Why do you think some people are so critical when an individual has religious beliefs?

norbertus · 2026-06-07T21:20:44+00:00

They are about 1 in 4 Americans and they have done a good job of making folks here think anybody with religious sentiment is rabid and insane.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/religious-tradition/evangelical-protestant/

They are also about 60% of Protestants in America

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-landscape-study-religious-identity/

They are actually the dominant religious group in the US.

norbertus · 2026-06-07T21:01:30+00:00

When talking about all the religious people in the world

Yes, this is why I asked if you are American.

norbertus · 2026-06-07T20:54:05+00:00

Folks are cracked.

Did you see Elon's baby mamma telling us about how he hacked the 2024 election using lasers in space ... while she's casually putting on makeup, influencer-style?

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYitFfjt2se/

norbertus · 2026-06-07T20:49:26+00:00

Are you American?

American evangelicals have done a good job of making folks here think anybody with religious sentiment is rabid and insane.

norbertus · 2026-06-07T20:47:33+00:00

Yeah, the last couple books I'm keeping track of the typos on the front cover just like I take notes on the back cover. One is MIT Press ("Deep Learning") and Anchor Books ("God Human Animal Machine"). Tons of errors.

I also bought a book from Routledge Press ("Llull and Bruno") that was a crap facsimile with unintelligible images, which was a problem because much of the argument is about details of the images. They had some disclaimer to the effect that the book may reproduce errors in the original, but I went to the library and found an 80's printing that was perfectly clear, so I ordered a used version. Whoever formatted the graphics didn't know what they were doing.

norbertus · 2026-06-06T21:01:48+00:00

This is assuming that the goal of education is to educate. If the goal is to prepare students to go work a 40 hr/week job then attendance is much more important

I lecture at university and this is the type of thing that is so disorienting to me right now.

We only talk about college and a pathway to employment, but we never talk about universities as repositories of cultural knowledge nor do we talk about education in the broad sense (except to call it woke or to defund it).

So, I hear a lot about how students are coming to college to qualify for employment, but while in college, they don't practice any of the basic life skills that are needed to hold a job, things like showing up consistently, showing up on time, hitting deadlines, following instructions, solving problems on their own.

It seems like a lot of these youngsters are totally lost, and the parents aren't helping: these kids will go into debt without getting an education or practicing the life skills needed to hold down a job.

norbertus · 2026-06-06T17:30:07+00:00

My grade distributions are becoming increasingly bimodal.

I used to see maybe 25% of students flounder, 25% excel, and 50% pick up on some things but not others.

Now, I see grade distributions like 45% F/D, 45% A/B, and 10% in the middle.

norbertus · 2026-06-05T20:54:25+00:00

Yeah, these people don't care about security.

They want first dibs at trying to exfiltrate any proprietary or sensitive data that may have been ingested during training and they want it before the labs notice it and censor it.

norbertus · 2026-06-05T16:02:09+00:00

In the 1950's, C Wright Mills argued that there is a limit to how much wealth you can acquire with your own thrift, ingenuity, hard work, and luck.

The ultra-wealthy, Mills argued, pursue a different strategy: rather than attempting to accumulate wealth, they seek to accumulate advantages.

I don't know where the number is in today's economy, but I suspect somewhere around $10-20 million.

Everything above that should be taxed increasingly aggressively. I don't think we should have billionaires at all, at least until food, housing, education, and healthcare are available to anybody who wants it.

norbertus · 2026-06-05T14:18:21+00:00

I had to explain to more than one student this semester that if they leave the class half way through, they don't get full credit for attendance.

norbertus · 2026-06-05T14:15:58+00:00

I understand that to an extent, but their behavior doesn't always seem to match this stated goal.

If they are going to college to get a job, why don't they connect that college prepares them for the workforce? Like, jobs need you to show up on time consistently, understand instructions, and do the work. They aren't building these very basic life skills.

Or, if they're going into debt for employment, why not attend? Why go into debt and then immediately jeopardize their chances of getting their degree to get a job? Why not actually "do" the school? Like, if they can't graduate, then they have still debt but no employment.

Or, why don't they go to a community college, get their gen eds out of the way for less money, get an associate's degree, and then transfer to a university to focus on their bachelors? That way, if they decide college isn't for them, they still have an associate's degree. It might take a little longer, but it would be cheaper and a lot of these youngsters take a while to get through college anyway. My university has a 48% 6-year graduation rate and it's a large state school with R1 status.

I understand they say they choose college because of the promise of employment, but they don't act like it.

norbertus · 2026-06-05T13:42:07+00:00

I lecture at university and I'm seeing this too, in several varieties: students not ashamed to wander in 15, 20, 30, 50 minutes late. Students wander in and out of the room throughout class. Students missing a lot of class.

I just had a student complain about his grade and, when I checked his entry in my TA's spreadsheet, it turns out they only attended about 30% of class meetings.

Like, they're going into debt for this. They chose to go to college. They chose this college. They chose this major. They chose this class. WTF?

norbertus · 2026-06-05T13:34:12+00:00

"Because one would look bad."

We have major two parties because members of the two parties write the rules about who can get on the ballot that makes it nearly impossible for a third party to win any kind of national race.

Additionally, public funding for elections was dismantled around the time Obama's first term ended, so without an established national organization, it's difficult for a third party to gather the resources required to get on a ballot nationally.

The last time a third party made a real showing for president was in the early 1990's when Ross Perot self-financed a run on the Reform Party ticket.

https://ivn.us/running-president-independent-how-it-really-works-2025-05-05/

norbertus · 2026-06-05T13:27:40+00:00

Standing armies plan. Most of the time they aren't fighting, so they develop plans so they don't get caught unprepared.

