Aparna Nair

@disabilitystor1

Historian, occasional anthropologist, working on disability, race and Empire; histories of public health. Eternal immigrant, writer, teacher. Indifferent cook. There will be many dogs on this feed. Luddite, yes, in the best way. Lives with epilepsy.

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Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· 26d

A single one of these M-series "robots" costs upwards of 95k. How much money does this school district have to waste?

M-Series

Modular Robot with Paneled Body
Our full-bodied modular robot that is stationary from the waist down, but has full upper body robotic capabilities.
The M Series robots have a wide range of upper body movements and the ability to be packaged in a suitcase for travel purposes.
The M Series robots have 39 degrees of freedom.
Available in male, female, or fully customized configurations.
Options: Seated, standing, or desktop configurations available (thighs-up). Pricing: Starting at $95K

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· 26d

"Full body capabilities"

Realbotix, formerly known as Tokens.com, rebranded after acquiring the hyperrealistic sex doll company RealDoll in 2024. The company recently debuted a new line of unsettlingly lifelike robot companions.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· 27d

Im increasingly realizing that simply stating the fact that I exist just enrages some people, let alone the fact that I might have something to say that is the result of my training and years of working on something. Not going to apologize for my expertise, so seethe more, fellas.

malAuDHDroit
‪@malaudhdroit.bsky.social‬

Follow

Account Muted
Infuriating how anti-AI crusaders conjure up "academia-approved" justifications for gatekeeping of AI assistive tools from disabled and neurodivergent folks.

It's malignant covert narcissism at its worst.

‪Aparna Nair‬
‪@disabilitystor1.bsky.social‬
· 2d
Before you come to tell me how AI is an access technology/we must not be critical of AI because disabled people use it, please consider:
Im disabled/neurodivergent myself.
I study/teach at the intersection of disability and technology, and in disability studies
Not pulling my critiques from thin air

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· 27d

yeah, Nigel, IN ALL OF MODERN TIMES, no one has suffered as much as you have as a "public figure and politician" No one but Nigel Farage.

Earlier in the week, in the course of his resignation statement - which stemmed from the £5m undeclared gift from a Thailand-based cryptocurrency billionaire - Mr Farage said: "I am the most physically and verbally attacked public figure or politician of modern times."

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· 28d

Im quite fascinated by the man insistent on educating me that the use of terra nullius as a concept to understand British settler colonizers' attitudes to Australia is "presentist" when Mabo vs Queensland was only settled in 1992. Fascinating. www.library.gov.au/learn/digita...

Overturning terra nullius
The concept of terra nullius, or land belonging to no-one, remained the legal principle on which British colonisation rested until 1992, when the High Court brought down its finding in the Mabo vs Queensland (No. 2) case. It ruled that the lands of the continent were not terra nullius at the time of settlement, just as Pascoe’s evidence suggests.

This sketch, which shows the land divisions of different family groups on Murray Island, formed part of the evidence in the Mabo case. The High Court ruled the Meriam people (from the Murray Islands, which the Meriam people call Mer) were 'entitled as against the whole world to possession, occupation, use and enjoyment of (most of) the lands of the Murray Islands'.

In recognising that native title had always existed, the Mabo ruling set a precedent in Australian law, which has now seen numerous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups regain rights over their traditional lands.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· 28d

or, maybe, just maybe, I have actually read some things written by experts in their fields, such as the historians who wrote that Australian Museum piece, or indeed, any of these, written by scholars/historians of Australia and of Indigenous rights/histories. But Im sure you know best.

Rethinking the Origins of Terra Nullius
MERETE BORCH
This article questions the accepted view of how and when land inhabited by
indigenous peoples came to be regarded as uninhabited or ownerless for legal purposes.
It suggests that until the nineteenth century the predominant view was that such land
was acquired through conquest or cession. This early legal interpretation was supported
by government policy which recognised indigenous title to the land. The incorporation of
the idea of terra nullius into British law in the nineteenth century seems to have been
significantly influenced by the establishment of New South Wales and the debate in and
about that colony.
ALTHOUGH THE DECISION in the Mabo case rejected the idea that the legal
concept of terra nullius could be applied to Australia as it was in 1788, the history
of how and when this concept came to be extended to land inhabited by hunters
and gatherers is still wrought with much misunderstanding.1
During the past
sixty years or so it has often been claimed that such land was always, or at least
from the early eighteenth century, seen as ownerless by the colonisers, thus
falling within the category of land which could be acquired by settlement. This
view has a long history among Australian jurists and historians; A.C. Castles, for
example, has argued that 'by the beginning of the eighteenth century' it had been
firmly established that 'a "settled' colony was a territory, which at the time of its
occupation by the British, was uninhabited or inhabited by a primitive people
whose laws and customs were considered inapplicable to a civilised rac

