Fine book. And McQueen’s best role IMO.
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It’s not loyalty to an authority class, it’ s towards one’s own group.
From the link in the OP
authoritarianism referred to one’s adherence to in-group authorities and norms and aggression towards those who did not adhere to those authorities and norms
We don’t need to adjust the reading, we can adjust the conditions that the reading indicates. There is nothing wrong with your television set.
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Yes, you’re right of course, here’s what the book actually says:
The deck log was a lot different from the engine room log. You had to put in the deck log what ships were in port and what kinds of clouds were in what parts of the sky and the direction and force of the wind. Holman had to search for the north star, finding the Big Dipper first, and he had not looked at the stars in years. The high, strung-out clouds drifted among the bright stars as if a strong wind blew up there, but there was only a light breeze on the river. The river was black and it whispered and chuckled. It was a big river, already a mile wide six hundred miles from the sea. A few lights bobbed on it and there were more lights on the far bank. There was a pagoda over there, and an old walled city named Wuchang, but at night they blended with the dark, humpy hills.
“High, scattered, moving clouds all over the sky,” he wrote in the deck log.
He logged the air temperature and pressure from the barometer and also the river temperature and depth. Those were temperatures and pressures and water levels, just as you logged them in the engine room, he thought, but up here you could not adjust them if they were wrong. You could not know when they were wrong. Down below even the illiterate coolies knew that much, from red limit marks on the pressure gauge dials and pieces of string around water-level glasses. It was much better down below. You did not care which way was north; you went by port and starboard, fore and aft. You did not care whether it was day or night or what the weather was, unless it got rough enough to pitch the screw out of the water or ship a sea down the skylight. In the engine room you had control of things.
So by analogy: engineers are more likely to be terrorists because they like to and know how to control things? I don’t buy it. Terrorists are disaffected. Disaffection is amplified by education, frequently. Disaffection is also amplified by conditions that separate you from your social structure: family, religion, country, romantic partners, workplace. Training too many engineers or lawyers or kindegarten teachers is going to put pressure on those social structures on a person by person basis.
I was responding to @dbeierl post, making an observation about the marine side.
As far non-marine engineers, maybe because engineering solutions tend to converge around a single solution, more so than in some other fields, that might make them tend to be more dogmatic?
This explains how otherwise intelligent and highly educated libtards cannot conceptualize practical reality.
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No, I don’t think so. Engineers-who-love-engineering are less dogmatic than people with pure science backgrounds: they are interested in new ideas: to a nearly pathological extent. Engineers-who-passed-their-exams-to-meet-expectations are in some ways kinda damaged human beings: they’ve worked really hard for something they don’t find rewarding, and expect a little quid-pro-quo. If those expectations aren’t met: predict some angry young men.
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on that note, look what I found:
blind people arguing over what colour their koolaid is. What-ever happened to the barking moonbat? At least that one has some poetry to it.
From your Wiki link:
“He played a major role in escalating the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War.”
so…yeah…about his smartness…
smarts ≠ benevolence
I would call that bunch an authority class. It is a class of group members who claim authority.
A class is a subgroup of a category.
The blog entry it came from (excerpted below) is fascinating:
American English has a specialized vocabulary of insults based on party affiliation. For instance, a Democrat deriding a Republican might use the term wingnut , combining the notion of right-wing extremism and irrational nuttiness, or Rethuglican ( Rethug for short), a blend of Republican and thug . The lexicon of Republican insults for Democrats includes moonbat , which the late William Safire traced back to libertarian blogger Perry de Havilland in the fuller form “barking moonbat”, suggesting ideology-crazed partisans howling at the moon. Even more common than moonbat in Oxford’s tracking corpus is the schoolyard-esque slur libtard (from liberal and –tard in retard , an offensive term for a person with intellectual disabilities). Liberal neologists have gotten in on the – tard act too, but Teatard (with reference to the conservative Tea Party movement), conservatard , and Republitard have thus far failed to achieve widespread currency.
Yes, that’s what he is most famous for, his “body count” metric. That’s the point. Before that he was part of a group called the Whiz Kids.
That he was a very smart man is not in dispute, also not many dispute he got Vietnam wrong. Both things can be true.
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Yes he did, but was also man enough to admit he was wrong later in life.
From Wikipedia:
" McNamara’s memoir, In Retrospect , published in 1995, presented an account and analysis of the Vietnam War from his point of view. According to his lengthy New York Times obituary, “[h]e concluded well before leaving the Pentagon that the war was futile, but he did not share that insight with the public until late in life. In 1995, he took a stand against his own conduct of the war, confessing in a memoir that it was ‘wrong, terribly wrong’.” In return, he faced a “firestorm of scorn” at that time."
Sure, I am willing to give him credit for that…doesn’t change the fact that he was directly involved in the deaths of many of the 58,000 names on that wall.
I just found it hard to sit idly by while someone talks up the great achievements of the ‘whiz kid’ Robert McNamara.
I do see the point you’re making…a smart guy was unable to see that he was making bad decisions
Yeah, like a degree in basket weaving and more student debt than they’ll ever pay off.
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People who work hard to earn a good living and pay a lot of taxes tend to be conservative. People who don’t work hard, don’t earn much of a living, don’t pay many taxes, or have a lot of easy money coming their way tend to be liberal. People under 30 who have been indoctrinated by the far left American education system, and have not had enough real word experience from the school of hard knocks tend to be uber liberal.
On the tugs I see a lot conservatives and damn few liberals.
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I tend to keep my political view quiet at work. Having some asshole rant about Obama, illegals, commies, millienals etc… gets old quickly.
Do I want to hear the oiler tell me about monetary policy? No, I want him to keep his area clean. If it’s clean, painted, straightened up i’ll indulge all of his theories about lizard people running the government.
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When I read the article in the OP I though of Capt Davidson and the captain of the Bounty. They both evidently functioned at a high level but both came up with disastrous plans for hurricane avoidance.
If metacognitive sensitivity is more or less" the ability to distinguish between one’s correct and incorrect judgement" then this seems to be the case with both captains. High level performance in some cases but bad plans in others. With Davidson he also likely displayed bad judgement with hiring the tugs, what he got fired for at Crowley, without a full discussion with the company.
The hiring of the tugs was reported in the media as the captain being extra careful but seems like it would have been better to have the company on board.