ChickenOverlord
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User ID: 218
ChickenOverlord
23d ago
is not incompatible with having empathy for her and awareness of the life history that likely brought her to the set of beliefs you find odious.
Sorry, my lack of free will prevents me from choosing to feel empathy
ChickenOverlord
3mo ago
My mom was a special education teacher for many years, most of that time was with the moderate to severe kids. I worked as an aide in her class on several different occasions. The reality is that many mildly mentally disabled kids can be taught enough to be able to be mostly functional adults (though they'll likely need help on a somewhat regular basis) while the moderate to severe ones never will, and will require constant care and supervision for the rest of their lives.
Schooling does little to nothing for these kids, but the problem is that school's real purpose is to be a state subsidized daycare to enable women to leave the home and work. Even though I vehemently disagree with school being used this way, that's the reality. Without these programs these parents will have to (gasp!) take care of their kids instead of working two jobs!
ChickenOverlord
1mo ago
Still, as Jesus said, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."
That's Spock. And Star Trek 3 and 4 completely (and explicitly) undermine that idea
ChickenOverlord
29d ago
Even Ross just got social engineered.
Nah, Ross was straight up retarded and ordered fake ids from Canada to his actual home address
ChickenOverlord
1mo ago
Anti-car people made it up even though there was already a word for it (arterial road or arterial highway).
ChickenOverlord
1mo ago
ditch all course-work based grading in favor of oral examinations and comprehensive graduation exams
Copying this from a post I made a few weeks ago: I had a college history class (ancient near eastern history from the earliest written history up to about the time of Alexander the Great) where all our exams were essays that had to be written in the school's testing center within a time limit. Sucked majorly but I learned more in that class than any other. For the essay we were given a prompt as well as a list of historical ideas, people, events, etc. that we had to tie into our essay in an intelligible way (or rather we had to tie a significant amount of them, something like 80%, into our essay).
This was the most I learned in any college course ever. If all my classes had been like this college would have been a lot fewer video games and a lot more studying (or I would have have flunked out) but college would be much closer to its intended purpose of teaching people. Instead of the 4 year state and parent subsidized booze drug and sex fest it currently is.
ChickenOverlord
3mo ago
In 1994, Ukraine, Russia, the UK and the US signed the Budapest Memorandum.
Important note that almost everyone who brings up the Budapest Memorandum always seems to forget (or even intentionally omit): it was never ratified by the US Senate. In the US, the constitution requires all treaties to be ratified by the senate. Without being ratified, any treaties are not legally binding and aren't good for much more than toilet paper.
This phenomenon also seems to happen in literally any discussion about the Paris Climate Accords.
ChickenOverlord
28d ago
Heck if anything I've always considered Freddy Got Fingered to be a Gen X comedy. The movie came out in 2001 when the oldest millennials would have only been 20 and Tom Green himself is Gen X.
ChickenOverlord
11d ago
That's the one
ChickenOverlord
3mo ago
a side effect of this taken across a whole society is an extraordinarily vulgar* culture that produces little thought, little art, and can't handle critical perspectives
How do you square this with the phenomenon of "this artist expressed rightwing opinions, we have to disavow anything he ever made"?
ChickenOverlord
3mo ago
I haven't read the book (though you've piqued my interest) but I have this to add: in my time as a missionary in the Czech Republic (one of the most atheistic countries on earth) I'd estimate that a majority of the atheists I met there still believed in all sorts of new age mysticism and general woo.
ChickenOverlord
1mo ago
And be willing to burn any and all political capital needed to stop Ted Kennedy's immigration bill.
ChickenOverlord
3mo ago
A reasonable compromise here would be giving people who’ve been here for a certain amount of time amnesty and a green card. Hard to support this
We tried that compromise in the 80's, and it didn't work then to stem the tide of illegal immigration it only encouraged it. Why would things be any different this time?
ChickenOverlord
3mo ago
I mean a more expansive view of language as a series of context-dependent games
Conservatives don't do this due to a "remarkable lack of intellectual imagination", they don't do it due to highly accurate pattern recognition that people who view things this way love to destroy civilization and law and order.
