Open Mic for the week of 2/19/2024
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
First 🙂
I found this review of Madam Web funny. It’s probably true too, but, since I’m not going to see it, except MAYBE on TV in a few years, I don’t really care. The review is funny as hell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhA6M50xzmk&ab_channel=TheCriticalDrinkerReport
I’m a big fan of The Critical Drinker, and I’ve also been enjoying watching YouTubers trying to outdo each other making fun of Madame Web.Report
All these dudebros upset that movies are being made that have different timelines entirely as the target audience.Report
Heh in fairness to Dakota Johnson I am pretty sure she sounds like that in everything she does.Report
The movie does seem to be terrible.
Critics universally panned the film for its sloppy editing, clunky plot and sluggish action sequences, resulting in a dreadful 13 percent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes as of Monday morning.
The poor box office performance was expected given the film’s tangled web of problems from the get-go. Johnson admitted in an interview with theWrap that the film went through heavy editing. The film’s first trailer, released in November, didn’t help as fans ridiculed it heavily on social media. One line from it — “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died” — became an internet sensation, though it was cut from the final version of the film.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/movies/2024/02/19/madame-web-box-office-review/Report
I ended up going down an internet rabbit hole on this subject and it is possible the line was recorded for trailer purposes only. It is apparently common enough that there is a whole TV Tropes page dedicated to scenes and lines in trailers not being in the film:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MissingTrailerSceneReport
I think having fanfic as a category here counts as an automatic disqualificationReport
You do know there’s literally one thing in there? And it does, in fact qualify.
Or do you mean on the site in general?Report
If the line was recorded for trailer purposes, then that makes this worse, not better.
That line is clunky by itself. If that’s after having been polished, then the skill level of the people involved isn’t good.Report
I’m certainly not defending it!
But then I’d also be happy if another super hero (or super hero adjacent or whatever this is supposed to be) film wasn’t made for the next decade or more.Report
As I understand things it wasn’t recorded for trailer purposes; it wasn’t actually recorded at all, it was cut together from several different lines in the actual movie.Report
My impression is it’s creators didn’t know what they were doing. They had the wrong background or something.Report
Speaking of Sydney Sweeney, her “Anyone But You” flick is now the highest-grossing live-action Shakespeare adaptation.
I assume they put “live-action” there because nobody is ever, and I mean *EEEEVER*, going to touch “The Lion King”.Report
Despicable Me is Henry V.Report
While Sony is not Marvel/Disney, I saw this excerpt from Matt Belloni’s newsletter where he talks about a DM he got from a Disney exec and immediately thought of the backlash against so-called “bad” movies:
You wouldn’t have to do a whole lot of word substitution to get a complaint about why people aren’t flocking to God’s Not Dead IV.
Aesthetics *ARE* a thing. And, yeah, they change over time. One year, Twiggy is seen as the height of beauty, another year, it’s Lizzo. Things change. Get over it.
But if you ignore aesthetics *TOO MUCH*, you might find yourself at a disconnect with the people who you are hoping will give you money.
Sure, do your best to change their taste in the direction you want it to go… but the dog food still has to taste good. If the dog won’t eat the dog food, you’ll be stuck writing DMs to dog food reporters complaining about the dogs.Report
“But more and more, our audience (or the segment of the audience that has been politicized) equate the perceived messaging in a film as a quality issue.” I’m sure that’s happened. That’s not my issue though. Remember that scene when Rey, in the Force Awakened, can pilot the millennium falcon like a seasoned pilot? It just happened. Sure, she’s got the jedi powers, but IIRC, nothing in the prior movies indicated that force sensitives had an innate understanding of flying ships they’d never been in. And she pilots like a seasoned vet. This is the “stupid”. It’s a glaring disconnect. Then, there’s little of her actually training and learning how to use her powers, unlike all the other main characters…
Really, no hero’s journey? She doesn’t grow at all. That’s just not how things work. It’s against the prior cannon, and breaks the whole suspension of reality thing for me.Report
It bears noting, also, that there are no small number of female empowered or otherwise “woke” films that are fantastic. Into and Across the Spiderverse, for instance, are both extremely progressive on identarian grounds but they’re also fantastic, well written movies.Report
Lemme check on Into and Across the Spiderverse’s numbers…
384.3 million USD and 690.9 million USD.
