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The modern public education system is an expensive daycare at best and a Potemkin village at worst. Kids lack any internal or external motivation to learn, discipline is basically forbidden, and any mark under 85 is cause for meetings and interventions and BS special ed plans. Many teachers don't think this is a problem- school should be a "safe space" for children (though to what end, they usually can't say). Any teacher that does think it's a problem is either too cowardly (or agreeable, same thing) to fight the decline or too attached to the sweet, sweet benefits of the job (even sweeter in Canada!) to die on this hill. They console themselves, however, by muttering about how "these kids are in for a big surprise when they get to university." Well, ti appears that there will be no surprise:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-university-student-accommodation/684946/?gift=o6MjJQpusU9ebnFuymVdsFCUJZQ0G9lMNnLXcGfnS-w
At elite US universities, huge numbers of students (20-30%) receive accommodations for intellectual "disabilities." Since these schools are much more selective than other schools, and intellectual disabilities make you worse at school, we should expect to find even higher rates of disability at less selective schools, but we don't. So either the upper class families are fortunate enough to have the means to ensure their kids get the help they need while less affluent students are struggling unassisted, or they're gaming the system to inflate their marks when the most common grade is already A. You know in your heart which one it is.
The main "accommodation" these kids get, at university and K-12, is extra time. This almost makes sense on final exams, but day-to-day they also demand it. The problem is that there is no "extra" time; there is only one time and it is limited. "Extra time" on anything is an illusion, because you are taking your own time from something else. This is not just a metaphysical quibble- parents will demand that a kid get extra time (which usually means double time) on anything the kid finds difficult. Since time cannot be created, a kid who finds the material difficult will take an entire class period for a short quiz, thereby missing a bunch of material and falling behind, ensuring that he finds future material difficult as well and requiring even more "extra" time. Parents rarely understand this, even when it is explained to them.
Kids and parents universally defend this practice because it allows the kid to do their "best work." The assumption is that if other kids do their best work in half an hour, but your kid needs an hour to do his best work, that's academic justice. We're here to find the kids best work, after all (this is never questioned and any discussion of speed is not even understood, let alone allowed). The "best work" that this system produces is never good- work expands to fill the time allotted, so if you were going to write a C+ essay in an hour, and now you have two hours, it now takes you twice as long to be just as mediocre. Other absurdities abound, which I've mentioned before, like the "separate exam space" having more kids in it than the regular exam room or kids getting the reading test read to them, but the time thing is the biggest one.
Goodhart's Law is driving all of this. We used to use marks as the best available way to measure how smart or educated kids were, but then it started getting gamed and now marks are totally meaningless (note that parents and Good Teachers will assert, in the same sentence, that marks are not a full measure of a person's worth/intelligence/etc and also demand these accommodations so that the kid's marks are propped up because the kid is good or valuable). A colleague just had a meeting about a kid failing Gr 11 advanced math. It's too late to drop the course. He reassured her that if she takes Gr 12 basic math the kid will retroactively receive a Gr 11 basic math credit, and her graduation will not be threatened. The mother freaked because this would still leave "Gr 11 advanced math: 44%" on the kid's transcript, as though there were a situation where you needed a good gr 11 advanced math mark but didn't actually have to be good at math (in Canada, there is no such situation- any scholarship or admission that would have this kind of demand is going to the kids in Gr 12 advanced math anyway).
These are pretty standard complaints about the ed system, but now lets talk about The Last Psychiatrist. His bugbear was narcissism. Not the swaggering bravado we normally associate with narcissism, but insecure or compensatory narcissism that causes empty people to act out a character rather than to be their authentic selves (they don't have authentic selves in the first place). "Main character syndrome" probably comes from his writing, though I don't think he used that exact phrase. So a narcissistic man would demand that his wife get breast implants, not because he loves busty women, but because cool dudes like him have wives with huge knockers. He is trying to shape everything but himself to project the identity he wishes he had. It's normal for kids to try out different identities, get tough-guy tatoos or act like Taylor Swift, but well-adjusted people grow out of it and start actually doing things, and the things they do become the basis for stable identities. TLP alleged that people in the West have stopped growing out of it and are trapped in juvenile psychology where identity is totally decoupled from action. So you can go every day to your actuary job and estimate health insurance risk and go home and scroll Twitter all night, but since you own a guitar you actually think of yourself as a musician. This has all kinds of bad effects on you personally, on the people around you, and on society. Read his oeuvre to find out more.
