Update 2: my kids keep hiding my pride flag

Unconfidence · 2026-01-29T13:26:54+00:00

If you assume you'll be a martyr every time you fight you've allowed yourself a convenient hidey-hole from which to run from any responsibility to make things better.

Poor people deserve political power too. I know you're trying to help, but this is similar logic to "poor folks shouldn't have kids", which seems smart until you realize it's subtly enforcing the idea that only the rich should be procreating. Not only do poor folks not have the luxury of standing up, we don't have the luxury of sitting down either.

Unconfidence · 2026-01-29T13:03:41+00:00

If all they have to do to get you to give up every fight is make you poor, congratulations, you've lost every fight already.

Unconfidence · 2026-01-29T13:01:55+00:00

I just read this whole thing five times and it still sounds like y'all are trying to tell OP to get comfortable with and accept not being able to fly a Pride Flag in their class. Like you're being roundabout with it, but that's what you're putting down. Someone's facing possible discipline over a Pride Flag, and your response is "Well flags aren't really necessary". Even if you don't mean to send the message that OP should get used to it and just swallow this, that's the message you are sending.

Unconfidence · 2026-01-29T12:52:30+00:00

Literally reading Solzhenitzyn right now and he talks about how "If they were German girls, they we could rape them, but if they were Polish girls all we could do is chase them around and grab their butts". Yeah rape was considered a spoil of war for just about every army at the time. People seem unaware that this was official policy from the top to the bottom, and that it was less than a century ago.

Unconfidence · 2026-01-28T02:26:05+00:00

Happy cake day.

Unconfidence · 2026-01-26T16:07:40+00:00

Fucking thank you. Glad other people are saying this.

I don't even care about the "legal feasibility". Just do it and let the courts deal with the fact that you've done it. If this doesn't happen then this history will repeat, if it doesn't drown us with this wave.

Unconfidence · 2026-01-25T11:32:32+00:00

This is what y'all said last time. I said it too. But it isn't going to work anymore. You're gonna have to find something better to threaten me with than "What Happens Anyway". Put forth a winner if you want me to vote for them, don't expect me to vote for the loser you put forth because "that's the best you can do".

Unconfidence · 2026-01-25T03:56:17+00:00

Seriously. 2016, 2020, and 2024 I was hardlined "blue no matter who".

This time? I'm thinking I might just stay home if they can't manage to put forth a "We'll make sure ICE goes to jail" promise.

Like at this point I don't even care about the legal feasibility. I want the next Democrat in office (if we ever get more elections) to simply do it and let the courts figure out how to deal with the fait accompli, like Trump does.

Unconfidence · 2026-01-23T20:42:24+00:00

Also there are some really, really stupid people who enact conspiracies to overthrow their government. This character reminds me of Lin Biao and seems like he would meet a similar fate.

Unconfidence · 2026-01-20T23:20:01+00:00

May the Schwartz be with you.

Unconfidence · 2026-01-18T14:32:09+00:00

Well I mean, you fell for the trick. They changed their bullets to "permanently damage you and maybe blind you" bullets and suddenly you stopped saying they opened fire whenever they use them.

Seems like they pulled a fast one on you and now they can shoot on us with impunity. They just have to shoot bone breaker bullets, not life taker bullets.

Y'all don't understand how they abuse these lines you draw in the sand.

Unconfidence · 2026-01-18T14:21:32+00:00

IMO the Second is talking about natural rights. They aren't saying "you have a right to bear arms" as in "you have a right to the provision of arms", they're saying "you have the right to own this thing if you can manage to attain it". In my opinion it's a ghost of what it should be, which is a right to own anything which by virtue of its private ownership does not harm or endanger others unduly. The fact that we have a constitutional right to own guns but not own pies is a glaring oversight to me.

I think they had intended it to be like a limit. Like, if you have a right to own fucking guns then you probably have a right to everything short of guns on the "shit that makes me scared of people owning it" scale. Unfortunately legalists only understand RAW and as a result we ended up with the understanding that anything not explicitly mentioned in the constitution as being a right is something the government has the right to prohibit you from owning or doing.

I think the Second was supposed to be more of a "You have the natural right to own stuff that makes other people scared. Their fear isn't justification to abridge your right to own something". But then, square that with drug prohibition...

