I was pondering differences between endonyms and exonyms, but then I started wondering where demonyms really, originally come from. I imagine it might come from the name of the leader of a group of people, that name becoming associated with that group as a whole and when people start mingling more it becomes a name associated with a whole people and so it dominos on, but if anybody has any good reads regarding it I'd be interested to check it out. I know that demonyms often come from place names but that also begs the question how those places got their names to begin with, or if its more often than not just a matter of "you call that place that hence we will call it that" à la Sahara Desert for example.

From apartheid to Gaza, university campuses remain crucial arenas for political change

The students were told their protest would cause trouble. Others argued they were overreacting; some called their actions inappropriate. Keep your head down, don’t draw attention, don’t get police involved.

It’s not hard to imagine the chatter from parents and professionals in the weeks and months before McGill University students succeeded in forcing the institution to fully divest from banks and corporations doing business with apartheid South Africa in 1985. Their protest was the culmination of a sustained, multi-year effort that saw dozens of students occupy university buildings and a company’s head office, where protesters were arrested and charged with “illegal occupation.” That this dissent faced considerable opposition, both from within McGill and without, is of secondary importance today. What matters is that the students won.

McGill’s anti-apartheid student protests, part of a wave of similar protests in Canada, have certain parallels with today’s campus occupations related to the siege of Gaza. The decision to take over a campus space might look like an impulsive act, but such occupations are typically an expression of frustration after other pressure tactics fail to produce meaningful action. The protests are not mass mobilizations—they involve, at most, a core cluster of students, whose numbers can vary. While the present occupation at McGill, which began in late April and now involves dozens of tents, has been described as a “tiny city,” this is more a reflection of the services provided—wooden walkways, stockpiles of donated supplies, a library—than sheer numbers. While encampments weren’t part of the anti-apartheid protests of the 1980s, just about everything else remains the same: a polarizing social justice issue, the occupation of “elite” spaces, and demands for divestiture. McGill students today aren’t really doing anything that different from what their parents’ generation did in decades past.

The broader public—even if their feelings are divided about calling Israel’s war on Gaza a genocide—seems to understand that. New polling from the Angus Reid Institute reveals that 81 percent of Canadians feel university campuses are fair game for protests. This support contrasts with the heavy-handed response by university administrators, politicians, and pundits clamouring for “law and order” after students occupied campuses across Canada in solidarity with the people of Palestine. Despite the fact that the McGill student protest has been completely peaceful, that the Quebec superior court twice rejected requests to dismantle the occupation, and that it was counter protesters who denied the public right of way and blocked traffic, Quebec premier François Legault called on police to clear the encampments. (This following an earlier request from the university to do just that.) Ontario premier Doug Ford essentially demanded the same. The premiers of Canada’s two largest provinces have witnessed the brutal repression of American students by police, university administrations, and anti-Palestinian counter protesters and apparently want the same to happen here. Alberta seems to be following the lead of the United States: the University of Calgary brought in police with shields and riot gear to forcibly remove protesters, and police cleared the encampment at the University of Alberta in the early morning hours.

That so many Canadians tacitly approve of protests on campus reveals an appreciation for the fundamental Charter rights to freedom of expression, conscience, peaceful assembly, and association. It also reflects an understanding that no better place exists to express those Charter rights than a university campus. The space is the literal marketplace of ideas—where students can question what’s happening in the world, imagine something better, and debate how that might be achieved.

The idea that the university would play this role stretches back well over sixty years. In the West, much of the middle class gained access to publicly funded university education in the post–Second World War period. It was a consequence of postwar prosperity and a promise made to the victors of the war. After the postwar generation gained wider access to higher education, they began forming social bonds that had been broken by, among other things, suburbanization, and this in turn would eventually lead to new civil rights efforts and new social movements as much as protests, demonstrations, sit-ins, and all manner of political organizing. In some respects, the university campus replaced the union halls or church basements of earlier generations. It almost demands the question: Are you sure you’re getting a proper university education if you haven’t seen or participated in a protest?

It is also worth considering that campus protest movements tend to be on the right side of history more often than not, even though that may not be apparent at the moment they happen. American students were right about Vietnam and civil rights in the 1960s, just as Canadian students were right about apartheid in the 1980s.

