It was all a meme

CNN or The Onion?

2009-06-06T21:45:00.000-04:00

Throwing Down

2009-05-28T00:45:00.003-04:00

Tonight was the first meeting of the weekly ceramics class I decided to take in order to humanize myself to Ilan and Lauren (little do they know I'd still kill them to save a computer!). I got into ceramics in high school after I stopped complaining about the mandatory art class and decided to give it a try -- this is the last time I can recall an authority figure being right about forcing me to do something. (Authority didn't even get to enjoy the feather in its cap -- I never really got to thank my ceramics teacher for exposing me to something I will love for the rest of my life, and anyway the bulk of her daily experience was yelling at people for making marijuana paraphernalia).

There are basically two pottery aesthetics. One is "make something that has thin walls and is functional. Spend as little time glazing as possible (i.e., dip it in the glaze instead of painting it on). Now make 11 more exactly identical things", and the other is "I just carved a frog into into the side of my pot!". Obviously I belong to the first school, with the additional qualification that the identical bowls (mugs are probably more useful, but the handles are annoying) look like they were made by a machine.

On the other hand, the rest of the class is very human:

(Carol, the instructor, spots me throwing away an attempt at a bowl)

Carol: Wait, did you just throw away that ball of used clay?
Me: Well, wedging it again would be a pain in the ass -- it's $20 for 25 pounds, right? The replacement cost of this small piece can't be more than a few dollars.
Carol: Oh, that's not really how I think about it ... for me it's more like "I can use that clay to make another pot".
Me: Hmmmm, so I guess this is a bad time to ask whether I can pay someone to clean my wheel for me?

I didn't want to get into it at the time (as with the gym, after awhile you learn that correcting people in the pottery studio is a waste of time), but life truly is too short to re-wedge slimy used clay. Does she have any idea how many vodka tonics people buy even though they're about to leave the bar and aren't really even in the mood?

The Luddites Have a Point (or Do They?)

2009-05-13T01:37:00.002-04:00

David Bradley writes:

What scares me is the pride with which many of the people who claim they don’t understand “computers” brandish their ignorance

One reason for this is people don't think learning technology is a legitimate intellectual activity. Many people envision the problems of computer science to be more complex versions of "how do I install this printer?" They can follow the instructions if they have to, but they'd prefer to just ask their grandchildren.

Which is a shame because the reality is that there's a whole world of ideas out there. Understanding, say, object-oriented programming or the idea behind a relational database is analogous to reading Hamlet or Mill. People don't brag about not having read Hamlet.

But anyone can read Hamlet -- you just pick up the book. On the other hand, how can you learn about object-oriented programming? Well, the wikipedia article is gibberish*, every book is too technical -- I'm out of ideas.

People get more exposure to math and science, but it's taught in a similarly unpleasant and inaccessible way. For example, any high school calculus student can tell you that the integral of x is (x^2/2) because "it's the anti-derivative". None are likely to know why differentiation and integration are inverse operations.

One problem is that to really understand this stuff you have spend a lot of time working out, e.g., what a "real number" is. This is a) is pretty boring, and b) unnecessary if all you need to do is use the equations in physics.

This is a shame though, because like computer science, math and science contain some accessible and compelling ideas. Unlike computer science though, there are a few good popularizations of math and science that require no background. The most prominent example is probably Godel, Escher, Bach, but more straightforward books like The Elegant Universe are pretty good as well.

Takeaways:

Someone should write a good popularization of applied computer science!
Everyone who's good at technology should stop pretending the boring stuff is so fucking interesting! Despite what my 16 year-old self would tell you, building your own computer is not fun. It's a time consuming cycle of experimentation and googling. (and pirating DVDs is a waste of time!).

So I guess the luddites have a point in that a lot of perceived technological "expertise" is really just familiarity with the boring and arbitrary implementation details that computers unnecessarily expose to us all the time. I.e., it seems like one could reasonably say "I'm not interested in learning to install a hard drive for the same reason I'm not interested in learning to change my oil."

* Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm that uses "objects" and their interactions to design applications and computer programs. Programming techniques may include features such as information hiding, data abstraction, encapsulation, modularity, polymorphism, and inheritance. It was not commonly used in mainstream software application development until the early 1990s. Many modern programming languages now support OOP.

The Power of Less

2009-05-04T11:07:00.004-04:00

Ilan and I have been experimenting with Fresh Direct.

