Politics/Slapfights - Ancient history to modern day!

[Vol]

Yeah, I mean, the whole point of instilling love for one's country just can't be done as an artificial construct like having to say the pledge. It's the same thing as if you force kids to pray. You're just going to teach them that they've just got to make a show of it, rather than actually believe the things you want them to believe, or hope they believe.

In my idealized, fantasy America, kids would be so proud and brimming with love of kin and country they'd spontaneously do the pledge in the mornings, like something out of an old movie. But much like prayer, it seems like both the actual reason for it, the enforcement mechanism, and the ability to believe in the ritual, are all out of whack. You have to force kids, and adults, to do things they don't want to do, that's just how civilization exists. But if we can understand what exactly we're doing, why we're doing it, and why there's a positive consequence, then it's as good as force can be. Like gang-pressing men into the navy to fight the Armada (I have no idea if this actually happened).

So if a child is raised to think you pray for things you want and people you don't like to be harmed, and it never works, but his parents make him do it every week, it's become pointless. The purpose of the ritual, the enforcement, and the outcome are all incongruent. Same with the Pledge of Allegiance.

At the end of the day it has to be a choice and ultimately the best way to show true love for your country is being able to acknowledge when things are batshit fucking insane and fucked up and speak out against them, something your nation could use a hell of a lot more of right now.
Hell, mine could too, so it's not as if we're without fault.

I agree, but for wildly different reasons, I'm sure!

Practically, the value of pledges and such are to reinforce social unity, not a literal solemn oath. Social unity is the explicit target of revolutionaries. It's screaming into a void to pledge to a flag from a country that no longer exists. We're as much early 20th century America as a shaman wearing a deer pelt is a deer.

[Ragabul]

I try not to post *really* clickbaity stuff without prefacing it with dismissive sarcasm at least. But this is one is just generically irredeemable if I'm understanding it right. Some official memo from the health department of New York on the use of Covid antivirals:

http://www.mssnyenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/122821_Notification_107774.pdf

Key passage:

Eligibility
Oral antiviral treatment is authorized for patients who meet all the following criteria:
• Age 12 years and older weighing at least 40 kg (88 pounds) for Paxlovid, or 18 years
and older for molnupiravir
• Test positive for SARS-CoV-2 on a nucleic acid amplification test or antigen test; results
from an FDA-authorized home-test kit should be validated through video or photo but, if
not possible, patient attestation is adequate
• Have mild to moderate COVID-19 symptoms
o Patient cannot be hospitalized due to severe or critical COVID-19
• Able to start treatment within 5 days of symptom onset
• Have a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for severe illness.
o Non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk factor, as
longstanding systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an
increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19

This seems to say that if I come down with Covid in New York (as a healthy in my 30s white person) and the only person in line with me is a clone of me (healthy 30s female) but black, the black chick should be able to get an antiviral because she is black and I cannot. That's just insane. And at a bare minimum doing 0 to dispel right wing alarm about "critical race theory" or whatever.

@ Grooming

Schools groom. There is no such thing as schools that don't groom. But it seems patently obvious to me there is a difference in a non-mandatory saying of the pledge (seriously it's been stated multiple times by Supreme Court) that every parent knows is happening in pretty much every school since 1950 something and teachers gaining members for a club by snooping through kid's computer usage and issuing clandestine invitations without parents even knowing this existed.

It's not about whether schools have agendas or not. It's about whether the only people with any say in setting them are school administrators and everybody else can just fuck off.

[Vol]

That's just insane. And at a bare minimum doing 0 to dispel right wing alarm about "critical race theory" or whatever.

Huh, there's some bubbling in this pot. Probably nothing, it's fine. Do you smell garlic?

Schools groom. There is no such thing as schools that don't groom. But it seems patently obvious to me there is a difference in a non-mandatory saying of the pledge (seriously it's been stated multiple times by Supreme Court) that every parent knows is happening in pretty much every school since 1950 something and teachers gaining members for a club by snooping through kid's computer usage and issuing clandestine invitations without parents even knowing this existed.

It's not about whether schools have agendas or not. It's about whether the only people with any say in setting them are school administrators and everybody else can just fuck off.

I meant grooming in the diddling sense. Call me old fashioned, but if I had children, and relative strangers (to me) were molding their sexuality with psychological and material incentives, I would fairly assume they are intending to be a part of the sexuality they are creating, in some form or another. They might not be, but I don't care.

Has this parental pushback borne any fruit? I know homeschooling is way up, thankfully, and I know of people who've formed local communes, with parents of appropriate knowledge teaching some courses, which is absolutely fantastic. But not how the centralized schools are handling the soccer moms.

[Vol]

6 page spread in the paper today on right-wing extremism, how the government has failed to root them out, why they're the greatest threats to America ever, etc. There was one sentence about Antifa, explaining why organized left-wing violence doesn't actually exist. Par for the course, all of it. Though it had a curious half-page where the story outright claimed Trump was and is directly responsible for the rising tide of Nazis poised to take over the US. I would think journalistic practice would be to heavily imply a correlation, not attribute causation. But I suppose this is to prime the pump for January 6th histrionics soon.

[Mazder]

Eligibility
Oral antiviral treatment is authorized for patients who meet all the following criteria:
• Age 12 years and older weighing at least 40 kg (88 pounds) for Paxlovid, or 18 years
and older for molnupiravir
• Test positive for SARS-CoV-2 on a nucleic acid amplification test or antigen test; results
from an FDA-authorized home-test kit should be validated through video or photo but, if
not possible, patient attestation is adequate
• Have mild to moderate COVID-19 symptoms
o Patient cannot be hospitalized due to severe or critical COVID-19
• Able to start treatment within 5 days of symptom onset
• Have a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for severe illness.
o Non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk factor, as
longstanding systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an
increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19

This seems to say that if I come down with Covid in New York (as a healthy in my 30s white person) and the only person in line with me is a clone of me (healthy 30s female) but black, the black chick should be able to get an antiviral because she is black and I cannot. That's just insane. And at a bare minimum doing 0 to dispel right wing alarm about "critical race theory" or whatever.

Except if they were a literal clone with the only thing being changed being skin colour then that erases all other potential societal outcomes and makes your scenario kind of moot.
They literally say health and social inequities. If you're the same person but with a melanin switch then you'd presumably have the same social equity as you'd both have the same job, health insurance credit, address, family tree, etc, etc.
If you said you, and a black woman from the same apartment building as you then it makes more sense as she may live in the same building as you but might have drastically different social differences. She may be unemployed and not have access to health insurance, which may have happened due to racial inequality in her area (I don't know about New York specifically, I just know shit like that can happen anywhere), therefor leading to not having vaccination in her past or other health problems that you might have been able to have fixed.

And even then, it's a case of numbers.
More black/hispanic people in america have less access to insurance, or are on medicare/meciaid/whatever weak attempt at social medicine the USA has.
They can't go on to the ventilators and get monoclonal antibodies and whatever cocktail Trump and Rogan have had. So, yeah, they get the quick and easy thing prescribed because that's what they can afford.
Furthermore it reads to me as "it should be considered they be place at a preference due to the previous lack of access at a relative level" than "non-whites only".
At worst it may be she gets the pill(s) first and you get yours second.

The right-wing alarm about critical race theory is such bullshit anyway.
Right now it's a catch-all term for anything they don't like.
First it was Political Correctness. Then it was Wokeism. Now it's CRT. Same shit, different label.

@ Grooming

Schools groom. There is no such thing as schools that don't groom. But it seems patently obvious to me there is a difference in a non-mandatory saying of the pledge (seriously it's been stated multiple times by Supreme Court) that every parent knows is happening in pretty much every school since 1950 something and teachers gaining members for a club by snooping through kid's computer usage and issuing clandestine invitations without parents even knowing this existed.

It's not about whether schools have agendas or not. It's about whether the only people with any say in setting them are school administrators and everybody else can just fuck off.

See, in principle I agree that parents should be aware of what their children are taught.
I don't necessarily agree with them having too much input with it. Especially when the parents may or may not be as smart as the teachers. And they are extremely vocal to the point of abusive to the teachers because of bullshit political, religious or just plain ignorant reasons.

I mean, just looking at the south and the "more prayer in schools" bullshit. Let alone the right wing panic over CRT despite not knowing what it is half the time because their definition about it is as malleable as PCA and wokeism.
And let's not get started on the covid measures...

I meant grooming in the diddling sense. Call me old fashioned, but if I had children, and relative strangers (to me) were molding their sexuality with psychological and material incentives, I would fairly assume they are intending to be a part of the sexuality they are creating, in some form or another. They might not be, but I don't care.

What do you mean by psychological and material incentives?
Actually teaching the current theories out there on personhood, sexual identity and safe sex practices?
Like, I get an age limit but the fact of teaching kids to young adults about this stuff is kinda necessary, I don't see that as psychological incentives.
And material incentives...I don't even know how one could apply that to be a thing other than it being literal predators offering stuff. but that's 100% not okay and should never be okay. I agree that we should stop predators doing that shit and I think it's kind of a given.

Or are you implying that a gay person would be actively grooming all their kids to also be gay because of the school's curriculum? Despite it not being different between them and a straight teacher?
Or is it the curriculum you don't agree with being taught?

Has this parental pushback borne any fruit? I know homeschooling is way up, thankfully, and I know of people who've formed local communes, with parents of appropriate knowledge teaching some courses, which is absolutely fantastic. But not how the centralized schools are handling the soccer moms.

Oh, sure, that's [i]exaaaaactly[/i[] what we need, more dumbfuck yanks who think they know it all taking themselves out of the education consensus to teach whatever the fuck they want in a closed community.
First it'll be taking them away because they don't agree with being taught things they don't like. Then it's enforcing religion. Then the shaved heads. Then the chanting. Then the kool aid.
I mean for fuck's sake, your education system appears cult-like already, yet you're happy with people just forming proto-cults? Only teching the kids what they want.

Yeah, because that's the solution to any of the problems...

Homeschooling is fucking stupid.
Breeds kids with no social capabilities with a shit-tier level of education that is going to be getting them involved with shit-tier idiots like the Qanon crowd and flat earthers.
Fucking dumb.

[Ragabul]

Homeschooling is fucking stupid.
Breeds kids with no social capabilities with a shit-tier level of education that is going to be getting them involved with shit-tier idiots like the Qanon crowd and flat earthers.
Fucking dumb.

Have you ever actually met somebody who homeschools? Homeschooled kids consistently outscore public school kids on most metrics. To a one every single homeschooler I've ever met (which has been quite a few) was taken out and taught by parents because the public school curriculum was too route and dumb to challenge them.

I'll be kind of of honest I've been avoiding a lot of your comments because they just seem to be like CNN talking point generic USA bashing trying to get a rise stuff. What's with that lately?

@ the actually serious answers

What that New York Department of Health memo appears to be doing is (badly) taking social circumstance into account. But it uses race as a shorthand, which produces the inane result that a black hedge fund manager in good health can get access to antivirals before a healthy white dude working at an Amazon warehouse. That's inane on a number of levels. If you want to adjust for social circumstancess than actually adjust for social circumstances and not assumed social circumstances based on race. This was chosen as a metric 1) for appearances and 2) because checking actual social circumstances is hard and checking race is not.