Consider not only the method of protest but also the goals. Here we find one of the few areas of genuine political innovation. We tell students to take an active role in their community and to become involved citizens. And while our society doesn’t explicitly tell students to limit their political involvement to party politics, quadrennial election cycles, and the ritual of voting, the fierce opposition to university encampments suggests otherwise. This is misguided: there shouldn’t be any caveats to political involvement in our society, amongst any demographic group. Students demanding their university divest from problematic companies is not only a form of peaceful protest but such civil disobedience constitutes one of the most effective tools of engaged activism we have. Quebec students have not only managed to keep tuition costs down over the course of several decades but also helped take down the very government that sought to suppress their protest in 2012. Liberal leader Jean Charest’s popularity plummeted while the striking students gained support from rival politicians.

Most politicians advocating police repression of the protests have no intrinsic interest in the cause one way or the other but are simply looking to exert power over something they cannot control. Violent crackdowns by police and the suppression of students’ fundamental Charter rights aren’t going to solve anything. In the US, MIT students reoccupied their encampment nearly as soon as the police had cleared it. The campus protest movement has now grown worldwide despite a heavy-handed police response. And if the violence that met the student-led protests of the baby boom era is any indication, repression tends to not only increase support for the students’ cause but may have consequences reaching far beyond the campus. The Kent State Massacre, whose fifty-fourth anniversary was marked just a short while ago, not only revived public opposition to the war in Vietnam but also further provoked the single largest student strike in American history. The long-term political fallout of the 2012 Quebec student protests included a major restructuring of the province’s political organization, the collapse of the Quebec Liberal Party, and the ascension of former student leaders in the political mainstream.

As long as our society wants its younger generations to get a higher education, think for themselves, challenge their assumptions, and broaden their horizons, we have to accept that this will likely result in students questioning the status quo and challenging the establishment, particularly when it comes to the historically marginalized and oppressed. Universities routinely tell their students to be the change they want to see in the world. The alternative to this isn’t students “living peacefully,” as Ford demands. It’s elementary school.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/32338762

> …or at least only non-romantic love. I’m learning about history of western philosophy and understand that Plato’s Symposium describes his theory on love and that a person initially desires physical love, but then eventually grows to love things that feel fulfilling, and eventually love the ideal form of beauty itself. It seems like more of a spectrum/progression that includes romantic/physical love, not abstaining from it. “Platonic love” would seem to include physical love and doesn’t seem consistent with the dictionary definition of “friendship love.” > > Any thoughts on that?

> For a few weeks in the Spring of 2024, readers took turns tracing the previous person’s drawing to make a flipbook-style animation. The result was 22,454 drawings.

Open-earedness refers to an individual's desire and ability to listen and consider different sounds and musical styling. Research has shown that adolescents exhibit higher levels of open-earedness, with a greater willingness to explore and appreciate diverse musical genres. During these years of sonic exploration, music gets wrapped up in the emotion and identity formation of youth; as a result, the songs of our childhood prove wildly influential over our lifelong music tastes.

> Six years ago I celebrated my 68th birthday by gifting my children 68 bits of advice I wished I had gotten when I was their age. Every birthday after that I added more bits of advice for them until I had a whole book of bits. That book was published a year ago as Excellent Advice for Living, which many people tell me they read very slowly, just one bit per day. In a few days I will turn 73, so again on my birthday, I offer an additional set of 101 bits of advice I wished I had known earlier. None of these appear in the book; they are all new. If you enjoy these, or find they resonate with your own experience, there are 460 more bits in my Excellent Advice book, all neatly bound between hard covers, in a handy size, ready to gift to a person younger than yourself. – KK

> The other day I was complaining to a friend how I've been spinning my wheels lately, having trouble finding any projects or gigs I could work on. > > He came back with a quick, short, smart response: > > Who cares? Just make weird shit.

> KPMG surveyed U.S. CEOs of companies turning over at least $500 million and found that just one-third expect a full return to the office in the next three years. > > So it's official: Leaders who believe that office workers will be back at their desks five days a week in the near future are now in the small minority. > > It's a complete 360 on their stance last year, when 62% of CEOs surveyed predicted that working from home would end by 2026. > > At the time, 90% of CEOs even admitted that they were so steadfast on summoning staff back to their vertical towers that they were sweetening the pot with salary raises, promotions, and favorable assignments to those who showed face more. > > But now, bosses are backtracking: Nearly half of CEOs have concluded that the future of work is hybrid—up from 34% last year.

> [...]Seabound found BLOQS, a 32,000-square-foot converted warehouse in the north London suburb of Enfield, fully kitted out with £1.3 million (around $1.7 million) worth of light industrial equipment for all kinds of manufacturing, including wood processing and metal fabrication, laser cutting and engraving, 3D printing, sewing machines, spray painting and more. If that didn’t already make the case for moving in, the flexible membership structure then quickly sealed the deal for Fredriksson and Wen. > > The initial sign-up is free, with members simply paying a daily rate for the machinery they need to use, as well as for flexible office and storage space if they need it. Raw materials are available to purchase too, price-matched with local suppliers. And if members need to learn to use a particular piece of equipment, they can pay for training. An added bonus is the on-site restaurant, where an award-winning chef serves a seasonable and affordable Mediterranean menu. Yet the biggest draw for the Seabound team was the community of 1,000 other like-minded members.

