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.
Students’ test scores had been increasing since 1990 — then abruptly stopped in the mid-2010s. That coincided with two events: an easing of federal school accountability under No Child Left Behind, which was replaced in 2015, and the rise of smartphones, social media and personalized school laptops.
the chickens are coming home to rooster the harvest they reaped.
alls i gotta say is cleaning up the messes created by junior actuarial analysts under age 24 is big business. They are fucking up .. .and they are fucking up huge. Because no one was passing the exams they decided to create a university credit equivalency system. Now we've got Beavis and Butthead running around doing reserve analysis. Cha-Ching!
Also, we live in a super-paranoid, risk-averse nation with crumbling infrastructure and broke governments unable to repair anything. This creates even more demand for new insurance products. This is a perfect opening for all these whiney tech sector employees out of a job.
No, this is not a US nor math specific problem. I think there are many explanitions:
-Impression bombing content from an early age damages patience and attention spans. -More screen time, especially using touch screens. -Less focus on creative and physical activities. -Teachers are understaffed, overworked and underpaid. -Less handwriting. -Less unsupervised playing with other kids. -Kids are more inside, unable to explore and move outdoors. -Gearing classes to score well on specific, general tests.
I think we will be surprised to see most of Gen Alpha will still grow up to become decent adults, but I have a strong feeling many get rude awakenings at the University level, where they have to tackle responsability.
On May 15 2026 04:01 Falling wrote: @Jankisa As far as I can tell in reading back, oBlade has made a separation between 'interesting' and 'information source'. And then there was separation between the 'hacks' like Shapiro and the 'conservative zeitgeist'. He gave an equivalent to TYT as Valutainment and then he lists what is key to the conservative zeitgeist at the time: Bannon's War Room, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, etc. However, I think all of them still fit in his 'interesting' category.
The confusing thing is I think Wombat was seeing oBlade shooting down many of the typical examples of conservative talking heads as being 'hacks' and not representative of the conservative zeitgeist (fast forward, turns out Shapiro was in process of being sidelined. Well, and he was only ever reluctantly defended Trump in the first place, thought he could break free after January 6 and then quickly toed the line again as under Trump, Jan 6/ stolen election is the Shibboleth loyalty test for anyone who dares call themselves conservative in the public sphere.). So Wombat asked, who do you actually recommend? And I don't think oBlade ever answered that, despite saying they were 'key'. He also separates voices from thinkers but only lists voices. But is he cosigning the voices or at least the unlisted thinkers behind the voices? Or are they just 'interesting' as in a piece of trivia? Because he ends with:
If I want just information as such, like you say there's other avenues.
So that whole list were 'interesting interviewers'... interesting for what reason? Presumably, not as a source of information. But yet they are keys to understanding the conservative zeitgeist... as a conservative source of entertainment? Or they use it as a source of information, but he does not?
This is mostly spot on, there is nobody from any ideology I would recommend for their ideas being correct, because I don't believe any specific ideology is correct, and I don't believe any people are specifically correct. Certainly no media figures are simply sources of what is correct. That's not their job and that's not how people should rely on them. People should either figure something out for themselves or be content not knowing, it is better to admit ignorance than get answers on faith fed to you like a faucet. That's the behavior of dogmas and religions and is not necessary when there's nothing pressuring people to have answers for everything.
Shirley was also a great call by me who noticed his promise before you knew him - which you do now.
@oBlade You saw his promise early and liked that he goes right to where the current events are- what do you think about his characterization of the US funding the war in Ukraine?
Thank you for acknowledging my tea leaf reading sense on Shapiro and Shirley. I don't know what Shirley characterization you are referring to though. There is a lot of bullshit in Ukraine rhetoric, like people characterizing literal purchases as free aid for one. Shirley is not immune to the mistakes any media make when they take shortcuts through stupidity or dishonesty. Like when the MSM took Trump's comments about the danger of "coyotes" (meaning human smugglers) and said actually there's no coyotes in this area it's not their habitat - I remember Nick Shirley standing in front of an apartment building with a post office on the first floor and saying there are a bunch of people registered to vote from this address. He is young so generally makes the mistakes that are associated with youth. His strength certainly wouldn't be in being right or wrong about Ukraine, it's other things.
Students’ test scores had been increasing since 1990 — then abruptly stopped in the mid-2010s. That coincided with two events: an easing of federal school accountability under No Child Left Behind, which was replaced in 2015, and the rise of smartphones, social media and personalized school laptops.
the chickens are coming home to rooster the harvest they reaped.
I don't understand your chicken reference, but as Slydie, Simberto, Fleetfeet, micronesia, and others have pointed out, there are a variety of issues that have likely played a role in this, ranging from technology and social media (screen time increasing, ability to focus decreasing, apps and AI becoming shortcuts for obtaining answers and cheating the learning process) to the covid pandemic, teacher shortages, ineffective school planning, and often a lack of leadership at local, state, and federal levels.
It's extremely difficult to address every single potential factor all at once, which makes it all the more important to gather data and at least take a swing at whichever issues might be most prevalent (within a district, throughout a state, etc.). For example, starting next school year, New Jersey will be implementing a general ban on cell phone usage throughout the day for all public school students (except for emergencies and other extenuating circumstances). This is a pretty big swing, and although I've personally been able to make occasional cell phone usage an academic net-benefit in my classroom, I think it's probably a very smart move. Removing the #1 potential distraction from classrooms is definitely a way to encourage students to pay more attention to the lesson being taught, and it reduces the ease with which students can lazily look up answers.