Delivery Guy: Where do you want the boxes?
Me: (Excited) Put them on the island, I guess? (Inside: I had no idea you offered this level of service!!!)
Delivery Guy: No problem -- whoa, it smells good in here!
Ilan: Yeah, this is our first time ordering from Fresh Direct; do you have any tips?
Delivery Guy: What? Oh, yeah, I accept tips.

Needless to say, it took some maneuvering to get out of this pickle (IRL it was me who asked if he had any tips -- you run out of things to talk about!).

Anyway, buying groceries is a balancing act:

You want to buy a lot at once so you don't have to transact as frequently
You can't buy so much that it will rot before being consumed

Of course the latter depends on how good the grocery is -- red cabbage goes bad more slowly than avocados, but it's also consumed more slowly and so you can buy about the same amount of each.

There are only a few groceries that are both tasty enough and last long enough to buy in enough quantity that it's worth the pain in the ass. Here they are:

Jumbo carrots
Pickles
Apples
Grapes (to freeze -- these are only necessary if you're planning on caddying or having sex and want to eat them afterwards)

I find videobox commenters only moderately more intelligent than Matt Yglesias

2009-04-06T14:48:00.005-04:00

I gave him a 2 carton box as a "gag gift" first

2009-03-25T00:35:00.004-04:00

Pop quiz: what's the most rational way to dispose of unfinished Atlas soup of the day? Counter-intuitively, the answer isn't "out the window" (spit take, I know). It's "flush down toilet" (but if you said "out the window", we really have no quarrel. ("Carefully put the top on the container and put it in the trash", on the other hand -- I've been watching you.))

Guess where I am!

The Doha International Airport Premium Lounge as Branding and Social Networking

If you ask a woman on the street about the Doha International Airport Premium Lounge, she'd probably say: "Oh, that's just full of businessmen who are interested in being productive and making their flights". Wrong!

This common attitude is all based purely on the Lounge's BRAND, you idiots! People in there are actually just relaxing and socializing while their laptops charge. Oh, you idiots think they have have unlimited Milanos because they're the most nutritious snack?

Business Lounge / Waterfall crossbranding experiment

Every building in Hyderabad looks either like a run-down 1980s-style condo (whose construction has just finished), or a 50 (100?) year-old lean-to covered with advertisements for mobile phones. Arriving at 4am was cool because I got to see all the municipal workers releasing the stray dogs into the city that they had earlier collected from across the country (seriously, what is with all the stray dogs.)

Everyone at the hotel was standoffishly obsequious -- one of their favorite moves was to ask "May I enter?". Of course you can enter! a) how else is my tea / DVD player going to get into the room, and b) do you really think that I'm being so anti-social as to walk away from the door like this without implicitly inviting you in? I guess they think it's a form of pampering, but really it just makes the whole situation even more alienating. I felt similarly uncomfortable when they forced me (in mock mortification) to expand at length on the at-bottom-irreducible reason I wanted to send the lambchops back (after about 45 minutes of interrogation, I muttered something that the waiter summarized as "Ah! Fatty and not much meat?")

My kindle broke just as a Jim Cramer conspiracy theory reached it's climax (obviously). Now the screen's all dark and line-y and the "famous authors" screensaver only fades partially. So now I can't make Emily Bronte's disgusting fucking face go away when I want to read something:

Fortunately, when I purchased the device, I negotiated a deal with Amazon, whereby, if it broke, I would have the option to purchase another at full price.

I spent some time cataloging and organizing the personal productivity blogs I read -- converting them from a per-sub-category grouping (Personal Finance, "Lifehacking", GTD Systems, Email Workflow Optimization, Google Reader Strategies & Tactics) to a grouping by quality (best blogs in the "A" folder, second best in the "B" folder, &c) and then back again.

This kept me occupied for a few hours, until, kindle-less, I lit a Dunhill and forced myself to pop in the Battlestar Galactica pilot / miniseries DVD.

Battlestar Galactica is terrible, or, alternatively, if you like plotlines in which central characters' (who obviously can't die this early in the series!) lives depend on whether they're saved before a countdown reaches zero, quite consistent. I actually found the pilot reasonably engaging -- the Ender's Game-style premise (earth barely wins the first war against space bad guys and then the second war starts), the idea of a (as it turns out incompetent) man-made artificial intelligence attacking us, the peculiar political power vacuum situation caused by 99% of civilization getting killed, etc.