[Ragabul]

The Pluralist Alternative To Neoliberalism

[Mazder]

Have you ever actually met somebody who homeschools? Homeschooled kids consistently outscore public school kids on most metrics. To a one every single homeschooler I've ever met (which has been quite a few) was taken out and taught by parents because the public school curriculum was too route and dumb to challenge them.

So that sounds like the public schools need more assistance rather than just taking every kid out to be taught by their parents.
Which, if they are I'm going to guess that those that did are probably from families that were well off enough to do so. If not then changes would be needed to be made to make it possible for everyone.
And even if every home schooled kid was better I personally still would trust a professional that has some form of credibility and responsibility rather than myself.

Not every parent can provide the best, and when stereotypically from a foreigner's perspective when it's seen, or at least appears to be, for religious reasons it seems that the problem isn't necessarily the quality of education but what the education is about.
But I grant that's more a minority of the reason in practice and that even if the best way to get a good education is from parents that can actually take the time to do so that means there is going to be a divide in students/kids anyway.
At least in public schools you can address the school and hold it to account. If a parent doesn't teach their kids right it's "their right", or if they're not able to do so then it's not up to society to address that?

I'll be kind of of honest I've been avoiding a lot of your comments because they just seem to be like CNN talking point generic USA bashing trying to get a rise stuff. What's with that lately?

Just my opinion of America as a foreigner.
I'm outside looking in and call stuff as I see them. If it offends or sound like what one side of your news media says then I don't know what to say about that as I don't consume and USA news media.
CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc, I don't like any of them.

What that New York Department of Health memo appears to be doing is (badly) taking social circumstance into account. But it uses race as a shorthand, which produces the inane result that a black hedge fund manager in good health can get access to antivirals before a healthy white dude working at an Amazon warehouse. That's inane on a number of levels. If you want to adjust for social circumstancess than actually adjust for social circumstances and not assumed social circumstances based on race. This was chosen as a metric 1) for appearances and 2) because checking actual social circumstances is hard and checking race is not.

I mean, it sounds like it's being used for a short hand because it acknowledges that people in those race categories are by average in a lower social standard and it's quicker and easier to assume so to get the antivirals out. The black hedge fund manager is probably a lot rarer than the white hedge fund manager. So what if one gets a treatment slightly sooner than the other if there is enough to go around?

But if they're making them in ample amounts for the entire USA population then it shouldn't matter ultimately who gets them first if there is enough for everyone.
Plus, black and hispanic peoples are still the minority in the nation so I guess it'd be faster to get the lower number of people prioritised?

I kinda get why you'd think it's sort of unfair as it sounds like non-whites are getting preferential treatment, and in a some respects they kind of are, but it sounds like to me that it's done to offset the fact that those in that racial group on average usually have less access to healthcare in general and would need that extra assistance first.

But I ultimately don't see the issue honestly if everyone is able to get it anyway in all the categories.

[Ragabul]

The document also goes into how there is a shortage of the antivirals so this is specifically about laying out who gets priority *because* of shortages. It makes complete sense to prioritize people with comorbidities that make them more susceptible to death by Covid. But "being black" is not a comorbidity. It corelates with comorbidities because black people are more likely to be obese, have heart disease, smoke, etc. If you focus on actual comorbidities you will end up prioritizing black people anyway because they suffer from them at higher rates. This will simultaneously be equitable in the way leftists usually mean it, be fairer because it's taking people's *actual* circumstances into consideration, and also be much less likely to get derailed by the terrible optics this current strategy produces. This is about 85% of the problem with the bureaucratic way most of this "woke" stuff is put forward. The point is not for the program to be efficacious and fair because what I just laid out would be better at both. The point is to appear to be doing something for various political reasons even if what's being done is dumb, controversial, and less effective than other alternatives.

As for schools, it's flat out a myth that schools in the USA are generally starved for funding (with some obvious caveats for some specific schools and regions). We spend more on education per capita than most countries. We pour money into poor student's education in particular. There's a lot wrong with American schools, but *amount* of funding isn't one of them. Most of the problems are structural and also have to do with some of the same problems with policing. Namely we are trying to force schools and police to solve social problems they are intrinsically unable to solve.

*Edit*

And one reason we get so little progress done on addressing the underlying social problems is that the left is about 50% right and the right is about 50% right and neither wants to admit the other holds an important part of the answer. Namely, the right is correct that you cannot address social issues while pretending cultural and family ills don't matter and the left is correct that you can't fix massive, ongoing disparities on (mostly) racial lines without acknowledging they exist and doing something targeted to try to fix it.

Also, what I already said earlier in the thread that schools are not actually optimized to be good for kids. They are optimized to be good for adults who utilize school mostly as daycare. If they were optimized to be good for kids, 80% of kindergarten would consist of freeplay and high school and junior high wouldn't start until 10 am. There would be almost no homework and school days would be significantly shorter (especially for littles). It is *deeply* unnatural for 7 year olds to spend 6-8 hours a day sitting at desks and being made to walk in lines. Even the metric on testing we use to compare between countries isn't really about what's good for kids. It's about whether or not we are beating China or whether some Nordic country or other gets to maintain bragging rights for the year.

[Mazder]

The document also goes into how there is a shortage of the antivirals so this is specifically about laying out who gets priority *because* of shortages. It makes complete sense to prioritize people with comorbidities that make them more susceptible to death by Covid. But "being black" is not a comorbidity. It corelates with comorbidities because black people are more likely to be obese, have heart disease, smoke, etc. If you focus on actual comorbidities you will end up prioritizing black people anyway because they suffer from them at higher rates. This will simultaneously be equitable in the way leftists usually mean it, be fairer because it's taking people's *actual* circumstances into consideration, and also be much less likely to get derailed by the terrible optics this current strategy produces. This is about 85% of the problem with the bureaucratic way most of this "woke" stuff is put forward. The point is not for the program to be efficacious and fair because what I just laid out would be better at both. The point is to appear to be doing something for various political reasons even if what's being done is dumb, controversial, and less effective than other alternatives.

If there aren't enough to go around then, yes, on a comorbidities basis is the better solution.
But it still seems that because those in the black and hispanic communities are more likely to have them that they are given the preference first, or have a higher chance to getting something provided for them given their social background across the board.
I am sure that in actual practice a black person that is well off and doesn't have comorbidities won't get medicine before a white person with comorbidities and is poor. I am pretty sure that those that are on the same economic ladder and have different skin will actually be seen at a healthcare basis rather than who's skin is darker.

Moreover it's addressing the long term systems that have led to this being a problem now.
We can't go back in time to give them what they need so bumping them up a little is honestly kinda fair after years of neglect, essentially.

It honestly seems like the wording is a bit off at most because it's clearly, in my eyes, intending to imply that "if there is not enough to go around then prioritise the worst cases, but be aware that black and hispanic people are even more at risk given long term systemic problems with medical care in those racial categories".

As for schools, it's flat out a myth that schools in the USA are generally starved for funding (with some obvious caveats for some specific schools and regions). We spend more on education per capita than most countries. We pour money into poor student's education in particular. There's a lot wrong with American schools, but *amount* of funding isn't one of them. Most of the problems are structural and also have to do with some of the same problems with policing. Namely we are trying to force schools and police to solve social problems they are intrinsically unable to solve.

Well when I said assistance I didn't really mean funding. I meant more along the lines of reforms. Like, I agree with the fact that some things schools just can't fix or solve, especially the way they employ teaching as it stands right now.
Standardized tests work if you're trying to do things en masse but we've known for at least a decade and a half that not all kids learn the same way so setting them up for that one form of education isn't going to work, and is honestly the laziest way of doing things.
I, personally, am a more hands-on type of learner. If you give me a manual for a car to study I'll eventually learn it, but let me take that manual and tinker with the actual engine I'll learn a lot faster what goes where, what doesn't etc.

I think we do need more teachers and more access to different methods of learning.

But what I do think would help is take the entire idea of faith out of schools.
I'm sorry but faith is for church, not school.
Or if you're going to have faith in schools then all faiths.
I remember having to sit through R.E (Religious Education) at school myself and honestly hating every moment of it. None of it was applicable to me but at least I learned the surface level of different faiths. It was taken out from being compulsory literally the year after me though so, I guess it definitely wasn't popular, but if so it should have been stripped for the curriculum completely and had it's funding go to STEM or the arts. Or even PE.

Some stuff needs to be sprinkled around as standard in places and not left for the specialized classes.
For example understanding racial factors such as skin colour and stuff like that should 100% be in biology class, sociology class and philosophy class.

And we need to teach kids (I am thinking more on the older side here) about politics.
We should not let kids go through school not knowing about what stuff is or who to vote for or what they're voting on and expect them to be model people at 18.

[Vol]

What do you mean by psychological and material incentives?
Actually teaching the current theories out there on personhood, sexual identity and safe sex practices?
Like, I get an age limit but the fact of teaching kids to young adults about this stuff is kinda necessary, I don't see that as psychological incentives.
And material incentives...I don't even know how one could apply that to be a thing other than it being literal predators offering stuff. but that's 100% not okay and should never be okay. I agree that we should stop predators doing that shit and I think it's kind of a given.

Ah. I'm talking about everything those teachers did beyond the scope of their lessons, which was the spying and coaxing children to join the GLA, which presumably involved material goods as part of running the club. Sex education is "fine" to teach, but it stops when class ends. They're not co-parents.

It'd be like if Parliament enacted a law that kids had to visit an Anglican soup kitchen once a week, and when they do, the staff go through their social media to find emotional vulnerabilities, then they personally reach out and try to cajole them into joining a Bible study group. Clearly predatory, yes? This is that, but with even less autonomy for the kids, because Anglicans don't control the bobbies. What do we expect a confused teen to do when an adult they're compelled to be around offers them sympathy, attention, and community?

Or are you implying that a gay person would be actively grooming all their kids to also be gay because of the school's curriculum? Despite it not being different between them and a straight teacher?
Or is it the curriculum you don't agree with being taught?

None of that, no.

Oh, sure, that's [i]exaaaaactly[/i[] what we need, more dumbfuck yanks who think they know it all taking themselves out of the education consensus to teach whatever the fuck they want in a closed community.

From where does the "education consensus" come from if we're disregarding all the adults the schools service? And as a follow-up, why did the schools fail to prevent people from becoming "dumbfuck yanks"?

First it'll be taking them away because they don't agree with being taught things they don't like. Then it's enforcing religion. Then the shaved heads. Then the chanting. Then the kool aid.
I mean for fuck's sake, your education system appears cult-like already, yet you're happy with people just forming proto-cults? Only teching the kids what they want.

A million tiny, local cults seems less destructive than a massive, unified cult. If we're that far gone, I'd prefer the least harmful option.