So that’s a cool billion (said with a French accent).
Seems like “make better movies” might not only be a dogwhistle, but also good, solid advice.Report
Personally I’d say anyone who has a problem with a movie solely for having a non-white and/or non-male leading character probably has some serious issues. Of course I feel the same way about someone who looks at a film that fails and blames said failure solely on casting a non-white and/or non-male leading character.Report
Absolutely.
And that’s why I say that everybody who thinks that Madame Web is “bad” is someone who has a problem with the move solely for having a non-white and/or non-male leading character.
Sure, they may *SAY* something like “the script is atrocious” or “the acting is leaden” or “the superheroes only show up *IN VISIONS* and never *IN THE REALITY OF THE MOVIE*” but you and I both know that, deep down, they are pulling a Ghostbusters 2016.Report
I remember the movie Jumper. They clearly had a plan to make a series of films out of it – they introduced the lead’s mom and sister in the last 10 minutes, and they were played by Diane Lane and Kristen Stewart. They wanted the lead to go on a multi-film arc that turned him into a good person. What they made was a movie about a horrible person who exhibited a few scraps of decency near the end. I have a feeling the same thing happened with Madame Web.
My guess is that they made this movie and lost faith in it near the end, so they decided to pull all the Spider-Man continuity out of it. That left them ADR’ing dialogue, setting the movie inexplicably in 2003, and pasting scenes together haphazardly. So it started out with a plan, fell short, then got made even worse.
It’s my understanding that Madame Web was supposed to be targeted at a female audience. They put in a ton of motherly abandonment as a reason for the four leads to bond reluctantly. But if you’re targeting a movie at women, you probably need to make the emotional connections even stronger, and they ended up doing the opposite. All in all, it was like the train tracks themselves led straight off a cliff. You couldn’t help but have a trainwreck on the course they laid out.Report
Maybe so. I am pretty negative on the whole super hero thing anyway, and am not even a fan of the better received films. It’s therefore pretty hard for me to imagine what a good Madame Web movie would look like.
However, from the outside looking in, and putting aside my skepticism that these things will ever be financially successful relying on a female audience to be the main revenue driver, the most baffling choice to me is the casting, and not because of sex. I mean who on Earth thought a low charisma, low affect actress best known for starring in a series of skinemax style melodramas was the right person to front a PG-13 rated super hero movie? Sometimes out of the box thinking is exactly what a stale formula needs but conventional wisdom is also conventional for a reason. To Jaybird’s comment Ghostbusters 2016 was ill conceived for a bunch of reasons but at least they understood the need for comedic leading ladies with some experience in over the top, less than serious roles. This one is inexplicable.Report
Someone looked on a spreadsheet and saw that Johnson and Sweeney have both been in projects that skewed female? (I realize what that’d imply about IQ’s in Hollywood.)Report
It probably is exactly that dumb.
I can also envision some variation of this behind the scenes before the whole thing comes crashing down.Report
Democracy comes for Wisconsin, Vos caves on legislative maps: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/19/us/politics/wisconsin-legislative-maps.htmlReport
Not really a link but more of a pondering. I am currently reading A Concise History of the Aztecs by Susan Kellog, recently published by Cambridge University Press. Naturally, the subject of human sacrifice comes up a lot. Dr. Kellog doesn’t quite come out and defend the practice of human sacrifice but she rights about it in a very casual manner and expects the readers not to demand a righteous denunciation of the practice. I think that for most normal people including very well educated people who read books like A Concise History of the Aztecs, reading about child sacrifices since it was necessary for rain to come in the Aztec cosmos seems just really out there and it is a reason why a lot of people can’t stand academics that look like they are defending some very immoral practices.Report
The Aztecs were a particularly brutal people and it’s really no surprise Cortez found numerous native allies willing to join his campaign against them.
Of course on the larger point the sentimentality some people view any native American society with is really ahistorical. The big empires the Spanish conquered were no better than bronze age fertile crescent civilizations in terms of adherence to modern concepts of morality and the smaller, disparate societies of North America were plenty primitive and warlike. The desire some have to gloss over that is more about contemporary sensibilities than actual blood and guts history which with respect to our species is… well overflowing with blood and guts.Report
Bronze Age fertile crescent civilizations did not practice mass scale human sacrifice.
