So if the 3 dems were alive, there’s a chance R’s would have whipped harder.

However, we should appreciate the 1 vote margin since it’s more fuel against the Dems as a party. They’re unable to fulfill their function, and must be purged.

Not going to revive the adventurism struggle session, but also I feel like Luigi action needs to aim higher than “staffers” (unless that is the media is being euphemistic about their role here).

There are, after all, levels of complicity and if adventurism is the name of the game, it needs to aim high up to maximally focus on the most complicit in order to make the tradeoff in crackdowns, etc. worth it.

I feel like this guy might have simply dreamed too small. It’s like, I see where you’re going, but small potatoes like this don’t actually have the same impact as Luigi (in fact, the response will sadly likely be predominantly negative).

Yeah I actually think by and large Gordon’s work shows how incompetent petit bourgeois are.

While 10% of the time a cook or chef is burnt out and producing subpar food, 90% of the time the owner and management are at fault (huge menus, stupid concepts, power tripping.

Also say what you will, when the owner in Amy’s Baking Company pockets the tips Gordon goes hard that it’s illegal and immoral to do so (even asking customers what they think, lol).

Gruesome Gavin needs to be purged.

I’ll leave “from what” up to the reader.

Good to hear you’re ok comrade.

While it might be extra work, have the hose set up in the future in case things go haywire. Glad you made it back in time and kept cool though.

JK Simmons playing a complicated father figure!

This is my new favorite volcel vanguard post.

Yep. There’s other spaces where folks can be horny and cringe. Here though, it’s about dialectical materialism.

If right wing anti-Semitism ends the war… I don’t know how I’m going to feel. I think mostly more white hot rage at Democrats for bungling so bad. They could have been -israel, no one cares.

Unless this is an only Nixon can do China situation.

Balatro. My life is over

doh, didn’t see link

You’re doing Lenin’s work comrade

5-4 was talking about this

Just gonna say that Said is a very enjoyable read. I’ve read some of his other works (never cracked Orientalism proper, I’m bad), and he is a very good thinker.

Here he is from “Secular Criticism” pgs 2-3. It gets a bit dense in the back half and he’s still an academic, but there’s always moments of lucidity like this in the Said I’ve read (again, can’t speak to Orientalism sadly).

The degree to which the cultural realm and its expertise are institutionally divorced from their real connections with power was wonderfully interested for me by an exchange with an old college friend who worked in the Department of Defense for a period during the Vietnam war. The bombings were in full course then, and I was naively trying to understand the kind of person who could order daily B-52 strikes over a distant Asian country in the name of the American interest in defending freedom and stopping communism. “You know,” my friend said, “the Secretary is a complex human being: he doesn’t fit the picture you may have formed of the cold-blooded imperialist murderer. The last time I was in his office I noticed Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet on his desk.” He paused meaningfully, as if to let Durrell’s presence on that desk work its awful power alone. The further implication of my friend’s story was that no one who read and presumably appreciated a novel could be the cold-blooded butcher one might suppose him to have been. Many years later this whole implausable anecdote (I do not remember my response to the complex conjunction of Durrell with the ordering of bombing in the sixties) strikes me as typical of what actually obtains: humanists and intellectuals accept the idea that you can read classy fiction as well as kill and maim because the cultural world is available for that particular sort of camouflaging, and because cultural types are not supposed to interfere in matters for which the social system has not specified them. What the anecdote illustrates is the approved separation of high-level bureaucrat from the reader of novels of questionable worth and definite status.

Yes but Deng did allow for the further support of the Khemer Rouge in their guerilla phase after Vietnam rolled in and kicked them out.

The unequivocal Deng “L” was allying with the US to support the rebels against the Vietnamese supported government. I can understand the choice as brutal Realpolitik but that doesn’t make it right. The fact that China basically took an aggressive posture versus Vietnam in this era was unfortunately the big L

I think they also mention this in season 1. Blowback is a mindset, a vibe. It’s when the state takes the consequences of its actions to further it’s goals (so Iraq 1 allowing for Iraq 2 is fine actually!).

MASSIVE MASSIVE QUANTITIES OF PIE

Yeah. Years of being policed means they have every motivation to deny (and indeed, they tell each other this too).

It’s just an intractable problem.

deny deny deny and then only when they’re clearly caught in it say “but the policy”

My goal (and I don’t know how exactly to achieve it) is to reverse this so that by copping to it quickly we can move to “do you understand why what you produced is shit and how the LLM did that” without them worried I’m going to drag them to academic integrity.

I don’t know how to get them to do it though. It’s like, I don’t want to spend an hour in my office pulling teeth about “ok, this source isn’t real, but did you document badly or did you use AI”

Primarily because I don’t want to police AI as source discovery stuff. Too much policing means students doing googles and using the AI summary would be afoul of my policy and I don’t want to deal with that. So the illicit use to write your paper is banned but I’m not really checking that and basically am upfront that their work is their own and they’re responsible for checking shit like this (also why this bungle is so infuriating). The whole “generate a wikipedia on a topic” trick it does can be a good starting point for key names, sources, etc and I don’t want to say all of that is banned.

And while I think since students pay for the writing center that’s a better use of time and resources (or hell meeting with me), if a student wanted to chat about their essay with the bot instead, I could see this as potentially useful for those with really bad social anxiety. Balancing what the bot says with what I say isn’t the WORST outcome (indeed as long as there’s multiple vectors of critique/possibility the student has to weigh and choose between my pedagogy is basically working). I don’t like it, but I don’t like a lot of stuff.

But fundamentally it’s because policing this kind of stuff is a time sink and a strict anti AI policy is just a ton of work. Instead, I try to assume student work is student work until presented with something otherwise. Which is also why this student is in danger not because of gen AI use but instead fabricated materials.

I try to be a generous and kind reader. I don’t want to be a cop. But shit like this forces my hand (I can’t pretend otherwise!) and it really bugs me. I want to help the students with THEIR work and writing and I try not to jeopardize that by constantly assuming it’s not theirs. Leaving the door open helps avoid starting with that attitude too early.