BahRamYou
1mo ago
I think most of the students are left-leaning even before they enter the university, they just don't express it so strongly. But yes, some indoctrination is clearly taking place. But it's more from student clubs and off-campus organizations than from the classes. Also probably pressure from dudes trying to impress women to get laid, and women are usually more left-leaning than men.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
In many cases, students’ politics are no more attributable to indoctrination by professors than are their green hair and pierced septums.
This is such a funny sentence. It feels like it belongs in the 1960s, when I can imagine a stuffy old-fashioned college professor being shocked by dyed hair and piercings.
Nowdays... well, first it's not very shocking. Second, the students who have that kind of fashion are almost all liberal, sharing the same politics as the faculty. Many of the faculty probably had those fashions when they were younger (or still have them). And the school's admissions policies actively select for those kinds of kids via their vague "personality" rating, which rewards people for personal demonstration of radical leftist politics. Which is to say, it rewards them for having the right fashion, and for a college, that means counterculture punk shit.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Cool, thanks. That's the first time I've ever heard of the European Broadcasting Union.
Seems like the US is also a member!
BahRamYou
1mo ago
What's the reasoning behind this? Did they just decide that it's good business to keep expanding the contest year after year? Is it eventually going to turn into a worldwide contest?
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Do you get an even bigger discount if you hold them in your arms using no bags at all? I'm guessing not, but I feel like you should since that's even more environmentally friendly than the reusable bags.
I feel like the "type of person who is happy to use a reusable bag and make small talk with the cashier" and "type of person who rules-lawyers these policies to save a few cents" are just fundamentally different types of people who will never understand each other.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
That would actually be cool if they really did it. Imagine if a city 400 years ago had set up a project like this and they were still going at it, generation after generation. The Notre Dame cathedral took almost 200 years to finish, but this would put even that to shame.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
I think this is the inevitable result of making college the default path, where most people feel that they need a college degree for the job market even if they have no interest in being there. And the colleges are happy to serve as a diploma mill.
A long time ago I worked as a math tutor for my college, working with freshman who were struggling wtih basic math. And it was pretty clear that most of them had no interest in learning math, they just wanted me to do their homework for them so they could pass the class. I tried to teach them if I could but... it's a lot easier to just do the homework yourself than to teach someone else. So I was basically serving as a "living LLM" in that case.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
Why is that for people like you and @Rov_Scam, every single war is WW2? There isn't a single other war in history that we could take lessons from?
I would argue that WW2 was actually highly unusual. Very few wars have a fully militarized society bent on large-scale invasion and genocide. A more normal outcome is to fight for a short while, then give up a small slice of land while glaring at each other until their desendants forget about it after a few hundred years.
I'd argue that the better analogy here is the breakup of the Soviet Union. Russia had been fighting the cold for for decades, mostly "just" through mass conscription and spending, but occasionally going hot also. At the start it was sort of even, but by the end they were obviously, massively outmatched by NATO. Meanwhile their economy was in freefall. Gorbachev saw the writing on the wall and thankfully ended it, mostly peacefully. But hardliners like Putin and wanted to keep fighting forever to hold onto every last scrap of territory no matter the cost. So ironically you're thinking more like Putin.
There's also the small problem that if Ukraine somehow did win this and took back the Donbass and Crimea... those areas are mostly filled with ethnic Russians who only speak Russian and are more loyal to Russia. So Ukraine would likely have to do some ethnic cleansing to actually take control of those regions.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
I feel like buying it for your 4 young kids is a bit different from buying it for yourself as a 40-yr-old though...
BahRamYou
2mo ago
Seems like a recipe to massively increasing the deficit even further. Everyone loves spending, nobody likes taxes. That's the one thing both parties agree on.
At this point I just feel horrified for the Ukrainians. They're stuck in a war they can't win, led by a "president" with no elections, and a universal draft that just keeps getting lower and lower in age. Their men are not allowed to leave the country since they're all property of the state. People talk about how this war is a pyrric victory for Russia, but I think the early success was also a pyrric victory for Ukraine, since it tricked them into thinking that if they just stay committed enough they'd be able to win. Now Zelensky and the generals feel like they can't possibly give up any land for peace, so they'll fight to the bitter end.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
How do people track all this stuff? Are there anonymous polls of cardinals? I thought it was supposed to be secret
BahRamYou
2mo ago
I think on redit and similar sites, people look to ttans as a gender and political identity. On 4chan, people are just into it as a weird sex fetish. And 4channers are very tolerant of weird sex fetishes. (Arguably too tolerant)
BahRamYou
2mo ago
I want to chime in and say that, while you're not wrong for some people, that's not always the problem. For me in my 20s, living in a midsize American city, I felt plenty safe riding public transit. The real problem was it was just so damn inconvenient. Riding a bike was faster, especially if i needed a transfer. And of course it totally shut down at night.
