For those who may not be aware, this was precisely the spirit of why affirmative action existed and why I personally supported it. These are the type of things that happen when our society misunderstands an executive action (because it was never a law) and debates in bad faith the intent of the premise for political purposes.
I agree that focusing on 'equality of outcomes' is not a good fit for our American culture and it should be about 'equality of opportunity'.
From wikipedia (which quoted Harvard):
"Affirmative action is intended to alleviate under-representation and to promote the opportunities of defined minority groups within a society to give them equal access to that of the majority population."
If focus is illiberally applied to the outcomes, then those at the edge of the bell curve are denied opportunities that likely work for them, i.e. the slashing of gifted programs as a gifted student.
As usual, the title is not accurate, as there is no "fuel".
What happens is that the antioxidants, including vitamin C, stimulate the tumors to grow blood vessels.
The tumors with better blood vessels grow faster.
So the antioxidants that are good for you are also good for tumors. Therefore they must be avoided whenever cancer is identified and you have to take medication that is bad for you, but hopefully even worse for tumors.
Some anti-tumor medication has precisely the purpose to prevent the growth of blood vessels. This may stop the growth of the tumor, but it is also obviously bad for your other blood vessels, so it can be used only to gain time until some other form of treatment becomes feasible.
Moreover, the paper specifically mentions administering Vitamin C, Vitamin E and N-acetyl-cysteine. The article casually throws in Vitamin A, Selenium and Zinc into the mix, none of which are mentioned in the paper.
> So the antioxidants that are good for you are also good for tumors.
I think the consensus is that supplements aren't useful as long as you don't have a deficiency (which is pretty uncommon in the west if you aren't eating particularly bad).
Sometimes they may be useful to treat a condition. I had common warts for years, they would never disappear on their own without freezing and there was one that was resistant to multiple freezing sessions at the doc. I have started taking stupid doses of D3, C and also eating garlic every day - the freeze resistant wart flattened to almost nothing in 2 weeks on its own, any small wart that pops up now will disappear in a month without freezing.
> but it is also obviously bad for your other blood vessels, so it can be used only to gain time until some other form of treatment becomes feasible.
As a nutrient/oxygen delivery network, in an adult human it should not be a problem unless one's injured I imagine? That's because the vessel network is fully developed, but I don't know if my intuition is correct on this one.
In general, supplements should not be taken without good reason, because their availability in concentrated form makes it very easy to consume too much, like is also the case for refined sugar.
Consuming too much of anything that is useful in small quantities, is either useless or harmful.
When restricted to the same small quantities that are normally available from natural sources, there are no significant differences between vitamins from supplements and from their natural sources.
There may be good reasons to use supplements, as long as their dosage is right. For instance, eating one raw red bell pepper per day will provide enough vitamin C for a human. However, the same amount of ascorbic acid powder costs ten times less where I live, in Europe. So either taste or budget may make the supplement preferable, which is fine, unless a much greater daily intake is used than it would have been provided by the bell pepper.
This - the overconsumption of supplements can lead to problems. The problem isn't so much with a daily multivitamin as it is with megadoses of a bunch of different vitamins. I know it's only anecdotal, but I had a cousin that really got into one of those vitamin selling pyramid schemes. She got to the point she was taking dozens of different supplements every day and was one of the top sellers. She got cancer and died while only in her 30's. This has been decades ago and I don't remember which cancer she had, but I do remember friends and family wondering if taking all those supplements was a factor? Subsequent research suggests perhaps so. Like I said, she was mega dosing - she wasn't just taking a daily multivitamin.
I have been, not sure if it counts as megadosing, but let's it does, megadosing D3 and C. I have struggled with common skin HPV that would not go away for over 3 years. Modest supplement doses did nothing, but when I increased D3 to 6,000 IU, C to 1.5g and started eating garlic, the warts just started disappearing on their own after some 2 weeks - including the most difficult ones (previously that would require freezing and even that could not eliminate some warts after multiple sessions at the doc). As far as I'm aware all of those are antioxidants. I guess that the invalid cell cleanup and virus cleanup are different mechanisms, but maybe just a guess - that if the immune system is too weak to clean up HPV on its own, it may also be more prone to let a cancer cell slip, maybe I would be better off to continue megadosing those... This kinda makes it a tough call. The thing about sugar is kinda related between the 2 - there's this study about how eating large amounts of sugar in one take will mess with the tumor cleanup mechanism - I noticed that I would often get more new warts after holidays when I consumed a lot of sugar.
lol I bet that works, you can also rub garlic directly on warts and other skin issues I’ve been helped by that in the last. On a separate note, 6,000 IU of d3 is nowhere near a megadose lmao, the study that supposed that it’s dangerous was wrong due to a typo, doses of 50,000 IU over 6mo have been tested and found to be safe. I personally take around 10-15k daily depending on sun exposure and once a week take 30k IUs, along with other things. I would recommend experimenting with 10k daily dose at least if you’re willing to check it out :)
I was just trying to say that healthy diets are still healthy, and that this study does not implicate healthy foods in the same way that it implicates supplements, which I agree, are generally either unnecessary or unhealthy, with a few special cases.