With every big swing, there are going to be tons of questions, critiques, and pushbacks. For example, for the cell phone ban, storing cell phones can be an issue if teachers need to take them away from students, not having cell phones as an educational back-up can be problematic if we encourage the use of technology but don't make sure students always have a functioning laptop/iPad, students and parents will push for individual exceptions and might have issues with the way the administration and teachers are implementing the policy, etc. There are ways to navigate these potential issues, and so all parties involved need to be regularly communicating and recognizing that we all have the same goal - to improve the education of our kids - even if we disagree with how that's accomplished.
On the topic of math, in particular, being able to focus on the day-to-day lessons is an absolute imperative. Tuesday's lesson assumes you understand Monday's lesson; chapter two builds on chapter one; to understand calculus, you should first understand the previous few years of high school math. Technology, as always, can be a valuable asset or a wasted crutch, and there are definitely ways to helpfully (or harmfully) invoke calculators, graphing websites like Desmos, apps/software, and even AI. It's very hard to keep all of that under control though - especially when juggling 30 students at once - even when schools try to preemptively manage situations by banning certain websites from their network, adding lockdown-browser capabilities on student laptops/iPads, and having (sometimes effective, sometimes ineffective) professional development sessions. Each obstacle eventually gets circumvented, one way or another, if the students are motivated enough to look for loopholes.
Maybe we'll see more and more teachers voluntarily attempt to go back to paper copies of everything, removing the potential distractions of technology altogether, even though it would really suck to print out thousands of pieces of paper every year (per teacher, that is). I just hope that we keep trying to improve, instead of giving up altogether.
On May 15 2026 04:01 Falling wrote: @Jankisa As far as I can tell in reading back, oBlade has made a separation between 'interesting' and 'information source'. And then there was separation between the 'hacks' like Shapiro and the 'conservative zeitgeist'. He gave an equivalent to TYT as Valutainment and then he lists what is key to the conservative zeitgeist at the time: Bannon's War Room, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, etc. However, I think all of them still fit in his 'interesting' category.
The confusing thing is I think Wombat was seeing oBlade shooting down many of the typical examples of conservative talking heads as being 'hacks' and not representative of the conservative zeitgeist (fast forward, turns out Shapiro was in process of being sidelined. Well, and he was only ever reluctantly defended Trump in the first place, thought he could break free after January 6 and then quickly toed the line again as under Trump, Jan 6/ stolen election is the Shibboleth loyalty test for anyone who dares call themselves conservative in the public sphere.). So Wombat asked, who do you actually recommend? And I don't think oBlade ever answered that, despite saying they were 'key'. He also separates voices from thinkers but only lists voices. But is he cosigning the voices or at least the unlisted thinkers behind the voices? Or are they just 'interesting' as in a piece of trivia? Because he ends with:
If I want just information as such, like you say there's other avenues.
So that whole list were 'interesting interviewers'... interesting for what reason? Presumably, not as a source of information. But yet they are keys to understanding the conservative zeitgeist... as a conservative source of entertainment? Or they use it as a source of information, but he does not?
This is mostly spot on, there is nobody from any ideology I would recommend for their ideas being correct, because I don't believe any specific ideology is correct, and I don't believe any people are specifically correct. Certainly no media figures are simply sources of what is correct. That's not their job and that's not how people should rely on them. People should either figure something out for themselves or be content not knowing, it is better to admit ignorance than get answers on faith fed to you like a faucet. That's the behavior of dogmas and religions and is not necessary when there's nothing pressuring people to have answers for everything.
Shirley was also a great call by me who noticed his promise before you knew him - which you do now.
@oBlade You saw his promise early and liked that he goes right to where the current events are- what do you think about his characterization of the US funding the war in Ukraine?
Thank you for acknowledging my tea leaf reading sense on Shapiro and Shirley. I don't know what Shirley characterization you are referring to though. There is a lot of bullshit in Ukraine rhetoric, like people characterizing literal purchases as free aid for one. Shirley is not immune to the mistakes any media make when they take shortcuts through stupidity or dishonesty. Like when the MSM took Trump's comments about the danger of "coyotes" (meaning human smugglers) and said actually there's no coyotes in this area it's not their habitat - I remember Nick Shirley standing in front of an apartment building with a post office on the first floor and saying there are a bunch of people registered to vote from this address. He is young so generally makes the mistakes that are associated with youth. His strength certainly wouldn't be in being right or wrong about Ukraine, it's other things.
This is a nice microcosm of complete dishonesty you operate with.
Nick Shirley, a proven liar and obvious and demonstrated agitator and propagandist is just a young guy who's "mistakes" can be explained by his youth, despite him very obviously lying through his teeth in order to demonize immigrants, because you like him and because you love when immigrants are demonized.
As contrasted to vague "MSM" taking comments from Trump (poor guy, good on you that you are always there to defend him) about coyotes and "maliciously pretending" like he meant the actual animals. Of course, no quotes, no this guy or this outlet, nope, just vague "MSM media bad".
Here's a nice video of an actual journalist debunking easily disprovable lies from this guy:
Students’ test scores had been increasing since 1990 — then abruptly stopped in the mid-2010s. That coincided with two events: an easing of federal school accountability under No Child Left Behind, which was replaced in 2015, and the rise of smartphones, social media and personalized school laptops.
the chickens are coming home to rooster the harvest they reaped.
I don't understand your chicken reference, but as Slydie, Simberto, Fleetfeet, micronesia, and others have pointed out, there are a variety of issues that have likely played a role in this, ranging from technology and social media (screen time increasing, ability to focus decreasing, apps and AI becoming shortcuts for obtaining answers and cheating the learning process) to the covid pandemic, teacher shortages, ineffective school planning, and often a lack of leadership at local, state, and federal levels.
