Rov_Scam
3hr ago
So what's the problem? Where is the historical inaccuracy? Yes, it's a work of fiction, but works of fiction are often based on real historical facts. The producers probably included it because it elucidates their point better than some dry as dust historical tract about how raw materials from The Congo were often used to produce military equipment. They didn't alert you that it was a work of fiction, but is this really necessary? If a documentary about WWI were done in the same style but quoted "For Whom the Bell Tolls" instead, would you insist that they flash "Work of Fiction" in yellow Impact font on the screen just to remove any ambiguity? And who are they supposed to be propagandizing, anyway? You can't stream it without paying extra, unless you have Kanopy, which most people technically have access to for free but don't know about and probably wouldn't be interested in. I'd be more concerned about historical movies that clean up the plot for narrative convenience and leave the viewer with an incorrect impression. These aren't even trying to pretend to be documentaries, but the fictionalized movie version ends up being cultural canon.
Rov_Scam
15hr ago
You just had to be there. There's nothing bad about sax solos per se, but by 1992 they had gone out of style and were a reminder of the 80s, which wasn't held in high esteem. Sax solos in pop records were ersatz soul. In R&B records they had worn out their welcome. But mostly it was just an ick factor involving anything associated with the 80s. The article isn't meant to be taken too seriously.
Rov_Scam
15hr ago
Ah, you're referring to the Bad Saxophone Solo (BSS). I stayed up much later than I should trying to find this incredibly on-point article posted to a now defunct file sharing site back in 2002. I'm posting it here not only for the enjoyment of everyone on the site, but so I can find it without searching the depths of the Internet Archive and its dead links. It goes to show how much hip musical tastes have changed in the past 25 years, and is a bit of a time capsule (it would be unthinkable now for a serious critic or music fan to shit on Hall & Oates, but back then they were punching bags). Enjoy:
Amongst the many horrible things to emerge from the cultural swamp of the 1980s (Reaganomics, crack, leg-warmers, the Coreys Haim and Feldman, Winger), there is nothing in the world of Rock music worse than the Bad Saxophone Solo. Unremittingly phony and invariably devoid of any shred of real emotion or creative expression, this sonic assault on all that is worthwhile is more destructive and more widespread than one could imagine in their most horrific nightmare.
Perhaps the most mysterious aspect of the Bad Saxophone Solo (BSS) is its origins. By all accounts, no matter when it was first laid to wax, all BSS seem directly evolved from Kenny G.'s 1986 smooth-jazz hit "Songbird." So awful that it seems to exist outside of time, this incomprehensible morass of suck is ground zero for all Bad Saxophone Solos ever. Spreading the BSS from Smooth Jazz throughout the world of popular music, "Songbird"'s evil is so pervasive that not even the collective din of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Roland Kirk, Eric Dolphy, Joe Henderson, and Lester Young all simultaneously spinning in their graves non-stop since its inception can drown out its malignant influence.
The BSS' powers are truly formidable: after but a few seconds of its aural assault, a cheesy-but-catchy pretentious prog-pop tune like Supertramp's "The Logical Song" is rendered so muzacky and faux-funky as to make the theme from Night Court seem like a vintage George Clinton production. The Bad Saxophone Solo has even been known to crop up within the confines of otherwise decent songs. In the middle of a relatively quality tune like the Pogues' "Summer in Siam," the schlocky BSS is like a fire hydrant at a dog-show - a piss-soaked novelty distracting all attention away from the true talent and refinement therein.
But, let's back up. What exactly is the BSS? The Bad Saxophone solo is an insidious but elusive blight. On the wings of some Joe Cool sunglasses-wearing, bandana-ed jackass's overly emotive stage gesticulations it alternately glides or skronks and wails it's way into your brain. Before long you're staring vacuously into space, tuning out not just it but the entire world around you, because the truly Bad Saxophone Solo is literally mind-numbing. Which song contained its gut-wrenching sound? And how exactly did its pseudo-bluesy/soulful melodic interpolation go? You don't know, because, like elevator music (even the worst of which is a preferable alternative), a Bad Saxophone Solo convinces the brain on an essentially primal level that sensory stimulus is a bad thing. In order to avoid the BSS (along with some of its multi-media counterparts like the Bad Hotel Painting and the Local Car Dealership Commercial) the brain attempts to ignore it and in the process closes itself off to the world around it.
Alas, the world, and unfortunately the BSS, is still there, and upon recovery blame must be placed in order for any true healing to begin. Some culprits are obvious. The music of Glenn Frey is a good place to start. Often, as one begins to surface out of the depths of a Bad Saxophone Solo-induced stupor, vague memories of the drab tones of this former Eagle's laughably idiotic music will linger. Was it "The Heat Is On" that so dulled your senses, or could it have been the pummel-your-forehead-repeatedly-against-a-spackled-concrete-wall tones of that soft-rock atrocity "You Belong To the City?" You don't know, and that's the point. Like an aural lobotomy, the very nature of the Bad Saxophone Solo prevents its victim from remembering its exact source. What's more, prior knowledge of the stopped-up commode that is Frey's musical canon may not be enough to help the victim sort out what just happened. Even an experienced BSS victim is subject to the confusion and chaos that follows a severe attack, often mistaking the music of Frey for other sources (such as serial-BSS conveyors like Huey Lewis and the News or Hall and Oates).
