bearistotle Profile picture
actual bear pretending (poorly) to be a human professor @DukeGSF | w/ @jan_dutkiewicz FEED THE PEOPLE! coming soon from @BasicBooks | https://t.co/n88u53gMfS
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Apr 13, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
Ah, just yesterday this tragic murder was being used by police state enthusiasts as evidence that San Francisco needed to crack down on the homeless and drug users and maybe publicly hang more fetanyl dealers or something.

The suspect is a tech CEO. Pardon. The man owns a tech company called "Expand IT." I don't know that he is the CEO.
Jan 5, 2023 7 tweets 2 min read
In my dotage, the thing that earns an instant block, even if the person is otherwise calm, polite, and intelligent, is any remark linking a tweet to my classroom pedagogy. ("Is this how you treat students?!") So stupid and irritating. To the outer darkness with you! It should be obvious to anyone worth conversing with that I have different responsibilities and prerogatives in a classroom than I do with random strangers on the internet, and those differences are profound and cut to the heart of what makes a good and ethical professor.
Jan 4, 2023 6 tweets 3 min read
This article contains, if not a lie, at least a blatant and lazy distortion of my view. Chait writes, "[Rosenberg's] point is that [journalists] have no right to make inquiries into [GAC] at all." This is patently false. I make no such claim and he should retract it immediately. Furthermore, the article fabricates wholesale a "quotation" from me, asserting that I wrote critics should "shut up." I did no such thing and quotation is fabricated.
Jan 4, 2023 5 tweets 1 min read
Today's kettlebell workout is stacked presses and I haven't been this excited about something in a very long time. Might mess around and do a stacked getup just for the giggles
Jan 3, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
It seems unlikely to me that Democrats would simply leave the chamber to give McCarthy the gavel, but if they did it would be profound political malpractice and they should punish any member who does it as harshly as they can. There's a general optics question--this makes the GOP look inept and silly--but, more importantly, allowing McCarthy to walk away with the gavel without making additional rules concessions to his right makes it easier for him to govern and advance a coherent GOP agenda.
Dec 21, 2022 18 tweets 5 min read
This week on my substack, I replied to Jonathan Chait’s recent piece on gender affirming care (GAC). I concluded that his views of the issue are badly distorted by his attachment to a narrow vision of masculine development. Here’s a thread about my reply.
bearistotle.substack.com/p/jonathan-cha… In particular, my reply compared how he approaches risks (and debates about risks) when it comes to GAC with how he wrote about risk (and debates about risks) when the topic hit closer to home: his own prized high school activity, tackle football.
Dec 15, 2022 8 tweets 2 min read
Jonathan Chait does enthusiastically support giving youth with troubled gender identities access to programs that expose them to serious risk of irreversible bodily damage.

Here’s his defense of football for boys with “testosterone poisoning.”

nymag.com/intelligencer/… Weird how Chait’s attitude about risk differs so much when the risk confirms his attachment to masculinity. But “stop being such a pansy about concussions!” is quite a stance for someone to take who has such an abiding respect for people’s fears of bone density loss.
Dec 15, 2022 11 tweets 2 min read
For an illustration of how dead this place is now--either from people leaving or changes to the algorithm--this tweet has 29 retweets and a healthy 6% engagement rate. A year ago, it would already be at 20-30k impressions and growing. At the moment, it's at 4k and plateaued. I don't think it's a particularly good tweet--it's explicitly derivative of something I say frequently whenever I see this kind of bullshit--but 29 retweets used to be strong and 6% engagement semi-viral. Something is definitely different about how tweets circulate on here now.
Dec 14, 2022 33 tweets 6 min read
I am an obsessive player of the original Sid Meier's Civ 1 from youth.

Many years ago, with a surplus of nightly couch time, I embarked on an epic, multi-month PROJECT OF WILL to terraform an entire game map.

Here is my story. If you're not familiar, Civ 1 is turn-based role playing game that allows you to rule a "civilization," build its cities, lead its armies, and guide its research & economic output. You win by surviving 7000 years, conquering all other civs, or building a successful space colony.
Dec 14, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
Rightwing Moral Self-Infantalization Watch: Only the left has agency or responsibility. Conservatives can't help but succumb to their worst impulses. The left can never be careful enough because the right cannot help but be slaves to their own cruel passions.

Pathetic people. My position on, say, crime is that crushing poverty and dire need can sometimes drive people to bad behavior and that we should respond compassionately to individuals and systematically to social factors.

Andrew's point is conservatives are big babies with emotional problems.
Dec 13, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
Happy birthday to us, the coolest kids around. @lizault @sfcdaly Cake pose!
Nov 4, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
Musk framing this grievance as being about a threat to “free speech,” a grievance eager GOP partisans will use state power to address, is exactly why the work of moralizing “free speech absolutists” has been so poisonous for the actual material protection of free speech. When you believe that free speech is the product of high minded virtue rather than material security, you will gladly call on the state to punish wicked dissenters… in the name of free speech.
Nov 4, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
Friends, the “free market” of ideas, speech, and money is often, indeed, “extremely messed up.” Image fREeDoM, hoW DoEs iT wORk?
Nov 3, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
A measure of how cloistered and moralistic academics have become is that it is increasingly awkward for me to calmly announce my opinion at dinner parties that people who’ve seen the film Avatar don’t deserve human rights. Yes, it’s distressing to me too!
Apr 7, 2022 29 tweets 7 min read
I think it’s important for people to recognize that the “groomer” panic being instigated by the right is categorically different and more dangerous than what we have seen historically and has greater potential to lead to widespread political violence. My analysis follows. (1) The strategy use the language of child sexual abuse as a metaphor for disagreements about educational content. This muddles the water about what constitutes abuse by confusing speech acts directed at children, whether good or bad, with physical harm.
Jul 13, 2021 44 tweets 9 min read
Some deeper thoughts on my controversial take that "Trump is funny."

tldr: Just because you're not laughing, doesn't mean he's not telling jokes. Humor defines Trumpism, especially because the laughter is deadly. To begin, it was a glib tweet, intentionally so, and I understand why it made some folks mad. Predictably, people responded to the most superficial and facile interpretation of the tweet: Gabe laughs at Trump’s jokes. But do I?