Dumb and Stupid Quotes Thread: Idiotic Source and Context are Key.

[Cutlass]

There are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to get them into the University of Texas, where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well. One of the briefs pointed out that most of the black scientists in this country don't come from schools like the University of Texas. They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they're being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia


http://www.motherjones.com/politics...elong-slower-colleges-fisher-university-texas

 

[Flying Pig]

I think there's a lot in that, if we assume that the average African-American went to a worse school than the average white American. The quote as it stands doesn't say that it isn't the university's fault for not bringing them up to speed, perhaps with summer schools before the course begins.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

The form in which I heard the argument before was that making it easier for blacks to get into very difficult elite schools makes it more likely for them to drop out or switch to a field like law rather than to continue to pursue their dream jobs in STEM fields.

The early math and science classes at elite institutions are often used to weed out weaker students, including students who would would be near the top of the class at any mid-tier school.

It is usually terrible advice for someone who wants to be a medical doctor to start in the Ivy league. Few who do so stay in that field, despite many later saying they still wished they could. Medical schools tend to care more about GPA than the institution that grants it.

Regardless of race, most students would be better off starting at a decent state school rather than Harvard or Yale (especially if they must take out loans to cover their tuition).

It is easier to be a big fish in a small pond that a small fish in a big pond.

If you help second tier students of any demographic get into first tier schools, the third tier students get into second tier schools, etc, then it will make that demographic appear to underperform their peers.

It would probably help minorities more to give them no special privilege when it comes to admissions, but extra help covering the costs of the education wherever they are accepted on their merits.

 

[Flying Pig]

I like that, with the caveat that 'accepted on their merits' can be a bit of a misleading phrase when a human being has to do selection, based on knowledge of (and usually a conversation with) the applicant.

 

[Cutlass]

Gov. Paul LePage said at a Wednesday town hall meeting in Bridgton that drug traffickers from Connecticut and New York come to Maine and impregnate girls who are “young” and “white” before leaving the state.

A spokeswoman for the Republican governor said LePage’s comment weren’t about race, but Lance Dutson, a Republican strategist who formed Get Right Maine, said it hearkens back to “a dark time in this nation’s history” and seems intended to stoke fear among Mainers about “black men trying to impregnate their white daughters.”

The video of the comment was posted online by a local public access channel on Thursday after it was flagged for media by Dutson’s group, which has opposed LePage. Reporters were at the event, but the comments weren’t flagged in reports from WGME and WMTW.

It came when LePage launched into comments on drug addiction, using a line that has become something of a stump speech on the topic, saying “guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” come to Maine, “sell their heroin,” and “they go back home.”

“Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we’ve got to deal with down the road,” said LePage.

LePage’s comments began as a riff on the street names of alleged drug dealers arrested in Maine. In September, Dionhaywood “Smooth” Blackwell, 31, of New Haven, Connecticut, was one of five people arrested on felony drug charges after a Bangor heroin bust.

But Peter Steele, a LePage spokeswoman, issued a statement on the comments saying the comments weren’t about race, which he called “irrelevant.”

“What is relevant is the cost to state taxpayers for welfare and the emotional costs for these kids who are born as a result of involvement with drug traffickers,” Steele said. “His heart goes out to these kids because he had a difficult childhood too. We need to stop the drug traffickers from coming into our state.”

Dutson, however, said the implications of the comment are clear, in part because LePage’s statement must be factually wrong.

“So the question is: Why is he making it up?” he said. “The logical conclusion is that he’s trying to incite that dark kind of fear.”

http://stateandcapitol.bangordailyn...-often-impregnate-young-white-girls-in-maine/

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

D-Money

Subtle.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Shame on Whole Foods for telling people to try collard greens.
"For other people collards are a trend -- for us they are a tradition. We aren't against cultural sharing, it's the appropriation without credit that we object to."
-Michael Twitty, as quoted by Cara Ready, "Whole Foods gets in hot water with Black Twitter", CNN Money

 

[Dachs]

The really obnoxious thing is that collards are a thing for white Southerners, too. Normally I'd be the last person to mention them, but, well.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Fried chicken and watermelon are white southerner things too.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

No hand-holding in this game, sorry. No obvious choices, you'll actually have to think carefully about which option to take.
"You can barely get one thing done without being interrupted a bazillion times by all the various projects you have going, by new missions popping up, or new resource collecting timers going off. Even when you get through a month and the powers-that-be send you your supplies, you have to go spend a few days picking them up. During that time any number of horrible things can happen, and all the while the ADVENT clock is ticking, leading toward some new calamity.

Frankly, it’s just too much going on at once to be enjoyable at times. There’s almost no breathing room, even in the very beginning, and it’s very easy to slid into chaos. Whether it’s because I’m not all that great at the game or not, I wish it was just a tiny bit less chaotic."
-Erik Kain, "The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly Of 'XCOM 2'", Forbes

 

[cardgame]

At least he mentions the possibility that he just sucks.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

He still listed it as a negative for the game, unfortunately.

