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Val Syverson 🕷️

@vjpsyverson.bsky.social
1.4K followers 1.5K following 4.3K posts

Paleontologist, teacher, parent, biophile, UU, intellectual omnivore. Topics: natural history, nerd stuff, surviving the culture war. Tenuous professor at UC Davis. Allergic to puns. (protogynous, he/they/Þei; Dr.) 🏳️‍🌈🇵🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼

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Reposted by Val Syverson 🕷️
Talking Climate Collaborative @tccollab.bsky.social · 3h
Not all online hate for climate communicators comes from people who reject the science.⁣ ⁣ Some comes from people who believe it, and have quietly given up. Saying something can still be done threatens the only comfort they have left.⁣ ⁣ Hope is the harder message here.⁣ ⁣ @katharinehayhoe.com
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Joe Árvai @joearvai.org · 5h
I spoke with @psychologytoday.com about how we might better support decision-making to make progress on #climatechange. What I talked about might surprise you. (Though probably not you, @katharinehayhoe.com, since we've exchanged ideas about this before.)
psychologytoday.com
Supporting Decision-Making for Climate Action
Consumers’ choices can only be as good for the environment as the options made available to them by policymakers and business leaders.
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Chaucer Doth Tweet @levostregc.bsky.social · 17h
Cyberpunke ys a cautionarye tale not a businesse planne
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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Like the other sub-reports that have recently trickled out (anthropology, sociology, literary studies, history), this only reinforces my original critique of the overall Vanderbilt report: it urgently needs to be corrected or retracted osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io
OSF
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Val Syverson 🕷️ @vjpsyverson.bsky.social · 11h
Good Omens
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Stan Oklobdzija @stano.bsky.social · 17h
Just got my property tax bill and I would like to share an image of what California would look like if Prop 13 were abolished and every freeloading, deadbeat Boomer homeowner paid the same amount in taxes as I do.
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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 12h
75% of the guys with computer science degrees who believe that intelligence is 100% heritable and racial will spend fourteen hours tomorrow watching to see if their training job diverges because it got the wrong random seed
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Wannabe Apparatchik @apparatchikwannabe.bsky.social · 13h
so much of what we think of as like, unquestionable baseline rights happened literally within living memory, but increasingly a lot of people have grown up with that as the “normal” world, and the right as weird, and this more than anything is why they’re never going to win the youth
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A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social · 12h
They’re live-streaming the execution of the person they think they can get away with doing that to first. It’s a test. If they can do that, they’ll expand the margins of permission.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 18h
jesus christ i have never heard a democratic talk this bluntly about an opponent
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Caga Tio @scottgoeke.bsky.social · 14h
both hilarious and super sad that all the “we’re literal logical higher beings…the Elves of Tolkien, the Vulcans of Star Trek” “we’re so far ahead, we should be anointed god-kings with slaves bowing before us” and then they repeatedly get dog walked by Donald “shitting my pants in public” Trump
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Val Syverson 🕷️ @vjpsyverson.bsky.social · 14h
genuinely super worried about what this is gonna look like
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DEAD TEENAGERS out now in paperback @judedoyle.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
You can abolish fraternities (and you should) or the rich (and you should) or underage drinking (we already have) but this phenomenon *is* *never* *going* *to* *stop* until men stop defining themselves over and in opposition to women. In other words: jude-doyle.ghost.io/y/
jude-doyle.ghost.io
You Know, You Can Just Say "Patriarchy"
These analyses of the Epstein case are... missing something.
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DEAD TEENAGERS out now in paperback @judedoyle.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
So here's the thing: Gang rapes are done for one purpose, which is for men to affirm their solidarity with each other and bond over dominating and humiliating a woman. They happen a lot in frats because they're male-bonding centers, but that impulse extends everywhere. (Dogpiling women online, etc.)
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Thought Punks 🎲 TTRPGs + Punk 👩‍🎤 @thoughtpunks.com · 08/10/2026
Children and young people barely out of high school into adulthood account for MORE THAN the total decline in births. You're upset that children stopped having children while actual full adults are having slightly more children. You need to go talk to your therapist and untangle that nasty knot.
