Prelude to the Apocalypse

[quash]

Speaking of "academics" and YouTube, I'll repost this gem for posterity:

https://youtu.be/dxE_UUrbMNA

Billions more for Israel or $1000 a month. The choice is yours.

[BryanM]

I'd like to hear some comforting lies that Biden is going to JEB out again, please.

Also some mocking Robert for standing on things not meant to be stood on.

[Mischief Maker]

Well I was seriously worried last weekend when Biden announced he was considering Stacey Abrams as his running mate. I was scared that would be an actually effective strategy against Bernie and was seriously disappointed in Abrams.

Turns out my fears were unfounded, Biden didn't even think to ask Abrams about it before announcing.

And she responded on The View by telling Biden in cautious politician-speak to go fuck himself.

[BryanM]

Peter Daou's strange journey has been the only thing that's given me any hope for the future of the human species.

And it looks like comrade Lucy Flores is the first one to talk about Creepy Joe. She got published in The Cut, primarily a women's fashion magazine. Which means she was rejected by all large papers of note.

Warren asked how she can hold her own against @realDonaldTrump: "You know I was a state champion debater for two years in a row."

I was a soap box derby champ, and now I’m taking those skills to the pit fighting ring where we fight to the death.

[OdiousTrident]

Okay, here's someone with academic credentials talking about the subject.

I guarantee this guy is hurting the progressive cause.

As I think I said before... People that think the free market can solve anything got a foothold with lobbyists, corporations and the business community. Socialists and Marxists got a foothold in Hollywood and academia. Both of these groups spend more time thinking about ideology and hypotheticals than actually helping people.

The fact that Wolff can't see he is describing himself as well as his opponents is SO SCARY to me.

[BryanM]

Socialists and Marxists got a foothold in Hollywood and academia.

Socialists do not have "a foothold" in Hollywood besides Danny Glover and Daniel Devito. And, less-so, Silverman and MacFarlane. Every single other actor upheld their material self interest. Which is what all of us do.

Did you not live through 2016? It wasn't even close. Every single one of these people from Ellen down only cared about their own personal bank account. Even Bill Burr had a huge meltdown the other week over the suggestion of a comedian that makes 25 million a year only making 21 million instead every single year. And he's one of the better ones.

The entire point of Rachel's Russiagate (including SNL singing to an effigy of Mueller - the entire edifice around it) is to excuse the endless failures of the Democratic party and distract us from raising her taxes and impeding the amount of power her boss (Comcast) wields. It could make $0 in advertising revenue, and just like Fox News or Rush Limbaugh would continue forever. Because getting to control the model of reality the cultural-normie people have in their heads, still makes them far more money than they spend on it.

The fact that Wolff can't see he is describing himself as well as his opponents is SO SCARY to me.

Rich is getting paid to bible thump to people they need more austerity in exchange for his paycheck?

That's news to me.

[Rob]

Why is the mainstream media pushing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

The entire point of Rachel's Russiagate

The point was Watergate LARPing. They failed spectacularly and it was hilarious. If they wanted to simply serve up a distraction, they would have done something that didn't needlessly jeopardize their brand. Narrative control isn't maintained by auto-torpedoing credibility. Of course the MSM/Maddow equivalent of InfoWarriors will hang on.

[Mischief Maker]

Why is the mainstream media pushing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

A creepy sexual fixation.

Like a kid pulling a girl's pigtails because he likes her and doesn't know how to say it, only the kid in this example is a grotesque middle aged trust fund baby.

By "mainstream media" you were talking about Fox news, right?

[quash]

A creepy sexual fixation.

It seems we've moved on from politicians we'd have a beer with to politicians we'd take home from the bar. Dwayne Johnson being our next president doesn't seem so far fetched when you consider this. I just hope he runs with Mick Foley as VP and brings back the Rock n' Sock Connection.

[BryanM]

Biden isn't announcing this week. Or next week. Maybe he'll announce the week that comes after that week.