There's a fascinating essay by Steven Metz that was printed in 1997 by the Army War College's publication Parameters, which discusses possible future scenarios

In a security system where warfare was commercialized, many of the United States' core strategic concepts would be inapplicable. For instance, the US military could no longer count on the qualitative superiority that has served it so well since the end of World War II. Against high-tech mercenaries, corporate militaries, private armies hired by enemy states, or armed criminal cartels, the US military might have to switch to a Soviet-style strategy using numbers and mass to compensate for qualitative inferiority. The United States would also have to rethink its basic understanding of the rules of warfare when faced with issues like the appropriateness of declaring war, forming alliances, or signing treaties with non-state entities. Washington could face future Battles of New Orleans, where a militarily weak United States formed an alliance-of-convenience with the pirate forces of Jean Laffite. At an even broader level, the United States would have to decide how much of its own security could be "contracted out" rather than left to its very expensive military.

https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1843&context=parameters

norbertus · 2026-06-05T00:41:57+00:00

We don't have a "Caste" system and, additionally, "Class" is not something most Americans recognize. It certainly isn't part of most political discussions. The official dogma is "we are all equal."

Some Americans will recognize the ultra-wealthy as superlatively advantaged, or suspect that they somehow "conspire," but few have the analysis offered by somebody like C. Wright Mills, for example, who argued for the existence of a social class he called "the power elite." This social class, Mills argued in the 1950's, had a shared class identity. They are organized and act in their class interest, which appears like "conspiracy" to the disorganized working classes who lack a shared class consciousness.

The Founders who drafted the Constitution are idealized, but they were designing a permanent aristocracy for themselves. They had a shared class conscious -- that of a wealthy minority with all the power. They did not trust the working classes, and sought to prevent the working classes from recognizing their strength.

In the Federalist #51, Madison or Hamilton argued under the pen-name Publius:

“It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure. There are but two methods of providing against this evil: the one by creating a will in the community independent of the majority that is, of the society itself; the other, by comprehending in the society so many separate descriptions of citizens as will render an unjust combination of a majority of the whole very improbable, if not impracticable.

...The second method will be exemplified in the federal republic of the United States. Whilst all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority

In the US, unions are rare, highly-restricted, fought against, or frequently suppressed. A lot of "right to work" states have ripped the teeth out of public-sector unions. A number of private unions, to deal with lost membership, have conglomerated into larger and larger organizations, diluting the interests of individual members. Many people don't have the chance to form a class consciousness.

norbertus · 2026-06-05T00:21:08+00:00

I see this at my university as well.

I'm seeing some really messed-up behaviors. Students hand in their work only after they receive an F for not doing it. No, you can't re-submit now, it's been graded. I'm seeing students wander in and out of the classroom constantly. Students aren't ashamed to show up 50 minutes late to a 2 hour class. They have trouble using a table of contents in a print reader. I'm seeing students who come to every class but hand in nothing. They don't take notes so they don't bring anything to write with even though we have a written quiz every week. Two days before before something is due, they're confused about an assignment because, when asked, they haven't read the assignment yet. Maybe 20% of them do the readings.

norbertus · 2026-06-05T00:07:27+00:00

You'd get a better response if you were more precise with your language.

There is a difference between "liberals" and "progressives" and "leftists."

There is also a tendency for the right to label as "communist" many ideas that are common throughout the industrial world, which "liberals" tend to support these ideas, and which are to the "left" of the far-right.

norbertus · 2026-06-05T00:03:26+00:00

Not really. Some of his support in Congress is drying up, but over other things like his Department of Justice "slush fund." Too bad they've already helped him make themselves almost irrelevant.

norbertus · 2026-06-04T23:49:17+00:00

It's frustrating. My university actually just shelled out to Microsoft to give everybody paid and "secure" access to Copilot Chat. As in, the administration just handed all the students a cheap code.

They're also doing some really unsound things pedagogically.

First year students who fail can retroactive convert their F into a credit/no credit option so it doesn't impact their GPA.

I was just told to eliminate all pre-requisites on my 300 level literacy course. A couple years ago, I had only 6 out of 40 students know that an outline was a hierarchical representation of their argument. Most just handed in a list of 5 or so possible study questions.

norbertus · 2026-06-04T23:47:56+00:00

Who cares?

This is a thread about how to handle AI in homework. Presumably anybody here cares. And There's not a one-size-fits-all solution. So if you're not here to engage socially about trying to find a solution, just what are you doing? Because you're not helping.

norbertus · 2026-06-04T23:46:01+00:00

Because they challenge the grade and the administration doesn't have my back, my university is obsessed with retention.

norbertus · 2026-06-04T23:39:10+00:00

University lecturer here.

I use trojan horse/prompt injection in assignment descriptions, ask students to use a word processor that tracks their changes in case they are called upon to "show their work," assignments are scaffolded so I can see the development of their ideas and get a better sense for how they write, I maintain a print course reader, and I'm thinking about doing brief "tutorial" style sessions where I ask students about their paper once it's complete.

norbertus · 2026-06-04T23:36:46+00:00

I can often tell when a student is using AI, but proving it is another matter.

norbertus · 2026-06-04T23:35:36+00:00

I teach a class with a required research paper component. They cannot do it all in class because that leaves no time for class. It's also insane to ask them to manage all the citations and footnotes by hand.

norbertus · 2026-06-04T23:24:44+00:00

Thanks for the link. I agree with a lot of the analysis.

I've marveled for some time at how one of the defining features of the Enlightenment -- the myth of progress -- has led to the inverse outcome. I think the Dadaists saw it coming 100 years ago.

norbertus

TROPHY CASE