Minus the lake, I had a nearly identical experience with a colleague who took me far away from campus to confess in a terrified whisper that she kind of likes Trump.
This kind of attitude is why we’re going to lose the next election:
I know how to cook. My husband and I make a very good living. What I am not is blind and clueless. Grocery costs have indeed gone extremely high since COVID. The market for used cars is downright insane. Rents have skyrocketed. My entire promotion of 2021 has been completely eaten by rising costs. For people who make less, this must be an absolute bloodbath.
This is not an issue of individuals making bad choices. There are some things that can be solved on the level of individual choices. There are others that can’t. That’s why politics exists. It allows people to seek solutions to collective problems together. Offering “biographical solutions to societally begotten problems” is the definition of neoliberalism. You can’t choose your way out of a dysfunctional economy.
We’re rightfully annoyed that young people get snared in the gimmicky promises of dishonest socialists. But what can we expect if we superciliously dismiss their very real concerns with these silly neoliberal slogans?
Yes, learn to cook. I’ve learned. I cook better than the absolute majority of people, and I’m still horrified every time I hit checkout at the grocery store.
Just move, just learn to code, just learn to cook. Okay, but why does anybody need to vote for the party that offers nothing except these inane suggestions? Because it will guarantee me the “freedom to learn to cook”? I already have it.
I have Claude check my inbox for important emails, summarize them, work with them, and send out replies if necessary. I caught Claude again simply not reading the email thread to the end and just ignoring the latest emails.
I assume the “important emails” were also written by AI. Which makes me wonder what these two AI instruments say about the unnecessary human criticizing them when they talk to each other l.
In other technology-related news, I am very happy that I am not teaching in the fall because my university switched to a new version of our learning management system. Some upgrades make things better. Others do the opposite. This is the situation of the opposite. I spent 20 minutes with the new LMS yesterday, and it gave me a headache. The color scheme is an unrelieved milky gray where everything bleeds together. Changes in federal law already took the most useful functions of the LMS out of play. You can’t upload most of the .PDFs and PowerPoints with images.
The change in the LMS is unfair to people who have to teach in the fall. They have under a month to master the new system, even though they’re not on contract and nobody is paying them for their time until the week before classes start. Then they’ll have to spend the first month of class trying to teach students how to use the new LMS because nobody will know where to find anything in the update.
Some technology is very useful. I am eagerly anticipating the automation of our scheduling. In theory, it was great that people could choose their own teaching schedule. That system was heavily abused, however. Everybody insisted on scheduling themselves at 12:30 on Monday and Wednesday, which meant that crucial, higher-level courses would often have to be canceled. I begged people for years to try to be reasonable about it, with no results. Now we will lose one of the biggest perks of our job, which is fair, because if you can’t be responsible with your privileges, you deserve to lose them.
I checked, and yes, it’s true. I had no idea.
None of this gets any coverage and instead we hear endless reporting on what Trump said and what joke he made.
Comments:
Ohio State University says it has no record of Cambridge’s embattled sociology professor Jason Arday being a ‘Visiting Professor’ there, despite the claim appearing on his Cambridge University profile.
It’s very funny that the poor bugger had to fake being a Visiting Professor, which, in case people don’t know, is not prestigious at all at Ohio State.
If you are not following the story of Jason Arday, you should. The guy is a pathological liar who DEI-ed his way into a professorship at Cambridge. He invented all sorts of really bizarre achievements for himself, such as, for example, running a 12-day marathon on a broken leg or something like that. With one or two exceptions, the faculty at Cambridge are still slobbering over the guy and defending this liar and plagiarist.
By the way, has everybody noticed that I now add categories to every post? Are they useful? This is aimed at making it easier to search posts with similar topics.
How do the people who insist that the U.S. army is not in terrible shape explain the war in Iran? It’s been dragging out for months. There have been zero successes. If the army is good, why are the results so bad?
The only attempt to handle this contradiction that I’ve encountered so far is to say that the army is good, but its leadership is bad. This is ridiculous because army and its leadership are inseparable. What’s good about it if it’s not achieving any results?
Let’s leave aside for the moment the issue of whether the war was necessary. I don’t believe it was, but that’s not the point. Is this the army anybody wants defending them in case of an attack? With all of the money in the world, with all of the best science and technology, why is it so exceptionally unsuccessful against a smaller, weaker, more primitive regime?
The war was unnecessary. It was a big unforced mistake of the Trump administration, but since it already happened, can’t we try to learn something from what we’re seeing?
I have no idea how it is possible to sit on a conflict with Iran for half a century and fail to prepare for it to this degree. I also have no idea how it is possible to observe Iran actually wage war for the past four and a half years, as it has done in Ukraine, and not learn anything from the kind of weapons it very obviously and insistently uses. What kind of a “good” army fails to notice the rise of a completely new type of warfare spearheaded by the very country you’re attacking? A good army is prepared for the existing warfare. You can’t be a good army when you come out with muskets against machine guns. This is exactly what the US Army is doing in the war with Iran.
None of this would change if the war were completely justified. Let’s say, God forbid, that we need to fight a defensive war. How would we suddenly gain competence in drone warfare? Not that this army won anything before drone warfare was invented.
