"Rich nerds are philistines" is cope.
Zuckerberg knows Latin and Greek. Andreessen gave an hour long interview about his love of the humanities. Peter Thiel is devoted to his philosopher mentor, writes for intellectual magazines, and has *taught* multiple liberal arts classes.
RT ๐ I like how the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the doomsday clock to two minutes to midnight over Trump tweets but hasn't budged it for a land war between Russia and a NATO proxy
One of the big policy/economic shifts of my lifetime has been relaxing the suppression of vices and mobilizing capital to actively promote them. For the modal user; sports book, or weed, or porn is basically harmless; but the profit is all in destroying the lives of addicts.
I know it makes me sound like a curmudgeon, but the *constant* gambling propaganda now integrated into every professional sports broadcast is really gross.
"harm done by [Ben Shapiro]'s presence" is understatement of the year. my buddy works at an ER in Dallas. said they're having to triage the wounded. they just don't have the staff to treat some of them so they give them some morphine and leave them on a stretcher in the hallway.
In a healthy society, having a public park, nature trails, and a public pool next to an elementary school would be a delightful amenity, but in the meth-addled antinomian dystopia we have chosen, the public park becomes the hellmouth
We pause by the railroad tracks and dismount our horses. Our scout feels the tracks then clutches her lower abdomen and grimaces in pain, "a vaccinated woman passed this way two days ago."
@KootsIslander
@AlexBerenson
@MattGertz
Over 60 women whom I know get menstrual-type cramps when they are just seated next to vaccinated women for an hour or so, ie at a lecture or play, or when they stay in hotels where vaccinated women have slept.
Dean: Well, what exactly were you thinking?
Me: OK, so first of all, I am very concerned with academic integrity and I know ChatGPT is a serious threat and then I was driving to campus and I though, aha! All I have to do is give a term paper prompt "make the case for fascism"
History has accurately recorded that the liberals of every era were morally ahead of their time, and that the conservatives of every era were the villains. History just doesnโt identify them as liberals and conservatives, so as not to hurt the feelings of todayโs conservatives.
@PstafarianPrice
Legally I think you're supposed to call the police, wait half an hour for them to show, then go home and watch those videos from Brazil of legal vigilante vehicular homicides.
my strongest possible recommendation is that you not set strangers on fire and pistol whip your wife, but if you insist on doing and prefer not to go to prison, apparently Alameda County is the place to be
"indigenous knowledge" can be valuable but hard to say in advance whether you will get "nixtamalization of maize prevents pellagra" or "the Bering Straits migration theory contradicts our self-conception as auto-chthonic" or just add 5% to the budget for consultants
The Party of Scienceโข๏ธ wants the EPA to set climate policy by consulting โindigenous knowledge.โ
Sounds like the Babylon Bee, right? But itโs a real story (by the inimitable
@SaysSimonson
) with real consequences.
On Rufo: what do integrity police say about his claim to have โmasterโs degree from Harvard,โ which is actually from the open-enrollment Extension School? Those students are great - I teach them- but they are not the same as what we normally think of as Harvard graduate students
RT ๐ [wife] has hung out with multiple people in [rural area] who have announced their unvaccinated status in the first minute of conversation, in case you were wondering whether there's a right-wing equivalent to declaring your pronouns
I thought the Twitter layoffs demonstrated how overstaffed the company used to be but apparently they fired everyone who knows how to write a regular expression for "โIโNโ โBโIโOโ"
I have referred 4 or 5 students to the dean this term for generative AI. It's exhausting. I am not sure what kind of homework, if any, I can assign going forward. And it's hard to substitute in-class assignments given the innumerable demands for make-ups, ADA accommodations, etc.
Our ability to evaluate student learning through out-of-class writing projects is coming to an end. This doesn't just require fundamental changes to college classes, but to admissions, where the essay, and arguably GPAs, will no longer be a reliable gauge of anything.