Philosophically, either there exists a shining path of wisdom and enlightenment, a transcendental knowledge and truth we can strive for and instill in our children, or, we're complex apes who have agreeable common beliefs that are never "true" in an absolute, objective sense but close enough to work. Such as, "2+2 = 4 is true even if no humans existed to think it," versus, "2+2=4 is the product of common neural configurations in the brain as the result of physical law and evolutionary pressure."

Schools teach the latter, but appeal to the former. A lecture on mathematics is one ape making noises and showing symbols that alters a smaller ape's brain to think the noises and symbols are correct, as a complicated evolutionary adaptation. 2 bananas + 2 bananas = 4 bananas only means something to us because our brains are conditioned to, there is no actual "2" or "4" beyond us, and a sufficiently complex lifeform without the same neural configuration could say "2+2 = 93" and they'd be equally correct. Thus the theory of "no gravity" and a physics courses are equally true, in that neither are, it's a matter of how many apes have congruent brain states. Knowledge would be a species-wide reduction in error-rates rather than understanding reality. So a common consensus isn't more correct, but it's as correct as anything can be, and as soon as their exists a common consensus against one thing, that thing is now wrong. Democracy of reality via brain states. But we all think schools are more like the former, they attempt to teach objective truths that transcend any individual.

I'm thinking aloud here, spitballing. Plato would probably have a good opinion. But the point I'm trying to grasp, while it slips out of my hand, is how the philosophical (not utilitarian) value of education is denied by the lessons taught in modern education, and it's a weird paradox. Bleh.

Homeschooling is fucking stupid.
Breeds kids with no social capabilities with a shit-tier level of education that is going to be getting them involved with shit-tier idiots like the Qanon crowd and flat earthers.
Fucking dumb.

I wouldn't call Millennials and Zoomers "socially capable," given the incredible increase in mental illness and social maladjustment. Granted, it could be worse, but I don't see what inspires such confidence in the current system.

And Sine, if you're reading this: I'm speaking purely of American education.

The Pluralist Alternative To Neoliberalism

Good article. Largely correct. Though the ending of Fight Club kept playing in my head as I read it, take that for what you will.

[Ragabul]

@Mazder

I'm ambivalent about faith in schools. I think its presence or absence in schools either way is largely much ado about nothing. If your goal is to catechize people in a particular religion, school alone is going to fail at that anyway because religion is a committed lifestyle and not a thing you do for 1 hour a day. Schooling absent the lifestyle won't make it stick anyway. While I personally think cultural competency in a given society is necessary for someone to claim to be a half-educated adult and a responsible voter and understanding the dominant religions of your culture at a not caricature level is part of that, I also realistically recognize that 90%+ of people won't/can't do this anymore than they will learn history well. I also don't think teaching watery religion in school is particularly more harmful or useless than teaching watery history or watery civics or the 10,000 other watery useless things that get taught.

I think I'm pretty much over the entire of idea of schools as some kind of transformative engine of anything (social, economic, whatever) except at the margins. If we are going to use schools as some kind of training ground for inculcating cultural/political/social agendas, the best approach seems to be bare-bones civics and not much else. Teach them the rudiments of how the government works, how voting works, and what their civil rights/duties are. This also seems to be about the maximum you will ever get a pretty clean consensus on with how pluralistic the USA is (and increasingly most of the West).

[Mazder]

Ah. I'm talking about everything those teachers did beyond the scope of their lessons, which was the spying and coaxing children to join the GLA, which presumably involved material goods as part of running the club. Sex education is "fine" to teach, but it stops when class ends. They're not co-parents.

It'd be like if Parliament enacted a law that kids had to visit an Anglican soup kitchen once a week, and when they do, the staff go through their social media to find emotional vulnerabilities, then they personally reach out and try to cajole them into joining a Bible study group. Clearly predatory, yes? This is that, but with even less autonomy for the kids, because Anglicans don't control the bobbies. What do we expect a confused teen to do when an adult they're compelled to be around offers them sympathy, attention, and community?

What's the GLA?
I'm not in the know of the acronym and can't find anything on it other than bloody mercedes cars.


It definitely sounds predatory by your description, but without knowing about it I don't know if you allegory is correct or not, lol.

From where does the "education consensus" come from if we're disregarding all the adults the schools service? And as a follow-up, why did the schools fail to prevent people from becoming "dumbfuck yanks"?

Well I'd imagine it comes form the advisory board that people are members of. As in qualified individuals, or in the very least individuals who are in the public eye who's job it is to form the consensus on education. Ministers/governors, teachers, public figures.

Probably because they kept listening to the previous ones stuck in their ways. Passed down from generation to generation thinking that they know best for their child but screw every other one.
The same type pulling kids out for mask mandates and religious "they ain't teaching about jesus" reasons.
Basically I'd not want people as dumb as I am making the decisions for kids.

A million tiny, local cults seems less destructive than a massive, unified cult. If we're that far gone, I'd prefer the least harmful option.

Philosophically, either there exists a shining path of wisdom and enlightenment, a transcendental knowledge and truth we can strive for and instill in our children, or, we're complex apes who have agreeable common beliefs that are never "true" in an absolute, objective sense but close enough to work. Such as, "2+2 = 4 is true even if no humans existed to think it," versus, "2+2=4 is the product of common neural configurations in the brain as the result of physical law and evolutionary pressure."

Schools teach the latter, but appeal to the former. A lecture on mathematics is one ape making noises and showing symbols that alters a smaller ape's brain to think the noises and symbols are correct, as a complicated evolutionary adaptation. 2 bananas + 2 bananas = 4 bananas only means something to us because our brains are conditioned to, there is no actual "2" or "4" beyond us, and a sufficiently complex lifeform without the same neural configuration could say "2+2 = 93" and they'd be equally correct. Thus the theory of "no gravity" and a physics courses are equally true, in that neither are, it's a matter of how many apes have congruent brain states. Knowledge would be a species-wide reduction in error-rates rather than understanding reality. So a common consensus isn't more correct, but it's as correct as anything can be, and as soon as their exists a common consensus against one thing, that thing is now wrong. Democracy of reality via brain states. But we all think schools are more like the former, they attempt to teach objective truths that transcend any individual.

I'm thinking aloud here, spitballing. Plato would probably have a good opinion. But the point I'm trying to grasp, while it slips out of my hand, is how the philosophical (not utilitarian) value of education is denied by the lessons taught in modern education, and it's a weird paradox. Bleh.

I'd prefer there be no cults.
And one unified cult would then be the consensus so wouldn't that still be more stable, lol?

I don't think that applies really. Appealing to an absolute or not kinda doesn't matter when it's going to the point of teaching what "is". 2+2=4 from a philosophical sense doesn't matter if all you're trying to do is teach mathematics. So teach mathematics.
And until we meet and other sentient complex lifeform it'll continue to be what is.

If you wan to get into the philosophy of it you kind have to teach philosophy first to it to be understood as such. Otherwise it's putting the cart before the horse and you're left with a mess.

But I'm too dumb for any of it so I'm just gonna leave it where it is for the smarter people.

I wouldn't call Millennials and Zoomers "socially capable," given the incredible increase in mental illness and social maladjustment. Granted, it could be worse, but I don't see what inspires such confidence in the current system.

I mean they'd be worse if they had no social interaction.
At least right now it's out in the open and not behind closed doors, or at least less closed doors than would be with the other method.

Imagine those kids with mental illnesses being brought up in an environment that doesn't understand them and put through trauma and abuse because the parent's don't understand how to deal with it because they too were never taught it?
Reforming the current system is the best way to make a better one, not ripping it up, root and stem and leaving it up to the failings of the current broken system where only those who got a good education can pass it forward.

But personally I'd not put my kids into the US system anyway because they'd be in debt before they get a first chance at life anyway. Or at least they would in higher education.

@Mazder

I'm ambivalent about faith in schools. I think its presence or absence in schools either way is largely much ado about nothing. If your goal is to catechize people in a particular religion, school alone is going to fail at that anyway because religion is a committed lifestyle and not a thing you do for 1 hour a day. Schooling absent the lifestyle won't make it stick anyway. While I personally think cultural competency in a given society is necessary for someone to claim to be a half-educated adult and a responsible voter and understanding the dominant religions of your culture at a not caricature level is part of that, I also realistically recognize that 90%+ of people won't/can't do this anymore than they will learn history well. I also don't think teaching watery religion in school is particularly more harmful or useless than teaching watery history or watery civics or the 10,000 other watery useless things that get taught.

I think I'm pretty much over the entire of idea of schools as some kind of transformative engine of anything (social, economic, whatever) except at the margins. If we are going to use schools as some kind of training ground for inculcating cultural/political/social agendas, the best approach seems to be bare-bones civics and not much else. Teach them the rudiments of how the government works, how voting works, and what their civil rights/duties are. This also seems to be about the maximum you will ever get a pretty clean consensus on with how pluralistic the USA is (and increasingly most of the West).

I mean I would agree that if one is going to teach anything it should be full on and not half arsed.

In terms of what civil duties people have I think that could lead to be a dangerous prospect. Well not dangerous more just open to be abused.
Because if the view is that their civil duty is to be a "good god fearing american" then religion is back into the mix again.

I do agree that teaching people what rights they actually have and not the ones they think they have is a good way to go though.
Like the Freedom of Speech one often gets confused as "fuck you I can do what I want", for example.

[Ragabul]

For example understanding racial factors such as skin colour and stuff like that should 100% be in biology class

This is potentially the biggest educational/political/whatever third rail there is. I present for evidence literally anybody ever who has ever tried to make serious arguments about the (pretty much undisputed by anyone serious) massive genetic contribution to educational attainment.

Two people on the left (one an actual socialist and one a standard liberal) have recently tried to make the argument that you cannot in fact pursue social justice while ignoring this fact and have been called Nazis/fascists/whatever pretty much non-stop for it.

The socialist (PhD in Education) wrote this book about it:



The liberal (a geneticist) wrote this book about it:



I'm all for *actually* teaching this stuff, but I have 0 confidence it would actually get taught. To do so you would have to beat back a mob of determined people for whom the barest mention of any of this is eugenics and also a bunch of people who are desperate to use this to try to justify barely concealed and thoroughly debunked 1800s race science.

[Ragabul]

*stuff on philosophy of education*

I don't even think it's that grandiose. I think it's as I said before that schools are actually optimized to be daycare and self-reinforcing bureaucracies. And I don't mean that in the standard right-wing "the Teachers' Union!" way because these kinds of bureaucracies usually make grunt level agents in them miserable as well. My brother-in-law is an elementary school art teacher. He is a straightforwardly uncomplicated "teaching kids to draw makes me happy and is good" person. And yet at the end of the day, he can't just optimize for that. He also has to optimize for keeping his job in the aforementioned bureaucracy.

One of the reasons I was kind of snippy on homeschooling. My sister has mixed homeschooled and public schooled her kids. Half their income comes from public schools. It doesn't mean public schools have served them well largely because she's got 1 kid with ADHD and 1 kid with autism.

What's the GLA?

Presumably the GSA which is the Gay-Straight Alliance which is a student club that is exactly what it sounds like. The club of itself is no more or less a problem than a Catholic Youth Club or a Young Republicans Club. The issue was the way teachers were recruiting members and then keeping membership secret from parents.

