Define “credentialism?”

The “well rounded person” shit is only ever given as a justification for forcing STEM majors to pay for liberal arts courses. I’ve never seen it go the other way, and it should. For every credit hour a STEM major spends in a humanities course, a liberal arts major should have to spend in a technical course.

Because guess what? That “just technical stuff” is the society we live in. Your ability to put current events into context because you studied the collapse of the Roman Empire won’t stop you from bleeding to death from multiple puncture wounds to the face, throat and chest caused by the rhinestones you glued to the hub of your steering wheel, turning your airbag into a claymore mine. You might not have crashed at all if you’d have taken your car to the shop when it started squealing every time you stepped on the brake pedal, you were relieved when it stopped that on its own.

The amount of staggering stupidity I’ve seen out of allegedly educated people…

“The way to get a job.”

The way to get certain jobs, like doctor, lawyer, scientist, engineer. Professions.

Don’t put education on some kind of pedestal. The very few people who were wealthy enough to attempt that shit had servants. They were rich enough to pursue the capstone of Maslowe’s pyramid. Nearly no one else is. The rest of us require a trade or profession to make ends meet. Until you solve scarcity, one way or another, reject as decadent the image of the angelic lofty scholar who learns for the sake of learning.

I keep saying it about AI written essays, but it applies here: College as we know it is bullshit and I hope this technology sparks the fire that burns it down.

The business model of quasi-requiring all young people to spend 4 years going into massive debt for the privilege of mostly repeating high school needs to die.

This shit about “become a well-rounded individual” also needs to die. That nonsense came about in the mid-20th century when it seemed industry, automation and electrical gadgetry was going to free us of toil, that in the future, George Jetson spends 3 hours a day, 3 days a week putting his feet up on his desk, so schools should teach art and music and literature classes to give people healthy hobbies so they know what to do with all this time they have. Wash that through the baby boomer intellect and it comes out “EXPLAIN THE THEMES IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS OR DIE A DITCH DIGGER.”

No such reduction in toil has happened. Artificial, gaseous toil has been created that expands to take up all available time.

We cling to this idea that “You are young. This is school time. You learn until you’re adult. When adult, you stop learn and start work. Never school again only work.” Which is the dumbest thing ever. We should offer all kinds of classes to all ages of people. You should be able to take a sociology class as a 38 year old man as casually as you can take yoga. Formal courses of study should be for earning certifications. You want to fly a plane? You need to complete this entire syllabus and take and pass this lengthy practical test so that we’re sure you won’t negligently crash into a neighborhood. You want to be a civil engineer? You need to complete this entire syllabus and pass this lengthy practical test so that we’re sure you won’t negligently sign off on a building that will collapse.

Humanities classes, arts and crafts, fine arts, culinary skills…this stuff needs to be available to anyone who wants them and not tacked onto technical training as a way to wring more money out of students.

No, the Decepticons are not misunderstood as the good guys. You are giving the Transformers series WAY too much credit.

First of all, let’s address this lie about decades and decades of woke comic books. That’s mostly marketing for the MCU that the movie industry has told you. Some comic books from some publishers some of the time have had social justice allegories. Stan Lee did it a lot. That was far from the standard; elsewhere in the industry you’d find nationalist propaganda like Captain America or just…DC spent a lot of time just doing salacious shit for the sake of salaciousness. Batman has been anything from goofy shit for children to a grimdark showcase of mental illness. Wonder Woman was an excuse for one author to write about his bondage fetish.

That’s not where Transformers came from. Transformers was a toy line first; Hasboro imported a line of Japanese toys and then created comics and cartoons around them as a marketing exercise. In the Ronald Reagan 1980’s. There’s a lot of people who have correct memories of Transformers being about a team of virtuous, American-made automobiles lead by a Red, White and Blue Peterbilt^® in their glorious fight against the fundamentally Evil, dark-colored foreigners. And those eye rolling The More You Know segments the Gubmint makes em do.

Making Stratt a little more sympathetic and likeable probably wasn’t a bad idea for the translation to the screen. They did the same thing with Annie and Mitch in The Martian. Book!Annie is - when the cameras aren’t running - a foul mouthed abrasive asshat. Movie!Annie is a somewhat impatient jerk. Book!Mitch is a sledgehammer of a man, Movie!Mitch is a broody snotrag, I legitimately didn’t recognize Sean Bean’s character as Mitch Henderson.

Book!Stratt is, in Andy Weir’s words, “A badass ice cube in heels.” She’s one of very few characters I can think of who is an unambiguously good person, and also thoroughly ruthless. She has a habit of taking possession of people…and biomes…she deems useful. She gets a humanizing and sobering “why I’m like this” speech near the end that works well in a novel but I don’t know if it would play as well on screen.

I’m fine. What’s wrong with the rest of you? When’s the last time you saw actual people do anything other than devolve into a who hates whom the most contest? Because I’m drawing a complete blank.

