[time machine taking me back to the “is it fascism or are you hysterical?” debates circa 2017-21]: What if they want to hang the opposition?

“Be ‘dialectical’ just for one minute: imagine a world where there is no point in teaching people things, the process of education is replaced by The Answer…Come on. Aren’t you imagining Hell?”

I’ve discovered a few of my undergrads are independently reading my books on their own time. Feels like I’m doing something right

Malm day in Ethics class. What about those pipelines? What do we think of the suffragettes arson campaign? etc. It’s striking how reading on resistance, even nonviolent resistance, feels like uncertain territory for academic freedom these days!

Returning to this strange little guy, remembering when my boy was a puppy chewing up my books

I’d like to think society would put an immediate stop to AI chatbots if you saw what professors in reading/writing-heavy disciplines are seeing on plummeting literacy and changes in cognition. But I’m not sure it would make a difference

Professors will say “we need to teach students how to use AI tools ethically.” Buddy you’re 20-50 years older you aren’t going to teach them how to use a computer

Yes! Sofia's superb essay on it is here www.break-down.org/the-sunlight...

fantastic interview on the history, state of research, and problems with geoengineering. Very much in line with my writing on SRM

My first 3 books are 50% off + free shipping until Nov. 30. I recommend the history of how evangelicalism went fascist. Promo code CONFSHIP and for $10 you learn how a racist sex cult, against all odds, keeps handing all power to the stupidest predator in America wipfandstock.com/978153266846...

Tired: the ruling class is a bunch of stupid pedos Wired: reductive moralization of bourgeois avarice as cognitive deficiency or sexual sadism obscures capitalism’s structural incentives Inspired: the ruling class is a bunch of stupid pedos

1) Fossil fuel Still no peak. Emissions are projected to increase by 1.1% in 2025, reaching 38.1 GtCO2. An all time high.

📢Global Carbon Budget 2025📢 Fossil CO2 emissions continue to rise in 2025 while the terrestrial carbon sink recovers to pre-El Niño strength. The key findings are covered in two reports this year: * ESSDD (preprint): essd.copernicus.org/preprints/es... * Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/

I still believe that if trump were to just come out and say he had assaulted underage girls, it wouldn’t be that big a deal for maga world.

Ever since finishing my PhD 9 years ago, I wake up at 5am and read for an hour. Not to continue learning, not to build a rich interior life, but so I can post about it

I was also thinking of Kate Aronoff’s closing argument in Overheated for better sex, that socialist measures we need on climate change lead to, especially for women, security and safety nets to leave bad relationships, experience more independence. Property hierarchies work against that liberation

Liberalism is a center position on the political spectrum, answering yes on the political question (whether people ought to have formal equal legal rights) but no on social questions (should people be actually equal? right to food/housing/healthcare). But when I explain it to students I feel insane

“I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time.” aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

In central MD alone, ICE is rapidly contracting: - AI skip tracing - AI face recognition - Cell tower spoofing vehicles - Signal exploitation equipment - 6 months of MREs for detainees - Detainee transport vans - Device cracking & data exploit firms

It’s an insane level of racism packed into your society when people simply “see things differently” re: Should the secret police torment toddlers?

In Grand Rapids we only had one item on the ballot and it was raising the millage. Happy to say two-thirds voted more money for schools

autism discourse in higher ed is always like “how do we handle these weirdos?” and never “wow the detail obsessed kid with empathy overload who communicates too directly keeps doing the best work”

It’s funny that a third of guys signing up to be racism police can’t do 15 push-ups or run 1.5 miles, even with a $50,000 signing bonus dangling in front of them!