In terms of what civil duties people have I think that could lead to be a dangerous prospect. Well not dangerous more just open to be abused.

I'd argue this is the only way you can teach civil rights because civil rights aren't like entitlements. Entitlements are something you get simply for being whatever you are or else have "earned" in some way. Every civil right has a corresponding civil duty. The classic example is I have a right to jury trial and thus I have a duty to serve on juries. Others are things like I have freedom of speech which means I must tolerate other people's freedom of speech and not abuse their rights. (So say in my former role as public librarian I could not refuse to check out books to the public even if I found those books morally objectionable).

[Mazder]

This is potentially the biggest educational/political/whatever third rail there is. I present for evidence literally anybody ever who has ever tried to make serious arguments about the (pretty much undisputed by anyone serious) massive genetic contribution to educational attainment.

Two people on the left (one an actual socialist and one a standard liberal) have recently tried to make the argument that you cannot in fact pursue social justice while ignoring this fact and have been called Nazis/fascists/whatever pretty much non-stop for it.

The socialist (PhD in Education) wrote this book about it:

*image snip*

The liberal (a geneticist) wrote this book about it:

*image snip*

I'm all for *actually* teaching this stuff, but I have 0 confidence it would actually get taught. To do so you would have to beat back a mob of determined people for whom the barest mention of any of this is eugenics and also a bunch of people who are desperate to use this to try to justify barely concealed and thoroughly debunked 1800s race science.

Well I meant in a "this is what melanin is, these people have it" and in a "these environmental factors led to these differences in their bodies and race is what we call them in a colloquial sense but ultimately we're all just human" kind of way.

I didn't even remotely mean in the ways nazi's a that lot meant it.

Presumably the GSA which is the Gay-Straight Alliance which is a student club that is exactly what it sounds like. The club of itself is no more or less a problem than a Catholic Youth Club or a Young Republicans Club. The issue was the way teachers were recruiting members and then keeping membership secret from parents.

Okay, well on the face of the intention of the club in name I don't have a problem with unless it's a situation where the name is not what the club actually intends.
But I do agree that as Vol described the activities of the teachers that the shit they were doing was disgusting and should be stopped.

Bad apples are found everywhere though. Reforms needed.

I'd argue this is the only way you can teach civil rights because civil rights aren't like entitlements. Entitlements are something you get simply for being whatever you are or else have "earned" in some way. Every civil right has a corresponding civil duty. The classic example is I have a right to jury trial and thus I have a duty to serve on juries. Others are things like I have freedom of speech which means I must tolerate other people's freedom of speech and not abuse their rights. (So say in my former role as public librarian I could not refuse to check out books to the public even if I found those books morally objectionable).

Would you be in support of having these rights and duties codified?
And how would we teach the nuance of, using the freedom of speech example, that sometime things that are the rights and duties are also leading to a lot of harm?
Such as the right to freedom of speech meaning we must tolerate the batshit speech and actions other have which lead to people getting sick, hurt, injured or straight up killed? Especially given the very obvious examples of what's been going on during the pandemic.
Unless we get to the point where the rights and duties are hard coded into the language of the law it seems that if a certain community adds stuff because of freedom of speech allowing them to do so then it can just lead to a lot of clashing of "what are the rights/values/duties of the people?"

I'm mainly spitballing the last sentence anyway.
I've said many times that a lot of this stuff just goes over my head.

[Ragabul]

Well I meant in a "this is what melanin is, these people have it" and in a "these environmental factors led to these differences in their bodies and race is what we call them in a colloquial sense but ultimately we're all just human" kind of way.

These are pretty innocuous but you also can illustrate genetics without touching that at all and the instance you do touch it, 7000 questions about why you are touching it will come up. You cannot say the words "race" and "genetics" in the same sentence without drawing scrutiny from various very motivated people.

Would you be in support of having these rights and duties codified?

They are already codified by law in the Constitution and 200 years of Supreme Court interpretation. And no, you can't teach these things at an actual level of nuance in public schools. Even constitutional lawyers usually specialize in particular *portions* of constitutional law because it's so complex. I'm not advocating for even trying that. But simply teaching people civil rights in the vein of "here are the things the government owes you" without addressing there are strings attached would be such an anemic civics education it would not even be worth pursuing it. I'm not actually going to die on a hill defending even teaching basic civics in schools, but *if* we insist on trying to use schools to explicitly shape morals, culture, and values, this approach seems the most likely to have a consensus and to be straightforwardly applicable to all students' lives.

For this to work you cannot teach it according to how you *wish* the constitution or the courts have interpreted this stuff but as they have *actually* interpreted it. The point of such a class would not be to teach students to critically examine the civic order but to show them how the civic order as it stands actually is. It would not be to debate what the rules on voting are but to teach students how to vote, when elections are held, etc. It's driver's ed for democracy. Anything beyond that would (and does) get mired in 1000000 competing agendas and could not be taught well.

[Mazder]

These are pretty innocuous but you also can illustrate genetics without touching that at all and the instance you do touch it, 7000 questions about why you are touching it will come up. You cannot say the words "race" and "genetics" in the same sentence without drawing scrutiny from various very motivated people.

Yeah you can, but it wasn't my intent.

They are already codified by law in the Constitution and 200 years of Supreme Court interpretation. And no, you can't teach these things at an actual level of nuance in public schools. Even constitutional lawyers usually specialize in particular *portions* of constitutional law because it's so complex. I'm not advocating for even trying that. But simply teaching people civil rights in the vein of "here are the things the government owes you" without addressing there are strings attached would be such an anemic civics education it would not even be worth pursuing it. I'm not actually going to die on a hill defending even teaching basic civics in schools, but *if* we insist on trying to use schools to explicitly shape morals, culture, and values, this approach seems the most likely to have a consensus and to be straightforwardly applicable to all students' lives.

For this to work you cannot teach it according to how you *wish* the constitution or the courts have interpreted this stuff but as they have *actually* interpreted it.

I mean it shouldn't be the place for shaping morals and values, but it should at least be an important part of the overall method used.
Or as an alternative in areas.

Like both religious texts and law teach "don't murder". Different methods, same results.

[Ragabul]

Don't Look Up: Movie Review

Actually a post about political doublethink.

[Vol]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... p_politics

Standard MSM poll spinning about their new holy day. The chestnuts in there are that over a third of US adults now believe violence against the government can be justified (should be 100%, we're a _revolutionary state_, but I understand people aren't thinking of that when asked the question), which breaks down to 40% of GOP and independent voters, and around a quarter of Democrats. The second is further down, and shows the perception of our "democracy" has cratered since the Bush-era patriotism. Once again, we shout into the void, "Constitutional republic," but only pedants care.

I have noticed an uptick in the Boomers I encounter spouting off violent internet rhetoric from several years ago, though I've never had the impression any of them would ever act on their beliefs. But the mood seems to match what the poll says. If nothing else, the social fabric of America has been thoroughly plucked apart by organized subversives, while we might remain docile, bloodlessly constructing a new revolutionary state with the old machinery of power is going to be a massive pain in the ass.

[Ragabul]

I'm not really sure what to do with that poll because so far as I know it's only in the last year or so that anybody has been motivated to even ask this or similar questions so it's just kind of sitting there unframed or uncontextualized by anything in particular.

Inasmuch as any kind of credible threat to overturning elections currently exists, it's procedural anyway and not based in mob action. A lot can change in 3 years but at least as things currently *seem* to stand I've seen a lot of joking comments along the lines of "Democrats push ironclad plan to circumvent dangers of Republican election tampering by losing fair and square."

I think the effort to turn Jan 6 into some ongoing, eternal boogeyman is very popular among a certain subset of very progressive & liberal PMC talking heads and most people either have stopped caring about it altogether or are more concerned about half a dozen other things.

We'll see.

My dad has certainly been radicalized (down to flying upside down flags and such prominently along the road by his house). He's also a borderline hermit and 76 years old so angry flag hoisting is about the most to realistically expect from him. He also managed to get this radicalized while having 0 internet access which is itself really interesting.

[Ragabul]

The Imminent Collapse of Digital Advertising

Tentative yay?

[Vol]

This is potentially the biggest educational/political/whatever third rail there is. I present for evidence literally anybody ever who has ever tried to make serious arguments about the (pretty much undisputed by anyone serious) massive genetic contribution to educational attainment.

Two people on the left (one an actual socialist and one a standard liberal) have recently tried to make the argument that you cannot in fact pursue social justice while ignoring this fact and have been called Nazis/fascists/whatever pretty much non-stop for it.

Because that's not a leftist theory. It's contradicts the presuppositions that natural, insurmountable hierarchies don't exist. Everything meaningful has to be socially constructed, and if dummies, normies, midwits, and geniuses are born with a hard limit, all the lofty humanitarian ideals have to be completely rejiggered. I suppose they could be shedding the skin of Marxism, trying to incorporate biological realities as well as free will into a workable philosophy, but modern leftism is root and stem a modernist/post-modernist movement that doesn't allow for reaching into the grimy past almost definitionally. The right-wing, ironically, has more flexibility in exhuming old ideas as "traditions" to be reincorporated.

Like both religious texts and law teach "don't murder". Different methods, same results.

This is a good example of what my rambling wall of text was about. Under any coherent religious system, murder can be an absolute wrong, in all times and places, no matter if you get away with it or not. There is an imperative from something greater than humanity to never do it, whether we're appealing to natural law, or God, or the giant turtle that floats through the void.

As opposed to trying to persuade someone murder is wrong, because the dominant culture says so at the moment, or that you'll be punished, or it creates some amount of pain, or that the victim's family would be sad. That's all transient and subjective. None of that is saying murder is wrong, it's only other people say murder is wrong. And it logically leads to cases where murder could be a good thing.

Imagine someone who's a complete scumbag, who degrades the lives or everyone who knows them, who only causes suffering and pain, but never to an extent self-defense would be justified, and they have no family or friends. If someone should wait until they're sleeping and murder them, is that wrong? The murdered gets away, because no one would testify against them. No one is sad about it, in fact they're all happier about it. The victim never felt an moment of pain, so no suffering was created, and in cutting short a life spent making others miserable, a great deal of suffering has been prevented. There is a social consensus it wasn't unjust "the law", there is no punishment, no pain was created, and no one felt bad for the victim. So we have no rational basis to say the murderer was wrong.

Not to get bogged down in this specific example, the underlying logic about the difference in origin more than (immediate) outcome. If what schools do is more like imparting whatever the most popular ideas and theories are, that job can be supplanted by walking around and talking to people all day. But if knowledge is objective, even if inexplicable how we possess it, then schooling fulfills a function that has to be centralized and is almost necessarily good to force children to attend.

Edit: Comically enough, I wish I'd taken a course on rhetoric, because I hit my own cognitive limits on expressing what's in my head _very often_.

[Vol]

I'm not really sure what to do with that poll because so far as I know it's only in the last year or so that anybody has been motivated to even ask this or similar questions so it's just kind of sitting there unframed or uncontextualized by anything in particular.

