As someone who ran track and cross country for 4 years in high school, this always fucking mystified me the most out of all the insane shit PE had us do.

Track and field club taught all new runners how to properly warm up, stretch, pace, etc. Its a process, and doing it properly takes 15-20 minutes to make sure your body is ready so you dont hurt yourself.

PE didnt do jack shit, they just said "go run a mile" so 70% of the fucking kids sprinted flat out the first lap and basically walked the other 3. Multiple people did it in boots or tennis shoes. I'm amazed more of them didnt pull a muscle or worse in the process.

I dont know what the purpose of PE was, but it sure as shit wasnt proper exercise. And I think a lot of people suffered for that. If they spent the time teaching us about the importance of physical health, proper nutrition, how to safely stretch/exercise, etc, we would all be better off now.

Let's be real, PE exists to shame and torture the fat kids, and for pretty much no other reason.

*Insert that thing with all the people who dread gym*

this one?

the purpose of PE, as it currently exists in the American school system, is to prepare kids to join the military. that's not some sort of moral-panic hyperbole. that's...pretty explicitly the purpose.

most of the prominently nightmarish features of PE, such as running the mile or doing sit-ups, originate with the Presidential Fitness Test. This test, which president Eisenhower implemented in schools in 1956, was created after a different fitness test (the Kraus-Weber test) revealed that Americans were less fit than Europeans -- specifically the Swiss.

The difference between the Kraus-Weber test and the Presidential Fitness test is that the Presidential Fitness test was specifically designed to test military fitness. While the Kraus-Weber test measured total fitness by testing things like core strength and flexibility, the Presidential Fitness test doesn't really make much sense in the context of ordinary fitness -- only in the context of military fitness. Do you remember being tested on how far you could throw a softball? That test mimicked throwing grenades. And it's pretty easy to see why Eisenhower went this direction. In 1956, the Cold War was in full swing and WWII was barely in the rear-view mirror. There was a real possibility that we would be at war with parts of super-fit Europe in the near future. Eisenhower wanted the nation's children ready to fight in that war.

The main issue with the Presidential Fitness test is that, as pointed out above, it really doesn't teach kids how to stay fit or incorporate physical activity in their day-to-day lives. A soldier at war might need to run a mile with no warm-up, or perform a pull-up, but for the average middle-schooler? The tests were just kind of...pointless exercises in misery. You're only really good at the Presidential Fitness Test if you've been practicing the specific exercises tested. And what 12 year old child is doing pull-ups for fun and pleasure? So instead of inspiring America's children to train themselves into a super-fit army, it just humiliated kids who didn't perform well.

There's been a recent push for PE classes to focus more on life-long fitness (things like actually teaching kids to warm up, exposing them to different types of physical activity, etc). Unfortunately, the Presidential Fitness test has already done its damage. It continued to be used in schools until 2013. That's 60 years of teaching kids to associate physical activity with shame and dread. The idea of military PE classes is pretty much baked into our cultural memory, giving us all a background dread of physical activity. and guess what, eisinhower?? that's just going to make people less likely to be physically active!! Maybe if we're trying to emulate the fitness of the SWISS, we shouldn't have gone with MILITARY TRAINING FOR CHILDREN!!

anyways. take some comfort in the fact that nobody will ever judge you for your mile time again. and if they try, ask to see them run a mile. directly away from you.

fucked up onion my belothed

One of the most life-changing things I ever learned came from Mythbusters, where they tested and proved (with cognitive testing puzzles and reaction time tests) that lying down and resting with the intention to sleep STILL provided significant mental benefits over just staying awake, even if a person couldn’t fall asleep in the amount of time they had. 

It helps me to actually sleep to know that just lying down with my eyes closed is still doing me some good, and helps me to not freak out/beat myself up when I stay up later than intended. Any amount of rest is better than no rest!

So if you didn’t know that…now you do

do you know that i think of this post every time i can’t sleep op. what mythbusters did for you, you have done for a great many others. 

One instructor in nursing school, fifty years ago: “If you can’t sleep, rest. If you can’t rest, at least lie down and pretend.”

i actually do think individual human lives are unfathomably valuable

I'm very frustrated by people who think that religion itself is the problem and should be eradicated.

Good, kind people can be good, kind people without religion. Bastards will be bastards without religion.

If you take religion away from humans, they will form another one. It's a thing that humans do. We form communities.

Like if the problem was religion, then atheist communities wouldn't be toxic at all, but it can get pretty hairy in there.

We should absolutely be calling out manipulative behavior in religious settings because it's in everyone's best interest to make sure it doesn't become a cult, but that can also happen in places like friend groups, college clubs, workplaces, and trivia teams.

