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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I love Pineapple Pizza

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.

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.

Eating meat unnecessarily is immoral.

I don't think humans deserve pets.

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.

Moral relativism and the postmodern position of 'nothing is true' (with the accompanying commandment not to think about anything too deeply because, again, no underlying truths exist) are now more than ever at the core of Western thought and the main reason that, despite the fact that the West has and continues to pillage and extract resources around the world thanks to their military superiority (and moral relativism plus a real belief in the racial superiority of Europeans) and probably enjoy some of the materially richer and safer existences ever, people in these countries have to pop pills/drugs/booze or turn the gun on their families and themselves to deal with their existences. The confusion is unbearable, and the lack of stable, productive, morally fulfilling ideology makes one aimless and prone to failure because the world and their understanding of the world are not compatible (can't make good predictions if your starting point is wrong or inexistent!).

I expect disagreement and even harassment on Lemmy/Western online spaces because, well, I know who I'm talking to. But doctors don't waste their time on the healthy! Travel a bit and go to brown places and you'll see what I'm talking about.

I think there are too many people on this planet. I see often people stating that this is not the case so this is often something people are vocal about.

Or maybe a more accurate way to briefly describe my point of view. I think there are too many people on this planet based on our current ways of consumption and destruction of resources. There may be an argument for a planet with over 8 billion people with the ability to provide food, shelter and all other aspects of life and social security that does not affect our environment so harshly and negatively but even then I just don't see it.

With so many people, we seem to have lost the ability to our right to roam. Something that I think is important for multiple reasons. People used to migrate for a number of reasons. Seasonal changes, disaster, allowing areas to regrow and repopulate in regards to land and wildlife, travelling to where wildlife is excessive, planned/controlled fires and so many other reasons.

When we settle into these large cities, we lose the ability to roam and ignore all the local environmental benefits of people roaming. The land has to be reshaped into providing for a constant, permanent settlement. The cities require outside resources to grow and maintain itself and it's much harder to see and understand the resource demand when we are no longer directly involved in maintaining the land. We are now focused on maintaining a city just for us humans.

I think this point of view is scary or intimidating to some people because it means giving up many modern conveniences. As if life can not be lived any other way.

I guess I also come from a point of view where I'd rather live a short dangerous life full of wonder compared to a long, sterile life of loneliness and resentful anger. Fuck borders, they are as made up as money, gender and religion. I want to roam and be free.

Make housewives (or house husbands, not gonna judge) viable again. Women in the workplace was a crummy deal all things considered.