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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   22982 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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There was a shooting at Brown University yesterday. Two people were killed. This is of course a tragedy, the kind of tragedy that has been well-litigated both here and everywhere else on the internet.

Brown decided to follow this up with another tragedy: canceling all outstanding exams and operations for the remainder of 2025.

"Given these deeply tragic events, all remaining undergraduate, graduate and medical classes, exams, and papers or projects for the Fall 2025 semester will not take place as scheduled. This choice was made out of our profound concern for all students, faculty and staff. In the immediate aftermath of these devastating events, we recognize that learning and assessment are significantly hindered in the short term and that many students and others will wish to depart campus. We know there will be many academic concerns about the implications of not holding classes and exams as scheduled, and we will follow up to provide students with more information in the coming days."

One of the issues with our education system is that it is fundamentally unserious. Final exams are, or ought to be, a big fucking deal. Ten thousand of our supposedly best and brightest students will now pass an entire semester of advanced classes without a comprehensive examination of their skills and capabilities. Medical classes. I hope the physician you visit to get your unusually yellow skin checked out didn't take hepatology at Brown University in Fall 2025.

I wonder if this shooting is connected to the one that happened in Australia this morning. The timing seems suspicious and we haven’t heard anything about the Rhode Island suspect.

The attack in Bondi seems to have been father/son and all about killing Jews. Regarding the shootings at Brown, don't have a lot of faith in US media to not immediately cloud over actual motives, so at this point, it's still hard to say. Probably just coincidental.

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