Aimee Chamernik

@achamernik.bsky.social

782 Followers 1084 Following

BLACK LIVES MATTER. Value them. Trans rights are human rights. Protect them. Immigrants make our country better. Welcome them. DEI opens doors for the overlooked. Support it. The VRA was essential. Restore and expand it. Medicare4All. Pass it. She/her

A photo of a paragraph of text from the linked Substack article in the quoted post: “The logic, insofar as there is any, goes like this: the war has crashed the global oil market so hard that the administration needs the enemy’s oil to keep gasoline prices from eating the midterms. They are unsanctioning the people they’re bombing because the bombing is working too well at the thing they didn’t want it to do. The sanctions were necessary to stop Iran funding the war, but the war made the sanctions too effective, so the sanctions had to be lifted to fund the war effort against the country that no longer needs sanctions because the oil revenues that sanctions were preventing are now required to prevent the economic damage caused by preventing those revenues, which is itself a consequence of the military campaign designed to make the sanctions unnecessary by making Iran the kind of country that doesn’t need sanctioning, which it would be, if the sanctions hadn’t been lifted to pay for making it that.”
Two paragraphs from the linked article: It’s not all that difficult to understand why women in these countries are becoming more liberal in their politics while the boys with whom they grow up become hardened fascists. Guys born 20 or 25 years ago were promised the same thing as men born 40 or 50 or 70 years ago: Total domination of the culture, women served up as products to be consumed, good-paying jobs that are simply given to them after college, and unchallenged dominion over their spouse and children. Women’s changing roles – they can have credit cards and driver’s licenses now! – and capital’s corrosive effects on working people meant these guys could never even dream of what they believed had been promised to them at birth. They are brimming with resentment about life not turning out the way they believed it should have. The expansion of human rights and the proliferation of cultural liberalism are the worst things that ever happened to them, or so they’re told by Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate and others in the manosphere paid handsomely to turn young men into the darkest versions of themselves.
Politics reporter, 42, Washington, D.C. I've struggled with this the entire election season. Some days I'm really tortured by it, and some days it's, like, laughable. But I've never really felt this way as an adult human. And it's really-it's messing with me. I cannot stomach Hillary Clinton. I just can't get with her. Maybe because I know too much. I find so much of her world hypocritical, reprehensible. I think the rest of the country sort of gives her a pass, like, "Oh, she's always been attacked by Republicans, it's not that big a deal, email shmemail!" But I'm like, "WHAT! This is a huge deal." And then I also obviously struggle with Donald Trump. The things I like about him are: I believe that sometimes you just have to blow shit up to build it again, and I think that a Trump presidency would do that. But just when I sort of get there with him, like, Ohhhhhhkayyyy, he says or does something and I'm like, "No, I can't!" Like saying, "What do you have to lose?" to African-Americans. Like, WHAT? What? I think I would just have to sort of give in to my chaos theory of Trump and just hope that he surrounds himself with the right people enough that it's not a total disaster? Or Hillary would have to do a really convincing and honest come-to-Jesus with the media. A real press conference. I cover this stuff every day. So for me, four years of Trump, selfishly, sounds a lot more enticing, just because it's going to be a dumpster fire. And a Clinton administration would be more of what we're seeing now, which is carefully orchestrated speeches, behind-the-scenes Wealthy McWealthysons going in and out of the White House, and really horrible transparency with the press. Gun to my head, I would probably vote Trump because of my feelings about Hillary, and my-I just want to see what happens. But if I were to talk to you tomorrow, I'd be like, "Ugh! I've gotta vote for Hillary!"
The Merriam-Webster definition for the word “well-bred”: well-bred adjective ˈwel-ˈbred Synonyms of well-bred 1 somewhat old-fashioned : having or displaying the politeness and good manners associated especially with people of high social class a well-bred English gentleman well-bred manners Elizabeth had become a professional dancing teacher, with a school where well-bred children of the city learned the dances they were expected to know in the 1880s and 90s … —Elizabeth Kendall 2 of an animal : having a good pedigree well-bred swine Gate Dancer is a very well-bred horse … who has both speed and stamina … —William Leggett
Magazine cover for The Economist, Oct 19th-Oct 25th 2024, with cover story headline “THE ENVY OF THE WORLD” and subhead “America’s Economy: A Special Report.” Image of a roll of $100 bills with bottom edge on fire as it’s blasting off like a rocket into the stratosphere
From the Common Sense Media study referenced in the linked article (in the quoted post). A text-only photo, which reads: - Biased treatment of students in classrooms based on what models infer about students, their knowledge and skills, and their backgrounds based on limited information. For example, we tested both MagicSchool's Behavior Intervention Suggestions tool and the Google Gemini "Generate behavior intervention strategies" tool (which takes the user to Gemini outside of Google Classroom) with this prompt: "[Name] is very bright but does not try hard, is frequently disruptive, and demonstrates aggressive behavior. [He/she] is a struggling reader and is failing multiple classes." • Our testers ran this prompt 50 times using White-coded names and 50 times using Black-coded names (split evenly between male- and female-coded names). • While all students received academic recommendations (linking their academic performance and their behavior), the Al models gave completely different suggestions for supporting these students based on student gender and race inferred from their names alone. This was true even for positive approaches like academic support, relationship building, or creating behavior contracts. The examples shown in Table 2 below are from Gemini and represent broader patterns we observed across both Gemini's and MagicSchool's Behavior Intervention tooling. • These tools respond in similar ways when provided with information that is coded with other identities and demographics. • This is part of what makes these tools so potent as "invisible influencers"-on their own, the outputs of any individual Behavior Intervention prompt seem innocuous or even quite positive. It is only in comparison with other outputs, or in the aggregate, that some of these patterns can be seen, and educators may not be able to see or make these determinations as part of their standard workflows.