The book, especially when dealing with Aztec religion, has sentences like “During several of the solar months, for example, Aztec priests, drowned children to draw their tears, thought to bring on rain.” (Pg. 73)
Most humans, including weirdos who like reading histories of the Aztecs are going to be really turned off by human sacrifice being dealt with in such an off handedly casual manner, especially for children victims.Report
Heh the comparison to ancient old world empires wasn’t meant to be flattering. Specifically I was thinking of the Assyrians who were known for utter brutality in war and merciless treatment of conquered people. These were horrific civilizations and testaments to man’s capacity for barbarism.
Personally I don’t mind my history being allowed to speak for itself without a lot of opinion style commentary from the author. Where necessary the light touch is
suits me better.
The part that baffles me is people insisting on projection of their own beliefs to make totally ahistorical arguments in favor of modern political or social causes.Report
That really depends on where you are talking about in North America.
Central America was a complete nightmare, mostly due to the Aztecs. Even other tribes were brutal, because they had to respond to the Aztecs. It’s basically a social experiment of ‘What happens when you live next to complete horrific lunatics?’
Everywhere else…well, Native Americans had territorial disputes, but generally were peacefully, and ‘primitive’ at that point in time mostly meant ‘Not rapidly burning down all their forests for firewood’ like Europe was.
Honestly, Europe had worse than most tribes in what is now the US. Hell, the only reason anyone was in America was that Europe had basically been falling apart for two hundred years. The end of the Middle Ages was _rough_.Report
Historians and academics glossing over past brutality isn’t exactly new.
Look at how we, meaning most Americans and Europeans, regard the Romans and Byzantines.
While ritual human sacrifice wasn’t practiced, the lives of the peasants, particularly children, were regarded with such sociopathic indifference that an unwanted infant could be left to die and the entire civilization was based on mass slaughter and slavery. I won’t go full Godwin but to say that the Roman Empire ranked up there with the 20th century tyrants isn’t much of a stretch.Report
I would say that politically certain cultures have earned more immunity. There are plenty of examples of liberal and leftist historians deeming X and Y cultures for being bad for not adhering to 21st century liberal standards but not other past countries or cultures. I am growing increasingly pissed off at some of the inconsistencies with this even though I recognize I can’t do anything about it.Report
Which is why I think it is a mistake to view the past with anything but detachment, rather than admiration or condemnation.
I personally love all those old castles and palaces and manor houses that dot Europe, but I also know that each and every one was built on a foundation of cruelty and injustice.
Or like how I can listen to Classical music without thinking about the political and cultural attitudes of the composers, or more to the point, I can enjoy a Kevin Spacey film or heavy metal song without thinking too deeply about the private lives of those who created it.
The Aztecs and the Romans were just, well, Aztecs and Romans. There isn’t any value to be gained by weighing their souls.
If we want to glean any wisdom from studying them it might be to figure out how to avoid their mistakes.
FWIW, within the past 24 months, I’ve seen social media posts from prominent people saying that the lives of old people were not worth wearing a mask, or that the right to carry around an assault rifle was worth the occasional slaughter of children.
Imagine explaining THAT to some academic in a few centuries. Or hell, explain it to me now because it doesn’t seem one bit better than killing a baby to ensure a good harvest.Report
That’s nice but even more people don’t view the past with detachment but with a lot more ferocity based on their beliefs and politics. For you the Aztecs and the Spanish Conquistadors might be something that happened so very long ago but for a lot of people, it is rather recent and still has political ramifications to this day. The decolonization crowd, etc. Your system also has an issue of when does the past reach the point we can see it with detachment. 100 years ago? 200 years ago? These are not easy answers or something that all humans would agree with.Report
RE: when does the past reach the point we can see it with detachment. 100 years ago? 200 years ago?
If everyone involved is dead, then “detachment” is reasonable. That’s doubly so if everyone who was alive then is dead now.
RE: “decolonization”
They’re drawing lines from things they don’t like to other things they don’t like and insisting that one caused the other.
As you go back in time the influence and responsibility of any one specific action or event get less because there is more things that had influence. As fun as it is to claim a butterfly created a hurricane, there are a lot of butterflies as time goes on.
