@kangaroopete.bsky.social this is kinda Boimler's whole vibe

genuinely crazy to me how unitary executive advocates read the vesting clause as granting a huge scope of essentially royal "inherent" powers. one would think that if the framers intended to give the president royal authority, they would have just said so.

LOL

Update: used 'Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach,' got a pretty solid response from the students. I think Half a Life or Pale Moonlight would have made equally as good or better choices. Maybe I'll find an excuse to return to them.

Dilemma: when using Star Trek to teach about utilitarianism, do I use TNG's 'Half a Life,' TOS's 'The Omega Glory,' DS9's 'In The Pale Moonlight,' or SNW's 'Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach'? Audience: high school seniors intellectually active enough to have decided to take political philosophy.

Every day there are like 3 new things that happen that 25 years ago would have instantly disqualified someone from public office.

Dana Carvey parodied George HW Bush on SNL — “Nah, wouldn’t be prudent” — the President called him up and they became friends. . Daryl Hammond imitated Clinton through his Presidency, including savage stuff during his sex scandal. Clinton invited him to do a “dueling Presidents” gag.

Am an idiot or the President simultaneously threatening large scale use of military force agst both Afghanistan & Venezuela on his social media accounts, which frequently double as official policy pronouncement venues? And the nations mass media outlets are warring over podcaster memorial services?

Is The Running Man the mainstream action film with the most politically stacked cast of all time? Ventura, Schwarzenegger, Brown, Alonso....?

Teaching utilitarianism for the next week and a half (political philosophy context) and I am so looking forward to getting a chance to legitimately use Star Trek as a significant curricular element.

What is a reasonable amount of time for a teacher to spend on work each weekend, in your view? It's a clear expectation that we work beyond contract hours, so the really interesting question is how much additional time you think that's meant to be.

So far it's been extremely clear incursions into Poland, Romania, and Estonian defensive spaces. There have to be some very nervous heads in Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania over the next 24 hours.

Sometimes, in my absolute darkest moments, I wonder if as a matter of pure undifferentiated utilitarian calculus, day to day life, I'd've been better off making the choice 20 yrs ago of becoming one of those permanent American expats living comfortably, heedlessly in a 2ns or 3rd tier Chinese city.

generally speaking, and with the glaring exception of november 2024, the more directly democratic an institution has been, the better it has checked Trump (eg grand and petit juries); the more elite and insular, the less effective (the Senate, the Supreme Court, big business)

Good reminder that public/private censorship of mass media was common in the 20th century. The Hays Code, the Comics Code, blacklisting; we have been here before and arguably more oppressive in the past. It took 75 years of 1A jurisprudence to make us all believe It Can’t Happen Here. But it did.

Every time I have long conversations with teachers working outside the stifling, awful Advanced Placement driven space I come away a lot happier and more inspired than when I ponder the gray expanse of learning goals and key essay skills.

There are two ways you can consume this: “Obama is a weakling who is tacitly endorsing Charlie Kirk because he’s not using the language and tone I would,” or “a professional communicator is making a point, I may not be the audience, and his primary aim may not be my personal emotional needs.”

Man, do my students consume a lot of energy drinks (Celsius is the most common, it seems). I'm sure it is just an old person out of sync with the times reaction, but I wonder if this is any worse for mental or physical well-being than drinking coffee might have been for a student 20-30 years ago.

@kangaroopete.bsky.social you should watch a few of these to understand the high I chase and constantly fail to achieve chasing Chinese food here in the US, esp the weird variety of Jilin and Liaoning.

if you live in a major city in the United States, particularly in the Southwest, you have easy access to the greatest diversity of excellent food in human history, it's astonishing

You know, though it's true that the Obama admin did the right thing morally with DACA + Holder Memo and didn't push the bounds of executive power as much as later admins did, no small part of our current predicament is extending 'take care' to 'effectively subvert and functionally ignore the law.'

issue with “hire more conservative professors” is that they don’t mean “hire a smart guy who happens to think taxes should be lower”, they mean “hire a movement conservative”, and these days there are multiple litmus tests for being that type of person that are “insist this false thing is true”

@kangaroopete.bsky.social hee hee

It takes special talent for missing the point for someone to hear the old (not rly true) saw that "China has a century long vision for things like companies and statecraft, we have a quarterly one" and think it means we should file transparency reports less often rather than adopt diff't priorities.

Every once in a while I check in on platforms I once spent some time on, and it's bleak. I can make 40+ posts on Facebook feed or more on a Twitter feed without seeing a human being I voluntarily follow via a real connection. One of my better decisions has been opting out of most social media.

One of the really positive attributes of The Man In The High Castle - both the (very old) book and the (very recent) adaptation - is that they really don't spend much time on details that would be hard to justify or trip them up, and allow storytelling beats and symbolism to drive them, mostly.

