AI Blues

 Grading, slowly making my way through a digital pile of script analysis papers. 

One newish twist is AI. It seems, more and more, I find a paper whose paragraphs are beautifully crafted but whose prose is superficial. My mode of script analysis focuses exclusively on structure. GPT and its ilk tend to prefer lofty reflections on theme and character, making (and repeating) basic links between those or that scene and this or that theme. 

Most students just don't recognize that a writer has a voice, that we can tell when they shift from their own (often error-riddled but honest) voice into the cottony vagaries of AI.

Encountering one of these depletes me. Usually I catch on about halfway through, as nonspecifics pile up. By that point I've spent time and energy crafting some encouraging intervention ("can you be more specific? Give me a 'for instance' from the text?"). 

And then I cut and paste something into gptzero or another detector, and BAM--likely AI generated. Such detectors are themselves error prone. I wouldn't use them as a first-line test. But they can sometimes tell me if and how someone has run into trouble.

I have to remind myself, as I always do when encountering academic dishonesty, that it's not personal. Dishonesty happens, as Truth Default Theory avers, when the truth becomes inconvenient. Students cheat out of desperation, not out of some desire to hurt teachers. I'm sure some may feel a certain contempt for the class or for me, but the same could be said of those who don't cheat.

Mostly there's just a mass of students who aren't (or who feel) unprepared to do the kind of reading and writing we do in class. I'm continually trying to revise my teaching to reach such students, to clarify what it is they need to make this task seem doable. 

And AI makes it harder. It feels like work to them--they look it up, they teach it about this play they may have read part of, and they have it spit out what they think I want to hear. I think some of them convince themselves it's like what they might have written. But then, how would they know? That's one of the awful things about LLMs (large language models); they prevent students from learning their own voice. They never know what they "sound" like without the filter of AI-ification. 

And it's exhausting to go through the rigmarole of reporting them to student advocacy and accountability. Each time, I'm like is it worth it? Am I doing this out of pique, or am I doing it to teach the student something? At this point, it's more a matter of consistency. I did it for this one student; I have to do it for everyone similarly positioned. And sometimes it really is a good wake-up call. My institution at this moment is pretty good about making these teachable moments. 

But. It's still rough. 

"I use GPT for lots of things," say some friends outside of academia.

I don't.

What's There to Say?

 Man. I don't have much to say. Across-the-board tariffs for all (except for Russia and a few other exempted states). Math apparently based on fundamental misunderstandings of economy. Fantasy predictions of liberation and prosperity. Global stock futures tanking. Retaliatory tariffs incoming. 

This on top of massive and stupid cuts to vital services (HSS, most recently). This on top of abandoning or even mocking the idea of due process for all and of democratic checks and balances. Just lots of open revenge and power-grabs.

Can't even write in complete sentences rn. 

And the worst thing is that I'm afraid none of this will be enough, that popular apathy, boredom, distraction, and/or ignorance that will make it seem like those sounding the alarm about all this are the unreasonable ones. Or I'm worried that the consequences, though bad, won't be severe or sustained enough to alter the opinion of low-information citizens about either (1) passionately supporting Trump, or (2) disengaging from everything.

I don't know. 

Even the comedy of Trump assigning "reciprocal tariffs" on unoccupied Antarctic islands falls flat in the face of the magnitude of damage he's done to the country and the world. 

God help us.

Booker's Filibuster

 Kudos to Senator Corey Booker (D-NJ), who broke the record (set by Strom Thurmond) for longest speech given on the Senate floor. He filibustered against Trump for over 25 hours (25 hours, 4 minutes). He spoke the entire time save for questions from the floor and time given over to fellow speakers. He remained standing throughout.

As Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski noted, "Whether you agree with him or not, the past 24+ hours was what most people think a filibuster actually looks like." She congratulated him. 

Social media that I looked at (Bluesky) seemed mainly supportive of Booker. Some detractors pointed out that he wasn't filibustering any one piece of legislation, that this made his performance more of a stunt than anything. Others disagreed, noting that Democrats have needed a coherent and inspiring leader since Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reversed course and (with nine other Democratic votes) helped Republicans to avoid a government shutdown. 

I still don't know what to think about that decision. I was against it, in no small part due to arguments from Isaac Saul. Saul himself, however, withdrew his opposition to the continuing budget resolution. Friends and family who work for government agencies were likewise opposed to shutting down the government, fearing that would embolden DOGE's already drastic government cuts. 

