Quotulatiousness

October 19, 2015

Dildos versus guns – Sarah Hoyt on a modern version of magical thinking

Filed under: Politics, Randomness, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In case the title isn’t clear enough, there’s a protest started recently at the University of Texas in Austin where students upset at a recent court ruling allowing concealed weapons to be carried on campus came up with what they thought was a perfect counterpoint: they’d open carry dildos instead. Sarah Hoyt comments:

… I have no idea what Ms. Jin majored in, but I can sort of follow the tracks of her thought. Logically, carrying sex toys to campus to protest guns makes absolutely NO sense. I could see carrying signs, or … I don’t know, police whistles, if you’re convinced you’re completely safe if you can just call the police. I can even see, in a more sane way, wearing a protective vest and claiming this is better than guns for defense. I mean, at least they are in the same general kind of thing and sort of kind of address the problem in different ways.

BUT no. Because this is not reasoning. This is magical thinking. WORSE. This is magical thinking based on a world that doesn’t exist, a world that was sold to Ms. Jin (literally. College is expensive) by academics so divorced from reality that they can’t find it with two hands, a cane and a seeing eye dog.

In this world, you see, conservatives love guns and hate sex. This is all “explained” with pseudo Freudian patter about how guns are a substitute for the penis. This is total nonsense and old nonsense at that, stuff we LAUGHED at for being pseudo profound way back in the seventies.

But they absolutely believe that we defend the second amendment not because we want to be responsible for our own self-defense, not because we believe power derives from the individual and that therefore an individual must be capable of reining in the government when it gets out of control. No. They think we want guns because that’s the way we express our sexual repression. (Actually now I think about it, my gun obsessed friends are also the most sex-positive, so their idea not only is wrong, it’s bizarrely wrong.)

Since Ms. Jin has never considered that these stories she was sold are in fact stories with no relation to reality, her reasoning went something like “They’re carrying guns and that upsets me. I must carry something that upsets them. Ahah! Dildos.”

In an even mildly sane world, the press would have made her a laughing stock, because that reasoning makes no sense whatsoever.

But the press buys into the same imaginary world in which somehow the belief in guns for defense is a Freudian thing and so the “gun” value can be countered with the “dildo” value.

This is not grown up thinking. It’s magical thinking, in which complex issues get reduced to amulets and symbols, countered by other amulets and symbols.

Again, this is sort of the human default. And believing absurd things about those you believe to be the enemy is also completely normal. The left calls it “othering” and is completely oblivious to the fact that they do it. A lot.

But it’s still human-normal.

The cyclic history of SF fandom

Filed under: Books, Gaming, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

I attended my first science fiction convention when I was 16, and being a science fiction fan in the mid 70s was ever so slightly more reputable than being a junkie or a drag queen in “mundane” society. Fandom was a tiny, tiny group of people compared to just about any other group of enthusiasts you could think of. At my first SF con in Toronto, there was a sharp dividing line between the “real” SF fans and the (euchhhhh!) Star Trek fans … even though the Trek fans were close to 50% of the attending fanbase. The “real” SF fans viewed the Trekkies as just barely tolerable (think of a guest bringing along a new and not-yet-housetrained puppy to your party). This was the first cycle of modern SF fandom history. On LiveJournal, wombat-socho outlines the pattern:

A short-lived show on NBC, Star Trek, generated massive fan interest in people who had never heard of science fiction fandom. The Trek fans flooded into fandom, and in the first of a sadly repetitive series of dumb mistakes, fandom turned on these newcomers and made them aware that they were most certainly Not Welcome. Fandom’s open and non-judgmental culture suddenly became harshly critical of “drobes” who ran around in Starfleet and Klingon uniforms they hadn’t even made themselves, and Trekkies who seemingly had no other interest in SF outside the series. This was horseshit, of course; perhaps predictable horseshit, given that so many SF fans (as I mentioned previously) were more than a little lacking in social skills, but horseshit all the same. Trekkies were in many cases SF fans fired up by the campaigns to bring the show back, fans writing fanfic, fans writing fanzines to publish fanfic and fanart in, fans starting conventions to which bemused actors were invited and besieged by legions of fans seeking autographs. In short, fans doing fanac, but not in the Approved Manner or on the Approved Topics. And so Trek fandom and its conventions, for the most part, went its separate way from traditional literary SF fandom.

