Opinions, art, debate
So what happened with that Delta flight that crashed and flipped over in Toronto? I asked my AI tool, and it refused to acknowledge the incident ever took place. I had to beat it into submission with links for it to even accept that the crash happened. Now it tells me the names of the pilots haven’t been revealed. Does anybody have fresher news?
This kind of thing started to happen way too often in recent months. And it’s always a struggle to find out the names of the culpable.
This will put inflation onto overdrive. Anybody who holds savings in US dollars should reconsider.
One would think that the very recent round of inflation caused by “sending out checks” should have served as a lesson but it didn’t. Musk is obviously doing this purposefully to undermine the dollar and strengthen crypto but Americans shouldn’t pay for this plan.
People seem confused by my recent statement that there are no female philosophers aside from Hannah Arendt. Here is what I mean by that.
We have an art festival in our town. It’s held every September and features work by a couple dozen local artists. Some are atrocious but some are quite good. They are artists doing art but not in the same way as Rembrandt or Degas were artists. I buy artwork there routinely because it’s enjoyable to look at and it’s good to support local artists. But I do it with a clear understanding that it’s art in a very different manner than the art you see in a museum.
Similarly, I am a writer in the sense that I write and publish books. But I’m not a writer like Cervantes or even Jennifer Egan. Of course, there are women who study philosophy and publish in philosophical journals and conference proceedings. I am one of such women. But I’m not a philosopher like Descartes, Hegel, or Arendt. And if you look at this last sentence, aside from Arendt, I have nobody of the female sex to list in a way that would be understandable to everybody.
I’m very interested in discussing why that is and how Arendt managed to become what women don’t usually try to become. But that there isn’t a list of female names to put next to Plato, Kant, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Lacan, etc cannot possibly be in dispute.
People say I shouldn’t be angry at colleagues for the impending elimination of departments and programs. I’m trying very hard to not be angry. I pray, I meditate. It’s very unpleasant to be choking with rage at your own colleagues. I’d so much rather detest only the administration.
But when I raised the question of how many DEI workers will be fired together with tenured professors, I was screamed down by tenured professors, some of whom are getting fired for sure. When I questioned how come there is money to hire DEI specialists from Washington, DC but no money to teach languages, colleagues pretended to be offended on behalf of DEI specialists. We are doing a 3-month DEI course with the DC specialists. I don’t want to imagine how much this costs because it’s not just the workshop but software to measure how thoroughly we are DEI-ed, the analysis of the testing, additional workshops to correct the insufficient DEI-ing of the remaining faculty, and so on. The only – literally the only one – person questioning this is me. Everybody else seems very sincerely to believe that this a fantastic way to spend money. Maybe they are faking but it changes nothing. Nobody is asking these questions openly and I’m getting tired of being the only person who cares.
Yesterday, when our Dean was announcing additional details about the firings, a professor who’s getting fired with 90% certainty interrupted. “This is because of Trump, right?” she said hopefully. “This wouldn’t be happening if he wasn’t in the White House, right?”
Even the Dean was taken aback with the ease of this extraordinary self-sabotage.
How is one supposed not to be angry at all this?
In the meantime, the Prime Minister of the formerly great Britain;
A murder is a result of knives, ladies and gentlemen. A crackdown on knife sales online – but not in stores because those don’t exist – will make murders disappear. If only humanity figured out faster how to make this happen.
What can one possibly conclude from these events other than that the nation-state is dead and nobody can bring it back? Besides the fact that politicians hate the English language and will torture it mercilessly, of course.
Unfortunately, in what concerns Ukraine, the Trump administration is doing exactly what the Biden administration did but openly instead of in secret. I expected a pivot in US foreign policy but there is none. A replay of Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden is taking place. Second administration Trump is weaker on foreign policy than the first. Why he’s repeating Obama’s failed reset with such dogged dedication I don’t know but it’s probably the usual lack of ideas in the same government apparatus.
I hope at least we’ll get our mass deportations. This is a historic opportunity, and it shouldn’t be pissed away.
He’s completely wrong.
It’s also a waste of time to ask primitive questions like this one but at least it doesn’t mention “rights”, so thank God for small mercies.
At the currently ongoing seminar on wokeness, we are encouraged to have our departments tested for how “interculturally developed” we are.
“Intercultural” is the new word for “anti-racist” or “DEI compliant”, in case anybody isn’t following.
What’s really entertaining is that people are lining up to take the test and narc on themselves. No reward is offered for doing it and no punishment promised for abstaining. This is an exercise in pure, self-sabotaging free will.
I’m observing this with entomological interest.
Yeah, aha, right. Yesterday, I asked Grok to explain the following quote from Elon Musk:
Grok wrote an impassioned essay about how “woke mind virus” is an expression used by far-right personalities to manipulate their audiences into believing that the fight for social justice and freedom of expression is distasteful.
I asked Grok to explain this expression from a centrist point of view. It repeated the same blather, adding a paragraph on how people who use this expression are racist.
I asked Grok to rewrite its explanation from a right-wing point of view, and was again presented with the same rant, preceded by the words “although there might be some overreach in the fight for social justice and freedom of speech sometimes referred to as ‘woke’…”
Guess he’s impotent not only in the sack but in the area of AI, as well.
A rich higher-IQ person manipulating 80-IQ dupes is a wonder to behold:
I particularly like the use of the caps and the “have I got this right” with dots instead of a question mark. Just the “have I got this right. . .” is like a key that immediately opens the brains of our low-IQ brethren to absolutely any sort of manipulation.
The dupes are jumping up and down with joy like trained poodles.
I noticed this otherwise trivial tweet in my thread because just this morning I read a very similarly worded email in which our faculty union is using the same rhetorical devices to distract its members from the plans to fire them. I don’t know yet if it’s going to be as successful as Piers Morgan’s little manipulation.
This is what I keep saying about cognitive inequality. The world grows more complex, and the intellectually less capable are so grateful for any crumb that makes it looks simpler that they gladly assist in their own despoliation. All that a smart person needs to do is to signal “I’m one of you, I’m also confused, make it make sense, have I got this right, and world peace”, and the grateful masses will experience profound devotion in return for this pretense at understanding and solidarity.
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