#Getting rid of religion will not create peace among men #if anything the more secular the world has become the worse it's gotten #every single communist country ever bans religion #and that sure as fuck never stopped them from constant genocides and human rights abuses

Sorry, I could never be a capitalist, I suffer from “wanting humans to have their basic needs met” disorder, where I care about people who aren’t me.

Someone once asked me if, assuming we got universal healthcare, I would be okay with the rise in “healthcare tourism” where people who are sick come to our country to get their medical bills taken care of and life-saving medical treatment cheaper than in their home countries. I was just like, yeah thats fine, I’d actually prefer it if 0 people died from preventable causes kept behind a paywall for no reason.

“even the addicts?” yeah dude did i fucking stutter

I keep thinking about a post I saw the other day, and likely won't be able to find again, which proposed as a response to "you'll be fine if you have nothing to hide" the phrase:

" I have nothing to hide, but I don't trust your intentions and judgement"

Was it this one?

"I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgment and intentions are."

you cannot justify bombing a fucking hospital i want isreal to fucking perish i have. no words.

a hospital.

it was a hospital.

there were infants in there.

you fucking monsters

same as it ever was

I've touched gras many, many, MANY times, and we still don't have a Democracy...

It is actually way better for 100 addicts to get their fix on pain pills than a single person in pain go without. I call this the "Torture is bad" principle. You should be able to get the good stuff forever after a single doctor's visit. If you're worried about addicts fund rehab centers and needle exchanges instead of torturing people.

Among other things if you can't use the legit market you turn to the black market anyway.

if you're worried about addiction, build a society where people get their basic needs met, including pain management.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against this post. But those 100 addicts are also in pain. It's most likely emotional pain, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I ask again, what is the purpose of school resource officers other than to instill discomfort in the student body? Other than to brutalize and single out select “problem” students at random, often marginalized ones? There was not one single time during my academic career when I was glad there was a school resource officer in the school. It was a teacher who disarmed a student at my school. Every time there was a violent brawl, it was a teacher who inserted themselves in the middle to stop it. It is teachers who put themselves in front of gunmen to protect their students while the coward cop sticks his thumb in his ass in the parking lot.

Ch👍

hey netizens! i'm not sure how many people are aware, but youtube's been slowly rolling out a new anti-adblock policy that can't be bypassed with the usual software like uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole out of the gate

BUT, if you're a uBlock Origin user (or use an adblocker with a similar cosmetics modifier), you can add these commands in the uBlock dashboard to get rid of it!

reblog to help keep the internet less annoying and to tell corporations that try shit like this to go fuck themselves <3

Where do I copy-paste these to? "My filters"? "My Rules"?

'my filters'! if you look closely you'll notice the format is different between the two pages. the (website)(##)(additional text) format goes in filters

I haven’t had any problems using adblock on YouTube with Firefox, so that’s also an option

Years ago I overheard (eavesdropped upon) a telephone conversation between a public parks official and a golf course owner.

Parks Official: No sir, you cannot

Parks Official: No. They are a protected species

Parks Official: You CANNOT shoot them

Parks Official: Or poison them, no. Or trap them

Parks Official: If you like, we can-- no, I'm it. I'm the ranking official here. There's nobody above me. My boss? You mean... the governor's office? Sure, I guess. Okay bye

After he hung up, he gave me this thousand-yard stare before answering my unvoiced question.

"There's a flock of flamingos at the 9th green disrupting golfers. He wanted permission to go out there with a shotgun and take care of matters, but sensed there might be... legal ramifications. So he called us."

I laughed. "Does that happen often?"

"Oh, we get calls like that a couple times a month."

Country clubs should be burned to the ground and their golf courses turned into community gardens i am 10000% serious

Was golf created for the sole purpose of hoarding ridiculously large amounts of land just to brag about how little they use it?

Yes, literally.

Actually for real. That is the history of literally every form of hoarding ridiculous amounts of land, clearing all signs of life other than immaculately mown and controlled grass, and barely using the space. Rich people having too much money to know what to do with it and far too much time on their hands to fuck around doing this shit.

ok not to go on about twitter again but Google is booting twitter cause they aren't paying for server space anymore so Elon is lying about these limits happening because he wants ppl to pay to see more, it was happening because the servers are genuinely DOWN 😭😭😭

One thing that you can always depend on from Musk—he’s the richest guy on earth but he won’t pay his bills and then he’ll lie about it. Nothing he says is true.

And people think this man is a genius. *SMDH*

people with medical issues are not “putting a strain on the medical system”. that’s what the medical system is for. yes this includes people with substance use related medical issues and other people often considered undeserving of help

common additions:

Hmmmm