Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

All the frozen dog piss I saw on my walk today did make me feel a little uncool

I thought it was cool how people routinely bring their dog to the pub in the UK. It helps that they're better behaved than in any other country I've been to, like nary a bark.

ARE Bri'ish dogs, best dogs in the world, mate

Pub dogs are not normal dogs though. Same with pub cats.

Holy shit they made it in before us and black ppl

the only british dogs i want in my pub

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/6a/The_British_Bulldogs.png/220px-The_British_Bulldogs.png

I think schools should be way more open than they are, is that still a conservative belief?

no I think it’s rather apolitical, just dumb

i know plenty of ppl who've moved to the suburbs, but you're the only one who regularly bumps this thread to troll against 'political correctness'

suburban lawyers who used to be in a band: c/d

*with biblical names

I think there is some theoretically possible but realistically fantasy world where the risk calculus could favor schools mostly being open, even with things being not that great overall, unfortunately we fucked up pretty much step along the way to making that happen

nah, it favors them mostly being open today

yeah keeping schools closed has had really terrible effects on my students and i think it's had pretty bad effects on them everywhere.

i was going to put up some articles on the main covid thread - about the negative effects on students and about how the data doesn't really support it as a best practice - but decided not to

a lot of the research right now centers on "learning loss" and while the impacts are definitely real (and definitely worse for students who tend to do worse in school, i.e. poor students, students with learning differences and bipoc) i have to remind myself that i am already of the opinion that we rush kids through school much too fast and concern ourselves too much w/ narrow measures of achievement, so i was able to talk myself down from the panic and uneasiness i felt when looking at achievement data

there is less focus and less research afaict on students' social and emotional health, but the data there is pretty clear too. increased isolation, increased anxiety, increased depression, increased trauma, increased mental illness, increased abuse of all sorts etc etc etc

but hey the reality is - in california anyway - the state government can exert easy control over just a few things: public utilities, public transportation, public safety and last but not least, public education

so it's a lot easier for newsom to shut down the schools than it is to shut down the apple store, the restaurants or the strip clubs. and people are screaming "do something", so that's what he does. what he can do. and the kids pay the price. oh well!

can we go back to eephus liking PB and flopson wanting to contraristan him for a sec? all i have to say to that bullshit is... gtfo of here with it

― cosmic vision | bleak epiphany | erotic email (map), Wednesday, December 16, 2020 4:52 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

idk he just doesn't raise my hackles the same way he does everybody else's

if i don't share the same rage about bread prices in ontario grocery store chains in 2005, it's probably because i grew up in quebec, where bread was cheap and plentiful

Viele Dank

It's vielen dank
xoxo,
someone who cares about language

virtual teaching completely sucks and i saw this semester how completely it drained my colleagues as well as our students. nonetheless i am 100% thrilled that we were NOT open this semester and are NOT open next semester. the idea of being packed into sections every week with three different groups of 15 undergrads for 80 minutes each is a fucking epidemiological nightmare to me after the last nine months in NYC. i would be fucking pissed, on my behalf and theirs, if they made us come in in person. also some of the people on our teaching team are in their 70s and 80s. no fuckin way.

otm

2xp just to pedantically backtrack for a sec:

It's akshually 'vielen Dank', unless you're Stefan George.

DC has it right. It sucks but we have to seal things up and muscle through this. Knowing that vaccine help is on the way should make this a little bit easier.

I saw covid hotspot map for my county the other day and it's just a solid red blob over the university (where I work) and the student neighborhoods close to it (where I live). No way I'm getting back into a classroom until widespread vaccine distribution has happened.

that's cool but FYI the impacts get significantly worse as the kids get younger

and the risk gets much lower as the kids get younger. I don't think universities need to be full in person at all fwiw, I think they can be all remote or hybrid.

I think you can also make the case for high school being all remote, because high schoolers are higher risk for spread, high school involves more movement of students and teachers (different classes for different subjects) and high schoolers are more capable of remote learning. Primarily believe elementary schools should be full time in person, with a remote option for those who want it.

yes, this is related to the fact that online asynchronous grad school is very common and online asynchronous preschool is not

adults (especially ones who already know a lot about what they're studying) have the executive function and intellectual skills they need to get a lot out of a loosely structured learning environment. kids, not so much

xp

DC has it right. It sucks but we have to seal things up and muscle through this. Knowing that vaccine help is on the way should make this a little bit easier.

― early-Woolf semantic prosody (Hadrian VIII), Thursday, December 17, 2020 10:45 AM (thirty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is not a reasonable ask for small children. I can muscle through it, I'm 41. For a kid "muscling through" means missing kindergarten and first grade. Also, I would not get too excited about the vaccine -- it's going to take a long time for sufficient vaccination to fully reopen schools unless we rethink the standards for reopening schools.

anyway my feeling is you can make whatever case you want for schools being open or not. obviously the more sectors of society we shut down the slower the pandemic spreads. whether you think it's worth saving the lives of x number of olds by endangering the welfare and stunting the social / emotional development of y number of youngs is a subjective judgment that comes down to your personal values and how much weight you put on different things. i mean i'm not thrilled about excess death, but we haven't outlawed driving on freeways, alcohol and tobacco, being obese etc etc and those are ultimately going to kill a lot more ppl than covid-19 is

i'm fine w/ teaching remotely even though it's having a terrible negative effect on my students. i work at a public charter school on a university campus that is coadministered by both the university (which also runs the largest local hospital system) and the public school district and i'm not protesting either the university or the school district's decisions to stay shut. i get it. but it doesn't make sense to me when people act like shutting schools is an easy or obvious decision to be making.

pom, all lowercase is fine for shitposting in any language. should've started with lowercase "it's" tho, my bad there.

Agreed, I'm just teasing. :)

whether you think it's worth saving the lives of x number of olds by endangering the welfare and stunting the social / emotional development of y number of youngs is a subjective judgment

I wish Harold Budd were still around.

personally i don't really care about harold budd because i didn't know him personally and he was 84. i definitely knew a coiple people much younger than him (one in 40s, one in 50s) that recently died of coronavirus and i wish they were around too!

"knew" = met a couple times, i was not close to these people

It is a fucking travesty that the national discourse around this is "should schools be open" as a yes or no question and not "should elementary schools be open" (although I will say that at the actual local school board and county health department decision-making level, there seems to be a lot more openness to doing this correctly, with younger kids going back to physical school first and in many places already there.)

As for college students, there is very little evidence they or their teachers are spreading COVID in class, but unfortunately a decent amount of evidence that lots of people feel "if it's safe to go to class it's safe to go to the bar" and then you get spread.

otm. I read a NYT story last week showing that the problem isn't classrooms -- there's little evidence students and faculty contract it on campus. The problem is travel and bars.

obviously the more sectors of society we shut down the slower the pandemic spreads.

This is not necessarily true. Just for example, with schools shut down, a certain percentage of kids are going to be in daycares, at their relatives' and friends' houses, playing on the playground, etc., and even a certain percentage of teachers and staff will not be isolating themselves. So it's not certain that having schools closed even slows the spread.

i get what you're saying but you could make that exact same argument about shutting down anything so i'm not sure it's that meaningful beyond "not certain that having [any isolated part of society] closed even slows the spread."

. Just for example, with [applebee's] shut down, a certain percentage of [applebee's employees] are going to be at their relatives' and friends' houses, playing on the playground, etc., and even a certain percentage of [applebee's employees] will not be isolating themselves. So it's not certain that having [applebee's] closed even slows the spread.

whether you think it's worth saving the lives of x number of olds by endangering the welfare and stunting the social / emotional development of y number of youngs is a subjective judgment that comes down to your personal values and how much weight you put on different things

it is not merely "olds" who are dying. and some people who aren't dying are being left with long term respiratory effects, and even neurological disorders....and that's just what we know so far.

i mean i'm not thrilled about excess death, but we haven't outlawed driving on freeways, alcohol and tobacco, being obese etc etc and those are ultimately going to kill a lot more ppl than covid-19 is

uhh, maybe long-term, but emerging evidence is suggesting that COVID may be the leading cause of death in the US this year. and even if it's not, it's in the top 3, so no, these things do not kill "way more people" than COVID at the moment.

