Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

Only Built for Cuban Dinks

^unsent post from last time I was looking at this thread on the app.

what kind of woke proposals, man alive?

For context, NYC schools are divided into "districts" but these are not like suburban school districts -- each district could easily have like 30 elementary schools and 10 middle schools (high school is already by application and citywide).

There was some Stanford study on diversity benefitting students, so now they have this goal of having every school reflect the demographics of its district within three years, every school reflect the demographics of its entire BOROUGH within five years (remember that each borough of NYC is already the size of a major US city), and every school reflect the demographics of the whole city within 10 years.

My district in queens is now one of the guinea pig districts and they are trying to come up with a plan for it, starting with middle school, but it spans all the way from rego park to jamaica and many parts have spotty public transit. In order to achieve their stated goals (due to the current school demographics) they'd have to send kids all around the district, mostly from the northwest end (rego park and forest hills) to the southeast end (jamaica). This is in the exact opposite direction of 95% of parents' commutes, and it's NYC so plenty of people don't have cars. Basically you'd either have to put your 11 year old on a subway to a bus through a relatively dangerous neighborhood or bring them to school and add an hour to your commute each way.

All such concerns are being scoffed at as the product of white privilege and racism, even though I have yet to see any evidence that the parents in Jamaica want this either. Another oddity of the whole thing is that the middle schools in my neighborhood are already about 30% hispanic, 10% african american, 30% asian and 30% white, so they really are not "segregated" per se, it's just that the schools in jamaica are mostly hispanic and african american, so somehow it's supposed to make a difference if we sprinkle some white kids into those schools?

In addition to these "diversity plans" school chancellor is also trying to end all gifted and talented programs and remove tests used to get into specialized high schools. Ironically the things that he's trying to remove were the imperfect solutions that enticed affluent people to stay in the public school system over the last 20 years where they previously would have left entirely (suburbs, or private school for the wealthier ones).

wouldn't ability-based applications for high school lead very quickly to segregation by class (and race) even if it were city-wide?

iirc nyc has the most segregated schools in the country

Yes, but a big part of the reason for that is that the whole system is only 15% white and a lot of the most affluent white people either put their kids in private school or leave for the suburbs. Even if you could achieve a perfect distribution of races across all public schools, so that each school was 15% white, I'm not sure what that would achieve, and you'd never get that anyway because a big chunk of those white people would just leave the system.

Private school should be banned (cool radical belief)

some Stanford study on diversity benefitting students

can you link to this?

tbh I'm not sure which study or whether I'm even remembering correctly that it was stanford. DOE officials mentioned some study done a few years ago in a meeting as the basis for the diversity plans.

so, I'm still not going to come out against callout or cancel culture, because I feel it isn't inherently good or bad, but ultimately comes down to how it is used. but incidents like this really make me averse to it: https://www.thewrap.com/kobe-bryant-dead-msnbc-n-word-alison-morris/

a friend shared this with me yesterday when the Kobe news was breaking, and I braced myself for what I thought was going to be a low-level affiliate broadcaster somehow letting an epithet fly on air. and I didn't hear it the first time, and I listened two more times, and it sounded like "nakers" to me. this was hours before she came out with her clarifying statement saying that this was exactly what she said - not being a sports reporter, accidentally started to say Knicks, and caught herself and combined the two.

nonetheless, there's a massive campaign of over 50,000 on social media trying to get her fired from her job, as well as harassing her on the internet. some are criticizing those who have stated they didn't hear an epithet, as if we're supposed to pretend we heard something we didn't.

I can't blame anybody in this hostile political climate for being anxious when they think they hear an epithet on live tv, regardless of whether she said it or not. but calmer heads aren't prevailing, and many are doubling down even when being told "you know, maybe this isn't what she said". and this is resulting in someone's livelihood being threatened as well as a harassment campaign on Twitter already underway.

I've never made any excuse for someone who has run afoul of human decency, whether it be racism, homophobia, etc, but this just makes me feel sick because there's certainly 'reasonable doubt' but everybody is pouncing.

a lot of that is pain about kobe dying and trying to take it out on an easy target

and that is a good point, I don't want to discount that by any means.

there was definitely a wide range of emotions with it - one of my best friends told me it outright ruined his day.

when you don't have a functioning system for holding people accountable for their words and deeds it's not terribly surprising that people will take enforcement of social norms into their own hands. nor are any of the consequences that follow from that terribly surprising.

house music: i'm perfectly happy if you wanna play the same beat over and over for an hour, but *please* spare me the single vocal line repeated every five fucking seconds

why waste your time you know you're gonna be mine you know you're gonna be mine you know you're gonna be mine i'm gonna get you baybeh i'm gonna get you yes i am

everybody got on the deck ten minutes ago goddammit

also the deckdeckdeckdeck

show trials and/or summary execution for prople who bring Wasabi (omnipresent “Japanese” takeaway place, not the paste) on public transport

feeling very "don't tell me wtf to do" lately. also: plagues happen and they're the wildfires of humanity. also: as someone whose parents are garbage i can't help but feel we could do with some thinning in that demo.

i love my parents and my grandmother and am currently struggling to convince them to take this seriously

feeling visceral anger at 'boomer remover' puts me at odds with map but is equally uncool and conservative idk

at least map is being cold-eyed and sincere, making light of it is the greater aesthetic sin

'boomer remover' is annoying, yes, it's clearly the 'silent gen-eraser'

i honestly see nothing positive but the possibility that a few people at the top are going to die.

People who steal hand sanitizers from hospital? Jail them. Fuck them for endangering vulnerable people.

my buddy is a nurse at a pediatric oncology unit and said that they have had to start searching the medical staff for masks and sanitizer on the way out the door because they were running out. This was five weeks ago!

i have actually been really surprised at how fundamentally competent the us government response to the pandemic has been. oh, don't get me wrong, it's not been adequate, but i'm not sure a truly adequate response was necessarily in the realm of possibility. i guess really i'm surprised at the number of people who actually know what they're doing still left in the government after three years of a racist idiot calling the shots. this is even more noteworthy when compared to the uk government response, which has, from what little i can tell, been the complete and utter failure i was sort of expecting the american federal response to be.

xpost I couldn't find n95 masks back in january without it being a price gouge on amazon. I don't know what they were thinking by not starting manufacture of them right away.

I think they were all just like “oh, this must be someone else’s problem”

This global crisis should be handled individually by all the governors. This global crisis is a perfect fit for 50 different state governments to handle

handling thing state by state does make a lot of sense. i wonder if some states do a better job of quarantining than others if there might be closed state borders set up at some pt

states have a role to play (a leading role, even!) but this is exactly the kind of situation that is best suited for federal oversight

in some ways the shelter in place orders' definition of essential businesses should be taken to heart after the pandemic has passed. The non-essential workers should take up useful occupations. At least 10% should become plumbers and another 10% should become structural engineers.

The government is still hiring.

thinking of applying at FEMA, for real. the writing is on the wall for my current job

kinda feeling pretty good about my current career, which is basically: "helping people fill out forms in order to get money / reduce the amount of money they have to pay the government" and navigating bureaucracy, in general ...

re: state vs federal on coronavirus:

As hospitals prepare for a flood of desperately ill patients unable to breathe on their own, mechanical ventilators have become the single most important piece of equipment that can mean the difference between life and death.

Now, with American hospitals facing a grave shortage of the vital devices, the Big Three automakers, small engineering firms, software designers and medical equipment manufacturers are rushing to figure out ways to produce more of them. But President Trump has so far declined to use powers that public health experts say could make a real difference in getting more ventilators to places that need them the most — right now.

What is really needed, a number of public health experts and former government officials say, is for Washington to take control of the nation’s existing ventilator supply. Because peak coronavirus infections will hit cities and regions at different times in the coming months, a centralized federal effort could send unused machines to hospitals that need them most.

“This is a national crisis,” said Frank Kendall, who served as under secretary of defense for acquisition and logistics in the Obama administration. “In a time of scarcity, you can’t leave it up to companies and governors to manage it themselves.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/health/ventilators-coronavirus.html

What is really needed, a number of public health experts and former government officials say, is for Washington to take control of the nation’s existing ventilator supply.

we should just put a big asterisk on the 2016-present era that whenever we recommend that "washington" or congress or the white house do something, it means not the crazy fascist ones

“we meant the dc government, not the federal one”

For anyone who thinks "we can afford to lose some olds," we could still easily lose anywhere from a few hundred thousand to a couple million working age adults in the US alone based on what current death rates by age look like.

Are you talking to map?

“People might get the misinterpretation you’re just going to lift everything up,” Dr. Fauci said, explaining Mr. Trump’s impatience to jump-start the economy and tell Americans they could resume everyday life. “That’s not going to happen,” Dr. Fauci said. “It’s going to be looking at the data” in regions of the country where there was not an obvious outbreak of the virus.

As a practical matter, however, Mr. Trump does not have the power to decide whether the country can reopen. He can issue federal guidelines, but the decision of whether to return to business as usual is up to each state.

you know, uh, maybe the states should actually take the lead then. jfc shit is bleak

Are they not doing that? Inslee told us today to prepare for an extension of the stay home directive beyond the initial two weeks.

Sorry about other states I guess :/

Anyway why is this in the uncool conservative belief thread I’m real confused

i'm replying to an upthread conversation i was having (mostly with myself, heh!) about the appropriate role of state vs federal in responding to coronavirus

Maybe the states can nullify the virus

This is where I feel sorry for poor people in the stupider states. Poor people in California actually have it better rn. We aren't getting back to business / normal any time soon.

that was the issue that got the 4 GOP senators so riled up - that the poorest people might end up actually being slightly poor, for 4 months