Not too long after the hordes of unwashed Trekkies had been successfully repelled from the ghetto, a fellow named George Lucas showed up at the Kansas City Worldcon in 1976, promoting a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress featuring starships, a courageous young farmboy with hidden psychic powers, a couple of amusing robots, two ancient masters of martial arts, and a brutal Galactic Empire. He got a warm reception, and a few years later millions of people around the world were flocking to see the movie we all know now as Star Wars. They, too, started showing up at science fiction conventions, and got the same warm reception shown to their older brothers and sisters the Trekkies, and they in turn started going to what were increasingly called media conventions. The media conventions, like the Trek conventions before them, were very different from the fan-run SF conventions that preceded them. More (if not most) of them were unabashedly for-profit, charged different membership rates with different levels of access to the guests, and sometimes seemed more like combination flea markets/autograph sessions, with some panels where the guests talked about the shows. And they drew tens of thousands of people, because after Hollywood saw the huge piles of money Lucas was making, they couldn’t wait to launch a new Star Trek movie, a new Star Trek TV series, and all manner of TV shows and movies with science fiction themes. And lo, the fans of these shows and movies were likewise greeted with a cold shoulder by the Big Name Fans, Filthy Pros, and Secret Masters of Fandom.

At about the same time, role-playing games (Dungeons and Dragons, Traveller) exploded in popularity, followed not much later by collectible card games like Magic. For some reason, gamers had always fit better with traditional fandom, perhaps because so many of them were SF and fantasy fans to begin with, but after a while (perhaps around the time video games started becoming affordable and popular) they, too, started feeling less than welcome at regular SF conventions, and began going off to swell the crowds at GenCon and other conventions that were mostly about games and gaming.

Are you starting to see a pattern here? Is a trend becoming apparent to you?

Fans, back before Star Trek, were an isolated low-status fringe group who banded together against the mundanes who looked down on them. Given multiple opportunities to live up to their declared open and tolerant mores, each and every time they tried to do to the newcomers (Trekkies, Star Wars fans, gamers, and so on) exactly what the mundanes had done to them. You can’t say fans aren’t human, because they certainly re-enacted the same social exclusion, belittlement, and shaming that almost every in-group in human society uses against almost every out-group. Oh, and look, the “real” SF fans did the same thing recently to the libertarian and conservative fanbase.

Having read the preceding, should the results of SP3 have been a surprise to anyone? The people running WSFS and the people running local SF conventions are the same people who for the last fifty years have been mouthing off about “openness” and “tolerance” and “not being judgmental” while doing their best to run off “fringefans” at every opportunity instead of welcoming new chums and introducing them to the wider world of science fiction and fantasy. In order to join traditional fandom, you are only allowed to come in through one door, only allowed to read certain books, only allowed to express certain opinions. Then you can be accepted as a “true fan”. Why would anyone in their right mind want to put themselves through that? It’s a good question, and one which a lot of fans have answered by ignoring traditional fandom in favor of geek culture events such as the San Diego Comic Convention, Otakon, GenCon, and Dragon*Con. Some fans have signed up for Sad Puppies 4, hoping to recruit enough friends and allies to retake the Hugo Awards from the Sadducees and Pharisees who have controlled it (and increasingly, handed it out to those favored by Tor) for going on ten years. In the long term, though, perhaps what fandom (as opposed to Fandom) needs to do is build up a fan organization that welcomes all fans of science fiction and fantasy, no matter what door they enter by.

QotD: Justin Trudeau

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

At the next election a young political huckster, who happens to be the son of the late Pierre Trudeau, and enjoys something of his father’s winning ways with the women, and a matching cynicism, is likely to win. Young Justin Trudeau is unlike his father, however, in having little in the way of an agenda, beyond power and prestige for himself. Like Obama, he is not an ideologue, only a typical product of our public universities: a mind half-baked with “progressive” platitudes and clichés. He has no discernible discernment, and there is still a chance that the electorate will see him for what he is. Nevertheless, he can already count on the protection and support of our liberal media, which, like musk-oxen detecting a threat, instinctively form a stomping circle around the little fellow, knowing he will be unable to defend himself.

(The situation is complicated by the existence of a socialist party, which itself displaced the Liberals in opposition at the last general election, thanks to a demagogue at their head, who knew how to pander to Quebec. This man has since died, but the party may still be attractive enough to split the opposition vote. In the past, Harper has been rather good at playing the two parties slightly to his left against each other, but after years of isolation in the prime minister’s office, he may have lost his edge.)

David Warren, “Ottawa in the news”, Essays in Idleness, 2014-10-23.

