Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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    3 months ago

    As sympathetic as I am to the parents and children for whom public school is a necessity rather than a choice, I donā€™t think sheā€™s actually wrong here? Putting her kids in public school wonā€™t magically immediately increase funding, reduce student/teacher ratios, improve facilities, get reactionary Texas nonsense away from history curriculums, or otherwise fix whatever problems those schools have. Rather it will mean that more people in that school have the resources to Karen their way into getting the people who can fix those immediate problems to make them a priority, and thereā€™s a time lag in how quickly that can be done (assuming parents still care enough to agitate as their kids get older and graduate). And while there are a lot of very good reasons to assume that growing up in a family with those resources has a more immediate impact than which school your kids go to (i.e. her kids are still going to have access and interest in private tutoring, PTA involvement, and a home environment free from the stress of economic precarity and that will benefit them regardless of what school they go to), we still talk as though giving your kid a good education at a good school is the most important single thing you can do to help them be successful. If weā€™re going to talk like going to a bad school is like playing Russian Roulette with your kids, Iā€™m not comfortable with the logic that everyone has a moral duty to play because it reduces each individualā€™s odds of losing, yā€™know?

    Of course, given her proximity to the Ratsphere Iā€™m probably being incredibly charitable and sheā€™s actually worried about having her kids spend time too close to genetically inferior races with mathematically-described low IQs or something.

    • cornflake@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      I donā€™t know about ā€œmagically immediatelyā€ (?), but the benefits of racial and economic integration in American schools is actually incredibly well studied and documented; you donā€™t have to argue from first principles unless you just want to ignore those benefits and do the thing you wanted to do all along.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        Donā€™t get me wrong, I think ending the de facto segregation weā€™ve ended up with needs to be a primary policy goal and that dealing with people not like themselves is going to do good for any kid all on its own. And the numbers parents use to figure out which schools are ā€œbetterā€ are cooked to all hell, making trying to accurately judge school quality incredibly difficult. But that doesnā€™t change the fact that some schools do have better outcomes or more problems than others, and while the broader systemic factors that create those problems need to be solved, expecting parents not to try and take care of their own kids first isnā€™t a viable way to make that happen.