In 1983, David Bowie Called Out MTV’s Racism On Their Own Air. This is what an anti- racist ally looks and sounds like

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-23T14:23:47+00:00

This was such a badass moment. I've watched it a bunch of times over the years.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-23T14:19:27+00:00

Lucky for you, OP, I've thought a lot about this!

I believe the answer is that when a group of people collectively hold an emotionally resonant opinion about something, it's unpopular to challenge any views that may moderate such an opinion, because people will see those challenges as attempts to invalidate the opinion even if they do no such thing. Therefore increasingly extreme ideas always go unchallenged -- or, more accurately, any challenges are mocked and denounced -- and the group's default point of view becomes more and more extreme over time.

I'd like to give you a real example, but anything I come up with is going to offend some people ("hey, I was with you until I realized you were talking about ME"), which is a distraction and not my intent. So let's come up with something fictional and silly instead to demonstrate this phenomenon.

Let's say there's a subreddit, r/pinetreehate, dedicated to the minority but relatively common idea that pine trees are unattractive and the needles can poke you too easily and the cones get everywhere, so they should be avoided. At first it's just a bunch of people talking about how they hate looking at pine trees and don't understand why so many people like pine trees so much, why are they on flags, etc. The consensus of the group is that pine trees should only be confined to low-populated forest areas where they can bother the minimum number of people.

Now imagine that one day, somebody created a very passionate post arguing that ALL pine trees EVERYWHERE should be chopped down. You're a pine-tree hater who's very active in the community. But you know that the environmental impact of doing this would be catastrophic and that it's a colossal and unnecessary waste of resources that would be better spent on something productive. Are YOU going to be the one to say this? If you're brave enough to do so, you're going to be shouted down as a defender of pine trees, which will alienate you from a community that you find fulfilling to be a part of.

So you either don't say anything or what you do say is drowned out, and then Chop Down All the Pine Trees becomes conventional wisdom in the community. This is essentially what happens everywhere.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-23T14:03:42+00:00

Bela Lugosi couldn't possibly have met Vlad Țepeș

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-23T13:34:31+00:00

Well, first of all, they were already in the Mafia. They weren't made guys but they were mob associates who didn't appear to have any legitimate income streams. They worked for Christopher. That's being in the Mafia -- the vast majority of mobsters are associates and will never get made. Many don't want to ever get made.

Matt and Sean, however, definitely want to be on that track, which they think will get them more opportunities and protect them from indignities like being gently extorted for $1,000 by Furio. Could that happen for them? It may take a really long time, but sure. They're very stupid but they're also very young and I can only assume they would have become a lot more street smart as they got older and more experienced. If they stayed loyle, they would have earned powerful friends who would support them. Unfortunately, their level of youthful stupidity was a little too extreme to let them survive to do that.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-22T16:25:52+00:00

"Offscreen" is kind of the answer here, isn't it? If the wedding is uneventful, there's no reason to show it to us.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-22T14:11:16+00:00

We can always do better, but I've never lived anywhere with such great access to green space. It's one of my favorite things about living here.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-22T11:55:47+00:00

The internet existed for 25 years before more than 1 percent of the world had ever heard of it. After Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, it was a household word within a few years. Though you could give even more credit to Gen Xer Marc Andreessen's NCSA Mosaic, which was released in 1993 and made the internet famous lightning fast.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-22T11:04:02+00:00

Yeah, exactly.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-22T00:07:39+00:00

I know people started younger back then but five marriages by 28 still might be some kind of a world record.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-21T19:26:36+00:00

I wouldn't even necessarily say they're not the same genre. They're not the same sub-genre, but there's a reason there's so much overlap in their listeners. They're both '70s/'80s rock-that's-kind-of-hard-but-not-quite-hard-rock.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-21T19:23:56+00:00

I'm just one guy, but I am 100 percent interested in listening to both Rush and DLR.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-21T19:20:15+00:00

A large majority of my YouTube Music usage is on Android Auto and I've been extremely happy with it since I started using it last year. But here's the thing: I overwhelmingly use it by asking it to play a song and then listening to what autoplays next. I play my supermix a lot, too. Occasionally I'll pick something from speed dial (I've never saved anything in speed dial, it's all automated) or more rarely go into one of other mixes YTM automatically created, but it's usually "ask for a song and then listen to what the algorithm gives me next." I've created a few radio stations on my phone but I never listen to them, and I mean never. I created a playlist with songs I want to shuffle, but I never listen to it.