I was also just making this point of clarification for other people, and not implying that a reasonable reading of your post would determine you thought otherwise.
> As usual, the title is not accurate, as there is no "fuel". What happens is that the antioxidants, including vitamin C, stimulate the tumors to grow blood vessels.
What an odd nitpick, especially as it's incorrect.
> fuel, verb, 2: support, stimulate [1]
By improving the blood flow, it supports, stimulates, or fuels the growth of tumors.
School's curriculum and grading system being connected to email alerts + doing standardized testing 3-4 times a year.
It takes a lot of energy to raise children and be a good partner. The anxiety introduced by constantly getting notified of what is being taught, what the grades are, what is missing EVERYDAY is not only overkill, but I think harmful.
My philosophy is that school (elementary, middle, high school) is a time to explore, be a kid, make mistakes, and do your best to navigate puberty.
The constant reminder of grades, grades, grades puts too much emphasis on my more school-inclined child to be obsessed with their identity as an "A" student, and my art-inclined child to rebel at every turn with us constantly stressing if she's "missed" anything.
Same with daycares. It used to be that the teachers would tell us if we needed to actually do something or bring something in.
Now, our kids miss out on school events because they are buried in single lines in one of the 4+ e-mails a day from them. And the response is always "didn't you see the e-mail?"
IIRC apartment complexes advertising no pet surcharges + other pet accommodations have been dinged for racial discrimination because more white people than minorities owned covered pets.
It just makes it sound like you want it to be exclusive doesn't it? How many black people are going to feel comfortable in a 'white friendly place'? It's kind of 'you don't belong here' in the most explicit but not threatening way possible.
If I (white) saw 'black friendly cafe' or something, I don't have a problem with that to be clear, but I would absolutely assume that I'm not exactly welcome, that it's intended to serve that community - as in perhaps even specific to a particular country/region people are from (or have heritage) locally.
If what you want is actually a hyper-inclusive mix, I don't really know what you can actively do, but I do think you need to not mention any particular groups or categorise people like that.
That's not the same thing. The big piece you are missing is context. Making an argument devoid of context means that you are ignoring how people understand something given a generalized heuristic.
"Pro-black" is not equivalent to "Pro-white" mainly because of the context within the US. "Pro-black" however is equivalent to "Pro-Italian" or "Pro-Irish" because of the historical context of how those phrases relate to generalized heuristic (cultural celebration usually involving commerce).
> If I (white) saw 'black friendly cafe' or something, I don't have a problem with that to be clear, but I would absolutely assume that I'm not exactly welcome, that it's intended to serve that community
If your lived experience is that you haven't been welcome to a 'black friendly cafe', then that is unfortunate. That is not my experience and I can't find any data or historical context that reinforces that narrative. I'm not saying it doesn't happen or that if it did, it would not be wrong, but that statement reinforces my point.
You are using the context of how you would feel as an equivalency to the intent of the person who puts out the message. If you don't allow for nuance, then you will have missed the point.
"Pro-white" or "White friendly" messaging historically has been extremely overt as being anti-Black, so much so that we have entire amendments in our US Constitution that exist in an attempt to combat them.
So lived experience is more important than a rule that applies equally to all human beings. Except for the lived experience of OP which you handwaved away because it doesn't match your experience.
If you find a flat that advertises as "pet friendly," does it discriminate against people who don't have a pet? No. But it does mean you probably won't like the place much if you don't like cats and dogs.
It is not uncommon for people to advertise a room in an "Asian household" (for example) and that isn't discriminating against non-Asians. It is suggesting that Asian people would probably be happier there, but it isn't excluding anyone.
The most compelling reason I communicate with young people who I work with in this age bracket is the idea of a safe sandbox.
Programming is a way to learn a new language that allows you to build something...ANYTHING...that you can easily tear down, upgrade, keep, or share.
There is nothing like the feeling of trying to build something, getting stuck, having the AHA moment, then seeing it work!
I don't focus on a particular language, stack, or goal. I push them to think about what they want to build, break, and poke around with, find an example online, then open it up and try to modify it.
I've found that most teens want the ability the explore, on their own terms. Programming is too often told from the perspective of working adults who focus on productivity, profit, or protection against obsolescence (you better learn it b/c it will be needed in your future). At that age, most kids aren't motivated by that because it's not their context.
I completely disagree with the notion that one has to "just like it" or "find your own motivation or its not for you". This is not a pipeline problem. This is an incentive problem and the industry is mostly incentivized by efficiency, speed, and profit. I try to focus on the value.
