cartman
13d ago
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If anyone on the left had said that Tesla vandalism is going too far, do you think your media/info channels would tell you about it? What do you think the motivations are of the news sources covering this? My prior is that any right coded media source would downplay/ignore any such statements.
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Your statement about the right reining itself in seems pretty shaky to me. If people march with Nazi flags they'll scream from the rooftops but Elon Musk himself questionably, ambiguously does a Nazi salute on a huge stage, notably doesn't apologize or even acknowledge that this would be offensive to some people, even if it was initially accidental,and the right as a whole lets him off scot free? This doesn't support your argument. And neither does the bit about riots, unless you think everyone in the Capitol building on the 6th was actually no criminal at all. I recall lots of financial and legal support being thrown their way.
If you don't give a shit what I think, I recommend stopping the engagement. This will be my last comment given this fact. I do find it a bit hypocritical to complain about the "way you talk to me" when you like to throw in some "LMAO"s and "Bud"s and openly don't care about what I say, yet accuse me of condescension as I clearly state my opinions, but alas.
"You say you aren't a faceless representative of the other side, but that's exactly how you behave." You think that's how I behave, because you seem to have flattened everything in the world of cultural and artistic appreciation that you either have no interest in understanding or cannot understand into the bucket of 'globohomo woke' and the cultural left. Case in point, my argument, which you have repeatedly misunderstood, as below.
"yet as far as you know nothing I said about the show is incorrect". Yes....if you read my last paragraph, i stated that this was the case and that that wasn't my point. It is very tiresome to have your argument misunderstood over and over again despite stating it in plain terms.
Yes, I do in fact believe your practice of consuming artistic and cultural objects is intellectually lazy. Writing some text about why you think this is not laziness doesn't change that fact.
Am I supposed to take your comment regarding "irony of just desserts" as saying that your first comment wasn't serious? Or was it? If the former, then it seems a mistake to engage on this forum in that way. If not, I don't see why this should be some new understanding for me if you still support what you said there in earnest. That's not irony. I think calling it the irony of just desserts when the the behaviour in question is really just trusting negative reviews from people who don't know what they're talking about to spite people you dislike is dressing up the behaviour a little bit to make it more presentable and sound more sophisticated than it really is.
So you say word of mouth is your method of discovery. That would be fine, except for the fact that your word of mouth supply chain seems to also consist of people who don't consume or know much about the things that they positively or negatively recommend. So you're not getting much value there if the posts in this forum were sufficient evidence to stay away from this show. I stand by the fact that if there were something important and iconoclastic in this or other shows, you would be extremely unlikely to come across it given your artistic consumption habits.
"No bud, you said "My attitude privileges nothing" so you can tuck that condescension back up your sleeve, your attitude privileges positive coverage." So I said essentially a synonym of what I said that I did, with about the same meaning, and you have chosen to not believe me. Fair enough. Again, the only reason you seem to think that my attitude privileges positive coverage is that you think other faceless people do this and that I'm one of them. That's what happens when you treat individuals (and artistic objects) as if they're all in a bucket that you despise.
I will disagree that this concept is a core part of advertising. I stand by what I said, if someone admits ignorance of the thing they're reviewing, they will be roundly mocked. Reviews rely on the perception the reviewer knows what they're talking about. These people may in some cases be paid to say those things, but the outward message is that they have consumed the thing and are recommending the thing. Advertising from the company that makes a product itself or makes money off of it can be heavily discounted, and indeed I think most consumers understand this and are not deceived that the sexy person in a Lexus commercial has some intimate knowledge about cars and prefers a Lexus. This does require some intelligence and intuition on the part of a consumer to separate what the company wants your perception to be of the product and the reality of the product given marketing expenditures, but that's why there is a vast information ecosystem you can use to make this determination, and independent reviewers exist. Refusing to do this legwork and instead throwing out the baby with the bathwater is what I would call lazy.
I'm not sure who you think you're talking to. I am not a faceless representative of the political side that you so clearly despise. I am an individual who has provided my personal view on how media should be commented upon.
You are conflating a ton of things. There are some things people will call review bombing, will flood with negative reviews, etc. There are also people (like you) who will do all of the same negative behaviours and think they're justified for some reason? Sure, those things happen (I also think review bombing is a term that points to a distinct phenomenon, albeit with a negative connotation) and are sometimes bad. How much water do you think the 'I'm going to blame the general audience for my show being unpopular' argument really holds with the public? Is this a thing you think all "globohomo woke" people believe, or is it something you saw a few people say on twitter and now you're repeating in your deluge of spite?
