Comments by "dixon pinfold" (@dixonpinfold2582) on "David Hoffman" channel.

@ChrisMathers3501 But it was video carefully selected and spliced together by the filmmaker. Come on. Even a kid knows not to believe everything he sees on TV. Why take a documentary's word for anything? It can easily be shot through with prejudice, ax-grinding, ill will, or plain stupidity. Every filmmaker is career-minded and feels a certain necessity to produce something compelling that people will talk about. So why produce a portrait of a town showing them as blandly decent and remarkably low in faults even if that's how you find them? Something more cutting will undoubtedly help you find support to make your next film, and no one will be the wiser --- except those you've defamed, and maybe even few of them. You've heard of sensationalism, of course? All forms of journalism are swimming in it. But never mind sensationalism --- even the most scrupulous fair-mindedness can be miles off the mark for innocent reasons. Did no one ever make you out to be something you're not, even if they quoted a few of your words accurately? It's very, very easily done.
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@averat84 I'm on JayT's side. Your two long comments suffer from a lack of organization, clarity, and coherence. Plainly they presume an already-existing agreement with whatever ideology you picked up at the education faculty at which you studied. Only a TA hired by a prof who taught the same material could approve of their rambling, canting, dogmatic style. The poor fellow simply couldn't make out what you meant to say (I don't believe you have any idea yourself) and you told him his mind was too corrupt and biased to get it. That was cheap, low, and betrays a total lack of the real intellectual confidence because it can't be answered, only denied. It's a bully and coward's trick and came out sounding well practiced. So here's a taste of your own medicine: Your self-respect depends on your not recognizing that you were fleeced of your time and money at university by a clique of dunces in turn depending on their students' defects of mind and personality. You'd understand this if you weren't so married to your biases without even knowing it. Like being addressed like that? Pretty obviously you were taught condescension and pity for non-believers. You would have emerged with the same type of mind had you attended a bible college.
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@Xanderfied There's no shortage of food. It has never been more plentiful or affordable. Those people who go hungry live in conflict zones or are direct victims of government corruption or incompetence.
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@Fireboat52 The "opening up of educational opportunity" as it was so attractively and optimistically called, also went hand in hand with an immense relaxation in standards. How else could you possibly increase the proportion of people attending college from 5% to 50%? Students from the middle of a high school class simply cannot graduate from college programs designed, as they formerly were, to fail students from below the top tenth. Neither can you inflate the ranks of professors ten times and think quality hasn't plummeted. Anyone who does think so should be asked what we'd have if we fired the worst 90% of them now. Low standards have ruined the universities. Ruined universities, in turn, have no way of producing the people needed to design and run society and everything in it. It has been long assumed now that material abundance and the basic unalterable decency of people are all that's required for a good society, but that's false. You need highly qualified elites firmly in charge, and they're gone. When I want to make fun of what happened to the universities and the elites that come out of them, which is all the time, I call it The Great Dumbening.
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@rwatertree Yeah, full-on independence can make you mature rapidly, that's definitely true. Probably having a kid most of all. I didn't guess that was your meaning. Nowadays that doesn't happen till much later, does it? People live with their parents till 30 and become parents at 35 or later. It's weird, really. All the best.
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@themiddleman3060 Yeah, you were right in that sense. Actually, sometimes I write comments and replies just for the mental stimulation that results from the effort. I feel mentally sharper after. It's like exercise. Cheers.
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@Tristanxh Splendid. The best way to defame and explode Marx's cant is to quote it.
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I disagree with the dad quoted and maybe with you, too. I disagree with the dad because commonly 16-year-olds in fact have lots of strong convictions. (How could he not know that?) But those convictions just aren't worth that much where they concern major national issues (the dad was talking about political protest). Kids are not allowed to vote for good reason, in my view. I strongly suspect, actually, that this is what the dad had in mind, saying "real convictions" when he really meant 'valid and worthwhile political convictions' because he spoke sloppily. So maybe I don't disagree with the dad, if I'm right on this. As for your statement, if you're just pointing out the paradox or irony I think that's good. But if you mean that a 16-year-old really is on the cusp of maturity, I don't think so. Eighteen-year-olds make poor parents and poor voters if you ask me. It's just reasonable to give them those legal rights (and hope they don't use them the instant they get them) in recognition of the responsibilities they get at the same age.
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@Tristanxh Marx himself set the tone. He never let himself be contradicted without unleashing a flood of abuse and attacks on his interlocutor. He didn't show respect and give reasoned rebuttals. You'd think someone regarded by so many as the saviour of humanity might have an exemplary personality, but no, apparently he was a super-*****ole. I read about it before and I bet you have, too, but if not, you can listen to this audiobook account of him as a person lasting 48 minutes. (You wouldn't call it a biography.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heGapg-08yE&t=1239s Frankly I don't think that highly of the author himself, but listened to it anyway, figuring that here he was in his element. In the event, it jibed with what I already knew.
