Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!
NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.
On March 10 2025 22:20 WombaT wrote: Religious fundamentalists with gay/trans kids, well you might get a beating, or be homeless. If you’re lucky.
i'm talking about your basic, every day Catholic or Muslim. I'm surrounded by them. Hell, they built the city in which I work.
They love it when I teach their teenagers advanced math. You think either of these parent groups want a jew talking to their kids about anything else? i doubt it. I'm 100% on board with their restrictions ... you see I have an ounce of common sense. For whatever reason, there exists overly militant Teacher's Unions that are not backing down. They have their life philosophy and they aim to teach it.
These teachers unions are creating more conservative voters every year.
I don't know what math lessons you're teaching, but mine aren't promoting identity politics.
ramsey #s, lagrange multiplier problems, combinatorics, getting them through the 1st actual science math exam... stuff like that.
On March 10 2025 22:35 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: Teachers make up the teachers unions, and it's our job to keep kids safe.
Tutor services hardly existed ~2000. Now they're everywhere. They teach math, science, english, and french. They stay away from Sex Ed. That'll tell you where parents priorities lie.
On March 10 2025 22:39 Hat Trick of Today wrote: If you want to blame anyone, blame parents for treating teachers as glorified babysitters who then flip out when their child underperforms.
If there is no discipline at home, schools can only do so much. I have also tutored as a side hustle and top performing students all come from households that enforce discipline and some form of routine.
If parents aren’t enforcing routines and encouraging bad habits, it aren’t the woke unionised teachers at fault. They’re not your family, they only see your kids a few hours a day in a classroom filled with a couple dozen other kids they also have to manage.
i agree.
as i stated earlier... Teachers Unions are only a symptom. the wider problem is that North America has lost the ability to develop children into healthy adults.
Citation needed. When I was an undergraduate in the early 00's, there were tutoring services being advertised everywhere. Quite a few of my classmates were tutors for high-school kids.
Roll the clock 40 years and my own father had a side-hustle as a tutor while he was at university.
Honestly, where did you get this information from?
Mostly photos from yearbooks in the '70s and '80s by the sound of it. No fat kids, no tutors.
regarding obesity...
The prevalence of obesity changed relatively little during the 1960s and 1970s, but it increased sharply over the ensuing decades—from 13.4% in 1980 to 34.3% in 2008 among adults and from 5% to 17% among children during the same period.
regarding tutorial services; all these services brag about how old and reliable they are as part of their sales pitch. Find me a tutor service that started in 1975 or earlier? New math tutor services have been starting up over the past 10 years to fill a need created by a generation of young people who can not perform basic arithmetic.
Yes we know, your record collection could do with some new additions.
It’s not stupid and inconsequential, it’s stupid but consequential.
There are exceptions, absolutely. The pattern usually is, something happens somewhere, it’s often someone or a body overstepping. It’s quite often reversed when it comes to light.
‘Wind your neck in/wise the bap (delete whichever is your less favourite Norn Irishism), “I for Intifada” for wains, fuck sake!’
Reasonable enough.
But we once more return to the idea of the nebulous ‘they’ and its fluid nature, and habit of sticking associatively to Democrat politicians. As the Dems are the left leaning party, ergo any other left-leaning person who does anything is also associated to the Dems.
Now, did Biden cum Harris run a particularly anti-woke campaign? I’d say no, but they also (largely) sidestepped being too woke as well. I’d also assume partly deliberately. Look I’ll not quibble, there are counter-examples, and counter-counter examples. I’m saying ballpark, broad brush.
It doesn’t matter. The transitive power of the ‘nebulous they’ is too strong. Some elementary school teacher somewhere told 5 year olds about anal sex, ergo I can’t vote for Kamala Harris, despite having nothing to do with the thing I’m angry about.
That is the element of this that is bullshit and manufactured, to piss people off and distract them. It’s not having concerns about x, y or z. 1. Signal boost any example of wokeness, no matter how small or insignificant, so people get really angry about it, all the time. 2. Misrepresent facets, or scaremonger (trans people will sexually assault you in bathrooms). 3. Wait for your political opponents to try to be somewhat reasonable, or compassionate and you’ve got em now! Those wokesters aren’t taking the issue of trans people sexually assaulting folk, or any of this other stuff seriously!
