United States | News & Politics

Let me guess....big oil is now lobbying for changes in our education so they can keep making money and ruining the planet

A lot of these religious folks think the apocalypse can't get here great enough, so they are helping

Fundies often expect the world to end any moment now and for Supply-Side Jesus to further comfort the comforted and to send the afflicted to further affliction.

Calvinism, in all its spinoffs, is a fuck.

At this point I think there might just be an element of pure reaction and contrarianism involved. Dying's worth it as long as you own the commie nazi libs or whatever

Teach 'em young to get more votes. Republicans have been playing the long game for generations now.

The problem is that there are grains of truth here, but a lot of emotional manipulation, such as:

• Ania's friends stop talking to her - is this actually likely to happen?
• Ania doesn't feel questions are welcome - every teacher I've had will return some days later with answers to relevant questions they couldn't readily answer

Poland’s leaders promised to cut all coal production by 2049

Yet the video focuses on the Russia-Ukraine war. Surely that war won't last for the next 26 years. I think the world would accept going back to coal (perhaps from non-Russian sources) until natural gas can be sourced elsewhere or replaced by something else. 26 years is a long time, and they could totally build nuclear plants in that time. They have the international agreements in place, so it shouldn't be a huge issue to roll that out by the stated timeline.

Had they started rolling it out sooner they would already have a backup plan to Russian natural gas and coal.

So the main thrust of the videos i completely fine, but it sets up a strawman pitting two all-or-nothing approaches (switch 100% to green energy today or abandon green energy).

I'm not going to go through the full video as the motherjones article does that already, but I do also want to point out that motherjones is pushing a heavy narrative as well, such as:

While no school district has announced plans to show any of PragerU’s videos, NPR reports, there’s nothing to stop teachers from independently airing the material

They're making a huge deal out of something relatively small. Basically, Florida has stated that schools may use PragerU's content, not that they have to or should use that content, only that it's allowed.

The important thing is how it's presented. I think this video would be interesting for in-class discussion, especially when shown alongside a video with the opposite perspective. It could raise interesting questions, such as:

• how quickly should countries/states switch to green energy?
• how do we balance local needs and global concerns?
• is going backward when an emergency comes up a bad thing? How long is acceptable for a "temporary" step back?

I think it's also interesting from a "how bias can impact the presentation" discussion. So I 100% agree with it being allowed to be used in schools, but I think that should be followed up with some kind of auditing process to make sure it's being used appropriately, and that process should be as open as possible.

Logic and critical thinking was a third year course... in college... and was a freaking elective.

I remember being in the class and thinking that this probably would have been good to know before deciding what college or major to pick.

Citizens who can logically assess information in a systematic manner are less easy to control.

Zoe Bee did a great video recently where she broke down some of the PragerU teaching materials from a teaching materials. They're worse than I expected.

What schools are teaching clean coal as part of their curriculum? And yes, even ineffective solutions like recycling are extremely different and far better than teaching kids outright denial.