With audience fragmentation and the decline of linear TV, almost every time I see a billboard for a network TV show it seems a semi-parodic fake, like a TV show that only exists within a movie.
really don't understand the mindset of seeing a young person dies for no apparent reason and thinking "probably the vaccine" rather than "probably fentanyl." it's like surveying a battlefield strewn with bullet perforated corpses and tallying each one as diabetes mortality
it remains bizarre to me that letters of rec for PhD programs routinely praise the applicant for having the correct opinions. typically something like "impressed by X's deep commitment to fighting inequality"
Who remembers when the sun was golden not silvery, the sky was deep rich blue, not pale milky blue, and robust gorgeous cirrus clouds were everywhere, crisply delineated in the sky; when the sky was not plagued with weird streaks that spread with horrid inevitability, blocking
If you're going to lock up everything in the drug store, an already demeaning shopping experience, at least have enough workers to open up the cases for all the customers who just need a razor.
Me, a member of a political coalition that includes Qanon and antivaxers, consoling a liberal colleague who has discovered that much of the academic left at worst actively cheers on the deliberate mass slaughter of Jewish civilians as "resistance" and at best is indifferent to it
Want to see a gritty sequel to an aughts romcom where the characters are getting divorced because the manic pixie dream girl has matured into a Munchausen by Proxy nightmare woman
Interdisciplinary humanities jargon has gotten so weird this conference sounds like a cult of Yog-Sothoth hoping to open a gate via ritual mass suicide
1992: The humanities are useless. Study STEM.
2002: The humanities are useless. Study STEM.
2012: The humanities are useless. Study STEM.
2022: Why are nazis suddenly about to take over?
I love this photo because it invokes primal reactions in people. They are the couple everyone wishes they were in high school
They represent the summun of popularity and success
Those who fall short this ideal cannot help but feel the sting of envy
A mirror into your soul
@jessesingal
Good news is the university is maintaining access to buildings. Bad news is they are indeed ceding control of a major thoroughfare to reach them. When I went to buy lunch today, the detour route around the back side of Kaplan and Powell was pretty crowded.
If you use Wikipedia, you've seen pop-ups like this. If you're like me, you may have donated as a result.
Wikipedia is an amazing website, and the appeals seem heartfelt. But I've now learnt the money isn't going where I thought...
7 Questions to ask your coworkers instead of "how are you"?
1. kill, fuck, or marry: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao
2. what's your worst memory from childhood, don't lie or I'll know
3. Pascal's wager, but for Cthulhu
4. Choose a sex act you enjoy to make illegal
...
I admire the vertical integration of Harvard's Berkman-Klein Center being both the leading source of scholarship on misinformation and incitement to political violence and the leading purveyor of misinformation and incitement to political violence
Recently, Helen Lewis from The Atlantic reached out to me for a story that she was working on, literally demanding that I speak to her. You don't have to take my word for it -- below is a screenshot of her initial DM to me. I w/o question declined this -- and here are my messages
It is often pedagogically appropriate to say things students will find disagreeable or offensive. There are absolutely no circumstances under which it is appropriate to single out students and personalize the material in ways intended to humble them.
@SonnyBunch
@MuseZack
Todorov's Conquest of America gives a compelling argument that Moctezuma just didn't grok the concept of the Spanish but the thing is that Cuauhtemoc didn't seem especially confused and neither were the Tlaxcalans.
it's 480p and 4:3 aspect ratio which suggests it was made at least 15 years ago, so if it reads as implicitly incestuous, that says more about the degeneracy of the present audience than the artistic intent of an ad that likely predated the launch of P*rnHub
@tthompson1000
@matthewstoller
At UCLA the students had a massive petition and staged a sit in to demand that classes remain recorded indefinitely so they wouldn't have to come to class. In theory this was about immunocompromised people but scratch the surface and you see it was mostly about convenience.
I don't think this is actually a dunkable take. We already get an annual flu shot and covid boosters are a good idea for a similar reason (declining antibodies over time and there's always new strains). "I'd like annual boosters" is not "I want to live in lockdown forever."
"easy call" is true but that just reflects how radically norms about internet speech have shifted in the web 2.0 era. in the usenet, and even the early social media era, there was a consensus that people who said stuff like this were creeps, but censoring them wasn't on the table
Taking down Yeโs blatantly antisemitic posts was an easy call for Instagram and Twitter.