As, unless I’ve crossed back over unbeknownst to me, I am still in Clown RealityTM, here’s how it should work, if we’re in that alternate Sensible RealityTM. 1. ‘Ok, most of that seems pretty silly/egregious, but most of that stuff was like, reversed? And l dunno what scheme directly links Joe Biden and a radical elementary school teacher in Vermont, who had their kids role play as the other gender as a social experiment.’ That last one didn’t happen, I made it up, just to save anyone Googling 2. Rather than discuss niche examples of wokeness all day, let’s discuss what politicians, titans of industry and people with actual power are doing now.
The ‘enlightened centrist’ types thru conservatives who go ‘actually BLM sucks because, statistically their cause isn’t as bad as they claim’, can’t remotely justify the amount of time they spend jabbering on about trans people by their own logic.
On March 11 2025 03:17 BlackJack wrote: We just have to dumb down the math curriculum for the sake of racial equity.
it is fascinating you say this because Canada's best math school with the hardest math courses has hardly any white and/or black people in it. I don't think the koreans, filipinos, pakistanis and east indians want the government screwing around with their very competitive courses.
the two top math professions are prolly Electrical Engineer and Actuary. What % of the 2025 graduating class are black and/or white in the USA? I'll bet you it is low.
On March 10 2025 22:20 WombaT wrote: Religious fundamentalists with gay/trans kids, well you might get a beating, or be homeless. If you’re lucky.
i'm talking about your basic, every day Catholic or Muslim. I'm surrounded by them. Hell, they built the city in which I work.
They love it when I teach their teenagers advanced math. You think either of these parent groups want a jew talking to their kids about anything else? i doubt it. I'm 100% on board with their restrictions ... you see I have an ounce of common sense. For whatever reason, there exists overly militant Teacher's Unions that are not backing down. They have their life philosophy and they aim to teach it.
These teachers unions are creating more conservative voters every year.
I don't know what math lessons you're teaching, but mine aren't promoting identity politics.
ramsey #s, lagrange multiplier problems, combinatorics, getting them through the 1st actual science math exam... stuff like that.
On March 10 2025 22:35 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: Teachers make up the teachers unions, and it's our job to keep kids safe.
Tutor services hardly existed ~2000. Now they're everywhere. They teach math, science, english, and french. They stay away from Sex Ed. That'll tell you where parents priorities lie.
On March 10 2025 22:39 Hat Trick of Today wrote: If you want to blame anyone, blame parents for treating teachers as glorified babysitters who then flip out when their child underperforms.
If there is no discipline at home, schools can only do so much. I have also tutored as a side hustle and top performing students all come from households that enforce discipline and some form of routine.
If parents aren’t enforcing routines and encouraging bad habits, it aren’t the woke unionised teachers at fault. They’re not your family, they only see your kids a few hours a day in a classroom filled with a couple dozen other kids they also have to manage.
i agree.
as i stated earlier... Teachers Unions are only a symptom. the wider problem is that North America has lost the ability to develop children into healthy adults.
Citation needed. When I was an undergraduate in the early 00's, there were tutoring services being advertised everywhere. Quite a few of my classmates were tutors for high-school kids.
Roll the clock 40 years and my own father had a side-hustle as a tutor while he was at university.
Honestly, where did you get this information from?
Mostly photos from yearbooks in the '70s and '80s by the sound of it. No fat kids, no tutors.
The prevalence of obesity changed relatively little during the 1960s and 1970s, but it increased sharply over the ensuing decades—from 13.4% in 1980 to 34.3% in 2008 among adults and from 5% to 17% among children during the same period.
regarding tutorial services; all these services brag about how old and reliable they are as part of their sales pitch. Find me a tutor service that started in 1975 or earlier? New math tutor services have been starting up over the past 10 years to fill a need created by a generation of young people who can not perform basic arithmetic.
A contributor common to both myopia and obesity is video games.
Overall, we are doing a poorer job, compared to previous generations, developing children into healthy hard working productive adults
Obesity is a real issue. We should start by reducing pre-produced food until they find a way to make it as good without adding in more salt and sugar. Perhaps a 50-75% tax on unhealthy food that goes into funding local sports clubs for people below 15 years of age?