>Just outside St. Louis, in the inner-ring suburb of University City, there’s a little neighborhood often called the region’s unofficial Chinatown. Growing up in the area, it was one of my favorite places to be; reflective of the city’s diversity and vitality, it opened up the world to me. This past December, when I went home for the holidays, I discovered that what was once a beloved strip of immigrant- and minority-owned businesses there — a Korean grocery, a pho shop, a Jamaican joint with vegetarian options, a Black-owned barber shop — had been bulldozed and replaced by a double-lane drive-through Chick-fil-A.

>“Drive-throughs have been around a long time,” Charles Marohn, a former traffic engineer and well-known critic of America’s car-dependent urban planning, told me. Today, he said, “they’re becoming bigger and more obnoxious.”

>That trend conflicts with a key objective that US cities are increasingly prioritizing: creating a safer, cleaner, walkable, livable urban environment that’s less dependent on cars. St. Louis and its suburbs, for example, in recent years have been building out bike lanes and walking and biking paths, including a segment that runs right up to the site of the new fried chicken and Chipotle drive-throughs. Where, exactly, are the people walking or biking that path supposed to go when they arrive at a development designed to be navigated only by car?

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This was a really good article that I wanted to share.

> SCCF is one of four Tennessee prisons currently operated by for-profit contractor CoreCivic, the second-largest private prison operator in the country. For every person it incarcerates, the company makes around $90 per day. > > Australia spends the equivalent of over $5 on food per prisoner per day. Canada spends over $6. In the US, especially in the South, many prisons spend under $2. And increasingly outsource operations to private contractors promising to find ways to keep us alive for less. CoreCivic did not respond to Filter‘s inquiry about nutrition standards or food expenditures.

archive link: https://archive.ph/Mn7Ui

Ötzi the Iceman's many tattoos were made by "hand-poking" — a manual version of the tattooing technique usually used today — and not by cutting his skin as some researchers have suggested, according to a new study.

Ötzi died in Europe's Alps about 5,300 years ago, and his body remained mummified there for thousands of years until tourists discovered it in 1991 on a mountain pass near the border of Italy and Austria. Studies have since revealed many aspects of his life, including the tools and weapons he carried, his clothes and his last meal.

There have also been studies of Ötzi's 61 tattoos; but while it's often reported they were made by cutting the skin and rubbing soot into the incision, that doesn't seem to have been the case, according to study first author Aaron Deter-Wolf, an expert on ancient tattooing who works for the state of Tennessee's Department of Environment and Conservation.

Instead, "within reasonable doubt they are hand-poked, rather than being incised or being done in any other style," Deter-Wolf told Live Science.

> The cost of specialized farm equipment is one of the biggest barriers for small-scale and beginning farmers. Cooperatives are springing up around the nation to help bridge the gap.

Linguists studying the Southern American Dialect reckon that it ain't what it used to be, y'all. I do declayuh!

Otherwords is a PBS web series on Storied that digs deep into this quintessential human trait of language and finds the fascinating, thought-provoking, and funny stories behind the words and sounds we take for granted. Incorporating the fields of biology, history, cultural studies, literature, and more, linguistics has something for everyone and offers a unique perspective on what it means to be human.

see also: list of rejected female names and list of rejected male names

> One of the more distressing qualities of humanity, in my mind, is the emphasis we collectively put on “efficiency.”¹ It saturates our professional existence. It haunts our socioeconomic barometer. And it drives our current approach to both creating and appreciating art. It’s insidious, the inordinate amount of power “efficiency” holds over our daily lives, without even drawing much attention to itself, creeping up in unanticipated ways: the life hacks bombarding us on TikTok; the large language models we use to reduce the amount of effort we need to put into writing an email to our colleague; the Trim Silence feature on our podcast player of choice. > > [...]I will admit that this is perhaps a weird hill to die on, but I truly believe that Trim Silence is an abomination that should be fully eradicated from existence, as it not only spits in the face of the people who take the time and effort to produce their shows, but also, more broadly, encourages a way of interfacing with art that can only be described as gluttonous.

> Many perfumes and fragrances are unsustainably extracted from plants and animals or made from synthetic chemicals. I wanted to find another way.