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@themiddleman3060 How is a guy certain the townspeople deserved what they got in the TV broadcast a sheep ready to die for the rich? I mean, on those grounds he was pretty silly in my opinion, but how is he a sheep/lemming?
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@smartstuf1026 "they took analytics and connected them to the films they captured." I don't know what that means. My point is this: when a documentary filmmaker enters the cutting room intent on a hatchet job with a few miles of footage to work with, the universe opens before him or her. Thanks for your reply.
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Excellent points. Rebellion, sometimes a healthy response to mistreatment, is commonly, however, a result of being indulged. This makes it a narcissistic power-grab which continues until it his a wall of resistance (other people won't stand for it) which sometimes never comes. Parents who think they'll make their children happy for life by giving them a childhood full of gratified desires are well-meaning but stupid. It always backfires.
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@willguggn2 Thanks for your reply. It's been a busy week or two since I watched the thing, so my ability to reply is really waning. But although they made their own answers, didn't the filmmaker choose which ones to highlight? And the filmmaker made the edit that went to air, so all criticisms from the public relied on his point of view. If you really think it was all fair to the point of airtightness, maybe you're right and I totally missed the point of something I was watching intently. I really don't feel like watching it again just to iron this out. Cheers anyway.
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@willguggn2 I had time while I was eating, so I did watch it again! This highlight version of the actual TV program only covers a handful of survey questions from among (presumably) many more in the survey itself. But ok, lets assume it a was scrupulously representative sample. (I doubt it; I think Mr. Hoffman has an axe to grind here, but let that pass.) Two answers were very unappetizing, I'll agree with that. One is unequivocal: 52% admitted cheating on a test (one time only or many more times, we don't know). That's pretty bad, to be sure. Yet who knows? What if it's typical of high school kids? What if it shows merely that a high percentage of them had character good enough to admit their character had a serious flaw? Overall, not a flattering finding at all, but possibly not the end of the world. I think that before the age of seventeen, most of us have done something wrong at school. The other one was that their cars were what they "cared most about." But let's be careful. Hoffman points out that this response edged out "looks". These don't sound like answers to the unadorned question "What do you care most about?" I really doubt people who truly did care most about looks and cars would actually say so. They'd either conceal it or wouldn't quite realize it. I think we're in the dark about the actual question. Perhaps it was "What is most important to you when it comes to social success at school?" or "What do your fellow students care about most?" which are very different questions. When students answered that the keys to social recognition at the Friendship Dance are looks, money, being from the 'right family', and three others, this does not mean they approve. Isn't it likely they deplored this state of things? The student body at large is being asked to evaluate an elite social institution. They may be right; their answers, on the other hand, might result from lack of first-hand experience of the dance, or for any other reason be tainted by social envy. Some people admire their social betters mindlessly; we call them snobs. Even more people bitterly resent their social betters mindlessly; I'm not sure we even have a word for it. (How can 83% of the kids choose the identical answers, anyway? Five out of six tick off all the same six boxes in a list of about a dozen? Why wouldn't many of them select three, five, or seven?) As far as other survey answers are concerned, what is wrong with wanting good grades, a college education, a good non-demeaning job, and a nice place to live? Nothing. A what on Earth could possibly be wrong with dance lessons? What is wrong with liking the comfortable, pleasant town you grew up in and wanting to stay there? Nothing. Others, like me, who have a taste for much more exploration and excitement, and who consider small towns and suburbs the height of boredom, have no right whatsoever to look down on it. To do so would itself amount to a nasty species of snobbery. I can't go on forever here. The original documentary maker, I sense, had it in for this town and all the places similar to it. He used the filmmaker's craft and things such as tone of voice and rhetoric to guide his audience to certain emotional responses. It is very difficult to put into a few words just what it was I saw to make me think this, but I think he made sure to make them look bad, despising them as philistines. But all but a few per cent of all people deserve that label. Philistinism is everywhere. Why he wanted to pick on these people who seemed pleasant, harmless, productive and law-abiding escapes me. Maybe he hated them for being prosperous and content, and if they were poor and miserable he would have made heroes of them.
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El-ahrairah I initially wrote here that 80% is too high for 1966, but I suppose maybe it's pretty accurate after all, so I had to change that. But I do think that fantastical and false are strong words for something that 20% of the people enjoy. Would you use them to describe a portrayal of how the bottom fifth lived? (Not that you claimed this, but I always hated the idea that the dirtiest corners of life are the most real. As a cry for help or love or as an expression of bitterness and disappointment I can accept it, but not as an assertion with truth to it.) On the agreeable side of how I see things, I really appreciate how you express yourself. An editor's dream. What a great contrast with the garbled and pretentious language of people here who obviously consider themselves very smart and learned. And they're presumably sober! Cheers and all the best to you.
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@smartstuf1026 I said nothing of the sort. I said what I said in plain English, my ironically-named friend.
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