This kind of narcissism is a natural, though regrettable, phase of growing up, and it's bad if you don't grow out of it. It's even worse, though, if all the adults around you are actively inculcating it in you. Accommodations are the main way society is doing this. "Marks are just one way of evaluating people" is perfectly true. If you really believe this, you won't be that worried about your kid getting a 60, unless he's slacking off, in which case you chain him up for a while until he gets his act together. But if you tell your kid, and doctors tell your kid, and the school tells your kid, and TikTok tells your kid (this, to your kid, is tantamount to the entire world telling him), that actually he's really smart even though he doesn't do anything smart, and that actually what needs to happen is for the world around him to change (=accommodations) then you are encouraging a mindset which life should actually be beating out of him.
People around here often object to The Last Psychiatrist's style, Sadly Porn is weird, etc, but he dropped the shtick and wrote a more obviously serious book called Watch What You Hear, about dream interpretation in the Odyssey. The big takeaway in the book (for psychology) is that insecure narcissists demand omnipotence from others and detest omniscience. "Omniscience" here means seeing clearly what your problems are, seeing through you. For example, a guy who thinks of himself as a woman has his whole world rocked if someone treats him like a man, or a girlboss feminist has a breakdown if someone suggests that all she wants is a baby. Instead, narcissists demand omnipotence- the trans guy wants the world rearranged to validate his feminine identity and the girlboss wants childfree spaces enforced, as though every else has the power to deliver affirmation/happiness/fulfillment/ for them.
We have allowed the education system to formally endorse this narcissistic demand for omnipotence over omniscience. The school/teacher/exam must not be allowed to correctly rate the student's intelligence, potential, actualisation or anything else. Whether that science is omni is beside the point; parents and students fear and believe that it is, which is why they lose their #$%ing minds when anyone suggests that if the kid gets 70 in every class then maybe he's just kinda a 70. The omnipotence they demand of everyone is the power to make their kid above-average. In some cases they believe this can be done, in other cases they demand the trappings of academic success without the substance (identity divorced from actions). This is TLP narcissism codified and is far worse for society than some lame teacher trying to get kids to like her by saying she's bisexual or whatever.
(I know that economic anxiety is a huge driver here, that parents fear that their kid will end up destitute if he doesn't get into engineering or something, but again, in what world will he be a successful engineer if you explicitly demanded that we cover up his lack of discipline, drive, and ability with fake marks? A world where, with regard to your kid, everyone else is omnipotent without being omniscient)
I guess my point is that the dominant objections here to public education rest on the system's financial or ideological effects, and while those are bad, the psychological effects are much worse and go much deeper than "I was bored and my reward was more work". The financial and ideological objections have more to do with the ed system being mainly made up of the outgroup, but they'll eventually all be dead. It's fine to dream of the day when the system is dissolved or otherwise rendered powerless, but until then, stop demanding accommodations for your kids. It's much worse for them than reading gay comics in English class.
People are always trying retarded shit to see what they can get away with. I think with modernity you just see the enforcement incentives are very different to smaller tight-knit communities. Everyone has so little to gain, and there are so many more interactions, and it is hard to coordinate because people are more atomised, and the person you are trying to enforce the norm on can just tantrum and you have to deal with that.
I think this "humour my bullshit or I'll throw a tantrum" is always present, just harder to enforce against in modernity. So you get a race to the bottom.
This problem is much less bad in rural areas due to this dynamic.
Also the elderly. I can see the tendency but they have grown up in a world where they feared repercussions if they did this.
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Yeah, university is a complete joke. Effort required was very low even prior to modern AI. Plenty of people would do a course and not actually read anything if they could at all avoid it. It was kind of funny seeing different teachers be at different points on the 'anger, grief, acceptance' scale, some gave up entirely and just aimed to maximize student ratings with shameless pandering and niceness.
This is what a decline in social trust looks like. People used to assume that nobody would cheat (dishonorable), students would work hard, there were rigorous standards. But that's clearly not a thing. University courses are designed to look rigorous to suckers, then accept any idiot (even if they can't do basic maths or write a vaguely decent essay) and extract their money.
