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.
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.
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.
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.
A colleague went to a black-tie event in St Louis where a valet service was provided. The dinner was nice but the vehicle left the reception without its catalytic converter. St Louis is like that.
The reason why I’m sharing though is that I diagnosed the problem as cat converter theft before the mechanic did. It just so happened that this crime is featured prominently in a novel I recently read and it was fresh on my mind.
I found a book that explores the depths of the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, and I’m dead to the world, my friends, because it’s so interesting.
Arendt is the only female philosopher who is actually a philosopher, meaning, she didn’t write solely about being female. Heidegger was her teacher, and pretty much everybody else’s because his is the most influential 20th-century thought. Byung-Chul Han, for example, is a Heideggerian.
Heidegger initially supported the Nazi party because he thought that Jewish thought was too intellectualizing and globalistic. Then, the Nazis accused his ideas of being too Jewish, intellectualizing, and globalistic. None of this prevented Arendt from resuming their relationship after the war, which is fascinating in and of itself.
My interest in Heidegger began back in Ukraine when I skipped a whole semester of philosophy classes and decided to mollify the professor by explaining, in simple words, the work of some particularly complex philosopher. Nobody is more complicated than Heidegger, and the professor was duly stunned.
Shocking. Never happened to anybody else ever. Getting fired is a completely new invention. At least, there’s a news program to inform us that losing one’s job is unpleasant. We’d never find out otherwise.
I apologize in advance for giving a pedestrian, boring answer but true scholars are people who publish the kind of research that makes an impact in their field. They introduce new concepts, find new directions of research, and define the conversation in some way.
Back in 2015, I came up with the name “literature of crisis” and explained that the crisis it described wasn’t going to end. It was, I said, a much, much larger phenomenon than the Great Recession.
Just recently, I finished reading a book that’s being prepared for publication where the author discusses my “pioneering, groundbreaking study” and argues that instead of “literature of crisis” we should say “crisis literature.” Which to me is “potato-potahto” but whatever. Ten years later, everybody agrees I was right and literature of crisis still very much exists.
My other big idea was that women grow down instead of growing up and it’s directly connected with women’s liberation.
And now I’m working on my biggest one yet with the new book that’s 55% done. I’m really excited about that one.
Articles and books come out debating my ideas. People send me their articles and say I inspired them. I’ve got a small crowd of scholars reading Bauman and Byung-Chul Han because I like them. All this is how I know I’m a scholar.
It’s all about results. If you can create ideas that are relevant and get other people thinking and creating, you are a scholar. If you can’t, then no matter how much you want to be one, and how much you identify as, and how much you feel like one, it’s all haloymes, which is how Soviet Jews referred to empty fantasies.
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