When you say that tattoos look bad people always come out of the damn woodwork saying, “I have right to do whatever I want with my own body!” Sure do. I agree with that 100%.
But I also have a right to say, “Damn, that looks like absolute crap.”
Those rights aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, both need to exist to have a free society.
I wish there were a way to measure “practical literacy” vs. “can recognize some words and sound them out.”
That said, let’s talk about what’s pinging around in my brain. Literacy rates worldwide went from about 12% in the early 1800s to about 88% in 2016.
I suspect that 2016 number is about the peak of what I deemed above to be “practical literacy.” Already, large portions — perhaps even the majority — of Gen Z is not even close to being literate in any real sense. This will probably only get worse as TikTok and similar scourges take over the collective culture. Literacy is now passé in the literal French verb sense — as in “past.” It’s no longer required nor desired for and by the majority of the population.
This ramifications of this change will be just as large an alteration of society as widespread literacy was. And I do not have any idea how it will play out, but that future is well on the way whether we like it or not. In most important aspects, it’s already here.
Loser.
Any vehicle that I drive becomes a “real man’s” vehicle, even a pink convertible VW Golf. My scintillating aura spreads awesomeness over the entire vicinity.
It’s a thing.
I guess it’s because Gen Z can’t and won’t read, but you can post all the reviews and guides in video format you want. I ain’t watchin’ a damn one of them.
Such an enormous, pointless waste of time.
I like Ada Palmer, but here she is completely wrong.
It’s vogueish now in the world of history to claim there were (and can definitionally never be) dark ages or renaissances, and that the Renaissance did not exist. Too much to go into here, but this is the au courant belief for a variety of reasons, among them that these historians are attempting to push back as a political project against the idea that society can be improved as that implies some eugenicist goals.
People like Palmer misrepresent both the causes and the advent of the Renaissance. They portray the people like me who believe the Renaissance is a useful way to divide up history as believing that one morning people woke up and were like, “Hey, it’s the Renaissance! Awesome!” No one, of course, believes that. It was a gradual transition from the Middle Ages, which used to be (for very good reason) referred to as the Dark Ages.
But the reality is that the Dark Ages occurred, and so did the Renaissance, no matter how much clownish historians deny them. For instance:
And no handy-dandy chart, but after the fall of Rome people forgot to how to bake fucking bread. And pottery quality reverted back about two thousand years. Among many, many other apocalyptic changes.
You can actually read writing from the time of people saying, “This is the end of the world and nothing will be good again.” And they were right — for about 800 years.
I hate this modern trend of denying very clear, very obvious occurrences and historical changes for political reasons. Come on, Ada, ain’t nobody gonna CRISPR your baby to have blond hair because you think the Renaissance and the Enlightenment happened.
Yay, guys, we’re ahead of Algeria! Woooo!
(I have no idea where that list is from, but seems about right to me.)
Basically, the right is ruled by people who don't read books and are proud of it, while the left is ruled by people who say "read a book" in response to everything without reading any books themselves. https://t.co/lz0yIP3rOQ
— Noah Smith
(@Noahpinion) March 30, 2025
Largely true, alas. The Right wants to be appear dumb while actually being the dumbasses they valorize, while the Left pretends to be intelligent intellectuals while also being the dumbasses they make fun of and disparage.
None of it is any good.
No one knows the difference now between “conscious” and “conscience.” That one bugs me quite a lot as they are completely different concepts.
But another lost cause, I guess.
I just imagine these people watching like, "Fargo" and being furious that they don't want to fuck Francis McDormand https://t.co/JTQ1uTXXJS
— Jane Coaston
(@janecoaston) March 30, 2025
I can’t understand it either. One of the reasons I like watching UK TV shows is that they have more normal-looking people in them. I don’t need or want every single person in a TV show to look like a damn supermodel. It’s distracting and it’s nothing at all like real life.
I was glad Bella Ramsey got cast in The Last of Us for instance as she looks just like a regular person, not one out of a million beautiful.
We overvalue beauty and undervalue character.
Do you judge people based on the car they drive?
No. But if they have a recumbent bicycle, I can guarantee they are slimy subhumans who subsist on a diet of donkey butts and octopus eyeballs. They abuse kittens and travel to faraway destinations for the explicit purpose of starving orphans.
They all somehow assassinated JFK and canceled Firefly. They are the ones who abscond with a single sock from the dryer, so you end up with no match.
The recumbent bicycle losers sneak in in the middle of the night and put mold on your bread and dust on your knickknacks.
There is no greater force of evil than recumbent bicycle riders. None.
YouTube, bro, why do you keep pushing ambient playlists on me? I don’t listen to ambient music and despise 99.99999% of it. I listen to noisy weirdo music, mostly. What is that about?
I’ve become an expert at hacking, whacking and cracking Mozilla’s anti-user features. Just spent part of the afternoon manually editing a Firefox sqlite database to get around another anti-user feature they claim is for “security” but is really there just because they like being petty authoritarians.
Ain’t no Mozilla clown can hold me down.
My dog tore up my blanket and this was underneath.
I bet you wish you did Nazi that.
The primary unfairness in dating — and one thing incels are completely right about — is that mediocre women get 100x as much attention and interest as even above average men. To receive the attention that a totally average woman gets, you need to be a top 0.1% man.
And that’s actually a pretty huge and psychologically-damaging inequity. It doesn’t make how incels deal with it likely to work or morally correct, but they are not wrong at all with their diagnosis.