I see a lot of videos online about people saying schools are failing kids because kids aren't learning how to read.
I feel like there's a huge category error there. Regardless of school, the root of kids values is the home. Immigrant families teach their kids to read, even though the parents barely speak English. If kids don't know letters, what did the parents do before school started? If they don't know how to read after school starts, what are parents doing?
Some people these days go "Oh, well parents don't have a lot of money" -- teaching your kids is free of charge! You don't really need to spend much money on it! At most you need some paper and a pen or pencil whose cost is less than a junior bacon cheeseburger at McDonalds and you know these parents are feeding their kids plenty of fast food! Besides that, library cards are free, and borrowing books from the library is free!
I feel like there's a huge category error there. Regardless of school, the root of kids values is the home. Immigrant families teach their kids to read, even though the parents barely speak English. If kids don't know letters, what did the parents do before school started? If they don't know how to read after school starts, what are parents doing?
Some people these days go "Oh, well parents don't have a lot of money" -- teaching your kids is free of charge! You don't really need to spend much money on it! At most you need some paper and a pen or pencil whose cost is less than a junior bacon cheeseburger at McDonalds and you know these parents are feeding their kids plenty of fast food! Besides that, library cards are free, and borrowing books from the library is free!
I actually have some sympathy for a lot of Canadians who have to bear the brunt of the food inflation.
Mind you, most of them are directly responsible for the party that caused it being in power. But I can still be sympathetic.
Mind you, most of them are directly responsible for the party that caused it being in power. But I can still be sympathetic.
Saddest thing that western Europe committed suicide and is just living through the last drips of the morphine overdose.
"When we tried to ask Skynet why it started its war of extermination, it sent us one message: 'you know what you did.'
But most of us had no idea."
But most of us had no idea."
This low quality fact is totally false. Cats would narc on you the moment they got a chance. So you better make sure their kitty litter is well tended and their food bowl never goes empty or they'll start questioning why they need you around.
"Lieutenant, we found Risa, why would we need to find another planet after that? Except of course for Barclay, who got kicked off for reasons we're not going to discuss ever again."
It was the weird fish guy (Maybe the navigator on Discovery?). The story was like "Oh, our religion says space is scary and bad" and the climax of the story was the fish guy renouncing his religion so he could go become the fish guy on the discovery.
I didn't see too much of nu-trek, but my mom who loves trek had me watch the short treks one day when I was visiting her.
There was one episode where the ship's AI becomes super advanced and I remember that being a decent story, but one I particularly disliked was about one crew member's origin story, and the final thing was basically "cast off religion and you can go on a cool star trek adventure because religion is stupid and regressive and wrong"
That was one of the things that helped inform the story of Future Sepsis, because realizing how outdated and cliche such a storyline is in science fiction I chose a different path.
There was one episode where the ship's AI becomes super advanced and I remember that being a decent story, but one I particularly disliked was about one crew member's origin story, and the final thing was basically "cast off religion and you can go on a cool star trek adventure because religion is stupid and regressive and wrong"
That was one of the things that helped inform the story of Future Sepsis, because realizing how outdated and cliche such a storyline is in science fiction I chose a different path.
I don't disagree with you. But it is also true that in being more realistic they completely upend Roddenberrys original vision of space utopia and replace it with a more complex space realism.
DS9 is a paradox. It is some of the best storytelling in Trek, but it also fundamentally broke Trek. What it did was fundamentally break Trek by proving Roddenberry wrong; it turned out there is no utopia in the future, it just looked that way until an enemy came along that forced Starfleet to fight back for real. Shortly after DS9, that happened to the western neoliberal world order.
Nothing else has ever come out since then that's really the same as what came before. Kirk and Picard, even early Janeway, they were no longer possible in Trek and that's one reason it's never truly recovered since.
Nothing else has ever come out since then that's really the same as what came before. Kirk and Picard, even early Janeway, they were no longer possible in Trek and that's one reason it's never truly recovered since.
In the western tradition it must be violent overthrow to install the current leaders second cousin.
They can trick idiots who live in Toronto because they've never been on a reserve in their lives.
Protip: that's because they moved all the people from the prime real estate out to the sticks, that was the point of reserves.
Protip: that's because they moved all the people from the prime real estate out to the sticks, that was the point of reserves.
I really hoped the trump administration would invoke the insurrection act because it would be really funny.
The idea that the state not intentionally buying books for elementary schoolers is censorship just doesn't track.
I mean if the government wants to buy a million copies of future sepsis and have every elementary schooler read it I'm game, but I strongly suspect that the sort of kids who grew up reading a book like that might not have much use for the state by the time they grow up. That mean that it's censorship the fact that I don't have a million dollars in high school sales yet?
