Slop
Have you noticed that everyone seems to be talking about slop these days? There are fashions in words, and this one has become very fashionable indeed.
My impression is that it started with descriptions of many of the products of AI. Now that I look it up, I see that is true but that it began in 2025:
Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen slop as the 2025 Word of the Year. We define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” All that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters: the English language came through again.
The flood of slop in 2025 included absurd videos, off-kilter advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks pretty real, junky AI-written books, “workslop” reports that waste coworkers’ time… and lots of talking cats. People found it annoying, and people ate it up.
“AI Slop is Everywhere,” warned The Wall Street Journal, while admitting to enjoying some of those cats. “AI Slop Has Turned Social Media Into an Antisocial Wasteland,” reported CNET.
It’s a pretty apt word for that sort of thing. But the use of the term has spread so much that the expression itself threatens to become … slop. It’s used for poor arguments, for obfuscating BS, for bad research, for Arday’s doctoral thesis, for anything and everything in the communication field that a person doesn’t like.
News roundup
(1) The former chief financial head of the SPLC has been arrested as part of the fraud case against the organization. I doubt this will ultimately go anywhere, but you never know.
(2) No third term for Trump, says Trump. But of course it never was a possibility; just something Trump teased about and the left amplified to rile and scare people who hate Trump. Here’s what he said:
“I’d love to run, but the law is very strong,” he told reporters on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews after disembarking from Air Force One.
The president added that he is asked this question “by everyone,” pointing to the crowd at the Patriot Games event in Ohio he had just returned from.
“Even tonight, they’re screaming at the event, ‘2028!’ No, everybody wants me to do it, but the law is very strong,” he continued.
Trump is eighty years old. He’s remarkably vibrant for his age, but I can see he’s more tired than he used to be.
(3) The South Carolina Republican Senate primary will go to a runoff:
[Darlene] Graham finished with the largest share of the vote, at 32.7%. Still, having received endorsements from President Donald Trump, Gov. Henry McMaster, and Sen. Tim Scott, she had been expected to come considerably closer to the 50% threshold needed to avoid a runoff. Appointed to her seat following the sudden death of her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham, she also has the advantage of incumbency.
Norman, who is currently serving his fifth term in the U.S. House, received 24.7% of the vote. He is a strong conservative with a proven record.
I’m in favor of runoffs in races with more than two candidates in which no one gets 50% of the vote.
(4) You’ve probably read all the fuss about Trump’s plane and the evasion of a possible Iranian plot to kill him. Here’s more on what actually happened.
(5) Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt will be leaving her position at the end of August. She was excellent. But with two very young children, she feels she needs to go; she will continue as an advisor. Often when people leave for family reasons it’s suspect, but in this case it’s completely understandable.
(6) Scott Johnson of Powerline reports on the results of the Minnesota primary. It’s interesting, but the bottom line is that he claims (and I agree) that it’s highly highly unlikely that any of the GOP candidates he covers in the post will win in Minnesota in the general.
Hong’s loss is Crowley’s gain
The polling indicated Hong’s win was a foregone conclusion, and it would be by double digits. Large double digits.
And yet she lost – by a small margin, but a loss. The Democrat establishment breathes a sigh of relief, and the GOP is unhappy because she was considered easy to beat.
Her voters may be angry enough to stay home in November. Then again, they may rouse themselves to vote for Crowley in order to avoid the big bad GOP.
This may be a good time to note that Hong was one of the worst candidates I’ve ever seen, and I’m not just talking about her DSA idiocy or her Thanksgiving angst or her saying she is “white adjacent” because she has a half-white son. Those things are terrible, and there were plenty more where those came from. But what I’m referring to is her extreme vocal fry, like gravelly chalk on a blackboard, and her complete lack of dynamism.
There’s a pattern emerging between this contest and the one in Michigan that was won by El-Sayed. Although in the case of Wisconsin the DSA candidate narrowly lost and in Michigan the DSA-adjacent 🙂 candidate narrowly won, in both races the polls were terrible predictors and in both the DSA- candidates were considered way way ahead. Were the polls just bad, or was there fraud in Wisconsin (and I suppose there could have been both)? After all, in these races the DSA people were running against the Democrat establishment that controls the vote-counting, not with it.
Take a look at the Wisconsin polls for the race. Even as recently as 8/7, Hong was extremely far ahead. What happened? You can see the basis for fraud allegations in this article; judge for yourself.
What I think is that most of the electorate wasn’t familiar with how awful Hong was until shortly before the primary vote, and when they learned of her previous statements and her extremist views they changed their minds. I don’t think fraud was necessary, although it’s certainly strongly possible. One of the reasons I tend to think the result wasn’t fraudulent is that I followed the vote-reporting very closely, checking last night every twenty minutes or so starting about an hour after the polls had closed, and Crowley was ahead all the way. At all points his lead more or less resembled his ultimate victory margin, although it waxed and waned somewhat. He took a small lead early and he kept it for the duration. I saw no evidence of vote-dumping there.