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Common Dreams @commondreams.org · 08/10/2026
Those of us who have more legal protections against these violent policies must be resolute in speaking out, and finding ways to shield Haitians and other TPS holders from their cruelty.
commondreams.org
Haitian Resolve and the Limits of Resilience
We are a people who will fight for our survival and dignity, but there is also a limit to our resilience. The Trump administration's attacks have not only threatened our physical safety, they are also working to destroy our sense of psychological safety.
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Mallory Moore @sexabolition.blog · 08/10/2026
One of the frustrations about "engineering" as a discipline is that the heart of the actual discipline is about taking care to make sure things work within specifications and requirements, but tech industry gender politics has characterised engineering as a work of disruption and disregard.
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Rsquared @rsquared.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Every adult woman should be authorized to shoot one man of her choice with no criminal or civil liability. I understand this places me at risk for my personal safety, but I'm prepared to gamble that any woman inclined to shoot me has at least one man higher on her list.
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CalMatters @calmatters.org · 08/10/2026
Here are the megadonors bankrolling California’s voter ID ballot measure Packaging magnate and Illinois businessman Richard Uhilein and venture capitalists Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are among the big spenders bankrolling California’s voter ID measure.
cal.news
Here are the megadonors bankrolling California’s voter ID ballot measure
Packaging magnate and Illinois businessman Richard Uhilein and venture capitalists Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are among the big spenders bankrolling California’s voter ID measure.
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Kasey Gifford @kaseygifford.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
To put this in perspective chestnut trees used to be dominant species in the United States. Billions of trees were killed by fungal blight and now fully grown America chestnuts are functionally extinct. There is no getting them back. Ever. All for a data center. www.gadgetreview.com/one-of-ameri...
gadgetreview.com
One of America’s Last Chestnut Groves Is About to Be Destroyed for a Data Center
A rare 200-tree American chestnut grove in West Virginia may be cleared for data-center development, but the project denies the site is on its land.
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Val Syverson 🕷️ @vjpsyverson.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
"with the Burgess Shale it's a lonely view"
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(numunu, quahadis band) - Sky Kwihnai Pihi (name) @anarcho.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
www.latimes.com/environment/...
latimes.com
Native tribes denied greater say in water decisions with Newsom veto
Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed a bill that would have given Native tribes greater say on decisions about water. One tribal leader said it shows that the governor "doesn't care about tribes."
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Eileen Clancy 🧿 @clancyny.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Holy Jury Nullification! An enslaver was killed. 41 people were charged with treason.
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Ipsita 🎃Mad Social Scientist🎃 Chatterjea(she/her) @ichatterjea.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
🤬 "UChicago simply elected to admit 5.9 percent of men but only 3.5 percent of women. (It admitted none of the 1,026 applicants of “unknown” sex.)" 🤬
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Rebecca Tushnet @rtushnet.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
“UChicago’s national ranking for selectivity, currently No. 4, depends crucially on its rejecting so many women. Its selectivity of men alone would drop it out of the top 10. By contrast, Chicago’s selectivity for women alone would place it in the first position in the country.”
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Cheryl Lynn Eaton @cheryllynneaton.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
People do not understand how men who are white supremacists can have wives who are women of color and I need folks to realize that those men see their wives as subordinate property and not equals. These men are foaming at the mouth to bring back quadroon balls.
Screencap from Invincible: "I do love your mother, but she's more like a pet to me."
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mcc @dryad.technology · 07/10/2026
So like I keep wanting to float the idea that there's a major unspoken current in American politics where like nine different things are coded versions of "people are angry that they can't control their kids/grandkids' thoughts and lives" but then here it seems to have broken out into being explicit
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kilometres d’avis @wwwwww.website · 05/10/2026
the lesson of the Civil War is that aesthetic warrior-cult societies get their shit rocked by schoolteachers and store clerks who'd much rather be doing anything else
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Judah Grunstein @judah-grunstein.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
She's writing in 2000, so things have changed in terms of advancing a feminist IR research agenda. But it reminded me of what Toni Morrison said about the function of racism being distraction: "It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again your reason for being."
