The colder the weather gets, the more we tend to be nice. Its just natural when you’re living in a state/province where breaking down on the side of the road in winter can mean death.

And I’m only half kidding. I do honestly believe that a shared experience of harsh winters creates empathy. Same reason Nordic countries are nice to each other mostly as well.

True. I must have typed my comment during my daily 5 seconds of optimism before crashing back down to my usual cynical reality.

I think “Is this guy literally a Nazi” is a pretty important policy question…

I’m not calling everyone a Nazi.

I’m saying the guy with tattoos on his chest of symbols that have been associated with Nazis since the late 1930s is 99.99999% likely to be a Nazi and not a long lost member of Prussian nobility.

Pretending that because there’s a .0000001% chance that his tattoos aren’t Nazi inspired just because Prussia existed, is purposeful pedantry, which IMO is worse than outright racism.

See, you’re not stupid. You’re the worst kind of person. Your not smart. But your not stupid. You have just enough trivia in your head that you can muddle any argument with pedantry just enough that stupid people might read it and think… “hmmm…maybe it WAS a Prussia tattoo.” even though you know damn well that a .0000001% chance is as good as 0%. It’s dishonest, it’s immoral, and it takes advantage of people who don’t have the critical thinking skills to call out your bullshit. You are worse than racists because at least racists are honest about it.

Or…hear me out here…maybe we could try holding men accountable for their actions? I’m just spit-balling here, but it’s so crazy it just might work.

I’m sorry what?!

That level of disingenuous knot tying is utterly baffling.

You know damn well that after WW2, all of those symbols ostensibly became inextricably linked with the Nazi party. Its the same reason a Swastika no longer automatically conjures images of Hindu and Buddhist peace.

Pretending that its possible that this idiot is somehow repping his pride of Wilhelm II and the glorious Prussian history is so unbelievably intellectually dishonest that it actually somehow manages to be even worse than being flat out racist.

At least Racists are honest. This…whatever this idiotic attempt at obsfucation was that you just shat into our lives is just pedantry that even racists would mock you for.

2008 wasn’t the fault of bad jobs. It was the fault of overly greedy banks offering sub-prime mortgages to people would otherwise never qualify for home ownership, and then crying for a bailout when those new homeowners (unsurprisingly) defaulted.

I majored in Near Eastern Classical Archaeology, but the truly life-changing course for me was honestly a Philosophy elective I took in third year where I was introduced to the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant as well as a few writings on Ethics by Locke and Hume.

Business Degrees are the most popular post-secondary degree in the world right now. Similarly, they learn about money money money and how to make ever increasing sums of it while completely eschewing anything else that distracts from that, like history, or ethics, or critical thought.

being a realist about how corporations value their “human resources

I was (and I guess still am) classic middle management. The day I went from “Cynical” to outright “radicalised” was when my previous employer told me that my staff would not be getting their yearly cost-of-living raise that year because “The Company didn’t make a profit.” Yet the company actually made 6 billion dollars in profit that year.

The issue is that some eggheads projected that they would make 7 billion, and giving raises would increase that shortfall and cause the stock price to drop by a few more cents than it otherwise would have. So in the corporate world, not making enough profit is equivalent to not making any profit and the workers get fucked.

But damn, did the head office muckity-mucks get THEIR bonus’ that year. Yessiree.

It’s not done yet. I’ve only just written the abstract and started collecting my sources. When it’s finished it’ll likely just go collect dust in a substack somewhere like everything else I shout into the void.

I write this stuff because if I don’t, I’ll go mad. But I hardly expect it to get widely distributed.

I agree completely. Trade-Schools are as good or as bad as the person attending. You’re going to have people like my best friend, who went to a tradeschool for bio-tech lab assistant, but reads constantly and is generally well versed in critical thinking. And then you have people like my brother-in-law, who’s a damn good Welder but doesn’t know, or care, about the wider world around him and just believes the words of whoever happens to agree with him.