Pumpkins from me and my five year old, plus my nervous dog

I listened to this on the commute today. Highly recommend. Brannen and Wyman both influenced my chapter in Future of Denial on the history of Earth told through CO₂ levels

There’s something fittingly American in letting a tacky moron bulldoze a building, source of untold global misery and horror, for a party room where all the world’s angels of death must ingest bad food and perform obeisance

They have more power than they’ve ever had, yet 64% of white evangelicals say religion is losing influence. A bit more evidence for cynicism and lying as positive virtues in that subculture

Whether or not they actually start drone striking American buildings in blue states, you know they are absolutely thinking, planning, fantasizing about it

“Most of the spending was on guns and armor, but there have also been significant purchases of chemical weapons and ‘guided missile warheads and explosive components.’” popular.info/p/ice-boosts...

We’re not a democracy—we’re a theocracy!

It would be good if the ceasefire involved cessation of fire from the side raining down fire

Our enemies are pathetic and whiny. Empty morals, empty minds. No higher purpose. Their kids cut contact because they’re spiteful, often abusive, lacking normal empathy. Their friends drift away wondering what happened to them. Repressed, isolated, insecure morons lashing out. We’ll win

Thank you, & thanks too for the article. I agree with Malm's view that we need to bring psychoanalytic ideas into conversation with a more material analysis if we're to grasp the dysfunctional absurdity of the current moment @taddelay.bsky.social has an interesting book that takes this approach

A so-called precept in the practice of news coverage is that “if it bleeds, it leads.” Well, apparently, if a Palestinian is bleeding, this isn’t true.

In this climate I’m so lucky to have the good admin I have now. My interests are a grab bag of things the bad guys hate (marxism, climate change, zionism, plus teaching on gender and sexuality). I haven’t always had that support. A prior school threatened legal action if we published books

Bloomberg reports this compact is being extended now to all colleges, and the first threat is withholding student loans. Multiple points clearly result in desegregating higher ed. I’ll underscore again that it bans professors from talking about “societal or political events”

I’ve wondered when they’d try shutting off student loan access to bully colleges into suppressing academic freedom. The new higher ed compact threatens this unless all college employees “abstain from actions or speech relating to societal or political events” No more talking about real things

In the US it’s still controversial to say fascism is a right-wing thing, or to say fascism is a legible result of capitalist production. I have more faith in a guy in a dinosaur costume dancing in front of the secret racism police in Portland than a guy “working with my colleagues across the aisle”

Walter Benjamin said politicians opposing fascism betray us by 1) a stubborn faith in progress, 2) confidence in mass resistance, and 3) servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus.

Simple enough to send troops in red states to provoke blue states. But if they start hitting with drones the real question for court’s Originalists is whether operators must be in North Dakota or some base in overseas. Hard to say!

I’m really into @peterbrannen.bsky.social’s new book. If you’ve most read anything I’ve written in recent years, it’s indebted to his prior book The Ends of the World

Told my 5 yr old I was teaching political philosophy today. “What’s that?” It’s about whether we should be fair to people or unfair. “I think we should be fair to everyone,” she said

Today’s class is in The Republic where democracy slides into tyranny when a shameless idler and liar abuses the courts to persecute enemies, makes big promises about how rich everyone will be while impoverishing all, and stirs up war to consolidate power. It’s weird how things used to be back then!

I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win

Isn’t the AOC photo when she was sad at seeing a concentration camp full of kids? Just like Satan

A strange dynamic of teaching is the back and forth between wondering if students are hearing any point you drive home and, OTOH, frequent realizations that students remember some obscure offhand comment and treat it as the unquestionably true Word of God

It looks like Colston was among those abducted by Israel yesterday. Ordinary people are capable of such bravery. I don’t know what to say

Before the February revolution in 1848, a woman in Paris said she knew revolution was approaching because the people were singing. She saw a worker run by with five loaves of bread. Enough for three days, he explained. “We always do these things in three days” I can’t imagine such optimism.

I’m no historian but you see three common results when troops are ordered into cities: 1. refuse to fire on citizens, exposes loss of control, may lead to monarch’s abdication 2. They do fire, groundswell of opposition, monarch abdicates or is deposed 3. There’s a massacre, new unbearable normal

Even fascists now mimic the weird speaking cadence and stilted hand gestures from a TED talk or mega church sermon