drumstick00m's latest 🔞

Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.

Free courses on Coursera.

Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison

For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.

You ever see the film The Green Mile?

There's a guard on the Mile named Percy who enjoys having a power trip over people. He's cruel, sadistic and giggles at the torment he causes.

He's also a cowardly little shit who can't handle the consequences of his own cruelty.

There's a moment in the film where he scares Delacroix, causing him to trip and hit his head on the floor, and laughs about it. He is promptly grabbed and groped by Wild Bill, and is so terrified that he pisses himself.

When he's put in charge of Delacroix's execution, he leaves the sponge dry so that it hurts more. But when Delacroix screams, smokes and eventually catches fire, he can't handle the results of his own cruelty and tries to look away before Paul forces him to watch.

I think about Percy when I think about people who are giddy and eager for blood. You think you are, but the reality is that the moment you get it you're not going to like it because you are not prepared for what it means to take the life of another human being.

I would not trust the common man to run a government.

You know who I want running the government? The intellectual elite. I want my Prime Minister to have a Master's in Economics, Law and Political Science, and a Phd in History.

I want "World Leader" to be a position that requires as much scrutiny and education in the Humanities as an astronaut requires in STEM.

What do you think Indie is?

Glitch is an indie animation company because they have no parent company. Nobody owns or dictates what they do. Getting federal subsidies doesn't mean you aren't indie, nor does making distribution deals. That stuff is just required for the business.

It's indie because it's privately owned, not publicly traded, and not owned by another company. They don't have the answer to anyone.

No Child Left Behind is one of those bills that sounds great in theory (standardize an unequal education system and introduce federal funding for schools) but failed at the hurdle where it let the states decide academic achievement minimums to receive federal funding, meaning red states often set the standard extremely high so they could embezzle the funding.

A bill that creates federal funding for schools (which they didn't have) and sets education standards that Red States can't interfere with is not a bad idea, but it left too many important things up to the states themselves.

Suicide is often treated as a mental health problem. As such a suicidal person will often be dragged into a hospital for a mental health evaluation, that will proceed to do fuck all but hold them until their mood evens out.

The problem is that it's not a psychological problem. It's a sociological problem.

There are mental illnesses that can suppress or inhibit the base desire to life that keeps most people off the ledge, but they are not responsible for the situations that brought them to the ledge in the first place.

As a kid my parents took me to doctor after doctor trying to find out what was wrong with me. The doctors would ask me "why do you want to kill yourself?" And I gave the same answer every time: "Everyone treats me like shit no matter what I do. My parents, my teachers, they're always angry with me even if I behave. Nothing makes them stop insulting or hurting me. I get bullied at school, casually insulted at home, and my father uses child abandonment as a threat very regularly. And my behavior does not affect any of it. What else do you expect me to do?"

Not as eloquently, obviously.

And this would go in one ear and out the other, while my parents chased more red herrings out of sheer, overwhelming denial. I currently, to this day, do not know if any of those doctors or care workers mentioned to them that how I am treated at home is the likely cause. If it ever happened, it was ignored.

If the reason for someone trying to end their own life is "I lost my job, and now I'll likely be homeless in a week" what the fuck do you expect a hospital or a psychiatrist to do about that?

People focus on mental illness, a decidedly rare lone cause of suicide, because otherwise they have to ask themselves uncomfortable questions about things that don't have easy fixes.

No.

The discourse suggests that the left should "stop shaming and finger-wagging at people for who they were in the past and who are trying to change."

Problem #1: They aren't.

The left does not shame or finger-wag at people who are trying to change. They shame and finger-wag at people who are not. Who are getting bent over a barrel by the Trump administration and are still clinging to this fantasy that imaginary trans groomers or mexican job snatchers are ruining their lives. People who are refusing to change.

What the discourse is actually suggesting is that we need to pre-emptively accept people to encourage change.

Problem #2: That doesn't work.

These people aren't Anakin and you aren't their kid making puppy dog eyes at them. You're not going to pry the good in them out of them. Working class conservatives are conservative because they want to hurt people they don't like, regardless of how much it hurts them in turn. Hurting people is all they care about, and until they learn to care about something else, they will never change.

So no. The left is now shaming people trying to change. They are shaming people who are stubbornly refusing to.

My dude, Britain is the original culture-hating settler colonial empire. The US, Canada, Israel, Germany, Japan, they're just kids paddling around the splash pool compared to England.

If they were officially counted as genocides as they should be, the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade and the Genocide of the Native Americans would make the Holocaust look like a pressure cooker bomb.

People have this idea in their head that Imperial nations of yore who stopped doing Imperialism (officially) experienced some kind of turnaround morally. But that's only ever been the case for Germany because we built 20 fucking museums as a permanent mark of shame. And those museums aren't even dedicated to all the people Germany killed, just the third of them that America gave a shit about.

We don't do that for any other Empire's wrongdoings. We don't have a hundred memorials to Unit 737, Nanjing, the Slave Trade, the genocide of the Natives, or the Rape of Africa. It's not mandatory education for elementary school students all around the world.

We did not put the other empires through the same state-sanctioned prolonged shaming that we put Germany through. The attitude toward Germany has always carried an undercurrent of "They're still in time out, and they know why!" from people whose Empires have committed far worse sins.

No, because to accept that I would have to deny the reality of my own eyes.

In 2016, a bunch of people were cheering and laughing for a guy who said "grab 'em by the pussy" and a bunch of people who claimed to be on the left looked at his opponent, who was proposing ending weapons sales to Israel, raising the minimum wage, and improving access to healthcare and said "Ew a woman!"

The Overton Window did not shift. It's remained exactly where it is.

Korra's fanbase has largely boiled her character down into a muscle girl pinup where discussions about her character are an extreme minority to people just going over 18 million scenarios where she's being dominated by the decidedly Fire Nation-coded Asami.

Katara got a lot of the same treatment, with especially misogynistic fans flooding the internet with fantasies of her being the concubine to the Fire Nation royal family. But since Korra is muscular people act like there's a veneer of progressiveness to such blatant body and racial fetishization.

Some people are idiots. You can recover from rape, you can't recover from being murdered.

The idea that rape is a worse crime is to suggest that the victim is "forever defiled" and that being dead would be better.