domain:betonit.substack.com
Lizzardspawn
23hr ago
(Drinking cum out of skulls is, uh, certainly a choice).
This guy is a reverse duke nukem.
FarmReadyElephants
23hr ago
Yes, we commonly treat those who have just arrived in this world as a part of their family unit. You are born into this world with very little, except the moral and often legal right to demand the resources of those who bore you. I am conflating the mother and the child because it is what our world always and everywhere already does.
The child comes into the world with the strongest sense of belonging to a tiny nation - that of his biological family. On a larger scale than that, he belongs as a junior member, by virtue of his parent's membership, into whatever web of belonging they belong to. Thus, a Hebrew boy was taken to be circumcized and named on the eighth day of life.
They do not have the liberty to exist on our soil, because their family does not have the right to exist on our soil, and we would be wise not to dismember the tightest and tiniest of nations.
TIRM
23hr ago
I took years of public school Spanish class. In one class we left school and walked to a local taqueria.
TIRM
1d ago
I don't know about all Asian countries, but, my wife grew up in China and had to cram and apply to get into a good public high school. Not going to high school or going into a less selective low ranked one were the alternatives.
I've seen 'bugmen' is a racist slur against Asians. But Bronze Age Pervert uses it in a non-racial sense as a slur against regular people. Asserting people you don't like are similar to bugs.
kky
1d ago
Just hire some 20yo porn actors and make them act out healthy sex scenes (where the actors play a couple (or actually are a couple), discuss boundaries, contraception and all that), put them on the web in 4k (or even better, find popular but healthy sex tapes produced (semi-)commercially and just buy the rights) and tell the minors in sex ed "it is actually normal and healthy to be interested in how sex works, if you are interested here are some videos which are more realistic than what you find on pornhub.
I’m going to assert a couple points.
First, although I think there is a right and wrong way to have sex, I really, really do not want the government getting involved in it past the absolute brightest of lines (rape).
Second, the locus of the erotic is, for whatever reason, in the forbidden itself. Everyone knows that sex is dirty. If it’s clean, normal, and well-ordered, it’s not tempting in the first place. At minimum it must be private; the private side of someone which they would never show anyone else, but for you…
A practical middle ground would be to define a clear boundary between softcore (basically nudity and intense looks, no partners or penetration) and hardcore (intercourse, violence, unrelated obscenities), and put a lower legal age target for the former. There’s frankly not nearly so much that’s damaging to either boys or girls with just seeing naked people. Sure, unrealistic standards this or body image that, but it’s nothing compared to the implication of hardcore porn that women are supposed to experience sex in the manner of seedy porn scripts.
HereAndGone
1d ago
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.
HereAndGone
1d ago
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.
HereAndGone
1d ago
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.
iprayiam3
1d ago
Cheating with AI in school is trivially solvable on an object level. It’s just that the bureaucracy and or faculty don’t want to.
Whether that’s due to laziness, head in sand, politics, profit, or some sense of “inequity”, or any other misaligned incentive is up for debate.
I assume the inequity part is a decent amount of it. If you start actually forcing measurable accountability, it will take away other subjective safety nets.
This will effect pass rates and almost certainly have some disparate impact.
But the point is that anybody with even a little bit of intelligence could think up a plan to counter AI cheating for any given course or learning objective.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
To attempt some answers:
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It seems obvious now because we know it happened, but you have to put yourself in the position of someone who would have been observing things at the time. For most of the 1850s, things were looking pretty good for the South. There was a string of Northern presidents with Southern sympathies, who weren't about to rock the boat on the slavery question. Dred Scott happened. The Whig party collapsed. Democrats had a 2 to 1 advantage in the Senate and Congress. There were certainly huge problems, but it wasn't until the 1860 election where the Democratic party split along sectional lines and the Republicans swept the North that the writing was on the wall.
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Lee is certainly overrated. Jackson is as well; both he and Longstreet are examples of guys who maxed out their own competence. Jackson was good at semi-independent commands but didn't have the political skills to be in charge of an entire army, and didn't do well when fighting directly under Lee. Longstreet was the opposite, in that he was a good general when serving under Lee but not so good independently.
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The "rich man's war poor man's fight" thing didn't have so much to do with who was taking casualties in the army but who was fighting in the army itself. The perception arose that thousands of men who would never be able to afford a single slave were fighting to retain an institution whose primary beneficiaries were plantation owners who weren't serving and who had an inordinate amount of political power.
