I could be wrong, but I think they’re wealthy enough for money not to be important in that sense. If they accept you, they want to minimize barriers for you to attend.

That doesn’t mean that most of the people who get in have been trained for years for that and have loads of money. In other words, the problem is social inequality.

Time to dust off my Google bookmark and contribute to those searches!

[I don’t have a Google bookmark but if I did it would be dusty]

Totally unrelated, but I’m wondering if you saw the Boost post a couple of days ago: it is not private and sends your data to advertisers 😢 Maybe seek for an alternative? There are many ☺️

Same. I actually thought it was Bezos before I realized it couldn’t be.

It sounds as if you think the USA is not a democracy, and I can agree with that sentiment to an extent. For example, I see how neo-conservatism and neoliberalism are whacking their axes at the forest of democracy in the USA. I also see how elites everywhere try to avoid investing in humanity, avoid paying back to the societies that made them rich in the first place, including in the USA. In fact, I’d argue that the elites in the USA are shackling people’s hands and covering their mouths so that they work for their corporate overlords without questioning anything.

If I agree with that then how could I possibly believe anything else? Do I not believe the narrow narrative that America is anything but a democracy? Well, do you believe that the millions of Americans who have striked or protested for their rights are shackled and mouth-covered? Do you believe that democracy is defined narrowly as suffrage? Or do you believe that democracy is defined as making people more capable so that they value freedom and therefore strike or protest to transform their institutions to build the capacities of everyone?

I see how suffrage within a constrained context like in the USA leads to awful results.

However, if democracy is stuffed into the small box of suffrage, its potential is limited. If, instead, it’s spread so that it grows everyone’s capabilities, then you see something very different. You see hundreds of thousands or millions of people in the street, demanding change against authoritarianism, against unnecessary cruelty, against egotism (“me me me my nation my family my religion my clan my precious me me me”).

So democracy tends to optimize for capacity building, democratic value orientations, and institutional capacity construction. In other words, it makes people more capable, it makes people care more about freedom for themselves and others, and it makes institutions guarantee that people can build their capacities to be free.

In fact, you can quote me on this, but the USA right now is way more anti-democratic than its people are and therefore there will be massive protests. Those protests will not be against democracy; they are democracy in action.

You can check out Christian Welzel and the World Value Survey literature to see why I say what I say.

First time I use Google in years. I’m sure they will readily suck my data, in this case my search for “Swasticars”.

Ah! Got it. Thanks! Brutal. And true.

I see that she’s female-presenting and white, but I guess the point is that she’s incompetent. If so, what’s the context? /c/OutOfTheLoop