History Compass 5/2 (2007): 386–405, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00392.x
Traffick of Empire: Trade, Treaty and Terra
Nullius in Australia and North America,
1750–1800
Bruce Buchan*
Griffith University
Abstract
It will be argued in this article that British colonial authorities in Australia employed
a framework of concepts, ideas and assumptions then current in European thought
in their efforts to translate the difference of the Indigenous inhabitants to the terms
of European familiarity. This framework was also buttressed by a previous extensive
experience of colonial diplomacy and trade in North America. By drawing on these
intellectual and experiential sources, colonisers in Australia sought to represent the
Indigenous inhabitants as ‘savage’– lacking their own property rights or sovereignty.
Some historians in Australia have focussed most attention on the concepts of legal
thought – notably terra nullius– in seeking to explain the colonial dispossession of
Indigenous peoples. A more potent if long neglected source for this dispossession,
I argue, lies in the ways that Europeans thought about and practiced trade or
‘traffick’.

POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY, Vol. 12, No. 4, July 1993,299-318
Tmm ~~~~~~, Aboriginal sovereignty and land
rights in Australia
The debate continues
DAVID MERCER
Department of Geography and Environmental Science, Monasb Universi?y, Clayton,
Victoria, Austrakz 3 I 68
ABSTRACT. This paper presents an overview of recent developments in Australian
Aboriginal land rights’ claims and demands for indigenous self-determination,
The period under review, from the mid-1980s to the present, has been one of
continuous government on the part of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) at the
federal level. While initially strongly committed to the idea of national land
rights’ legislation, the Commonweal~ go~‘ernment has since backed away from
this approach in favour of one allowing the states a greater degree of individual
choice in this area. In contrast to the situation in Canada, the treaty idea, too, has
recently been shelved in favour of the formation of a Council for Aboriginal
Reconciliation. While all this has been happening at the administrative level the
extraordinary legai concept of terra nz&xs has been coming under mounting
pressure from many quarters. In June, 1992, the Australian High Court handed
down a landmark decision in a long-running indigenous land rights’ case (the
M&o case). While of enormous symbolic significance for the Aborigines, it is
unlikely that this case will result in a flood of similar land rights’ claims in the
future.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· 28d

this exhibit is fascinating, and so very necessary. And underlines why colonization and imperialism remain relevant analytical frameworks for today.

$Examining how colonial violence, dispossession, genocide, extractivism and environmental exploitation have been historically and contemporarily entangled, the exhibition seeks to show how these fractures remain open. Through spatial analysis, satellite imagery, environmental modelling, archival research, and digital reconstruction, Fractured Lifeworlds explores how ‘green energy’ projects are reproducing colonial continuities, exposing the tensions between ‘green transition’ narratives and unresolved colonial injustices.$

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· 28d

The desire to defend Australia before colonization as terra nullius endures in the 21st century, even if history does not provide evidence for these racist colonial fictions, but its fascinating how mainstream media continue to perpetuate them through inaction and action

It also undercuts a popular narrative holding that the British colonized a land whose few inhabitants quickly vanished after early colonists arrived. “The smallpox story was a way that the British could say that there were no more of us in those early times, that everybody was wiped out,” says molecular biologist Shane Ingrey, whose Indigenous ancestors, the Dharawal, lived around Sydney Harbor and might have been watching as the First Fleet landed. A co-author on both papers, Ingrey is the research manager for a Dharawal cultural organization called the Gujaga Foundation. “We want to undo the myth” of an empty continent, he says.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· 29d

Serrano is blind, and I wonder how much of his iniital pedagogy of offering take home midterms and exams was shaped by a need to make the classroom accessible. But either way, this story highlights how impossible universities, AI companies, and able-bodied students are making accessible classrooms..

Beyond the numbers, many of the answers, even when correct, felt slightly off. They had a “very convoluted style,” Serrano said. When he and his grad students ran the exam questions through ChatGPT, they received similar results.

A suspicious Serrano decided that he would make the final exam in-person; he would see if students did similarly well on it. He emailed his class, telling them, “I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong. That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.”

Eighteen students suddenly dropped the course, while nine others didn’t even attend the final exam. Of those 27 students, El País noted, “22 had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam.”

