All guys, especially guys who choose not to go into frats, know this. Frats have always been about rich or popular kids having a place to congregate that was partially shielded from administration, to be able to do stuff they otherwise couldn't (often with the help of their alumni parents).

Quite polished marketing [visualized story] video. Direct link to the website: https://newpress.com/

Reimagining journalism.

We are on a mission to build the most trusted network of creator-led media.

Looks like I hit a bug. Clicking explore on "The Human Element" series updates the URL but not the website content. Loading the URL directly works, though.

https://newpress.com/humanelement EP1 coming Nov 7 - so still a while.

Students don't vote. Why cater to a population that won't keep you in office.

Wow he looks half decent without the face tattoos

Funny law in Spain is that its illegal to piss in the Mediterranean sea.... But if you think about it for a second it makes sense this way: Now the federal gov. can make local gov. provide public restrooms and facilities near the water- and local gov. can pressure local businesses to also provide facilities if they operate the seasonal beach bars.

I will probably be banded for being a cynic, but I'm not buying what the author is selling. To over the top.

Just seems too much drama queen, it's all about me. Less a cry for help, and more about a need to sell an article to the New Yorkers.

I got like that because of taking antidepressants. It prevents me from crying.

I can imagine adding some more taxes to private education tuition, direct the money to public education. Won't end it but it will help.

I agree with this, but it's never going to happen in developed countries without a societal collapse. The affluent love their private schools, even China has them.

Yeah its very problematic. In addition those private schools usually have scholorships which allow them to grab high level students who might be a good peer at the public institution. This gets problematic with home schooling as you can argue against that similarly somewhat but it feels there should be an option for parents to opt out of the system.

Yeah. I've been saying for years private schools should not be allowed. We're all in this together.

Yes, this is an especially bad problem when those schools also are used as status/ social clout indicators, regardless of the student involved.

Sadly, money is treated as the root of all virtue in our society.

Basically ancient Dota or LoL

That must have been heartbreaking to hear as a parent and a shitty and confusing discovery for the child. I hope with time she’ll understand and maybe even be thankful for who the experience shaped her into vs who she would have been in an elite private school.

My k-9 school trajectory was non-standard and I was upset as a kid that it prevented me from feeling ‘normal’ and fitting in, but now I’m thankful to be a little bit out of step with the status quo. I feel it gave me a perspective that I value which I would have had to work hard to see (or may have been impossible to see) from the standpoint of most of my classmates.

Big fan of Meslier, wish he was more well known.

Less a fan of Voltaire, who edited Meslier's writings before redistributing them to make Meslier appear to be a deist instead of an atheist. I imagine that long-standing confusion around Meslier's real views has a lot to do with his obscurity relative to how notable and unprecedented his Testament actually was.

Never thought I'd see Ryobi as the bastion of anti surveillance state tech. But, the color matters not, its how you use it that matters.

Around here?

Someone with dark clothing, a mask, and a green circular saw

One of my best friends turned 83 a few weeks ago. I'm 39 and we've been close for almost a decade. We have so much in common and it's been such a rich and rewarding friendship! I think I'm my "most authentic" self around him. Not that I'm specifically hiding things from other friends, but we've had similar struggles and similar perspectives on things. It makes it easier to talk about anything and everything! It's always funny seeing people assume I'm his biracial granddaughter. Haha!

In the next year or so, I'm moving out of the US and he's going to move closer to family down south. It's going to be bittersweet. But it's heartening to know that you can make new, meaningful connections at any point.

This is a good article and I wholly agree with it. I wish more people felt this way!

Thank you for sharing all these neat articles with us all the time. :)

Listen, I love biscuits n’ gravy, but if they come for my avocado toast they’ll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.

I came to this realization in 2020 and thus started my journey of distancing myself from passive visible harms (especially social media, aside from Lemmy, ofc). News was coming in fast, and it felt like everyone was paying attention to the pandemic. It was in many respects a global unifying moment, but our collective mental health was also in new territory.

If you're committed and intentional about how you decide to change your approach to life, it can alienate you from your friends, and it takes a lot of effort. The change was mainly in how I use my phone, and how often and how quickly I respond to texts and emails, and I definitely relapsed a few times using Meta products along the way. Those that understand and work with you in that journey are worth bringing closer, and I'm in a better headspace with being mindful on how much time I spend on things that give me anxiety. Just paying attention to my body and emotional response has saved me. It's what I can control.

A language, when it comes down to it, is a means of communication. When too few people are using it to communicate, it has stopped doing its principal job, and it may as well be allowed to die. It is, of course, a tragedy when languages are killed, especially when they are killed out of malice or bigotry. But death by natural causes—well, that’s just how things go

The author completely ignores two significant things.

One is that language, beyond being just a form of communication, is also something that bears culture for any given collection of people. Its not the equivalent of throwing away a telegraph machine just because now you have a cell phone. It’s not only a medium of passing information in the way that a cell phone or a telegraph are. Its akin to how the brain’s interpretation of drinking any given liquid is intrinsically tied to the sensory information it receives about the container the liquid is in. How it feels/tastes to drink orange juice out of a paper cup is not the same as drinking it out of an aluminum bottle, even if the orange juice is exactly the same. There is something to be said for the discrete differences involved. Thats why so many things can be translated to a point, but not truly be fully translated from one language to another. You can know that “apapachar” in Spanish means some relative equivalent of “to hug with the soul” in English. But in total, that translation does not truly carry the full weight and context of the term in Spanish.

The second thing is that the author tries to separate “killing” languages off versus “natural decline”, even though those two things are almost always related. Languages dont typically just die off on their own. Most commonly they are suppressed to a point of collapse by colonial forces and then left to die once they are too weak for colonial forces to be concerned about. Look at the Hawaiian language for example. Once upon a time, it was made illegal for native Hawaiians to use the Hawaiian language. Eventually, once it was socially and legally driven to near extinction then it was left alone. But to this day Hawaiians are struggling to revive the language due to the decades of stigma that was forced upon the remaining people that have knowledge of the language. The same thing has happened to hundreds of indigenous languages just within the US alone. The author would probably describe those languages as dying a natural death now, since its not outright illegal to use them anymore. But they were most certainly killed intentionally. If someone was beaten within an inch of their life and then left to die, the person who beat them would still be charged with murder if they did. Its not a reasonable excuse to say “well he only beat them almost to death, so really he died from natural causes”

here's an interesting--but also extremely poorly argued--article for you from the New Yorker about language preservation and whether that's an unconditionally good thing

The late Soviet Union was damned by the iconic image of people waiting in endless lines for scarce consumer goods

Even when attacking the Right, left critics cannot pass up an opportunity to flash their anticommunist credentials. So Mark Green writes in a criticism of President Ronald Reagan that "when presented with a situation that challenges his conservative catechism, like an unyielding Marxist-Leninist, [Reagan] will change not his mind but the facts." While professing a dedication to fighting dogmatism "both of the Right and Left," individuals who perform such de rigueur genuflections reinforce the anticommunist dogma. Red-baiting leftists contributed their share to the climate of hostility that has given U.S. leaders such a free hand in waging hot and cold wars against communist countries and which even today makes a progressive or even liberal agenda difficult to promote.

M. Parenti - Blackshirts and Reds

Not justifying it, but your experience sounds like the experience of a "bad neighborhood" not a nationwide phenomenon.