They mention it's been asked in the past, and is notably higher. I'm interpreting it as an indicator of faith in the republic and the peoples' opinion on if non-violent reform is possible, more than any imminent action.

I think the effort to turn Jan 6 into some ongoing, eternal boogeyman is very popular among a certain subset of very progressive & liberal PMC talking heads and most people either have stopped caring about it altogether or are more concerned about half a dozen other things.

It's a totem for power and control. We can all roll our eyes at the histrionics, but there's an iron framework under the cushions of the fainting couch. That's what most of the stupid wedge issues boil down to, inevitably. The ones who scream the loudest and pass laws regarding moral issues are not moral people, because moral people are scary to entrenched power structures, and often get shot by the FBI on their balcony.

My dad has certainly been radicalized (down to flying upside down flags and such prominently along the road by his house). He's also a borderline hermit and 76 years old so angry flag hoisting is about the most to realistically expect from him. He also managed to get this radicalized while having 0 internet access which is itself really interesting.

Case in point. I listened to a 15 minute Tucker Carlson monologue last night on a whim, and he fairy succinctly explained a dissident right platform, using tangible examples, without advocating action or naming names. I was a little shocked, honestly.

[Ragabul]

I suppose they could be shedding the skin of Marxism, trying to incorporate biological realities as well as free will into a workable philosophy,

I haven't actually read either book but I read the socialist's writings all the time on his blog and I've read interviews/listened to podcasts interviewing the lib. The New Yorker had a surprisingly even-handed profile on her here.

They are mostly using it to justify the need for progressive measures like a universal basic income. And while I'm pretty ambivalent on that, I'd say it's a coherent point of view well within progressive or leftist lines of thought.

@ Carlson

Been half thinking of watching Carlson. Not even because I get much out of it, but it's unquestioningly one window into one of the bigger holes in my media consumption since Trump got kicked off all the kosher places on the internet. I don't like not knowing what's going on there. Though I've also mostly retreated into weirdo blogosphere in general anyway so not being up on things is something that I care a lot less about anymore. There's just no Carlson equivalent weirdo decent bloggers I know of. Kinda, sorta Rod Dreher. That's about it.

*Edit*

The good fairy of pretentious articles strikes again leaving me one serendipitously relevant to the thing I just happened to be talking about.

Why So Many Kids Struggle to Learn

[Vol]

They are mostly using it to justify the need for progressive measures like a universal basic income. And while I'm pretty ambivalent on that, I'd say it's a coherent point of view well within progressive or leftist lines of thought.

UBI & automation are the escape hatch for progressives, so the smart ones should be jumping on that. So if the goal is to retain Marxist/liberal ideals, within the framework of their massive failures and the breakdown of neoliberalism, yeah, paying people for existing will keep a lot of heads on necks. If they're staring down the barrel of genetic intelligence, I don't see why they'd want to stay married to the authoritarian-left (socialism) though. That's a nightmare we already went through repeatedly.

@ Carlson

Been half thinking of watching Carlson.

Anecdotally, because of radio talk shows and discussions with my father, he started watching the news and pundits regularly. He likes Hannity more than Carlson, despite Carlson nominally closer to his views. Tucker plays a clever game, where he floats relatively bold ideas, but if he took one more logical step, he'd be fired and probably black-bagged. I listen to a monologue every now and then, but I've long since lost my taste for anything the MSM has to offer me ideologically.

Why So Many Kids Struggle to Learn

It's like Sideshow Bob stepping on the rakes, but with intellectuals trying to impose rationalism on organic systems. Thwack, thwack.

Edit: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/opin ... arter.html

I'm not clear on what exactly they mean by "democracy in danger." A collapse of civic duty? An army springing from the foothills? State secession? Sporadic violence? It's like Tim Pool and his thousand and one ways to say "A civil war is coming?!" in that it means nothing, but sounds grave.

[Ragabul]

It's like Sideshow Bob stepping on the rakes, but with intellectuals trying to impose rationalism on organic systems. Thwack, thwack.

My reaction was on some level that as well. It's really just the supplanting of a fad with a fad in a long line of pedagogy fads. But at least this one is making an argument you have to teach kids, you know, actual *content* and not just vaguely hope they absorb it by cutting out green colored things in magazines. That seems straightforwardly uncontroversial to me. There's no way around rote learning and boring repetition in learning on at least some level.

The pertinent thing I found most revealing was the general all-over-the-placeness and vagueness of education departments, the appalling lack of subject expertise, and the general mindlessness of "teaching to standards." Having gone to library school, I can attest it's 98% the same stuff. I had to take initiative to independently learn via internships all the actual useful fucking things librarians do like cataloging, collection development, and providing competent reference services. School was a whole lot of vague generalizations peppered with sociology gobbledygook. The idea you can graduate library school without knowing MARC (no longer a requirement and not even kinda hard to learn) is about like getting an information technology degree without needing to take basic networking.

It's also inane you even need a graduate degree for it in the first place, but that's a whole other kettle of fish. The best argument I've heard in favor of it for public librarians is that a Masters degree nominally acts as a screen on general applicant quality and means that the public will be getting *free* Masters degree having people to help them solve various problems be it basic research, building a resume, computer literacy training or whatever. I'm skeptical of this argument on any number of levels, but inasmuch as I don't doubt many cities would be happy otherwise happy to staff libraries with high school dropouts making $10 an hour, there's probably something to it.

[Ragabul]

Apparently Steve Bannon has a podcast. Maybe that's a thing worth listening to once now and again to keep a better finger on what right wing whackery is currently doing. Might investigate.

[Mazder]

Apparently Steve Bannon has a podcast. Maybe that's a thing worth listening to once now and again to keep a better finger on what right wing whackery is currently doing. Might investigate.

Apparently he had Mad Marge on it recently, so...yeah make sure nothing sharp is nearby or you'll want to stab your own ears out, lol.

She's a 200lb bag of shit and crazy shoved into a 2lb bag...

[Ragabul]

Will amend something I said earlier about the far-right having 0 strategy. Apparently, some of them are starting to have some:

Heeding Steve Bannon’s Call, Election Deniers Organize to Seize Control of the GOP — and Reshape America’s Elections

Granted I would not say most of the people doing this are actually far right. Their actual ideology (inasmuch as they have one) probably ends up being somewhat vanilla right-wing libertarians. But supposedly various more overt stuff (Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, etc.) are assisting and endorsing this. Who knows how widespread or effective this will be. But it is an actual strategy.

This guy is also probably the main architect of getting people to focus on school board meetings over critical race theory, vaccine mandates, school closures and various other things that paid off in Virginia. He's not far right but he's been very good at mobilizing Trump people. Current schoolboard here is currently embroiled with this because apparently some official from Loudon County which was the epicenter in Virginia for this got a job here.

I am not endorsing any implicit or explicit ideology in any of this (including the standard implied disapproval in the Pro-Publica article). But the only way to piece together a coherent narrative for any of this anyway is to read all over the spectrum and piece it together yourself because *everybody* is ignoring certain things, downplaying certain things, and exaggerating certain things.

*Edit*

Race Is a Spectrum. Sex is Pretty Damn Binary. by Richard Dawkins

[Vol]

It's also inane you even need a graduate degree for it in the first place, but that's a whole other kettle of fish. The best argument I've heard in favor of it for public librarians is that a Masters degree nominally acts as a screen on general applicant quality and means that the public will be getting *free* Masters degree having people to help them solve various problems be it basic research, building a resume, computer literacy training or whatever. I'm skeptical of this argument on any number of levels, but inasmuch as I don't doubt many cities would be happy otherwise happy to staff libraries with high school dropouts making $10 an hour, there's probably something to it.

I'm not part of the white collar/academic world, so you tell me, are "equivalencies" of a degree generally accepted for most jobs? I was thinking about it last night, though I can't articulate it well right now. There's a basic assumption we make about the value of a formal education, that anything structured takes primacy, to the point of denying reality if a doctor and a laymen disagree. And it's not a reflection on the degree, because a sheepskin only reflects the program it represents, it's us (and our lords) who ascribe additional value. A tonsured priest working his way through the ranks of seminary, and to the Vatican, would be far less qualified to talk about God than a ascetic living in the desert and giving every coin he earns to the poor, though he could explain what he does know tremendously better. Molding yourself to a job and pursuing what the job "is" are not the same thing.

Such that a librarian with a Masters is almost assuredly going to know a great deal about her job, or be able to pick up on fast, and a lot of other topics, but a bookish woman from a small town who spent her life reading until she took over the post as librarian, is infinitely more valuable. She'd not know as much, or at least be as structured in what she knows, but what she doesn't know isn't as important as how she knows what she does, and that's not a quantifiable "thing" under a belief system of accreditation being intrinsically superior as a standard of competency. It makes it much easier for companies and governments to sift through people, by reducing humans down to percentages and likelihoods, and in practice you're more likely to find competence among degree holders than "lived experience" applicants. Or another way, if going into an African hellhole for some reason, would you rather have an extremely well trained Delta force member at your side, or a 60 year old mercenary?

Anyway, incoherent rambling aside, I agree. Were it not for the degree requirements, I'd probably have signed up for JET or become a military officer by now.

Apparently he had Mad Marge on it recently, so...yeah make sure nothing sharp is nearby or you'll want to stab your own ears out, lol.

She's a 200lb bag of shit and crazy shoved into a 2lb bag...

I miss the days when you could have a nickname like that. It's poetic, and fun, and also very useful to know to stay the fuck away from someone.

[Ragabul]

It makes it much easier for companies and governments to sift through people, by reducing humans down to percentages and likelihoods, and in practice you're more likely to find competence among degree holders than "lived experience" applicants.

This is the main function it serves. The other function it serves is artificially limiting the number of people in a given field so that wages stay higher like an old school guild. This is the main function it serves with librarians. And you see this even with fields that do need some formal rigorous training like doctors. Irish doctors as one example get their degree much faster than US doctors and I've heard 0 about doctors in Ireland being in any way worse or deficient, but when you suggest reforms like this here it gets resisted by doctors' associations for the simple reason that it would increase the supply of doctors and then somewhat lower the price they can demand.

As for caring about equivalencies, it seems to mostly be a totem poll thing. The lower down the totem poll a given entity is, the less they care about a degree in the exact thing they want because they can't afford to be that picky. So if you want to go work for Google with 2 years of helpdesk work and associates in computer repair, you are shit out of luck, but you could plausibly use this to snag a position as sysadmin in an unsexy town of 20,000 people or some mid-size mom and pop business with 45 employees and a handful of servers.

Likewise small towns often have to staff their libraries with old woman volunteers because they can't afford anything else. But if you want to go work at a research library at an Ivy League school, you will need not only the MLIS Masters but also probably an additional Masters or even PhD in a specific relevant subject matter and to keep the job you will have to publish papers like a regular professor.

Another thing in all this though is that a lot of times, a given supervisor who is trying to hire doesn't actually have as much control over the process as you think and his request is getting filtered through the HR department. This filters out all kinds of applicants who might otherwise have been looked at seriously if they managed to actually talk to said supervisor.