After the show got picked up however, they went into "lets milk this motherfucker" mode and started giving you constant updates about all these terrible characters instead of advancing the fucking plot. I get it -- every character is "the best we've got" despite his personal problems! Here is the plot of one episode:

The "Starbuck" character (edgy female pilot -- the best we've got) is asked to train some new pilots.
The pilots are pretty bad, but probably okay for beginners.
"Get out of here guys, you'll never be pilots!"
It is revealed that earlier Starbuck unintentionally contributed to the death of her boyfriend by letting him pass flight school when he really wasn't ready. Maybe this is why she's being so hard on the recruits!
Commander Adama: Starbuck! Stop letting your personal life interfere with your work! Let Zac go -- it wasn't your fault! (You're the best instructor I've got!)
"Okay guys, you're back in training!"
(Cylons attack, Starbuck is shot down, ticking timer until she runs out of Oxygen -- audience on edge of seat re: whether she'll die!)

And so forth, right down to the last meme (the last meme, of course, being the idea of the spaceship's captain meticulously working on a model ocean-ship in his spare time). But obviously I ended up watching the whole first season, and then, when I ran out of disks, reading episode summaries on wikipedia (and, occasionally the Battlestar wiki). Why? Because I wanted to find out what was going to happen, and which humans were Cylons!

Let this be a lesson to you Young Writers: it's much easier to make the audience want to find out what happens next or how some mystery gets resolved than it is to make them want to find out what a character will say next or how he feels about something, etc. (In another episode, Adama gives his son his father's good luck charm lighter right before the son is about to fly on a crucial mission and the son promises to bring it back -- AHHH MY EYES!)

Once I ran out of BSG content with which to vortex, I had that same nightmare two nights in a row and flew back to NYC. (It was the one where I'm responsible for the music at a party filled with cute poor hipster girls. I can barely keep up if I manually control my iPod the whole time, but they keep saying "just put on a playlist with some ambient hip-hop!").

Fortunately, I found the perfect present for Ilan right in the Qatar airlines duty free shop:

If You Don't Like What The Numbers Are Saying, Get Some New Numbers

2009-03-10T16:49:00.004-04:00

TechCrunch speculates that Apple and Google could replace Citigroup and GM in the Dow. It's a pretty incoherent post, but the point made at the end, though sad, is important:

Some might say that the Dow Jones, with the limited amount of funds to track, is inaccurate and insignificant compared to the reach of the S&P 500. But still, it is the Dow that most Americans know and follow.

I don't believe that "most Americans" know or follow the Dow, but I do know that simply swapping out the underperformers for better performers undermines any scant remaining legitimacy the Dow might retain as a broad, American economic indicator.

Headlines That Please (Vol II)

2009-02-21T19:30:00.000-05:00

It's Sort Of Weird To Realize That If You Were Raped, It Would Just Be Rape, And Not "Molestation"

2009-02-21T00:00:00.000-05:00

Eben recently turned me on to Jeff Pearlman, a former SI writer who's got a blog. Good writing, he said. It's right up your alley; trust me, you'll like it.*

Eben's not often wrong about these things. He turned me on to Anonymous Lawyer back when it was still funny/published; he gave me a copy of Confederacy of Dunces; he harped on The Wire relentlessly. He does still watch 24, but nobody's perfect.

It's possible that Pearlman's, coincidentally, had a rough streak during the time I've consumed his posts. He's not been publishing for all that long, either, so maybe he's just adjusting to the format. This week's posts, though, have not been good. And by "not been good," I mean "been not good."

In part, I think it's because he's focused on steroids, and sportswriters, like other media figures/humans, tend to be at their worst when talking about morality. For one, it's hard not to step back and be like "IT'S A FUCKING GAME," when reading for the umpteenth time about how 'roiders have dishonored everything it means to be an Athlete, an American, and a Human. I'm less susceptible than some (Tom) to this, because I actually do like and care about sports, and think that on balance they serve a positive function in society. For two, sportswriters are rarely the sharpest tools in the shed. The sharper ones interested in writing for a living are waxing idiotic about morality in the context of Israel-Palestine, or stupidly advocating ever-more-expensive military purchases, or being Jim Fallows (he's the bomb).

Here are some choice bits from a recent post:

When I was a kid, my dream was to dig a tunnel in my backyard and wind up in Disney World. [You were a retarded kid. You also dreamt small.] I really thought I could do it, too. [Really, retarded.]I’d get Gary Miller and Dennis Gargano and John Ballerini to come over with their shovels, and we’d dig and dig and dig until reaching the Magic Kingdom. Boy, that would have kicked butt. [?]