"And no, you can say that you personally don't hold that attitude to privilege positive coverage over negative coverage, but of course boosting positive coverage and chilling negative coverage privileges positive coverage". Umm...yes, privileging positive coverage privileges positive coverage. I said that I didn't boost positive coverage. And I also don't think it's common to do so with coverage from people who don't know what they're talking about. Anyone who posted a video to social media where they gushed for 5 minutes about a movie that they announced throughout the video that they had no knowledge of would be roundly mocked in most circles. "Think pieces" Again, why are you letting what a couple random people online write about dictate your entire artistic life? If you asked the general public, what do you think trust in user scores would show?
Your 2nd last paragraph is a bunch of motivated excuses for laziness in not attempting to appreciate the artistic work as a cultural object. From everything you have said, I would have to reply that the world you describe does seem to be the world you want to live in, since you seemingly make no attempt to do anything other than perpetuate it. You'll never know when something "important and iconoclastic" really does come along because you'll never have given anything a chance.
This whole time my point has been that you should not proudly proclaim a positive or negative opinion on art that you have basically no knowledge of. I have no interest in watching the show myself because my point is not that it definitely does not say what you think it says, my point is that you simply don't know if that's the case. Neither do I, and neither does anyone else on the forum apparently. I'm not inclined to do someone else's homework if they want to take the leap of making proclamations about a show they haven't seen.
cartman
15d ago
You do need to watch the show to know if the show is saying little white boys are the problem. Anything else is laziness disguised as politics.
Is any show that depicts a young white male murderer implying that young white men are The Problem? I want an actual answer to that, because it seems like you're saying yes to that if you feel this comfortable shitting all over something you have the barest passing familiarity with. If no, then I don't understand your reasoning.
My attitude privileges nothing, it is simply the fact of the matter that people will spend hours and paragraphs shitting all over something they have no idea about. The reverse is usually not true. When it is, I also find that distasteful.
Your attitude of treating every artistic and cultural object as a missile to jam down the throat of the other political side without any of your own analysis is both lazy and sounds incredibly tiresome and unrewarding. I prefer analyzing things on their own merits. What you describe is certainly not the world I want, nor is it the one I find myself in.
cartman
15d ago
That's well and good if that's what you want to talk about, but the OP has 2 sentences which relate to the series being discussed by MP's. The rest is their own analysis of the plot, its supposed real life references, and some non sequiturs about knife bans and asian hate, which as far as I can tell have nothing to do with the show, they're all just getting lumped in as things that people that OP dislikes are promoting.
If the culture war angle relies on what the message of the show is and not just who is talking about it, then I would simply repeat my comment that I find it irritating that people will decide what the message of a show is based on a review from someone they dislike. It is simply lazy.
In that case I commend you for practicing a forgotten art. I also read Babel last year (not knowing much about it going into it). I actually quite liked the historicity and worldbuilding of the book, it was pretty different from what I normally read in that sense and a good change of pace, but ran into a headache with the sections that were maybe to the most unsubtle degree I've come across in modern fiction so overtly didactic and earnest about the reader getting the point. Like, we get what you're trying to say, you don't have to try so hard. Still glad that I read it.
I agree that there's no way to please everyone, but there's also no reason to attempt to. Read what you want and comment however you like on it. If someone thinks you missed The Point or are wasting your time but you found it a valuable reading experience, they can get bent. If it wasn't, then you can reevaluate whether you want to continue those reading habits. It just irks me when people will dismiss something so completely out of hand because the wrong people like it. It's one manifestation of the brainrot you see everywhere these days where people don't want to bother taking the time to form their own critical opinion of something, so they'll regurgitate what some content creator said about X or Y or judge it on the most surface level of details.
Though on that note, I also agree with you that works which are striving to be summed up into one didactic surface level message invite bad takes. Still, I don't see how (from the summary that was given) this show would qualify necessarily. The original comment even qualified by saying that even IF young white men are radicalized in a way that the series shows, then that's reasonable. "it's not happening, but if it is, that's fine." So you don't have a problem with the possible reality of the content, you have a problem with the perceived message that this is promoting about young white men I guess?. But without watching the show, we have no idea what the message of the show might be, what conclusions it might draw about how much race/social media/drug use/gender dynamics/parent responsibility or anything else play into the narrative.
cartman
16d ago
I must admit, as an English Lit guy, it irritates me quite a bit that all of the commenters on this forum feel comfortable judging an artistic work by reading a basic synopsis and reviews from people they dislike (if anyone actually watched the show I'm happy to be corrected but it doesn't seem that way from how people are talking). I haven't seen the series either and I can't say that it's good, but there's a reason why we have the saying about the book and it's cover and all that. It's lazy and can hardly be called analysis at all.
cartman
18d ago
Hmm, I see what you mean but I'm not sure I agree with the premise. For example, (correct me if I'm wrong) I think we may agree that medical school teaches valuable and necessary skills to being a doctor, and is not predominantly a signalling game. However, literally no one will hire a person as a doctor if they made it all the way to final exams and then quit. The signalling is part and parcel with the actually valuable education.
