Some states do wield out-sized influence. Maybe we need to break the larger (by population) states into multiple smaller states for pluralistic federalism to work.

Since people keep bringing up Florida, I'm going to suggest that *letting Florida deal with Florida* may well be part of the answer. Federalism rather than centralism. Pluralism rather than national uniformity. Here's a sociologist's definition of federalism: "Federalism is a system in which pluralism is accommodated because governing principles vary from place to place." Maybe we shouldn't be aiming for an ideal of across-the-board correct-thinking or correct-legislating. That is exactly what is not possible in a pluralistic society since perceptions of correct aren't all the same. The best path forward might in fact be to let Florida (or California, or Massachussetts, or Arizona) be wrong. To embrace that as part of our national identity--cousins squabble and disagree, and that's OK. We're family. I realize this makes no-one happy. I suspect that any path forward that does not start and end with broadly liberal conceptions of what individuals and groups and governing bodies can reasonably think and do is doomed to unproductive, antagonistic polarization.

I don't think that countering people's narratives by telling them how wrong they are moves us in a positive direction. I think we have to let multiple narratives co-exist. I don't think the path forward is going to be deciding on one homogenous narrative--short of Chinese-government level of control over information dissemination, that's never going to happen. And I'm entirely opposed to imitating the Chinese government. I think people can learn from exposure to narratives beyond those of their own family and group, but in a pluralistic society there will be a multitude of narratives with frequent disagreements among them. Mutual respect includes allowing for wrongness of opinion by whatever standard I am judging. Difficulty 1: learning to live as a larger society with a multiplicity of sub-narratives and cultures, learning to be active in promoting things that are important to us without acting out antagonistically and judgmentally towards those we disagree with. Difficulty 2: finding something to unite us across this plurality of cultures and viewpoints. A commitment to plurality and diversity and liberality of thought and belief could be part of 2.

My generation didn't have cell phones and an expectation of constant connectivity. I called home once a week. This generation grew up with cell phones and the expectation of staying in constant contact with people important to them. It's normal to them to touch base multiple times per day. Their friends are all doing it too. Enjoy it.

Can you give me examples please?

We've got thousands of titles in our family kindle and audible libraries. What is allowable as my kids leave home? Can I continue to share my account with them?

I'm usually an optimist. I'm not sure what our path forward is here. Best I can figure is somehow genuinely embracing diversity of thought/culture/opinion and freedom for individuals and communities to be actually diverse from each other without acting out judgmentally towards everyone else. Difficult because part of embracing any particular group view involves rejecting other views. I'm on board for trying, how do we get enough people to start? There's heavy judgmentalism and a tendency towards social (and sometimes political) authoritarianism both on the right and left of our political spectrum right now. Is there less in the middle? Do we have a middle?

I don't know how we would go about creating a common foundational knowledge core for history and literature. We live in a diverse, pluralistic society. History is narrative, point-of-view, story telling. How do you go about establishing a compilation that would be accepted by the multiple points of view? I'm not arguing against it, I'm just not sure it is possible. Every country I have lived in has had a (current at the time I was there) mainstream narrative regarding their history. It is not a narrative that encompasses every people group or point of view in the country. It usually represents primarily a majority culture point of view. Few countries are trying to balance as many different perspectives as we are in the United States. Where we now stand, we've rejected the notion of embracing a majority culture or a majority-culture historical narrative. That's a complex, I think even unprecedented place for a society to be. It's not going to be easy to navigate. There's a ton of tension between different views that very much want *their* perspective to become the new established culture perspective, but I don't think there's enough of an actual majority behind any of them to do that. Somehow we need to learn to actually accept living in a world with a multiplicity of cultures in balance. Including the ones we disagree with or don't like or think are just plain wrong.

We've pushed academics to younger and younger kids, a lot of what is in current kindergarten standards really isn't developmentally appropriate for 5 year olds--especially 5 year old boys, who tend to lag behind girls in some areas. Under those circumstances, it makes sense to wait to start school for some kids until they are a bit older. I'd love to see more direct-job-skill vocational training and internships/apprenticeships at the high school level.

Can we be accurate in our discussion? No-one is telling adults what they can or can't read. The controls are only on what a student (as a student) can access through their school library. I'm curious about your situation. If your library is school/public, can students get a public library card and access the books that way? Is the legislation specifically about what school libraries can offer or what any public library can offer to minors? (Since you are moving books not discarding them I assume those that are off-limit for students to check out are still available to the public, or at least to adult public patrons.)

Did you know you can delete things from your amazon viewing history? #pro-tip Sorry, I don't have any book recommendations!

Black and white thinking is always a problem. Humans, individually and collectively, are complicated. Thoughtfulness and nuance are needed. Polarized politicalization of any issue undermines that.