Those same friends, however, just got "the letter" today--a "better take it while it's offered" deal to retire early. Some are taking the deal. Some--those who haven't worked long enough or aren't old enough (there's a calculation that balances those factors)--can't afford to retire now. Thus they wait for a roll of the dice to see if they still have a job.

Mind you, the FAA will, I expect, still be relied upon to do all the tasks they currently do--prevent widespread death and chaos in air travel--at severe labor shortages.

Tomorrow, April 2, Trump is supposed to be announcing his "liberation day" tariffs on everyone everywhere. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board calls the "tariffs are really tax cuts" an Orwellian exercise. One gets the sense that Trump and his Commerce Secretary Howard "I Don't Know Anyone That Isn't Pissed Off At Him" Lutnick really do believe what, well, no one with any economic training agrees with. The Politico article I linked to suggests that Trump world is poised to blame Lutnick when things go south. "Bad advice." I hope that dodge fails. Trump owns "tariffs are good." And even if he didn't, isn't he supposed to be so good at hiring the best people?

I don't know. I'm back to hoping for bad things. Really, I'm not sure what good path Trump perceives by raising taxes on all imports. Nothing I've heard on that score seems realistic or coherent. 

There's so much I'm losing track of what next to write about to my Republican Senators. I'm guessing it'll be about ICE overreach and the horror of doing away with due process for all. But it could be about how Trump's initiatives seem to do the opposite of what they aim to do. He's going to fix the economy by ruining it? He's going to create peace by going to war? He's going to improve government efficiency by gutting vital programs--including and especially those that make or save us money--randomly? He's going to fix immigration by creating no-human-rights-apply states of exception? 

No wonder Senator Booker needed 25 hours.

Credit Where It's Due

 Credit where it's due: I gotta write one of my two mega-GOP senators today. I had written them previously to ask them to stand up to Trump's badmouthing of judges who rule against him. It seems now that some Republican senators are doing just that, including the one I wrote to. He was quoted saying, well, good things?

Of course, other Republican legislators are trying to replicate that end run with extra steps, proposing a bill to strip federal judges of blocking executive acts beyond the immediate parties bringing the challenge. That seems like a bad idea, one that GOP senators would have (rightly) decried had Democrats attempted the same to curtail challenges against Biden's or Obama's executive orders. Hopefully they'll see that.

Did my letter make any kind of difference, play any kind of role in that senator's stand? Almost certainly not. But it was good to see.

Thus he gets this letter tonight:

Dear [SENATOR]--

About a week ago I wrote to urge you to stand up to the White House's badmouthing of federal judges for rulings they don't like. I was pleased to see an article from thehill.com: "Senate Republicans urge Trump, allies to stop threatening courts." You were quoted, speaking against Speaker Johnson's plans to defund federal courts. 

I applaud your stance and thank you for defending our system of checks and balances.

I am less thrilled by Senator Grassley's proposal to limit the injunctive power of federal judges. Limiting injunctions to the immediate parties bringing a challenge would seriously hinder a major check against executive overreach. Temporary stays and temporary injunctions already have a limiting factor: they're temporary. If the acts in question are legal, then they will find their way through judicial scrutiny. If they're illegal, then they should never have been issued in the first place.

By contrast, victims of ill-considered executive orders require broad and immediate protection. Waiting for a class action lawsuit to redress a sweeping illegal order by the President is like filling out mail-in request for firefighters while the house burns. 

I note that Republicans have never taken a stance that judicial injunctions go too far when Democrats occupy the White House and issue executive orders. Nor should you. Executive orders that overstep should be challenged and when necessary paused. Thus we have judicial stays and injunctions.

That there have been many injunctions against the President indicates executive overreach, not judicial activism. Over the last two months, the White House has proudly adopted a "move fast and break things" attitude. The President has "flooded the zone" with sweeping executive orders and novel interpretations of old laws to justify a range of actions. It's no surprise that causing a flood triggers floodgates to close.

The broad powers the President claims call for extra caution. Already we've seen how imprudent acts such as the Venezuelan deportations to El Salvador turn out badly. News reports tell of mistakenly identified several innocent people as violent gang members. It's a nauseating abuse of power and flagrant disregard of due process. The worrisome practice of "disappearing" legal residents who break no laws at all likewise cries out for close scrutiny.