Small things making me happy this evening: a fantastic discussion of Heinlein, Haldeman, Starship Troopers, politics in the 1990s, aesthetic (mis?)judgements and symbolic (mis?)readings of media from @jamellebouie.net + @lioneltrolling.bsky.social in their amazing Unclear and Present Danger podcast.

A friend at Cato just did some great work quantifying this and his main point was to underscore how relatively rare it still is, to throw a bit of a cold water on the panic. But he also found, as any serious methodology inevitably does, right-wing outnumbered left-wing several times over.

Late-August issue salience in a pretty reliable poll of Virginia registered voters below. When the follow-up w the same methodology happens it'll offer a rare look at how a major media event does (or doesn't) shift state political issue publics and issue dynamics.

i have said this before but when “getting rid of race in admissions” for the administration means “you can’t even try to reach out to underrepresented communities and encourage them to apply and if you do it is illegal discrimination against white people” then the actual goal here is segregation

@kangaroopete.bsky.social Mariner has an identical twin!

One of the more profound (actually-profound, not dumb-tv-profound) things under the surface of the show is exploring how or if corporations and states are actually distinct. There are sociological and psychological themes farther from my political theory wheelhouse ofc, but this one interest me.

I think if I was sentenced to east only one variety of food for the rest of my life, Chinese street food (if forced to choose further, breakfast foods) would probably keep me happier and more nutritionally well rounded than I would have any right to demand.

Thinking of starting a TikTok for old people where I just doomscroll and say "For fuck's sake."

I'll never like Virginia's part time legislature model. Being a legislator is more than session+election - it's endless meetings, commissions, boards, review sessions, conferences, and other things keeping you in the know on issues and constituency events/needs. Hard to have a full time job w that.

Alien: Earth is extremely good because, like a lot of good sci-fi, it creates a very grounded feel via powerful and emotionally, socially recognizable characterizations for concepts which are otherwise absolutely mind-bogglingly science fictional.

Doing this intro poli philosophy class with high schoolers is a really odd dilemma of scheduling- I really do want to balance breadth and depth but it’s so hard to combine that with source reading and independent research time.

Read the Weber short story in which human beings met treecats for the first time today, and it was really quite sweet and good (even if it, as typical, did more telling than showing). Makes me wish he'd written more non-war, non-spy stories in the broader Honorverse.

the future of tech is sociopaths chasing engagement clicks with zero ethical considerations at impossible scale

This remains one of the books that's had the most enduring influence and relevance for me of the things I've read over the last decade or so. I remain surprised that Anderson's work here isn't more widely cited in discourse like this. Maybe because it's simultaneously obvious + hard to address?

The degree to which insane internet memetics and AI obsession has overtaken politics means that sci fi authors like Stanislaw Lem (thinking here of Futurological Parliament, Memoirs in a Bathtub) or Stephenson (particularly Diamond Age) are just all too relevant. I need to shift my reading list.

Travelers (Canadian sci fi), Dirk Gentlys Holistic Detective Agency (the recent one) are my strongest white whale short lived tv shows.

luigi mangione murdered a healthcare executive and opposed "wokeism." i don't know why people insist that killers need some coherent ideology. most people don't even have coherent wardrobes, let alone a coherent worldview.

Totally rational RETVRN opinion: live updating gradebooks that feature push updates on students devices every time their grades change is one of the worst things we've ever done to their mental health. Midterms and quarter grades, maybe check ins, are fine!

In mid-September 1832, candidates Henry Clay+Andrew Jackson both tried to visit ailing and aging founder James Madison at Montpelier in the midst of the election season. They both succeeded (and avoided each other). Just shows how long the connective tissue of the founding held the nation together.

In case you think building civic responsibility, deep research and critical thinking, engaging in genuine scholarly discussion aren't possible for young people, these prompts are a big part of the first half of a real honest to god high school course, as we are expected to think 'em all through:

My most antiquated and weird RETVRN opinion is that a version of oral exams - discussion and discourse based evaluation in some way - are a way better mechanism for evaluating a student's grasp of material+ideas, especially in the humanities and some social sciences, than we give them credit for.

This is true and it represents an unhealthy habit people have of thinking about the US a president as some kind of tribune of the plebs, a single man embodying a mass plebiscite in dozens of complex policy issues. Nothing could be further from how the Founders imagined the presidency!

One of my versions of this is to remember to go for a run where I just listen to some boring panel ramble about the Necessary and Proper clause and try to ascend for a little while from the day-to-day of politics. That, and stupid Stellaris binges.

We could use a Something Terrible button that only allows you to post cat pics and puns for the next 4 hours, after which we'll know more.