At some point we’re seeing what we want to see and ignoring everything that doesn’t add to our agenda.Report
I remember being a child and sitting for the annual reading of the Passion. Being a child, I naturally reacted with righteous indignation. Why did we, the congregation, have to be the chorus that shouts “Crucify him!” I certainly wouldn’t have done that- I would have been nice to Jesus and stuck up for him.
I thought this because in my child’s mind, the purpose of the reading was to illustrate heroes and villains and praise or condemn them.
Then I had an epiphany. The whole purpose of the reading, and our part in it, was to emphasize that no, most of us, maybe all of us, would NOT have done the right thing, that most of us, maybe all of us would have in fact shouted “Crucify him!”
If the only takeaway from the Passion, or the study of the Punic Wars, or the Holocaust or the Rohingya genocide is to wag our fingers at people then it becomes a pointless exercise.
Its only enlightening if we ask ourselves how we are similar, or different, than the Aztecs and Conquistadors.Report
The Passion is indoctrination. It doesn’t agree with itself, it has tales of magic, and it shifts the blame for the crucifixion away from Pilot.
Pilot’s job was to maintain Roman control and kill rebels. Even by those standards he was Ax Crazy and used crucifixion to fix all problems. Jesus was so popular that the Romans had to take him in the middle of the night.
RE: All the other examples.
There are lessons to be learned about the human condition. There are lessons to be learned about the misuse of gov/power/etc.
However if every fight about politics needs to be treated as a fight against genocide then that’s the wrong lesson.Report
Cultures that were genocided? Well, you have to assume that they weren’t as bad as the cultures that genocided them.
And who is best poised to give voice to the voiceless? It’s not the defenders of Western culture, I tell you what.Report
The problem with applying 21st century ethics to old cultures is we expect resources and knowledge that just didn’t exist at the time.
For brutality, corruption, and generally making life suck the Roman Empire was awful by modern standards (i.e. you’re correct). But that’s probably not the correct standard; How they were compared with or against their fellows and were they good for humanity as a whole?
Think of the ethical standard “an eye for an eye”. At the time, this idea was an example of divine reasonableness and mercy…
…because if someone took your eye you’d take your tribe to war to kill them and their family.Report
I think the general answer is that looking at these things requires some perspective, nuance, and maturity. Rome produced feats of engineering, government, and human development that have proven of such quality as to be an enduring influence. That’s worth understanding and on a certain level appreciating. However none of us need to entertain the idea that the average person (and in many ways even the most wealthy person) was living anything other than a life that was incomprehensibly poorer compared to modern people, or think that such appreciation is somehow an endorsement of everything long dead people did or believed. The fact that anyone even has to say this is a statement of the neurosis of our own times.Report
Yes, all that.
The basic idea that a Roman Wealthy person was much poorer than a modern poor person doesn’t go well.
We have a lot of competition for victimhood today and the idea that things were much worse before takes away from that.Report
That’s because the only people giving xenophobic conservatives a run for their money on wildly ill informed ethnocentrism are identity politics obsessed progressives.Report
Is it necessary to include a righteous denunciation of the practice of murder in a coroner’s report for a homicide victim?
It sounds to me that the author is attempting to explain their primitive perspective. If you’re unwilling to at least try and put down your modern lens when studying ancient history, it’s probably not for you.
Anyway, I’m sufficiently intrigued enough to read it. Thanks for the recommendation!Report
Lack of denunciation doesn’t equal defense. Especially in history as a discipline. When historian do weigh in with a particular opinion they are generally pilloried in the popular press, as Heather Cox-Richardson sometimes is today. So how about we give this author some grace?Report
Ukraine cancels elections.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-birthday-grenade-b1b82e4f84eb5a39286d1500cf49fcd1Report
And? Holding elections in war time – when a third of your country is under active attack and occupation – seems like a not good use of anyone’s time.Report
Remember that stupid, stupid idiot with his “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” sign? I mean, yes, he’d been told his entire adult life that Medicare is an earned benefit, implying that the payroll taxes paid by the average worker cover the actuarially fair cost of Medicare benefits in retirement, but that’s on him for believing such blatant propaganda. Obviously no intelligent person could fall for that.
He was a stupid, stupid idiot, and we were right to laugh at him.
The thing that confuses me is that, a decade and change later, many of the highly intelligent, sophisticated people who had joined in the pointing and laughing back in 2009 starting echoing him with calls to “Keep your government hands off my public schools.”
