It actually is a great exercise in debate in general. You can't have a real debate if you're not even arguing the same thing. In the fake example above, yeah you're debating cats/dogs, but by arguing the opposite of the main claim only, you'll never convince someone to even consider your side.

This element of the situation is so maddening because it adds this air of unreality to the transphobes statements - and yet they are taken totally seriously by our press and much of our political class. Very obviously people were muddling making accommodations and no great social crisis was caused!

And I'll add that one of the reasons why students may not value the experience of writing is because much of the writing they're asked to do in school does not require thinking. In fact, they're given lots of methods (templates, et al) that actively discourage thinking.

In light of today’s conversation on academic accommodations, I’m going to revive a thread lost to time when I deleted my Twitter profile. It’s about a bunch of academic accommodations that instructors can offer in lieu of an extension on an assignment. 🧵

500,000 violations.

There's another dimension to this Rosa Parks story that you may not know. This is where the story most often gets mis-narrated. The bus driver is often left out as a faceless entity and passive part of the story, but he is important to this story. James F Blake adds some much needed context 🧵

chat are we cooked

the fact that dealing with rampant lying and its much worse downstream consequences involves cultivating values rather than just imposing formal frameworks or rules (legal or otherwise) is a tough pill to swallow for some. but it is indeed medicine

Same with a student admitted into Windsor's Law's LLM program. The federal government's refusal to assist these students is unconscionable.

So they don't feel like the sort of places containing lots of people sympathetic to their own worldview, the sort of places wherein people who form their base of support congregate or work, are actually politically legitimate or economically productive places. And evidence can't interfere with this.

We actually have a paper that finds exactly that! osf.io/preprints/so...

New evidence that twin estimates of heritability should be adjusted downward by about half

Retirement is celebrated everywhere except by academics and supreme court justices, who view it as capitulation

Ultimately, what I think we need is patience: The patience to explain from first principles, to meet people where they are at, to untangle webs of lies, to refuse the hoarding of wisdom. And this is much harder than shame because you must fundamentally reject that erring is a personal flaw

If you want to help elect a left-populist leader right here in Canada, join our campaign today - and let’s fight together for a government that serves us all. lewisforleader.ca

While Carney caters to the corporate elite, our movement knows that it’s time to tax the rich and invest in the 99% who keep this country going. Thanks @lindamcquaig.bsky.social for the shout out in the @thestar.com! www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

Something absolutely perfect about Larry Summers riffing about the scourge of woke cancel culture being unfair to predatory men in a friendly email to his pal JEFFREY EPSTEIN.

Epstein: Trump knew

“.. in the Situation Room.” 👀

My takeaway from every new Epstein revelation is that some powerful people victimized many powerless young women, many more knew, some actively enabled it--and we're still being told that MeToo and accountability for sexual violence have gone too far

@404media.co is journalist founded and independent, so ya, we can tell meta pr to come back when they have a sound answer for the horrors that are the meta ray-ban glasses:

I feel sick to my stomach reading the reports from Palestinian prisoners released from Israeli detention. I genuinely want to vomit.

OVER A MILLION USERS DISCUSS SUICIDE WITH CHATGPT EVERY *WEEK* what the fuck are we DOING here

INVENTOR OF THE LIBRARY: hey check this out

The arc of history is a foot-long, but it bends towards justice.

Librarians told 404 Media they're being inundated with new pitches for AI library tech and catalogs are being flooded with AI slop books. But more broadly, AI maximalism across society is supercharging the ideological war on libraries, schools, government workers, and academics.

The FBI has subpoenaed the domain registrar of archive.today, demanding information about the owner.

the question nobody with a soul is asking, answered by people nobody wants to hear from

Join Mariame Kaba and Danica Savonick for a two-hour virtual discussion of Savonick's book Open Admissions:The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College. Sunday Feb 1st from 3-5PM EST. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

"404 Media ... obtained an internal DHS document which says ICE does not let people decline or consent to being scanned by the app. The document ... said photos taken by the app will be stored for 15 years, including those of U.S. citizens." www.404media.co/cbp-quietly-...

NEW: The US Army website for its bases in Bavaria, Germany told its soldiers and employees that it might need to obtain free food from the German government during the US government shutdown. The Army later altered publication to remove a list of food banks, but we have the original text here:

I just saw a meme represented in emoji form for the first time: 🌎🧑‍🚀🔫🧑‍🚀 Are there other memes that have been successfully translated to emoji?

U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman just took the bench for today's hearing over conditions inside the ICE processing/detention facility in Broadview.

Someone on the other site posted wallace shawn canvassing for Zohran Mamdami and I will never miss a moment to post one of the most moving pieces of writing ever written by an American Socialist... www.thenation.com/article/cult...

"President Donald Trump said Tuesday that federal food benefits won’t be distributed...In a Truth Social post, Trump said Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits “will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government...and not before!”" www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...

I am so upset. Last week Time Magazine solicited a piece from me on Zohran Mamdani & anti-Muslim hate. I pitched a framing re the dehumanization of Muslims & how Mamdani’s inclusive, socialist campaign in its content resists that. They agreed. I wrote the piece. 1/

Teen Vogue did some great journalism around immigration detention and enforcement. Sounds like corporate has now killed that off. The media landscape shrinks even further.

If they tried to launch self-driving food delivery robots in Montréal they would get vandalized to shit faster than you could say bonjour/hi.

You laugh, but this is how the exododus went extinct

This is also how they’ll cover him if he wins. Mamdani - all democrats who actually want to govern and fix things - need to understand the NYT politics team as a partisan force arrayed against them.

When ChatGPT was asked to rate 40,000 résumés, it ranked the older male candidates as better quality than the younger female applicants.

I can't think of anything to say

"Ensemble Montréal originally proposed deregulating Airbnb — despite the fact that short-term rentals are a leading cause of the housing affordability crisis. It's all more evidence that the people who often have the best chance to lead Montreal seem to have no idea what the city's problems are.”

The music cuts off awkwardly before the end, but this is an incredible NYC Halloween costume compilation.

Over my career, I have had 12 PhD students start working with me, and for the first time two of them have the same name. So by the birthday paradox, I estimate that in total I will have about 115 differently named PhD students.

I think my graph theory students liked my antifascist frog costume. It was really hard to hold the chalk without opposable thumbs.