u/paxinfernum

• 78% of U.S. adults favor allowing students to voluntarily pray in student-led groups.
• 57% favor allowing coaches to lead their teams in prayer.
• 50% favor displaying the Ten Commandments in classrooms.
• 46% favor allowing teachers to lead their classes in prayer.

I got politely lectured the other day because I didn't understand the idiotic logic of the Aldi app. Apparently, they want you to hit "I'm coming" on a pickup order only when you're within like 3 blocks. The attendant let me know this, saw my takeout, and commented if I was picking something up at a restaurant first to wait until I was almost there.

Then, what is the point? If I'm within 3 blocks, I'm probably driving, and I'm not going to pull out my phone to give you a 3-minute heads-up. Who thought up this dumb feature? And who thought that customers should be the ones to figure out that it meant "I can basically see your parking lot" instead of "I'm coming"?

Walmart does an excellent job in this area. They tell you you can hit "I'm coming" when you leave your house. You know? Because that's when I've started coming. And no Walmart attendee has lectured me about not waiting long enough. Somehow, order doesn't break down if I'm not within 300 feet of the floor when I tell them I'm coming.

I've also never gotten a passive-aggressive comment on the Walmart app about how they can't see me outside yet. No shit you can't see me. There's an "I'm coming" button and an "I'm parked" button. If I pushed "I'm coming" but not "I'm parked," why are you searching for me in the parking lot? Just get the shit ready; put it in bins and the fridge like Walmart does, and wait for me to get there. This isn't rocket science.

In this video, the commentator talks about how The Skeptics Annotated Bible can be used as a resource by English teachers.

When Harmonie Perrone arrived at Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital in Illinois with symptoms of an ectopic pregnancy, she knew exactly what treatment she needed. She had been through this before. But because the hospital is religious, it restricted abortion-related care, and Perrone says doctors refused to provide the medication that could have ended the dangerous pregnancy before it became a medical crisis.

Instead, Perrone was repeatedly denied treatment by OB/GYN Dr. Dympna Coll, sent to a Catholic facility that also refused to help her, and forced to seek care elsewhere while the clock was ticking.

By the time she finally received treatment at Northwestern Medicine, the delay had dramatically increased the risks. Ultimately, surgeons had to remove her remaining fallopian tube, leaving her unable to become pregnant without IVF.

Now Perrone is suing Advocate Good Shepherd and Dr. Coll for medical negligence and violations of Illinois law.

But that's not the only lawsuit involved. After Perrone shared her experience on TikTok, Coll sued her for defamation and demanded she take down her videos.

White sold out on the first day, which means they either only made a few of them or they were much more popular than Insta360 expected. Personally, I want the Luna Ultra, but I'm holding out until they're back in stock.

The core argument of the video is that Noam Chomsky's dominant framework of generative grammar—specifically minimalism and phrase-structure-based movement—has acted as an institutional gatekeeper in linguistics, despite being fundamentally flawed [01:55].

The creator details the intense academic "hazing" he faced at UPenn, where a year of generative syntax was mandatory, regardless of a student's actual research focus [00:52]. After initially struggling and being told he should quit, he mastered the material, but always harbored deep doubts about its validity [01:20, 03:11]. Years after graduating, a colleague handed him a book on alternative frameworks, causing his belief in Chomskyan grammar to collapse like a "house of cards" [03:37].

He compares leaving the Chomskyan tradition to being a "cult survivor," explaining that the framework invents its own "theory-internal" problems (like "raising" and "control") and then sells the solutions [03:49, 15:36]. Ultimately, he argues that alternative frameworks like Dependency Grammar and Construction Grammar are superior because they don't rely on unobservable mental machinery, match how human brains actually process speech incrementally, and fit the cross-linguistic data [11:50, 17:53, 23:01].

Detailed Outline

1. Introduction: The Academic Gatekeeper [00:00:00–00:04:30]

• The UPenn Experience: The creator describes the grueling, toxic culture of his PhD program, which used Chomskyan syntax as a "flaming hoop" to weed out students [01:55].

• The "Tomistic" System: Even his advisor subtly mocked the framework, calling it a "Tomistic system" (an dogmatic, insular philosophical web) [03:25].

• The Turning Point: Working on a descriptive grammar of Black English and reading alternative literature completely shattered his worldview, forcing him to rebuild his understanding of linguistics [03:37].

2. What Chomsky Got Right [00:04:31–00:08:05]

• The Cognitive Revolution: Chomsky rightfully destroyed B.F. Skinner’s behaviorist model, proving language isn't just a Pavlovan stimulus-response [05:04].

• Discrete Infinity (Generativity): Chomsky correctly identified that humans use a finite set of mental rules to create infinite unique sentences [05:51].

• The Clarification on "Generative": The creator notes that rejecting Chomsky does not mean rejecting generativity; alternative models are also generative, they just don't use Chomsky's specific architecture [06:35].

3. The Flaws of Chomskyan Architecture [00:08:06–00:14:52]

• Phrasal Scaffolding & Movement: Chomsky posits that sentences have a "deep structure" that undergoes physical "movement" to become the "surface structure" we speak [09:00].

• Invisible Machinery: To make the math work, the Chomskyan framework invents unobservable elements like "empty categories," "traces," and "copies" [11:24].

• Poverty of the Stimulus Deconstructed: Chomsky claimed children don't get enough language input to learn grammar, meaning "Universal Grammar" must be innate [12:26]. The creator points out this has been thoroughly debunked by modern corpus studies, statistical learning theory, and modern Large Language Models (LLMs) [12:52, 13:17].

• The "Epicycle" Problem: The minimalist program has become an unfalsifiable "notational variant" where any contradictory data is explained away by adding more abstract structural layers (akin to adding epicycles to defend a geocentric universe) [14:10, 16:50].

4. "Theory-Internal" Problems [00:14:53–00:19:40]

• Creating the Disease to Sell the Cure: Complex syntactic puzzles taught in grad school (like raising vs. control) aren't actual mysteries of human language; they are glitches created entirely by the assumption that words "move" in a mental tree [15:36].

• The Neuroscience Disconnect: Chomskyan grammar assumes a sentence is completely calculated from the end backward before speech begins [16:26]. Psycholinguistic data proves human speech is actually incremental—we regularly start sentences without knowing exactly how they will end [17:53].

• Falsified Universals: Supposedly universal grammar laws (like Principle A of Binding Theory) completely broke down when applied to cross-linguistic data from Mandarin, Icelandic, and Japanese [19:15].

5. The Alternatives: True Structural Science [00:19:41–00:24:42]

• Dependency Grammar (DG): Dispenses with abstract phrases and invisible nodes. Words connect directly to other words as asymmetric heads and dependents [07:37, 11:38]. Active and passive structures are simply two different direct arrangements, not derivations of one another [19:45].

• Construction Grammar (CxG): Views language as a toolkit of "constructions"—direct pairings of form and meaning [09:33]. It elegantly handles real-world language phenomena like "coercion" (e.g., "She sneezed the napkin off the table") by treating language like inherited classes in programming [21:17, 21:30].

• Conclusion: The frameworks intentionally kept away from graduate students align significantly better with neuroscience, child development, and cross-linguistic data [23:01].