The Comments Section, Part 3 (Hate Speech)

In response to a Facebook post about free speech, I left this comment:

I think freedom of speech is like when a kid calls another kid an ugly freak, and the other kid smacks him upside the head for calling him that. The kid has the right to say that, but he also has to deal with the consequences of his actions.

Another person then asked me what I thought hate speech was. This was my reply:

Words that repress or restrain people, reinforcing ideas of inferiority, despite being purely based on sociological bias without fact.

The equivalent of a kid throwing rocks at another kid because her skin color looks different from most of the other kids; turns out the kid's parents said things that put down people with dark skin, and so the kid thought it was okay to throw rocks at her.

Or maybe another kid publicly ridiculed a girl because she was trying to reprogram a video game, and that's a "boy" thing to do, and girls aren't good at that.

Hateful words spread to others and often cut more deeply than physical actions, affecting them for the rest of their lives. Consistent hateful words can systematically and subconsciously plant bias in people's heads that cause them to believe the hateful words as fact - even those being repressed.

Exposed to this hate speech over time, that black kid might eventually believe she is an inferior being, even though she is a human, just like everyone else. That could cause her to aim lower in life, and instead of getting a career in neuroscience, she may be stuck working retail at minimum wage, because she, and so many others, said she isn't capable of being a scientist.

That programmer girl might begin to believe she's bad at programming, even if she's brilliant at it. Instead of a high salary job working at Google, she may never go to college, because it's expected of her, as a girl, to stay at home and mother children. She has been told this so long that she, herself, now believes it.

Hate speech is what made you assume that the second girl in this story was white.

I believe that's what hate speech is, and that's what it creates. That is what it does to people. My view may be a bit too broad for realistic political application though.

The Comments Section, Part 2 (Education Rant)

As an educator, and a human being who learns, I have random thoughts about education. This started as a Facebook status based on a comment I left, but I expanded a little, since I felt like ranting.

It feels to me like too many educators don't actually understand how learning works, and what kids need in order to maximize not only their education, but their overall growth as a human being and their overall quality of life.

Education and fun are not two separate things. The things that inspire passion and fun within kids are the very things that help inspire them toward their careers, and yet these things are so often pushed down in favor of the things students hate doing the most.

If students can Google the answers to tests, and their research skills are adept enough to thoroughly answer the questions, then they can do the same thing to get by in real life. Google is a powerful and valuable tool, so why prevent students from teaching themselves how to use it?

It's like a calculator. Everybody said I needed to learn long division and algebra because I wouldn't have a calculator on me all the time. Well you know what? That's a bloody lie. I have one in my pocket everywhere I go now. I never freaking need long division, and the only reason I ever use algebra is for programming, which is an entirely different context than how they taught it anyway. Using Google doesn't seem any different than using a calculator. If it's relevant to my life, I'll figure it out when I need to. If I need to calculate a tip, I'll pull out my calculator.


Just let the kids research the answers. They'll put more effort into the subjects they're passionate about, and those are the subjects they'll excel at in life because you let them focus on them, instead of exhausting them with things they don't care about. Why force things on them so harshly when all the real world is is googling what you don't know anyway?

It's so frustrating to me how little people care about education. Parents just drop their kids off at school and consider it out of sight and out of mind. Any issues with their kids' education is considered not their problem, and yet a kid's education is one of the most important parts of their development. When a kid is doing poorly in school, the parents' response is often negative, reinforcing that the kid needs to study more, or work harder, or stop slacking off. So rarely do most parents stop and think about the issue being with the way the kid is being taught, or that maybe the school itself isn't a good fit for the kid. Or, godforbid, maybe it's a subject the kid can simply skip and take care of later in life, when it becomes more relevant to their lives.

This is not an issue that can be solved by throwing money around. This is an issue with the school systems themselves. They cater to the idea that every human child should learn the same exact material in the same exact way, rather than the fact that all human beings are individual people with different interests, hobbies, and talents. Everything must be tested with statistics and math to determine the maximum potential effectiveness of the education, right? Like making up the budget for a company, they're trying to maximize the profits. But human beings are not currency, nor robots. We are not all the same, and we do not follow perfect logical rules, nor are we completely predictable by mathematics and statistics. We don't all fall into the cookie cutter laid out for us.

When a student hates a subject, the educators and parents cut the focus on the subjects that student likes in favor of the subject the student struggles with, instead of allowing the student to excel and perfect the subjects they're passionate about. If that subject is truly important for the student to learn for later in their life, what's the big deal about waiting until later in their life to learn it? Would it not be easier to learn that subject after is has become more relevant to the student's life?