What’s most upsetting is that Hong almost won, and in a purple state like Wisconsin. Very sobering. However, we’ve become used to the extremism of the Democrat base this voting cycle.
Open thread 8/12/2026
I was fortunate enough to see the original on Broadway as a young child, and I still remember it:
It’s not about Arday. It’s about the rot in colleges that’s been going on for a long long time.
I don’t know how far the rot extends to other countries, but it’s certainly pervasive in the US and Britain. I suspect it’s even worse at elite institutions than at institutions that once were thought of as being of lesser quality.
The scandal of the Arday story isn’t really about Arday, it’s more about his fawning enablers. But even that isn’t broad enough, because it’s about an entire system that let this happen. For it’s not just a story about plagiarism getting past a committee. Nor is it just a DEI story about race and neurodiversity, although it’s about that as well. It’s not even just about a fabulist whose lies were so obvious no one should have believed them. Primarily it’s a story about universities that have utterly lost their way. The reason I say that is that the people who have actually read Arday’s academic work or listened to speeches he’s given have concluded that the content itself is garbage – and that includes both the plagiarized parts and the parts he seems to have composed. Unintelligible, ungrammatical, meaningless sloganeering.
Arday should not have been hired as a professor anywhere, much less at Cambridge. And yet he was not only hired, but praised to the skies in an almost ecstatic frenzy.
Everyone involved with this needs to go, and universities need to rethink their entire curriculum in race studies and gender studies and in particular the education departments. It’s of absolutely zero surprise that the Arday affair involved the education department of Cambridge. Education departments have always had less rigorous scholarship than most other departments, but in recent years they have become deeply political and deeply woke.
Will this happen? To put it bluntly: no.
[NOTE: These trends were already starting in the 1960s. I’ve written many times about Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind as well as the 1969 Cornell uprising. Here are some previous posts and an article on the subjects: this list as well as this post and this account by Thomas Sowell.]
AOC giggles her way to an excuse
Even a writer at CNN is not impressed:
“I have a local city councilman that has this saying: ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’” the New York congresswoman said on ABC’s “This Week,” before laughing.
Ocasio-Cortez, who once supported defunding the police, went on to suggest Covid had expanded the range of acceptable political discourse. But she said that it’s “not rhetoric that we would use today.”
This might be a politically deft explanation for Ocasio-Cortez and her ilk. But it’s a bad one for the body politic. It continues a troubling trend of major politicians asking Americans not to take the things they say — or more specifically, that they once said — at face value.
The article goes on to describe other politicians laughing it off as a weird or crazy time. Well, it was indeed that, but they said what they said and are responsible. And it’s only gotten weirder and crazier.
More on those years, from Wisconsin’s gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong:
“I had some hot takes, some bad takes on Twitter, but when you’re a business owner running a restaurant during Covid, trying to pay bills as a student, you’re putting feelings out there into the world,”?Hong told Politico. “But I’ve evolved, I’ve learned.”
Yes, she’s learned to dissemble in order to fool voters. She wasn’t trying to appeal to voters back then.
But I’ll leave it to Ami Kozak to give you an idea of what AOC would be saying if she were to be honest. I love this guy:
Miscarriages, Fauci, and the COVID shot
I think Fauci was a plague on this country. He made things up regarding masks and distances, he promoted shutdowns that harmed people, and he was a self-aggrandizing narcissist.
And yet I will be defending him at least somewhat on the current topic, that of miscarriages and the COVID shot. The story:
Dr. Anthony Fauci privately raised concerns that the COVID-19 vaccine could “theoretically” be linked to miscarriages in expectant mothers, despite having publicly insisted there were “no red flags” for pregnant women.
“I asked around a bit more and another issue came up that you need to be aware of,” wrote Fauci in a Jan. 25, 2021, text exchange with then-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.
“Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester,” added the then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director.
So, there was a theoretical risk, but no data. Recall that there was the same or worse theoretical risk from getting COVID itself.
More:
Days later, on Feb. 3, Fauci said during a question-and-answer livestream with the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that the FDA “found thus far, and we have to be careful, but thus far no red flags about that, about pregnant women.”
So, what’s a “red flag”? Is it a theoretical risk, or does there need to be actual data saying there’s a higher-than-normal risk after the shot? And to what should the risk be compared – healthy women or women who contract COVID itself? The shot doesn’t prevent COVID, but it did initially ameliorate the most severe symptoms of early strains, and early 2021 involved relatively early strains.
In the end, what we’re really debating here is how to inform the public of a theoretical risk without doing more harm than good. What if Fauci had said this to the public: “We have no data on the shot in pregnant woman, but there’s a theoretical risk that a second dose might precipitate a higher-than-normal number of miscarriages. However, so can getting COVID. So you need to make your decision based on that information or lack thereof”?
