The Big Picture: Mailbag

jecht35

New member
Jul 2, 2011
92
0
0
Love the mail bag episode do more please. Also I don't know but to me high school was a mix bag of the good and bad. Freshmen and sophmore year where kind of hell but Junior year I had good friend, good teachers, I was passing classes, rarly did anyone bother me. Then I left to college and I like it a whole lot more. So yeah school can be rough but like Bob said IT ENDS.
 

Zydrate

New member
Apr 1, 2009
1,914
0
0
Not a bad one, very interesting answers. I honestly didn't know some of that.
 

Jelly ^.^

New member
Mar 11, 2010
525
0
0
Ah, so this is what The Escapist is going to do until they get the guy who does the Errant Signal show on Youtube on to do Thursdays? Sounds good either way.

It would be interesting to have two Bob-like people on the site for more plurality.

P.S, Escapist, if you're not looking at signing him to fill the Thursday gap:
please look at signing him to take over Thursdays.
 

subtlefuge

Lord Cromulent
May 21, 2010
1,107
0
0
I had no idea what "Lost Girls" was, but after looking it up on Wikipedia, I kinda wish you would do something about it.
 

gphjr14

New member
Aug 20, 2010
868
0
0
Bluecho said:
The Great JT said:
High school should be abolished.
Or at the very least made optional. There are so many kids in high school that don't care about how well they do there, and would probably be better off going into the work force. They sure aren't interested in getting into college or learning anything more the state has to teach them, so why not just get them working?
Well at 16 you can drop out so its kind of optional. Not much you can do though most places want at least a GED especially when you're older.

For me high school was a breeze in regards to high school "politics." I got along with most people because I was funny. I didn't have to make jokes at other peoples expense because I was raised better. Most of the people who spent all their time being popular never really amounted to much. Only person I can think of is a guy who made it to the NFL and even then it was for a practice team and they make way less than the actual team with the same health risks.
 

-Dragmire-

King over my mind
Mar 29, 2011
2,821
0
0
Hmmm... What's this Lost Girls thing that's too weird for Bob?

Let's check Wikipedia...

Lost Girls is a graphic novel depicting the sexually explicit adventures of three important female fictional characters of the late 19th and early 20th century: Alice from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz and Wendy Darling from Peter Pan. They meet as adults in 1913 and describe and share some of their erotic adventures with each other.
 

Souplex

Souplex Killsplosion Awesomegasm
Jul 29, 2008
10,312
0
0
Someone actually had to ask if you're evil?
Your dislike of the Yankees and Giants has made that fact abundantly clear.
 

Grunt_Man11

New member
Mar 15, 2011
250
0
0
"High school is hell!"
I found High School to be hell mostly due to the fact I felt like I was surrounded by total idiots. Yeah, I know that makes me sound snobbish and pretentious. I apologize for that, but I really couldn't help it. Especially, given I had classmates that just reinforced this feeling.
For example, I had one kid who tried to cheat on a test by erasing my name off my paper and put in his own. He forgot two things:
1) That my handwriting was vastly different from his own.
2) He forgot to erase my last name and put his down... I'm not kidding.



`
Also, thanks for giving the Hulk movie the credit it was due.
It was, and still is, a very underrated movie.
 

Vzzdak

New member
May 7, 2010
129
0
0
anthony87 said:
Could someone help me out here and explain just what it is about American highschools that makes them so different and horrible compared to the equivalent level of schools in the rest of the world?
Reading [a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave_(Toffler)"]The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler[/a] would probably provide some good explanation for you. Essentially, the criticism is that high school was primarily designed as a means to prepare children for factory and assembly line work. For example, get you accustomed to arriving at your desk at specific times, taking instruction from your teacher/supervisor, perform repetitive tasks, take scheduled breaks of specific duration, etc.

If you get caught up working in government bureaucracy, then you might find that "high school" dynamics continue to apply to you. So consider that a warning to think about your career, unless you're one of the ones that enjoyed high school and would like to continue that until retirement.
 

