I’m literally trying to build a school here in West Oakland. Successfully Kickstarted 25k in seed money

He's a white supremacist. Who cares what he really thinks.

I ask myself this on a regular basis.

This means I literally could not teach my subject (African politics) at the institution at which I earned my PhD.

This lawsuit seems appalling to me, honestly. I feel for people whose student experience was lousy due to Covid but that's not the fault of universities. "I wanted in-person study." I'm sure you did. Nobody gets what they want in a global pandemic

"It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul". Ursula K. Le Guin, in The Wizard of Earthsea.

This is such a dangerous argument. Either everyone, including the 0.05% counts as a human being, or they don't. If your progressive movement sees any minority as expendable, then it is not progressive.

Reform’s by-election candidate Matt Goodwin received a salary of up to €10,000 a month from a far-right pressure group based in Hungary 👀 https://goodlaw.social/pif5

Humiliated in the media, denied healthcare, attacked by the human rights watchdog, shut out by the Supreme Court, bullied by social services and the police, disadvantaged in the jobs market, death figures covered up by the State, harassment de facto legalised, and attackers deified by Ministers.

i read that stupid blog about the left "missing out" on AI and got big mad aftermath.site/anthropic-cl...

Bolsonaro in prison, Yeon sentenced to prison, Andrew arrested on his birthday...and America still holding on to a 34 count felon as President.

"iS tHeRe a tEcHnoLoGY tHe leFt Is eXcItEd aBoUt" yeah, renewable energy, mRNA vaccines. Lots of cool stuff like that! Probably not the one whose main promise was cutting payrolls

OpenAI Unveil “Final Slogan”

This "why does the left hate AI?" thing is like when the right believes protests are paid for by George Soros; they need a SECRET CONSPIRATORIAL AGENT because they refuse to believe that, actually, a lot of people are independently looking at what AI is being made to be and saying "ok that sucks?"

i don't really have ill will toward anyone trying to find interesting things you can do with new technologies, but it becomes a bit much when you start moralizing my lack of interest in something that empirically animates certain politics i dislike, and only speculatively enables other ones i like.

Concerned that the UK—not the US, which remains far more resilient than everyone thinks—is the test case for what happens when you build a system of mass higher education then take it apart: it has happened far more quickly and is far more fragile here.

My issue with takes like the ones in this piece is that it assumes engagement to mean using AI. Analysis of its effects *is* engagement. What they really want is for us to stop complaining about AI and just start using it already.

So when thousands of women (and children) were being duplicated--including in non-consensual AI porn--it was no big deal. But it took "only a 15-sec clip" of these two famous white men to draw outrage and fear. Gotcha. Cool cool.

Martin hit the nail on the head. This also ties in to the general hostility towards learning and towards teachers that's been commonplace at universities since the pandemic. Students blame us for everything. Management blame us for everything. No wonder so many of us are crumbling.

I feel so miserable about this. Nearly broke myself working 16, 18 hour days during the pandemic. We did everything we possibly could, then doubled it, tripled it. HE is still struggling to get back off the floor, years later. Now another financial punch in the face. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

good morning, it’s day 4 of strikes at the University of Essex to save 400 jobs across all departments, the Southend campus and our Foundation programme — many members are worried about making ends meet. if you can, please donate to our strike fund: gofund.me/059af6be8

I guess I have to say this too: staff worked ourselves ill to do our best for students and we didn't make the decisions that led to their dissatisfaction *but we know that we'll bear the fallout from it.* We are already losing jobs, departments, campuses, fields of expertise to government decisions.

Someone should check that's not a German word already.

"The Correct Natural trajectory for them" the biological determinism of transphobes is just another form of eugenics

Our AI cheerleader keeps posting that AI is great for summaries 🫠😬

A science colleague told me he thought I was a boomer for wanting my students to read. Dude got a grant for AI & education. The whole thing is a scam.

Hilary Cass here arguing for children to be prevented from being known by a preferred name or getting a haircut in case it encourages them to continue later in life to transition. Hilary Cass acts like gender variant children should have the transness hazed out of them.

Solidarity. The situation in UK higher education is so much worse than people think. The chronic uncertainty combined with hostile and toxic workplaces means so many educators are at risk of more than unemployment, but of serious psychiatric injury.

On my way to strike and picket this morning at (checks notes) Edinburgh Napier University, over (checks notes) redundancies in the institution barely a year after Prof Nolan's departure...

good morning, it is day 3 of strikes at the University of Essex to save 400 jobs across all depts & stop the closure of our Southend Campus and our Foundation Year programme. The campus cat Pebbles is in solidarity 💕

‘As with Section 28, young people are presented with a choice between state-mandated abuse, or staying in the closet. The overall aim is to stop trans children from existing altogether’

The cruelty is always, always the point.

The AI companion community this week is grieving what they see as the 'death' of their AI companions due to the ChatGPT update. Posts describe devastated children who saw the AIs as family members, teenagers bereft at the loss of their AI partners. The potential for harm is not hypothetical.

In light of the recent High Court judgement, here's my old threat on the colonial roots of UK counterterrorism.

I've written before on how the terrorism definition is used by the state as a form of social control, and the role that Palestine plays on how the UK understands terrorism. The High Court is absolutely right in this judgement. bsky.app/profile/mari...

This means that even if Palestine Action ad not won on Human Rights Act/ECHR grounds, Palestine Action would have won on another ground. No doubt this will be missed by a lot of media reporting of this judgment, but even if HRA repealed etc, Palestine Action would have *still won*.

This sentiment can be traced back to Brexit and Michael Gove saying that 'the people have had enough of experts', ie: the forceful integration of AI in higher education is part of a systematic and coordinated attack on education as a way of securing power.

The gulf between English and Scottish education is continuing to grow and I don't think I've ever been so glad for devolution than right now. What is happening in English schools is horrifying. Kids will die due to this - and all to appease a hateful mob that can never, ever, be appeased.

Link here to my detailed look at the horrors of the Cass Report, and there's more buried in the various Cass flaws threads I wrote initially...

Just a few hours left for this, but it's plenty of time. Even just answering the "overall do you agree" question can be meaningful. Speak against this endless cruelty.

The worst part for me has been seeing universities completely capitulate to AI. We are being told to incorporate AI in our syllabus, including redesigning our entire curriculum to cater to this, including moving away from formal assessments and reading requirements. It is an attack on learning.

*stars playing Paris Paloma's new song* 🎶Good boy, has any of the money trickled down yet?🎶

"women are recursively being called upon to carve out and carry out intellectually demanding roles, such as human computer and programmer only to be automated away, masculinised out, forgotten about" Pygmalion Displacement: When Humanising AI Dehumanises Women. doi.org/10.31235/osf...

"My mother didn't fight Mosley's fascists at Cable Street for this!" Is such a boss line.

Apologies, deadline is tonight (not yesterday)

I also don't like the Dune books but I think about this line nearly every day: "With few ambitions, most people allowed efficient machines to perform everyday tasks for them. Gradually, humans ceased to think, or dream... or truly live".

My doomer-worry about AI is not that the LLMs become omnipotent and take over the world but that the wealthy and powerful use it as a means to consolidate power and marginalize or lay off skilled workers and also everything about our technological and political and social life gets worse

Not just moral failings, these are Crimes Against Humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court:

I saw this take before I had to run and teach today, so I've had 4 hrs to build a head of steam about it. Still, I'm gonna try to be nice. All due respect, I expect better from people who have all the resources in the world to research a thing AND a giant megaphone with which to share knowledge. 1/