DocWatts

What the fuck are you talking about? A civilian was brutally executed by Trump's secret police, and all you can say is that she had a death wish? I'd expect this type of unhinged take on 4chan, not on what's supposed to be a Conscious Politics Forum. Do us all a favor and GTFO until you're able to engage in this space constructively.

The fact that anyone is willing to give Trump's secret police the benefit of the doubt for shooting a 37 year old mom in the face is disgusting, in and of itself.

Jonathan Ross. Remember his name. He murdered a 37 year old mother, shooting her in the face three times from point blank range in front of her house. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/08/ice-agent-minneapolis-shooting

Welp, the criminal syndicate that's currently in charge of the DOJ finally dropped a tiny portion of the Epstein files that they were ordered to release. And what's here is a doozy:

My sense is that the MAGA Cult is much closer to defending pedophilia than they are to admitting they've backed an irredeemable monster.

Honestly, I'm surprised we're not in the midst of a land invasion of Venezuela right now, to distract from Trump's kid-diddling.

The [Redacted] States Of America

Trump wouldn't be Trump if he wasn't grifting: all he's doing is moving money around (illegally) and calling it a 'gift', hoping that our service members are too stupid to tell the difference.

I can speak to this - the Dem's brand is in the toilet because the Democratic base wants: 1) A party that fights back against Trump's authoritarian power grab. 2) A bold agenda centered around affordability. Instead, current Democratic leadership seems content to roll over for fascism, and make small tweaks to an economic system that's not working for ordinary people. Unlike the GOP which is a Cult of personality with a built-in approval rating floor (around 30% of the country will support Dear Leader no matter what), the Dems have to earn their approval rating. And Democratic leadership is doing a terrible job, practicing an outdated style of politics from thirty years ago. This isn't about the age of people running for office (at least not entirely), it's about an Old versus New style of politics (think Chuck Schumer versus Mamdani).

Thought I might share this podcast series, about a disastrous social experiment that's contributed to an illiteracy crisis in the United States, The podcast traces out how American educators were sold a story about a now-discredited paradigm about how people learn to read and write, called 'whole word comprehension'. Advocates of whole world comprension claimed that phonics (learning how to decode printed words by sounding them out) was outdated and unnecessary, and that kids learn to read through contextual clues alone. This is a well meaning assumption that's utterly incorrect. What wasn't understood was that whole word comprension isn't actually teaching kids how to read - it's how functionally illiterate people muddle their way through sentences. The podcast traces out how something as seemingly apolitical as basic reading and writing got politicized, and how well intentioned people working from bad information were training kids throughout the country to be functionally illiterate. Sold A Story Podcast: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

Fair point, but my personal experience is that a lot of academic philosophy is convoluted to an unnecessary degree. To return to Heiddegar, Being-In-The-World is a genuinely useful concept - that we're embedded within the world before we start reasoning about it - that's weighed down by overly technical, precise language. There's a tradeoff between splitting hairs and writing in a way people can actually comprehend. Quality philosophical writing has a good economy of accessibility relative to its precision. (I.e., 'Don't make your writing more difficult than it needs to be')

One more, courtesy of Heiddegar: "In the name ‘being-in-the-world,’ ‘world’ does not in any way imply earthly as opposed to heavenly being, nor the ‘worldly’ as opposed to the ‘spiritual.’ For us ‘world’ does not at all signify beings or any realm of beings but the openness of Being. Man is, and is man, insofar as he is the ek-sisting one. He stands out into the openness of Being. Being itself, which as the throw has projected the essence of man into ‘care,’ is as this openness. Thrown in such fashion, man stands ‘in’ the openness of Being. ‘World’ is the clearing of Being into which man stands out on the basis of his thrown essence. ‘Being-in-the-world’ designates the essence of ek-sistence with regard to the cleared dimension out of which the ‘ek-’ of ek-sistence essentially unfolds. Thought in terms of ek-sistence, ‘world’ is in a certain sense precisely ‘the beyond’ within existence and for it. Man is never first and foremost man on the hither side of the world, as a ‘subject,’ whether this is taken as ‘I’ or ‘We.’ Nor is he ever simply a mere subject which always simultaneously is related to objects, so that his essence lies in the subject-object relation." What's actually being said here, just in the most inefficient way imaginable: "Mind and world are entangled. We live in the world before we start making sense of it."

Most academic philosophy in a nutshell:

It's the foundation of how people learn to read. It's not cheating. It's how we connect what's on the page to the spoken language. English isn't Mandarin - it's a phonetic language. Knowing how to sound out words is essential.

The point of phonetics is to connect written words to spoken words that are already in your vocabulary. It's not a replacement for building a vocabulary. Maybe an example would make this more clear. Think of an 8 year old knows what a porcupine is. If shown a picture he could point to it and say "porcupine!" Then he comes across the word porcupine in a book. If he hasn't been taught phonetics and hasn't encountered the word already, there's no way for him to connect it to a word in the spoken language that he already knows. Beginning readers who lack phonetics aren't struggling to decode Floccinaucinihilipilification - they're struggling with the written version of spoken words that they already know. Like confusing 'invite' and 'invade' for example, because they're the same length and both start with 'i' (they use this example in the podcast). Encountering the written word 'automobile', knowing what the spoken word means, but being unable to decipher it on page, because they've memorized 'car' but not 'automobile'.

