201–210 of 402 posts
Sometimes it feels like we're living in the second Victorian age. Living sanitized lives and speaking sanitized language, with recurring bouts of moral panic. Even in the early 00s when I was in college everything seemed to have become lamer than it was just a decade prior. 20th century libertinism peaked in the 70s and has been in retreat since then.
My interactions with Stanford administrators convinced me that I didn't need a graduate degree and that I would never donate to the school. Beyond that, I also got totally fed up trying to figure out how to get definitive positive permission to do anything. At one point I asked facilities if I could build an oven to cure composites. They reviewed and approved the plans. But when some other group within the school saw…
This is the craziest part to me. There doesn't seem to be any rational reason for it other than wanting absolute control for its own sake.
My interactions with Stanford administrators convinced me that I didn't need a graduate degree and that I would never donate to the school. Beyond that, I also got totally fed up trying to figure out how to get definitive positive permission to do anything. At one point I asked facilities if I could build an oven to cure composites. They reviewed and approved the plans. But when some other group within the school saw…
There are hundreds of stories like this out of Caltech as well. Ultimately it makes one believe the saying that it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission, and that getting things done relies on this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons_(rocket_engineer)
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Multiculturalism does work. The way it works is, people with different cultures / wants / ideas form their own communities and mind their own business. And when someone feels part of one community and part of another, they band together with others in the middle and create a third community. Multiculturalism often fails because people on all sides get offended too easily. Maybe it’s my personality but I really can’t…
> Multiculturalism does work. The way it works is, people with different cultures / wants / ideas form their own communities and mind their own business. You're describing nationalism.
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> a peek into the bureaucrat's vision for America It’s not the bureaucrats vision. That attributes the individuals happily working myopically in their pigeonholes with far to much omniscience. Second, it’s not a future tense vision of America. It’s come to pass with single family zoning and rampant HOAs and sterile “luxury” high rises.
I'm a big YIMBY but the source of this problem is not NIMBYism.
It is absolutely impossible to take this article seriously, because the author refuses to acknowledge the un-fucking-believably fraught legacy that the Greek fraternity system has, at Stanford and at every other school. > Driven by a fear of uncontrollable student spontaneity and a desire to enforce equity on campus Oh, yeah, Stanford’s really afraid of “student spontaneity.” They’re definitely not afraid of organiza…
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>unless it passes some bureaucrat's standard of diversity? That is what was said, but not why the school is attacking student organizations. Any student organization presents a liability to the school. An outdoor club, something with the schools name on it where student go out and teach each other how to ski on glaciers or climb rocks? The schools are listening to their lawyers, their insurance schemes. They are agai…
I don’t think so. Stanford has several suicides a year. Any theoretical liability from and outdoor accident is a rounding error on their total liability for student deaths, morbid though it is.
For that reason, fighting white supremacy is the keys to the kingdom for despot administrators, and the definition of white supremacy is undergoing an accelerating expansion that will soon extend past the edges of the universe.
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Nature activities are "endemically white"? Is this a serious comment? Even if we buy into the ridiculous naturalistic fallacy here, it's completely ahistorical: our modern history is primarily the history of white countries colonizing and industrializing nonwhite countries and alienating them from nature in the process. Suburban white America is arguably even more alienated from nature than city dwellers, in its rede…
> Nature activities are "endemically white"? Is this a serious comment? The Unbearable Whiteness of Hiking and How to Solve It - https://www.sierraclub.org/outdoors/2016/12/unbearable-white... Why Are Our Parks So White? - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/opinion/sunday/diversify-... The unbearable whiteness of cycling - https://theconversation.com/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-cycl... Five ways to make the climate m…
Why would you make your housing or social life, or indeed your weird edgy experiences of whatever kind, dependent on the same institution teaching your classes? That's the actual root cause. And I understand that some of these institutions require living on campus, at least in the first years, which is absolutely insane.