Friday Ephemera
Scenes. (h/t, Darleen) || Not without its uses. || When your ‘they-ness’ isn’t noticed. || Amblin’ by. || He does, er, this better than you do. || Assorted bus tickets. (h/t, Things) || Bread bugs. || Restoration of note. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Residential Los Angeles, 1940s. || Ring for service. || For sequencing. || Samantha has conditions. || Snowflake generator. || Little helper. || He loves his 28 head-mates. || Mixed messages. || “Your mind should automatically say father.” || “Whiteness is the overarching disease.” || The joys of public transport, part 4,862. || An archive of paper bags, and a plastic bag museum. (h/t, Things) || How far could you throw a ball on the Moon? || And finally, does yours do this?
Oh, and for those that care about such things, I now have a Gettr account.
Say it now and say it loud: I’m sinister and I’m proud!
Say it now and say it loud: I’m sinister and I’m proud!
https://unz.com/isteve/lefthanders/
a hugely successful Lefthanders Liberation movement that succeeded in persuading parents and teachers not to force lefthanders to write righthanded.
And a very worthy cause that was, as I have heard that forcing lefty children to write right-handed can cause harm.
But it seems that what we’re seeing now is the left-handed version of Black Lives Matter–call it Critical Handedness Theory: Left-handed people are “oppressed”, even though nobody is seeking to harm them: The mere fact that many technologies and devices have a natural handedness, and are normally made only in right-handed versions, is not proof of an anti-lefty conspiracy (right supremacy?) but rather is a natural, organic development. One might as well complain that life is difficult in Japan for people who do not speak Japanese.
Never mind all the BLM and CRT bullshit: This is what real racism looks like:
April 2021: 61 year old Asian man in coma after repeated stomped on head by black stranger.
Today: The victim, Yao Pan Ma, has died of his injuries.
Widespread black racism is the elephant in the room which liberals refuse to talk about.
Watching Hawkeye. Rather like it 2.5 eps in.
My capacity for agog-ness has been exceeded
Lia’s slacked off probably because of his coasting for wins over all the girls in the pool. Now comes another trans athlete ready to yank the spotlight from Lia.
Say it now and say it loud: I’m sinister and I’m proud!
I see what you did there. Bar-ring that…f**k the bastards.
She faced a real challenge in the 100 freestyle from Yale’s Iszac Henig,
Interesting choice of words “faced a real challenge.” Apparently losing when you’re expected to win is facing a challenge. It was so shocked by its failure that it finished fifth. Let the games begin!
If you want to know real problems as a left-hander, be Muslim.
It’s highly unusual for someone with a name like Iszac Henig not to be immediately labelled as a privileged white oppressor but I’m sure a suitable angle will be found before too long.
Sabrina Strings is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine
And I am an alumna of same, and I gleefully toss their entreaties for donations when they arrive in the mail. More so for the anti-Semitism that the university allows to flourish. Go, Anteaters.
I am also the alumna of another school who must bear the mark of having produced the wise Latina sitting on the Supreme Court. Sotomayor was Class of ’74 at Cardinal Spellman HS in the Bronx, I was Class of ’78.
At least my law school, Loyola, produced the winning team in the OJ trial, Shapiro and Cochran. Rest in power, Johnny. You proved the old adage that A students make judge, B students make partner, and C students make millions.
The fatphobia thing is hilarious. First off: it is not a phobia. No one is afraid of fat people–you can outrun them easily.
Heh.
Another hot mess of politicized dysfunction+.
I enjoyed the comment on that post: “It’s amazing how a decades-long campaign to trick people into believing that women are as mentally and physically capable as men in every aspect just fell apart immediately as soon as transwomen became socially accepted and started outperforming cis women in every field.”
In other news, you all here may recall that a few months ago I got a new puppy. The new puppy has given me so much pleasure that I felt he deserved the same so I got him a puppy. Now I have two Weimaraner puppies wrestling happily and the world is good, at least in my home. New puppy is Zeke, after the prophet Ezekiel, specifically for Ezekiel 25:17 which film lovers will recognize as the Bible verse used by Jules in “Pulp Fiction” before he kills someone. The cat remains unamused.
