MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
14hr ago
Except that I’ve never ever seen this drive more people to support these causes. In fact, it’s almost always a negative publicity to the point that it would often do the cause better to not protest at all. Your protest blocked a road, now everyone is pissed because they were late to work, or missed a flight, or other activities they needed to get to. Are people talking about the cause as in “does this idea have merit” or in terms of “what a bunch of inconsiderate losers making people late for work and making people miss their flights. It’s negative at least around me. People outright cheered when the people blocking roads in Europe got pushed out of the way by SUVs or were manhandled to the side of the road by outraged drivers. Not one person seeing the souping of the Louvre paintings got curious about the cause, they were upset about the destruction of the art. So on net, it’s more likely to turn people away.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10hr ago
I’ll agree to the decline in quality of entrants. But I think the bigger issue is student loans and the ease with which those institutions can make money by reducing rigor even in high rigor subjects. A butt in the seat of any university makes them 30,000 a year. This is putting enormous pressure on schools to not only admit anyone with a pulse, but to reduce the difficulty of coursework so students don’t fail or drop out. So you basically remove the difficulty from the courses, handhold everyone in the class, and offer more extra credit to shore up flagging grades. Which means students are no longer thinkers, innovators, readers, or otherwise able to do anything beyond regurgitating whatever is in the study guide.
Another issue, which I think has also reduced the usefulness of college is that really, the ability of any program at any school to be held to any sort of account for not actually teaching students to do the things that are a major part of doing that work. As it sits now, what students and employers know about what the program does is what the school says it does. If I’m looking at a program in biology, I honestly have no way to know whether a program I’m looking at is going to teach me to do the labs, or to teach me the fundamentals of biology or statistics used to analyze the results of an experiment. I can use reputation as a proxy, but it isn’t a very good proxy.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1d ago
I think, if schools wanted to, they could absolutely teach people how to actually think and solve problems. Plato and Aristotle and other philosophers could do so with nothing but a bunch of eager students meeting outside in the agora and listening to him talk. We’re actually shockingly bad a thins. I honestly think high school students in the 1950s and 1960s were actually better thinkers than college graduates and in some cases college students in the 21st century.
I have my theory as to why this is. I think the classical model of education worked much better than modern educational methods. I also think that the demand for rigor and precision in thought and the need to actually understand rather than simply memorizing the correct answers to questions is more or less dead. The value we used to place on dispassionate inquiry died long ago and has been replaced by narratives determined by the culture.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3d ago
I think the big and frankly unmentioned part of the phenomenon is that we in the WEIRD west have long been accustomed to defining ourselves and choosing our lifestyles and interests accordingly. If you’d been born in almost any other era and any other set of countries, your life would have been largely predetermined before you could walk or talk. There were exceptions, but for the majority, what you were was handed to you, and in some cases still is. You practice your ancestral religion, you worked at whatever it was your parents and grandparents did. Your ability to go to school was determined by social class. Your roles and expectations were largely defined fairly rigidly full of expectations for the roles you were born into. Religious rules. Gender roles. Job roles.
Fast forward to today and we really don’t have any of those things. You can become anything you darn well please. The son of a welder can become an artist, or a doctor, or an actor. You can freely choose your religion or lack thereof. You can dress any way you like. You can take on or abandon social roles with little regard for what other people think. Gender is really the final frontier of this process. It’s the only reality of yourself you don’t get to decide on. Everything else, religion, job, hobbies, clothing styles, education, etc. can all be bent to the whim of the individual. So why wouldn’t gender be something a culture like ours would try to negate with medical science? Why wouldn’t a society that treats every other identity as if they’re fashion accessories not try to make gender and sex into yet another consumer choice?