Among those who took the test, the average score plunged—from 96 all the way down to 48.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jul 12

Counterpoint: fuck off

Aparna, take productivity on the go with you
Get answers, analyze photos, and summarize threads. Download the free Microsoft 365 Copilot mobile app on iOS and Android.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jul 11

aside from everything else in the article, Im awe struck by the description of genocide through the euphemism of "retaliation" (the use of agency here is also interesting) Bravo, NYT

The article, published on Thursday with the headline “A Silent Moratorium,” explores how Israeli and Jewish authors have experienced harassment and professional challenges since the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s retaliation. In an early section, PEN America says that boycotts such as those employed by pro-Palestinian activists represent a threat to free expression rights for writers.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jul 11

For me, its the story of his novice biker ass joining a bunch of experienced cyclists on a 50 (?) mile weekend ride, cycling aggressively trying to "lead" the pack, and then crashing hard, and screaming in agony. His ego must be studied by science. For science.

island. "I had done no biking all summer." Ackman now admits. Sitll, he went out at a very fast clip, his hypercompetitive instincts kicking in. As he and Loeb approached Montauk, Loeb texted his friends, who rode out to meet them from the opposite direction. The etiquette would have been for Ackman and Loeb to slow down and greet the other riders, but Ackman just blew by at top speed. The others fell in behind, at first struggling to keep up with the alpha leader. But soon enough Ackman faltered--at Mile 32, Ackman recalls--and fell way behind the others. he was clearly "bonking" as they say in the cycling world, which is what happens when a rider is dehydrated and his energy stores are depleted. While everyone else rode back to Loeb's East Hampton mansion, one of Loeb's friends, David "Tiger" Williams, a respected cyclist and trader, painstakingly guided Ackman, who by then could barely pedal, and was letting out primal screams of pain from the cramps in his legs, back to Bridgehampton. "I was in unbelievable pain, " Ackman recalls. As the other riders noted, it was really rather ridiculous for him to have gone out so fast, trying to lead the pack, considering his lack of training. Why not acknowledge your limits and set a pace you could maintain? As one rider notes, "Ive never had an experience where someone has gone from being so aggressive on a bike to being so hopelessly unable even to turn the pedals....His mind wrote a check that his body couldn't cash."

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jul 10

yes, thats entirely possible, and I could have said that as a historian, too, but this strikes me as absolutely hilarious--both the idea that "no one had ever thought of this before" but also the confidence

The trouble for the Blue Zones began about as far from a Greek island as one can get: a Canberra library in the dead of winter. Saul Newman, then a PhD postdoctoral researcher working in plant science, had started spending his spare time digging, for fun, into the data around the oldest people who have ever lived.

But things weren't adding up, he tells the ABC, and he "discovered these shocking levels of problems in this data".

The more he researched, the more he started to wonder if poor record-keeping or pension fraud could be behind many of these claims of extreme longevity, including in the Blue Zones.

"Nobody before me seemed to have any qualms about the Blue Zones. Why did nobody notice this for 20 years?" Newman says.

"There are some extraordinary, unexplained issues."

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jul 5

"IQ" is also a eugenicist measure, aside from the fact that it does not measure what it claims to measure. See for example, the work of US Public Health official and eugenicist Howard A Knox. In this 1914 paper, he describes a series of "intelligence tests" to filter out "unfit immigrants. #DisHist

THE "IMBECILE" TEST.
A normal six-year-old child can fit all the cut-out blocks into their places inside of five
minutes, with riot more than six false moves. All immigrants suspected of feeblemindedness are asked to perform this and other similar tests; their exact degree of
mental deficiency can thus be rated. For instance, if a ten-year-old boy requires five
minutes to fit the pieces in this block, and makes half a dozen false moves, it indicates
that he has only the mentality of a six-year-old. (Figure 12.)

the attached photo shows two block puzzles featuring a series of shapes with removable pieces, and the pieces are stacked on top of the block on the left.

TESTS FOR MENTAL DEFECTS
How the Public Health Service Prevents Contamination of Our Racial Stock by
Turning Back Feeble-Minded Immigrants—General Characteristics Noted
and Progressive Series of Tests Applied to Determine Exact Mentality.
HOWARD A. KNOX,
Assistant Surgeon, United States Public Health Service, Ellis Island, N. Y.

THE "CASUIST" TEST.
Properly to fit into their places the blocks of this frame requires the intelligence of a normal
12-year-old child. He should be able to do it in five minutes, or less, without making any
mistakes that are not reasonable. At an older age, he should be able to do it in correspondingly less time. (Figure 14.)