It's extremely difficult to address every single potential factor all at once, which makes it all the more important to gather data and at least take a swing at whichever issues might be most prevalent (within a district, throughout a state, etc.). For example, starting next school year, New Jersey will be implementing a general ban on cell phone usage throughout the day for all public school students (except for emergencies and other extenuating circumstances). This is a pretty big swing, and although I've personally been able to make occasional cell phone usage an academic net-benefit in my classroom, I think it's probably a very smart move. Removing the #1 potential distraction from classrooms is definitely a way to encourage students to pay more attention to the lesson being taught, and it reduces the ease with which students can lazily look up answers.
With every big swing, there are going to be tons of questions, critiques, and pushbacks. For example, for the cell phone ban, storing cell phones can be an issue if teachers need to take them away from students, not having cell phones as an educational back-up can be problematic if we encourage the use of technology but don't make sure students always have a functioning laptop/iPad, students and parents will push for individual exceptions and might have issues with the way the administration and teachers are implementing the policy, etc. There are ways to navigate these potential issues, and so all parties involved need to be regularly communicating and recognizing that we all have the same goal - to improve the education of our kids - even if we disagree with how that's accomplished.
On the topic of math, in particular, being able to focus on the day-to-day lessons is an absolute imperative. Tuesday's lesson assumes you understand Monday's lesson; chapter two builds on chapter one; to understand calculus, you should first understand the previous few years of high school math. Technology, as always, can be a valuable asset or a wasted crutch, and there are definitely ways to helpfully (or harmfully) invoke calculators, graphing websites like Desmos, apps/software, and even AI. It's very hard to keep all of that under control though - especially when juggling 30 students at once - even when schools try to preemptively manage situations by banning certain websites from their network, adding lockdown-browser capabilities on student laptops/iPads, and having (sometimes effective, sometimes ineffective) professional development sessions. Each obstacle eventually gets circumvented, one way or another, if the students are motivated enough to look for loopholes.
Maybe we'll see more and more teachers voluntarily attempt to go back to paper copies of everything, removing the potential distractions of technology altogether, even though it would really suck to print out thousands of pieces of paper every year (per teacher, that is). I just hope that we keep trying to improve, instead of giving up altogether.
Part of the problem I was getting at with my previous comment was that public education basically came about as a response to the desire to turn agrarian societies into industrial ones.
I trust most people can see how that aligned people from the bottom to the top of society in a way that going from an industrial to a technological society doesn't? This is particularly pronounced under the constraints of capitalism.
While ipads and cell phones are certainly a part of all this, there are more fundamental things at play that can't go unaddressed if we actually want to turn away from the abyss we're hurtling toward.
Students’ test scores had been increasing since 1990 — then abruptly stopped in the mid-2010s. That coincided with two events: an easing of federal school accountability under No Child Left Behind, which was replaced in 2015, and the rise of smartphones, social media and personalized school laptops.
the chickens are coming home to rooster the harvest they reaped.
I don't understand your chicken reference, but as Slydie, Simberto, Fleetfeet, micronesia, and others have pointed out, there are a variety of issues that have likely played a role in this, ranging from technology and social media (screen time increasing, ability to focus decreasing, apps and AI becoming shortcuts for obtaining answers and cheating the learning process) to the covid pandemic, teacher shortages, ineffective school planning, and often a lack of leadership at local, state, and federal levels.
It's extremely difficult to address every single potential factor all at once, which makes it all the more important to gather data and at least take a swing at whichever issues might be most prevalent (within a district, throughout a state, etc.). For example, starting next school year, New Jersey will be implementing a general ban on cell phone usage throughout the day for all public school students (except for emergencies and other extenuating circumstances). This is a pretty big swing, and although I've personally been able to make occasional cell phone usage an academic net-benefit in my classroom, I think it's probably a very smart move. Removing the #1 potential distraction from classrooms is definitely a way to encourage students to pay more attention to the lesson being taught, and it reduces the ease with which students can lazily look up answers.
With every big swing, there are going to be tons of questions, critiques, and pushbacks. For example, for the cell phone ban, storing cell phones can be an issue if teachers need to take them away from students, not having cell phones as an educational back-up can be problematic if we encourage the use of technology but don't make sure students always have a functioning laptop/iPad, students and parents will push for individual exceptions and might have issues with the way the administration and teachers are implementing the policy, etc. There are ways to navigate these potential issues, and so all parties involved need to be regularly communicating and recognizing that we all have the same goal - to improve the education of our kids - even if we disagree with how that's accomplished.
On the topic of math, in particular, being able to focus on the day-to-day lessons is an absolute imperative. Tuesday's lesson assumes you understand Monday's lesson; chapter two builds on chapter one; to understand calculus, you should first understand the previous few years of high school math. Technology, as always, can be a valuable asset or a wasted crutch, and there are definitely ways to helpfully (or harmfully) invoke calculators, graphing websites like Desmos, apps/software, and even AI. It's very hard to keep all of that under control though - especially when juggling 30 students at once - even when schools try to preemptively manage situations by banning certain websites from their network, adding lockdown-browser capabilities on student laptops/iPads, and having (sometimes effective, sometimes ineffective) professional development sessions. Each obstacle eventually gets circumvented, one way or another, if the students are motivated enough to look for loopholes.
