Yeah. They're deliberately undermining education. It's not good.
They're just honoring Kirk's legacy, rooting out the people who abuse the privilege of free speech.
Especially frustrating because there is a playbook:
A) Require course syllabi to be posted with descriptions of each assignment. Profs are told to avoid controversial words to inhibit doxxing.
B) Course includes controversial words. Students feign the vapors. Instructors get fired.
Utah legislated step 1, so this will be fun. On the other hand I'm probably safe as chair bc no one wants this job.
And amidst all of this, major media today is all about Kirk--you know the free speech warrior (now "martyr")--whose organization specifically targeted professors.
And I have not seen anything from FIRE on either of these two yet (or did I miss it?)
I hate everything and eveybody; most certainly including myself.
A hollow voice says "plugh" "logoff."
For 1, I don't know if I want to go down the rabbit hole of finding the course descriptions at this point. The student's objection is that her individual religious beliefs and an executive order should determine what the instructor teaches, three people have now been relieved of their duties, and yet I'm not sure how fundamentally arbitrary this decision is. Eight months into this stuff, I'm still not sure what binding force Trump's executive orders have.
It's interesting that I haven't heard many calls to rehabilitate Joe McCarthy's reputation. If a billionaire wanted to make that their cause for the week, it seems like really low-hanging fruit.
I'm starting to feel the vertigo of rapid societal deterioration again.
The recording was too long for me to watch it. It seems to me the thing to do would be to avoid recording. There was a bluesky thread about what to do if a disabled student requests to record lectures as an accommodation. When it was just their audio and they were using it to take notes at home, that was one thing.
Now it can be transcribed it and fed it to the AI bot or searched using OCR and spread on the internet - and if the topic is controversial, the professors can get fired.
The recording was too long for me to watch it. It seems to me the thing to do would be to avoid recording. There was a bluesky thread about what to do if a disabled student requests to record lectures as an accommodation. When it was just their audio and they were using it to take notes at home, that was one thing.
Now it can be transcribed it and fed it to the AI bot or searched using OCR and spread on the internet - and if the topic is controversial, the professors can get fired.
The recording was too long for me to watch it. It seems to me the thing to do would be to avoid recording. There was a bluesky thread about what to do if a disabled student requests to record lectures as an accommodation. When it was just their audio and they were using it to take notes at home, that was one thing.
Now it can be transcribed it and fed it to the AI bot or searched using OCR and spread on the internet - and if the topic is controversial, the professors can get fired.
Sorry. I did that on a desktop too. I guess I'm not used to the mouse on my Mac anymore.
5.2: McCarthy is generally understood to have been too timid - a RINO, really.
When McCarthy accused people of being communists, he was actually accusing them of believing in the state ownership of the means of production -- actual communism -- and he wanted them fired and blacklisted.
When Donald Trump says Kamala Harris or Zohran Mamdani are communists, he means that they are the wrong race or political party and they should be arrested.
11: what does it mean when Trump demands state ownership in Intel?
Holy creeping fascism, Batman!
Idly curious if you have a source or two on this "general understanding" of McCarthy, pf? My thought was that the idea of "McCarthyism" (witch hunts!!!) was more useful than anything McCarthy actually said or did, so you really would have to work to rehabilitate him as a right-wing hero. But I think it could be done.
12: That's all chopped up and too hard to read. It struck me as boring. People must be trying really hard to get people if they want to wade through all this stuff.
Yeah, I haven't waded through any of it myself. I'm sure there's snippets of the alleged worst parts available, but my sense is that this is straight up brutality.
Texas Tribune article on the second guy.
Accreditation is a dead letter if they can get away with such transparent state control.
Has been for years, really, but this is just absurd.
15: No sources. I'm really just drawing a conclusion from what you said. I agree that you don't hear calls for McCarthy rehabilitation, and it seems reasonable to suppose that this is because McCarthy was too submissive.
McCarthy was a project for old-timey respectable conservatives of a more polite era. William F. Buckley and M. Stanton Evans were interested in McCarthy.
Nowadays you've got Elon Musk and Steve Bannon doing Nazi salutes in public. Tired: McCarthy. Wired: Hitler.
Two public school teachers here suspended because they posted disrespectful* things on their personal instagrams, libs of tik tok found them, police had to be called to protect their schools, schools say they were condoning violence.
*One signing God Bless America in front of footage of the incident, the other saying how she was not offing sympathy about his death.
That's bad. I don't know whether to be reassured that it's still l.o.t.t. calling those shots -- an account that even I have heard of! -- and that there aren't fifty more accounts with exponentially larger reach. It does feel like the repression is just barely getting started, and the inherent disorganization and incompetence of the U.S. right only goes so far to insulate us. I'm pretty sure there are worst-case scenarios for disorganized, incompetent political parties that I still don't want to contemplate.
Watch and learn, Merrick, watch and learn.
Also, Americans present may wish to stock up on coffee and orange juice.
One signing God Bless America in front of footage of the incident
I admire her commitment to accessibility!
Coffee prices are already up quite a bit. It's been a bit strange because the ordinary-cheap coffee has been shooting up in price (e.g. Folger's and the stuff that basically everyone over 65 drinks and that is likely to be from Brazil). That stuff is 2 or 3 times what it used to cost a few years ago. The fancier, but not luxury, coffee that we usually drink (e.g. Costco, but whole beans from Columbia) hasn't increased that much in price. Apparently, not many people are thinking "The better coffee is now only $2/pound more than the slop" and buying nicer coffee.