That would have been truthful. But since there was no evidence at all one way or another about the shot and miscarriages, would it have been best to say that? Or would it have discouraged pregnant women from getting a shot that, on the whole, might have done more good than harm for them at the time? I don’t have an answer, although I think the truth should have been told anyway.
And in no way do I think the shots should have been mandatory.
As for the actual evidence that later emerged on the topic of the COVID shot and miscarriages, there is no evidence that it increases the rates of miscarriage. Now, if you have come to distrust all science reports on this topic – and I could understand why you might have concluded that – you’ll just shrug that off and believe whatever you want. But that’s not science; that’s belief in anecdotal evidence on the order of “my friend got a COVID shot and a week later she had a miscarriage, therefore the shot caused the miscarriage.” That proves nothing, because miscarriage rates are very high and have been high even without COVID or the shot.
I was open to the idea that COVID shots might exacerbate miscarriages, and I looked and looked for evidence of that, but the overwhelming result of research is that the shots do not raise the miscarriage rates (see this for example, but there are plenty more studies of that type). The evidence on COVID itself is the following:
Pregnant women were initially excluded from the initial COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials, as they are from most trials. However, experts have recommended the vaccines for pregnant women since they were first released to the public because of the disproportionate risks this group faces compared to the general population. Pregnant women are at higher risk to experience severe illness from SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to nonpregnant women, and are at greater risk of needing to be hospitalized, admitted to the intensive care unit, and intubated. COVID-19 is also associated with pregnancy complications such as preterm birth or stillbirth.
Health authorities are supposed to give recommendations that balance the risks. Is full disclosure necessary? I’m in favor of it, but I realize that sometimes the risk/benefit ratio is difficult to process and understand. In the case of COVID, many lies were told and many errors made, increasing the suffering of many people and hurting society as a whole in a myriad of ways. But the miscarriage message turns out to have not been harmful, and compared to all the rest it’s very very minor.
[NOTE: If you’re interested, here’s an article on miscarriage rates in general, which occur in approximately 30% of pregnancies. The rates have been rising year after year at a rate of about 1% per year, but that trend started before COVID or COVID shots.]
Open thread 8/11/2026
Confessions of a former DSA organizer
If you watch only one video on the DSA, I strongly suggest this one. It’s an interview with a former member from back when the organization was advocating more of a European-style welfare state. He watched it morph almost overnight into the extreme left-wing group it is now, and dates the change to around 2014-2015. He is very angry, and has dedicated himself to fighting DSA, even to the point of supporting its opponents on the right such as Michigan’s Mike Rogers.
It’s definitely worth a listen, IMHO:
Trump seems to have decided to take the economic pressure route on Iran for now
At least, that’s what he’s saying at the moment:
“We are low-keying it,” Trump said during a brief phone call.
“We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.”
He stressed that Iran “is in very bad shape” economically and has no money to pay its troops. The U.S. naval blockade has exacerbated the Iranian regime’s economic crisis, Trump said.
At the same time, Trump said that with oil down to slightly over $75 a barrel, U.S. consumers are feeling less pain from the war.
“It will work out. It always works out. It’s like a chess game,” Trump said of the back-and-forth with Iran.
I had long thought that it was the Iranians (Persians) who invented chess, but that’s not exactly true:
The history of chess can be traced back nearly 1,500 years to its earliest known predecessor, called chaturanga, in India; its prehistory is the subject of speculation. From India it spread to Persia, where it was modified in terms of shapes and rules and developed into shatranj. Following the Arab invasion and conquest of Persia, chess was taken up by the Muslim world and subsequently spread to Europe via Spain (Al Andalus) and Italy (Emirate of Sicily). The game evolved roughly into its current form by about 1500 CE.
How is Iran actually doing economically and politically?
U.S. officials also say there are growing disagreements inside the Iranian regime. One camp, led by President Masoud Pezeshkian, is extremely worried about an economic collapse and believes Iran needs to reach a deal with the U.S. Another led by the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Ahmad Vahidi, rejects any concessions.
“Good cop, bad cop”? I very much doubt that either is actually a good cop.
I don’t especially trust any predictions on Iran, so I’ll skip them.
There’s also this:
After months of conflict, Iranian officials decided the United States should compensate them for damages tied to the war. …
[Trump replied]:
“It is an interesting idea because now I am likewise demanding compensation from Iran, for all of the people that they have killed and gravely wounded with their roadside bombs and many conflicts,” Trump countered.
He went on to mention the USS Cole bombing from nearly 26 years ago and suggested compensation to America should include consideration of “thousands of others killed in combat.”