Maybe we'll see more and more teachers voluntarily attempt to go back to paper copies of everything, removing the potential distractions of technology altogether, even though it would really suck to print out thousands of pieces of paper every year (per teacher, that is). I just hope that we keep trying to improve, instead of giving up altogether.
Part of the problem I was getting at with my previous comment was that public education basically came about as a response to the desire to turn agrarian societies into industrial ones.
I trust most people can see how that aligned people from the bottom to the top of society in a way that going from an industrial to a technological society doesn't? This is particularly pronounced under the constraints of capitalism.
While ipads and cell phones are certainly a part of all this, there are more fundamental things at play that can't go unaddressed if we actually want to turn away from the abyss we're hurtling toward.
Sure. I was just really interested in the fact that someone brought up that we were hurtling towards the abyss of... lower math scores... so I kept my response limited to that topic.
Part of the problem is that teaching phonetics fell out of fashion in favor of whole-word reading, and there's still more studies to be run before we can be 99% sure that it fucked up innumerable kids' ability to read, but that seems to be what happened.
Once you start lagging behind in English it's a short slope to not caring about school at all, hence why everything including math is declining.
On May 16 2026 03:40 LightSpectra wrote: Part of the problem is that teaching phonetics fell out of fashion in favor of whole-word reading, and there's still more studies to be run before we can be 99% sure that it fucked up innumerable kids' ability to read, but that seems to be what happened.
Once you start lagging behind in English it's a short slope to not caring about school at all, hence why everything including math is declining.
I am not completely certain that the specific way of teaching reading in school is the core reason here. The generally reduced prominence of reading in peoples lives also sounds like a likely culprit.
I don't think you can really expect school alone to get children to a high reading level. That simply requires so much reading that you can't do that in school alone. And if children don't read a lot outside of school, then they will lag behind expectations more and more, with the problems you mention following.
When i was a child, i read for fun, and i read to get stuff done. I read when playing video games, i read and wrote when chatting with other children (though that was a bit after elementary school, where most of this happens).
I think it is not unlikely that children nowadays simply do less of that, with the prevalence of video and audio content available to them. And i would be very surprised if there wasn't a pretty good correlation between the amount you read and your reading ability.
This seems to support that children read a lot less for fun. Of course, this is somewhat of a hen-egg situation where if you are bad at reading, you don't read for fun, and if you don't read for fun, you are bad at reading.
And as you said, reading is an absolute core skill for basically any type or subject of learning.
I find learning by reading from a monitor a lot more difficult than from books because computers are mostly associated with entertainment activities or output work (ie writing). So you can't really focus as well because you get drawn to a videogame here or a bunch of memes there like what you get into when you're off work.
Book and paper notebook are the way to go for me.
Personally have very little patience for audiobooks and sometimes even movies because it's a lot more slow paced than reading.
I don't really believe that learning by using electronic devices is the way to go. The entire motoric component that is associated with writing by hand helps with retainment. Learning software with a game component is great though.
The big issue here is, in elementary specifically but it likely goes all the way up. Way bigger class sizes and far fewer educational support. The amount of teaching time is greatly reduced as most of the day spent doing classroom management techniques. It also makes it far harder to personalize teaching. People learn in different ways and different speeds. Not much of that can happen with one person teaching 26 6 year olds. Some with issues.
On May 16 2026 03:40 LightSpectra wrote: Part of the problem is that teaching phonetics fell out of fashion in favor of whole-word reading, and there's still more studies to be run before we can be 99% sure that it fucked up innumerable kids' ability to read, but that seems to be what happened.
Once you start lagging behind in English it's a short slope to not caring about school at all, hence why everything including math is declining.
I am not completely certain that the specific way of teaching reading in school is the core reason here. The generally reduced prominence of reading in peoples lives also sounds like a likely culprit.
I don't think you can really expect school alone to get children to a high reading level. That simply requires so much reading that you can't do that in school alone. And if children don't read a lot outside of school, then they will lag behind expectations more and more, with the problems you mention following.
When i was a child, i read for fun, and i read to get stuff done. I read when playing video games, i read and wrote when chatting with other children (though that was a bit after elementary school, where most of this happens).
I think it is not unlikely that children nowadays simply do less of that, with the prevalence of video and audio content available to them. And i would be very surprised if there wasn't a pretty good correlation between the amount you read and your reading ability.
This seems to support that children read a lot less for fun. Of course, this is somewhat of a hen-egg situation where if you are bad at reading, you don't read for fun, and if you don't read for fun, you are bad at reading.
And as you said, reading is an absolute core skill for basically any type or subject of learning.
But let's say you're interested in what part of the decline of reading is due to stopping phonics education. This could be a yes-and overdetermined problem.
Teachers have a lot more power in what they teach in the classroom, compared to their ability to dictate what families do outside of school.
The good news is many US states and districts passed laws going back to phonics teaching, so we'll have those experimental results piling up. Early results showed gains ex1. States that improved in reading scores were the states that had ordered phonics-based reading curriculum and teacher training around that.
On May 16 2026 03:40 LightSpectra wrote: Part of the problem is that teaching phonetics fell out of fashion in favor of whole-word reading, and there's still more studies to be run before we can be 99% sure that it fucked up innumerable kids' ability to read, but that seems to be what happened.
Once you start lagging behind in English it's a short slope to not caring about school at all, hence why everything including math is declining.
I am not completely certain that the specific way of teaching reading in school is the core reason here. The generally reduced prominence of reading in peoples lives also sounds like a likely culprit.
I don't think you can really expect school alone to get children to a high reading level. That simply requires so much reading that you can't do that in school alone. And if children don't read a lot outside of school, then they will lag behind expectations more and more, with the problems you mention following.
