Let's torch the environment, world economy, and human creativity for instantly banal gimmicks. LLMs are terrible comics.

I think what this captures is why cigarettes were sublime, and the ambiguity that term implies between a kind of awe and awfulness. They were the death drive reified between tar-stained fingers.

In my Modern Latin America class today, we watched these clips of JFK introducing and selling the Alliance for Progress. It's really striking, the rhetorical difference between the last ten years and these speeches. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Co6...

New book from @ucpress.bsky.social: Together We Fight: Surviving Peru's Campaign of Coercive Sterilizations by Ñusta Carranza Ko www.ucpress.edu/books/togeth...

Back on the plane today, with this.

The bird drama is big at home here in San Diego these days. We've got a bunch of hummingbirds going through Top Gun training, and serious ongoing feud between the neighborhood hawks and the neighborhood crows. All in our backyard.

Worth remembering that just war theory wasn't always put to just purposes, shall we say? For example, in the Salamanca debates over the humanity/fate of Indigenous peoples, Ginés de Sepúlveda explicitly appealed to just war theory as justification for enslavement and domination of the Indies.

Worth remembering that just war theory wasn't always put to just purposes, shall we say? For example, in the Salamanca debates over the humanity/fate of Indigenous peoples, Ginés de Sepúlveda explicitly appealed to just war theory as justification for enslavement and domination of the Indies.

Beautiful, emotional win by Wout.

I will risk the unpopular opinion that student preference doesn’t matter. That is a “customer” framework. Students also often prefer not read paper syllabi or expend cognitive load on classes.

Government of the death drive, by the death drive, for the death drive.

Would someone please fire the political consultant who has convinced Dem comms people to respond to every shitty illegal thing Trump says or does with some version of "don't let the president distract you from....."

Oh, go fuck yourself. And then, when you're done, do it again. Sorry, go fuck yourself, Senator Reverend.

Government of the Todestrieb, for the Todestrieb, by the Todestrieb.

There has been no greater advertisement for the necessity of attaining nuclear weapons that the circumstances of the last 25 years. Any rational government would pursue them as insurance against aggression.

After hanging out with the normal people of Jena, Hegel said "The human being is this Night, this empty nothing which contains everything in its simplicity.... We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a a Night which turns terrifying." Imagine if he'd met JD Vance.

The last 15 years have been the best empirical evidence of the continued relevance of psychoanalysis. I swear, vulgar Marx and Freud explain easily 90% of the USA’s trajectory.

One of my favorite things about our house in San Diego is that it is on the evening/sunset route of all the crows who overnight in Mission Valley. Every evening there are just hundreds of crows flying low overhead as they cruise from Normal Heights/Univ. Heights/North Park/etc. back to the valley.

Every time my plane arrives at ATL, I like to pretend it’s a Nahuatl airport.

Every week a new participation trophy.

Let's get this paper done.

Not content with early modernity's drive to remake the world in Europe's own image? Now you can also find any society in the world contemporaneous with Europe's medieval period, and just call it medieval too!

‘The downside of adult offloading is people get less sharp. The downside of adolescents growing up delegating to AI is a generation that was never sharp to begin with. Protecting the space our children need to develop the foundational skills of thinking is now a non-negotiable.’

Will Meta learn the meta lesson from failing with the metaverse?

Sometimes when I read old work I've published I think, "damn, whoever wrote this is good." Other times, I think, "Goddamn, this is terrible, what was I thinking?" The good is always a dead author. The bad is always me.

Warm day in San Diego calls for the first rosé of the year.

A Clockwork Orange + Bedknobs and Broomsticks

There’s no such thing as impostor syndrome when everything is faking it and put on by definition

Do the higher ed administrators beating about degrees as all about job skills and using AI regret their PhDs in research disciplines? You know, now that their careers have nothing to do with being intellectuals?

So they invented a no-show job for Noem? Nothing corrupt here.

The future of developer-less tech companies will need a new term for users beyond Doctorow's enshittification. Maybe enfuckification?

I am old enough to remember when one of the controlling metaphors for software development was craft, the craftsman's journey to mastery. Now it's, how dare you suggest I be less productive by not letting machines do my work to get it out quicker faster yesterday?

Would it be too much to ask that the AI boosters take a minute to read (for themselves) Chapter 15 of Marx's Capital? Hell, just the first paragraph on John Stuart Mill?

Album #1 today: Cat Stevens, Greatest Hits (1975). Which reminds me that before streaming, if you couldn't afford a bunch of albums, you bought the Greatest Hits record and still experienced it as album-whole.

Kind of feels these days like if Marcuse was writing One Dimensional Man now, it’d be one dimension too many.

Who has two thumbs and found the baby in the office King Cake?

We invented computers hoping to help do brain things, then some scientists started to imagine the brain as a computer and now, because the brain is obviously a computer, we think we can make a computer that is a brain.

So much damage has been done that isn’t reversible, at least in the short to medium term.

Exactly. It’s not a historical claim, it’s an aspirational claim.

Conservatively, 80% or more of our social and governance problems could largely be fixed by a return to robust progressive taxation.

Right, because the options available are either the saturation of Flock cameras across cities or physical toll booths. It's not automatic license plate readers on toll roads that people are concerned with.

My experience of the last year is that no one is more surprised when an American Airlines flight shows up at a gate than the ground crews who is supposed to be there to meet it.

A great tragedy has occurred. I’ve boarded this plane with two books in tow, but nary a pen, pencil, or highlighter.

Siempre que veo a los estudiantes leyendo PDF en sus teléfonos… quiero gritar y me siento viejo 1000 años.

The moment that Amazon MGM paid $40M for the Melania movie was the moment its performance on opening week ceased to matter.

Lately, every time I read Benjamin's Theses and his language of the weak messianic obligation of the present to redeem the suffering in the past, I think of Harry Dean Stanton in Red Dawn. (The first PG-13 movie, which I saw at age 12 and thought I got away with something). AVENGE ME!

Oh, damn. RIP Catherine O'Hara.

What are the chances someone I. The White House bought Embraer stock right before this post went out?