panel. What’s worse is when the first-floor-exit person stands in the back, forcing nearly everyone to step outside of the elevator to accommodate their exit. If you’re going to get off on the first floor, please stand toward the front, and off to the side, allowing for an easy departure.

5) Awkward moments of seeing old coworkers: Many of us feel the need to be overly cordial with old coworkers we encounter in the elevator, and it’s usually out of guilt. Most of us don’t care to know what that person’s been up to lately or where they’re working currently. It’s harsh to say, but it’s doubtful we’d even notice if they croaked over unless we read it in the obituaries. It’s not necessary to guilt yourself into pointless small talk. Just smile and say hello.

6) Pick-up lines: Unless you’re already exchanging flirty glances and cutesy smiles with your potential “eye-candy,” don’t be a weirdo. Chances are high we’re not interested in your gawking stares, or date proposals. A mutual vibe would be felt if that were the case. It’s best to avoid flirtation.

7) Phantom button pushers: Let’s not make believe there’s a ghost in the elevator. It’s okay to make a mistake, accidentally hitting the wrong button. We’ve all done it. It only gets awkward when the designated floor is reached and no one gets off. Everyone looks around at each other with irritation and confusion, yet no one confesses to pushing the wrong button. If you admit it, chances are we’ll all laugh along with you. It’s not a big deal.

8) Making room for one more: It’s annoying to wait for another elevator, but it’s better than squishing into an already small, crowded space. Imagine standing shoulder-to-shoulder with people, and just when you thought you were on your way up, BOOM! I don’t think so! A fearless hand chops in between the elevator doors, forcing them to re-open. In come a few more people who think there’s just enough space for them to pile in. No one refuses their entry, but the annoyance is evident.

Make the elevator journey a better experience for all of us.

To view this story on my personal blog site:
https://melissaannsite.wordpress.com/2016/05/22/hold-the-door-a-dummies-guide-to-unspoken-elevator-etiquette/

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As Maine goes, so goes the nation, Bernie? Because we know what happens when a stubborn, left-leaning candidate stands on principle complaining about persnickety party politics, and it isn’t pretty. In fact, it’s insane by definition: We do it over and over again and expect different results.

“I am not standing down … and neither should those voters whose consciences compel them to cast a vote for me,” Eliot Cutler said defiantly, with zero chance of winning – and then Maine re-elected the man Politico magazine called “America’s craziest governor” with 48 percent of the vote, the majority of votes split between two far-superior candidates.

It doesn’t take Einstein to figure out the math had Cutler urged his team to put on the blue jerseys in 2014. And it’s pretty simple math that says Bernie Sanders can’t win the Democratic nomination in 2016, but his ego and the affluenza of his advisers insist on fighting until the end – one that looks to become increasingly more bitter by the day.

The arc of Sanders’ campaign has gone from extremely inspiring to incredibly annoying, and the latest temper tantrum in Nevada is inexcusable. Whining about “unfair” rules that have been on the books since 2008. Outrage that delegates not registered as Democrats were refused a seat at the official convention of Democrats to select the Democratic nominee. Indignation that the higher number of Clinton delegates trumped the higher volume of Sanders delegates. Astonishment that “Bernie Bros” rushing the dais, throwing chairs, cursing and shouting caused security to shut down the convention four hours after the designated end time. Accusations of another conspiracy by establishment.

Hillary Clinton is winning the Democratic primary fair and square by the same rules by which she lost to Barack Obama in 2008. She won the recent contest in Nevada for the same simple reason she’s winning overall: She got more votes. That’s not “establishment” – that’s democracy.

The reaction of the Sanders people — trashing the place and threatening the state party chairwoman — was immature at best, and if it weren’t for the fact that their antics increase the probability of a Trump presidency, we could gently close the door and let them cry it out.

But that’s what Maine did in 2014, and who’s crying now?

What’s sold as a “political revolution” looks more and more like just another power trip. Bernie and Jane Sanders are high on crowds and crowdfunding, and through the haze it’s crystal clear why virtually none of Sanders’ colleagues in the capital support him. It’s not because he’s “anti-establishment.” It’s because he’s an angry, unreasonable man with a chip on his shoulder as big as the state of Maine.

America’s economic system might be rigged to favor the rich and powerful, and maybe the nominating process is, too, but hello? Sanders’ campaign is pretty darn rich and powerful.

A Washington Post analysis of Federal Election Commission reports found that “by the end of March, the self-described democratic socialist senator from Vermont had spent nearly $166 million on his campaign — more than any other 2016 presidential contender, including rival Hillary Clinton. More than $91 million went to a small group of admakers and media buyers who produced a swarm of commercials and placed them on television, radio and online.”

Sanders is losing fair and square in the voting contest, so why must he torch every bridge along the way? Why must he incite volatile people and provoke useless rage? Sanders has been in Washington for decades, and he still can’t manage to disagree with people without being disagreeable.

There’s a word for somebody with these characteristics, and it’s not “leader.”

Clinton has won 2.9 million more votes than Sanders and has won 1,768 pledged delegates to Sanders’ 1,494. The so-called superdelegates are not to blame for these numbers. Sanders is not going to be the nominee because he hasn’t won enough votes or delegates, and his latest stunt – an anti-democratic pitch suggesting that polls point to him as the best nominee – is ridiculous. Elections are rigged, so we should use polls to determine who gets to be president of the free world? Is that what socialism looks like: Polls determine a future that we must believe in? The same polls that Sanders himself was against before the polls were for him?

Elections, rules and math are as American as hot dogs and apple pie, and we love an underdog who accepts defeat with grace after a rigorous contest, but none of us — even bleeding-heart liberals — likes sore losers.

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