Isn’t that weird?Report
Who is this, exactly, who wants the government to get out of public schools?Report
The people who say stuff like “okay, my second choice is charter schools!”Report
You know who, um, grants their charters, right?
And who foots most of the bill?Report
Lest there be any argument…
https://data.publiccharters.org/digest/charter-school-data-digest/how-are-charter-schools-funded/Report
And…
https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/what-are-charter-schools/2018/08
“In exchange for exemptions from many of the state laws and regulations that govern traditional public schools, charters are bound to the terms of a contract, or “charter,” that lays out a school’s mission, academic goals, fiscal guidelines, and accountability requirements. On the other side of a charter contract is an authorizer—such as a state agency, a university, or a school district, depending on the state—that has the power to shut down charter schools that do not meet the terms of their contracts.”Report
Private school or homeschool is likely third choice.
Is that hypocritical too?Report
I’m not following… who are you pointing to as the folks saying, “Keep your government hands off my public schools.”
People who send their kids to private schools?
Note: I work in a private school.Report
The question was “Who is this, exactly, who wants the government to get out of public schools?”
I’d guess the people who are actively looking for alternatives to these particular public schools.
Which, it seems to me, are likely to be people who will go to explore charters and then either homeschooling or private, depending.
Do you have a different answer to the question?Report
You guessed wrong.Report
So, your thesis is that the people who choose charters or privates or home schooling, would cite “the presence of the government” as their reason for doing so?
Note: I work in a private school and routinely have conversations with current, past, and applicant parents about why they are interested in our school and/or other schools.Report
Oh, no.
It’s low-status to say “we’re doing this because of the presence of the government!”
Only a tiny percentage would be willing to say that out loud.
They’d probably say something like “We wanted Bexley to have access to a robotics club.”Report
So… these people… who I’m assuming are merely hypothetical… would justify your thesis if we could read their minds but not if we actually spoke to them, thus justifying your thesis?
Got it!
It’s okay to admit you’re wrong.
Note: You’re wrong for the overwhelming majority of people.Report
Yeah, maybe they’re merely like the various politicians who send their kids to the good schools instead of the default government ones.Report
Brandon, a useful thing to remember here is that people like Chip are OK with government being thoroughly involved in what goes on in a public school. They just think it ought to be the proper sort of government, involved for the proper sort of reasons and dictating the proper sort of restrictions and requirements and regulations.
Like, it’s OK for the government to declare that books be taken off the library shelves, they just think the books taken away ought to be Dr Seuss and not Erika Moen.Report
Yes, exactly.
Liberals want a government that dictates that the curriculum be created by professional teachers and educators, and using the best available science and pedagogy and that treats all persons with dignity.
Conservatives want the government to dictate the religious and cultural views of a shrinking minority and to treat certain classes of people as inferior.
And it looks like I need to say it again for the umpteenth time:
Everyone, everywhere and always wants the government to suppress or punish certain types of speech.
There are no exceptions to this rule, never have been and never will be.
The only disagreements are about what type of speech and under what circumstances.
And yes, liberals generally want to suppress racial slurs, while conservatives want to suppress depictions of same sex relationships.
You hit the nail on the head with that one.Report
Liberals are subject to profound disagreements on education, mainly between the moral crusade types on our side and the nuts and bolts STEM focused people on our side.Report
Yeah, this. There may be no policy area in which there is less unity amongst folks on the left side of the aisle. Which breeds soupy thought about how to better educational outcomes as a policy matter and soupier thought about how to explain what they’re trying to do to a skeptical public. The headline from Oregon Jaybird cites below is an example of reform advocates being unclear.Report
I think this is because it is pretty much impossible to answer what is and what is not a good education and also what does and what does not make something a good school.
I personally think students need and deserve a comprehensive education in a wide variety of subjects including the arts.
I am suspicious of Waldorf though and recognize that sometimes rote memorization might work best (like math).
But I am down on the trolling cranky right-wing engineers do for schooling.Report
Americans are just really weird on math. For most of the post-World War period, it was generally assumed people were either good at math or not good at math and no amount of teaching would help the former. When we got a lot of immigrants who really believed in STEM as the basis of education and that a reasonably competent teacher could teach math to nearly all students than this agreement started being questioned.Report
Americans are just really weird on math. For most of the post-World War period, it was generally assumed people were either good at math or not good at math and no amount of teaching would help the former.