If I want to avoid dying on the highway, I can avoid driving in a car. I can still leave my house and do things. If I don't want to die of alcohol related causes, I can abstain from drinking. If I don't want to die of smoking-related cancer, I can not smoke. No, we don't have absolute control over these decisions. But from a technical sense, we can avoid these things to a greater degree than we can COVID. Someone else drinking in the same room isn't directly going to give me cirrhosis of the liver, someone else smoking in the room, I can probably move away from them and I'm not going to develop lung cancer from a single contact with this person. another driver isn't likely to ram into me with their car if I'm taking a bus, subway, or walking on a sidewalk. I can manage my own risk and still go about my daily business and be around other people.

With COVID, just leaving my house is a risk. I can get severe COVID from as little as being sneezed or or having 15 minutes of contact with someone who is infected and may not know it. Literally my only way to reduce risk close to zero is to never leave my house.

in some cases, I can die even if I've had no previous health complications or how old I am. or I might survive, but now I might have trouble breathing for months. Or concentrating. and I don't know how long it will last.

https://abc11.com/covid-deaths-coronavirus-leading-cause-of-american-death-heart-disease-cancer/8845819/

the main reason 'other businesses are open, but not schools' = it's a helluva lot harder to shut businesses down without severe blowback from rich corporate monsters, and they file lawsuits against you in court to challenge your executive orders

I realize the decision to open schools or not isn't merely a black and white discussion, buuuuuut....I would hope the decision-making isn't based on "well we can sacrifice a few old people for this".

. Just for example, with [applebee's] shut down, a certain percentage of [applebee's employees] are going to be at their relatives' and friends' houses, playing on the playground, etc., and even a certain percentage of [applebee's employees] will not be isolating themselves. So it's not certain that having [applebee's] closed even slows the spread.

― the late great, Thursday, December 17, 2020 11:43 AM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

You could make that argument! And if you had evidence, I'd listen and consider whether it's worth shutting down applebee's. There does happen to be evidence that teachers and students are getting COVID at the same rate whether in school in person or remote.

in one of my friends' districts where she teaches, cases are on the rise, finding new students each day reported as testing positive. yeah, their infections are probably being acquired somewhere other than teh class room, but these students have been in the classrooms with COVID. not all classrooms are ventilated well, or allow for distancing.

one of my teacher friends is asthmatic and has other health risks is a bit worried about coming into contact with one of these students. so far she's been lucky.

i mean i'm not thrilled about excess death, but we haven't outlawed driving on freeways, alcohol and tobacco, being obese etc etc and those are ultimately going to kill a lot more ppl than covid-19 is

pro tip: don’t say these things

ty k3v, I was waiting for your reaction

Elementary & middle schools have been open here (France) since the start of September. We've made it to the end of the year break without any major breakouts from those schools. Some high schools have been on half-time (one week you go in the morning, next week in the afternoon) to ease crowding, but most have been full-time for everyone, and also, no major breakouts there. Universities went full distance after six weeks, because there was evidence of spread there.

I was skeptical that schools could stay open without problems, but I was wrong. We still have terribly many infected & I think we'll have a third wave in early January because of holiday travel & gatherings, but schools aren't the key to that here.

Applebees closing has gotta save a few lives irrespective of pandemic

one of my teacher friends is asthmatic and has other health risks is a bit worried about coming into contact with one of these students. so far she's been lucky.

― Lover of Nixon (or LON for short) (Neanderthal), Thursday, December 17, 2020 11:57 AM (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I know this is unlikely to be comfort to her, but asthma has been determined not to be a risk factor for severe COVID.

my conservative belief is that boys should go to jupiter and get more stupider and girls should go to mars and become rock stars