Participating honestly today is being a sucker. Why would you work hard when that's not necessary to get through? I began to loathe the imbecilic, patronizing, childish box-ticking BS that lecturers inflicted. Some of them were fools too, they didn't have a clue about what they were supposed to be teaching. Better to read a book on the subject, faster and cheaper too. It's extremely demoralizing to go tens of thousands of dollars into debt for this worthless, time-wasting garbage.
If I just tossed that money into crypto or shares, at least there's some possibility of returns on the investment.
The job market has little demand for skill or degrees either, it wants people with the right connections or wearing a cute dress or from a politically correct background.
Lack of rigor barely describes how bad modern university education is.
I recently started an online master's program for computer science through the University of Colorado (Boulder). The amount of difficult work and overall rigor in the courses has been, uh, lacking to say the least. My undergraduate degree is in a humanities related discipline and all of my CS knowledge is self-taught, just to give you some context.
All assignments except for the final exam in each class have unlimited attempts, which makes the multiple choice quiz assignments a joke. But even the actual programming assignments haven't been any serious work. So far I've finished the general networking and Linux networking classes, and the assignments have been things like:
Analyze some packet dumps and find the maximum amount of TCP datagrams that are in flight at any given point in the stream.
Create ethernet devices in 4 different containers, connect them to a bridge in a 5th container, then run this premade script to ping between them and submit the packet dump.
Modify half a dozen lines in a couple of BGP config files, then turn off some ethernet interfaces, ping between two endpoints, and submit a packet dump showing that your BGP config worked correctly after turning off the interfaces.
The finals have been worth 10% of the total grade in the general networking class and 20% in the Linux networking class, and you only need a B in the first three networking classes to be admitted into the full computer science program (where, as the saying goes, C's get degrees, at least for the elective courses that make up half of the degree; you still only need B's in the required breadth courses).
And this degree doesn't have a special "online" caveat attached to it, it will appear exactly the same to employers as a Computer Science master's obtained in person at CU Boulder.
It makes more sense when you realize that many master's programs are just busywork to justify a student visa and a follow-on graduate STEM OPT work permit (two years that can be converted to a green card or H1).
They are optimizing for the user experience of someone who wants the fastest, lowest effort way to get entry into the US white collar labor market, not actual learning.
Not just that, its also grade inflation where due to the erosion of standards and enforcement, 3 year bachelor degrees are often not enough for professional graduate intakes. Also some 'blue collar' positions now require college time (eg NYPD needs 24 semester credits / 1 year of college time), or a degree where it used to be trade school (nursing in some Western nations).
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Yeah, the only reason I'm in the program is because I want to boost my resume for future employment (especially since my undergrad degree isn't in a STEM field), and because my current employer is paying for it. I have actually learned some useful things from it, but only because I applied myself more than someone just looking to pass the class would need to. And everything I did learn from it I could have learned on my own without the program, the program just provided a minimal amount of guidance and direction as to what to learn.
I did find out I can take some electives from the electrical engineering master's program and have them count for my degree, so I'll probably do that since a lot of them seem more interesting (and hopefully more rigorous).
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As I keep saying, if you have a 'disability' that makes it difficult to do well in school, your grades should just reflect being bad at school. Unfortunately, parents really want their kids to have high grades, and teachers serve the system(which cares about its own internal numbers, not whether those numbers reflect reality). C'est la vie, it's a clearly ridiculous example of the iron law, but it's far from the worst.
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Employing Ockham's Razor, isn't it likelier that this is just... POSIWID? Hippies have been pointing out for decades that the US public school system, maintained at enormous expense by the state, seems mostly about... serving the interests of the state. And that primarily means raising children to be conformist tools of whatever the state needs.
US public schools were originally designed to get immigrant urchins off the streets, subdue their disorderly tendencies, and get their parents back into the factories; so of course the early curriculum stressed English grammar, commercial arithmetic and romantic-nationalist mythology like "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere," in the context of ruthlessly enforced obedience to authority. Need soldiers for the great wars? Phys ed programs and high school football.
Now it's the 50s, the state needs people to instead consume regularly, resist communism, and prep for nuclear war/space race... ok, more home ec, more arts and literature with reminders that creativity is anti-collectivist, more project-based learning because same. And STEM, lots more STEM.
