Redpill me on season 2 of The Wire:

Redpill me on season 2 of The Wire:

More than ten years after it aired, is David Simon's elegy to the blue collar American still relevant?

Did people like Frank Sobotka and that black guy he always butted heads with ruin everything for the next generation with their cronyism, or is there a legitimate reason why senior members deserve the first pick of the shifts?

Would Ziggy have been cut out for college? He seemed to be the only stevedore who knew how to work a digital camera, maybe there was a future for him as an early adapter to the changing times.

What happened to Delores and her bar, AKA the place where Frank laundered the ill-gotten cash through to the union guys who weren't getitng shifts so they could feed their families. Was she arrested as well? The show never mentioned it IIRC.

The IBS Local 1514 talk about the "good old days" constantly, but all of their stories seem horrific to an outsider. From some tragedy relating to an injury on the job, or a violent protest, to punishing their body with drugs and alcohol to no doubt numb their aching bodies. Could it be implied that moving away from humans doing manual labor is a good thing in the long run?

I finished the season for the 3rd time last night and am dealing with some powerful emotions today, with the failure of the American industrial force on Nicky Sobotka's shoulders. I have to know it will be okay.

Also, I was very upset that Nicky showed up in season 5 for two minutes, looking 10x more attractive and fit. Given his situation and prospects at the end of season 2, I was expecting him to look a lot fucking worse. In season 2 he looked like Nicky Sobotka. In season 5 he looked like an actor.

Other urls found in this thread:

davidsimon.com/trayvon/
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

bump

Season 5 was shitty overall, but they had to "end" the story some way. Season 2 will always be the most underrated because people who just watched season 1 will want more of the streets will get mad and then immediately forget about season 2 when season 3 starts back up

Of course it's still relevant

I would say that Frank Sobotka was doing what he thought was right in order to help the working man; his whole "we used to build shit in this country" speech was great

Its underated and its a good change of scenery from the whole nigga ghetto

Omar is one of the corniest motherfuckers in the history of television. I understand he may be "cool" to the early-2000s audience, but his whole persona is totally lame now.

baumo

literally dindu the show

Checked.

It's the greatest season of them all by a long shot.

It basically postulated that low-IQ working class individuals, when not allowed the opportunity to make money doing the menial work that they're actually cut out for, will quickly turn into niggers.

And that assertion is right on the money. I live in Baltimore and the reason why this city is so infested with niggers is because the factories, etc all shut down, leaving the parents and grandparents of Freddy Gray etc in Frank Sobotka's shoes while their kids all turned into Nick and Ziggy.

Additionally, Ziggy is clearly meant to represent the kind of blue collar kid who actually has a chance at making it in the white collar economy (no street smarts, no aptitude for menial work, but understood computers and technology better than anyone he knew) and the fact that he sticks out like so sore of a thumb compared to everyone else in the IBS is clearly meant to illustrate just how unrealistic of a pipe dream the idea that the working class can seamlessly transition into white collar jobs is.

They can't. And instead of taking part in the new economy, they are only displaced by it, as seen when Nicky tries to buy a house in Locust Point where he grew up only to learn that the house he knew is 4x what he can afford.

Again, I live in Baltimore, and all you need to see is the very real condo tower that the grain pier turned into, which anchored the gentrification of Locust Point, to see just how things went for Frank and the IBS. Pic related.

Every time I re-watch the series, it becomes clearer and clearer to me that David Simon is completely red-pilled about race, IQ, crime, and the 21st century economy, and hides behind a blue-pilled façade so that the PBS crowd who actually steers public policy might be more receptive to his message.

>Additionally, Ziggy is clearly meant to represent the kind of blue collar kid who actually has a chance at making it in the white collar economy (no street smarts, no aptitude for menial work, but understood computers and technology better than anyone he knew) and the fact that he sticks out like so sore of a thumb compared to everyone else in the IBS is clearly meant to illustrate just how unrealistic of a pipe dream the idea that the working class can seamlessly transition into white collar jobs is.
Fair point but you have to consider that the reason Ziggy stuck out like a sore thumb was because he was never content to just shut up and stop making a fool of himself. Negative attention in his mind was better than no attention and that stemmed from his father not giving a shit about him growing up, instead throwing his weight around in the union hall while Ziggy was probably wrecking his poor mother's house.