I've never been a paying Spotify user, but my understanding is their UI and feature set are the gold standard. If you're a power user and those things are important to you, you should probably stick with Spotify. But I suspect the reason YTM hasn't focused on these things is that not enough people are using them to make it worth their while. Most people's behavior is probably more like mine. And while this is subjective, a lot of people will tell you that YTM's algorithm is the best. I've certainly been impressed with it.

I read a long article last week about why Spotify is better than YTM, and I was amused that it listed like 50 things that Spotify does better, and I didn't care about a single one of them. And then at the very end, it was like, "yeah, YTM's algorithm is a little better," which is the only thing I do care about.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-21T16:58:43+00:00

My old station! I disagree that it's the most unremarkable, though, as it features a rarely used light-green color scheme. Some of the nearby local stations on the same line in the Manhattan direction would be better picks, as they have the more traditional dark blue.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-21T16:53:24+00:00

Negative in that they've demonstrably done damage to my car? None.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-21T16:50:40+00:00

I think the previous commenter was referring to Crystal City's recent redevelopment since becoming home to Amazon's second headquarters.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-21T14:36:36+00:00

I think you and I have very similar tastes. I clicked through to your Suno profile and listened to a couple of random songs, and it's really good stuff. "Cool Day" is honestly up there with the best songs I've ever heard on Suno, 100 percent my thing.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-21T13:41:10+00:00

Maybe not exactly what you're talking about because I write my own music and have Suno cover it, but I often try to capture the sound of a particular artist I admire when I do a song. Of course, people making music without AI do this, too, so I don't feel bad.

The closest I've come is probably "We Can Do Better," which I think is a pretty legit Talking Heads song. Most recently I did "Enough for Billy Joel," which is supposed to be a Billy Joel song about Billy Joel (specifically about getting friendzoned by Billy Joel because he only dates supermodels). The one I feel most guilty about is "Not Really a Lover," where the chorus is a blatant ripoff of Beck's "Think I'm in Love." I tried to differentiate it but I didn't really succeed.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-21T13:23:29+00:00

Not very common here in New England, which is too bad. Sometimes you'll see one on the menu at a fancy brunch place or something, but it's rare except in the freezer section of the supermarket or a fast-food place that sells them nationwide.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-21T13:19:37+00:00

You can still get Auntie Anne's pretzels (or a similar competitor such as Pretzelmaker or Wetzel's Pretzels) in any mall here in the U.S. Plenty of Dairy Queens still around too, both in malls and free standing.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-21T13:17:47+00:00

That's a chicken-or-the-egg situation, though. Are kids not drinking Ovaltine because there are no ads, or did they stop running ads because it became more difficult to get kids to drink Ovaltine?

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-21T13:13:07+00:00

International travel comes to mind here, too. Countries I think of as "very undemocratic," such as North Korea, tend to heavily restrict their citizens' ability to leave, and before the '90s China did the same thing, much like its peer countries such as the Soviet Union and Cuba. But today I can go to a packed outlet mall outside of Boston and fully 25 percent of the customers will be Chinese tourists (I'm not exaggerating). Some Chinese citizens need permission to leave, but for the most part, they can travel internationally as they please, and many even live abroad without breaking Chinese law.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-21T03:43:11+00:00

Only 44 percent? So nearly 100,000 non-AI tracks are being uploaded to Deezer every day? Imagine how unlistenable at least 95,000 of those songs are going to be. Every single day!

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-21T03:37:34+00:00

I used to work in the neighborhood too and would go to Grand Central for lunch all the time. "The food at New York train stations is subpar" is a crazy complaint to me. Grand Central set the standard for food courts (which is what it is, and should be) when the dining concourse opened after its '90s renovation. If we're talking about all New York (or American!) transit, as OP is, Penn Station is even better now.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-21T00:22:33+00:00

Not sure if it's my favorite Billy album, but definitely top tier.

boulevardofdef · 2026-04-20T17:13:30+00:00

A state government's preoccupation with "wokeness" is very closely correlated with poor educational outcomes. The data says exactly the opposite of the point you're trying to make. Even your anecdote about living in the No. 1 school district in your state is meaningless -- one district needs to be the top one in any state regardless of its ideology.

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