Paul Friendshuh

The system doesn't fail bad students. It fails the gifted ones. Ask too many questions? Sit down. Finish early? Here's some busywork. We built schools to produce compliance. Then wonder why brilliant people feel broken. The system was built for the average. It sacrifices the exceptional to protect the feelings of the mediocre. It moves ahead as fast as its slowest members. It's a convoy. Your gifted child isn't the problem. Being held back by the convoy is. I spent 7 years in that education system. The solution? Homeschooling. Homeschooling isn't a last resort — it's the first intelligent choice. Your child's potential isn't waiting for the system to catch up. Neither should you.

The strongest case for homeschooling is that nobody loves your child more than you do, and nobody has more stake in their flourishing.

The best way to defeat liberals in argument is to argue from the left of them. $15 minimum wage, why not $100? Asylum? why not open borders? They have no principles they can call on to limit their own arguments.

The proponents of “empathy” lack a theory of mind and a real understanding of the dysfunction and darkness in the hearts and minds of others, because they are blind to the evil in their own psyche. That envy, greed, self praising grandiosity gets expressed when they advocate for “empathy” for evil people, because it makes them appear holier-than-thou; yet they are completely blind to their own motivations, which are not aligned with truth, beauty, justice, or love. “Empathy” is merely a weapon used by them to manipulate and control others, as soon as it’s no longer effective, they will immediately stop appealing to others in such a way.

The assumption of “putting yourself in someone else’s place” is that it will create sympathy. But I’ve been poor, struggled with mental health issues, etc. I never started robbing stores or punching random grandmas. When I imagine the edits to my psychology I’d have to make to get to those behaviors, it makes me less sympathetic, not more. The proponents of “empathy” engage in no such thing. They do not realistically model the psychologies of the most dysfunctional people in society. Rather, they tell themselves a little fable totally unrelated to other people’s actual minds, feel an emotion in response, then congratulate themselves for this solipsistic exercise and vote to give away other people’s money. “Do unto others and you would have them do unto you.” What I want done unto me is to be held to a fair, uniform standard of self-reliance and good conduct. And that is what I do unto them.

@MarcoFoster_ @RepAOC They really just hate the strong, the wealthy, the beautiful. Anytime they see wealth, because they could not generate it without theft, they are envious of others for their own ineptitude.

AOC: “There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that”

One of the greatest mistakes in American history was allowing the government to educate our children.

@GrantSlatton People need to stop assuming such conversations are had in logical good faith. They are emotionally motivated by envy, not by seeking the truth. The reality of the economy and the virtue of production in capitalism exists in their shadow.

what do the "no such thing as ethical billionaires" people say about an individual who codes a great app that sells 100 million copies for $10 each who was exploited? zero marginal cost goods are weird

In 458 BC, Rome was on the brink of collapse. An invading army had trapped the Roman consul and his legion in a mountain pass. Panic spread through the city. The Senate did the only thing they could think of: They sent messengers to find a 60-year-old farmer plowing his field. His name was Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. He had once been a senator, then lost his fortune paying his son's bail. Now he worked his own four-acre plot just to feed his family. When the Senate's envoys arrived, they found him sweating behind a plow. They asked him to put on his toga so they could deliver an official message. The message: Rome was making him dictator. Absolute power. Total command of the army. No checks. No oversight. No term limit. He accepted. Within 16 days, Cincinnatus had raised an army, marched out, surrounded the enemy, and forced their surrender. The republic was saved. He had legal authority to rule for six months. He could have stayed. He could have expanded his power. He could have done what every other ruler in human history did when handed unlimited control. Instead, he resigned on day 16. He took off the toga, walked back to his farm, and finished plowing the field he'd left half-done. Twenty years later, when Rome faced another crisis, they called him back. He was 80 years old. He took command, crushed the conspiracy, and resigned again, this time after just 21 days. He died poor. On his farm. 2,200 years later, when George Washington was offered a kingship after winning the American Revolution, he refused and went home to Mount Vernon. The reason he was hailed as "the American Cincinnatus" is because Europeans literally could not believe a man who had won would willingly give up power. King George III, on hearing Washington would resign rather than rule, said: "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world." The lesson isn't that Cincinnatus was humble. The lesson is that for most of human history, the people most qualified to lead were the ones who didn't want to. And the moment a society starts rewarding those who chase power instead of those who flee from it is the moment the republic begins to die. Cincinnati, Ohio is named after him. Most people who live there have no idea why.

White people still have pretty much zero political representation across the entire West (their own homes) with precisely nobody representing white interests politically - in fact we remain unmentionable

@LancesLegion The higher the ideal, the harsher the judgement.

“Those who aim at great deeds must also suffer greatly.” — Plutarch

@Handre Normal people stay in their lanes and are afraid to risk anything. They want food and drink, and unless those are tampered with, they don’t resist hardly anything else.

It still blows my mind how little resistance there is globally to government overreach.

@nickitruesdell Nothing done at the level of the commons can be done well. Imagine cooking a meal for one. It can be the most delicious meal ever concocted. Imagine cooking for 1000 people. Good luck making it taste well! Education should not be hindered by the commons.

Grade levels were invented to manage hundreds and thousands of children in mass schooling. They really have little bearing on a good education, and they didn't exist before the 20th century. Homeschool parents, this is the first thing you should let go of when educating your own children. Progress in reading, progress in math, progress in writing -- these are the things that matter. You will have children who progress rapidly, and you will have children who progress slowly. This will often happen in opposite subjects, too: kids who are great at math might often be slow in reading or writing, and vice versa. That's why grade levels based on age are so arbitrary, and they cause untold problems. If you left the government school system, don't bring their methods home.

@PositivFuturist *Eternal Spiritual Battle* It’s just finally reached politics, due to the democratic nature of our times.

It’s crazy that the political battle of our age is whether we should hate ourselves or not.

“What is most frightening about the political left is that they seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition. All problems seem to them to be due to other people not being as wise or as noble as they are.” — Thomas Sowell

@ThomasSowell Difference in age is more diverse than the leftist ideology definition.

“In the academic world, diversity means black leftists, white leftists, female leftists, and Hispanic leftists. Demographic diversity conceals ideological conformity.” — Thomas Sowell

@constantinvonh All of history is the manifestation of the energies of eternal mythological archetypes. All of mythology is the encoding of patterns so deep and consistent that humans knew them across all of history.

“Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.” — Joseph Campbell

@minordissent One realizes that civilization is held up by a few, not by the many.

its actually insane how dysfunctional the average person is. Like it really is a miracle we have civilization at all.

@Hitchslap1 Most people never learned to think, and instead of taking in observation of the world and building thoughts based on that, they have a thought and then refuse to take in observations of the world.

Humans aren’t born a blank slate. I have no idea why so many people struggle to understand this. It’s so obvious.

Suicide is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.

Raising taxes won’t work because government will just find new ways to squander the money. The only solution is gutting the budget.