Professor KPA 🗃️😷

I think it's simpler - a trauma and panic response to Things in General and clinging to the Dems as their Daddy Savior. Anyone criticizing them is saying "good may not win" and trigger their worst fears. That kind of thinking always leads to making your worst fears come true.

LENINISM. Say it with me. LENINISM is the state owning the means of production. Marxism is the workers owning the means of production. Socialism is the aim for economic equality, which can be achieved many, many ways. STFU until you can achieve even a wikipedia level understanding of these concepts.

It's profoundly saddening to read that AP will no longer be assigning or running book reviews because readers don't engage with them enough and they take too much effort to plan and assign. People complain about critics as gatekeepers; wait until all that's left is marketing.

AI Ethics & Policy News

The giant spreadsheet of AI ethics & policy news has officially hit 2,000 entries! bit.ly/ai-ethics-news

I have teaching plans & ideas for this so have been writing up curriculum in case it's useful for others--I know a few folks have told me they use this in their classes, can you tell me how? :)

This is it.

At least the Reichstag actually was on fire

“I understand that there are parents who are concerned about trans kids in schools. I hope those parents are more concerned about the Republican destruction of opportunity for your kids. If your greatest concern is trans kids, there is a party that will harass them to death for you. It won’t be us.”

Fun fact: DC was created originally because the Founders were worried about a take over of the seat of government.

DC statehood is now an imperative. No more dicking around. Next Dem majority, get it done immediately.

Hey religious history folk:

Is there a good article to assign that reflects the recent historiographical focus on religion and empire? Preferably one that covers the late-19th and/or early-20th century?

If you ever find yourself drifting towards the idea that public defenders, legal aid lawyers, and pro bono/sliding scale/movement lawyers are bad people for representing rapists or murderers or con artists or whatever, just keep in mind that is true only if you conclude the government never lies.

The national guard is being deployed to protect the Epstein files.

I keep thinking about Linda Tirado, who was hit in the eye with a rubber bullet at a protest and later died of complications from the injury. I miss her voice on here all the time.

all I want, from any type of relationship, is a person who will make jokes about the horrors while actively fighting them with me

This too. Fascism will not hesitate to disable you, and then use that disability against you. We are all one bad accident or one diagnosis away from disability.

Across every single aspect of human experience

The media is in favor of Trump’s crackdown, that’s all there is to it.

Good (Enough) Christians — Russell Moore in The Atlantic Illustrates the Limitations of 'Christian Nationalism' as Category As a transgender person who grew up evangelical and is now an atheist, I feel the consequences of the “myth of Christian innocence” that profoundly shapes American society in ways that many Americans ...

I’ve written quite a bit about it, mostly but not entirely for @religiondispatches.org.

Here’s a take you probably haven’t seen elsewhere and that I think deserves consideration:

religiondispatches.org/good-enough-...

If you’re in DC and seeing National Guard/Federal agent activity, reach out via Signal at marisakabas.04

GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that’s not the worst of it. A new release botched … and a breaking research new paper that spells trouble

GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that’s not the worst of it, by Gary Marcus @garymarcus.bsky.social / Marcus on AI - Substack garymarcus.substack.com/p/gpt-5-over...

I'm a super macho, tough law-and-order conservative and I'm here to tell you that just thinking about a big city makes me pee my pants a little bit.

RFS feel-good update (8/11): "When she knocks on doors, she spends most of the time listening." Winning elections, fighting back, doing the work

This week's @runforsomething.net feel-good update: More than half our candidates in elections last week WON. Here's how they (and we!) do it. rfsfeelgoodupdates.substack.com/p/rfs-feel-g...

Charge them with crimes.

Damn right. They're "telling you who they are" when they pay for "ai" but not teachers.

They hate labour. They hate professions of care. They hate women. They hate communities of colour.

They want the poor to have cheap, shitty education that trains them to take orders and shut the fuck up.

I find it difficult to not see this as synonymous with a truly selfish culture who takes the promise of something being easier for them without question without judgement without care for fucking over others or themselves—anything to capitalize on the form of getting ahead sold to them as a panacea

This one's a collective responsibility. If you are in the general public and you care about public health:

DO:
- Get in the replies of people with power who actually read their replies. Bother them, fluster them, link them to unflattering news stories.
- Share correct information on your own page.

DON'T:
- Use X, at all.
- Quote tweet dunk, especially small accounts.
- Vent about their talking points in other people's replies. Remember: we're sucking the oxygen out of their ecosystem. And: doing this annoys and exhausts the people you're replying to. I'm sorry if you didn't realize that.

Historians working on race and gender. Anyone have a good indexer they can recommend to Howell?

More than a century ago DuBois coined “wages of whiteness” just for it rephrased and repackaged a thousand different ways by white people who keep acting surprised

I think the part that bothers me most is that Black people have been saying this for more than 100 years and it has not changed anything at all because we are not heard or listened to. And this disregard is another manifestation of the problem to prevent it being solved.