Jesus almighty, I understand why he dodged the financial quarter so he could go in "cleaner" to the first debate. Why in god's name isn't he running already. Name recognition is everything, and he's the best chance that they've got. This makes no sense.

If he's so damn toxic that his faction thinks he does better not-running than actually-running, maybe he should not run.

Why is the mainstream media pushing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

That she gets any significant airtime is indeed a red flag. I consider my speculation on the matter very weak at this stage. Maybe these people are so out of touch they think they can use her as a punching bag to fight back against populism.

There's been ~50 congress critters who've supported Medicare For All and not killing everyone with climate change for decades. Who got zero air time.

Maybe they know it doesn't matter because it's too late and we're all going to be dead soon? Heat exhaustion on crops or killer robots, they've got us by the balls either way right?

[Specineff]

Someone please tell me this was all just a series of jokes being cracked and the video is being taken out of context:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0s5Zqmb09g

[Rob]

Diversity is our ultimate strength, Alaska edition. Days later: "our kids can't read".

Anchorage shows Reagan was right: Immigration and diversity make us stronger

But qualifications aside, the fact remains that as of Farrell’s study in 2014, Anchorage had the three most diverse districts in the country, and the top 26 most diverse schools, routinely cited as a positive aspect of the city’s development, of living here.

Our children must read by 9 years old

Right now, Alaska’s public-school children are ranked last in the nation in fourth-grade reading proficiency, a key indicator used to measure academic success. In terms of school years, they are as much as a full year behind their counterparts in other states.
...
Students who cannot read well almost never catch up and their future is in peril. Statistics compiled by groups like ExcelinEd are sobering. Students who cannot read by the end of the third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school. High school dropouts make up 75 percent of food stamp recipients and 90 percent of those on welfare. Nearly 85 percent of teenagers in the juvenile justice system cannot read to learn, and seven out of 10 adult prisoners cannot read above a fourth-grade level.

Not a problem.

[BryanM]

I remember my elementary school had a student mentoring program of sorts. When I was in the fourth grade, I'd read with this first grader kid once a week. Hope she's still doing ok. Probably wouldn't enjoy having a president that tells her that she's subhuman and worthless.

The United States ranks roughly dead last in education among developed, non-vassal states. Because the Goldwater dictatorship of the last 40 years didn't make it a priority. Either that, or we're just inherently and magically a garbage country. One or the other or both, take your pick.

None of this is new or interesting. Blame the immi'gants that make up a far larger proportion of the countries kicking our asses. Never blame ourselves or our own policy objectives. Never improve things for us, just make them worse for a scapegoat. Any scapegoat, it doesn't really matter who.

As long as it isn't Mr.Burns. He's a cool guy and not responsible for our education system. Despite the fact they're the only ones who have any power to do anything about it.

[Obscura]

You are aware that educational achievement stats are basically just racial demographic stats, right? The US has more hispanics and blacks than any other first world nation.

(Fun fact: when normalized for demographics, funding per student is inversely correlated with student achievement. Spending more money actually makes public schools worse.)

[BryanM]

Yes Obscura, having more money leads to education actually being able to make a tangible difference in one's life. Thank you, but we all know that. A peasant can never make a living as a rocket scientist. The caste system does indeed force them to pick turnips their entire lives.

Spending more money actually makes public schools worse.

Nah, it has zero impact either way on most vocations. School funding coming from local property taxes has a correlation, but the school having the money isn't the causation. It's the households of the kids having a sufficient amount of money that is the key factor.

Lectures are the absolute most worthless shit way to transmit information and the fact they've persisted this long another testament to how much we deserve to go extinct and let someone else inherit the planet.

[Mischief Maker]

Fuck your maga hats, Bernie's sending me free stickers!

[BryanM]

He sent me a free book four years ago and that's why I know about his long struggle against the liberals. (I sure hope he gave you one, too.)