My strategy for getting out of crap jobs was to find legit but unsexy places that still had you send in paper resumes and not apply through a computerized system. This worked, but again, it will land you unsexy jobs. But since my goals were always to not be in a rat race and to just make enough to not be miserable, this worked out just fine for me. So I work for an industrial exurb that nobody but roughnecks wants to live in and about half of it is a ghetto, but whatever. It works.

And at least for government jobs (in my experience), they tend to prefer in network hiring when they can. I have seen with my own eyes guys get hired for IT whose experience is like "I build computers in my spare time as a hobby but I have worked in the toolroom at the city mechanic's shop for 5 years." The reason for this is that one supervisor can just call up the other who he already knows and ask "Is so an so a hard worker? Can he learn new stuff?" and get quick affirmatives. I got poached from the library for pretty much analogous reasons.

[Vol]

*Edit*

Race Is a Spectrum. Sex is Pretty Damn Binary. by Richard Dawkins

My impression of Dawkins as a very intelligent biologist, and a retarded philosopher, is sustained. But at least he's found one place to put his foot down, when others are trampling in his garden. He's obviously correct in that sex is a binary, and then we extend care and courtesy to the people who exist on the margins, but he's incapable of threading the needle to sew it all up.

Semi-related, I was listening to a relatively popular e-philosopher do a critique of Darwinism without touching on the evidence. It was interesting, though I didn't understand all of it. My takeaway was that Darwin himself produced his work with a set of presuppositions relative to his context as a 19th century Englishman. Hence the, "Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life," part that gets dropped in polite conversation. That was the lens he saw the world through in composing his theory, a clear distinction between Caucasoid, Negroid and, Mongoloid, and all that. Then the principle of "life moves from lower to higher," which as we discussed colors our thoughts in nearly everything today, would taint, or invalidate, his work if it was false.

Which is an interesting point. Looking at the exact same data with divergent presuppositions can lead to absolutely different conclusions. If there existed an alternative universe, identical to ours in everyway, except that Darwin presupposed that ancient aliens had visited in the past, because it was self-evidently true to 19th century English men of science, then they'd have a theory of Alien Selection that would work equally as well as Natural Selection. It would coherently explain everything, if not better, because even our brightest minds can't help but see teleology of a sort in nature. Whatever led to people assuming ancient aliens existed would be baked into the common thought, their conspiracy kooks would be saying there were no aliens and that tinfoil hats are stupid.

The problem I had with it, as much as I understood, was that it would only extend to invalidating Darwin himself, and no one else who didn't share his presuppositions. That and Darwinism was supplanted by Neo-Darwinism, the theory has evolved beyond the man's initial errors and ignorance, that's how the methodology works. So that led me down a rabbit hole of trying to find out if speciation has ever been observed in a lab setting, or anything close to it in the wild. To which the answer is "No, but we've observed situations that could lead to it," framed in intellectually dishonest ways, to my great annoyance. Maybe among academics it's different, but laymen, and people who claim to be academics, are some of the most smug retards, even if correct, I've ever seen.

The examples I saw cited were all, more or less, that distinct populations of a species (In a lab or the wild) would not willingly mate with each other, or only shared genetic information via a third population geographically & genetically between them. To which I would consider that a chihuahua and an Irish wolfhound would not breed in the wild, and are absolutely fertile and the same species. Though I'd be curious to know if pedigreed dogs of very distinct heritages, as much as dogs can be, are showing any sort of sign of genetic incapability. I know with humans and chimps, the theory includes chromosomes fusing together at some point when precursor populations split apart, though the scale of dog generations is surely not remotely close to a similar timespan.

Since the whole theory is inductive anyway, I would think ligers and mules would be good evidence, infertile crossbreeds. But that gets into "kinds" and a whole other argument I haven't read anything about.

[Ragabul]

To which the answer is "No, but we've observed situations that could lead to it," framed in intellectually dishonest ways, to my great annoyance.

The most famous "watching evolution in action" experiment I usually see cited is this one. Obviously, bacteria are not a perfect example of what you are talking about because they are notoriously able to borrow and change DNA with lots of other types of bacteria and they reproduce asexually. But it is an example of major spontaneous change by genetic mutation in a controlled environment which led to bacteria being able to metabolize something they could not formerly metabolize.

The best thing I can think of for humans off the top of my head that *may* be going into a speciation direction is that certain populations of humans (Tibetans and some tribes that live in the high Andes) have developed genes that enable them to carry fetuses to term in low oxygen environments. Women without these genes find it very hard to impossible to reproduce at high altitudes. These people are not a different species because a mixed race child born of a native mother at high altitude or born of a non-native mother at low altitudes would presumably be delivered just fine. But that's potentially the kind of real environmental constraint that if it lasted for long enough *could* presumably eventually create populations that were mutually infertile.

Plus clean lines of speciation are not really the best way to think about evolution anyway. There *is* no clean line of speciation observable if you are looking at this at the level of one generation to the next one by one. As Dawkins put it in another book, your great-great-great-great-great (to the power of a zillion) grandfather was a fish. Obviously you could not breed with a fish but every parent-child relationship in that line was obviously the same species as its offspring.

And the lines of absolute infertility between species is also fuzzy. Several breeds of housecats are fertile crossbreedings between two different species (Savannahs are housecat which descends from African wild cat cross with servals, Bengals are a housecat cross with Asian leopard cats). Red wolves and coyotes are another pair of species that can interbreed. This classification is contentious enough that apparently there's dispute about whether or not red wolves are a "real" endangered species or not because modern coyotes have been found to have large percentages of red wolf genes. So that thing witch was the phenotypical red wolf is basically extinct but tens of thousands of its descendants are still running around. To make it even more complicated, coyotes are also evolving to be larger in many areas to start filling some of the niche of eradicated large predators like wolves. Do they become red wolves again then with this?

The better analogy on evolution is not the tree with discrete branches but a river delta with streams that flow into and out of each other before sometimes eventually meandering off into a separate pool (that usually eventually goes extinct). Hence the "Out of Africa" story is no longer straightforwardly true. We did a lot of interbreeding with various other hominids outside Africa as well such as Neanderthals and Denisovans.

This whole point of criticism to me is oddly empirical anyway. If I can't directly see it, it must not be real? That seems like a very scientifically positivistic way of evidence seeking.

[Vol]

I was thinking of that bacteria experiment yesterday, actually, and then what 50,000 generations would entail in humans and other large animals. My question, if I could get the researchers to indulge a layman, would be if that adaptation was totally novel, something extant but dormant in the DNA, or a predictable result of a concentrated population. Or if they even know enough about that bacteria to say.

Right, the examples I saw were generally like the Tibetans you mentioned. The intellectual dishonesty was to extrapolate that would constitute proof, rather than a starting point for study. Like Dawkins, we're making a presupposition that it did happen, and therefore any logically coherent extrapolation is probably correct. A little earlier, I was reading a slapfight between two retards on the origin of religion in human. The retard who proposed a naturalist explanation went on about pattern-seeking behaviors and agency attribution that lead to false conclusions. How anything could be true or false for finite, determinist creatures was not addressed. So simplistic, but I can see the logical steps, it's coherent and seems to explain things well. We can easily imagine these gradual narratives building, because they factually did. However, it also is like trying to decide if a ruler is 12" by measuring it with itself.

Dawkin's line about the fish is a cute way of framing life as all the descendants of the LUCA as DNA replication units. Which, begrudgingly, to his credit is the best explanation for the data. I'm not sure what a "ideal" speciation scenario in the wild would look like. I don't like to lean on labs experiments, because those are literally intelligently designed. The liger/tigon shows genetic drift within panthera, but not a transitory state between a cat, near-cat, and not-cat. Which begs the question of what a transitory state "is," since by theory, everything is always in a transitory state. Unless a population is relatively static, like the coelacanth, while a spectrum of split off populations somehow are extant nearby, with the furthest one out being totally distinct, like a textbook illustration of living things. It's frustrating that every near-human variant managed to go extinct before recorded history began in that way. Though I assume by original Darwinism, sub-Saharan Africans and Aboriginals would have been.

Which might have been what the philosopher was trying to drive at. Everyone uses Platonic terms to describe animals, it is basic and intuitive that there are wolves, dogs, coyotes, cross-breeds, and everything isn't them. Then evolutionary theory asserts that none of that is strictly true, the labels are only our best ability to categorize a general range of genetic expression. A beagle, mastiff, wolfhound, and mutt are all dogs, but dog isn't a strict boundary, if given time and isolation, the margins of "dog" could become so blurred as to be meaningless. Which implies our basic, intuitive sense that ascribes discrete labels is completely wrong, in a fundamental way. Which then begs explanation for how our logical thinking, which was used to determine these things, which is supposed to be an emergent behavior from our basic, intuitive senses, could be correct. You and I have no ability to _truly_ believe a tiger is not a Platonic tiger, but we can reason to ourselves it isn't. But then my reasoning is conflicting itself, what I know to be true and what I've extrapolated to be true deny each other.

Eh. That's enough armchair philosophizing for a day, Solomon Grundy want pants too.

[Ragabul]

You and I have no ability to _truly_ believe a tiger is not a Platonic tiger, but we can reason to ourselves it isn't.

I don't really have the capacity to believe in tiger as spectrum stretching from primordial microbe to now, no. Or more precisely, this would be a useless category anyway because it would just describe life and be unable to sperate life into anything manageable. But I'm quite capable of holding the idea of a Siberian tiger and a Bengal tiger in my head at the same time, all of which are phenotypically distinctive in notable ways. In enough ways that if taught the difference and shown 100 pictures with 50 being Siberian and 50 Bengal, you could sort them into the appropriate categories with near perfect accuracy. These phenotypes also correspond to real differences in geography and genes as well which we can also document.

I don't think humans think *only* in archetypes. We are obviously quite able to process spectrums. To say I have an archetype for "empty cup" and "cup full of water" does not mean I can't very easily picture a cup filled with a near infinite variety of other liquids or filled to a near infinite variety of different levels.

Like think about the categories of color. The thing we colloquially call "blue" is a spectrum that at the far ends drifts off into what we start calling green or purple or whatever. There are an infinite variety of shades of blue such we could never actually document them all. But we can eyeball if with astounding consistency with things only getting blurry and contentious at the edges.

[Vol]

https://www.ft.com/content/1e030bbb-a07 ... fe579a9a8a

"It's not happening."->"It's a right-wing conspiracy."->"If it was happening it wouldn't be bad."->"It is happening, but it's a good thing!"->"You're a Nazi if you don't support it."->"It's mandatory to consume the daily Truth Messages."

Granted, the author is some neocon from a think thank, but the last 2 years has been institutional lying parroted into Truth, and neocons run the GOP still. I see this more as a litmus test for the mood of the nobility.

[Ragabul]

A blogger I read calls it "The Law of Merited Impossibility" though he mostly uses it to refer to culture war stuff. It goes "That will never happen, but if it does, you bigots will deserve it." It's a subgenre of motte-and-baily. It starts off with arguments like "If you don't support X, than keep your mouth shut" and ends with "If you don't support X, you will receive 0 government funding for whatever you are doing and also you shouldn't be employable and maybe it should even be a crime."