Warforger

New member
Apr 24, 2010
641
0
0
CrazyBlue said:
French and British relations are doing pretty ok right now. Whilst Cameron may be stupidly cautious about the UK's place in the EU, he does at times seem to be BFFs with Sarkozy.
I'm pretty sure Bob is really off on his assumptions. All those immigrations he listed were hated and discriminated against by the natives especially the Chinese and often times they were assimilated anyway keeping their culture out. The thing about France is more about the hostility its people have towards America i.e. keeping Americans out of hotels to protest their government. Of all countries why France that would seem like a joke considering they don't have much of a good foreign policy track record either and probably mostly are biased since they're not the ones leading the world this time. Thus when America does they feel a sort of competition to prove their nationalism right. This could be said about Britain though.

It's not like there are no reasons to hate America, there definitely are, but if you're Britain or France I don't see why there would be any logical ones.
 

Therumancer

Citation Needed
Nov 28, 2007
9,909
0
0
Triaed said:
Wow, it was a real mixed bag. I enjoyed it.

France, let's not forget that with a big help from France the US obtained their independence. Yeah, France was acting in self interest to put a dent in the British Empire crown, but still... I don't get the bad rap they get in the US

Highschool was awesome for me, I partied like a monkey on speed and drank like a fish... then again I was not constrained by that silly rule in the States that says that you are mature enough at 18 to put a bullet in an enemy soldier's head, but you cannot drink a beer in a hot-summer day

Also "mumorpuger" :)
France is viewed as a group of backstabbers and with good reason. What the generation after mine is not learning due to historical revisionism is that during World War II France mostly sided with the Nazis. There were French resistance fighters and such, but nothing like the popular fiction perpetuated after the fact. Today history is taught in a politically correct fashion where somehow a small group of Germans somehow managed to simultaneously conquer and hold most of Europe as omnipresent fascist occupiers with heroic resistance fighters everywhere, when really that isn't the case. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Germany was behind Hitler, and a lot of the nations that he conquered more or less wound up siding with him willingly, the guy was highly charismatic and an international man of the year, and not quite as crazy as people like to let on after the fact. If the way things are presented in today's media and even educational centers were true, he could never have held this together due to a simple lack of manpower, as opposed to coming two milimeters away from conquering the entire world. It's just today we want to present the Germans as our friends so we play up the resistance in germany, we overlook the role nations like Italy and Romania played, and we pretty much hold to a diplomatic agreement with France.

See, what happened with France is that after some relatively token resistance it decided to surrender to Hitler and more or less welcomed the Germans. It wound up providing both troops and logistical support for other areas he was campaigning in. When the tide of the war began to turn France realized that whether Germany won or lost it was going to get decimated, so it pretty much switched sides. This saved the allies a lot of time, trouble, and manpower and in return the war department more or less agreed to present France as a straightforward ally from that point onward to present historical backlash, and what you learn now is more or less part of that. Basically France played both sides and did whatever benefitted France at the moment. This is where the "Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys" comes from, France having arguably surrendered TWICE in World War II, first to germany, and then to the allies. The stereotype kind of being of the fat Frenchman telling people whatever they want to hear
while he munches his cheese and just lets everything go to hell around him.

I learned this while in school since I'm just old enough to have had history teachers who were veterans of World War II, and really they had some interesting things to say about it. I think a lot of Franco-American relations comes from the perceptions of "The Greatest Generation", and to a lesser extent from some of the younger Baby Boomers raised by them and closer to those events. Things change as the changes to the educational system and history become the truth te younger generation learns... and really that's the point of historical reinventionism.

Franco-American relations are not helped by things like the "Oil For Food Scandal" (look it up, I've posted links before, and it's fairly complicated). In short France was one of the few nations that opposed the "War On Terror" going into Iraq, and did so on grounds of being "peace loving". Later we found after going into Iraq that France had been exploiting the "Oil For Food" program to engage in general trade with an otherwise embargoed country. The point of the program being to prevent the people from starving while otherwise trying to hammer it's economy since Iraq was dependant on food imports. The whole "we will not use food as a weapon" schtick which is something I could say a lot about on it's own. Basically for all of it's pretensions of other reasons, France was not supporting the effort because it (this does not go for everyone, but I believe Germany was involved to an extent as well) was making money in violation of treaties, and feared an invasion would out this (which it did) and put an end to that trade at the very least. France being concerned over the new Iraqi goverment acknowleging debts owed to France didn't help matters much either.