Edit: and if we stopped subsidizing students to go through medical school, I don't think that would make any difference to the above.
cartman
18d ago
Can you point me to the evidence you're referencing? My impression of the stats was that higher level education at college/university has a quite large lifelong earnings benefit.
i suppose this could still be just signalling that gets them into a higher earning network of like-minded signallers, but if we are trying to change this economic framework we would somehow have to also disincentive businesses from hiring based on this signalling. And that does not seem like an easy ask to me.
cartman
20d ago
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There will likely be a pretty ugly transition period between programs being gutted and the states spinning up their own versions of some of these programs, if they manage to sucessfully do it at all. It would be simpler to prune specific programs carefully rather than gutting the whole department and starting from scratch.
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I'm not really understanding your point here, it doesn't sound like it makes that much of a difference to me? If the money amounts are the same and going to the same places, why do we need to make a change at all?
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Respectfully, I don't agree that some programs being wasteful on an anecdotal scale necessitates gutting a department which oversees a huge amount of programs. Fine, the programs you saw were bad and a waste of money. What about all the other ones? And further to your point, what reason is there to believe that the DOE has wildly out of whack incentives from teachers/students/parents but the states do not? Why not fund it at the municipal level?
cartman
20d ago
I appreciate your response and recognize that these are issues that plausibly arise from more funding from non market parties.
I won't debate your points as I agree they are likely the case in some respects, I will only quibble on the point that none of these issues imply that stopping this funding would improve or leave the same the education level of the population. We might be spending money inefficiently, we might be issuing loans in a way that is net financial negative for some students, and we may be throwing off the private market of education, but those are all things you can do while still raising the education level of the population, and indeed goals like that are why we as a society trust the government and not the market for some things.
At this point, it becomes about how much extra money you want to spend for how much education, which is a much harder question, so I'll leave it there.
cartman
20d ago
Sure, but you don't think there is a difference between your null hypothesis being that any government funded non profit is a CiA front and your null hypothesis being that these orgs waste some money? At a certain point you can judge a null hypothesis and find it wanting based on prior evidence and how much of a reach it is
cartman
20d ago
That's not the same thing as assuming that it is specifically a CIA front sponsoring regime change and murder. I have no reason to think that about this org based on anything I have heard thus far.
cartman
20d ago
I appreciate that this could plausibly be the case, and is not assuming some huge gains in education efficiency, but I still have my doubts the transition will be as clean as all that.
cartman
20d ago
Copying from another reply: Unless you are positing some actual, specific mechanism through which education will somehow improve when it's less invested in, then I don't understand your argument. Things don't magically improve when you stop investing in them just because you were paying too much for the service you got before.
You don't get to suddenly match other countries quality of education by spending the same as them. For that to be the case, you would have to posit some huge gains in efficiency of cost/pupil educated.
cartman
20d ago
...okay... all I can say is I hope these are not the standards you use to make decisions.
cartman
20d ago
You are making exactly the same mistake that I called out before. I believe the graphs say what you say and that is not good evidence. America spends more than most other countries and gets worse results. That does not imply that we would get better results by suddenly spending less in line with other countries, that doesn't follow at all. Other countries have a huge amount of other variables going into education that you cannot replicate by simply matching them on price.
Unless you are positing some actual, specific mechanism through which education will somehow improve when it's less invested in, then I don't understand your argument.
Any qualms I may have were not the point of this argument, which was to determine whether gutting the DOE would result in a lower education level for the population. You have argued that the current education level is unnecessary, which is tangential to my point and something I'm agnostic on.
cartman
21d ago
What reason is there to think that this agency's actions is analogous to the example agency's actions you cited?
cartman
21d ago
I don't understand how you can expect the quality of a service to remain the same when a substantial portion of the funding for that service is cut. It seems like a fully generalizable statement that more funding=on average better service. We can quibble about how much funding results in how much improvement in quality for various services, but the principle holds. If police budgets are cut, police service gets worse. Ditto for healthcare, research, customer service, education, and basically everything else.
