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obiternihili · 5 years ago

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I got into an argument with a friend who was kind of ignoring or not seeing what I was arguing and accused me of placing too much political emphasis on “personality types” instead of “material conditions”. And now that’s backfired because I couldn’t really find a reason that wouldn’t be relevant to the political reality we share.

Personalities can affect material conditions.

Before I write anything else, I want to clarify that psychology is imprecise and facing a replication crisis. I’m not using any terms of art, but just common uses of generally accepted concepts. I don’t believe that there’s anything really substantiating things like Myers-Briggs or what-have-you.

It’s common knowledge that conflict averse people are less likely to insert themselves into leadership positions or fight for credit they deserve. So if people with rough lives are more likely to be conflict averse, the less fortunate are less likely to seize leadership opportunities.

Abusive parents give their kids hangups and generally don’t give them the best information, be it social modeling or academic guidance or flat out normal sense information about what to do or how to do it, with regard to dealing with the real world. Sometimes their kids pass on the abuse another generation. Sometimes their kids are so busy dealing with or coping with their traumas they wind up failing or avoiding what they need into poverty.

Neglectful parents by definition don’t equip their kids for the world they’re going to have to face. If the kid’s not aware enough or skilled enough to do what they need it’s not ridiculous to expect the kid to flunk out of school or miss any opportunity their parents failed to provide.

And, like, it’s not the poor’s fault.

Opportunities and the lack of opportunities are heritable. If your parents never knew anyone to make connections, they couldn’t have made connects for you. If they didn’t have opportunities, they have that much less to pass on to you. If something malignant worked its way into their parents’ values, it may have been passed on to them for them to pass on to you. And certain practices that may have been necessary or pragmatic in older economies have had the context leading to their value changed, so that an adaptive strategy that used to work may not have equipped the same people for the modern economy.

It’s not a genetic problem either. While there is some heritability to certain personality types, large populations will without culling show every personality type. The human brain is plastic enough that many of these personality types are themselves malleable and responses to external circumstances, not genetic predetermination. People can change. And sometimes it’s trauma that changes them. Or a stroke.

Mental illness is something stigmatized especially in the past generation or two; consider the number of people with health disorders in your community, such as being overweight or having allergies they’re unaware of or smokers or so on and so forth - imagine if they completely lacked medical doctors and medical knowledge, and you probably have an idea for the average health of the mind. The point to this paragraph being that it’s probably more common than you think to be ill, and to an extent the parts of personalities that can cause harm, even the parts that objectively cause harm, may not even be serious enough to factor into an assessment of the person’s health, much as 5 or so pounds doesn’t really affect someone’s assessment of health the way 50 or 500 would.

Minding that negative personality traits generally aren’t malignant, and you have an immense population on the borderline between whatever we might believe to be good or “““evil”““, that can’t be screened. Even someone objectively evil, someone who sets out to destroy value with nothing to gain for anyone, isn’t such a person in such an alienable way that they could possibly be screened for, say, voting. Especially if you consider that most objectively bad decisions have some kind of immediate endebting payoff that you can brush aside or rationalize.

And if people with malignant personalities are, say, 40% of the population, or maybe something akin to how many people have health issues, whether minor or major, they’re a fact about our population.

No one who seriously values democracy wants to disenfranchise their community. No one who values a free state really wants the regime in power to say who gets to be part of society and who doesn’t.

And, like, CEOs are notoriously low empathy. But so are surgeons, as you might imagine for someone who thinks about cutting flesh for a living and goes “yeah that’s a job I’d do”. Even the worst personality features can have a sickle-cell like advantage, which is a big part of why psychology has been working on the language it uses when talking about disorders and shit.

Yet you have people perfectly at ease with innocent strangers being genocided ostensibly because their friend’s friend’s husband in law was harmed by completely different people decades ago. You have people willing to betray an entire city-state in self interest leading the damn city-state. You have fuckers defending that in the name of ‘pwning the X’. And you have people entirely content with orphaning developing children, destroying families, wrecking economies, enabling bragging rapists, and rolling back civil rights (that they naturally fought against) to “pwn the Y”.

But like personality’s something that, to me, at least, seems more and more everyday to be deeply relevant to politics, and to political historiography, maybe even moreso than ideology, even if it’s completely “unsolvable”. People objectively vote to spite people, and just like they smugly rub in your face there’s nothing (reasonable, ethical, pragmatic, possible) you can do to stop them.

But a certain, maybe awful part of me would actually like something like a “psychological materialism” to be explored, developed enough to see if there’s anything salvageable from what would inevitably become “psychic eugenics”, if anything just to better organize, reward, and deal with the diversity in human personalities.

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savegraduation · 5 years ago

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“But being a minor is only temporary!”

On the old Fourth Turning forum one day, a teacher who called herself TeacherOfMillies ("Millie" being a diminutive of "Millennial" popular on the board) started a thread in which she wrote about telling her son that he needs to "respect adults". Adina, a Millennial on the board, accused her of ageism. TeacherofMillies' response was:

Adina: Recognizing that minors have different capacities from adults and therefore do not deserve the same rights cannot be put in the same category as racism or sexism. A minority group is a group (such as sex, race or religion) whose membership is normally permanent. People who are born black stay black for life. Adolescence is not permanent. There is no discrimination here.

Then there was the old Pagan message board at AOL, where Brocéliande, a Joneser Wiccan with a 12-year-old son, told me that teens were not a minority group, because a minority group was by definition permanent, with the implied reasoning that discrimination on the basis of age was therefore acceptable.

It happens again and again when youth rights is brought up. Someone will bring up the -isms: sexism, racism, classism, ableism, and by extension, ageism. Someone will then bring up Murray and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve or other ostensibly scientific claims that some demographic groups are statistically more likely than others to be wise or have a higher IQ. Someone might say, "Statistics show that Asians are, on the average, worse drivers", or "Simon Baron-Cohen showed that men are better than women at systemizing tasks and women are better than men at empathizing tasks", or even, turning the tables, "Statistically, women are less likely than men to start wars; does this mean we should deny all men the right to positions of world leaders, even the gentler men, so the world will be safe from the risk of blowing ourselves up?" And then she or he will ask, "If it's not right to deny freedoms to deserving ethnic minorities, or deserving women, or deserving men, just because a large number of other people in their demographic aren't qualified -- it would be discrimination -- why is it OK to deny a mature 17-year-old the right to vote or drink just because some other people her/his age are immature?" And then some defender of the anti-YR position will fumble to defend it by arguing, "Being a minor is only temporary, so age is different from race, gender, or religion!"

Before I go any further into rebutting this argument, let's play this on an honest ground with our terms here. I prefer the term "demographic group" to "minority group". A group does not have to be a minority group to be discriminated against. Males are not a minority group, and the draft discriminates against males. Blacks are not a minority group in South Africa, where only 10% of the population is White, and apartheid discriminated against the Black majority. But males and Black South Africans are demographic groups, and prejudicial treatment against them is discrimination. Discrimination simply means treating someone wrongly differently because of her or his demographic group. And no one can argue with the fact that teens are a demographic group (as are seniors, for what it's worth!) When you say "minority group", you're really saying "demographic group that has traditionally been at a social disadvantage in the society/civilization in question" (in this case, the United States, or the West). So it's not "minority group", but "demographic group" that's the relevant concept here.

The first problem with this argument is that the impermanence of being a minor ("An American who was born Black could never wake up one day and be White all of a sudden!"), while making this different from other forms of discrimination, is not really relevant to the issue of whether discrimination is justified. One can pull up interesting differences when comparing two things, but just because those differences exist, it does not necessarily follow that said differences are relevant to right and wrong. For example, one might argue that in England, committing murder with a knife is different from committing murder with a gun because knives are legal to own in England, just not to use for murder, whereas guns are outright illegal to so much as possess. While this as a fact in and of itself is true, is this difference in any way germane to whether an Englishman killing someone with a knife is morally acceptable, or whether it should be legal to murder someone with a knife in England? Exactly how does the temporariness of membership in a group make discrimination defensible? I don't think that if that person became White one day and was finally allowed to vote because of it in the pre-1860's world, he or she would forgive and forget all the needless discrimination in the past!

Secondly, being mistreated during one's teen-age years will stay with a person for life. Your world does not become a clean slate again once you reach the legal age to do something; rather, the pain of discrimination from the past carries on.

A butterfly that flaps its wings when you are 13 will still have the ripple effect going when you are 40. For example, if 15-year-old Rachel's parents restrict her from taking the courses that competitive colleges like by refusing to sign her course selection form until it is whittled down to the dumbed-down classes that satisfy their anti-intellectualism, Rachel will have a very hard time getting into the colleges she wants by the time she's applying for colleges her senior year. As an adult, her opportunities will be limited against her will because of the choices her parents made for her against her will as a teen-ager.

In 2016, a 16-year-old boy named Gary Ruot was diagnosed with Leber hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON), an ocular disease that causes rapid degeneration and ultimately leads to blindness. The only hope for Ruot was a treatment called gene therapy, for which GenSight Biologics was running a trial for the treatment of LHON. However, the FDA had only approved the gene therapy LHON trial for patients over 18. By the time Ruot would turn 18, it would be too late, and he would be blind. Ruot's relative, Avery Wilson, posted a petition on Change.org, demanding the FDA lower the age for this trial to 16. Less than three months later, the FDA did the right thing and lowered the age for the trial, and Gary Ruot was saved. But what if the FDA had not reduced the age to 16? By the time Ruot was 18, he would be blind, and it would be too late for the gene therapy to save him. He could turn 21, 25, 30, 50, 75, and 100, and he would still be blind.

And what if your parents take you to get a circumcision before you are old enough to legally say no to an operation? Your foreskin isn't going to magically grow back once you reach the age of medical consent (which, in the U.S. varies depending on your jurisdiction, from 15 in Oregon to 19 in Alabama). Judging by the arguments ageists use against 12-year-old boys being allowed to say no to circumcision, you’d think they were convinced a boy’s foreskin will magically regenerate on his eighteenth birthday! Similarly, we're now hearing news stories about teens who live in states where under18s may not get vaccinated without their parents' permission researching vaccination on the Internet and often driving (or, if under 16, being driven by a friend) into states where minors do not need parental permission to be vaccinated. If some teen's Christian Scientist parents say no to a vaccination, and then s/he is exposed to the bacterium Bordetella pertussis or the rubella virus at 16, and catches pertussis or rubella, the teen will most likely die before her/his eighteenth birthday of a preventable disease -- are you seriously then going to defend this with the "But being a minor is only temporary!" argument?

The emotional enscarment that comes from being hurt by age-discriminatory laws will also last for the rest of one's life. If someone goes through a gulag school where he is subject to waterboarding, electroshock therapy, straitjacketing, and sensory deprivation, he may eventually be out of it as an adult, but by then the damage will be done. He will suffer the trauma for the rest of his life. Survivors of conversion therapy may be past conversion therapy, but by now they're 8.9 times as likely as their peers to consider suicide. Since I was 6, I suffered from a mental disorder called logaesthesia, where I taste words and have the sensations of swallowing them. The words I don't like I have to "purge" out by scraping my nails against my groin and then "vomiting" them up by carrying my nails over my abdomen, chest and throat. All the "socialization" I received in high school, all the being forced to do things, all the fascist comments that my behavior was "inappropriate" or "socially unacceptable", haunt me to this very day. I'm 39 now. Every day I still think back weekly to run-ins with authoritarian teachers that happened during my school years over both logaesthesia and other conflicts that came up. I have flashbacks, I bite myself, I slam my fist against my head, and punch my abdomen as if slicing open a watermelon, I yell. If I had only been given the chance to stop going to school, to live away from my parents, to move to Berkeley, I may have been able to get away from it before too much damage was done.

People who have been arrested under status laws may feel the effects of the arrest for the rest of their lives. Many employers would not hire a 30-year-old if they dug in his records and found he had been arrested for underage drinking at age 19. In California, where Proposition 21 eliminated the automatic sealment of one's juvenile record upon reaching 18, a conviction for breaking a city's curfew law at age 15 could put off potential employers. And the social stigma will attach to the arrested ex-minor from many people who know, firsthand or secondhand, about the arrest.

And what if you die during your teens? Then your adolescence will indeed become permanent. If you die before age 18, you will never have the chance to vote for or against a president. If you abided by the law stating no one is to drink alcohol until his or her twenty-first birthday, then you got drafted and went to war rather than dodging the draft, and got killed in war at the age of 20, you would die without ever having the chance to try alcohol. You think a belated "sorry" is going to make that OK?

