The point is "exaggerated porn noises" during sex, even if the girl isn't enjoying herself. And choking certainly wasn't mainstream, but it's seeping out just like heterosexual anal sex, and that comes from porn. Kids are watching porn and picking up lessons from it about "this is what sex is supposed to be like", which is why we're trying to hold back the tide on minors accessing porn. Age-verification laws like the one in Texas may be futile, but the alternative surely shouldn't be "they've got Internet access since the age of six, they're gonna find porn anyway, let thirteen year olds watch hardcore BDSM, you can't stop them".
Also the relative paucity of large families plus the increased rate of step-relationships adds fuel to the fire.
I hadn't considered that, but yeah: with divorce and remarriage and having kids outside of marriage, it's a much more 'realistic' scenario now than previously, because there is always that faint chance the hot chick you saw at the club might be a half-sibling by one of your momma's baby daddies who moved on to have other kids with other women. So you get the taboo and the nice, naughty thrill, without doing anything "physically excessive" as your producer friend says, plus it's becoming much more relatable to the audience.
I don't have statistics on an increase in incest irl as a result of incest in porn
There is a sub-Reddit about "incest is not wrong". How much this is real people who really think banging your full-sibling or your dad once you're all grown up is just peachy, and how much this is a kink site, I have no idea and not much interest in finding out. But like they say, whatever you can think of, it's out there on the Internet.
Not helping are the kinds of chin-stroking 'thought experiments' on philosophy sites about "but why is consensual incest wrong, you Neanderthal knuckledraggers who aren't as big brained as I am?" and, of course, contrarians but contrarians we will always have with us.
Surely people are aware that there's a difference between reality and fantasy?
When you're old enough. But watching porn at a young age is trying to find out "how does this sex thing work? what goes on during sex? what am I supposed to do?" because porn is supposed to be 'real' sex (and I guess hardcore, if the distinction even exists anymore, is people having real sex on film or video). You pick up a general idea of "what is sex like?" from movies and TV, but that's not as explicit as porn, and you get directed towards porn from society around you and your peers, even if your parents try and keep it away from you.
The reality-fantasy borders are very blurred there, because these are real people really naked and really doing it. It's only when you're older that you work out that these are actors and it's all scripted and the makeup and hair removal and breast sizes etc. are artificial.
Average age of exposure to porn is now around twelve to thirteen. That's not a very mature age to be able to discriminate about "ah yes, this actress is faking her sounds of arousal, I see that the mild BDSM is added to the script just to spice it up, this is not a realistic portrayal of how people have sex in reality".
Maybe young teenage boys were always trying to sneak peeks at naked women in 'dirty' magazines, but that's not at all the same as on-demand moving images of whatever tickles your fancy.
Respecting your partner? Nah, they like to be degraded.
I was wondering where the hell all the "women like/want/demand to be choked during sex" was coming from, and it seems it's from porn. And what boys (and I do mean boys, not even young men - in the linked article "transition year" is aged 15-16) are learning from watching porn is "when having sex, I should be choking my partner". That's something that can go very wrong very fast if you have no idea what you're doing, and how the hell is a fifteen year old having sex for the first time going to know what they're doing with breathplay?
For the last eight years, Eoghan Cleary has taught transition-year students a module about the dangers of pornography and how to navigate safe and consensual sex. During the class at Temple Carrig Secondary School, the teacher asks his students to make a list of what they believe is expected of them during sex.
Speaking at the launch of a new Irish report outlining the stark dangers of pornography on Thursday, Mr Cleary said the recurring things that students are putting on this list are “shocking”. Young boys said they feel they need to chase women, be dominant, be aggressive, want anal sex, and be with as many partners as possible.
In the past four years, Mr Cleary said the majority of teenage boys now say they believe they need to choke a woman during sex. Similarly, when girls were asked to make the same list, a high number said they need to be submissive during sex by allowing their partner to choke or slap them.
Other common things young girls said they feel the need to do during sex include having no pubic hair, making pleasurable noises, doing what the man says, and orgasm or pretend to. Mr Cleary said students admit that these expectations are coming from porn.
