Sham Hamwitch

For example, I've had students ask me (in good faith) how it was possible for international medical bodies to report different counts of COVID-19 cases during the early years of the pandemic. And one of the answers is that you need to first define what you mean by a "COVID-19 case." Do you include self-reported incidences? Waste water data? Geo-fenced social media posts about people complaining about their coronavirus symptoms? Federal estimates? Hospital data? How do you compare countries/territories/substate entities with mandatory reporting mechanisms vs countries/territories/substate entities that rely only on voluntary self-reported cases? And what combination of these do you use? How you construct what you mean by "case" is going to impact the outcomes you report. These different counts of COVID-19 cases can all be true simultaneously, not because numbers are made up, but because they all come out of different methodologies that can be equally valid.

And this is true across all science, not just social science. Bill Clinton said it best lol: "it depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." This feels obvious when you look at scientific research that uses "skull measurements" as their object of analysis - the concept itself is white supremacist, regardless of how "sound" the research is. But even something as apparently self-evident as a COVID-19 case still requires a definition, and how you define your variables is necessarily going to impact how the research goes and what conclusions are drawn.

These definitions are always embedded in political & social assumptions. And again, this does not mean that science is all made up or nonsense or whatever. There is a widespread fetishism of "objective knowledge" that is itself ideological - the idea that knowledge can be divorced from all historical and political contexts, that you can scrub bias from research and simply report the facts. Valuable, well-supported, well-constructed scientific research is always embedded in these contexts. Not just as a result of researcher assumptions, but of the material context it exists in - what research resources are available, how & what research gets funded, the academy's relationship to the state & non-government bodies that both provide data and use that research to inform policy, the historical relationships universities often have with settler-colonialism and imperialism that give them access to "foreign" research subjects, etc etc etc.

If we learned anything from the leaks, they are always so ambitious with what they wanted to do, only for, what I presume, crunch time to fucking kill them and make them scrap a good amount of it.

Some wha traditional drawings I forgot to post here

qiflings band AU yayayayayayyy!!

The first photo is from 1956. It shows a Black woman watching members of the Ku Klux Klan (a terrorist, racist, far-right organization focused on white supremacy) walking along a sidewalk in Montgomery, Alabama (USA). I couldn't find the photo's author, but most sources state that it was taken in 1956.

The second photo shows members of the Patriot Front group (a white supremacist and nationalist group, formed in 2017, that openly advocates what they call "American Fascism") traveling on the subway during the 250th anniversary of the U.S. independence in Washington D.C., while a Black woman watches them. The photo is by photographer Cheney Orr, taken on July 4, 2026, 70 years after the first photo.