I hope the graphic design job comes through! In the meantime, here's a customer service job for a homeschool curriculum instruction company; hours aren't ideal but it sounds like better hours could be available in the future: https://www.indeed.com/m/viewjob?jk=de27b17e37235e47&from=ja&alid=639a91371ef86228dd53a92f&tk=1h6vmjkr5rhhj800&utm_campaign=job_alerts&utm_medium=email&utm_source=jobseeker_emails&rgtk=1h6vmjkr5rhhj800

Regarding brain research, a comparison could be made to the state of research on religious experience and the brain. There are a fair number of studies out there showing differences in brain activity and even structure between people who report religious experiences and those who don't. There's science indicating that something of note is happening in the brains of religious people and differentiating them from non-religious people. This doesn't mean that we push to re-organize society around the professed experiences of religious people. We do, in many countries, make allowances for people to believe as they will and, within reason, practice as they will--but we don't demand that everyone else in society treat their specific beliefs as scientific truth that must be reinforced at all times just because *something of note may be happening in their brains*. I grant that people can absolutely *believe inside their heads* that they actually experience a thing they label gender that is at odds with their biological sex. That doesn't mean that their subjective experience needs to accepted by everyone in the population as outweighing the objectively observable, overwhelmingly scientifically supported physical reality of biological sex. I'm a religious person. I believe that I commune directly with God and that I have experienced direct guidance in my life from deity. I don't at all expect every person in my community to bend over backwards to acknowledge and affirm and reinforce and demand that others reinforce my specific, subjective experiences and beliefs.

I'm quite confident that evolutionary pressures have ensured that humans on average, like other animals, are very, very good at differentiating between post-adolescent males and females of our own species. My experience is that this happens automatically without thought. I noticed it in myself when watching co-ed martial arts tournaments; competitors were dressed identically (well, the uniform was identical--the fit was not) and groomed similarly; there weren't a lot of *cultural* gender markers in evidence. But as each individual stepped onto the stage my brain was automatically categorizing them as male or female--not even in a super conscious way, but at some point I noted the fact. I'd never met these people, I didn't know there names or anything else about them. But my brain made instantaneous male/female categorizations. I very much expect that such is the norm not only among humans but among nearly every other species of animal on our planet.

I have yet to see significant material change come about from the manipulation of words. All the obsession with pronouns in English always brings to my mind the fact that Chinese uses a non-gendered* 3rd person singular pronoun. And anyone who knows anything about Chinese culture and history knows that they've managed heaps and mountains of gender expectations and limitations in spite of gender neutral pronouns. *in modern written form there is now a distinct female-ta character, invented according to my understanding to translate foreign texts into Chinese. The word itself remains the same for male and female.

I am sorry there are so many awful parents in your area. I have never in my life heard a parent say anything like this to a child. You actually hear these things on a regular basis?

Hispanic is not about being a Spanish speaker. Here's how the OMB defines it: It really is quite random to include only Hispanic as an ethnicity option. Also not very meaningful in and of itself. There are people who fit within that "Hispanic " definition whose families have been residents of Texas for centuries, and people who are recent immigrants from Uruguay, and neither of them has much in common with the second generation kid with parents from Mexico.

So, I once encountered a drop-down ethnicity list for a medical practice that was clearly trying to be inclusive in a very haphazard way. It included what must have been the entire registered list of native American tribes individually, a scattershot sampling of European nationalities (like, Italy and Sweden but not France or Norway) and then just Asian for that entire continent. It was perplexing to say the least.

I was never given a choice, it just was what it was. Which was fine. I'm quite content to use a name that "fits" in the local phonetic system. I do think, like everything, things can be taken to an extreme. If I want to call Mi Kyeung "Micky" and I know she dislikes that, it would be rude of me to persist. But back to language being communal--I don't own what comes out of the mouths of others.

??? Why??? Inserting an English pronunciation of my name into a non-English phonetic system is all kinds of awkward, and actually most speakers of other languages literally cannot form an American rhotic "r" comfortably or competently. That's a speech sound that takes an awful lot of practice. Nope, there was zero call for me to either try to impose that on anyone or to feel somehow slighted by their failure to attempt it.

This is truly befuddling to me. In the many years I lived in places where the standard English pronunciation of my name didn't match local linguistic patterns, never once did it occur to me to expect let alone demand that the people around me use the pronunciation my family used at home. I adapted quite easily to the variations on my name that flowed comfortably in the native dialects of the people around me. Their mouths, speaking in the way that was comfortable to them. Seems perfectly reasonable and accomodatable to me.

No, actually. The words that come out of my mouth are under my control, not that of someone else. Thst's pretty base level personal autonomy. People can absolutely choose how to introduce themselves, can tell other what they prefer to be called. But none of us chooses the actions of another. Basic locus of control.

Jonathan Haidt addresses some of the risks associated with treating words as violence: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/07/why-its-a-bad-idea-to-tell-students-words-are-violence/533970/

Words are not bullets.