NielsBohron

That book… Was the Bible

Do people still use ratemyprofessor? The reviews at my school don’t seem terribly recent

The Paradox of Tolerance writ large in real time

He pardoned the conscientious objectors and draft dodgers, gave the Panama Canal back to Panama, founded the Super Fund to prosecute polluters and clean up spills, lifted the military ban on LGBTQ people serving, etc. Sure, he made some mistakes, particularly as it applies to deregulating numerous industries, but in general, he was reasonably close to progressive in numerous ways.

A strong argument could be made for FDR’s government at least making steps toward leftist goals, and Jimmy Carter was a lot more progressive than a typical liberal.

The system isn’t broken; it’s working exactly as intended.

I think you’re mistaking “conservatives and centrists” for “American government”

Ok, here we go…

I’m going down, down, stung a frog like a clown

Sugar, I’m going down stinging

His handlers are just using it as a distraction from the class war. Trump is too dumb and fried to think with that level of intention.

ISIS the American post-metal band, not ISIS “the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria”

100%. The only redeeming quality of boredom is that it encourages you to go out and gain other interests and skills in the absence of other entertainment, but that’s more in the “I’m done with my homework and have nothing to do for the next 2 hours until dinner” sense. And even before smartphones, TV, booze, and weed easily filled that niche if you weren’t careful.

It’s just that a majority of them now seems to be incapable of focusing on anything for more than a few minutes.

I teach chemistry at a college and I don’t think it’s any different than the past; it’s just more obvious. When I was in middle school, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I brought shitty fantasy novels to read under the desk. In high-school, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I would just leave or draw band logos. In undergrad, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I doodled or wrote song lyrics in the margins of my notebook. Even in grad school, i would frequently just straight disassociate my way through lectures when I ran out of attention span (so every 5 minutes or so).

There’s tons of pedagogy and andragogy research that shows that humans in general only focus for 10-15 minutes at a time (and it’s even shorter for teens and males in their early 20’s), and that’s remarkably consistent across generations. I don’t think people actually have shorter attention spans; they just have an easy way to mindlessly fill that void that is harder to come back from without an interruption. Frankly, my students from Gen X all the way to Gen Alpha students do pretty good at paying attention, but even my best students still zone out every few minutes, and that’s fine. It’s just human nature and the limitations of the way our brains are structured.

or “water closet” in the UK

Keep in mind, these are almost certain to be the same people who complain about how political everything is these days. What they mean is that they don’t want to see leftist/progressive memes, but they’re fine shifting the Overton widow to the right.

Depends on how steep the hill is and how precise you need to be with your position. Parallel parking in San Francisco almost requires the handbrake.

I live in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and regularly drove my standard transmission in San Francisco (one of the hilliest cities in North America), and used my hand brake all the time to maintain my position while I engaged the transmission. I’m not really sure what you’re on about…

Like any decent Lovecraftian work, it looks like a big ol’ bag of NOPE.

I don’t know; during the Bush Jr. Era, I would have agreed with you, but I think the powers that be have figured out that religion is more useful for creating wedge issues than actually governing.

If the goal is simply controlling the population, then oligarch-controlled media and social media seems to be perfectly adequate with just a little bit of religion to give the conservatives bad-faith plausible deniability when it comes to the racism, misogyny, and homophobia (both the politicians and the voters).

If I’m being honest, I don’t expect to see a penny of social security. I’m making other arrangements wherever possible

And the people voted for him (or didn’t bother to vote) anyway. America as a whole deserves the shit that we’ve brought down on ourselves, which is really too bad considering how the people that are most actively anti-fascist are going to bear the brunt of the consequences.