[Covering sports i]s a fantastic way to make a living, and I count my blessings quite often. But there’s something about this widespread cheating (and it is, undeniably, cheating) that drives me to drink. [What about all the other cheating that took place over the years? That didn't bother you? Have you ever written an article blasting spitballers? Excoriating Kenny Rogers, who cheated IN THE WORLD SERIES? Calling for Gaylord Perry's ouster from the Hall of Fame?] In my six years of covering major league baseball for Sports Illustrated, I was led to believe I was seeing a lot of amazing things. Faster-than-ever fastballs; deeper-than-ever homers; arms that acted as cannons, and jumps that rivaled Mike Powell’s best. In hindsight, however, I’ve learned that much of it was fiction. [You are retarded. Your job was to cover this game; this massive, massively-obvious conspiracy was taking place in this game; you did not suspect anything; I should hate the perpetrators of the conspiracy for fooling you???] I was, in a sense, covering the WWF. [You were also, in a sense, covering women's basketball. What the fuck, in a sense, does this sentence mean? Does it mean the outcome of games was scripted? The announcing crews were better? That this is a misleading and/or irrelevant comparison? Right.] Why does this bother me? Because I have always been a lover of baseball’s history; of the very idea that Mickey Mantle and Bernie Williams stood in the exact same spot; that Rickey Henderson’s stolen bases, Lou Brock’s stolen bases and Ty Cobb’s stolen bases can be measured on the same chart. [Someone should teach him about controlling for eras and parks, such that these things can actually_be_compared.]

Yes, things have changed over the years: Stadium sizes, ball textures, integration, internationalism. But baseball is baseball is baseball is baseball. [Someone has apparently taught him about such things, though obviously only superficially, as we see with the "baseball is..." sentence.]

Hence, to see someone like Barry Bonds or Alex Rodriguez come along and show such blatant disrespect for the history of the game, well, it infuriates me. [Hard to see how you get a "Hence Q" from "P is P is P is P."] I’ve written this before, but if you’re Barry Bonds, how do you possibly justify breaking Hank Aaron’s all-time home run record while loaded with steroids and HGH? You know the man faced bitter racism in his pursuit; know he received death threats on more than one occasion. So how do you cheat? [With a syringe and a guillable press corps.] How? Or, in a similar case, you’re Mark McGwire. You’ve been juicing regularly, and when you pass Roger Maris’ single-season mark you rub your bat against his and begin to cry. How? How? Roger Maris’ 1961 was, from an individual standpoint, a nightmare. The media rooted against him; he began losing his hair and chain smoking. It was pure hell—and you come along, cheat and claim the title as your own? How? [Well to be fair, the pitchers were cheating too.]

So, yes, I am self-righteous, and I need to move on, and my high horse is on stilts by now. But I just can’t shed this anger. I probably need to, but I can’t. Not yet anyhow.

That’s my sincere explanation.

Thanks. [You ever cheat on anything in your life, Jeffy boy? Yes? Good, go kill yourself.]

I wrote this giant blog post, then realized that someone else said basically the same thing, only much more pithily.

*Eben wishes it noted that since his recommendation (he called Pearlman "must read") he has not read a single Perlman post. Did he level me?

It's Simple

2009-02-19T18:51:00.001-05:00

One thing Yglesias whines about a lot is the idea of simplifying the tax code. This has a lot of upsides and no real downsides, other than for lawyers and accountants who are paid to exploit the complexities and ambiguities in the code so that their wealthy clients save money. I always assumed that, at some point, the complexity of the tax code would cease to matter, because computers would just take care of shit. So, while to humans, the difference between 15 rules and 1500 rules to apply before arriving at a figure is rather large; to a computer, this difference takes up all of .003 extra seconds (I used Stirling's to approximate that).

Some persuasive evidence that I am wrong arrived today, in the form of a W2 1099 from a company I did some work for this year. The boxes on it are numbered. Here are the titles associated with numbers 1-10:

Rents
Royalties
Other income
Federal income tax withheld
Fishing boat proceeds
Medical and health care payments
Nonemployee compensation
Substitute payments in leu of dividends or interest
Payer made direct sales of $5000 or more of consumer products to a buyer (recipient) for resale [with a box for checking]
Car insurance proceeds

Headlines That Please (Vol I)

2009-02-12T20:45:00.001-05:00

This one's from CNN.

Free At Last; Free At Last; Thank God All-Mighty; I'm Free At Last

2009-02-09T07:19:00.006-05:00

I closed all of my Bank of America accounts today. They asked why, and I cited John Thain's commode.

