In Gisèle Pelicot’s place, I would completely refuse the trial, the publicity, all of it. Mind you, I’m not saying she should have refused. I’m saying I would have. In my worldview, I’m at least equally responsible for the relationships I create. Once again, I’m not saying Pelicot is responsible. I’m saying I am. I’m an active agent of my life, and if my half-a-century marriage were to lead to such ugliness, I’d care about nothing before figuring out why I constituted it this way. I’d definitely not want to spend the last few good years of my life on being a public spectacle.

I respect Pelicot’s choice but I really don’t get her lionization on social media. People are wailing that she’s the person of the century but that would be really sad for the century. A decade of being completely asleep to her own life and a passivity of extraordinary proportions do not merit all the gushing.

Education is a very faddy field. The newest fad has the clunky title of “social-emotional learning”, and it’s as dumb as you can gather from the title:

Much of what is termed “social-emotional learning” does not stem from developmental psychology, cognitive science, or neurology. The creators of these programs often lack the academic or professional background necessary to navigate this “social-emotional” space, yet they create programs that promise to address kids’ cognitive and emotional needs. They treat correlation as causation, reduce complex processes to linear constructs, and lack a developmental lens.

Most social-emotional curricula promise that kids will become little high-functioning adults—calm, organized, optimistic, and rational problem-solvers—forgetting that young people are still growing and learning (and that they are human). Yet, these expensive programs are apparently too compelling for administrators to pass up.

https://x.com/KarinMariaPsyD/status/1869715601872089524?t=wFzCPYASkPF89BJ0yGEt1Q&s=19

Most adults are not “calm, organized, optimistic, and rational problem-solvers.” To expect children to be that way is nuts. It’s not even a desirable thing that children should be like that. Experimenters in the field of education are promising to engineer away childhood, and they’ll fail. We need to stop humoring them and tolerating their inept theorizing.

My daughter uses “the latter and the former” correctly in casual conversations, and my students use apostrophe to denote the plural.

Putin said today that he started the war because he was bored. I expect an apology from everybody who kept repeating “NATO expansion” like an overheated parrot.

Even this they can’t get right. He said “dovboyob”. People whose languages have an impoverished swear vocabulary should not even try to understand all of the beautiful shades of meaning of the word “dovboyob”.

I respect Google Translate for this inspired translation:

Good for you, GT. A dovboyob is a dovboyob. Nobody translates whiskey, and it’s the same principle at work.

My friend and I arrived at the pre-Christmas dinner with identically wrapped gifts for each other from the same store. It’s a little, out-of-the-way store, not a chain or bog box, and we never discussed it with each other.

We went there on the same day and apparently said identical things to the shop owner.

“You don’t have an unhealthy attitude to food!” a friend said.

“Yes, I do,” I answered.

“No,” she said. “I’ve known you for years. I would have noticed.”

“I carry this picture with me on my phone,” I explained. “And I look at it often.”

“Oh,” she said.

And once again, the answer in the comments is overwhelmingly Israel.

Tremaine Carroll is a lifelong criminal and biological male. After California passed a law requiring inmates to be housed in prisons based on their “gender identity,” Carroll abruptly declared that he was a woman, and got himself transferred to a women’s prison. Last January, he was accused of raping two women there.

https://womensliberationfront.org/news/da-compelled-to-call-alleged-male-rapist-she/her

People who vote D, please understand that it’s not the messaging, it’s not the platform, and it’s not how you explain it. It’s this. It’s that you offer absolutely nothing other than this in every area of life.

On Duolingo, whenever a grandpa is mentioned, it’s always in the context of “grandpa and his husband.” What I don’t get is, if these grandpas are so gay, how did they become grandpas?