The experience can be excruciating. A typical Bad Saxophone Solo experience finds the victim awakening - like a sorority-girl the morning after a Rohypnol-enhanced date-rape - groggy and disoriented but acutely aware that they've been fucked and that it was a far from pleasurable experience. Drooling uncontrollably and just steps away from catatonia, the unlucky listener will, for example, catch the last few endlessly repeated chords of the George Thorogood blues-rock abortion that is "Bad to the Bone." Many victims are unable to believe that this song could actually get any worse, but indeed, its atrociously soulless and completely forgettable Bad Saxophone Solo makes it so.
The question remains: why would the Bad Saxophone Solo do this? What is it goal? The answer may be revealed deep within the lyrics of one particularly saccharine and nauseous BSS carrier. To the casual observer, Wham!'s "Careless Whisper" might be dismissed as the lonely musings of two men, one struggling with the desire to thwart anonymity and the other struggling to stop getting caught having anonymous homosexual sex in public bathrooms. But "Careless Whisper" is so much more than that. It is actually both a purveyor of the BSS and an unintentional post-modern treatise on the plight of the Bad Saxophone Solo victim. The "whisper" at issue here is not just, as would at first seem the case, the hushed words of a gossiping lover. The "whisper" is in fact the bleating, faux-soothing tones of a particularly bland Bad Saxophone Solo. "No, I'm never gonna dance again…" reveals "Careless Whisper"'s narrator, unveiling the ultimate harrowing result of the BSS. The BSS to prevent (often with great success) its victim from any further enjoyment of music. Ever. Especially music that contains saxophones. The ugly truth is that, for the BSS victim, "guilty feet have got no rhythm."
There is no known cure for the Bad Saxophone Solo, and no band or musical style is safe from its cancerous grasp. Great bands like Pink Floyd, David Bowie, and, yes, even the Rolling Stones have bowed to its hokey will. It is inescapable. Even if one were to explicitly avoid elevators, dentist chairs and movie soundtracks, the BSS would still creep up unannounced on Classic Rock radio - perhaps even in an overblown "life on the road" Bob Seger ballad. Worse yet, though the frequency of the BSS has diminished since the onset of the 90s (3d Wave Ska Revival non-withstanding), it is quickly being replaced by an even more deadly variant: the dreaded Rock and Roll Scratch-DJ Turntable Solo (RRSDJTS). For the love of God, please, beware.
-Robert Whiteman
Rov_Scam
1d ago
As a straight investment, maybe, but who is buying this stuff as a straight investment? Collectibles have the advantage of having intrinsic utility that these meme coins don't. In the 1980s my mother was gifted a series of limited edition Norman Rockwell commemorative plates that would supposedly increase exponentially in value over the years. They didn't, but they were displayed in my parents' dining room for at least 30 years. I don't think Trump Coin or whatever has that kind of value.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Elon doesn't know what he's talking about. I used to work as an adjudicator for the PA Disability Determination Bureau, and the investigation is so thorough that getting disability through fraudulent means is effectively impossible. The evaluation is mostly based on the claimant's actual medical records and, if those are insufficient, the bureau will schedule an examination. Some information comes from the claimant themself, but most of this is clarification about medical treatment or conditions which are noted on the medical records but that they aren't claiming disability for. The ydo fill out an ADL form, but this is only really taken into consideration in the event that the claim is borderline; in that case it might tip the balance toward an approval but only if the condition is significantly limiting their ADLs in a way that one would expect the condition to limit them. In any event, most ADLs show some limitations but not nearly the kind that would be sufficient to tip the balance in that circumstance. For example, if a guy is claiming disability for a back problem there's probably going to be something about how they don't move around very well and can't lift heavy objects. They probably aren't going to claim that the pain is so bad that they can't get out of bed and have to have someone else do housework for them.
Realistically, the only way you're getting disability on the initial application is if you're over the age of 50, have a job that involves physical labor, and haven't done any other kind of work in the past 20 years. If you're under 50 it's assumed you can adjust to other work, so if you're capable of doing a sedentary job that doesn't require any special qualifications you're denied. If you're over 50 and you have an office job you're denied. If you're over 50 and you have a job that involves physical labor but there's a similar job that uses the same skills but doesn't involve physical labor you're denied. If you're over 50 and you generally work a job that involves physical labor but you you worked the register at your brother's convenience store a decade ago when he was just starting out and needed extra help, you're denied.
Some of the cases I can remember: One approval of the more typical kind involved a 55-year-old black guy who worked as a welder his entire career and had back problems. Claims of back problems are common, but this guy had serious problems documented on x-ray and had undergone at least one surgery. He tried to go back to work after the surgery but had to stop. Another case involved a guy in his 30s with brain cancer who was in such bad shape I couldn't talk to him directly and had to get the information from his sister (cases like this are flagged upon intake so they can be approved quickly). One case involved a 16-year-old girl who had severe psychological and emotional problems to the point that her mother couldn't take care of her and she was put into a group home, but her behavior was so bad that she kept getting kicked out of them. She had been admitted to Western Psych repeatedly over the past few years. I only spoke to her briefly; most of my communication was with her mother, who spent most of the conversation on the brink of tears as she talked about how she didn't know what she was going to do about her daughter and how scared she was about the future. I honestly don't know if this is an approval because I left before the case was resolved. I was pushing hard to get it out the door because it was clear to me that this girl would never be capable of working but my supervisor was skeptical because, if memory serves, while she had frequent hospitalizations it had been close to a year since the last one so maybe things were improving.