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There's a difference between treating your enemy with respect and going out of your way to honor him. I doubt there are any statues of Petain in France commemorating his work in WWII.
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The commanding generals in Virginia take up most of the slack for the idea that the South had better generals than the North. In my opinion the opposite is true, with the North's generals being somewhat better on the whole. In Hood's defense, he didn't really have a choice at this point, as the war in the West was already lost and he had to do something. It's like a runner at third trying to score on a sac fly to left field when the team is down 7–2 in the 8th. Bad idea overall, but sometimes you just need to get something going. As for Davis, I think he had the idea that he wasn't going to cave until he absolutely had to. Most of the Deep South and large parts of the Trans-Mississippi never came under Union occupation, and I think the idea was that he'd make them fight for every inch, because the Union couldn't really claim victory unless every state came back.
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Yup
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It's easily the best single-volume work about the Civil War ever written, and it's required reading for anyone who wants to claim familiarity with the war. It's of "read this before you begin to discuss it" variety. The Great Courses series by Gary W. Gallagher covers similar ground, but in more depth, and he and McPherson seem to be like-minded about most things, so it makes an excellent supplement if you're looking to go further without risking running into a dud or something controversial.
2rafa
1d ago
The Israelis are delusional and wrong about regime change. It’s strange that critics of Israel seem to be so heavily invested in Mossad’s infallibility (even ‘October 7th was allowed to happen’ etc). The only way regime change happens in Iran is if the Tehran middle class get fed up enough to make it happen. That will be independent from Israel.
kky
1d ago
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.
If I were managing a school like this, I’d send the kid to the local community college with night school classes and have them start farming up two years worth of college credits and do something like productive wage labor on the side to drag things out. Possibly I’d see how challenging it would be to get my own school thus accredited.
At 18, apply to a four-year with two years of credit and plan to graduate at 20, which is not that far off from the larger cohort and is a fine time to go for the first rung of a white-collar job. Most American four-years permit this. It’s something I did myself, with the ages shifted around somewhat (I got my two years of credit while working starting at 18, and went to an ordinary high school).
HereAndGone
1d ago
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.
HereAndGone
1d ago
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?
AnonymousActuary
1d ago
There's a great FCCfromSCC post...maybe on reddit about confederate monuments...
Ope not FCCfromSCC, but here you go: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/71ydqb/comment/dnfdfl3/?context=3
HereAndGone
1d ago
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.
HereAndGone
1d ago
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.
anon_
1d ago
effectively nullifying the condition Congress put in place
This is not true. Congress when creating conditions gets to create both the rule and define the process by which it is enforced. That is their prerogative. They can chose whether it can be enforced by {individual plaintiffs bringing suit in Federal court} and/or {the HHS secretary decides and can withhold the money} and/or {any other enforcement scheme}.
Now if the statement is that Congress passed a law with no reasonable enforcement mechanism, I don't think that's terribly controversial. Indeed they do that all the time, which is comparable (after a fashion) to not passing the law at all. But they are entitled by Art I to do so, at least in the sense that there isn't a judicial remedy if they don't provide for one.
HereAndGone
1d ago
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.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Homeschool coops with no facility costs are much cheaper than that.
anon_
1d ago
If the strep throat screening cost $10K to provide, then not. The question seems to be whether it's a cross-subsidy.
HereAndGone
1d ago
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.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
1d ago
So, what are you reading?
I'm adding Shapiro's Contested Will to my list.
hanikrummihundursvin
1d ago
Whilst I agree with the general sentiment of your post I think there are is a very valid reason for why a child should be placed in this sort of program over public education, at the very least.
Considering the child will largely grow up to be similar to mom and dad, barring bad friends and unlucky accidents, why not put them in a program that maximally conforms to whatever ruleset upper class academia emphasizes? It's a good use of time if we assume the kid will inherit the brainpower to meet the demands of higher learning. Instead of being potentially stifled by public education, which is poor, it can potentially be motivated to pursue education and have the resume to enable that pursuit.
I'm not in favor of crazy people having guns, but I'm not sure I fully trust the system to draw the line on crazy people.
If the system was accurately drawing the line of crazy people I'd be fine with having them all institutionalized. If you are considered too dangerous to own a gun then you are a danger to society in general, after all knives, vehicles, and lighters are still easily accessible for these people.
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