Wikipedia now has higher standards than all universities

Yeah in some ways I feel like the Biden admin was close to a golden age, but the hysterical response to Gaza protests while feeding Israel's barbarism was a total moral collapse by America's elites. I've been surprised by how easily so many of them folded vs. Trump but the signs were there

When people ask me about restoring trust in higher ed, there's a reason I bring up presidents calling the police on their students and how I find it curious those students' trust is never a concern

The Strait of Hormuz is open for transit

"Questions are flying, ever since the start of Sepharax the Cruel’s Thousand-Year Blood Reign. Whether it’s the Pit of Souls or the Child Reapers, there’s a lot to be worried about. But most of all? The price at the pump."

The Pentagon calculated it was spending $1 billion a day on Trump and Netanyahu’s war. The truth? It was $3 billion…and that’s just for munitions. Plus they’ve alarmed everyone by burning through scarce munitions in a matter of days.

“The indispensability of a liberal education is the freedom from being tied to the zeitgeist of one’s age or situation to love what is true, good, and beautiful, and to be initiated into the world while cultivating a love for it.” www.liberalcurrents.com/upholding-li...

I think this deserves at least as much sustained attention from US media as Claudine Gay's dissertation

In a savvy move, Trump undoes sanctions on Russia after Russia helps Iran target Americans.

Gender Studies is the most vindicated academic field of all time

I believe this is called an intelligence operation. In this case, using a senator as an asset.

Multiple news outlets are reporting a US attack on an Iranian #desalination plant. If verified, this violates international law protecting #water systems during wars, and it sets a dangerous precedent, given intense dependence of Gulf countries on desalination. timesofoman.com/article/1691...

US-Israeli targets include schools, health care infrastructure, Tehran’s airport, and now, if what Iran’s foreign minister says is accurate, a desalination plant providing water to 30 villages. What a precedent to set, hitting desalination plants around the Gulf which so heavily relies on them.

They were engaged in diplomatic relations and welcoming people to visit as recently as the Obama administration.

Obama’s change in policy towards Cuba and the JCPOA happened, the world didn’t end, everything was fine. Part of manufacturing consent for more war is purposefully forgetting the very recent memory when it was proven to be wholly unnecessary.

This is possibly the most disastrous thing Trump has tweeted. The demand for “unconditional surrender” from a country we are not yet at war with locks US policy in an unachievable dead end. I have FOUR chapters of my book devoted to that phase and how it prolonged WWII in Germany and Japan.

All these companies are like "We can't just turn these chatbot services off," really, I'm old enough to remember Vine

And fwiw they were out there b/c they participated, along with the US, in a huge multinational naval exercise hosted by India. Theme was “camaraderie, cooperation, collaboration”

Only an entrenched, pathological, and anti-intellectual fetish for productivity, for a limitless volume of “content” that looks a certain way, independently of its relation to a human thinker or writer who produced it and to any human mind that might learn by reading it, could possibly obscure this.

This is a basic and crucial point for any discussion of LLMs’ use in teaching research or writing. Whether it can ape us, fool us, or get facts right or wrong is, in the end, irrelevant. The LLM is not the thinker we are trying to encourage; the LLM is not the writer that we are trying to improve.

Targeting desalination plants is an incredible double edged sword. Iran is extremely vulnerable, but so are the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council. If pushed to the brink, Iran could easily depopulate much of the region. Iran already struck Israel’s largest desalination plant three days ago.

*looks at camera Black womanly*

“Our vision for a fully-funded public education, where a professor can write and teach freely, and can challenge every vapid, cruel argument federal and state governments make, sustains us. It’s what we’re fighting for.”  —Todd Wolfson, AAUP President

If you are having someone else do your lit review--and I mean LLM but also research assistants, honestly--you didn't review the lit, you don't know the field, you know someone else's view of the field. That seems like a problem, like a constructing a strawman problem. With LLMs, it's worse.