Now, I saw plenty of bullshit as well, but it was obvious bullshit that resulted in a denial. The modal case for this was some kid in his early 20s who never worked for any length of time and never had any education beyond high school who was trying to claim disability for psych problems despite having never seen a psychiatrist. He might be taking some kind of antidepressant but it was always prescribed by a PCP and didn't follow any kind of psych workup. That presents a complication, since we can't deny the claim without any psychiatric evidence, so we'd have him evaluated by a psychiatrist who would invariably conclude that the kid had garden-variety anxiety and depression but nothing that would prevent him from working. Psych claims usually require a longitudinal history of progressively worsening problems, or else some kind of huge psychic break that's unavoidable. But most of the cases are people who obviously have problems, just not of sufficient severity to render them disabled. The determination office is basically a denial machine, and most of the claims that are approved at the initial stage are ones so obvious that no one could possibly claim they were fraudulent. There are also a small number of people who have already retired and later have a health problem and figure they'll file just to see if they qualify.
Now, once you get beyond the initial determination stage and into appeals, the success rate is much higher. However, if you're appealing then you have an attorney and the case is heard by an administrative judge who issues an opinion. I think that the reason for this is that few of the bullshit claims get appealed, so the cases the judge sees are of overall higher quality that what are seen at the initial stage, especially since most of the severe cases are sent to a different department for fast-tracking. An adjudicator who spends all day dealing with marginal claims basically turns into a denial machine. I saw a statistic that claims 38% of initial applications that reached the adjudication stage (i.e., not denied for technical reasons, which half of all initial claims are) were approved. This seems way too high. Granted, the numbers are from ten years after I stopped working there and I can't speak to how they do things in other states, but in my office it was like 20%, 25% tops. And that includes expedited cases and cases adjudicated by people who have been there for 20 years and think they can tell an approval from a denial based on gut feeling.
I wasn't there long, but in my time there I evaluated hundreds of claims, and I never once saw anything I thought looked fraudulent. As I said, there were bullshit claims, but these were obviously bullshit, and in any event the claimants weren't lying about anything. It's one of those things that just isn't worth it. The average SSDI benefit is $1,200/month, and the average SSI benefit is $800/month. And if you make more than something like $1,200/month from a regular job your benefits get cut off. So the reward one gets from perpetrating a fraud on the system is a life of bare subsistence living. One thing I can't speak to is fraud at the technical level, for example, people hiding income or assets so they qualify for SSI. Given the high rate of technical rejections, it's clear both that SSA is doing thorough investigations and that people aren't even trying to hide much. I'm not saying that fraud doesn't exist, but the guardrails in place for preventing it are so high and the incentive for committing it are so low that I doubt there's much savings to be had here.
pinging @jeroboam, since I didn't see his comment until after posting this
Rov_Scam
4d ago
It was a bad war, but what other choice did Israel have? Not retaliating or trying to get the hostages would have been politically untenable. Immediately entering negotiations for the return of the hostages would have had the effect of legitimizing hostage taking as a means of diplomacy. the only real option was to invade and hope that Hamas kept the hostages alive for leverage and wait until Hamas was sufficiently weakened to be in a position to make a deal. And that's just a deal, not necessarily a good deal.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
I think you're missing my point here. You can talk about the language used in the document, but I conceded in my initial post that people being forced to sit through bullshit training conducted by charlatans was one of the consequences of wokeness. What is missing is evidence that this nonsense results in any tangible differences to a significant number of ordinary people. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't get the impression that you came across this publication because your 7th grader brought home math homework that you found highly suspect and were directed to the PDF by school administration. Which is why I brought up the fact that no one I know IRL who is complaining about this can produce any worksheets, or textbooks, or anything like that that would convince a reasonable person that this is a widespread phenomenon. Instead all I see are media reports, or rumors, or material discovered online by people who were actively looking for it.
I believe if you look with regards to education you'll find a number of objectionable curriculum and policy changes in major school districts.
Well, that's my point. If the change is as big as you suggest, I shouldn't have to look for it. It should be obvious. I know a lot of parents and quite a few teachers, but I've yet to hear any of them talk about any specific instruction in their schools. It's always happening somewhere else. I don't doubt that some teachers in some places are teaching woke material, but if this were widespread I should be able to throw a dart at the map and find plenty of examples locally. But it's always someplace else.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
I'm a few years older than you, but beyond the internet, I think the problem started with cell phones. First, because they enable much easier communication, and second, because they became status symbols. While ease of communication seems like a good thing, it has the unfortunate side effect of making it easier to flake. If I call you tonight and we make plans to do something right after work tomorrow, unless you change your mind within the next few hours, you're pretty much stuck. Obviously, if there's some kind of emergency you could call me at work or at the place where we're supposed to meet, but that's intrusive and inconvenient (especially if you have to find the phone number of a business without the convenience of the internet), reserved for situations where you truly can't make it. These days, if it's getting late in the day tomorrow and you feel too tired to do anything, you can always just send me a text cancelling. I'm always available, and you don't even have to talk to me directly.