Being fair to Alexander, he's not a racist. He's a classist. He doesn't want white trailer trash having litters of kids, either. That's why he always bangs on about religiosity: you Bible-thumpers and Catholics, you pro-lifers, don't you realise what you are doing by encouraging teenagers and low-economic status women to have babies at a young age that they can't possibly support themselves?
From the public school's perspective, the problem is that there are all these families where the parents don't read, and would like their kids to read better than they do, but don't necessarily do things like reading in front of their kids, making the whole thing much more difficult and tedious. And there are also kids with various processing differences, who have to be taught very concretely, but English is a bit odd phonetically, it takes up a lot of memory space, so they have to drill a lot
Oh gosh yes. Reading aloud fluently and easily, you need to practice that, and the best way in school still is "have everyone read out loud in class and take turns reading several paragraphs". If there's no reading at home, and no practice with books, that's hard to pick up (having said that, my parents never read bedtime stories to us, but my father used to tell us stories every night). You can only do so much in school, and if it's not happening at home, then what you get at school is even more vital.
I was about four and a half when I went to school (no such thing as kindergarten in my day) and I was able to read. Learned at home, can't even remember learning so I can't brag about "I was two (or three) when I learned to read". That wasn't a sign of me being particularly smart, it was (a) the result of freaky genes on the paternal family side where everyone is an early reader, for some unknown reason (possibly bound up with the strongly suspected but not formally diagnosed autism spectrum/Aspergers we got going on as well through the generations) and (b) my maternal grandmother lived with us and she did a lot of the childminding of infant me, and what is a bedbound old woman going to do with a two year old but start them on the alphabet etc.?
All that means that I have no idea what the optimum age for learning to read is, or what is the best method for teaching reading, but there's definitely a range between "will pick up reading anyhow be it late or early" and "need to be taught or will fall behind" where school is useful.
Seeing the hoops that the first private school made them jump through just to get their kids in, the headmistress could well afford to have the attitude "we fire you, you don't quit" towards the parents. Let them take their kid out and leave, that just opens up a gap for the next affluent, anxious, and aspirational parents on the waiting list to get their little budding genius in. Demand definitely outstripped supply, even at that level of fees.
whatever ruleset upper class academia emphasizes?
Quis paget entrat, is the joke about that. Though upper-class academia does have its share of clever, as well as well-connected, students.
St Cake's School is an imaginary public school, run by Mr R. J. Kipling (BA, Leicester). The headmaster's name is part of the joke regarding the name "St Cake's", in reference to Mr Kipling cakes. Articles featuring the school parody the "Court and Social" columns of The Times and The Daily Telegraph, and the traditions and customs of the public school system. The school's motto is Quis paget entrat (He who pays gets in), although variations on this arise from time to time, such as when the school decided to admit only the daughters of very rich Asian businessmen, and the motto became "All praise to the prophet, and death to the infidel". While the school's newsletters feature extraordinary and unlikely results and prizes, events such as speech days, founders' days, term dates and feast days are announced with topical themes, such as under-age drinking, drug abuse, obesity, celebrity culture, anti-social behaviour and cheating in exams. The school is sometimes referred to as "the Eton of the West Midlands", in reference to that area's relative lack of such schools and the magazine's founders' attendance at Shrewsbury School in that region.
They don’t learn “public speaking”, they learn how to craft and deliver a speech and then submit the performance to the Moth to be judged by external parties.
Maybe I'm just dumb, but trying to navigate The Moth's website makes me think this is just a Gen Z version of Toastmasters. I mean, yay for "public storytelling" but I doubt they're going to be very hard on a bunch of elementary schoolers and since they seem to be aiming for podcasters, well okay maybe yeah they are training the new generation of social media influencers who will be hosting podcasts as a career given that AI will take every other job by the time these kids have speedrun the national curriculum and are ready to join the world of work aged sixteen.
Lead with the fact that it is designed to turn the top 5% of children into Überkinder
It's American, so they can't. Some of the wealthy striving Blue Tribe parents that these programmes are intended for may, indeed, be one or two generations away from the horny-handed sons of toil, so if they're trying to attract the newly wealthy through tech jobs sector, they can't be overtly snobby. The old money upper class already have their own snobby schools, as the review notes:
How do Alpha’s MAP score improvements compare to other selective private schools across the country?