Similarly, the marginalized status of feminists means that they cannot assume familiarity with their argumentation. A criticism of feminist IR is that it has not forged ahead with a research agenda. But this is due, in part, to the demands of writing for uninformed and resistant audiences. At this point in time, feminists cannot avoid the need, whenever engaging an IR audience, to devote inordinate attention to reviewing feminist arguments rather than getting on with new work and charting new directions. All critical interventions confront this dilemma, but it seems particularly acute in IR, where ignorance of, and resistance to, feminist scholarship is considerable. In sum, … it is important to recognize the power of ideological, political and personal resistance to feminisms and how this affects what feminists – given few numbers, marginalized locations, and scant resources – are structurally able to produce. 

– V. Spike Peterson, A ‘Gendered Global Hierarchy’? in Fry & O’Hagan (eds), Contending Images of World Politics
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Phil Plait @philplait.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Goddammit. The contempt these people have for everything wondrous and good and *human* is so grotesque.
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Mona Eltahawy @monaeltahawy.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Every decade or so, we go through this. Waves & waves of women sharing their stories of sexual assault & harassment after an especially horrific case hits the headlines, such as the Cornell 7. And every decade or so, what changes besides collective retraumatisation? open.substack.com/pub/feminist...
open.substack.com
Essay: #IBeatMyAssaulter
On “Optimal Violence” and Trickle-Up Retribution
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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Anyway, this logic of having lunch & talking across difference is exactly how you get Ezra Douthglesias & co. agreeing that “birth tourism” is real, chumming with Rufo & Hanania on podcasts , headlining “Abundance” conferences with fascists, & normalizing the far right authoritarianism every day.
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Beth Andres-Beck @beth4ma.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
There is a good bit of work to do after a campaign is done. Closing out accounts, filing the paperwork. Recycling lawn signs into mushroom-themed larp shields.
A round larp shield in the process of being made. Two circles of corrugated plastic have been cut out of lawn signs that say “Bethany Andres-Beck for Congress: Rebooting Democracy”. One has been covered in brown duct tape. The other has a door handle on one side and a belt run through two holes on the other.A larp shield leans against a couch in a living room. It is now complete: there is black foam around the edge and yellow and black dots have been added that make it look like a cartoonish mushroom. 🍄‍🟫 Still leaning against the couch, the back of the shield is visible. Wood-grained tape radiates from the center like the gills of a mushroom, and a foam pad in the center is made to look like a mushroom stem.
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Alice Jane Grimm (she/her) @alice-j-grimm.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
so wild because it’s true if you only recruit from Ivy’s you’re missing like 98% of US talent and there’s a ton of legacy hacks at Ivy’s But if you are switching to high schoolers because they haven’t been tainted by anti-Western ideology, you are looking for inexperience + lack of options
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Robert Sansom @fossilrob.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
PhD opportunity: 🦠🪱☠️🪣🔬🏞️ Do you want to test hypotheses of how fossils form, figure out if lab experiments reflect the real world? Come and join our lab! www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
findaphd.com
[School of Natural Sciences PhD Scholarships] Bridging the taphonomic gap between the lab and the real world: Experimental Insights into Fossilization and Preservation at The University of Manchester ...
PhD Project - [School of Natural Sciences PhD Scholarships] Bridging the taphonomic gap between the lab and the real world: Experimental Insights into Fossilization and Preservation at The University ...
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Gareth Watkins @garethwatkins.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Since everyone started talking about Yudkowsky last week, I think we should talk about the other person who created contemporary AI discourse: Nick Land. This will be written for a general audience, and for something more substantial I'd recommend @eruditorumpress.com's Neoreaction: A Basilisk
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Gwen C. Katz @gwenckatz.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
And, for the coup de grace, two bills protecting fire survivors from predatory insurance companies, which he vetoed, deliberately, to punish fire survivors for rejecting his "reform" bill that was actually a huge payout to SCE for starting fires. calmatters.org/economy/2026...
calmatters.org
Newsom vetoes insurance-claim bills: Is it ‘petty’ politics?
