Germ theory of disease is WOKE!

IMEU Policy Project Post-Election Polling Shows Gaza Cost Harris Votes — IMEU Policy Project

If you are better on all sorts of stuff but have this one area where you do hitler type evil, a lot of people won’t vote for it even if the other option is dumber more evil hitler. Some people lose motivation to vote, and others have serious moral red lines
www.imeupolicyproject.org/postelection...

This is an insane method to try to wave away party’s choice to lose the election over Gaza. The IMEU/YouGov survey already gave a pretty good picture of what happened, and word is the Dem autopsy is being held because it says the same

The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court

they can conjure immense new power when it’s climate/energy, but only on the side against the biosphere
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...

Extremely normal and fine for a company to put this in a public statement

The three theologies. With an insane harvard salary

Big challenge for Iran is Trump is the type of guy who won’t take yes for an answer.

It’s like how his only religious belief is he will go to hell. If God himself said ok I’ll let you into heaven, Trump would say “yeah well, we’ll see about that…”

Like in the sense that virtue is no longer a shared horizon?

Why study languages when you can Google translate? Why study literature when you’ll never read a novel again? Why study religion when you can believe whatever the fuck you want? Thinking is for losers and isn’t profitable

Studying philosophy does make people better thinkers | Department of Philosophy Studying philosophy does make people better thinkers, according to new research on more than 600,000 college grads.

I mean what’s philosophy even good for? The only recent quantitative study I know of is Dartmouth’s showing it makes you a better thinker. And god knows that’s not a skill in high demand!
philosophy.dartmouth.edu/news/2025/08...

How does philosophy align with jobs skills such as babysitting the computer? I don’t know I can’t defend it

(Because reading is dumb)

[college board member as a kid] when I grow up I want to see program outcomes aligned with skills desired by CEOs of email job companies

Reading stories week after week of humanities programs or whole colleges closing, you wonder it was a mistake to select and empower top administrators who see little to no value in education

Roundup on Research: The Myth of ‘Learning Styles’ | Online Teaching Roundup on Research: The Myth of ‘Learning Styles’ – Online Teaching

I’ve never had strong knowledge to speak intelligently about learning styles, but @taddelay.bsky.social posted this in a comment the other day and I found it really helpful and relevant to my own basic experiences of teaching things, and of learning things. onlineteaching.umich.edu/articles/the...

Oh my god, looking this up and seeing it’s a thing already. Well mark my words, it’ll be normal enough we’ll see a president eating raw beef from the Oval Office buffet in our lifetime.

At some point, eating raw ground beef by the handful will be a masculinity signifier on the right. Somewhere between 2 and 3°C

Know why remember the pope and HRE bickering a thousand years ago? Because in high school Euro history I did the reading

Imagining a Canossa reversal, where Leo comes to Mar-a-Lago and for three days talks shit about how he’s going to hell. Presumably JSOC or ICE deals with the pope and Trump appoints Hegseth or Erika Kirk as antipope

Everyone’s talking Avignon but I keep thinking about the road to Canossa, when the Holy Roman Emperor fucked up so bad he had to stand outside the pope’s castle and beg for forgiveness for three days. (I mean later Henry just appointed his own antipope but the humiliation is funny)

I think we might be talking past each other. I do a lot of discussion, projects, in-class activities. A problem is I’m not convinced most of that matters for learning if and when students are discussing their views on something they haven’t read (normal is reading for about 2 minutes)

It’s teaching style I’m trying to sort out. On learning styles, a large body of literature indicates learning styles are not real, esp the visual/auditory/kinesthetic version (people strongly believe they have learning styles, evidence is lacking)

onlineteaching.umich.edu/articles/the...

The most common reason offered is that reading is hard. Granted, it’s philosophy, so even at an introductory level it is pretty hard especially when in US education a student might never have been asked to read a book in high school

Guess I’ll also add that I have lots of success stories to, students that read and chase down books I mention, read my books on their own time, etc. I’m pretty good at this now! But knowledge resistance is pretty normal

One benefit I have, which many profs don’t, is I actually have fantastic colleagues and can discuss these problems openly, colleagues who think reading is important. Not everyone gets to teach in an environment like I do

Anyways, what I’m saying is I don’t know what to do about all this, and I’m skeptical of anyone claiming they figured out the trick. I almost wish I could be an AI moron that thinks it’s fine if people get college degrees without ever reading or writing!

I’m sensitive to those challenges. In college I worked at least 40 hours, usually over several jobs. I’m at a community college so almost all students are working, first-gen like me. What I’m talking about re: reading is not confined to students with particular challenges. Not reading is the norm

It doesn’t help that there are all these studies with questionable research design trying to show a flipped classroom or whatever trend, anything where reading and lecture is downgraded, is better than a professor talking about what they know while students gain from that knowledge. Feels incorrect!

I consider reading everything assigned to be a bare minimum. I doubt I ever skipped a reading from undergrad through phd, even in undergrad subjects I didn’t feel passionate about. I doubt not understand why people do not want to learn all they can, or at least all that’s on offer. But most don’t.