TBF, it is Louisiana, so it could be history lessons about Catherine of France.
@pst314:
OK, a bit late.
“although many do fear black lawlessness and worry about black bigotry.”
Also, some may wish to avoid situations where they may be accused of raycissm. Easier not to be there in the first place.
“so it could be history lessons about Catherine of France.”
“I’m Henerey the Eighth I am, Henerey the Eighth I am, I am…”
Easier not to be there in the first place.
Very true.
Supporting my contention that STEM is being taken over by Maoist barbarians:
Scientist accused of sexism & racism for joke that roundworms are ‘overhyped’:
“Scientist provokes ire of Twitter users and is accused of sexism, racism and privilege after saying roundworms are ‘overhyped’:
“In a debate designed to spark friendly banter, podcast host Ellen Weatherford tweeted on July 18 to her 3,500 followers from @JustTheZooOfUs: ‘What is the most overhyped animal?’
Michael Eisen, the editor of eLife and an expert in fruit flies, replied a day later that the roundworm was, in his opinion, overhyped.
‘They wiggle forward. They wiggle backwards. And occasionally they f*** themselves. That’s it,’ he tweeted.”
I would like to make the non-joke case that leftists are the most overrated animal: They eat. They excrete. And they spend every other moment of their lives fucking people over.
STEM is being taken over by people with no sense of humor who are married to their pet theories, and take every criticism of the work as personal. They’re turning science, a methodology for getting at a better understanding of how things work and why they work as they do, into a faith-based religion. That could be considered Maoist barbarians, too, because the superstitions they’re pushing sure aren’t scientific.
Ye gods – how is saying “roundworms are overhyped” racist? Are these barbarians comparing BAME/BIPOCs to parasites and pests?
But I was told not so long ago, I believe on these very pages, that this nonsense would stop at STEM. It simply would. Because logic and reason. Thank God at least our cops and military are safe from getting woke. What?
Ye gods – how is saying “roundworms are overhyped” racist?
It isn’t. But they don’t believe it’s racist either. These are the same ideologues who have taken over most of the other departments at the universities. Their objective is to take power and the way they do it is to destabilize the status quo. Of course, they have no idea what they’ll replace things with. They just know that they’ll be in charge and make you bend the knee.
I always wondered what a fat woman would look like if she went around dressed as a 1970s “G Plan” sofa. Now I know:
https://twitter.com/SophiaTassew/status/1480171276283035650
Ye gods – how is saying “roundworms are overhyped” racist?
At least some of them say that the joke is unacceptable because it “triggers” them: It reminds them of actual racism and sexism. Of course, anything can remind a crackpot of her obsession (see Freud, cigars, and Rorschach Test jokes) so the end result of this thinking is that anything and everything can be banned–which is why the left is so fond of such ploys in the first place.
Now I know:
What’s that expression? Somewhere a Volkswagen is missing its seat covers…
Now I know:
Wrong shade of green for the stylish elephant.
If you want to know real problems as a left-hander, be Muslim.
Ha, ha. No. At least if it is why I think you mean.
Very, very few Muslims still only eat right handed. I say that as person who had deliberately set out to watch that, so I didn’t embarrass myself in Muslim majority society. Thing is, they aren’t idiots. They use cutlery, which pretty much removes the problem. Even eating with their hands, say kebabs, most of the Middle East don’t bother with the hands thing any more.
In traditional society, the choice is between putting the food into your mouth a bit awkwardly and wiping your rear end a bit awkwardly, I think the lefties have the advantage. A mistake with food isn’t half as serious.
Finally, and this is absolutely massive. Lefties are hugely advantaged in Arabic speaking countries, for the same reason that righties are in the West. Their writing system is much easier if you write with your left.
