Muhammad Velji
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myhamismad.bsky.social
Muhammad Velji
@myhamismad.bsky.social
3.4K followers 1.4K following 110 posts
Philosophy PhD, McGill
Teaching at Western University in London... not that London
Political philosophy, Decolonial feminism, starting to write a book on Abolition
https://muhammadvelji.com/
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myhamismad.bsky.social
Muhammad Velji @myhamismad.bsky.social · 28d
Are you interested in affordances? What about Iris Marion Young's "Throwing Like a Girl"? What about autonomy? I'm super happy to have this paper accepted by Ergo. It's sort of the centre piece in the new direction my work is headed
philpapers.org/rec/VELERA-2
Muhammad Velji, Extended Relational Autonomy: Affordances, the Meso-Level and the Internalist-Externalist Debate - PhilPapers
Catriona Mackenzie in a recent essay, Relational Equality and the Debate Between Externalists and Internalist Theories of Relational Autonomy (2022), takes a look back at an intractable debate within ...
philpapers.org
Reposted by Muhammad Velji
jlazarus.bsky.social
Congratulations to Ross Douthat for learning the material for week one of a political science PhD seminar. Too bad he didn’t stick around for the rest of the semester, when we learn all the ways the median voter theorem is wrong.
By Ross Douthat Opinion Columnist The most obvious thing in politics is often the hardest to admit: If you lose an election, the best thing that you can do to make sure you win the next one is to find a message that puts you closer to the median voter than you were the last time around.
November 1, 2025 at 12:36 PM
myhamismad.bsky.social
@maevemckeown.bsky.social does and as a person on the job market she's a real one for doing it "The current conditions in academia are preventing many people from achieving their full potential. I wrote this book in spite of not because of, the institutional frameworks in which I have been working."
October 29, 2025 at 5:23 PM
Reposted by Muhammad Velji
iansociologo.bsky.social
Du Bois basically did a version of this in his bibliography in Black Reconstruction
BIB L I OGRAPH Y STAN DARD - A N TI-NEGRO (These authors believe the Negro to be sub-human and congenitally un- fitted for citizenship and the suffrage.) Burgess, John W., Reconstruction and the Constitution, 1 866-1 876. Coulter, E. Merton, Civil War and Reconstruction in Kentucky. Davis, William W ., The Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida. Dunning, William A., Reconstruction, Political and Economic . Eckenrode, F. Hamilton, Political History of Virginia During Reconstruc· tion. Fertig, James Walter, The Secession and Reconstruction of Tennessee. Ficklen, John R., History of Reconstruction in Louisiana. Fleming, Walter F., Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama. --, Documentary History of Reconstruction, 1 906, 1907. Hamilton, Joseph G. de R., Reconstruction in North Carolina. Hollis, John Porter, The Early Period of Reconstruction in South Carolina. Lonn, Ella, Reconstruction in Louisiana after 1 868 . Ramsdell, Charles W., Reconstruction in Texas . Rhodes, James F., History of United States from the Compromise of 1 850. Scott, Eben G., Reconstruction During the Civil War. Staples, Thomas S ., Reconstruction in Arkansas . Studies in Southern History and Politics . Inscribed to William Archibald Dunning. Carpet-Baggers in the United States Senate. By C. Mildred Thompson. The Literary Movement for Secession. By Ulrich B. Phillips. Negro Suffrage in the South. By W. Roy Smith. Some Phases of Educational History in the South Since 1 865. By Wil- liam K. Boyd. Southern Legislation in Respect to Freedmen, 1 865- 1 866. By J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton. The Federal Enforcement Acts . By William Watson Davis. The New South, Economic and Social . By Holland Thompson. Grant's Southern Policy. By Edwin C. Woolley. Taylor, Richard, Destruction and Reconstruction. Thompson, Clara M., Reconstruction in Georgia, Economic, Social, Po- litical, l 805-1 872. Wooley, Edwin C., The Reconstruction of Georgia.
October 14, 2025 at 12:47 AM
myhamismad.bsky.social
Blue Jays win, Leafs win, over at a good time. Definitely a good night
October 29, 2025 at 3:11 AM
Reposted by Muhammad Velji
spavel.bsky.social
Look, I'm not saying I told you so, but I was right
EA's AI Game Development Tools Are Apparently So Bad That It's Costing More Money To Fix Their Mistakes
A new report suggests that EA's pivot to AI is just causing costly mistakes, and the developers hate it.
www.thegamer.com
October 25, 2025 at 2:35 AM
Reposted by Muhammad Velji
joolia.bsky.social
“An artificial intelligence system apparently mistook a high school student’s bag of Doritos for a firearm and called local police to tell them the pupil was armed.”