Now it's the 2000s, the economy is contracting, Turchin's cycle is at its maximum "elite value extraction" position, state capacity is at an all-time high with massive investments in surveillance and social engineering (and that's leaving out AI!). Why would the state need or want a citizenry with a lot of self-reliance, initiative, independence and self-awareness at a time like this? Self-reliant people are trouble. Damaged people with enormous needs, by contrast, make great pets.
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In one of The Last Psychiatrist (hereafter Edward Teach)'s articles, as an exercise, he challenged the reader to describe themselves without using the word "am".
Given that English speakers habitually describe their professions this way ("I'm a fisherman" rather than "I catch fish)"), completing the exercise can be surprisingly difficult.
I've long thought that there has never been an interesting sentence beginning with "I identify as", but Teach's writings illustrated to me that such a framework can be not just tedious and navel-gazing, but actively harmful to oneself and those around you.
When I criticise sentences beginning with "I identify as", I am of course referring to our modern fixation on "identities" in the sense of "identity politics" ("I identify as a QPOC agender neurodivergent...") but also in the sense of "identifying as" something wholly removed from any corresponding action associated therewith. As you point out, being a musician is seen as high-status in a way that selling insurance isn't: there are innumerable people who still call themselves musicians (namely in their Instagram handles) despite never having recorded a single note of music or having gone years without playing a gig (if ever); likewise for people calling themselves "writers" without having written anything, never mind published. This worldview is starting to affect more traditional identity categories as well: a majority of American women who call themselves lesbians have had sex with at least one man (6% in the last year); there are sexually active people who call themselves asexual; there are self-identified vegans who subscribe to a non-standard definition of veganism. "Inclusivity" has become so valorised and "gatekeeping" so stigmatised that it's seen as poor form to tell a meat-eater that they aren't vegan; a person who's diagnosed themselves with autism that they aren't really neurodivergent; a chronic masturbator that they aren't asexual; a bearded, penised male in jeans and a t-shirt that he isn't a woman. Identity has become wholly uncoupled from essential rule-in criteria or adherence to a standard of behaviour (broadly defined): vague, unfalsifiable "vibes" are the order of the day. I wonder if you could draw a bright line between the relaxation of academic standards you outline in your post, and the relaxation of standards of behaviour for who is and isn't a "lesbian".
"Why are you getting so incensed, @FtttG? It's just some kids on college campuses – who cares if a woman with multiple male sexual partners and zero female ones calls herself a lesbian?"
But I actually think it's much more insidious than that. I think the relaxation of standards such that anyone can call themselves a musician (without playing a note of music) and anyone can call themselves queer (while exclusively pursuing hetero relationships) – and that anyone who calls them a fake and a poseur is a toxic exclusive elitist gatekeeper – can lead to some extremely toxic habits of mind, ultimately causing people to "identify as" the only thing anyone should aspire to be: a good person.
Because if you don't have to write anything to call yourself a writer, and you don't have to adhere to a plant-based diet to call yourself a vegan – if it's all just vague, unfalsifiable, unquantifiable vibes – it stands to reason that you can "be a good person" without once doing anything good, without once doing anything to improve the lot of the people around you. How does that cash out in the real world?
As Teach pointed out, the last bullet point is particularly unsustainable for forming a real sense of self and personal identity. In principle one could take full responsibility for all of one's impressive achievements while refusing to take responsibility for all of one's failures (moral and otherwise), but most people are no good at that kind of compartmentalization. If you've gotten into the habit of refusing to take accountability for your fuckups, it's only a matter of time before your positive achievements don't really feel like "yours" either. Thus, impostor syndrome.
I suppose it could be worse: identifying as a good person hasn't yet become wholly uncoupled from consistent pro-social behaviour. Believing you're a good person because you've never set a cat on fire is a low bar, but it's a hell of a lot better than thinking there's literally no difference between someone who sets a cat on fire and someone who doesn't. Insincere performative virtue signalling still acknowledges that there is a thing which exists called "virtue"; aspiring through one's actions (namely insincere performative virtue signalling) to be seen as a virtuous person still acknowledges that virtuous behaviour is a precondition for being a virtuous person. Reflexive invention of exculpatory circumstances to explain away one's bad behaviour still acknowledges that said behaviour requires explanation. "Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue" and all that. Still, two decades ago anyone who called himself autistic without having ever consulted a mental health professional would have attracted a lot of funny looks – nowadays it largely passes without comment. (Indeed, the concept of "social awkwardness" no longer exists: every such person is reflexively assumed to be "on the spectrum".) I worry about where this train leads. Will we end up with innumerable tautological Templars running around, who no longer even feel any need to explain away their bad behaviour; who sincerely believe that, as a PoG (person of good), everything they do is good, because they did it?