The fatuous professor talking about right-advantaged is a prime example of a person who thinks they have all the answers, but is every bit as insular as the people they decry. Almost as much of the world writes right to left as left to right, once you factor in Arabic and Chinese for starters.
roundworms are overhyped
The worm nerds, including some female worm nerds, were in a male sociability mode of dissing each others’ lab creatures.
Until somebody switched to a female sociability mode of mean girl bullying, with an extra dose of claiming to be an oppressed minority.
And then one of the female worm nerds deleted her tweet and apologized, not for bullying the male worm nerd, but because whatever she said offended somebody higher up on the meangirl/oppressed minority pecking orders.
“Somewhere a Volkswagen is missing its seat covers”
– Venus Flytrap referring to Herb Tarlek’s suit in WKRP in Cinncinnati.
He loves his 28 head-mates.
DID is largely recognized now as Not a Thing, and tends to be considered part of the Cluster B personality disorders, It manifests very similarly to Borderline/Unstable Personality Disorder: the patient adopts a personality most likely to be agreeable to the person they’re currently interacting with.
she is doing hormone experiments on the fetus
Unless she’s doping on the sly, probably not. Doctors will not allow a pregnant dysmorphic to continue taking the hormones. And the bead won’t magically fall off just because she stops taking the hormones for nine months.
Discovery channel picked up the U.S. rights to Repair Shop
I ponied up for the Animal Planet documentaries about the Georgia Aquarium and the San Diego Zoo. It’s hard to be discouraged by the reality outside when you’re watching penguins.
artist/parent/gamer
These are not my people.
the vast majority of the shaming that is allegedly thrust onto females by The Patriarchy is in reality carried out by hens squabbling amongst themselves
“OMG Becky, look at her butt” passes the Bechdel Test.
One might as well complain that life is difficult in Japan for people who do not speak Japanese.
Life is difficult in Japan for anyone who isn’t Japanese because the Japanese are incredibly chauvinist and xenophobic. Speak Japanese too well, and you’re accused of wanting to be Japanese which is above your station. Don’t speak Japanese at all and you’re a boorish gaijin who can’t be bothered to learn the language.
Watching Hawkeye. Rather like it 2.5 eps in.
Any good? I skipped Falcon and Winter Soldier and Loki after the sociopathy excusing of Vision and the Scarlet Witch. I’m assuming it falls into the spy action subgenre of the MCU.
A pale, upper-middle-class lefty, a New York Times contributor and editor of the London Review of Books, is jumped and beaten by sadistic black youths, who laugh as they rob him and kick him repeatedly.
Fretting about “privilege” promptly ensues.
roundworms are overhyped
I would have gone with pandas. They are an animal that should have been extinct some time ago due to their inability to breed adequately and instead require expensive human intervention. But maybe that is how some evolution works: “Okay, we can’t properly fuck but we retain Disneyesque cuteness.”
True Fact: there is a Chinese restaurant near my home called “Panda Garden” that has a koala as its logo. I always mean to stop in and ask whether they did that intentionally.
Any good?
Given recent offerings, I found it hard to care – certainly not enough to make me sit through it. For me, the next Doctor Strange outing, the only Marvel film in ages I’ve any interest in, will be the do-or-die for any subsequent viewing.
Life is difficult in Japan for anyone who isn’t Japanese because the Japanese are incredibly chauvinist
Yes, I could have chosen a better example.
True Fact: there is a Chinese restaurant near my home called “Panda Garden” that has a koala as its logo.
🙂
Even funnier true fact: Not far from a friend’s home there was a Chinese restaurant called “Golden Ho”. Very amusing to people who are more familiar with urban slang than with Chinese. And even more amusing to people who are familiar with both. (“Yellow River” in Chinese is “Huang Ho”. The owners should not have tried to mix English and Chinese.)
Fretting about “privilege” promptly ensues.
And you just know that in every election he votes for the most radical left candidate.
And you just know that in every election he votes for the most radical left candidate.