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
7d ago
My working hypothesis on bad writing is at least in part due to the hyper-professionalization of movies and games. In both cases, the people making them don’t come from all walks of life. They come from a rather insular world of people who have gone through specialized training at university, and they then go on to live in the same town and hang out mostly with other people like themselves who went to the same professional schools and so on. They’re rarely if ever outside that bubble. They rarely know anyone who came from outside that bubble. And as this goes on for generations, the lack of contact with the normie world makes it impossible to create movies and tv and games that feel realistic. Nobody in Hollywood shoots guns, and probably very rarely would they even know anyone who collects or uses them. When it comes to writing a story about the kind of person that owns or shoots guns, they aren’t referencing their own lived experience with gun owners. They’re referencing other works about the topic, they’re referencing their political views about guns and the people who own them, and maybe stereotyping they’ve seen about gun owners. That doesn’t allow for much depth. It’s like a copy of a copy of a copy — every step away from the real thing makes it less like a real person and thus less interesting.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
2d ago
I tend to agree with the idea that the meme itself is artificial, and I think the aim is to give the public a meme that simply dismisses the idea of conspiracy out of hand. I don’t believe in any particular conspiracy personally, but I find the meme obnoxious simply because dismissing a claim out of hand is a dangerous thing simply because it means not even bothering with the evidence. I think the proper and critical thinking response to a conspiracy claim isn’t dismissing it out of hand, but demanding proof. If the earth is actually round, it will still be round even if I question it. And provided that the evidence is available, truth will eventually win.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1d ago
First of all, the person who makes a positive claim is the one obliged to provide evidence. This is simply elementary logic. Negatives cannot be proven, so it’s not on me to prove that no conspiracy happened, it’s on you to provide some evidence that there is a conspiracy.
Second “it’s obvious” isn’t evidence. If it’s obvious, proving it should be easy.
Third, I don’t accept YouTube as a source. Find me a newspaper or other print source so I can check on the facts presented.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6d ago
I totally agree. The stuff that grabbed me about Fight Club, and The Martian is just how close Palahniuk and Weir seemed to be able to get the mindset of ordinary working class people stuck in extraordinary circumstances. A lot of sci-fi seems to assume that everyone is PMC and that ships in space or colonies are going to be large and clean and have lots of cool gear. They’re cruise ships built for luxury run by people who cry but rarely experience a real hardship.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
14d ago
I agree that it was urban vs rural. But the biggest difference was in the effects of pretty standard policies. It was painfully obvious that most of the CDC had no idea how the rural economy works. Shutting down an office and going remote is no big deal. Those office workers didn’t lose their jobs, the owners of those companies were in no danger of losing their businesses. It frankly mattered so little that most office workers are fighting tooth and nail to not go back to the office. In rural areas, the exact same restrictions were absolutely devastating. If you worked in a factory, a small business store, a restaurant, a construction company, you got a layoff. If you owned those kinds of businesses, you had bills pilling up at a time when it was illegal to do business. At the same time, big businesses doing the same thing could often poach your customers by simply being allowed to do business. If you needed something, you went to Amazon or Walmart or Target, nobody else was open for business. And the cruelest part was that the owners of those businesses were basically forced to watch and forced to let it happen.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11d ago
I’ll agree that parents are responsible for their kids, and I’ll agree that in this case (as they bought the weapon and took him out target-shooting with it) they are responsible for enabling the shooting.
But I think as a blanket thing, I’m less convinced simply because preventing your kids, especially if they have ongoing mental health issues, from doing anything wrong is an impossible task. Once a kid has access to money and a vehicle, your ability to control them is pretty small. It would take an extreme level of helicopter parenting to prevent a teenager from doing this. He goes and steals a gun from somebody else, and you don’t know. He builds bombs out of household materials, and you don’t know. You’d have to track him to be sure, and watch his internet to be sure.
