Brett Kunkle

This is so sweet. A father prays over his baby girl, reciting Scripture and declaring blessing and protection over her life.  Studies show when a father actively practices his faith, up to 75% of children will carry it into adulthood. A father’s love changes the world.

This, right here, is the canary in the coal mine for higher education. For my upper-level in-person teaching, I've switched to in-class, no-device, open notes essay exams. Online humanities courses at any significant scale are dead, and publicly available LLMs are the reason. Our fundamental skills -- reading, writing, reasoning, remembering -- are decaying at an alarming rate. We are losing a generation, and when that generation is grown, there will be virtually no one left to teach basic skills to the next. I love the good things that generative AI can do. Some of them are absolutely amazing. I use these tools to create projects that I think will be groundbreaking. But we are facing an extinction event for higher education. And with the best will in the world, my colleagues don't have a plan. They mill around, acknowledging that, yes, there are problems, and opining that perhaps we should move to in-class exercises that incorporate AI and ask students to think about the outputs. There is no coherent university-wide policy. There is no movement to recover the lost tools of learning. I mention memory palaces, but most of my colleagues have never heard of them. Those who have think that I'm trying to be clever, recommending going backward in order to go forward. How quaint! It does not occur to them that training young people in such skills might become a lynchpin of civilizational survival. Intensive reading, effortful study, deep learning -- a few individuals will always gravitate toward these things. But at scale, all of this is dying. We are drowning ourselves face-down in the shallows. φάσκοντες εἶναι σοφοὶ ἐμωράνθησαν

This is the kind of headline you read and your mind just refuses to believe it. You assume there must be some exaggeration or misinformation, or some nuanced fact is being exploited to paint an inaccurate picture. Because surely it cant be this, right? Surely theres no way a 20 y/o man could have his sentence overturned because it wasnt established at his trial whether he "thought he was having consensual sex with a 10 y/o". But then you read the article (article 🔗'd in reply) and thats literally what it is. This is what makes ppl think our leaders hate us, this is what deligitimizes the Liberal project in many people's minds. Like many liberal-minded people of my generation, I grew up believing that progressivism promised a better way, a more fair and just world, where people really WERE judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. When I see stuff like this, i cannot help but think something is deeply wrong with the state of the modern Left. After all, to paraphrase the psycho from No Country For Old Men: "If the liberalism you followed brought you to this....of what use was your liberalism?"

Please get back to doing puzzles, sudoku, board games, crosswords, word search. Read long novels and watch long form videos. Seeing my students and even my age-mates uncomfortable being cognitively unentertained is... something. We’re losing patience with thinking deeply.

The only thing weird and bizarre is the fact that this is a dude pretending to be a woman.