But Ziggy's lust for attention could just as easily have stemmed from his dad's inability to effectively connect with him, much less give him the intellectual stimulation that he needed at home.

Furthermore, since his intelligence made it harder for him to connect with the IBS folks around him, he chose to hide it and cut up around them instead, since that responded far more favorably to him whipping his dick out and walking his duck on a leash than they did to him talking about computers and technology.

He's basically an earlier-generation analogue of Dukuan.

I FEEL ALRIGHT!
I FEEL ALRIGHT TONIGHT!

Absolutely. S2 took an episode to pick up but it's clearly the best season of the series.

holy shit it's just a tv show you nerd. get a degree in sociology.

What can I say? It fucking touched me. I needed to vent a little.

I went to school in Baltimore, I took a course on the Wire, a public health course. David Simon came in to speak, and I actually believe he is more blue pilled on race and things like that. But hes spot on on voting jurisdictions. He said if he could change only one thing in this country, it's that, to ensure that votes matter again

Eh, I think he does a really great job at appearing blue-pilled, because that's all his audience will respond to.

But when I watched Season 4 for the first time, I just had this overwhelming feeling that while the message on the surface was "we need to do better by these kids", what he was subtly REALLY saying was "these kids haven't a prayer in 21st century America, society has no need for them, and they should never have been born in the first place".

I would bet that deep down inside, David Simon beliefs on how we realistically break the poverty cycle are more in line with Margaret Sanger.

jesus fucking christ, this is the best thread i've seen on Sup Forums in a long while and fucking retards are getting pissed because there aren't enough memes.

Don't listen to this faggot OP, post threads like this more often.

>The same blood don't flow for us, pop! I wish it did, but it don't!
>You're more of me than you know. You're a Sobotka!
Holy shit that was painful

I think the whole point was that he was corny.

I don't know, I still like him.

What are you suggesting here? Isn't the claim that poor living situations and character are fundamentally caused by class rather than race a left-wing, not right-wing, position?

I think if you unironically use the "pilled" maymays, you don't have much business talking about anything.

>"You can stand your ground if you’re white, and you can use a gun to do it. But if you stand your ground with your fists and you’re black, you’re dead.

>In the state of Florida, the season on African-Americans now runs year round. Come one, come all. And bring a handgun. The legislators are fine with this blood on their hands. The governor, too. One man accosted another and when it became a fist fight, one man — and one man only — had a firearm. The rest is racial rationalization and dishonorable commentary.

>If I were a person of color in Florida, I would pick up a brick and start walking toward that courthouse in Sanford. Those that do not, those that hold the pain and betrayal inside and somehow manage to resist violence — these citizens are testament to a stoic tolerance that is more than the rest of us deserve. I confess, their patience and patriotism is well beyond my own.

>Behold, the lewd, pornographic embrace of two great American pathologies: Race and guns, both of which have conspired not only to take the life of a teenager, but to make that killing entirely permissible. I can’t look an African-American parent in the eye for thinking about what they must tell their sons about what can happen to them on the streets of their country. Tonight, anyone who truly understands what justice is and what it requires of a society is ashamed to call himself an American." - David Simon

davidsimon.com/trayvon/

Totally fucking red-pilled, dude. Like, fucking completely.

Also, can you find the real-life equivalents of Frank and Ziggy in the same way that some of the black characters literally played themselves, or did he maybe kind of make that up? In his series and his true crime book "Homicide" that inspired it (and two other shows), I can see the actual niggers and actual cops, but I didn't notice any mention of the white working class.

>i live in baltimore so i totally know
Cool story, white person.

If you get your impression of right wingers from people like Jon Stewart I can see how you would think that

I'm talking Sup Forums style right-wing.

Wow, a thread about the wire that isn't being spammed with all the irrefutable evidence that niggers are subhuman while someone attempts to claim those people aren't representative of right-wing politics.

Rewatching this season right now actually, just got into the Brother Mouszone introduction episode.

Yes, I still believe it's relevant. Hell, if anything, it's probably even moreso relevant today than it was when the show was made.

Ziggy could have gone to college I think, but the problem there was Ziggy himself. He was shown to have some smarts, at least technology wise, compared to the others, but he wanted to sell drugs and pretend to be a gangster.