This is an important question for some parents. It is great if you can expect your 5th grader to advance 2.6x faster than they would at the local public school, but if you are planning to spend $40,000/year to send him to Alpha, your alternative is likely not the local public school. And if you are considering moving your family to Austin for the school, your alternative options are places like Horace Mann, Harvard-Westlake, and Lakeside.
So the market for Alpha (and others like it) are the new money, self-made, middle to upper-middle class:
2013 – 2017 | Garage‑School to “Alpha”
MacKenzie Price, then a mortgage broker in Austin, wasn’t impressed by the city’s gifted programs. She invited a small number of neighbourhood kids (including her two) into a makeshift microschool that ran two intense, teacher‑led academic “sprints” each morning, then “life‑skills” projects after lunch. Joe Liemandt — Founder of Trinity Technology, ESW Capital billionaire and family friend (MacKenzie’s husband worked for him) — kept his own children in conventional private school until he saw the qualitative improvement in the life skills of MacKenzie’s kids. He decided he wanted his kids to join MacKenzie’s but he wanted to take the project to the next level. Sometime around 2014-2017 he joined MacKenzie as a co-founder and started writing checks. Alpha recruited more students and guides and the operation jumped from location-to-location looking for a larger permanent home.
And these people can't be appealed to on snobbery grounds, since as part of the Blue Tribe values they are all about the DEI, fairness, fight racism, and all the rest of the shiny liberal values. Hence why Alpha has been trying to expand out past the "you're smart and well-off, your kids are smart, let us provide a boutique concierge alternative to public education for you" market so the parents who fork out the 40k per kid can soothe their consciences about their privilege:
The success of the 2-hour learning platform was giving the Alpha founders confidence. Liemandt in particular wanted to see if the program had legs beyond the elite group of students being educated in Austin. Alpha’s first external test in August 2022 in Brownsville, TX – a small community on the Mexico border with less than half the per capita income of Austin. SpaceX had recently launched Starbase in Brownsville in 2014 and the employees there were not happy with the existing school options. Someone at SpaceX approached Alpha and asked if they could launch a new campus for their employees. It is unclear if any money changed hands, but when Alpha launched their Brownsville campus (available to SpaceX employees and any other locals who are interested) tuition was only $10,000 (vs $40,000 at the main Austin campus); incoming students trailed national academic standards by over a year. But after nine months on the Alpha program the first cohort of students had caught up and surpassed the national average, and they kept accelerating, achieving an average learning velocity of ~2× the national average (see section four for what that means). Brownsville was Alpha’s attempt to show that their model wasn’t just rich‑kid selection effects.
...I also heard that around this time Alpha began testing the 2-hour learning platform at a facility for juvenile delinquents in Florida. I heard that from one individual who was not directly involved and I have not found any written documentation on it, so unclear if it worked, it was a one off, or if it even happened. But it fits into the pattern of Alpha at this stage: “We know this program works for a specific type of kid. Let’s find out how broadly it is applicable. Can it work for everyone? Is it the solution for learning and education for the world?”
Personally I don't think "kids of employees at SpaceX" is the move out from 'well-off smart parents' that they think, but also the comment from a Brownsville parent seems to show it really does work on "rich-kid selection effects", as does the lack of information about the Florida effort.
So in short: they can't sell it overtly as "this is for the 5% to help you hoist your kid into the 1%", as the 1% already have their established track for their kids and don't need Alpha, even for their dumber scions (see the joke about being the cream of society - rich and thick) and the middle-class strivers don't want to think that they're using their privilege to get an unfair leg up.
I'm not sure I have this right as I'm only going by impressions picked up online at third-hand, but there seems to be the reverse idea about Asian universities: what we would call the state ones are considered the high-value, high-class colleges you want your kids to get into (the equivalent of MIT and the Ivies), going to a private university is considered a step down (think "small liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere versus an Ivy League college").
So you grind grind grind to get into the right university to get the degree that will get you into the handful of 'acceptable' large business combines where you grind grind grind to get on the executive path or else you're just an 'office worker' which is a failure.
There is this notion of being an elite/belonging to the elite, and elite seems to mean "from a wealthy family, went to the right university, got into Big Corp and am on the executive promotion track".