Slippery Slopes

2009-02-08T20:45:00.000-05:00

Maybe some of the aspiring lawyers among my readership can answer this question for me. I'd imagine that, if someone left a stereo in a public place, and that stereo were blaring an annoying, incredibly loud series of alarm-sounds on repeat, after some amount of time I would be legally allowed to turn it off, take it, or destroy it. My question is: what if the "stereo" is also a "car"? How long do I have to wait?

P-O-O-P

2009-02-04T08:45:00.001-05:00

Defecating in another man's bathroom is like raiding enemy territory: you get in, you do what you have to do, and you get out, all the while hoping to leave as little evidence of your presence as possible. You're attentive to sounds, odors, and really anything else that might be emanating as a result of your incursion; you don't want your presence (in the bathroom) nor your lack of a presence (where everyone else is) noted; you don't want to take too long, but you definitely don't want to leave the job unfinished and risk a return trip.

This is why a nice rack with a selection of reading materials is such a wonderful gift you, as host, can give your guests. All at once it provides people with something to do (especially people hesitant about using an iphone while, you know) and assures them that you know what they're doing, and you're ok with it. Indeed, they should just relax and enjoy themselves. I recommend stocking it with the current New Yorker, and back issues of the Yale Alumni Magazine. The former is useful after the person exits, providing them with instant conversation fodder, while the latter helps the main event along nicely.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet

2009-02-03T12:27:00.003-05:00

Some time ago, I put up a post cataloguing one instance of the larger debate over how and when one should use the phrase "begs the question." There are two camps on this one. First, there's the Rugby Dan/Jeremy camp, whose members are firmly against using begs the question to mean raises the question, under any circumstances, and generally feel that those who do misuse it in this fashion should be subject to, at the least, scorn (Rugby) and, at the most, death (Jeremy). I hesitantly count myself a part of this camp, and, although I am slightly more equivocal in my views, I come down on Jeremy's side of the punishment question. Arrayed against this formidable alliance of nitpickers/linguistic crusaders stand Tom and Ariel, Tom doubly so because he not only decries linguistic prescriptivism but also believes begs the question to be an empty statement (according to Tom, all valid arguments beg the question).

To each group I offer a challenge. Now, one mildly sophisticated thing to know about "hopefully" is that it is commonly used incorrectly, as is spelled out in some length in the usage note here. Saying "hopefully, I will do [x]," actually means I will do x, and I will do it in a manner that suggests that I am full of hope, not I hope that I will be able to do x. One interesting aside from the usage note: opposition to this usage has increased on the panel, despite the fact that other adverbs used in this fashion are given a pass (mercifully, frankly), so:

It is not the use of sentence adverbs per se that bothers the Panel; rather, the specific use of hopefully in this way has become a shibboleth.

As such, I would challenge Jeremy and Dan to only use hopefully in its original sense. As the usage note points out, unlike with begs/raises the question, hopefully is useful precisely because there's no exact synonym for its fake meaning. As such, using hopefully exclusively correctly will likely entail both correcting slip-ups and, occasionally, preemptively contorting one's phrasing.

On the other hand, I would challenge the Tom/Ariels among us to deliberately employ the "modern" usage of begs the question in front of people (a) whose respect they desire (maybe law school profs for Ariel; Ilan and/or Tyler Cowan for Tom), and (b) who are reasonably likely to hold Dan/Jeremy-esque views on the usage question.

Wannabe xkcd

2009-01-31T08:45:00.001-05:00

MoDo

2009-01-30T17:12:00.013-05:00

Some time ago, I commented to Nick that I found it weird that nobody was referring to Bernie Madoff as a sadist, since he'd caused too much pain for me to believe that he wasn't, at least in part, getting off on it. Today Nick points out to me that, of all people, Maureen Dowd read my mind.

There Is Such A Thing As A Free Lunch

2009-01-28T08:45:00.002-05:00

Amid the many TARPs, stimuli, bailouts and nationalizations that are either being floated, implemented (badly) or bastardized beyond recognition in Congress, the key word seems to be tradeoff. TARP all the bad assets and recapitalize the banks, and you've "privatized the profits and socialized the losses," creating a "moral hazard." Put a moratorium on foreclosures and force banks to accept "cramdowns," and you've left the banks with shittier assets on their hands, lowered revenue streams, and created a "moral hazard" (in the other direction). Plus, you cause other banks to have to write down their loans, causing contraction in lending markets which you don't want... A stimulus package targeted at infrastructure is limited by the number and size of "shovel-ready" projects, meaning that some of the monies won't reach the economy until 18mos-2yrs from now, if then. You may also "crowd-out" private investment, although nobody really knows whether that's true, and certainly not to what degree. Lowering taxes provides a shot in the arm, but it's unclear what size multiplier you get, and you certainly decrease government revenues in the future (the Laffer curve remains a joke). Plus, you have to fight Republicans if you ever want to raise them again. Nationalize the banks and you've get the upside of TARP (taking the losses off the banks' balance sheets) without the attendant moral hazard (because the consumers keep the "good bank" assets as well), but you've given up on a central tenet of capitalism as we understand it (that markets should set at least most prices; now we'd have the Fed or its equivalent setting both the price of risk and the price of liquidity.)

