wemptronics
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User ID: 95
wemptronics
1d ago
Hah! I haven't gotten the impression he hates interacting with locals. He has a strong mind for independence, is somewhat guarded, but he must have higher openness than most to want to do what he does. His own personal hell is probably traveling to Hawaii or Prague with 3 other couples to bicker about the daily itinerary. Now that'd be fun.
Matt Lakeman is a blogger who reads books about a country, visits that country, and synthesizes this experience into a single article. He also has some type of crossover with SSC which might explain why his posts are memoir sized. The most recent post-Taliban Afghanistan travel post where he visits each provincial capital in Afghanistan I thought was fun. Fair warning, In This House Long Form Means Long Form. It is over 45,000 words, so clear your Sunday afternoon.
Lakeman writes throughout about the overwhelming positive attention, hospitality, and friendliness he received from local Afghans. He relays he wasn't bothered by most Taliban members he interacts with -- mostly they are bored security guards -- although notes at least one scary character. Norms of politeness, friendliness, generosity, and "sovereignty" are mentioned throughout the memoir. As I understand, he means sovereignty as shorthand for the likelihood of an individual of a culture to value a stranger's personal space, which Afghans most certainly do not. A real quagmire for nerdy travel bloggers! The positive attention he received was so great that Lakeman has dubbed Afghanistan the friendliest place on earth-- a title won from previous champ, Iraq.
Is this fun? Unsure, but I'm deleting all the other jibber jabber I wrote about it. General travel thread... and/or travel blog thread.
P.S. If you do read it consider evaluating this claim. "I think there is something to the idea that being – by Western standards – overly friendly and hospitable to strangers is indicative of a collectivistic and tribalistic mentality that in extremis leads to terrible conflict, often intranationally"
P.P.S. Bonus internet throwback Off-Road Trip Through the Democratic Republic of Congo series of forum posts circa 2010 (also long) This one is definitely fun.
"The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities" in The Atlantic has garnered a fair amount of attention. The article is an addition to the problems with academia pile, but I figure it is worth documenting.
Tyler Harper argues that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Mellon) is the last true giant grantmaker for the humanities. The problem for traditional humanities faculty, now beholden to this purported monopoly, is that Mellon announced it aimed to prioritize social justice over pure research. Mellon has made good on that 2020 promise, and this can be lazily verified by briefly scrolling Mellon's grant database.
Atlantic Philanthropies, a onetime stalwart, reduced its funding for the humanities in the 1990s. The Rockefeller Foundation began moving away from humanities funding in the 2000s. In 2022, the Ford Foundation announced plans to drastically reduce its higher-education funding in order to focus on racial-justice-movement building. With the broader ecosystem of humanities-focused philanthropies all but dried up, only one major private grant-maker is left standing.
In 2024, the federal money tap from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) appropriated $78 million dollars for competitive grants. That number is dwarfed by Mellon's $540 million dispensation that same year, and a historical look at NEH appropriation -- with only a portion allocated to grants -- on the NEH website demonstrates a shrinking interest the humanities. Compounding the problem of a shrinking pie is the growing fragmentation. Over the last 15 years core disciplines (English, history, philosophy) have seen significant decreases in enrollment and funding. Ethnic, gender, and cultural studies experienced something of a boom through the 2010s that led to fragmentation, and now, pain.
These have included grants to Portland State University to help its Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department become more “ungovernable,” creating “spaces where activism is encouraged” and “queer and feminist resistance” takes place; to Texas A&M at San Antonio for the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva (a group of academics and activists who “use Shakespeare to reimagine colonial histories and to envision socially just futures in La Frontera”); to Northwestern University for a project that explores how “Black dance practices” work to “instantiate Black freedom”; to Northeastern University for its Digital Transgender Archive to establish a new “lab” on the West Coast; and to UC Davis’s Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies to create a working group on “Trans Liberation in an Age of Fascism.”
Mellon’s newer Dissertation Innovation Fellowship focuses on “supporting scholars who can build a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable academy.” The guidelines list “thoughtful engagement with communities that are historically underrepresented in higher education” as one of the primary criteria used to evaluate the strength of an application; by my count, all 45 of the 2025 awardees work on issues of identity or social or environmental justice. The fellowship is explicitly “designed to intervene” before a student’s research direction is finalized, which means, in practice, that Mellon can steer students who are just beginning to settle on a dissertation topic toward its preferred areas of inquiry.
Tyler Harper has described himself as "a soft 'Marxist'" whose "politics slouch toward reformist social democracy, not revolutionary overhaul." You might expect that helps insulate him from criticism in the 10 Reasons Why Big Grant Money Strangled My Dissertation frame he constructed, but you'd be wrong. People aren't happy about this article.
