Good intentions, hard work
Back to Brooklyn
Joined December 2014
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Chani retweeted
Due to recent events I'm getting suspicious of the whole idea of "moving to a state with better politics" or whatever.
Imagine uprooting your entire life (at great cost) to "red Texas" just to see the state go blue a few years later.
Many are coping about this but come on, the strategy employed by conservatives who fled to Texas very clearly did not work.
Seems wisest to simply choose where you want to live based on whether it's a nice place to live. If you gotta turn the radio off to enjoy it, then do so.
If you want the NJ shore, go to the NJ shore. New York, California, Minnesota -- whatever, if that's where your heart is happy then go for it and mitigate the negative effects of disastrous Dem policies whatever way you can. Don't get your blood pressure up over it.
There's nowhere left to hide anyway.
Chani retweeted
In many ways millennial white men have been sacrificed on the altar for the supposed sins of their fathers and grandfathers. A lot of Gen X too. But the Boomers and older kept their jobs while this went on. To me that’s the scandal. Old white men sacrificing their own.
A statistic that sounds fake but isn't: Not one single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker.
It's not because they stopped writing. It's because The New Yorker has refused to publish them. The publishing industry has blacked out a generation of male writers & then they wonder why boys don't read.
Chani retweeted
I'm not an optimistic person by nature
But it does seem to me that the hardcore antizionist left simply was not prepared for the pushback it received from local community leaders, politicians, and from the Philadelphia Jewish community
That feels, in my mind, like a win
Chani retweeted
Lay people don't appreciate how much of post-1960s scholarship has been invalidated by ancient DNA, nor the extent to which it's vindicated earlier scholars, nor how generations have been mal-educated.
The post-60s errors are all in a single direction too: they interpret evidence through a model of human nature that predicts behaviors that run contrary to everyday intuition and observation. For example, for decades, dogma was that violence was rare until the bronze age. Of course, violence was, in fact, ubiquitous. Pots changed because people changed, not because (as scholars asserted with straight faces somehow) ideas diffused through word of mouth.
You can draw your own conclusions about why the academy pushed this model so hard, but it happened at exactly the same time the academy was pushing tons of other ideas inconsistent with an intuitive understanding of human nature.
Ancient DNA has made late 20th century revisionist historiography untenable, but other disciplines are still pushing related nonsense. All of it must be defunded and rebuilt.
Chani retweeted
There could be 100% women in the publishing industry and they’d still act like they’re swimming against some kind of patriarchal LitBro current. It’s honestly so undignified
Chani retweeted
I would be more left if leftists weren't such West loathing freaks. Like I support universal healthcare and workers rights, but I don't support ayatollah Khamenei and Putin
Chani retweeted
I think there was an overcorrection sometime in the late 90s early 2000s involving young boys who were literate and verbose, maybe creative. Not all of us were gay. The culture’s ability to recognize literate, intelligent and witty straight male is a diminishing thing in my social circles such that a middle aged single man who reads widely and doesn’t have the typical three hobbies as his peers is pretty much assumed to be sliding around the Kinsey scale.
Chani retweeted
Obsession with Israel has destroyed this country for the next two years. The amount of total foreign aid to ALL COUNTRIES is 0.7% of the budget, with 0.05% going to Israel, 93% of which must be spent in the US. The largest mountain made of the smallest mole hill in history.
The fact that Somalis are a general scourge and the fact that they mutilate their women's sources of pleasure and life are not separate things .
Chani retweeted
It’s incredible how these cases turn people into the most complacent versions of themselves. Russell Brand could spend 9 years in prison without hard evidence that he raped anyone, but you’re supposed to accept “well, he was a bit of an asshole sometimes” as some kind of nuanced and objective take on the matter
What are your thoughts on Russell Brand being found guilty of rape and sexual assault?
I'm firmly of the belief that if the evidence was substantial enough to prove his guilt, then he deserves to do the time for it.
But I do wrestle with the fact that some of these allegations date back 20-25 years.
I can't help but question why some of these women waited so long to come forward. Yes, I appreciate that fear and trauma can absolutely prevent someone from speaking out. But part of me wonders whether some knew exactly what they were getting involved in at the time, only to look back on it very differently years later.
At the same time, it's equally difficult to believe that Brand didn't abuse his position, his fame and the influence he had over women.
I think about how he conducted himself back then. The things he said, the things he openly admitted to doing, his attitude towards women in general.
None of that, on its own, proves he committed rape, obviously, but it hardly paints a picture of someone who was completely innocent of any wrongdoing either.
I'm genuinely interested in hearing what people think, regardless of whether they like or dislike Russell Brand.
Chani retweeted
Inquiry learning and group projects mask misbehavior and give the illusion of learning. In a direct instruction setting, misbehavior can’t be ignored, nor can the damage it does. And thus, in a permissive school, direct instruction exposes the inadequacy of the new no-punishment orthodoxy. No wonder principals are loathe to embrace it.
Had an interesting conversation with a visiting American teacher - their position is that the push back against explicit teaching* is because it exposes the problems with the systems. It exposes the poor behaviour, it exposes the kids who can't read, it exposes the students who don't get it.
If you have discovery learning, and kids milling around and chatting and copying off each other, everyone looks engaged and like they're learning. Once you try to get them to sit down and actually teach them, you have to have systems in place for the kids who refuse.
*They said direct instruction, but they were talking about explicit teaching more generally
Chani retweeted
Children need to learn how societies outside of Western civilization and Confucian civilization were never anything near functional.
Learning about the societies that sacrificed children, ate each other, slaughtered each other frequently vs working together, etc and how all of them never generated enough of an economic surplus to create more advanced civilizations is important. It’s a missing building block in the education of so many of our well-meaning leftist friends.
To keep the west functional, and push back on the base cultural appeal of third-worldism, kids need to understand this before they are too exposed to talk about how all cultures should be respected.
(And there is generally something to admire in most cultures - but understanding how to structure interactions with people with different values when you need to engage with them in a heterogeneous world is different from thinking their underlying culture is great!)
When Saladin took Jerusalem, he destroyed all the crosses, including the relic of the True Cross which the Muslims took in battle. They paraded them before Christians before destroying them, even urinating on some of them.
He had 200-300 Christian Knights beheaded while he watched.
He had 8000 women and children enslaved that day alone, including noble women and nuns forced into concubinage. Muslims enthusiastically described the deflowering and r*pe of the Christian women.
Through his entire campaign it's estimated that 40-50k Christians were enslaved.
This is what modern Hollywood films present us instead. Interfaith dialogue and a Saladin who respects the cross more than....the Crusaders.
This is how you end up with CAIR endorsed candidates winning office. A population fed CAIR endorsed films like this one.
