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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • It bears repeating, even places like this one. I’ve run into shocking amounts of innumeracy and utter lack of critical thinking - in addition to illiteracy. In the United States, as least.

    I remember kids in school dunking on “book learning” and that they valued “street smarts”. These are exactly the types that are now “doing their own research” on things, but completely without any of the fundamental building blocks to separate the wheat from the chaff, other than by vibes.

    If our education systems was beyond the reach of conservative/Republican monsters, children would be well-served by teachers that hand out something like this as an essay-type question to explain why the claim is suspect - and have them show their work. You’d get to cover critical thinking, media literacy as well as some basic math all in one fell swoop. I’m sure lots more instances could be found over the years, plucked straight from news articles…

    In our current education landscape, all it would take is one snowflake to tell mommy and/or daddy that are infected with fauxbrain, and that teacher would be fired for “indoctrinating” their children with intelligence, I guess…


  • I live in a small town of about 4k people and the day after Obama was elected you would have thought that a 2nd 9/11 happened or a nuke was dropped.

    I remember I worked with a guy and another co-worker was sometimes still finishing up listening to NPR at a low volume, and around that time (Obama years), they’d be playing a soundbite from Obama. Almost every time Obama was talking, even though we could just barely hear it, the other co-worker would turn to me and mutter how much he hated Obama’s voice. Like clockwork. Not what he was saying (if we could even make it out). Just his voice. This same co-worker thought NPR, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, etc…were all extreme left outlets, too, lol. And he spent some period of time where he was super-upset about…checks notes…seeing two government workers in a trucks. He mentioned this multiple times, so I can only guess it was some thing on hate radio around that time. When asked follow-up questions on why he’s upset, nothing coherent could be discerned. Same dude was riled up about people that couldn’t afford their house getting bailed out by government, or something, too.

    I lost contact with him before Taco was elected, but I can only imagine he thinks that Taco is “fixing” everything. I don’t know what he was like before Obama, but he was nearly inconsolable about Obama. It’s why I think they uncreatively talk about “TDS” when Taco does completely outrageous things - Obama did completely normal things, or even if he did nothing at all, and they lost their heads over it.








  • They are extremely cult-like about Taco. I saw one of them put one of those stupid “never give up” shirts [1] on their kids and went out in public with it last summer. I mean, what the actual hell. Who knows if the spell will every break with the true believers. Even if Taco were to stroke out on live tv and shit his diaper, they’d probably blame that on Hillary or Biden or Hunter’s hard drive, oops, I mean, “laptop”. These people are fucking crazy.

    [1] The pose where he was thinking “photo-op” right after the shattered glass hit his ear.






  • I seem to recall reading one of the divisive things the cipherpunks on their mailing list discussion was about untraceable digital money (before Bitcoin) and the thought experiment about just this very kind of thing (minus the siren server like GoFundMe, because why would you want that in the mix if you were doing this kind of thing).

    Not that anyone set it up, and the many proposals around digital cash did not really gain traction until 2009 or so…but this was from the 90s.