He also just reminded me of how the maternal mortality rate of black mothers is 4x that of white mothers and infant mortality of black babies is 2x that of white babies. I guess the just-world liberals will explain it away at their inability to learn how to poop out babies correctly or something - which is the fundamental problem with quibbling over details with these people. Making things better isn't the fundamental goal of the opposing liberal. It's making themselves feel comfortable with the world exactly as it is, and to make them feel good about their complicity with the regime.

Whether it's a person who can pat themselves on the back for being for Biden over Trump, 'cause Biden doesn't wave around a visible erection (all that much) about his racism or sexism. Or the kind of Trump supporter that has to create their own narrative of why getting excited over these erections is a good thing - whatever. It is a waste of time to engage with such imaginary Harry Potter nonsense.

Not a single mind on the planet has ever been changed by the similar chewbacca defense tactic of demanding a candidate's "tax returns", shit's just a waste of everyone's time.

[Rob]

If you open the borders, there's a lot of poverty in this world, and you're going to have people from all over the world. And I don't think that's something that we can do at this point. Can't do it.

Just say shithole countries Bernie.

[Mischief Maker]

That's right, Rob! See how much you share common values with Bernie Sanders? You should vote for him!

[JBC]

That's a hard Trump 2020, shmups.

[ED-057]

Lectures are the absolute most worthless shit way to transmit information

How do you figure?

In the context of school, I think it's safe to say that lectures were the aspect I got the most from. Unless you count the "life lessons" like "people suck and should be avoided whenever possible" but I learned those early on and could have done without the many additional years of reinforcement. School textbooks are written to be as boring as possible. I'm not sure I remember a single word from them. A teacher giving a lecture may also be boring, but many are actually decent at it. The only other stuff we did was play dumb games and build crap out of popsicle sticks. I recall that a lot of kids claimed to prefer "hands-on" learning, but I always figured that just meant that they would rather build crap out of popsicle sticks for the sake of wasting time, or it was their excuse as to why they failed at the "three Rs."

Lectures may not be the most efficient way to communicate. Which is why I generally don't waste my time watching a youtube video of a talking head when I can read an article that contains equivalent information instead (and even skip the fluff and get right to salient part). But considering how many videos of talking heads there are now, and how many people do watch them, I'd say that the lecture is undergoing a renaissance. IMO, something like Adam Garrie and George Galloway's History Boys is comparable to a lecture one would get from a top-notch history teacher.

[BryanM]

How do you figure?

Well, at its core it is a presentation that would be more efficient written down in a book or recorded in a video, which can be referred back to as much as necessary. It's been rendered obsolete for a long time now.

More specifically, I think back to math class where the teacher would solve multiple examples on the board, which probably wasn't the most effective way to help the kids who were behind. The stragglers tend to be the kind who didn't learn a few important things, or had forgotten them. Giving a demonstration of The Newest Thing isn't effective if they're missing critical chunks of information. You have to go through everyone one by one to get everyone who needs it up to speed.

I remember a guy who was next to me in Geometry, completely lost. He asked for help, I found that he didn't know that equations described lines. I showed him how to chart them over a few minutes (about a minute for me to explain, the rest for him to digest it and show back to me that he got it), and he did great that year.

A reference is just a starting point. If you can't do anything with it, or have additional connections to make it stick in your head, nothing permanent is gained.

School textbooks are written to be as boring as possible.

This is something that is quite infuriating, yeah. If you really want to see the most boring thing ever, try watching one of those math lectures PBS runs in the middle of the day meant for people who need to get a GED.

It's the complete antithesis of joy; hardly any wonder our country sucks at math. And it doesn't need to be that way - Square One was a splendid show for rudimentary math concepts.

The only other stuff we did was play dumb games and build crap out of popsicle sticks.

The 'ole "school as a daycare" problem. It really doesn't take 13 years to learn geometry or what a pronoun is...

But I guess that isn't too bad.

We (the internet) has been talking a little bit more about basic income since Yang has been pushing it a bit. A lot of talk about why this would be appealing to the average hardcore 4-channer - they're alienated by society and this dream of checking out of it completely is only natural. A bag of money now is certainly more impactful to them than the medicare they'll need in a dark uncertain future 1 day or 5 decades from now.