I'm as guilty of this as anyone, but it also makes it much easier to be late for things. If I have the kind of appointment like a job interview or court appearance where it's imperative that I be on time, I'm almost never late unless I make a fundamental miscalculation or there are unforseen circumstances. But if the engagement is merely social or recreational, I'm horrible at it, not because of unforseen circumstances, but because of inertia. After all, if I say I'm going to meet friends to ski at 9 am and I'm running a half hour late, I'll just text them to start without me and I'll call to see where they're at when I'm ready. In the old days, they'd have to wait around for me in the parking lot, not knowing where I was, and they couldn't go on ahead of me because I'd have no way of finding them once I got there. Being late meant either getting them pissed off waiting or running the risk of being ditched for the day.
Whether or not this is a net negative is hard to say. People flaking is annoying but it's nowhere near as bad as people having medical emergencies and no way to call an ambulance. Hell, it's probably better than the old days when people would have to cancel for legitimate reasons but had no way of contacting you and just stood you up. It's better than being stuck at home waiting for a call, or needing to get in touch with someone who isn't home at the time. As much as people complain about people being slaves to their phones now, it was worse in the old days. If you were at home and your phone rang, you basically had to answer it. Sure, you could screen calls through your answering machine, but this was inconvenient, and the idea of doing this for every call, all the time, was absurd. So you basically had to answer the phone, and the person on the other end could be anybody, wanting to talk about anything.
To get back to the social aspect, say I'm having people over this Friday night and I'm calling friends to invite them. These days you'd send a text. The recipients can see the group text, check their schedules, and respond at their convenience. If they don't really want to commit but want to keep it as a contingency, they can wait a few days to see if anything better comes up before responding. In the old days, you'd call your friends, and they'd have to give an answer immediately. "I don't know" was an acceptable response, but one only given in the event that there was some legitimate contingency involved that prevented you from committing in the here and now but wasn't certain enough to entirely preclude your attendance. And giving such a response required you to take the additional step of calling the host back at a later date to give a firm answer.
Which brings me to my second point, about phones being status symbols. This, admittedly, isn't that much of a problem, but it ties into everything else. Cell phones were always status symbols, but originally they were status symbols of a different type. Owning a cell phone before about 1995 meant that you had a very important job where people always needed to be able to reach you and it was worth paying ridiculously high fees for this capability. Then the cost of the phones and the basic subscription came down enough that normal people could afford to have them, but the per-minute charges were expensive enough that most of these were only used for emergencies or other situations where they were the only option. Landlines still ruled the roost for everyday conversations.
Then, in the early 2000s, changes were made to the business model that made teenagers actually want to own them as opposed to having them so they could call their parents for a ride. First, plans became available that came with a certain number of minutes that could be used during the day, and unlimited minutes on nights and weekends. Eventually, unlimited talk became the standard. Now, they could be used for casual conversation without your parents getting a huge bill. Second, texting became available, quickly gaining market share for low-priority communications that weren't worth interrupting somebody over. If I called for the specific point of telling you that the Penguins' goaltending looked especially shitty tonight (and not as an entree to a longer conversation), you'd be annoyed. If I texted the same you wouldn't care. The ability to have short, inane conversations (in an era with a telephonic keypad) didn't appeal much to adults, but kids loved it.
And with more kids having cell phones, marketers realized there was room for improvement of the phones themselves. Progress in cell phone design was initially centered around making them more compact. Now it was about making them more stylish. This is where Apple really knocked it out of the park. The Blackberry had existed for years, and provided much of the same functionality as smartphones would. But they were only appealing to people who actually needed the functionality. Nobody bought a Blackberry as a status symbol, and people who needed them for work didn't seem to like using them (one friend of mine who bought one for work purposes was thrilled when her job started paying for a work phone because she could now carry a normal phone for personal use). The iPhone had improved functionality, for sure, but it was a status symbol more than anything.
This only gets truer as time goes on. The first iPhone was a huge leap forward, but subsequent iterations have been less revolutionary than the improvements to the flip phones before them. Every couple years we'd at least get a new, useful feature, like a camera, or a full keyboard. Smartphone improvements are basically limited to incremental improvements of technology that already existed in flip phones or the first generation of smartphones. Faster processor, better camera, waterproof, etc. But new iPhones don't really do anything that the originals didn't, and that statement is even less true when comparing the current generation to the previous. (The biggest selling point of the iPhone 16 is that it has native AI capability, which sounds good until you consider that any phone with access to the internet has AI capability, just not on the phone itself. I don't know who this is supposed to appeal to.)
Nonetheless, there are people who want this thing. Every time a new iPhone comes out, there's a line out the door at the Apple Store of people who can't even wait a couple of weeks. Contrast this to the 90s. Phones were appliances. My parents had the same wall phone hanging in the kitchen throughout my entire childhood and most of my adulthood. You only got a new phone if the old one broke or, rarely, if there was some game-changing feature like a cordless handset or touch-tone dialing that you wanted. The idea of getting a new phone every two years was like the idea of getting a new dryer every two years.