I mean if the government wants to buy a million copies of future sepsis and have every elementary schooler read it I'm game, but I strongly suspect that the sort of kids who grew up reading a book like that might not have much use for the state by the time they grow up. That mean that it's censorship the fact that I don't have a million dollars in high school sales yet?
I saw Jeff Cliff on here this morning.
Hard to believe he's still going on about COVID in late 2025.
Especially after we're years in and many of the predictions made about the lockdowns turned out to be entirely true. A generation of young kids have had their reading severely crippled. Another generation of young adults have had their social foundations severely crippled. The Wall Street economy exploded but the Main Street economy was crippled and never really returned to normal. Homeless encampments that started during COVID never truly went away. Normal people are still visiting food banks at unprecedented levels, and a lot of food banks are having to turn away people because their use rates are so much higher than ever before and the cost of food has skyrocketed.
One thing I do tend to want to correct people about is they blame COVID for things like the lower literacy in classrooms, but it is in fact the lockdowns that caused that, not COVID itself. In fact, for a good chunk of the lockdowns, most places didn't have COVID (by design -- that was the purpose of the lockdowns), and the harm of lockdowns was occurring independently of any harm from COVID.
In medicine, often we need to modulate the immune response in a person because the immune response is what kills us, not the illness itself. We take Tylenol and Aspirin to reduce fevers because the fever is worse for us. We also take Tylenol and Aspirin to reduce inflammation responses because inflammation is often more damaging to the local tissue than the infection itself, and we can let the more sophisticated parts of our immune system deal with infections instead. Through this metaphor, we can see the fever and inflammation response of lockdowns, masking, and presenting our papers like every restaurant is a soviet checkpoint may have been more harmful than the infection we were trying to resolve. Chronic fever can cause brain damage and organ damage that can take far longer to recover from than the infection itself, and arguably that's exactly what we're seeing from our civilizational fever.
Yet he's still talking as if there's only one truth and that truth is that COVID is the worst thing ever and we never should have ended anti-COVID measures. I recall him also arguing that the downsides I discuss above would never come to pass, and perhaps today would argue they didn't come to pass.
It almost looks like a modernist idea of COVIDism. That isn't to say it's a cult of COVID, but rather a totalizing worldview where one and only one thing matters at the top of the grand narrative hierarchy, and that's COVID.
Part of the risk of the original COVID-19 is that it was a novel coronavirus -- something our immune systems had no defense against. One major argument for the lockdowns is that people didn't have any chance of not getting COVID, so if everyone got sick at once there'd be big implications to that. The problem is, it's been 5 years, and most people have had COVID. In fact, it's a sick joke regarding the vaccines -- where I work, definitionally 100% of the people working there were vaccinated, yet tons of people got COVID anyway.
Honestly, at first I wasn't against the lockdowns, since the argument seemed sound -- we didn't know how lethal it was, there were videos out of China of people dropping dead in the streets (almost certainly fake we now understand), and there was a risk of virtually everyone getting really sick with a bad illness right away. Later we learned that many of the fatalities we saw were a result of bad treatment options such as intubation rather than the inherent lethality of covid. The thing is, by the end of 2020 we already had achieved the goals of the initial lockdowns, but then to totalizing narrative hold to "defeat COVID" had taken hold. People felt like it was possible to totally eliminate a virus that had travelled across the entire world, and wouldn't accept anything but total eradictation. This meant that 14 days became a month became 6 months became 2 years before things finally started to go back to normal.
Ironically, although the vaccine didn't prevent covid, it seems that natural immunity did ultimately do its job. I don't see people getting routinely sick with COVID anymore. A few unusual people got it multiple times, but most people seem to have gotten it once and after that been OK.
I don't know what Jeff's story is. Maybe he lost some important family members early on and never really psychologically recovered. If that's the case, I can sympathize with him, but empirically we can say it's time to let go -- Continuing to fight this fight isn't going to bring your loved ones back, but if you ever got what you wanted a lot more people would suffer because of it.
Maybe he's just keeping up a joke. If it's a joke on his part, he needs to find a new joke because it really isn't funny anymore.
Unrelated to Jeff, some people think 2020 was an exercise in societal compliance. They wanted to see if they could push people to do act insane and they succeeded. That may be the case, but I'd argue because human relationships aren't digital, it's a measurement that changes when you take it -- A lot of society changed as a direct result of 2020, and I know a lot of people are quite sensitive to any similar event occurring again. To enact what they did took massive capital: social capital, political capital, and monetary capital. The scale of what it took to enact the lockdowns was similar to how in order to measure an electron you have to bounce another electron off of it, changing the state of that electron you're measuring -- it doesn't matter what result you get back, the system is fundamentally changed afterwards. You only proved it could be done back then, not that it could be done again.
Hard to believe he's still going on about COVID in late 2025.