October 18, 2015

Playboy‘s biggest market today

Filed under: Business, China, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Colby Cosh on why the Playboy brand is so attractive to the Chinese market:

… Playboy was once an important cultural force; and what are Chinese men and women buying when they buy jewelry or clothing with the Playboy bunny on it? They are buying a small stake in an anti-puritan, worldly vision of the good life. Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy philosophy,” which he used to set out in windy essays sandwiched between the pictorials, is still considered good for a laugh decades later. But every magazine does express a philosophy, whether or not it chooses to yammer on about doing so, and Playboy’s epicureanism was a powerful one. It practically amounted to a guarantee to the customer: if you bought Playboy, the only uplift you were at risk of encountering would involve lingerie, not morality.

When you were done being titillated by an issue of the magazine, the ads and the articles about stereos and cigars and cocktails were there to linger as an aftertaste, making a subtle but sharp imprint on one’s endocrine system. It is hard for us to appreciate what this kind of thing means in a strongly collectivist, egalitarian society. People who visited the old Soviet bloc, and who saw what blue jeans or heavy-metal cassettes did to the brains of the people there, will have some idea. It is an enigma of 20th-century history: stuff that seems trivial to a Western consumer somehow encodes a message of choice and private aspiration that can never be expressed as powerfully as an explicit proposition.

Is that how that meme started? ERMAHGERD!

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

They’re not quite as common as they once were, but the “ERMAGERD!” girl can still be found in lots of odd corners of the interwebz:

ermahgerd-meme-maggie-goldenberger-012Maggie Goldenberger and her fourth- and fifth-grade pals used to amuse themselves by dressing up in weird clothes, doing crazy stuff to their hair, and posing for polaroids holding funny objects and making weird faces. Years later, Goldenberger uploaded some of her favorites to her Myspace and Facebook accounts, which led to Jeff Davis, who she didn’t know, posting it to Reddit, where a Redditor called Plantlife ganked it and captioned it with “GERSBERMS. MAH FRAVRIT BERKS” — and a meme was born.

The meme was pretty much perfect, a super-awkward tween frozen in a moment of crazy nerding-out over some super-awkward tween books. Combine that with the wordplay in which every vowel sound is “strangulated into ‘er'” and you get a meme that has refused to die, year after year.

Darryn King’s Vanity Fair profile of Goldenberger and history of the ERMAHGERD is a fascinating read. Most interesting to me is the fact that the meme’s premise — that the retainer-wearing, squinch-faced Goosebumps-clutching kid in the photo was a gormless, awkward tween with no idea of how weird she looked — is totally, perfectly wrong. The picture was posed, created by a savvy, funny, witty tween with more smarts than tweens are credited with by an unfair world, who created a genuinely comic character that inspired millions of people to riff on it. Not bad for a nine- or ten-year-old.

Should we build “modern battleships”? The answer is probably “no”

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

The question, raised by Robert Farley at The National Interest is “Is it time to bring back the Battleships?”

Is it time to bring back the battleship?

For decades, naval architects have concentrated on building ships that, by the standards of the World Wars, are remarkably brittle. These ships can deal punishment at much greater ranges than their early 20th century counterparts, but they can’t take a hit. Is it time to reconsider this strategy, and once again build protected ships? This article examines how these trends came about, and what might change in the future.

The label “battleship” emerges from the older “ship of the line” formulation, in the sense that a navy’s largest ships participated in the “line of battle” formation that allowed them to bring their broadsides to bear on an opposing line. After the development of ironclad warships, the “battle ship” diverged from the armored cruiser based on expectations of usage; “battleships” were expected to fight enemy “battleships.” The modern battleship form settled around 1890, with the British Royal Sovereign class. These ships displaced about 15,000 tons, with two heavy guns each in turrets fore and aft, and steel armor. The rest of the navies of the world adopted these basic design parameters, which provided a ship that could both deal out and absorb punishment. The process of ensuring survivability was simplified, in these early battleships, by the predictability of the threat. The most likely vector of attack in the late 1890s came from large naval artillery carried by other ships, and consequently protective schemes could concentrate on that threat.

From the American perspective, even if through some collective congressional brain-fart the US Navy was compelled to build and deploy modern analogues to the classic battleship, what the hell would they be used for? China and Russia are not going to build opposing battleships, and it’s difficult to imagine anyone else on the planet who would have both the economic resources and the strategic desire to go toe-to-toe in Jutland fashion against the USN.

QotD: Peace and order in the Kaiser’s Germany

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Law, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Private lawyers are not needed in Germany. If you want to buy or sell a house or field, the State makes out the conveyance. If you have been swindled, the State takes up the case for you. The State marries you, insures you, will even gamble with you for a trifle.

