What are the freakin' rules, Saul? If murder is insufficient reason to deport an illegal immigrant, but saying that Jews aren't trustworthy is a reason to deny refugee status, I am unclear on the freakin' rules!
What are the rules we're using?
Because if you're trying to push some variant of "tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall down and open sewer and die", let me just say that:
You're goddamn right that I am a contrarian degenerate.
Any given special-interest group has concerns that are serious and legitimate and, unfortunately, sometimes they have concerns that are unserious and stupid.
I don't know which of these Ms. Free's are but if I wanted to pick a worse time to have a 61-year-old woman get rid of a 25-year-old firebrand, I'm not sure I could do a better job than when the 25-year-old firebrand was complaining about calcified power at the top.
AND I'M NOT EVEN SAYING DAVID HOGG WAS GOOD!!!
There are only a handful of reasons to know who a DNC vice-chair is and they are:
1. They do an exceptional job. Seriously out of this world.
2. They effed up so badly that it's fodder for late-night comedy show opening monologues.
3. They're publicity hounds that are more interested in going into self-promotion than in promoting the Democrats.
Two of those are bad!
BUT GETTING RID OF HIM BY PULLING A #2 IS BAD TOO!!! YOU'RE FIXING A MISTAKE BY MAKING A BIGGER MISTAKE!!! AAAAAAAAA
And, to be perfectly honest, removing Hogg from his seat not because "you can't sabotage Dems in good standing from your position of Vice-Chair, no matter how Righteously Angry you are... do it yourself, not as a DNC official" but because "you're male" is one of the things that does, in fact, matter for the Democrats in November 2026 (and 2028, and 2030, and so on).
There's a very particular reason that the Democrats have a lower approval rating than Trump and the stuff like this is why.
Good news/Bad news. The bad news first: David Hogg's election to the position of Vice-Chair is a step closer to being overturned.
The good news: It's not related to his arguments that we should primary useless Democrats in safe seats. It's because he's male.
The ruling by the credentials committee on Monday was not technically related to Mr. Hogg’s plans to engage in primaries. Instead, it was the result of a complaint from Kalyn Free, one of the losing candidates in the vice chair race. Ms. Free said the party had wrongly combined two separate questions into a single vote, putting at a disadvantage the female candidates because of the party’s gender-parity rules.
It describes writing a paper thusly: "The assignment itself is a MacGuffin, with the shelf life of sour cream and an economic value that rounds to zero dollars."
That's actually one of the reasons I posted a bunch of my college papers here. I worked hard on those papers back in the 90s! If I could wring out a handful more readers by making blog posts of them, dang it, that's a way to turn the sour cream into honey... and they found honey in the pyramids that was still edible.
The part of the essay that everybody is quoting is this part:
Earlier this semester, an NYU professor told me how he had AI-proofed his assignments, only to have the students complain that the work was too hard. When he told them those were standard assignments, just worded so current AI would fail to answer them, they said he was interfering with their “learning styles.” A student asked for an extension, on the grounds that ChatGPT was down the day the assignment was due. Another said, about work on a problem set, “You’re asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn’t I use a car to get there?” And another, when asked about their largely AI-written work, replied “Everyone is doing it.” Those are stories from a 15-minute conversation with a single professor.
"You're not always going to have a machine god in your pocket" seems a silly thing to say.
It's certainly not an endorsement of Moira Donegan's playbook.
Was Al Franken considered a victory?
To be perfectly honest, I think that he represents a fairly important victory for #MeToo but I have argued against people who see it as an excess. Something to the effect of "We shouldn't be leaning on #MeToo if all it does is result in people like Al Franken, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein, and Andrew Cuomo either going to jail or getting their charges dropped or having to resign or whatever weird thing happened with Bill Cosby that still isn't exactly clear."
Remember The Crappy Media Men's list? Moira Donegan paid out a six-figure settlement over that thing.
In any case, Hogg's statement strikes me as being, at least!, a pivot away from the #MeToo actual energy of 8 short years ago (while allowing that the theoretical energy that anybody would defend was a needed corrective for the time).
My take on the whole take on young people wanting to get laid thing is that this is one hell of a departure away from #MeToo and, as one hell of a departures go, they probably needed a better spokesperson. One who was less of a weenie.
Like, imagine if Joe Rogan said such a thing. It might mean something.
