• 22 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • The problem isn’t female leads, it’ trash-tier writing.

    Worst part about the sequels was the compulsive need to regurgitate elements of the prior series.

    • Empire is back, kids!
    • Death Star Plus
    • And we’re back on Tantoine again
    • Harrison Ford again
    • Getting killed by Discount Darth Vader to buy time to escape the Knock Off Death Star
    • Only a direct hit on the main loud farting sounds

    There’s so much lore from the books and the games and the toys and the cutting room floor of the original movies. And they had a ton of good ideas at the outset. A storm trooper who defects? A six foot tall super trooper in mirror armor? A Sith Lord who isn’t stoic and morose, but hot headed and self-destructive? These are cool good ideas!

    Shame they got drowned out in Disney fueled nostalgia.



  • Like the capitalists want “uneducated” masses

    Capitalists have historically needed liberal universities in order to reproduce, both as asset managers and as propagandists. The modern turn towards “AI can do everything” is a real vulnerability in the material working of the system. The Professional Managerial Class has been a major pillar of modern capital since the Cold War Era. Dissolving it to save a few bucks is a serious blunder.

    Only question is who steps up to take advantage.







  • I know quite a few teachers, and so many of them genuinely love the part of the job where they get to interact with their students and educate them and encourage them to experiment and grow. The inevitable “Why do I have to do this thing if I don’t like it” is the beginning of a broad conversation about how what they’re doing can be fun and engaging and deeply satisfying. Every class shy of high school has it. I rarely left the room without feeling more curious and invested in the material I was there to learn.

    What fucking sucks about the modern education system is the fixation on metrics, monitoring, and milestones. Classes that used to be much more freeform and experimental have become this ridged march forward in the state-mandated lesson plan. Read the chapter, do the homework, take the quiz, tell your parents they need to panic if you got less than a “B”, prepare for the exam, prepare for the exam, prepare for the exam. That’s the shit that sucks.

    So much of the actual curriculum is sacrificed to keep kids on a conveyor belt of assessment and evaluation. Anything that can’t be strictly and objectively graded - lab exercises, independent study, school trips, artistic expression - is flensed from the lesson plan. And the only way to escape this assembly line style education system is to have parents rich enough to pay for private school or teachers daring enough to transgress against the state rubric.


  • Get the fuck off Twitter, get the fuck off Reddit, get the fuck off Facebook.

    I mean, way ahead of you. But we’re just jerking each other off if we think saying this downthread of a Lemmy post is changing anyone’s mind. This is the most Preaching To The Choir ass post you can make outside of an actual church.

    We weren’t ready for the internet and it’s time to turn it off.

    eye-roll

    Listen, if you want to walk around downtown with a big sandwich board that says “Log The Fuck Off And Touch Grass”, I’ll cheer for you when I see you. But there’s a reason people flock to an easily accessible portal for social engagement. And its naive to keep shouting “Log the fuck off!” from within the medium you can’t seem to quit yourself.








  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program#Torture

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre#Killings

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange#Use_in_the_Vietnam_War

    Read through that and tell me what we missed.

    The American military tried everything just shy of nuking Hanoi. Anyone who tells you otherwise is ignorant or trying to sell you something.

    Soviet-sponsored air and naval defenses prevent North Vietnam from being saturation bombarded at the scale we inflicted on North Korea a decade earlier. Americans were largely confined to combat against insurgencies in the South. So much of the war was fought against the civilian population that the Americans were ostensibly there to protect from the villainous Communists.

    But the idea that we simply didn’t use enough troops or sufficiently advanced weaponry or brutal tactics… that’s all reactionary mythology. If skinning half the population alive would have won the war, we’d have done it. A far more compelling argument is that Americans alienated the entire peninsula with our “all out” invasion (not unlike how we ended up alienating the bulk of the Afghan population following our '02 invasion). A subtler and more strategic approach - like our efforts to stand up anti-communist governments in The Philippines and Indonesia - seemed to have far better results in hindsight.


  • Vietnam lost over a million of its people during the US invasion and occupation. It’s all cutesy and smug to tally this as a Big L for Team USA. But I don’t think anyone in that country values the W/L record over the hundreds of thousands of family members, friends, and other loved ones who died to feed the American war machine’s rapacious appetite.

    That’s before we even talk about the ecological damage that haunts Vietnam to this day. Or the deaths in Laos and Cambodia racked up in collateral. Or the tenuous diplomatic relationships between the various South Pacific neighbors based on Cold War grudges, which have re-emerged as a shooting war between Thailand and Cambodia just last month.