Casual Conversation

Lemmy is as much of a cesspool as Twitter, but left-tinted.

The stock market is a scam, value has become meaningless, and capitalism is a slow march to societal breakdown and revolution.

People who say schools don’t teach anything useful are failed students.

Pick your cutoff age but it should be illegal to groom children into an organized religion. Frankly, since human brains are still developing until age 24-25 that would be my choice but 21 would be acceptable. "Let go and let god" is literally advocating for a trained lack of critical thinking skills.

Sugar and the industrial farming system are literally poisoning the food supply and driving a epidemic of chronic disease globally

I think education should be demanding, so much so that we should all be fine with kids failing at it instead of blaming the school for it. I think grades should only and honestly reflect the level of understanding of each student on whatever they are supposed to be learning, not make them feel good about themselves.

The school should not be there to make the student feel 'good' or 'understood' (that's the family's job). School main purpose should be to make them smarter, which is something that demands practice and efforts, like anything.

Making them smarter means making them better equipped to deal with the real world, that is not a fairy tale kingdom filled with nice people and magical animals that will make them feel welcome and where they lived happily ever after.

Instead of lying to those kids, the school should help them prepare to become an adult person able to face a not-perfect world with a not perfect population, and teach them how to use their effing brains to solve any of the many problems they will face in their life (personal as well as professional)—and for that making them study their lessons, aka memorize stuff (even stupid shit one will never use again) and having to do their stupid homework, and get a failing grade when they don't, is still the best and the simplest way to develop.

Kids that are being told they're amazing perfect little creatures (they're not), and that they should never have to break a sweat in school (they should) are being lied to. Even more sadly for them, compared to those other kids that are still encouraged to face that they're aren't perfect angels and that they should put in the work, every single day, all year long, they're the ones being screwed up. Big.

Feel free to downvote as much as you want.

Milk is gross

You don't need more protein, you need more fiber.

Aggresive leftifts confirm the right wing bias, creating an escalating dynamic.

This “hydration” crap.

Up until the late 1970’s for approx 300,000 years of humans being around hydrated themselves just fine.

Long as there was water available one would drink when their body signaled them by getting thirsty (don’t care about exceptions to the rule where someone has a medical issue or if water was limited in high school, your a big person now). All of a sudden humans forgot to drink fluids?

Bullshit.

It’s just yet another scam the drink makers have perpetrated to get people to buy the various liquid products they sell.

I love Pineapple Pizza

Anime and Weeb culture are a stain on humanity and objectively bad.

Forcing students to take notes is counterproductive: I was most successful in those classes in which I wasn’t forced to take notes. It only ever distracted me from listening to the teacher.

Also, for foreign language classes actually being forced to speak the language in class is so valuable. I had one teacher who focused on big cultural projects with very little language instruction and her students (including me) all did pretty poorly.

The mismanagement of housing in the West is an insurmountable failure that cannot be recovered from. American workers can never become competitive, and birth rate decline is a terminal cancer with no cure. The cost of living is artificial but there is no way to reset the suicide switch that is the atrocity of housing mismanagement in most Western countries.

I don't think humans deserve pets.

Eating meat unnecessarily is immoral.

Schools should teach more practical subjects, they're more useful to loads of people and improve engagement. If they have to reduce subjects like history to do that then they should.

As someone who's slightly center-right, a significant number of my opinions are unpopular on this platform. But setting politics and social issues aside, I'd say the nuclear bomb of my unpopular opinions is my belief in determinism - and, by extension, my claim that free will is an illusion.

By that, I mean the idea that you could have done otherwise in a given situation is false. If we had a time machine and could replay a moment exactly as it was, you'd make the same choice every single time. Whatever caused you to make that decision the first time would cause you to do it again - without exception.

A related belief of mine is that the sense of self is also an illusion. To me, these are two sides of the same coin. By “self,” I mean the feeling that there’s a subject behind your face, looking out at the world. But that’s just brain chemistry. There’s no point in the brain where it all comes together - no central “you” making decisions. That’s why there’s no free will either - because there’s nothing making the decisions. They’re simply being made.

The illusion comes from the fact of consciousness. The fact of subjective experience. It feels like something to be you, from the inside. There’s qualia to your existence.