As it is, Hogg is a walking "Why 'Baby It's Cold Outside' is Problematic" essay and he comes across with that sort of energy.
That said... a correction is needed and handling it less than perfectly is probably the only option and, as such, well... we're stuck between the weenie and the waiting for someone good to say it. The weenie is not obviously the wrong option.
Now, with *THAT* said, this is a completely different message than "we're going to light fires under the Dems in safe seats by primarying the useless ones!"
If the DNC chair fired Hogg for saying "We need to reach out to young people without sounding like those PMRC Schoolmarms", I'd find that to be the funniest thing that has happened this week.
However, the DNC chair seems to be firing him for running ahead with the whole primarying safe dems thing *BUT* using the whole "we elected a white dude instead of following our diversity goals" rule which, somehow, manages to take a reasonable position ("you don't get to threaten safe dems in safe seats as the DNC vice-chair") into an unreasonable one and, somehow, also turning it into the funniest thing that has happened this week.
If you haven't seen David Hogg on Bill Maher recently, you should check it out. He points out that the Dems have lost young men because “What I think happened last election is younger men—they would rather vote for somebody who they don’t completely agree with, they don’t feel judged by, than somebody who they do agree with, that they feel like they have to walk on eggshells around constantly because they’re going to be judged or ostracized or excommunicated.”
He concludes: “Young people should be able to focus on what young people should be focused on, which is how to get laid and how to go and have fun.”
We may be witnessing a turnaround in real time!
Assuming, of course, he isn't removed from the Vice-Chair position.
The right has plenty of anti-Semitism of it’s own that it hides up. They force universities to deal with a particular type of anti-Semitism.
I'm going to need more detail on this?
I'm not sure that the right has a whole lot of ability to force universities to do stuff? (And, if so, it's only manifested in the last year or so due to Trump/Trumpism and that particular manifestation leans far more "pro-Israel" than "anti".)
Back in 2023, I mentioned how my friends' 14-year-old (at the time) was delighted to show us how he could make the AI spit out 800 words on The Underground Railroad.
Now, to be fair, I rarely have to do stuff that involves The Underground Railroad. Like, the kiddo's AI-written essay glanced at from across the room was the last time I had a real interaction with the concept. When it comes to being able to sit down and write multi-paragraph essays, well, I suppose that I do that sort of thing all the time and benefitted from decades of doing it and then doing it again and then doing it again.
I like to think that I'm good enough at it to break the syntactical rules in ways that engage the reader rather than alienate the reader (allowing the semantic content to do that).
And I don't know whether I actually benefitted from getting good (or good enough) at it or whether it's like how I learned to drive a stick or write cursive.
In this week's "We're All Going To Die" news, I was at friends' for Game Night on Saturday and we were close enough to the teenager's computer setup to hear him playing Fortnite with his broskis and, at one point, he was yelling "Chicken Jockey!"
We'd have to see the people get weeded out to *REALLY* feel that.
(That said, I'm kind of suspicious that this sort of thing was made illegal by Griggs v. Duke Power Co, but he was an architect-kinda guy applying for something architecture-adjacent so I'm pretty sure that they could get this as being related to job duties.)
On “Open Mic for the Week of 5/12/2025”
Plus one of them is an outright anti-Semite of the most vile tropes of anti-Semitism.
I find it difficult to believe that the examples that you, yourself, gave to me are the "most vile tropes of anti-Semitism".
From what I've seen of anti-Semitism, they're somewhere in the middle of "prejudiced".
Maybe I've seen more than you have.
Which, lemme tell ya, would surprise me... but it's certainly in the realm of possibility.
"
What are the freakin' rules, Saul? If murder is insufficient reason to deport an illegal immigrant, but saying that Jews aren't trustworthy is a reason to deny refugee status, I am unclear on the freakin' rules!
What are the rules we're using?
Because if you're trying to push some variant of "tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall down and open sewer and die", let me just say that:
You're goddamn right that I am a contrarian degenerate.
"
Wait, are people with sufficiently offensive views not allowed to be refugees now?
This is a tool that I'm pretty sure that Trump and his ilk have been waiting for.
I'm sure that they'd say "thank you", if they knew you gift-wrapped it for them.
And look at your examples! Holy cow! Yeah, this would be amazing in the hands of someone sufficiently thin-skinned.
"
Any given special-interest group has concerns that are serious and legitimate and, unfortunately, sometimes they have concerns that are unserious and stupid.