ChickenOverlord
1mo ago
Institutional cycles of growth and decay. To some extent of course people were writing about this in 'Decline of the West' and 'Hard times -> Strong men' but the knowledge hasn't widely circulated.
Within my church (Latter-day Saint i.e. Mormon) this has been common knowledge among members for almost 200 years. One of the main themes of the Book of Mormon is what we call the "pride cycle." People follow God and are blessed with peace and prosperity, their prosperity causes them to forget God and become prideful in their own accomplishments (instead of giving the credit to God), and this causes them to be brought low by God (whether through external invasion by the Lamanites, internal dissent/civil war, or other things like famine etc.).
These ideas are also present in the Bible (Deuteronomy 11 is one of the better examples) but the nature of the cycle is far more explicit in the Book of Mormon.
ChickenOverlord
2mo ago
At least in Zimbabwe, black Zimbabweans now have fewer political rights and less economic prosperity than they did when it was Rhodesia. A real win for decolonization!
Anya Taylor-Joy's character in The Northman was a slave taken from raids on other lands. The raid the protagonist is taking part in when he finds out about his uncle and then runs off to take revenge is a raid on Garðaríki, i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gar%C3%B0ar%C3%ADki
Not Scandinavia.
Also her character is meant to be Olga of Kiev: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_of_Kiev
One of my favorites, my only complaint is his hard on for boot camp that makes it take up so much of the book (and after that's done he decides to go to OCS for even more training!).
ChickenOverlord
1mo ago
Except Linus is from the ethnic minority of Finns that are native Swedish speakers. Further reinforcing the conspiracy theory that Finland is an imaginary country made up by the Swedes.
ChickenOverlord
3mo ago
I liked Hlynka but my biggest issue with him was when people would respond to him with specific arguments and he would completely ignore them and/or refuse to address them
ChickenOverlord
1mo ago
Last I checked, Muslims commit about 4% of the domestic terrorism despite being only 1% of the population.
ChickenOverlord
1mo ago
Basically, but instead of being single because she decided to date a ghetto thug who left her the moment he found out she was pregnant, she became single because the father had to have a buck naked swordfight on top of a volcano against his uncle to avenge his father's murder and secure Olga and their children against future possible reprisals from his uncle.
A hacker hacked NYU (both some of their internal databases and their public website) to show that NYU is still practicing affirmative action in spite of the supreme court ruling that was supposed to end the practice:
What would be the way for the courts to actually make sure this ruling gets enforced? Would some sort of federal commission like the ones that were put in place to monitor black voting rights in the south work?
ChickenOverlord
3mo ago
I have a degree, but in History. I'm completely self-taught in IT and software dev and am currently a senior dev at a highly dysfunctional megacorp (not a FAANG type, more of an old school megacorp but I guarantee every single poster here is familiar with the company). Simply having the degree (in an irrelevant , unrelated field) helped me immensely with getting through pointless application filters early on in my career. I'm sure it still does but now my experience counts for more.
I'm just annoyed because a lot of advancement for me seems to be blocked by my not having a degree in CS or a related field, even though the incompetent Pajeets that make up 90% of my coworkers have CS degrees from India but couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. In fact the technical debt they've piled up over the last decade or so in my subdivision of the company finally came to a head last week. Performance and stability issues with our software finally pissed off enough of our large customers that all new development has been frozen and our sales teams are no longer selling our products (instead some similar software made by a separate recently-acquired-by-us company will be getting pushed by sales).
After we do some work to stabilize and improve performance is done in the next year or two I expect our products to be kept on life support with a skeleton crew for security updates etc. As a result I'm strongly considering getting my masters in CS because the job market (and all of the retarded filtering done by HR and hiring managers) makes it so much harder for someone like me without a relevant degree to even get considered.
I mean I have no slaveowner ancestors, and I have at least one ancestor that fought on the Union side of the Civil War. Why the hell would (or should) I feel any guilt over it? I imagine most white Americans that aren't direct descendants of slaveowners would feel similarly.
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