iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Eric D. de Roulet (should be writing)

I thought this was quite a useful read, a good counter argument to those who think that the ROC military during the KMT era is some model for today when it was rife with graft and rewarded sycophants to dictators rather than innovation or ability

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Eric D. de Roulet (should be writing) @ericderoulet.bsky.social · 8h

I wrote an essay for Speculative Insight a year ago (though it feels like three or four). They're a fine venue for writing at the intersection of social commentary and literary commentary, so seriously consider supporting them! www.speculativeinsight.com/essays/lives...

speculativeinsight.com

Lives under empire — Speculative Insight

Eric de Roulet explores how Premee Mohamed's fiction depicts the experience of living under a totalitarian regime, and how it reflects real-world experiences.

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Speculative Insight journal @speculativeinsight.bsky.social · 12h

This year SI is participating in AusArt Day, raising funds to completely cover paying our authors at a higher rate for (at least) Jan-June 2027. Feel like supporting us? Click the link to send some money... and tell your friends! artists.australianculturalfund.org.au/s/project/a2...

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Pretty impressive data viz

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Scary Mr. Olmec Man @scarymrolmecman.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

One of the worst pieces of advice I got for my dissertation was to write it with the book in mind. One of the best was to think of the dissertation as a database that stores ideas, readings, materials you can draw on forthe rest of your career

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Frankie Huang 黄碧赤 @ourobororoboruo.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

“Students told us the temptation was greatest when they feared they would miss a deadline,” the report reads. IMO the underlying issue here is the labor practices these students are being fed into as they near adulthood. Learning is not about volume of output, but do these students understand that?

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Niao Collective @niaocollective.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The real question is - short crust or flaky crust

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Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

For those interested in learning more about Qing history (unfortunately, I think we can rule the above user out, I will post a couple of links about Qing civilization w/r/t internal/external behavior): www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...

cambridge.org

The Qing Extermination of the Zünghars (Chapter 12) - The Cambridge World History of Genocide

The Cambridge World History of Genocide - May 2023

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

So, where this sort of 'real talk' falls a bit short for me is that this 'glut' coexists with the easily observable fact that most departments have more than their share of indifferent teachers, mediocre researchers and straight-up abusers, protected by the social rules of the tenure track.

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elia ayoub @ayoub.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

"All at once, Canada tried to get rid of the people it had spent so many years courting." Sometimes I just wish shame was a more powerful political force macleans.ca/longforms/i-...

All at once, Canada tried to get rid of the people it had spent so many years courting. It cut permanent residency spots by 20 per cent—from 500,000 to 395,000—and would further reduce the target over the next two years. It closed immigration pathways for caregivers and agriculture workers. The three-year post-graduation work permit, which I had, used to be open to all graduates of Canadian post-secondary institutions; now it’s only available to those who finished university and specific college programs.

The Canadian Border Services Agency, or CBSA, has ramped up removals like never before. It sent more than 23,000 people home in 2025 and aims to oust 40,000 over the next two years. In March, Ottawa passed legislation that denied refugee hearings to certain asylum seekers, making them easier to deport. Altogether, Canada expects more than a million people to leave every year. And the Immigration Red Wedding is working. The country’s population declined for the first time in 2025, largely because there were fewer non-permanent residents.

I was next on the chopping block. Nearly 1.4 million work permits were set to expire in 2026, including mine in October. I couldn’t believe the government had the gall to double-cross people who’d planned their lives around immigration. I was livid: I’d done absolutely nothing wrong, yet my future was in limbo. I’d lived my entire adult life in Canada. To go would mean to leave my job, my professional contacts, my friends and my partner. It would mean starting over in a country where I hadn’t lived for almost a decade. And it might mean giving up my career; journalists in the Philippines regularly face persecution, legal harassment and physical violence. I’d have to move back in with my parents because, even if I worked as an editor back home, I would only be earning around $600 a month. All the freedoms I took for granted would be erased. I couldn’t imagine reaching, much less exceeding, my potential there.

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elia ayoub @ayoub.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Canada better be careful to not repeat the same mistakes. So far it seems like that's precisely what's happening under the new (anti)-immigration rules. macleans.ca/longforms/i-...

macleans.ca

I Wanted to Stay in Canada. So I Learned French. - Macleans.ca

Under the new immigration rules, I had to become a francophone in one year.

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Eric D. de Roulet (should be writing) @ericderoulet.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Shuster's piece, which this New Bloom article comments on, sure does stink of a common phenomenon in the field in which mediocre China analysts pivot to trying their hand at Taiwan analysis, demonstrating how little they understand either subject.

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Eric D. de Roulet (should be writing) @ericderoulet.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Favorite footnote written? Not sure, but I thought this one was decent, writing on some parallels between fictional regimes and real ones.

