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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: April 8th, 2024

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  • Another laziness by the professors is using book questions instead of just writing their own.

    When I taught I told my students that the book was a resource for studying the material from a different perspective than the one I gave in lectures. Not actually required for the course even though I didn’t have control over it being listed as required on the course listing. And I told them if they wanted to get it, they should find the cheapest copy they could. I’ve heard you can sometimes find very cheap electronic copies (wink wink).

    It is funny to see the questions you write end up on Chegg though.









  • IMO 59/60 should be about the max for a first term president. That would put them at retirement age if they serve two terms. I think Walz is a great choice to make the whole thing more palatable to progressives like me (who feel that now for a third time in a row we’ve been deprived of a fair primary). I do wish the VP were a little younger than the president to set them up for a run of their own afterwards. Not sure if Walz has any intention of running afterwards, but we’d be right back to a retirement age candidate if Kamala serves two terms.

    Personally, I’d like to see more presidents in their 40s or early 50s. That’s plenty of time to get “experience” while still in principle being able to understand the needs of the majority of people. Plus it helps that they’ll still live for a while in the world they shape after their term.










  • Since you seem willing to engage in discourse about this, I feel similarly to the person you replied to and can explain my position. I don’t want to discourage anyone from voting, I have two goals:

    1. Don’t concede the White House to Trump
    2. Fight back against the Democratic Party’s efforts to reduce the voice of the people.

    I’m guessing we agree on #1 and disagree on the premise of #2. I see #2 as a systemic pattern that really launched after the 2008 primaries when Obama disrupted the plan to place Hillary in the White House. It came to a head in 2016 and has been rippling ever since.

    I never believed Joe should have run again in the first place, and in the last month it became clear that him running was detrimental to #1. So we push for him to step aside, while I still think he shouldn’t have run in the first place. He steps down, and you feel satisfied because goal #1 is protected. But I’m deeply unsettled by the damage that has been done to #2. The Democrats just figured out how to skip the voice of the people entirely.

    The last time this happened (1968 primaries, eerily similar) the Democrats launched a committee to reform the primary process into what it is today. A big improvement over what it was before, but Biden just revealed a significant weakness in it.

    I’m happy to vote for Harris to fulfill #1, I’m thrilled that there was a surge in registrations. But if the Democrats don’t address the critical problem of this process we all just witnessed, I fear #2 becomes unreachable. The Democrats are our only hope of saving our democracy, so if they abandon democracy within their party (like I have seen happening over the last 16 years), it’s a hollow victory.


  • Looks like we’re back in full “you can’t criticize the Democrats at all or you’re a Russian troll” territory. I hate this sycophancy.

    I’m with you on this one. The Democrats have been skirting democracy to the best of their ability for years. I’m glad we’ve got a better chance of defeating Trump now, but I’m unwilling to concede the democratic process of nominating candidates. If we celebrate this fucked up process instead of holding their feet to the fire, they’re just going to learn that actually they don’t need to bother involving the people at all. We cannot give a single inch to the plutocrats at the top.