Tries to tackle the two major sources, reduced mobility and worse food quality. If something is a bit off adjust it to something better the year after. Keep adjusting it as new solutions surface. A predictable problem is for profit organizations using ghost members to pull in money. So limit size of recipient organization to 500 participants or less.
Or perhaps require 1hour of PE per day and use the taxes on poor food to kickstart that instead? Meaning PE is an overall larger part of your total grade.
When we realize that a lack of walk-able cities is also a major reason on year 5 and have some momentum going we can try to lower amount of highways going through cities.
On March 10 2025 22:20 WombaT wrote: Religious fundamentalists with gay/trans kids, well you might get a beating, or be homeless. If you’re lucky.
i'm talking about your basic, every day Catholic or Muslim. I'm surrounded by them. Hell, they built the city in which I work.
They love it when I teach their teenagers advanced math. You think either of these parent groups want a jew talking to their kids about anything else? i doubt it. I'm 100% on board with their restrictions ... you see I have an ounce of common sense. For whatever reason, there exists overly militant Teacher's Unions that are not backing down. They have their life philosophy and they aim to teach it.
These teachers unions are creating more conservative voters every year.
I don't know what math lessons you're teaching, but mine aren't promoting identity politics.
ramsey #s, lagrange multiplier problems, combinatorics, getting them through the 1st actual science math exam... stuff like that.
On March 10 2025 22:35 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: Teachers make up the teachers unions, and it's our job to keep kids safe.
Tutor services hardly existed ~2000. Now they're everywhere. They teach math, science, english, and french. They stay away from Sex Ed. That'll tell you where parents priorities lie.
On March 10 2025 22:39 Hat Trick of Today wrote: If you want to blame anyone, blame parents for treating teachers as glorified babysitters who then flip out when their child underperforms.
If there is no discipline at home, schools can only do so much. I have also tutored as a side hustle and top performing students all come from households that enforce discipline and some form of routine.
If parents aren’t enforcing routines and encouraging bad habits, it aren’t the woke unionised teachers at fault. They’re not your family, they only see your kids a few hours a day in a classroom filled with a couple dozen other kids they also have to manage.
i agree.
as i stated earlier... Teachers Unions are only a symptom. the wider problem is that North America has lost the ability to develop children into healthy adults.
Citation needed. When I was an undergraduate in the early 00's, there were tutoring services being advertised everywhere. Quite a few of my classmates were tutors for high-school kids.
Roll the clock 40 years and my own father had a side-hustle as a tutor while he was at university.
Honestly, where did you get this information from?
Mostly photos from yearbooks in the '70s and '80s by the sound of it. No fat kids, no tutors.
The prevalence of obesity changed relatively little during the 1960s and 1970s, but it increased sharply over the ensuing decades—from 13.4% in 1980 to 34.3% in 2008 among adults and from 5% to 17% among children during the same period.
regarding tutorial services; all these services brag about how old and reliable they are as part of their sales pitch. Find me a tutor service that started in 1975 or earlier? New math tutor services have been starting up over the past 10 years to fill a need created by a generation of young people who can not perform basic arithmetic.
A contributor common to both myopia and obesity is video games.
Overall, we are doing a poorer job, compared to previous generations, developing children into healthy hard working productive adults
Jimmy there are innumerable different factors that go into both of these, you’re cutting out a lot of them to make your argument here.
Even seemingly small factors have big knock-ons. Car ubiquity being one.
For us the main street game is football, your mileage may vary. Find a brick wall somewhere (ideally without windows) and you’re good to go, even if there’s not much green space in dense urban areas.
Know what fucking sucks? Cars every 3 minutes. I walk through my childhood neighbourhood (bloody UVF mural and all) pretty regularly today and even in that period, it’s really noticeable how much the vehicular traffic has increased. Push it back a generation, or a generation further and it’s no wonder you had a lot more kids out all day, or we produced a George Best, that kind of rare talent you really only ever see street football produce.
Or boomers stabbing your ball. No doubt the same folks would also be the ones to whinge about kids on their phones and say ‘back in my day my ma threw me out after tea and said don’t come back til bedtime!’
Another factor is simply parents don’t let kids roam unsupervised nearly as much, I mean the reasons for this are understandable, but the effects are the same regardless.
But I digress. If kids don’t have the environment to do that informal, pop out, see if your mates are done their homework and get mucking around, you have to compensate for it with organised activities. Takes time, takes money in some cases. Resources which are not always available.
It’s the same with many adults as well. Unless you’ve got a reasonably strenuous physical job, you gotta counteract that in your free time. Some are better at this than others, some simply couldn’t be arsed.
And I haven’t even mentioned some of the shit the food industry pulls yet!
On March 11 2025 03:17 BlackJack wrote: We just have to dumb down the math curriculum for the sake of racial equity.
it is fascinating you say this because Canada's best math school with the hardest math courses has hardly any white and/or black people in it. I don't think the koreans, filipinos, pakistanis and east indians want the government screwing around with their very competitive courses.
the two top math professions are prolly Electrical Engineer and Actuary. What % of the 2025 graduating class are black and/or white in the USA? I'll bet you it is low.
I imagine he just said it because it sounds cool. Although to me it’s quite odd to include a quote that describes the breakdown in their friendship with Xavier and Magneto splitting over the whole ‘co-existing with the non-superhumans’ question.
Are the Filipinos Magneto here? Will they purge the inferior white fools on their ruthless ascent to power?
On March 10 2025 22:20 WombaT wrote: Religious fundamentalists with gay/trans kids, well you might get a beating, or be homeless. If you’re lucky.
i'm talking about your basic, every day Catholic or Muslim. I'm surrounded by them. Hell, they built the city in which I work.
They love it when I teach their teenagers advanced math. You think either of these parent groups want a jew talking to their kids about anything else? i doubt it. I'm 100% on board with their restrictions ... you see I have an ounce of common sense. For whatever reason, there exists overly militant Teacher's Unions that are not backing down. They have their life philosophy and they aim to teach it.
These teachers unions are creating more conservative voters every year.
I don't know what math lessons you're teaching, but mine aren't promoting identity politics.
ramsey #s, lagrange multiplier problems, combinatorics, getting them through the 1st actual science math exam... stuff like that.
On March 10 2025 22:35 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: Teachers make up the teachers unions, and it's our job to keep kids safe.
Tutor services hardly existed ~2000. Now they're everywhere. They teach math, science, english, and french. They stay away from Sex Ed. That'll tell you where parents priorities lie.
On March 10 2025 22:39 Hat Trick of Today wrote: If you want to blame anyone, blame parents for treating teachers as glorified babysitters who then flip out when their child underperforms.
If there is no discipline at home, schools can only do so much. I have also tutored as a side hustle and top performing students all come from households that enforce discipline and some form of routine.
If parents aren’t enforcing routines and encouraging bad habits, it aren’t the woke unionised teachers at fault. They’re not your family, they only see your kids a few hours a day in a classroom filled with a couple dozen other kids they also have to manage.
i agree.
as i stated earlier... Teachers Unions are only a symptom. the wider problem is that North America has lost the ability to develop children into healthy adults.
Citation needed. When I was an undergraduate in the early 00's, there were tutoring services being advertised everywhere. Quite a few of my classmates were tutors for high-school kids.
Roll the clock 40 years and my own father had a side-hustle as a tutor while he was at university.
Honestly, where did you get this information from?
Mostly photos from yearbooks in the '70s and '80s by the sound of it. No fat kids, no tutors.
regarding obesity...
The prevalence of obesity changed relatively little during the 1960s and 1970s, but it increased sharply over the ensuing decades—from 13.4% in 1980 to 34.3% in 2008 among adults and from 5% to 17% among children during the same period.
regarding tutorial services; all these services brag about how old and reliable they are as part of their sales pitch. Find me a tutor service that started in 1975 or earlier? New math tutor services have been starting up over the past 10 years to fill a need created by a generation of young people who can not perform basic arithmetic.
A contributor common to both myopia and obesity is video games.
Overall, we are doing a poorer job, compared to previous generations, developing children into healthy hard working productive adults
Obesity is a real issue. We should start by reducing pre-produced food until they find a way to make it as good without adding in more salt and sugar. Perhaps a 50-75% tax on unhealthy food that goes into funding local sports clubs for people below 15 years of age?
Tries to tackle the two major sources, reduced mobility and worse food quality. If something is a bit off adjust it to something better the year after. Keep adjusting it as new solutions surface. A predictable problem is for profit organizations using ghost members to pull in money. So limit size of recipient organization to 500 participants or less.
Or perhaps require 1hour of PE per day and use the taxes on poor food to kickstart that instead? Meaning PE is an overall larger part of your total grade.
When we realize that a lack of walk-able cities is also a major reason on year 5 and have some momentum going we can try to lower amount of highways going through cities.
Solving for sedentary lifestyle is real hard, places where people live being walkable is probably the best solution, getting people to actively go to the gym and stuff is hard since its very much not fun or pleasant in almost any way unless youve already been doing it for a while.
Promoting active hobbies is also nice, I was never in better shape than when I was doing combat sports 5 days a week. Soccer, football, any sport that involves moving a lot and is also fun is definitely a great way to get exercise and also not be as miserable and boring as running
The firm now sees growth averaging 1.7% for 2025, down from 2.4%, with the tariffs creating a drag via higher consumer prices, higher borrowing costs and delayed investment due to uncertainty.
It'll be interesting to see how the economy withstands 60,000 government job layoffs every month in 2025. In aggregate, the US economy added 150,000 jobs and lost 160,000 jobs in the past month.
Uncertainty during a Trump presidency? who could've predicted that? i mean Ronald Reagan is his role model and hero!
Is it interesting that in here and now, things are going exactly as basically everyone predicted?
I mean I enjoy the majestic sight of the moon, but I’m not like, surprised every time she pops up.
I quite enjoyed this snippet, was reading what the BBC were saying about Carney stepping into Trudeau’s shoes.
After Carney had accepted the party's nomination, I caught up with former Canadian Prime Minister, Jean Chretien, who served for a decade from 1993 and who'd taken to the stage earlier in the evening. Did he think Trump was being serious? "You know, I don't know," he told me. "Do you know? Does anyone know? I'm not a medical doctor or a psychiatrist. He changes his mind every two or three hours. So [for him] to be leader of the free world, it is preoccupying for everybody."
That sure reads like one of these fabled statesmen that apparently Canada doesn’t have anymore, who could have dealt with Trump if only the quality of Canadian leaders hadn’t so declined, basically saying ‘fucked if I know?’ on well, how to generally deal with Donald Trump.
GH: The idea is that I'd like people to try out behaving as a socialist in my blog so I might as well demonstrate I can and am doing that with behaving like a progressive. LibHorizons doesn't advocate the abolition of capitalism, votes for Democrats, believes in electoralism supplemented by direct action, and so on. Sort of 21st century Bull Moose Progressive.
I'd argue LibHorizons since inception is demonstrably a better Democrat than anyone here despite being on the periphery of the party and an informal demonstration of my capacity to behave like Democrats should.
ThirdHorizons: I'm not much of a fan of GreenHorizons Or LibHorizons. Think I'll be taking the lead for a bit.
Takeaways on Why Democrats Have a Cultural Disconnect with the Working Class
1. Overemphasis on Identity Politics Many working-class voters feel Democrats prioritize niche identity-based groups with overbroad, unifying messages, making them feel excluded rather than included.
2. The “Faculty Lounge” Problem Democrats are often viewed as judgmental, out-of-touch, and dismissive of those without elite education or progressive views. This makes the party seem disconnected from everyday people.
3. Failure to Prioritize Economic Concerns While voters struggle with jobs, wages, and inflation, Democrats are seen as more focused on cultural and social issues than on economic progress and opportunity.
4. Weak Messaging & Communication The party’s language is often vague, politically correct, or overly intellectual, making it hard for working class voters to connect with Democratic policies.
5. Fear of Dissent Within the Party Democrats are perceived as intolerant of internal debate, where questioning progressive orthodoxy results in backlash rather than open discussion. Candidates and operatives need to feel more comfortable just saying NO to activist groups and unpalatable far-left ideas.
6. Attachment to Unpopular Institutions Democrats are seen as defending elite institutions (academia, media, government bureaucracy) while being critical of institutions working-class people value (churches, small businesses, police).
7. Allowing the Far Left to Define the Party Activist groups and progressive staffers push unpopular cultural positions, making it seem like Democrats are more extreme than they actually are. Operatives and campaigns must remember that activist groups exist to promote their single issue and raise money around it, not to make Democrats electable.
8. Reactionary Rather Than Proactive Democrats often let Republicans set the terms of cultural debates (e.g., crime, immigration) instead of clearly defining their own positions in a way that resonates with voters.
9. Overreliance on Buzzwords & Political Correctness Terms like "pregnant people" and "Latinx" alienate working-class voters who see them as out of touch with real-world terms and vocabulary.
10. Lack of a Positive National Identity Message Democrats focus too much on America’s flaws (racism, sexism, inequality) without acknowledging the country’s progress and potential, making them seem pessimistic and unpatriotic.
The third way Democrats are insane with their views, in my opinion. Their points are more about optics than anything else. It's hard to see how they would actually want to change things. They seem to want only to copy Republican theatrics. It is insane that these people can be in the same party with AOC and Sanders. However, if there were elections in 2028, I would not be surprised if one of the third-way Democrats were the official candidate. Honestly, they do not deserve to win just by being the other option for Republicans. People need to realise that the lesser evil is still evil and that they need to work to get out of situations where they must constantly choose the lesser evil. Otherwise, you will be stuck in the situation for decades, and then you can't blame GH and the company for advocating a risky revolution.
ThirdHorizons: This "optics" idea applies much more to the "progressive" wing of the party than it does the base. Third Way Democrats are the Democrats getting everything done. Every piece of legislation Democrats pass is passed by Third Way Democrats, signed by a Third Way president, and all of them are elected by Third Way voters like myself.
Meanwhile, Bernie is doing another vanity tour.
He can draw a crowd sure, but that crowd needs to show up to support/vote for the Third Way Democrats if they want to oppose Trump, win elections, and pass legislation.
Those crowds don't want to vote for Third Way Democrats. They want to vote for Sanders or someone like Sanders.
This is what the moderate wing of the Democratic party doesn't understand. They don't get the voters enthusiastic to come out in numbers the way the Progressives do, and voter turn out is a very significant piece of the puzzle to winning a national election.
Kamala Harris couldn't turn out voters as well as Biden did. Biden couldn't even come close to turning out voters the way Obama did.
There's a merit to being able to compromise to get things done once you actually get elected, but nobody wants to vote for Moderate Democrats to get them into that position to do the compromising in the first place. Conservatives would rather have Republicans and Liberals want to actually feel represented for once.
And btw Bernie's "vanity" tour is all about calling out the current administration as an Oligarchy, which it is if you pay even the slightest bit of attention. Bernie's two main points on this topic are as they have been for decades, a tax on the ultra wealthy and getting dark money out of politics. Two issues that most Americans actually agree with. Democrats won't go near either issue properly though because Democrats are funded by the uber wealthy just the same way the Republicans are.
ThirdHorizons: They are going to have to show up and vote for Third Way Democrats whether they like it or not, unless they win primaries, or prefer Trump and his minions. This time they got us Trump and his minions. Next time they shouldn't be so stubborn/stupid.
Take 2 identical children, put one in the US and one in Europe and let them do the same activities and I guarantee you the one in the EU will be healthier simply because of the food.
Trying to blame schools for obesity rather then the food people consume is just moronic when the evidence for America's horrible food standards is overwhelming.
Interestingly, the Toronto Stock Exchange fell by a lower % than the New York stock exchange. I think 2 consecutive quarters of less than 2% growth is a "recession". At this point, I recommend watching bond yields.
On March 11 2025 07:32 Gorsameth wrote: Take 2 identical children, put one in the US and one in Europe and let them do the same activities and I guarantee you the one in the EU will be healthier simply because of the food.
Trying to blame schools for obesity rather then the food people consume is just moronic when the evidence for America's horrible food standards is overwhelming.
who blamed schools? the teachers are unhealthier than teachers have ever been.
Anyhow, as i've stated several times, NA is doing a poorer job of developing children into hard working productive adults. The video "America, Home of the Anxious and Fragile" explains step by step the role the education system has played in this decline. It is well explained in "The Coddling Of the American Mind". Overly militant Teacher's Unions are only a symptom of the over all problem. "Militant Teacher's Unions" != "schools".
