Oh I’m sure, but it seemed like a different beast. American Idol was really tuned into the characters and personal drama, there was never that much meta-drama. Almost like the Super Bowl vs. World Cup

Isn’t it the inverse of that? And Hemingway always struck me as more of a “write drunk, edit buzzed” guy

As for middle school, exactly what did you learn that you think is so useful for daily life?

Off the top of my head: basic biology so I’m not dumb enough to be antivax. History subjects that require more than elementary maturity so maybe we can avoid another Holocaust. Enough physics, ecology and chemistry that I can comprehend how climate change is happening. How basic statistics work so I’m not completely lost when someone throws around misleading data.

None of that is automatic from a 4th grade education and is crucial to be a functioning citizen. Learning to take unquestioned GPT answers is not a substitute for actually learning any of those.

You either went to a painfully bad pipeline of schools or were too dumb to recognize the important parts.

Good god, if you went through an entire education and don’t realize how fucked of a take that is I don’t know what to say. Go try again at a different school maybe?

The problem is offloading critical thinking to a blackbox of questionably motivated design. Did you use it to solve problems or did you use it to find a sufficient approximation of a solution? If you can’t deduce why the given solution works then it is literally unknowable if your problem is solved, you’re just putting faith in an algorithm.

There are also political reasons we’ll never get luxury gay space communism from it. General Ai is the wet dream of every authoritarian: an unverifiable, omnipresent, first line source of truth that will shift the narrative to whatever you need.

The brain is a muscle and critical thinking is trained through practice; not thinking will never be a shortcut for thinking.

Forgive my American ignorance, but do people actually watch Eurovision as entertainment? I feel like I’ve only ever heard of it as an arena for politics/protest/controversy, never “hey listen to this great song that won”. Is the controversy part of the draw?

I’m starting to think you’ve never been to college

“I’m too poor to not give money to a regressive university”

Bama has over 40k students enrolled and less than 200 bothered to even protest this shitbag giving a commencement speech. There wasn’t even a movement to skip attending the event at all.

I know college students at minor schools, I know people who work in admissions at major universities, I know grad students who are single parents. I know people who handle scholarships and grant funding.

Yeah college is an expensive bureaucracy and not having money makes it harder. But trust me when I say that anyone scraping by at a flagship university has a way out. This isn’t cold hearted bootstraps, the university system is probably the most supportive career institution in America (if you’re a student).

There are a plethora of ways to show you give a shit and resources to help you do it. The people still at Bama don’t give a shit.

They’re college students. They already moved to live in Tuscaloosa, have temp/seasonal jobs and all of their possessions fit in 2-3 suitcases. Millions of students accomplish this every year for much weaker reasons. Stop acting like it’s uprooting a family of 4.

Like I said, there are 13 other institutions that are also in state where you can get the same aid. And that doesn’t even matter for the 67% from out of state, they could save money on the switch.

You have a pretty limited view of higher ed if you think there’s no way to attend a university that doesn’t have these problems.

How many publicly funded universities are in Alabama?

And how many are within a reasonable distance of [insert town here]?

67% of Bama’s student body is from out of state. The in state students are no more than a 5 hour drive from anywhere else in the state. So again, 14.

We’re not talking about a cheap commuter school or an accessible community college. The in-state cost for a 4 year degree is 138k. There are plenty of schools with the same admission requirements for the same sticker price.

You can get a similar academic, athletic, and campus experiences at other places. If you don’t bother, then you care more about the crimson A branding than being associated with scumbags.

That’s not the case here at all? Do you know how the higher education system in the USA works?

I’m not judging every single person in Alabama. I’m judging the students that choose to enroll or remain at the University of Alabama when they regularly give shitty people platforms like this or host them at football games.

There are 60 colleges and universities in Alabama and 1000s more across the country. It’s not uprooting your life to change schools, and Bama isn’t exactly an academic powerhouse anyway. If you don’t find one that fits your goals and isn’t massively regressive that’s on you.

These aren’t high school kids tied to an underfunded school district. They’re young adults who explicitly chose to attend and not transfer to any other public university. You’re allowed to judge them however you want.