Texasโ social media law would make that kind of call much harderโand legally risky. Story by me and
@viaCristiano
:
This thread is amazing. You'd expect this level of didactic ethnocentrism from The Museum of the Bible or some Soviet Bloc Ministry of Culture exhibit, but they've got nothing on woke WEIRD museum curators.
As a follow up to the personal finance columnist who got conned, a sociologist needs to write a confessional article for NY Mag about how despite everything they know about social construction and peer influence, they ended up simping for a mass sociogenic illness.
RT ๐ Is there any evidence that the CCP is directly controlling the TikTok algorithm to derange US teens, or is that just a more reassuring story than the truth that purely domestic US institutions spent the last decade seeding egregores?
Wow, I didn't know that. What else can you say about Arrakis? It's an amazing planet whether you agree or not. It's an amazing planet with an amazing geological history.
Portland police officers didnโt hold back when asked for anonymous feedback about new training videos designed to teach them how to interact with the cityโs โqueer community.โ
I am very sorry to be the bearer of bad news. It seems that the estimates the effect of lead on crime are affected by publication bias; accounting for this reduces the effect to almost nothing. There do not appear to be easy answers.
imagine having to come up with some bullshit "it's for utilities access in an emergency" veil out when a journalist is on the verge of breaking the story of how pixies, gnomes, and sprites secretly control the US government.
Not that people actually think in terms of political philosophy, but there's a good case that if you think in terms of the Rawlsian veil, you'd continue to suppress vice.
51 years ago, NYT won a court case demanding the right to publish documents contradicting US foreign policy and now it is saying you're a traitor, a fascist, and a war criminal if you invest in a hosting platform that does *not* censor in favor of US foreign policy
The New York Times is out today with an absurd hit piece on JD Vance about how his firm invests in Rumble, which allows Russia Today to operate a channel. Somehow the reporter declined to mention
@TimRyan
's myriad appearances on RT.
Imagine a Washington Post headline saying "putting a stop to the Hebrew Israelites blatantly racist and antisemitic speech at the Capitol Mall was an easy call for the US National Parks Service. Cases like Brandenburg v Ohio could make that much harder."
Taking down Yeโs blatantly antisemitic posts was an easy call for Instagram and Twitter.
Texasโ social media law would make that kind of call much harderโand legally risky. Story by me and
@viaCristiano
:
Dear Journal Editors: Please inform your reviewers that it is not necessary for authors to provide a citation when they state theater kids are ruining RPGs. This falls under the category of "common knowledge" and a citation is not required.
really hoping that by the time i go senile, my bank has developed safeguards to prevent me from emptying my 401k into the btc wallet of whatever criminal deepfaked my grandchildren FaceTiming me saying they need me to bail them out of a third world prison
This is an AI generated influencer video.
Looks 100% real. Even the interior car detailing.
UGC content for your brand is about to get really cheap. โ ๏ธ
The phrase "generational trauma" has never appeared in American Sociological Review. A search on google scholar suggests it's mostly a concept from social work, interdisciplinary studies, and, ahem, the less empirically grounded periphery of social science.
When I first heard of the concept "generational trauma" in sociology 101 I said "oh I get it it's like the Bills losing 4 super bowls before I was born" and the professor said I was disrespecting the victims of the Holocaust
@yuanyi_z
Amazing that activists were able to prevent prisons from getting this set of drugs for capital punishment of people convicted of especially heinous murders but Canada can dole them out to people who are depressed and/or disabled but not terminally ill. CC
@CharlesFLehman
RT ๐screenplay pitch:
the secret services of the US, UK, Russia, Poland, and Ukraine have all sent special ops teams to destroy the Nord Stream 2 pipeline; each thinks the others are there to stop them; hilarity ensues.
@jessesingal
It's almost as if Chase Strangio is actively contemptuous of the ACLU's traditional mission of prioritizing procedural liberalism when it comes into the slightest conflict with substantive progressive policy goals.
Her other example is Shephard, which was probably a drug deal gone wrong (though the defense thought it would benefit from a gay panic defense, which is pretty gross). There are obviously hate crimes against gay people but Sotomayor's examples are 0/2.
