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BiggerBoat posted:I grew up in Delaware and lived in Philly and, let me tell you, I'm not sure how anyone can tell the difference after a chemical spill. loving 30 years ago, if you flew into the Philadelphia airport, you'd get a good look at the Delaware river and it looked an oil slick on a wet road. Rainbow color swirls and all. It also loving stunk to high heaven. That river doesn't even resemble water and looks like you could walk on it. I get your point, but it's a bit like how we used to make jokes about Boston Harbor being a literal septic tank in the early 80s: they've done a lot to clean up the Delaware in the intervening decades.
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Mar 27, 2023 16:51
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Kalli posted:The point isn't to enforce it, it's to prevent anyone from trying. If you're a support group, are you willing to send your members and money to help transport someone in Idaho? Can Idahoans even get people to form such a group in Idaho? This. The point of these laws are twofold, first to signal to your rabid base just how much you hate the Other, and second to scare people enough that they don't even try the thing you're trying to prevent, regardless of constitutionality or anything else really.
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Mar 29, 2023 19:48
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PostNouveau posted:Anything fun happen in the Howard Schultz hearing today? Romney attempted to come to the aid of a fellow billionaire psychopath and tried playing the "job creator" card, so there's that if you're yearning for classic GOP euphemisms as opposed to the current crop.
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Mar 30, 2023 14:54
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PT6A posted:So I take it that with language like "Soros-backed" DeSantis has not typically been relying on the support of Jewish voters in FL? He tries to make up for it by ostentatiously slobbering all over Israel whenever the chance allows, thus consciously or not acting to reinforce the idea of the good ones (over there, oppressing Palestinians) vs. the bad ones (over here, doing anything at all we don't like).
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Mar 31, 2023 01:17
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Epic High Five posted:In my experience, Trump has massive appeal to the constantly victimized mindset small business owner/landlord like nobody else I've ever seen since Dubbya specifically right after 9/11 (when he had that kind of support from almost everybody). Most of the rural lumpen who are getting hosed over instead of feeling hosed over because they watch TV news all day are about as relevant to anything that is going on as immigrant labor and urban lumpen. I could get a service worker with a Black Rifle Coffee shirt who lives in the cheapest place in town to sign up to vote for Bernie, but his boss, no fuckin way. I had to teach the former about class warfare, the latter already knows. I think this is the crucial distinction about the majority of Trump's base vs. common media descriptions of same. Like previous fascists, his demographics are mostly bourgeois/petite-bourgeois types who feel deeply insecure and vulnerable to shifting socio-economic trends and movements, without in the main actually suffering significant damage from them. They have their petty little kingdoms and by god they're not giving up their privileges so some pink-haired androgynous weirdo can feel safe being themselves in public, or whatever other example you care to name. Now, the people actually getting screwed over by the capitalist hellword we live in are no less vulnerable to culture war distractions to be sure, but they're also usually much more keyed in to who/what specifically is giving them the shaft on a daily basis ie: their job, boss.
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Apr 2, 2023 19:46
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Jaxyon posted:Religion was a post-hoc justification for slavery once the war started, IIRC. You don't. Southern Christians, Baptists in particular but not exclusively, were preaching about slavery being a positive good well before the war started. And more broadly you can go back well into the eighteenth century and earlier to hear Christianity cited as the reason why enslaving Africans is better than letting them remain free, but pagan. As to education programs, those emphatically were not a thing in the ante-bellum South, and legally could not be even if there had been motivation to set them up. Anti-literacy laws were rife across the region, with South Carolina characteristically leading the way in 1739. Sure, there were vague platitudes offered from time to time about how Christian benevolence was why the planters treated their slaves so well, but actual education was not a thing, unless you count very, very basic training so they could work the fields more efficiently. And even that's dicey, as the anti-Capitalist slant of the old South meant many ignored/refused to employ modern agricultural methods as who needs money-grubbing Yankee efficiencies when you can just throw more slaves at a problem.
