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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • Preemptive: take what I’m saying with a heavy grain of salt, obviously and as always.

    The true liberals will vote Dem no matter what - Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, hell this group would vote for Pete Davidson at this point!

    The true conservatives… same, mostly. Unless the liberals advanced someone like Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney, who may be able to chip into that? (This is when we finally stop pretending that liberals have any options in this race, midway between neoliberalism and outright fascism.) Bc just like Dem != liberal, but differently, Repub != Trump-er.

    There are probably like 5-100 people in the middle somewhere, but bc they live in swing states somehow determine the course of the entire nation. Would this be a time to be risky and advance AOC - as a young, passionate, genuine person, since the votes of neither liberals nor conservatives are likely to be affected either way? Except the old money probably worries too much that they could not control her, whereas both Trump and Biden have been vetted in this regard.
















  • It’s okay - that’s how I interpreted it:-). Lemmy formatting can also be weird sometimes and people access via different methods, so I try to remember that as well.

    citizens of their own country

    ^This is the big one, particularly in a democracy this is so extremely crucial. But… we did not bother to secure it, so now we may be (are?) losing it all. Like someone who has lost their immune system, we are now vulnerable to not only lack of knowledge but outright presence of active disinformation. Wait… didn’t we need that - ooopsie daisy!? :-P

    I am afraid of my country becoming like this.

    If we had had more fear sooner, we might have avoided getting eaten alive by Russian disinformation campaigns. As it is… our lack of fear has definitely harmed us greatly, possibly fatally.

    The good news is that whatever society rises out of our corpse will have learned lessons from the ordeal. Rome also fell too, but life goes on. Ours might not, and given climate change humans or even mammals + far more might not, but even so, all we can control is ourselves individually, right now. I for one take that as a charge to do whatever I can in however much time we have left. And maybe it’s not a foregone conclusion after all? So much the better. All we have is today - make it a good one.:-)


  • If you will allow me to say? Your premise seems incorrect. Words like “need” presumes a goal to keep people alive. We “need” Oxygen, in order to breathe which itself is necessary in order to stay alive rather than convert into a corpse state of ‘existence’. However, as e.g. https://lemmy.zip/post/17644464 shows, we are not being allowed to have even that. And if even Oxygen is denied us, then surely education will be even less of a “right”, for homo sapiens or otherwise.

    To a fascist, such as the current set of billionaires in charge, education of the masses - or even our very existence, in light of globalism for now and automation eventually - is no longer necessary. And with climate change diminishing resources, possibly it is not even desirable or neutral anymore, so much as something to be either neutrally or perhaps actively pursued to demolish what has previously been built up. e.g. when the pandemic occurred, the response was “so what? let them die. BuT tHe EcOnOmY will go on just fine without them, in fact better without those restrictions imposed by safety protocols”.

    So no, “everyone needs education” sounds like something that is not true… at least according to the likes of Elon Musk, who now controls Twitter. Not Bezos, nor Zuckerberg, etc. And they would really like it if we did not tax them in order to pay for such. And a LOT of people seem to agree with them, whether we like it or not. See this fantastic description of it: https://youtu.be/agzNANfNlTs?si=dAGHoctLiPimmTTQ.


  • First note that it’s enormously variable, with some college preparatory high schools being better than some colleges. The main thing is that education is a for-profit exercise, and now even government-funded ones behave like that too after No Child Left Behind. So like anything else, it’s whatever they can get away with selling their product with minimal input into in order to maximize the margin:-(.

    Then above and beyond that, schools are partly paid for by the government, but also by the local district they are in, so schools in richer areas are going to be 1000x better than those in poorer ones. See e.g. this older John Oliver (Last Week Tonight) special: https://youtu.be/o8yiYCHMAlM.