The importance of this to the current phenomenon relates back to the first reason. Even though phones seem more central to our lives now, they are actually less central than they were 30 years ago. Like I said, if the phone rang, chances are you answered it, even though you probably had no idea who it was or what the call was about. If you made plans over the phone, you were stuck with them, unless you went to great lengths. If an important call came and you weren't home, you were out of luck. Our entire lives revolved around telephones and having access to telephones, but nobody really noticed or cared. They were as exciting as vacuum cleaners. Now they're as sexy as ever even though the core functionality hasn't improved since the introduction of texting. Once the average person was liberated from the noose of the telephone, that should have been the end of it, and progress should have stopped. The smartphone's integration of communication equipment with a portable, but unimprovably limited, personal computer, should have been the last improvement anybody cared about. But here we are, 15 years later, and people are even more concerned now than they were then.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
I think this is one thing people don't realize. With all the discussion about "third places" in recent years, it's almost like the writers complaining about them are essentially asking for bars without admitting they want bars. I'm a member of a local VFW post. I go several times a week. I don't go because I like drinking, I go because I like the people. If you're a regular at a bar, you know you can show up any time and you're friends will be there. Not all of your friends, but at least some of them. It's the ultimate low commitment social life, because there's never any obligation or expectation to show up, but it's always there if you want to do it. And if you just want to sit there and read or look at your phone, you can do that, too, because, even if you know everybody else in the bar, you didn't specifically go there to meet them specifically, so there's no obligation to entertain them.
For all this lack of obligation, though, it only really works if you commit to it; you have to go there often enough that everybody knows your name for it to have that kind of effect. If you only go a few times a year, you won't know anybody well enough for it to be worth it. The only time you can really get away from this is if you slowly back off after having gone regularly for years, at which point you can do the minimum to keep in touch. So when writers complain about the lack of some amorphous "third space" that I imagine they picture being like a college student union, I wonder if they realize that they don't work unless enough people are committed. Is there going to be a critical mass of people who show up several times a week solely out of routine to make it attractive for a stranger to want to join the community? What's the default activity? Bars have pool tables, dart boards, trivia nights, etc., but most people default to sitting around the bar bullshitting.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
In my experience, planning tends to go a lot smoother if it's the kind of event where your own personal attendance isn't contingent on other people showing up. If I'm trying to get a group together to ride bikes, and I make it clear that it's a group ride, if I don't get sufficient interest then the few people who are interested will probably drop out as well, if only because of a perception that we need some kind of critical mass. If I simply say that I'm going and if anyone wants to join they're welcome to, then it seems clear from the beginning that it wasn't intended as a big group blowout and if only one other person is interested they won't feel weird about showing up, and in turn pressure on the group isn't as much so more people will show up overall.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
Funny story about this. The summer before I started law school I took a job painting houses. I was out in the sun on a ladder all day and, consequently, I drank a lot of water. I had just moved to the city and one job was only a few miles from my house, so I walked there. Well, I'm on my way home and all that water catches up to me, so I start looking for a place to relieve myself. I pop into a random bar figuring I'll just buy a beer if I have to, but as soon as I step inside I realize that something isn't quite right. There are no doors on the bathroom. And while a bar not having any women present isn't exactly uncommon, the men were acting a little friendlier with each other than one would ordinarily expect. Having never been in a gay bar before, I unnecessarily freaked out a bit, not knowing if there was some etiquette norm I'd be violating, so I glanced around the room like I was looking for someone before turning to leave. As I'm walking out of this place I see my ex girlfriend getting off of a bus. I just waved and kept walking.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
The point of suing anonymous John Does is that the suit will allow the Plaintiffs to get a pre-discovery subpeona directed toward the relevant parties that could help identify them. Whether or not they'd actually be able to collect, or what the damages would even be, is an open question, though. Sometime the point of a lawsuit isn't to win the judgement but to demonstrate your willingness to defend you rights.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
I've never heard of folding poles but most poles are telescoping. These I'd recommend since you'll be able to adjust them to your preferred length. I know that some people will adjust throughout the day, using shorter poles when going uphill and longer ones when going down, but I'm not this particular.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
It's hyperbolic in the implication. Yes, I'm sure you can find some classroom in Galveston with a Pride flag in it, but the existence of one isn't necessarily an indication that this is a widespread phenomenon, any more than a British flag in a classroom in Des Moines is evidence of widespread Anglophilia. the fact that Vanderbilt has a trans surgery center that may have, at one time, performed an operation on a minor is a far cry from them having an entire wing at the hospital dedicated to pediatric trans surgeries. And just because one particular person was admitted to the University of Florida doesn't mean that they've gone full DEI. If they're really stumbling over themselves to keep out highly-qualified white dudes then it doesn't explain how they continue to make up a large percentage of the student body. And it really doesn't explain why the proportion of black students has been trending downward for over a decade, to the point that it's only half of what it was in 2010.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
I would consider that both objectionable to teach to children and derived from a critical race theory framework. That's irrelevant, though, because what you linked to wasn't intended to be taught to children. Your screenshot was part of an explanatory note at the very beginning of the first module explaining that certain terms in the materials would be italicized in reference to concepts put forth in another publication. It wasn't even explained in detail, and it certainly wasn't intended as a handout or something to be taught to middle school kids as part of the curriculum.
You're really stuck on how the media reports on things. The media is dishonest all the time.
Because this is how most people hear about this stuff. Very little of what is reported to me on this comes from an actual student, parent, or teacher. It comes from people with no connection to the education system responding to media reports and to a lesser extent, rumors based on media reports. Hence the inability to produce any classroom materials as evidence supporting their assertions. If there weren't any media coverage about CRT in schools it's unlikely that very many complaints would arise from people who discovered it organically, given how unobjectionable most of these proposals are once you strip away all the woke bullshit.
I bet in 1990 the "give everyone extra attention" doctrine wouldn't be couched in such language or concepts. Thus, this is one piece of evidence, for one state, that teaching became more 'woke' in some (at least) marginal respect, no? Saying it's not as bad as it looks is not the same as saying it's not a real thing. We should limit the number of indoctrinations into, what I consider, goop.