So, fine, I don't have any real suggestions/opinions that haven't been raised elsewhere, other than that Greg Mankiw is intellectually dishonest, and high speed rail is great. Except, legalize weed. It's the mythical free lunch, which, if served, we'll all be hungry enough to devour. First, you move a huge black market (isn't MJ the number one cash crop in the US? Why, yes.) into the actual market, enabling it to be taxed. Hooray, revenues! Since the revenues from the current indirect weed tax (the cost of dealing with illegality, from people arrested for smoking, to businesses having their employees face the possibility of getting arrested/shot) accrue to "criminal" enterprises, legalizing weed functionally amounts to a tax on crime (the government takes their revenue stream). Of course, the other benefits of legalization are myriad and would also probably act as a stimulus. The prison guards wouldn't like it, but the cost savings in the form of lowered imprisonment would certainly ease the burden on already stretched state budgets. We could pare back the DEA, significantly. We would lower court costs across the board, and likely see better results as prosecutors, public defenders, judges, and cops see a massive time-sink disappear off their collective calendars. Anyway, weed legalization being a good thing isn't a new idea, but I haven't seen anyone mentioning it as a stimulus-y idea. I would also make the point that Yglesias does, that good policies should virtually always be implemented, regardless of the economic climate. The current economic climate makes some ideas that are in normal times bad ones (bank nationalizations) potential good ones. But a good idea that isn't stimulus-y enough for the current bill (like high speed rail, apparently) should still be implemented.

It's also very much related to another idea that I'll do a post about, which is the counter-intuitive one that WARS ARE INCREDIBLY EXPENSIVE.

Separated at Birth (The Triumphant Return II)

2009-01-28T08:45:00.000-05:00

Schemer Charles Ponzi:

and Jay Chandrasekhar (from Super Troopers)

Granting God's Request

2009-01-27T08:45:00.004-05:00

Here's the cover of Percival Everett's Wounded, which I haven't read yet:

Here's the cover of Nick Antosca's Midnight Picnic, which I also haven't read yet:

Of Few Things I Am Certain

2009-01-26T18:24:00.003-05:00

One of them is that I intensely dislike Terry McAuliffe. Hate is a strong word, to be reserved for...well, no, fuck that. I hate Terry McAuliffe. Of course, most of you would not find this surprising.

McAuliffe is noteworthy not because I hate him, then, but because I'm confident that I would have hated him whenever I was exposed to him. For many contemptible people, it's not hard to imagine liking them, if certain circumstances were different. If I'd met him before that bitch of a girlfriend poisoned him, I might have liked him. I bet he was really chill until he got that job, or didn't get into that school, or became gay. Before he got old and became insane, he was probably a reasonable professor.

Not so McAuliffe. If, in some alternate universe, Terry McAuliffe the boy and I had lived next door to one another, I would have hated him. If we'd been in homeroom together, I'd have hated him. When he's 90 and some sort of éminence grise in the Democratic establishment, or wherever his political ambitions land him, I will hate him. If we volunteered at the same soup kitchen; if I were to marry his daughter; if he simply, for no reason, gave me $1,000,000, I would hate him.

Indeed the vitriol I feel for the man is probably irrational. I tried to make a list of his deplorable qualities, and it isn't that impressive:

He's chirpy - ugh.
He's a liar - fine/reasonable.
He's totally unhinged from reality when it suits him to be - ugh (understandable).
He's enthusiastic - ugh.
He's unintelligent - ugh.
He's utterly, totally, insanely shameless - ugh.
He hunts - ugh.

There was a kid, MP, who played baseball with my brother for a number of years. MP was a hustler in the David Eckstein model: a mediocre-to-bad player who ALWAYS hustled, even when it made no sense to. He was the kind of catcher who would dive for foul balls that were clearly going over the backstop and out of play. The kind of kid who would score sliding when there wasn't even a throw to the plate - in warmups (gotta be the first to get the uniform dirty!). The kind of kid who was always "firing up" his teammates by screaming incoherently at them while they were trying to focus on hitting - with a metal stick - a small, white ball flying at them at the speed cars travel on the freeway. The kind of kid who was always yelling about how many outs there were, even if he was wrong. Terry McAuliffe is a grown-up version of MP. I hate Terry McAuliffe.