Mr Shatz is a Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer, using the word “apocalyptic” to describe Mr Trump’s 2016 election victory, and his writing about “racial justice” is pretty much what you’d expect. “White supremacy” is of course invoked. Presumably, we’re supposed to believe that the endless cultivation of pretentious victimhood and racial animus by middle-class leftists, with white people as the go-to target, can have no bearing whatsoever on how often people find themselves being abused or attacked by those gorged on the aforementioned pretentious victimhood and racial animus, and whose behaviour is so often excused, even championed, by middle-class leftists.
Mr Shatz doubtless imagines himself as enlightened and sophisticated, rather than, say, delusional or morally degenerate.
“Yellow River” in Chinese is “Huang Ho”. The owners should not have tried to mix English and Chinese.
I remember back in 5th grade the book Yellow River… author was something…Daily I believe.
Mr Shatz is a Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer, using the word “apocalyptic”
But that’s an even greater part of this country now following the abject stupidity of our recent January 6 memorialization. Once a critical mass of delusional and morally degenerate people have spread their delusions far enough and wide enough, they are the enlightened and sophisticated ones and it’s everyone else who is delusional and morally degenerate. That is until of course the Gods of the Copybook Headings show up. Which based on past history could take years, decades, centuries. There’s a lot of ruin in a wealthy civilization. A lot of ruin.
In lawless times and places, people always traveled in groups, armed. In 1600s London everyone carried a knife. Murder was a major cause of death. Caravans in the middle east of less than 50 men were at risk. In the US South, lynchings were common and not (contrary to popular belief) of blacks only. In fact more whites were lynched. One of the last major lynchings was 8 italians in New Orleans. This is what “defund police” yields. One is not spared because of woke credentials.
This is what “defund police” yields.
And in fact many “progressive minded people” would be very comfortable with the lynching of peaceful people they disagree with.
Once a critical mass of delusional and morally degenerate people have spread their delusions far enough and wide enough, they are the enlightened and sophisticated ones and it’s everyone else who is delusional and morally degenerate…
See Russian history where “intelligent”/”intelligentsia” meant fanatical leftist rather than educated. (This is never mentioned by “liberal” educators.)
…That is until of course the Gods of the Copybook Headings show up.
And most of the “intelligentsia” were liquidated by the Bolsheviks.
Mr Shatz is…
As bad as the fucking pandas.
…our recent January 6 memorialization.
The latest round of lies regarding deaths that were, shall we say, “attached” to that date had me thinking of Armando Valladares.
The latest round of lies regarding deaths that were, shall we say, “attached” to that date had me thinking of Armando Valladares.
About Valladares: “In 1960, at the age of 23, he reportedly refused to put an ‘I’m with Fidel’ sign on his desk at work. He was subsequently given a thirty-year prison sentence.”
Same mindset as is found among those who demand that we publicly support every leftist cause du jour, from “black lives matter” and “I can’t breathe” to “transwomen are women” to “believe all women” to “hands off Iran”. Does anyone else here know a leftist who has ever expressed outrage at Cuba’s human rights violations? I don’t.
I remember back in 5th grade the book Yellow River… author was something…Daily I believe.
Wasn’t the author I. P. Standing or was it I. P. Freely?
In fact more whites were lynched.
That’s what I had always heard. But, according to the Tuskegee Institute, 4,742 people were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968. 1,297 were white, 3,445 were black.
It’s entirely possible that between 1776 and 1882 that more whites than blacks were lynched. If so, I can’t find any statistics.
The reason that Haiti is such a mess is that it’s full of Haitians.
Black jurors refused to convict vicious killer of murder because they didn’t want ‘another black man’ to be sentenced to death or life in prison.
I’m sure those jurors imagine themselves as enlightened, rather than, say, delusional or morally degenerate. This…cognitive defect…is note rare.
