Pretty sure we’ve had presidents who killed people before, like wasn’t murdering Indians Andrew Jackson’s whole campaign platform?

Well there are good days and bad days. When she started here she wasn’t able to get into her room to set it up until the 11th hour, so she started the year on her backfoot. She takes good care of her self, much better than me tbh, so I think that helps. She’s very tough and competent, and she has a sort of gentle frankness that I think help smooth out rough interpersonal issues that drive so much burn out, just because she like can’t stand to let things fester between people. Also our relationship is very strong and open and honest, and we share everything including housework. We take vacations, and alto she likes to plan vacations so it can be a nice mental getaway for her. Luckily I have a decent job too so we can do that. My kids are older and we only have them part time so she doesn’t have to full time mom, even though she’s a great step mom and very involved.

As a fellow musician, I’m not able to read

It closely approximates my experience having known dozens of musicians, I’ll have my neuroscientist friend weigh in later today. Keep refreshing this thread until you see her response

He doesn’t write his own lyrics, he does write his own music

Okay I’m not defending the teacher here except for the child’s right to be recognized and have their needs tended to. This also isn’t about “good” and “bad” teachers, but the education system. This is anecdotal, so take it for what it’s worth.

My wife, S, is an intervention specialist which is a teacher in a special ed classroom. I think she is a very good teacher, and after years in a underfunded inner city school, she now works in a very large well funded elementary school in a nice area with very involved and stable parents, by and large.

She has a student, L who is non verbal, most of her kids are and she has the most difficult special-ed classroom in her school. She works on a team with two other intervention specialists, one of which, B, was L’s teacher for two years previous. L has a muscular disability.

It’s S’s first year at this school so she is just starting to know the kids. What she is discovering is that these “very low” non verbal children, have basically received no prior schooling on subjects. Their learning plans have each of them marked very low, with the most basic goals. And granted, behavior is usually an issue with these kids who can’t communicate. They can lash out suddenly and scratch or bite a teacher or aide, drawing blood more often than not. So behavior will eat up a ton of bandwidth for any teacher. It took my wife months to get her kids to sit with her and do any work whatsoever. But once they started to do work for her so she could test their ability, she discovers that they are all quite advanced in various areas, despite basically never being taught. Kids with educational goals of being able to count to 5 can do multiplication and division for 2 and 3 digit numbers, ahead of their grade; kids who seem to have no concept of reading or conceptual language can spell and construct sentences or answer questions about a story, if it is shown to them in a way that they will interact with.

Back to L, he is another case just like this. Very difficult to work with at first, refused to be taught, lashes out violently when he gets frustrated, but now that he is used to her he will sit and work and also demonstrates advanced ability in multiple subjects.

However the last to years his previous teacher and the head of their team, B, by all accounts from teacher and aides did nothing with him for 2 years. He was basically laid on a mat in a closet, and ignored, everyday for 2 years. My wife says that for the most part he gets around in her class pretty darn well, so even the assumption that he’s mostly immobile was wrong.

Special ed teachers spend most of their time some weeks filling out complicated ed plans that are a state requirement, but frankly no one ever checks or even seems to know how to fill these things out. Everyone is just winging it. Bureaucracy is a stand in for education and the needs of the child. Imo my wife is an exceptional teacher who has time and time again achieved breakthroughs with some of her most difficult students. The lead on her team, with over a decade of experience in this job couldn’t even see past their own assumptions about the child, and never stopped to question them, and so the poor kid was neglected, uninjured thank God, for 2 years.

So if a pretty good teacher at a good school can fuck up that badly, how dangerous would it be for a inexperienced or disengaged teacher? To me this isn’t a problem that comes down to individual teachers but of the American education system as a whole, and it’s priorities. Spoiler alert, politics matter more than children.

Coherent and good!

Musicians only use 1/3 of their brain because making great music uses the other 2/3rds. Sometimes this rule isn’t true when a musician is part of a group, so they can still like study and better themselves without having to burn out just making music, but solo musicians and prominent bandleaders are hopeless. The best you can hope for from a musician is that they are at least self aware of their own idiocy and can laugh at it or keep it in check, but this quality doesn’t survive very long once someone makes several million dollars.