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Apr 3, 2023 20:02
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FLIPADELPHIA posted:Which one did they voluntarily lobotomize again? That was Rosemary, Robert and JFK's sister.
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Apr 6, 2023 22:28
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I mean if he was capable of even an ounce of shame enough pressure might convince him to resign, but unfortunately I've some bad news about that first part.
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Apr 16, 2023 19:45
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nine-gear crow posted:No. We've at least seen proof that Fetterman is still alive. McConnell and Feinstein are....? Emperors_Death_Bed_Scene_Dark_Crystal.MOV
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Apr 17, 2023 04:13
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Gyges posted:While pervy old guys were probably among the most staunch advocates, the ridiculously long tradition of naked swimming in America was it's own force. That's how it was when the adults were kids, and how it was when their parents were kids. Ain't nothing never come of it before, and by god we'll keep doing it that way until...we have to have co-ed pools now? Why the hell are these boys naked!? Britain, too. During the 19th century there was a long conflict between middle class prudes who disapproved of male public nudity versus people who recognized that for the working class nude swimming was pretty much the only option they had, given the utterly miserable state of sanitation and available facilities for anyone who wasn't well off. When London finally passed ordinances requiring swimsuits, Boy Scout founder Robert Baden-Powell wrote a number of blistering editorials about how awful it was, to touch back to the point about old pervs being also invested in it.
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Apr 22, 2023 19:44
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DarkCrawler posted:I mean...do progressive politicians deliver to their constituencies? Bernie has, and does. His constituent services are generally very solid and he's done right by VT both in the House and Senate; as just one example, he was instrumental in getting federal money for both the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail and Kingdom Trails in the NEK.
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Apr 26, 2023 21:07
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Comstar posted:What ended up stopping them? They broke in, got into some offices… and milled around and walked out. Organized =/= competent. They absolutely were looking to murder people if they could have gotten their hands on them, but thankfully were too dumb/easily distracted to get to where their various targets were sheltering. DarkCrawler posted:Maybe the leftists in United States should? Because their current track won't get them anywhere different if the liberal establishment fails as it often does. There are no militant organizing at any level. Hell, you're doing a disservice to leftists under Hindenburg by even comparing them, to be honest. Where is the American RSRG and if that could exist are American leftists really facing bigger threats now? Historical quibble, the Reichsbanner weren't hugely leftist; they generally rose in support of the more centrist (though usually not the actual Center) and center-left parties like the Social Democrats who were (usually) the largest partner in the ruling Weimar coalition until the end. If you want an actual, and really, leftist Weimar street militia you'd look to the Roter Frontkämpferbund, particularly as any actual American equivalent would likely be treated the same by the Democrats as they were by the Social Dems ie: getting banned for being too indecorous/actually leftist.
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Apr 30, 2023 09:48
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lobster shirt posted:forced sterilization in the united states didn't end until decades after ww2. like i think the last one was in the 1980s. If you count what ICE got up to during the Trump presidency, it still hasn't.
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May 5, 2023 09:37
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Ither posted:Why are chuds starting to push child labor? Because it's still just beyond the pale to openly demand the return of slavery.
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May 8, 2023 17:15
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the_steve posted:Slavery was never truly abolished, they just tweaked it enough that they could call it something different. That's why I qualified with "openly." Still have to use the prison system and other dodges, how inconvenient.
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May 8, 2023 17:31
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Bar Ran Dun posted:gently caress the lost causers. And gently caress sideways Jubal Early in particular as he was the prime and prolific author of early (hah) Lost Cause material, in particular that Grant was a bumbling drunk who only won by drowning the Confederacy in Yankee blood. Real motherfucker, that Early.
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May 18, 2023 04:18
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pencilhands posted:I always thought it was cool that the general who won the civil war and became president was named "U.S." Grant it's like something out of a book Nerding out for a moment, he wasn't. His actual first name was Hiram, which he hated. His full name was Hiram Ulysses Grant, so in his youth he got the nickname of "hug." Upon being admitted to West Point he decided to use his middle name as his first as "Uhg" could hardly be worse, but the admitting officer didn't bother asking him and just assumed he used his mother's maiden named as his middle ("Simpson"), which is a long and round-about way of explaining how became U.S. Grant. His classmates at West Point called him Sam, or Uncle Sam, affectionately. This included his best man and eventual enemy then friend again James P. Longstreet, one of maybe two repentant ex-Confederates.