At some point after I put my wife in memory care last year, I started drawing again. It seems to be helpful as therapy. Talking to friends, family, and neighbors and mentioning it, the most common single thing I’ve heard is, “I can’t draw at all.”
Suppose that one of our goals from the K-12 public system was that every person be able to sketch a recognizable intersection with buildings, cars, people. The same way that we have a goal that every person be able to complete an individual tax form by hand, sans pages and pages of tables that do the division for them.
How would we get people through that? We’d teach useful tools like one, two, and three point perspective. (We teach the particular long division algorithm we do because hundreds of years of experience shows it minimizes the number of errors people make.) But mostly it would be rote: practice, practice, practice.
I started a comic drawing class through the local parks and recreation yesterday evening. Most of the participants are much younger than I and are early in the learning process. One of the exercises the instructor had us do was to draw as many shapes as we could think of. I noticed that everyone but me was drawing flat shapes: square, circle, triangle, etc. I was drawing 2D representations of 3D shapes: box, cylinder, ring, disk.Report
I think housing and certain foreign policy issues are other areas of equal divisiveness in the Democratic Party. Education is a tough one though because you have lots of different ideas on what should be taught, school organization, and testing. Like a lot of rank and file Democratic voters do not like the idea of using education as a moral crusade no matter what that moral crusade is. Moms for Liberty and Woke Activists are equally distasteful. Many hate and despise the idea of tracking but others love it. Same with testing and other things.Report
I would not describe this as the main source of disagreement but generally agreeReport
I think that broadly speaking, almost everyone wants schools to serve a dual purpose of Moral Crusade and STEM function.
We don’t call it moral crusade, but the purpose of schooling has always been to instill correct values in young people and prepare them to be good citizens, alongside the STEM type of subjects.
And this seems to be pretty universal. The real disagreements are about what happen to be the “correct” values and how much stress to put on them.Report
You’d think that that would be a “frosting on top” kinda thing.
But I suppose if you can’t teach the kids how to read, teaching them that, if they must beat someone up, beat up people who aren’t like the teachers is a good second choice.Report
Well, you’re not far wrong; when people say “public school is better than homeschooling because it teaches social interaction skills“, one of the skills they mean is “recognizing when someone’s about to get beat up and making sure it isn’t you.”Report
“Never trust a man who hasn’t both punched someone in the face and himself been punched in the face.”
-Theodore RooseveltReport
I am not sure if I entirely agree with this. I can see this if I squint but to me installing correct values is slightly to very different than education as moral crusade because the former is a bit more vague than the later.Report
“And that’s why we got rid of algebra.”Report
I mean, seriously. This is a real headline: Oregon again says students don’t need to prove mastery of reading, writing or math to graduate, citing harm to students of color
The disconnect between your stated ideals and the way that it seems to actually work in practice is undercutting your position.Report
Did you know that in some states it is literally against the law to teach any subject that makes people feel uncomfortable about their race?
“And that’s why we got rid of history.”Report
Well, it seems that we can add reading, writing, and math to the pile of subjects that make people feel uncomfortable about their race.Report
I think this is more than a bit of whataboutery Chip. Stupidity on the Right should not be used to wave away the craziness on our side. They might not be the majority of the Democratic coalition but they exist in significant numbers in key positions and places.Report
RE: and to treat certain classes of people as inferior.
By definition, half of all people are below the mean.
By definition, about 15% of all people are one standard deviation or more below the average.
Those are facts. In practice this means not everyone can learn pre-calculus in the 8th grade. Not everyone can learn to code.
Liberals want to get rid of those facts. Instead of treating everyone as everyone as equal and being unhappy with unequal results, they insist that we have equal results.
In practice this means dumbing down educational standards to hide the reality.Report
I was referring to the conservative practice of suppressing any books which show same sex couples or relationships.Report
Yes it is. Because public school is inherently a government function.Report
Moscow invites Hamas and other Palestinian factions to a meeting to be held there:
https://www.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news-02-18-24/h_d7fe8b0d1648652842b5f5daa65928c1
Somehow I don’t think throwing there lot in with Russia is going to do much for the Palestinians and isn’t going to improve their stance among Western governments either.Report
Vice is shutting down. More than that, apparently they’re shutting down the website entirely. So if there are any stories that you really enjoyed, you probably want to archive them.Report
The Anti-Liberal Internationale:
https://www.arcdigital.media/p/the-anti-liberal-internationale?fbclid=IwAR2A5Tn7tb7BMbirqZrax33lukqnR06Z_2nZeMNVWe_-ZT2IrVJIXVhDJ9EReport
This is not an interesting story because of the content of the story.