I always got the impression Delores was clean.

The good old days chat is a sort of lower class thing I think. To someone outside of that life, the stories sound horrible, but to them, it's the way they live, every day. And I mean, it's no secret there's a link between lower class people with shitty lives taking things like drinking and drugging to an extreme.

I think that guy with the beard showed up as a hobo in season five, right? The one Ziggy stole cars with?

Same here, I could've sworn he was in the series finale outro walking drunk next to that black guy (Art, I think) from the IBS

Then you're wrong. The left thinks poverty is caused by racism.

>Ayo lock that door, man.

Great thread, btw. Sup Forums hasn't died yet, like most say

Well, putting all the low cost housing for the state in the same 2-3 acres, meaning they'd instantly be occupied exclusively by black people, then completely abandoning the places, didn't exactly help that impression.

The white working class got mentioned in Homicide: Life on the Street a few times, but usually in a derogatory way.

Danierl Baldwin's character is stated to hail from "Billytown" in Baltimore, a place derogatorily called that because "hillbilles" from rural areas moved to that area of Baltimore for work that didn't exist back home (a very real phenomena that exists in many American cities, both historically and recent). When a more well to do detective uses the name "Billytown" in reference to that area of Baltimore while working a case, Daniel Baldwin's character is quick to tell him to shut up, saying he's from there, he can say it, this white collar ass can't.

They touched on this subject again in season six, in a much more blatantly stereotypical way, when two detectives go out of Baltimore and towards the Appalachians looking for suspects. One detective goes on with the stereotypes in the car, while the other calls him out on it. Until they arrive there, and they see a bunch of run down houses and shit and the characters make a comment about how "they can't believe WHITE people live like this".

Now granted, I can't blame Simon for that directly, as he was less involved with Homicide, particularly in later seasons. But his portrayal of lower class whites in season two of The Wire seemed more an exception than the norm when compared to his other work.

What I'm saying is that social class is a downstream effect of heritable differences in IQ, and that culture largely reflects biology.

Since that's the case, all of our efforts to fight poverty have failed because they are based on the false pretense that everyone has the same cognitive ability and therefore the same potential to succeed in any field, regardless of the complexity of thought required to effectively do the job. Since we believe that falsehood, we instead focus on percieved man-made causes of sociological inequality, and our attempts to rectify those man-made causes always inevitably fail while allowing the poverty cycle to get worse.

What we instead need to do is acknowledge those heritable differences in IQ have real, tangible effects on the sorts of jobs that people are capable of working, and that those heritable differences unfortunately fall along racial lines.

Since that's the case, the answer to how we fix the issue of multi-generational black poverty and the well-documented social ills that come with it ISN'T to confront racism and increase educational opportunities to try to turn more black kids into software engineers, because the former does nothing and the latter is highly unrealistic.

Instead, we need to preserve the blue-collar jobs like the ones the IBS guys worked, jobs that anyone, regardless of intelligence can make a living doing, so that the other 75% of blacks and other lower class folks who will NEVER make it in the STEM fields (and for whom even becoming cops is a stretch) have an option other than the corner or the sole and can also have the opportunity to partake in the inherent dignity of gainful employment and the joys of self-sufficiency that come with it.

*dole, not sole

You know you can say all that without bringing race into it, right?

I only mention race because the reality is that American blacks, with a median IQ of 85, suffer disproportionately from the dearth of blue-collar work in this country compared with other races.

Trying to talk about the relationship between IQ and social class and how to realistically repair the American lower class without specifically mentioning blacks is like trying to talk about how to cure skin cancer without specifically mentioning redheads.

That's not to say that poor, low IQ whites aren't also being left out in the cold by the knowledge economy, but I honestly think it's unfair not to mention blacks specifically since so many of them have sub-90 IQ's relative to just about any other demographic in this country and they by far are bearing the brunt of the fallout from the death of blue collar America.

You know IQ is entirely cultural, right?

lolno. Literally every scientist acknowledges that IQ is heritable.

Ziggy never had the makings of a varsity athlete.

Culture isn't heritable?

Not in the same sense.

Two dumb people will have dumb kids
Two smart people will have smart kids
Not always, but it's basically true. Education etc is also important obviously IQ is 50% genetic.

