Beth DeSombre

Literally straight out of the authoritarian playbook.

Having five synagogue attacks (three in Canada, one in the U.S., now this) hit the news in a matter of days has me thinking about how many more didn't grab media attention. It's shabbat. Look out for your Jewish comrades.

The award for best press release goes to....

#canpoli #chillax

Billionaires’ % share of federal election spending in:

2008: 0.3%

2024: 19%

@nytimes.com #GildedAge
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/u...

This is terrifying

One of the founders of the boycott wrote on Facebook that this article is total BS

we remain firmly on track for 'republican president leaves the country an omnishambles, next democratic president is punished for not cleaning it up fast enough'

Asking for the names of Jews is never about combating antisemitism. For heaven's sake.

If you want to beat them, figure out how to organize a bloc of economic actors whose material interests are served by the transition. Organize a bloc with *more power* and then *defeat* them. That's how this works. You're not going to fucking seduce them with your clever verbiage!

I don't want to do a whole long rant on this, so I'll just say: the reason fossil fuels & other aligned incumbents don't want to transition to clean energy is that it will *damage their material interests*. And folks, they understand their own material interests. Really well!

‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI As AI has upended the way students learn, academics worry about the future of the humanities - and society at large

I'm one of many professors quoted in this report from Alice Speri. I really appreciate The Guardian taking an angle which has basically eluded every other major outlet.

But I don't WANT to use a rubric -- it feels like it pretends at something that isn't real, and they "write" to it and use it to complain about grades. Rubrics are pretend objectivity. So it's not that I want one; it's that I want a clearer way to explain why I don't plan to provide one.

Hmm. Struggled with my effort to explain to one of my students not only why there isn't "a rubric" for the paper assignment but also why a rubric is an artificial (and problematic) way to approach thinking about a paper assignment. Anyone have advice?

Americans Are Now a Target in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown A WSJ investigation tracked the U.S. citizens caught in the crosshairs of an aggressive federal campaign to detain and demonize dissenters.

www.wsj.com/us-news/immi...

Iran’s people were facing a horrible shortage of water before the war began. If we are destroying desalination plants and setting fire to Teheran we are committing unfathomable crimes.

Sorry I'm not more open-minded about LLMs, it's just some fucking maniacs shoveled out a bunch of useless bloatware featuring that technology, did not give me any chance to opt out, reorganized the entire economy around it, zeroed out gains made by green energy, and made it impossible to buy RAM

Can you ask your reader? As a reader, things I *notice* are distracting (especially if it feels like it's waving a flag), so I would wonder whether you could continue to include the detail without calling quite as much attention to it.

Trump’s Justice Dept. reportedly failed to find a crime in Biden’s use of autopen One former U.S. attorney described the investigation itself as “a disgusting abuse of power,” which was more than fair given the circumstances.

There’s obviously a lot going on, but the fact that federal prosecutors tried to build a criminal case against Joe Biden — based on no evidence, because Trump barked unjust orders — is quite insane.

The collapse of the case doesn’t negate the underlying abuse.
www.ms.now/rachel-maddo...

When You’re an ‘Expert’ Reviewing Students’ Work on Grammarly — But You Didn’t Know It The platform offers users AI-generated feedback under the names of scholars by drawing on their accessible publications. Some academics are unsettled.

I stand by what I said in this article: "Look, nobody enters academia to get rich, but I think business models that are built on basically extracting other people’s work without attribution or consent are fundamentally predatory".

cc @janerosenzweig.bsky.social @hpsvanessa.bsky.social @ceaubin.com

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...

Grammarly Offering Manuscript Reviews by AI Versions of Recently Deceased Professors The Grammarly "Expert Review" feature uses AI to provide feedback on papers using the name and work of real professors, dead or alive.

Daily reminder that calling ai dead labor and stolen labor is literal.

They’ve already seeded the next few generations.

If you are not in arms control you would not know how well constructed the JCPOA (Iran deal) was. An absolutely beauty of an arms control agreement. Negotiated by 2 ministers who had doctorates in nuclear physics. Technically and politically so well designed.

And the US just wiped its ass with it.

A big part of the authoritarian playbook is war. War takes over the news. War blots out criticism. War divides a nation’s people, subjecting those against it to being called unpatriotic. War grants leaders all sorts of emergency powers. War consumes everything else.

We mustn’t let this war do so.

I think you can worry about American Islamophobia without minimizing American antisemitism. People literally shoot up synagogues in this country, it’s not an imaginary problem or a matter of microaggressions against bourgeois knowledge workers, which is how I see fellow leftists describing it

The Department of Education has hung a massive banner honoring a racist college dropout who built a lucrative career out of targeting professors for harassment

I was born in an Iranian prison. My parents were held in their jails. My uncles lie in their mass graves. Nothing you can tell me about the crimes of the Iranian regime that I haven't lived in blood and bone. That doesn't mean I want my people bombed, maimed, killed, their homes in ruins. If your vision of liberation comes only through the destruction of innocent lives, then it's not freedom you're after. Sahar Delijani, Iranian author

I am pro Iranian people. I stand with them against their own government’s repression AND against the imperial violence in the form of bombs dropped from the sky from Israel & the US who have already killed hundreds.

I support neither imperialism or dictatorship.

Sahar Delijani said it best:

the war is unpopular but it's also illegal but it also doesn't serve any purpose but it also undermines diplomacy but it also is set to produce the opposite outcome as intended but it also already has hundreds dead and threatens more but it also will not make anything better for anyone but it also

Obama signed a peace deal. It was working extremely well.

Trump ripped it up and started a war instead.

As a professional military strategist, I just wanted to make sure everyone has a full understanding of the American strategy in Iran, thank you for your attention to this matter