“You get yourself born,” says the German Government to the German citizen, “we do the rest. Indoors and out of doors, in sickness and in health, in pleasure and in work, we will tell you what to do, and we will see to it that you do it. Don’t you worry yourself about anything.”

And the German doesn’t. Where there is no policeman to be found, he wanders about till he comes to a police notice posted on a wall. This he reads; then he goes and does what it says.

I remember in one German town—I forget which; it is immaterial; the incident could have happened in any — noticing an open gate leading to a garden in which a concert was being given. There was nothing to prevent anyone who chose from walking through that gate, and thus gaining admittance to the concert without paying. In fact, of the two gates quarter of a mile apart it was the more convenient. Yet of the crowds that passed, not one attempted to enter by that gate. They plodded steadily on under a blazing sun to the other gate, at which a man stood to collect the entrance money. I have seen German youngsters stand longingly by the margin of a lonely sheet of ice. They could have skated on that ice for hours, and nobody have been the wiser. The crowd and the police were at the other end, more than half a mile away, and round the corner. Nothing stopped their going on but the knowledge that they ought not. Things such as these make one pause to seriously wonder whether the Teuton be a member of the sinful human family or not. Is it not possible that these placid, gentle folk may in reality be angels, come down to earth for the sake of a glass of beer, which, as they must know, can only in Germany be obtained worth the drinking?

In Germany the country roads are lined with fruit trees. There is no voice to stay man or boy from picking and eating the fruit, except conscience. In England such a state of things would cause public indignation. Children would die of cholera by the hundred. The medical profession would be worked off its legs trying to cope with the natural results of over-indulgence in sour apples and unripe walnuts. Public opinion would demand that these fruit trees should be fenced about, and thus rendered harmless. Fruit growers, to save themselves the expense of walls and palings, would not be allowed in this manner to spread sickness and death throughout the community.

But in Germany a boy will walk for miles down a lonely road, hedged with fruit trees, to buy a pennyworth of pears in the village at the other end. To pass these unprotected fruit trees, drooping under their burden of ripe fruit, strikes the Anglo-Saxon mind as a wicked waste of opportunity, a flouting of the blessed gifts of Providence.

I do not know if it be so, but from what I have observed of the German character I should not be surprised to hear that when a man in Germany is condemned to death he is given a piece of rope, and told to go and hang himself. It would save the State much trouble and expense, and I can see that German criminal taking that piece of rope home with him, reading up carefully the police instructions, and proceeding to carry them out in his own back kitchen.

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel, 1914.

October 17, 2015

Tesla’s latest software update includes self-driving program (almost)

Filed under: Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tesla does over-the-air updates for their electric cars (which is kinda neat). The latest update includes an almost-but-not-quite self-driving feature:

Tonight, Tesla makes its cars autonomous. Well, semi-autonomous. And it did it with an over-the-air update, effectively making tens of thousands of cars already sold to customers way better.

There are two things to talk about here. There’s the small story about the features and what the upgrade actually looks like and how it works. That’s a good place to start: This is the biggest change to the visual display of the Model S and X ever. There are new instrument panels, app windows are larger and take up more of the 17-inch touchscreen. Drivers will now get more information about what their cars are doing when in Autopilot, they can lock and unlock their car from the status bar. There’s a new clock!

These are simple cosmetic changes. The Big Story is that all of this—and really, who cares about anything beyond autopilot mode?—is being pushed through to customers’ Teslas overnight. The update will begin being pushed out tonight, and will hit every Tesla made and sold in the US in the past year over the course of this week.

Before you get too excited about an autonomous, hands-free present, you need to know that you can’t nap in the back, chauffeured around in beautiful, electric silence.

Even in Autopilot, you keep your hands on the steering wheel. Well… you don’t have to keep your hands on the steering wheel. You can rest them on your knees (resting on knees, palms up, fingertips touching the wheel is advised), or keep one pinky on the wheel. And okay, you can take your hands off altogether for a moment. But after a few seconds, your car will give you a little message, asking you to touch the wheel in some capacity.

Ken White of Popehat.com Talks Blogging, Anonymous Speech

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Published on 13 Oct 2015

Ken White, founder of the influential group blog Popehat, tells FIRE how he got interested in the First Amendment and discusses anonymous speech on the Internet.

