This was entirely about purging a trans instructor from the school and they succeeded. It was aided by a lot of dumb liberals taking it at face value arguing the minutia of grading rubrics while ignoring the obvious bad faith efforts behind this.

If we are banning cell phones for kids we need to be talking about banning chatbots for boomers www.persuasion.community/p/my-chatgpt...

So, El Fasher looks like one of the worst single event atrocities to happen this century so far, but the evidence has come in such a trickle it seems to only now be getting verified

The climate crisis is causing warm rain to fall in December, generating floods while setting up serious summer drought due to the lack of a mountain snowpack

I feel like you can't really say "war is inevitable" in response to the chants of a country's army when you're literally occupying the territory of that country

Trying to finish an overdue r&r but sidetracked by colleague contacting me for advice because they are dealing with the problem discussed in the article I need to r&r

This post (+ the one after it, but starting with this one because context is important) has gotten surprising amounts of attention from folks who think that students are necessarily lazy and malicious. >>

They're using the confinement box, one of the most horrific methods of CIA torture in the post-9/11 black sites, against migrants now. This is the direct result of the lack of consequences for the architects of the torture program. Either there will be criminal penalties for this or it will expand.

The RSF just attacked a kindergarten, killing at least 33 children in Sudan. Meanwhile, the Trump Admin. continues to sell arms to the UAE, who are aiding these atrocities. Imagine if Trump spent as much time trying to stop the killing, as he did getting the UAE to invest in his crypto coin.

In *sigh* AHA news www.jadaliyya.com/Details/4704...

“The math is brutal and the juxtaposition stark: millions for OpenAI while pink slips go out to longtime lecturers. The CSU isn’t investing in education—it’s outsourcing it, paying premium prices for a chatbot many students were already using for free.“ www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

I love how the media just decided to memory-hole the vast, administrator & state-directed, violent suppression of student, faculty, and staff speech about genocide because it simply does not fit with the ingrained narrative of higher education as a woke indoctrination factory.

Nearly a year after the Assad regime's fall, we spoke to some of the Syrians who have returned home over the past year. The vast majority of returnees are from neighbouring countries; many fewer are returning from Europe. www.thenationalnews.com/news/mena/20...

This is terrible. Ursinus College (where my partner works) spent last year planning a reorganization (they’re creating multidisciplinary “hubs”) only for its administration to announce layoffs this semester. I hope this isn’t in the cards for those working at Montclair State

Breaking from us: As the Trump administration searches for more space to detain immigrants, it is approaching Washington tribes to see if they will participate. Nisqually Indian Tribe is saying no. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

UPDATED: Washington state epidemiologist on first human infected with H5N5 bird flu strain, different from H5N1 that has been spreading widely: “This is a severely ill patient.” But officials say no change to public health response or guidance. My story. 1/3 www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

Texas A&M University System regents will vote Thursday to ban classes on “race” and “gender ideology.” It's the latest escalation in a statewide conservative push to rid universities of liberal leaning teaching. bit.ly/4nTHlDY

basically every 2024 truism is dead. Trump did not build a lasting multiracial coalition or turn young men into committed Republicans. You don’t need to cave on trans rights to win. The pundits have nothing left to tell you.

schadenfreude is rarely my thing but I will make an exception for the incoming Third Way meltdown

I saw a kindergartener do the 6-7 in Assyrian (“ishta showa”) complete with hand gestures. This is getting out of control

I have an essay on self-help, the "philosophy" industry, and human finitude in our new issue. As Dylan said of "Tangled Up In Blue," it took me ten years to live and two to write. I hope you enjoy. www.thedriftmag.com/how-i-learne...