Anglophone Gen Zers were raised in a discursive environment which tells them they're smart (even if they've never done a smart thing in their lives); which tells them they can be queer (even if they've never done anything queer in their lives and have no desire to); which tells them they're beautiful – even, dare I say, a certified bad bitch (even if no one wants to have sex with them); and, most toxically of all, tells them they're good, even if they've never carried out a single selfless act, maybe provided they parrot a catechism of cookie-cutter woke catchphrases they don't even understand never mind positively endorse. No wonder they go into adulthood with no idea of who they are, what they're good at, what they're bad at, what they want from life, how they come off to other people, what makes them them. They can list off all the identity categories they fall into like a math nerd reciting digits of pi, but they couldn't begin to tell you who they, personally, are. No wonder they report unprecedented rates of mental illness**, sexlessness and social isolation. How can you begin to make friends based on common interests if you don't have any interests (besides rotting in your bed watching Netflix), and neither does anyone around you? What does it even mean to be attracted to another person if you've been consistently told all your life that all bodies are equally attractive? How can you form a relationship with another person if you don't even know what you want out of life? How can you and your partner have shared relationship goals if you don't have any goals of any kind?
*I used to occasionally read an online article which I found so insightful and perceptive that I felt like the author had cracked one of life's cheat codes: this was the first time I can remember it happening. One of the most recent times I had such a feeling was when I read the TLP article linked under "periodic paroxysms" above. The second time was when I read my first post of Scott's, "The Toxoplasma of Rage". And he succeeded in inducing that feeling in me again, and again, and again – and now he mostly sucks. Nothing good lasts forever.
**To bring it back to the subject of the OP, I have no doubt that this is partly an artifact of young people or their parents attempting to game disability frameworks to secure carve-outs and accommodations – an extra hour in an exam for a student diagnosed with anxiety or depression is a low-hanging fruit waiting to be picked. But I don't think that's the whole story: I think there's a real signal of Gen Z being miserable in a way and at a scale that previous generations weren't. Yes it's the phones, but it's not just the phones.
I've never found a study like this about vegans, but one study indicates that 60% of vegetarians had eaten meat in the past day. To be fair, I had a boomer coworker who claimed to be a vegetarian despite eating fish ("I consider fish to be vegetables"). He was a health vegetarian though, so there's presumably a variety of reasons that meat eaters call themselves vegetarians besides virtue signalling.
Sounds like your coworker needs to learn about pescetarianism.
I tried to tell him. He wasn't having it.
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Is it @thejdizzler who's vegan except for oysters?
Regardless of their motivations, calling yourself vegetarian when you eat meat is simply a misuse of the word, surely?
Be reasonable, @thejdizzler is not a boomer.
Yes. My point is that the misuse of the labels is not always exclusively due to TLP's narcissism theory.
Agreed, and I didn't mean to imply that it was. I was using it as an example of a once-strict identity category for which the boundaries seem to have become more porous over time.
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I've also said here that I describe myself as a vegetarian, despite eating bivalves (and roadkill, and caviar, and etc...)
It's just much less work to do that than explain to a restaurant the exact things I do eat. There is a word--ostrovegan--that kind of describes it, but most people would be confused by it, as it's obscure enough to be overly precious.
That's just communicating dietary requirements, though, in the not especially common scenario when I need to. I wouldn't say I identify as any particular terms associated with dietary restrictions.
Really burying the lede there.
Roadkill doesn't necessarily mean it's been sitting out in the sun for days. In fact most larger animals struck by a car are left crippled and then need to be shot- the police will donate it to the zoo for lion food, but if legal it doesn't really make much difference if you/your redneck neighbor shoots it and takes it to the freezer.
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I had a great-uncle who would apparently listen to police scanners at night so he could be the first to roadkill strikes for the free meat.
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I salvaged a deer and pretty much every vegetarian I know said they would eat it. Most didn't know you could legally (it depends on the state) salvage roadkill and thought it was pretty cool. In my case I also dispatched it, so time from death to fridge was faster than most harvested deer.
