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Isaac Speer

@isaacspeer.bsky.social
516 followers 317 following 1.8K posts

Continuing Lecturer in UCLA's Sociology Department

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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 1h
No, actually, it's the people who fervently believe AI is conscious who are akin to deists. And the burden of proof is on them, not us.
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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 22h
I hate to pile on but the left really needs to stop with this "it's always been this bad" nonsense. There is in fact a difference between police murders and pre-planned public executions.
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Micah @rincewind.run · 10/10/2026
if your agents are going to commit crimes, you are legally responsible if you cannot figure out how to prevent your agents from doing crimes, you’re going to have to choose between releasing them and protecting yourself from criminal liability imo this would do more for “ai safety” than a sex cult
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victoria scott @victoriascott.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
This is just a fucking carjacking. How the hell was he supposed to know it was a state sponsored carjacking. what the fuck are we doing here.
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Shiv Ramdas Mens Rice Activist @nameshiv.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
this is literally why you have uniforms and badges every member of the media pretending that any of this is due to anything else should be frogmarched out of public life
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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
No words
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Blake Emerson @blakeprof.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
It’s striking that the GOP has a massive cash advantage even when Trump is currently causing lasting harm to the US and global economy. What does that say about the interests of capital?
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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Demonizing Canada, and now a public execution - it's like someone in the White House is stealing ideas from the South Park movie. Insanity.
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Sarah T Roberts, PhD @ubiquity75.xyz · 09/10/2026
A “budget shortfall” is not a credible reason for the closure, especially when VC for Comms who spent $600,000 on external mgmt of her own LinkedIn page continued to operate in admin’s favor. The reason is future liability mitigation and sexist reduction in services. Period.
dailybruin.com
UCLA Academic Senate calls on administration to keep childcare centers open - Daily Bruin
This post was updated Oct. 8 at 10:40 p.m. The UCLA Academic Senate overwhelmingly passed a resolution Tuesday calling on administrators to reverse a decision to close the university’s childcare cente...
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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
He who must not be named
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Eric Levai @ericlevai.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Now THIS is how you write a story. Devastating.
Screenshot from this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/us/politics/fort-hood-execution-streamed-public.html?unlocked_article_code=1.HVE.Rw7O.Sj-0_s5YONzL&smid=nytcore-android-share
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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
The president is inciting racist violence. We can't let this become normalized.
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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Just like the US News new formula, this “earnings after four years” is a stupid metric of the worth of college. If folks were serious about all this, they’d stop pretending that people don’t go to grad school & do other things in their 20s while not earning high salaries: bsky.app/profile/mcop...
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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Oh sorry I should have said "superintelligence", per President Trump's order.
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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Faced with horribly high unpopularity, the GOP has somehow decided the best strategy is to fully embrace Elon Musk, AI, and datacenters. Geniuses.
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Jacob T. Levy @jacobtlevy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I remember a decade-long panic about undergraduates, activists, or Tumblr pages declaring new language rules and denouncing people for violating them.
post from Trump on Truth Social declaring that anyone who uses the term "Artificial Intelligence" is THE ENEMY!
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Miriam Posner @miriamposner.com · 08/10/2026
This is an issue @cucfa.org will be taking up this year. Our student:faculty ratio just grows higher and higher—much higher than comparable institutions. Meanwhile we’re buying campuses and hiring more and more administrators. www.sacbee.com/news/local/e...
sacbee.com
UC is hitting its enrollment targets. But permanent faculty hiring lags
Faculty say the University of California’s reputation for academic excellence and its contribution to new ideas and innovations is at stake.
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Universities bring in foreign students ... to undercut the wages of American residents? What? This is exactly backwards. Foreign students subsidize the tuition of American students. I wonder why the VP who follows Nazis online has this all wrong. Probably an innocent, non-racist mistake.
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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Racist war on higher education
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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
The "SI" thing is was intended to provoke this exact sort of sniveling response from the courtiers, to train the oligarchs to humiliate themselves for Trump so they'll do it again later when it really matters.
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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Tyrant
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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
So, are we seceding yet? /S
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Murshed Zaheed @murshedz.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
It’s the double standard in American elite political media that’s telling and chilling. Again imagine a Democratic President made this comment about Charleston and Columbia. How would the American media and political class would have reacted? Does anything matter?
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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
I agree he probably didn't mean to invite Iran to nuke two American cities. Nonetheless that is what it sounded like, and then the crowd cheered.
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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Sure, but the crowd cheered at letting Iran destroy my city. If any other president said that, and their fans reacted that way, it would be over for them.
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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Who knows what Trump intended to say. Nonetheless, what he did say was "let [Iran] take out Los Angeles" and "San Diego." Then his supporters cheered at the idea of Iran destroying Los Angeles and San Diego. Theres no middle ground with people who hate us and wish us dead.
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Dave Karpf @davekarpf.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
I'm just gonna bookmark this for future reference when Dem pundits complain about how the party has trouble communicating its message to voters. The reason you keep running into trouble with your branding isn't campus radicals. The reason is that your opponents purchased all the media outlets.
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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Controlled opposition?
