So, we're going to keep having a Congressman with AI psychosis, a thing most people recognize as being bad. Great Democracy we've got here!
Michael Scott Balch, PhD
@uqprofessional.bsky.social
I sell VVUQ and VVUQ accessories. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspa.2018.0565
New Evidence Suggests Dinosaurs Had Quinceañeras https://theonion.com/new-evidence-suggests-dinosaurs-had-quinceaneras/
Re-watched The Odyssey (2026) today. Got home to my wife without incident. Guess I'm built different.
It's election day in VA-08, the one that actually counts. Vote Mo.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die (2025) is an absolute gem of a movie, and I will not brook a word against it.
The thing about free will vs no free will is that it's you either way. You made that choice. You may have made it as a deterministic result of everything you are and everything that ever happened to you, but you are still the entity through which that chain of causality flowed.
noam@noamchompers.bsky.social · 3d agoalso, if free will is not an illusion, then we should also make sure to end poverty and reduce chronic stress
A lot of people I really respect have been working hard for a long time to make this style of engagement *not* be the norm in academia. None of the people I am around do this (and would never valorize it) because it is the worst thing about the academy.
Anjali Dayal@anjalikdayal.bsky.social · 4d agoI don’t really want to get into this with people who feel this way, but i don’t think this is a good thing! We don’t need to behave this way! It’s not healthy to approach academic discourse as an exercise in harshness!
I understand the desire for a one-narrative-fits-all-scenarios approach to anti-AI politics, but "our tech overlords built computer god" is very different from "these MFers are so disconnected from work that they thought they could replace every professional with a computerized magic eight-ball".
I am ambivalent on the question of norms and, in particular, Nolan's specific appeal to norms. After all, this is the guy who made a whole Batman movie about how much Occupy Wall Street scared him. But I still very much enjoyed this piece.
Patrick Wyman@patrickwyman.bsky.social · 5d agoWrote about Nolan's Odyssey and what it tells about both the Bronze Age Collapse and our own age of wreckers and destroyers. Christopher Nolan's Collapsing Worlds: www.patreon.com/PastLivesMed...
You don't actually need more income to eliminate the vast majority of student debt. They can just write it off the books.
Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Bisexual of the Blade (Alt-text or DIE)@shengokai.blacksky.app · 5d agoBunch of people are suggesting very good uses for the gold crap Trump has festooned the oval with. I'm gonna throw my suggestion: eliminate student loan debt. Use the proceeds from selling tickets to the demolition, the melting down, the selling off to eliminate student loan debt.
You know, I've despised Liberal appeals to dead civic norms for so long that it has blinded me to my relationship to norms. I've built my life around norms. I've made profound life altering choices based on norms. I think about norms all the time; I just don't think of them AS norms.
can't speak to classics but appalachian studies was enthused
Claire E. Aubin@ceaubin.com · 6d agoA real question: were classicists acting this insane about O Brother, Where Art Thou when it came out
Karl Popper. I only recently discovered this because I'd been getting him second-hand through Deborah Mayo, who cleans him up a lot.
Sanjay Srivastava@sanjaysrivastava.com · 7d agoWhat is an extremely nerdy/obscure/specific thing you hate with a white-hot wrath?
We went to a niece's play last night. Strap in for two weeks of posting about the politics of Legally Blonde (2001).
We really should have gone to greater lengths to be loudly disgusted by anyone who acted like getting a shot or wearing a mask to prevent the spread of a pandemic virus was worse than being conscripted into the First World War
*Trojan historian watching as the Achaeans break down the gates* Wow, my civilization is undergoing a complex transformation from a heavily centralized and stratified administrative society to a more socially-fragmented modality of living in which material culture is dispersed amidst smaller sites.
Oh, right. The fascism. The horrible horrible fascism.
Rendering hundreds of thousands of people “illegal,” out of status, overnight, makes it obvious that illegality is produced by policy, an event version of something that has taken place over years and decades
We sacked Troy, and all I got was this stupid hat.
Emily Wilson gets mad at the Author for not telling the story she would've told, hallucinates a bunch of stuff that's not in the text, and then sets a bar that cannot be satisfied in the Author's medium. I don't understand how anyone with a PhD finds this anything but grating.
There is no one original review of Nolan's Odyssey, they’re all the product of an oral tradition of going “hmm, not quite right" at Classics conferences.
It is not sexist to correctly notice that half of Emily Wilson's complaints are not addressable through the medium of film. Sometimes, academics say stupid things that defy the expertise that they really do actually have. It's not wrong to notice.
I take Emily Wilson's film criticism about as seriously as I take Christopher Nolan's politics.
‘Just not Trump’ is the exact platform you would have if your goal was to ensure the conditions that produced Trump remained intact.
Our cake supply can't handle more than one horse.
InfoWars@realinfowars.bsky.social · 2w agoWhat if someone told you there's MORE than one horse? Have you ever considered that?