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956 Worldwide

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956 Worldwide last won the day on April 17

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  1. I didn’t enjoy this as much as what I think are PTA bests— There Will be Blood, Boogie Nights, Phantom Thread. I understand these were artistic choices but: 1. The world building and context was underdeveloped in favor of the narrative and action which I found disorienting. It was clear that French 75 was leftie SLA type revolutionaries and on the other side were reactionary White supremacists but the stakes, the aims, the goals were unclear and muddy. How did the French 75 get rolled up but there’s still this huge infrastructure including a phone bank ready to go? How are we still in basically a stalemate over 16 years, how is Lockjaw and Co still basically doing the same shit wrt migrants if America has become fascist? One or other group should have consolidated gains and groups like SLA have a propensity for burning out quickly. 2. The gritty realism juxtaposed with cartoon-level characters, complete with heavy-handed naming conventions, and villainy was also jarring. I realize it’s a choice. I’m saying it’s a choice I didn’t love. 3. I couldn’t understand the timeline (did this start in like 2008 and flash towards 2026 or did it start in 2026 and flash towards 2040)? Visual cues like tech and automobile models were jumbled up. Again, I know this is a choice and it’s a choice that kept yanking me out of the world. I generally like alt-timelines and stuff but it didn’t work for me here. I needed a firmer foundation of what was actually going on and the state of play to really begin to care about the people and what was making them do things.
  2. Something that is inarguably true: if a system has over time discriminated against groups of people, resulting in unequal outcomes— it is not possible to proactively rectify that imbalance without exercising some form of discrimination on an individual level. That doesn’t mean that systemic biases against the previously over represented group are being introduced. It does mean that some individuals within that group will be adjudicated based on different standard, though. There is not a way around this. This is the explicit goal of affirmative action and DEIA— a recognition that introduction of color and gender-blind standards would not achieve equitable outcomes in a satisfactory time-frame. I think a big amount of the anger comes from two places: 1. Those who actually benefited from the lingering effects of systemic social biases continued benefitting, and introduced corrective policies downstream on the generation that already least benefited from those systemic issues. 2. As evidenced on this thread; a lot of dissembling about what was going on. “It’s not happening but also it’s good and needed.” I honestly think the following will be more palatable: “We are not introducing a new system of biases. However, correcting the old one WILL mean that some members or previously advantages groups will see outcomes that are individually unfair.” To the point of #2, however— that runs explicitly counter to established EEO and civil rights laws, and that’s why just saying honestly that we are doing it was impossible.
  3. Kind of a thread derail, but strongly think you’ve overshot the Golden Age of TV by maybe five years give or take. There’s nothing out there that is even close to something like The Wire, Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men; or even good-season GoT. Better Call Saul maybe was really the last truly good prestige drama. Also really hit me watching Masters of the Air and how plodding and inferior it was to The Pacific or BoB. On the light comedy front, has there been a thirty minute show worth watching since Arrested Development wrapped? Or a family comedy since Blackish or Modern Family? It’s a better landscape than pre-Sopranos but it’s in a pretty clear dive and that isn’t just my impression, it’s pretty broadly shared. I don’t think it’s DEI related, it’s pretty clearly industry consolidation, enshitification, and continued hacking of writers’ rooms. The streaming services got taken over by slop and even the “good” stuff is mostly an interesting premise for a two hour movie stretched into 10-12 hours or more.
  4. America must be the most over-sexualized but deeply unsexy society imaginable. I cannot think of a less sexy thing than “slut con.”
  5. I don’t disagree at all. I think that across lots of areas but especially education we have succumbed to a kind of cargo cult mentality towards credentials that mistakes the symbol of a thing for the thing itself. We noticed that high school graduates had better outcomes than non-graduates and so we dramatically dropped standards and made it close to impossible not to graduate. A large percentage of high school graduates cannot read at near a “sixth grade level.” Close to half of graduates leave with an “A” average. We noticed that students who got As did better and so we gave out more As. Crept into college, too, and we have oodles of innumerate and barely literate bachelor holders. While high schools grades have risen, standardized test scores have fallen and so schools choose to deemphasize them. Cargo cult. The credentials were merely symbols of possessing a certain amount of ability, knowledge, and discipline. Divorced from that theu hold less and less predictive power for outcomes. Like building an airstrip in the jungle in the belief it will attract airplanes full of valuable goods.