California governor rejects legislation sponsored by LA fire victims, who had spoken out against his wildfire-liability effort.
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Gwen C. Katz @gwenckatz.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Things Gavin Newsom has vetoed this week: -A ban on secretly recording people with smart glasses -A ban on ICE agents working for the state government -A ban on websites selling your data -A bill giving native tribes more say over water rights -A bill protecting transgender healthcare providers
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Shooti @bambooshooti.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
#ResistanceRoots Today in history, 1904: A train filled with white, Catholic orphans pulls into Clifton, Ariz. Enraged that the children are being adopted by Mexican American families, a white mob abducts the children from their new homes at gunpoint and redistributes them to white families. /1
Some of the Irish Catholic orphans who arrived by train in Clifton, Ariz., in 1904. The Arizona Orphan Abduction of 1904 remains one of the most explosive and revealing chapters in the history of race relations and family law. The aftermath permanently altered the trajectory of child welfare. The Supreme Court ruling codified race as the most critical factor in child placement, cementing the doctrine that non-white parents had no legal right to raise a white child. The case normalized a practice in which social workers matched children to parents based on racial categories, a standard that lasted into the late 20th century. Eastern charities drastically scaled back sending children to western territories, shifting instead to localized, legally sterile foster systems. The children stolen in Arizona never returned to New York and never saw their Mexican mothers again. They grew up as white Protestants, their identities rewritten by a flashpoint of frontier racial panic.
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depths of wikipedia @depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
The Phantom of Heilbronn, also referred to as the Woman Without a Face, was a presumed female serial killer whose existence was inferred from DNA evidence found at 40 crime scenes across Austria, France and Germany from 1993 to 2009.

In March 2009, investigators concluded that the supposed serial killer did not exist, and the DNA belonged to a woman who worked at a factory that made the cotton swabs used for collecting DNA samples
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 01/10/2026
I recommend people read this to get a sense of the president's grave cognitive impairment. Trump is either unwilling or unable (or maybe both) to answer the questions he's actually asked, so he just rants and raves while the interviewers do their best to provide structure to his random brain firings
time.com
Read TIME’s ‘What Trump Has Built’ Interview Transcript
The U.S. President discussed the war in Iran, press freedom, AI, and more ahead of the midterm elections.
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🌈Dr. Frizzle @swilua.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Ok but “the rainforest is gay” is a helluva shitpost lmao
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Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
OMB has not repeatedly proposed a 55%+ cut to NSF because of 'woke' research—even if you eliminated all of the grants flagged in the Cruz report, you wouldn't scratch 10% of the budget. It is because NSF heavily funds universities.
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Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
This has been explicit all along and those who have pretended that it is not are fools or knaves.
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Brooke @brooklynmarie.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
It may take a long time, it may be very frustrating, but achieving multi ethnic democracy, justice, and true egalitarianism is not only possible and worth pursuing, its the only way we are going to survive the coming climate crisis.
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Val Syverson 🕷️ @vjpsyverson.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
they're exactly and identifiably the color of Spanish moss, too ❤️
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Kevin @reginageorgebush.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
had someone quite angry at this and frankly I don't know what you expect to achieve in politics if you can't grasp that "this person who sucks moved our way slightly due to pressure from our side" is good and a sign that you should keep pushing them
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Sammy Roth @sammyroth.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
BREAKING: Newsom signed a bunch of clean energy bills! Californians can now install balcony solar. Plus big wins for virtual power plants, reining in utility profits and converting farmland to solar. One loser: community solar. Really stings. Details: www.climatecoloredgoggles.com/p/newsom-cle...
climatecoloredgoggles.com
Breaking: Newsom green-lights balcony solar
The governor finished strong on clean energy — with one big exception.
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LorennaCleary.bsky.social @lorennacleary.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I don’t know how anyone can still try to justify this.
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Val Syverson 🕷️ @vjpsyverson.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Yeah, I mean, the UC grad student and postdoc unions are UAW and I don't really get the impression that the mismatch in... everything... is causing any actual structural problems with that union?
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