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May 18, 2023 04:33
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Mooseontheloose posted:The computer is neutral and has no judgement, sorry. Are you telling me you don't Trust the Computer, citizen? The Computer is your friend!
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May 18, 2023 19:10
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Nucleic Acids posted:She ran the worst campaign in American history and goths results she deserved. How do I know that? Goths don't deserve that!
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May 20, 2023 18:31
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Clarste posted:They used to do nuclear bomb drills back in the Cold War, so something something something. They weren't doing them anymore by my time in school, but growing up in even the late Cold War the constant fear of imminent nuclear annihilation is something that definitely affected me and mine. I remember working myself into a near-panic when I was like 6 after my father explained, in as close to appropriate and simple terms as possible for someone that age, why nuclear weapons were so bad and I got it into my head that we didn't have enough food stored in the root cellar to survive the fallout.
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May 22, 2023 19:37
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:When I was a kid in the 80's, we got nuclear terror talks all the time and I *still* get flashback jump scares about it sometimes. I still sometimes get wigged out by Emergency Alert System tests on the radio and whatnot due to be absolutely convinced as a kid that any time they came on it could be the ninety-second precursor to dying in nuclear fire. Those three leading beeps followed by dial tone just sometimes reach back to a real place of terror. Captain_Maclaine fucked around with this message at 20:13 on May 22, 2023 |
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May 22, 2023 20:09
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I teach history surveys and upper-level classes, and I don't assign homework. Under certain circumstances I'll assign a weekly response paper to the assigned reading, and there will usually be a term paper or two per semester, but beyond that I the main grade points come from quizzes, in-class discussion/participation, and exams, the weight of all of which varies depending on the level of the class and number of student I'm teaching. Homework, like the sort we all used to get in grade and high school, is generally just marking time, and of little if any academic worth at the university level, best I can tell.PhazonLink posted:education and grown up work days imo could do more to respect different chrono types. some people are just night owls, some people are early birds. Totally. I hate morning classes, both as I'm a night owl myself, and I generally find college students are at their best between 1 and 4ish PM.
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May 23, 2023 03:42
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I AM GRANDO posted:I made the mistake of studying the humanities: no exams, assigned reading (a lot) discussed in seminars twice a week, and a large essay due at the end of the semester. 100% of the grade was quality of seminar discussion and the big essay. Did a great job of preparing me for the horrible mistake of going to grad school and probably infected me with a lifelong love of reading difficult things and thinking carefully/wanting to talk about bid ideas with people. Man when a class discussion hits critical mass and the students start really engaging on their own with the material without me having to prompt them or ask leading questions, it's just the best. Completely validates whatever it was I assigned them to read and makes the imposter syndrome I'm convinced like 90% of professors have feel less relevant, at least for a few minutes.
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May 23, 2023 03:57
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Nash posted:Another for the humanities crew. All this school talk just makes me thankful it is almost summer. 18 years of HS history down. The past three years or so I've seen a significant decline in the number of students who know how to write formally. In particular, how, where, and when to cite a source has gotten significantly worse; even when I write up my own style guide in addition to the published ones I recommend they use, I still find "cite this" to be one of the most common comments I leave on papers. Unrelated to this, but also unsurprising, I've noticed a much higher level of students needing mental/emotional assistance from Student Success than before 2020. JosefStalinator posted:The pandemic continued the giant gulf in ability in students in my college classes - they either became more resourceful and better at doing things independently (including learning on their own to fill gaps!), Or they just sit there even more obediently waiting to be told EXACTLY what to do and become deeply confused when they have to do any sort of inference or activity they are not 100% practiced in or aware of. Man I just realized I've seen this too! A significant increase in passivity, distinct from the usual baseline of slackers who are just there to get their gen ed ticket punched and/or destined to fail out in a semester or two.
