Meme - Coleman Bee: "The most satisfying part of this is that its always liberals doing it"
"As more Americans go 'no contact' with their parents, they live out a dilemma at the heart of Shakespeare's 'King Lear'"
Ashley De Silva: "I cut off both of my parents and it's the best decision I have ever made!"
Parenting books aren’t the solution, they’re actually the problem - "My parenting style flapped around like a windsock in a hurricane, as one childcare guru superseded another. Every change of direction eroded what little confidence I had in my own instincts; and this, in turn, kept me scurrying back to the bookshelf in search of guidance. I ended up – as I remain – confused, irresolute and inconsistent. Not just from reading the wrong books, but from reading any at all."
Katharine Birbalsingh: Gentle middle-class parenting can be harmful - "Parenting guidance written by the middle class is destroying child-rearing among the working class, according to a prominent head teacher. Katharine Birbalsingh said parents should stop giving their children choices in food and clothes and should embrace being authority figures. She decried the impossibility of finding traditional parenting books, such as those from the 1960s, that gave parents permission to tell their children what to do and teach them right from wrong. Birbalsingh, who runs Michaela Community School in Wembley and is often described as Britain’s strictest head teacher, also criticised parents who did not teach their children to read and count. “The culture and the language that’s being used means parents feel that they’re not in a position of authority over their child,” Birbalsingh, 52, said. “If you’re looking for books to give you advice on what to do as a parent, it’s almost impossible to access the kind of advice you would have gotten 50, 60 years ago. The stuff you’ll get nowadays will be much more along the lines of gentle parenting, being friends with your children, not holding them to account. It will be written from the point of view allowing them to choose to lead their own feeding. “That same idea goes through everything. So when they’re older in school, is it child-centred learning where the child is leading the learning — or is it the adult who’s the authority in the room leading the learning?” She added: “When it comes to tantrums and teaching them right from wrong — even just that language of teaching them right from wrong — you’re not going to come across that, it will be very much about understanding the child, communicating with the child’s needs.” Books from decades ago would have given parents more agency and more of an understanding of “having dominion” over their child, she said. Modern parents, Birbalsingh claimed, had “been infantilised”. This phenomenon has been partly shaped by parenting literature and general advice... “Middle-class parents might then say, ‘well, that doesn’t happen to us’. If you are able to afford a nanny, or if you have two parents in the home, you might get away with some gentle parenting. But for families that are under financial pressure, social pressure, don’t have two parents in the home, they simply aren’t able to do what you might be able to get away with,” she said. “And the culture that is created by this literature, written by middle-class people — they don’t realise the absolute destruction that it causes for the working-class family.”... Fathers have a big influence by being stricter than mothers but are also more fun and adventurous, she said, although she suggested that either parent could take that role. “There needs to be a different dynamic when you’re bringing up children. There cannot just be one dynamic. It’s the same in school. You’ll always have a good cop and a bad cop with the teachers — it’s a role that we play all the time.” Parents who wanted their child to succeed had to teach them at home, she said. On social media Birbalsingh said she was regularly told by parents: “That’s not my job, that’s the teacher’s job.”
Clearly, she is abusive, favours inflicting trauma on children and deserves to have any kids she might have go no contact and put her in a nursing home
The cruelty of gentle parenting - "Gentle parenting, or conscious parenting, professes to foster compassion and emotional self-understanding in a child. It’s about respecting the emotions of a child and the motivations behind those emotions. If a child has a tantrum, hits, or generally misbehaves, it is because she is frustrated — and a parent’s job is to address the root cause of the child’s frustrations. A child should be understood, never punished. This is because for a gentle parent, children aren’t bad. They aren’t even neutral. They are inherently good. As a mother myself to two teenagers, this is news. Punishment, in the gentle mindset, focuses the attention on an unnatural consequence rather than on the motivations for behaviour. No motivation is bad, because no feeling originates in one’s selfishness, one’s greed, or one’s desire to dominate. Anger and inappropriate behaviour are caused by frustration: the frustration of not being understood, of not being able to accomplish what one wishes, of not being able to freely do what one wants. When a child experiences a curb to their will, the parent needs to offer comfort. Instead of punishment, a child should face the “natural consequences” of her choices. For instance, if a child refuses to go to sleep, this means that she suffers the natural consequence of getting tired and cranky. A natural consequence of my own kids acting cranky is that I might lose my shit on them, but I don’t get the impression that gentle parents are encouraged to act naturally. This brings us back to the insufferable tone of voice that gentle parents all seem to use with children, particularly those millennial mom influencers on social media. My aversion to it is that there is a fake niceness to their wheedling that anyone can see through, including most four-year-olds. It is patronising, and reveals a deep annoyance with children but prohibits any kind of genuine expression of it. One can’t get angry with a child because he is not doing anything bad because he is inherently good. What is needed is to redirect his natural self-expression to a more socially accepted choice, one that will result in Mommy speaking to you with more authentic niceness. Gentle parenting flattens the human experience into a series of choice options, none of which reflect any natural goodness or badness in the child, but which instead represent optimal or less optimal outcomes. This is crude behaviourist psychology, treating the human as a kind of input-output machine. Under this model, gentle parenting ignores the depth and complexity of a child’s soul — including the baseness therein — and, because it ignores it, the technique also fails to nurture the depth of a child’s soul, resulting in, unsurprisingly, children who have shallow souls. A child is denied her full humanity as a moral agent, and treated not as an equal, but as somehow less than fully, richly, terribly human. In short, as the little shits they are, yet having a spark of the divine. Just like Mom... Since gentle parenting has no capacity for talking to a child about wickedness, guilt, and punishment, it also has no ability to speak about redemption... the real problem with gentle parenting is that it removes moral freedom from a child because it refuses to accept the moral depth of a child. Punishment is unnecessary because the child is never bad, merely misunderstood. While gentle parenting concedes that a child’s behaviour might be less or more appropriate, well-socialised, and safe, it doesn’t concede that a child’s motivations might originate in wickedness just as easily as goodness. Nor does it accept that a child’s will should be curbed because it is often corrupted in its desires, not simply frustrated. In neglecting the dark corners of a child’s soul, gentle parenting does children a disservice. For the fact is that most children know that they’re sometimes bad, and that they sometimes do things out of malice, spite, and greed... the job of the parent is not to prevent any potential “trauma”, it is to love the child even when they are bad, and to punish them, and most importantly to forgive them. A child can’t understand the lightness of forgiveness without understanding first that one needs it... Since the age of Shakespeare, most of our great literary villains have had depth, reasons for their villainy, motivations that we can sympathise with, even be attracted to. Yet we can also see that they’re villainous because they choose to be. Shakespeare gives his villains and his tragic heroes dignity by granting them their awful humanity. And he shows that it is only because his villains do wicked things willingly that they can be redeemed... Ironically, it is the avoidance of punishment that may very well cause anxiousness in the child, for the work of making oneself more socially appropriate is never done, but punishment has a fixed term"
Gentle parenting is creating little monsters... and I should know - "From what I’ve seen, the approach seems to produce children who disregard adults and have a loose understanding of consequences - which feels like a concerning crop of bandits to have eventually entering society."
Fishermen unravel family mystery after month at sea - "Two men from the Pacific nation of Kiribati who were lost at sea for a month have managed not only to survive, but to unravel a 50-year-old family mystery. Uein Buranibwe, 53, and Temaei Tontaake, 26, made headlines late last month when they washed ashore in the Marshall Islands after 33 days lost at sea. They were more than 600 kilometres from home. Their global satellite positioning system had run out of batteries after they left their island on what should have been an 80km trip to get gas. Marshall Islands Journal editor Giff Johnson says the men found much-needed food and water on Namdrik Island. But he also says that one of the men discovered that his uncle, feared drowned at sea 50 years earlier, had also wound up on the same atoll and married into the community."
Sydney ‘science nerd’ may face jail for importing plutonium in bid to collect all elements of periodic table - "Emmanuel Lidden, 24, will have to wait to learn his sentence after breaching nuclear non-proliferation laws by shipping samples of plutonium to his parents’ suburban Sydney apartment. Lidden pleaded guilty to offences under Australia’s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act that carry a possible 10-year jail sentence, and is due to receive his sentence from the judge Leonie Flannery on 11 April. The importation sparked a major hazmat alert, with Australian Border Force (ABF) officials, firefighters, police and paramedics all attending the scene in August 2023."
Analysing speed profiles for the estimation of speed on traffic-calmed streets - "This research examines the speed profiles of individual vehicles on traffic-calmed streets in Christchurch, New Zealand, to provide a better understanding of how drivers react to calming devices over an extended street length and to find ways of estimating speeds along such streets. The results indicate that traffic-calmed streets do not necessarily promote low speed environments. It was found that 85th percentile speeds at long distances from calming devices were 45-55 km/h for horizontally deflected streets and 40-45 km/h for vertically deflected streets. The speed hump and the angled slow point produced the biggest speed reductions, while the 2-way mid-block narrowings caused no significant speed changes. The results also show that drivers have different perceptions of the appropriate operating speed at such devices, as evidenced by variations in speeds at the devices. Standard deviations in speed at speed humps and raised angled slow points were smaller than those at speed tables. For multiple devices, larger spacings produced higher speeds between devices. These findings, along with speed-difference relationships and speed-spacing models developed from this research, can aid in the selection of device type and spacing between devices, to improve the effectiveness of traffic calming."
The claim that narrower streets are safer and people drive slower has mixed evidence supporting it
SUMMARY REPORT-Safety Effects of Using Narrow Lanes and Shoulder-Use Lanes to Increase the Capacity of Urban Freeways - "McCasland evaluated two freeway segments in Houston, TX on which narrower lanes and a narrower outside shoulder were used to create an additional travel lane. Reductions in the accident rate per million vehicle-kilometers (veh-km) were found using a Poisson comparison of means test. Urbanik and Bonilla evaluated similar projects on urban freeway segments in California using a two-sample t-test. Statistically significant changes in the accident rate were found for three of the 10 projects evaluated. Two projects experienced statistically significant reductions in the accident rate, but one project experienced a statistically significant increase. In particular, the entire accident rate increase for this project occurred near the downstream end of the segment. There are concerns that both evaluations addressed accident rate rather than accident frequency and did not compensate for regression to the mean, both of which could have distorted the safety benefits... The analysis results indicate that narrow-lane or shoulder-use-lane projects on urban freeways increase accident frequencies for four- to five-lane conversion projects. Such conversions may increase accident frequencies for five- to six-lane conversion projects as well, but the results for those projects were not statistically significant. Because of the different findings for these two types of conversions, the results obtained are difficult to generalize to urban freeways as a whole. One possible explanation for the increase in accident frequency on conversion projects is that the added lanes in most of the projects were HOV lanes. Speed differentials between the main lanes and HOV lanes on freeways have the potential to increase sideswipe and lane-changing accidents, although this effect has not been satisfactorily quantified in the literature. The crash type results in this study indicated a nonsignificant increase in sideswipe collisions on the four- to five-lane conversions, but a decrease on the five- to six-lane conversions. If this is indeed true, it may help explain why the results differ between the two classes. The results also suggest that, at least for the five- to six-lane conversions, the effect of the project may have been to dissipate congestion upstream of the treatment site by removing the treatment site as a bottleneck. It is possible that the effects of the four- to five-lane conversions have been partially because of the displacement of a bottleneck as well. The bottleneck may have been transferred to a location downstream of the treatment site, with a corresponding increase in accident frequency at that location and possibly within the treatment site itself. In summary, the findings are more complex than expected. Differences may exist in the crash-related effects of lane conversion treatments at four-lane versus five-lane sites. The differences between road classes observed may be explained by differences in traffic operations (e.g., speeds, lane-changing behavior) that could not be analyzed in this study. In addition, the observed increases in accident frequency cannot necessarily be attributed to the use of narrower lanes or the conversion of a shoulder to a travel lane. The use of the added lanes as HOV lanes, which may introduce a difference in speed between adjacent lanes, may be another explanation for the increase in accidents. The analysis results also suggest that the conversion projects may decrease accident frequencies upstream of the project and increase accident frequencies within and downstream of the project because the projects may result in the relocation of a traffic operational bottleneck. These various effects on safety are confounded in the data and could not be separated in this study."
Merissa Hansen on X - "🚨BREAKING🚨 Leaked documents reveal how riots are organized and funded through leftist NGO’s"
Romanticising 'sickness' dooms us to a national cycle of dysfunction - "In a little over a decade, illness and suffering have gone from being a negative whose inconvenience the average person tried to manage and overcome as privately as possible, to the centrepiece of a person’s identity. Sickness has become a power tool, a game piece to play, and a shield: once you declare your badge of honour in the form of a diagnosis of ADHD or PMT, it’s open sesame. Nobody can counter you because of… neurodiversity or hormones or whatever it may be. No wonder the staggering rates of sickness benefits claimed by young people are breaking Britain’s finances. Somehow, as woke ideology has marched across internet users’ consciousness, phrases like “my trauma” have become utterly commonplace, obscuring, as so many of these overused labels do, the serious traumas of people who have experienced genuinely terrible things, from wars and domestic abuse to the terror and despair of being stalked by a mental illness such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Because the seriousness of some mental states has been lost amid all this froth, emotional wellbeing is packaged up as information to share before communication is to take place. I was struck by an advert for the “I’m OK” bee enamel brooch by the artist Gary Floyd, which encapsulates “the often unexpressed sentiment that many individuals face when asked about their emotional wellbeing… It’s OK not to be OK sometimes.” Really? Who knew? Experts now worry that amid all this reaching for the I’m Not OK button, TikTok’s myriad of “neurodiversity” influencers encourages people who might be looking for meaning, identity, a place to hang their anxiety and, of course, a bulletproof get-out-‑of-jail-free card to self-diagnose with a disorder. This is worrying for many reasons, including that in their pure form, such disorders need to be taken seriously with specialist treatment, not just deployed for sympathy points. The case of ADHD is one of the most prominently pushed online, romanticised and rendered “cute”. Researchers carried out a study with 2,843 undergraduate psychology students on how they perceived the videos. This showed that “people who watched a large number of ADHD-related TikToks also tended to overestimate ADHD’s prevalence by as much as 10 times and think more negatively about their own symptoms”. Scientists expressed concern that the videos – which have had more than half a billion views combined – portray ADHD (and other disorders, such as mild autism) as “lively, loveable and almost entertaining”... Because of the way the umbrella ideology of “diversity” has spread and embedded itself, there is a pervasive belief that pathology is power. Diversity, after all, is about making sure marginalised groups are not “under-represented” (a spurious term if ever there was one). What this translates to is giving anyone who isn’t “privileged” – namely straight, white, non-trans people – priority in all things so as to stamp down any “systemic” phobias and “isms”. Translated into the domain of health, it’s obvious where this is going. Just as prioritising tick-box criteria – skin colour, sexual orientation and so on – has been devastating for the quality of education, politics and cultural life, so the celebration of pathology and the zest for auto-diagnosis that it invites is decimating the ability to even interact with other people. When members of a society are incentivised to cry sickness – an unanswerable claim to being “marginal” too – it becomes impossible to rely on anything operating properly, from the legal system and businesses to hospitals and family gatherings. Because if everyone and everything can be stopped in their tracks by someone’s pain, trauma, disorder or negative feelings – lest the latter be railroaded and the person further traumatised and “unheard” – then nothing can work, no matter how important. Friends can’t speak freely with each other. Plans can be cancelled at short notice for any excuse because “my pathology made me”. This is vexing enough on the personal level, but writ large over the country as a whole, it is devastating our economy and our spirit. But as Britain groans, the TikTokers are laughing all the way to the bank."
Chris Selley: Two recent elections violated the Constitution, but don't expect consequences - "the court ruled that the $600,000 limit on third-party spending in the 12 months leading up to an election “create(s) an absolute disproportionality in the broader political discourse” that favours political parties over third-party actors. It “deprives voters of a broad range of views and perspectives on issues during a critical period in the democratic cycle,” Justice Andromache Karakatsanis wrote in the majority decision . “This undermines the voter’s right to an informed vote and to meaningful participation in the electoral process.” The decision was cheered by the Ontario Federation of Labour and the NDP alike . Now, Ontario’s government isn’t what you would call slavishly, or even identifiably, conservative. Still, it has been odd seeing Premier Doug Ford’s opponents to his left cheering a decision that invites more money into Canadian politics. They’re usually the ones arguing for less. It was barely a decade ago, and only in her political death throes, that Ford’s predecessor Kathleen Wynne got around to banning corporate and union donations in Ontario — something the federal Liberals, also circling the drain, had done roughly a decade earlier... The Citizens United case landed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in December 2007. The Supreme Court issued its ruling in January 2010, roughly 15 months later. The Working Families Coalition case took more than three years to meander its way through Canada’s pantomime yawn of a justice system. The Supreme Court heard the appeal May 21 and 22 of last year. It took them 10 months to come up with a ruling! It’s routine that Canadian court decisions, especially respecting to government overreach, come down long after they can provide any remedy for the parties involved — and far too late for future politicians to feel any deterrent effect against overstepping their authority. If we’re to be badly governed, and if bad governments are to be badly overseen by courts, could we at least make it quicker?"
Jonathan Kay on X - "The student union at @ubcokanagan (part of @UBC) denied an application for a student Conservative Party Club. And amazingly, the student union’s VP Internal flat out admitted that the decision was made on the basis of partisan political considerations"
Conservative Club ratified after UBC Okanagan Students' Union review - "UPDATE: March 13, 10:20 p.m.
The UBC Okanagan Students' Union Board of Directors met on Thursday evening to review it's decision to deny the Okanagan Conservative Club's application to be an official campus club. "After careful consideration, the Board has ratified the club, ensuring that the decision was made in alignment with our values of equity, inclusion and respect for all students," said the Students' Union...
UPDATE: March 13, 3:15 p.m.Politicians, campus clubs and members of the public have spoken out to condemn the UBC Okanagan Student Union's (SUO) decision to deny official club status to the UBCO Conservatives Club. According to an email from the Student Union that was leaked on X, the Conservative Club's application was rejected after "concerns were raised regarding the political stance of the party your club would represent," despite the fact that there is a Young Liberals Club at UBCO. The directors suggested that the students applying to form the Conservatives Club "take a more neutral stance to ensure inclusivity," saying that the SUO's concerns relate to certain views associated with the political party could make UBCO students feel excluded or unwelcome. The Young Liberals of Canada Okanagan, are now standing in support of an official campus Conservative Club. "There is indefensible hypocrisy evident in their supporting our Liberal club to exist. The freedom to express diverse opinions on our campus is crucial. It is important for all of us to be exposed to and challenged by ideas we may not agree with," said the Young Liberals of Canada Okanagan in a statement on Instagram...