Phonetics is foundational for learning to read phonetic languages like English. We learn to speak before we learn to read, phonetics let's us decode words by sounding them out into the spoken language.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that learning to decode 'Being & Time' was like learning a second language - this is NOT a credit to its author. Heiddegar was a deep thinker but rubbish at communicating his insights in a straightforward manner. Most academic philosophy texts are written for other professional academics. In 80-90% of cases I would recommend finding someone who's already decoded these texts into something that's intelligible for normal humans. No need to reinvent the wheel, unless you're doing so for a very deliberate purpose (like if you're writing a book on 'everyday phenomenology').

What people don't seem to understand is that a gradual transition into the type of universal health care system that every other developed nation takes for granted is the compromise - and what happened to Brian Thompson is the alternative. Stranger still is the idea that people are just going to meekly consent to impoverishment and death just so a handful of sociopaths can enrich themselves at their expense. Protesting United Health Care does jack shit when the for-profit healthcare industry has thoroughly captured the political institutions that are supposed to be regulating their behavior. When money is equated to free speech (thanks SCOTUS!), lobbying becomes a legalized form of bribery. Personally, I'd greatly prefer that we channel this rage into a passing constitutional amendment to get money out of politics and then pass some form of universal healthcare, rather than having assassinations of healthcare executives. But I'm not going to feel a deep sense of shock and outrage over an administrative murderer getting iced by one of his victims.

@Elliott Over a 200 year timespan - yes, people are more literate than today than they were in 1820. But what I've heard in Sold A Story also corroborates what I've been hearing from teachers, who've described that the 11-14 year olds are making it into their classrooms lacking basic reading and writing skills. That said, it was never my contention that Whole Word Comprehension is the only reason for this - America's public education system has always had sharp inequities (the quality of the education you receive is heavily dependent upon your zip code). And iPads making their way into the hands of 4 year olds has been disastrous for developing the kind of attention span that lets that child become a good reader. Here's a 5 min vid of Millennial describing her experiences as middle school teacher, and these sorts of experiences aren't uncommon: https://www.tiktok.com/@heymisscanigetapencil/video/7579812040152288567

And so was a concentration camp guard. Fact of the matter is that Brian Thompson became fabulously wealthy denying people access to health care. The fact that we view intentionally denying people access to life saving care as ethically different from walking into an intensive care unit, unplugging those patients from their life support, and dumping their bodies out on the street just shows how inconsistent our ethical intuitions are.

Yes, schools still teach vocabulary lists and reading comprehension, of course. But for these practices to have their desired effect, readers have to first be able to decode written words - and phonics is indispensable for learning how to decode words, because we learn to speak before we learn to read. Or that's how it is for heavily phonetic languages like English, at any rate. Phonics was the traditional approach for beginning readers for many decades before it was deemphasized in favor of an experimental approach (whole word comprehension) that sounded plausible in theory, but didn't pan out in practice. Our brains are evolved to pick up spoken languages very easily if we're exposed to them early in life. So it was assumed that the same might also hold true for written languages (ie, "just give kids books and a supportive environment they'll eventually learn to read") - but the scientific evidence doesn't bear this out. Kids need both explicit instruction and lots and lots of practice to learn how to read. Again, everything I've been saying in this thread is just a condensed summary of that Sold A Story podcast - if you're curious, I'd recommend giving the first episode or two a listen.

If you believed you were putting a mass murderer in the ground, how much remorse would you have over it? Brian Thompson almost certainly killed more Americans than Osama Bin Laden - he was just doing it from behind a desk by denying people access to health care that they paid for, rather than by flying planes into buildings. I'm not advocating for extra-judicial killings, but let's be real: America is a two tiered society where the rich and powerful can get fabulously wealthy through admirative murder (and get away with raping kids if they're the president), while ordinary people can have their lives ruined over a bag of weed.

I'm summarizing the 10-15 hours of the Sold A Story podcast that I've listened to so far. Full transparency, I'm a writer but an actual linguist could explain this much better than I ever could. It sounds like you learned to read through a phonics approach, as I did - what you described is exactly how I was taught. Problem is that many schools across the country adopted an approach that either didn't include phonics, or heavily de-emphasized them.

They do a really thorough job explaining the mechanics of the whole word approach in the podcast, but here's a simple example. So a whole word approach would present kids with a sentence like: "The bee was in the ____." And then the teacher would show them a picture of a tree, and ask them what word what makes sense here. 'Is it a tree?' This 'works' for a simple three year old picture book story, but it falls apart when the pictures go away and the sentences become more complex. If instead of a bee it's another type of bug in the tree, like a tarantula, the kid doesn't have a way to decode the word. They've memorized 'bee' but are unable to sound out 'tuh-rant-you-lah', and connect it to a spoken word. What was discovered is that kids weren't actually reading, they were memorizing the simple stories they were presented with, rather than decoding the words and sentences.

English is a phonetic language - phonics is how you decode words, including words you've never encountered before. You do this by sounding them out, connecting them to the spoken language. Whole word comprension is how people who can't decode words use contextual clues to guess at the meaning of an unfamiliar word. This works okay when the text is very, very simple and there are pictures in the book to tell you what the story is about - but it falls apart very quickly as what you're reading gets more complex.