This negativity and pressure and stress kills their ambition. It kills their love for learning. It can stunt their ability to learn the subject even worse, as they grow to despise the subject.

Anyway... I guess my rant is over. I guess I'll end this on a positive note. I am very happy that the school I work at understands this and allows me the freedom to teach my classes the way I want to, because the students at our school are thriving so much, and they all seem so much happier than at other schools I've been to. At least there are some places out there fighting for the education options our kids deserve!

The Comments Section, Part 1 (Political History)

So I've begun to realize that I produce so much writing online in comments sections, and it's completely wasted in there. It just gets lost in the void, and it really doesn't even make much impact. So I thought maybe I should, at least, log some of this stuff away on my blog! At least this way it doesn't get lost in the void and I could potentially copy and paste it for future reference.

So yeah. I'm going to try to make this a thing, and I'm calling it "The Comments Section".

I saw this image in the comments section on a Facebook post.

This is actually only half correct. The democratic party split into two pieces during the Civil War, Northern Democrats and Southern Democrats. The Southern Democrats were the ones advocating for slavery, and many of their ideals most closely resemble today's "Tea Party" Republicans. This is not an opinion based on bias, this is based on US history research. Northern Democratic ideals have somewhat merged with the Republican party ideals of that time, becoming what we know today as the Democratic party.

Yes, they swapped places, but it's also important to note that there were technically three parties at this time, and when running for re-election, Lincoln was not running as a member of the Republican party, but a member of the National Union party.

The temporary new party was created because people would choose not to vote Republican simply because of the name, rather than the actual policies being spoken by the candidate, and this choice made it more likely to get votes from both War Democrats and Peace Democrats on the northern side.

Ultimately, let us not forget that even before all of this, before we fell so deeply into a two party system, two of the big parties arguing the same stuff we currently are were the Federalist party and the Democratic-Republican party - Federalists typically leaning toward current-day Republican arguments, and Democratic-Republicans leaning toward more current day Democratic values.

Laziness

I think the laziest thing I've ever done was when I sat down at my laptop about 9 years ago, completely prepared to not move from my position for at least a few hours, only to realize that I needed to get something off my desktop PC. We had a network share in the house, but unfortunately, the files I needed were not shared over the network yet.

Instead of going upstairs to get the files off my desktop, I got an idea and opened Google. I began to research methods of remote controlling my desktop. It took me about 4 or 5 minutes before I came up with a way to remote control my PC from anyplace that had an internet connection, networked or no. But I needed to install software on my upstairs PC to do it.

So instead of going upstairs, I rigged a quick temporary remote control via Windows remote desktop over our home network, to remote control my upstairs PC to install the remote control software. After getting that done, I used the remote control software to set up a VPN between the two computers. A VPN which would remain active for full file sharing no matter where I was. I shared my entire user and program files folders over that VPN.

Boom! I began copying the files I needed! Didn't have to move, and the whole thing took maybe 15-20 minutes. Since then, it has saved me so much unnecessary getting up off the couch, it was completely worth it in the long run.

My mind is almost never lazy. My body, on the other hand, well... That's another story ;)

Thoughts on Christianity

I have some thoughts...

This is a sensitive subject for a lot of people. These are merely my thoughts on Christianity as a whole, good and bad, my experiences with it, and how it has changed over time. I have no right to tell people what they can and cannot believe, and I have no right to tell people how they should live their lives.

When I was around age 8, I began to seriously question my Christian upbringing, because some things just weren't adding up. I'm rather proud of myself for thinking so critically as such a young age; it feels like my core ethical values have hardly changed since then in that respect. I feel I can thank Calvin and Hobbes for much of my analytical and critical thinking development. But I digress.

Unfortunately, few people wanted a small child to critically analyze their religion, and I was never taken seriously, so I rarely, if ever, asked these questions. And when I did, they were often not adequately answered to quell my thirst for knowledge. So often I heard the "you just gotta have faith" response, which left me extremely unsatisfied, and felt to me more like "I don't know, stop asking me questions. That's just the way it is." I've never been one to respond well to a "that's just the way it is" answer.

Here are a few of the questions I remember asking myself from ages 8-12:

-Who wrote the Bible? Was it Jesus?

-Who decided what to write in the new testament? Wasn't that written after Jesus and his disciples died?

-If the Bible can be re-written by people, couldn't anyone just put whatever they want in there for us to worship in his name?

-If we're worshiping Jesus, why does so much of the bible have teachings from people who are not Jesus?