The choices adults make for minors may even last beyond their terrene life and carry beyond the grave. For example, a recently deceased 17-year-old may have his organs harvested for donation against his consent. Or imagine that Blebdahism is the one true religion, that God is a Blebdahist and believes anyone who betrays Blebdahism is sentenced to Hell. But one young person who believes in Blebdahism deep down in his heart may have parents who are Sporgalists. In the United States, the parents may, by law, force their child to practice Sporgalism even though it is wrong, which would thereby condemn not only the parents, but also their child, to Hell for refusing to practice the rituals of Blebdahism. Since no one knows God's exact sentiments, one could not promise children that God would understand if they betrayed their religion only because they were forced; it could very well be that God thinks conforming to parental force is no excuse for not following Blebdahism, even for part of one's life, and still refuses to let those youth into Heaven, regardless. Of course, it may very well be that God understands people who betray their religion because of coercion by authority, that several religious paths lead to "Heaven", or even that Heaven does not really exist . . . but what if those aren't the case? Or suppose, arguendo, that God does let people into Heaven who practiced Sporgalism as minors but converted to Blebdahism as adults, but not people who were still practicing Sporgalism when they died. What if the child of Sporgalist parents who wants to practice Blebdahism gets hit by a truck at age 15? She'll never get another chance at practicing Blebdahism, and will be stuck spending an eternity in Hell. And the Blebdahist child of Sporgalist parents will probably be buried, in accordance with her parents' wishes, in a Sporgalist cemetery, where her body will lie forever . . . and ever . . . and ever.

Thirdly, lost time is never found again. Everyone only has a finite time to live -- at least until human life extension technology is invented, and we don't know how soon that will be. If the first 18 years of a 90-year life are spent in chains, that's one whole fifth of your life -- lost forever. Say a girl named Danielle wants to wear dreadlocks starting at the time she begins high school in September of 2016, at the age of 14 years and 6 months, but her school clamps down and forbids her to wear dreadlocks because they are against the dress code. Danielle graduates in June of 2020 at the age of 18 years and 3 months. She is then free to wear dreadlocks, until she dies the day after her eightieth birthday. She got 61 years and 9 months to wear her dreadlocks, but if her high school hadn't disallowed them it would have been 65 years and 6 months of her life. God is not going to magically add 3 years and 9 months to her life, allowing her to live to 83.75, to make up for the years she could have spent dreadlocked but was wrongly denied the right to.

An election only comes once. A person born in 1980 would not get to vote until 1998, and the thousands of decisions voted on in 1996 and 1997 did not have that person's say. He may get to vote on 1998 propositions or in the 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020 elections, but it is already too late for him to vote in the Clinton-Dole election of 1996, which is lost forever in the annals of history. For any of the bad decisions of voters leading up to the current day, there’s a possibility it could have been avoided being passed had more young people, those who were 16 and 17, been allowed to vote.

Fourthly, ethnicity is the platonic prototype of a demographic variable and racism of discrimination, and every other demographic variable about humans has something about it that makes it different from race and unique from other demographic variables.

Take gender and sexism, for instance. Gender is a universally recognized trait; the gender someone is assigned at birth would be the same across the world in more than 99% of cases. Someone's race may be labeled as Mulatto or Mestizo or Black in Cuba but Hispanic in the United States. In one society, having sex with another person of your gender automatically makes you gay, whereas in another society, it is viewed as natural to experiment even if you are straight, and a third society may have no concept of "sexual orientation” whatsoever. The legal ages for things differ from country to country. Someone with epilepsy is viewed as disabled in modern countries but as having special, supernatural powers in the Hmong culture, and what is seen as ADD in the context on one culture is "normal" in a traditional nomadic culture. But everywhere around the world, someone with a penis and testicles is assigned male at birth and someone with a vagina and ovaries is assigned female at birth. (Defining someone by their karyotype -- XX vs. XY vs. various trisomies and polysomies like Klinefelter's syndrome -- is a twentieth and twenty-first century development, and even then, fewer than 1% of births are ambiguous or "intersex" when external genitalia, gonads, and chromosomes are taken into account.) Some people turn out trans, and there are some special gender categories, such as the berdaches/Two-spirit people in Native American cultures or the Thai kathoey, or ladyboys, in some cultures, but even then the person's biological sex is still acknowledged. Even in the relatively trans-friendly United States, the Selective Service system still has laws on the books requiring transfemales to register but denying transmales registry, because gender assigned at birth is so hardwired into the law. In 2002, in the case of In re Estate of Gardiner, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that a man and a transwoman could not marry, because the transwoman was male before the law and Kansas did not recognize same-sex marriages at the time.

Religion and religious discrimination are unique because unlike other demographic variables, people choose their religion. No one chooses to be male, or Chinese, or gay, or 23 years old, or disabled (unless they deliberately stab their eyes out or jump off a height to make themselves paraplegic). But people have control over what religion they practice, and this makes religion different.

Sexual orientation and homophobia are different because sexual orientation revolves around certain behaviors, and behaviors that certain factions and individuals believe are immoral at that. No one gets arrested for the mere condition of being African-American, or female, or teen-age. No one believes that blind people will burn in Hell. But many nations still have sodomy laws on the books making gay sex illegal (this included several U.S. states as late as 2003). Many churches teach that LGBT people will burn in Hell after they die. There are no controversial behaviors that are defining of Blackness, or defining of womanhood, or defining of adolescence. But sexual orientation is about what someone does just as much as what she or he is.

Disability and ableism are different because a disability can render someone by definition unable to do something. An example would be paraplegics being unable to do work that requires you to walk on feet. Men are generally stronger than women, but there are amazonian women and plenty of weak men. Stating that 20-year-olds are too immature to drink but 21-year-olds are mature enough to drink is a loose generalization. Some psychologists, most notably the White Charles Murray and the Jewish Richard J. Herrnstein, in The Bell Curve, make claims that average IQ of African-Americans is lower than that of Whites, which is in turn lower than the average IQ of Asians. There are disputes as to whether these statistics come from culturally biased IQ tests written by upper-middle-class White males, and many people believe there is no difference in intelligence among ethnic groups at all. Others believe that different ethnic groups and different genders have different tendencies towards strengths and weaknesses, such as Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen's theory of female empathizing and male systemizing. Whether the Bell Curve statistics are legitimate or not, though, no one can deny you find bright people and dim people -- even a few autistic savants with extremely lopsided abilities -- in all racial/ethnic groups. But blind people driving? This form of discrimination based on disability is recognized as "bona fide discrimination", and actually is legal in certain cases in many jurisdictions across the world. On the other hand, forbidding an epileptic to become a lawyer or refusing to let someone with cerebral palsy into your cake shop would most certainly not be bona fide discrimination, and pointing out this way disability is different from other demographic variables would not be an acceptable argument.

Socioeconomic class and classism are different because class is mutable (yes, possibly temporary!) in some societies but not in others. If you live in present-day Nashville or Los Angeles, you can rise to the top echelons just by being a great singer or actor. If you lived in Edwardian England, on the other hand, being a prole pretty much meant you were stuck being a prole, all your lower-class ways and mannerisms hard-wired into your identity. Rising in social class was very difficult.

Every rights movement has its own hurdles to overcome, and people who shout, "But this is different!" cause every rights movement to have to start at square one. A good example is Martin Luther King's niece, Alveda King, who fights against the gay rights movement and argues that homosexuality flies in the face of "family values" and therefore cannot be compared to the Civil Rights movement. Youth rights, like women's rights, LGBT rights, disability rights, and civil rights for ethnic and religious minorities, are human rights, and human rights supporters today don't say that being free from anti-Islamic discrimination isn't a human right because people choose their religion, or that being free from sexism isn't a human right because sex is a biological reality instead of just a social construct.

Finally, the transience of temporary pain or damage has never excused hurting people. As someone on the forum for National Youth Rights Association (NYRA) once wrote about people you argue that discrimination against teens is acceptable because minority is temporary: "Someone should give them a hard punch in the face. After all, it will only hurt for a little while". Damage can be temporary (even though damage caused by ageism is NOT always temporary), such as the 7-year-old who gives his baby sister a bad haircut, knowing it will grow back. But, as Martin Luther King famously stated in 1963 in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, "Justice too long delayed is justice denied". Perhaps no infliction of suffering should be illegal because life itself is only temporary, and therefore all of a person's suffering will one day come to an end?

"But!", you say, "What about the definition? You can't deny that a minority group is a permanent group, like female, or Chinese, or lower-class, or Hindu, and therefore teens are not a minority group!"

Putting aside the "minority group" vs. "demographic group" issue, the problem is this: what you've got here is an ad hoc definition. It's what logicians call the definist fallacy. Let's look at the definition of "minority" (definition 3a) in Merriam Webster's Webster's Unabridged: "A part of a population differing from others in some characteristics and often subjected to differential treatment". No mention of the membership in that group being permanent. Next, Wiktionary defines "minority group" as: "A group that forms only a small part of the population, whether it be for ethnic or other reasons". Still no mention of being permanent. Finally, for something different, let's look at the Collins COBUILD dictionary's definition (definition 2): "A minority is a group of people of the same race, culture, or religion who live in a place where most of the people around them are of a different race, culture, or religion". This excludes age, but this definition is so narrow that it also excludes such undisputed minorities as lesbians, transgender people, and the blind! Does that mean the U.S. government should feel free to round up gay people or people with bipolar disorder, since they're not protected by the definition of "minority group"?

As a matter of fact, some published, professional authors have referred to youth as a minority group. In 1971, Edward Sagarin edited a book titled The Other Minorities, which consisted of essays concerning the minority status of non-ethnic minorities: there are essays on women, gays, teens, the elderly, the disabled, criminals, and even intellectuals as minority groups. From pages 95 to 107 is Edgar Z. Friedenberg's essay "The Image of the Adolescent Minority". In it, Friedenberg writes: "In the most formal sense, then, the adolescent is one of our second-class citizens. But the informal aspects of minority status are also imputed to him. The 'teen-ager', like the Latin or Negro, is seen as joyous, playful, lazy, and irresponsible, with brutality lurking just below the surface and ready to break out into violence. All these groups are seen as childish and excitable, imprudent and improvident, sexually aggressive, and dangerous, but possessed of superb and sustained power to satisfy sexual demands. West Side Story is not much like Romeo and Juliet, but it is a great deal like Porgy and Bess." Friedenberg recognizes how facile stereotypes of teen-agers are about as respectful as the old "minstrel show" stereotype of African-Americans.

"But!", you object, "I'm just saying teens aren't a minority group!" Then if the question of whether teens are a minority group isn’t relevant to whether anti-youth discrimination is acceptable (and it isn't, given all the other problems with the "temporariness" argument), then why are you even bringing it up?

Teens are a (very often) oppressed demographic group. Discrimination against teens is still discrimination. The fact that unless you die before your twenty-first birthday you will not be underage forever does not justify your parents dictating what high school courses you will take, or you being denied the rights to medical consent, or you getting arrested for breaking curfew or underage drinking, or you being denied the vote at 16. So please don't use this argument.

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lhs3020b · 5 years ago

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Yep, it’s that time again. Another soul-destroying week in the darkening void that is UK internal politics leads me to another Diary of a Disaster entry. Today, we’re looking at a key theme in why the Brexiteers keep winning - basically, because Remain is its own worst enemy. This week, the Greens and the Lib Dems have joined the clown show.

Seriously, with friends like these, who needs enemies?

The last week has been an unpleasant reminder that there were good reasons why the Remain campaign lost in 2016 - and those reasons consisted of a lot of the people in said campaign.

There's been a weird fad on British political Twitter for fantasy cabinets in various fever-dream "government of national unities". The various putative line-ups have varied from "weird" to "laughable" to "how can you be an elected representative and know this little about how politics works?"

Anyway, Caroline Lucas of the Green Party gave this fad a "hold my beer" moment with her proposed all-women cabinet. Leaving aside the issue of whether a single-gender cabinet is necessarily a good idea (in of itself it's rather gender-essentialist, and uh, what about trans folk?), there was also one very gnarly problem in her line-up. She'd somehow managed to not include any black people. (In particular, Diane Abbott was very noticeable by her non-inclusion.)

Ouch. Grim, grim, grim.

Like just about everyone, I'd expected better from the Green Party's leadership than this. (In the interests of fairness, a lot of Green members were Very Very Not Happy about it as well.) It was really not a good look.

But today, have no fear - the Idiot Ball moved on. Today, the Lib Dems had it.

Whenever you start to feel a little bit better about them, they go and do something that dispels it all. First it was Farron and homophobia, then Cable being his reflexively-neoliberal self, and now Jo Swinson's got in on the act.

You see, Jeremy Corbyn's proposed a short-term GNU with him as Prime Minister, which would do two things; seek an additional extension to Article 50, and then use that time to lay the groundwork on a second referendum with Remain on the ballot. And, uh, Swinson's response? She won't consider it, because Corbyn is unacceptable in all circumstances.

This is a painfully-bad move.

I'm going to say, straight up, these days I have some serious reservations about Corbyn too. He's been visibly off his game since early last year. Perhaps the rumours about his health are true. Perhaps all his energy is consumed on Labour's internal forever-war. Perhaps he's secretly not that bothered about BoJo being PM. Who knows - I don't know, you don't know, perhaps even he doesn't really know. Also, there are sound reasons to be ambivalent about the proposal itself - is another referendum even a good idea, what else is on the ballot, would the EU-27 agree to another extension, can't we just go and revoke A50 if we don't want to do it, etc. etc.?

But, sometimes, you have to work with what's available, rather than what's theoretically-perfect.

It would seem that Swinson isn't willing to do that. It seems she and the senior LD leadership can't see past their own personal antipathy for Corbyn. Yes, he's done some dumb things. I've not been happy with him recently either. But still, this “no to everything, all the time” is not a good approach.