A passage listing many features of totalitarian regimes with many footnotes. The key line is:

[in totalitarian regimes,] thuggery and mob violence might be secretly orchestrated by the Party-state

The footnote:
As happens in the PRC (Ong 2018), but secret police forces the world over blur the boundary between unidentified thugs and law enforcement agents.

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 08/09/2026

not sure about greatest but it’s probably the one I most enjoyed writing

footnote on the word 熱趕郎: ‘The iconoclastic philosopher Li Zhi 李贄, who died in 1602 after cutting his own throat to make a point, used it in the same sense around the same time, in a posthumously published book of essays whose title (續焚書) I can only translate as Burn This Book Too.’

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Simple Sabotage Field Manual @simple-sabotage.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.

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Pwnallthethings @pwnallthethings.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

America and Asia are on course for a collision. Not talking about geopolitics here. 200-300 million years from now the two landmasses will literally collide, having squashed and eventually eliminated the Pacific Ocean between them

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Academic freedom does not demand the humoring of cranks. It does demand the countenancing of unpopular ideas, but you need to be able to sustain a decent argument in favor of those ideas, with evidence.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Yeah, so as the 'academic freedom is important and in the past there has existed a from-the-left chilling effect on campuses'...this ain't that. UGhent is saying this guy just didn't do the work he was hired to do and instead was doing turbo-racism and...yeah, that's gonna get him fired. Buh-bye.

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Michael Turton @michaelturton.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Fascinating post from one of the most interesting Taiwan history blogs. This one on Koxinga's sister, Ursola de Bargas danshuihistory.blogspot.com/2010/12/koxi...

danshuihistory.blogspot.com

Koxinga's sister (Part 1): Ursola de Bargas

[Koxinga's birthplace in 平戶Hirado in Nagasaki - known as 兒誕石] According to the writing of Franciscan missionary to China, Fr Antonio de Sant...

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Mary Dudziak @marydudziak.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Beginning my research seminar, as always, with Lynn Hunt's essay How Writing Leads to Thinking (and Not the Other Way Around). Should be mandatory reading in light of the impact of AI. www.historians.org/perspectives...

Writing is stressful. Sitting in my computer chair my neck and shoulder muscles almost immediately tense up as I dig around in my brain for the best phrase or even any coherent string of words, whether I am writing an essay like this one, a book chapter, a letter of recommendation, or an email message to a friend. Writing is time-consuming. It’s a great way to pass the time on a long airplane flight because you lose track of the passage of time altogether. It’s even better, from that point of view exclusively, than watching an episode of Mad Men on your laptop. Writing means many different things to me but one thing it is not: writing is not the transcription of thoughts already consciously present in my mind. Writing is a magical and mysterious process that makes it possible to think differently.

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eileen chengyin chow @chowleen.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

Rather beautifully, Professor Mahmood Mamdani's dedication in "Neither Settler Nor Native" is to his trail-blazing son, @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social. He quotes the revolutionary Chinese writer Lu Xun's famous concluding lines in "Hometown": 「其實地上本沒有路，走的人多了，也便成了路。」 -魯迅，故鄉 #everynightapoem

For Zohran,
You teach us how to engage the world in difficult times. May you inspire many and blaze a trail!
It’s like a path across the land—it’s not there to begin with, but when lots of people go the same way, it comes into being.
—Lu Hsun, “Hometown”

From the dedication page of Mamdani, Mahmood, "Neither Settler nor Native : The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities," Harvard University Press, 2020

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Alice Camp @acampwriting.com · 16/08/2026

the people's mayor is out here distinguishing j/zh and pronouncing yue correctly and you haven't even started chinese 101... get it together.

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YOUR PROSTATE IS HUGE THAT MEANS YOU NEED TO HAVE IT EXAMINED @terminal7.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

When you can only speak one sentence in Chinese:

The mayor says “I don’t know Chinese” menacingly.

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YOUR PROSTATE IS HUGE THAT MEANS YOU NEED TO HAVE IT EXAMINED @terminal7.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

but you try anyway:

The mayor says “but I want to give it a try (to speak mandarin)”, again, menacingly.

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Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @mayor.nyc.gov · 16/08/2026

演出现场见! on.nyc.gov/broadway

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Eric D. de Roulet (should be writing) @ericderoulet.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

re: the latest hyperbole with respect to what's going on at universities, this essay on the news media's construction of the campus as a site of conflict and insecurity feels apt.

parapraxismagazine.com

The Campus Does Not Exist — Parapraxis

How campus war is made Samuel P. Catlin

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

I really can't get over this, this is such a wild example. there was a whole Church Inquisition torturing and extorting suspected heretics in Newton's day and we are being invited to ask whether he would have survived land acknowledgments lmfao bsky.app/profile/pwhi...

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

And which is more serious: 1) A silly campus protest 2) Someone said a mean thing Leftishly 3) Armed agents of the state murdering people 4) A political party using the state to silence dissent. (3) and (4) are very obviously a much bigger deal than (1) or (2), not that you can tell from the NYT.