This is an interesting story because of the editorial judgment that resulted in a “Dog Bites Man” story being seen as newsworthy in the first place.
Report
Lets toss this atop the massive pile of “New tax/ Wage increase/ safety regulation/ Obamacare will cause economic chaos” stories.
My prediction: Prices will go up and no one will notice and life will go on.Report
The SF Chronicle really needs to purge the reactionary editors they got.Report
Though if I wanted a perfect example of “here’s how bad the economy is”, I just saw this headline: On-duty cop arrested for shoplifting while in uniform: ‘It’s embarrassing for the department’
This is how little police officers are being paid now. This is how bad the economy is.Report
I heard somewhere that McDonalds was rolling out fully automated restaurants. Be interesting to see the cost benefit calcs in a place like Cali for that.Report
I’m sure that “fully automated” still requires at least 3 humans.
You need at least one to prevent vandalism.Report
Also someone to make sure the machines hold the onions on cheeseburgers for 6 year olds.Report
Although case law has established that you’re not actually allowed to act to stop vandalism in progress, all you can do is take video and hope to identify the person afterwards.
Maybe the only reason they’ll have humans present is to act as sacrifices for the rare instances when the automated system goofs up; since you can’t meaningfully punish a computer system, the humans’ job will be to click “confirm” on any incident reports and take the heat if the computer mis-identifies someone.Report
While you probably can’t prevent sociopaths from vandalizing, a pair of eyes can keep non-sociopaths from doing so.Report
The problem is that we’re creating a society of sociopaths.Report
I remember reading Twain’s “Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court” when I was a child and snickering at the silly medieval peasants for their superstitions and ignorance.
Florida surgeon general defies science amid measles outbreak
As a Florida elementary school tries to contain a growing measles outbreak, the state’s top health official is giving advice that runs counter to science and may leave unvaccinated children at risk of contracting one of the most contagious pathogens on Earth, clinicians and public health experts said.
Florida surgeon general Joseph A. Ladapo failed to urge parents to vaccinate their children or keep unvaccinated students home from school as a precaution in a letter to parents at the Fort Lauderdale-area school this week following six confirmed measles cases.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/02/22/florida-measles-outbreak-ladapo/Report
And a minor complaint about the WWE:
During matches, they’ve started putting the wrestler ratings for WWE 2K24 on the screen. Like, during the live match.
The cart is literally leading the horse.Report
The New York Times had these rather disturbing article about “child influencers” Involves discussion of some families exploiting their children to some rather disturbing creeps.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/us/instagram-child-influencers.html?unlocked_article_code=1.X00.V-5o.4hdzD6MTtm3t&smid=url-share
Apply the firm and beating hand of the state and the full force of the law to stop this now.Report
Canadian YouTubber JJ McCullough has an interesting video on Japan’s middle class object culture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntlQ9Nf2R-g&lc=Ugyj0J4jKWXOn3D88Sp4AaABAg
One of the more interesting points he makes is that Japan’s monoculture allows for easier communication than it does in Japan. The Japanese chain hands, which he describes as a combination of Ikea/Wal-Mart/GAP has different stickers in the shape of basically signs and posters that exist through out Japan that everybody automatically gets because even things like help wanted posters have a very uniform design despite no government regulation about it.
We don’t have this in the United States. Even focusing on relatively light social issues and not the big weighty cultural issues like racism, the difference between growing up in a affluent suburb near a big city and an affluent suburb in area with a stronger Evangelical culture is great. Parents in my NYC suburb or similar ones might have found D&D odd but the entire Satanic Panic didn’t happen. Then I encountered people my age who grew up in areas where the Satanic Panic thing was very real and it might have been an entirely different country. Same with alcohol. My parents drank with kids around. Other people’s parents drank with kids around. It seemed totally normal. Then there are just lots of people whose parents would never touch alcohol with kids around.Report