(It’s an especially-bad approach for a party who stand no chance whatsoever of winning a majority at a general election. If they want to get into government again, it will have to be through a coalition of some sort. Even if they have a truly stellar night and somehow get up to - say - 25% of the vote, they probably won’t have more than 40-50 seats unless FPTP does something really deeply weird. Basically, they are not in a position to drop a blanket “no” in response to everything.)

Also, this refusal has the political effect of cancelling any goodwill that Swinson may have gained from being willing to table an anti-BoJo confidence motion.

(Her ostensible reason for the rejection is that she thinks that the parliamentary arithmetic doesn't work for Corbyn's proposal. Thing is, if that's true, then said arithmetic doesn't work for her confidence vote either.)

Here's the basic problem with Continuity!Remain: no-one in it seems willing to look beyond their own blinkers. With friends like these, we don't need enemies.

In case you're wondering where I am, I'm moving onto a very bleak view. It feels to me like the Remain cause is now as a good as lost. While theoretically Article 50 could still be revoked, it won't be. The toxic dynamics within parliamentary!Remain, where factional squabbles and petty egos are far more important than the cause itself, guarantees that.

And of course while this lot are fighting each other, BoJo is busy cementing himself into Number 10. He's probably rubbing his foul little hands with glee right now.

#diary of a disaster #UK internal politics #Yep they're at it again #toxic people being toxic

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boyettegutierrez7-blog · 6 years ago

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Menswear Pro Sid Mashburn On The 6 Products Every Individual Should Have.

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hopefulfestivaltastemaker · 4 years ago

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February 14, 2021

My weekly roundup of things I am up to. Topics include the precautionary principle, housing politics, the role of eccentrics in industry, and Can’t Get You Out of My Head.

The Precautionary Principle

The precautionary principle is the “better safe than sorry” mindset of regulation, particularly environmental regulation. It holds that if there is a reasonable fear of significant harm from an activity, then the activity should be prevented.

This 1996 article by Frank Cross, generally critical of how the precautionary principle is applied in law, is fairly interesting. It’s a bit long at 79 pages, but it is very readable and I think worth it if this is a subject you find interesting.

Cross’ main argument is that the principle is not a reasonable standard by which to evaluate regulation, since there are harms both from failing to regulate when it is called for, and for regulating when it is not called for. He calls for a more balanced mindset.

A few points that I found particularly interesting:

- Cross points out that an increase of GDP (GNP back in his day) of $5-10 million is associated with the reduction of one premature death. This is not too far (with CPI adjustment applied) from the statistical value of a life of about $10 million that is often used today in the United States. We are therefore willing to pay for safety in the form of regulatory costs, but there should be a limit on what we are willing to pay.

- Citing some other studies, Cross asserts that about 40% of the decline in TFP observed since the 1970s can be attributed to environmental and occupational regulation. I would be very interested in knowing some more modern estimates.

Housing Politics

This week an Oregon Legislative committee will consider a bill, SB 2583, that would override the ability of municipalities to impose occupancy regulations on housing. There is an amendment that would allow regulation strictly on the basis of square footage, which I understand exists to allay concerns about fire codes.

Unlike the housing bill I commented on last time, this one seems to have more support. I counted four written testimonies in favor and two against. One of the testimonies against cited fire codes, an issue I hope the amendment adequately addresses. I haven’t weighed in yet. I’m not sure if I will, though I think I should because housing affordability has not been explicitly addressed by other testimonies.

We like the idea of more space per person, which is (ostensibly) the reason why occupancy regulations exist. But they take away a person’s ability to choose how much space they want to pay for, or even having the option of being able to afford to live in a city at all. This bill would restore that freedom. Another virtue is that lifting occupancy regulations is the fastest way to increase housing supply, as it does not require building anything right away.

Meanwhile, the Washington County Board of Commissioners held a work session this past week, where they kvetched about Oregon’s HB 2001 from 2019, a bill that would require significant upzonings in most cities. The commissioners asserted that local governments, rather than state governments, know land use better and are in a position to make better judgments on it. The former statement might be true, but the latter self-evidently is not.

Industries and Crazy People

Palladium Magazine had another interesting article earlier this month where they pointed out that most new inventions and industries come from eccentric people. The examples of Thomas Edison, John Burroughs, and Henry Ford as discussed, as are Howard Hughes and Steve Jobs. Contemporary examples include Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, and of course Elon Musk.

The conflict between Tesla and the SEC is an instructive case. If you remember your history, Musk made some false statements on Twitter about Tesla’s finances back in 2018. The SEC investigated the case and quickly settled for basically a slap on the wrist. In a more sclerotic country, like France or Italy, the SEC could have use the incident as a pretext to shut Tesla down or put Musk out of the picture entirely. Although not discussed, I wouldn’t be surprised if similar dynamics were at work in the recent SpaceX / FAA spat.

It is important for a society to value nonconformists and let them operate freely. This is a major reason why a political culture that imposes a high degree of conformity is dangerous.

Can’t Get You Out of My Head

This is the title of the latest Adam Curtis documentary, which I watched yesterday in it’s entirely. The whole thing weighs in at about eight hours, so I probably would have been better off splitting it over two days, but it was interesting enough to keep me going.

Like some of Curtis’ other work, there are a huge number of seemingly unrelated topics, and it can be difficult to keep it all straight. Some threads, particularly that on climate change that was introduced in Part II, are not concluded to much satisfaction.

The main theme of the series is on individualistic versus collective visions by which a society may operate. Individualism, Curtis argues, has become an ideology centered around money and consumption and fails to bring satisfaction to people. Meanwhile, the series reviews a wide range of collectivist ideologies that have been attempted over the years--fascism, socialism, Islamism, identitarianism, and democracy--and reviews where and how they have failed.

In Curtis’ telling, the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, Russia, and China are aging, sclerotic societies that are casting about for a collectivist ideology that will move them forward. The series ends on a hopeful note, that maybe Biden’s recent election in the US marks a return to a more communitarian democratic society.

I would hope so too, but I don’t see much reason for optimism. It should be observed that nations, or whole civilizations, can exist for generations or even centuries in a dysfunctional state, long after one thinks they “should” have collapsed. If what ails the modern world is primarily cultural and is global in extent, then great power competition won’t be much of an impetus to get out.

As far as what is the way out, Curtis doesn’t give us much guidance, and I think this is intentional. However, it seems to me that Curtis is looking to some form of collectivist ideology as the way forward. Whereas figures such as Michael X, Jiang Qing, and Afeni Shakur did not bring about the change they should, maybe another form of collectivism will.

I am more inclined to think that the way forward is not a type of collectivism, but a new form on individualism. Today’s individualism revolves around consumption and does not appear to be conducive to building a civilization that is healthy in the long term. Perhaps we can move more toward a form of individualism that values production instead. It doesn’t help that individualism is not really defined in the series, and I don’t recall that the term collectivism is even used, so this might be grafting my own reaction upon the series.

Anyway, I’m glad I watched it, and there is a lot of food for thought here.

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back-and-totheleft · 4 years ago

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Rider on the Storm

Oliver Stone--Hollywood outlaw, cinematic high priest of the lost generation, America’s reigning Angry Young Man--has dismissed the haplessly out-of-touch: those within earshot as well as those not in sync with his favorite decade.

“Get out there! Take a chance! That’s what the ‘60s were--the cutting edge! Ride the snake! Now! Now ! Remember that? Go to the limits! Challenge authority! Challenge your parents! See for yourself! Get in touch with your senses!”

That fusillade is being delivered by arguably Hollywood’s most successful protester. Yale dropout, drug-taking, decorated Vietnam vet turned auteur , Stone has delivered take after take on the ‘60s and their children--"Salvador,” “Platoon,” “Wall Street,” “Talk Radio,” “Born on the Fourth of July"--coming at his theme every which way. Drugs! War! Money! Politics! Stone has made movies to exorcise his and his generation’s demons, annoying the industry with his excesses, filmic and personal, earning a round of grudging respect for ballyhooing a 20-year-old Zeitgeist all the way to the bank. He is even a producer these days, taking home a nice percentage of the gross. The Outsider has become Establishment. Hey, Oliver, what’s that sound, everything going round and round?

After nearly two decades in the business--writing or directing about a dozen films, earning five Oscar nominations, including two awards for Best Director--Stone has mastered the art of turning the counterculture into a mainstream, bankable product. Today he is Hollywood’s most consistent practitioner of point-of-view filmmaking, yet one who just as consistently falls on his own sword.

His films, lofty in their intent to capture the New Left values of the ‘60s, frequently come up short with undistinguished if competent craftsmanship and an in-your-face moralizing. Critics regularly fault his work. The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael wondered in a review of “Platoon” whether Stone was “using filmmaking as a substitute for drugs. . . . There are too many scenes,” she went on to write, “where you think, It’s a bit much. The movie crowds you; it doesn’t give you room to have an honest emotion.” If Stone disdains such caviling as aesthetic elitism--"Critics say that; audiences don’t. I won’t ever make boring movies, ever!"--he nonetheless has his sharpshooter’s eye trained on his place in American film history. Stone still hungers for the imprimatur of artist.

“We don’t practice repression in this country, we practice triviality,” the director says, standing in a Hollywood sound stage on an early winter afternoon. “I try to make films that are bold and on the cutting edge, with ideas that are greater than me--and I try to serve those ideas.”

Now, Stone is set to unveil his latest homage to his generation--"The Doors,” the much-anticipated movie about the legendary ‘60s band, starring Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison, the band’s charismatic lead singer and lyricist. It is Stone’s first film since “Born on the Fourth of July” won him his third Oscar three years ago, and at $30 million it’s his most expensive production to date. It is also his least overtly political--something of a first for this filmmaker who is regularly accused of being anti-American--but one that is not without risks.

With few exceptions--such as “The Buddy Holly Story"--movies about the music industry are notoriously poor box office. And with “The Doors,” Stone is bringing to market a glossy tale of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll come round again in a new age of conservatism. It is a film for the ‘90s, with a controversial protagonist who practiced a particularly lethal brand of hedonistic nihilism; Morrison died of an apparent heart attack in Paris 20 years ago at the age of 27. Stone has taken a calculated risk in opening “The Doors” in today’s sexually nervous and unexpectedly jingoistic climate--the AIDS crisis and the country embroiled in its first real war since Vietnam. “I think we all feel on the edge of imminent disaster,” says Stone about his film’s upcoming release. “One always has that feeling.”

Even by the ‘60s’ break-the-mold musical standards, the Doors were considered sui generis--a home-grown Los Angeles band whose organ-rich, Eastern-sounding melodies, combined with Morrison’s vicious but poetic lyrics and undeniable stage presence, captured the growing alienation of an entire generation. From their first album--"The Doors” in 1967--to their last--"L.A. Woman” four years later--the band’s raspy mysticism and intellectual lyricism embodied the dark side of the ‘60s.

At the center of the band’s appeal was Morrison, the pouty, drug-ingesting “Lizard King” who became something of the Prince of Darkness in an era that did not lack for antiheroes--a figure extolling themes of undeniable attraction for Stone. “Look, I’m in my 40s,” the director says. “So I suppose this film is about the formation of our generation--the values we shared. People were out there, experiencing things, changing things. There were no limits, no laws. . . .”

Brian Grazer, an executive producer of “The Doors,” perceived two outlaws well-matched. “Oliver was my first choice as the director,” Grazer says. “He does what nobody else does--he takes dark, difficult subjects and turns them into hits.”

But hit making, as Stone likes to maintain, is not his goal. Rather, he single-mindedly goes after what he thinks of as the truths of his generation, wherever that search takes him: Vietnam, Wall Street, rock ‘n’ roll, even the Kennedy assassination. He describes the J.F.K. murder, the subject of his next film, which he will begin shooting this spring, as “the most covered-up crime of our era.” Although risk-taking and possibly radical in their intent, Stone’s films are increasingly mainstream, made with ever-larger budgets and more prestigious producers--Hemdale, Carolco and now, with the Kennedy film, Warner Bros. Success, for Stone, is a double-edged sword.

“Success?” asks the director, slightly startled. “That didn’t become popular as a concept until the ‘70s. Yeah, I have much more freedom to make the subjects that I want, but I don’t see myself as Darryl Zanuck. I would feel bad if I got indulgent. All good films come from people with an independent spirit, those who push. But the power of perception in the world is such that fringe ideas, when they are accepted, become mainstream--that because of their success they become a cliche.

“ ‘Platoon’ was a major innovation in our perception of what that war was. I thought ‘Born’ was a fairly radical statement; it took 10 years to make that picture--everybody passed on it. Once it was made and got eight Oscar nominations, it became a successful Hollywood movie. If it had not been successful, it would have been considered an outlaw film. Now, with the Kennedy film--why haven’t they made that already? Because people were fearful that it was uncommercial. I hope I was destined to make that picture.”

Those who know him suggest that Stone is indeed struggling to reconcile his renegade past with his current role as emerging power broker. “Oliver is conflicted about his success,” says one industry executive. “He hasn’t allowed his political sensibilities to get in the way of taking large amounts of money, and he struggles with that.”

