It’s awesome when some students go from C’s to A’s based on my feedback.

If you can get a really positive feedback loop going, where the student trusts the teacher and you can harmonize, that’s awesome. I’ve been in classes like that. I’ve also been in classes where the RA didn’t speak English and I had to argue trivial subjects straight from the textbook that got graded wrong.

There’s real quality education and there’s diploma mills and weed out classes, and you can find them two doors down from one another on some campuses.

You’re either with the oligarchs or you’re with the terrorists

DOGE is already tearing wiring out of the walls. Crazy to get weeks of “Half Department X has been fired and the budget has been slashed” articles only to hear Schumer take the blame in advance for further defunding.

I mean, on the one hand, giving some freemium AI the job of doing the work you paid tens of thousands of dollars to have the privilege of practicing seems like a giant waste on a variety of fronts.

But on the other, a lot of this is busy work anyway and only really intended to sift out students through attrition. So I don’t feel that bad when I hear a class with 200 students all getting told to churn out 40 pages of homework over the weekend so that some RAs can feed the homework back through a different AI to handle the grading for them.

Well, that sucks and I’m sorry to hear it. Yeah, could just be anxiety issues. I have a friend with a severe enough case who ended up getting on SSRIs to treat it and it genuinely turned around her personality immensely. That might go a bit above the raw psychology of Thinking Fast And Slow (or it might not, idk, I’m no doctor). But one of the things the book gets into is the real physical toll deliberative thinking takes. Chess professionals can burn calories comparable to a pro-athlete planning out their next move, for instance.

I don’t know about “messed up”, but its useful to understand when you’re responding on reflex. The intuitive response is the normal response, with deliberative thinking tending to be the exception rather than the rule. So you can recognize the impulsive action as a problem. But you shouldn’t see reflex as a problem. Reflexes are useful precisely because they let you make decisions quickly and effortlessly. Ask any pro-athlete.

What really got me was how quickly conservatives pivoted from “Russia is an enemy of all right thinking, red blooded Americans!” during Snowden/Wikileaks under Bush to “Vladimir Putin is the only man who truly cares about freedom and democracy!” under Obama.

Same with Hong Kong, which consistently enjoyed the highest praise in Paleocon/Libertarian circles… right up until the 2019 protests, when half the conservative movement realized this city was fully within the thrall of the Chinese Communist Party. I’ve seen Singapore bleeding support for similar reasons.

People being disappeared in the US isn’t a sudden turn of events. The BLM movement from 2014 revolved around chronic police abuses, including the kidnapping and murder of local residents by municipal police (Sandra Bland and Freddie Gray being two contemporary well-documented examples). Then we had the hundreds of residents tossed into Gitmo and other US blacksites, going back to the War on Terror. And the police terror campaigns during the Nixon-Reagan War on Crime/Drugs and the Eisenhower Red Scare. Hell, we’ve known about police-endorsed lynchings as an American tradition since Emmett Till, ffs.

But we have to pretend this is an Evil Foreigner Thing that we need a strong overseas military to prevent, rather than a sinister domestic agenda that Americans need to rebel against and overthrow. Otherwise, we might begin to see the Thin Blue Line as less of a protective barrier and more of a garrotte closing around our necks.

There’s a book called “Thinking Fast and Slow” that talks about a bifurcation of the mental process between intuitive mental work and deliberative work. It goes through a bunch of examples of people with established credentials, careers in intellectual professions, and proven records of deliberative thought being tricked by relatively casual visual and verbal illusions.

Getting tricked by Tall Can isn’t something you can “Critical Thinking” your way out of reflexively. It is something you have to exert continuous mental energy to achieve. When the overwhelming majority of your decisions are made reflexively, and even the process of stepping over from reflexive intuition to deliberative intuition is ultimately an intuitive process, you’re going to get fooled more often than not. The only real defense is to intuitively train defensive behaviors, and that doesn’t avert being fooled so much as it averts falling for the most common scams.

In the end, a handful of marketing flacks can consistently outwit any audience, because they can knowingly engage in a campaign of strategic deception more easily than you can reflexively catch every deceit thrown your way. What you need is a countervailing force. A regulatory agency dedicated to imposing transparency at the barrel of a gun can render calculated deceits more expensive to implement than they return in revenue.

But the “lolz, just don’t fuck up” mentality is what leads to people getting gulled at industrial scales. You’re not going to outsmart the professionals and its painfully naive to think otherwise.

I mean, I was super curious what Sanders could’ve done if he had the chance.

There is a lot of speculation that Sanders would have faced enormous opposition both from the “centrist” media and conservatives within his own party, such that he was hobbled for his full four years. But the expectation is predicated on Sanders playing by Clinton/Obama rules, where you float a progressive idea and Congress says “NO!” and then throw up your hands and spend the back half of your term glad-handing dictators to sell F-35s.

I don’t think Sanders would have the Trump/DOGE enthusiasm for shredding the norms and imposing radical reform at the executive level. But if this Presidency is any indication, all you really need is a ketamine fueled cartel of techbros, a stack of EO stationary, and a fresh sharpie. And you can fully remake the federal bureaucracy from root to branch.

If democrats in the US vote for stuff like Biden, then they’re not voting for any radical change.

Biden made a very conscious decision to run to the left of Bernie in 2020. He avoided Clinton’s fumbles through the Midwest in large part by echoing all the Obama '08 and Sanders '16 pledges, while the national media amplified his electoral platform in the middle of a COVID-induced campaign freeze.

American Dems are just as vulnerable to a coordinated propaganda campaign as their conservative and libertarian peers. So its no surprise people who’d fallen for the corporate sponsored faux-populist schtick in elections prior would fall for it this time around. But there was also a very deep and not unjustified fear among moderate Dems that running anyone but Biden would guarantee the kind of news cycle smear campaigns against Sanders that brought down Hillary.

The failure of the American liberal movement is largely rooted in their lack of faith in their own base and their own message. Liberals have convinced themselves that every year is 1972 and every progressive is going to lose like McGovern did. They’ve bought fully into the Republican propaganda machine and only ever know how to fight on the Republicans’ terms. And, as a result, guys like Reagan and Bush and Trump can stake out turf to the left of Democrats, win on narrow margins, and then govern uncontested as fascists.

He’s not even hurting them. They’re still up for the year. They’re historically up for the last ten years, in the face of enormous economic headwinds.

Trump stepped in, the market surged, and now its floated back down to December 2024 baseline.

And these losers are screaming like stick pigs because Big Line doesn’t always go up forever.