The US Army is like the US secondary education. Gigantic amounts of money are thrown stupidly at the issue, with predictably poor results. Maybe this is the unplanned purpose of the war with Iran. It’s a low-stakes conflict that finally makes us realize that urgent reform to the armed forces is needed.
Ukranians aren’t giving a well-deserved and proportional response to Russia to please the smug mealy-mouthed bastards like this Jay. This attitude, if not radically and severely counteracted, is going to be the death of our civilization. The idea that it’s extremely important not to be mean to invaders is poisonous. The belief that it’s better to be raped, robbed, and murdered than to hit back at the invader is immoral and self-defeating.
I’m not talking about Ukraine right now. This endless chant that “Russian civilians should not suffer” is identical to “Starving Moroccan women and children deserve a chance at a better life.”
Moral high ground is a poor consolation prize for losing your country.
Yes. I’m the mom who persecutes waiters with “And please, no sauce anywhere in the vicinity of the meal. No sauce. None.”
To which they tend to respond, “Ok, I’ll just put the sauce on the side.” Which makes it clear that they are childless, or otherwise they would understand that no sauce means, ideally, that there is no sauce in the radius of 3.5 miles from my child.
And yes, a burger is just meat and a bun. Lord have mercy on anybody who has the gall to suggest otherwise.
Yes, and I almost remained single because of this. I kept meeting men who cooked, who loved to cook, who wanted to impress me with their cooking skills. And I didn’t need that. I found it very unnecessary and, frankly, annoying.
Now I understand that it was some sort of a class thing. The men were trying to access a higher rung on the class ladder. They weren’t accessing me, though, because I most certainly do not need anybody else in my kitchen.
And it was always these really fancy, convoluted, frou-frou meals they tried to cook for me. I suffered.
And then I met N who needs detailed step-by-step instructions on how to cook plain pasta. I knew we were made for each other.
A conservative literary critic and college professor
It’s really too bad Republicans aren’t interested in winning elections anymore. ethyl
Here is Ben Shapiro, right on cue. https://x.com/i/status/2085041868362994075 Clueless is as clueless does.
Absolutely, it’s going to be chaotic and extremely inconvenient. But after six years of trying to schedule the entire department…
A comedian was saying the other day that she couldn’t loose weight not because of having an eating issue, but…
We have moved to a software deciding the timetable and room for all courses. The result has been incredibly chaotic…
No reason it can’t be both. But this particular account… https://x.com/JoelWBerry Definitely making a living sh*tposting on X. I don’t…
We need a political party that has an economic philosophy which goes beyond the endless repetitions that socialism is bad…
Yes, he’s making a packet off this. And he’s too stupid to understand that he’s helping the Dems win after…
Ethyl, I keep hearing that there are huge numbers of bots floating about the internet. It could be that a…
PS: a quick X search for “Joel Berry” suggests he’s just an engagement farmer. Nothing rakes in engagement points like…
Yeah. We have been cooking every meal at home for 10+ years. I am sick of being informed that “it’s…
This goes to show that self-learning is a myth. There is an enormous amount of information readily available to people…
It was exactly the same when we did have ground troops fighting. No matter what the warfare type is, our…
Eveyone already covered stuff very well. Just one clarification: There are no ground troops in Iran. The Army is not…
As your former and current compatriot, and of the same generation, I concur. To those who say that socialism is…
That’s good but whether the army can actually prevail in a conflict is a different issue.
Kid, I can tell you from personal experience that Canadian reserves, militia, are not quite as heavily DEI infected as…
“Subtly is not their strong suite.” Yeah, about as subtle as a swift kick in the arse with a frozen…
I very, very much want it to be a success. Words can’t describe how much I want you to be…
“War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war…
All true. And the result is what I said. A bad, weak, useless army.
Clarissa, on the drone tech. You have to understand our military leadership is fighting the last major war. They still…
Though yea, you are absolutely right. The US military went from commercials about fat lesbians being just as good as…
To be fair, from what I understand Japan had been trying to negotiate their surrender for a few months beforehand.…
So Part 3, Outside Effects. Again things the media will not tell you is that the US military is not…
Continuing in Part 2, Supply is a big problem. This battlefield is a very long way away from the US.…
Ok so this isn’t a simple one to answer, in reality there are several different branches to this, and those…
One thing – Russia can afford to lose order of magnitude more men… Its own, North Korean, random mercs… An…
LOL, damn, back of my neck ;-D What I am trying to say is the last time America was unified…
LOL, back of my head ;-D
How Midwestern if her!
Kid, men measure everything. When enlistment commercials suddenly show white men instead of diversity bumpf, the hairs go up on…
As for the analogy with Ukraine, the United States is doing colossally worse in Iran than Russia is in Ukraine.…
What prevents the US from fighting drones with drones? Why is this tech development so one-sided and why is the…
Or another possibility is that we are objectively at the point (re weapons tech development) where weaker countries can make…
True. And the same goes for the natives of European countries who are supposed to put up with egregious offenses…
\\ This endless chant that “Russian civilians should not suffer” Reminded me of “Palestinian civilians should not suffer” .”be raped, robbed,…
If it were so effective, Russians would do it.
“An Afghan immigrant has been charged with the murder of a British woman who was found dead in a suitcase…
Klara makes an exception for ranch sauce which is something I’ll never understand.
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