Birthplace of the free speech movement: “[4] individuals were arrested while attempting to hang an approximately five-foot-tall cardboard bug off Sather Gate in protest of Turning Point USA’s, or TPUSA, upcoming event on campus” www.dailycal.org/news/campus/...

Taco Bell’s new Seventhmeal promotion is looking pretty good

Perhaps they’re inspired by Hungary’s universal healthcare system.

Huston Smith and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. And in the popular scholar category, Karen Armstrong. (Although, I wouldn’t say that any of them are influential on my thinking about religion.)

I think we need to stop calling it empathy and go back to calling it decency. It isn't a favour you're doing someone else, it's you proving that you aren't a fucking ghoul

These guys really are accelerationists hell-bent on burning the whole thing down.

You (a fool): The LLM is an all-knowing oracle, on its way to godlike intelligence Me (dumber): The LLM is Indra’s Net, each fundamentally empty token a multifaceted jewel in whose surfaces the reflections of every other jewel arise in mutual interdependence The LLM: You can eat that rock

This is brilliant.

Coffee shop entitlement on display: Barista calls, “Orange cappuccino for Lisa!” Woman steps up and says somewhat curtly, “It’s supposed to be a flat white.” Meanwhile, Lisa picks up her orange cappuccino. Five minutes and two drink orders later, barista calls, “Flat white for Kay!”

Where's the piece about how buying super yachts and supreme court justices can lead to both overspending and fascist regimes???

Now this is a metaphor that even I can understand.

My favorite marcher so far at the SF No Kings is wearing a high-vis vest and raising a trash grabber in lieu of a sign.

this rocks. when indiana edu killed the student newspaper, Purdue stepped up, printed the forbidden issue, drove it to Bloomington and stocked the boxes.

Take a picture of yourself at the No Kings rally. Print it. Put it in a frame. Your grandchildren will speak about you for generations to come. You took a stand against fascism. You stood up for democracy. 

WE ARE PRACTICING AN ICE LOCKDOWN at Berkeley Adult School, ffs!!!!!!! (I take Arabic classes here, but the vast majority of the students are ESL learners.)

Actually, a daily battle for me- don’t let them eat the delight.

is it not weird that every day there’s a new video of anonymous masked men having the time of their lives beating/shooting/disappearing people and the dem response from the top down is “republicans want to double your health insurance premiums”

To me the thing that is so infuriating about this is that I teach high school students who have vastly greater critical thinking skills and are far more politically astute than any of the three speakers from this clip 😡

I think that this is sage advice in quite a broad range of contexts really.

Absolutely no disrespect to Dorroll here, who is far more a scholar than I will ever be, but isn’t the very point of critical RS to problematize and redescribe? If we want to “simply better understand the experience of faith on its own terms,” can’t we simply consult an insider?

Reality Winner is truly a national treasure.

you're looking at a foreign country. the government rounds up people on the basis of skin color or other characteristic, puts them in 'detention' facilities, separates families, deports them without process, confiscates their property, denies them access to counsel. what would you call it?

From August 2024: Vaught suggests that mass deportations are “part of a plan to "end multiculturalism" in America” and “should protests break out in response [Trump] use the military to ‘maintain law and order.’” www.mediamatters.org/russ-vought/...

We are being ruled by every loser you ever met in high school

As history teaches us, we will one day be subsumed into a void of cold, dark meaninglessness. That’s why self-aggrandized bloviating is so naive and dangerous.

As a non historian might I suggest that history does not teach us about anyone “deserving” anything in particular.

As wrongheaded as Trump v United States is, I’m next to certain that presidential immunity doesn’t extend to the White House deputy chief of staff (not yet anyway). www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Textbook example of @eric-reinhart.com’s thesis in this article: www.bostonreview.net/articles/wha... “[Violence] is judged—and narrated—according to whether it sustains or threatens a particular social order. What counts as ‘violence,’ […is] always political determination made by those in power.”

16 year old nephew just asked, “So what do they want us to be, ‘profa’?”

Living in 2025 is having a good, productive day only to suddenly find yourself in a panic because you realize it's been four hours since you checked the news and you don't know if we've invaded China or banned Claritin or if it's illegal to be from Massachusetts now or something

KG Hutchins’ A Song for the Horses has officially landed in Berkeley, California! @songsforhorses.com

Folks, you can't report the United States to its manager. There's no superhero coming to save us. We don't need one giant act of heroism. We need millions of small acts of solidarity. Help one person in your community for nothing in return. Then, do it again. And again. That's the revolution.

Excellent piece from @evandeneykel.bsky.social religiondispatches.org/charlie-kirk...

“Political violence” doesn’t just mean vigilantes shooting political candidates or activists (which, to be clear, I strongly oppose). ICE disappearing people is also political violence. Police shootings are also political violence. Bombings are political violence.

From 1997. Added a whole new dimension to my love of “metal.” (Also, speaking as a PNW native who was a teenager in the early ‘90s, I’ve always kind of hated grunge 🤫) kocaniorkestar.bandcamp.com/album/l-orie...

Until I realised they were misusing the term I got very excited about a rise in grindcore culture, but sadly this doesn’t mean that everybody in SF is listening Napalm Death

Here’s a bit of excitement for your Saturday morning: “What matters is that we were consenting adults filming porn in a private location [an active parish]But because we were in the Bible Belt and the building had mythical significance, it was deemed a crime.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Judith Butlerian jihad champions the universal struggle of all critical studies.

“Grandpa what did you do during the war?” “I fought Door Dash delivery people, and had to protect myself against sandwich attacks”

The prompt was something like “increase a band.”

Fascism is confusing because in the last week alone I have cheered on the behavior of Gavin Newsom, Hunter Biden, and a Vinyard Vines-coded guy

Washington Post: “Is fascism bad? The answer may surprise you” Teen Vogue: “Here are three fun tips you can use this summer to disable an armored personnel carrier”

A glutton of big boys? A circumference of big boys? A fellowship of big boys? Or, maybe simply a bob of big boys.

This looks cool. Humans, Dogs and Other Beings Myths, Stories, and History in the Land of Genghis Khan Baasanjav Terbish. Open Book Pub 2025 Open access: www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.116...

25. Canonicity is socially constructed.

The #1 way to explain America working properly is by saying “comedians can make fun of he President on TV.” A good way to explain fascism is “the President forces companies to fire those comedians as a condition of allowing them to conduct business.”

Spotted at the edge of the UC Berkeley campus. We are sliding into dark times.

May your day be filled with opportunities to verbosely employ these five categories:

I'm not going to repost any of the insane antisemitic conspiracy bullshit that grok is spewing today, but it highlights how absolutely essentially is that we not let LLMs become a form of epistemic grounding for our society.

It does not feel coincidental that we are hearing all about how we do not need the humanities, only STEM education, right as the greatest advances in STEM in AI research raise fundamentally humanist questions about personhood, ethics, self-identity, and alterity.