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UC Faculty Association @cucfa.org · 03/10/2026
Thanks to the advocacy of hundreds of faculty who joined the fight through their Faculty Associations, the $7.5B California Research Fund (SB 895) is now headed to the 2028 ballot where this funding decision will be in the hands of California voters. cucfa.org/ca-research-...
A win for research! Governor Newsom Signs SB 895 California Science and Health Research Bond Act
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Impossible to understand how anyone could look at Rufo's career and conclude he was someone engaged in a "forthright defense of meritocracy." Rufo's entire career is built on the idea of purging people who don't think or look like him from positions of power.
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Normalization is treating the president stealing from taxpayers to buy campaign ads and offer bribes to voters like it's just another day. Normalization is reacting with "won't work" or "polls poorly," and not "resign immediately or you'll be removed, we exist because of a revolution against that."
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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 03/10/2026
Killed. NSF’s SBE was killed, in violation of law. The President does not have the power to choose to kill programs at a whim by defunding them. The imperial presidency was a mistake and we are in a separation of powers constitutional crisis.
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Justin Baragona @justinbaragona.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
So he did exactly what we thought he did -- instructing his aides to use taxpayer dollars to fund his propaganda ads. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/02/u...
nytimes.com
Trump Directed Use of Taxpayer Money for Ads Praising His Presidency
The government-funded ads show just how much President Trump has been able to use federal money for his own aims.
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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
No, I meant that within the group of people who call themselves Zionists there is a big range of views.
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Dannagal Goldthwaite Young @dannagal.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Do yourself a favor. Read these 7 pages by @lilymasonphd.bsky.social right now. It is the most concise explanation of the current situation in U.S. politics I've seen and it captures why calls to reduce "polarization" can ultimately worsen the problem 🧵 www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/pol...
journalofdemocracy.org
Polarization Is Not the Problem | Journal of Democracy
Americans have never been angrier with one another. But polarization is not the disease—it is the response to a revanchist movement seeking to roll back sixty years of social progress.
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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
I think that's true to some extent. OTOH, the same could be said about Zionism.
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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
For me it just means that Palestinians should have a contiguous nation-state of their own and that Gaza and the West Bank shouldn't be under Israeli control or assault.
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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Right. Stole oil from another country, allowed his top donor to run a government agency, has his cronies cut business deals while making agreements with other countries, punishes states that didn't vote for him...it's just breathtaking.
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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
The worst people in the world keep doing terrible things with impunity. And then the good people are just supposed to turn the other cheek.
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Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴 @wamsleylab.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
The fiscal year is over. The dying Social, Behavioral, and Economic division of NSF ended up awarding 90 total grants this year, as opposed to ~700-800 in recent past years. Source: grantwitness.org/nsf/analyses...
The graph shows the cumulative number of awards made by month across this fiscal year, as compared to the last 6 fiscal years. The line for this year is total flat until June, but then finally gets up to 91 by October. In prior years the increase starts building earlier and ends on average in the 700-800 range (with variability, last year was only between 400-500).
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Jacob Montgomery @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Universities have been going for the “insiders strategy” of trying to lobby quietly without making public waves. Counterfactuals are hard, but I would say the strategy has been a complete failure.
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Joshua Foust 🪖🎮 @joshuafoust.com · 03/10/2026
It’s weird to see so many higher education leaders beat their chests about “the decline of trust” from the public while refusing to acknowledge the conservative movement organizing to destroy it. Imagine someone stabbing you repeatedly while you complain about not having enough blood to bleed out.
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Adrienne LaFrance @adriennelaf.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
New just now in The Atlantic: David Robinson resigned this week. He was among the longest-tenured employees at OpenAI—and oversaw safety reports on 12 frontier launches. He is very worried: “The time for trial and error is over.” You can read his essay here: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
theatlantic.com
I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken
The industry’s approach to safety guarantees more failures.
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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
~Approximately no one in the general public knows because the leaders of the R1 research universities - whose budgets, programs, & personnel are entirely or significantly dependent on federal funding - have been totally absent from the public square in explaining & collectively protesting this.
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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
“Our business model is to bring enslaved conscious beings into existence, which we then murder at will.” So… you should all be in prison?
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Josh Zingher @zingherpolisci.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
The entire last decade has been an exercise in creating a different set of standards for One Special Boy. Trump can never fail, people can only disagree about his performance. It isn't that he doesn't understand anything, he has unorthodox economic stances. It's delusions framed as evenhandedness.
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 01/10/2026
Trump: "Nobody knows that dumb has a B on the end"
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Isaac Speer @isaacspeer.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
UCPD says it's not their job to stop classroom disruptions, even when those classroom disruptions involve sexually harassing faculty and students. It's a "boys will be boys" club with no regard for education or safety.
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Sarah T Roberts, PhD @ubiquity75.xyz · 01/10/2026
“…the administration is using allegations of discrimination—including antisemitism—as a pretext for coercive strategies that are plainly unlawful and unconstitutional, and that undermine both civil rights–including the civil rights of Jewish Americans—and our constitutional democracy.”
nationalcampusjewishalliance.org
Press Release September 28, 2026 — National Campus Jewish Alliance
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Amidst a failing war the US started, the SecDef chose to focus on measuring military members’ hormones, and injecting testosterone into personnel whose hormone levels he dislikes. He also fixates on PT while losing an air war. If you said this to someone a few years ago, they wouldn’t believe you.
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