“It isn’t about getting successful and having a career,” Stone says. “Going against success as a formula and embracing failure, like Morrison, where death becomes the last limit. . . . You mustn’t let money or power corrupt. I don’t feel in any way that I have compromised. I want to stay truthful to my era.”

STANDING HERE IN THE CAVERNOUS SOUND STAGE, Stone is putting the finishing touches on “The Doors.” While ostensibly another ‘60s film, “The Doors,” colleagues say, is actually a further cinematic echo of the director’s own persona as self-exiled prodigal son. As one actor puts it, “Although Oliver’s films seem to be about social issues, they are really about him.”

In conversation, Stone is by turns boyish, combative, thoughtful and overheated, one who seems to delight in spewing hyperbole as much in person as he does in his films. A husband and a father, he insists that his one regret is, “I didn’t sleep with all the women I could have.” A former drug user once busted in Mexico, he now calls cocaine “the biggest killer I know” but still salutes hallucinogenics as “fascinating.” A relentless advocate of the ‘60s, he disparages Woodstock as “a bunch of Boy Scouts getting together.” A most famous veteran, he is nonetheless disdained by some members of his old unit as a self-righteous blowhard with little sense of humor and a skewed perspective. (“He is very opinionated, over-generalizes the facts and bad-mouths people who have different points of view,” says Monte Newcombe, who served with Stone in Vietnam.)

As is well known, Stone made his mark as a movie maker five years ago when he turned his own life into film--"Platoon,” the 1986 Oscar-winning Vietnam War film that chronicled the director’s 1967-68 tour of duty. The movie won Best Picture and Best Director and grossed more than $160 million. Stone has made similar connections in his other less overtly biographical films. James Woods in “Salvador,” Charlie Sheen in “Wall Street,” Eric Bogosian in “Talk Radio,” Tom Cruise in “Born on the Fourth of July,” all played characters close to the director’s “male, Type-A personality,” says Bogosian. “Oliver makes movies about men under pressure.”

In “The Doors,” Stone evinces a similar fealty to Morrison, a contemporary of the director’s and a man also known for not tempering his excesses. “Jim had a thing where he went to the limits--women, drugs, alcohol, the law,” says Stone, who plays down some of Morrison’s excesses and recut parts of the film to make Kilmer’s character more likable. “His lyrics were earthy--snakes, fire, earth, death, fear, eros, sexuality. But he was also close to the French symbolist poets--Apollinaire, Rimbaud and a little Dylan Thomas. That combination--the high end and low end, black and white, vulgar and refined--I liked that contrast.”

It is a marriage of opposites that also fits Stone, who is described by those who know him as intense, passionate and smart, a prodigious director and writer whose early reputation for womanizing and drug taking never hindered an equally relentless work ethic. “He has the curiosity of a child and an incredible drive,” says Kenneth Lipper, an investment banker, author and consultant on “Wall Street.” “Oliver uses his films as an excuse to search out the facts--the truth--of a situation.”

Others who have worked for him say Stone is a masterful taskmaster who will manipulate, taunt and pressure cast and crew into sharing his commitment to the subject at hand. “He likes to do a lot of sparring to challenge you,” says actor Willem Dafoe, who starred in “Platoon” and “Born on the Fourth of July.” Adds Bogosian: “He expects you to be a self-starter and thick-skinned when it comes to criticism. And if he senses you can’t take it, he will move away from you fast. Being on a set with him can be very punishing. But at the end of the day, everyone wants to be around him.” Kyle MacLachlan, an actor best known as FBI man Dale Cooper in television’s “Twin Peaks,” who co-stars in “The Doors,” says simply, “I miss working with Oliver.”

With so many of the director’s oft-related demons so readily on the surface, so out there, it is a challenge to sift through the rhetoric. Ask Stone what he is looking for in his self-inflicted Sturm und Drang , and he scorns the question as “so obvious. OK, the 49ers to win.” But in the next breath he turns philosophical, cribbing from Milan Kundera, the celebrated Czech novelist: “the ‘Lightness of Being.’ We’re all looking for equanimity of our souls.”

HE IS TALL, ABOUT 6 FEET AND JUST SHORT OF formidable, with an arresting collision of cultures--French-American, Jewish-Roman Catholic--etched into a face that is all but haggard from years of hard living and late hours. Bleary-eyed, dressed totally in black, Stone is sandwiching in an interview in the midst of back-to-back editing sessions for Friday’s release of “The Doors.”

Surrounded by his editing crew, he holds court in a room that seems the extension of himself as both polemical filmmaker and erstwhile Peck’s Bad Boy--everything state-of-the-art and bigger-than-life. Extra-large leather sofas, screen the size of a football field, giant neon clock ticking off the frames. The sequence being edited this day is quintessential Stone. On screen, Morrison, played by Kilmer, heaves a television set at the head of Doors’ keyboardist Ray Manzarek: MacLachlan in flowing locks. The result--exploding glass and screamed epithets.

Stone flashes his signature gap-toothed grin. “There was a sound vacuum, and it’s making me crazy,” he says about the morning spent laying down extra decibels of breaking glass. “Sound abuse. I’m accused of that all the time,” he says. “But this is the noisiest film I’ve ever made. I have to gauge how much the audience can take after two hours and 15 minutes.” In Stone’s hands, “The Doors” is less an illustrated history of the band’s genesis or Morrison’s peculiarly tortured life than a visceral recreation of the world of ‘60s music. The approach is similar to the sensuous verisimilitude the director achieved in “Platoon,” the first Vietnam War film made by someone who had served. “I don’t want to reduce the ‘60s to a formula or say this is all-inclusive,” Stone says, “but it is about the texture of the ‘60s . . . how music was the big common denominator.”

Producer Grazer says the film is less linear and narrative than “a film made from a real rock-music point of view. Oliver has made a movie that shows that world as dangerous and erotic. It has a real feel for the period.”

Much of that feel comes from the director’s personal affinity for The Doors’ music, which he first encountered in Vietnam. He found the band “visceral and mystical,” Stone says. “The Doors were not a mainstream band like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Jim hated that whole teeny-bopper thing. There were decency rallies held against him.”

That Morrison’s grave site in Paris still has the faithful trekking to touch the headstone has only burnished the mystique of the tortured songwriter with the Kennedyesque jaw and the black leather pants that would, on occasion, not stay zipped. A well-known abuser of alcohol, drugs and women, Morrison was arrested in 1969 on obscenity charges after exposing himself during a Miami concert. “He was a pirate, a free soul, an anarchist,” Stone says. “I loved his spirit--a combination of James Dean and Brando, sexiness combined with sensitivity and rawness.”

Morrison’s persona transcended not only his performances but also his death in 1971, which Stone recalls as “like the day Kennedy died.” The revival of so-called Doorsmania, as Rolling Stone magazine referred to it, began 12 years ago when director Francis Ford Coppola used the band’s Oedipal song, “The End,” in his 1979 Vietnam film, “Apocalypse Now.” In 1981, the lurid, controversial Morrison biography, “No One Here Gets Out Alive” by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, the singer’s manager, was published. That same year, “The Doors’ Greatest Hits” was released and made it into Billboard’s Top 10. By 1981, Rolling Stone had Morrison on its cover with the headline, “He’s Hot, He’s Sexy . . . He’s Dead.”

Hollywood chased the Morrison story for nearly a decade while the Morrison estate and the surviving members of the band battled over the movie rights. Eventually, Grazer’s Imagine Productions held all the cards--a hefty $2-million development package--largely through the assistance of veteran rock producer Bill Graham, who shares production credit on the film. Grazer took the project to Stone--who had just passed on the on-again, off-again “Evita"--and Mario Kossar’s Carolco Productions, which had signed the director to a two-picture deal.

For Stone, directing “The Doors” brought several new challenges. “It was a very complicated screenplay to write,” says Stone, who shares screenwriting credit with J. Randal Johnson, who had done an earlier draft. Using his usual reporter’s approach, Stone plowed through “250 transcripts from people who had known Jim. It was like ‘Citizen Kane’ in a way--everyone had a different point of view.” Stone shot the film last spring with 30,000 extras for concert scenes in San Francisco, New York, Paris and Los Angeles, including the L. A. clubs Whisky a Go-Go and The Central, which doubled as the old London Fog.

Recreating The Doors’ sound on film proved more difficult. Kilmer, a baritone like Morrison, was cast after Stone interviewed hundreds of actors. Perhaps best known as Ice Man, Tom Cruise’s nemesis in the film “Top Gun,” Kilmer had been so eager to land the role that he recorded an entire Doors album, substituting his own vocals for Morrison’s. In a similar move, Stone decided to obtain the rights to The Doors’ master tapes minus Morrison’s lead vocals. He then spliced the original soundtracks with performances by the actors--Kilmer, MacLachlan, Kevin Dillon and Frank Whaley, who learned to play instruments for the film. The film’s final cut contains 25 Doors songs, including such classic hits as “L. A. Woman,” “Crystal Ship,” “Light My Fire” and “The End.” The music was recorded with “a little bit of Jim Morrison’s vocals--and in the concert scenes I have mixed in the actors’ voices, and I defy you to find the difference,” Stone says.

Kilmer describes Stone as “a person of vision and integrity. He has lived triumph and horrors. And I can tell you his life does not pass unexamined. Look at his body of work. It pulls from his introspection, knowledge and vast intuition.”

Indeed, ask Stone what he hopes the reception for his film will be, and he launches into another paternalistic eulogy for the ‘60s. “A lot of people will want to see this the way they wanted to see Tom Cruise in ‘Born,’ so they can be given an alternative way of looking at things,” he says. “These kids have grown up with Travolta and disco, the high-tech world of the ‘80s, and maybe they have never even seen that there is a different, an alternative, lifestyle, a world we’ve lost touch with.”

“WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE BAND OF THE ‘60s?”

Stone is asking this over lunch of Thai soup--hot as napalm--set out for him and his guest in an upstairs conference room. With Stone, that isn’t an idle question; it’s a password, a test of character, sort of like the soup he’s ordered--beyond an ordinary mortal’s standards. “Come on, it’s good for you,” he says laughing at his guest’s discomfort. “It puts hair on your chest.”

Shying away from risks is the ultimate sin with Stone, the only child of a privileged Manhattan couple, a stockbroker father and socialite mother. Stone wore a coat and tie every day to prep school, wrote weekly essays for his father--who paid him 25 cents each--and embarked on his well-documented fall from grace as soon as he was able. Says one old friend: “Oliver grew up with a lot of contradictions in his life--Jewish father, French Roman Catholic mother who was this semi-Regine-type character. Oliver led this sort of Eurotrash jet-setter’s life--even after his parents were divorced--where nothing was normal.”

“My mother was never in bed before 3 in the morning,” Stone recalls. “She used to take me to France in the summers, and she was a great fan of movies, took me out of school to go to double and triple features. She was this kind of Auntie Mame person. ‘Evita’ would have been my homage to her.”

His parents’ divorce when he was 16 years old, Stone says, “was like parting the curtains of a stage play and seeing what was really there. I found out about a whole lot of things--affairs--I had been blind to. After that, I felt I was really on my own.”

The divorce also coincided with a larger rupture--Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, the de facto starting gun of the ‘60s. “I had no faith in my parents’ generation after that,” Stone says. “By 1965, I was in Vietnam"--first as a teacher and a merchant marine, later as an Army enlistee.

He briefly attended Yale University, his father’s alma mater, which he says he “hated, especially since it was before women were admitted.” Stone dropped out and headed for Vietnam.

He was wounded twice and earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart in a tour of duty that was later chronicled in “Platoon.” “He was never a regular GI Joe,” recalls Crutcher Patterson, a former member of Stone’s platoon. “He was pretty green, a loner and moody, always writing things. Whenever we got a break, he would stop and write a little descriptive story about it.”

During his brief Army career, Stone abandoned the idea of being a writer--he had written a novel at 18--to become a filmmaker. “Being there was a very sensual experience, and I started thinking in visual terms,” Stone says. “In Vietnam, all your senses were awakened. You had to see better, smell better, hear better. It was very sensual, with the jungle six inches in front of your face. You couldn’t think along abstract lines--you had to become more animalistic or you wouldn’t survive.”

He bought a still camera and started taking pictures even before he left for home. Once Stone returned to New York, “I got a super-8 right away and started making home movies.” He enrolled at New York University’s film school, where he studied under director Martin Scorsese, drove a cab, married Najwa Sarkis--an official at the Moroccan mission to the United Nations--and made “short, crude 16-millimeter films that were really screwed up,” Stone says. “They were arty, kind of abstract poems with a touch of Orson Welles and the French New Wave filmmakers--Goddard, Resnais, Bunuel. I was trying to get away from a normal narrative line.”

He was also pursuing a similar line in his personal life. Arrested for marijuana possession in Mexico 10 days after his return from Vietnam, Stone became well known for using drugs, an experience that later informed his screenplay for Brian DePalma’s “Scarface.”

