It's final paper season!

We are better. You people are ants.

 

I think you actually believe that.

 

Nah. Santa Quix believes that, but he's a character I only play once a year. But teachers are pretty important.

 

must be nice

 

Not for nothing, but I'm just going to say the idea that stupid statements can't be mocked for being such is, imo, dangerous for society.

A friend of mine was known for saying immensely stupid things. Like, oh, when he instructed the school paper that there should be "no more unanimous quotes". We teased him a lot about that stuff. And eventually, he started using words the way they were meant to be used. It was corrective. So in that sense, given that they're not being publicly identified, if I saw that something I said was being used as a legitimate example of "immensely stupid things said on school papers" it'd be a push to take things more seriously.

 

That was never the proposition here. Rather, there was some question about how appropriate it was to mock people for their lack of skill/understanding in a discipline, when in fact the whole aim of the coursework is to bring them to proficiency with the material in the first place. Beginners make appalling, fundamental errors precisely because they haven't yet grasped the fundamentals. The degree to which they can/should be mocked for this is an entirely different question than how as a society should deal with people interacting in a public forum, where a certain minimum standard of competence is expected.