domain:aporiamagazine.com
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5hr ago
We should ban guns below a certain size limit for everyone except police/government agents/licensed bodyguards but otherwise legalize larger guns, including crew-served and mobile weaponry.
We do that, gun misuse shifts to larger guns, someone draws a circle around some subclass (e.g. "assault weapons") and moves to ban that one, lather, rinse, repeat.
Most legitimate uses (hunting, home defense, overthrowing a tyrranical government) are equally or better served by larger weapons
Personal defense is not.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5hr ago
I have a cynical answer that I expect to get me in trouble with the moderators, because I am about to take a stand in defense of Bulverism.
Not for this, but for unmasking yourself. Someone else finally pointed out the obvious, and I am kicking myself for not seeing it.
Hlynka, I have told you this before, but I am hugely disappointed that rather than taking your ban like a man, or asking us to reinstate you, you keep creating alts. Good job that you managed to run this one for months and being actually rather flamingly obvious about it in retrospect and not getting tagged, but you're done now. We don't exert much effort to catch alts and some people think they are clever, clever little people bragging about how easy it is to recycle an alt every time you get banned, but it just shows you have no integrity and place no value on your word or reputation. You're there to troll, to shit up the place, to giggle and get your digs in before the mods swat you and you reboot. Hoorah, a winner is you. Yes, it's easy to do this. Eventually, however, everyone regresses to their mean.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
The unadjusted scores are still quite good; perhaps they're not as good as Massachussets but leading the second quintile ain't bad.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
The median teacher is a normie. Mathematically, this must be true- there are simply too many of them for it not to be.
But to be more specific, teachers are very very conformist women who are at least moderately good at school. If, going through a 'standard' American education system, you uncritically do what the system recommends at every point(and are smart enough to do so, but not smart enough for someone to recruit you out of it), you will probably wind up as a teacher. This is not a recipe for pushing back against retarded activist union bosses or doing hard work that your coworkers doubt the value of.
So no, Miss Smith, second grade teacher number three at literally who elementary that used to be named after a well-known but now problematic individual, does not bear responsibility for this proxy battle. It's hard to see how she even could. She took the job because she didn't think the default path pushed on her through very well, would rather go home after her shift than engage in politics but doesn't know how to say no. She probably likes believing that she's helping the kids in her classroom; she certainly likes the kids. She probably doesn't like her admins or union bosses but does whatever they say with no pushback- because she has never pushed back against anything in her life, ever. That the teaching profession is populated, on the 'grunt' level with the normiest, most submissive women in existence may not be good, but it is a failure of all of society rather than of those teachers themselves.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5hr ago
marinuso
5hr ago
Yes, suicide is bad. Ideally there would be no suicide at all. This is part of my point.
When we do something in an official manner, we thereby give it a stamp of approval. We should not approve bad things if we can avoid it. Because by doing so, we are saying that the bad thing shouldn't be considered as all that bad. We are shifting the norms and encouraging more of it. We can't always avoid this, but we should at least always try.
If someone's dying anyway, say with terminal cancer, and we artificially keep him alive at that point (which we've gotten quite good at), we are merely prolonging his suffering. At that point, sure, just end it humanely.
But this person (and see my other comment, there are more) was not actually dying. She was in fact physically healthy. There is no argument to be made that we are prolonging her suffering. We are not actively doing anything. There is no argument to be made about freedom either. If you are physically capable of killing yourself, you always have this option.
She could've ended her own life herself at any time. And that would still be bad, even if it truly is the least bad option it's still bad, but we would at least have avoided giving the act an official stamp of approval. And maybe she never would've killed herself, and then there would've been one less suicide. This is the point that I was trying to make.
And it does seem to be accelerating. I looked up the statistics (see my other comment for the sources). There were 14 euthanizations for purely psychiatric reasons in 2014. By 2024, this had grown to 219. In the same year, there were 1819 traditional suicides. So by now, for every ten suicides we're adding an eleventh.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
5hr ago
But like how much is too much MAID, is 10% too much? Is 50% too much? Define what your limit is.