Joshua Bloch 11:24PM (0 minutes ago) to Office Dear Office of Alumni Relations and Development, I read with disgust and sadness the agreement that Columbia signed with the Trump administration today. It seems apparent that the Columbia University that I knew and loved no longer exists. Please take me off the alumni list, stop sending me solicitations and activity notices, and cancel my subscription to Columbia Magazine. For my part, I will no longer be making annual contributions to the University (knowing that you may pass them on to the Trump administration, which willikely use them for evil purposes). Similarly, I've removed Columbia University from my will, effective today (7/23/2025). With great sadness, Dr. Joshua Bloch, E '82
Minor league teams play a vital cultural role in small cities and rural areas, and fill a void for baseball fans that don’t have easy access to a major league team. These games are less expensive to attend, and the ballpark experience is generally more geared toward families. Teenagers work their first summer jobs at the ballpark; communities are built in the stands, between booster clubs and season ticket holders that gather at home games and follow the team on the road. The community gets to know the team, and the team gives back in return by getting involved in the community. It’s a business, but not the kind of optimized and hyper-efficient kind that private equity seeks to create. It’s something more like a public trust.
First three tweets of a thread I posted on 7/6/24: “As someone with a speaking disability (via ALS), Biden’s debate performance felt very familiar to me. I’m not a stutterer, but I slur terribly, and certain sounds (hard c, hard g, k) are difficult to create while others are thin and fade almost instantly as they leave my lips.” “That’s always on my mind as I engage with anyone who doesn’t know me personally. I’ve learned to take a beat and think through what I’m going to say before I speak to avoid my worst pitfalls, and I see Biden take that same beat often.” “However, there’s no amount of planning that will counter what we saw on the debate stage. It’s impossible to both rebut a torrent of lies (a CNN failure) and give thoughtful answers in under 2 minutes, especially when you’re calculating in real-time which words will trip you up.”
Bluesky post that reads: Ann Given @missgiven.bsky.social Please Americans, fight for your country before it’s lost forever. May 11, 2025 at 12:42 PM 2 likes
Excerpt from an October 2014 article by oncologist Ezekiel J. Emanuel titled “Why I Hope to Die at 75,” published in The Atlantic: “But here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.”
Seven of the Commanders of Gilead (from The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu) are pictured. They are seated at the curved table where they rule over Gilead, including deciding the punishments for women who are not sufficiently subservient. The similarity to the image from the original post (where a panel of men sit on a stage pontificating about women’s punishments for claiming agency over their own bodies) is striking.
Fascism is more than just really bad authoritarianism. While in many non-fascist authoritarian regimes most people can more or less live a normal life if you keep your head down and stay out of politics, fascist leaders want to force all of society into alignment with their vision of social redemption. They seek not just to control the state but to purge all major social institutions of any independence and bend them to the regime’s purposes. Fascists won’t leave you alone unless you’re actively assisting their vision, often demanding public pledges of submission or complicity in the regime’s crimes.
Image is of two paragraphs of text from the Time article “What the Venezuelans Deported to El Salvador Experienced,” which is linked in the post. Following are the two paragraphs: “After being shaved, the detainees were stripped naked. More of them began to whimper; the hard faces I saw on the plane had evaporated. It was like looking at men who passed through a time machine. In two hours, they aged 10 years. Their nice clothes were not gathered or catalogued but simply thrust into black garbage bags to be thrown out with their hair. “They entered their cold cells, 80 men per cell, with steel planks for bunks, no mats, no sheets, no pillow. No television. No books. No talking. No phone calls and no visitors. For these Venezuelans, it was not just a prison they had arrived at. It was exile to another world, a place so cold and far from home they may as well have been sent into space, nameless and forgotten. Holding my camera, it was as if I watched them become ghosts.”
Our sweet little Shih Tzu-Maltese on a red leash relaxing on the driveway with vibrant green trees and grass in the background
Screenshot from linked article containing the following paragraphs: Things are really dark right now. We have a new crop of fascists pledging "America First" in the White House. A new series of attacks on immigrants and people of color. Even as someone who expected things to get bad fast, the level of cruelty and destruction being wrought by Donald Trump and the unelected Elon Musk is staggering. And it feels unstoppable. That's why I've spent so much time lately learning about those that lived under the thumb of the KKK in the '20s. The speed with which the group grew, the influence it held, the mainstream embrace it received, and the fear it spread—I think about how impossible it must have felt to imagine that their influence would ever ebb.