(Incidentally, this line from Eve Fairbanks' pre-Gubernatorial profile of McAuliffe is pretty funny: "The idea of Terry McAuliffe babysitting an autistic child seems a patently bad one.")

Irresistable

2009-01-24T03:56:00.005-05:00

On another note, here's Ross Douthat's much-ballyhooed meditation on torture post-9/11. I think it not at all intellectually honest, which is what most of the people who disagreed with it would have said if they didn't like Douthat personally. It's mostly argument by non-sequitur; here's the bright insight that motivates the piece:

That while the Bush Administration's policies clearly failed a just-war test, they didn't fail it in quite so new a way as some of their critics suppose ... and moreover, had I been in their shoes I might have failed the test as well.

He proceeds to go on and on about just war theory, invoke an atomic bomb comparison, and obliquely argue against The Dark Side. What he does not do, however, is more telling.

He does not, once, in some 2100 words, mention efficacy. Or effectiveness. Torture's lack thereof is well-established (incidentally, this is an argument Mayer's made many times, upon which Douthat fails to comment). Assumed throughout Douthat's piece is that torture works. While Douthat doesn't come right out and say so, his phrasing gives him away:

But I certainly remember how I felt about interrogation in the aftermath of 9/11: I felt that we were all suddenly in a ticking-bomb scenario, that the gloves have to come off, and that all kinds of things needed to be on the table.

As Rugby Dan has pointed out before, the ticking time bomb scenario is tendentious as generally posed: You have a responsible party before you who holds some piece of information critical to saving thousands of lives, the lives of people who will otherwise perish in some short amount of time. Do you torture him to get the info? Rugby offers a categorical no, based on this phrasing of the question. I've heard it offered with the following modification: The only way to get it out of him is to torture. Do you? In this case, the answer is probably "toss me the razor and the blowtorch," although it's close. The problem is that the second scenario explicitly, and the first implicitly, assume that torture will achieve the desired effect: saving the people. Which it won't in the first case, and only will in the second case because it's specified as part of the hypothetical. Douthat does not address this issue in the follow-ups (1, 2) to his post. He did finally, kinda get around to it a couple of days ago.

Here's his verdict:

But I know at least some people in Washington for whom this isn't the case: People who argue, with a reasonable degree of knowledge and no self-justifying incentives, that whatever one thinks about the morality of waterboarding, the Bush Administration's interrogation policies up made a substantial difference in our ability to disrupt al Qaeda in the aftermath of 9/11.

Nothing that's been made public to date has left me convinced that they're right. (And even if they are right, it probably wouldn't change my judgment that the Bush Administration's broader record on detainee policy looks like a moral fiasco.) But I'm entirely convinced that they're sincere - and I think that any sincere proponent of what the United States did to its high-value detainees should be willing to see those policies defended more fully and publicly than they've been to date.

(emphasis mine)

Astonishing, no? He defends the decision to torture, decries the results, and then admits that the best evidence he can offer that torture works - that we were, post-9/11, actually in a ticking-time bomb scenario - is that some people he knows are sincere in their belief that torturing hundreds if not thousands of people helped us disrupt al Qaeda.

I am having a difficult time making myself clear to Richard Berger

2009-01-06T14:21:00.000-05:00

In reply to my reply, Rich writes:

the oscars have rules about what can be up for best picture (http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/rules/rule02.html), so if i were you i would have assumed that i (rich) had just assumed the same films that are up for oscars are up for my mythical awards. while this issue is valid and interesting to discuss on the whole, it was not an important part of the post and you are blowing it out of proportion.

ps a movie could "rip off" another movie, but still be a great movie in its own right for a given year. e.g. the departed was a remake that won best picture. furthermore, what if someone made a sweet mash up of only found footage from casablanca and the departed (a la the grey album in music) and it was genius. should that be allowed? interesting questions. but where do you see me shutting down this line of thought in my original post?

The question isn't whether a particular movie should be eligible for an Oscar. The point is that, in determining what should win an Oscar you can't merely consider a movie's intrinsic quality (but rather also its place in the intellectual history of movie-making).