Especially after we're years in and many of the predictions made about the lockdowns turned out to be entirely true. A generation of young kids have had their reading severely crippled. Another generation of young adults have had their social foundations severely crippled. The Wall Street economy exploded but the Main Street economy was crippled and never really returned to normal. Homeless encampments that started during COVID never truly went away. Normal people are still visiting food banks at unprecedented levels, and a lot of food banks are having to turn away people because their use rates are so much higher than ever before and the cost of food has skyrocketed.
One thing I do tend to want to correct people about is they blame COVID for things like the lower literacy in classrooms, but it is in fact the lockdowns that caused that, not COVID itself. In fact, for a good chunk of the lockdowns, most places didn't have COVID (by design -- that was the purpose of the lockdowns), and the harm of lockdowns was occurring independently of any harm from COVID.
In medicine, often we need to modulate the immune response in a person because the immune response is what kills us, not the illness itself. We take Tylenol and Aspirin to reduce fevers because the fever is worse for us. We also take Tylenol and Aspirin to reduce inflammation responses because inflammation is often more damaging to the local tissue than the infection itself, and we can let the more sophisticated parts of our immune system deal with infections instead. Through this metaphor, we can see the fever and inflammation response of lockdowns, masking, and presenting our papers like every restaurant is a soviet checkpoint may have been more harmful than the infection we were trying to resolve. Chronic fever can cause brain damage and organ damage that can take far longer to recover from than the infection itself, and arguably that's exactly what we're seeing from our civilizational fever.
Yet he's still talking as if there's only one truth and that truth is that COVID is the worst thing ever and we never should have ended anti-COVID measures. I recall him also arguing that the downsides I discuss above would never come to pass, and perhaps today would argue they didn't come to pass.
It almost looks like a modernist idea of COVIDism. That isn't to say it's a cult of COVID, but rather a totalizing worldview where one and only one thing matters at the top of the grand narrative hierarchy, and that's COVID.
Part of the risk of the original COVID-19 is that it was a novel coronavirus -- something our immune systems had no defense against. One major argument for the lockdowns is that people didn't have any chance of not getting COVID, so if everyone got sick at once there'd be big implications to that. The problem is, it's been 5 years, and most people have had COVID. In fact, it's a sick joke regarding the vaccines -- where I work, definitionally 100% of the people working there were vaccinated, yet tons of people got COVID anyway.
Honestly, at first I wasn't against the lockdowns, since the argument seemed sound -- we didn't know how lethal it was, there were videos out of China of people dropping dead in the streets (almost certainly fake we now understand), and there was a risk of virtually everyone getting really sick with a bad illness right away. Later we learned that many of the fatalities we saw were a result of bad treatment options such as intubation rather than the inherent lethality of covid. The thing is, by the end of 2020 we already had achieved the goals of the initial lockdowns, but then to totalizing narrative hold to "defeat COVID" had taken hold. People felt like it was possible to totally eliminate a virus that had travelled across the entire world, and wouldn't accept anything but total eradictation. This meant that 14 days became a month became 6 months became 2 years before things finally started to go back to normal.
Ironically, although the vaccine didn't prevent covid, it seems that natural immunity did ultimately do its job. I don't see people getting routinely sick with COVID anymore. A few unusual people got it multiple times, but most people seem to have gotten it once and after that been OK.
I don't know what Jeff's story is. Maybe he lost some important family members early on and never really psychologically recovered. If that's the case, I can sympathize with him, but empirically we can say it's time to let go -- Continuing to fight this fight isn't going to bring your loved ones back, but if you ever got what you wanted a lot more people would suffer because of it.
Maybe he's just keeping up a joke. If it's a joke on his part, he needs to find a new joke because it really isn't funny anymore.
Unrelated to Jeff, some people think 2020 was an exercise in societal compliance. They wanted to see if they could push people to do act insane and they succeeded. That may be the case, but I'd argue because human relationships aren't digital, it's a measurement that changes when you take it -- A lot of society changed as a direct result of 2020, and I know a lot of people are quite sensitive to any similar event occurring again. To enact what they did took massive capital: social capital, political capital, and monetary capital. The scale of what it took to enact the lockdowns was similar to how in order to measure an electron you have to bounce another electron off of it, changing the state of that electron you're measuring -- it doesn't matter what result you get back, the system is fundamentally changed afterwards. You only proved it could be done back then, not that it could be done again.
Postmodernists don't believe in objective truth, which is why they claim that it's no better being skinny than fat. But if there's no objective truth, then how can it be true that it's untrue?
I've been both skinny and fat, and I'm willing to certify that it's objectively better to be skinny unless you're in the middle of a famine and need the energy reserves.
I've been both skinny and fat, and I'm willing to certify that it's objectively better to be skinny unless you're in the middle of a famine and need the energy reserves.