Homeschool and exercise close, very close, supervision over what your kids do on the internet.
I'd have hated this as a child. But the case for unrestricted internet and social media access for children being harmful, at this point, seems pretty shut.
For those who sadly cannot homeschool their children... well, we need to push for school choice and to dismantle the teachers' unions. Which probably ultimately is the same thing.
It's so odd to be a Washingtonian from Snohomish, and hear about what a shithole Seattle is. Everett has a lot of the same problems but nowhere NEAR as bad as I hear things get down there.
Broadly speaking I love Washington. I think the people are nice, I think the state is beautiful, I think the towns are generally clean. The experience that I hear Seattleites talk about is not in any way representative of what I see in the rest of the state. And that's crazy to me. It's like Seattle is its own little world, completely insulated from the outside.
The fact that you and other anglophones call the indigenous Scottish variety of Gaelic simply "Gaelic" is a pretty good example of why I continue to be very, very suspicious of those who insist upon "Scots" being a language fully distinct from English, and not a dialect - and insist upon calling it by that name.
The Irish and Scottish varieties of the Goidelic language family have far less mutual intelligibility than the English and Scottish varieties of English. Scottish English forms a pretty smooth continuum between "English with a Scottish accent", and what you'd call "Scots" or "Lallans".
But Scottish Gaelic is the tongue that gets the downgrade to "Gaelic", despite it being simply called Scottish for the vast majority of Scotland's history. Despite it literally being the reason for the country's name.
Scottish English was literally only called "Scottis" instead of "Inglis" as the Lowlanders gained a greater sense of national identity and distinctiveness from the English further south. At that point, funnily enough, the Goidelic spoken in Scotland ceased to be called "Scottis", and became "Erse" instead.
It is quite impossible to separate this insistence on distinguishing "Scots" from English, from suppressive efforts towards the indigenous Gaelic language of Scotland. You can see the exact same dynamic in Northern Ireland, where unionists play up the supposed variety of "Scots" spoken by the Ulster planters and their descendants as a fully distinctive language equal to Irish, as a means to delegitimize Irish as the primary indigenous language of the land.
I don't say all of this from a place of antipathy towards the speakers of "Scots". One need only read some Burns to see that the variety of English spoken in Scotland diverged heavily from the varieties spoken further south, and that diversity is beautiful. But the label is politically charged, and fundamentally it is a weapon - and always has been - pointed in the direction of Gaelic-speakers.
People that have a vested interest in the suppression of the indigenous Goidelic language of Scotland - on both sides of the England-Scotland border - will always insist upon the full-fledged distinctive language status of Scottish English.
In fact, literally the only reason it's called "Scots" and not "Inglis", as it originally was, is as the Lowlander Scots gradually developed a sense of national identity separate from the English, they decided that they wanted a national label of their own. But of course, they still didn't want to share a national label or identity with the hated native Celtic-speaking population.
And so "Inglis" became "Scots", while "Scottis" - the native Goidelic language - became "Erse", or Irish.
Sure. I probably wouldn't call Wuxi insignificant myself.
My main issue was just citing Wuxi's historical importance and background to defend its significance, in comparison to pre-Anglo Saxon Britain. I see Chinese people do this a lot in regards to China, often to shut down criticism of the country from "lesser" countries, ie ones that were tribalistic or uncentralized during Imperial China's heyday. "We were the center of civilization while you were backwards tribals", that sort of rhetoric.
London was never Gaelic. The populations living in Southern England would have spoken Brythonic languages, not Goidelic.
And at any rate... it's pretty obvious he was referring to Wuxi today. I don't think anybody's about to have an issue referring to the Sparta of today as insignificant, its historical significance being whatever it might be.
I'd have hated this as a child. But the case for unrestricted internet and social media access for children being harmful, at this point, seems pretty shut.
For those who sadly cannot homeschool their children... well, we need to push for school choice and to dismantle the teachers' unions. Which probably ultimately is the same thing.