The entire point of my post is that, for all the discussion of various woke concepts, precious little of it has made it into actual policy. The fact that people are citing to documents that are long on bullshit and short on actual substance is only further evidence of that. If I really had to I could probably justify the entire Trump policy platform using woke CRT language, but it wouldn't really say anything about the underlying policies. All the use of this excess verbiage does is provide evidence of the thought-process of the people writing the documents, but I'm not arguing that there aren't important people who think this way; I'm arguing that this kind of thought hasn't been pervasive enough to result in objectionable policies.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
What do you think of Critical Theory and do you believe it has impacted K-12 curriculum in a significant way?
I'm not a fan of it personally, but I haven't seen evidence that it has affected the curriculum of the average school in any significant way. I've heard a lot of accusations that it has, but there's a difference between news reports and actual substance to the allegations. I don't doubt that critical theory is part of school curriculum somewhere, but I also don't doubt that there's some district or classroom that's teaching a far-right version of American History. The question is whether this is something the average student in the average suburban district is being taught, and while I've heard plenty of rumors, none of those have been substantiated with any evidence. Pulling something off the internet may be evidence that it exists, but it isn't evidence that it exists where people say it does, let alone that it's the dominant method of instruction.
Second question, what do you think of this toolkit for teachers and would you accept it as evidence for the kind of "woke" people are talking about?
Having downloaded some of the modules and looked at the FAQ, this is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. It uses a lot of cringeworthy language to explain how math instruction is secretly racist, but when you drill down to the core of what it's saying and, more importantly, what it's actually recommending, there isn't really anything objectionable in it. The idea that different students may benefit from different instruction styles isn't exactly a new idea, and the changes they're proposing aren't even that substantive. It reminds me of the whole Ebonics debate from 30 years ago. The media made it sound like students were going to be instructed in jive talk and given English tests based on different grammar, when the reality was that they wanted to do additional instruction relating formal English concepts to the vernacular the kids were already speaking. If what the documents are recommending was quietly slipped into the curriculum without all the woke verbiage few people would even notice, let alone care.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
You're engaging in the same fallacy that Democrats often engage in when it comes to Trump voters and other Republicans: Assuming what their interests are. Trump spent the entire campaign season portraying himself as the protector of Israel, and Republican politicians routinely criticized Biden for the mere suggestion that Israel should make concessions in cease fire talks. Remember when he threatened to withdraw supply of offensive weapons and the backlash surrounding that. I don't think Trump coming in and saying that Israel would have to completely withdraw from Gaza and release 1,000 Palestinian prisoners would have played well during the election. Especially considering he made no bones about the fact that Ukraine would have to surrender territory. You may agree with Trump's actions here, but it runs contrary to what anyone could have reasonably expected based on his prior statements. Whether or not this constitutes selling out his base depends on whether those who wholeheartedly supported Israel up until now are willing to cast these loyalties aside in favor of Trump.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
They can't do anything to him personally. But they have their own elected representatives who are going to be looking for concessions lest they find themselves on the hot seat. It's not so much about what they can do to Trump as it is about Trump's own lack of loyalty. He's acting like he can do anything he wants to and Republicans in congress will just fall in line. If he oversteps, though, people who need to keep their seats will make it very difficult for him to get anything done.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
There are various "stock market games" you can play online where you make investments with fake money and software tracks how you're doing. You'll quickly realize how quickly your money disappears when you put it in the market expecting quick returns. Unless you're looking to put your money into traditional investments and wait decades for it to grow, you might as well start playing ponies since they're about as predictable.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
So how if woke stuff never polls over 60% in California are there pride flags in classrooms in Galveston, TX, entire wings of hospitals dedicated to choppping off 12 year olds penises and breasts in Nashville, TN, and admissions departments giving scholarships to Black Lesbian 'B' students with a 24 ACT and stumbling over themselves to keep out a 4.0 White Dude with a 35, in Gainsville, FL?
The fact that you have to resort to obvious hyperbole proves my point.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
I think that, if true, this is a good thing. Like the US going into Iraq, Israel had no real endgame, and, like people have said below, US pressure may give Netanyahu an out. BUT... I'm not a Trump supporter. Six months ago the idea that Biden was even suggesting the necessity of a ceasefire was anathema to my IRL Republican friends. I personally tend to be pro-Israel so I'm kind of agnostic about the whole thing given my above comments about there being no endgame. Trump hasn't even been inaugurated yet and he's already expressed willingness to sell out his base. First in siding with Musk on H-1B visas and now by forcing Israel into terms that they find unacceptable. One further possibility is that Netanyahu, realizing that acceding to the deal ends his political career, tells Trump to pound sand. What's Trump going to do, withhold aid? Again, six months ago this would be unthinkable. Will the US become completely aloof from the Middle East? Will the Jews who support the Republican party exclusively because they're the most unwavering about Israel turn coat? Seems more likely than the pro-Palestinian protestors backing Trump. But what about the Muslims? Are they another group Trump is trying to pull into his orbit? How many more sacred cows is Trump willing to slaughter?
