Brian Spears

@briankspears.bsky.social

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Senior Poetry Editor at The Rumpus, author of A Witness in Exile (Louisiana Literature Press, 2011) and Another Poem to Love https://brian-spears.com I also crochet stuff.

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Much as I hope some NY Times editorial page people are having a really bad day today, I kind of doubt they are.

Ah the familiar feeling of switching over from wondering if my baseball team has a chance to compete to wondering if they’ll lose a hundred this season.

Forget the 10 Commandments. If you want to post a document that tells kids what this country is really all about, post the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.

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Anyhow the best time to address the shit was yesterday, the 2nd best time is today. Demand everyone asking for your vote to support packing the court, stop giving your resources to the police, demand public housing, healthcare, childcare, education, transit, food support and a right to privacy.

Every so often I wish I was one of those people who could just tune out politics until like 3 weeks before an election. That whole ignorance is bliss thing.

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because i’ve had a few people bring it up (no harm no foul!), clyburn’s actual quote is probably worth repeating in full rather than the truncated version that tells a different story

Jonathan Mitchell, white supremacist and one of the leading candidates to be Attorney General in a second Trump administration, is leading this. And that he filed the suit on the anniversary of Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is not a coincidence.

A lawsuit filed against Northwestern University opened a new front in the legal battle against affirmative action, alleging that its law school hires less-qualified people of color and women over White men for faculty positions in violation of federal anti-discrimination laws.

Lawsuit: Northwestern’s law school is biased against White men in hiringwapo.st The lawsuit, filed by a prominent attorney, alleges the university’s law school gives hiring preference to women and people of color.

The way I look at it is that Trump had huge advantages in 2016 & still had to draw an inside straight to win the Electoral College. He’s never come close to winning the popular vote. I don’t play cards much anymore, but I was always happy to be at the table with people who depended on luck to win.

I'm constantly marveling at Trump's luck as a politician. He only won in 2016 because he ran against one of the Democrats' weakest candidates. In 2024 he ends up running against someone even weaker.

I think I might call my Republican Congressman tomorrow and ask his office how he feels about SCOTUS’s decision to let the Biden crime family “just get away with it.”

I’ve been working on this off and on for a couple of weeks. I finished it today because I desperately needed to stay off my phone.

Conservative SCOTUS this term reminded everyone that it doesn’t matter how good your lawyers are or how strong your argument is when the judges hearing the case already know how it’ll end.

I have literally told students before class that I will be happy to talk to them in person and at length about their question once the semester is over and the teacher-relationship is ended.

have you talked with our educators? did you know they fear being baited into classroom discussions on race and gender by right-leaning students so they can be sued and fired for doing so? even tenured professors are losing the assurances & securities that having tenure was meant to provide.

But her emails

I promise I will give the Biden campaign some money if they promise never to have James Carville ask me again on their behalf.

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Last weekend to send us your full-length poetry manuscript to read! 📚📚📚 Submissions close tomorrow, 6/30, at midnight ET. riverriverbooks.org/editors/subm...

Submissionsriverriverbooks.org

If I just stood in the kitchen and ate the rest of this damn near perfect watermelon I cut up a couple of days ago, that wouldn’t be a bad way to spend the day.

I will not pretend to be a pundit today I will not pretend to be a pundit today I will not pretend to be a pundit today I will not pretend to be a pundit today I will not pretend to be a pundit today I will not pretend to be a pundit today I will not pretend to be a pundit today I will not

Pokemon Go and the Supreme Court are on the same page today I guess.

I keep thinking of things to post but it’s all gallows humor and this place doesn’t need any of my negative energy right now so I’ll see y’all back here later.

Sentences you probably never want to say: okay I see now why that sausage was on closeout.

A lot of terrible people die every day. They’re just usually not the terrible people I’m hoping for.

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Maybe I’ll try this out in my classrooms. Do I count as an official when I’m teaching?

SCOTUS says it's okay to bribe officials as long as you pay after you receive the thing you paid for

When the Oklahoma Supreme Court says this is going too far, you’ve really accomplished something. www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/...

Oklahoma court rejects proposed religious public charter schoolwww.washingtonpost.com The state Supreme Court said the first-of-its-kind school, approved last year by the charter school board, violated the state and U.S. constitutions.

The funny thing is that you don’t even have to get into the world of creative writing to see the difference. My tech comm students can see the difference in effectiveness between student-level and LLM-generated writing.

Was listening to a Sixty Minutes segment on AI. The host made it do a short story based on "for sale, baby shoes, never worn" and could not shut up about how good the result was even though it was pure soulless drivel. Think a big key to this racket persisting is not knowing what real writing is.

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So it’ll cost a lot of money and won’t be able to find a job in its field?

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Someone should whisper in MTG’s ear that any conservative SCOTUS justice who votes that Trump doesn’t have immunity should be impeached.

So it’ll cost a lot of money and won’t be able to find a job in its field?

No necesitas aprender español. Necesitas acariciarme, por favor.

Someone should whisper in MTG’s ear that any conservative SCOTUS justice who votes that Trump doesn’t have immunity should be impeached.