domain:felipec.substack.com
plural
4m ago
There was a TV Show a few years back called New Amsterdam and it was the peakness of Woke. It wasn't really well received or popular but it certainly was probably a signal of the high water mark of the popularity of that ideology I think. But it could also have been a very well disguised parody. I couldn't take it after a couple seasons so there could quite possibly be better examples than these, I wish I could find clips of them but it's hard to beat tumors caused by racism.
There was a whole episode about getting people to take the COVID vaccine because their freezer broke or something and they need to use up all the vaccines in a small period of time. So they get the word out and people show up but when the Chief notices that everyone waiting in line to get it is white he cancels the plan to give it out so he can give it to black people but when he approaches the black community over it they say they've all gotten their vaccine and he needs to look in his own backyard, to which the token conservative character says they haven't gotten the vaccine because they're waiting until people at risk get it, so the Chief decides to tell him to gather all his conservative friends and they all show up just in time for the arbitrary timer on the vaccine's viability to run out and nobody get vaccinated at all.
Another episode is about a previous Chief from the 70s-80s getting cancelled for throwing away donated blood during the AIDS crisis. That's it. Apart from doing that he was perfectly coded as a good left-leaning guy he did great stuff for minorities and the underprivileged but he breaks down and admits that they couldn't be sure if the blood donated from gay people at the time could have infected people with HIV so he ordered the blood thrown out. His legacy destroyed and the new Chief, disgusted at his decision, has to confirm to others that yes, it was true this man made a mistake with blood 50 years ago and must be erased from history. In the end, the old man leaves in shame as his picture is removed from the hospital wall.
I remember an episode where a minor was getting a court injunction against the hospital because they said their treatment was bad and the court responded by shutting down on childrens' aspects of the hospital until it was investigated and the first thing the psychiatrist says to the Chief about it is "You need to sort this out now, they're already shutting down our trans children's clinic."
To me, The Pitt in many ways seems more preachy even though the episodes are dedicated to mostly medical treatment because it's often injected into situations apropos of nothing and the resolutions feel bad because they're presented in the narrative in a way that feels like they're strawmanning/weakmanning an argument and then declaring victory.
hydroacetylene
9m ago
A surprising number of people just literally don't know that Eptstein's victims were adult-presenting teens who were mainly 16-17 and performed escort work. They think it's Rotherham, where elementary and middle school aged girls were used as brothel prostitutes.
Every society has distinguished between hetairia and porne. People are fine with the former as a vice other people engage in but furious at the latter involving citizen women.
theincompetencetheorist
11m ago
Well part of the problem is that all social media tech is that a small group of people deciding everything based on how much they can trap you in their algorithms to shove advertisement in front of your face. I would not characterize that as decentralized! It is the very nature of the companies gives the two-digit IQ megaphones on social media, it is encoded in the incentive structure of the business models. Someone stupid getting their voices heard get the slightly smarter people spending energy on feeling good about how they are smarter than the idiot got boosted.
Misinformation and disinformation is not an internet problem it is a (social) media problem and the quote just conflated that.
chooky
17m ago
I am confused what the complaint about the episode was and what subtext was occurring. It does not seem to me that the episode was any more subtle than that "The Nazis are bad guys, and the bad guys are Nazis".
hydroacetylene
22m ago
The wire is a character drama focused mostly on the criminals as long-run characters in a broader narrative, though. Very different genre than episodic investigative dramas from the cop's perspective.
You can make an interesting show about investigating lowlives shooting each other. It just wouldn't look anything like CSI.
Botond173
23m ago
Criminal Minds goes even further in that regard as it features multiple black bad guys (and girls). In one episode it even features a white woman who makes a false rape allegation.
hydroacetylene
25m ago
Does the medical field understand that alienating conservatives through crazy far left is the reason for their decline in public trust?
I'm not intending that as a snarl. I'm intending that as a legitimate question- have they considered it?
bolido_sentimental
35m ago
I am a serious chess nerd, and to be honest, I enjoy it purely as an end in itself. I don't think it's making me smarter or better at anything - I just really like chess, and so I play it and study it because it's fun. It brings me great happiness to have something like that
I wonder if this is sort of a luxury of the middle-aged: I do not need to be getting better at "real" skills to give myself a shot in life, because I'm married, mid-career and so on. It certainly would be more valuable to do something else with her time from that perspective. But it's not as useless as some other things. Like others have said, it's socially acceptable and even cool to some people; and it is certainly possible to meet folks and make friends (admittedly odd ones) through it.