Does the amount of death attributed to MAID even matter? If 96% of MAID recipients have a terminal illness, why do you care?
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5hr ago
It's also called "whole word". Amusingly, the Wikipedia page on it currently starts with a little editorializing in the opposite direction that you'd expect for Wikipedia:
Whole language is a philosophy of reading and a discredited[8] educational method originally developed for teaching literacy in English to young children.
"Discredited" dates back to May 2022. The citation goes here, which is clearly a biased source.
There's another citation to Jordan Peterson:
"You don't use whole word learning unless you're absolutely bloody clueless"
NewCharlesInCharge
5hr ago
I mean someone working on the site’s codebase, presumably with all the necessary credentials.
It makes for very short iteration times to run dev code locally connected to the prod database. That’s how we work on the front end code at Meta.
But I have no clue how people work on the code here.
FistfullOfCrows
5hr ago
Where to even start, the government used its tendrils in twitter and youtube/google/facebook to do its damndest censoring right wing voices/ gaslighitng the public about the origin of covid. They entirely suporessed biden's son's laptop shenanigans and the corrupt dealings with Borisma.
These mother fuckers tried to unperson and ruin Alex Jones. Hilldawg is still not in prison for the e-mail server and use of the state apparatus to try and paint Trump as a Putin controlled puppet.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
5hr ago
My take which I will double down is that I come out of what he makes feeling joy, twin peaks has a charm, the bad things for me serve as a backdrop that let me enjoy that, this is a very normie take.
I am nearly on episode 7 of Twin peaks, David Lynch the actor is very fun to watch too. All the attempts to state what the show really is about are very valid, he wanted people to have their own interpretations. I will watch fire walk wth me post season 2. I would want to hear @TowardsPanna s take on Lynch since he too meditates a lot and would have a very interesting perception because of that.
What other shows or movies capture the same thing. My recent favorite directors are Joachim Trier whose work is mostly modern day scandi land slice of life dramas and robert eggers who makes movies that celebrate the folklore of Europe with decadent environments. I think I may be interested in reading good murder mysteries now after watching the show instead of surfing
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5hr ago
I am fairly sure that even Bryan Caplan, when he makes his case against education, is not referring to primary education but to secondary (high school level) and post-secondary education. There is little doubt, IMO, that most people simply will not learn to read and write unless actually taught, and there are better (phonics) and worse (whole word) ways of teaching reading English. Same goes for arithmetic, though I suspect less so. Part of Freddie's "Education Doesn't Work 2.0" article is weaker than that; it is basically claiming education does work to larn you stuff but not to make you smarter, and thus doesn't change your relative position in society. Of course, even granting Freddie's thesis, this becomes false if Mississippi is doing the right thing and Illinois and Wisconsin are not; if that's true the Mississippi students will change position relative to Illinois and Wisconsin students.
Freddie does go on to say that no educational interventions work, and the Mississippi experience argues against that. But most of his evidence concerns older students. And it's quite likely the interventions he's referring to don't work. The reductio of the claim that educational interventions don't work is the claim that not teaching at all works as well as teaching, and that is clearly false -- but it does not mean that lesser claims are not true.
FistfullOfCrows
5hr ago
I'm frankly disappointed in Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Going back on their initial mockery of climate change; keeping their mouths shut on the frankly ridiculous clown world tier state of dems/ zombie Bidden. Where were they for the four years of nonstop gaslighting and censorship we endured?
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
If you mainly feel with your thoughts you probably have alexithymia, a surprisingly common condition
Why are we medicalizing this? It's common and not disabling. People should just go through life this way. It's 'normal human variation' not a 'condition'.
We medicalize way too much normal human variation. ADHD people should just... not become accountants and use the reminder/note taking functions in their phones instead of taking amphetamines. The mildly autistic should stop calling it that. Etc, etc. You don't need special accommodations for every human variation. Maybe just accept that not everything is for you.
Throwaway05
5hr ago
Okay, not a train. That's an asshole thing to do. If you're going to commit suicide, don't involve other people.
This is surprisingly hard to do. Someone needs to find the body and unless you plan carefully this can easily be a random bystander or group of random bystanders (and planning carefully is hard when you are suicidal).