Bret Stevens is such a treasure

Well the economy is what rips you off to make companies money, so its actually one of the more honest usages I’ve seen

Does this mean if I have a stroke I turn into a chud 😭

Don’t mention post-WW2 America First rhetoric

Um I’m not someone who depends on institutions for change. I’m a revolutionary Marxist who wants to tear down the system of capitalism and the imperialist state, not some liberal.

So I can tell you’ve spent some time thinking about these problems of philosophy, which is great! But I’m afraid there are telltale signs of your unfamiliarity with these topics. Its okay, I’m also a great admirer of the Tao Te Ching and the I Ching, both of which deal directly with the dialectical form of reason that I’ll try to describe here briefly as I can, though its a huge topic I’m still wrapping my mind around and actively learning. As such, I can recognize and hope that our “ways” are similar since you are asking many questions that I have asked and sought answers for. But you aren’t there yet and I’ll show you where you are tripping up.

You make this case that there is no objective truth, and on that we certainly agree. But where you are mistaken is the empiricist fallacy that because the subject, in this case truth, lacks empirical objectivity, it therefore lacks realness. This is the problem with Kantian dualism which is the main way that we assemble meaning out of our experience, since the industrial revolution in the modern era. It is too common for sophists like Sam Harris to point to a blurry objectivity and claim nonexistence, and also for people who are seeking education on this topic to buy into this ridiculous modern myth.

You see it is dualism that compulsively categorizes, evaluates, alienates objects so that our reality appears as an assemblage of discreet things interacting with one another. This particular ontology (which is the name for the problem you have solved by flushing it down the intellectual toilet like one of your shits, the word means “theory of being”) struggles to find real subjects. So unless you want to throw away all subjectivity, which by quoting Descartes you claim is the only provable subject, you can’t dispense with truth, because you rely on a version of it for your own arguments, except you make a strawman of mine due to the shallowness of your own understanding. So I’m sorry, there is truth and meaning even if its inconvenient for your ego. Idk if this works on other people but you’re barking up the wrong tree. The philosophy you describe is like a characature of a fictional villain supergenius, who upon revealing their master plan also revels their philosophical motive which is actually extremely dumb and shallow. It doesn’t matter how sinisterly you laugh, I ain’t buying it. You didn’t do the reading, I can tell dude.

The philosopher you were trying to quote about Truth/Power is Michel Foucault. Who is an interesting thinker! I’ve read Power/Knowledge and I’m reading history of sexuality.

Anyway, what if we have different ontologies? What if we use the same words but they have different meanings which create an epistemological crisis? Another failure of popular reasoning is the Greek idea that a logical contradiction is a sign of error. However, it has been mathematically proven (mathematics itself a theory of formal, if abstract, knowledge) that every logical system contains breaking contradictions, and any attempts to “fix” these contradictions leads only to new sets of contradictions (Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.) Even formal arithmetic can he exploited cleverly in order to make an equation where 1 = 0. When I learned this, I thought much the way that you do because I was still locked into my dualist way of thinking that turns reality into objects. How can contradictions in every logical system and every ontology lead to any conclusion other than there is no objective truth?

And the answer is that objectivity is not all there is to reality, as you so thoroughly pointed out. The contradiction that you made in your theory of no truth can be rectified by uniting the subject and the object and understanding that instead of separating these things as the dualists do, that actually the subject and object are united in contradiction. Lao Tsu was the master at this, which is why i have hope for you.

As soon as beauty is known by the world as beautiful, it becomes ugly.

As soon as virtue is being known as something good, it becomes evil.

Therefore being and non-being give birth to each other.

Difficult and easy accomplish each other.

Long and short form each other.

High and low distinguish each other.

Sound and tone harmonize each other

Before and after follow each other as a sequence.

Realizing this, the master performs effortlessly according to the natural Way

You are finding the pieces of the puzzle but haven’t put them together quite yet, there are still missing pieces. But with intellectual work often these gaps are invisible to us until we have enough of the facts uncovered so that the limits of our knowledge stop appearing as the edges of reality and begin to appear as gaps in understanding. You not only don’t understand my ideas, you don’t understand what you think are your own ideas. That’s okay, it just means we have work to do.

The word for this kind of reasoning, this ontology, is dialectics, and it has a long history both in eastern religion but also esoteric hermeticism which influenced much of Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel reforged dialectical reasoning and developed a theory of history that surpassed Kant’s dualist libertarianism. In the subsequent century Hegel scholars elaborated on Hegels theory of history and oneness, and began to fuse his dialectical reasoning with French materialism which was in vogue at the time but suffered from the same limitations of dualism which it had failed to surpass. Feuerbach managed to make a lot of extraordinary conclusions from this unity and coined the term dialectical materialism, but the master of dialectical materialism was certainly Karl Marx. However it was his collaborator Engels who penned the work Anti-Duhring which laid the foundation for future generations of dialectical materialists. In it he puts forward a few rules which I might describe for you but you can also look them up yourself, they are described in the first section of the book, on philosophy. If you want to know more I’d be happy to go into more detail. He’s a pretty digestible author, and I think you’ll like his seething disdain for the illusions and idealism of the ruling class. That is who we need to surpass, not each other, but them. Or maybe who we were yesterday, as rise and grind of a mentality as that is, nothing is static and everything, including our selves, is becoming something else. What it is that we become is a matter for free will and circumstances to decide.

I won’t make an exhaustive case for the efficacy and predictive power of this kind of analysis, for that I would encourage you to read Engel’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, particularly the last two sections on dialectics and Historical Materialism. Without that shared basis on which to discuss we will likely talk past each other from this point on.

Its also easy to assert that I’m just saying that the form of logic that I like is the one that determines truth. That’s not it, but I do believe that it is possible to determine what is true and real from a particular logical system, only that certain systems are better than others for solving certain problems. We have a scientific method (which also has limits) for determining the efficacy of any methodology, and without relying on the truth and realness of its conclusions we couldn’t have the advanced society that we have. Here is where we differ. You still subscribe to idealism, which implies that our thoughts change our environment, but you’ve found the limits of idealism and its made you determine there is no truth. Materialism asserts that the environment affects our ideas, which seems self evident in one regard but is almost completely alien to our popular conceptions. You haven’t even begun to explore this, at least you’ve given no indication of it. This is where you might continue your journey. I would choose the intellectual tools I need to solve a particular problem, not claim the tools are worthless because it can’t solve this particular problem, or that the problem is unsolvable. If I’m looking at history I use a historical perspective, if looking at figures, mathematical; this is something you can do and have done, but because you haven’t sufficiently questioned the overarching ontology of our era (and all ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, consider this!) its led you to the negation of meaning. But instead of stopping your inquiry at the discovery of a contradiction, this is where we would start our inquiry, since the presence of a contradiction implies the presence of a dialectical opposite, such that our subject is merely a part of a system, a monistic whole, which modern logic utterly sucks at detecting even though it is apparent to anyone with sense abilities and a subjective mind to experience them.

I appreciate your comments, and apologize for any “intellectual arrogance” I don’t mean to be like patronizing, I’m just having a bit of fun. Bourdieu once wrote something like, when you express any strong opinion you make a clown out of yourself, and so that’s all I’m doing, a bit of clowning. However the assertion that I havent though as deeply as you have on this issue, or that I’m adhering to some orthodoxy that blinds me to the truth that there is no truth (lol) is perhaps the biggest clown of all.

There’s likely much you could school me on, but not this, at least, not yet! But I also believe that discussion is the medium through which much personal growth becomes possible, which is why I actually like to discuss this stuff, not to clown or debate but to grow.

Thanks for the correction, I hope to start studying the socialist history of Vietnam much more

Well considering what the last dozen or so headlines you’ve read about banned books were probably about, I can see how you would make that assumption

Where did I call you stupid? What is this, a reverse ad hominem? A passive aggressive strawman? I criticized harshly the action of encouraging adventurism, and the “are you religious” question was to point out confusion, not stupidity. I wish you wouldn’t assume I think the worst of you because we disagree. Even if I criticize you doesn’t mean I believe there is something inherent, some “stupid” quality that you have and I don’t. That’s a phenomenological fallacy. I don’t believe that things are, I believe that everything is becoming something else. So I am hopeful that you will learn from this event, and it pushes you to develop beyond your current limitations, which have led to my harsher criticisms. I used to have a lot of very confused ideas myself but I pushed myself to learn more and refine my ideas and ideals. Even in my confused notions, I can see the nugget of truth that I was clinging to, and I’ve learned to refine it and communicate it better. I’m sure there is some nugget of truth for you as well that remains unrefined, and if you learn to separate the bad ideas that form your base assumptions and warp your perspective, from the truth, then that will become your unique perspective and communicating it well will help others to find their unique perspectives. Everything is one thing. Obsessing about individualism is one of the main weapons wielded in the class war.

But to your points I think your reasoning is purely idealistic and divorced from history and what is possible. As if Luigi was the first person to invent adventurism. Its good to be able to formulate your own reasoning, but you’re missing the step where you check your conclusions against the material world. Hopefully in your process of self actualization you learn to apply this step and improve your ability to draw meaningful conclusions from facts and not just rearrange them to suit your fancy.

I hope you are never approached to help any adventurist, as you will surely have been targeted by a federal informant.

That’s just it, they aren’t afraid. Also encouraging other people to do adventurism and potentially throw their life away is a disgusting, shameful thing to try and do. “Organizing can be inconvenient” so can prison and execution, not to mention the cascade of negative repercussions for the left, in addition to many others, that always come from widespread adventurism. I’m afraid you don’t know enough about the history of class resistance to see why you’re just pinning some hopes on a dream.

Hoping someone else will solve your problem, someone else will pull the trigger, is wrong headed. Don’t pull the trigger yourself, create the conditions for a new way of living. There is no one who could be executed whose death will result in everyone getting free, high quality, gender affirming healthcare. Your first step isnt a step forward its a step back. But in the end we won’t know for sure until the history is decided stay tuned, and in the mean time educate yourself!

Once humans are in power they corrupt.

Corrupt what? Are you religious, because this is some christian mythology. This is why our movements must be democratic. Get a grip

I didn’t make it I just have cool friends

That’s why its the system that needs to be killed, not billionaires. It doesn’t matter if you are good or bad, capitalism is in part a system of forced competition. A CEO who doesn’t make the hard calls for the benefit of stockholders will be replaced if he is caught choosing his moral compunctions over profits. A competitor will exploit what he might refuse to, and thus the harm is done and the “good CEO” is drummed out of the system. The only way for a CEO to remain good and a CEO is to never be tested by the markets mad search for profits. This is possible in a small way, like maybe a CEO of a small regional firm which will eventually be bought out or forced out of business. Hell, most of the strictly “moral” repercussions of an executive are hidden from them, and appear only as columns in a profit/loss report. Capitalism alienates us all from the world we inhabit, our humanity and our selves; worker and owner alike.

But regardless of this, the class interests of ceos and employees are in direct conflict. This doesn’t mean we need to kill, but we will have to fight to crush their way of life which exists as a result of the mass exploitation and immiseration of millions.

George Soros is not a good billionaire. The right wing delusion of him is such a convenient smokescreen for all of the actually horrible global conditions he’s helped give birth to and gotten rich from, that I wonder if he doesn’t perpetuate it himself. He’s basically the final boss of neocolonialism, but because noone will teach you what neocolonialism is and how capitalism violently extracts cheap hyper-exploited labor and natural resources from the third world which amount to super profits for the billionaire class, most people don’t see how bad he is.