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
Dancing to Tom Paine's Bones
38m ago
'Who shot this low-rent ghetto drug dealer? Well flip my dickens, it was this other low-rent ghetto drug dealer.'
That's... pretty much Season 1 of The Wire to a T, which is widely acknowledged as one of the best seasons of television ever produced.
Rosencrantz2
1hr ago
This is Sarah Champion's method to arrive at 1 million victims: “I extrapolated that Rotherham is a town [of] 200,000 and had 1,400 known victims of CSE [child sexual exploitation] between 1997-2013 and 15% of women report their rape - so scaled up,”
I really don't want to lessen a large number of very serious crimes, but to say that method is seriously flawed would be an understatement.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
To get a reasonable, moderate perspective, you have to follow the kind of people who march around with tiki torches and scream "Jews will not replace us!" That's not much of an exaggeration; the statement that libs were right about misinformation came from Jason Kessler, the organizer of the Charlottesville goon march.
Come on. That is a cheap rhetoric trick and you know it. Anyone can read Mein Kampf, find an unobjectionable quotation which which their current political opponent would disagree and thus prove that their opponent is literally less reasonable than Hitler.
I think English has the idiom that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. I am sure that if I were to dig through all the stuff Trump had said this year, I would be able to find plenty of sentences which sound reasonable, even insightful in isolation.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
The whole "misinformation" thing has always seemed strange to me. The default was that everyone was always wrong about everything, 100% of the time.
This is a common misconception. For most things of life-or-death importance, people were usually at least vaguely right. The Middle Ages might have had a cosmology which was laughably wrong, but their farmers certainly knew what was the optimal time to plant grain, because no society which is wrong about these things can survive.
Would medieval Europe have benefited greatly from a time traveler infodumping all the actionable knowledge of our age, e.g. how the plague works, and how to bootstrap an industrial civilization a la planecrash? Sure.
But there is a difference between being wrong because you lack the tech to find evidence either way (e.g. microscopes and sterilization for germ theory) or because your epistemics suck (which to be fair they often did).
Tree
1hr ago
of the sexual revolution and the very negative consequences it had on many young women. My mother tells stories about half her friends at 14 years old (in the late 1970s) having 25-30 year old boyfriends who picked them up outside school. That is the way it was.
Were normal, middle/upper class girls screwed up by stuff like this? All I know is I like my hippy aunts better than the tightasses. And I don‘t really see much regret or complaining from that generation compared to younger ones.
plural
1hr ago
The Wire exists. As best as I can recall there is only a single real murder investigation in the wire that's not gang related. In fact there's an entire storyline about no one giving a shit about gang murders because they're not interesting or meritorious enough to devote resources to investigate.
yofuckreddit
1hr ago
It's the weight for sure. The brake system is nice, but I just disabled the front brake on the priority and will get it on once I trust the kid a bit more.
A friend got the 14" (?) Guardian and it was still just too heavy. The Priority is both ligher and uses a belt drive, both major advantages for a similar price. The woom is unbelievably expensive but is also how light a kid's bike SHOULD be.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I think this is broadly true, but I think there’s another serious problem which is that starting with Gen X, there’s been a steady decline in literacy in the sense of having read and absorbed enough written fiction to understand how to use things like symbolism and metaphor and subtext to tell good stories. It’s actually weird, but for artists, they are not subtle at all. One conversation on Reddit sort of crystallizes this. There’s a very famous episode of old series Star Trek in which Kirk lands on a planet full of literal Nazis. As in full on swastika wearing, goose stepping Nazis. Turns out that this Nazi planet was turned Nazi, deliberately by a rogue Starfleet officer. Now, lots of people on Reddit, college educated, supposedly literate had a huge problem with the episode. They could not grasp that you could have the bad guy defend a bad idea unless you secretly hold the views that the villain is espousing. And of course if you can’t imagine other people telling stories without having to explain that X is bad so that you understand that they don’t agree with it, telling a story where you don’t hit people over the head with your own views lest you be accused of heresy becomes impossible. First because you don’t want to be mistaken as a heretic, as you kinda need to be able to work in mainstream media, but second because you have no idea how to use subtext or metaphor or symbolism to get a point across. It’s a skill issue.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
1hr ago
So?