>Literally every scientist acknowledges that IQ is heritable
>citation needed

Any study on intelligence done by scientists and not sociologists

>50% genetic

You realize you came to that conclusion from a situation where its intensely easy to say the "dumbness" and "smartness" of the parents was taught to the children, right?

so a nullset. Cool.

>He still believes that IQ tests are culturally biased

Serenity now.

Unfortunately the least "culturally biased" AKA verbal IQ test, the Raven's Progressive Matrices, also happens to show the largest disparities in intelligence between the races.

Add to that the fact that many, many studies have proven a causative relationship between IQ and socioeconomic success, to the point that IQ is the strongest predictor of it, stronger even than socioeconomic class. Furthermore, take into account that there is a direct relationship between the average IQ of a nation and its human development index. Finally, look at the fact that multiple studies attempting to prove the "IQ is purely cultural" hypothesis have ended up instead proving that IQ is overwhelmingly biological/heritable in nature (the Minnesota trans-racial adoption study, and just about every other adoption study out there).

The idea that IQ is largely heritable, varies between the races, and is the single strongest factor influencing the success of both the individual as well as the society, is the 21st century of Heliocentrism in the time of Galileo. There is overwhelming evidence in support of it, but the religious establishment is terrified of acknowledging the relationship and censors all discussion of it because of the implications it carries.

In the 1500s, the Catholic Church was terrified of Heliocentrism because the idea that mankind was not the center of the universe implied that the biblical story of creation was wrong, and it ended up being the first step down the path towards Charles Darwin and the death of God at the hands of empirical science.

TBC

Just google "IQ and genetics" you fucking retard. Do you need a study to prove that fire is hot? We are talking about established facts.

>I can't google 'IQ is genetic'

I thought the general idea nowadays was that genetics = your potential, environment = how much of that you can attain

Like, if your parents are both geniuses but you grow up in a war-torn ghetto and drink lead tainted water everyday you're going to be below average regardless of your genes

Lead paint is still an issue even today, especially for people who live in public housing/projects, if the government came in and cleaned it all up, america as a whole would gain millions of cumulative IQ points, but no one wants to pay for it

Last I checked, IQ was tossed out as a measurement of intelligence, as it's just a measurement of how well people test.

So a study on a genetic linkages to IQ just introduces more uncontrolled variables, such as environment, culture, mass media, etc, etc. So unless the studies were done in total vacuums (impossible) there's no way to derive a meaningful conclusion from them.

But hey, its just easier to think you're genetically superior to them niggers, right?

Continuing:

Today, political dogma has superceded religious dogma, and one of the central tenets of modern western political, particularly leftist dogma, is the notion that all humans have the same innate intellectual potential, and any disparities in measured intelligence or socioeconomic success are therefore the results of cultural differences or of humans oppressing other humans. This is as comforting to us as the idea that God made man the center of the universe was to the Catholic Church, as it reinforces the modern dogmatic worldview that all human inequality can be fixed with better education and opportunities.

Unfortunately, the data doesn't bear that out. Here in Baltimore, for instance, per-student public school spending is actually higher than it is in nearby Montgomery county. Meanwhile, Baltimore features some of the worst schools in the country, while Montgomery county features some of the best. If educational attainment were merely a case of access to resources, the schools should be equal. However the reality is that Baltimore city schools are filled with the kids of unemployed formerly working class people (with the low IQ's that come with it due to O.6-0.8 heritability of IQ) while the kids at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda were born to parents with median household incomes north of $200k a year, and likely inherited the median >~125 IQs that their parents all have. Which is why $15k/student/year grants one group of kids one of the best Ivy League acceptance rates, while just 30 miles up 95 that same $15k/student/year can't even get half of the kids through high school without lowering the standards to what you'd see 5th graders doing in Bethesda.

TBC

In closing:

So the reality we are faced with is an ugly, uncomfortable one, in which kids with low IQ's literally don't have the same academic and career options that high-IQ kids do. But instead of accepting this uncomfortable truth and using it to shape domestic/labor polocy, we have chosen to ignore the reality and instead attack those who wish discuss it, because the implications are so threatening to our 21st century sociological/political dogma.

But ignoring that reality only dooms us to watch helplessly as socioeconomic inequality and the societal unrest that comes with it worsens and worsens.

