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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • I have a kid, I spent 10 years working with kids professionally, and I agree with this dude.

    In fact, lots of people, myself included, are drawn to leftist anarchism BECAUSE of lessons we learned about the failures of authoritarianism in school from parents and teachers. It’s always super annoying to see parents and teachers settling comfortably into an authoritarian role with their own kids, after hearing them wax emphatically about the effects of authoritarianism in adult society. I’m surrounded by hypocrites, and it’s not harmless. It’s like everybody either forget what it’s like to be kids, or think that the lessons of adulthood give them license to stop caring about those “little” problems, (and be fricken condescending in the process) when actually they just find it “easier” or it “feels safer” to them.

    I have friends who we’re excellent teachers, but left the school system in absolute despair because they went in intending to be collaborative, entertaining teachers and passionate advocates for the kids in their care… Only to run up against all the bureaucratic walls the education system throws up to prevent exactly that and create as much conformity as possible… And then the icing on the cake is the vast majority of parents who just don’t get it, Don’t even try to get it, Don’t listen, know what they know, their opinions are their opinions and talking to them is just effing hopeless.

    Whenever I’ve dealt with really difficult children, 9 times out of 10 you meet the parents and you’re like “Oh, this all makes sense!” (I can actually only think of three exceptions and two of those were clinical sociopaths). Or you go to work with a school (I’ve worked with and at dozens of schools) and you’re like “Oh, I understand why the kids from this school that I see in my program are always behaving in X, Y and Z dysfunctional ways. How is everyone this clueless and incompetent??” I have watched teachers utterly fail to teach or connect with the kids in their charge, and then watched those same teachers play politics and keep their positions while teachers who are doing a great job get let go (or forced out through social bs) because they want to ignore all that crap. I have had teachers come up to me when I’m running a program or event at their school and had them say “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I saw the kids in your program and those are all the most difficult children we have!” And I’m like “these kids are fine! You’re an authoritarian in an authoritarian environment, aren’t you??”

    And I’m literally surrounded by adults who like think they know what they’re doing, and aren’t even trying to get it and MAN do they have opinions they want to share and it pisses me the fuck off.

    My kid creates super good boundaries, he emphasizes kindness in communication in ways I was totally unable to do it his age, he advocates for himself (and other kids) like someone a decade older, and if he’s on his phone in class, it’s because the teacher is failing to engage the class. End of discussion. When I see that situation, I’m almost always like “I could teach this class and these kids would not be on their phones, and I have the experience under my belt to prove it.” (And I have seen shit like that).






  • Yes, but nothing real came of them. The US government has a long and well recorded history of spending money on pseudoscience, even well after it’s been debunked, as long as there are True Believers in the chain of command.

    And the conspiracy theory community has a long and even more dramatic history of taking those mole hills and turning them into mountains (especially if grifters can sell books and / or T-shirts and / or weird copper sculptures that are supposed to “protect” you from it).

    Look, I grew up with parents (and a wide community) who believed in psychic shit, crystal healing, telepathy, getting messages from the Akoshic record, what evs. It’s NOT real and also believing it is NOT harmless. You’re gonna find PLENTY of misinformation about what people “believe” but if you look into any of it, you’re going to discover that somewhere along the line someone channeled something or someone like David Icke or Garahm Hancock or Rudolph Steiner or Drunvalo Melchizedek or Raël is involved, or someone is selling tickets to their lecture or psychic seminar.



  • That sounds like pseudoscience to me.

    On the other hand, there have been rather dramatic advances in brain / computer interfaces and using machine learning to interpret electrical signals from the human brain. The good news there is that every brain is different, the machines need to learn each brain individually (a model trained to pull dream images out of my brain will pull just gibberish out of yours).

    So far, the researchers would need your close cooperation in order to train a machine to understand even a little bit of what’s going on in your mind. This tech is nowhere near being used for interrogation.