“Almost everyone I know comes home from a hard day being ground on the wheel of late stage disaster capitalism and tries to wrap their shattered brain around the very real prospect of species collapse. It’s a lot.”

Guess who.

Also, open thread. While I get my act together. 

Posting will be, at best, intermittent for the next week or so, for which I apologise in advance. I can imagine the terrible, crushing impact this will have on your lives. However, I do have a half-decent excuse, in that, said interruption to normal service is on account of my getting hitched next week. To The Other Half, I mean. A civil partnership, with jewellery and ties and such. There are, therefore, things to be organised. And after 27 bloody years, I think I can consider myself sufficiently wooed.

Now that you’re all moved and tearful and engorged with bonhomie, I’m going to slyly remind patrons that this rickety barge, on whose seating your arses rest, is kept afloat by the kindness of strangers. If you’d like to help it remain buoyant a while longer, and remain ad-free, there’s an orange button below with which to monetise any love. Debit and credit cards are accepted. For those wishing to express their love regularly, there’s a monthly subscription option top left. And if one-click haste is called for, my PalPay.Me page can be found here. Additionally, any Amazon UK shopping done via this link or the search widget top right, or for Amazon US via this link, results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you.

Contributions towards covering the impending post-wedding bar tab, the likely proportions of which are now dawning on me, are of course welcome.

For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last twelve years, in over 2,600 posts and over 100,000 comments, the reheated series is a pretty good place to start – in particular, the end-of-year summaries. If you like what you find there… well, there’s lots more of that.

If you can, do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads too. The posts are intended as starting points, not full stops, and the comments are where much of the good stuff is waiting to be found. And do please join in.

As always, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company. Also, open thread. 

Not that spelling matters, apparently:

American University trains faculty not to judge quality of writing when grading.

It’s the world of the woke, where inversions abound.

Earlier this year, American University invited an outside professor [Dr Asao Inoue] to teach its faculty how to pursue “antiracist ends” through writing assessments… The training has now moved in-house, according to a faculty workshop taking place Thursday morning. Neisha-Anne Green of the Academic Support and Access Centre and Marnie Twigg of the Writing Studies Programme will lead the session, titled “How to Incorporate Anti-Racist Pedagogy in Your Classroom.”

Participants will be shown how to “revise course materials so they don’t accidentally promote or reinforce racist practices,” though the particulars are somehow both emphatic and opaque. We are, for instance, told that, “single standards” for language “kill our students,” which sounds just a tad breathless. There will, it seems, be lots of “redesigning assessment ecologies,” and quite a few “dimension-based rubrics,” which, via an as yet unspecified process, will upend “white racial habits of language,” resulting in some kind of righteous emancipation. In short, grading a student’s ability to convey their thoughts in writing – and to formulate thoughts by writing – is a manifestation of “white language supremacy,” an apparently murderous phenomenon, and therefore to be abandoned in the name of “inclusive excellence.”

Asao Inoue of the University of Washington-Tacoma is known for advocating that students should be graded based on the “labour” they put into their work, not the “quality” of the finished product.

According to Dr Inoue, teachers should “calculate course grades by labour completed and dispense almost completely with judgements of quality when producing course grades.” And so “critical information literacy” – a term deployed with an air of satisfaction – actually entails not being critical, or indeed literate. Dr Inoue, who denounces grammar as “racist” and “an unjust language structure,” has been mentioned here before, when boasting that a simple 495-word press release for his own “racial justice” Writing Centre took “over a year” to write. As if this reflected some profundity of thought, and not a more prosaic explanation.

AI systems to detect ‘hate speech’ could have ‘disproportionate negative impact’ on African Americans.

If you’re laughing at the headline, you’re a terrible, terrible person.

A new Cornell University study reveals that some artificial intelligence systems created by universities to identify “prejudice” and “hate speech” online might be racially biased themselves and that their implementation could backfire, leading to the over-policing of minority voices online.

Specifically,

[Researcher, Thomas] Davidson said tweets written in “African American English,” or AAE, may be more likely to be considered offensive “due to […] internal biases.” For example, terms such as nigga and bitch are common hate speech “false positives.” “We need to consider whether the linguistic markers we use to identify potentially abusive language may be associated with language used by members of protected categories,” the study’s conclusion states.

“Human error” and “inadequate training” have been cited as explanations.

Update, via the comments:

Given the volume of research that’s subordinate to the conceit that anything reflecting poorly on a Designated Victim Group must therefore, by definition, be an unconscionable act of bias, it’s refreshing to see that the authors of the study do concede that the effect they denounce is most likely a result of statistical differences in actual behaviour:

Different communities have different speech norms, such that a model suitable for one community may discriminate against another… The ‘n-word’… can be extremely racist or quotidian, depending on the speaker… we should not penalise African-Americans for using [it].

