iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 13h

tv viewers elect man from tv

Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 13h

in fact if I were a contemporary US historian I would call my survey of this period A Very Special Episode which thank god I’m not, I work on a calmer time, the seventeenth century

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 13h

it’s been rule by very special episode from day one

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 17h

typing in “social obligations, amirite?” and awaiting the bot’s knowing “lol”

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 17h

asking ChatGPT how I should reply to my family’s announcement that they’re stepping back from me to spend more time with Claude

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 17h

using AI to suck the life out of my life, so that I can have more job

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 21h

We live in a police state now

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 23h

if the Atlantic wanted to be really brave, they'd ask Jack the trucker what he thinks about the cities of the coast (and then check)

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 23h

and it's not obvious to me that any particular construction of The Canon needs to be part of general education, as opposed to disciplinary grounding a shared frame of reference has real instrumental value in a classroom, but its susceptibility to culture warfare likely outweighs that at this point

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 23h

agree; it's about making things legible in my discipline it's also about historicizing them; but I tend to think it has a critical value even if your engagement is transitory whether a *given* canon is important is context dependent, though. "great questions of life" is the wrong way to justify it

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 23h

I will also say, regarding my first comment, that the sentiment I'm talking about is 100% supported by centrists wailing that sandwiches with foreign names are why Ordinary Americans are afraid of the coast and the rest of the bullshit that fills upper-middlebrow magazines

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 23h

delaying the destruction of Sodom till the last troop in the Sodom army has been evacuated

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 23h

if you think the public exists to defend the military, I think you're most of the way to where these creeps want you to be

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 23h

also the reply that what's worst about it is that there are military personnel in San Diego is... really worth thinking about

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 23h

this kind of thing isn't new, just more crass than it used to be. the thing a lot of red voters love best about NYC is 9/11

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

To put it another way: what conduces to understanding the world, past and present is the job of scholarship and of academic institutions to preserve. It’s to be expected this will overlap with what is relevant at any moment; we inhabit the world we study. But its value doesn’t derive from relevance.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I don’t see any way to “save” any body of knowledge by appealing to its relevance, because relevance is constantly shifting and usually (almost invariably, when the humanities are up for discussion) relative to exogenous concerns. Either you value knowledge and defend its preservation or you don’t.

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Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

People are so broken they are now outsourcing fun to AI.

Just saw someone say their AI runs their fantasy football team and I can’t stop laughing. Like, I’m sure everyone’s doing it or something but it’s very funny to me that pretending to be a team manager was so hard that you needed to pretend to pretend to be a team manager

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

since the CAQ mostly stole the PQ's clothes on that score to begin with it's more like going from New Coke to Coke Classic

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

the project of making QC as small a place as possible does not really depend on independence

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I doubt sovereignty will pass either way, for what that's worth. But the islamophobia will get cranked to 11 and you'd best not attend or work for an English university

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

the xenophobia is endemic. sure, here it's done this, and there it's done that, but it's everywhere and it only moves one way

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I still get people telling me I moved in the wrong direction. what they don't know is, there's no right direction

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"He has blamed immigrants for Quebec’s overflowing schools, increased crime and skyrocketing housing prices, while promising to slash immigration.... He has derided his critics from the leftist Quebec Solidaire party as “woke”, and has taken to repeating the talking points of hard-right columnists."

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Do we teach what we teach because it is preparation for some general 21st-century future? Or do we teach it because this is the knowledge that work in our various fields of study has yielded, which includes, but is not exhausted by, knowledge of the methods and sources and so on that will make more?

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I’m also hesitant to make “preparation for the 21st century” into a criterion of curricular critique, in part because proleptic appeals to future “relevance” are easily co-opted by instrumentalist agendas. For some, the only “preparation” humanities offer is skill in generating searches or prompts.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I don’t think teaching a canon is bad, and studying intellectual traditions as historical phenomena is important to understanding culture, past and present. What’s bad is teaching a specific canon as if it’s above history and somehow universal. The frame matters, as does what’s available beyond it.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

and I think it's really weird that anyone in journalism would think it does. but patently, many, many people in journalism do

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I also just don't think a grown man learning basic things like "immigrants aren't pet-eating criminals" far too late in life and also too late to be any use to the person he killed -- even setting aside that this man apparently spread those lies himself -- merits particular praise or coverage

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Sure. if he really feels guilt then he's feeling what any normal person in his place would feel. great! not a feature story without the (false) political metanarrative of "lifelong Democrat who voted for Trump out of frustration regrets being fooled" there's nothing here to turn Atlantic editors on

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Stephen Miller? The White House advisor best known for his support of academic Freedom?

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I don't know how you tell *that* as a sympathetic tale about Jack, but then neither does anyone who writes for the Atlantic.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

To the extent that there's a story to tell about Jack the trucker at all, it's that the while he might appear to have had no relationship to the man he killed by accident, Jack was in fact an active part of the movement that drove that man to his death

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 03/10/2026

Higher ed leaders are doing "decline of public trust" discourse in order to avoid talking about all the things they've done to undermine their institutions, including exploiting contingent faculty labor, attacking student protest, and underfunding the humanities

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

*5 seconds later* we regret to inform you milkshake truck was a Jan 6 supporter

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I saw this and it's stupid and ought to be embarrassing but it isn't close to the worst thing about this, imo

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

treating the whole of the world as backdrop to a two-degree shift along the moral arc of a single white American conscience remains undefeated as a unifying narrative

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

the politics you support are not a terrible thing that happened to you, sorry

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"He’d supported what Trump had said about deporting undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes, but none of what he was learning now sounded like that." sometimes following an immensely complex process to the letter gets you kidnapped. sometimes baby steps toward adulthood get you feature articles

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

it takes something special see a man hounded out of his future by politics you've helped legitimize step in front of a truck and then ask how the trucker feels

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

and while we're on the subject of legacy media and its suicide pact with the same old templates

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

A charlatan is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

in other news it's been two years since Elon opened the first pizza joint on Mars

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I don't want to say you have to be a fool to take Altman's pronouncements seriously but I don't know how else to get there

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

did the bot not explain that good cop/bad cop requires two cops

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

less than three weeks apart this is such a stupid pantomime

ChatGPT CEO Sam Altman gives chilling warning after fears grow over out-of-control AI
Andrew Griffin (The Independent)
Wednesday 16 September 2026

Accept ‘bad things’ in return for benefits of AI, says Sam Altman
Boss of OpenAI calls for a regulatory light touch because of the ‘good stuff’ the technology can deliver
Robert Booth (The Guardian)
Monday 5 October 2026

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