Usually EMS and healthcare get involved and seeing someone who has committed suicide can be deeply harmful (especially if it's gruesome like a gunshot to the head). Often they'll have to run a code on the body even if it's clearly dead which is....awful.
Then you have to think about the family and friends of the deceased. Having a close contact or family commit suicide is a risk factor for suicide it hurts people around you in a way that just dying doesn't.
haroldbkny
6hr ago
I've never understood Parker and Stone when it comes to their politics, or at least not over the last 13 years since they moved on from their early episode libertarian leanings. Why have they gone easy on leftists so much since the rise of wokeness (note: I haven't consistently watched the last few seasons of South Park, so I may be wrong about recent years. But I remember them soft balling progressives from 2013 through 2017ish), and repeatedly claim that Trump is the worst person ever, then turn around and awkwardly claim they're Republicans. And most of the episodes I've seen of South Park over the last 5 years just seem so random and incoherent. I almost feel like they don't really have any convictions, don't really understand the current issues, and are just randomly throwing whatever elements they feel like together in episodes, while trying to pass it off as relevant political commentary.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
I think the blue tribe ideological reason for not teaching reading don't have much to do with the idea that it's racist. It's an ideological fixation with teachers always being right. Teachers don't like phonics and self-proclaimed education experts say it shouldn't work- these things may be related, but they're both there and they're both more important than whether it actually works. To these people 'educating kids' isn't really the point of public schools- although it's ideal- public schools exist to spend an ever-increasing amount of money, provide jobs for college educated women, and separate kids from their parents. It's unsurprising that red states who care more about the kids learning than about using the public schools for evil can close the gap rapidly when discovering techniques that work.
Friedliche DeBoer (of the South African Boers perhaps?)
No, DeBoer is just Dutch for the farmer(the South African Boers were originally named this to refer to their supporting themselves by farming, in contrast to east india company employees). It's not a particularly uncommon surname and Dutch names are scattered throughout the US white population from either small waves of immigration or original settlement.
Throwaway05
6hr ago
Absolutely yes!
People have so much more variety in the way they view the world than you might imagine based on the fact that most people end up doing more or less the same things.
It gets super interesting in the case of legitimate pathology like personality disorders and speaks to some interesting things about the human condition (ex: true sociopaths with zero anxiety. They really aren't human, and it tells a bit about what anxiety is for).
As you note nearly everyone here is not normal at all and has features like super high ability to decouple, and a common fail state for people like us is to assume people with low ability to decouple aren't actually intelligent.
Another fun one is the way different cultures and native language speakers interact with the world can result in some foreignness. The results are generally mostly recognizable societies but a lot of Russians, Asians, Middle Easterners etc just experience the world in a way that is unexpectedly foreign.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
6hr ago
I think for three years I watched Robby Suave at The Hill tee off on the Teacher's Union for fighting against phonics based teaching, despite all the science and decades of outcomes showing that whole language teaching is a miserable failure. But teachers hate it, because it's rote and boring, and they insist on narcissistically avoiding all unpleasant aspects of their job. Despite being responsible for the education of our next generation. So their union fights phonics based teacher curriculums tooth and nail.
At least that's what Robby's reporting showed consistently over the years. It was a bit of a hobby horse for him, and an area where his libertarian brain really found a nit to pick with the "trust the science" blue team.
The point I'm drifting towards is that this is really a proxy battle against teachers. The profession is overrun with activist LARPing as educators, their union is controlled by a lesbian activist, and to whatever degree education is occurring, it's haphazard and inertial based on decades of diminishing institutional knowledge. It's a low pay, highly political profession, and increasingly only true believers are attracted and willing to stay in the profession. The ones that treat the trials and tribulations of the profession as a test of faith for their activism are the only ones that thrive.
wayfarer
6hr ago
oh, so this time it was intentional joke
(you would be surprised how many people actually believe it)
marinuso
6hr ago
she's earned the right to kill herself.
She's always had it, and never lost it. This was part of my point. It's the official approval that I disapprove of.
If you care to criticize this, then just about nothing in psychiatry remains standing.
