We may have to revise our education system so that it’s not connected to our credential system.

There’s a story about Einstein teaching physics and letting the kids who didn’t want to be there leave and do something else with the time. The ones who remained were quite attentive.

There are multiple models for teaching that do something similar, let kids approach a subject when they’re ready. Yes, they goof off a lot early on, but eventually even STEM and literature call to them, and they pass equivalency exams in their late teens.

In the meantime even when I was in high school in the 1980s, our system was created to sort kids into sports stars that might become college players, STEM kids that might become scientists and engineers, and House Hufflepuff (common laborers).

The education system has only gotten progressively worse since then, as its budget increases have not kept up with inflation. And then there’s the whole effort to insert evangelist Christianity (+ American Exceptionalism + Conservativism–Capitalism) into public school.

And to this day, we still use the lecture / lab / test model that excludes a lot of alternative comprehension and learning models. We’re not looking to teach kids, rather we’re looking to harvest the geniuses, and turn the others into bonded laborers and soldiers for billionaire vanity projects.

What is curious to me is why billionaires don’t start massive civil projects that would get their bronze statue in every state park?

Musk had several opportunities, except he then had to figure out a way to monetize it so it profited him.

For me, seeing corruption and inequality lead to major depression, but I figured out early I didn’t want to cause harm.

What hit hard is learning deception and exploitation is baked into the system.

France revolted violently for less… and again after Charlie X started stripping away the Napoleonic rights.

Is that her face?

Is that the sound of fast-approaching leopards?

Is it face-eating season?

So did the Brevard County sheriff’s department murder anyone today? Or beat them brutally? Or otherwise dispense unjustified violence?

So it means we all get to be Spartacus.

Note that Disney and Universal pirate other people’s stuff whenever they want.

Note also that all the Generative AI services are very protective of their big cistern of web-crawled data, say when China borrows it for DeepSeek.

Content, content everywhere and not a drop of principle.

Do we know it was a pure tourist visit and they could choose the location? Many state departments are already flagging the US with a state instability warning if not no-go, so I’d assume she (or the husband) was here on business, or because there were circumstances that pushed them.

To be fair, NYC is pretty blue, it’s just the NYPD that has been for decades a threat to the people, especially nonwhites, with Bloomberg’s mayorship taking much of the blame.

3000 abductions a day is the ICE quota. They just want warm (non-white) bodies.

I’m getting a paywall or adblock block or something. Anyone have a less problematic link to the article?

The climate crisis has a good chance of completing the job. And then there’s a lot of not-quite-worst-case scenarios where a tiny number of humans are able to survive for the tens of thousands of years it’ll take for the earth to repair itself. Everything we know about humanity will be lost and replaced by an entirely different culture.

BMW and VW are the same beasts they were when they were backers of NSDAP in Germany.

Between the VW emissions cheating and BMW’s subscription car features, it seems their attitude towards commerce has not changed a jot.

Then let’s see Microsoft do this with full transparency and keep a publicly accessible list of forbidden words. Then evidence this is a general policy should be plain.

If your oath against genocide has any exceptions, it’s not an oath against genocide.

So long as one person is in danger from genocide, we all are in danger from genocide.

I’ve worked hard to keep these kinds of men out of my personal life, to keep them away from me, out of my goddamn sight… It’s time for us to start getting revenge on the nerds.

And there’s the rub. I was there, and we still have the nerd-to-nazi pipeline pumping vast numbers of boys into the alt-right. And to this day, no-one wants to deal with them.

Curiously, Japan is entirely dissatisfied with herbivore men who just want to be left alone in their life with their waifu, but that doesn’t produce the next batch of cheap labor and soldiers for industrialists to exploit.

Yes, I’m bitter, and righteously so. Treat our kids better; acknowledge they have sexuality. Teach consent and human intercourse in public school. (We’re not going to do these things. We hold great contempt for our fifteen-year olds, whether men or women, and just can’t help ourselves.)

cringe = cringeworthy for anyone who needs an easy search-and-replace

In the 1980s, being a nerd meant being a target for bullies, and we didn’t fare too well. The nerd hierarchy (in which the tech nerds looked down on Trekkies and Furries) was rather brutal, and informs why the furry / otherkin moral panic is mixed in with the trans moral panic.

Eventually, every company needed an MIS and nerds showed they were useful after all. This is not the good ending.

A parallel problem came from young people having libidos that no-one was allowed to acknowledge. We were all incels before the term, and they tried to teach me math when my brain was telling me I needed to rut. Even today, society disregards horny teens, creating a wide pathway to the Alt-Right (Immortan Joe’s Warboys) who respect only Alpha Males. Our Christian-centric sex-negative culture fuels the young-men-to-Nazi pipeline.

I don’t have a solution for it. The common response to horny-teens-gone-white-supremacists is to say yeah, fuck those guys in total contempt, so they’re going to continue to be an available and eager force of militants and voters for any charismatic strongman. They may go Herbivore (like Japanese men) once Generative AI porn gets good.

This is something I observed regarding Trump in his first term, here this guy is allegedly super rich and now leader of the free world, and he still thinks he’s a total loser, hence his own inability to tolerate criticism, and obsession on harming enemies and bullying people.

He has to fuck other people’s wives and make John Kennedy Jr. eat McDonalds because even being President isn’t enough assertion of dominance to make him feel on top.

I have a tender self esteem, myself, and have deep-running neural pathways that will drive me nearly to self harm when I mess something up (e.g. drop my coffee, or burn dinner, or thoroughly lose my wallet). I have these structures of rational self-assessment so that when I calm down I can see I’m actually alright and have some sweet talents, and friends find me useful, and when not even that, at least lovable.

Trump with all his money and power doesn’t have that, and people like me can see Trump feels like a total loser propped up by hollow victories, even as POTUS, which is a fucking scary place to be. This is why cabinet meetings are a round-robin ritual of telling Trump how huge he is.

As for the tech bros, they succeeded in their careers which is exactly what we are taught manly men are supposed to do and still feel hollow (which is common when you fixate only on your career). They didn’t have that (possibly essential) experience where they collapse into despair as a young person and realize they need personal integrity or spirituality to climb out. (For me it was a moment of rational self-assessment and finding I was not wanting after all; that my depression and self hatred were based on delusions.)

As for Musk, his bio on Behind the Bastards suggests it’s really difficult for someone not to emerge from his upbringing without turning into a Disney / Marvel supervillain.

Thiel has his own backstory and obsession, and is perpetually feeling Death (his own mortality) chuffing hyperborean chills on the back of his neck.

So yes, these guys are desperate to cling to power, _because wealth and political transactional power are the only power they’ve ever known, hence J. D. Vance’s obsession on forcing women into natality which is likely to turn into Lebensborn style breeding programs (which inspired Atwood to write A Handmaid’s Tale. ) They are terrified of equality because then they’ll just be eccentric, antisocial dorks.

(I am an eccentric, antisocial dork, with few things to offer other than listening skills, peer psychology, computer nerding and moral philosophy, and in a world where we’re not all overwhelmed with bad news, that is more than enough to find friends, family and crew. But it takes some personal introspection and willingness to practice soft power to learn this.)

If they were able to step away from power, or we took it from them and forced them into peer group support, they’d eventually discover that they don’t need to be captains of industry (or James Bond supervillains) to be accepted and loved (and consequently, fed and homed by the community).

And when they’ve given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it’s not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall

They always were. At least since Nixon.