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Mole

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Everything posted by Mole

  1. Just practically speaking, in order from best to worst: 1. Pick a different route ahead of time and simply stay out of the protest area. The best kind of road rage is the kind that happens far away from me. 2. If a protest materializes right in front of you, as they apparently often do, find a quick detour. Obey traffic laws, keep your eyes out for people walking at unusual angles, find a reasonable way out, and generally don’t be insane. 3. If you’re stuck, wait patiently, proceed slowly like a normal person would, and turn on some music (Rage Against the Machine if you’re surrounded by BLM and Lee Greenwood if they’re Blue Lives Matter folks). Unless it’s an anti-car protest, the protesters have no idea whether or not you secretly love or hate them. 4. If a confrontation starts, deescalate like a normal person. If you picked the right tunes above, they’ll think you’re on their side anyway. Depending on the protest, a well placed comment in support of defunding the police or backing the blue should be enough to blend in 5. Tell them you heard the car behind you use a slur. 6. Use your car as a weapon. 7. Start waiving and shooting your firearm that you usually keep pointed at the gas pedal. Then drive away quickly.
  2. I’m a bit more optimistic than most on this thread I guess. I think the social media misinformation pain is largely temporary. We’re still pretty new at dealing with it and it’s largely an issue of critically evaluating sources like this. How many people critically evaluated Cronkite? Is that a reflection of how good the media was or how naive our culture was to issues of reliability? Or some of both? Misinformation is with us to stay, but eventually our culture will get better at coping with it, as we have with previous developments. The ship has largely sailed for many older people, but younger generations that grow up dealing with this in their interpersonal relationships as well as the news will become better at intuitively evaluating sources.
  3. This and not showing up to the WWI memorial service in France are two things that I agree with him on. He has no place at anything honoring people sacrificing for the greater good. The contrast is just too stark. He doesn’t belong there. I’m sure they won’t have a clown making balloon animals in the Capitol either.
  4. When we moved online in the spring, I figured testing would be a disaster and that most students didn’t have the mental bandwidth for normal tests anyway, so we refocused to single, bigger projects such as papers for most of my classes. My approach was to have them do one thing well instead of fail at a million things. They wrote way better papers/projects than normal and I think the courses were just as rigorous if not more so. There were some tests, but they were pretty much projects in disguise. It feels absurd to me to give students access to the internet and not expect them to use it during an unproctored test. The gen-ed that I teach stayed with my original model of testing/homework with highly modified tests to make any plagiarism obvious. It ended up with a massive plagiarism headache at the end of the semester complete with angry emails from parents, ducking them with FERPA, getting FERPA approval from the student, and then dropping the hammer of what actually happened. It was a huge waste of my time, but it resulted in no appeals since the cheating was absurd and plainly obvious. The gen-ed has always been a plagiarism magnet, but I’ve slowly modified it over the years to make it more of a hassle to cheat in. All of that came crashing down once the students were stuck at home. Idle hands and all.
  5. The creativity of the defensive tactics here and in Hong Kong recently is amazing. Leaf blowers, umbrellas, traffic cones, and milk are the weapons of the day. The younger generation is pretty brilliant.
  6. If you want to write great songs, you have to burn through a lot of terrible ones as well. Part of genius is volume. I think My Sweet Lord is a good song, but it feels a little strange to hold it up to demonstrate his song-writing prowess considering its history and connection with He’s So Fine. Imitation and inspiration have a fine line between them, but sometimes it’s pretty clear. I’ve been meaning to start a plagiarism thread for the past year or so. There’s a ton of meat in that topic beyond everyone suing Ed Sheeran.
  7. B L I P P I spells Blippi! Don’t forget to hit like and subscribe and don’t ever check out my Harlem Shake video! I’m an excavator....
  8. So the kid might literally have a million dollar smile?
  9. July is almost over; August seems a bit early for the electronic apocalypse - it’s too hot for tat anyway; September is when all the school kids start really spreading COVID and killing their teachers (no CR); November is already reserved for the civil war after the election (again, no CR); and December has the asteroid scheduled. It looks like we’ll have to pencil in the Chinese EMP attack for October, unless the creepy clown video trend comes back for Halloween. At that point we’d be overbooked. I guess we could move the EMP to concurrently with the civil war, but I really need twitter and Facebook to keep myself angry. Otherwise, why have a civil war anyway?