Let the more informed correct me, please!
What the fuck, your kid is in fourth grade!!! She should be playing in the woods with other kids not training to get into a feeder school like it's the olympics!
That's the Elite Human Capital route to success, and why the likes of us are too normie to ever be worth the time of day from Richard Hanania 😁 Reading articles by Freddie deBoer from his time in NY, it gets even more insane: you have to get your kid into the right kindergarten so you and your spouse train the kid like you're stuffing a Strasbourg goose prepping them to pass the entrance exams while both of you cultivate the right connections and present yourselves as the 'right kind of parents'.
You need to get into the right kindergarten to get into the right school to get into the right high school to get into the right college so they will network with the right connections and get into the right careers. Or else their entire lives will be failures.
At least in England, they were upfront about the model of getting into Eton or other public school -> Oxbridge -> civil service career, the professions, or inherit Papa's estate.
"We're smart and successful, our kids are gonna be smart and successful, that means making sure they get into the right schools which will advance their learning on the time-table we think most efficient, you don't get to be the 1% just by lollygagging". The parents would die rather than acknowledge the snobbery, because they've been brainwashed in their turn that this is all about merit: they were smart and bored in school, why didn't the mean ole teachers let them learn what they wanted to learn how they wanted to learn at the pace they wanted to learn, they're going to do better by their own kids.
The fact that achieving this meritorious path means you have to have the spare resources to throw around 40k per kid and be able to quit your job(s), move across the country, and be pretty certain of walking into a similar well-paying job just for a school is swept under the carpet. No, it's all about pure intelligence and enabling kids to learn without clutter of traditional education system.
They must be doing something necessary because if I understand the review correctly, Alpha is burning through money. So they're not going to pay "guides" higher than market salaries for no reason. I think there must be a lot more 'under the hood' traditional teaching going on than the marketing materials make out. Maybe they discovered that hey, you actually do need physical bodies on the premises when you have a bunch of kids running around, no matter how smart and well-behaved the kids are.
Yeah, I think so. At the very least, if the school is bringing the kids on ski trips, that presupposes the parents can pay for the ski trips. If they can't, and the ski trips are treated as part of the curriculum about learning something, then the low-income kids are going to lose out on that 'learning experience'. The ordinary school day is structured to mesh at least some way with the parental work days, if the Alpha school means parents can't drop them off early/pick them up late, or other reasons, that's not going to work out in the long term.
Schools are expected to do a ton more than simply teaching, and the home environments of the kids also has a heavy influence on how well they do. Alpha and the other suggested fixes work best for those who are "I hated school, I was too smart and was held back" and who now have smart kids and plenty of money to burn on "send them to a programme that will accelerate their learning".
What happens after that, though? So now you have a fourteen year old who has completed the school requirements up to age eighteen and can graduate four years early. Maybe they get into college four years early. But now they're fourteen on a campus with eighteen year olds who are theoretically their peers, and unless there is someone there to act in loco parentis they may not cope well.
What do you do with the extra four years? Go into a job? Start your own business? Maybe some of the genius fourteen year olds will do that. Do your college learning at home? The example of "paying the kids to learn" with the tokens as per the review doesn't reassure me about that, because it seems the kids didn't want to explore their own learning during summer holidays and free time, they wanted to do it in school time to earn the tokens.
Smart kids from well-off families is where the 'fixes' work and if the parents demand them, then there will always be an educational entrepreneur revolutionary with the latest fix, but it's never going to scale for the average kids from low income backgrounds.
The school in question costs $40,000/year, and the writer sent three children there last year.
Yeah, I'm hoping that is the total for all three and not 40K each because holy crap. Mind you, the description of the private school they were attending before the parents decided to up sticks and move lock, stock and barrel to Austin also had me going holy crap, this should be the school anthem. (Knowing the original makes the Horrible Histories version even more enjoyable, though I digress).
The fact that this guy is able to up sticks, move across the country, and enrol three kids in a private fee-paying school means that once again, this is something that probably works very well for smart (see the description of the hoops his kids had to jump through to get into the first private school) kids of well-off families who will have support from interested and involved parents, and the genetic and environmental advantages of the same. That's why I went "holy crap" about the private school, because creaming off the best of the best and ensuring you don't have the dummies, the average, and the troublemakers - yeah, you could just stick the kids in the library and leave them to their own devices and they'll come out okay.