Great power requires great oversight and accountability. The White House has so far been reticent to accept oversight on its own. (Witness the shameful whataboutism and excuse-making around the Signal debacle.) Congress and the courts must step in to compensate for the White House's rashness.

I ask that you and the rest of Congress continue to hold the executive branch accountable to the law and to the Constitutional protections for all.  

Thank you,

Mouffe in the Time of Trump

 A friend of mine at church briefly let me know he'd been thinking of my work with Braver Angels and the entire endeavor of talking to the other side. 

He was having a hard time with it lately. When a senator of ours was walking his dog through my friend's neighborhood, my friend rolled down his window and "said some unkind words."

I'm not a fan of unkind words per se. But I do see where my friend is coming from. Support for Trump--really, absolutely loving what he's doing--seems so foreign to me. 

This, my training tells me, represents a failure of my imagination. I remember my Chantal Mouffe. The classical trap is thinking your political opponents must be either irrational or immoral. They're deluded, poor things, misled by the right-wing mediasphere into believing the stories of immigrants flooding over the border to steal their jobs and infect their communities with fentanyl. Or they're just self-centered, ethically broken people who covertly or openly want a white supremacist (and patriarchal, anti-queer, anti-disabled, etc.) society. 

The hardest truth to swallow is that people just as intellectually and ethically sophisticated as you are hold very different values and believe very different things. They think the same things about your side: how could anyone believe what they do? Are they stupid or just evil?

 Our differences can't just be talked out. We can't just meet in the middle. Our struggle will determine the fate of democracy, the political and practical realities for everyone.

Mouffe argues that the challenge is to see such opponents not as antagonists--enemies we must crush utterly--but agonists--players in the same liberal democratic game. We play to win, not to draw. But winning does not mean annihilating our opponents. Nor does it mean breaking the system that allows them to play in the first place. That means anyone's victory is always partial, always temporary. The struggle continues. 

At least, that's ideally how it is supposed to go. 

I'm not sure Mouffe entertains enough the possibility that one set of players might operate via bad faith. I'm not sure she entertains the possibility that a majority of the populace may vote to do away with the fair-play rules altogether. Stanley Fish once wrote that democracy has a self-destruct button permanently installed inside of it. Any demos at any time could conceivably press it, abdicating rights and popular sovereignty in favor of monarchy or feudalism or something else.

It's hard not to see people who defend this administration's chaos and incompetence and pettiness and unlawfulness as mashing that button as hard and as often as they can. Does this make them evil? Deluded? Something else? 

I don't know. But Mouffian agonism seems unlikely to muster an effective response. The alternatives, though, promise even less appealing paths. 

All this to say: I don't know what Braver Angels has to offer right now. I've not yet been able to bring myself to watch some of the "debates" about Trump's first 100 days. I may need to summon some courage, if only to respond well to my friends--and my enemies. 

A Small Voting Victory

 It's hopeful that all four amendments on the state ballot today failed. Though some of them dangled enticing treats (e.g., a pay raise for teachers), such lures hid several sharp hooks that would have snared citizens. Our GOP Governor wanted more power. The people denied him this power, contrary to his apparent expectations.

I'm especially heartened Amendment 3 failed. It would have, essentially, made it easier to prosecute juveniles for a wider array of crimes. That 65% of voters said no to this gives me hope that the culture of justice-as-revenge-on-those-I-hate may be losing steam. 

So much of the Trump administration's actions seem predicated on revenge against those Trump perceives as having slighted him: people, law firms, companies, universities, and whole countries and international organizations. Trump acts like a petty bully; this we knew already. 

The really depressing part was how many US voters seemed happy to endorse that bullying. Decimating federal government agencies, firing qualified people for random reasons, and choking off research funding? Just what those stupid bureaucrats deserve! Disappearing people from other countries--even those here legally and legitimately--without due process? Screw 'em! Threatening universities and colleges? Love those know-it-all elites' tears!

I think we're starting to see some pushback even from Republican voters. This is especially so among those who find themselves directly affected by DOGE cuts and anti-DEI purges. John Stoehr, editor of The Editorial Board, however, argue that such stories do not indicate conversions to left/Democratic causes--just disillusionment with Trump. The woman CNN interviewed for the story, a Trump voter who lost her job due to DOGE, regrets her vote now. But, Stoehr skeets, "She expected the government to cut out people who do not belong, that is, cut out “waste, fraud and abuse,” and now that she has discovered that she is among the 'undeserving,' she is experiencing cognitive dissonance." She voted for Trump three times, Stoehr observes. Her problem isn't that Trump wanted to go after/take revenge on people; it's that she personally got caught up in those targeted people. For Stoehr, Democrats must focus efforts not on converting or appealing to voters like her--that's not a winning move for them. Rather, the aim should be to discourage her from supporting Trump. "Stay home if he's on the ballot" makes for a better and moer reachable goal.