  10. The speculation about the sounds of the volleys seems to ignore this point. The two volleys clearly sound very different, but a lot changes between the volleys. For the first shots, the cameraman is taking footage of the streets, and the mic seems to be unobstructed and generally pointed towards the action or at least not covered. For the second group of shots, he’s hiding behind something with the mic pointed towards him and there’s even a reasonable change that the mic is obstructed or covered by part of his hand or clothing. Even without an obstruction, there’s lots of soft things for the sound to bounce off of and a big difference in mic placement. If you’ve ever watched a sound guy work, changing the placement can have dramatic results. Unless there’s other videos with sound that I missed, in which case, never mind.
  11. How long until that’s illegal?
  12. Salman Rushdie is one of my favorite authors. I might not have started reading him had Iran not announced that The Satanic Verses was so good that they wanted to kill him. So I guess I can thank Khomeini for being a wonder advocate for the arts. Likewise, I would have likely never checked out the 1619 essay without all of this. So thank you modern GOP for advocating for scholarship like Khomeini.
  13. I support telling kids across the country that this curriculum is banned and they absolutely should not read it. Seriously, don’t read it. It’s banned, offensive, and you shouldn’t look at it. Also, you can easily access it via your phone.
  14. Rakes might work for corralling rolling tear gas canisters.
  15. That sounds a little like the Montessori model, which I’ve heard is excellent.
  16. Username checks out. I have a hard time imagining things being any darker with pretty much any other possible president. In this scenario, the pandemic would have been at least marginally addressed.
  17. I’ve thought about how to point out what’s been stolen from us - very precious family time - without being cruel. Maybe with real leadership we still might not have been able to visit this summer, but it sure would have improved the odds. At some point prior to November, I think it will be good to explicitly point out the obvious, but it’s delicate due to the personal nature of having their life shut down. The lonely and painful death of this thing is a pretty terrifying prospect.
  18. Like many of us, my parents turned from reasonable, thoughtful, caring, educated people to getting their opinions from Tucker. They didn’t go full cult and start flying Trump flags, but they had a Trump sign during election time and started ranting about all the socialists. It was surprising at the time, but Fox is insidious. My family is somewhat scattered across the country, so my parents haven’t played with their grandchildren in about 6 months. Visits were canceled due to our new world. It sucks for everyone. They’ve essentially been locked in their house and yard. They stopped going to church since no one will wear a mask because America. Unwelcome at church due to Christian hospitality. Unwillingness to be mildly inconvenienced for our brothers has become a Christian identity. My dad emailed me recently expressing some disdain for his worthless R governor failing to allow them some sort of outside life with universal mask wearing. No widespread mask usage means endless lockdown. I commiserated complaining about my even worse R governor and of course the absence of national leadership. They’re stuck waiting on a vaccine since that’s our last hope. A mentor of mine that my parents knew well died of it. That really opened their eyes. My dad knew my mentor’s dad well when I was younger. Seeing your friend lose his son can shake you. Parents shouldn’t have to bury their children. This stuff has stolen what should have been a wonderful time from my parents and it’s getting hard to ignore. Most of the issues we get worked up over are theoretical to most of us, even the ones that really deeply matter. This isn’t theoretical and it’s damaged all of us. I don’t know how they plan to vote this fall, but I suspect that losing time with their grandchildren, losing their church community, losing their golden years, and seeing so much suffering might make that old Trump sign look pretty unappealing.
  19. I love a good reckoning and facing up to the way we dehumanize one another is a pretty good one to have.
  20. So he’s unlikely to be as good as KD.
  21. I liked to leave rambling, confused stories in the comments and would sign my reps as Grendel.
  22. On the other hand, we can all unite in laughing at the throw and it gives us something petty and meaningless to care about. It seems like a win to me. Maybe we don’t need W throwing a strike in this moment.
  23. At least we know he was hard at work on COVID and not practicing for this. Vlad Guerrero would have still swung at it.
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