US student handcuffed after AI system apparently mistook bag of chips for firearm
Baltimore county high schools have gun detection system that alerts police if it sees what it deems suspicious
www.theguardian.com
October 24, 2025 at 12:58 PM
Reposted by Muhammad Velji
carlzimmer.com
Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory. www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...
Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory
An intensive international study was coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC
www.bbc.co.uk
October 23, 2025 at 5:17 PM
myhamismad.bsky.social
Are you interested in affordances? What about Iris Marion Young's "Throwing Like a Girl"? What about autonomy? I'm super happy to have this paper accepted by Ergo. It's sort of the centre piece in the new direction my work is headed
philpapers.org/rec/VELERA-2
Muhammad Velji, Extended Relational Autonomy: Affordances, the Meso-Level and the Internalist-Externalist Debate - PhilPapers
Catriona Mackenzie in a recent essay, Relational Equality and the Debate Between Externalists and Internalist Theories of Relational Autonomy (2022), takes a look back at an intractable debate within ...
philpapers.org
October 16, 2025 at 1:33 PM
myhamismad.bsky.social
Close to a perfect song. I pretty much put it on whenever it rains. RIP D'Angelo www.youtube.com/watch?v=clXS...
Spanish Joint
YouTube video by D'Angelo - Topic
www.youtube.com
October 14, 2025 at 4:42 PM
myhamismad.bsky.social
good kid maad city at 12, biggie doesn't break the top 10, illmatic at 5? The pitchfork top 100 rap albums list is a joke
October 14, 2025 at 1:18 PM
Reposted by Muhammad Velji
timbale.bsky.social
"People who attend church or identify with a Christian tradition are not systematically more (or less) nativist, authoritarian or populist than their secular counterparts. Conversely, people who hold nativist and authoritarian views are often also Islamophobes, and vice versa." 👏 @kai-arzheimer.com
Islamophobia in Western Europe is not driven by religiosity
Are Christians more likely to be Islamophobic than other citizens in Europe? New research finds European Islamophobia has no link to a person’s religiosity.
blogs.lse.ac.uk
October 10, 2025 at 2:11 PM
Reposted by Muhammad Velji
junoryleejournalism.com
David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)
SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems... SIMON: What? SHAPIRO: ...Or saying... SIMON: You imagine that? SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over. SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level. SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this. SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.
October 9, 2025 at 4:42 AM
myhamismad.bsky.social
I like how Southwestern is pretending in its commercials like paying for assigned seating is a good thing. Just the enshitiffication of everything sigh
October 7, 2025 at 1:07 AM
myhamismad.bsky.social
Every time my partner says she's off to the gym I always say, "Guym, what's a guym?" Reading it really doesn't do this joke justice. www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFrP...
October 1, 2025 at 9:03 PM
myhamismad.bsky.social
It feels like Cass Sunstein of all people should have seen coming how Chotiner "nudged" him into this embarrassing reaction to being asked why he's friends with Kissinger.
nycsouthpaw.bsky.social southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social · Sep 23
Isaac Chotiner interviews Cass Sunstein. www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...
