C. E. Aubin

Blurbing my first book today! How fun! :-)

TODAY ON @thisguysucked.com: if you forgot that Richard Bruce Cheney was an unabashedly evil human who wanted nothing more than unchecked executive power and forever-war in the Middle East, Nicole Hemmer @pastpunditry.bsky.social and I are here to remind you.

I have an Edinburgh version of this and he loooooves to post on instagram that I “flew all the way to get my hair done by him” 🥰

Some of you do not understand why I am so aggressively Oregonian.

Gorgeous!!!

I was pretty openly appalled by the Cheney endorsement you're talking about when it happened, and have brought it up in other episodes. We don't talk about it specifically in this one though, and people are more than welcome to draw whatever conclusions they like.

???

We actually stopped the recording and then kept going for another 15 minutes after it ended lmfaoooo

TODAY ON @thisguysucked.com: if you forgot that Richard Bruce Cheney was an unabashedly evil human who wanted nothing more than unchecked executive power and forever-war in the Middle East, Nicole Hemmer @pastpunditry.bsky.social and I are here to remind you.

Bluesky overindexes on humorless scolds and people doing identity formation by arguing with something you didn't say but that doesn't make it an echo chamber; it means the place has an institutional culture, and I much prefer that culture to fending off Nazis with a block button that doesn't work

powerpoint slide screenshot - on the right, Le Juive de Tanger by Jean François Portaels> on the left, text reading 'Daily overview: Orientalism, Romanticism, discussion'

It's the last day of teaching before 2 weeks of Spring Break, no one has a functioning brain (least of all me), and Past Claire has inexplicably given me the most difficult 75-minute class period imaginable for today

Literally the first thing academics pointed out about LLMs YEARS AGO was that they would be used for catastrophic levels of fraud—how nice that now the AI bros are confirming what we all knew by running fraud experiments to tell cheats which LLM to use to cheat

Yes

The ones I research usually married *after* working for the Nazis, so spouses likely were unaware at the time they got together.

Pasts Imperfect (3.5.26) Across the world—from the United States to Canada to Australia—departments and museums within higher education are closing. This week, ancient historian Geoffrey Greatrex discusses the suspension of t...

The latest Pasts Imperfect is out, focused on the closing of humanities depts. & museums. @otavano.bsky.social discusses the U. of Ottawa, @mokersel.bsky.social on the DePaul Art Museum, @meirazk.bsky.social & @vox-magica.bsky.social on shuttering religious studies depts, & Justin Vorhis on U. Iowa.

People can have their own personal convictions about which public figures they think are (or are not) Nazi sympathizers. Whatever. Just don’t be extremely weird about it.

Platner’s obviously not Ford and is obviously not a concentration camp guard so I’m not trying to compare them - I’m saying even literal Nazis had personal relationships with Jews. The two things are not mutually exclusive.

What are we doing here, man? I don’t really care if you think Platner is or isn’t a Nazi, but personal relationships to Jews just don’t signify here.

Henry Ford was famously good friends with his Jewish neighbor, and at least two of the concentration camp guards in my research had Jewish spouses.

Grammarly Is Offering ‘Expert’ AI Reviews From Your Favorite Authors—Dead or Alive The tool, offered by the recently-rebranded company Superhuman, gives feedback based on the work of famous dead and living writers—without their permission.

Read the full piece (including much longer quotes from me) by the perpetually excellent @milesklee.bsky.social below!

www.wired.com/story/gramma...

A quote from me - “it’s pretty insulting to see scholarship used this way when the academic humanities are currently under attack from every possible angle — as though the actual people who do the thinking and produce the scholarship are reducible to their work itself, and can be removed entirely from the equation”

Went on record saying, essentially, “AI sucks, fund the humanities” today

No but if you give me her number I bet I could sweet talk her into it

Objection sustained

!!! Thank you for listening and also for reminding me that tier exists lmao

Oh hey I’m in this

There are plenty of people outside of this group making similar aesthetic decisions.

If you include a critique of the present culture that leads people to feel that significantly altering their appearance is necessary to fit in, sure. But without that element included, it sounds like you’re just taking a swing at a woman for what you’ve deemed an “acceptable” body-based insult.

I’m aware that there is a particular Gen X contingent on here that is obsessed with aggressive physiognomy (Trump is fat/orange/bad, Noem is skinny/fake/bad etc) and I’m just over it. Try harder. Make real arguments.

Outward appearance is not indicative of internal moral character! It just is not! Using a concept that is beloved by racists against those same racists does not rescue it from their clutches and weakens YOU, not them

Resharing this thread, since I’m once again seeing physiognomic stuff circulate on here re: Noem and Bondi