This may come off as a rant but I'm annoyed by how infantilizing everything in the world is today.

Story time. My wife and I had another child a few months ago. When we take our daughter to her checkups the receptionist hands us this tablet and we have to answer a bunch of questions before we can even go back. It proceeds to ask us questions like:

Do you have any guns in the house? (None of your fucking business)

If so, how are they stored? (Again, none of your fucking business)

Name three things you love about your child (Why am I having to answer open response questions?)

What makes this organization think they have the right to ask me these invasive questions? It feels like everything is this way now. Every company or organization treats you with this infantilizing tone like they have to guide you through life.

I don't remember it being this way when I was younger. Has anyone else noticed this shift?

There’s been much ballyhoo lately about cost of living and affordability in media lately (deservedly so, imo) but I’m curious how hard it is for those of us who are a little more capable than normies (we like to think).

Feel free to be somewhat vague. Not asking anyone to doxx themselves. I’ll start.

In my mid-thirties. Married, two kids. Combined income is just under 100k. We live in a low cost of living area which has helped us a lot. We were able to buy a house in ‘21 with a 15 year mortgage and it feels like we got on the last lifeboat off the Titanic. We’ve been able to build about a 200k net worth, about half of which is home equity.

Day to day expenses are getting tougher, however. We’ve never had a car payment but our older kid has started school and that has put a strain on us since he goes to a private Christian school. I’ve worked in education and I consider sending a kid to public school to be akin to child abuse.

It feels harder and harder to save and invest. Just making ends meet with two kids in this red state feels like a Herculean task. Wondering if anyone else feels the same way.

We're two days in to this second term and the TDS is stronger than ever. I have lefty friends making jokes like "Hurr durr we're all female now!" over some semantics in the new two genders policy. As if pretending not to know what a woman is owns the cons.

I'm lurking reddit and they're calling Trump senile (projection) because he got the number of soviets killed in WWII wrong. They just can't help themselves but over-analyze every little thing he says and take it literally like autistic spergs. I've never seen anyone who is able to live rent-free in other peoples' heads like Trump.

Anyone else have some early Trump 2.0 TDS examples?

I think it helps to have a nuanced opinion and make sure we don't spiral into an echo chamber. For my example, I've found that lefties are able to identify a lot of the right problems, it's just that they think gay space communism is the solution to it.

For instance, I completely agree that North American cities are really stupidly designed. The car-centric nature of them means you're stranded if your vehicle breaks down. The fact that you have to go into debt to buy this big stupid box to navigate your own city is ridiculous in the first place.

But when it comes to their solutions for this they can't separate their stupid idpol nonsense from it. My local city government keeps talking about "equitable solutions" to traffic and pedestrian fatalities. Typical "world ending, women most affected" type stuff.

Plus they keep droning on about high density housing which absolutely no one wants to live in. in their utopia we'd all live in depressing Soviet-style block apartments.

I don't know many Sanderson fans are around here, but for those who don't know, the 5th book of the Stormlight Archive just came out. I'm about halfway through it and there is so much shoehorned woke garbage in it.

One character is suddenly gay, like Kaiden in Mass Effect 3. There are all these references to transgenderism, which hasn't existed at all in this universe until this point. All of it is so jarring and out of place. I guess Sanderson has been spending too much time on reddit.

I just want one thing I can enjoy.

This is something I've tried to keep track of casually but I always feel like I'm forgetting some. Off the top of my head:

The Little Mermaid

Triss Merrigold

Velma

Starfire

Annie the Orphan

I'm sure there are more. Who am I missing?

I'm always looking for new ways the social contract is breaking down. It's easy to get caught up in internet drama but every now and then I like to touch grass and see what the normies are doing. One thing I've noticed is how aggressively people drive now.

This past weekend I had my whole family in the car and a Dodge hatchback of all things shoots past us at over 100 miles per hour. This was in the middle of town, not a highway. We pull up next to the dude at the next red light (because that always seems to happen) and he guns it again, going into the opposing lane of traffic to pass everyone and shoot down the road again.

I feel like I see this kind of thing more and more now. People going 60+ in residential areas and blasting through school zones. Has anyone else experienced this? Do you think it's indicative of anything or am I just an autist?

This school year I went "undercover" at my local school district. Long story short, I'm in a position in life where I don't really have to work so I can do more or less what I want (once I see to it my children are taken care of that is).

So I decided to become a substitute teacher. It's shockingly easy. They'll let anyone with a pulse do it apparently because I just applied on the website and a week later I was in a room with 40 other people in an orientation.

I went to elementary, middle schools and high schools throughout the district to get a good idea of what's going on all levels. I know we all have a basic understanding that public education is bad but what I saw shocked even me.

My district has begun a policy called "inclusion" wherein all the special ed kids are put in regular classes in the name of, well, inclusion. This goes about like you'd expect. The teachers spend all their time trying to control the screaming autistic kid while all the others play Fortnite on their school issued laptops. The gen-ed teachers told me they were given no extra training about how to deal with kids with special needs. They just got an email a week before school started letting them know of the new policy.

The lowest grade any student can be given is a 50%. If a student puts their name on a paper and turns it in blank, congratulations! Automatic 50%. This was done in the name of "equity" because certain demographics were performing poorly compared to others (you know who). The fudging of the grades serves to eliminate some of that gap and also boost graduation rates so they get that sweet, sweet federal funding.

The most shocking thing to me though was the absolute lawlessness in the high schools. Teachers told me they have no way to discipline a kid now. The admin will side with the kid every time (especially if they have a certain baseline of melanin) so the teachers don't bother. There were a minimum of two fights every day and the video was circulating on snapchat 20 minutes later every time.

Kids do basically no work and learn nothing at any time. Assignments are either ignored or the kids get the answers from a group chat.

I looked up the district's budget to see if maybe a lack of funds was causing some of this. Nope. My district's total budget for this year was 200 million (!!!) dollars. No doubt all that money is lining someone's pocket because it hasn't gone to any of the classrooms that are the same as they were in the nineties when I was in them.

The kicker? I live in one of the reddest states in the US. Get your kids out of public schools as fast as you can.