Notices by Alfie Kohn (alfiekohn@sciences.social), page 4

I don't know where you bellyachers get the idea that AI isn't going to benefit all of us.

This story appeared on p. 17 of today's print edition and featured typical NYT weasel phrasing ("The deportations deepened the questions surrounding the Trump administration's legal tactics and administrative errors...").
It should have been on the front page with a huge all-caps headline: TRUMP BRAZENLY FLOUTS COURT ORDER, IMPERILING DEMOCRACY

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/us/politics/trump-deportation-el-salvador.html

Axiom: The lower the status of the student population, the more traditional and teacher-centered the education they're likely to receive.

Corollary: When this proves counterproductive, it will be assumed the problem is with the kids... prompting adults to double down on the traditionalism (and the use of control).

Is a plan to remake it backfiring, or is a plan to destroy it proceeding exactly as intended?

Well, yeah, but Stephen Miller points out that anyone with darker skin isn't, like, *really* an American citizen, right?

Rest of the world (except for a few dictators): "Trump has poisoned the U.S. & turned it into a pariah state. It no longer makes sense to buy its products, invest in its bonds, trust its research, visit its sites, or study (or work) at its universities."

MAGA: "Yeah! We're number one! USA! USA!"

https://www.americaamerica.news/p/once-a-magnet-becoming-a-pariah?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=283745&post_id=162053725

Rubio's "most drastic change [to the State Department] is the elimination of the office of the under secretary for civilian security, democracy, and human rights." Doesn't get much more on-brand for Trumpism than that, does it?

Can't get enough of this meme

How Not to Be a Human Being - chapter 83 and 84

BAD: running a government like a business

CATASTROPHIC: running a government like Trump ran his businesses

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/04/05/tariffs-tech-retaliatory-imports-silicon-valley/

Fox News stumbles onto something important by referring to anti-fascist graffiti as "anti-Trump"

BREAKING: In an effort to avoid being seen as craven enablers of authoritarianism, the top decision makers at Columbia, Harvard, and several Trump-compliant law firms will show their solidarity with defenders of democracy and free speech by beginning a one-hour hunger strike today at 4:00.

Maybe decimating efforts to deal with the climate crisis can be explained as putting short-term financial gain (for fossil fuel companies) ahead of long-time survival. But THIS - destroying the CDC - is pure nihilism, devastation for its own sake, for no reason and toward no end.

This is MAGA rule.

https://www.alternet.org/cdc-mass-firings/

I've been thinking about this a lot lately: "Part of what makes it so easy for democracy to slip away" is that "there are a lot of features of daily life that continue to exist long after a country has stopped being a democracy": https://smotus.substack.com/p/liberty-can-actually-die-pretty-quietly

RFK, Jr. & the GOP aren't just eviscerating critical medical research and replacing science with pseudoscience. They're creating "a new age of public-health libertarianism" - a "war on all the things that make health a 'public' good, sustained by mutual aid," instead "seeing individuals as perfectly autonomous and inviolable units and defining everything outside individual control as either an irrelevant consideration or a violation of 'bodily autonomy'": https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/opinion/public-health-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8E4.waA9.DbyTkbS3GcGB&smid=url-share

"All of our institutions are the Republican party now....
"We must stop viewing political life through the lens of American politics as we have known it, and adopt the viewpoint of dissident movements in autocratic states....The only way to win is people power."

Important read: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/how-to-think-and-act-like-a-dissident-in-trumps-america

Attention universities, law firms, other corporations, and former allies & trading partners: It appears that Disney's craven capitulation to Trump's unreasonable right-wing demands has resulted in ... more unreasonable right-wing demands: https://www.avclub.com/fcc-launches-disney-dei-investigation

Honestly, now - do we even need The Onion when a headline like this is for real?