joseph p. derosier

Whether it’s Barack Obama, appearing in a tan suit or Donald Trump appearing 1700 times in Jeffrey Epstein‘s emails, both presidents made some highly controversial appearances.

seems to me that those democrats inclined not to fight perceive themselves as living through a somewhat ordinary cycle of presidential overreach and backlash and not something much more significant and dangerous

Do people know that politicians get paid to do politics? That politics is actually their JOB?

For the love of God stop calling capitalism “Technofeudalism.” This is not a mutant regression off the track of benign capitalism’s progress to utopia. This is capitalism doing capitalism.

Polls show that only 33% of Americans blame Democrats for the shutdown. But at this Atlantic staff Zoom meeting, that percentage feels much higher.

The average age of U.S. homebuyers is now 56, up from 49 last year.

In 1981, the year trickledown economics began, it was 31.

Happy official publication day to Close Reading for the Twenty- First Century

This is Syd

I'm soon adopting a cat named Syd and the person who rescued her offered me to change the name but it seems like a pretty bad ass cat name.

if i had the opportunity to ask a question of anyone in the administration, given this "war in chicago" messaging, i would ask them how many americans the president intends to kill in his war

article written in 1913 by William H. Maxwell, superintendent of schools in New York City. In an angry and defiant reaction to unfair criticism and to pressure groups, Maxwell first attacked the "arro-gant unreasonableness" of certain educational theorists who periodically made sweeping indictments of the schools and then offered their pet solutions. But nothing, he said, had been as arrogant as the agitation with which the educational world is now seething for the introduction of industrial or trade teaching in the public schools. That agitation, as every one knows, originated with the manufacturers. They had practically abandoned the apprenticeship system of training workmen. No longer training their own mechanics, they have found it difficult to obtain a sufficient supply of skillful artisans, unless they import them from Europe at great expense. Out of this dilemma the exit was obvious —- persuade the State to assume the burden. It was only a new application of Colonel Sellers' definition of patriotism — The old flag and — an appropriation! — let the State do the work that is so oppressive to us. And, as a first step to secure their ends, they and their agents in unmeasured terms denounced the public schools as behind

the age, as inefficient, as lacking in public spirit. And why? Because the public schools are not training artisans— are not doing the work that had been done by employers of labor for thousands of years. The arrogance of the manufacturers was two-fold — first, in condemning the schools for not doing what thinking men had never before considered it the duty of the schools to do and what the traditions of thousands of years laid it upon the manufacturers to do; and, second, in demanding that the State, after taxing consumers for fifty years, through a protective tariff, in order to fill the pockets of manu-facturers, should then proceed to pay the bills for training their workmen. To condemn a great industry — schoolteaching — for not doing what hitherto it had never been expected to do, and to clamor not only for protection from competition but for relief at the hands of the state from the duty and expense of training artisans —could arrogance farther go? 36

William Maxwell, superintendant of NY public schools in 1913 being a BOSS.

It isn't until the 26th paragraph that there is mention that what Trump is doing is being challenged as illegal. And it accepts Trump's stated rationale to act.

Here is what I think: Trump is illegally deploying the military in blue cities to set the stage to interfere with the 2026 elections.

AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified Copyright class actions could financially ruin AI industry, trade groups say.

The crux of their argument is that if they're found liable, then the consequences of their own actions that no one forced them to take could ruin them and the rest of their industry that undertakes similar practices.

To which I say motherfucker did you never hear about Napster

Anyway I came on here to BEG academics to stop using AI in their journal submissions. Yes, that includes for proofing, arranging reference lists etc. I am currently staring at a perfectly decent article, written by a human being, with a useless AI-generated bibliography full of errors.

Opinion | You May Not Be Trump’s Target This Time. But You Could Be Next.

If you read only one thing today please make it this, by the great Vanita Gupta

You May Not Be Trump’s Target This Time. But You Could Be Next

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/o...

Israel is not "throttling food supply" It is STARVING PEOPLE AS PART OF ONGOING GENOCIDE.

Thinking too about how right-wing authors are always “best sellers” because some rich dude or think tank just buys thousands of copies on release to sit in a warehouse

Iran did not have a nuclear weapon.

Iran did not have a nuclear weapon.

Iran did not have a nuclear weapon.

Iran did not have a nuclear weapon.

Iran did not have a nuclear weapon.

Iran did not have a nuclear weapon.

Iran did not have a nuclear weapon.

Iran did not have a nuclear weapon.

Teachers Are Not OK AI, ChatGPT, and LLMs "have absolutely blown up what I try to accomplish with my teaching."

I talked to 15 teachers/professors about how AI and ChatGPT is ruining their lives:

www.404media.co/teachers-are...

Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America The reactionary blogger’s call for a monarch to rule the country once seemed like a joke. Now the right is ready to bend the knee.

my takeaway from this feature is that in a functioning political system there would be televised congressional hearings over the fact that one of the most influential people in the white house is a total maniac www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Until recently I hadn't read "Scapegoat," a book that is never mentioned in the now 6-year-long Dworkin revival going on (even though it seems in many ways to be her magnum opus). It's the book where Dworkin finally says what she thinks women should do. The answer she comes up with may surprise you.

This is really the perfect use of generative AI: to create a report whose purpose is solely to exist as A Report, which no one is supposed to read because no one involved in its creation even pretends to have the slightest genuine interest in the actual facts at issue.

RFK Jr. threatens to bar government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals The health secretary said the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet are in bed with pharma.

reputable medical journals keep saying that RFK and his pro-disease friends are full of shit and so naturally they must be shunned www.politico.com/news/2025/05...

Opinion | What I Learned Serving on My University’s AI Committee What I learned serving on a university AI committee.

“Preserving art, literature, and philosophy will require no less than the creation of an environment totally and uncompromisingly committed to abolishing the linguistic alienation created by AI and reintroducing students to the indispensability of their own voice.“

"History will say..."

No.

People are dying now. Listen to us now. Do something now.

Enjoying Peter Szendy's latest: “[…] read whatever happens, read for the sake of reading, read no matter what you read, despite what you read, even if, or precisely because, it is unreadable.”

Ocean Vuong tells us that the novel, is in fact, a bottom that contains multitudes.

I Talked to the Writer Who Got Caught Publishing ChatGPT-Written Slop. I Get Why He Did It. The latest A.I. controversy didn’t just hallucinate a summer reading list. It exposed how broken the system already is—and how fast it’s unraveling.

The AI slop summer book preview/supplement in the Chicago Sun-Times is about what's happened in media more than what's happening with AI. This Slate piece gets it and I have some thoughts from the perspective of someone who writes about books for a major Chicago newspaper. slate.com/technology/2...