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May 23, 2023 14:28
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Mooseontheloose posted:American public education isn't great but the people who want to change it are the worst people to put in charge of it basically. Until you decouple location from funding, not much will change. A decent case study in doing this, incidentally, is Vermont's Act 60 back in the 90s. In very brief and not doing it justice, the state Supreme Court ruled that Vermont having localities fund education through property taxes meant the richer town (largely but not exclusively in Chittenden County) ended up with vastly better funded schools than the poorer, more rural ones (again, chiefly but not exclusively in the NEK, where not coincidentally I was growing up at the time) which violated the state constitutional right to equal education. Consequently, the legislature had to rush through legislation remedying this, which became Act 60, which again to boil a complicated matter down more than it deserves, allowed the state government to manage school funding directly, which hasn't worked out perfectly but has resulted in real improvement in the poorer parts of the state, though initially the district used to fatter funding struggled to get by on less than what they'd been used to.
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May 23, 2023 19:00
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Rappaport posted:Richard Nixon did nothing wrong. That said, the... "Snazzy" uniforms were not exactly that. At the time he got accused of dressing them up like the palace guards of various South American tinpot dictators, which isn't entirely unlikely given, *waves in direction of Henry Kissinger.*
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May 27, 2023 20:23
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Willa Rogers posted:DeSantis's current support compared to Trump is almost identical to that of RFK Jr.'s compared to Biden (roughly 20 percent to 60 percent). I think the difference is that while unlikely, DeSantis beating Trump is within the realm of the plausible, whereas no one without a recent severe head injury thinks RFK jr. has a realistic chance of beating Biden. Sure, I agree neither stands much of a chance, but one has at least a pathway to do so that's more likely than "incumbent president killed in bizarre blimp accident."
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May 27, 2023 20:34
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Willa Rogers posted:The only possible way for DeSantis to win the nomination is if Trump dies, which is about as likely as Biden dying imo. I'd argue that though if Trump gets hit by a bus, DeSantis has a legit shot, the same is not true of RFK Jr. because he's a wackadoo lunatic and there's tons of other centrist dems who'd then suddenly jump in and near-instantly eclipse him (Harris and Buttigieg being the two most likely off the top of my head). Would DeSantis have to compete with Scott and Halley and the other GOP no-hopers? Sure, but unlike RFK Jr. he could plausibly carry it off.
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May 27, 2023 22:05
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Willa Rogers posted:Sinema doesn't have a prayer of winning as an indy but she could (and probably will) serve as a spoiler. It seems quite likely to me that her leaving the party and going independent was a less-than-subtle threat to the party to not run anyone against her or she'd torpedo the whole deal. It seems equally likely to me that she grossly overestimated the amount of leverage she brings to that particular dispute, as well as her own popularity and ability to pull Democratic voters to her side of things.
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May 31, 2023 19:39
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Meatball posted:Within the next year, a company will sue a union and claim loss of income should count as damage. The Supreme court sides with them and now any strike, property damage or not, gets the union sued. This is incidentally how, indirectly, part of how the British Labor Party came into existence. In 1900 the Taff Vale Railway sued the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants for lost income during a recent strike and won, which unsurprisingly made the practice commonplace. This caused the Trades Union Congress to ally with the existing Independent Labor Party to form the Labor Representation Committee, which then became just the Labor Party in 1906 and was key in heralding in the Trade Disputes Act of that same year, which revoked businesses' right to sue unions for lost income during industrial actions.
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Jun 1, 2023 20:28
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Alkydere posted:Why would they have Pence on? He's the most boring man to ever exist. Not even the MAGA crowd cares about him. You're forgetting that the management at CNN is desperately, paint-huffingly stupid.
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Jun 4, 2023 21:22
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Morrow posted:It's not so weird when you consider that basically every President since WW2 came from a wealthy enough family they could get educational deferment. Or get then into the reserves or National Guard if they wanted the resume line item without most of the attendant risk.
