Opinions, art, debate
I used Copilot to edit my article in Ukrainian that I wrote for an online portal. It did a great job. But I wouldn’t do it for my research. It won’t work. Nor would I do it for writing in English because I do it much better myself.
In my field, which is literary criticism, the quality of writing is half the value of the piece. And even Claude (which is the better AI for writing) doesn’t get beyond a gushy Filipina type of writing.
The best use I have found for AI so far is to have it write a piece of code to clean out my Gmail inbox. The code only needed a small tweak to work moderately fine.
But please rest assured, every word of Neoliberal Love was written by me.
I have found it unexpectedly hard to write my sabbatical proposal. I’m supposed to explain why I need a semester dedicated exclusively to research, and I do need it for my sanity but that’s not an argument I can roll out.
I will have written two whole books from start to finish and I don’t know how many articles and chapters, while being department Chair, teaching, and serving on two executive boards for scholarly organizations. It’s kind of hard to explain what additional feats of productivity I will manage to perform without any obligations beyond writing.
Apparently, Trump’s militarization forced these women to wear costumes from a TV show making them look like characters from that TV show.
We are surrounded by idiots.
An English Department, of all people:
Nobody wants their own extinction more than academics.
My husband’s father beat his wife regularly to a bloody pulp. My husband’s mother chased the father with a meat cleaver. We make a lot of jokes about meat cleavers (and now you know why) but other than that out relationship isn’t thwarted by fear that it will be anything except what we make it.
The guy in the tweet is a wuss. He might very well be apocryphal but the thousands of guys who are tweeting about how he was right are not. They are all exceptional pussies.
My Dean has no secretary or receptionist and has to do his own secretarial work. And he’s too much of a wuss to protest, take a stand, and demand that this travesty end.
A friend of many years built a cabin in the woods and moved there for a foraging lifestyle because that’s what his girlfriend always wanted. He is so not a foraging wooden cabin guy. He’s a “sitting in a cafe in Paris with a new Gallimard book” type of dude. After a few years of forced foraging, I was afraid we were going to lose him prematurely. He looked bereft and bedraggled, it was heartbreaking. Of course, the girlfriend eventually dumped him for a guy with a better wood cabin. My friend is now free to be who he always was. Last week, he showed up in a new fancy suit and told me about this new really cool cafe in St Louis where he goes every morning with a book. I almost cried.
You can say no, you can have some agency, you can figure out how to do the bloody dishes to mutual satisfaction. Yesterday I had a very confrontationional situation at work. Verbally confrontational, no cleavers. It was a serious issue and we both felt very strongly. After 1,5 hours of debating in very strong terms, we found a compromise and were hugging before we left. If I can do it with a woman I’ve met exactly twice before in unpropitious circumstances (she’s the one who has a dream that there should be no white people on campus), surely one can manage to discuss who’ll do the dishes or express a reluctance to work without a secretary / forage in the woods instead of crying in the corner.
Obviously, most men are not like that. My husband is the opposite of that. He makes reality his bitch, and I love it. But performative wussiness exists, and I hate it.
You thought you had problems? Look at these poor bastards:
Notice the word “choice”. These loser idjits brainwash themselves into utter abjection with this word. Choice is their god. It’s their only measure of morality.
I don’t know how these parents achieve these results. My kid is 9, and she wouldn’t let me manage her school affairs for love or money. She doesn’t even like me knowing when she has a project or a test at school.
“This is my business, mommy. I know how to handle my own business. Here’s a book, go read it. Or fold some laundry. I know how much you enjoy that.” She’s not being sarcastic. I do love folding laundry, a pastime I discovered in my dotage.
I suggested volunteering as a recess monitor and she asked if I was trying to be funny.
Daily, I’m observing academics destroy their own jobs. But they are not alone. Journalists do the same thing:
Without freedom of speech, there’s no journalism. Anything can be labeled abusive and hateful. You’d think a journalist would be aware how easy it is to mark her as hate speechifier if arresting people for saying words becomes the norm. But no, it doesn’t sink in.
Airbnb co-founder @jgebbia explains how Joe Biden’s border crisis was the start of what drove him to leave the Democrat Party.
And on the same day:
Malcolm Gladwell says “trans athletes have no place in the female category.”
He admits he was cowed into saying that it was ok.
Yes, they are all opportunists. But the fact that it’s now become opportune to say the obvious without fear is a very big deal.
P.S. Found more immediately after posting:
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