Women With Swords Be Like

how i'm handling my students using AI to write papers:

-don't accuse them on using AI from the get-go and instead ask them to informally define all the huge words that they used in their essay which i know they don't know the meaning of

-ask to see their original file where they "wrote" the essay. go to version history to see if it was just copy and pasted and then just edited a bit. i keep an eye out for the shit like "certainly! here's an essay about...."

-if they own up to it, they can re-do the assignment for a higher grade even if there will be an automatic penalty. if they don't, i process it like plagiarism and get my supervisor involved.

And this is much better than the immediate accusations. Some students have a good vocabulary. Stop accusing them of faking their essays without proof, and this is a good way to check.

Fellow students please stop using AI, go back to promising not to kill the school nerd if they do all your homework or something.

I don't usually get hyped about national protests but they got people out in THE VILLAGES??? If ur from Florida you know why that's crazy.

See also, "We're in a drought; conserve water!" Meanwhile, bottled water companies and golf courses for rich folk empty the aquifers.

a lot of people could stand to start viewing the nakba and the holocaust as a continuum rather than as competitive binaries

Genya and Henryk Kowalski's recollections of their 1948 arrival in Israel after surviving Nazi death camps, by Alon Confino in The Holocaust and the Nakba: a new grammar of trauma and history ed. Bashair Bashair and Amos Goldberg

[Text ID: Genya recalls people's surprise at their choice of coming to Israel. "The man at the Jewish Agency told us, 'Why did you come? There is no food here.' A day after we arrived to Pardes Katz, I took the bus to visit a friend in Tel Aviv. A young man sat next to me. He was very nice, we talked and he asked, 'Why did you come?'"

Genya visited Tel Aviv because she was adamant to leave the ma'abara. "In the Jewish Agency they told us there is a house of Arabs who left: you have nothing to worry about, no one lives there."

They arrived in Jaffa. "We opened [the gate] and I was shocked, it reminded me how we were made to leave, everything abandoned. The plates on the table. It was scary. We didn't get into the house." She turned around, with Henryk, and gave back the key.

"Why did you do it?" I asked.

"Why we didn't get into it," Henryk stated rather than asked. "The Germans kicked us into the ghetto, and [now] they wanted to give us a house of Arabs who left, food on the table. They did to us the same thing."

"It was something instinctive," said Genya quietly but firmly. "I don't want to live [in a house] of people who were thrown out. For me a human being is a human being."

End ID]

i got spanish anon hate for this one btw

As we head into multiple viral outbreaks including potentially H5N1, I am begging people to think carefully about how they talk about these viruses. It has been exhausting since the start of COVID hearing people talk about "only people with pre existing conditions" as if that makes everything okay. I am worth something, we are worth something, our lives matter.

I assigned a writing prompt a few weeks ago that asked my students to reflect on a time when someone believed in them or when they believed in someone else. One of my students began to panic.

“I have to ask Google the prompt to get some ideas if I can’t just use AI,” she pleaded and then began typing into the search box on her screen, “A time when someone believed in you.”

“It’s about you,” I told her. “You’ve got your life experiences inside of your own mind.” It hadn’t occurred to her — even with my gentle reminder — to look within her own imagination to generate ideas. One of the reasons why I assigned the prompt is because learning to think for herself now, in high school, will help her build confidence and think through more complicated problems as she gets older — even when she’s no longer in a classroom situation.

She’s only in ninth grade, yet she’s already become accustomed to outsourcing her own mind to digital technologies, and it frightens me.

When I teach students how to write, I’m also teaching them how to think. Through fits and starts (a process that can be both frustrating and rewarding), high school English teachers like me help students get to know themselves better when they use language to figure out what they think and how they feel.

. . .

If you believe, as I do, that writing is thinking — and thinking is everything — things aren’t looking too good for our students or for the educators trying to teach them. In addition to teaching high school, I’m also a college instructor, and I see this behavior in my older students as well.

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This! This is what scares me the most about AI! Physical exertion is difficult if someone isn't used to it, and it gets easier the more often it's done. When it's done often enough, it becomes a habit. Mental exertion is exactly the same. Thinking is a learned skill just like a sport is, and an entire generation is growing up without that most critical skill.