“I started smoking cigarettes on the plane going over to Vietnam,” says Stone. “Once I got there, the guys I liked best had been around drugs for ages, and I started doing acid and marijuana. I also got into the music. I had never heard Motown before then. Jefferson Airplane and the Doors. Jim was the acid king. It was all part of the Zeitgeist. “

It was a taste for substance abuse, topped off with an appetite for pursuing women, that Stone, newly divorced, took with him to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s as an aspiring screenwriter. He soon had a reputation notable even by Hollywood’s standards. “He always had a million women in his life,” says one female former friend. “I don’t think he missed too many.”

In Hollywood, Stone wrote “Platoon,” and although it would be more than 10 years before he would get it made, the script earned him attention as a writer of unusual force.

“I was looking for a writer for ‘Conan’ ” recalls Ed Pressman, an independent film producer who worked with Stone on “Conan the Barbarian” and several films since, including “Born.” “His agent showed me ‘Platoon,’ and I was very taken with it. His script for ‘Conan’ was a great screenplay. Like Dante’s ‘Inferno.’ ”

The success of that film led to other screenwriting assignments--"Midnight Express,” “Scarface,” “Year of the Dragon” among others--all white-hot, unsubtle stories, the type that increasingly became Stone’s signature. He won his first Oscar for “Midnight Express,” which led to his first directing opportunity--"The Hand,” a marginal thriller starring Michael Caine that failed at the box office and temporarily stalled Stone’s directing career. Eventually, he was able to make the low-budget “Salvador” through Hemdale Productions, followed by “Platoon,” a $6-million film that Orion picked up from Hemdale and that saw grosses in the hundreds of millions. After that, Stone was admitted to the big leagues--directing Michael Douglas in “Wall Street” and Tom Cruise in “Born on the Fourth of July.” The latter film, based on Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic’s life story, won Stone his second Best Director award but lost out for Best Picture to the crowd pleaser “Driving Miss Daisy"--a loss that Stone took particularly hard. “We made over $60 million with that film--an incredible success. I guess it was just not meant to be.”

Today, Stone has remarried and divides his time among homes in Santa Monica, Montecito and Colorado with his wife, Elizabeth, a former nurse, and their 6-year-old son, Sean, who plays young Morrison in “The Doors.” Stone hasn’t lost his concern for current events: “I’m praying for our soldiers, who are making the ultimate sacrifice in the Gulf War, but I don’t think Bush ever intended to negotiate. There was a military-industrial complex that pushed us into this.” Friends add that the director’s only real interest these days, in addition to making films, “is trying to set up other films.”

Have Stone’s demons finally gone AWOL? “I didn’t say I didn’t miss my old life,” he says with a half-smile. “I love the concept of suburbia, but I also love going to New York and Europe and Asia, meeting new people. My wife and I are different that way. I have a restlessness that never stops.”

Indeed, as soon as “The Doors” opens, Stone is off to Dallas to begin shooting his version of the Kennedy assassination, a film that Stone describes as “the untold story of a murder that occurred at the dawn of our adulthood. It’s a bit like ‘Hamlet.’ You know, the real king was killed, and a fake king put on the throne.” Suggest to Stone that some of Camelot’s luster has tarnished since 1963, and the director says quietly, “There has been an incredible disinformation campaign put out about him. A lot of misinformation. I am using everything I have to get this film made.”

Ask Stone if he likes where he is positioned now in the industry and he laughs. “Oh, this is the part where you’re going to quote me, right? The outlaw director.”

If Stone is cagey about self-definition these days, friends seem equally divided. Some, such as Pressman, who produced “Blue Steel” and “Reversal of Fortune” with Stone, say the director “is at the top of his game. I was always mesmerized and excited by his personality, but now he is much more comfortable with himself and a lot easier to work with.”

But another Hollywood executive suggests that “Oliver has not changed much. He really hasn’t mellowed. He is conflicted about his ‘financial’ success. But that’s how Hollywood respects you--they pay for what they respect, and his movies now make money.”

Stone does seem to be a man with his eye fixed perpetually over his shoulder, one who keeps a daily diary and who describes the art of filmmaking as giving vent to “that other person that is in you. The shadow self, the one that is always walking behind you. The real you, the deeper you.

“I’m not going to say I’m a lone soul here, wandering through my own soundtrack,” he says. “I enjoy the community of people who love movies. And I like using the power that I have to make things happen. But will I be doing this forever? Maybe I’ll be working in Eritrea or the Sudan, or maybe I’ll become a journalist for Rolling Stone.”

Stone has spent several hours over lunch, repeatedly waving off his crew, but now his impatience is tangible. “I still don’t like the answer I gave you about the ‘60s, how this film relates to this current generation. I felt stupid. I was doing a lot of ‘ums’ and ‘ahs,’ ” he says, suddenly obsessed with his image.

“I don’t want to believe in generation conflict, but it’s there. I feel distant from my own generation, out of step with the people my age who went to college. I always identified more with the Charlie Sheen generation, that younger group who came up, because it gave me new life. I was able to act out my own history through them, skip a generation and go back to it again. Believe me, that’s exciting, and I’m grateful for that chance because our tribal rituals are the same. It doesn’t have to be Jim Morrison or Vietnam; it’s about going out there and finding yourself.”

-Hilary de Vries, “RIDER ON THE STORM : With ‘The Doors,’ Director Oliver Stone Exhumes the ‘60s in All Their Lurid Excess,” Los Angeles Times, Feb 24 1991 [x]

#los angeles times #the doors #oliver stone

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covid19updater · 4 years ago

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COVID19 Updates: 07/23/2020

US: RUMINT/Analysis: Critical Update 07.23.2020 This is only the beginning. This morning I took the time to pour over on the ground reports from an especially hard hit area of Texas. It is a town of about 350,000 people that I'm very familiar with as I lived there for 5 years and still own property there although I haven't been there in about 5 years now. Despite it being a very backward and uneducated place, this town issued a stay at home order and was conducting temperature checks before there was a single case of COVID in the county. The first confirmed case was on March 21st. Local experts were predicting a peak in April and that by June, there would be virtually no cases. Fast forward to July- for the past several weeks the town has been consistently reporting 300-500 new cases a day and 8 people in the town are dying every day this month from the virus. Doctors and members of the police force have been lost to the virus. Lines of cars go on for miles at testing sites. Medical staff in full PPE- body suits with tape, face shields, n95 mask with a surgical mask on top of that. Many people are low income even before the shutdown ravaged the economy. The only shopping mall is now a meal distribution center where the lines of cars waiting for food are just as long as the ones at the testing sites. It is unclear how the virus spiraled out of control in this town which is almost 3 hours away from any other city. As much as I loath the place, ostensibly they did everything right from the very beginning before there was ever a known case of the virus. It seems like you can run but you can't hide from this thing. For as much disruption to daily life as it is causing, it has only burned through 2% of the population. By my calculations, even as quickly as the situation has spiraled out of control there, it will take 4 more years to reach a point of herd immunity at this rate, if that is even possible with this virus. From everything I'm seeing, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Everything we have seen and experienced so far is just one tenth of what is to come. Supply chains are already spotty, local budgets are spent and within the next week the economy will implode with bankruptcies and the end of stimulus benefits. Regional hotspots are on the verge of erupting into conflict. Economic strain and resource scarcity are all it will take to shove things off the cliff. Those places that haven't been hit very hard by the virus won't be spared, they are just waiting for their turn in the barrel.

World: New England Journal of Medicine: Antibodies Mild Infections: 73 Day Half-lifeRapid Decay of Anti–SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies in Persons with Mild Covid-19 LINK

World: Structural basis for translational shutdown and immune evasion by the Nsp1 protein of SARS-CoV-2 LINK

Japan: Report of a #COVID19 cluster in a childcare centre in Tokyo, comprising 2 adults and 20 children.

Florida: COVID-19 in Florida Microbe The latest report from @HealthyFla is out. There’s 173 new deaths reported, which is a record. Our two-week moving average for daily deaths is well over 100 per day. We were at 39 on July 1. New cases (10,249) and % positive (12.31%) also increased. And Florida dept of health reports covid death of 9 year old from Putnam County FL. Putnam County Health Officer Mary Garcia confirmed the fatality to CNN on Wednesday and said she was unaware of any underlying medical conditions in the girl's case.

RUMINT/Analysis: here is what i see at the moment. it is not much really. The local governs. have to keep the economy moving to get paid the sales taxes. they already lost enuf from the 1st lockdowns to growl to the states for $$.thius is why they want schools open. with both parents working,the local govern's see double the income. won't work that way. but is their theory. this is another "kick the can down the road plan". here is the problems. 1 is not enuf $$ to make up for the lost time. not enuf items to sell to bring in the sales tax.CHINA still dead in the water means no goods being sentg to stores. the local govern will still b short $$ since they lost months of tax $$ already. how long before this is an issue? best bet is going to b layoff local govern workers so they get kicked to the state UI dept. this won't buy much time. can they get to spring financially? think the local govern's have different fiscal years than the normal taxpayer or calendar year. we have xmas in the middle. how bad are things and how much does the state and local govern really know? NOV-DEC is the biggest shopping mths to bring in that sales tax. however, u do not want to p*ss the ppl off and panic them in these mths either.unless Santa has a magic wharehouse, where do all the goods come from to sell? based on waht we know and the DR report, the lockdown has to occur in Oct at the latest. farther than that will lead to riots and the govern losing control over the ppl. i don't think there is enuf supply to buy them into JAN. now since it is an election year, can they kick the can into NOV a week or 2? will TPTB do that if the DEMS are losing the election? tipping popint seems to b between mid OCT to mid NOV. all depends what TPTB decide is their best move with the election. watch for "flue season" to start as soon as schools open. expect death counts for OCT. expect the situation to b 50-100x as bad as now.

US: The coronavirus threatens auto industry recovery as cases rise and more employees miss work LINK

UK: Covid-19: England could need another lockdown in winter, say government’s chief advisers. LINK

Australia: Melbourne lockdown could last until Christmas as state battles coronavirus cases LINK

RUMINT (Texas): Yeah just saw a verified report that in the McAllen area it is killing entire families. Local funeral place there is doing 3 funerals a day. They did so many this week that their backhoe broke down and workers are now digging graves by hand with shovels.

California: California reporting 157 dead in the last day, biggest daily deaths since pandemic began

World: Scientists discover coronavirus in the EARS of two dead Covid-positive patients as studies suggest hearing loss may be a rare symptom of the infection. Another study on 20 symptomless patients, with no history of hearing problems found that hearing abilities worsened after the infection had passed

Georgia: ~4,300 new cases (3rd highest daily), and it's not bc testing is up. Testing is down, but the positive % is 17.1%. Current hospitalizations remain ~same while new hospitalizations up 431 (3rd highest).

US: UNITED STATES - 2,600 new cases per hour. Cases of coronavirus contamination exceeded 4 million on Thursday, with an average of more than 2,600 new infections per hour.

Florida: Level 5 emergency” in Florida — 6,700 nursing home residents & staff infected with coronavirus in July. The 129% rise is blamed on major delays in getting COVID19 test results & letting people enter facilities WITHOUT proof they’re not infected. LINK

US: About 40 percent of U.S. adults are at risk for severe COVID complications LINK

World: Coronavirus can travel 26 feet in rooms with cold, stale air—like meat plants LINK

US: Trump cancels in-person Republican convention in Jacksonville, Florida LINK

RUMINT (Hong Kong): Hk update Record cases two days in a row It’s out of control in city City is shutting down again and schools have no opening date Today large groups in supermarkets some panic buying Acute bed shortages in hospitals Hk Government has ample reserves but lacks common sense and keeps making blunders like kept boarders open , not strictly quarantine people Still no mass testing and test results takes several days and people are moving about Social distancing was a joke in hk and now we have major clusters This so called second wave is just starting Most people who can are working from home Hk maybe couple of months ahead of rest of world for second wave Be warned and prepare for 3-6 months bug out supplies

World: Huge: Masks LOWER SEVERITY of COVID too! Masks definitely reduce transmission, but scientist now think that MASKS CAN ALSO MAKE ILLNESS MILDER. How? masks may limit the dose of virus people get, & result in less severe symptoms of illness. on evidence.

RUMINT: FWIW, My bank branch was closed due to Covid exposure. The phone number taped to the door linked to someone who had worked there b4 the covid closure. They were at another branch in the process of closing it due to exposure. I had to wait 10 minutes w/o a guarantee of non-exposure to put some items into my safety deposit box. They drove to the branch to let me in...God only knows what it would take if more branches are closed and no one to retrieve items. Just passing it on. This shit is real.

Texas: COVID-19 patients will be ‘sent home to die’ if deemed too sick, Texas county says LINK

California: Dozens of top influencers gathered for a massive Hype House birthday party despite record COVID-19 numbers in California LINK

World: COVID19 Projections based on machine learning LINK

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keyofjetwolf · 7 years ago

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Jet Wolf Summarizes Act 40

The manga and I kind of hate each other. This is unfortunate, but still, I’m determined to come out of this with something. Rather than spend energy on a liveblog that’s increasingly negative, I’m reading each manga act (mostly) silently, and then writing up summaries at the end. I won’t pull my punches. There’s going to be criticism and snark about the manga, either wholesale or in details. If that isn’t a thing you feel like reading, please skip this post!

Mercury is in the title, so I am of course immediately suspicious. She doesn’t actually show up until thirty-five pages in. I’m SUPER suspicious. But I get ahead of myself.