The concept of testing is inherently cultural. As even in verbal IQ tests, its still pushing information through culturally defined cognitive sieve and seeing what "correct" bits survive to the other side.

The wire even addresses this in a fashion in season 4, with the kids losing interest in anything related to education because none of it comes close to relating to anything they have in their lives. If their IQs were being tested in these cases, they would be losing points. Also that bit in season one, "you fuck up the count they whoop yo ass."

And all you're talking about education spending is entirely irrelevant, because the more kids you have in the system, then more it costs, If you were going by funding per teacher/student, then you might have something resembling an argument. Not to mention no child left behind makes it impossible to expel a student. Ever.

Eh, it's worse than that. It's not that you'll end up with a below-average intelligence, it's that you'll end up with a below-average intelligence relative to your parents.

It's like height. If my mom is 5'11" and my dad is 6'8", I will most likely be taller than average. If I grow up malnourished, I will be less tall than I might have otherwise been, but that will likely mean one that I'm 6'1" instead of 6'4". So I'm still taller than average, just shorter than I might have been.

The same goes for the other side of the spectrum. If my mom is 4'11" and my dad is 5'5" and I grow up malnourished, I might end up being 5' tall, but no amount of good nutrition will ever make me 6'5".

Intelligence works the same way. If my dad has an IQ of 85 and my mom has an IQ of 90, I'll most likely be somewhere between them, and while a rough childhood might leave me with an IQ of 80, no amount of nurture will raise my IQ appreciably higher than that of my patents.

As to early childhood interventions, they can certainly raise IQ in childhood, but unfortunately those gains seem to be completely reached by age 18 or so.

>he believes height child hheight is just an average of both parents

You're just about to lose all business you have talking about anything.

We aren't talking about "culturally biased" IQ tests, we're talking about purely visual ones, aka "guess what the next shape is", which is equally boring/dry for everyone but autistic puzzle nuts.

Seriously, trying to talk to people like you who have been indoctrinated with the "IQ is an utterly meaningless test rooted in cultural/racial biases you shitlord" narrative is like trying to explain Newtonian physics and Keplerian orbital mechanics to someone who still believes in planetary epicycles because their priest told them that God made the earth to be the center of the universe.

When logic is demanded, every straightforward, empirically-based fact is instead countered with an ever-increasingly complicated piece of unfalsifiable pseudoscience to explain the fact that the data grows further from the dogmatic hypothesis with each and every objective observation.

Nope, but saying it's an average of both parents is a hell of a lot simpler that saying "a child's height will fall along a normalized distribution curve, with the mean centered on the averaged heights of their parents".

But fine, lock onto one simplification, because that's the only thing I said that you could refute with actual evidence.

Yes, its is frustrating to talk to people who do not agree with you on something, especially if you have no compelling evidence as to why they should, especially when you believe anyone who says x, must also say y, and therefore is a SJW, despite that never coming up, once.

So good on ya, way to keep the level of discourse low.

Nah breh, its not just one, you're dropping broscience and Sup Forumsscience left and right as if it actually means anything.

And once you start talking about statistical distributions of anything, you're admitting you're ignoring every variable you can't cleanly fit into a narrative (such as all of genetics) and completely undermine your entire argument.

>Intelligence works the same way.
Pretty big leap in reasoning to make this conclusion based on a dubious analogy.

>ctrl+F
>culturally biased
>all (you)

I think you're misunderstanding something basic and getting triggered over arguments you had in the past.

You admit in your post that no one but the most puzzle loving fucks will give anything resembling a fuck over a completely visual, non-linguistic IQ test. Which is just further reinforcing the idea that the entire concept of testing is entirely cultural.

So it seems you're legitimately in a state of doublethink.

Whatts going on?


First the Exorcist Thread, now this


Feels like Christmas in the middle of summer

Show me one African country that even comes close on the HDI to a white country.

Hell, show me one, ONE community in the US was majority white and saw a net increase in all quality of life indicators as more black people moved into it and I might be more willing to take your dogmatic rants more seriously.

But you don't have those examples, examples that exist for every other minority in the US such as Jews, Chinese-Americans, and Indian-Americans, hell, even American Indians. And rather than keep an open mind and consider hypotheses that run counter to the sociological religion that you have been unwittingly indoctrinated into, you instead attack those that challenge your central dogma with the same vitriol that Torquemada employed in pursuit of whatever he deemed to be heretical on a given day.