On Bluesky, Roxane Gay retorts that Mellon is not "the only humanities funder", although this is not something I see in dispute in the article. Mellon did provide something like 65% of all competitive grant money for humanities research in 2024. That doesn't directly translate to a claim that most academic researchers are funded by Mellon grants. There are still many small(er) grants going to humanities research, such as ACLS or Getty. There might be expectations in these, but they are not the kinds of grants that place ideological demands on institutions to shape their output.
I can see no easy way to break down where Mellon grants focus their impact for this afternoon write-up. Mellon's 2024 annual report is narrative focused. If we compare it to the bastion of non-profit transparency that is Gates foundation we can see only one of these tells me straight up they focused $934 million dollars on Gender Equality. Mellon seems unconventionally opaque, but forgive me if I am mistaken. I've conjured up a best guess estimate of 40% unambiguously scholar-activist, 30% traditional boring research, and 30% traditional research smuggled through justice-like lens, but this is not a rigorous analysis.
An NYT comic guy, Sam Thielman, provides an example of a more common reply to the piece: "That thing about the Mellon Foundation in The Atlantic may be the worst piece of feature writing I’ve ever read in my life. Just shamefully undercooked on every level—reporting, rhetoric, framing. Just a total embarrassment". NYT comic guy may not be a meaningful voice on his own, but he reflects a kind of popular reaction from the left to this critique and others before it. On the flip side, we have fun anecdote from a Jonathon Fine who describes his Mellon fellowship interview as "the scariest and most antagonistic interview" he ever had.
I don't think there is anything unfair about a value for money transaction for grants and fellowships. If the problem is in the monopoly pushing social justice, then a few additional endowments from billionaires to compete would fix it, right? Well it's not always so easy as Lee Bass could tell you way back in '95:
Last week the king of all fund-raising foul-ups was unveiled when Yale University admitted that it was returning, at the donor’s request, a $20 million gift from Texas oil billionaire Lee M. Bass. Scrambling to put a spin on the fiasco, Yale claimed that giving back the money, intended to endow a new program in Western Civilization, was an act of courage in the face of unreasonable demands. Some critics of the administration claimed a Pyrrhic victory for multiculturalism. At heart, though, it was managerial ineptitude and a clash of egos that ruined the deal.
The saga began four years ago when then dean of Yale College, professor Donald Kagan, a vocal champion of the study of Western Civilization, helped inspire the $20 million donation from Bass, a 1979 graduate of Yale. Bass, whose family had given a total of $85 million to Yale by the early ’90s, agreed to fund seven new full professorships and four associate positions in Western Civ.
No, it is not the right time to file your critique against academy, they said-- yesterday and twenty years before. I am inclined to defend the pursuit of knowledge. Nonetheless, the nerds who merely want to spend their time dwelling in the archives to answer novel questions will stay there for as long as they can before they bother with silly things like power. Add it to the list of things robots will have to save.
wemptronics
3d ago
Isn't Canada in the midst of a gun buyback? Seems like a buyback should override any concern over details like what kind of weapon was used. But, the Canadian public may be more discerning than Americans on gun control. Here the type of weapon used is a tertiary consideration, at best. It's a gift to advocates if a shooter uses a scary gun, but none have let a shooting go to waste because it doesn't line up with the bill that's already in the chamber.
Republican president and Congress, foreign, Olympics taking up story time, not useful to Trump vs. Canada, and the shooter is not the favorite type. Could be a lots of these factors that influence coverage. I am most certain it has nothing to do with a newfound ethical backbone among journalists. Had the kid spray painted a swastika we'd hear about it. Another idea is there are no political interests positioned to feed a big gun control news cycle in the US, or a Canadian shooting may not be capable of setting that off. There's still time for stories of backlash and pouncing Republicans/Conservatives.
Seems like a fairly big story, anyway. CBC is willing to report this individual "started transitioning" four years ago in one of its last bullet points. I see /r/Canada issued an obligatory reminder to not spread hate or misinformation. It is important to be careful.
9 dead, 27 injured in a town of 2400. That's 1.5% of the population hit... incredibly grim.
wemptronics
6d ago
Veggie Tales is radical entertainment as far as Christian approved programming goes. Each episode has an abundance of musical numbers and relatable (to children) storytelling. That's pizazz... so long as we compare it to Davey and Goliath and not to the latest Incredibles feature.
I think we're being gracious by making sure no guest crosses the threshold without an offer of beverage. If I notice a confused looking tourist I'll try to make sure they're okay and know where to go. I feel good about myself when I do these things.
Here on the other side of the world dirt poor Afghans drop everything to treat a complete stranger to dinner, offer them a place to sleep, and make sure they have a ride to the other side of the country in the morning. They do all this even though they can't communicate with the stranger. It's a major reality check for any pride I have in so-called Southern hospitality. Maybe it's not a great way to organize society, but it's still impressive.
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