This is not the way in which I meant it. By outsiders I meant the general public, society as a whole, not her psychiatrists, who I'm sure knew what they were doing and tried their best. Because even if I grant that this was the right decision in this particular individual case, I still oppose it because of the example that it sets.
The picture that is shown is of a (physically at least) healthy 29-year-old, who has people who care about her. When someone like that commits suicide, it should not get a societal stamp of approval. Let alone that we should do it for her. This will cause the societal norm around suicide to shift.
I think that we shouldn't be giving the general public the idea that society approves of just stepping out of life if you're not feeling it. I grant you that that's not actually what happened in this case. But that is what it looks like. You know what the fancy words mean, but remember that to a layman, "depression" means "not feeling it".
And in fact, I've just found another depressed 29 year old woman who was euthanized. I forgot the name of the first one, googled "euthanized depressed 29 year old" and immediately found another. This made me go and look up the statistics. Here they are, in Dutch, but summarizing: in 2014 there were 14 cases of euthanasia for purely psychiatric reasons. This is the first year for which there is data, so presumably the first year this was even done. By 2024 this had grown to 219. Line go up fairly quickly.
Meanwhile, there were 1819 "traditional" suicides in 2024. So by now, for every ten suicides we're adding an eleventh. More than that.
This really looks to me like official approval causing the social norms to shift, in turn causing the psychiatrists too (who are after all also part of society) to be more free in granting approvals, causing the norm to shift further.
Good for them.
I haven't read the others, but as I recall Freddie's position is explicitly that, yes, there are better and worse teaching methods, and that teaching can and sometimes does improve. And that's good! More kids can read when teaching improves! But to the extent that the improvements are important and sustainable, everyone else will pick up on it fast enough, and then everyone will be back in their relative positions again, but now with more people able to read (again: good and worth doing).
The test for that is whether in a decade, (assuming people still care how many kids can read and haven't just switched to voice interfaces for a large chunk of the population) Mississippi ends up exactly where you would expect them to be, based on their demographics. They already have to adjust for demographics to look really impressive. Tenth is good, but not groundbreaking.
You can also get programs that are good but not sustainable, like KIPP. It's sort of sustainable, because New York schools in general are able to absorb all the burnt out teachers leaving there, and supply a constant stream of new, talented, excited teachers. But it's not sustainable at scale, you can't just replace all the normal schools in a state with KIPP schools, because in addition to teacher burnout, you have to have family buy in, which is a limited resource. I suppose whatever Mississippi is doing is reasonably sustainable, or they would have flamed out by now.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
6hr ago
I think I binged Twin Peaks maybe 3 or 4 years ago when it was on Netflix? Then rented Fire Walk With Me on Amazon, and purchased the bluray for The Return.
You really feel the gap where Lynch wasn't involved in season 2, but when he comes back he absolutely fills the show with a presence you couldn't put your finger on, but could feel the absence of. Then The Return cranks that quality up to 11 and is a massive impressionistic mind fuck.
I've seen analysis that try to distill was Twin Peaks, and especially The Return, are "really" about. And then I've seen the rebuttal where you need to shut the fuck up and let the feelings and impressions the show creates wash over you. Don't try to reason what it's about, intuit it.
I really should watch Twin Peaks again, it's probably one of my favorite shows of all time that I felt I got the most out of. And you're right, it's spiritual message is very much looking into the darkness of the world and choosing love anyways.
NYTReader
7hr ago
This guy summed up a lot of my internal thoughts though.
The "anti-vaxxers" and “conspiracy theorists” were not "right about everything".
Apart from Biden's senility, what other low-hanging fruit were there from the administration? South Park didn't attack Dems per se, but it did mock Dem-adjacent policies. And what other show makes fun of fat black women?
MAGA and its menagerie of spokespersons are, unfortunately, cartoonishly easy to lampoon. There are "serious" right-wing intellectuals on Twitter and Substack, but these people are not represented as the public face of MAGA.
There's about 4 million primary and secondary school teachers in the US, compared to about 260 million adults. That leaves plenty of room for non-normieness among teachers.
More options
Context Copy link