-Why do the disciples of Jesus say things that sometimes conflict with the things Jesus himself says? And why are we following their words in these cases rather than his?

-Why do we decorate a tree on Christmas? What does that have to do with Jesus' birth? And aren't we killing a tree?

-Why is Santa Claus the mascot of Christmas instead of Jesus?

-Why were the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night during December? Shouldn't the sheep be inside at night, where it's warm?

-Is it possible to be a good person without being Christian?

-If Jesus was trying to tell everyone to love each other, and we worship Jesus for that ideal, why don't Christians love gay people just as we would anyone else?

-If God created us, and everything happens according to God's plan, why do Christians hate people who aren't Christian? Aren't all people created by God, whether they believe it or not?

-If someone were gay, wouldn't that be a part of God's plan? Isn't everything that happens a result of God's plan?

-If the ten commandments say "thou shalt not kill", why did Christians kill so many people in the crusades?

Now since I asked these questions, I have asked many more. More than are coming to mind right now, of course, and many more over the years after I was 12. And over those years I have received/researched answers to most of them, and I have come to some conclusions. One being that most of the deeper messages read into the faith were a combination of lost in translation, interpreted/written through the personal bias of another human being, and the more people read into the deep lore, the fewer examples they will find of the actual core values shown through the actual words of Jesus Christ and the ten commandments, which were supposedly provided to us directly by God.

I find that most people I encounter who call themselves Christian are not actually demonstrating the core teachings of Christianity at all, except to other people who identify as Christian. The teachings of Jesus and the ten commandments are broken by many Christians on a regular basis, most notably through their contempt for other people who live their lives differently than they do, or otherwise in a way they don't, and/or are unwilling to, understand.

"Love thy neighbor" does not have a footnote that says, "but only if they are also Christian."

Over the years so many different churches would focus on so many different aspects of the bible with so many interpretations, that the whole thing divided. And thus, many people have many different ideas about what it means to be Christian. This is less often demonstrated in the words they speak, because they are so often directly quoted, but rather the actions they take. Oftentimes they are unknowing that their actions are even hurting anyone, and unwilling to hear people out when they try to tell them to stop.

I believe many Christians are simply using their Christianity as a title to describe themselves, to feel like they belong to a larger community of like-minded people. And hey, many people have done things like that to feel included. We're a social species, and we like to feel like we belong somewhere. But many people may be Christian simply because they feel it is expected of them, or they were raised to be that way, so it's all they know.

I believe the teachings of accepting things as being fact with nothing but blind faith as proof has helped turn many Christians into people who do not question authority, do not ask why things have to be the way they are, and do not think honestly about figuring out who they are as a person, since they often live through the religion instead of through themselves. And to reinforce this even further, there's an ultimate eternal punishment if you stray from your religion: Hell. But I'd rather not focus on that right now.

It's a darn shame these behaviours so often make it difficult to have calm conversations about this stuff, because through patience, understanding, and actively listening to each other, we could solve a lot of issues that lead to verbal abuse and other forms of violence performed in the name of God. But so many issues are shrugged off as being blasphemous, ridiculous, "impolite", or any other number of excuses to not talk about it openly.

In contrast, the LGBTQ community (I mention it because it's a large part of my life) is largely built on the foundations of being true to one's self and accepting/recognizing people for who they are. I guess it would make sense that people who are trained to live through the teachings of someone else and trust it with blind faith would find issue with people who live to do the opposite - to learn about themselves, constantly ask questions, and try to live according to what makes them truly happy, rather than living in fear according to what they think a higher power wants.

And yet, at the core of Christian religion, through all this control and blind faith and fear, is a contradictory message. A message that says people should love one another, no matter who they are. A message that shows Jesus as a simple carpenter who kneels and washes people's feet, feeds the poor, and heals the needy, whether they be old, young, male, female, rich, poor, celibate, prostitute, straight, gay... It doesn't matter. What matters is that he showed them love - he equally spread love for other people, regardless of who they were. That is the man who is supposed to be at the center of this faith, and that is at the core of what Christianity is supposed to stand for. That is how it started.

I believe that is a truly admirable ideal to have at the core of a belief system, spreading love to all those around you, treating everyone like family, as fellow human beings. It's just a shame more Christians don't demonstrate this in practice with people they don't understand, and instead they search the Bible for ammunition to fight them. Can we please just stop trying to attack one another and say live and let live?

We're all humans here, trying to get by and live our lives as happily as we can. If we don't understand someone, how about instead of finding ways to hurt them, we try to get to know them, human to human? Surely they'll have at least one interesting story to tell about their lives, as we all do.