The Shmups Forum Dead Pool

[NTSC-J]

Abe Vigoda passed away at 94.

[GaijinPunch]

15 years in the waiting...

[broken harbour]

hahahaha, also.. now I'm depressed.

[rtw]

Sir Terry Wogan has passed... "Norway Zero points"

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-35453541

[system11]

Joe Alaskey, voice of Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny.

2016 needs to just go fuck itself.

[rancor]

BMX rider Dave Mirra (41) - Self-inflicted gunshot:

http://wncn.com/2016/02/04/bmx-icon-dav ... ead-at-41/

[Bloodreign]

Maurice White, co-founder of Earth Wind and Fire, dead at 74.



Axl Rotten, pro wrestler, known from his ECW days also dead at 44.

[Strikers1945guy]

BMX rider Dave Mirra (41) - Self-inflicted gunshot:

http://wncn.com/2016/02/04/bmx-icon-dav ... ead-at-41/

Oh fuck I remember looking up to this guy as a kid as I was more into BMX riding in my teenage years as opposed to skate boarding. Very sad.

[Ed Oscuro]

Abe Vigoda passed away at 94.

Are you kidding me...the Retrogaming Roundtable is going to be in shock

But some of these other deaths are shocking. Dave Mirra?!

[NTSC-J]

Legendary MMA fighter Kevin Randleman has died from a heart attack at 44.





That fight with Fedor is an all-time great. RIP Kevin.

[BryanM]

[Ed Oscuro]

Oh my, you weren't joking. Totally unexpected. Scalia had a huge influence on how the law is read with his originalism theory. Also, the most unpleasant of the justices, from what I've been hearing recently.

[BryanM]

Totally unexpected.

Old people die every day. Today's a day.

[BulletMagnet]

Also, the most unpleasant of the justices, from what I've been hearing recently.

He did memorably tell everyone who was upset at the Court's rejection of a recount in election 2000 to "get over it" (I always like to imagine what the reaction would have been if the election had gone the other way and, say, Ginsberg had said that).

I don't wish death on anyone, but to borrow a line from Mark Twain, in this case I'll go on the record as approving of it.

[Mischief Maker]

An El Paso source close to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia tells ABC-7 that the 79-year-old died in his sleep last night after a day of quail hunting at Cibolo Creek Ranch outside of Marfa, Texas.

The Justice did not report feeling ill and retired to his room after dinner. The source, who was traveling with Scalia, told ABC-7 an El Paso priest has been called to Marfa.

Scalia was the longest-serving current Justice on the Supreme Court. He was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986.

All I wanna know is if any of the people he was hunting with were defendants in pending supreme court cases.

[GaijinPunch]

Probably hunting with Cheney.

Anyway, at least we get to go another day without

[Rob]

That dude needed a water fast, not quail.

[EmperorIng]

Also, the most unpleasant of the justices, from what I've been hearing recently.

Perhaps if your only sources of information are garbage websites like Salon. I mean come on man, "the most unpleasant of the justices." Like this is a quantifiable thing.

[Ed Oscuro]

Also, the most unpleasant of the justices, from what I've been hearing recently.

Perhaps if your only sources of information are garbage websites like Salon. I mean come on man, "the most unpleasant of the justices." Like this is a quantifiable thing.

While it's not really great to write nasty comments about somebody who's just died, what I've said is actually true and you don't need to be his white knight. I should have written more directly about him, but that's what I get for trying to sand off the edges.

I don't get my SCOTUS reporting from Salon, or any other reporting for that matter, but nice try.

Reporters have long noted his foaming at the mouth about his fellow justices' opinions. I have the impression that this has only increased in recent years, but maybe he's been like this a long time. None of the other current justices are known for doing this, in any case. Of course there are past justices who were known for their histrionics, too.

Legal scholars also might have something to say about Scalia as well:

[...] there is a disingenuousness to Justice Scalia's decision-making and a meanness to his judicial rhetoric that I believe are undesirable and inappropriate. [...] Scalia's opinions are distinctive because of his frequent sarcasm and pointed attacks on his colleagues.

There was another side to him, holding friendships with Kagan and Ginsburg, but that has all been lost when looking beyond the bench at how he's affected the legal tradition outside the chambers of the Supreme Court.

And that's before even getting into his nonsensical beliefs about African Americans in college, or his basic judicial philosophy.

[EmperorIng]

Nonsensical? The essence of what he said is that if an African American is placed into a college that he is not qualified for, his/her education will suffer. I am not qualified for Harvard Law School, or the Economics program at University of Chicago, because I have neither the grades nor the aptitude for those programs. If I were black, should I be accepted? Note I did not say "should I be allowed to attend?" Putting someone into a program merely to fit a diversity quota doesn't help a student, it statistically sets them up for failure. Furthermore, if someone has had a bad educational upbringing, like most poor blacks in shitty public schools, placing into highly rigorous academic environments is going to place them at a severe disadvantage - which in fact has happened, according to [black] economist Thomas Sowell:

Despite much media spin, the issue is not whether blacks in general should be admitted to higher-ranked or lower-ranked institutions. The issue is whether a given black student, with given academic qualifications, should be admitted to a college or university where he would not be admitted if he were white.