Is affection a thing that even exists?

See?

A bunch of people on the right have progressive ideas, they just either don’t care about them as much as they care about their regressive ones, or they don’t see them as “progressive”.

And these people, are they “on The Right” because they’ve already been othered by The Left? See, I myself have been accused of being a “right wing nazi chud” only a day or two ago in another thread on this same topic. To the nut case accusing me, it didn’t matter that I consistently vote Democrat and consistently vote against right-wing ballot measures, for instance I voted against NC HB2 “The Bathroom Bill” in 2016. Didn’t matter. Nut case accused the entire Democratic party of right wingedness along with me. Which means in this person’s eyes there’s no ACTUAL political action I can take that will put me on their side, I’m discarded as an enemy for the crime of being okay with Andy Weir. My irredeemable sin? Labeling terminally online gender obsessed leftists “bluehairs” to contrast them with far right “skinheads.” As thought crimes go, that one’s a capital offense.

I see this as a “it’s unclear where you stand” and I think that’s valid because to exist in modern America and not think your art is political makes you stupid or republican and I don’t think he’s stupid.

Grammatically speaking, I think this sentence has rabies. I think what you mean is, all art is political, and if you don’t think so you’re Republican or stupid. Okay, if all art is political, what statement is being made by the creator of this:

I’ve seen that assertion made a lot in the backlash to Weir appearing on Critical Drinker’s show. “Everything’s political, especially Sci-Fi.” Bullshit. Sci-fi is a useful venue for exploring ethical dilemmas, granted, but what law says that’s what it must be used for? Who the fuck are you to tell me what I can and can’t mean while writing fiction? Andy Weir uses accurate science for world and story building. By his own admission, he’s not a good enough writer to come up with the climactic “Do I continue to Earth and survive, or do I sacrifice myself to save Rocky?” dilemma; that was derived from the astrophage lifecycle. Sometimes the curtains are fucking blue.

I’m more willing to buy the premise…have you ever heard it said that all works of art are unintentional period pieces? Like, Amadeus is set in 1830, but it’s a very 1980’s movie? Part of that is reflecting the political character of its creators. So what of Andy Weir’s character do you see reflected in his works?

At the end of the day I don’t think he’s as harmful as JK Rowling,

JK Rowling significantly funds anti-trans organizations and causes. Andy Weir’s charitable contributions include The Planetary Society, the National Air and Space Museum and Space Center Houston, all to promote space exploration and STEM education. He’s done fundraisers for Marie Curie, a cause in the UK supporting people living with terminal illnesses. Based on what he actually does, I’m pretty okay with the man.

(Funny thing is, most of that is from ALttP’s manual. If you haven’t, go find it and read it, the first 4 or 5 pages read like a design document for the rest of the series)

Curly feet and crooked tail. The adorableness is plentiful and diverse.

Is that a dad joke or a father jape?

One of the things I do worry about sometimes among progressives in the United States…is a certain kind of rigidity where we say, “I’m sorry, this is how it’s going to be,” and then we start sometimes creating what’s called a circular firing squad, where you start shooting at your allies because one of them is straying from purity on the issues, and when that happens, typically the overall effort and movement weakens.

– Barack Obama, 2019

So. An examination of Andy Weir’s works indicate he’s got a head full of progressive ideas. His two biggest works have major themes of setting aside differences to cooperate to solve massive problems using evidence-based science. He writes female characters in positions of authority, in the case of Eva Stratt, he wrote the most powerful person on Earth as a woman. When writing Artemis, he gave drafts to women in his life to read for input on his portrayal of Jazz.

“I never put any politics or messaging in my stories; there’s no deeper meaning, there isn’t even any symbolism.”

Make ready. Take aim. Open fire.

Anyone else feel like the book moved at kind of a breakneck pace compared to The Martian?

Like, The Martian went through this whole thing about using ASCII instead of the alphabet with the speak and spell…to communicate with people Watney knew personally. Meanwhile Grace and Rocky just…learn each other’s languages. “I wrote a program in about 6 hours.”

So, explain why you think this is anything other than a waste of time for engineering students?

Ben Rich, aeronautical engineer and second head of Lockeed’s Skunkworks after Kelly Johnson mentions Harvard Business School in his autobiography. He was apparently sent to a program they taught there for professionals already working in industry to become more business savvy. Kelly Johnson sent Ben Rich to this program, and when Rich got back, Johnson asked him what he learned. He said “Okay let me show you.” and he turned to the blackboard and wrote “2/3 HBS = BS” on the blackboard.

I mean, that game contains the in-universe creation myth, the origin story of the series’ main villain, the establishment of four recurring in-universe races of people, and a host of ideas they’re still riffing on to this day…but this is Lemmy, no non-existent homoerotica will be left uninvented.

The Soich For More Money

And with a hypothesis.

Who figured out this is a thing that works?