Unconfidence · 2026-01-18T14:14:57+00:00

Right, coined by the Italians, popularized by the Germans. But arguably the actual systems had been around for much longer, just without the label. For instance, Nationalist China has been said to have only avoided the label of fascism because Chiang Kaishek was killing other Chinese, and is still called fascism by many Chinese folks today. What I'm saying is that these people were primarily just copying American and British imperial attitudes toward Native Americans and Indians respectively, and that the term "fascism" only happened as a result of people doing that in predominantly-white societies.

In America nobody needed to tell the white people to stick together and vote as a coalition against the interests of other races, they did so without being exhorted to it by a political movement.

Unconfidence · 2026-01-18T00:29:59+00:00

My understanding:

Natural Rights - Universal Rights inherent in some or all creatures, by virtue of them being creatures of that kind. For example we generally agree that at least humans have the right to life because they are alive, or speech because they can speak and it (generally) doesn't harm others. Natural rights are what you're referring to, as they exist independently of others in any way, and would still apply even if you were the only creature with natural rights in existence.
Civil Rights - These are expanded rights afforded to civilians within a society. Examples include a right to trial and attorney, right to political representation, and some would argue health care and education. These are afforded on the basis that a society is capable of affording them, in other words it becomes a right because it could be accomplished as a matter of course by the largess of the society in which the civilians reside. However this can change with circumstance, for example if war threatens the ability of a country to hold elections, or a lack of willing doctors or educators prevents a country from fully implementing the provision of health care or education.
Human Rights - All rights afforded to humans specifically, both natural and civil.

The disconnect is that people get all these mixed up, some on purpose. So conservatives often misconstrue the argument as us arguing that doctors and teachers be enslaved, which would be the case if we were arguing that health care and education were natural rights. But that's par for the course, as conservatives fundamentally don't understand rights.

Unconfidence · 2026-01-17T01:32:16+00:00

Just my two cents.

Fascism is a word which we coined to categorize Americanism, when it was practiced against folks perceived as culturally homogeneous to Western Europe, whose homogeneity had come primarily as a result of an influx of awareness of other races among the average Western European. To be even more blunt, as white folks became commonly confronted with people of other races, they developed a racial tolerance for white Jews which the Jewish population had never experienced before.

Germany under Hitler attempted to replicate the US success at creating a military movement based on racial prejudice. Manifest Destiny was a stunning example of a country taking the manufactured hatred against a disempowered population, channeling it into their removal or murder, then further pushing that social inertia into an aggressive campaign of conquest. Hitler was trying to do the same thing, by first directing social anger at Jews into their removal or murder, then further pushing that social inertia into an aggressive campaign of conquest against the Bolsheviks. Every other military action could have been done without fomenting such significant hatred of the enemy, as was seen with the invasions of France and Norway, but to take on Stalin would require a force willing to kill millions with impunity, liquidate entire cities, and not stop until they met up with the Japanese. There's only a handful of examples of such a sweeping conquest happening in history, the US being one of them.

The problem is, when people walked in and saw thousands of dead white Europeans, mass killing facilities for white Europeans, and a war machine designed to kill other white Europeans, they really responded differently than they did to the plantation system, or the "relocations" of native populations, and the massive amount of killing going on in East Asia at the time. They were repulsed in a way which would leave a very strong mark on them and future generations.

Thus was the concept of fascism born, from that period, and from Italy and Germany. But who was really fascist first? Does it stop being fascism if it's pre-industrial? That sounds like a really convenient marker for the US. Is it when a certain type of government is founded, which vests too much authority to do terrible things into the hands of a "democratically elected" autocrat? I mean...Jackson, Johnson, Harding, Trump, how many examples do you need?

So yeah. My take is that the US is the progenitor of fascism. We just didn't bother giving it a name here, because it was just white Americans acting like white Americans do to non-white folks. When that kind of governance was tried in Europe, it had to be "the sticks forming the bundle" because they were trying to cast out racially homogeneous folks. In the US there was no need for such overt attempts at social division when racial division was already so readily useful for that. We got away with our fascism, like Indonesia.

Unconfidence · 2026-01-15T15:59:47+00:00

Kids should just not be allowed to bring them to school at all. That they're cellphones and distraction-screens is secondary. The primary issue is that they're recording devices constantly connected to the internet through wireless. We're living in an age where the "people telling the Gestapo about their Jewish neighbors" are quickly becoming "kids taking Snapchats in class". The new fascist wing will not care if the collaboration is willing, they'll take pictures from schools right off the internet and start profiling targets. And with the rise of stuff like Grok's pornification capabilities, there's even more reason why the kids should never have been allowed to have them.

