Jump to content

Mole

Legacy Members
  • Posts

    2701
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Mole

  1. During times of mourning, I like to turn to great works of our shared culture.
  2. The Jerry Lee Lewis talk made me realize that I only really knew him as the crying face on my TV, so I checked his Wikipedia article and found this gem of a sentence:
  3. He was definitely a harbinger of the our present day cultural rot. Someone so obviously dishonest, disingenuous, and sleazy feels so warm and familiar these days. Some of us sure do love our cartoon characters. Of course him admitting to “sin,” even so disingenuously, would put him in the top 1% of his type in terms of character and personal responsibility today. It’s almost quaint that someone would lie to us in such a way.
  4. A little more context in the IU situation: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2025/07/01/indiana-university-to-discontinue-more-than-100-academic-programs/ Reading between the lines (maybe too much), these are probably smaller, less popular degrees that are probably mostly being shuffled into other programs to boost and consolidate numbers. I know that’s what I’d do in this situation.
  5. AI is pretty good at some things (loosely walking through technical problems, writing grammatically correct yet asinine prose, cooking advice) and terrible at other things (namely accuracy and truthfulness). My uniformed guess is that this is a result of its training, largely internet writing. ChatGPT’s default tone is the same as Reddit posters. With that in mind, and considering the history of the internet, AI will no doubt make access to more and weirder porn even more ubiquitous. Considering AI’s disinterest in factual accuracy and its ability to confidently argue against reality (again, consider its training), I see us going one of two ways: 1.) learning to value factual learning and actually knowing stuff in your head again or 2.) losing our grip on reality. It’ll probably be some of both.
  6. It’s turned me into a pretty good pastry chef. On the downside, my family will all end up with diabetes.
  7. In good faith, you can make an ethical case against abortion or at least certain instances, but that good faith rings a little hollow when the most notable and hardline advocates are harassing women with anal asteroid rape spam. Its hard to coherently argue for the sanctity of life when your sticky fingered auto correct changes life begins at conception to: observe my C-type as I ram this Trojan asteroid up Uranus while you’re on your orbital period; you got me at Perihelion baby.
  8. I think I’ll work up a Velcro version that you can slap over the “I CAN” statement each day and sell it on TeachersPayTeachers. Two conflicting thoughts of mine: 1. If I were king of education, we’d do more to embrace religious (and irreligious) traditions. If you have to fill your walls with pieces of flair, they might as well come from foundational texts of our culture. Understanding what people believe or don’t believe, and dealing with that openly and respectfully should be possible, but we don’t do it well or even try. 2. My faith is a big part of my life. I can’t imagine trusting some random school teacher to teach that to my child. Theology is a thorny subject and I’d rather deal with that in my home and church. I don’t want some flat earther teaching their nonsense when the overwhelming evidence — both scientific and biblical — is that the earth is shaped like a tesseract. Your average school teacher lacks the theological, historical, and scientific training to grasp such concepts.
  9. You’re welcome to your ignorant views — and they are no doubt built upon ignorance — but internet people pretending to love their country and their community and calling active duty soldiers “cosplayers” is the height of irony. They signed their life over in service of something bigger; you’re playing the ignorant troll role on a college football website. Those specific “cosplayers” are the ones responsible for representing OUR country at Arlington when WWII, Korean War, etc. vets are interred. Today they marched in a dumbass parade; tomorrow they’ll be guiding a grieving family through a terrible day. Trump is the most unamerican president even if you include Jefferson Davis. Stop being shitty and reclaim the pro-America side. It’s so easy to not be anti-soldier.
  10. I mean the Old Guard has been at every presidential event since before most of us were born. Every inauguration, state arrival, etc. Those guys in blue are all active duty infantry soldiers. Whatever your thoughts about Trump are — hopefully mostly bad — calling active duty soldiers cosplay is pretty ignorant and shitty.
  11. I agree; you’ve posted way dumber stuff. Also, I have no idea who that Andor chick is, but those pictures look like a strung out Reece Witherspoon.
  12. https://apnews.com/article/badar-khan-suri-georgetown-immigration-case-65e9a9675c29ebe91b39eb647d1d6f18
  13. I’m in academia, but even usually get called Dr. in most social settings outside of my academic colleagues; I also never refers to myself as Dr — just my first name. I don’t advertise the doctorate. I live in a community that seems to place a higher value in formality than many places. The only place that calls me Mr. is the doctor’s office. The only people that call me by first name are my parents and a few colleagues and close friends. Everyone else says Dr., which was weird for me when it first started happening, but now it’s weird if I hear anything else. My wife has other names for me depending on other factors. Love you
  14. It’s time for the Surley PAC to get to work. We’ve got a target-rich environment here. Secretary of State Derka solving the Middle East crisis seems as reasonable as anything else that’s happened in recent years.
  15. Besides the dishonest misquote, most of the book of Proverbs consists of lessons on how to live a productive, Godly life. It very clearly says that how we act, think, do business, etc., directly impacts our quality of life. Taking some fatalistic view of religious life from that book in particular is madness. At least pick Job or something where you can at least put together a case for it. It’s not surprising that things would be so corrupted: bad company corrupts good morals.