But this poor family made a terrible decision because they've been lied to about reality their entire lives.
They made a brave decision without realizing why it was brave, i.e. there's a lot of danger involved. That doesn't make it terrible. Had they walked into it with open eyes, it would have been admirable. Insofar as it's not their fault alone that they had a poor understanding of the odds they were facing, sure, they're entitled to some sympathy when things turn out poorly in a way they never anticipated; but not infinite sympathy.
Picture a guy who signed up to be a firefighter because he'd observed that everyone admires and compliments firefighters. One day, things get bad, and as he's being roasted alive in an out-of-control inferno he whines: "man, I thought this job was going to be all about rescuing cats from trees and collecting praise just for existing! I'd never have signed up if I knew it involved actual peril". If the fire dept's recruitment drive genuinely downplayed the hardships and hazards of the job, sure, he gets a degree of sympathy from me for the injuries he sustains. But once he starts saying "no one in their right mind should ever become a firefighter! it's a terrible idea! you could be horribly injured! stop praising firefighters and encouraging people to join up!", no, sorry, gotta stop you there. You have a right to be a coward, everyone does, I'm not a firefighter myself - but you can't start preaching cowardice as an ideal. That's wildly antisocial.
Transfer of learning doesn't exist, so all those quotes about how chess teaches foresight and vigilance are full of shit; learning chess teaches you to play chess, period. And we are not in an age or place where it is a common pastime, so it is not particularly useful as a social skill, either.
I would not be categorical about it, I think there are a lot of lessons that a child would learn from chess. Mostly character lessons, not intellectual lessons, and not because it's chess specifically, but because it's a competitive game. It would teach a child humility; even if the kid is good, she will meet people who can effortlessly curbstomp her at it, so she will have to learn to deal with that. She will also learn that if she studies and practices hard, she can improve at something; a valuable insight that eludes a surprising amount of adults.
There's a few pitfalls too though, it's important that she understands that just because she can beat some people at chess, especially adults, it does not make her better, superior or even really more intelligent than them. And vice-versa. But I can easily imagine a kid losing respect for adult autority because she thinks she's more intelligent than them.
faceh
1hr ago
It is interesting to think about what sort of evidence you personally would need to bump your personal probability of "God" existing to like 99%.
There's a bit of a problem in that '1 off' events can be 'explained' as an extremely rare confluence of factors that produced an unlikely (but not impossible!) occurrence. And events that seem impossible but are repeated with some kind of regularity can be studied and eventually 'explained.'
And a lot of things CAN be written off as hallucinations or misperceptions of an otherwise normal event.
For me, I'd count "Reviving someone who was proclaimed dead, on demand" as pretty high up the scale of things that can't be explained (yet) with current science, and thus proof of 'divine' intervention.
WandererintheWilderness
1hr ago
"Invasive species" is strong language, to be fair. Yes, African-Americans were brought over to the US, but this was a few centuries ago and by now they're as native as the rest of the immigrant US population.
Well, the metaphor was about the small scale, about white couples adopting black orphans. The idea is that the singular black child is "invasive" in the gated environment of the white family's hearth-and-home. An ugly sentiment, but not really historically falsifiable either way.
WandererintheWilderness
1hr ago
While unquestionably a horror story and about adoption, I don't think this is the kind of "adoption gone wrong" the thread is about, which focuses on cases where the adopted kid turned out to be 'bad seed' no matter how much nurture was applied, and consequently wrecked the innocent adoptive parents' lives - not the other way around.
KMC
1hr ago
They are at least as different as wolves, and coyotes, and dogs are from one another.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I mean so was the printing press. I don’t see this as a huge problem, as eventually we will learn to deal with it. And I find that in almost all cases, the dangers of censorship and centralized clearing houses of information is that not only does it make organized lying possible— in fact easy — but it makes countering the official lies nearly impossible.
The danger of too much contrarianism is being exposed to crazy ideas that fail on critical examination. This is at least possible because the truth is also available.
People in general are OK with lower class girls from the same tribe becoming courtesans(which is basically what Epstein's victims were) as a form of social mobility as long as it's quiet. Very few people are OK with ingroup women of any description working as brothel prostitutes/streetwalkers(which is what the Rotherham victims were). It's reasonable to see these as different kinds of sex work and I'm not sure 100x worse is that far off.
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