Wednesday's Most Active Threads

The most active thread yesterday was the vice presidential debate thread that I discussed yesterday and will skip today. After that was a thread titled, "the Atlantic: The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books", and posted in the "College and University Discussion" forum. The original poster linked to an article in "The Atlantic" and provided a brief summary of the article's main points. According to the article, students are showing up at elite colleges such as Columbia University unable to read an entire book. The reason for this is that they were never assigned complete books in their previous schooling. Rather, they have only read excerpts previously. As a result, professors have been forced to water down the curriculum. In response, several posters discuss their children's experience in high school, detailing the number of books that they were required to read. In most cases, the number was quite small, frequently only one or two through their entire high school experience. Posters offer a number of explanations for this situation. One theory is that students who are selected by elite universities such as Columbia are singularly focused on checking boxes needed for college applications. If there is not a box saying "read an entire book", then they don't devote time to doing that. Others blame the spread of technologies such as mobile phones and social media that encourage shorter attention spans and distract students from reading for long stretches. Some posters argue that schools have traditionally assigned books that students find boring and that if more interesting books were chosen, there would be more interest in reading them. A poster who graduated from Columbia pointed out that Columbia's curriculum is particularly heavy in reading and, even when the poster attended decades ago, it involved way more reading than to what she was accustomed. A lot of the traditional forum arguments came up in this thread. Private school parents told of huge numbers of books their kids were expected to read, citing that as an advantage of private over public schools. Some posters blamed test optional admissions, a topic with which some posters are obsessed and blame for almost every problem with colleges today. Of course, grade inflation was also blamed. Several posters argue that this is a parenting issue and that parents should be ensuring that their kids read books. In response, several posters recount struggles they've had trying to get their children to read more. A number of posters suggested that the inability of today's kids to read entire books is due to the easily accessible alternatives they have to fake reading in order to pass an assignment such as Internet summaries. However, others pointed out that while the specifics might be new, the idea is not. Older generations might not have had Internet summaries, but they had Cliff's Notes.

Yesterday's next most active thread was posted in the "General Parenting Discussion" forum though that may not have been the best forum for it. Titled, "Playground etiquette: running around with pb&j sandwich", the original poster asks for other's thoughts about running around a playground with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The original poster says that this is a choking hazard and is inconsiderate towards kids with peanut allergies. She asks what happened to eating at picnic tables near the playground. DCUM has always had a number of posters who are more interested in picking a fight than having a discussion. Similarly, the forum has always had posters who are very averse to being told what they should or should not do. I don't know if the numbers of such posters have increased recently, or all such posters suddenly appeared in this thread. Either way, very few posters were sympathetic to the original poster's viewpoint. Rather, the original poster was accused of "virtue signaling" and being a "communist". I don't know exactly what to call the opposite of "virtue signaling". "Vice signaling" doesn't seem quite right, but perhaps "selfishness signaling". Whatever the proper term, there was a lot of it in this thread. Posters were not exactly saying that you would have to pry their PB&Js from their cold, dead, hands, but you might have to pick them off of playground equipment because, as red blooded Americans, they were going to exercise their God-given right to let their children run around the playground with peanut butter sandwiches. According to the PB&J advocates, children with peanut allergies should simply avoid the playground. After all, they claimed, there are plenty of other places they can go. Peanut allergies have really become a triggering issue in some quarters. Parents who are lucky to have allergy-free kids are often resentful that they have to take precautions for the sake of others. Posters with such attitudes were loud and proud in this thread. Several posters castigated the original poster for even bringing up this issue. "Please find yourself some real problems," wrote one poster. For parents whose kids have a peanut allergy, this is a real problem. Other posters seemed to resent the focus on peanut butter to the exclusion of other food allergies. "PEANUTS ARE NOT THE ONLY ALLERGYYYYYYYYYY", wrote a poster who is obviously very calm and collected. Another poster summarized the thread this way, "OP - Can parents please just be slightly thoughtful about peanut butter?". "Parents- No. go eff yourself." If anything, that summary understates things. Some posters were even threatening to bring pitbulls and guns to the playground in response to peanut butter. Needless to say, I locked the thread.