Worse, I fear that the looming threat of liability might make parents less likely to seek help. If you have your kid diagnosed with something like bipolar or borderline personality disorder or something that makes them more likely to be violent, you’ve now created a situation where you’re admitting possible guilt — you know your kid has issues, and if they act out, well, you knew about it. The best defense is that the child isn’t diagnosed with anything.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3d ago
In general I think formalism is a good thing. If we’re to have a debate on the merits of a certain social system or political ideology, we must know what it is that we’re actually talking about. If I’m advocating for “democracy” or “white nationalism” or “communism” it’s absolutely important to know what the terms actually mean. The first reason this is important is that it prevents people from speaking past each other. If “communism” is formally defined as “state ownership of capital” then we can be sure we won’t get lost in the weeds of talking about things that look like communism that actually aren’t like Kibutz or monasteries or nuclear families. It also avoids the issues of changing definitions and snuck premises. If we don’t define Communism, then either one of us are free to change the definition in ways that suit us. If I don’t agree with communism, I can redefine it to be only totalitarian socialism and dismiss everything else as “not really communism” even if it would meet the definition. If I’m in favor of communism, I can do this in reverse and start including Sweden as a communist country because some utilities and the health care system are state run. It also prevents to snuck premise problem where I talk about things that I really wish were part of the communist system but aren’t.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3d ago
I think that Nate Silver’s approach is correct, though like you, I don’t think his math is right. Probability modeling is just simply more accurate than gut feelings. Or as Ben Shapiro likes to say “facts don’t care about your feelings.” And this is something the left especially has missed quite often. In fact they missed out on putting a liberal on the bench because RBG didn’t retire with a Dem majority.
And if the polling data is showing that Biden loses in 2024, you’re talking about minimum 2029 before we could replace a justice with a liberal judge. If Trum does really good, he might win in 2028 thus making the next replacement window at 2033. That puts her at near 80.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9d ago
If that were the extent of the advice, I think it would be fine. Put sunscreen on is good advice. Don’t let your kids play outside is batshit insane. In fact, to my mind the benefits to children from playing outside are substantial enough that if I thought talking about sunscreen would keep a kid indoors I’d never tell parents about sunscreen.
The physical benefits are that a kid gets actual exercise, running around, playing. They develop better coordination. A kid who’s playing is basically getting hours of aerobic exercise, building muscles, and so on. A kid stuck inside gets none of that. They sit and stare at screens and get fat.
Then there’s the social benefits. Making actual real life friends improves mental health. It embeds a child in a social network of peers and other adults. It teaches social responsibility and empathy and a whole host of social skills that simply cannot be learned by chatting over a headset.
It teaches good problem solving. Kid wants to get across a stream, he might accidentally learn something in trying to figure out how to do that. He might want to play a different game than the other kids and have to learn to negotiate with the other kids to get that. He might learn how to practice a skill so he can get good enough to play with the other kids.
If children only got one single benefit, I’d still be in favor of having the kids play outside. Even if the only benefit were preventing obesity, it’s an easy trade. Cancer at 70+ is bad, but if caught early is fairly treatable most of the time. Obesity is a chronic disease that often causes heart attacks in fairly young people. Taking 5 years off retirement or 30 years? Easy choice.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6d ago
But compared to the USA, Russia hasn’t been a globe-trotting military power imposing its will on other countries. This is the first large scale military invasion of a sovereign nation by Russia since the end of the Cold War. Compare that to America who has invaded Iraq twice, bombed Libya, invaded Afghanistan, and expanded NATO to include almost all of Eastern Europe. Whether or not you agree with either the geopolitical position (not wanting a NATO member along a difficult to defend border) or the stated aims (removing Nazis from Ukraine) or not, it’s not exactly the military adventures of the USA.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5d ago
True, but then again, we expanded NATO eastward to a difficult to defend border after it told Russia it had no intention of doing so. Even if Poland wanted in, it’s hard to ignore that having NATO troops and military equipment on the border of Russia is at least somewhat provocative. And given that it’s all of Eastern Europe and soon Ukraine as well, Russia is going to be basically surrounded. It’s about equivalent to Russia forming an alliance with Mexico and Canada. I can’t imagine a universe in which the USA would not view that as a threat.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10d ago
It’s not a scam it, like solar is overrated for large swaths of the globe simply because the weather and geography often make those solutions impractical. Solar only works in places that have a lot of sunny days. And transmission can only go so far. Wind has a similar problem— if the place isn’t windy enough, there’s no power. Add in the space requirements for either solution, and it’s a minor source of power that people overhype because they want to believe you can get free-ish energy that’s perfectly green and leaves no waste. I think it’s a step backwards simply because for most of the globe nuclear fission is so much more efficient per meter of space used and produces so little waste that anything that stops people from wanting more nuclear energy is a step away from green energy.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6d ago
I’ll say We, as in NATO would be stupid to do it. Putin has nukes and has said repeatedly that NATO in Ukraine is his red line. If Putin is backed into a corner where either option is “lose and die”, the restraining force of gentility just isn’t going to stop him.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11d ago
The problem of people no longer seeking treatment is to my mind one of the more serious problems with this ratchet. Managed properly, people with even serious mental illness can live somewhat normal lives. But untreated mental illness can easily become a time bomb in which the person muddles until they can’t anymore. And removing guns for mental illness or cars or knives doesn’t help when the people with those mental illnesses decide not to risk losing their guns or their car by talking about their anger issues or depression or bipolar. Then it goes off in an explosion when the person with anger issues takes them out on a room full of people.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
15d ago
I hadn’t heard this particular story, but it absolutely tracks with the naive way that modern western leaders approach global politics. There’s just a weird thought that all they need to do is “be the good guys” and they win by default. Couple this with the idea that bad actors wouldn’t use subterfuge to get what they want and it’s a system that’s not hard to either work around or subvert. We expected Russia to just collapse when we disconnected them from the global exchange. We sneered at them rushing western stores to get the last goods before they closed. What we never ever seemed to consider is that Russia might well have had contingency plans for the sanctions they knew the west would impose, that they’d already created BRICs and could do just fine without us. We expected a short war tha5 they would lose any day now. Annnnd guess which side is lowering their draft age.