I don't know which of these Ms. Free's are but if I wanted to pick a worse time to have a 61-year-old woman get rid of a 25-year-old firebrand, I'm not sure I could do a better job than when the 25-year-old firebrand was complaining about calcified power at the top.
AND I'M NOT EVEN SAYING DAVID HOGG WAS GOOD!!!
There are only a handful of reasons to know who a DNC vice-chair is and they are:
1. They do an exceptional job. Seriously out of this world.
2. They effed up so badly that it's fodder for late-night comedy show opening monologues.
3. They're publicity hounds that are more interested in going into self-promotion than in promoting the Democrats.
Two of those are bad!
BUT GETTING RID OF HIM BY PULLING A #2 IS BAD TOO!!! YOU'RE FIXING A MISTAKE BY MAKING A BIGGER MISTAKE!!! AAAAAAAAA
"
And, to be perfectly honest, removing Hogg from his seat not because "you can't sabotage Dems in good standing from your position of Vice-Chair, no matter how Righteously Angry you are... do it yourself, not as a DNC official" but because "you're male" is one of the things that does, in fact, matter for the Democrats in November 2026 (and 2028, and 2030, and so on).
There's a very particular reason that the Democrats have a lower approval rating than Trump and the stuff like this is why.
"
Even a blind squirrel is right twice a day.
"
Good news/Bad news. The bad news first: David Hogg's election to the position of Vice-Chair is a step closer to being overturned.
The good news: It's not related to his arguments that we should primary useless Democrats in safe seats. It's because he's male.
On “From New York Magazine’s Intelligencer: Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College”
The Chronicles of Higher Education has a cri de coeur: Is AI Enhancing Education or Replacing It?
It describes writing a paper thusly: "The assignment itself is a MacGuffin, with the shelf life of sour cream and an economic value that rounds to zero dollars."
That's actually one of the reasons I posted a bunch of my college papers here. I worked hard on those papers back in the 90s! If I could wring out a handful more readers by making blog posts of them, dang it, that's a way to turn the sour cream into honey... and they found honey in the pyramids that was still edible.
The part of the essay that everybody is quoting is this part:
"You're not always going to have a machine god in your pocket" seems a silly thing to say.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 5/12/2025”
The same thing that #MeToo had to do with it.
In theory, it wasn't sex-negative but abuse negative and fought *VERY* hard against abuses large and small up to and including those of Al Franken.
In practice, it resulted in Al Franken resigning and all sorts of weird cultural eddies. I mean, you've witnessed the last decade or so, right?
We've seem to come a long way from trying to get justice for Jackie Coakley.
"
It's certainly not an endorsement of Moira Donegan's playbook.
Was Al Franken considered a victory?
To be perfectly honest, I think that he represents a fairly important victory for #MeToo but I have argued against people who see it as an excess. Something to the effect of "We shouldn't be leaning on #MeToo if all it does is result in people like Al Franken, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein, and Andrew Cuomo either going to jail or getting their charges dropped or having to resign or whatever weird thing happened with Bill Cosby that still isn't exactly clear."
Remember The Crappy Media Men's list? Moira Donegan paid out a six-figure settlement over that thing.
In any case, Hogg's statement strikes me as being, at least!, a pivot away from the #MeToo actual energy of 8 short years ago (while allowing that the theoretical energy that anybody would defend was a needed corrective for the time).
"
My take on the whole take on young people wanting to get laid thing is that this is one hell of a departure away from #MeToo and, as one hell of a departures go, they probably needed a better spokesperson. One who was less of a weenie.
Like, imagine if Joe Rogan said such a thing. It might mean something.
As it is, Hogg is a walking "Why 'Baby It's Cold Outside' is Problematic" essay and he comes across with that sort of energy.
That said... a correction is needed and handling it less than perfectly is probably the only option and, as such, well... we're stuck between the weenie and the waiting for someone good to say it. The weenie is not obviously the wrong option.
Now, with *THAT* said, this is a completely different message than "we're going to light fires under the Dems in safe seats by primarying the useless ones!"
If the DNC chair fired Hogg for saying "We need to reach out to young people without sounding like those PMRC Schoolmarms", I'd find that to be the funniest thing that has happened this week.
