You don’t have to tell me. I believed the White Sox would go to the MLB playoffs this season!

Rufus T. Firefly:

I understand. But the first time I saw it I was still a committed leftist and also more entranced by conventional, yet fantastic notions of “prodigy.” So a lot of the film’s realistic problems went by me.

The film largely fit my prejudices because the writers had the same prejudices.

One of my themes here — on the Planet of Apes — is that humans will believe almost anything, given the proper circumstances.

I know I have.

I hated “Good Will Hunting.” Damon and Affleck might have got Boston right, but they got everything else wrong. Their depiction of a prodigy growing up in an abusive household (and the foster system*?) was immature and two dimensional.

Steve Tesich’s “Breaking Away” was a much more entertaining and realistic depiction of non-credentialed “townies” living amongst College students in a town dominated by elite academia.

*I think Will was in the foster system. Been a long time since I saw it and I never had any desire to re-watch.

Fundamentally is rooted in culture: a culture that enables rule of law. Eventually the culture will change and no longer enable it. Our education system as well as open borders are working towards destroying rule of law culture.

Perhaps a decade ago I had a conversation with two fellow engineers about history. They thought the US had engaged in actual genocide against Native Americas. I told them that wasn’t true, one of them said that his kids textbooks said it happened. He believe the textbook. I was a bit surprised and the conversation moved on, so I didn’t correct him. He was probably in his 40s, and the younger 30 something engineer also agreed with him.

I’ve always regretted not telling them about Zinn, how awful history texts were, etc.

Some years back the haters swooned over a video featuring Jeff Daniels citing all kinds of facts and statistics that supposedly demonstrated that America wasn’t great. At one point he goes on at great length about how poorly our students rank academically. Ignore the serious problems with comparing apples and oranges in such rankings or that he is really just impugning what liberals have done to our schools. It’s an excellent example of lefty cluelessness missing the point.

What Daniels and the haters don’t understand is that America’s greatness has nothing to do with scores of average students. America’s greatness is due to a system that encourages and rewards the smartest, most innovative, hardest working people in the world to come here to create wealth and jobs for all of us including dummies.

We win because we encourage a system that raises the incomes and wealth of our least intelligent and least successful. What Jeff Daniels and his fellow haters are far too stupid to understand is that the lower our average test scores, the STRONGER the argument for America’s greatness. Not surprisingly, just another example of lefties getting it exactly backward.

I was in sixth grade, in a small Texas town, and our teacher had the radio on so we could listen to the motorcade parade’s narrators gush over the significance of Kennedy’s visit to Dallas.
For us, listening to the chaotic report of his assassination was like our kids watching the Challenger explosion live on TV — fortunately, not as graphic.

Sad.

Neither of them are/were actual geniuses. They just played them in movies. 😛

ErmaGERD!!!

…Which is essentially a legitimate challenge to expose the ideological substrata, not to abandon the concept of objectivity.

How big of a fuckwit moron makes this conclusion, and how much of an even bigger fuckwit moron decides that the original fuckwit was “correct in doing so”??

SMH. There are some people who should not be allowed out in public, given that they clearly lack the capacity to count to 21 with their shoes and pants on.

}}} A one sided presentation of history is more propaganda than teaching, from the Right or the Left.

The problem with this assertion is that equates one — which overly reveres the nation — with the other — which leads to nothing but social destruction.

The former is misleading but “does limited harm”. The latter is a literal social cancer.

The statement is inappropriate on that level, as a result. The two are not the same by ANY rational means.