Back in 2016, I couldn't rule out the possibility that Trump was some kind of Trojan Horse meant to gin up the loyalty of a populist base only to betray them. What I had in mind at the time was that his "replacent" of Obamacare with "something better" was just code for instituting some kind of socialized healthcare system, since a popular Republican would have an easier time getting such a proposal through, even if heretofore no Republican would consider doing such a thing, and would be lambasted if they even tried. But Trump was so completely unlike any other politician that he might have been able to pull it off. His first term shattered any such illusions of moderation, as he leaned further into MAGA expectations, but this veneer is beginning to crack. Maybe he figured he needed to win a second term and solidify his base of support before delivering the coupe de grace. I wouldn't bet on it, but between siding with his billionaire friends over his own base on an issue central to his popularity and selling out Israel to Hamas, it wouldn't exactly surprise me. And the worst part is that the Trump true believers will tell me that he's being entirely consistent and that H-1B immigration is good, actually, and he's not selling out Israel because this war had no endgame anyway, and while all that may be true it doesn't change the fact that you have to do quite a lot of mental gymnastics to make this conform to anything Trump has said previously.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
Let's be honest, though—it only works because Trump is untouchable among his base. If Biden had insisted on a similar deal Trump would be screaming about how he can't sell out Israel and we must support Israel at all costs. Any US president could force Israel into a ceasefire by threatening to cut off military aid, it's just that the political consequences would be dire. Whether the pro-Israel wing of the party (i.e. the wing that's more pro-Israel than usual) will take him to task for this remains to be seen. I doubt the Orthodox Jewish community will let this slide, though. They're essentially single-issue voters.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
Citing something that was implemented between 2009 and 2014 is hardly evidence of the woke explosion having influenced anything.
And they managed to make a small minority of Blacks to get away with killing more Blacks because policing them is racist if it leads to disparate outcomes.
This is based on the assumption that "defund the police" and other movements led to a conscious effort to decrease policing that resulted in a higher murder rate. But the increase in murder rate happened everywhere, and to much the same degree. I haven't seen any study that's attempted to grade cities based on how enthusiastic they were about implementing police reform and looking at how the murder rates responded. Hell, Dallas and Miami had Republican mayors and still couldn't avoid the crime increase, so I doubt that this phenomenon was solely driven by policy decisions. Until someone actually takes a look at this, it's nothing more than conjecture.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
Right now I prefer the term "gender & race communism" to "wokeness." And as such "wokeness" did not start in the 2010s or in the 19080s as Paul Graham posits, but was a growing trend the entire last two hundred years.
I'm not playing this game. Sure, you can trace the roots of any political or intellectual movement back hundreds of years or even further. But that's not what anyone is talking about when they mean "woke". I've been in enough online discussions to recognize that this is just an entree to claiming that Marbury v. Madison / The 14th Amendment / Women's Suffrage / The Progressive Era / The New Deal / The Civil Rights Act / any number of other things is the moment the true spirit of the founding was lost and America started to go to hell in a handbasket, but I'm not buying it, not least of which because most of the people complaining about wokeness aren't buying it either. Not least of which because a colorblind society a la Dr. King was anathama to a large enough segment of the population as to be a progressive idea for the time but is the essence of anti-woke ideology today.
The curriculum of the school system in the major US city where I live is a near total wreck. Up through eighth grade, they basically don't teach a single classic American text, they don't teach anything that would inspire a white American boy (and frankly the curriculum probably isn't that inspiring to the people of color it is supposed to represent). Even the unit on space exploration -- uses Hidden Figures as the main text -- the school is flat-out teaching "misinformation." The magnet schools that were previously a great option for the better students have been greatly harmed by the post-2020 equity craze that lead to a change in admission rules. The administrators talking about these changes explicitly said that these changes were a result of making equity and anti-racism a central focus of their mission.
I've been hearing complaints about the alleged intrusion of wokeness into the elementary school curriculum for years, but there's been a paucity of concrete evidence. It's never anything that anyone's kids are bringing home, but what they heard is going on at a school district that's close enough to seem familiar but not so close that there's a good chance of actually knowing anyone whose kids go there. I'd expect that in this era of cell phone cameras and social media that the people who are outraged over this would have no problem coming up with examples of worksheets, reading materials, etc. that is supposedly indoctrinating our children, but somehow the only things I've ever seen produced are copypasta obtained from Google Images.
As to why kids aren't reading the classics of American literature anymore, my cousin, an elementary school teacher, gave me the answer, and it's more boring than some communist plot to make every story about black people. Basically, the so-called "curriculum experts" who decide these things came to the conclusion that the reading material needed to be specially tailored so that conformed to the precise reading level that was expected of the children and contained all the necessary vocabulary words but not any that were too hard. The result was that none of the existing children's literature filled all of the specific requirements, so they essentially had to commission a lot of stuff that did.
Anyway, this isn't a new thing. I was in elementary school in the early 1990s, and while we read some of these books, it was always apart from the standard curriculum. In any event, most of the stuff (like Charlotte's Web, for instance) involved all animal characters, so I'm not sure what was supposed to have especially inspired me as a young white boy. the stuff we actually read from the provided textbooks had no shortage of multicultural influence, so I'm not going to chalk up the mere existence of stories that center around black characters and traditions to some woke mind-virus.
The police were told to stand-down, a huge crime wave ensued, and urban public safety in the major cities has not come close to returning to 2000s levels, far less 1950s levels (Don't talk to me about crime rates -- due to police capacity and risk homeostasis, crime rates don't actually measure changes in public safety in the medium-term -- you have to look at how people's behaviors have changed).
