Currently at: — only buy tech too old to have AI built in — painstakingly disable AI every time they add it to something that used to work perfectly well — if it can't be switched off, abandon the platform or tool — if there are no good alternatives, avoid the AI parts — patiently wait for the crash

I had a discussion with my therapist who got a scam phone call during our visit that its just beyond frustrating that literally every single second of being american is fending off people trying to fleece you, email, phone, hobby stores, whatever its just scams on scams

I'm a historian. Sewage systems have saved more lives than any medical intervention. Vaccines are second and antibiotics third. Prior to the 1880s, the urban annual death rate was ~25%; it dropped to ~0.5% in under a generation. Support your sewage system. Dispose of bodies responsibly.

Trump is too lazy to get us to the mass graves part--and I want you to hear how fucking terrifying it is that personal laziness is the limitation, not belief or structure--but it's still fascism. Sloppy fascism is fascism. Failed fascism is fascism. Half baked fascism is a gooey butter fascism.

This is such bullshit. The public allegations are that Dixon participates in an NC chapter for Redneck Revolt. The gun club for a different chapter in a different state posted flyers on a different campus, which riled up fascists on Twitter. Dixon is blamed. www.dailytarheel.com/article/2025...

Is that effective campaign messaging? I don’t know & I don’t care. It’s true. It’s my job to discover and say things that are true. The radicalization of the American right is *the* political story of my lifetime and the public should know about it. Politicians can do what they like with that.

Friend of mine opened every history class with a piece of art to discuss and I feel like this would be a good one

the modal domestic terrorist over the next decade is going to be a terminally online 20-something who cooks their brain in irony-poisoned social media spaces and decides to kill a bunch of people as an elaborate shitpost

I've said it before, but I think the current spree of memekillings is the product of an ideological transition. It's hard to parse because it's rapidly evolving. It's clearly derived from far right precursors, but it hasn't progressed to coherence yet.

I was part of a couple of meetings last week where I thought: "yup, people are braver when they know others have their backs."

We’re gonna need a bigger reconstruction.

“why some people be mad at me sometimes” they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and i keep remembering mine - Lucille Clifton [writing the most Black woman poem of all time]

It is so damn obvious the trans sports issue is a drummed up nonsense moral panic masquerading as “common sense” - but if you look deeper for two seconds you see how the whole point of sex segregated sports is to defund women athletics & to build and propagandize the western idea of women as weak.

This cartoon by artist Frank Ape grounded me today #artmatters

so many dead canaries and we just keep on mining

I believe this to my core. They're using trans people as a test case to dismantle individual rights in the US.

I think it's important and useful for us, as academics, as writers, as professors, to open up the hood and pull out the parts and show our students how they fit back together sometimes, even in lower-level courses, so they see what a writing process looks like, not just a polished finish.

Every accusation is a confession when you can't conjure a theory of mind for anyone but yourself

I surround myself with peers, mentors and students who in all kinds of ways call out the best in me. I sit down with my students and want to be a bodhisattva FOR them. I learn from history and my elders what integrity feels like from the inside. This work can’t happen in isolation.

"Political violence" is a term that exists to suggest a moral distinction between "violence against politicians" and "violence by politicians" - so that one can be condemned while the other can be normalized. Obviously, no such distinction exists in reality: violence is violence.

My facilitation trainer and mentor a million years ago told me that no one learns in a conversation where they can’t walk away with their dignity and it has ALWAYS stuck with me.

So I'm grumpy that we seem to be once again creating a dynamic in our party where the people who got to the right answer sooner are marginalized for doing so, while people who were wrong get credit for changing their minds once it became obvious they were wrong. (See also NAFTA, Iraq War, Gaza.)

The GOP's education playbook. Step 1: Make public schooling as shitty and stressful as possible for kids and parents and teachers. Step 2: Sell private schooling as the antidote to the stress and shittiness. Step 3: Funnel public education money into private hands.

By nullifying Congress's biggest ever investment in climate projects, the Trump admin is threatening both public health and democracy By concocting any reason to insulate the admin from accountability, conservative judges are proving themselves just as dangerous ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/clima...