Human rights: The Left did not support Hong Kong at all. They have blocked a resolution condemning the interment of the Uighurs in China. They support Castro and Che and Maduro. They deny that Stalin and Mao murdered millions. They want to help Iran–why I cannot guess because it isn’t even communist. They are enabling spyware on all our computers (tiktok, zoom, the chinese chip company). The white house uses zoom FGS. It is stupid and scary.
jumped and beaten by sadistic black youths, who laugh as they rob him and kick him repeatedly
Nothing stolen, done for the pure delight in cruelty, probably targeted because he’s white. But the concept of “hate crime” somehow doesn’t enter into consideration.
And then obviously black violence is incubated in a culture of Donald Trump’s machismo, James Spader in Pretty in Pink and the smirking Covington boys.
He suggests simple-minded titillating narrative-compliant things, then says he’s not suggesting such things. It’s the easiest form of a motte and bailey.
He’s not suggesting that it’s an act of conscious protest, but perhaps an act of unconscious protest.
He’s not suggesting that a Covington type white would have been a legitimate target, but have I mentioned my anti-white credentials lately, perhaps even in this article?
When he brings up Fanon’s notion of the “dreams of aggressive vitality” of men “penned in” by colonialism, only inattentive readers, influenced by Chekov’s Gun tropes, will assume it has some thematic relevance to the article. If there’s one thing that comes to mind about American blacks, it’s that they’re penned in, forced into submissive postures while white men are encouraged to swagger and manspread. Or perhaps it’s that American blacks, most of whom according to the Moynihan report couldn’t say what their father or grandfather did for a living, have a more vivid memory of the humiliations of slavery 5-10 generations back.
If there’s one thing that comes to mind about American blacks, it’s that they’re penned in, forced into submissive postures
Such as my high school, where the black kids were forced, forced! to not pay attention in class, to not do homework, to act up, to commit violent crimes. /sarcasm
This is what “defund police” yields
And that’s the point. All of the left’s actions do not make sense if you assume their motivations are what they say they are.
They make perfect sense once you realize their goal is to destabilize the target country’s social and cultural cohesion to the point that it cannot resist a violent revolution/invasion. That is the playbook; it has always been the playbook. We were warned about this in the 1980’s by Bezmenov.
Dwayne Hickman, aka Dobie Gillis, has died.
What I found unusual about The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis was the frankness with which Dobie, the emulatable audience-sympathetic character, was depicted as a square, with a straighforward conventional viewpoint, and not seeking edginess or intellectual provocation. Dobie was open minded enough towards his intellectual friend Zelda and his beatnik friend Maynard to maybe accompany them to a folk club or something, but he saw it as a novel night out, and not as requiring a cultural or political commitment from him. Interesting in terms of this blog’s theme of extremist ideas being promoted as suitable for ordinary people.
Recommended watching, at least the first season, where the triangle of Dobie, Zelda, and Tuesday Weld is set up. It declines in the following seasons, with the beatnik Maynard being used as an infinite source of shark-jumping implausibilities.
What I found unusual about The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis was the frankness with which Dobie, the emulatable audience-sympathetic character, was depicted as a square, with a straighforward conventional viewpoint, and not seeking edginess or intellectual provocation.
In contrast, the beatnik character, Maynard G. Krebs, was not portrayed so sympathetically: he was a lazy goof-off with goofy ideas.
At least that is how I remember the show. Is my memory accurate? It was a long time ago and I was awfully young at the time and
When I was young and in the south, there were older black men (which means they grew up in the 40s) who were beaten down and hopeless from lack of opportunity. However, that was long long ago. 50 yrs ago. Young black men today mostly suffer from not having a father and from a gangsta culture that says “acting white” is to be scorned and violence embraced. Culture is not genetic. It can change.
The erasure of women continues apace.
He was subsequently given a thirty-year prison sentence.
On terrorism charges related to a bombing that never occurred. It was an invention of the communists for the purposes of generating criminal (rather than merely political) charges, vilifying those who opposed who opposed the revolution, and painting the revolution, now in power, as continuing to serve the people as the “resistance” against nefarious forces.