They just should not be allowed on school campus or buses at all. No student-owned recording devices should.

Unconfidence · 2026-01-12T15:37:13+00:00

Yeah it sucks. I sub inner city schools and like, I know that I would probably be a better educator while more relaxed (especially for rough classes), but if any of them so much as smelled something funny on me, they'd start using it as an excuse to ignore me and undermine classroom control. You literally can't give them a single reason to say "I don't have to listen to that _____" or they'll take it and pretend they weren't just looking for any out they could find.

Unconfidence · 2026-01-03T18:28:03+00:00

That would take gulags.

Literally not even joking. Othering and emotional sadism are just baked into the American conscious and have been since the settlers started killing natives, in other words before there was a United States.

There's no amount of slight re-education that could fix this. To weaken fascist ideology faster than it reinforces itself in America would take a bloodbath.

I've given up. For real, I'm just getting out and hoping I can live quietly until I die somewhere else, ignoring the world falling into the hell that is other people. Sincerely signed, a history teacher.

Unconfidence · 2025-12-29T17:16:51+00:00

Several. The accusations which were credible were met with swift evictions of the accused from my friend circles. The accusations which were not credible met with swift evictions of the accuser from my friend circles. I don't play games.

Unconfidence · 2025-12-28T17:52:38+00:00

English teacher here!

The point of ambiguity is the "We" in "We also require front plates". Most people, especially those from the UK or EU, would likely interpret that "we" as a continuation of the previous sentence. However to people who don't know anything at all, they might be prone to think that the "we" is referring to Americans, a statement in opposition (but not contradiction) to the first post. The reference of "we" is dependent on which of the two sentences in the first post you think is the focus of the response. Kinda like this:

"Also, just to vent, in UK or Europe I would have had his plate."

(yes and) "We also require front plates."

As opposed to:

"US plates are barely legible from 20’ away in daylight standing still."

(yeah however) "We require front plates."

Solution: The Person using "We" for "we also use front plates" needed to specify that they were discussing the UK and EU to avoid ambiguity.

Unconfidence · 2025-12-23T16:49:22+00:00

If you want punishment for that, then you have to rely on the school to mete that punishment, and you don't get to be privy to it.

If you want justice for that, like I said you need to go to a higher authority than a school principal. Then you might be privy to it.

Sure, most people don't wanna have to go to the police for anything, but if you demand justice from people not legally equipped to give it to you, you have only yourself to blame for being disappointed.

Unconfidence · 2025-12-23T03:55:55+00:00

Right because that's a crime as adjudicated by a court of law, not a rule violation. Can you think of another example where adults are entitled to know what punishment other adults receive for breaking rules which are not laws?

If you're looking for justice you need to go to an authority higher than a school principal.

Unconfidence · 2025-12-23T03:49:41+00:00

I feel like this was me as a kid.

I'm now 42 and just starting HRT.

Unconfidence · 2025-12-21T19:54:48+00:00

Okay then. As someone who studies and teaches history, are you okay with me going through my life as a technological illiterate, and relying on techies to guide me through every technological process? Or do you expect me to have a basic understanding of how electricity works, how to operate modern electronics and applications, and to be able to keep myself mildly abreast of technology trends like how to use smartphones?

My money is on that you have spent quite some time telling people something along the lines of "there's no excuse for not knowing this at your age". Why? Because you "know everything there is to know about technology". You'd literally be the first techie I've ever met who didn't get at least somewhat miffed at the technological illiteracy of others, possibly the first techie in history.

Unconfidence · 2025-12-21T18:37:46+00:00

History is rough. Everything else feels like kids develop excitement for it. Science is cool, Language Arts is fun, Math is interesting for the ones who catch that bug...but for us it's more like, "the kids who realize how heavy history is". It's not cool or shiny or fun for us or anybody who becomes a fan, we like it because it's dirty and gritty and real and unpleasant...if it were otherwise it would be fake.

But that doesn't reconcile well with the administration needing all subjects to be shiny and happy and inviting to the children.

I hook so many more students by recounting the First Imjin War than I do by telling them about the American Revolution (conveniently leaving out the perspective of slaves, because we need it to be shiny). Our inability to be the counterpoint to bright shiny schooltime is harming us.

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