When i was a child, i read for fun, and i read to get stuff done. I read when playing video games, i read and wrote when chatting with other children (though that was a bit after elementary school, where most of this happens).
I think it is not unlikely that children nowadays simply do less of that, with the prevalence of video and audio content available to them. And i would be very surprised if there wasn't a pretty good correlation between the amount you read and your reading ability.
This seems to support that children read a lot less for fun. Of course, this is somewhat of a hen-egg situation where if you are bad at reading, you don't read for fun, and if you don't read for fun, you are bad at reading.
And as you said, reading is an absolute core skill for basically any type or subject of learning.
But let's say you're interested in what part of the decline of reading is due to stopping phonics education. This could be a yes-and overdetermined problem.
Teachers have a lot more power in what they teach in the classroom, compared to their ability to dictate what families do outside of school.
The good news is many US states and districts passed laws going back to phonics teaching, so we'll have those experimental results piling up. Early results showed gains ex1. States that improved in reading scores were the states that had ordered phonics-based reading curriculum and teacher training around that.
I am absolutely not claiming that it isn't relevant. I am mostly saying that focusing on a single cause in teaching as the core reason is probably not optimal. If you want to increase reading skills in children, you have to approach this from different angles. What and how reading is taught in school is surely important, and as you say it is something that is somewhat easily controlled.
But reading at home is at least as important. People who read more read better. This isn't as easy to solve as what is taught how, but it is at least as important.
For example, as far as i can tell, reading in Germany is usually taught through phonics (I am not an elementary school teacher, so i can only cursory try to look it up.), and yet we also have the exact same problems with decreasing reading skills among students. So clearly phonics or non-phonics isn't the only relevant factor.
Once again, i don't claim anything about which way to teach reading is better, since i am not knowledgeable about it. And i agree that studying it sounds like a good thing to do.
Besides what happens in schools, we need to make reading with and to children more popular, and reading as a pasttime for children. Schools can do a part here, but a lot of important work needs to happen in families. And since i assume that parents are generally interested in their children doing well in life, they should mostly be on board with this.
On May 16 2026 05:21 Vivax wrote: I find learning by reading from a monitor a lot more difficult than from books because computers are mostly associated with entertainment activities or output work (ie writing). So you can't really focus as well because you get drawn to a videogame here or a bunch of memes there like what you get into when you're off work.
Book and paper notebook are the way to go for me.
Personally have very little patience for audiobooks and sometimes even movies because it's a lot more slow paced than reading.
I don't really believe that learning by using electronic devices is the way to go. The entire motoric component that is associated with writing by hand helps with retainment. Learning software with a game component is great though.
Audio books has a speed setting for a reason. I very rarely listen under 175% speed. I would not want to use them for learning without a great pause setup for thinking. The biggest advantage for reading is dynamic speed (including content skipping).
On May 15 2026 04:01 Falling wrote: @Jankisa As far as I can tell in reading back, oBlade has made a separation between 'interesting' and 'information source'. And then there was separation between the 'hacks' like Shapiro and the 'conservative zeitgeist'. He gave an equivalent to TYT as Valutainment and then he lists what is key to the conservative zeitgeist at the time: Bannon's War Room, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, etc. However, I think all of them still fit in his 'interesting' category.
The confusing thing is I think Wombat was seeing oBlade shooting down many of the typical examples of conservative talking heads as being 'hacks' and not representative of the conservative zeitgeist (fast forward, turns out Shapiro was in process of being sidelined. Well, and he was only ever reluctantly defended Trump in the first place, thought he could break free after January 6 and then quickly toed the line again as under Trump, Jan 6/ stolen election is the Shibboleth loyalty test for anyone who dares call themselves conservative in the public sphere.). So Wombat asked, who do you actually recommend? And I don't think oBlade ever answered that, despite saying they were 'key'. He also separates voices from thinkers but only lists voices. But is he cosigning the voices or at least the unlisted thinkers behind the voices? Or are they just 'interesting' as in a piece of trivia? Because he ends with:
If I want just information as such, like you say there's other avenues.
So that whole list were 'interesting interviewers'... interesting for what reason? Presumably, not as a source of information. But yet they are keys to understanding the conservative zeitgeist... as a conservative source of entertainment? Or they use it as a source of information, but he does not?
This is mostly spot on, there is nobody from any ideology I would recommend for their ideas being correct, because I don't believe any specific ideology is correct, and I don't believe any people are specifically correct. Certainly no media figures are simply sources of what is correct. That's not their job and that's not how people should rely on them. People should either figure something out for themselves or be content not knowing, it is better to admit ignorance than get answers on faith fed to you like a faucet. That's the behavior of dogmas and religions and is not necessary when there's nothing pressuring people to have answers for everything.
On May 15 2026 04:01 Falling wrote:
Shirley was also a great call by me who noticed his promise before you knew him - which you do now.
@oBlade You saw his promise early and liked that he goes right to where the current events are- what do you think about his characterization of the US funding the war in Ukraine?
Thank you for acknowledging my tea leaf reading sense on Shapiro and Shirley. I don't know what Shirley characterization you are referring to though. There is a lot of bullshit in Ukraine rhetoric, like people characterizing literal purchases as free aid for one. Shirley is not immune to the mistakes any media make when they take shortcuts through stupidity or dishonesty. Like when the MSM took Trump's comments about the danger of "coyotes" (meaning human smugglers) and said actually there's no coyotes in this area it's not their habitat - I remember Nick Shirley standing in front of an apartment building with a post office on the first floor and saying there are a bunch of people registered to vote from this address. He is young so generally makes the mistakes that are associated with youth. His strength certainly wouldn't be in being right or wrong about Ukraine, it's other things.