Next was was thread titled, "Israel is trying to drag America into a war w/ Iran" which was posted in the "Political Discussion" forum. The original poster says that Israel wants the United States to be involved with both troops and money in endless Middle East wars. The original poster suggests that Israel had a role in convincing the United States to invade Iraq in search of non-existent weapons of mass destruction. There are several unequivocal facts. In 2002, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the U.S. Congress that, "There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking, is working, is advancing towards to the development of nuclear weapons." Netanyahu went on to say that, "If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region." As it turned out, Netanyahu was wrong on both counts. Iraq was not seeking nuclear weapons and the only reverberations in the region were a long U.S. occupation of Iraq and instability that continues today. Even within the last few days, U.S. facilities in Iraq were subject to hostile fire. But Netanyahu does not appear to have learned from his mistakes. Or, alternatively, he did learn that there are no consequences as far as the U.S. is concerned to being wrong. In Gaza, Netanyahu has ignored one red line set by President Joe Biden after another. Biden's only reaction was to allow leaks suggesting that privately he is angry with Netanyahu and to briefly delay delivery of 2,000 pound bombs. It would be hard to imagine a weaker reaction. Therefore, it is no surprise that Netanyahu again ignored Biden's advice and invaded Lebanon. That is actually an even more unconscionable action. It was reported this week that the Lebanese organization Hezbollah had agreed to a ceasefire with Israel and U.S. officials were under the impression that Israel had also agreed to the terms. Instead, the next day Israel bombed six buildings in the southern Beirut using more than 80 U.S. supplied 2,000 lb. bombs — remember those? — and killed Hezbollah's leader and several top officials. Needless to say, the ceasefire did not go into effect. Now Israel is planning retaliation against Iran in response to a missile attack Iran launched on Israel in response to the killing of the leader of Hamas while he was in Tehran. Almost certainly, Israel will rely on U.S. support and assistance for such an attack. Yesterday, Biden said that he did not support an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. Based on past history, I would suggest that makes Iran's nuclear facilities the most likely Israeli target. Netanyahu knows that Biden can be ignored and U.S. money and arms will continue to flow. Certainly large numbers of U.S. elected officials will side with Netanyahu over Biden and it would be political suicide for most of them to oppose anything but full and unequivocal support for Israel. It seems obvious to me, as I guess that it does to the original poster as well, that Netanyahu would love for the U.S. to fight his battles for him. But, short of that, he will be satisfied with the continued funding and supply of weapons. Obviously, as they say, views differ. Especially on this topic and many posters in this thread have much different views. While a number of posters are very supportive of Israel, a few posters wrongly targeted their animosity towards "the Jews" generally. I may have many disagreements with the first group, but I simply can't countenance the second. "The Jews" are not the problem, not the cause, and not deserving of blame. Some Jews clearly are — as well as many non-Jews — but obviously not all Jews or even most Jews. Due to such posts, I locked the thread.

The last thread that I will discuss today was posted in the "Soccer" forum. Titled, "ECNL moving to school year not calendar", this thread was started back in May. The original poster suggests that the Elite Club National League, a national youth soccer league, will begin categorizing players by age according to the school year rather than the calendar year in which they were born. He wants to know if this is a done deal and whether anyone has the "inside scoop". This is the second thread on this topic that I have discussed in this blog. In July, I discussed a similar thread that had been started subsequent to this thread. In that blog post, I even mentioned this thread, noting that it was 15 pages long at that time. Today the thread is 95 pages. It appears that the thread has been active since its inception, receiving enough interest yesterday to be included among the day's most active threads. As I noted in my post about the other thread, the issue here is that schools normally have a Fall cutoff for kids based on birth date. Kids with late Fall birthdays attend school with kids younger than them and play on school soccer teams with those kids. But if those Fall birthday kids play in soccer leagues that go by calendar year, they will play on teams with kids older than them instead. This means that they are playing with two different groups of players which has social and skill-development implications. As I said in my earlier post, some parents like this but many don't. This thread added 10 pages yesterday. Obviously, I am not going to read the entire 95 pages, but nor am I up to reading even the 10 new pages. Skimming through the most recent pages, it appears that the change from calendar year to school year has not yet happened. Moreover, there seems to be some skepticism that it will happen. I see that there is a new argument about which type of cutoff aligns with other leagues or even other countries, and whether or not ECNL will be out of sync with others if it changes. Otherwise, most of the arguments seem to be the same ones that I read back in July. I am really going to have to plead ignorance as to why this topic is getting so much attention. As I understand it, the change only involves the relatively small number of players with Fall birthdays. There is concern for those who are "trapped". In 8th grade, these kids still play with 8th graders on school teams, but play with high school freshmen on their club teams. The change that ECNL is planning will resolve that issue. I can understand the interest from those that this change will impact. But, I really don't understand the anger and other emotions coming from posters on whom it will have no effect. If someone's kid will still play on the same team or with the same kids they always have, why do they care if a handful of others get moved? But apparently many do care, enough to create 95 pages of posts at least.