The reason why I stress this is to explain to Richard, why this idea:

How about making the Best Picture the one that brings the highest combination of profit to filmmakers and enjoyment to viewers. Have exit polls at every screening of every movie and tally the enjoyment ratings in some manner (details TBD).

won't work. To wit: if you only (or even primarily) consider profits and enjoyment (exit polls), you'll be taking into account only the movie's intrinsic quality and not its context. People don't care that Yes Man is a rip off of Liar Liar, and this will be reflected in their dollar votes and exit polls. However, when determining who should win an Oscar, presumably we do care about originality (and therefore exit polls and dollar votes are inadequate metrics for Oscar-worthiness).

Any port in a storm

2009-01-06T12:01:00.002-05:00

Rich writes:

3. This paragraph is classic condescension/wanting to make a funny:
The above two symptoms hint at the gangrene that infects Rich's entire premise: when we say "Best Picture of 2008" we are not trying to approximate "The movie released in 2008 that provided the most total pleasure to movie watchers". Proof: even if a re-release of Star Wars killed the game in terms of clitoral stimulation, we wouldn't want to give it "Best Picture" since it was made 30 years ago.
You are putting words in my blog post that aren't there and making false assumptions about what I wrote. I never explicitly said "only new releases" because I didn't realize that I had to be so rigorous in a blog post to avoid ridicule. I'm (sincerely) happy to hear your take on this stuff, but I would prefer to hear substantive disagreements.

You wish I'd put words in your blog post.

At first blush, my example -- a re-release of Star Wars winning "Best Picture" -- doesn't seem troubling. After all, you could always (as Rich suggests) add the caveat "only new releases can win Best Picture". My point, however, is that it's impossible to adequately define "new release" (for this purpose).

What about a re-release of Star Wars that included 5 new shots? Can this be considered for "Best Picture"? What about a shot for shot remake of Star Wars by another director? What about a movie that just rips off its central premise (like "The Wizard" rips off "Rain Man", as Kristen astutely points out in comments). What if a movie ripped off its main artistic technique (e.g., another movie in which time is reversed, a la Memento).

The point is that, when considering a movie for "Best Picture", you can't merely think about its intrinsic quality. Rather, you have to take into account is place in the history of movies, whether what it's trying to do has been done better (or worse) before, etc. If you don't, you'll never be able to exclude movies that, though they're pleasurable to watch, are unoriginal rip-offs of other movies.

Is it a mistake to wage war against Richard Berger on two fronts simultaneously?

2009-01-05T19:35:00.003-05:00

Richard cautiously (yet laudably!) shuffles into the world of ideas in his latest post:

Maybe "best" needs to be redefined. As currently understood for something like the Oscars it's a fairly arbitrary decision that pretty much only rewards dramatic movies that are judged to be well-acted and have some serious themes. Fairly limited, eh? How about making the Best Picture the one that brings the highest combination of profit to filmmakers and enjoyment to viewers. Have exit polls at every screening of every movie and tally the enjoyment ratings in some manner (details TBD).

First of all, Richard, on behalf of myself and Malcom Gladwell, welcome to the world of ideas!

I think the "Best Picture" case is substantially more complex than you grant (does that hidden complexity intimate a larger problem? Yes). For example, why profits instead of gross revenue? It's "Best Picture", not "Best Picture per dollar spent to make it".

Exit polls of enjoyment are problematic as well -- a scary or otherwise upsetting movie might bias watchers' immediate responses, even if they would later admit that the movie was good. Furthermore, what if the watcher just doesn't get it (this is a problem even among well-educated Jews as evinced by the friends of mine who don't like Adaptation)? Or what if the main idea depends on getting some reference, or being a certain age, or having lived through certain events?

The above two symptoms hint at the gangrene that infects Rich's entire premise: when we say "Best Picture of 2008" we are not trying to approximate "The movie released in 2008 that provided the most total pleasure to movie watchers". Proof: even if a re-release of Star Wars killed the game in terms of clitoral stimulation, we wouldn't want to give it "Best Picture" since it was made 30 years ago.

Likewise, even if a movie doesn't completely copy another movie, but rather just rips it off substantially, we wouldn't want to give it "Best Picture" either (even if no one noticed and everyone loved it).

The point is that you can't effectively crowdsource the selection of the year's "Best Picture" because the criteria aren't available (or even easily definable). There's a plausible case that experts do a better job here since they have a good intuitive understanding of what makes a "Best Picture" (though comedies tend to get the short shrift -- and what am I saying; they're all idiots; whatever.).

That said, if you could define what makes a "Best Picture" (in the same way that you can define what makes a good encyclopedia article -- Wikipedia has a tome of guidelines), I think you could also effectively crowdsource its selection.