I developed a different coping strategy. When I figured out I was smarter than everyone else my age I simply stopped doing homework and coasted on high test scores. That worked from age 8 to 16 when I had to contend with the fact that I had never learned how to actually study or manage my time. Pretty easy to slip through the cracks when you’re well-behaved and the district didn’t have any money for advanced learning programs anyway~

My partner and many of her friends did IB in the late 2000s and every single one has trauma from the workload and culture of expected achievement and it doesn’t seem to have benefited their careers at all. (I did Running Start instead, a Washington State early college program, and had a very positive experience)

You should always remember it regardless, and learn to recognize the signs decades before they bear fruit. This is the culmination of a long and multifaceted process. Reject nationalism, reject regulatory capture, reject media monopolization.

I live in one of his hated Liberal crime-ridden cesspits, Trump bombing his own country is an uncomfortable possibility.

My point is that ignoring a bunch of implied context isn’t a compelling argument. The obvious difference between cancer and body hair is that hair growth is the normal state and cancer is aberrant growth. This shouldn’t need to be pointed out.

Fun fact: hedgehogs aren’t rodents, and are actually more closely related to tigers than to mice (by about 10 million years). Porcupines are rodents and echidnas are another thing entirely so spines developed on mammals a bunch of times.

Oversimplification does not an analogy make.

I assumed it was to cope with heavy snowfall but that makes sense too.

Because some people use it as a thin veil over their actions doesn’t mean it’s the root cause

I firmly disagree with this premise, I think religion’s particular mix of social othering and righteous justification are the root of a great deal of evil in the world.

What a religion calls for is almost never what it enables.

how is the world a better place because the banned prayer rooms in universities?

I don’t think public funds should support any religion, and I don’t think universities should support unsubstantiated claims.

Antisemitism doesn’t happen without religion. Think about everything downstream of the Judaism/Christianity/Islam splits. Think about the impact of The Church being the de facto cultural force in Europe for a millennium. Think about how much harder it is to whip a population into supporting your expensive conquest without a Divine Right or Moral Imperative. Sikhism exists because of how shitty life was under Islam and Hinduism in the region, their current “mostly chill” status does not negate the past suffering.

And in a broader sense, consider how much fraud exists because people are willing to accept claims not backed by evidence. The normalization of magical thinking is probably as harmful as the actual power wielded by entities like the Catholic Church.

I don’t think the good comes anywhere close to balancing the evils justified by religion.

It’s all made up bullshit anyway, they can declare whatever “rules” they want.

Ugh. Pascal’s Wager for technophiles.

The argument is that there is no “you” without memory.

You think that guy is “dominating the industry”?

• on average

John Kellogg salivating in his grave.

How dare people write fiction with icky things in it.

One-day strikes are the same as one-day protests. Good visibility and networking but no actual pressure on their own. Ideally a general atrike would be “indefinite until our demands are met” but the US doesn’t have enough class unity or social safety net for that right now.