But i do appreciate how bad the safety is in some places.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
If anything, its better! I've never heard Walz be this willing to tell it straight.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
It seems like a lot of your criticism is just that it has a lot of old people? Which, yeah, not nearly as many young people as it once did. In part because the birth rate dropped, but also in part because they just live a long time. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
SEA and Africa is where the "youth" energy is at these days. Especially Africa... I've never been there though.
Does the parents/self-esteem thing work for women too? I feel like it works for men, since men are so heirarchical and fighting for dominance. But I feel like women are more accepting that their daughter/mother is of different status. I dunno, that's my lazy pop psychology.
RE: Japan- most of the things you criticize are things I like about it! I feel like most of the rest of the world is accelerating into the same generic slop: apps for everything, no unique culture, bad english, generic "world" food, etc. Japan is a country that figured out a great way to live in the 80s/90s and just kinda stuck with it. It's like the shire at the end of Lord of the Rings reacted to Saruman and just said "Nope! We don't care about your high-tech economy, we'll just stick with our happy traditional life, thanks."
Also, for what its worth, I found them extremely stylish in fashion/food/music many other ways. I sometimes feel embarassed of how poorly dressed my fellow white people are in Tokyo.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
Yeah, I'd agree with all of this. In general the larger boards are faster and more meme-ey, while the smaller boards are slower and more thoughtful. Don't expect long essays, but you can still get some thoughtful responses. Find a subject you like, find a thread you like (popular subjects have a regular thread that gets re-created over and over, with the same people and culture). Find one person you like and just talk to them. It's like a big, crazy party where everyone is talking at once, but that doesn't mean all the people there are the same.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
4chan is back up! I'm so happy!
I... feel like that says something bad about me, that 4chan is basically the only place left on the internet where I feel at home. (this place is also good, but I do feel a bit out of place here). So many places these days are either enforced, toxic positivity (reddit) or worshipping a single influencer (most other social media). 4chan lets me speak my mind, and I feel like the people there actually get me. I'm a depressed, aging, alcoholic weeb so 4chan is very much "my people." But I can't help but feel like the people there are, weirdly, smarter than a lot of internet sites these days.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
so I see that the liberals got the most seats, but not enough to make a majority, with conservatives in a close second. Does that mean they automatically win? Or do they both have to negotiate with the BQ and NDP to see which party actually forms the government?
BahRamYou
2mo ago
It's probably because I've had my brain rotted by the internet and videogames, but I prefer writing that it's simple and clear. Straight to the point, with minimal fluff. I know that there's a place for the more flowery, poetic writing but I just can't enjoy it anymore, and I find it gets in the way of communicating complex ideas.
I do appreciate advanced vocabulary though. Like the standard writing advice is to not use adverbs, just find a better verb/noun instead. "don't say she was very sad, say she was morose." That sort of thing. Not only does it sound better, it also helps clarify just exactly what's going on.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
Many of the Epstein victims admit they did it voluntarily for money, but you can't say that because it gets in the way of the narrative of helpless proles victimized by evil sex-trafficking finance guys.*
Por que no los dos? It's true that most of the victims were offered money to step on a plane, not forcibly kidnapped. But they were also psychologically manipulated and placed in a strange circumstance way outside anything the expected or had ever experienced. Being teenagers, maybe they thought they could handle it but then the reality was very different than they expected.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
I don't look at it in terms of certainties, but in probabilities. It's not like a videogame where war is automatically declared when you declare on an ally- it's always subject to the whims of politicians and public sentiment.
So yes, this time, NATO countries chose to stay out of it, although they did provide massive amounts of material aid. I note the steady escalation as we went from financial and medical aid, to obsolete weapons, to eventually sending top-shelf military equipment. There's also been a divide in our politics, with Trump and the republicans being much more isolationist, while the Democrats want to get more involved. I could see a future where there's a cease-fire for a bit, a Democrat in the veign of LBJ gets elected, and the Republics flagrantly violate the cease-fire in a way that really pisses off the American public, like the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Or it could go the other way. I have no idea! I don't think Putin does either. Just saying that he'd be a fool to completely ignore the US and assume he has carte-blanche to conquer all of non-affiliated Europe just because Biden and Trump chose not to get involved in this specific instance.
Of course, what I would really like to see is a massive build up of our munititions stockpiles, so that even if we don't get directly involved, we could just send enough shells and missiles to stop the invasion. it's embarrassing how badly we're getting outgunned by 50-year-old Soviet tech.
i love that book
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