I think the best thing to do with this is to toss it with a vinaigrette and add some crumbled feta and a few croutons.

Pretty sure this is ai

Non-AI technogibberish is a lost art.

I think he’s trying to blame Trump on The Excesses of Wokeness(TM). A theme that certainly hasn’t been touched on in the pages of the Times for at least…oh, the last 14 hours or so.

It’s bad. Maybe he used AI - trying it out?

I walked away with two words: Obfuscated and Incoherently. They apply to the text reasonably well, so it is fitting that it contains them.

I think he's trying to say he's the smartest person in the room, but it's an unconvincing argument.

Good to see I am not the only one who has no clue what he is trying to say.

Just don't forget to capitalize the word English, Jamelle, or you'll break my heart.

It's a lot like the way that I write, but that's why I have an engineering degree.

Grok, write me like one of your French girls, but use a lot of words

We must fall back on the ol de rigueur' "topic sentence" which really needs to be somewhere in the (nonfiction) paragraph. When I was in college we would watch Eric Severeid's reports and try to find the topic sentence. Maybe the author is writing fiction.

After about your 8th legal memo to Partner or brief to the Court, you get this down: 4 maxims of coherent discourse 1.Quality: be truthful and have evidence of what you say 2.Quantity: be succinct and yet complete 3.Relevant: be relevant to the topic as presented 4.Manner: be clear and orderly

you should never say a nice word about ai on this platform because it is not a good use of your capital but as it happens claude is up to this one ai is amazing at sifting through trash

"Biden openly embraced identity politics focused on antiracism. This replaced the more unifying message of early Obama-era politics. Instead of bringing clarity, this approach created more confusion in our complex society.

Trump has exploited the failures of identity-focused politics. He has won over some disaffected Black and Latino voters while appealing to white Americans. Trump has flipped the script by portraying whites as victims and minorities as oppressors who receive unfair advantages."

it is of course being stated obliquely because if stated directly someone might disagree with it

I guess the tacit assumption of our politics replaced the unifying ethos of the early Obama years and became a very bad conventional wisdom that obfuscated more than it illuminated. What was that tacit assumption? "antiracism." I feel like we need an abstract noun or three more.

I re-read it a few times and then re-read what you said above. There a ton of words you can avoid avoid and you need to watch the bouncing ball. I agree with your reading. I think there is a question being begged up front, though.

Probably multiple questions driven to panhandling.

1. I don't understand antiracism so it must be inherently confusing. 2. Why do these kids today persist in believing identities affect how they're treated and want to do something about it, when they just need to believe we're all the same and other people will accept that? But that's just a guess.

I imagine the sheer cognitive effort of untangling Tommy Chit-Chat's prose might trigger a brain aneurysm; please be good to yourself. If you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything.

Allow me to translate: “Kids these days, amirite?”

This is actually something LLMs are (IMO) good at. I asked ChatGPT to dial down the pretentiousness by 50%:

Long as you're getting your hands dirty, how about asking LolNazi Grok to do that? It might be more dialed in on what's going on there.

Isn't it easier to just write the damned thing?

I’ll try! Biden failed to make Obama’s utopian campaign vision of an America that’s equal to all a reality in 4 years. Trump capitalized on this during his campaign, so he was elected by the people Trump is trying to disadvantage further to create a white Christian ethnostate.

i do not agree with this but i think it’s what he’s saying in what could definitely be done better in normal english

Genuinely think he gets told "professor, I have no idea what you're talking about" all the time and he just adds the "I was 4 in 2008" part in his head.

My daughter says it sounds like a wannabe philosopher used AI like the students in her class

“We went woke, so, sadly we must go broke”

I read one paragraph of that piece to my wife, the English major, and she was like, “Yeah, I have no idea what’s going on here. It’s just word salad.”

😆

I'll give it a shot. "Obama divided us into interest groups. Trump 2.0 capitalized on the people who preferred the vision of a unified United States, peeling off minority voters who preferred not to identify themselves as minority voters." That's the core idea buried in the tortured prose.

I wrote Obama, but I meant Biden.

i haven’t seen this much rhetoric obscuring the total lack of content since undergrad. wow.

Some awesome postmodern wordplay going on there.

I fed it into chatgpt and it exploded.

Just doing a less comprehensible Dennis Miller impersonation. Only thing missing is the "Now I don't want to get off on a rant here" opening.

My favorite t-shirt says “eschew obfuscation,” and that’s what this article forgot to do…

"my kingdom for a copy editor willing to use corporal punishment to rein me in"

That costs a LOT more than most authors can pay.

The DIY version is reading your work aloud to your cat.

The "read aloud" clue that people keep relying on is probably useless here. I give good odds this is how he talks extemporaneously, since this is how I talk, too. Especially since I don't struggle to understand his meaning at all. But I would never let my random ramble go into print unedited...

I agree it would be largely useless but I think if you read this to your cat you would get clawed because how dare you speak to them like this

It hovers between fascinating and horrifying. Seems like he's been radicalized and blames Obama, Biden, identity politics, wokeness, etc. for his descent into or rediscovery of his biases and blames his students for not going through the exact same experiences he did. #BadlyBroken

I think he's saying Trump got elected partly because racialized people got tired of having to help white people learn about and make efforts to ameliorate systemic racism. At least I hope so, because otherwise it's little more than an erudite fart.

I’d like some of whatever his editor was smoking though. Assuming there was an editor involved?

It's not trying to say anything. It's clearly the output of a generative transformer. Those use randomness as a seed. That leads to lots of adjectives and it resembles writing approaching a point. But GPTs don't understand anything, so they never have a point, they just look like they do.

I believe he's referring to an old, old wooden ship used during the Civil War era

Latinos like Trump even tho he's racist, so the usual Democrat wisdom of "minorities will automatically vote for us" doesn't hold anymore I think it's the gist of what he's saying

He's trying to do the whole, "Trump is an acceptable response to people correcting me but also I don't like him but he is onto something because one of my students identified as latina but I don't think she really was based on (long fart sound) and really what did we expect?"

It really reads like when you feed something thru a translator app over and over.

It's just color blind nonsense. A desire for things to be a certain way that they simply aren't and a refusal to ground what is likely a liberal worldview in history and socioeconomic reality. Basically, dems acknowledging that some groups have specific and unique concerns is the real racism.

Yeah that's the impression I got from the esoteric magic incantation that this writer seems to be channeling.

He probably got AI to do it for him?

I feel this constantly. I've retrained myself to recognize it as my writer brain warning me that the text is actually just disorganized drivel.

A sentence with a double appositive followed by a run on sentence fragment? Truly informative.

The politics around identity have divided our society. Biden tried to speak to the ideal of atoning for our racist past and moving to a more just future. Biden’s clumsy efforts only served to make the divisions more clear to many voters.

Trump spoke to these divisions. Angering White voters with immigration and framing diversity as discrimination. While rallying disaffected Black and Hispanic voters with the perceived failure of decades of policy.

Not exactly what I’d go with, getting each paragraph to fit in 300 characters is tricky. But it’s a little clearer at least. Can already see some more edits now that I posted it. OH WELL.

Yup. Had one of my 1L's turned in this gibberish, it would have earned a big red "X" across the whole damn thing with a "Start over, this time in English" comment up the margin.

I really don't think that understanding whatever's there is in anyone's best interests

That's me trying to write an essay...that's why I pursued a chemistry degree. Couldn't write to save my soul. Give me an equation or formula any time

Having flashbacks to tutorials where my essay partner was clearly up all night on double-strength Nescafé dosed with scotch.

But yeah, stylistically he’s trying to write around the edges of the thing, but there is no thing.

Of course there's a thing: the tacit assumption that calcified into a conventional wisdom. Plain as the nose on your face!

This is one of those rare instances when using AI is justified

Same.

“Both sides!,” duh

I just explained to my son that you gotta write like people talk.

"It's Biden's fault because 'Don't be racist' was too complicated for people and yet, paradoxically, too simple for our complex society."

Just write “Antiracist college students are the real racists” and have the sentence be a hyperlink to a Lee Fang tweet

So… are you free to comment on TCW because this is just a guest essay in the NYT? (Genuinely wondering what the parameters of the social media criticism restrictions at NYT are.)

I think he means ignore race? But rewriting history that early Obama years were a time of no racism? um no. While Obama strove to be a unifier & we had a brief moment of hope we didn’t have to be so aware of differences - THE RACISTS STILL CLAIMED HE WAS DIVISIVE. So we learned to face the rot.

“I am smart”

Someone was writing with a Thesaurus…

P1: I don't like anti-racism P2: what if we stopped with the anti-racism, because it works for Trump

At this juncture, let’s all say a quiet “thanks” to editors who fall on grenades like this every day.

I thought I was just tired. But no, those paragraphs make no sense.

Is he paid by the syllable?

That's okay. He doesn't know what he's trying to say. There's no fixing muddled thinking.

Trying to win a multisyllabic derby?

Sir, you are disrespecting SAT scores

“Biden lost because of identity politics, and Trump’s appeal to racism and bigotry was even more effective because of that.”

My best guess is that this guy is complaining that some kind of hope for a "colorblind" America that he thought the Obama years would help usher in has been usurped by identity politics, and that Trump used this to convince white voters that they were victims being exploited by minority groups

It seems to me like this dude seems to think that we were on track to solve racism forever after Obama got elected and is mad that it didn't turn out that way

That's one hell of an unappealing and unintelligible word salad.

Whatever the thing is where people use "utilize" where "use" would be better (which is almost always), that's like his entire writing style.

He thinks reaction to the identity politics he sees in his classroom is what brought Trump back to power. His mistake is thinking that his classroom has much to do with America In General. Again, I like the guy. But he holds the conceit that his lived experience is "representative" way too much.

It is a bit of a slog.

This is giving me a compulsion to attempt to diagram these sentences and see if I can glean…anything.

He doesn't either

He doesn’t know either. Half baked is generous

I’ve read and reread this carefully 6 times now, and I cannot, for the life of me, fathom what point or argument the author is trying to construct

I think he fancies himself the next George Will or William F. Buckley. Unlike those men, he can't write.

I can see why a piece that short takes 7 minutes to read lol

I'm trying to figure out how i would diagram these two sentences and I'm coming up short. "Run-on sentence" doesn't begin to describe them.

I *think* it says, “Wokeness is worse than ‘colorblindness’. Trump has used the wedge issue of DEI to reassert white supremacy while somehow also appealing to a cohort of POC.”

If you ask chat got to clarify this, it will break

Chatgpt geez