An unthinking populace is a more easily controlled populace.

via @bobafett

Calling scam victims stupid, much like cult members, serves to do nothing but make you feel superior, blame victims for the wrongs done to them, and in turn actually makes you more vulnerable to scams (and cults, and so on). "Look at these people! Morons! I could never be one of them because I am smart, unlike these people who fell for them because they are stupid. It is not about vulnerability and luck, both of which are factors that could affect me, it is all simply a matter of in-born intelligence, which is why I, a better human, don't have to worry about falling for them."

And boom, you have already let your guard down - you would never fall for a scam (or cult, etc.) so you can safely click on that link or read that pamphlet because if it was a scam you'd have identified it as such immediately, because you are smart. You don't need to stop and question. You're too smart. And, really, if they didn't want to get scammed they shouldn't have gone out dressed like that.

We're all potential victims. Every single one of us has been at one point or another been at vulnerable to a scammer, or a pickpocket, or any other number of external force trying to harm you for their own benefit. Blaming the victims feels good but it doesn't help shit in the long run.

Do not obey in advance.

Keep hating It's working

Okay but reblogging specifically for "Tesla in Distressla" because whoever came up with that tagine deserves a moment of recognition.

Btw, this is how conservatives keep getting to claim that trans people are a new thing no one has ever heard, because our history and existences have continually been erased or obscured systematically through out history.

The most famous example was 92 years when the Nazis raided the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the medical practice where the term transsexual was first coined and the first gender affirming surgery was performed in in 1931.

What did the Nazis do after raiding the library on May 6th, 1933? You may be familiar with these images

It is happening again.

Yeah,

Now might be a good time to go to Google Scholar or any database you can get your hands on and download any articles with the terms above that you can and make sure to save it to a USB or hard drive, somewhere offline where they can’t take it from us.

I know I’ve featured this scene on the Nazi Punch of the Day, but this version seemed particularly timely given the ongoing attacks on education.

HARRISON FORD as INDIANA JONES Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

What the media won't show

It’s actually pretty nuts how there is no real mass media coverage of the protests that are happening all over the US. It demonstrates fairly conclusively that the unlawful activities at the White House aren’t just limited to Trump. There’s a lot of wealthy people in powerful positions in the US and around the world helping to support the dismantling of the US federal government.

The Choctaw-Irish Brotherhood(via)

I love stuff like this. Didn’t a tribe in Africa send America some cows after 9/11? Like this is holy and the most valuable thing we have. We hear your suffering and want to do anything in our power to help

It was not a potato famine. The famine didn’t happen because of the potato yeald failing. Ireland was actually producing more than enough food. However it was almost all land owned by Brittish landowners, who took all of the food out of the country to sell in UK. Potato was what the Irish farmers ate, because it was cheep and could be produced in worst parts of the land, where more profitable food couldn’t be grown. When there were no longer potatos, the decision for the farmers was to either starve and sent the food as rent to the landlords or loose their homes and then starve.

The Brittish goverment was unwilling to do anything for two reasons. First was the laissez-faire capitalistic ideology, that put the rights of property owners to make profits above human lives. Rent freeze was unthinkable and they even were unwilling to do proper relief efforts as free food would lower the cost of food. The second reason was distain for the Irish, and the thought that they were “breeding too much” and the famine was a natural way to trim down the population, aka genocidal reasoning.

This is why it’s important to stress it was not a potato famine. The potato blinght was all over Europe but only in Ireland there was a famine. The reasons behind it had nothing to do with potatos and everything to do with the Brittish.

Apparently what made Choctaw want to offer relief to Irish was the news about the Doolough Tragedy. Hundreds of starving people were gathered for inspection to verify they were entitled to recieve relief. The officials would for *some reason* not do that and instead left to a hunting lodge 19 kilometers away to spend the night and said to the starvqing people they would have to walk there by morning to be inspected. The weather conditions were terrible and many of them died completely needlessly during the walk thoroung day and night.

This apparently reminded the Choctaw of their own very recent (and much more explicit and bigger scale) experiences of ethnic clensing, where they were forcibly relocated. It was basically a death march and thousands of Choctaw died from the terrible conditions also completely needlessly.

In 2015 a memorial named Kindred Spirits was installed in Southern Ireland to commemorate the Chactow donation.

Then in 2020:

Choctaw Nation has now added a monument of their own: