@socraticme.bsky.social

@socraticme.bsky.social

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Quote about an article that did tons of damage by convincing everyone that reading is just decoding and the libs fucked it all up with their stupid progressive sense making. Sure do wish supposed leftists would stop immediately turning conservative once kids (and the largely female workforce that interacts with them) are invoked. “that one big article about how a bunch of americans were taught how to read wrong changed everything for me. now when i get a comment about something i never actually said i think oh, are you one of the kids that got taught three cueing instead of phonics? are you half guessing what i said”
The point of this update and this partnership is not to make ourselves feel good. It's not to make ourselves look like saviors or anything like that. The money for all of this, after all, comes from backers! The point here is: if you can be a light, be a light. Our world, our country (the USA anyway), and our communities seem more polarized and fractured than ever. Doomscrolling is now in our common vernacular. We're watching literal videos of war play out on social media. There's an endless amount of studies and articles being written about the decline of mental health in pretty much every age group. It's hard for any of us here to remember an uglier point in society in our lifetimes (though admittedly many of us are relatively young and haven't experienced some notably dark times in history). But at the end of the day, we're so fortunate. We're fortunate to live where we live, work where we work, have what we have, and to have money to make and buy trinkets and doodads and Wroths and Wrecks to entertain ourselves. And if we can afford to buy board games, we sure as heck can afford to be a light and send some help where it's needed.
Lyman Stone: Look my own view is not only should curriculum be public, but any parent should have a right to veto any curricular item *for the entire classroom*. I'm an extremist. I don't really believe in the idea of a common, socially-shared curriculum. Pluralism FTW. Same Deutsch: this is literally the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard
Page 94: When the ingredients are sufficiently standardized, this script will, in fact, produce reliably perfect results. But it sucks much of the joy out of the process. We've taken a deeply aesthetic, deeply satisfying set of sensory interactions with Food-smelling it, tasting it, hearing it sizzle, being sensually immersed in the smells and sounds of food, and then making decisions triggered to those smells and sounds-and replaced it with staring at a stopwatch and a thermometer, mechanically executing a precise procedure. There are no choices, no judgments, no improvisation, and no sensory intuition. There is only following the rules.
Page 89: What's magical about games-what's different from so many other art forms-is that in games, you act. You analyze the information, you make decisions, you try to enact your will upon the game world. And well-designed games make beautiful action more likely. They call it forth. Good games don't tell you what to do, exactly. They don't puppet you into beauty. They leave space for your freedom, for you to choose and decide and act and react. But they create the background conditions that make it likely that your own actions will be elegant, fascinating, and thrilling. The beauty is in the process- in what it feels like to be doing the thing.
From page 82: The Gap can intrude through external pressure on experts, or incentives. If experts in an institution know they will be rewarded for doing well on the metric and punished for doing badly, then they'll be forced to take actions that advance that metric. Instead of using their own understanding of what's important, they'll be pushed to act on the public's understanding of what's important-at least when their actions are visible. But it will be even worse if the experts are value-captured by the transparency metric - if they start wholly substituting the metric's simple target for their own richer understanding of what's important. In that case, the expert will internalize the public's limited understanding in the core of all their decision-making.
Quote from p. 79 of the score: You might think this was just because the overhead metric and the conviction rate metric are completely crappy, and we can just make better ones. But the problem is much deeper than that. It’s baked into the core logic of public transparency. The goal of public transparency is for the public to judge the success of some group of experts. To serve that function, THE METRIC HAS TO BE COMPREHENSIBLE TO THE PUBLIC. But the public, as a whole, can’t understand expert reasoning. The whole point of experts is that they understand things the rest of us cannot.
BANANAMAN flying below the earth with his name scrawled across it.
Appiah: One large thing universities do is educate people. Exposing students to the widest range of views available is part of our task. I teach a course on race and racism, a large part of which is devoted to discussing arguments against affirmative action. I'm in favor of affirmative action, so I have to get my students to read things by people other than me.
Fleming: There is this conundrum that the whole system rests on what has historically been the premise that there is scholarship that is good and scholarship that is bad, and we have evolved systems that are designed to help administrators who may not have a clue about a given discipline. We have peer review, or the solicitation of external letters, and that whole edifice is propped up by its own set of rules. So the real problem from an administrative standpoint is that the kinds of things we've identified as problematic in this report are undermining the ability of administrators to continue, as it were, to defer to the experts, and administrators should be deferring to the experts.
Fleming: The whole university enterprise rests on the idea that people are hired, promoted, tenured, and rehired on the basis of quality scholarship. If we don't have a common set of premises and guidelines, I no longer know the world in which I'm meant to function.
Appiah: The decision was made to allow the authors of those internal reports to decide whether or not to make them public. They were the basis of our deliberation. I will make mine, which is about literary criticism, public at some point, and I think others will. But on the whole, I think it was right to do it the way we have, because we need people to think about the main conclusions and the main arguments, which are in this document. We did a fair amount of research, including research using new artificial-intelligence methods to survey large bodies of text and see what was in them, and to identify themes and so on. My report will come with six appendices of such material, not produced by me but produced by the researchers that we were able to hire with the money that was given to us by the chancellors.
A picture of legendary vampire Nosferatu… or the winner of a Stephen Miller lookalike contest.
The NFL has consistently touted its approach to media as the most fan-friendly in sports. Last season, 87% of games were available on broadcast networks-and matchups are aired on local TV in teams' home markets even if they also appear on paid streaming services.
1 am forever resisting the false binary that says we are either all-in or absent, either useful or useless. Fascism thrives on abandonment, but burnout also produces abandonment. So does untreated pain. So does loneliness. So does the shame of believing that if we cannot do what we once did, we have nothing left to offer. There is a difference between abandoning the world and finding a way to remain part of it.
An absolutely absurd quote from the linked article: While the Progressive model has some use for accommodating diverse student bodies and pushing millions of young people through the educational assembly line, in practice, this has meant ditching the literary canon, embracing educational gimmicks that seem more "modern," and stripping all curriculum of any moral content. In doing so the model has produced a critical mass of incompetent adults who lack the knowledge and skills to be independent.
A bullet point about the new SD standards reads as follows: “Clearly labeled fluency standards that include expectations for how the students should compute a math problem to ensure deep comprehension for students.” Demanding students compute math problems using standard algorithms does nothing to ensure deep comprehension and often stifles attempts to generate deep understanding.
Google’s list of consequences since they “couldn’t confirm I am an adult”: 1. Safe search on 2. No ad tracking 3. Won’t save my timeline
Quote from the article linked in OP: Kirk was a contestant on the reality show Summer House and founded a Christian clothing brand called Spiritual Gangster.
Picture of Eileen Gu with a medal on her neck and the Chinese flag wrapped around her shoulders, overlaid with the text: “I think people are hypocritical for shaming her for representing China… Y’all would have told her to go back to China. Now that they’re back in China, you’re mad.” Alissa Liu on Eileen Gu, via the NYT
41 Action News: A sinkhole roughly the size of six to seven washing machines has closed the northbound lanes of State Line Road near 100th Street in Kansas City, Missouri. Followed by a photo of a highway with three vehicles and a large sinkhole, shown from above. Mohubedu (in reply): Americans will measure with anything but the metric system.
“Walsh said watching the "Romeo + Juliet" movie makes the literature easier to understand. During the Oct. 28 meeting, the board cited concerns over gang violence shown in the movie.”
“Only when you stand a little closer, or when circumstances make you a little less blinkered, do you notice the fact which then becomes blinding and finally crazymaking, which is just that there is zero, less than zero, stress put on the relation between those two "sides," or their histories, or their sponsors, or their relative evidentiary authority, or any of it. Instead, what you get is a piece making the various more or less bovine noises of studious grey-lady impartiality, with the labor of anything resembling "appraisal" surgically excised.”
The cover of a book: Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis Edited by Kelly Hayes
Grey Worm from Game of Thrones, who also played Louis in the new adaptation of Interview with a Vampire.
Russel Vought, a white man with a confused look on his face, stands at a podium, while Vance, RFJ and Johnson stand around him with their best “I am a very thoughtful white man” faces on. None of them appear to know what they are actually doing and the performance is middle school levels of transparent.
Quoted Text: As an aside, I think this explains a lot of left anger at liberals. When they say 'middle-class liberal' they're imagining someone who has not had experiences like this and does not understand-indeed, arrogantly dismisses-the perspective of those who have. It isn't a fair characterization of all, or even most, liberals (loads of us have also had shit jobs), but it is of some affluent libs, and it does make them incredibly frustrating to talk to. While there will always be people who will try and stereotype liberals, we could do a better job at avoiding this image, at not letting people like this be the face of the movement.
Quoted text: This provides a freedom-based argument for workers cooperatives, public institutions, and a strong public sector. That these institutions create barriers to humiliation is one reason why the right opposes them. For instance, l've often suspected the real bone-deep hatred many American conservatives have for the DMV is because their staff have greater job security and are hence harder to humiliate. Their stereotype of a DMV worker is of a middle-aged-to-older Black woman who will not tolerate being disrespected. The mere thought of this is enraging to them.
DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin issued a statement that said: "This man was not in and has not been in CBP or ICE custody. Although he was not being pursued by law enforcement, this individual climbed up to the roof of a greenhouse and fell 30 feet. CBP immediately called a medivac to the scene to get him care as quickly as possible."
Lording power over politicians and the press was the Cuomo way when he was governor. His close aides thought they could go right back to yelling and cursing and making demands of endorsers and reporters alike, who tended to respond by treating Cuomo as a menace and Mamdani as a fascination.
…But to Mamdani, democratic socialism isn't an identity or a set of principles. It is being part of and accountable to a democratic organization, the sort of working-class civil society that has atrophied in this country, but at one time built the backbone of the welfare state across western society and lent the muscle to the New Deal.
“…especially magnanimous of Lander, who seems like a real mensch. He must have known in the final weeks that he, personally, would not win, yet, he never punched left. Instead, he repeatedly used his various privileges to defend his ally: as a white man running interference for an immigrant of Ugandan and Indian heritage, as a Jew for a Muslim, as a 55-year-old for a 33-year-old, as a liberal for a leftist.”
Quote from the article linked in the quoted post: “Prominent Democrats speaking out about all this a year ago would have been meaningful. Today, it means nothing. Denouncing Biden's run now that he's a political nonentity-out of office and perhaps very near death-isn't taking a brave stand against the internal culture of the Democratic Party. It's a reflection of it: a wholly cost-free and substantively empty way for opportunists to perform independence from the party now that the coast is clear and there are no toes of consequence to step on. Biden ran again, and is being condemned for running again, for the very same reasons.”
Josh Marshall: The only relevant political point is that Republican members of Congress are all supporting these tariffs 100%. They could stop them at any moment. Each day is on them. Everyone with a messaging bullhorn needs to make that clear. They can pull the plug now or pay the price at the polls next year.
CW: white supremacist rhetoric Photo of Elon Musk staring directly into the camera with a blank expression. His eyes are slightly red-rimmed. Written across his forehead is: “This is the immigrant who took your job.” This is a common claim about immigrants and is used to argue for eliminationist policies, though it is not generally considered eliminationist on its own.
Vivek Ranaswamy Tweet saying “this whole ‘they’re weird’ argument from Dems is dumb and juvenile. This is a presidential election, not a high school prom queen contest. It’s also a tad ironic coming from the party that preaches “diversity and inclusion”. Win on policy if you can, but cut the crap please.”