The word “ceasefire”—the cry of protests two years ago, including ones I was part of—was vacated of all meaning once people who supported the genocide started to claim that they wanted one. And now this

The fact that this is how people are learning about the Assyrian Church of the East 💀 if you enjoyed this post you may be interested in my forthcoming article on Assyrians in Middle Eastern studies, stay tuned

“In the end, generative AI might be a blip in tech history, over-promising and under-delivering until finally the cash runs out. But it seems it’s arrived just in time to shove universities over a cliff edge they’d already walked themselves up to.” defector.com/higher-eds-r...

“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.”

Translation: After we built an addictive tool based on stolen data, exploited labor and plundering the environment, which pushes kids to commit suicides, we were like, why not cash in on "erotica"? After all, this is what building so-called AGI that "benefits humanity" looks like.

For more information about the Friday night massacre at CDC, I wrote up an analysis of who got terminated and what that means for public health. Grateful to @saveamericamvmt.bsky.social for supporting and amplifying. We are in really terrible trouble. rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/the-death-...

👇🏽

Chicago, Illinois, 2025: "They had the Black people in one van, and the immigrants in another van." "They was bringing the kids down, had them zip-tied to each other." "I kept asking, 'What is the morality?' One of them laughed. He said, 'Fuck them kids.'" abc7chicago.com/post/ice-chi...

I think the Trump admin assumed no one would try to find out who the people on the boats they blew up really were

♥️

well

The Israeli government continues to violate international law — this time, killing 31 journalists in a strike on Yemen in the second deadliest attack on the press ever recorded. The U.S. cannot keep funding and supplying weapons for this destruction. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

CAIRO (AP) — A Sudanese paramilitary group reportedly killed 43 civilians while praying inside a mosque early Friday in the besieged city of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, said a local medical group.

In light of this reporting, the story from a couple months ago about American contractors in Gaza celebrating whenever they shoot a starving aid seeker comes into focus

www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i... A vital interview that will serve as a testament against our fucked reality.

So how many fake names are there in this clown car? (Dartafiwijhak from Kharatuz is definitely fake, the one right above it looks fake too though I don’t get the joke)

this article quotes one of my UW colleagues as saying that he used ChatGPT to come up with his AI usage policy (it’s allowed in his classes, of course) www.chronicle.com/article/how-...

The Middle East Studies Association of North America has published a very helpful “know your rights” FAQ on how and when to interact, or not interact, with immigration or law enforcement officers on campus mesana.org/advocacy/tas...

they’re so close

I am just … livid that this is what children are doing. From Minnesota to Gaza. Shielding each other. Facing snipers. It is obscene.

Another example. Danyel Reiche is the purported author of ‘Qatar’s World Cup and the Challenge of Sports-Washing’ (Third World Quarterly, 44/2, 2023, 245-64) No such article exists (I checked the library catalog and with Danyel too). But if I google it, I get an AI summary of its probable content!

I'm peer reviewing a manuscript for a reputable publisher and came across fake references which must be AI-generated - including to an article attributed to me which sounds fascinating but which I never wrote.

Four journalists were killed by an Israeli strike on a Gaza hospital today, including Mariam Dagga, a freelancer with the @apnews.com. She has a 12-year-old son, who was evacuated from Gaza earlier in the war. She was a true hero, like all of our Palestinian colleagues in Gaza. tinyurl.com/3cn5c9vb

A massive attack on several humanities units (Arabic Studies, Judaic Studies, Holocaust Studies, Classics, Religion, German & Scandinavian, Russian/East European/Eurasian Studies) *and* tenure now unfolding at the University of Oregon (a blue state!). Closure of units and faculty layoffs threatened.

It's happened. An AI slop post in Arab American history is making the rounds, blending every immigration stereotype with a cloyingly implausible story about a fake Syrian peddler in Michigan. This is deeply fascinating and also troubling. AI can regurgitate these stereotypes endlessly. What to do?

‘Oxygen is Not for the Dead’: The Life and Legacy of Hiba Abu Nada During a book fair in Qatar, Hiba wrote, "My book has been to several book fairs, and I have not been to even one. How far away we are from the world in Gaza, and how many places are empty of us."