We’re in some sense victims of our own success. We have been so dominant for so long that we don’t think about how vulnerable our systems are or what a determined nation can do.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
14d ago
I’m personally of the school of thought that interventions should be minimal until at least the mid teens. Don’t make a fuss about their clothes, their hair, their activities. Give them a nickname if you must, but keep it somewhat gender neutral. At 16 or 18 if the child is still thinking they’re the wrong gender, then and only then is there a subject worth talking about. There are real trans people. They do exist, though I suspect they are much rarer than supposed. But I don’t think we need to go much beyond “don’t be mean to people who look weird or act weird” in a grade school classroom.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11d ago
But at least in the case of a getaway driver, the driver absolutely knows and is an active participant in the murder. He knows he’s driving someone to a place where they fully intend to shoot someone, and they know after the fact they will be helping them escape. If an adult I share an apartment with takes my car keys and drives to someone’s house and shoots them, I’m not involved. I had no reason to think that a crime would result from me leaving the keys on the counter.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3d ago
My understanding is that he can’t serve more than two consecutive terms. Since Theresa gap, he gets two more.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
13d ago
I’m glad we agree. My point though is that this is a huge problem with trying to turn schools into one stop shopping for solving everything that affects kids. They’re daycares, cultural centers, therapists, art centers, sports leagues, enrichment activities, and when they can find the time and money, education centers. I don’t think it’s possible to have schools take over everything that other institutions and families drop and still perform their primary function as education simply because everything added takes time, energy and resources away from that purpose. And I think this is also a major factor in teacher burnout. They’re wearing so many hats, many of them contradictory, with little to no support and often forced to deal with serious mental health crises while trying to teach the other kids something.
My sister in law teaches elementary school. She had a kid in her class who was cutting herself as a way to get attention as well as acting out a lot. Because the resources are minimal she had to deal with this, and pretty well beg the school to get the kid more help than she could provide (parents didn’t seem to care). In the meantime, the class could get nothing else done. That’s the result of turning public schools into the Swiss Army Knife of society. Once it does everything, you no longer have time for teaching.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
21d ago
The problem comes in the design phase of the game. The developers aim the game at “Bob”s in the customer base and then later add difficulty, usually by tweaking the HP, or maybe the hit boxes. Or they might lower the number of recharging drops. What they don’t do is create a hard game for Alice alongside an easy game for Bob. Alice no longer has a game designed ground up to be challenging in a thoughtful way. She gets the easy version gameplay - one that might well not really require strategic decisions or foresight or grinding. She just has to mash the attack button more often than Bob.
I think a lot of this could be somewhat curbed if there were reasonable requirements to get various helps from the government. If you want assistance, it should be assistance and therefore you should have a job. That doesn’t seem controversial to me. And it would work. If having sec 8 housing required having a full time job, then people would be much more likely to find and keep a job. Add in a requirement that nobody living at that house commit a felony and a lot of these sorts of problems get handled.
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