Still can’t believe the entire campaign relied on people not googling “Tariff” and spending like a minute to read the definiton. “I’m going to introduce tariffs” as a campaign promise is LITERALLY saying “I’m going make the price of things even higher than they already are, for you (usamerican)”
He literally won by telling people to their faces that he’s going to make inflation worse. Joke country.
A new national day of protest is set to sweep across all 50 states on Saturday, April 5, with demonstrations organized under the banner “Hands Off” targeting threats to democracy, bodily autonomy, and climate justice. Organizers say the protests are a direct response to figures like President Donald Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk, accusing them of undermining key democratic principles and freedoms.
“Donald Trump and Elon Musk think this country belongs to them. They’re grabbing everything they can, and it’s up to us to push back. On April 5th, we’ll take to the streets with a clear message: Hands off!” ~ ThirdAct.org
A map published by the event’s website, HandsOff2025.com, shows protests stretching from Anchorage, Alaska, to Miami, Florida. Some of the largest gatherings are expected in cities like Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Philadelphia, while smaller events are planned for college campuses and public squares nationwide.
“Across the country, grassroots activists, workers, community leaders and everyday people are coming together to say that it’s time for billionaires and extreme lawmakers to take their hands off our healthcare, our wages, our safety, and our rights,” the spokesperson said. “Trump and his billionaire allies are openly planning a power grab to roll back our rights, strip workers of protections, and dismantle the foundations of democracy in service of tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations. The stakes couldn’t be higher.”
I once wrote a 1500 word essay on something I’d forgotten to read in the 40 minutes before class. Including the time it took to read the thing I’d forgotten to read.
I got an A on that paper.
Writing is a skill. Skill is muscle. If you don’t use a muscle, it atrophies. If you are a student and you are tempted to use genAI to cheese an assignment, I am begging you for your own sake to not do it.
This is not a moral stance about genAI (which is shit at what it’s ostensibly for, and full of lies and evil, and fueled by art theft and burning rainforests, and there is no good reason to ever use it for anything; that’s the moral reason for why you shouldn’t use it), it is a purely pragmatic stance based on the fact that if you use it you will never learn the single most essential skill that is used in every single workplace.
You will never learn to bullshit.
And if you cannot bullshit, you will not understand when you are being fed bullshit by others.
For your own sake you must learn to do your own thinking, your own bullshitting, because our trashfire society runs on bullshit and for your own good you must become fluent in it, because very few people will bother to translate it for you. It was asinine in the late 90s, and it is asinine today, but it is the central truth of adult society: everything is bullshit, and you need to know what is going on beneath the bullshit, and you need to be able to bullshit back if necessary.
I know that the expectations being placed on you are ever-increasing, and I know that it does not seem rational to put effort into explaining the plot of a Charles Dickens novel to someone who has read the thing 50 times and will read 50 identical essays about it over the weekend. I know you are being handed ever-greater heaps of what is functionally mindless busywork because of an institutional obsession with metrics that don’t actually measure learning in a useful way. High school was nightmarish in the 90s and I am fully aware that it has only gotten worse.
Nevertheless, you must try, if only for your own sake. Curiosity is your best hope, and dogged determination your best weapon. Learn, please, if only out of spite.
I was able to get an A on that paper because I was able to skim the reading, figure out what it was about, and bullshit for 1500 words in the space of 40 minutes.
Imagine what you can do if you learn to bullshit like I can bullshit.
For my senior year of AP English, I was assigned reading over Easter break. We were instructed to read The Old Man And The Sea, and save the rest of the short stories in the book for the first week back.
Unfortunately, what I heard was “read everything BUT The Old Man And The Sea.”
Double unfortunately: the first day back was a test, on The Old Man And The Sea. Which I had read exactly zero words of. It was, notably, a short essay test. It wasn’t multiple choice or fill in the blank. It was designed to require deliberate answers from scratch, entirely out of your own head, with nothing to go on BUT what was in your head.
And in the course of about 45 minutes, I was able to use the questions of the test itself to piece together a vague enough sense of how the story went to bullshit my way through other questions. I gave wide, thematic answers that were extremely light on details, since I did not know any of them, and did not even know this test would be happening until it was in front of me. An essay test for an AP-level English class.
I had a starting point of zero information, and an essay test about the thing I was supposed to have read.
I bullshitted my way to a B+ on it.
On a test I should have gotten a ZERO on.
It’s been 16 years since I took that test.
I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about The Old Man And The Sea.
But you better fucking believe I still know how to bullshit, and when someone is trying to bullshit me.
The power and utility of knowing how bullshit works CANNOT be overstated. It is one of the most important skills you can ever have.
My favorite part of this is the little “Yet I’m still failing” at the bottom of the screencap. It’s not yet occurred to you to change something you’re doing? Maybe try not using ChatGPT?
I say we put Trump’s name on everything terrible that happens from his shit. Homeless camps due to recession? Trumpvilles. Tariffs? That’s the Trump Tax you pay for!
Add onto this if you have other ideas to add Trump’s name to his horrific policies.
Going by the Hoover precedent you’re clearly calling back to, homeless person using cardboard and newspaper as bedding material? That’s a Trump Blanket.
It’s sad how much of what is taught in school is useless to over 99% of the population.
There are literally math concepts taught in high school and middle school that are only used in extremely specialized fields or that are even so outdated they aren’t used anymore!
I took calculus my senior year of high school, and I really liked the way our teacher framed this on the first day of class.
He asked somebody to raise their hand and ask him when we would use calculus in our everyday life. So one student rose their hand and asked, “When are we going to use this in our everyday life?”
“NEVER!!” the teacher exclaimed. “You will never use calculus in your normal, everyday life. In fact, very few of you will use it in your professional careers either.” Then he paused. “So would you like to know why should care?”
Several us nodded.
He picked out one of the varsity football players in the class. “You practice football a lot during the week, right Tim?” asked the teacher.
“Yeah,” replied Tim. “Almost every day.”
“Do you and your teammates ever lift weights during practice?”
“Yeah. Tuesdays and Thursdays we spend a lot of practice in the weight room.”
“But why?” asked the teacher. “Is there ever going to be a play your coach tells you use during a game that requires you to bench press the other team?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then why lift weights?”
“Because it makes us stronger,” said Tim.
“Bingo!!” said the teacher. “It’s the same thing with calculus. You’re not here because you’re going to use calculus in your everyday life. You’re here because calculus is weightlifting for your brain.”
And I’ve never forgotten that.
THIS.
When it’s taught right, learning math teaches you logic and how to organize your brain, how to take a problem one step at a time and make sure every step can bear weight before you move to the next one. Most adults don’t need to know integrals, but goddamn if I don’t wish everyone making arguments on the internet understood geometric proofs.
Scientific concepts broaden our understanding of how the world is put together, which does not mean that most adults ever really understand how light is refracted through a lens or why spinning copper wire creates electricity–and they don’t need to. But science classes in general are meant to teach the scientific method: how to make observations and use them to draw conclusions, how to test those conclusions, how to be wrong and grow stronger from it.
History isn’t about dates and names of battles, it’s about people, patterns, things we’ve tried before and ought to learn from. It’s about how everything is linked, how changing one circumstance can lead to changes in fifty others, cascading infinitely. Literature is about critical thinking, pattern recognition, learning to listen to what somebody is saying and decide what it means to you, how you feel about it, and what you want to do with it.
Some facts matter: every adult should know how to read a graph, how global warming works, some of the basic themes and symbols that crop up in every piece of fiction. But ultimately, content is less important later in life than context.
The good thing is, students who learn the content are likely to pick up at least some of the context, some of the patterns of thinking, even if they don’t realize it. (The unfortunate thing is how the current educational system prioritizes content so much that a lot of students, and a lot of adults, don’t see the point in learning either, and teachers are overworked and held to standardize test grading scales such that it’s hard for them to emphasize patterns of thinking over rote memorization, etc etc etc, but that is a whole different discussion.)
I would also add that giving as broad an education to as many as possible gives everyone the opportunity to follow a career that might use calculus. Or colour theory. Or electromagnetism. Or [insert specialism here]. If we gatekeep specialisms, those careers are only available for the ones who were privileged enough to have the background training. That’s why Classics as a degree subject is full of private school kids: it’s not offered in state education.
And when you gatekeep classics you get people who turn up their nose when people enjoy things ‘the wrong way’ like some (thankfully few) of the comments on the video of the girls playing Vivaldi on their marimbas with such joy.
BOTCHED COUP D’ETAT LEADER YOON SUK YEOL HAS BEEN IMPEACHED CONSTITUTIONALLY AND UNANIMOUSLY, AND THE DECISION IS FINAL!!!!!🥹🥹🥹🥹🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
WE DID IT!!! WE KOREANS DID IT!!! PLEASE SPREAD THE WORDS!!! I WANT ALL INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITIES TO KNOW THAT WE DID IT🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🩵💙🩵💙🩵💙🩵💙🩵💙🩵🩵💙🩵💙🩵🩵🩵🩵🩵🩵🩵💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💛💛💛💛💛💙🩵💛💛💛💛
I’m nearly in tears. All the mental and physical pain and suffering that me and other Koreans have gone through waiting for his ousting has finally been paid off.
It was NEVER easy. I can’t believe how many obstacles there actually were to come to this conclusion. Yoon and his cronies, his ruling far-right conservative party, and their blind supporters never gave up till the last minute. They took numerous cards in their sleeves to prevent this glorious day from happening.
Still, such is life. Life is full of chaos. Humans are just chaotic. Some are unbelievably great, while some others are just downright scumbag. That’s just how it is. All we need to do is never give up going forward. 🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹
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amhrancas 