Looking at the Department of Education in particular: the Office of Federal Student Aid provides 120.8 billion in funding (grants, loans, etc.) for postsecondary education. It seems like a safe assumption that there are, very conservatively, thousands of university and college students who depend on this aid to attend their school at all. This seems like a very straightforward example of a way in which gutting the Department will have a negative effect on the education level of the population at large.
Perhaps you're only discussing the education of minors? Still, in that case the OESE seems to provide a huge amount of programs which top up funds to improve local and state schools. You can see a list here: https://www.ed.gov/about/ed-offices/oese/offices-programs-by-office
Is your position that none of these programs have any impact on the education level of the population at all? Or are you assuming that when the Department is gutted similar funding will flow to the states to spend under their own discretion? Unless that is your assumption, then the teachers and schools will not remain the same because they won't have the same budget. If that is your assumption, then we simply disagree on how calculated/planned out this gutting and refunding will be. There are huge costs associated with recreating programs from scratch.
cartman
21d ago
The education level of the population won't remain the same after funding is cut, it will get worse, even if it's already bad. That's the same fallacy that many people indulged in with Covid: the numbers don't remain the same when you change the policy that affects those numbers.
cartman
22d ago
Again, you seem to be squashing a lot of plausible complexity into a very simple categorization of Hanania being 'antiwoke'. Does being antiwoke preclude one from disagreeing heavily with other antiwoke people to the point you publically break from them? I don't see why it would. It COULD be the case that he thought this was best for his career and this is some massive error on his part in sensing what his audience wants, but it's just as convenient an explanation that he disagrees with Trump on policy to such a degree that simply being on the antiwoke team is not enough to garner a blind eye.
I think there's a country mile between cynically falling in line behind 'your guy' and being an internet troll. Was Sanders trolling when he ran against Clinton? Or is it more likely that people on ostensibly the same wing of politics sometimes do things that hurt others in the same wing because they have different beliefs?
If you don't accept that people who don't run successful businesses can't provide insight on those who do, then I struggle to see how you manage to derive value from any comments on this forum, where anonymous internet randos constantly comment on the goings-on of high profile business and government leaders who are usually, by every public metric, very successful. A sneer (or criticism, or observation) is just as good as the argument it presents, no more no less. People who are successful may have on average better insights into others that are as well, but you can still always judge the critique on its merits no matter who submits it. In this case, to refute Hanania's comments a good response would be to cite Musk's recent successes, as you've done. The comments on Hanania' lack of business success don't really address anything directly. (And in fact, I find it likely that he is, by this metric you've chosen, more successful than most commenters here, the forum you elect to participate in.)
Do you really believe that someone leading a for-now successful business precludes them undergoing mental decline? If anything, why not take a look at recent developments in contrast to past performance as more relevant evidence than the simple fact of a successful business existing? Tesla stock not doing so hot these days.
Should we assign truth value to people's opinions based on their wealth and following? I don't see how your comments about Hanania's global strategic positioning have anything to do with the veracity of his opinion.
You also seem to think...people are dumb for not following Trump even if they don't believe in his goals or execution? It seems extremely plausible that Hanania simply did not want to be a sycophant for Trump, which says nothing about how 'bad' he is at politics. You seem to be invoking some assumption that Hanania was clearly angling for some political gain that he fumbled by not supporting Trump, and that doesn't seem much more plausible than other explanations.
cartman
26d ago
That's called coyote time, and it's a pretty commonplace feature of most platformers these days, not just in one or two games. Judging from the trend, It seems to be the case that consumers prefer the feeling of that timing much better than strict one-pixel-past -the-ledge and you're dead timing.
Its fuzzy in that there is a gap between what is shown to you and what the inputs will do, but it does not have to be fuzzy in the sense that the game will likely still have a strict threshold it adheres for what is 'too late'.
What is your approach with regards to preparing raw fish for sushi at home? I've been tempted recently and have done some research, but it seems very difficult to find any relevant safety statistics for different preparation methods. For example, I THINK at this point (at least for salmon) the consensus seems to be that you want farmed Atlantic salmon that has been previously flash frozen at lower temps than a consumer freezer to kill parasites. However, a) it's hard to find out whether a salmon filet has been previously frozen, especially since amateur fishmongers seem to think 'fresh never frozen' sounds better even if they don't know/it's not true, b) I can't find any raw numbers about parasite infection risk from eating salmon this way at home, c) I can't find data about the risk from food poisoning eating this way, and to what extent curing for a short time might help with this. Also whether buying frozen or freezing at home has any significant effect or if it's just totally useless of it's not at low enough temp.
I'm probably going to just rip it with what knowledge I have and see what happens, but if you have any ideas they would be appreciated.
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