First we have to deal with Mamoru in the hospital, where he regrettably regains consciousness. The Senshi run in like they’re a) concerned, and b) were notified, both of which we know are patently untrue. So since Ami isn’t with them, I’m going to assume she had one jello shot too many and passed out. At which point Mako hefted her up piggyback and ran all the way to the hospital like a charging bull, drunkenly barreling down the street and mowing down all passersby while Minako kept pace in her wake despite drinking more than anyone, making ambulance siren sounds and also carrying Rei piggyback style who made it a point to scream at everyone to get out of the fucking way and turn and nearly but never quite fall and yell at anyone who had the gall to not possess her precognitive abilities and ALREADY be out of the way, which meant, not coincidentally, that she was yelling at literally fucking everybody.

Unfortunately the manga didn’t have that, it had this.

Yet another wasted opportunity, manga.

They get an eyeful of bodyswapped Usagi and Chibs, and conclude that Black Lady’s back, which I’m sure wouldn’t have traumatized Chibi-Usa in any way. Talk talk, recounting last issue, Ami enters! MERCURY DREAM!

Oh, not yet, she was just late, despite the Senshi otherwise all consistently arriving at the same time always. She says they should get Usagi and Chibs checked out, and she called her mother to look at Mamoru, too. Speaking of, Ami’s mum enters. She looks, creatively, exactly like an older Ami.

I guess hairstyles are hereditary after all. NOW YOU KNOW.

Ami’s mum finds nothing wrong with Usagi and Chibs, and I can only assume that includes the fact that Chibs is a sixteen year-old girl impossibly squeezed into a ten-year old’s clothes, SERIOUSLY WHY DON’T USAGI AND CHIBS AT LEAST EXCHANGE OUTFITS CAN YOU IMAGINE HOW UNCOMFORTABLE CHIBI-USA IS

I MEAN THE UNDERWEAR ALONE NOT TO MENTION WITH THE SKIRT SITUATION

SHE’S WEARING SUSPENDERS WITH NO BRA YOU GUYS COME ON SOMEONE PLEASE GET THIS CHILD ACTUAL FITTING CLOTHING

Anyway, Usagi and Chibs are medically fine, but Mamoru has “shadows over the lungs”, which is apparently so unusual that the doctor “has never seen anything like it”, and I’m just sitting here UHHH MAYBE GET THIS GUY AN ONCOLOGY REFERRAL RATHER THAN LET HIM WALK OUT WITH A VAGUE PROMISE TO SCHEDULE A FOLLOW-UP SOMETIME MAYBE

Of course this is probably the same hospital that let Mamoru walk out with a ten year old child for whom he has no parental or legal guardianship and despite her suffering from cardiac arrest and no blood flow, SO CLEARLY I AM EXPECTING TOO MUCH OF THE MEDICAL STAFF HERE AT FUCK YOU HOSPITAL.

Chibs decides to try and trick Ikuko, so she goes home and pitches Luna-P at her. It works! I can’t even be surprised. She goes up to Usagi’s room, and rather than, I dunno, CHANGE CLOTHES, she thinks about how Mamoru said she was pretty and ughhhghgh. The Pegabell accidentally falls and instantly summons him, and someone really needs to tell Pegasus to let the phone ring a couple times because desperaaaate.

Pegasus says he can sense this is a bad spell cast on her by “someone”, but he refuses to answer any other questions, proving that no matter the continuity, Pegasus will never be helpful and needs to fuck off.

“I won’t tell you anything at all whatsoever, not about me or the enemy you’re risking your life to fight, but trust me, okay? PS: GIVE US YOUR POWER PRECIOUS”

One thing I will say is that Chibs immediately is like “I GOTTA TELL EVERYONE PEGASUS SHOWED UP AGAIN”, so while this is super jacked up, it’s not SuperS jacked up, so I can avoid screaming about everyone neglecting Chibs while she’s being secretly groomed by a fucking magical ungulate, and yes, I WILL take my small mercies.

Meanwhile, Usagi’s hanging out with Mamoru, who is intensely weirded out by the fact that Usagi is now a child, which I have to say that I was more than a little concerned about given the Chibi-Usa stuff.

Hm, this is twice in a row the manga’s not exceeded my expectations in a negative way.

OH GOD SOMETHING HORRIBLE IS COMING ISN’T IT

Well certainly Mamoru angst is coming, and jesus fucking wept. “I’M SICK I’M DRAGGING YOU DOWN PERHAPS WE SHOULDN’T HAVE A FUTURE TOGETHER”. And while fundamentally I’m fine with this conclusion, dude, you’ve been ill like A DAY, maybe take some Nyquil and calm your shit. And while I could maybe appreciate this from a flipping of stereotypes to have Mamoru the one so uncertain and worried, given how EVERY OTHER FUCKING PAGE OF THIS MANGA is about lifting Mamoru up and making him critically important, it reads less like a reversal and more Takeuchi grasping at a reason so she personally Usagi can remind us how wonderful he is. These plagues of doubt only work if something ever happened for him to be doubtful ABOUT.

Anyway, Chibs walks in and sees them (specifically she sees ten year old Usagi kissing an unconscious Mamoru but I can’t you guys I’m so tired) and she has a thought.

A THOUGHT I KIND OF FEEL YOU SHOULD HAVE HAD BY NOW CHIBS I MUST BE HONEST WITH YOU

She thinks about how her dream is to become an amazing lady and meet her own prince, and then we cut to Pegasus and then I threw up everywhere. BUT JUST IN CASE YOU NEEDED A PARALLEL TO DRIVE THE POINT FURTHER HOME, Pegasus is thinktalking to Mamoru and apologizing for not protecting him, because they’re trading positions now you see like Usagi and Chibi-Usa with the bodyswap and blaaarg. I much preferred all this last arc, when Mamoru was like “Huh I feel like I just married Chibs and Hotaru, THAT WAS WEIRD.”

Meanwhile at Ami’s house – YES AMI ACTUALLY APPEARS OVER THIRTY PAGES LATER – she’s up late doing research on the Dead Moon Circus. She pauses for a moment to have a really nice flashback with Pluto:

Sweet, huh? ONLY IT’S NOT A FLASHBACK IT’S A BRAND NEW SCENE AND WHAT’S MORE IT’S A BRAND NEW SCENE THAT DOES NOT FIT WITH WHAT WE JUST READ LAST FUCKING ARC.

You guys know me. You know I fucking LIVE for Senshi moments. But the Outers spent THE ENTIRETY OF LAST ARC actively avoiding the Inners. THAT WAS LITERALLY A PLOT POINT. You can’t work so hard to sell them as separate teams unable or unwilling to come together until the climactic final moments of the final battle and then turn around and pretend that Ami and Pluto were hanging out every weekend trading cool links and writing Perl applets. And it can’t have happened after, because as soon as they learned they’d gotten a baby out of the deal, the Outers fucked off before the dust had even settled.

I realize I should just be happy I’m getting anything at this point, but I’m ACTIVELY IRRITATED that this is being painted as something that was there all along when you know and I know that Takeuchi hasn’t been able to scrounge up two fucks to rub together about the Senshi before this point, let alone them interacting in any capacity that didn’t have Usagi at its center. OWN YOUR TERRIBLE DECISIONS DON’T STARVE ME AND THEN ACT LIKE YOU’VE BEEN SERVING ME STEAK DINNERS FOR THE PAST SEVEN MONTHS

Not to mention how it makes exactly zero sense for Ami to be all wistfully missing Pluto.

WHEN DID YOU EVER AMI WHEN DID YOU LITERALLY EVER

Which brings us to Part Two (through fucking Ten, I’m so angry) of why this pisses me off: it attributes whatever accomplishments Ami has had to this point TO A MENTORSHIP THAT LITERALLY NEVER EXISTED UNTIL THIS MOMENT. This Act is ostensibly about Ami learning to trust and believe in herself and blah blah blah THESE ARE NOT PROBLEMS MANGA AMI HAS BEEN WRESTLING WITH. Manga Ami hasn’t been wrestling with ANY problems, because Manga Ami has all the characterization of my partially-filled Papa Murphy’s punch card. But at least she could own whatever tiny moments of achievement she managed scrap together for herself out of this dismal fucking story that barely remembers she exists. BUT NO. Now she has to be smacked back five steps just to watch her walk back to where she started and call it development.

Jesus fucking WEPT I hate the manga.

All right, let’s blast through the rest of this since it means literally nothing. Ami begins to feel ~a stirring~ or whatever, prepping for her end of episode power-up. Her mum finally comes home at 1am and laments that she’s not a very good mother, but seems to make no actual effort by the end of the story to change that, so yeah, I guess you are. Ami zones out partway through to tell us about her father, who was an artist who fucked off to paint fish or something.

Blah blah bad guys, blah blah Fish Eye and PallaPalla will go after Ami because they’re blue.

Next day, Ami goes for a walk and spontaneously buys a fish, as you do.

Oh no it’s really Fish Eye, who could possibly have foreseen this?! As Ami falls asleep, she begins to have a nightmare where her mum brings a new man home and disowns her. Then she becomes her younger self, and her dad doesn’t want her either. Then she sees Usagi, Mamoru, and Chibs (though bodyswapped as they currently are, wtf Ami) and imagines Usagi saying that when she’s with them, she doesn’t need anyone else.

Not a single bit of this I feel is unreasonable for Ami to be really worried about, I have to say, but since no part of this has come up before now and no part of it will come up again (PARTICULARLY LOOKING AT YOU, NIGHTMARE USAGI), it has all the staying power of a foot cramp I had once, inconvenient and a little painful in the moment, but over and forgotten five minutes later.

Ami realizes none of it is real and tries to break free, only to fall through a mirror and begin talking to herself, only tiny.

Tiny Ami says Bigger Ami should remember her real dreams and not give up. “Yes, there are so many people I love and who love me”, she says, LITERALLY THINKING OF ONLY SEVEN PEOPLE TWO OF WHICH ARE HER PARENTS BECAUSE REMEMBER WHEN AMI HAD TO USE NARU SHE DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A SINGLE TERTIARY ACQUAINTANCE WE CAN PRETEND SHE CARES ABOUT

My favourite part of this though?

IT’S A SHITTY LIST AND MAMORU’S STILL NOT ON IT

Ami goes on to say that her real dream is to become a “full-fledged soldier” (okay) and protect everyone. This triggers her power-up, and also a talking doohickey.

I can’t help but notice we’ve increased our talking inanimate objects by about 500% lately, and I’m wondering if Takeuchi was on massive amounts of painkillers.

I wish I were on massive amounts of painkillers.

“Mercury Aqua Rhapsody”, Ami breaks the mirror, and frees her mum from the nightmare. But she apparently still can’t actually do anything of real combat importance, SURE AM GLAD YOU’RE A FULL-FLEDGED SOLDIER NOW AMI. It takes Chibs and Usagi running in (Ami called Usagi earlier) and transforming – triggering the end of their bodyswap – to attack and kill Fish Eye.

Because Usagi and Chibi-Usa are here, the story is instantly handed back to them. Usagi’s awesome awesomeness is just so bloody awesome that Chibs is like “Oh man, I must not be this Princess who can help Pegasus, it’s probably Usagi.” So she calls and tells him he’s got it wrong, to which he’s “Oh? Weird, but okay. So heyyyyy, other Princess, s’up?” Which upsets Chibs and she runs off.

KEEP RUNNING CHIBI-USA

KEEP RUNNING AND NEVER LOOK BACK

#JW reads Sailor Moon #sm manga dream #sm manga act 40 #jet wolf versus the manga #jet wolf summarizes the manga #a novel by jet wolf

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hasufin · 5 years ago

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I just spent two days at work training on “Design Thinking”.

I was there for a very specific reason: there’s this company-wide initiative to create guidance on how to do documentation, and there will be working groups to create specific guidance. There will, in fact, be a working group covering exactly the kind of documentation I do.

Looking at who will be involved, I am absolutely the logical person to be in charge of this working group: I have the most seniority by a fair bit, I will be the most affected, I have worked on similar initiatives in the past, etc..

Problem is, I have very little experience in a leadership role, and none in leading something like this. I telework, I don’t do people. I’ve been teleworking so long I’m basically a feral employee. So my boss said, “We’ve got this training, you should come do it.”

And, well, I did. The idea was to teach us how to do group-based creative thinking. And I’ll have to admit, it worked pretty well. It may not seem like much, but the practices have evolved a very great deal from simple “brainstorming”.

What really struck me, though, is the demographics of my work environment. We’re a tech company, and the campus where I am ostensibly attached is almost entirely focused on development. So, you know, it skews more male than female - maybe 70/30 or 60/40, somewhere in there. And ethnically mostly white folks, quite a few Indians, some Chinese. Out of 18 people we had one Black person, and one Arab. Obviously there’s something to address in there.

But! There was a point on which we were all completely identical.

Not a single extrovert in the room. None. Oh, and I’d say most of us were (undiagnosed by dint of our age) on the Autism Spectrum, and at least a few with ADHD as well. This was, I gather, pretty normal for our company. The facilitator had actually brought fidget spinners, legos, play-do, and other things for people to fiddle with, and made it clear we were allowed to use them. And I can’t say my pen didn’t end up in pieces several times, but the attempt was appreciated.