 

[jackelgull]

Cancer is only "a thing" because long, long ago, deviant malcontent proto "progressives" decided that, unlike any other organism on Earth, including human beings in their normative social configuration, they were going to dispense with nature's dictation as to what they should eat and how they should live, and would instead act according to their own conscious thoughts. This resulted in such half-assed and supremely destructive practices as making grains a staple of the human diet because they can be stored for years. You see, this isn't so much of a matter of "intellect" at work as it is a matter of presumption and stupidity. While it was true that you could store grains forever, the reason for that was that there was hardly anything that could use them for sustenance and remain healthy, and that, of course, included humans!!! The unconscious organisms, heeding the innate inclinations which nature or God had bestowed upon them, did not subvert such key safeguards, but (subhu)man did!! Dr. Weston Price gave the results of his findings on the introduction of grain and sugar into the diets of peoples who had never before consumed such substances in the early 1900s, and it was just as one would expect based on the results of forensic archaeology, which show that countless chronic diseases and deformities can be traced to the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. This includes things such as our jaws no longer having the space to accommodate wisdom teeth, something that ignorant, stupid or deceitful "scientists" attribute to "evolution". The features of the very generation which came after the introduction of white flour and sugar into the diets of those peoples mentioned above were born with narrowed features, a sign of connective tissue disorder from the antinutrients in such foods and also the absence of real food to counter the effects thereof. That's right, it wasn't a matter of natural selection and evolution; the VERY OFFSPRING OF THOSE WHO FIRST CONSUMED GRAINS AND SUGAR (and I believe grains are obviously the more significant factor) WERE BORN WITH SUCH DEFORMITIES AS ARE FOUND IN THE FOSSIL RECORD ASSOCIATED WITH THE BEGINNING OF THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION!!!

http://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/ancient-dietary-wisdom-for-tomorrows-children/

http://cjhuntreports.com/

http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?...n-farming-changed-our-mouths-worst-180954167/

Cancer become "a thing" until human civilization, which was brought about by the development of agriculture, which is the idiocy I described above. It was barely anything at all until another relatively recent stage in "progress", the Industrial Revolution, which resulted in such innovations as the high rates of childhood cancer with which we are now blessed as a species.

http://phys.org/news/2010-10-scientists-cancer-purely-man-made.html


Another factor which is affected by diet, and is thrown off balance by the consumption of things that are not intended to be consumed by a given organism, is prenatal hormone release, which I am convinced is the primary causative factor in homosexuality. This has resulted in countless millions who are forever discontented because they are attracted not to others who are of their own homosexual inclination, but to heterosexual members of the same gender. That's right; homosexuals are among the greatest unrecognized victims of the very "progressive" agenda that so many unfortunately have been convinced that they should support, not that the things they wish to progress away from are necessarily reflective of normative human existence in the first place, and for the most part, they are not. They simply represent an earlier stage in the perverse pagan agenda of "progress". Soy is a major factor contributing to disruption of the normative hormone balance in the womb, and anyone accustomed to reading the ingredients lists for packaged foods will understand that it really requires that one eliminate most of the standard American diet from his or her consumption in order to avoid consuming significant amounts of soy. For instance, the main ingredient in that mayonnaise which a certain reviewer had slathered all over that McWhopper he ate on camera a while back isn't egg yolks, but soybean oil!!!

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soybean-fertility-hormone-isoflavones-genistein/

This was just too beautiful

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Jesus Paradox, just...just stick to writing flavor text for history stuff next time. This is worse than Beyond Earth.
"Advanced DNA methylation techniques allow for functionally significant alterations to be made to arbitrary genomes."
-description for technology Epigenetic Triggers, Stellaris

Spoiler :

1. If you're altering the genome itself, then it's just genetics, not epigenetics.
2. Methylation silences gene expression. That's a very poor way of evolving new traits or triggering transformative changes.
3. What the bloody hell are "arbitrary genomes"?

 

[Arakhor]

Not that the quote isn't wrong, but if that's the only one, they're doing pretty well with their technobabble.

 

[The_J]

Well....actually...not dumb.
The quote is for epigenetics, so #1 is right (or am I missing something?).
Significant functional alterations can also be stopping gene expression, because that will probably alter the function of the cell.
And arbitrary = any.

It's not a very good quote though.

 

[gay_Aleks]

Considering the track record on historical flavour for Paradox isn't all too well, I'd say that this isn't all that bad.

 

[Dachs]

"Have just fired 6 rounds at a camel but the beggar is still grazing peacefully."
-signaled by British destroyer HMS Scorpion during the Dardanelles bombardments, spring 1915

Considering the track record on historical flavour for Paradox isn't all too well, I'd say that this isn't all that bad.

Paradox's games do have a rocky relationship with history, yes. I don't know if that's worse or better than the science flavor text, because I don't science.

 

[gay_Aleks]

"Have just fired 6 rounds at a camel but the beggar is still grazing peacefully."
-signaled by British destroyer HMS Scorpion during the Dardanelles bombardments, spring 1915

Is that coded or is it literally what it means?

 

[Arakhor]

"The beggar is ..." is somewhat dated slang for talking about someone in an exasperated manner.