Looking further down that entry, I see the Cuban regime’s propagandists still have a free hand as editors at Wikipedia. Valladares’s time in wheelchair was due to the toll being in the care of communists had taken on his body, not a spinal injury. It is no secret that he was able to recover.
However, that was long long ago. 50 yrs ago.
Over 500 years after the liberation of Spain from Muslim conquerors, there are still angry Muslims who obsess over this and call for jihad to resubjugate the infidels. I wouldn’t be surprised if, 100 years from now, there were still black racists using historical slavery and discrimination as an excuse for violence and theft.
Couple proudly announces they will not reproduce. Fine with me.
Call me proudly toxic.
Proudly toxic: anything that makes the inadequate feel inadequate is to be banned. This one is pretty out there though. Will obesity become mandatory so no obese person feels bad?
Call me proudly toxic
And “sentient jessica” has obviously never been to Newcastle.
Accurate? “The social problems of low IQ:
“I did IQ research as a grad student, and it involved a lot of this stuff. Did you know that most people (9%%+) with less than 90 IQ can’t understand conditional hypotheticals?
…
We did research on convicts in San Quentin. They’re absolute fucking retards, at least 50% illiterate.
…
Other interesting phenomenon around IQ involves recursion.
…
Time is practically impossible to understand for sub 80’s. They exist only in the present, can barely reflect on the past and can’t plan for the future at all.
…
It’s the main reason why so many people with sub-90 IQ are sociopathic or psychopathic. They don’t have the mental computing power to model other people’s thoughts and feelings. I’ve seen it over and over with convicts… It comes across as psychopathic, but these people literally don’t have the brainpower to build even a crude model of someone else’s mind, let alone populate it with events that are in the past.”
people with less than 90 IQ can’t understand conditional hypotheticals
I was going to look up conditional hypotheticals but then remembered that I can’t read.
Did you know that most people (9%%+) with less than 90 IQ can’t understand conditional hypotheticals?
I don’t see what you’re getting at…
Call me proudly toxic.
Sweater/Jacket: Something you wear when you’re mother/wife is cold.
Accurate?
If you follow the link, you will see that the Tweet has screen caps but no link to the original source. So I have no idea where it came from. Annoyingly common to omit links.
you’re
…your…
Proving my previous post.
Time is practically impossible to understand for sub-80s. They exist only in the present, can barely reflect on the past and can’t plan for the future at all
Last year reading Roberto Callasso’s The Unnameable Present, I was reminded that this is what Santayana was referring to in his famous “Those who cannot remember history” — not the lessons of schoolbook history, but the continuity of consciousness which distinguishes and enables human life in full. This continuity is attenuated or absent in the awareness of imbeciles or savages (not using these terms loosely or as slurs), and they suffer, literally, being passive to all circumstance.
Callasso elucidates the perilous “digitization” of our habits of mind: our possible surrender of continuity under a swarm of “information” — a surrender which has long been a persistent temptation, as he shows, and now takes the form of letting ourselves be guided, moment to moment, by a stream of discontinuous bits.
I was going to look up conditional hypotheticals but then remembered that I can’t read.
Yeah, but you shur rite real good.
Must be why ah feelz write at home here.
Did you know that most people (95%+) with less than 90 IQ can’t understand conditional hypotheticals
I’ve met many, many Smart People who can’t understand that (A => B) <> (B => A), the Converse Fallacy. If you give them a concrete example they see it in the example – I was once talking to two lawyers and had to use the example “if the police go into a housing tenement and arrest ten people for drug dealing and they’re all black, does that mean all the black people in the tenement are drug dealers?” – but they can’t generalize it.
I was once talking to two lawyers…
I was sad because I only had one shoe. Then I met a man who had no shoes. My former swimming coach became a lawyer. I remembered him as an exceptionally strategic thinker. In fact I learned a lot from him. But some of his posts/reasonings on FB, especially in regard to economics, stun me in their logical fallacies or inability to understand some things outside of a zero-sum framework.