...

Justice Scalia was not talking about sending black students to substandard colleges and universities to get an inferior education. You may in fact get a much better education at an institution that teaches at a pace that you can handle and master. In later life, no one is going to care how fast you learned something, so long as you know it.

I would recommend reading the entire article.

Affirmative Action, if used, should try to place students into environments where they will get the most out of their education - not colleges that already turn away 98% of all applicants. But if you only glean headlines like "Scalia says Blacks Belong in Slower Schools" you'd be inculcated into a very warped view of reality.

[Ed Oscuro]

Not even a "my bad" for your failed gotcha attempt? Just a mostly irrelevant nitpick...still, I'll bite.

Ha, ha, your suggestion that I read "the entire article" was golden, thanks

Onto Thomas Sowell. Not a bad article from the economist here, as a wholly self-contained thing, but the problem with Sowell's and Scalia's argument is (well, putting aside the "liberals don't care" slapstick which doesn't stick this time) the acceptance of a permanent two-tier educational system, ignoring the roots of inequality in early education and elsewhere. Under such a system, wealthy neighborhoods get good schools and send their students on to top tier schools, and low income neighborhoods' sudents remain literally held back years, with a lower trajectory for that entire demographic in earnings and other prospects (Sowell, the economist, should mention this, but he doesn't). Inherent in that word "education" is the belief that students can do better with guidance than they would if they were thrown naked into the shark tank, and a big problem with Scalia's and Sowell's argument is that underprepared students are not just an affirmative action issue (although, it should be said, I am personally in favor of targeting students by actual need, not just by race which can exclude some students), and colleges should at least be forced to take steps to prepare unprepared students who end up at their doors - and in fact I believe most colleges actually do this already.

What makes Scalia's and Sowell's arguments fall off the track, I think, is that it is being coopted by people who simply don't want to pay in taxes to benefit students from "other" populations - and these are the people who truly "do not care," against Sowell's argument. Scalia and Sowell ought to know this will happen. So, in my book, that's a kind of nonsense.

Additionally, it is disingenuous to insist that this is a problem that schools are incapable of tackling - indeed I think over the last ten years (at least) there has been a lot more awareness of the problem of students in general being unprepared for college. You can tackle these problems and get the benefits of diversity of the student population - which Scalia gave no thought to. In higher education, the best academics simply don't go to these "lesser" schools, so it doesn't matter how long students need to get through those programs - they simply don't get access to the best academics, don't get their views into the mainstream, and basically are shut out of the mainstream.

So far I have mostly treated Scalia's and Sowell's claim of a "mismatch theory" as being true. But physicists and scholars directly involved with students and studying affirmative action have denounced it in plain language. To quote a U of M professor:

Study after study tells us that whether one looks at graduation rates or future earnings, minorities admitted to more selective schools with an assist from affirmative action do at least as well as and more often better than they could have been expected to do had they gone to less selective institutions.

In short, even though affirmative action is not the perfect equalizer, it is capable of dramatically altering the future prospects of a student who otherwise would have always been stuck with a substandard education. That this comes at the cost of some other students is unfortunate, especially if both students had equally substandard educations but only one happened to be black. However, I will say that if one student came from a better educational background, they have been favored by the system up to this point and so I think that giving the other student some consideration is appropriate.

At the end of the day what's most important is that improving education needs to be looked at, starting at a stage before college.

Edit: As an addendum, it was Alito who actually pushed the question furthest in the direction it needed to go. Oh yeah, it's Slate this time. So sue me

[rancor]

George Gaynes (Punky Brewster, Police Academy) has passed. He was 98 (!!!)

[Limbrooke]

George Gaynes (Punky Brewster, Police Academy) has passed. He was 98 (!!!)

May you rest in PEAAACCE, Commandant Lassard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSiJiDSmb1E

[Mischief Maker]

Too soon?

[BulletMagnet]

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, dead at 89.

[EmperorIng]

As well, an author whose work I much admired: Umberto Eco has passed away. In the Name of the Rose and Baudolino were such wonderful high-school and college delights, respectively. The former's movie does no justice to the book, but is definitely watchable.

The world of literature is poorer off!

[Ed Oscuro]

Aw, two great authors. Eco's essay on Ur-Fascism is a good read.

[GaijinPunch]

I tried to read Focault's Pendulum in university and fucking failed hard... it hurt.. Are his other two easier reads?

[EmperorIng]

Baudolino is pretty fun reading (though the last third of the book goes in a lot of weird directions), and In the Name of the Rose is an entertaining murder mystery wrapped up in a lot of history and arcane monastic academia. In fact, a lot of Eco's works are sort of like that - heavy prose and heady concepts over more conventional stories (e.g. countless tedious arguments over Aristotle's conception of a vacuum, used for comedic effect in Baudolino). I'd say Baudolino is the easier read, as I admittedly haven't read In the Name of the Rose in a decade.

[rtw]

I tried to read Focault's Pendulum in university and fucking failed hard... it hurt.. Are his other two easier reads?

Name of the rose is an excellent read Foucault was a bit more challenging.