Stoehr's rationale here presumes that Trump voters will never share the ethical stance Democrats might wish them to have--Perhaps it's wrong to treat people unfairly even if we don't know or like them. I don't know about that. 

Maybe people voted down Amendment 3 just because they hate Amendments, or hate Landry, or just hate change. But maybe, just maybe, there was something in them that militated against the idea juvenile offenders deserve harsher and longer sentences. 

I'd like to think so.

Solo

 We put one of our cats down today. Solo--named not after Star Wars but because originally we thought we'd be getting him and his brother. When his bro was given away before him, we got a solo kitty instead of a duo. He'd been having gastrointestinal trouble for the last year or so--throwing up a ton, lots of poop problems. Gradually he went down from his former 14 pounds to 10, then 9, then this week 7. Despite tons of vet visits and medication regimens--is it IBS or lymphoma?--over the last week or so he just stopped eating. 

Even at the end, Solo so enjoyed his "water treat": we trickle water from a cup into a bowl for him. He's always gone gaga for that, pawing (and clawing) at the cup, taking a turn around the mini waterfall, examining the back of the cup, sticking his little nose underneath the stream, sneezing violently after water would go up his snoot, and even sticking his head into the cup to drink directly from the cup as water trickled out of it. Just the words "water treat" would summon Solo like magic.

That remained up even this morning. When I got up, Solo came in, thin and bony and bleary-eyed, and sat next to his bowl and cup. I gave him water treat. He stuck his nose in the stream. But he couldn't bring himself to drink. He hadn't eaten anything for days, not even the nibbles or licks at kibble or canned food. 

We had stopped the nightly ordeal of stuffing meds down his throat a few days prior. 

After I got home from school, we took him to the vet down the street, the same vet that had taken care of Solo when he was a kitten with what they feared was kitty pneumonia. 

As we pet him, the vet gave the first of two shots--this one to relax him into near unconsciousness and painlessness. His eyes stayed open, and I tried to close them so they wouldn't cause any discomfort (though he was by that point beyond discomfort). They then brought in the heart-stopping injection. They had to struggle a bit to fit it into his thinned vein. But they did, and he was gone.

Solo is only the second cat that I've raised from a tiny kitten, and the only one so far I've seen all the way through from kitten to passing. (Our other cat, Hidey, we got from a shelter when she was just emerging from smallest kittenhood.) Our next cat is likely to be my partner's attempt to domesticate the stray he's been courting for over a year now. I'm not convinced NC ("Neighborhood Cat") wants to be indoor, nor am I convinced Hidey would want her. But he'll try anyway, and we'll see.

I cried earlier this week, holding Solo, anticipating this day. I shed tears all day and sobbed on the way home. I'm going to bump up against a kitty-shaped absence in my life for some time to come. All the little places he'd be: hopping up to take one of my hands as I work on the computer, waiting outside of the shower to investigate the drips and puddles (a scientist of water was Solo), chewing on anything crinkly and often carrying it to his water bowl like an offering to some sea god, and mostly snuggling up to me. At his healthiest, he was so big, and he insisted on taking up my torso. 

Cats are infamously aloof. You can't count on a cat to show affection to you. But Solo outdid any dog in loving on us. He adored us. We adored him, even in his destructive kitten phase. (We would often joke about having visits from some mysterious cult's monks, who in their gentle way would inform us that our cute little kitten was in fact Destruction incarnate. "Behind his innocent face, he dreams of the world broken and burning." "But he's such a cute boy!" we'd respond. "Yes," they would sigh, shaking their heads, "That's how he gets you.")

We withdrew somewhat as his health declined. I suspect some touches of kitty dementia. But he was still happy to sit with us, kneading a blanket and sucking on it, never having grown out of his nursing phase. He loved our hands resting on him or his head and paws resting on our hands. 

He was an exceptional cat. I told him often how much I loved him, what a good guy, a good Solo, he was. I thanked him often for being with us, and I thanked God for bringing us together. 

May God take his soul to a paradise of water treats, crinkly plastic, and beloved hands and warm torsos to snuggle with.