I stopped playing colleges, and the reason is because they're way too conservative. Not in their political views, but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody. You can't say "the black kid over there." No, it's "the guy with the red shoes." You can't even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.
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When Obama first got elected, he should have let it all just drop. Just let the country flatline. Let the auto industry die. Don't bail anybody out. In sports, that's what any new GM does. They make sure that the catastrophe is on the old management and then they clean up. They don't try to save old management's mistakes.
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When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it's all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they're not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.
He also talks about a surprising effect of technology on comedy: that comedians have to test and test their stuff in front of an audience to make it just offensive enough to be funny. To find out where that line is on every joke, they have to be too offensive and then back off. If they can't do that, their comedy is bland, but if they do it and people are recording with their phones, then it can get out and hurt their career.
I was thinking about that when I saw this article posted to the subreddit, The Sci-Fi Future of Personalized Advertising. I went a long time not watching much TV, and now I'm watching more and the commercials are just terrible. I mean if you listen to their tone of voice, and their whole framing of reality, the bullshit is laid on so thick that it's like they're not even selling products -- they're training the public to accept that level of bullshit as normal.
But now I'm thinking, what if instant viewer feedback enables commercials to learn, like comedians learn, until every commercial is genuinely interesting? Will it lead to better mind control, or will commercials become authentic and subversive because that's what people need?