However, the DNC chair seems to be firing him for running ahead with the whole primarying safe dems thing *BUT* using the whole "we elected a white dude instead of following our diversity goals" rule which, somehow, manages to take a reasonable position ("you don't get to threaten safe dems in safe seats as the DNC vice-chair") into an unreasonable one and, somehow, also turning it into the funniest thing that has happened this week.
"
David Hogg fans should know that HE HAS RELEASED A STATEMENT: "Today, the DNC took its first steps to remove me from my position as Vice Chair At-Large."
If you haven't seen David Hogg on Bill Maher recently, you should check it out. He points out that the Dems have lost young men because “What I think happened last election is younger men—they would rather vote for somebody who they don’t completely agree with, they don’t feel judged by, than somebody who they do agree with, that they feel like they have to walk on eggshells around constantly because they’re going to be judged or ostracized or excommunicated.”
He concludes: “Young people should be able to focus on what young people should be focused on, which is how to get laid and how to go and have fun.”
We may be witnessing a turnaround in real time!
Assuming, of course, he isn't removed from the Vice-Chair position.
"
The right has plenty of anti-Semitism of it’s own that it hides up. They force universities to deal with a particular type of anti-Semitism.
I'm going to need more detail on this?
I'm not sure that the right has a whole lot of ability to force universities to do stuff? (And, if so, it's only manifested in the last year or so due to Trump/Trumpism and that particular manifestation leans far more "pro-Israel" than "anti".)
"
I'm not entirely sure that you want to mix the whole "antisemitism" thing with the "antiapartheid" thing.
Like, that is not proverbial chocolate that you want to get in your proverbial peanut butter.
On “From New York Magazine’s Intelligencer: Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College”
We can always look at the Lego test.
Surely that's something that we can't imagine having significantly different numbers for success/failure (say, within 5% of each other), right?
On “Open Mic for the Week of 5/12/2025”
Why in the world would Mo Khan have needed $10,000 just for putting up an offensive sign after ordering bottle service?
On “From New York Magazine’s Intelligencer: Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College”
Back in 2023, I mentioned how my friends' 14-year-old (at the time) was delighted to show us how he could make the AI spit out 800 words on The Underground Railroad.
Now, to be fair, I rarely have to do stuff that involves The Underground Railroad. Like, the kiddo's AI-written essay glanced at from across the room was the last time I had a real interaction with the concept. When it comes to being able to sit down and write multi-paragraph essays, well, I suppose that I do that sort of thing all the time and benefitted from decades of doing it and then doing it again and then doing it again.
I like to think that I'm good enough at it to break the syntactical rules in ways that engage the reader rather than alienate the reader (allowing the semantic content to do that).
And I don't know whether I actually benefitted from getting good (or good enough) at it or whether it's like how I learned to drive a stick or write cursive.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 5/12/2025”
In this week's "We're All Going To Die" news, I was at friends' for Game Night on Saturday and we were close enough to the teenager's computer setup to hear him playing Fortnite with his broskis and, at one point, he was yelling "Chicken Jockey!"
On “From New York Magazine’s Intelligencer: Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College”
I suspect that part of the whole AI Apocalypse will result in employers having to put together Lego tests for prospective employees.
"We just want to see if you can read a document, summarize it, and write three lines of code based on its instructions."
"But I have a degree in reading documents, summarization, and coding."
"
Huh. You'd think that that'd be appealing.
"Staff recommends you do the thing that I talked about in my dorm room at 3 in the morning."
"Staff recommends you outsource this to a contracting company owned by my brother-in-law."
On “Open Mic for the Week of 5/5/2025”
The Daily Princetonian reports: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ’03 ‘plagiarized’ small portions of his senior thesis, experts say. But how serious is it?
There are discussions over plagiarism theory in the article.
People seem to agree that it violates Princeston's "Rights, Rules, Responsibilities".
On “From New York Magazine’s Intelligencer: Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College”
"Testing or measuring procedures cannot be determinative in employment decisions unless they have some connection to the job."
"
We'd have to see the people get weeded out to *REALLY* feel that.
(That said, I'm kind of suspicious that this sort of thing was made illegal by Griggs v. Duke Power Co, but he was an architect-kinda guy applying for something architecture-adjacent so I'm pretty sure that they could get this as being related to job duties.)
On “Open Mic for the Week of 5/5/2025”
I have more sympathy for the kids who aren't going to miss their finals but weren't allowed access to the library for a critical day.
"
I can't imagine one more impossible to defeat than "chicks".