  16. So you’d say that the thread titles on this site are deteriorating and getting worse? I bet there’s a thread to discuss this phenomenon; if only the thread titles made any sense. College professor perspective: I’ve changed most of my writing assignments to prioritize thoughtful student engagement with the materials. AI really likes to tell you about things, but so far, doesn’t do a great job of engaging with things in a meaningful way. There’s a difference between a student thoughtfully considering and struggling with new concepts and a machine telling me about everything that’s ever been written on the subject. On the surface, the AI version looks smarter, but it demonstrates no real analysis or human thought. It’s just a catalogue of ideas. Also, its tone sucks. I like to run important emails through AI just to make sure it hates my tone. I’ve have learned a new appreciation and respect for students who are bad writers, since they are likely not cheating and failing honestly. — For this thread, the iPhone keyboard is getting worse every year. I have more and more typos and it sometimes randomly inserts several words in place of one or two letters.
  17. Some think that the worst part is the hypocrisy, but I disagree. I think it’s the raping.
  18. As a reminder from slightly less crazy times in 2017: https://www.texastribune.org/2017/11/01/russian-facebook-page-organized-protest-texas-different-russian-page-l/
  19. Semi-connected thoughts: 1. I’d recommend reading and rereading the Sermon on the Mount. Contemplating everything in there and its application could be a lifetime exercise. Actually following it would make for a life well-lived. 2. We should remember that church isn’t a commodity or service that we shop for and purchase — or at least it shouldn’t be. If your church community is actively living out the Sermon on the Mount, it might be worth it to deal with services that don’t move you. If the purpose of the music is to worship God, then your feelings on the music aren’t all that important. 3. That said, church meetings are important for a healthy church. Congregational singing is important for a community and for our own spiritual well-being. It’s harder to hate someone if I’m engaged in music-making with them, even if the music feels asinine to me. You don’t have to jump around or act super emotionally, but I’d recommend making yourself sing along, even with the sillier songs. 4. I used to count the lyric references to self (I, me, etc.) vs. the reference to God (You, he, God, etc.) and see which was more. I figured that if we’re singing more about ourselves, we might be worshipping ourselves. I don’t do this anymore and think it’s probably unhealthy spiritually and overly cynical, but I still agree with the general premise. There are modern hymns-writers that don’t write the in the style of Cartman’s Faith +1. Maybe see if you can turn the worship folks on to them. They are much better sing along songs.
  20. I’m a bit behind on this thread, but in short, an external threat is like space aliens or something, and existential threat is Jean-Paul Sartre pulling a gun on you. It’s a pretty simple distinction.
  21. USB stands for universal, so why is it so hard to find the right USB cord?
  22. I teach at a small NAIA college. Some realities that I had never considered before coming here: 1. There are certainly some good athletes and high performers, but a less gifted or relatively unskilled kid could get a scholarship as well. They might never play though. A kid who will be relatively headache-free and help the coach meet their recruiting goals will be appreciated. An ok high school player could certainly find a spot on our rosters. 2. Scholarships are discounts off the sticker price. The school knows how much on average they need to get per student and scholarship accordingly. There often isn’t some magical pool of cash they are drawing from — instead they are just balancing out average costs. Tuition at lots of private schools is so high in order to allow the schools to offer bigger scholarships. 3. Even at our level, the student athletes are busy. It is a lot for them to keep up with. 4. At least at my institution, the coaches are good about supporting academic goals. If a student-athlete isn’t getting it done in my class, their coach is usually the first person I reach out to. 5. At least at my institution, while they celebrate winning, there isn't the same pressure like the higher levels. Coaches surely have been let go, but I don’t think winning or losing has been a big part of that equation.
  23. Blaming the reporter; another example of that conservative personal responsibility they love to crow about. Obviously our country has a stupidity problem, but it goes hand in hand with the run away character problem.
  24. I get unsolicited text messages all the time but I usually just ignore them. How many times have I ghosted the Secretary of Defense trying to send me not war plans? It feels rude of me to just ignore the guy. At least in the iPhone App Store, I was disappointed to find no mention of this in the app reviews.
  25. Ubiquitous porn usage is probably frying some brains, but I’m inclined to immediately dismiss any article pointing to decreased alcohol use — and thereby abuse — as contributing to declining mental health. A lot has gotten worse for the kids, but decreased boozing isn’t making things worse. It’s asinine. Let’s take these depressed kids and throw alcohol into the mix and expect it to get better. Assuming the truth of the claim regarding mental health and political affiliation made by the Baptist deacon who lives out the Sermon on the Mount by belittling the least among us, it makes sense that religious people — with a healthier social structure as well as social pressure to not express mental health problems — would report better mental health outcomes. Maybe some good reasons, maybe some unhealthy reasons. And the peacocking about how virile and sex obsessed we are is satire, right? The pervs from those 80s movies weren’t heroes anymore than Andrew Tate is. Or maybe this is locker room talk? I love talking about how much sexy sex my sexy sex brain thinks about all day and if it weren’t for all of that sexy sex, I would have dropped out of school, but thanks to all of those sexy sex girls I was chasing — I’m so virile you see — I read Boethius (you see the ladies swoon when you tell them how Boethius mistranslated some Greek sources and then the panties start flying) and now am so rich and manly. I hope I’m doing it right because my manhood is at stake.
×
×
  • Create New...