Though I have to admit, I'm not terribly upset at the idea of Western democracies exposing and/or giving the Russians a dose of their own medicine. Just because elaborate "Russia stole the election" stories are false does not mean the Russians do not aggressively try to manipulate American audiences in various ways. Keeping its enemies destabilized and off-balance is totally a thing the Russians consistently strategically pursue. They are uniquely good at exploiting chaos.

Of course, the standard Law of Merited Impossibility in this situation would go something like: "I am concerned about these government anti-Russia efforts because I believe it will eventually be used to crack down on domestics who have nothing to do with the Russians and are merely guilty of saying things the government doesn't like." And of course the standard response of "That will never happen, but if it does you crazy domestic terrorists will deserve it."

[Sinekein]

The problem I had with it, as much as I understood, was that it would only extend to invalidating Darwin himself, and no one else who didn't share his presuppositions. That and Darwinism was supplanted by Neo-Darwinism, the theory has evolved beyond the man's initial errors and ignorance, that's how the methodology works. So that led me down a rabbit hole of trying to find out if speciation has ever been observed in a lab setting, or anything close to it in the wild. To which the answer is "No, but we've observed situations that could lead to it," framed in intellectually dishonest ways, to my great annoyance. Maybe among academics it's different, but laymen, and people who claim to be academics, are some of the most smug retards, even if correct, I've ever seen.

A "species" is an intellectual construct whose definition is still under debate for several reasons. But even without that, observing speciation in a lab is by definition impossible since it is the ecosystem in which a wild population resides - biotope, which designates all the physical and chemical parameters of this ecosystem (light, altitude, humidity, pressure, temperature, etc), and biocoenosis, which is all the other living organisms that population interacts with. Pressure from this ecosystem will lead to natural selection and possibly, over time, to speciation, as this population might end up being different enough from other populations of these species to be considered to be "new".

As a result, in a lab, you will not be able to properly recreate the ecosystem, so at best you would observe a completely alien kind of speciation. Which would have no ecological value.

Now, as to whether it has been observed within the timeframe of a single scientific study, obviously not, because even for cases of very fast speciation, you will need centuries of enforced reproductive isolation for two populations to become different enough not to be able to mate anymore - and as such, to be considered two different species. The only living organisms that evolve fast enough to be observed in a lab don't have species - bacteria for example, or various microscopic eukaryotes.

If you want just one example of how slow speciation is, take bears. Everybody considers grizzlies and polar bears to be two different species (Ursus arctos horribilis and Ursus maritimus, respectively). They have been isolated for 600.000 years, have wildly different phenotypes and behaviors - polar bears are the only purely carnivorous bears, for example - and yet they can still mate with each other, and the "grolars" or "pizzlies" that are born aren't sterile either (and as far as I know, there is no hybrid degeneration involved).

However, even if it is not part of a scientific study, there have been enough observed examples of "directed speciation", ie domestication, for Darwin's theories to be proven true.

And indeed there are many situations in which speciation is going to occur down the line because a two populations are irremediably split - yet you will need to monitor them for several thousand years for those to be able to be called "two species".

[Sinekein]

The most famous "watching evolution in action" experiment I usually see cited is this one. Obviously, bacteria are not a perfect example of what you are talking about because they are notoriously able to borrow and change DNA with lots of other types of bacteria and they reproduce asexually. But it is an example of major spontaneous change by genetic mutation in a controlled environment which led to bacteria being able to metabolize something they could not formerly metabolize.

Historically, you can also have a look at the peppered moth evolution in England from the 19th century onwards. Technically not one long study, but it has been very-well documented that around Manchester or Birmingham, black moths became the dominant variant of the species in the mid-XIXth century after the industrial revolution started. Before that, white moths were by far the most common because this moth spends the day on trees covered with lichens, making them well wamouflaged. But the air pollution from the first factories killed the lichens, darkening tree trunks, and the black moths were the ones well-hidden when landed on bark. And since pollution has been at least partially cleaned, lichens are growing again, and so is the population of white moths.

The best thing I can think of for humans off the top of my head that *may* be going into a speciation direction is that certain populations of humans (Tibetans and some tribes that live in the high Andes) have developed genes that enable them to carry fetuses to term in low oxygen environments. Women without these genes find it very hard to impossible to reproduce at high altitudes. These people are not a different species because a mixed race child born of a native mother at high altitude or born of a non-native mother at low altitudes would presumably be delivered just fine. But that's potentially the kind of real environmental constraint that if it lasted for long enough *could* presumably eventually create populations that were mutually infertile.

There is far too much movement of populations within the human species for speciation to occur now. The best you can do is to study the effect of past environmental pressure, like the very high metabolism of polynesian people which presumably stems from a mix of fish-heavy diets (since there was no agriculture) and the need to store fat efficiently in case you need to go for a while without eating, like for sea travel. There is a reason they are sought after for playing rugby or American Football...and why many of them become incredibly fat as soon as they retire from the sport.

And the lines of absolute infertility between species is also fuzzy. Several breeds of housecats are fertile crossbreedings between two different species (Savannahs are housecat which descends from African wild cat cross with servals, Bengals are a housecat cross with Asian leopard cats). Red wolves and coyotes are another pair of species that can interbreed. This classification is contentious enough that apparently there's dispute about whether or not red wolves are a "real" endangered species or not because modern coyotes have been found to have large percentages of red wolf genes. So that thing witch was the phenotypical red wolf is basically extinct but tens of thousands of its descendants are still running around. To make it even more complicated, coyotes are also evolving to be larger in many areas to start filling some of the niche of eradicated large predators like wolves. Do they become red wolves again then with this?

Indeed, which is why most smart conservation biologists want to preserve populations, not species. It just so happens that most critically endangered species have just one remaining population, so by trying to save the population, you try to save the species. I worked on the Pyrenean brown bear population, which is critically endangered - but brown bears definitely aren't.

[Vol]

I don't really have the capacity to believe in tiger as spectrum stretching from primordial microbe to now, no.

We don't have the capacity to not associate an individual entity with a categorical equivalent to species. Such as "unclean," it's a compulsion that undergirds our cognition, and that has implications for the higher order reasoning.

I don't think humans think *only* in archetypes. We are obviously quite able to process spectrums. To say I have an archetype for "empty cup" and "cup full of water" does not mean I can't very easily picture a cup filled with a near infinite variety of other liquids or filled to a near infinite variety of different levels.

Archetypes fail to represent anything real, and spectrums are an extension of them. You cannot picture the (finitely) infinite variety of cups with infinite levels of liquid without the archetype of "cup" and "liquid." I have a perfect intuitive sense of the difference between a Raga and a banana well before I know words to express it or the science to qualify it. I cannot express that distinction as a mind-state, it's not coherent or rational, and attempting to do so, with genes, form, function, etc., seems to be layering arbitrary traits to estimate what I already know.

Like think about the categories of color. The thing we colloquially call "blue" is a spectrum that at the far ends drifts off into what we start calling green or purple or whatever. There are an infinite variety of shades of blue such we could never actually document them all. But we can eyeball if with astounding consistency with things only getting blurry and contentious at the edges.

Red is not blue, blue is not yellow, yellow is not red. The spectrum between them composes all visible colors. There does not exist an archetypical red, blue, or yellow. That would mean we have only a range loosely grouped by their most distinct values. The cluster of colors that are most different from red and yellow are blue. That makes sense.

But in order to make that statement, I must possess foundational knowledge of blue, which would have to be biologically innate. Something in our brains evolved to lump the spectrum of visible color most different from red & yellow into the perception we call blue, for some reason at some point. But there is no perfect "blue," we only experience the spectrum, yet are born with this innately imperfect category. Where in the sequence from a primitive, evolved concept of "blueness" to a scientific explanation of light wavelengths and cognitive processes do we start becoming objectively correct? Again, it sounds like trying to measure a ruler with itself.

"I know what blue is. Here is the process of how we know what blue is. There is no blue. But I know what blue is."

[Ragabul]

I guess I'm just not following you then. There is no thing called "blue" in any objective sense that can be perfectly articulated. Different languages in fact have wildly different ways of classifying colors and this is one of the things that silly people who believe words shape thoughts (rather than vice versa) will try to use to demonstrate that some random Aboriginal tribe or other has a totally alien way of thinking Western man cannot hope to understand. Yet, if you show some person the color blue who has no name for blue and ask them to pick out other things that are that same color or close to that color, they can do it. And "blue" does in fact correspond to a real state that can be verified with other tools besides the naked human eye. None of this actually corresponds to a perfect Platonic blue. The test of the category is in its repeated usefulness as a symbol to convey meaning between people or in the case of science to predict outcomes. It's the only usable standard. Anything but this is going down an epistemological rabbit hole in which it's impossible to know anything or even screen out some answers as being more probable than others.

You can do this without having any inborn categories. I can show you a picture of something you've never seen before and didn't know existed. I don't know, say an archival spatula. And you could then pick that object out of jumble of other objects with near perfect accuracy. The inborn capacity is pattern recognition. Humans are stupidly good at it. We do have some innate superstructure that prioritizes certain varieties of patterns like children are hardwired to learn language but not any specific language.

[Vol]

Assuming pattern recognition is intuitive and how we come to know abstract categories like "species" and "color," and the applied study of patterns in nature is how we eventually invent the scientific method, and the scientific method contradicts the abstract categories we know before we know formal science. We think "tiger" is an absolute container long before we think it isn't. Is our intuitive pattern recognition incorrect, incomplete, or irrational? And why isn't the scientific method, as the cumulation of noticing patterns in nature, subject to whatever you answer?

I'm not a solipsist, so I would say what we first know is incomplete, as science is supposed to be (as opposed to scientism), and that scientific theory is true because it builds off sense information, instinct, and some kind of capacity for free, independent, rational thought. Therefore, a tiger is factually a tiger, and tigers are tigers, no matter what I come to learn later about DNA, geography, mutations, cross-fertility, and sub-species. Because the latter knowledge is built on the former, they cannot contradict, and if they appear to, then either my foundation and conclusion are wrong, or the conclusion is wrong, it can never be that my foundation is wrong and my conclusion is correct.

Edit: Bizarrely enough, shortly after posting this, randomly picking a lecture to listen to, it was about this.

[Ragabul]

I'm not a solipsist, so I would say what we first know is incomplete, as science is supposed to be (as opposed to scientism), and that scientific theory is true because it builds off sense information, instinct, and some kind of capacity for free, independent, rational thought.

I guess I never thought this was in question.

Therefore, a tiger is factually a tiger, and tigers are tigers, no matter what I come to learn later about DNA, geography, mutations, cross-fertility, and sub-species. Because the latter knowledge is built on the former, they cannot contradict, and if they appear to, then either my foundation and conclusion are wrong, or the conclusion is wrong, it can never be that my foundation is wrong and my conclusion is correct.