This is a nice microcosm of complete dishonesty you operate with.
Nick Shirley, a proven liar and obvious and demonstrated agitator and propagandist is just a young guy who's "mistakes" can be explained by his youth, despite him very obviously lying through his teeth in order to demonize immigrants, because you like him and because you love when immigrants are demonized.
As contrasted to vague "MSM" taking comments from Trump (poor guy, good on you that you are always there to defend him) about coyotes and "maliciously pretending" like he meant the actual animals. Of course, no quotes, no this guy or this outlet, nope, just vague "MSM media bad".
Here's a nice video of an actual journalist debunking easily disprovable lies from this guy:
There is an ever-increasing crowd of obvious far-right agitators in the US who walk around places and events of public interest and ask people questions while quietly holding microphones to listen to and record their answers, and there is NOTHING you can do to stop it except argue with yourself against strawmen here.
On May 15 2026 04:01 Falling wrote: @Jankisa As far as I can tell in reading back, oBlade has made a separation between 'interesting' and 'information source'. And then there was separation between the 'hacks' like Shapiro and the 'conservative zeitgeist'. He gave an equivalent to TYT as Valutainment and then he lists what is key to the conservative zeitgeist at the time: Bannon's War Room, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, etc. However, I think all of them still fit in his 'interesting' category.
The confusing thing is I think Wombat was seeing oBlade shooting down many of the typical examples of conservative talking heads as being 'hacks' and not representative of the conservative zeitgeist (fast forward, turns out Shapiro was in process of being sidelined. Well, and he was only ever reluctantly defended Trump in the first place, thought he could break free after January 6 and then quickly toed the line again as under Trump, Jan 6/ stolen election is the Shibboleth loyalty test for anyone who dares call themselves conservative in the public sphere.). So Wombat asked, who do you actually recommend? And I don't think oBlade ever answered that, despite saying they were 'key'. He also separates voices from thinkers but only lists voices. But is he cosigning the voices or at least the unlisted thinkers behind the voices? Or are they just 'interesting' as in a piece of trivia? Because he ends with:
If I want just information as such, like you say there's other avenues.
So that whole list were 'interesting interviewers'... interesting for what reason? Presumably, not as a source of information. But yet they are keys to understanding the conservative zeitgeist... as a conservative source of entertainment? Or they use it as a source of information, but he does not?
This is mostly spot on, there is nobody from any ideology I would recommend for their ideas being correct, because I don't believe any specific ideology is correct, and I don't believe any people are specifically correct. Certainly no media figures are simply sources of what is correct. That's not their job and that's not how people should rely on them. People should either figure something out for themselves or be content not knowing, it is better to admit ignorance than get answers on faith fed to you like a faucet. That's the behavior of dogmas and religions and is not necessary when there's nothing pressuring people to have answers for everything.
On May 15 2026 04:01 Falling wrote:
Shirley was also a great call by me who noticed his promise before you knew him - which you do now.
@oBlade You saw his promise early and liked that he goes right to where the current events are- what do you think about his characterization of the US funding the war in Ukraine?
Thank you for acknowledging my tea leaf reading sense on Shapiro and Shirley. I don't know what Shirley characterization you are referring to though. There is a lot of bullshit in Ukraine rhetoric, like people characterizing literal purchases as free aid for one. Shirley is not immune to the mistakes any media make when they take shortcuts through stupidity or dishonesty. Like when the MSM took Trump's comments about the danger of "coyotes" (meaning human smugglers) and said actually there's no coyotes in this area it's not their habitat - I remember Nick Shirley standing in front of an apartment building with a post office on the first floor and saying there are a bunch of people registered to vote from this address. He is young so generally makes the mistakes that are associated with youth. His strength certainly wouldn't be in being right or wrong about Ukraine, it's other things.
This is a nice microcosm of complete dishonesty you operate with.
Nick Shirley, a proven liar and obvious and demonstrated agitator and propagandist is just a young guy who's "mistakes" can be explained by his youth, despite him very obviously lying through his teeth in order to demonize immigrants, because you like him and because you love when immigrants are demonized.
As contrasted to vague "MSM" taking comments from Trump (poor guy, good on you that you are always there to defend him) about coyotes and "maliciously pretending" like he meant the actual animals. Of course, no quotes, no this guy or this outlet, nope, just vague "MSM media bad".
Here's a nice video of an actual journalist debunking easily disprovable lies from this guy:
There is an ever-increasing crowd of obvious far-right agitators in the US who walk around places and events of public interest and ask people questions while quietly holding microphones to listen to and record their answers, and there is NOTHING you can do to stop it except argue with yourself against strawmen here.
I don't think you know what a strawman is.
This guy is a proven liar and to anyone not deeply in the cult, an obvious idiot.
Of course, to you, he's interesting, good gonzo "journalist" and the obvious lies he spews are all just "product of his youth".
On May 16 2026 03:40 LightSpectra wrote: Part of the problem is that teaching phonetics fell out of fashion in favor of whole-word reading, and there's still more studies to be run before we can be 99% sure that it fucked up innumerable kids' ability to read, but that seems to be what happened.
Once you start lagging behind in English it's a short slope to not caring about school at all, hence why everything including math is declining.
I am not completely certain that the specific way of teaching reading in school is the core reason here. The generally reduced prominence of reading in peoples lives also sounds like a likely culprit.
