He’s so stupid the “knave or fool?” question goes nowhere. You think of a fool as having actual beliefs, if idiotic, but he doesn’t rise to that level with any convictions at all. Each problem is a hoax, or it kindof depends, or it’s the greatest, or it doesn’t matter, or I forgot, whatever

As an educator I’d like to live in a world were talking about facts and things that are actually happening isn’t controversial or career-ending for teachers. We don’t live in that world though so we’ll have to keep talking about facts and things that are actually happening

In class, on Socrates’ approval of leaving the unhealthy to die so we don’t prolong suffering or produce kids with similar constitutions, I brought up this article on whether a just society would cure or de-cure cancer. Something people disagree on. It gets tense talking about stuff that’s happening

“Is this actually God I am talking to?” Man I love this stuff. We are about to see levels of narcissistic delusion we can’t imagine www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/u...

After days of people losing jobs and facing threats for not feeling the correct emotions, I’m thinking again about Burke’s “preventative murder” and confiscation when commoners don’t display fealty

We’re teaching Aristotle today. Eudaimonia they’re calling it. Loser wrote Nicomachean Ethics for his WOKE son but nobody reads it. He said virtue is the greatest. We like vice. We’re doing vice like you’ve never seen it before and you’ll love the vice, believe me

Every day I think of that study in the Lancet over the summer that said Trump’s cuts to aid will kill 14 million people over 5 years. How many people in history have eliminated life at that pace? But it’s totally faded and doesn’t count as political violence. We are so saturated in casual violence

Not sure what to make of it but it feels like Kirk is treated as a bigger deal than the shooting at Trump’s rally in Butler. I went to his next rally in Grand Rapids and coverage was already fading. I remember him workshopping a line: “they say I hate democracy—I took a bullet for democracy!”

There’s too much time in the day when you’re waiting on big news

You can’t even teach the Western canon they say they love without constantly questioning gender and sexuality. I say this all the time but reading Plato requires you to think about stuff the right portrays as some brand new 2020s gender indoctrination. They just don’t want to read or think

I know it’s meant to trigger but the memes always confess again what “he says what people are secretly thinking” means. It’s not just racism they share. It’s his relentless confusion, a disorganized mind, tackiness, a desire to be a belligerent asshole to everyone around you

Half the government is dedicated to killing people, mostly civilians, everywhere in the world. It’s always been dishonest to call it dept of defense. If fascists want us to call it a war department then ok the contradictions are more open

Marx writing on the US civil war, sounds like today. “The Union was only of value for the South in so far as it let it use federal power as a means of implementing its space policy. If it did not, it was better to break now…””

“In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary…All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.” -Marx

🚢 The Global Sumud Flotilla—the largest civilian mission to break Gaza’s siege—launches today, with 50+ ships from 44 countries. Drop Site editor Alex Colston is on board and will be reporting live as it sails from Barcelona toward Gaza.

Since he’s alive and well, I’ve wondered if he’d go before end of term. Passing peacefully at the height of his power and adoration without ever suffering a single consequence is the logical end to a modern Doctor Faustus

About time for a life update. We moved to Grand Rapids over the summer. I joined the faculty at Lansing Community College. It’s been a very good change.

After nearly a decade teaching Ethics, my go to example of something on which everyone agrees no longer works. I used to state it, check everyone agreed, then have student explain why to probe differences in moral reasoning. This example that no longer works? “Genocide is wrong”

Forming a new social contract theory where by Natural Right we yield a portion of our stupidity and cruelty and, in pursuit of misery, invest it in an individual sovereign

Dogs on campus

A towering giant among Christians who hit their kids. I’ll remember him suggesting weird stuff like a dad “can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.”

Back to school

People always believe nothing can change since rulers control an almighty military. But that’s always true. A common feature of revolutions is a military refusing to shoot civilians. It’s never the cops (they are used to pointing weapons at civilians) but if 18yr old troops back down you never know

A whole day adjusting syllabi, tinkering with settings on the learning management system and so on, ahead of a new semester during a world historic, endless genocide

You give people a chance to read and think in more sophisticated ways. It sucks to live in a society that increasingly sees philosophy or sciences as fake, but if someone doesn’t get why reading and thinking—becoming more educated in an educational environment—are intrinsically good, that’s on them

You never see business profs struggling to explain why what they do has value, and that’s a field made up to squeeze out a bit more surplus value! Humanities scholars, whose work is much more intrinsically valuable, could learn something from them

The veterinarian says my dog’s feces should be proactively tested for microbes twice a year, per CDC guidance. The same CDC pivoting from human vaccinations. What a world!

They promised the birth of God and built a pedo bot

$2 ebook Future of Denial. @versobooks.bsky.social ebooks are 80% off until Aug 14 www.versobooks.com/products/285...

I’m course planning and stumbled again across this bit from Marcus Aurelius, a true poster: “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly.”

Every coffee shop is chain, Christian, or gay

I’m writing syllabi for the semester, dwelling on how AI ruins every possible assignment, wishing it were possible to convince anyone outside education how rapidly destructive this tech has been for comprehension and literacy!

Israel murdered this man yesterday

most stubbornly know nothing society in centuries pivoting to PhD=good but only for chatbot

This is amongst the most impactful two minutes of broadcasting I’ve ever seen. By Emma Murphy, International Editor, ITV News. #Gaza

An aerial view of what the Gaza City area looked like this week. Taken from a Jordanian military aircraft, by our colleague Heidi Levine.

On the podcast feed: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/f...

In this talk: Zionism and Israel, Arab revolutions and CIA coups, why liberal political philosophy is so limited, climate change, and relationships between oil, arms trade, and the US dollar. I’ll post it on my podcast feed later but here’s YouTube youtube.com/watch?v=yvzX...

I’m such a sucker for these types of graphs. Geology is such a subversive discipline once you see each mass exciting since the Ordovician correlates with rises or falls in CO₂

In Gaza, the meaning of malnutrition has been forcibly redefined — it is systematically human-made and weaponized.

An administered mass starvation is so incomprehensibly evil, something for which we have barely any analogies in the history of cruelty, a murderous drive beyond the capture of words, that nobody knows what to say. We just watch, and while everyone who could stop it wants it

Neighbors are escalating flags and signs in battle between the liberal house and the nazi house. The addition of Israel and a”support ice” flags are new this week

2 like when the Supreme Court greenlighted sending seal team six after rivals while the president was Biden

On anthropomorphizing AI, one time the grocery store self-checkout wouldn’t scan something. A worker explained “it wants you to do it this way” I smugly thought: no it doesn’t want

As a kid when a new game came out, I’d get the disk and put it into the computer. Wow, suddenly it could play Star Wars! Nobody called it “training” or “machine learning”. That would have gotten my ass kicked

When the plan is mass killing conducted through starvation, daily shootings of a few dozen at food distribution points look like they’re for sport. From journalist Anas Al-Sharif:

Learn to babysit the computer. No reading dirty old books

I think if trump acknowledged he was implicated on some Epstein list, or if he straight up admitted he was a pedophile, his base would mostly get over it quickly, within a few days

Long ago, I lost a ministry job because I didn’t think it was wrong to be gay. The minister who fired me later went to prison for sexually assaulting a kid. The evangelical congregation was far more forgiving of him than my heresy. That shapes how I read this Trump-Epstein cover up