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.

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.

Saruman just seems too… competent.

A guy who spent his early years claiming to be Leader of the Good Guys, while secretly poisoning the brains of the elderly, embracing all the worst forms of anti-environmental industrialization, and building a personality cult of Ivy League freaks does kinda feel like neoconservativism in a nutshell.

Yeah, you look competent in the early years. But when you’re trying to negotiate terms of surrender from the top of your half-flooded Ivory Tower and your next big move is to flee to a small mayorship in the hinterlands to do low rent fascism, until you get stabbed in the back by one of your most weasley sycophants?

Say what you will about the tenants of National Sauronism, but they put Mordor on the map. Saruman reeks of squandered opportunity driven by fear of failure.

This is why you have new leftists terrified that the UK or US or europe “might turn fascist!!”, betraying that the atrocities propagated by those empires against the global south was and is completely acceptable.

While the criticism is on point, I think you’re underselling the legitimate dire fear modern leftists have when they see the brutality of the periphery returning home. We have to recognize that - individually - we’re incredibly weak in the face of a mobilized police state. And we have every reason to be horrified of The Jakarta Method being visited on LA or Atlanta or Houston, particularly if we’re members of that domestic political underclass so often targeted for abuse.

Any opposition must be a unified and organized resistance. But we are also plagued by mass surveillance, structural alienation, and a profound sense of vulnerability cultivated over decades of “War On” maximalist state propaganda. So we’re feeling weak, we don’t know who we can trust, and we see this horrifying inevitability cresting over our heads like a tsunami.

This isn’t a betrayal of comrades abroad but a reflection of our own dismal moral, disunity, and despair. It represents one more hurdle for a modern western left to overcome and should be received as such, rather than used as a bludgeon to degrade left-wing moral even further.

Far better to be awake and aware and justifiably afraid of the threat of fascism than blind to it as the unaligned, compromised by it as the liberals, or enthusiastically participatory as the conservatives.

Why should farmers be exempt from inheritance tax that applies to everyone else?

In theory, the problem is one of compounding assets. If you have a family farm with multiple inheriting children and the farm has to be sold to pay off the inheritence tax debt, who buys them? Inevitably, bigger industrial agriculture firms. So more and more plots are aggregated within a smaller and smaller number of privately owned farming companies.

In practice, this has already happened decades prior (centuries prior, if you look at the history of land ownership in Ireland). The people buying up small plots of land aren’t pioneering farmer entrepreneurs. They’re people explicitly looking to dodge taxes by converting their accumulated wealth into an untaxable asset. So you’re not seeing small farmers shielded from consolidation thanks to inheritance taxes. You’re seeing celebrities and mega-millionaires shielding cash assets behind an accounting trick.

Millionaire farmers driving around in their tractors protesting that when they die, their wealth shouldn’t be redistributed to any degree is pathetic.

Wealth in the UK isn’t being redistributed, its being aggregated. The prior and current governments have gone all in on private equity as a cure for sluggish growth. This is purely Rich Guy on Rich Guy violence.

If you genuinely care about protecting the assets of the working class, you need less middling Starmerism and more radical Maoism.

The maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry

• Michael Parenti