I don't think you can really expect school alone to get children to a high reading level. That simply requires so much reading that you can't do that in school alone. And if children don't read a lot outside of school, then they will lag behind expectations more and more, with the problems you mention following.
When i was a child, i read for fun, and i read to get stuff done. I read when playing video games, i read and wrote when chatting with other children (though that was a bit after elementary school, where most of this happens).
I think it is not unlikely that children nowadays simply do less of that, with the prevalence of video and audio content available to them. And i would be very surprised if there wasn't a pretty good correlation between the amount you read and your reading ability.
This seems to support that children read a lot less for fun. Of course, this is somewhat of a hen-egg situation where if you are bad at reading, you don't read for fun, and if you don't read for fun, you are bad at reading.
And as you said, reading is an absolute core skill for basically any type or subject of learning.
But let's say you're interested in what part of the decline of reading is due to stopping phonics education. This could be a yes-and overdetermined problem.
Teachers have a lot more power in what they teach in the classroom, compared to their ability to dictate what families do outside of school.
The good news is many US states and districts passed laws going back to phonics teaching, so we'll have those experimental results piling up. Early results showed gains ex1. States that improved in reading scores were the states that had ordered phonics-based reading curriculum and teacher training around that.
I am absolutely not claiming that it isn't relevant. I am mostly saying that focusing on a single cause in teaching as the core reason is probably not optimal. If you want to increase reading skills in children, you have to approach this from different angles. What and how reading is taught in school is surely important, and as you say it is something that is somewhat easily controlled.
But reading at home is at least as important. People who read more read better. This isn't as easy to solve as what is taught how, but it is at least as important.
For example, as far as i can tell, reading in Germany is usually taught through phonics (I am not an elementary school teacher, so i can only cursory try to look it up.), and yet we also have the exact same problems with decreasing reading skills among students. So clearly phonics or non-phonics isn't the only relevant factor.
Once again, i don't claim anything about which way to teach reading is better, since i am not knowledgeable about it. And i agree that studying it sounds like a good thing to do.
Besides what happens in schools, we need to make reading with and to children more popular, and reading as a pasttime for children. Schools can do a part here, but a lot of important work needs to happen in families. And since i assume that parents are generally interested in their children doing well in life, they should mostly be on board with this.
Certainly tell parents to read to their kids at home and encourage them to read.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that a bundesland in Germany was able to reverse the trend of decline in reading skill and that happened concurrent with a change in how reading was taught. I’d put emphasis on teaching and experimenting with that success as a hypothetical “core reason to focus on.” It would be a little too important to discard, or to dissemble.
Since that’s not an applicable lesson in Germany to your knowledge, the treatment should be different than the US. Reading itself is too important to fail to note successes and attempt to recreate them using the best evidence we have.
On May 15 2026 04:01 Falling wrote: @Jankisa As far as I can tell in reading back, oBlade has made a separation between 'interesting' and 'information source'. And then there was separation between the 'hacks' like Shapiro and the 'conservative zeitgeist'. He gave an equivalent to TYT as Valutainment and then he lists what is key to the conservative zeitgeist at the time: Bannon's War Room, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, etc. However, I think all of them still fit in his 'interesting' category.
The confusing thing is I think Wombat was seeing oBlade shooting down many of the typical examples of conservative talking heads as being 'hacks' and not representative of the conservative zeitgeist (fast forward, turns out Shapiro was in process of being sidelined. Well, and he was only ever reluctantly defended Trump in the first place, thought he could break free after January 6 and then quickly toed the line again as under Trump, Jan 6/ stolen election is the Shibboleth loyalty test for anyone who dares call themselves conservative in the public sphere.). So Wombat asked, who do you actually recommend? And I don't think oBlade ever answered that, despite saying they were 'key'. He also separates voices from thinkers but only lists voices. But is he cosigning the voices or at least the unlisted thinkers behind the voices? Or are they just 'interesting' as in a piece of trivia? Because he ends with:
If I want just information as such, like you say there's other avenues.
So that whole list were 'interesting interviewers'... interesting for what reason? Presumably, not as a source of information. But yet they are keys to understanding the conservative zeitgeist... as a conservative source of entertainment? Or they use it as a source of information, but he does not?
This is mostly spot on, there is nobody from any ideology I would recommend for their ideas being correct, because I don't believe any specific ideology is correct, and I don't believe any people are specifically correct. Certainly no media figures are simply sources of what is correct. That's not their job and that's not how people should rely on them. People should either figure something out for themselves or be content not knowing, it is better to admit ignorance than get answers on faith fed to you like a faucet. That's the behavior of dogmas and religions and is not necessary when there's nothing pressuring people to have answers for everything.
On May 15 2026 04:01 Falling wrote:
Shirley was also a great call by me who noticed his promise before you knew him - which you do now.
@oBlade You saw his promise early and liked that he goes right to where the current events are- what do you think about his characterization of the US funding the war in Ukraine?
Thank you for acknowledging my tea leaf reading sense on Shapiro and Shirley. I don't know what Shirley characterization you are referring to though. There is a lot of bullshit in Ukraine rhetoric, like people characterizing literal purchases as free aid for one. Shirley is not immune to the mistakes any media make when they take shortcuts through stupidity or dishonesty. Like when the MSM took Trump's comments about the danger of "coyotes" (meaning human smugglers) and said actually there's no coyotes in this area it's not their habitat - I remember Nick Shirley standing in front of an apartment building with a post office on the first floor and saying there are a bunch of people registered to vote from this address. He is young so generally makes the mistakes that are associated with youth. His strength certainly wouldn't be in being right or wrong about Ukraine, it's other things.
This is a nice microcosm of complete dishonesty you operate with.
Nick Shirley, a proven liar and obvious and demonstrated agitator and propagandist is just a young guy who's "mistakes" can be explained by his youth, despite him very obviously lying through his teeth in order to demonize immigrants, because you like him and because you love when immigrants are demonized.
As contrasted to vague "MSM" taking comments from Trump (poor guy, good on you that you are always there to defend him) about coyotes and "maliciously pretending" like he meant the actual animals. Of course, no quotes, no this guy or this outlet, nope, just vague "MSM media bad".
Here's a nice video of an actual journalist debunking easily disprovable lies from this guy:
There is an ever-increasing crowd of obvious far-right agitators in the US who walk around places and events of public interest and ask people questions while quietly holding microphones to listen to and record their answers, and there is NOTHING you can do to stop it except argue with yourself against strawmen here.
I don't think you know what a strawman is.
This guy is a proven liar and to anyone not deeply in the cult, an obvious idiot.
Of course, to you, he's interesting, good gonzo "journalist" and the obvious lies he spews are all just "product of his youth".
Dudes biggest gotcha was going up to day care centers with a camera crew and insisting that he be allowed to film the children inside.
The fact that conservatives didn't see a problem with this behavior and respect him for it is extremly telling.
On May 15 2026 04:01 Falling wrote: @Jankisa As far as I can tell in reading back, oBlade has made a separation between 'interesting' and 'information source'. And then there was separation between the 'hacks' like Shapiro and the 'conservative zeitgeist'. He gave an equivalent to TYT as Valutainment and then he lists what is key to the conservative zeitgeist at the time: Bannon's War Room, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, etc. However, I think all of them still fit in his 'interesting' category.
The confusing thing is I think Wombat was seeing oBlade shooting down many of the typical examples of conservative talking heads as being 'hacks' and not representative of the conservative zeitgeist (fast forward, turns out Shapiro was in process of being sidelined. Well, and he was only ever reluctantly defended Trump in the first place, thought he could break free after January 6 and then quickly toed the line again as under Trump, Jan 6/ stolen election is the Shibboleth loyalty test for anyone who dares call themselves conservative in the public sphere.). So Wombat asked, who do you actually recommend? And I don't think oBlade ever answered that, despite saying they were 'key'. He also separates voices from thinkers but only lists voices. But is he cosigning the voices or at least the unlisted thinkers behind the voices? Or are they just 'interesting' as in a piece of trivia? Because he ends with:
If I want just information as such, like you say there's other avenues.
So that whole list were 'interesting interviewers'... interesting for what reason? Presumably, not as a source of information. But yet they are keys to understanding the conservative zeitgeist... as a conservative source of entertainment? Or they use it as a source of information, but he does not?
This is mostly spot on, there is nobody from any ideology I would recommend for their ideas being correct, because I don't believe any specific ideology is correct, and I don't believe any people are specifically correct. Certainly no media figures are simply sources of what is correct. That's not their job and that's not how people should rely on them. People should either figure something out for themselves or be content not knowing, it is better to admit ignorance than get answers on faith fed to you like a faucet. That's the behavior of dogmas and religions and is not necessary when there's nothing pressuring people to have answers for everything.
On May 15 2026 04:01 Falling wrote:
Shirley was also a great call by me who noticed his promise before you knew him - which you do now.
@oBlade You saw his promise early and liked that he goes right to where the current events are- what do you think about his characterization of the US funding the war in Ukraine?
Thank you for acknowledging my tea leaf reading sense on Shapiro and Shirley. I don't know what Shirley characterization you are referring to though. There is a lot of bullshit in Ukraine rhetoric, like people characterizing literal purchases as free aid for one. Shirley is not immune to the mistakes any media make when they take shortcuts through stupidity or dishonesty. Like when the MSM took Trump's comments about the danger of "coyotes" (meaning human smugglers) and said actually there's no coyotes in this area it's not their habitat - I remember Nick Shirley standing in front of an apartment building with a post office on the first floor and saying there are a bunch of people registered to vote from this address. He is young so generally makes the mistakes that are associated with youth. His strength certainly wouldn't be in being right or wrong about Ukraine, it's other things.
This is a nice microcosm of complete dishonesty you operate with.
Nick Shirley, a proven liar and obvious and demonstrated agitator and propagandist is just a young guy who's "mistakes" can be explained by his youth, despite him very obviously lying through his teeth in order to demonize immigrants, because you like him and because you love when immigrants are demonized.
As contrasted to vague "MSM" taking comments from Trump (poor guy, good on you that you are always there to defend him) about coyotes and "maliciously pretending" like he meant the actual animals. Of course, no quotes, no this guy or this outlet, nope, just vague "MSM media bad".
Here's a nice video of an actual journalist debunking easily disprovable lies from this guy:
There is an ever-increasing crowd of obvious far-right agitators in the US who walk around places and events of public interest and ask people questions while quietly holding microphones to listen to and record their answers, and there is NOTHING you can do to stop it except argue with yourself against strawmen here.
Subgroup type of shitty groups of people who set traps up for others with stupid questions or show up when it least matters to stop being shitlords.
Just avoid them and minimize their impact on your life. No need to feed a bunch of guys just trying to make a quick buck at the expense of others. Definitely an US phenomenon, we have rules about recordings and publishings here.
There's probably a few local shitlords who simply don't care about said rules though. Morons in control isn't uncommon nowadays. That includes Austria.
I‘ve never seen them so organized. It‘s ridiculous. The protozoa evolved and congregated on platforms.
EPT