The attached black and white image shows a wooden block puzzle. The shape of the block itself is uneven; and the puzzle pieces themselves are a combination of circle-thirds, half-circles, and other shapes.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jul 3

I say this as someone who is daily grappling with the social and psychological damage that Hindutva is wreaking on India under Modi, I dont think we can ignore the millions who voted for these men as not "of" these countries. They are. The US is all of those things. As is India.

Coach Finstock
‪@coachfinstock.bsky.social‬

Follow
Trump is not America. He's anti American. America is eating birria with some randos on folding chairs in the parking lot of the Food 4 Less watching the world cup on a flat screen wearing my knock off Mexico jersey.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jul 3

On one of my favourite artists, Horace Pippin (1888-1946), a disabled war veteran, whose diary is digitized by the Smithsonian, and includes sketches of his wartime experiences. www.metmuseum.org/perspectives...

IGURE 2: Horace Pippin, Mr. Prejudice, 1943. Oil on canvas, 18 x 14″. (Image courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art.)
At the top of the painting is a menacing white man with an axe above the “V.” The “V for victory” was a gesture and phrase coined by Winston Churchill during World War II that took root in the US, especially after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In the African American community, this became a double V, which represented victory in the military conflict abroad as well as the racial conflict at home. The axe held by this menacing white man has created a crack in the V, which divides not just it but the entire painting equally in two. To the left of the painting are African American symbols and to the right, the realities they faced due to racism. To the left of the painting is a black Statue of Liberty, which signifies the freedom and liberty that African Americans have been denied.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jul 2

Im going to say this: no one I know in history is in it for public acclaim (there are a few fame hounds, but most of us are here because we just like punishment and what we do). We are certainly sure we would lose any popularity contest with cartoonists, journalists, other popular history writers.

Of imaginary vignettes from their life based on the fact that you and others have been able to find about Charity and Sylvia’s lives.

I also want to let you know that your open letters are coming off as you being scared that her book might be more popular than yours, and it’s not a good look.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jul 1

yeah, bro, you should totally succeed

WeAbolitionists 🇺🇸 🛡️
@WeAbolitionists
Succession. It just takes one State. Others will follow. What’s the freaking point of this republic? Citizenship means absolutely nothing.
12:01 PM · Jun 30, 2026
·
30.7K
Views

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jul 1

its not making any sense to me, but Im sure the authors think it does

Daniel Kodsi
@dfkodsi
·
Mar 30
For The Philosophers’ Magazine, John Maier (
@johnmaier_
) and I have written the best and final diagnosis of the culture wars, explaining in unified terms what is wrong with all of the things you dislike and many more.

The problem, we explain, is exceptionalism, a tendency to throw rules and principles to the wind when presented with apparent exceptions. Exceptionalism is practiced by the exceptionalist, a tedious character, and related to overfitting, a widely recognized scientific pathology. It is manifest in cases ranging from gender ideology to Covid-19 maximalism.

I hope you’ll take some time to read the essay (link in the next tweet). Many of you follow me because of my previous writing with John on the viciousness of trans activism. But trans activism is just the most blatant example of exceptionalism, a much broader pathology of our culture.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jun 30

Bryan Johnson
@bryan_johnson
Nighttime erection data from my 19-year-old son,
@talmagejohnson_
, and me. His duration is two minutes longer than mine.

Raise children to stand tall, be firm, and be upright.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jun 30

If I had to read Bryan Johnson describe his gf's young and "near-perfect punani" you have to as well At this point, this is just a fetish, and a very public one.

Bryan Johnson
@bryan_johnson
"With a near-perfect punani and a face that’s aging in reverse, Kate Tolo is a billboard for longevity."

There is a hole in the universe waiting to be filled with our mission.

The opening line is humorous and poetic, underneath is the real issue of female health, relationships, love, and living the lives we care about.
Quote
New York Post
@nypost
·
Jun 25
30 going on 21: Bryan Johnson's girlfriend reveals extreme biohacking that made her skin age backwards https://trib.al/vxcynuv

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jun 30

Figures. The attempts to rehabilitate this human skidmark remain one of the weirdest things Ive seen self-described liberals undertake.

Richard Hanania
@RichardHanania
I've begun working with Mechanize, a company seeking to automate away all jobs, which is definitely something we should all support, but some people oppose because they don't understand economics.

They're hiring software engineers at a base pay of $300k -$400K, research engineers at $500K, lawyers ($400K), recruiters ($200K) and more. They also provide generous bonuses and equity.