On March 10 2025 22:20 WombaT wrote: Religious fundamentalists with gay/trans kids, well you might get a beating, or be homeless. If you’re lucky.
i'm talking about your basic, every day Catholic or Muslim. I'm surrounded by them. Hell, they built the city in which I work.
They love it when I teach their teenagers advanced math. You think either of these parent groups want a jew talking to their kids about anything else? i doubt it. I'm 100% on board with their restrictions ... you see I have an ounce of common sense. For whatever reason, there exists overly militant Teacher's Unions that are not backing down. They have their life philosophy and they aim to teach it.
These teachers unions are creating more conservative voters every year.
I don't know what math lessons you're teaching, but mine aren't promoting identity politics.
ramsey #s, lagrange multiplier problems, combinatorics, getting them through the 1st actual science math exam... stuff like that.
On March 10 2025 22:35 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: Teachers make up the teachers unions, and it's our job to keep kids safe.
Tutor services hardly existed ~2000. Now they're everywhere. They teach math, science, english, and french. They stay away from Sex Ed. That'll tell you where parents priorities lie.
On March 10 2025 22:39 Hat Trick of Today wrote: If you want to blame anyone, blame parents for treating teachers as glorified babysitters who then flip out when their child underperforms.
If there is no discipline at home, schools can only do so much. I have also tutored as a side hustle and top performing students all come from households that enforce discipline and some form of routine.
If parents aren’t enforcing routines and encouraging bad habits, it aren’t the woke unionised teachers at fault. They’re not your family, they only see your kids a few hours a day in a classroom filled with a couple dozen other kids they also have to manage.
i agree.
as i stated earlier... Teachers Unions are only a symptom. the wider problem is that North America has lost the ability to develop children into healthy adults.
Citation needed. When I was an undergraduate in the early 00's, there were tutoring services being advertised everywhere. Quite a few of my classmates were tutors for high-school kids.
Roll the clock 40 years and my own father had a side-hustle as a tutor while he was at university.
Honestly, where did you get this information from?
Mostly photos from yearbooks in the '70s and '80s by the sound of it. No fat kids, no tutors.
regarding tutorial services; all these services brag about how old and reliable they are as part of their sales pitch. Find me a tutor service that started in 1975 or earlier?
First one I thought of, Kumon, started in 1954/55.
Wow higher education placements becoming more competitive is pushing more and more parents to pay for tutoring? It seems like a symptom of an increasingly uneven society pushing parents to do anything to give their children a leg up against other children.
There is a reason why China attempted to crack down on cram schools and the like. Even they can comprehend what happens when socioeconomic and cultural segregation occurs in the education system at a systematic level. It’s not a meritocracy, kids who can afford private education aren’t any smarter or dumber than the poor kid around the corner. The rich kid, like me, were given all the answers to the exams. That’s largely the service pre-higher education tutoring provides and arguably pretty inefficient at actually educating the public since a lot of it basically amounts to rote learning.
Literacy and numeracy rates in general have tanked worldwide for lower socioeconomic individuals, with only a handful of social democratic (Denmark, Finland) or Asian countries treading water or improving. In many of these countries, teachers are given considerable amounts of power and are actually respected to a degree, unlike in countries with failing education systems where they are treated as glorified babysitters.
If American children can’t sit still in class or pay attention for longer than 5 minutes, militant woke teacher unions can’t do shit to beat children into submission lest they want to attract the wraith of helicopter parents. Nor should they, that’s theoretically the job of the parents but even then parents are increasingly forced to work longer and longer hours as the price of essentials continue to outpace wages. Is it any surprise disrespected teachers and absent/exhausted parents can’t do anything to lift up disadvantaged children?
On March 11 2025 03:37 Dan HH wrote: a teacher with prosthetic tits or a children's book that teaches words related to Palestine are somehow humanity's biggest threat and super serious business that we need to destroy everything to prevent.
Terrible strawman. That's exactly the opposite of what I've been saying. I'm not saying we should elect Trump to defeat the wokeism. I'm saying you should drop the wokeism so we don't end up with Trump. Too late now, anyway.
I know you haven't advocated for Trump, but you also can't tell us that half your posts in this thread have been about wokeism and DEI due to some meta concern. You were pretty damn passionate about each of those when propagating this messaging, your information sphere convinced you that this is prevalent, severe, and important.