“Additionally, compensation should be paid to the families of the hundreds of thousands of innocent protestors that Iran has killed over the last 50 years, not to mention the 52,000 that have been killed in the last five months,” he added.
Trump said he has instructed his representatives to include the compensation demand into “any, and all, future negotiations.”
I don’t think negotiations have much of a future. But then, I never did think so.
Roundup
(1) From what I can tell, the Irish civil war threat over “migrants” from an entity called the “New IRA” comes from a single source. I’m not convinced it has much if any meaning:
The New IRA is planning a violent campaign aimed at driving migrants out of Ireland, intelligence officials have warned.
Security bosses fear the republican group, which succeeded the Real IRA, has been exploiting “tensions” on both sides of the Irish border. …
A video appeared last week on social media in which an unidentified man issued threats against migrants on behalf of the IRA.
“They will take control, and they will give an ultimatum, not to politicians but to the illegal migrants who are in the country,” he says.
The man claimed the British Army had “respected” the IRA during the Troubles for their effectiveness and “professionalism”.
(2) Netanyahu says no to the 15-point Gaza plan:
“I want to clarify this: Israel rejects the 15-point document. I have heard people saying, ‘You didn’t say that.’ So here I am saying it again,” he told a Cabinet meeting, referring to the peace plan set out by Trump last year. “The IDF will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is disarmed,” he added. …
The peace plan called for a phased withdrawal of Israel’s troops from Gaza alongside the disarmament of Hamas, but Netanyahu said Israeli forces are not going anywhere until Hamas completely disarms first.
“When I say Hamas must be disarmed, I mean heavy weapons, lighter weapons, all weapons. We are talking about genuine disarmament, not a fictitious one,” Netanyahu said Sunday.
Hamas had last month said that it would disarm, but only after Israel withdraws completely and stops all hostilities.
It sounds as though Gaza had rejected it first. And of course Israel wasn’t going to withdraw before any disarmament: been there; done that, and 10/7 was the result. Israel may have been asleep at the wheel that day, but Netanyahu is not planning a repeat, if he can help it.
(3) The WNBA is a travesty. The racial tensions are vast:
Black WNBA player clotheslines Sophie Cunningham on a lay up attempt. Gets ejected. Tweets “White privilege” from locker room to argue she was ejected because of racism. Identity politics destroys everything, even sports. pic.twitter.com/mr3Zelj2cv
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) August 8, 2026
But that’s not the only problem. Another one is that they’re trying to figure out what the “W” in WNBA stands for, now that a few men have figured out they can declare themselves women, do nothing to change anything about themselves other than that, and qualify to play in the league. It’s a clever way to point out the insanity of the point we’ve reached on trans sports issues:
Former NBA player Royce White plans to declare for the 2027 WNBA Draft — the second former pro to test the league’s policy on trans athletes.
White, 35, a Republican candidate for US Senate who only played three games in his short NBA career, made the announcement on Friday on the heels of former first round draft pick and Knicks center Enes Kanter Freedom’s declaration earlier in the day.
“I’m transgender. I’m a woman… I identify as sometimes identifying as a woman for purposes of… professional basketball,” White told Fox News.
Oopsies, says the WNBA. Time to define “woman”? More:
White said the move challenges the league to define parameters clearly and indicated he would pursue the declaration regardless, stating he does not want to be discriminated against.
“I think the WNBA could come out and make a definitive statement about guys with a pair of balls playing in the Women’s Association,” White told Fox. …
The Women’s National Basketball Players Association issued a statement on Friday addressing the broader debate:
“We embrace justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. Those are the values that unite this Union and allow it to protect women’s sports while creating transformational change. Hate, abuse, and demonization of any person or group of people, including transgender people, only fuel fear, division, and harm. We will continue to have hard conversations. But we will not be used as political pawns.”
You’ve already inserted yourself into politics and chosen sides.
(4) More brilliance from DSA:
Oh my God.
Watch this interview with Dr. Frances Gill of the Democratic Socialists of America's national political committee.
I'm sorry.
But putting these people in charge of the Democratic Party will usher in a century of fascist rule. pic.twitter.com/yGyip30UHP
— Joshua Reed Eakle ? (@JoshEakle) August 10, 2026
Here’s more about the exchange. Also, more on Dr. Gill, who is “a resident physician in psychiatry at Los Angeles General Medical Center.” Wow, just wow:
According to watchdog reports from Canary Mission, Gill has been active with the DSA since at least 2019, boasting on social media back in June 2020 that her medical school class group chat was “blowing up with people talking about why they support defunding the police!” Today, she is licensed to practice psychiatry and neurology in California while sitting on the DSA’s 2025–2027 National Political Committee.
Idiocracy is here.
(5) On the much brighter side – remember that 16-year old lifeguard whose successful rescue of a 10-year-old boy was caught on video that went viral? Here’s a fascinating breakdown of what the lifeguard was doing during the rescue: