Coronavirus

[In2ition]

The thread is about Covid. You turned it an anti Meuller ad.

I did post a tweet that had Meuller in it, but that wasn't my intention. I would have never said anything about it.

[Superbone]

The thread is about Covid. You turned it an anti Meuller ad.

It was more anti-son of Asimov and maybe even anti-Asimov himself than anti-Mueller, I thought. But yes, still a deflection from Covid.

[3rdside]

It is so depressing that vaccine mandates are even necessary. What is wrong with us?

Republicans are what's wrong.

I’d say be careful with comments like this .. the current version of the ‘pubs may have lost the plot but it seems to me the MSM is partly responsible for it, with their fostering of a good guy vs bad guy mentality giving rise to Fox News and harder right, contrarian politics.

For each action there is an equal and opposite reaction and somewhere in and amongst the crazy gop’ers are legitimate, decent, conservatives who are justifiably upset by the excessive liberalism of the Dem’s, left unchecked by the MSM that has now also given rise to the nearly-as-dangerous woke, identity politics perpetuated by the left.

[Mori Chu]

It is so depressing that vaccine mandates are even necessary. What is wrong with us?

Republicans are what's wrong.

I’d say be careful with comments like this .. the current version of the ‘pubs may have lost the plot but it seems to me the MSM is partly responsible for it, with their fostering of a good guy vs bad guy mentality giving rise to Fox News and harder right, contrarian politics.

For each action there is an equal and opposite reaction and somewhere in and amongst the crazy gop’ers are legitimate, decent, conservatives who are justifiably upset by the excessive liberalism of the Dem’s, left unchecked by the MSM that has now also given rise to the nearly-as-dangerous woke, identity politics perpetuated by the left.

I respect your opinion, but I don't think the "woke identity politics" of the left are even remotely as dangerous to the future of the country as the authoritarian tendencies of the modern GOP. And I don't blame the media or the Democrats for the fact that the GOP has become this dangerous. CNN and MSNBC and AOC and Bernie didn't make those loons storm the Capital; they didn't make Trump try to become a dictator. That's on Trump and the GOP. They want to discard American democracy, and somebody being a bit too "woke" doesn't even come close to the danger of that.

[Nodack]

woke
/wōk/
verb
past of wake1.
adjectiveINFORMAL•US
adjective: woke; comparative adjective: woker; superlative adjective: wokest
alert to injustice in society, especially racism.

Being alert to injustices in society doesn’t seem like such a horrible thing to me.

How are todays Liberals practicing excessive Liberalism? An infrastructure bill is excessive? Wanting health care for all Americans is excessive? What is the excessive part? Leaving Afghanistan? Wanting to slow down global warming? Investing in green tech?

Good guys versus bad guys is all MSN? Have you seen FOX News? Dems are the enemy of the people on FOX News. Dems aren’t trying to overturn elections by storming the Capital.

[3rdside]

Likewise I respect your opinion, but on woke politics I think you underestimate the threat of it (have raised this point before so am not going to push it .. we can agree to disagree here)

If the threat of the right is their loopy ideology, with facts being ignored or misinterpreted, then there is no difference about the same threat from the left:

https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/jorda ... for-actual

And if the right loopies have taken over the GOP, then there's no reason the left loopies couldn't do the same to the D's.

I'll rephrase what I said about the woke left being 'nearly as dangerous' and say it is equally as dangerous ... it's just that the authoritarian threat appears to be more immediate, so by default the woke threat more manageable.

[3rdside]

woke
/wōk/
verb
past of wake1.
adjectiveINFORMAL•US
adjective: woke; comparative adjective: woker; superlative adjective: wokest
alert to injustice in society, especially racism.

Being alert to injustices in society doesn’t seem like such a horrible thing to me.

How are todays Liberals practicing excessive Liberalism? An infrastructure bill is excessive? Wanting health care for all Americans is excessive? What is the excessive part? Leaving Afghanistan? Wanting to slow down global warming? Investing in green tech?

Good guys versus bad guys is all MSN? Have you seen FOX News? Dems are the enemy of the people on FOX News. Dems aren’t trying to overturn elections by storming the Capital.

Being a conservative doesn't seem like such a horrible thing to me, but essences can be corrupted.

Excessive liberalism in the field of identity politics e.g. the story of the guy who sued his company because he identified as a cat and they wouldn't provide him kitty litter, and dumb interpretation of the great liberal concept of equality e.g. removing high school exams because the results for white kids are higher than for blacks and Hispanics, therefore exams must be a racist construct, all conducted with an air of intellectual elitism that has totally off-sided the conservatives and allowed the GOP to retain relevance, even though they're a disaster (at least in our liberal eyes).

Biden 'should' have won in a landslide, but didn't.

[Nodack]

All things can be taken too far in anything. Being woke can be taken too far. That doesn’t make it a bad thing. My Jehovahs Witness friends say Birthdays are bad because John the Baptist was killed as a Birthday gift for the kings wife. That means Birthdays are bad to them. I thought it was silly. My interpretation of this is whole woke thing is all connected to the George Floyd BLM thing. White people seeing with their own eyes videos of police killing Blacks thanks to cell phone cameras being everywhere now. That is when some of them woke up and decided they support the cause of rehabilitating the police and support the cause of treating Blacks equally.

Some on the right don’t believe in that cause whatsoever. They won’t even acknowledge what football players are kneeling over. They consider BLM a terrorist group. They were pulling for the cop to get off in the George Floyd case. The term woke is a bad word. Being sensitive to injustice, especially racism means you hate white people.

[Indy]

exams aren't a racist construct, but when most exams are written by cis white men from US/EU, then yeah, the exams are not based in truly assessing something on merit alone.

This has been proved over and over again with "IQ" tests.

I mean, if you had to sit for an exam created by an elephant, I would be most elephants would score quite a bit higher than you. Does that make them smarter than you?

[3rdside]

2 + 2 has no racial bias as far as I’m aware.

[Indy]

2 + 2 has no racial bias as far as I’m aware.

If you think that is the kind of tests that have been shown to be biased, you are fooling yourself. And I guess you might be ignoring the bias towards arabic numbers and cultures that read left to right.

[3rdside]

Sorry, a little flippant .. but to do away with all testing because some tests show bias?

Crazy.

[Indy]

Sorry, a little flippant .. but to do away with all testing because some tests show bias?

Crazy.

Nobody is seriously doing that, though.

[3rdside]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ds/596668/

It's a long article, so search the word 'test' and start from the 8th 'test' in the search ..

[Nodack]

NBA denies Warriors player's request for religious vaccine exemption
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/p ... -religious

[Indy]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ds/596668/

It's a long article, so search the word 'test' and start from the 8th 'test' in the search ..

Ah, so you don't mean any and all tests. You are talking about Standardized Tests. I took them all through school (I think I started with the Iowa Tests in the mid-80s) and finished with the SATs in the early 90s. The ones throughout K-12 are not impactful at all. They just forced teachers to teach to the test for a month before we took it. It was a huge waste of time. The SATs are one of the most talked about standardized tests when it comes to inequities in test design. You can do a simple google search and find very reputable studies that show how biased it is.

[In2ition]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ds/596668/

It's a long article, so search the word 'test' and start from the 8th 'test' in the search ..

Ah, so you don't mean any and all tests. You are talking about Standardized Tests. I took them all through school (I think I started with the Iowa Tests in the mid-80s) and finished with the SATs in the early 90s. The ones throughout K-12 are not impactful at all. They just forced teachers to teach to the test for a month before we took it. It was a huge waste of time. The SATs are one of the most talked about standardized tests when it comes to inequities in test design. You can do a simple google search and find very reputable studies that show how biased it is.

Weird, my teachers never taught to the test or focused any time on the test at all. They never wasted their time on those.

[Indy]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ds/596668/

It's a long article, so search the word 'test' and start from the 8th 'test' in the search ..

Ah, so you don't mean any and all tests. You are talking about Standardized Tests. I took them all through school (I think I started with the Iowa Tests in the mid-80s) and finished with the SATs in the early 90s. The ones throughout K-12 are not impactful at all. They just forced teachers to teach to the test for a month before we took it. It was a huge waste of time. The SATs are one of the most talked about standardized tests when it comes to inequities in test design. You can do a simple google search and find very reputable studies that show how biased it is.

Weird, my teachers never taught to the test or focused any time on the test at all. They never wasted their time on those.

which years and which districts? Just curious. I went through the mesa and kyrene districts throughout most of my education. And I specifically remember teachers in early grades saying "this is going to be on the Iowa Test so you need to know it."

[In2ition]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ds/596668/

It's a long article, so search the word 'test' and start from the 8th 'test' in the search ..

Ah, so you don't mean any and all tests. You are talking about Standardized Tests. I took them all through school (I think I started with the Iowa Tests in the mid-80s) and finished with the SATs in the early 90s. The ones throughout K-12 are not impactful at all. They just forced teachers to teach to the test for a month before we took it. It was a huge waste of time. The SATs are one of the most talked about standardized tests when it comes to inequities in test design. You can do a simple google search and find very reputable studies that show how biased it is.

Weird, my teachers never taught to the test or focused any time on the test at all. They never wasted their time on those.

which years and which districts? Just curious. I went through the mesa and kyrene districts throughout most of my education. And I specifically remember teachers in early grades saying "this is going to be on the Iowa Test so you need to know it."

I went to a very small Catholic school in rural North Dakota '80-'88. We never focused on the Iowa Basics tests. We only set time aside to take the tests every yr.

[3rdside]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ds/596668/

It's a long article, so search the word 'test' and start from the 8th 'test' in the search ..

Ah, so you don't mean any and all tests. You are talking about Standardized Tests. I took them all through school (I think I started with the Iowa Tests in the mid-80s) and finished with the SATs in the early 90s. The ones throughout K-12 are not impactful at all. They just forced teachers to teach to the test for a month before we took it. It was a huge waste of time. The SATs are one of the most talked about standardized tests when it comes to inequities in test design. You can do a simple google search and find very reputable studies that show how biased it is.

If it's just the standardised tests then I can agree that it's biased, but it sounds to me there were no tests at all if they did away with these?:

"Instead of giving grades, teachers at our school wrote long, detailed, often deeply knowledgeable reports on each student".

Regardless of background (or gender, apparently..) there has to be some testing (IQ tests possibly, which rely less on preparation?).

Maybe I can be convinced otherwise, but I doubt it.