Small classroom numbers and highly motivated teachers? Yeah, once again: skim off the good young teachers as soon as they finish teacher training, promise them (reasonably) good salaries and conditions plus they will not be running the risk of getting stabbed in the face for telling a kid to get off their iPhone in class, plus they get freebies like going on ski trips in order to supervise the kids and of course you get them before they're burned out and they're still full of enthusiasm and optimism about education.
How well this Alpha scales up (or down) is something I'm fascinated to know - there's mention of trying it on kids from deprived backgrounds:
I also heard that around this time Alpha began testing the 2-hour learning platform at a facility for juvenile delinquents in Florida. I heard that from one individual who was not directly involved and I have not found any written documentation on it, so unclear if it worked, it was a one off, or if it even happened.
That is where the rubber will meet the road about "is this a genuinely innovative approach to education that will enable kids to learn more, learn faster, and learn more deeply?" versus "is this something that is about a bunch of very smart kids from well-off families who, let's face it, would do equally well if left in a field supervised by wolves?" and the fact that the author seems to have heard nothing more about it would lead me to believe "the success comes because we cherry-pick really smart kids and put them into a specialised environment of nearly 1:1 tutoring".
In the end, I had to laugh that even the Alpha programme ended up re-inventing school. They have teachers, even if renamed "guides". The selling-point of "only 2 hours per day to learn all they need!" turns out to be "and then we fill up the afternoon with the socialisation, practical subjects, etc." part of education.
I hope it works out for his kids, but this sounds more like "yet another Bright Idea that doesn't scale up" in the field of educational reform. The problem is not "does this work for smart kids from motivated families", the problem is "so now does it work for less able kids from families that don't give a damn so long as the brats are taken off their hands for six hours a day".
EDIT: I'm also curious about this bit:
Could educational assistants do what the Brazilian on call tutors are doing?
So maybe they have a handful of very well-paid "guides" but the real teaching is being done on the cheap by call centre tutors in Brazil? Because why would you have the kids ringing someone in Brazil if they have problems with the material, rather than the guides on site? This, on the face of it, seems to be the way they can afford to pay the "guides" much more than if they were public school teachers - less of them, the real work being done by cheaper outsourced labour.
And if she had originally felt that lying was a minor offense made as much for Henry's sake as for hers, it wouldn't be at all shocking if she refused to come clean so that he could look justified in betraying her.
Or, on the other hand, if she wasn't lying, neither would it be shocking if she refused to lie just to make it convenient for Henry to dump her for his long-term mistress. Henry (and those he had charged with getting this done) had little scruples about bending the truth; there was a lot of ground to be cleared before the second marriage could take place, and it wasn't all down to an inconvenient wife.
Anne Boleyn had at one time attempted to contract a marriage with Henry Percy, son of the Earl of Northumberland, and they were secretly betrothed. This didn't suit either of their families, or Cardinal Wolsey, so whatever arrangement they had was broken up and Percy was married off to another woman. When the king's marriage with Anne was to go forward, Percy was pressured to claim there had been nothing between them. Then later on, when it was incumbent to get rid of her, he was pressured to admit there had been a pre-contract before them. This was treated as legally akin to marriage, so she was allegedly not free to marry Henry.
Did the men accused of being Anne's lovers lie or tell the truth when they denied this? Was Anne lying in her letter to Henry denying that she had ever committed adultery? We are really in "he said/she said" territory now.
As well as Anne's past romantic/sexual history, there was the problem that Henry had taken Anne's elder sister, Mary, as a mistress before he met Anne. If Catherine was guilty of having consummated a sexual relationship with Henry's brother, thus making their marriage illicit, then the boot was on the other foot here as well: a sexual relationship between Henry and Mary would have created a pseudo-kinship making Anne his sister-in-law, as it were, and thus rendering his marriage with her equally sinful, incestuous, and invalid as Catherine's marriage with Henry was claimed to be.
So in the tangled matter of Henry's marriages, we can't know what was the truth, as apart from "what was the 'truth' the king wanted declared at the time?"