Minor culture war angle: A Muslim guy had "called dibs" on the deer and didn't want me to kill it because then it wouldn't be halal. Said he had his brother on the phone and he was going to come butcher it. The deer was suffering greatly and I said if his brother wasn't almost here I was going to kill it. He wouldn't tell me how far away his brother was. Heard him derogatorily call me a cowboy between whatever he was speaking. I'm not nearly that cool.
Bewarned- in most of the bigger states this is deer poaching. If you hit a deer with your car, you're supposed to call a police officer to come dispatch it humanely.
In practice, you may not get caught, and the main penalty(loss of hunting license) is irrelevant to non-hunters. But it is de jure illegal.
It does greatly depend on state, but I live in a cool state. I used to work for F&G it's de facto here, you have 24 hours to get the salvage tag. Cops showed up after I'd dispatched it, we had a pleasant chat before they took off.
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It's worth checking your state laws for sure, cause I know in Wisconsin at least it's perfectly legal. In fact, you're even entitled to take the carcass if you didn't hit it with your car - the driver who hit it has dibs, but after that whoever comes across it can take it if they want.
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This is a great story. I'd love to come across a dead deer like that.
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Makes for a solid venison chili, though more of something from my youth than present (illegal to collect in CA).
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I do eat oysters and other bivalves m, but I no longer label myself vegan.
Why not?
1). I now eat bottom-feeding fish (sardines, anchovies, tilapia). This is too far to call myself vegan anymore. 2). I no longer believe that veganism is nutritionally beneficial due to big mental health changes from eating fish. I still think largely plant-based is the way to go however. 3). I no longer believe in the purity culture associated with veganism. The way forward for animal rights is by a large number of people making small changes to their diets, not through a couple million extremists trying to argue people into diets they will not comply with.
Why did you decide to start eating those fish?
A couple reasons. A blogger I used to follow (rintrah) who used to be vegan found out he was extremely deficient in Omega-3s and this had been negatively impacting his mood and behavior. I noticed similar symptoms in myself. Also the canned fish were right next to the oysters in the supermarket and I found myself craving sardines every time I bought oysters.
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Ah, fair enough.
I also wouldn't say it's egregious if someone who eats oysters calls themselves mostly vegan or even vegan for simplicity.
As mollusks are invertebrates it's not even clear they have the ability to perceive experience. So, at least some, of the ethical considerations for veganism are moot. I know, I know, they still have nerves. It's not clear if there is still proper concept of pain or suffering from those structures or if the nerves just allow for reflexive action like a silver maple turning over a damaged leaf. They can also be farmed relatively sustainably, so some of the environmental considerations are also moot. It's probably a lot easier to explain to a normi "I'm mostly vegan" than to say I'm a vegan, but I cleave the phylogenetic tree at Nephrozoa not Animalia.
Pescetarians calling themselves vegetarians is relatively more potentially confusing, though also understandable if they come from a tradition of giving up only carne (in the flesh from that which walks the earth sense) for lent or on Fridays, etc.
Cephalopods are mollusks, too. I'm not sure about the nervous systems of gastropods, either. It's mostly bivalves that are effectively meat-plants. outside of mollusks, some echinoderms had, then lost brains at some point, but display far more complex behavior than bivalves, so IDK. Sea Anenemies (HTF do you pell that I've tried like 6 ways and can't get any spellcheck suggestions) seem fairly plant-like, but does anyone actually eat them? Does anyone eat echinoderms besides seacucumbers?
Wikipedia article
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Technically speaking the current Catholic definition of meat requires the animal to be both land dwelling and warm blooded. Older Cajuns will think reptile meat is vegetarian, including things like rattlesnake. It makes sense from a culinary definition, if not nutritional.
The church also declared beavers to be cold-blooded water dwellers and therefore perfectly suitable to eat during Friday fasts. The rules get weird around the edges.
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This rather famously resulted in some awkward loopholes around the capybara. Thankfully, 1800s Catholics had not yet discovered the swamp rabbit.
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I think this is representative of a general societal movement that holds, basically, that discipline should be done away with and replaced with more nurturing. The stick is just sadistic cruelty, and does much more harm than good, and whatever good it does do can be done all the better with extra carrots.