Link to apply below.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jun 29

‘Hurty words’ is funny but the rest is just absolute bananas

Q: You have called Ed Miliband a villain, and compared him to the Nigerian dictatorship. Why do you hate him that much? And is that language appropriate?
Badenoch said she did not approve of language policing. "Let's stop worrying about hurty words and look at the people who are hurting in the country," she said.
She went on:
I do feel very strongly about this issue. Many people know that my childhood was spent in Nigeria. Nigeria is an oil producing country that never had any electricity. Why? Because it had bad policies from military dictatorships, people who did not care what the country wanted.
They imposed socialism on the country. They took over all of the oil production.
They had a national state oil producer and it failed.
Ed Miliband is actually doing the same thing. He wants more state control. He has terrible policies that are reducing our capacity, reducing our energy security.
So having lived under both, I think I'm uniquely placed to make that comparison. Yes, Ed Miliband is acting like the Nigerian military dictators who ruined a lot of that country's economic potential and made it so much poorer and in some cases bankrupted the country.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jun 28

It’s hard for me to know for sure, but I think I’ve actually adopted a fox spirit. He rarely wags his tail. He has mysterious conversations with apparently invisible things (borks into emptiness) He is mischievous. And he laughs at me.

A close up of a Japanese painting by artist Utagawa Hiroshige, titled New Years Eve Foxfire’s at the Changing Tree, Ōji. C.1857. The painting shows several lean, graceful, light blonde fox spirits gathering around a large enoki tree, each of the fox spirits bearing kitsunebi (foxfire) with them. The painting is beautiful, moody and lyrical. The background is dark blue, with stylized line work showing grass and landscape

A color photo of two dogs on a mattress: one is a blonde fox like dog with a serious face and behind him is a goofy smiling older dog with black and white dappled fur and chocolate brown eyes

A sleepy little fox like blonde dog with a delicate face and sharp ears lies with his face on the lap of the human.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jun 28

On 9/11, someone in my family, who fought in the first Gulf War, asked me bewildered: ‘why do they hate us (Americans) so much?’ Dunno, it has got to be all the ‘freedom.’

struggle? Between 1955, when Bernardine Dohrn was 13 years old, and 1977, when Dohrn and Ayers were expelled from the Weather Underground in a fit of unavoidable leftist infighting, the United States murdered roughly two million people in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It sprayed over 18,000,000 gallons of Agent Orange over Indochina, causing some 400,000 additional deaths and some 500,000 birth defects in children. In March 1968, the Mỹ Lai Massacre alone saw roughly 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians—mainly women, children, and the elderly—executed by American forces. The CIA’s

executed by American forces. The CIA’s Phoenix Program is conservatively credited with the assassination of over 20,000 people. In 1965 and ’66, the State Department provided kill lists to the Indonesian military, resulting in an anticommunist purge that produced some million bodies. In 1971, President Richard Nixon backed the Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh, selling arms to the perpetrators and blocking international action while mass rape and murder produced several million refugees and another million dead. The CIA overthrew the government of Chile, installing a dictator who killed around 3,000 dissidents and tortured thousands more; it coordinated with dictators in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil to assassinate and disappear tens of thousands of left-wing dissidents. Beyond

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jun 27

Part of my long photo series titled ‘But I Never Asked for a Sibling’

A color photo of two dogs on a mattress covered with a colorful cotton quilt. One dog is older and has black and white dappled fur and limpid chocolate brown eyes. The other is young and looks like a blonde fox, and has a grey harness around his neck. The younger dog is leaning back, his teeth showing in a very silly way, trying to reach the older dogs ears. The older dog is looking directly at the human, his face a combination of reproach and acceptance

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jun 26

www.earthisland.org/journal/inde...

Rashid is a sugarcane farmer in Jhang District, Punjab province, where temperatures regularly exceed 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) during peak summer months, transforming agricultural work into a form of biological endurance that few understand. Just last summer, the city of Jacobābād in Sindh province recorded 51°C — making it one of the hottest human-inhabited places on Earth and creating conditions that push human physiology to its absolute limits. When I first examined Rashid in my Lahore clinic in early 2022, I noticed something that didn’t fit the typical decay pattern I’d seen in rural patients across six years of dental practice. This wasn’t the gradual erosion from poor hygiene or untreated cavities that you’d expect in communities with limited access to healthcare. This was aggressive, systematic dissolution — as if teeth were being chemically attacked from the inside out, dissolved by forces entirely beyond individual control or comprehension.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jun 25

I call this short film: Regrets, A Story of Siblings.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jun 24

When I looked this author up, after reading this, the very first thing that came up was that she writes for Bari Weiss’ The Free Press and that she thinks Bluesky’s reaction to her silly arguments are in fact a validation of her arguments No, honey. It’s that you don’t seem to understand feminism.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1· Jun 23

very interesting I think