If you're going to jettison statistics in favor of vibes, you also have to consider how much the narrative contributes to those vibes. When I was writing the entry on the South Side for my Pittsburgh series, I discussed the increased perception that the South Side was unsafe, a perception that wasn't really supported by the statistics. At first, I thought that maybe the perception was being influenced by high-profile shootings that made the news. But I was surprised to find a similar number of high-profile shootings in 2014 as in 2022. The difference was that in 2014, there was no narrative about how the South Side was becoming increasingly unsafe in the wake of a post-pandemic crime wave. With the overall crime rate having gone down the previous few years, there was no reason to believe that anything was out of the ordinary, so the shootings were reported on, chalked up to bad dudes hanging around nuisance bars after-hours, and quickly forgotten about.
In 2021 and 2022, after a summer of protests, rising crime rates, and being told that police were at the end of their rope, a similar number of instances caused the widespread perception that the South Side was unsafe, at least late at night on weekends, and it accordingly prompted various police strike forces and visits from the mayor. Never mind that the crime rate in the neighborhood was roughly similar to 2014, including the number of shootings that made the news. Now it was dangerous when it wasn't before. Are people really responding to increased risk of crime victimization, or to a conservative narrative that says woke policies are sending our cities to hell in a handbasket?
The demographics of our elite colleges were greatly changed as a result of equity focused changes in admissions. This matters a lot for the future leadership of our country.
Just out of curiosity, I checked the demographics of Harvard. The class of 2010 is roughly similar to the class of 2023. The biggest gains for blacks in university admissions overall seemed to happen in the 1980s. But this is also concurrent with the biggest gains made by Asians. Not only did this change happen in the pre-woke era, it happened at a time when blacks made huge gains in closing the high school graduation rate gap. It's no surprise that the percentage of blacks in a certain college will increase at a time when the college-eligible black population is also increasing.
The nature of campus social life and dating has fundamentally changed, partly because of Title IX investigations and metoo, but of course, also for many other reasons.
Fundamentally? I can't speak to any changes that have happened since I was there in the early 2000s, but I'd bet they're nothing compared to the changes made in the 1960s, prior to which men couldn't even get into women's dorms and people had to sign in and out, or since the 1940s, when you add to that the fact that the overall college population was 75% male, and all-girl's schools were much more prominent than they are today, meaning that if you went to a big college like Ohio State or Notre Dame, you probably weren't dating any fellow students.
The demographics of the entire country changed because it became racist and xenophobic to do any border control which produced bad optics or "violated human rights"
Hispanics were 5% of the US population in 1970, 6% in 1980, 8% in 1990, 12.5% in 2000, 16% in 2010, and 19% in 2020. The demographics seem to be changing at about the same clip as they have for decades. As an aside, this is why people who are anti-immigration are often accused of being racist. the official explanations range between worrying about them taking American jobs (if you assume they work), and leeching off of the welfare state (assuming they don't work), which at least are credible economic concerns. But here you make it sound like the real concern is demographic, which is as much as most Trump critics suspect.
The replacement of merit-based hiring with DEI hiring has not been rolled back, our institutions are continuing to crumble as a result. We do have people claiming they saw explicit anti-white-male discrimination in hiring at companies like Google and Intel and I think it has something to do with the stagnation and decline of those companies.
If this really happened then Mr. Magire was a fool to not take the statement to an attorney. If Google was actually using minority hiring quotas then they would have settled for a pretty penny to avoid discovery and the attendant publicity. Even the all-in DEI grifter employment law firms around here are quick to warn that DEI is not affirmative action and that private companies need to focus their efforts on recruiting and "fostering an inclusive atmosphere" and steer clear of anything that could be construed as a Title VII violation. I'd be surprised if a company that can afford the kind of attorneys Google can would be this stupid about the whole thing. And who are these unqualified black senior executives I keep hearing so much about?
Cross-dressers went from being a joke, to something that will get you fired and ostracized if you don't play along with their false beliefs. School systems now teach multiple genders and you are a bad person if you don't acknowledge someone's chosen gender. Code-of-conducts across an enormous number of projects, conferences, and other institutions, now ban "misgendering" someone. Mandatory denial of reality across many institutions of society is an enormous concrete change.
School systems encouraging this kind of trans-affirmation or whatever you want to call it isn't so much a symptom of woke ideology as it is of administrators who are spineless when it comes to discipline. I hear it from high school teachers and parents in several districts that administrators are loathe to discipline all but the most troublesome students, because the parents all think their own kids are angels and can't be inconvenienced by after-school detentions or suspension. The teachers are basically told to stand down; they can send the kid to the principal, but he just comes back without punishment. The result is that bullying is rampant, and the bullied kids end up going trans because it at least gives them leverage over the teacher that they didn't have before. And this isn't happening in highly-rated PMC school districts in the suburbs; it may be happening in urban areas, but the stories I'm hearing come from rural parts of the rust belt where the parents in question aren't voting for Kamala Harris.
Justice for what, though? If what he's technically being accused of would have been attributed to some faceless administrator whose name didn't come up until the middle of the investigations, few people would care about whether this person technically lied about funding an organization that may or may not have been funding gain of function research into coronaviruses. No, the ire directed at Fauci is almost entirely due to the recommendations he made during the pandemic and the people who didn't like them. These people had no love for Fauci before he was dragged in front of the committee and were looking for an excuse to nail his ass to the wall.
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