It occurred to me that "free college" could be a way to actually meet people with similar interests in the blood and flesh. In the neofeudal future of robots, I guess social meetings to play baseball/build unnecessary houses/play MTG/etc would be a primary function of that type of gathering space for most humans. It'd probably be psychologically healthier to incentivize people to do that if they want, then pay them to stay alone at home all day.

[Mischief Maker]

Just got back from the Bernie rally in Madison!

It was outdoors and the weather was shit but there was still a big crowd. I'm a tall guy but I still had to stand on my tiptoes to see him. He did his one and only speech and the crowd loved it as usual.

Everybody lavished affection on my dog because Bernie supporters are the nicest people in the world.

[Durandal]

[BryanM]

Yeah. But we don't have a dictatorship or an evil empire.

For those of you who aren't excited by the fact the debate in two months is going to star over a dozen plastic serial killers, maybe consider tossing Gravel a buck to improve the show. He needs 65,000 donors or to place 1% in polls to get into the first ones.

From the condescending attitudes of the plastic people, it's pretty obvious the Clinton team in 2016 thought Sanders would just be another Gravel. A ball of impotent rage and fury. Quickly laughed at and silenced.

A few things were different - an electorate injected with 8 more years worth of internet literate people. A focus on tangible rewards for his supporters (which is what all politics is). And an avoidance of negativity instead of embracing it as Mike does.

The normies who let TV think for them aren't going to be convinced that their imaginary friends are worse than Jeffrey Dahmer. It's a futile endeavor.

[ED-057]

So I hear that Trump has proposed delivering illegal immigrants en masse to the "sanctuary cities" that oppose him on immigration policy. It seems that some of the dems fell right into the trap but others called his bluff.

Meanwhile, we all wait for Assange's dead man's switch to trip. There's speculation that decryption keys will be released for one or more wikileaks insurance files. I don't know how many there were, the only ones I remember were released sometime in 2013-2014 and I thought that those had already been decrypted. Didn't some wikileaks defector print the key in his book or something? I had one of the files, not sure if I still do.

Oh and BTW, all that stuff that Assange said about an international plot to have him arrested on bullshit charges and hauled off to the evil empire to answer for his insolence turned out to be true.

[Mischief Maker]

So I hear that Trump has proposed delivering illegal immigrants en masse to the "sanctuary cities" that oppose him on immigration policy. It seems that some of the dems fell right into the trap but others called his bluff.

What trap? This is Trump as usual. He had a brain fart on camera, Sarah Huckabee-Sanders (who was supposed to have left months ago but nobody wants to hire her) has to pretend this is some thoroughly considered policy and not Trump's usual "dumb guy at the bar who has opinions" nattering, the rest of the media has to take this shit seriously because he has the nuclear codes, then a week later Trump forgets he ever said it and denies it on camera.

It's monotonous.

No wonder Trump supporters have to make up QAnon fan fiction where he's an undercover super spy taking on pedo-lizard-satanists in their volcano lair/pizza parlor while sending them secret messages on 4chan in code:

Spoiler

The secret message is "BE SURE TO DRINK YOUR TRUMP WATER"

[BryanM]

I guess the trap that Trump or anything he says matters. Spikes in a megaman game, people. Just hop over them and you'll be fine.

A lobbyist has claimed that Pelosi will stop any Universal Medicare bill from reaching a vote. A reminder that Democrats control the House right now. Like with how Republicans voted 865 times to completely repeal Romneycare, the Democrats could pass Medicare in the House a couple times if they actually wanted people to vote for them. It'd be purely symbolic, but only for now. Yet the donors definitely don't want to build that kind of electorate.

[quash]

https://youtu.be/dAJUm02eDNo

Pretty rad that propaganda this potent is on TV these days. Shame I don't even own one anymore.

[BryanM]

Heard that Sanders released his tax returns today? Some shocking stuff ther