Critical thinking is the most basic skill that needs to be reinforced in a democracy. But you need knowledge in order to participate in a proper dialogue, whether it’s political, social or economic. Knowledge that doesn’t come from learning how to weld good.

I recently asked someone about 10 years older if he knew what partitioning and formatting means in the context, and he knew, despite initially saying he has no clue about computers, to show someone 10 years younger (who didn’t know) that such knowledge was just basically required back in the day

I call them Intellectual Oligarchies. The knowledge (of any subject, not just tech) being limited to a circle of elites while the products are made simple enough to operate that the average person doesn’t really need to know how it’s done, just how to purchase it.

The good thing about Intellectual Oligarchies, however, is that they are open to be joined by anyone who wants to learn, or is curious about things. No formal education is required; just intellectual curiosity and the ability to read. They’re entirely self-propogated; not purposefully created by some evil cabal trying to withhold knowledge from the average person. Knowledge itself is open-source, in other words. Anyone can use it if they want.

In the Greek and Roman democratic condition, people who don’t exercise that “right to knowledge” lacked the context necessary to properly partake in the citizen’s primary job…democratic rule.

Ars Liberalis doesn’t translate to “Liberal Arts”. It literally translates to “The skills of Freedom”. A citizenry of a democracy needs the skills (knowledge) to properly function in said democracy; and that included studies of history, philosophy, politics, civics, etc…

Gen-X mostly ignored and sidelined

We’ve been ready for that since we realized that our parents were never going to retire soon enough for us to have access to the “good jobs”. We went to school and majored in “whatever was available”, and then the generation that graduated after us coincided with our parents retiring and freed up the good jobs for them.

“Ignored and Sidelined” pretty much sums up my generation. If we didn’t have computers, weed, and grunge, we’d have nothing.

This is exactly why I keep beating the drum for critical thinking and media literacy, steeped within a rich liberal (in every meaning of that term) educational program.

I’ve actually begun work on an essay about that exact thing. One that I’ve put off for a very long time because the last time I dared to imply a causal relationship between the rise of Trade-Schools, where you learn to do one thing and one thing well, but have no real education otherwise, and the dumbing down of the electorate, I got shouted down for being “elitist”. But with recent events, I’ve decided to expand on my idea and throw some more research behind it because fuck it, I’m feeling vindicated.

I’m not saying that everyone who attends a trade-school is intellectually incurious; just that a broader understanding of the world is not a part of the curriculum and it’s left up to the students themselves if they want to be a well rounded individual on their own time.

Algorithms ensure that the only content that ends up getting to your eyes is content that you already agree with for the most part. Or content that you hate so much that you have an incurable urge to respond to it with swearing and vitriol. (or at least that’s why I think TikTok keeps giving me Maple Maga bullshit)

In other words, you can put up whatever you want but thanks to modern social media, the only people who will ever see it are the people who already agree with you.

“Crazy how Millennials were the only ones to learn how to use computers and we apparently are also the only ones who learned to see through disinformation,”

Whoever this Dylan jackass is can piss right off. Gen-X built your fucking computers.

Congratulations America. You put the reins of power in the hands of toddlers coming up with cool names for made up comic book superheroes.

I don’t disagree, but that’s not really my point.

What you’re arguing is basically akin to people who sat out the vote because “Genocide Joe”. Which is what gave America Trump 2.0 in the first place. Yes, the established Military Complex is flawed and in some cases downright evil. But the response to that isn’t “fuck it, let’s burn it down and give a fucking toddler direct control of it.”

You don’t fix things by picking the worse option on purpose. That’s utter lunacy.

The US can not be trusted with its own military.

I’m not a fan of U.S. foreign policy. But as far as the military chain of command, it’s specifically designed to have it’s own checks and balances against abuse of power. Precisely what Trump is wanting to topple. So if the choice is an orange toddler or a robust and effective circle of generals, I’ll go with the generals thanks.