Invincible

Vergil summoning V

This explains so much about why 20 somethings are just unable to read to any level of complexity beyond a tweet. The miserable failure of US pedagogy

They didn’t teach children phonics for TWENTY YEARS because they just hoped this “balanced literacy” bs would magically work out???

Obviously everything is political in some way and it’s always worth analyzing who is promoting which ideas–but I think when aspects of public health/science/medicine/education become polarized we all lose out because the issue becomes so much harder to analyze on their merits. And it’s especially awful when the people most impacted are children who are still developing the basic skills needed to think critically for themselves.

Secondly, I’m just… is this not basically the gist of the scam in The Music Man? Y'know, where Harold Hill—who can’t play of note of music—passes himself off as a band leader, telling everyone he has a “revolutionary new method called The Think System where you don’t bother with notes,” and says ““If you want to play the Minuet in G, think the Minuet in G”? Like sure, context is helpful for reading, but having it be the basis is… WILD. I’m so sorry Gen Z 😭

We certainly weren’t taught to check the first letter and then guess based on vibes. If you read like that then there’s no point in the rest of the word being written down. How would you learn new words and advance your skill that way?

Tags that hit like a punch in the face.

I’m so glad someone put it into words.

And if you get to a point where it’s bad to have dark thoughts and it’s bad to wonder what something would be like and it’s bad to put yourself in the shoes of anyone who isn’t “pure”, if fiction is no longer a realm where you can confront and explore, but an ongoing test of moral purity… well, maybe not everyone’s brain works like mine, but I feel like that takes away something incredibly important to being human.

Not everything has to be deep, or have meaning, etc. unless the creator wants it to be and a lot of the purity types end up forcing something to have deep meaning or social commentary where it isn’t meant to.  Is this inherently bad? No, but these people don’t just say “But this is my interpretation of it.” they go as far as trying to force that interpretation onto everyone else, including the creator, as a means of saying “See? It means that they promote/condone xyz so they’re bad and shitty people who should spend the rest of their life in jail with/are the same as people who’ve actually committed acts of violence against other people.” 

What are you? Protestant? Thought crime isn’t real, ya twit.