Benjamin Not Ben 🍉

The mRNA vaccine decision is just pure Moloch-worship. The pure worship of destruction and death, as an end to itself.

I’m not a violent guy! But I don’t know, if I sincerely believed that some decision you made killed one of my children, well, people change.

I do not publicly advocate political assassinations and I think a world where that happens a lot is probably a worse world! But it’s hard to see how you avoid it in a world where so many people are justifiably angry that they have lost loved ones as a result of some of these decisions.

Revenge, or at least retaliation, is also going to be very important to the generational political project, for what it’s worth. The incentives quite simply have to change.

The specific text of the email doesn’t matter, but it’s an email from the Mamdani campaign with a very hard to read combination of colors: lavender background and white tape, with links in a blue that is far too close to the background color.

These background and type colors, especially with blue links, are the rare design L from Team Zohran.

As I look them up, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Unfortunately I think people from any discipline can just be dumb and gullible.

These are the members of the AHA committee that says it’s OK to use the plagiarism and fantasy machine. Do not trust their scholarly production.

The closest analogy I can think of is to be ten years into eradicating cholera and typhoid and then deciding to destroy the sewers and have everybody shit in the street again.

That’s what I tell my kids when they call me out on repeating jokes

The reason that some disciplines are “humanities” is because the process of doing them is supposed to be humanizing. There is no place for AI in that.

Lol just saw you saw my actual post about this

The Fordham person is the most right wing member of the entire faculty, so this tracks.

I agree with this, and I also think there is a place for journals and publishers to refuse to publish the work of the members of this committee, specifically.

If you are a historian who believes that the plagiarism and fantasy machine is part of your historical method, I do not want to read your work! No one should want to publish it, at least not as something within the genre of history

It should be public who is on this ad hoc committee, and their work should not be published.

Unfortunately not a case where a bad headline got put on a decent article - Leonhardt and Applebaum are just blowhards spitballing about whether Columbia is legally a private institution and guessing that whatever Trump does must be legal. You will know *less* after you listen to them!

somebody check if his pee is blue

* I do think it's the case that some structural positions tend to be morally enervating, but that doesn't actually change the structural nature of the question.

That is to say: "billionaire" as such is not a moral category.

Something we need to understand clearly is that "billionaire" is a structural position* which means both that we need to attack it as such and also that different billionaires can act from their structural positions in better/worse/different ways (as indeed can we all).

Every rich person is going to tell *you* how great AI teaching is while sending *their* kids to the kind of schooling the Ancient Greeks would recognize. I just wish everyone would think about why that is.

The *opening line* sets a troubling trajectory. Trained historians ought to know the difference b/t assertion & demonstration.

“This committee recognizes that generative AI tools offer significant opportunities to improve teaching and student learning.”

Really? Says who? Backed by what evidence?

Illinois law requires that hospitals not discriminate, and when Pritzker and Raoul tell the parents of trans kids "it's not discrimination to comply with the federal government," they're abandoning their obligations.

Four Illinois hospitals have stopped providing gender affirming care to trans kids, in violation of Illinois law, because they're complying in advance with the Trump administration.

@jbpritzker.bsky.social & @kwameraoul.bsky.social are defending the HOSPITALS.

So much for being a sanctuary state.

👀

It was driving me nuts and then I figured it out.

I'm putting together a team

His design firm hates him

"He beat a well-known candidate and turned out a whole lot of first time voters. That's energy and momentum our party needs to defeat Trumpism. Yes, I endorse voting for the Democratic candidate that New Yorkers selected."

Voters chose him to run with D next to his name.

Endorse that.