Agreed, great movie, great lines, great acting, wonderfully referential. And I learned useful things from the review.

Also, the movie is emotionally quite powerful as well as funny.

And your evidence for this is ...?

It is one of those irregular nouns.
Q: What is a man who has sex with prepubescent girls?
A: A paedophile
Q: What is a man who has sex with prepubescent boys?
A: A homosexual

The gender of the victims of paedophiles says nothing about the (adult) sexual preferences of the paedophile. Indeed, male paedophiles who are heterosexual in their adult attachments tend to prey on younger boys than homosexual male paedophiles, since they have fewer of the adult masculine traits they are not attracted to.

If the owner of a football club offered to take over running the entire football league, everyone would see that was really stupid, because of the obvious conflict of interest in having the same club competing in the league while being also in charge of setting and enforcing the rules.
Obviously stupid.
But that is exactly how public education works. The government sets the rules, enforces the rules and is the main producer. The conflict of interest is obvious, but ignored because somehow government is magical.
The two main providers of schooling are governments and churches. That is because they both are interested in socialising children into particular sets of beliefs. Since it is hard to test whether you have actually inculcated the beliefs, one controls the inputs.
So, extending school hours means control over more inputs.
Not only is school choice needed, governments should stop running schools at all, and just stick to making and enforcing the rules and ensuring all students have funding (since we all benefit from the literacy of our fellow citizens).

Churchill and FDR allied with Stalin during WWII. Does that mean they "created" Stalinism? The ideological roots of al-Qaeda go back decades before the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Read The Looming Tower (which I review here) if you want genuine understanding.

People really should not cite Leviticus for moral commands. Citing Leviticus 18:22 & 20:13 but not other commands in Leviticus is in clear defiance of Leviticus 18:4-5, 26; 19:19, 37; 20:22 which require all the laws set out be followed. If one is picking and choosing, then one’s authority is not Leviticus but whatever criteria one is using to pick and choose one particular bit of the "Holiness Code" and not others.

But that is why the index not only has some attitudinal features but includes such things as:
Number of civic and social organizations per 1000 population
Average number of club meetings attended in last year
Average number of group memberships
Average number of times volunteered in last year
Average number of times entertained at home in last year
Average number of times worked on community project in last year
Number of non-profit (501[c]3) organizations per 1000 population
Served as officer of some club or organization in last year (percent)
Served on committee of some local organization in last year (percent)
You mix in attitudinal and behavioural indicators to get a more complete picture.

Putnam's original study was of Italy after the introduction of provincial government. He famously found that the strength of choral societies in a region predicted how well governed a province was. My original point was simply to suggest a way in which the legacy of slavery may still matter. The connection to economic success is a more complicated matter and not one I was alluding to, you brought that up.

Regions low in social capital are more likely to be comparative poorly governed, to have higher levels of social division and to have lower rates of economic growth. To put it another way, the less connected a society is, the poorer the information flows within it, the less likely effective citizen organisation to restrain office holders from being corrupt, inefficient and divisive is and the less likely people are to connect in mutually beneficial ways.

JFK was being ironic: so he found Washington charmless and inefficient.

Attitudinal surveys such as that are generally crude measures, that is why Putnam's index is a composite of a series of indicators. I am not sure, however, that I understand your question. The question results are just what proportion of people responding stated they agreed with those statements.

If you did a cross-tab with how rural a State is, it is unlikely you would find much correlation with the level of social capital. Indeed, it is part of Putnam's contention in Bowling Alone that rising urbanisation has seen in recent decades a decline in social capital.

Nor is slavery at all likely to be the only factor which affects levels of social capital. Very strong kinship structures can be bad for social capital since it encourages an "us and them" attitude. You can see this in Southern Italy, most of the Middle East and, I take it, Appalachia.

That reminds me of JFK's comment on Washington DC: "a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm" :)

But social capital is not really about charm, vivacity or immediate friendliness, it is about more enduring connections and deeper attitudes.