Now, before anyone argues with me, I'm just explaining why a lot of people think what they do. If you happen to disagree or have learned things differantly that's fine, I'm just saying I understand the mentality and a lot of the history behind it. The bottom line is that France is viewed as largely being fair weather friends, who tend to only act in their own immediate best interests and don't really care about what happens to anyone else. A bunch of guys who will be your buddy one second, but then slide a knife into your back if they see a better deal from somewhere else.

Is this reputation fairly deserved, with the stories being entirely accurate? That goes beyond the scope of the point I'm making. All I'll say is that while I don't consider the French enemies, I am very wary of trusting them as a nation.

Before anyone gets into US Bashing, I will say that with the US our issue in counterpoint is mostly that we're a group of meddlers who tend to work through proxies by empowering groups of people we think woll change things more to our interests or what we consider to be the greater good, oftentimes with unforseen consequences. We also are viewed as having a sort of "Cowboy" mentality where we're willing to do whatever we think is right, regardless of
the existing social order or reasons for events. We can however be trusted, and oddly as much as a lot of people dislike us for it, things like our support of Isreal (when it would be much easier to just throw it to the dogs, which a lot of people want us to do) shows that we generally honor our agreements even when it becomes incredibly inconveinent to do so. There are good points and bad points to this. However when you consider the US tendencies you can see why having a reputation for nearly complete self interest doesn't always sit well.

All of this also plays to a lot of stereotypes you see like the French temptresses and schemers and such throughout the media, and it's very rare to see a French hero, and if you do see one (in a supporting role if nothing else) it's usually still in the role of a cunning schemer. In comparison while we have our massive disagreements with the UK for example, you'll notice that British heroes are portrayed somewhat differantly and accross a wider gamut due to better relations with that nation. As odd as it might sound that we get along better with the culture we rebelled against, it's still our parent culture, and again everything was still pretty straightforward between us. The French, the guys who helped us, arguably did that entirely out of self interest and that helps mitigate a lot of the gratitude.
 

The Random One

New member
May 29, 2008
3,310
0
0
I don't know what you mean... it's perfectly legal to make money off MMOs nowadays. It goes against the TOS, but those aren't legally binding. And there's no law that says you can't get money in exchange for virtual goods. In fact, a few countries have ruled that stealing virtual goods is a crime, so it follows that selling virtual goods is just a sale.

I think you mean, a game that is designed in such a way that it allows people to make money from it in such a way that it doesn't disrupt gameplay. I guess it would be like a freemium game, only instead of the devs letting you give them money in exchange for high-level characters/equipment/spells/spices, you have tools in place through which players can grind for those stuff and then sell through the game to others, with the devs taking a small cut.

By the way, thank you for reminding me to go buy Neal Stephenson's REAMDE. I almost forgot.
 

Daniel Segal

New member
Oct 19, 2010
9
0
0
Thank you, Bob, for another great (if brief) episode. While I may not agree with everything you say, you never fail to say your mind eloquently and reasonably. Well played, sir.
 

ThePS1Fan

New member
Dec 22, 2011
635
0
0
I don't find high school to be hell, and I'm certainly not the one making it a hell for other people. Maybe I just got lucky by being about in the middle of the popularity hierarchy having enough friends on both sides to make most other people just leave me alone.
 

PunkRex

New member
Feb 19, 2010
2,533
0
0
As an Englishman I don't know what the deal is with the hate between us and the French. I understand with the older generations sure, the people who went through hard times but with the young? The goverment I sort of get aswell what with the Euro buisness and all that stigma with money lending but why people from 40 down have any sort of negative feelings towards them just sort of weirds me out. I get that some people are just racist tossers but you do see it alot.