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Jun 5, 2023 21:18
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Mellow Seas posted:Poor Gen X is just gonna get skipped over… We're used to it at this point.
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Jun 5, 2023 23:29
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Jaxyon posted:It can kinda be fun on occasion but everything about it is awful and it's certainly not fun enough to justify the amount of land wasted on it so rich fucks can have private clubs Absolutely. There's a 9-hole course set on the side of a hill back home that my father and I used to play once a year or so. No caddies or carts, admission was like five dollars in the box on the honor system, so only people looking to have a some fun and not take it too seriously ever were there. Contrast that with the few Actual Golf Courses I've been on which tended to be infested with the worst self-important "I own a car dealership so I know what this country really needs*" bourgeoisie. *More racism, in case you're curious.
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Jun 7, 2023 00:58
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Failed Imagineer posted:Tucker's Alex Jones-ification continues apace Huh, I guess I never really considered if Der Ewige Jude was in the public domain or not.
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Jun 7, 2023 14:40
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Riptor posted:Get your money for nothing, get your chicks for free Well that ain't workin'.
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Jun 12, 2023 21:12
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Fork of Unknown Origins posted:The fact that “gay parents shouldn’t adopt, kids need one of each!” never supported taking kids from single parents sure was telling. I never saw them get upset over single parents adopting either, which isn’t super common but isn’t unheard of. They used to. When I was a kid the deeply negative "unwed mother/single mother" stereotype was still fairly commonplace, to the point where cretinous VP Dan Quayle picked, and lost, a fight with fictional TV character Murphy Brown for becoming one on the show of the same name, and why Phil Ochs includes the line "unwed mothers should be sterilized, I've even heard them say" in Love Me I'm a Liberal.
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Jun 13, 2023 18:25
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Fork of Unknown Origins posted:Our capability to be lovely will never cease to amaze me. I think a lot of that was a racist dogwhistle but yeah I knew about the stereotypes (hey let’s poo poo on the parent that stuck around…) but never heard about the sterilization thing. Good god. Oh it absolutely was spun into the Reagan-era welfare queen myth, which was entirely racial in nature and framing, but this was an adaptation of a previously-existing stereotype based more of female immorality/depravity than novel creation. And since I brought it up, Ochs wasn't exaggerating for effect in his song. Well into the 20th century single mothers, particularly if minors, were sterilized as they having become pregnant was seen by eugenicists as a sign of irreparable moral failure, rather than, you know, maybe being raped or something.
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Jun 13, 2023 18:35
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Gumball Gumption posted:It's a "joke" in that it's untrue and probably funny to someone. Lincoln was not elected senator after the debates and loss the election, Douglas was a senator until he died in office in 1861. Interestingly, Lincoln used the stultifying length of his debates with Douglas to his advantage, as his more languid, relaxed speaking style allowed him to maintain his voice throughout, whereas he knew Douglas spoke forcefully and only got more forceful as he rose to the climax of this or that argument. As a consequence, by the end of the debates Lincoln was still in good shape and Douglas could barely speak at all, having seriously over-strained his vocal cords. Didn't help him win as you note, but one of those things that shows Lincoln was a cannier actor than he is usually given credit for.
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Jun 14, 2023 00:53
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shoeberto posted:I can absolutely see why guys who were bullied and "queer" was thrown at them as a slur would reject it now. As a millennial, homosexuality was THE bullying vector of choice in my school. I was called gay more times than I can count by my bullies. It's not really triggering for me now specifically because I've never had issues with my sexuality, but it's not hard to see how it would be if you ever dealt with shame around it. Late Gen-X here, and this was absolutely my experience as well. In school I got called queer and/or fag at least once virtually every single day from about sixth grade until graduating high school, as it was the main vector for abuse (other than physical, of which there was a non-trivial amount as well) of any and all weird kids who didn't fit expectations or made the evil rednecks I grew up with feel inadequate by doing well in class. I can't imagine how much worse it was for the actually gay kids, given I'm straight and it was a nightmare.
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Jun 14, 2023 15:51
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