Great thread! Two reactions: 1) Theories of learning are not separate from our assumptions about the *purpose* of learning. 2) Those assumptions are inherently shaped by political factors. We don’t unpack the politics underlying the CogSci purists’ rhetoric often enough - they’re dangerous.

Human rights are either universal or you don't believe in them. This is one of the few places in our reality that actually is a binary.

"Classroom life should, to the greatest extent possible, prefigure the kind of democratic and just society we envision and thus contribute to building that society."

In contrast, recent trends do differ by education group. Until 2012, Americans with the most formal education (Bachelor+) were most pro-business. By 2024, became most pro-union. On the other hand, Americans with the least formal education were historically among most pro-union but became least.

Federal agents arrest firefighters working on WA wildfire

“I asked them if his (family) can say goodbye to him because they’re family, and they’re just ripping them away,” the firefighter told the Times. “And this is what he said: ‘You need to get the (expletive) out of here. I’m gonna make you leave.'”

And continuing the analogy, that doesn’t mean zero driving, because cars will always have some purpose, it means not single-mindedly pursuing the impossible goal of everyone driving a car everywhere as fast as possible and destroying everything that makes being alive in a place worth it.

Academics and activists have tried to help people see that social problems are structural--that people's struggles often stem from the way systems of power and privilege prevent them from getting by or getting ahead. That kind of structural thinking is inoculation against authoritarianism.

This is one of the absolute toughest things about predatory inclusion — the predation is often fun or a little useful. Criticism makes a reasonable person sound like an asshole. LowerEd weathered me for this kind of social death. So I’ll say it: your enjoyment does not matter & should not matter.

I strongly think more people need to be writing about the culture shift toward anti-autonomy and anti-humanism and how that plays out in the entwined cultures of technology, fascism, and the religious right, but also its cultivation in popular culture more broadly

Ding ding ding ding ding. Been 40 years building to this. Americans believed a lie about what education should be (sterile and devoid of values) so that evil people who hurt kids could do so comfortably within their own homes. Destructive to those kids and, turns out, our whole country.

suggests that very little happens to us when we read something new. This tool reinforces the idea that instructors have some kind of narrow personal agenda that they will reward when in fact what we "want" is for our students to write about what matters to them and figure out what they think /6

The appeal of this program for RFK and the writer isn’t in efficacy but the imagined control over people they’ve decided they know better than.

If anything, the main thing these essays do, and probably why they’re so popular among editors, is that they allow people to hold onto the idea that the main conflict in politics is reasonable disagreement among people with shared goals.

This is in the replies and it demonstrates a real issue which is if you find profundity from an AI, you’re responding to something profound a human being wrote that was vacuumed up and what ends up happening is you thank AI and not only don’t thank the person, you have no idea they were involved

The difference is I committed a crime on my neighbor's front porch when all of our parents were at work. They committed a crime in a nice basement with their SAHM upstairs. Poor teenagers, by and large, are not allowed to fuck up and then move on. Rich kids don't even realize they fucked up. 3/

Football truly is a mirror for America for both good and ill www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/...

They only see top-down and can't imagine bottom-up construction of understanding or power. I think that's why conspiracy theories -- it's projection b/c the pyramid must have a top!

The White House’s official X account has a long thread in which they’ve posted pictures of people arrested during the feds’ occupation of the city. Every single person in the thread is a person of color.

It is profoundly disheartening to watch people talk about depression and trauma and neurodivergence with a great deal of empathy and then gleefully call someone they don’t like “psychotic,” “a sociopath” or “a narcissist” as a way of invalidating the social and relational worth of a person.

Absolutely. Because the purpose of a system is what it consistently does, not what it says in interviews that it wants to. And it has always been about stripping the government for parts.

However, you really already know the advice? I think. I’m just not sure people *like* the advice. You have the right to organize, no matter what anyone tells you. You have the right to deny your union’s leadership your compliance if they don’t act in your professional interests.

This is why fascism and financial capitalism go so well together. Because trapping people in precarity makes it easier to force them to work for low wages in crappy conditions. And those low wages and crappy conditions keep labor costs low for employers, leaving more profits for shareholders' gain.