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Eric D. de Roulet (should be writing) @ericderoulet.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

What an excerpt. Do academics have to stay within the Overton window at all times, or do a bunch of them have tenure Anyway, the real threats to senior academics are program closures, populist political personalities adversarial to higher education, and increasingly Orwellian legal regimes

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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

so I just want to emphasize something here that non-media people might not pick up on: Marisa is an independent journalist and is taking on the risk of being sued by Moraff here without any institutional backing. That's admirable bravery - and also means being very, very certain of the facts.

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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Exclusive from me — Daniel Moraff, one of the political operatives behind Graham Platner's rise and fall, has been accused of sexual assault. Full story here:

thehandbasket.co

Exclusive: Political operative behind Graham Platner's rise accused of sexual assault

A spokesperson for Daniel Moraff said: “Any suggestion that he committed a criminal offence is false and without foundation."

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Count Binface @countbinface.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Here it is. My manifesto for the 2026 Clacton By-Election. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Join me, clean up Clacton and let's make 13th August Bin Day! #VoteBinface #VoteyMcVoteface #YesWeTinCan

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Olivia Hill @machineiv.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

Today is July 25th, often celebrated as the fall of Italian fascism. Mussolini passed draconian controls over pasta production which he considered decadent and overly reliant on foreign grain. Today, we celebrate his fall with a simple, defiant partisan dish: 1) Pasta 2) Creamy butter 3) Parmesan

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Eric D. de Roulet (should be writing) @ericderoulet.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

An acceptance in the inbox. Obviously, I won't say more yet.

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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

In a free country, failing to comply with law enforcement does not give the state license to murder you

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#StupidSuez @diplomatofnight.com · 20/07/2026

This long-form article paints an extremely damning picture of Biden, but also Blinken, Sullivan, Austin, and Finer who all seem to be trying to place the blame solely on their boss.

newyorker.com

How Biden Enabled Israel’s Aggression Toward Gaza—and Iran

Top officials from the previous Administration now express regret over their failure to rein in Netanyahu.

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Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa @benjaminschultzfig.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

As with most problems effecting higher-ed, this one turns out to be a labor issue. In that vein, I'd propose another good deterrent for cheating with AI: strong faculty unions.

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Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa @benjaminschultzfig.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

A really interesting piece on reducing AI cheating in the classroom from a Professor of English and former Dean of Humanities at University of Utah. The solutions? Smaller classes, lower teaching loads for faculty, and in-person classes.

hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com

How to limit unauthorized AI use in the classroom

A handy rule

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Hong Kong Free Press HKFP @hongkongfp.com · 14/07/2026

Hong Kong independent bookstore Have a Nice Stay announces closure, citing financial difficulties and ‘red lines’ 🔗 hongkongfp.com/2026/07/14/h...

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McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net · 14/07/2026

It's Harrison Ford's birthday, which means we are obliged to share this absolute banger from our archives: "No one on the committee can identify who or what instilled Dr. Jones with the belief that an archaeologist’s tool kit should consist solely of a bullwhip and a revolver."

buff.ly

Back from Yet Another Globetrotting Adventure, Indiana Jones Checks His Mail and Discovers That His Bid for Tenure Has Been Denied

“As chairman of the Committee on Promotion and Tenure, I regret to inform you that your recent application for tenure has been denied by a vote of 6 to 1. Fo...

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[Christopher M. Federico] @chrispps.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Vance has blood on his hands

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5 foot Home Depot skeleton @redderbeanpaste.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Abdul El-Sayed: hello i will make videos of me grilling and talking about meatpacking oligopolies also i have experience in state government and am running in a purple state oysters mcBlackwatercrimes: Every woman that distrusts me is Israel www.youtube.com/shorts/MaBJZ...

youtube.com

I got beef with the meatpacking conglomerates.🥩🍗🍖🥓

YouTube video by Abdul El-Sayed

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Eric D. de Roulet (should be writing) @ericderoulet.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Really starting to think this practice of ceding all personal agency to consulting agencies is some kind of social contagion.

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Dave Vetter @davidrvetter.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

This might be the most blatant example in existence of "rich guy who created a problem attempting to place the blame for that problem on immigrants"

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Xun-ling Au 歐迅灵 🏴 @xunlingau.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Gov'ts across the world have failed the peoples of Myanmar. They have failed to cut the funds & weapons flows (indeed some enable them)& have failed to get humanitarian aid to people starving & displaced. Despite this the peoples of Myanmar persist, survive the best they can & continue to fight back

france24.com

More than 100,000 killed in Myanmar since 2021 coup, monitor says

Since a 2021 coup ousted Myanmar's democratically elected government and triggered a civil war, 100,114 people have been killed across the country, according to a report by monitoring group Armed Conf...

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