So, you had an entire room full of neurodivergent introverts learning how to work together in a creative design process. And the results were absolutely stunning. We had four different products come out of it - I’m used to these being half-assed “See, we have demonstrated that we heard the words you said” things. But in this case, each team figured out a way to address specific real-world issues, and developed ideas which I am confident will be implemented in our company. And that, just from a two-day training course.

I’m left wondering, though. The processes and tools we learned were honestly not all that unique; they really are just what happens when someone takes the idea of “brainstorming” and experiments with where to go from there. But that’s certainly something. So was it that? Was it creating an environment which was tailored to appeal specifically to high-functioning neurodivergent people? Or was it the fact that we only had high-functioning neurodivergent people in that room? It wasn’t a “and magic happened” thing, but we definitely had a very productive, creative environment going on. Would we have had such a thing, if a quarter of the people present were extroverted salespeople? Did the fidget spinners matter? Did the course material actually mean anything?

And, honestly, does it matter? Should I worry about that, or having observed a combination that works, instead focus on making that recipe again?

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sejinpk · 8 years ago

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Shit. It’s 1:42 a.m.

So, I should’ve been in bed quite a while ago. But, I’ve been really stressed and frustrated by a lot of the political stuff that’s been going on due to Trump and his administration, as well as just the general amount of combative political discourse due to my own conflicted feelings about it (more on that later). It’s nothing compared to what the people who are more directly affected are going through, but I want to vent and get some of this out.

(More of this will be unsourced than I would like. In going back to pull up where I’ve read stuff, I realized I bookmarked fewer pages than I remembered. In addition, I freely admit up front that some of my sources are not the cream of the crop when it comes to news reporting.)

It frustrates me that people are happy about Trump’s Muslim ban. Even beyond the fact that it’s wrong and goes against core American values of diversity and non-discrimination, it doesn’t make any sense. And the reasons people give as to why it’s necessary don’t make any sense. Even its implementation is based on nonsense.

Why ban people from these particular countries? In one of the few factual tweets he’s made, Trump said that there are 40+ Muslim-majority countries. This is true. Even if you account for an error of 10%, there are still over 40 Muslim-majority countries. As has been mentioned in various news articles, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the two countries which produced (most of?) the 9/11 hijackers, aren’t on the list. I read something saying that these are two countries Trump’s business does business in, but I haven’t confirmed it for myself.

How does that make any sense? 9/11 was easily the largest terrorist attack on U.S. soil. If you’re going to institute a Muslim ban, and attempt to predicate it on safety, why would you not include Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the ban? You could argue that not targeting all Muslim-majority countries is proof that the ban is legitimately focused on safety, but what I just mentioned about Saudi Arabia and Pakistan not being included in the ban invalidates that argument.

Another issue is that it targets people who had already been vetted, such as the two men mentioned in many news articles, as well as green card holders.

Why target these people with the ban? The reason I’ve seen people mention is that our vetting processes are bad or nonexistent, and that our borders are just open to a flood of immigrants and refugees. This makes no sense, and is clearly based on wildly erroneous assumptions, not reality. You don’t even need actual data or sources. You can reason through this with basic logic, like so:

One of the fears that Trump has stoked is the idea that the vast majority of Muslims are terrorists. This is completely false, but for argument’s sake, let’s assume it’s true. The U.S. has been taking in Syrian refugees for quite a while now, many of whom are Muslim, as well as accepting non-refugee immigrants from various Middle Eastern countries, many of whom are Muslim. If the vast majority of Muslims wanted to commit acts of terror, we would be hearing much more about it than we do, either from (news reports of) numerous, continuous occurrences of attacks on U.S. soil, or from reports of numerous attacks being prevented. This is the media we’re talking about. As much as they’ve been painted as having a political bias, first and foremost they operate off of ratings, and this is something they would eat up in a heartbeat due to the number of viewers it would bring. Neither of these things (a surge in attacks or in prevention of attacks) have happened.

“But what if it’s planned out? What if they’re biding their time?” you might say. From the attacks I’ve heard about, both in the U.S. and in Europe, this doesn’t appear to be the case. If they were biding their time, if there was truly a “Trojan horse” plan in the works, why plan and carry out attacks as they have? Why not do nothing, and lull your enemies into a false sense of security?

I think this disproves the idea that the vast majority of Muslims are terrorists who want to do the West harm. But, again, for argument’s sake, let’s keep pursuing this under that assumption. If the vast majority of Muslims are terrorists, and if relatively few attacks have happened over the past several years, that means that the current vetting process is doing a really damn good job. If that’s true, why replace it (this is the Trump administration’s ostensible reason for the ban--putting immigration on hold while they craft new vetting measures)? Further, this will only sow animosity towards the U.S., which can be used by terrorist groups to recruit members and inspire them. The Trump administration’s rationale makes no sense.

Another thing that I’ve seen people who support the ban say, in response to arguments about which countries were targeted, is that it’s simply using the same list that the Obama administration used in 2011. This claim could very well be false. And even if it’s not false, it still makes no sense to simply reuse Obama’s list and measures from five years ago, and not update them.

Further, Trump has stated that he intentionally did not give advance notice about the ban to the people responsible for implementing it. In addition, some of Trump’s own national security appointments weren’t made aware of what was going on until right around when Trump signed the executive order. His reasoning was, “If the ban were announced with a one week notice, the 'bad' would rush into our country during that week. A lot of bad 'dudes' out there!” This line of thinking operates on the same faulty assumptions I’ve already discussed. If there were really so many “bad dudes” out there, and if our vetting was really as poor or nonexistent as Trump and his supporters claim it is, these “bad dudes” would already be wreaking havoc. They would have done it years ago.

Even if you take it in good faith (which I don’t) that the ban is non-discriminatory, the reasoning behind it is faulty, and its implementation is sloppy at best. Even if you look at it under the assumptions Trump’s administration and supporters have, and the reasons they give, it makes no sense. It has no basis in reality, and very little, if any, planning actually went into it.

And in addition to all the difficulties it’s putting refugees and immigrants through, this ban has really soured the reputation and standing (which wasn’t terribly good to begin with) of the U.S. with the rest of the world, increasing tensions with countries that are important allies in the fight against ISIS in the Middle East. It’s increasingly seeming to me like “America first” really means “America (and really only the highly privileged few in America) only, and fuck everyone else.”

It’s immensely frustrating to me to see people who support the ban being confronted with all of the stuff I’ve mentioned above, and literally just refusing to acknowledge reality, and coming back with generalized insults about “liberals” or “Democrats” and all of that nonsense (or heaven forbid bringing up “alternative facts”). And if the other person takes that bait, and responds with generalized insults about “conservatives“ or “Republicans” or “the GOP,” then the entire thing derails completely and people start bickering about completely irrelevant technicalities and other nonsense.

I’ll go into this more in another post, but what worries me about about this sort of thing, about the combative state of political discourse right now is that many people make these generalizations, which I think leads to this perception of half the country leaning one way, and the other half leaning the other way. And when you have entire groups of people vilifying other groups in tandem with these generalizations, it really feels like the country is tearing itself apart. Since perceptions influence our views of reality, we have people thinking that people like them represent a much larger portion of the population than is actually the case. And that perception also extends to people on the “other side” thinking that same thing, viewing the opposing group as being much larger than it actually is, and so we have people on the left accusing the entire right side of the political spectrum of being bigots, and people on the right accusing the entire left side of being involved in mass information manipulation, and each group treats the other like dirt. And so you have these combative overgeneralizations, which lead each “side” to not want to work with the other “side,” which gets us to where we are now in terms of having such strong political polarization in government and in society at large. Nobody wants to come to the table. Compromise is a dirty word. This is very detrimental to the long-term stability and functionality of the country and its government.

This worry is part of why I often don’t get very combative or vehement when expressing my views on social justice issues, even if I’d probably word things more strongly otherwise. But I’m conflicted about this because I do feel like these issues are important, and that not clearly speaking and acting out against bigotry encourages it. But if you have to get the other half of the country to come to the table for the sake of a functioning government and society, how do you reconcile that? One way may be to realize that it’s not half of the country. But if many people on both sides of the political spectrum do perceive it as half the country, again, how do you reconcile that? This is what I was talking about when I said at the beginning of this post that I have very conflicted feelings about the current combative political climate.

#Politics #Society #United States #Donald Trump #My thoughts

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davidegbert · 8 years ago

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Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus Review: What you get for $850!

Just when I thought I was done with big phones, Samsung drags me back in. There’s an obvious commentary happening here. The return story. The rebuilding. Samsung’s comeback. This company weathered a brutal public disaster last year. An opportunity for other manufacturers to steal some limelight, but unsurprisingly, most affected consumers opted to stay in the Galaxy ecosystem. Minus a feature like the S-Pen, the Galaxy S8+ seeks to further reward the Samsung faithful. We get a new big-screen phone that heavily features a radical new form factor. That big screen comes with big specs, and a big price tag is along for the ride.

It’s a bit obvious to declare that this will be one of the top sellers of 2017, but has Samsung successfully made the argument for why consumers should spend this much money on mobile device?

Design

From our first time holding it, to my first day playing with it, to now, this design continues to impress. For color options, black is striking, but personally, the gray is my favorite for an attractive and professional looking gadget. Shame we don’t get a blue option for this phone.

This hardware aesthetic remains visually appealing weeks after launch. Symmetrical curved sides playfully confuse your fingertips into thinking this phone is thinner than it really is. It’s actually thicker than the LG G6 by .2mm, but it FEELS thinner thanks to the contouring. That’s a neat trick.

It fits in the hand terrifically well, and this is the easiest time my stumpy thumb has had with lateral swipes on a phablet. However, I find I need to slide the phone around quite a bit for basic navigation. You slide the phone up to unlock, then down for navigation controls, then up for notification shade. This thing always feels like it’s balanced on the least amount of fingertip surface I can comfortably utilize.

It’s a stunning look which should be admired under museum lighting, but we still can’t shake some of the traditional concerns we’ve had using glass back devices and edge curved displays. It’s an age-old debate in our comments, case or no case. The S8+ doesn’t help move the needle at all on those opposing viewpoints. For my personal use, this design mandates using a case or skin. I’m the guy rolling around in the dirt, and holding the phone over highway overpasses, to produce camera reviews. The S8+ is too slippery for me to use naked (the phone naked, not me naked).

Using the camera is a perfect example of this ergonomic consideration. You hold the phone on impressively thin edges, while also accurately interacting with on-screen controls. The user is focusing more on taking the photo than on holding the phone. It’s a great recipe for a quick move, or a careless gesture, to send the phone flying. Samsung’s design is incredible, but additional money will be spent to recover the thicker sides and edges found on competing devices.

Bumps and drops are all normal aspects of lifestyle abuse, what our phones need to survive over the life of a multi-year commitment. Gorilla Glass 5 has proven to be a durable performer, but the Galaxy’s curves provide more surface area to wreck your day with a fairly common lifestyle issue like dropping your phone. Another timeless gadget debate, how much attention does our phone demand and how well should it blend into the background of our day. In early use, the S8+ demands more of your attention in holding the phone than the flat edged Galaxies of Samsung’s past.

Jaime has successfully “tested” this durability several times on the smaller S8, but we’ve also reported the concerns from third party labs that rate this phone as more of a risk. We’re also not terribly impressed with the solutions other companies have delivered for screen protectors. This isn’t a deal breaker for prospective S8+ owners, but it’s an idea which should be discussed when summing up this investment.

The inclusion of IP68 water resistance is always appreciated though. Samsung was ahead of the curve for protecting phones against moisture damage, and continue to celebrate that focus. It’s disappointing that this kind of guard is not more common on competitor’s handsets. I still find it kind of amazing to see open ports on a phone which handily survives being completely submerged.

Hardware

We’ve well documented the technology packed into this phablet. It’s about as cutting edge a collection of specs as we should expect for 2017. Only the RAM junkies in our audience stand to be disappointed. North American owners will see the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, while the rest of the world will receive Samsung’s Exynos 8895 chipset. We were hoping to see more parity this year, but from early benchmarking, the Exynos continues to deliver a consistent bump in performance over the Snapdragon. Even for this disparity, the 835 at least catches Qualcomm up to the horsepower we’ve been enjoying for a while now on the Huawei Mate 9 and P10.

The improvements to storage capacity will be appreciated by all. Other phones have pushed into 64GB territory, but now that Samsung has arrived, it sets a clear bar for other manufactures to reach on premium phones. The S8 had its own minor scandal in terms of disclosing what kind of storage was used. This phone might ship with UFS2.0 or UFS2.1 storage chips. Between the two phones in my possession, my S8+ is using the faster UFS2.1 storage, while my smaller S8 has the slower UFS2.0 chips.

The difference in read speeds can be around 40%, no small discrepancy, but even at the slow end, this isn’t a disastrous situation for “losing” the hardware lottery. It’s not as significant a difference as the selection of components one might get in RAM and storage on a Huawei P10 for example.