= THE NEW YORKER ICO In terms of human rights, I've always found it a little bit puzzling, given what you write, and given who your wife is, that you two were so close to Henry Kissinger. Of all the pre-Trump political figures in America, he is the one I think of as in some ways the opposite of liberal, given his behavior toward the rest of the world. I'll tell you a story. I wrote a book a few years ago on Star Wars. We invited Dr. Kissinger to my Star Wars book party, and he said, "You wrote a book about Star Wars? Why'd you write a book about Star Wars?" He was puzzled and courteous, but really confused. And then he came to the book party, which was quite generous. He was a busy person. But, despite his busyness, he came to the book party. Yeah, and then I gave a talk on Star Wars, and he came up to me afterward and he said, "Oh, I see why you wrote a book on Star Wars. There's a lot there. It's, like, about families and it's about governments and freedom." The amount of curiosity and generosity that he showed was incomparable. I don't know anyone who showed that level of curiosity and generosity. And we really got into Star Wars. He just wanted to think about it. I know there are strong views about his career, and I'm hardly an expert on his career. But your wife is one of the great human-rights experts in the world. I asked you about him being anti-liberal, and your response was that he was very nice to you about your book. About Star Wars. It is certainly a touching story. But that's not totally an answer to the question. Yeah. Well, I don't know. What he would think of this book I'd love to know. But no second thoughts about being friends with him or anything? I feel generally very grateful for friendship, and he was, when I knew him, a person of immense kindness. Those who think of him as someone who was something horrible or worse, 1 don't know what to say about that. But you could have an opinion on it. You have an opinion on all kinds of things, right? Well, on him and his role in government, that's not something I've particularly studied, so I don't know. I know some people who think he was a horrible historic figure. They would say, "Would you be friends with Genghis Khan? Would you be friends with Stalin?" And I wouldn't be friends with Stalin, so I concede that. Well, the next time someone brings up a terrible anecdote about Cambodia or Vietnam, I will definitely drop the Star Wars story to show that people have two sides. Yeah. And I get those who think you shouldn't be friends with someone who did terrible things. I hear that. I can just say that he was, as a very large number of people would say, though many fewer would say it publicly, an extraordinarily generous friend. Professor, thank you so much for doing this. Great, thanks. If we go light on the Kissinger part, I wouldn't complain, because it could dwarf everything else. *
September 23, 2025 at 9:03 PM
Reposted by Muhammad Velji
petersterne.com
More from the Suffolk University poll: www.suffolk.edu/-/media/suff...

Do you support or oppose "defund the police"?
Support - 21%
Oppose - 74%

Would you support or oppose cutting some of the police budget and using the money for social services?
Support - 54%
Oppose - 41%
September 23, 2025 at 3:09 PM
Reposted by Muhammad Velji
transitcenter.bsky.social
“Why does transit seem to be in an endless emergency? Why is it so easy to assume that transit’s financial situation is hopeless? Because we have constructed our transportation funding streams to make transit’s costs visible, while the costs of car dependence are mostly concealed.”
September 20, 2025 at 12:49 PM
Reposted by Muhammad Velji
swilua.bsky.social
you don’t understand bro, if we didn’t lie, no one would buy our product 😩
Consider the implications if ChatGPT started saying "I don't know" to even 30% of queries - a conservative estimate based on the paper's analysis of factual uncertainty in training data. Users accustomed to receiving confident answers to virtually any question would likely abandon such systems rapidly.
September 16, 2025 at 3:31 PM
myhamismad.bsky.social
I've seen more jobs in Continental philosophy posted by the first week of Sept than all of last year... what's going on?? (I'm not complaining, more please!)
September 9, 2025 at 5:59 PM
myhamismad.bsky.social
I will never stop banging on about this proposal by Jennifer Whittig. Tenure should be based on your 4 best pieces of writing. This would focus on quality not quantity also help solve the journal crisis and publishing arms war for junior scholars that fuels the crisis.
dailynous.com/2015/12/31/a...
September 8, 2025 at 3:25 PM
Reposted by Muhammad Velji
jacobtlevy.bsky.social
Stephane Pallage, vocal advocate of the CAQ government gutting funding to other universities that attract international students: I never thought the face-eating leopards party...

www.lapresse.ca/actualites/e...
Limite du nombre d’étudiants étrangers | « On demande l’abolition des quotas », dit le recteur de l’UQAM
L’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) a enregistré une chute « dramatique » des demandes d’admission provenant de l’international cet automne. Elle demande l’abolition des quotas mis en place par l...
www.lapresse.ca
September 5, 2025 at 12:08 PM
myhamismad.bsky.social
"A law that changes every day is worse than no law at all." - Lon Fuller
September 3, 2025 at 9:48 PM
Reposted by Muhammad Velji
mattseybold.bsky.social
The bubble is popping. When we look back, I expect, we will say it has already popped.

open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...
August 22, 2025 at 4:04 PM
Reposted by Muhammad Velji
carnage4life.bsky.social
MIT’s NANDA initiative found that 95% of generative AI deployments fail after interviewing 150 execs, surveying 350 workers, and analyzing 300 projects. The real “productivity gains” seem to come from layoffs and squeezing more work from fewer people not AI.
MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing
There’s a stark difference in success rates between companies that purchase AI tools from vendors and those that build them internally.
fortune.com
August 20, 2025 at 4:52 AM