However, the authors seem quaintly mystified by the fact that tweets by black people “are classified as containing sexism almost twice as frequently.” And whether the word bitch and various common synonyms should result in flagging and censure only when used by white people and other, as it were, unprotected categories is left to the imagination.

Also, open thread.

Lifted from the comments: 

It goes without saying chappie is an educator. Also needless to say, our educator chappie has form.

Given the self-satisfied ignorance on display – or malign perversity – I’m guessing Dr Kotsko doesn’t live in a neighbourhood rapidly being enlivened with Congolese and Somali borra gangs, whose social skills, and machetes, are so much in the news here.

Of course, it’s much easier to be dismissive of rapidly changing demographics and to disdain expectations of cultural common ground if your own immediate neighbourhood hasn’t yet been enriched by gangs of machete-wielding sociopaths, or by people butchering animal carcasses in the back garden, or newcomers struggling with the concept of electricity, or getting lively in the name of Islam, or just shitting on your doorstep, as happens in some of the more vibrant areas.

And yes, we’ve been here before.

The fantasy bathrooms you’ve always wanted. (h/t, Julia) || Tiny animals on fingers. || His apple cheesecake is fancier than yours. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Cat-fur custom hats for cats. || Uranium in a cloud chamber. || Eh, close enough. || Tokyo, 1934. || A partial success. (h/t, Damian) || Painting with paper. || Dissolving pills. || People skills. || Ping pong Can-Can. || Supermarket scenes. || At least it was a manly scream. (h/t, Ben) || Imaging Earth. (h/t, Things) || There are tardigrades on the Moon. || “She has received many commendations for her customer service.” || Close encounter with a bluntnose sixgill. || Literature of note. || And finally, temptingly, you want one and you know it.

I wasn’t previously familiar with Rosanna Arquette, an “actress, poet and activist,” but goodness, she puts on a show:

But then, this isn’t her first rodeo:

He was white, you see, and obviously that’s another incriminating feature:

Update, via the comments:

As so often, these little things are quite telling. I realise that gestures of politeness or chivalry aren’t always perfectly expressed, but it takes a certain churlishness, a practised sourness, to construe the above as some ill-intended act of patriarchal oppression, and therefore something to resist – before publicly congratulating yourself on Twitter. And as noted previously, it’s curious how all this feminist empowerment doesn’t seem to result in much stoicism or self-possession or mental resilience, just lots of narcissism, ingratitude and chronic whininess. Such that publicly disdaining the physical attributes – whiteness, maleness, middle-agedness – of the person offering to help you retrieve your overhead luggage – is deemed an act of woke piety. As if these were things for which a person should be disdained, along with their offers of help.

Via Ben Sixsmith. Also, open thread.

So, anyway, in the nightmare, I’m trapped at the Atlanta National Convention of the Democratic Socialists of America, which is currently underway, and where the gathered superior beings keep triggering each other. Most notably, bottom right:

To recap: Mr Sensory Overload declares his pronouns and brings up “a point of privilege” – about how distressed and triggered he is by hearing whispering in the auditorium – and such is his distress, he uses the verboten word “guys.” This immediately triggers the Big Ungendered Flamingo Being, who, also clearly distraught, denounces the use of gendered language as itself privileged and oppressive. Given how one person’s complaint about being triggered instantly triggers another person to complain about being triggered by the previous person’s complaint, you can imagine the rip-roaring pace at which decisions are likely to be made. I suspect the toppling of capitalism may take longer than expected.

Update:

Mr Sensory Overload, pronouns he and him, is still unhappy.

Update 2:

God help us, there’s more.

Main video via Andy Ngo. Previous nightmare scenarios can be found here, here and here.

There is, I suspect, a story here. || A partial success. || Life lessons. || At last, stabilised beer. || Because you’ve always wanted contact lenses with a blink-triggered zoom option. || Virtual body ownership. || Best not to. || Balanced gourds and other stacked foodstuffs. || Them’s good eats. || Sock-related intrigue of note. (h/t, Damian) || One of these things is not like the others. || Thin crust. || Maximum security. (h/t, Holborn) || Hardcore constipation. || Duct-tape typography. || He does have a point. || Inadequate planning. || Inadequate planning, part 2. || Incoming. || The climbing Cholitas. || A mystery unfolds. || And finally, somewhat alarmingly, a lesson in, among other things, not knowing when to quit.