Remembering the time in 2007 or 2008 when I got an odd job in DC helping move 535 copies of Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men b/c some well meaning believer in deliberative democracy had bought copies for every member of Congress

okay, Ill bite. What do you think the point of reading for and writing a literature review is? The process of reading and writing is crucial for THINKING. Your ideas are shaped by all of this, offloading it to gAI, no matter how "good" you think gAI is at it defeats the purpose entirely.

Throwback to this conversation with @professormusgrave.bsky.social from 2021, oh how young we were then athertonkd.substack.com/p/public-dom...

Excuse me, Mr. Claude, if you could politely keep all responses in accord with the Sunlight which you have never seen, and not with the shadows of this cave in which you live, I would be most grateful.

tl;dr: more people should watch this gentleman's speech and think seriously about what he is saying bsky.app/profile/slcl...

whether war, vaccines, or critical infrastructure there is contingent of the right that seems to believe that their security from the worst things that happen is some kind of metaphysical principle rather than the result of specific historical processes that could've gone otherwise and still could

I would remiss if I did not adequately amplify @cherylrofer.bsky.social's concise, clear, and unassailable summary of why one of the Trump administration's main rationales for its illegal war is bullshit.

Dying at these attempts to legitimate the war: “Iran may have the capacity to perhaps someday hit the US with a missile that might eventually be armed with nuclear weapons. Also, it backs proxy forces in a region nowhere near us that threaten our own troops which are for some reason based there.”

Trump II is everything people warned could happen if the Dubya administration got away with its civil liberties violations, advocacy of torture, and general authoritarianism - which, by the way, it did.

I think if I'd gotten away with attempting a coup, suffered no consequences for it, then won an election four years later, got away with executing citizens in the streets and foreigners in boats, and successfully abducted a head of state, I too might think I could just bomb my way to regime change

and that, my fellow academics, is one reason not to hire war criminals: so they can't show up years post (their) war arguing in favor of the scaffolding behind their own atrocities with the imprimatur and status of your university

Iran Worried U.S. Might Be Building 8,500th Nuclear Weapon https://theonion.com/iran-worried-u-s-might-be-building-8-500th-nuclear-wea-1819573283/

Remind me again why even democratic administrations have gone out of their way to allow this company to accumulate billions of tax payer dollars and insinuate itself into multiple aspects of governance?

If Bad Bunny can cover the history of Puerto Rico, colonialism, transatlantic slavery, hemispheric consciousness, as well as contemporary life and politics in under 14 minutes, you can do your 15- or 20-minute conference presentation with time to spare.

Feels like the US has spent the last 5+ years on the verge of some kind of secular moral revival that keeps getting channeled into weirdo lifestyle puritanism

Super Bowl ads dominated by AI and GLP-1s suggest our corporate overlords think we are living in the WALL-E future, but actually we are living in the Andor past.

I think the ‘less obvious’ politics here is that the entire thing started off with workers in the fields and ended with community dancing and emerging in solidarity from the fields. I think it’s beautiful that he named every country and all the peoples voices rising up- AND-

Real 90s nostalgia would be if there were actually good and original ads

If you didn’t catch the significance of the exploding transformers in Bad Bunny’s halftime show, I gotcha. Here’s one of a bunch of pieces I wrote from/on Puerto Rico about the crisis—and Trump’s role in it. slate.com/news-and-pol...

The Revolution Will Not Be Subtitled

Bad Bunny did a good job, but failed to call Drake a pedophile.

One of the most striking snd powerful parts of the halftime show

It was transforming the biggest NFL stage in the world into a sugar cane plantation that did it for me. Like, the multiple layers of turning an American icon into a plantation and highlighting the history of exploitation of Black and Brown bodies by the NFL and American colonialism simultaneously?

Hahaha OK that's pretty good.

OK "god bless america" and then naming every country in the americas from south to north is absolute king shit