Naw, laws to protect young children and parental rights are just flexing over non-existent imaginary issues that don’t actually happen…
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I agree with a lot of what you and @glitch99 are saying. However, there have always been wild conspiracies. Most people had more sense than to believe them … much less, promote them.
One example - IIRC, it was Dan Rather who promoted a wild conspiracy which was later proven to be comically incorrect about George Bush’s military service. While not pre-social media, it was long before social media was embedded in the brains of young people and many of their elders.
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Much like how there have always been wild conspiracies, there has also always been lots of stupid and gullible people. I dont think they had more sense than to believe it back then, it’s that they lacked the level of exposure necessary to convert them. Most people dont go to the fringe, when they have to invest a lot of time and effort to find the fringe.
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Yeah, I think I agree. I suppose if it wasn’t for social media, the BS could still spread via SMS/MMS, just a lot slower.
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Now this is getting serious
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Top 5 (actually 9) worst crime cities in the US have Democratic mayors. Had to get to Stockton CA at #10 before I found one that had only recently turned over to new mgmt in 2021 (having been Democratic prior).
https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/most-dangerous-cities-in-the-us
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I would guess that most large cities are run by Democratic mayors, since cities tend to be liberal in general. And obviously traffic will be worse in large, dense cities than in small, sparse ones.
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You’d be right, and here’s a nice list
The point about crime is it’s more highly correlated with party than population, since you have other large non-Democratic run cities on the list which avoid the top crime numbers (in TX, FL, AZ for example). It may not have been (as?) true previously, but the last few years of anti-cop, pro-criminal policies have taken their toll.
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I was replying to onenote regarding traffic, not to you regarding crime. Thanks for confirming my guess.
The article is not listing large cities exclusively. Two of them on the list, Frisco and DC, are not particularly large population and yet have traffic problems. I am more familiar with Frisco and they actively try to impede traffic for example by closing off lanes on major streets for bicycles only. I’m also familiar with Tucson Arizona, a democrat city, where for many decades they have refused to build freeways, forcing high-speed traffic onto city streets. The much larger Phoenix, Arizona has built freeways and is able to move traffic fairly efficiently. It is only recently that imports from California flipped the city Democrat.
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An article digging into various possible reasons
No matter how portable and light it is, you’re not reflexively checking your laptop on the subway platform or in the bathroom. The iPhone took all of the various pathologies of the internet, made it possible for them to be experienced repetitively and at zero cost morning and night, and dramatically scaled up the financial incentives for companies to exploit those pathologies for gain. You can certainly have an unhealthy relationship with the internet when it’s confined to your desktop. But phones make relentless conditioning and reflexive engagement a mass phenomenon.
There are young people out there who have arranged their various [Instagram] feeds such that they’re always a few seconds away from seeing concerts they can’t attend, cars they can’t drive, houses they can’t live in, clothes they can’t wear, women they can’t fuck or whose bodies they can’t have, places they can’t travel to, food they can’t eat, and lives they can’t live. When I was young, if I wanted to see a picture of a Ferrari, I had to seek out a picture of a Ferrari. It was hard to see suggestive photos of intimidatingly hot women…
if we’re dividing the hours of the day and our mindshare between more and more relationships relative to the past, we’re almost certainly investing less in each individual relationship.
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I think social media (as it exists today) is worse on kids than it is on adults. And it is VERY harmful to them.
I think this is more accurate. The addition of the camera to phones, plus cheap storage, plus fast internet speeds that allow people to easily share video (whether on youtube, social media, or just sent directly) completely changed our lives in ways that we don’t even realize until we sit down a think about it. For all of human history up until ~2010, there was very little photographic/video record of non-celebrities living their lives (and even the recordings of celebs were sparse). Now it is ubiquitous for everyone - in the form of surveillance video, bystanders recording, or people voluntarily documenting their own lives. This is a completely different way of living and humans are still adjusting to it (and will be for decades).
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Update on this case: Jury found Houck not guilty.
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Good!
Look. I don’t really know if I support this case or if it’s frivolous. The headline makes this article’s bias obvious, so I dont really trust the analysis and conclusions. But it’s time to stop fearmongering with hypotheticals about what could theoretically happen, and start establishing a record of what actually can and will happen.
So an English professor gets fired for teaching stuff other than English in his English courses? I get that teaching English can breech tons of tangent topics, because it gives context and applicability to the core lessons. But it sounds like this was a unit on racial justice, not an English lesson that used racial justice subjects to apply those lessons.
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Here’s a case were they fired a tenured prof for doing research on IQ and race. He wrote a complicated and well cited paper that suggested there was a decent chunk of genes behind IQ, and that those varied by race, and boy the Social Justice crowd couldn’t stand it. Here’s more on his lawsuit over his first amendment rights.
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There is an article on the incident leading to his termination here:
Racial Pseudoscience on the Faculty?
I read a book titled “The Bell Curve” maybe 20 years ago. It was clearly a racist theory, supported by results on IQ tests. The underlying issue is that an IQ test, particularly the aspect of vocabulary or knowledge of basic math concepts, can (unintentionally) skew results.
I do not follow that. Why is it a racist theory? The academics who design IQ tests do their best to make them non-biased. You claim the tests are biased but don’t provide any evidence.
For what it’s worth, I read the book, although it was a number of years ago, and I do not find it racist at all.
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Obviously a Trump overthrow of the government/jury/judicial system. 
Why do you say it was clearly a racist theory? I vaguely recall the book, but possibly an earlier version than yours. My brain was not hitting on anywhere near all cylinders at the time, so may have missed something that was obvious to you.
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