Disclosures: My MIL is Japanese and is still here because an Allied pilot didn’t kill everyone working in a field near the end of the war. My deceased FIL was from central China and was able to escape after the Communists took over. (He met MIL after he was drafted for the Korean War but was stationed in Japan versus Korea.) One of my uncles was a sailor on a destroyer near Iwo Jima and saw a lot of shit.
I’m quite well aware of the atrocities the Japanese had done in those days; in some ways they were much worse than the Germans at the time. It’s a bit of a toss up between the 3rd Reich and the Japanese Empire of the 1940s to see which was worse. (The Japanese governor of Taiwan was somewhat enlightened; my understanding is that the Taiwanese don’t view the Japanese with the same level of distrust as almost any other country near them do.)
If you are an island nation near a large continent, you have to BE chauvinist and xenophobic to maintain your culture’s identity. England used to be that way and now it isn’t (or so it seems from across the pond, although I’ll be needing to replace most of my country’s glass house after throwing that stone).
I went to school in the very county where the KKK originated. I’m soon-to-be 63 years of age; my very first year of school was in a fully integrated classroom. White kids were pushed off the front rows of the bus by our less white students. That was in the early to mid 1960s. (Now, if you are on a school bus and are up to no good, you might not want to sit near the driver. So, there’s that view as well.)
I do remember Yankees in Boston complaining about integration, but that was years after I had lived through it. “What goes around, comes around.”
There’s a model in your head, but I don’t believe that it tracks history very well. American blacks are humans beings with a mix of heaven and hell that we all have.
My dad used to think that an IQ of the low 90s was optimal.
Over 90 IQ meant that you could see multiple ways to solve a given problem. Less than 90 IQ meant that you might not be able to see any way a given problem. But, if your IQ is in the “sweet spot (so to speak)” then you would see only one solution to that given problem and would not be distracted by chasing down the alternatives.
I’ll just point out that we used to be able to build rather large and complicated things in much less time that we currently appear to be able to do.
I’ll just point out that we used to be able to build rather large and complicated things in much less time than we currently appear to be able to do.
I’m pretty sure that’s a matter of willpower, not ability. Designers, engineers and construction workers can accomplish a lot when the lawyers and managers get out of the way. For instance, the Interstate 35 bridge replacement in Minneapolis was opened just 12 months after the contract was awarded, and four of those months were winter.
The Mayor and the usual band of lunatics made lots of noise about how the bridge needed to include infrastructure for mass transit, to which the State said “Yah, shure, we’ll build that into the design in case people decide they want to ride a toy train someday. You betcha.” And then just plowed right in with any train-related stuff as an afterthought.
Your observation holds true because most projects aren’t critical enough for the decision makers to treat the community organizers like the children they are. So projects get bogged down in endless meetings and lawsuits and community listening sessions and design revisions and environmental impact studies and diversity directives and all the other nonsense that Angry Studies majors depend on for their livelihoods.
But very little of that is due to the guys with the slide rules and the hammers. Once they get the green light, stuff gets built surprisingly quick.
If you are an island nation near a large continent, you have to BE chauvinist and xenophobic to maintain your culture’s identity.
I highly recommend — if you have a strong stomach for descriptions of atrocities — Hardcore History’s episode on the Japanese. The first episode in the series “Supernova in the East,” describes a country under complete military rule much like North Korea today, in which the entire population is cut off from any thought but the Emperor’s. It helped me understand the atrocities visited upon China in the 1930s, and the mindset that required two nukes to just begin to dislodge.
But very little of that is due to the guys with the slide rules and the hammers. Once they get the green light, stuff gets built surprisingly quick.
In WTP’s defense, though, he is 100% correct about “that nonsense will never infect STEM”. It was infecting STEM back when I was an engineering undergraduate in 1991 and it’s only gotten worse. The FIU-Sweetwater bridge collapse shows a lot of hallmarks of DIE interference.