really it's like watching the Special Olympics with a family who has a child in the games. You are going to be super nice and supportive and cheer for everyone correctly mainly because you want to be a nice person and not hurt anyone's feelings. And then your hosts decide to start being hyper critical of the quality of the niceness you are showing. Accusing you of being insincere and not really caring about the Special Olympics. The nicer you try to be, the more your hosts reject your fake attitude. And then you realize that the only thing that could ever give you status in their eyes is if you competed in the Special Olympics. The fact that we can't just come out and say, "you are right I don't care about the Special Olympics at all and the kids run slow" is like what topics involving race are like these days. We wouldn't want to come out and make a shocking claim if we weren't forced into it by the badgering of The Elect. We are being constantly provoked in order to make this the only topic of discussion.

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Francesca Gilles11 hr ago

This piece brings to mind a recent interaction I had with a few of my friends (well-meaning, white, dues-paying members of The Elect, to be sure). Innocently enough, while discussing emerging evidence that Vitamin D deficiency may be correlated with severe Covid outcomes, I mentioned that darker skinned people require significantly more sun exposure than lighter skinned people to synthesize the necessary levels of Vitamin D. Instantly, before I had even managed to finish the sentence and absent any mention of Black people specifically, my friends scoffed and said, "Fran, Black people are dying because of medical racism." End of conversation, as if it wasn't even worth mentioning a concrete scientific reality in the face of the all-encompassing trump card of medical racism.

Britain's seeing it's vaunted educational system hammered by Covid and Brexit. The US system isn't immune. Sure, for tech we'll stay strong, but if liberal arts and all other things take on this veneer, foreign students just might not bother, with the *huge* costs. Part was always to buy access, but now there's the question "access to what?" 2nd prize *2* degrees! I still question this criminalizing these pay for access schemes - everyone's trying to out their thumb on the scale - that *us* how you get ahead. Sure, imprison everyone who tries something not my way, tries to push their type of advantage. 

Except sometimes we haven't