This is why I tend to believe Catherine. She was put under oath, and I don't think she would have been prepared to commit perjury just to get back at Anne. Nowadays we think of perjury as a technical legal offence and indeed trivial (unless you're caught out), but people used to believe that swearing false oaths would indeed damn you to Hell. So there wouldn't have been the attitude that "lying was a minor offense made as much for Henry's sake as for hers". Catherine could have admitted a consummated marriage with Arthur, claimed that she had relied on the papal dispensation and the advice of her elders that the marriage with Henry was permissible, and made things easier for her. Henry had had mistresses during their marriage and she had accepted that, because that was the way of things. (Something Henry later allegedly reproached Anne about, when she was said to have confronted him about taking a replacement mistress, that greater ladies than her - a reference to Queen Catherine - had had to accept this). It would have made things easier and more secure for both her and her daughter, Mary (and Henry was not above being spiteful to his own child, with alleged threats later of executing her if she continued to be obstinate about accepting Anne as queen), as it went for Anne of Cleves who was more complaisant or better able to play the game, agreeing to all Henry's demands and being well treated in return when he wanted to get rid of her.
We'll never know the exact truth, without getting a time machine to go back and see if Catherine remained a virgin after her first marriage. All we can do is judge the characters of those involved as to how they strike us, and Henry strikes me as a liar - or at least someone able to persuade himself that he was acting from the purest motives and not just out of personal whim, and that all those opposed to him were in fact not alone wrong but wicked and evil.
Alexander Turok is the Hyacinth Bucket of TheMotte. His dream? To have room for a pony, someday. His greatest fear? To end up amongst people like Rose.
(Me, I'm Daisy and am sufficiently low-class that I don't give a flying damn about trying to shin my way up the greasy pole of social climbing status).
I think if, in your very own acceptance speech, you are already writing your place in the history books of tomorrow about future generations recognising the great job you did, that counts as "establishing a cult of personality".
Kids and grandkids of Trump have much more in common with stereotypical children of wealth than they do children of celebrities.
By comparison with Hunter Biden, though they may not be perfect, they're not as messy. Even The Onion can only mock Eric and Don Jr. for being childish idiots, whereas they had to go from 'Biden won't pardon Hunter' to 'Biden pardoned Hunter'.
The cult of personality around Obama didn't hold a candle to Trump's.
Thrills up the leg? The Light Worker? The oceans stopped rising?
Granted, all that was his first term, the gloss had worn off by the time the second one came around.
The God-Emperor stuff was both funny and a satire by someone not a fan of Trump, it was taken up ironically because hell, yeah it was funny and cool at the same time.
Not to mention having the instincts that let him react like this in the immediate wake of the assassination attempt, leading to what you have to admit is an iconic image.
would Eric or Don Jr. draw enough attention to fatally weaken another MAGA candidate and throw the race into confusion?
Did Jeb! work to weaken the Republican alternatives to Trump, by which I mean had he not been in the race, would the support and party machinery have gone to someone else (maybe Ted Cruz) who would have been stronger and therefore successfully challenged Trump, or was it Trump's moment and the rest of them were fatally flawed as being identifiably part of the Establishment? (Do we really want the world where there was a President Cruz instead?)
I don't think Jeb's support, such as it was, mattered that much in the end - he had four pledged delegates to Cruz' five hundred and fifty-one, so clearly the support wasn't behind him despite being a Bush. I think the same would be true for Eric or Don Jr., they just wouldn't have enough recognition of their own to do any real damage as splitting a MAGA vote. I think anybody wanting to vote for deSantis or Vance (if they go in 2028) would be deterred by "vote for Eric Trump instead".
Wow, child of political officeholder is open to idea of someday running for office themselves. This has never ever happened in the history of the world before. Nope, no dynasties of Dalys, Bushes, Kennedys, Gandhis, every local politician round my way... this is why there isn't a whole Wikipedia article about US political families besides one about the practice in general. Yes, this is all about "an illegal 3rd term" for Trump.
Look, if I want my filthy depraved kink, I get it the old-fashioned way: by going on fanfic sites. I'm old enough that I don't need to lie about age-verification anymore, but these young'uns nowadays should at least have to work that much to get their porny kicks!
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