School is where the passion for learning goes to die and the desire to cheat is born
In this day and age, hobbies are the last bastions of passion and curiosity. One who is engaged in a hobby is intrinsically motivated to learn and apply what has been learned in novel ways, just as the scholars of old have done. School, reviled by many a student, has earned its reputation by perverting the concept of learning and exploiting students' passions. The desire to cheat is most unnatural among students, a telltale sign that one's passion and curiosity for the topic at hand has been extinguished, replaced with a desire to rid oneself of a burden, the burden of learning only for the sake of becoming learned.
Markdown is trash. It almost always comes in a fork that is naturally incompatible with other forks & never has the features you need for blogging or technical writing (leading to abuse of the limited features, unsemantic markup output, and/or embedding HTML which is both ugly & also ruining portability to non-HTML targets). This leaves you locked into some specific tool’s forked implementation & never looks good in other contexts. Markdown was also never the only or best option for lightweight markup at any time.
In a discussion about whether liking trans women is gay or not I said that they are all missing the point. Even if it was the gayest thing on earth, being gay should never be this big of a deal. And it just shows how hard it is for some to overcome the stigma of being gay, even if they are super tolerant in general.
That started a group discussion with a lot of different opinions on that matter.
People considered woke often only focus on institutional racism and make every other form of racism seem unimportant, including those targeting so called "whites" / Europeans. (And I'm not trying to victimize perpetrators here, I'm aware of the current and historical situation in Western countries.)
I see that institutional racism is a huge problem, especially in the West, but that doesn't make any other form less important or significant.
For comparison: just because in sub-saharan Africa people starve on a daily basis due to extreme poverty caused by Imperialism doesn't mean that poverty inside industrial nations with less harsh effects is less of a problem, especially to the individual.
I was hanging with a group consisting of mostly older millennial gay men who don't like that trans people are being included alongside them in conversations about human rights, sexuality, and gender. They think it takes away from the fight their community has gone through over the past few generations.
I chewed them out. Like, a lot. I am usually not at all confrontational but I pretty much stunned them into silence. Now I'm waiting to let them process, expecting a couple to reach out to me to step back from some of the shit they were saying. If that doesn't happen, I guess I'm not really welcome in that group anymore and I'm ok with that.
There are no trans people in this group. I'm not a gay man nor am I trans. But when I hear shit like that, I hear echos of gay men activists not being willing to work with lesbian women activists, white feminists not includig black women, male laborers trying to keep women out of labor rights movements. It's stupid. It's tribal and hateful. It undercuts the strength the movement could have if we weren't asshats about it.
Rights campaigning 101, strength in unity. This is basic ass shit.
Being born to narcissistic parents was extremely controversial in my childhood home. I was the selfish little ingrate in the house who kept asking for things even though they already provided a house and food most of the time, and that was very polarizing for my parents.
I have a few. I'm not the kind of person that says controversial things to attract attention, but I also don't refrain from putting them out there.
A selection of the ones I use in my political activity:
- knowing things doesn't change things
- work should be abolished
- atheism and rationalism are a scourge on the ability of the Left to reach people
- hacker culture is intrinsically gnostic and reactionary
Some others:
- suicidal and self-harming people should be listened to by understanding and validating the motivations behind their desire to hurt or kill themselves, even entertaining with them their own plans. Anything else would likely put a wedge between the two of you that will prevent from addressing the causes and ultimately do what's good for them.
- mathematics is just narrative with rules/arbitrary opinions with rules
- nurses, doctors, teachers and other professions of care attract the worst psychopaths because they are put in charge of vulnerable people. On top of that they are by default perceived as caregivers, so it's harder for them to raise suspicion of doing fucked up stuff.
Edit: people down voting in a thread about controversial opinions must be very very intelligent
Telling 8th grade content teachers that they must modify their assignments to accommodate migrant students and English learners, and that just directly translating those documents forever wasn't going to cut it. Gosh there was a lot of grumbling in the room.
I get it, we're short staffed and overwhelmed, but it doesn't make it go away.
Complaining about politics in !memes
Stuck a wire in a power outlet.
Told my friend that she was being a terf when she started saying terf shit.
