In a free country, we're free to praise the powers that be in whatever way we like so long as they also like it. Calling Charlie Kirk a great Christian? Great. Saying he valued the free exchange of ideas? Great. Quoting him? Terrible. Feel free to choose which of option one or two to start with.

I sense we should support academic independence and free respectful dialogue, despite threats (and because of threats). It will be very difficult to recover what we surrender. So, let’s not surrender. www.404media.co/union-warns-...

I just spoke to NYC Comptroller Brad Lander as he left police custody following his arrest at immigration court. Here’s what he said:

In my mind's eye I see the golden statue of Trump, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in a breathtaking gesture and I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the coin is being gifted, or held firmly in place; whether I am witnessing liberation or a more efficient blinding

ICE shot and killed a man in the Chicago suburbs last week. In the days since, we've seen a laundry list of escalating violent behavior from the feds: reckless driving, destroyed property, dawn raids, intimidation and threats against reporters, witnesses assaulted and threatened with pepper spray.

This will be handy for the next 3-??? years

I'm excited to see people express their hope that Susan Collins and other "moderates" will intervene to save us. I'm sure that this time it really, really, really will happen. Really. Post them hopes.

Your credence that Trump will be the last POTUS either because he serves a 3rd term or because there’s nothing identical to the USA by the end of his second?

Speaking of leaving the US, look, if you want to do a PhD and live in incredible city, think of Melbourne. More than happy to supervise. Yes, we're not in the rankings now, but it's the nicest place I've ever lived, Australia treats visa holders better than the US will, and the coffee.

I guess the nice thing about going back on the market and applying for jobs outside the US is that nobody would want to leave the US for work. Might be the only applicant. (If I were Oxford, I'd give me the job just for that hilarious tweet about me going to Oxford.)

FYI for anyone who would like to no longer be on the academia dot edu site 👇

We are coming up on the two year anniversary of an online meeting where I'd learn that my jobs and the jobs of my friends were going to be made redundant. It's easy to remember because it was my birthday. (And those who helped me find escape routes, I appreciate it. Genuinely.)

Exciting to see this ancient law, which baffled scholars for centuries, finally being used.

'Don't call the other side fascists' is a good norm. But it only makes sense against a normal background in which another good norm is respected by both sides: 'Don't go fascist - don't go near the stuff. Don't do it, or vote for it. Not even the trolling joking/not-joking stuff.'

Quick Q about disinformation. Is it disinformation if you're arguing for things that contradict the messages of propagandists to deter people from believing or paying attention to the propaganda (and not because you believe what's being argued for)?

I approve this win. It's always tough - impossible - to fairly divvy credit between the actor and the writer(s), who came up with something new and great for the actor to work with. Milchick is a great character, on paper. What makes him different? He's a minion, a company man.

Feeling bad that I didn’t assign Quine

This man will not be fired for calling for the murder of American citizens, yet multiple journalists/reporters/teachers lost their job for accurately reporting things Charlie Kirk actually said and stood for. But it’s the “violent left” that’s the problem

Extremist murders by ideology, 2013 to 2022. www.pbump.net/o/reassessin...

Someone shot up my kid's school today, and our governor is paying tribute to a guy who thought that is an acceptable price to pay for having the Second Amendment. Jared Polis has failed Colorado.

📽️ Kenneth Santizo captured ICE and FBI officers stopping a family on their way to church in the Boston suburbs. Agents broke the window and slammed Daniel Flores-Martinez to the ground while his wife and children sobbed: https://propub.li/3IbPftA

We don't have an in house philosopher of language (I know, I know). If a speaker is agnostic about whether p but states that p, we can't say that this is false (we can suppose p is true), but do we think that it's misleading? (I'd suppose not, but I'm not sure what prevailing opinion is)

Interesting to me how people on the right seem to think that people on our side are emotionally invested in Clinton. Clinton signed off on the execution of a mentally disabled prisoner to advance his political career, so if he ended up in prison with Trump somehow, I see this as a karmic win-win

Let's thank 6/9ths of SCOTUS for giving him the sense that he can carry out extrajudicial killings without fear of prosecution and not forget the help of our fellow philosophers who ran cover for the people responsible for gifting him immunity in official conduct.

What is fuckery? I'm getting it from it from "Our Flag Means Death" and it seems that theories of things like deceptive intent (inspired literally by the work of saints) is bad because it's missing concepts that I've picked up from (fictional) pirates. Why think about this like a saint not a pirate?

Can you use the word 'fuckery' in academic work in your theory of X? I think the quickest and most efficient way to correct the literature on X is to say that theorists about X aren't thinking enough about the power of fuckery.

One of my possibly favourite movies is showing next week at the iMax ... just need to find people to go.

The "President of peace" teaches that true peace involves random acts of violence

Horrific footage circulating of the National Socialist Network attacking the peaceful Camp Sovereignty in Melbourne. We've heard the main targets of their extreme violence were women.

I don't think Claude read Hare's The Limits of Kindness.

Is there any good empirical research on atheism or agnosticism in the Christian church? I've found this, but not much else yet. Interested in numbers from other sources. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

It's like the NY restaurant, but books. I can't believe there's an Oxford Handbook of Lying and I can't believe that ACU doesn't have access to it. My best guesses are (a) Oxford is a small town and unlikely to have an important press and (b) lying is seen as wrong in the Catholic tradition.

People make fun of AI “hallucinations,” but this is 100% accurate.

I want to say something snarky about that Guardian piece but isn't recirculating it rewarding the Guardian for content we don't like? Is there a way to recirculate it, but in a bad way?

I'm reading an old Rand report on the firehose of falsehood tactic. The authors are wondering why amplifying contradictory messages might be a good tactic for inducing specific false beliefs. Yeah, great question, but instead of looking for a really surprising psychological mechanism...

I'm always between disappointed and shocked that most people in the rooms I'm in dislike (on occasion), are indifferent to (more common), underrate (pretty common), or haven't heard of (also pretty common) MF DOOM.

I'm probably more interested in whether their behaviour is influenced by apparent "beliefs" that they suffer, but sympathetic to Nolen's take

The only way one can top the current buzzword-bonanza surrounding AI is to go Quantum AI or Neuro AI. Thus, my next grant shall tackle QUANTUM NEURO AI. You heard it here first.

How the Light Gets In apparently couldn't get the Oswald Mosley hologram to work so they got Curtis Yarvin to fill in. These people used to try to get our students to work for "experience" and wouldn't give them lodging or food.

Just wait til this motherf7cker learns about AI that would turn us all into paperclips

Bro, just talk with a therapist

this will never stop being my favourite @theonion.com article theonion.com/millions-of-...

The nice thing about Southerners treating "fixin' to" as equivalent to "intends to" is that there's no such thing as doing something fixin'ly. Maybe Southerners are less primed to expect some link between a state (fixin' to, intending to) and a doing that's modified adverbially. Xphi investigate plz

Bad enough trying to write up all the formal whatsits with subscripts for choosing lotteries, but now it's a dynamic choice problem and I'm working in Word.

Yes!! (But I guess I should read first answer later.)

Counterpoint

Ran out of my allowance of Claude time and have nobody to talk to now about philosophy 🥺

I've finished a draft of a paper on a new topic. Spies and stuff. Super excited. Basically, existing views of misinformation, malinformation, etc. knocking about in philosophy need revision. I revise. It definitely shouldn't be me, but I'm taking a crack.

Christ, sometimes you can sub too hard, you know?