If you take this "socially construction ate my homework" defense of lockdown learning loss seriously, it implies a signaling rather than human capital model for education, which in turn implies it would be socially optimal to disinvest in education.
โ'Learning loss is largely a subjective term,' she told me. 'Working to standardize our kids at any point in their learning process is an artificial exercise...Characterizing it as learning loss looks at it from a deficit perspective.'"
This thread is like an old west medicine show where the barker says "friends do you suffer from consumption? asthma? inclination to Onanism?" except instead of selling mint-flavored laudanum what you're supposed to buy is 8 oz of hating your parents.
Do you wince or feel anxious when someone walks into a room? Do you want to connect with someone but cannot trust that they actually love you? Do you lack communication skills & immediately lash out or shut down?
Another perfectly good word is being canceled: The USC School of Social Work is nixing the word โfieldโ as in โfield workโ & โgoing into the field.โ USC thinks this has something to do with white supremacy. Please stop.
It speaks very poorly of both the Republican primary electorate and the DeSantis campaign that they are attacking Operation Warp Speed, which brought us an effective vaccine much faster than expected
WATCH: Trump again refuses to acknowledge the Americans who experienced adverse effects of the mRNA COVID shots, brags that he โsaved 100 million lives.โ
โI never got the credit that I deserved on COVID.โ
the "no more half-elves" thing went viral but the whole meeting minutes/transcript is amazing. it's like mau-mau'ing the flak catchers but everyone has d20s and self-diagnosed mental illnesses.
If the Empire in Star Wars was real, you would see local minorities on every planet actively favoring it as protection against local majorities and then after the Battle of Endor they'd face mass intercommunal violence that would be glossed over in New Republic history textbooks
It's basic behavioral economics of framing. People are OK with high prices that get discounted but not low prices that get a surcharge. This is why The Gap charges $80 for trousers but every other time you go to the mall they have a 40% off sale.
I have never fully understood why people get so annoyed about "surge pricing" but are completely happy with "happy hours" which are a cruder version of the same thing
Just once I want to read a letter that talks about being deeply impressed that some college senior shows deep fealty to the king over the water or to purging Languedoc of the error of Catharism or to bringing flower war captives to sate the blood thirst of Huitzilopochtli.
@SwannMarcus89
Garbage archaeology and excise tax data both suggest that NSDUH survey data is an *underestimate* of how much people drink. Since there is little or no social desirability bias against moderate drinking, the skew is probably even greater than it appears in the graph.
@lymanstoneky
My opinion of you just dropped, and not by a little. You're entitled to explain why you think a particular pseud is an idiot or creep. You're also entitled to believe that pseudonymity in general is bad. But doxing (and doing so recklessly) is a real bitch move.
@eigenrobot
my favorite version of this is when you point out people won't willingly give up cars as long as public transportation is allowed to be a land of wolves and they're just like "we'll march you onto the subway car and make you sit next to the masturbating tweaker at gunpoint"
It will be interesting to see how many student organizations, not just at Harvard but throughout higher ed, update their bylaws to require that public statements require majority vote of the membership.
I generally agree with Yglesias that deterrence is a force multiplier for cancel culture and tenured faculty hold our manhood cheap and find ourselves accursed if we refrain from candor on our expertise, but the fact is speaking a very anodyne truth did destroy Wright's career.
People don't like changing the names of things because at a certain point that's just what they're called. Nobody thinks about Monica of Hippo when visiting Santa Monica, CA and if tomorrow we learned she'd molested a young Augustine in 362 AD we still shouldn't rename that city.
Dear Atheists,
Are you aware that the Dead Sea Scrolls are not a Judean newspaper archive but a mix of canonical Hebrew scriptures, 2nd temple apocrypha, and religious texts distinct to the Essenes? It's like saying Elvis didn't exist because L Ron Hubbard never mentioned him.
so sick of these woke adaptations that don't stick to the source material. I'm 30 minutes in and have yet to see one crate shoved around a room so someone can climb up to an otherwise inaccessible ledge.
@eigenrobot
the kind of thing that suggests we would get outcomes more conducive to civilization if we replaced the law with just relying on the mafia to beat the shit out of people