A small hardware gripe, the Galaxy’s home button has a vibration sensor to mimic the tactile response of hardware, but it doesn’t pulse consistently. Sometimes I press hard expecting the haptic feedback. When the pulse doesn’t happen, my thumb lingers, which then launches my Google Assistant instead. More often than not, I’ll swipe around the screen to get the navigation bar to pop back up, then tap on a home button. The idea is appreciated, trying to maintain the feel of hardware, but the execution is inconsistent. It doesn’t seem to bring much benefit over pure software controls. Lightly touching the home button delivers exactly the same functionality as “force pressing” the home button area. It’s one area I wish Samsung had been a bit more “inspired” by the tactile response on the iPhone 7.

Losing the front hardware button means the front fingerprint sensor is also gone. That biometric security feature clumsily moved to the rear of the phone. Using the phone for a week now, I still smudge my camera on the regular. My early teething pains in unlocking have mostly been ironed out, though the phone still prefers my right index finger to my left. We receive many comments from folks who think that this move is no big deal.

To a degree, we agree. It’s a situation that will improve as your muscle memory is retrained. We still feel its relevant to point out that this is awkward design for such an expensive phone. Playing with center positioned sensors on entry level phones, it’s tough to not be irked by this tiny blemish on the S8+. It stands in contrast to how this manufacturer is praising a symmetrical design. Like a tiny little rock in your shoe on a long hike, it’s yet another vote in favor of using a case, to quickly retrain your finger where to reach.

I still find it hilarious that Samsung has a camera pop up, warning you not to smudge your lens, not that they couldn’t have helped us out there with a better hardware position.

I do need to deliver a small retraction from my first impression video, that I was disappointed in not having a notification shade gesture on this sensor. Of course this gesture is included. I just couldn’t find it in my first 12 hours of use and setup. It’s still not as full featured as what’s included on a phone like the Mate 9, but I’m happy to have this ergonomic consideration on a bigger phone.

The counter argument to the fingerprint sensor is to train the iris scanner, so you don’t have to smudge your camera. The performance is incredibly fast to unlock in all but backlit conditions, but it’s a much more deliberate an action. I’d prefer the phone be unlocked before I hold it up to my face. A fingerprint sensor is a purely tactile gesture, implemented as the phone is being pulled from a pocket or purse. Pairing over Bluetooth with Trusted Devices like my car or a smartwatch has pretty much eliminated when I might use that iris scanner.

Display

That brings us to this new AMOLED. A 6.2” WQHD+ screen with an 18.5:9 aspect ratio. It’s huge, just slightly besting the 5.9” Mate 9 for overall area. It makes a mockery of the forehead and chin bezels on an iPhone 7 Plus. If you’ve got HDR content to stream, do it. This screen will handle HDR beautifully. This is a very good display, with excellent contrast, and best in class outdoor brightness.

A small concern, on the Galaxy S7, switching the display to basic mode used to deliver one of the most color accurate screens on any phone we’ve tested. The S8’s color processing is downright ruddy by comparison, and users should probably stay in some kind of adaptive mode. Samsung is pushing out software updates to help address this issue, but our review S8+ has yet to receive that tune up.

Oddly, the phone pops out of the box using a lower than native resolution. Ostensibly this has been done for better performance and power management, which we’ll cover later in this review. There’s nothing wrong with this in theory, but I would have preferred some kind of disclosure, or option to change this, during the initial set up. Many phones now include screen resolution options in power saver modes, but those are up to the user to activate when needed. Those modes are not activated by default out of the box. Why pay for all these pixels if we’re not really going to use them?

Software

The spirit of Touchwiz lives on. Nearly every aspect of this phone has been touched, skinned, or tweaked. Some of these changes are comically unnecessary. Like sliding up to get the app drawer, then laterally to get app pages. Is it a big deal? Nope. You’ll get used to it, but WHY change directions for navigating a core UI element?

The brightness controls in your notification shade are another example. Toggling auto brightness requires an extra menu tap, which slides two toggles for you to adjust, instead of the usual option next to the slider. Changes like these don’t add anything to the experience, instead often adding a step. It’s different just for the sake of being different.

Menus, settings, UI elements. They all have that special Samsung twist to them. Though switching to a dark theme, I still couldn’t find a way to change the notification shade. The screen gets plenty dim for night use, but I’m still not a fan of that bright white notification slide.

For all this customizing, Samsung still hasn’t quite answered the question of WHY we need this taller screen. More area is great, but what do we really get for it? Games and videos will likely be cut off at the corners, the camera app is a sea of wasted space, and we’re reaching farther for corner mounted ui elements.

There are improvements. You will see more content in your browser, and in vertically scrolling apps (if you manually increase your screen resolution). Samsung does feature some of the best split-screen multitasking available, easily shifting the size of apps on your display, but it’s not so much better than an LG G6 that we would call that a purchasing recommendation.

Samsung’s answer for productivity is one we’ve seen since the S6 days. The edge screen panel, now slightly more evolved, for customizing at a glance content and shortcuts. In using a ton of other phones, I keep forgetting it’s there, but people using the S8 as a permanent daily driver will probably better enjoy quick access to shortcuts. This feature has grown significantly over the last two years. There are numerous options now for edge panels, delivering a number of different options, no matter what content is currently on your screen.

Game Center also returns as a handy way to capture game play, but with recent improvements to Youtube Gaming and Google Play Games, we’d probably recommend the Google apps over Samsung’s custom solution. It works well for capturing game play, but it’s a separate Samsung solution which sits just outside Google’s services. These menus do provide quick access to screen and resolution options though. Games which aren’t broken by the curved screen corners, can quickly toggle aspect ratio from Game Center.

Bixby

Unfortunately, we can’t comment much on Bixby. It’s not done yet, and we have to ding Samsung here the same way we dinged HTC for the U Ultra’s missing AI. This is such an important feature that there’s a dedicated button for it, but it wasn’t ready for launch, so our review remains incomplete. If using bixby vision is any early indication, we’re not entirely impressed with Samsung’s digital assistant strategy.

As it stands, I’ve already disabled the Bibxy home page, which just lags the phone in one of the most important areas for smooth performance. Just like Flipboard for previous generations of Galaxies. The Bixby cards page is another area which needs some polish. Pushing the dedicated button, it can take around a second before we see a welcome page, then several more seconds before the screen is populated with content. After that, trying to scroll, Bixby is one of the most consistent areas where we encounter lag and stuttering.

Lastly for software, I was a bit disappointed to see the S8 ship with Android 7.0, as more phones are arriving with 7.1. This hasn’t given me a lot of hope that Samsung can leverage carrier relationships for more timely updates. This phone is expensive, and has hardware which should help improve battery performance, but we’re denied some of the refinements found in Android 7.1. We’ll just have to be ok with heavily skinned devices lagging behind the updates on phones with leaner builds of Android.

Performance

Taking a closer look at performance, it’s very good, if about par for a Samsung phone. This is bleeding edge hardware, but Samsung has a LOT running on this device. We’re using an unlocked phone, without carrier bloat. There are numerous Samsung services running, like the edge customizations. The general UI and app performance is snappy, but phones with less powerful hardware, and less customization, often feel comparable, or even a touch faster.

Gaming

This hardware is overkill for the communication basics. The true test often arrives with gaming and multimedia benchmarks. Firing up a poorly optimized for Android game like Marvel Future Fight, the S8+ delivers the smoothest, most fluid frame rates we’ve ever seen on Qualcomm hardware. Getting into busy gameplay moments however, we think Huawei’s Kirin 960 still has a slight lead. A quick note on this game, I use Future Fight BECAUSE it’s poorly optimized. It’s a test of brute force heavy lifting. Better optimized games will obviously run smoother. A huge graphics intense game like Implosion is an absolute screamer on this phone.

Wireless

LTE performance is generally excellent around Los Angeles on AT&T. The S8+ regularly bested the LG G6 using Android’s built-in reception gauge. That was also mirrored in faster downloads running some speed tests around town.

However, WiFi performance was nearly identical to the G6 when testing from the edges of my condo. Often the LG would post a minor lead in reception, but one so minor it could easily be within the margin of error for the app we use to test signal strength.

Camera

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We’ve already produced our Real Camera Review for the S8, and it’s the most in-depth examination of photo and video performance available on the internet. We’d highly recommend watching the above video if you’re curious about what this 12MP camera can really do, especially the conclusion to that video at 14 minutes in. As a brief summation here, if you don’t like the Samsung aesthetic of popping saturation and sharpening, the S8 won’t do much to change your mind. Shots are juicy and crisp, if maybe a touch exaggerated.

Otherwise, we’ve got a terrific all-rounder. It’s a low light champ, with excellent autofocus performance, and lightning fast autofocus. However, it only stands as a minor improvement over the S7 which came before it.

Like the G6, one of my favorite improvements has little to do with the actual output of the camera, but more the fact that this camera module is now completely flush with the rear housing. It’s an impressive feat which more manufacturers will hopefully learn from.

Audio

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We also have a Real Audio Review available, and a separate review of the included ear buds. Earbuds which are not made by AKG, but prominently feature the branding which Samsung acquired in their acquisition of Harmon.

Happily, this whole system represents a noticeable upgrade in speaker and headphone quality over the S7. The conceit last year, enhanced water resistance was the culprit for the S7’s dull sound, but the iPhone 7, LG G6, and now the S8 show you can have water protection and solid audio. A top tier speaker, compared against other mono speaker phones, and a more competitive headphone jack were long overdue. The S8+ won’t reach the prowess of an HTC 10, LG V20, or the Axon 7, but it’s no longer bottom mid-tier sound on a premium priced gadget.

Sound options

One thing we didn’t cover in our Real Audio Review, Samsung’s EQ tweaking is a convenient way to tailor playback for folks who are into that kind of thing. It’s really easy to use, so if you’re not quite impressed with the audio out of the box, these options should help you dial in the color you prefer.

Battery

Our usual pairing of battery tests, the S8+ pulled very normal numbers for draining and recharging. Streaming thirty minutes of HD video over WiFi, at a screen brightness of 190 Lux, resulted in 5% battery drain. Ahead of the G6, and right in line with phones like the Pixel XL. The S8+ falls behind the larger battery capacity in the Mate 9 (4%). It’s still a short way off from combating the iPhone 7 Plus (3%), which is our current battery champ.

Recharge rates we’re similarly mid pack. Thirty minutes on the included charger delivered a 29% top off. Well ahead of the glacially slow iPhone (19%), just behind the Pixel XL (37%), but faces a significant loss again to the larger battery in the Huawei (57%).

This is a conservative generation for Samsung in terms of battery tech. After last year’s drama, caution was probably the right play this year. This phone will be more closely scrutinized than any other phone released in 2017. The S8+ had very few issues lasting a day with moderate to heavy use, light users should easily be able to hyper mile two days out of this battery. In my day to day routine, it easily lasts past dinner time, but I am plugging it in every night when I go to bed. While it’s not the fastest phone we’ve ever recharged, a short stint on a charger should give you a healthy top off when you need it.

Expanding on the battery, how it relates to this new screen, we wanted to take a closer look at the resolution, and how that might affect run time. Pushing our video streaming test to one hour for each resolution setting, we only saw significant gains when dropping resolution down to 720p. The drain between 1080 and 1440 was nearly identical. Anecdotally, we also didn’t see much, if any difference in performance. We’re not quite sure why this was such a priority for Samsung, reducing resolution out of the box, or why there was no disclosure during device set up.

Conclusion

So let’s wrap this up. Where’s that leave us with the Galaxy S8+?

We’re looking at what is sure to be one of the bestselling phones of 2017. Jaime is tackling a separate review of the smaller S8, but in early sales data, it looks like the S8+ has a slight lead. Probably a combination of the phone’s thinner width, the exciting new form factor, and the population of people who were left in the lurch by the Note 7’s absence.

This is a stunning example of design, but it leaves us with a few philosophical questions. What does this screen deliver that can’t be done on a smaller display? Sure, we all supposedly hate bezels, but the sea of empty space in the Samsung camera app, isn’t that just as bad? Google apps are fairly aware of these new aspect ratios, but Samsung’s own apps often fail to make productive use of this area. We’re waiting to see if third party developers will embrace this hardware. Will devs simply shift app controls around (would be useful for the above picture)? To dodge the curved corners of the S8+, will we trade bezels for unused strips of pixels?

Including more powerful hardware is great, but right now all Android manufacturers, not just Samsung, would benefit more from better software optimization. The experiments we’ve been playing with from Huawei, OnePlus, and the Pixel point to the true lifestyle improvements we should expect from better hardware and software synergy.

One of the most concerning elements of this phone, it feels like there’s a lot of untapped potential here. As a general rule, we tend to avoid making technology purchasing recommendations based on potential. Instead, we try to highlight what a gadget can do at the exact moment you buy it. Sometimes that untapped potential is realized, and that’s like getting a bonus for your cash. However, when you base a purchase on potential, and that potential is left unfulfilled, that feels like a financial loss.

“Are you really getting your money’s worth”

That’s a precious question to ask on a phone which starts at $850. The S8+ certainly delivers a spec sheet arguing for that price tag. No question, there’s a lot packed into this gadget. Only you and your wallet can determine if you’re really going to get the full return on this investment.