And I can see where people may be coming from on that, in that the downsides of discipline - the consequences of overdiscipline - are dramatic and immediate. Too much harshness leaves people shattered on the spot. The downsides of nurturing, though - the consequences of overnurturing - are comparatively dull and delayed. Too much nurturing leaves people stunted, but without any single, immediate, dramatic event that can be pointed to to say "see! That shows that they were treated wrongly!"
(I suppose it's an eternal human way to trade obvious, immediate problems for less-immediate ones.)
But it's not just academia: just as it would be inhumane to hold students to academic standards, in light of their Circumstances and Conditions, so too it would be inhumane to, for example, hold petty criminals to legal standards, in light of their Circumstances and Conditions. Instead of punishing anybody to stop their bad behavior, it is better to connect with them, to build relationships and trust, and constructively help them out of whatever pit they were in that made them feel they had to act out.
Which sounds lovely, but it just, well, doesn't work.
(I'm sure it would be pointed out if I don't do so now that the vanguards of civilized behavior who deplore discipline are real quick to grab the stick whenever somebody they don't like does something that really bothers them. That language policing is carried out with enthusiasm by those who detest regular policing. That would seem to point to just a different hierarchy of values, rather than a consistent stance against discipline...)
I like this framing because I think it highlights just how pernicious overnurturing is.
Overdiscipline is easy to spot. We call it abuse. If I steal from the cookie jar and my mother gives me a sharp crack about the ear, that's discipline - perhaps harsh and a bit pre-1972, but still within the acceptable definition of discipline. If, however, she wails on me with a wooden spoon for 10 minutes, that's abuse.
Grown up abuse is often called hazing. If I am at Marine Corps boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina and I screw up my locker inspection, the Senior Drill Instructor may respond by making me do pushups for some amount of time or repetitions. Discipline. If he throws the locker at me, that's hazing (if it seriously injures me, that's actually illegal, but it'll be covered up.)
Abuse or hazing, that it is fairly easy to draw the line makes it easier to manage, imho.
Not so with the over-nurturing. Returning to the cookie jar example, after my mother has caught me red handed, she takes 15 minutes to "gentle parent" me about how stealing is wrong because it makes other people sad and that too many cookies might make my tummy hurt and she knows I just like cookies, which is great, but right now we (why are we using the plural all of a sudden?) just can't have any cookies. Now, I don't even know if I did anything wrong. I don't know if I was just subjected to that ... event ... arbitrarily or in response to something I did directly.
Fast forward the tape and now I'm being arrested because I stole a couple doze iPhones with my friends from the mall. The cop is placing me into the back of his squad car because ... why? I wanted the iPhones so I took them. I'm not thinking about Apple, Inc. or the employees at the store because nobody (like, for instance, my mother) ever told me to do that much less associated direct consequences with the failure to do that. It's as if the entire concept of causality has been so watered down in my brain that I am an observer of my own actions instead of their source.
Sound familiar?
Every police interaction video online where the person who is obviously resisting arrest shouts "I didn't no nothin!" is, perhaps, a person who literally cannot associate their actions through time with a chain of causality. If it weren't so socially destructive, I'd feel bad for them -- like they're forced to watch a movie of their own life that's nothing but jump cuts.
Overdiscipline can lead to a damage deficit that may take years for a person to overcome. Extreme enough and it may never be totally overcome. But there is still the potential to overcome it and people will have the ability to work to do that. With overnurturing, it seems to me, they are utterly robbed of that ability to overcome. It's a complete short-changing of some core developmental pathways that turn children into adolescents into young adults that lack even the vague concept that they have control over their own actions which then influence the outcome of life and circumstance around them. If I drop you into the middle of a Japanese accounting firm and tell you to reconcile the balance sheet of Hashimori Corp in 90 minutes, you're going to laugh, throw up your hands, and just kind of let the world roll over you. You don't even have a sense for where or how to begin because you have zero contextual history or familiarity with this environment.
And that's a non-trivial part of younger millenials, Gen-Z, and whatever laboratory goo babies follow after them.
Is that actually a thing, where 'gentle parenting' results in kids who are stealing iphones or doing more or less organized crime? I genuinely have no idea.