This was actually one of the few interesting bits of sociology gobbleygook I got in grad school in a class called "The Organization of Information." The premise of the class was *supposed* to be something like "the ways we have categorized information (like Library of Congress subject headings, Dewey Decimal, Dublin Core, or whatever) is fundamentally arbitrary, based on our own culture, and in no way corresponds to anything objective." It then attempted to blow poor Westerner's mind by exposing us to classification schema from various Aboriginal tribes that had been documented by anthropologists. There would be some pretentious article or other that would say something like: "The Ubungu people of Peta Peta have an elaborate ritualized classification for all objects in the hierarchy of being. In Category A are rocks, some types of spears, drums, all hot food but soup, and feet. In category B are liquids, some other types of spears, all body parts but feet, and flying animals. In Category C are pots and volcanoes."

I thought this was stupid even at the time because these articles and the instructors were fastidiously ignoring whatever internal logic guided these categories in an effort to try to maximize their arbitrariness (and thus the socially constructed nature of literally everything). I promise you there is some actual human logic to the Ubungu classification system that a Westerner could eventually understand. It will not satisfy scientific rigor. It will be contradictory in places and arbitrary in some others, but it will be usable, based on some kind of actual logic, and something any human could learn without having their mind utterly blown. Because this is how *all* human classification schema are.

So, no, none of these categories are ever *wrong* but they do exist on a spectrum of usefulness and we can and do amend them. So the category "fish" used to include whales because "fish" meant something like "finned animals that live in the water." We changed this for various good reasons and now most half-assedly educated people have no real problem thinking of whales as belonging in the same category as elephants instead of tuna. Pluto was a planet until it wasn't.

Since I'm reading that autism book now and am going to read another similar book about psychiatry in general next this is like 80% of what the entire field is. Arguing over categories of what does and doesn't fit the description of a particular disorder and whether X should even be considered a disorder or not.

On some level, this might be the best definition of science. An attempt to edit intuitive, organic categories based on their level of correspondence to reality on multiple non intuitive, artificial metrics. Human classification pre-science mostly emerge based on usefulness. Science is an attempt to add *accuracy* as a criterion in such schemas.

Edit: Bizarrely enough, shortly after posting this, randomly picking a lecture to listen to, it was about this.

Ah, I see the good fairy of pretentious articles/links has come to favor you as well.

[Vol]

I guess I never thought this was in question.

I don't assume people have or haven't unrolled the implications of their beliefs.

I thought this was stupid even at the time because these articles and the instructors were fastidiously ignoring whatever internal logic guided these categories in an effort to try to maximize their arbitrariness (and thus the socially constructed nature of literally everything). I promise you there is some actual human logic to the Ubungu classification system that a Westerner could eventually understand. It will not satisfy scientific rigor. It will be contradictory in places and arbitrary in some others, but it will be usable, based on some kind of actual logic, and something any human could learn without having their mind utterly blown. Because this is how *all* human classification schema are.

Post-modernism, always a joy (joy is socially constructed).

But that's sort of what I'm getting at here. In programming terms, it's the abstract template at the root of an object hierarchy, then varying layers of inheritance before getting to the individual. You can never instantiate the template directly, it's pure abstraction, but it's also real in that it defines the common elements to every successive inheritance. So while every end point can be totally unique, and thus incompatible, you can also run back up the hierarchy, discarding the added attributes at each layer, and then walk down another path. Or in human terms, "Anyone can understand anyone else's logic if they're willing to suppress their own." Which is also the inverse of physical reductionism, funnily enough.

So, no, none of these categories are ever *wrong* but they do exist on a spectrum of usefulness and we can and do amend them. So the category "fish" used to include whales because "fish" meant something like "finned animals that live in the water." We changed this for various good reasons and now most half-assedly educated people have no real problem thinking of whales as belonging in the same category as elephants instead of tuna. Pluto was a planet until it wasn't.

Whales are both "fish" and "mammals." Both categories are true, the taxonomical definition is not inherently the most useful, or that common usage of the terms has changed to reflect researcher's particular precision. If you told someone who'd never seen a whale before that they are a fish and a mammal, they would understand the nature of what you're saying (within assumptions). "Finned animal that lives in the water" precedes "aquatic placental mammal with ungulate ancestry." The foundational "fish" precedes the technical "mammal" and "not a fish (taxonomy)," and none of it is incongruent.

On some level, this might be the best definition of science. An attempt to edit intuitive, organic categories based on their level of correspondence to reality on multiple non intuitive, artificial metrics. Human classification pre-science mostly emerge based on usefulness. Science is an attempt to add *accuracy* as a criterion in such schemas.

Exactly. I make use of scientific categories so people can understand me, and for technical discussions, but I don't bake in a value judgement about the paradigm.

[Vol]

Pressure from this ecosystem will lead to natural selection and possibly, over time, to speciation, as this population might end up being different enough from other populations of these species to be considered to be "new".

As I've said, I haven't read much about alternative theories, since they range from "Everything was literally created as is in an instant" to "evolution with teleology." The hanging point for some people seems to be a boundary on a population changing past a certain point. The "kinds" idea, so that a horse population could become very different with isolation and time, like dog breeds, but would never not be a horse. I don't know how that would be expressed in physical processes though, or if there is any evidence that there are crucial, static DNA segments that would preserve a "basic horse nature" even if physically the animal was exceptionally different. Similar to whales and ungulates, but on a naturally structural level that I've never seen explained.

And indeed there are many situations in which speciation is going to occur down the line because a two populations are irremediably split - yet you will need to monitor them for several thousand years for those to be able to be called "two species".

Intellectually, what annoys me is that it's inductive, has no predictive power, and is unfalsifiable. So all reasonable evidence implies this is how speciation occurs, but there is nothing to criticize or refute, nothing to directly observe or experiment. The theory is too amorphous, like when ancient men would say there's an ocean above the sky, and that's where rain comes from. You can do nothing with that theory until you have better means of seeing into space.

[Sinekein]

That's probably because the rules of evolutionary biology do not exist to satisfy a human intellect.

And the lack of predictive power has to do with the fact that the evolutionary force at the basis of them all, mutation, is random, and we have no computer powerful enough to predict what biological changes will occur when an Adenine is replaced with a Thymine in a random genomic location.We can't automatically extrapolate how much a proteine will change, or how much more (or less) active a gene will be because of a random change. We can't do it for a single mutation, and since it occurs millions of time within the lifespan of a single individual, well...

But it has to be said that all four main evolutionary forces predicted by Darwin and his followers - mutation, migration, natural selection, genetic drift - have been documented thousands of time, and nothing ever came close to disproving any of them. It explains sexual selection of disadvantageous traits. It explains altruism. There is nothing we've found on Earth that does not follow these rules. Better even, Darwin basically stated before we knew much about genetics themselves, and yet his theory still holds very well.

That's why there's not much to say about "alternate theories". At best, what has been discovered is that to a limited degree, epigenetics might allow individuals to acquire minor genetic modifications throughout their lives - making Lamarckism somewhat true, but without disproving Darwinism whatsoever as those traits would still be acquired by environmental pressure (something both Lamarck and Darwin agreed on).

The "kinds" idea, so that a horse population could become very different with isolation and time, like dog breeds, but would never not be a horse. I don't know how that would be expressed in physical processes though, or if there is any evidence that there are crucial, static DNA segments that would preserve a "basic horse nature" even if physically the animal was exceptionally different. Similar to whales and ungulates, but on a naturally structural level that I've never seen explained.

Again, "species" - intellectual tool. Nothing more. Invented by humans, and as flawed as anything invented by humans. There has recently been a controversy going on as to whether there were one or two elephant species in Africa (forest elephants and savannah elephants) as genetic studies have proven that they had such different behaviors that they did not interact with each other anymore and were on the path to speciation, while obviously not being there yet. Now, few deny that it will eventually occur - assuming assholes don't exterminate them before that - and most will even agree on what kinds of traits will be selected in each future species, but whether they are one or two species right now is under debate. Because, well, discovering a "new species" is a good way to show off when you're a biologist, even moreso for a famous animal like the african elephant.

It does not change a thing about their ecologies, it's just a matter of putting your name on a scientific paper "discovering a new elephant species" and getting the subsequent funding that goes with it (and mediatic attention).

So no, there is no "static horse DNA" because there is no such thing as a horse for nature. A horse is a phenotype, which itself is a sum of traits, and all animals whose traits roughly fall in that category have been named horses. If nature pressures those traits to change, they will change, or the species will go extinct, as has happened a lot over time.

Two million years ago or so, sloths were 2 meter tall agressive land predators after all. Then environmental pressure occurred.

[Ragabul]

But that's sort of what I'm getting at here. In programming terms, it's the abstract template at the root of an object hierarchy, then varying layers of inheritance before getting to the individual. You can never instantiate the template directly, it's pure abstraction, but it's also real in that it defines the common elements to every successive inheritance. So while every end point can be totally unique, and thus incompatible, you can also run back up the hierarchy, discarding the added attributes at each layer, and then walk down another path. Or in human terms, "Anyone can understand anyone else's logic if they're willing to suppress their own." Which is also the inverse of physical reductionism, funnily enough.

I don't know how that would be expressed in physical processes though, or if there is any evidence that there are crucial, static DNA segments that would preserve a "basic horse nature" even if physically the animal was exceptionally different. Similar to whales and ungulates, but on a naturally structural level that I've never seen explained.

They have absolutely started doing something along these lines now with DNA because genome sequencing has gotten exponentially cheaper and faster in recent years. There are no truly static bits of DNA (to my understanding, Sine could probably explain it better) because of recombination where genetics sequences from mother and father are shuffled around to produce offspring. However, some things do indeed persist intact down the ages which is why we can speak of certain genes we have as being "Neanderthal" genes or "Denisovan genes" or whatever.

So there is no static horse nature, no, but this kind of thing can absolutely be used to identity common ancestry and even the approximate time that ancestor lived.

[TTTX]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mExN99kHMB0&ab

[Ragabul]

Pretty interesting video. Somewhat disagree with his stance at the end that you can willfully direct a place to explicitly become like another place across the board. I don't so much believe people are on destiny rails as prisoners of history as that the pile of things that resulted in a given society becoming what it is is just as much unguided, uncontrolled things as it is conscious effort. And those unguided, uncontrolled things (like geography leading to storage economy example in this video) provide a king of cultural flavor that you cannot just flip a switch and undue. Any conscious effort you make to go in a particular policy direction has to take into account this cultural flavor and sensibility.

It's one reason I keep going on and on and on about that Albion's Seed book in the USA context. It does a better job of explaining origins of US cultural flavor that still persist to this day than pretty much anything else I've read. One example of this for pretty much all Anglophone countries is common law. Common law doesn't just create a distinctive legal system. It itself evolved out of (and maintains) a particular set of cultural sensibilities.

*Edit* Also in general genre of Danish history (not that I read a lot of this to be honest but this one I did see stuff on last year):

An Extraordinary 500-Year-Old Shipwreck Is Rewriting the History of the Age of Discovery

I actually watched a good Nova PBS documentary on it, but it's unfortunately behind a paywall. Hey, what do you know. Found a bootleg copy on Dailymotion that can be watched.