I actually grew up believing the same as you did, but once I saw the data, and once I spent the last decade working firsthand with the poor of all races in east-coast cities, the ugly truth that intelligence is heritable, that IQ predicts social class, and that therefore poverty is innately hereditary became overwhelmingly clear to me.

As someone who still considers myself to be a liberal, it actually pisses me off, because we have allowed America's poor to suffer terribly through 50 years of failed domestic policy that has done fuck all to make people's lives better all because we don't want to acknowledge the truth (and build solutions that are mindful of it) because it shatters our precious political dogma.

Or to put it this way: If you're actively placing adherence to an ideology above any openness to thorough empirical discussion of the etiology of a social problem, did you ever really care about the lives of the people affected by that problem in the first place?

Its 2, right? dots outside represent negative numbers, dots inside represent positive numbers, each one is as vertical math problem, and the answer is 4 "outside."

How would someone not familiar with Cartesian number lines understand/visualize the process of adding negatives to negatives and such? The middle one is an okay sort of start to being a primer, (have five, 2 leave, 3 remain) but the left and right columns require the tested subject to abstract the middle completely in order to get the correct answer.

I don't claim to know what the hell IQ actually tests (though I do believe it's the same thing as G), but the fact that just about every good study has demonstrated a causative relationship between IQ and socioeconomic/societal outcome (instead of the other way around) makes it abundantly clear to me what whatever IQ is, it is incredibly valuable to have in a modern, western society.

>HDI

Fuck, I had a feeling you were going there. Good thing i inb4'd you with .

>though I do believe it's the same thing as G

But does it cause one to suffer like G did?

That was obviously one of the hard ones. A Raven's test starts with stuff like pic related and gets progressively more complicated the further into it you get.

Your IQ is determined by how many of get right compared to the hypothetical "average" test taker.

The sorts of highly abstracted answers that you describe aren't seen until the last cards in the test, the ones that are intended to be indicative of >130 IQ's, since that is the level of intelligence most commonly seen with those sorts of reasoning skills.

summer is ending. Kids are in bed/school, remotely intelligent people return.

Its why the kids started believing summer Sup Forums was a myth. They drove out posters, so actual posts per minute/day didn't change much.

>reason

Also an intensely cultural concept. Age of Reason, the enlightenment, etc. Periods that were huge fundamental changes in society and culture in response to teaching people an organized system of thought.

And, yea, I've taken the entire raven's test a few times, as it was popular as fuck on Sup Forums for a bit... in the beforetimes.

But you're still mostly dodging the question. Cartesian number lines are pretty much the foundation of all higher math, and Descartes almost instantly renders his shit at odds with math as a whole (square roots of negative numbers), so learning how to reconcile the paradoxes caused by interactions between Cartesian, Pythagorean, and euclidean math is not something that can be reasoned through, that shit has to be taught and it has to be practiced, because it simply doesn't work unless its forced to work.

bamp

I thought it was 6, not black btw

Am I retarded

Yeah but my sociology class told me that intelligence is just culture, and that culture appears magically and has no relation to genetics. Racists btfo

I never needed to learn it, because I think graphically and all sequential numerical figures (numbers, dates, etc) have always appeared on a number line in my head when I think of them for as long as I can remember. Geometry was also incredibly intuitive for me.

But I also know my IQ is 143 from test administered by a Harvard-affiliated cognitive psychologist as part of a learning disability workup.

Which is exactly where I was going with the idea that IQ has meaning. You're right. Not everyone can instantly pick up on the intricacies of Cartesian number theory. But for some, it's just as logical as 1+1=2. Which is exactly what the IQ tests are looking for. Intelligence is a measurement of your ability to comprehend increasing degrees of complexion thought. The higher/more complicated the kinds of thoughts that your brain can comprehend, the higher your IQ.

So just because something isn't self-explanatory to some people but is to others doesn't mean that invalidates the test. If anything, it does the complete opposite.

Yeah, it's clearly not one of the ones that's a repeat of one already in the matrix, which eliminates 3 out of the 6. I just guessed from there. 33.3% odds are fine by me.

give me a right answer then or I dont belive you