I think robbers know perfectly well what they're doing and are evaluating risk and reward for their crimes, perhaps with skewed analysis of risk but they're still making an assessment. You'd never see them rob some 2 metre tall bodybuilder, even those 'schizophrenics' who push people onto subway lines or whatever, they'll go for someone weaker than themselves. Maybe the payoff for killing is hatred or jealousy rather than pure monetary gain...
I agree that swift discipline is the cure but I think that they all have some ability to judge, even if it's some reptile-brain 'this guy looks alpha better not attack him' level. More specifically I think some middle-class coddled brat is going to be really whiny and irritating when running into some obstacle but won't rob a store because he/she assesses 'I can just get my parents to pay for it'. Whereas the hardened thief calculates more along the line of 'who cares if I go to prison, my mate Bronco is there, I know lots of people who went to prison, and I don't want to look like a pussy and I need this cash fast'.
You'd think this, but then there are endless videos of criminals doing things that just seem completely insane to anyone who has a normally functioning understanding of cause and effect, like reaching for a cop's gun inside of a police precinct. A mere knave wouldn't do that.
This is because a certain category of criminals are simply that slice of humanity that has very low impulse control and is incapable of modeling the consequences of actions, or at least incapable of letting that affect their judgement. Watch enough footage and you'll recognize them.
Lots are just pretending they don't understand because they think that this will let them get away with it, but the small slice of people who genuinely have no impulse control exists and is most of those people who are arrested hundreds of times for the same petty crime.
Career criminals as you mentally model them also exist but they're a different breed.
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Indeed. Except the second you suggest otherwise, they're happy to "give you what you want" by using the stick on you and people like you while continuing to "nurture" people they like.
...much in the same way as, when someone advocates redistribution of wealth, they are met with calls to redistribute their wealth specifically while not redistributing the wealth of their richer, less compassionate neighbours.
I'd say this is legitimate. It's easy to support very harmful actions based on abstract principles when the harmful consequences don't fall on yourself. Sometimes you need to do this anyway (punishing criminals, not allowing underage drinking) but it's often a warning sign that someone is applying principles in a very self-justifying way.
That does not apply to that to which I was referring.
If Alice calls for 'redistribute Bob's wealth; do not redistribute Alice's wealth', your argument might be valid; however, I am referring to when Alice calls for 'redistribute a fraction of both Alice's wealth and Bob's wealth' and Bob counter-proposes 'redistribute Alice's wealth; do not redistribute Bob's wealth'.
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They're even against language policing when it polices them: see all of the discussion about "correct" English and how marginalized groups speak correctly in their own dialects (AAVE, for example).
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I teach at an expensive private college (cost per year >$90k) and I used to teach at the state school down the street (cost per year $20k). There is definitely a difference in the quality of the education, but the private school is at most 1.5x better than the state school. (For some majors, the state school would be 1.5x better than the private school.) The amenities (food, gym, clubs, etc.) are basically the same.
The main difference---and what the parents are really paying for---is that the admin of the private college is VERY hands on. The private college has something like 10x the number of deans per student, and those deans have very busy jobs interacting with the students. One of their jobs is to ensure that every student is registered for whatever accommodations they might be eligible for. They see themselves as "cutting the red tape" for the students and "helping them navigate the bureaucracy". At the private school, I deal with these deans every semester, and your stat (20-30% of students on accommodations) matches my experience here. The public school is very different. There are no deans helping students get these accommodations, and a student must be very proactive in order to get them. (My sense is that basically none of the engineering students I had would have even known accommodations existed.) Teaching at the public school for 6 years, I literally never had to deal with the deans about student accommodations.
I don't think accommodations are the only reason for the price difference between public/private colleges (the administrators do a lot of other things as well), but I'm sure they make a substantial part.
How many deans are we talking about here? My alma mater had fewer than ten deans for seven thousand students. Is "dean" not a title for a small group of department leaders in your school?
At the private school: Under the "dean of students" office, I count 10 people with the title of dean (or vice/assistant dean), 4 with the title of director, and 5 administrative assistants. We have about 1500 undergrads.
At the public school: There are 3 people total in the "dean of students" office: The dean, a vice dean, and an administrative assistant. They have 25000 undergrads.
Both schools have separate deans for managing the faculty and the dean:faculty ratio is similar between both schools. Both schools also have separate "student-centered" departments (not part of dean of students) for financial aide, study abroad, career center, the gym, varsity sports, etc.
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