And it isn't, it's a handful of people of little to no consequence. It's the equivalent of using Florida Man headlines to convince someone that Florida is the most dangerous place on the planet and needs to be sunk into the ocean to protect civilization. That's not what you did, but rather what was done to you. You were a little wiser than others and didn't fully buy into the solution, but you did buy into the fake problem and propagated it.
On March 11 2025 09:45 Hat Trick of Today wrote: Wow higher education placements becoming more competitive is pushing more and more parents to pay for tutoring? It seems like a symptom of an increasingly uneven society pushing parents to do anything to give their children a leg up against other children.
There is a reason why China attempted to crack down on cram schools and the like. Even they can comprehend what happens when socioeconomic and cultural segregation occurs in the education system at a systematic level. It’s not a meritocracy, kids who can afford private education aren’t any smarter or dumber than the poor kid around the corner. The rich kid, like me, were given all the answers to the exams. That’s largely the service pre-higher education tutoring provides and arguably pretty inefficient at actually educating the public since a lot of it basically amounts to rote learning.
Literacy and numeracy rates in general have tanked worldwide for lower socioeconomic individuals, with only a handful of social democratic (Denmark, Finland) or Asian countries treading water or improving. In many of these countries, teachers are given considerable amounts of power and are actually respected to a degree, unlike in countries with failing education systems where they are treated as glorified babysitters.
If American children can’t sit still in class or pay attention for longer than 5 minutes, militant woke teacher unions can’t do shit to beat children into submission lest they want to attract the wraith of helicopter parents. Nor should they, that’s theoretically the job of the parents but even then parents are increasingly forced to work longer and longer hours as the price of essentials continue to outpace wages. Is it any surprise disrespected teachers and absent/exhausted parents can’t do anything to lift up disadvantaged children?
Cannae disagree with much there like
Us Northern Irish can take an exam at 11 to go to Grammar schools. Which are our elite ones, we don’t really have too many private, fee-paying schools, and they’re not as high-performing anyway. Versus say, England who have private schools pumping out many a Prime Minister.
Look it’s more meritocratic in ways than quite a few places. I went to one. You’ll sure as fuck find more bright working class students in a Northern Irish Grammar than a prestige private school, or even a top comprehensive in a rich English area. Really good school, you got a catchment area, what happens to the house prices around said school? And look, who can’t go now!
Anyway, contextual rambling aside, we’ve got plenty of ‘11 plus’ tutors floating around. It’s quite a leg-up, kids spend a fair bloody while prepping, at that bloomin age. Then we’ve our GED equivalent at 15/16, then A levels from 17-18 for university.
That’s a lot of exams to prep for, and a lot of tutoring work. Tutors don’t even pretend it’s anything other than exam prep, they actively advertise their wares specially for those.
They ain’t working pro bono to help little Timmy from a deprived home to improve his literacy that’s for sure.
No wonder kids get stressed like. Gotta prep em for the rat race early. Which, really is kinda the only advantage of rigid rote learning and why it’s so popular still today among certain folks.
On March 11 2025 03:37 Dan HH wrote: a teacher with prosthetic tits or a children's book that teaches words related to Palestine are somehow humanity's biggest threat and super serious business that we need to destroy everything to prevent.
Terrible strawman. That's exactly the opposite of what I've been saying. I'm not saying we should elect Trump to defeat the wokeism. I'm saying you should drop the wokeism so we don't end up with Trump. Too late now, anyway.
I know you haven't advocated for Trump, but you also can't tell us that half your posts in this thread have been about wokeism and DEI due to some meta concern. You were pretty damn passionate about each of those when propagating this messaging, your information sphere convinced you that this is prevalent, severe, and important.
And it isn't, it's a handful of people of little to no consequence. It's the equivalent of using Florida Man headlines to convince someone that Florida is the most dangerous place on the planet and needs to be sunk into the ocean to protect civilization. That's not what you did, but rather what was done to you. You were a little wiser than others and didn't fully buy into the solution, but you did buy into the fake problem and propagated it.
My personal headcanon is that Florida Man is one singular individual, and must be stopped at all costs.
EPT