  6. Perhaps so. I will say that “(demographic group) is failing because they have shitty parents with shitty values who don’t teach them to make good choices” has me double checking if maybe I didn’t open TexAgs Forum 16. Are people SURE that’s the exit we want when discussing disparate outcomes?
  7. NGL, if ever a statement needed some evidence this is one. I am wholly skeptical that college age boys are not applying to college because they don’t want to be around college-age girls.
  8. This thread and the take that the Left needs its own Joe Rogan makes the mind reel at the dissonance.
  9. I don’t think I’m misrepresenting you man. I’ve pointed out that in many areas, especially in broad zoom, disparity of representation is considered pretty strong evidence of explicit or implicit discrimination or barriers somewhere in the pipeline. So much so that generally the onus shifts to prove that it ISN’T the cause.
  10. My thoughts on this are complicated and I don’t disagree that we have over-credentialed a lot of work and under-valued non-credentialed work. That said, it’s not really disputable that for decades the message and policy has been that college is an important vehicle for social mobility and improvement and that it’s important to improve access to minority groups and women. It’s a hard pivot from that to “actually a bunch of you need less college.”
  11. One sector is not a good proxy for something like college. And to your point, for most of the 20th century fewer women chose to apply to college than men due to “cultural and societal factors.” That was (IMO) properly recognized as problematic and the entire educational system mobilized to shift. To this day, more boys than girls play sports due to “cultural and societal factors.” And yet we have Title IX to try and legislatively equalize that and continue to do so. When do we get to cite these factors as non-problematic?
  12. In most institutions and industries, a non-representative applicant pool is considered prima facie problematic and great pains and effort is taken to identify the deficiency and close it. It strikes me that this argument is not considered acceptable for other underrepresent groups lack of presence whether actually on campus or in the pool.
  13. You will get no argument from me that a culture of complete dependence on government largesse, a political sense of untouchability, and a feeling that “everyone else is doing it, I’m missing out if I don’t” has created a deeply corrupt set of people in high-level health care executives.
  14. I will concur with Walz that it’s likely above $1 billion. We will see where it stops. Even that figure is frankly obscene, but completely unsurprising as I’ve seen similar combinations of factors result in absurd amounts of ignored criminality. Even “only” $215 million across 77 conspirators is astonishing. It requires vast community-level complicity combined with willful ignorance at the bureaucratic level. It is extremely difficult to find 76 people willing to go in on a “defraud the government” scheme absent some very unique community factors.
  15. You also alleged that Walz was misquoted in agreeing that fraud could reach over one billion. For no reason other than than that “you couldn’t find it,” and it’s not like this is some uber lib or con rag. Anyway, here he is saying it: Clip starts at 30:35. Reporter: “Joe Thompson said that fraud could surpass one billion in Minnesota. Do you agree with that number?” Walz: “Yes.” You are correct that the Star-Tribune analysis counts formal charges in addition to guilty verdicts and pleas. (It is much easier to say that since I am not a lawyer.) So I will rework my statement: an analysis of all charges brought in RICO cases against mafia figures and the dollar amount involved would be interesting. I would never attempt to say that the figure represents something like a useful guide to mafia theft and corruption. It’s really silly to think so. And I don’t expect the Star-Tribune analysis of charges to get close to the real amount of fraud perpetrated on Minnesota DHS. So what we know is that Walz agreed that fraud could go over a billion. Now he disagrees with Thompson that it may be 9 billion. The real amount surely can’t be known. Maybe somewhere between 217 million and 9 billion we reach something that’s worth more concern than a misleading tweet.
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