For those who find this and ask the question "What does math have to do with white supremacy?", I will attempt to try and lay out the argument. I'm going to assume you're asking this question in good faith.
I understand that the phrase "white supremacy" is equated with the idea that "people who identify as white are superior" (bad). I also understand the immediate reaction is to possibly think "I am not a bad person and I identify as white, so there must be something wrong here". When you then tie it to a concept like math, the next thought then tends to go to "how can a concept, not a person, like math, inherit a bad human trait like superiority"? It can't, so therefore there must be something wrong with these ideas.
First, the argument is not referring to a person, but a culture. Another way to think about it is a system. In this context, the system simply refers to the current methods of teaching.
If we all agree that the goal is to encourage as many people as possible to participate in STEM, enjoy it, thrive in it, and feel supported in it and we all agree that the data and studies show that our current system could be improved to accomplish this goal, the next conclusion is to criticize the system of which we teach fundamental concepts, like math.
Within our current system (or culture), we teach math a certain way. Some of those ways emphasize independent practice, mistakes are failure, teaching concepts linearly, and/or grading students based on what they don't know.
Because a lot of us learned this way and we are in the STEM field, we may ask ourselves "what is wrong with that?"
The argument is not that you don't have a legitimate question. The argument is that stopping at the question does not achieve the goal. After years and years of social science study of what prevents people of color from getting into STEM fields (if you don't believe these studies exist, that is ok, but only encourage your own investigation), the argument of "white supremacy culture in math" is providing points of how to center the experiences of people in color within the curriculum of teaching math to increase the thing we all seem to claim we want: the pipeline.
As a Black man, its really hard to be a part of this community and see people argue that is a pipeline problem, see scholars provide solutions to address the pipeline, then see those same people say "but why do we have to change anything, why is this relevant?"
At this point, it just feels like some people actually don't want a solution. Even if this doesn't work, why are we afraid to try? Isn't that the point of being part of the scientific community?
Instead, we're stuck demonizing the motives of people we don't know who are trying to help others who may be outside of our own bubble.
Sorry, but you didn't answer the question you set out to answer. What does mathematics or the way its taught have to do with white supremacy?
> After years and years of social science study of what prevents people of color from getting into STEM fields (if you don't believe these studies exist, that is ok, but only encourage your own investigation), the argument of "white supremacy culture in math" is providing points of how to center the experiences of people in color within the curriculum of teaching math to increase the thing we all seem to claim we want: the pipeline.
"Prevents"? Surely there are physicists and mathematicians graduating in majority non-white countries. Somehow I doubt they teach mathematics in a radically different way. If that's the case then I don't see how doing anything to the curriculum could have any effect.
After reading your comment a few times, I still don't see the argument for why it makes sense to partition simply based on race. At best it's a proxy for real personal difficulties, but at worst it's just another top-down cookie cutter model that will precess and oppress the individuals it claims to help.
Anybody that has gone to school or otherwise suffered an institution is keenly aware that the major failure mode of institutions is trying to push top-down models that don't respect the individual details of their members. Taking it as a given that different people have their own individual learning style - why wouldn't we want to, for each individual, determine a teaching approach that best suits them? There will likely be correlation between race and learning style, but why should we take that as a fundamental given and leave behind all of those students who don't fit that simple model?
For example, from page 10 of the pdf you linked:
> Design homework policies that are responsive to the lives of students of color in order to support their learning needs.
Shouldn't homework policies be responsive to all students home lives? What is special about "of color" that makes for a different home life, beyond being correlated to other qualities that would be more appropriate to speak in terms of?
I'll give you that there is an issue of latent racism where a teacher will/may be less understanding to a minority, but it seems like addressing this issue directly makes more sense, rather than thinking it will fall out of some overabstracted general concern. Reading that pdf gives me the same exact feeling I had reading "literature" in college that mostly consisted of ambiguous postmodern rambling, where the only winning move was to regurgitate the themes and phrases the professor themselves had said. Such antirealism is not a foundation for reforming society.
(Having said that, I think this "CRT" political trope is mostly just a bogeyman)
There are two great responses here that read your points and the source material and come to the same conclusion. You have not made a point.
Why not try? Because this is the wrong method. Kids hardly learn math as it is. Confounding their learning with other factors will only make the whole situation worse.
Read these comments and try to understand why people are opposed to these methods. Force divisive topics into the classroom and no one will learn
I agree that focusing on 'equality of outcomes' is not a good fit for our American culture and it should be about 'equality of opportunity'.
From wikipedia (which quoted Harvard): "Affirmative action is intended to alleviate under-representation and to promote the opportunities of defined minority groups within a society to give them equal access to that of the majority population."
If focus is illiberally applied to the outcomes, then those at the edge of the bell curve are denied opportunities that likely work for them, i.e. the slashing of gifted programs as a gifted student.