Original:
A leaked email posted to X regarding the Student Union at UBC Okanagan has caught the attention of B.C. Conservative leader John Rustad. On Wednesday night (March 12), Jonathan Kay, an advisor for the free speech union of Canada, posted a screenshot to X of an email from the Students' Union UBC Okanagan (SUO) rejecting a student's application to create their own Conservative Party Club in the union. The reasons for denying the application for a Conservative Party Club on campus had to do with some directors' concerns with certain views of the party, “particularly regarding the Black and LGBTQ+ communities - could make students from these groups feel excluded or unwelcome.” It was suggested that the club take a more neutral stance to ensure inclusivity. The email also stated that there was no appeal process for the board’s decision at this time. However, since the email was leaked it is now being reported that the SUO has been called into an emergency board meeting on the matter. The email also stated that there was no appeal process for the board’s decision at this time. However, since the email was leaked it is now being reported that the SUO has been called into an emergency board meeting on the matter. In a SUO release, it stated it remains committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse campus environment where all students feel respected and heard. The SUO is non-partisan and claims it supports open dialogue and differing perspectives."
_s.a.m.e.m.e.m.e_ on X - "One of the less talked about but craziest parts of the Biden admin was when a clear recession hit in 2022 and there was a full court press from the media asking "what even *is* a recession, anyway?" along with Wikipedia and THE DICTIONARY changing the definition of the word"
Sherman McCoy on X - "The Fallout subreddit removed a post from the _creator of Fallout_ saying that Fallout was not anti-capitalism, but anti-war bc it offended the mods sensibilities Ever since The Last Jedi, Internet content moderation exists for the 5,000 leftmost people in the world. Once they removed the “bots” from The Last Jedi’s RT audience score and replaced it with a fake number they realized they could do anything. Redefine “recession.” Cover up Biden’s senility. Anything."
Guardian Media Group Forced to Apologize, Pay Damages to Douglas Murray over Racism Smear - "The Guardian Media Group was forced to apologize to Douglas Murray on Tuesday for falsely accusing him of “supporting violent racist attacks” during anti-immigration protests in the U.K. last year, after the British author won his libel suit against the media company in a London court."
Douglas Murray on X - "I should have noted that the Guardian group (which had to apologise and retract their falsehoods in court this morning) left X last year because of alleged ‘disinformation’ on this platform…"
Damn Daily Mail and Fox News spreading lies, falsehoods and disinformation!
Basil the Great on X - "In honour of @DouglasKMurray winning against the Guardian Group in court and because they've been sadly missed on X since they left. I thought it time we took a stroll down memory lane and revisit some of the very worst from the Guardian Feel free to add your own 🧵"
Insurrection Barbie on X - "I hate to tell you Democrats, but the economy will be just fine. I guess it’s back to everybody’s Hitler as a campaign strategy for 2026."
Mike Engleman🇺🇲 on X - "It's all they have. Hate, identity politics, and racism."
SYIP extremely overhyped : r/SingaporeEats - "Most cafes here are overhyped. They're just variations of Melbourne-style coffee served with the same generic Western menu set in Taiwanese or Korean inspired decor with the same Spotify 'cozy cafe' playlist, with the only local touch being an ondeh ondeh cake they probably source from the same place as everyone else."
Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche - "Language is universal, but it has few indisputably universal characteristics, with cross-linguistic variation being the norm. For example, languages differ greatly in the number of syllables they allow, resulting in large variation in the Shannon information per syllable. Nevertheless, all natural languages allow their speakers to efficiently encode and transmit information. We show here, using quantitative methods on a large cross-linguistic corpus of 17 languages, that the coupling between language-level (information per syllable) and speaker-level (speech rate) properties results in languages encoding similar information rates (~39 bits/s) despite wide differences in each property individually: Languages are more similar in information rates than in Shannon information or speech rate. These findings highlight the intimate feedback loops between languages’ structural properties and their speakers’ neurocognition and biology under communicative pressures. Thus, language is the product of a multiscale communicative niche construction process at the intersection of biology, environment, and culture."
i.e. In long winded languages like French, people speak faster