White, who writes for Popehat on a variety of issues, including the First Amendment, criminal justice, and the legal system, said a college project at Stanford University “during … one of the upsurges of controversy on campus about speech codes and speech issues,” opened his eyes to the nuances of the First Amendment.

“I wound up doing my senior honors thesis in college with a law school professor on the subject of legal restrictions on hate speech,” White said. “I thought it was very much emblematic of a very American problem, and that is: How do we express our disapproval — our moral disapproval — for bad things like bigotry, while not restricting liberties?”

Popehat seems to be a space created to do exactly that. The forum has evolved into a blog the contributors describe as a “group complaint” about “whatever its authors want.”

That freedom hasn’t always come so easily for White, who blogged anonymously for more than five years due to concerns his honest blogging might harm his career. He still thinks anonymous speech provides both benefits and drawbacks.

“I think the right to anonymous speech is very central in the First Amendment and in American life,” said White. “Throughout American history, people have said unpopular things, incendiary things, politically dangerous things behind the shield of anonymity. A lot of bad things come with that. There’s some really terrible, immoral, anonymous behavior on the Internet.”

White said there’s also a risk to writing anonymously, and that even while he benefitted from posting behind the security of an online persona, he supports the rights of others to try and discover his true identity. Eventually, White said he gave up the pretext and started blogging under his own name.

For more from White, including why free speech “catchphrases” harm First Amendment discourse, watch the above video.

Moynihan’s scissors

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

David Warren looks at the work of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan:

We are celebrating this year, if that is the word, the fiftieth anniversary of perhaps the most inconsequential sociological study ever published. That was, The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, by the brilliant American politician and thinker, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927–2003).

Working then in the U.S. Department of Labour, Moynihan focused his attention on a counter-intuitive statistical fact. Unemployment among black males was falling, in 1965. But rates of welfare enrollment for black families was rising. This did not make sense. The two lines on this chart had always fallen or risen together. But they had crossed over in 1962. He had put his finger in what came to be called, “Moynihan’s scissors.”

[…] while the “Moynihan Report” is famous, and at one time, everyone claimed to have read it, it contains something so obnoxious to enlightened post-modern thought as to remain invisible to all participants in the discussion.

This was Moynihan’s sociological and anthropological observation that the American black culture was becoming “matriarchal.” Whether without, or more likely with the help of welfare programmes, women were becoming the heads of households, and men were being removed from that station.

(The background: All of the higher civilizations have been unambiguously patriarchal; matriarchy is associated in the prehistoric and anthropological record with savage, gratuitously violent, self-destructive tribes.)

Already, in 1965, one in four black kids in the USA were born out of wedlock. Today it is more than three in four, and levels of bastardy among the other races have risen in course. By the end of the last century (1990s), white children were as likely to be raised in fatherless homes as black children had been in the 1960s. “Progress” has been progressing rapidly.

The Nanny State has replaced fathers as the principal source of income for such families (bankrupting itself in the process), and the feminist movement has supplied the arguments — or more precisely, misandronist slogans and vindictive clichés — for the overthrow of “patriarchy” and its systematic replacement with a shrewish matriarchy in all facets of social life. The movement has been, moreover, so successful in achieving its objects — the emasculation of men, and degradation or actual inversion of traditional morality — that it has now moved on. For with the defeat of masculinity, new horizons of “gender-bending” or “transgendering” have come into view.

Now, part of the reason people can’t get their little heads around what has actually happened — first to the black family, then to the brown, then to the white — is the surviving, basically modern (i.e. pre-post-modern) belief that eunuchs behave much like fairies; that they become docile and effeminate, harmless and nurturing, sensitive and sweet; that their previously reprehensible “masculine” traits will quietly disappear. Some men do indeed respond to emasculation by becoming the pathetic, contemptible wimps that all women, including feminists, instinctively abhor. But some do not.

As a well-read student of social sciences and history, Moynihan knew better than this. The masculine capacity for violence (at all levels, spiritual as much as physical) does not go away. From Spartan Laconia, backwards and forwards through history on all continents, we see that eunuchs and other “homosexual” (the word is inadequate) guards and soldiers have been employed by the great warrior despots. This is because they make the fiercest fighters. Having no families, no heritage to protect, no women and children to feed and shelter in safety, they become a purely destructive force. They become men who do not care even for their own lives, let alone for the lives of others.

QotD: Stephen Harper

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[Prime minister Stephen] Harper’s genius, as a power-seeking politician, is the opposite of Obama’s (the once popular USA president). He carries the “Conservative” label, of a party slightly to the right of the others in our Parliament. Therefore he has most of the liberal media machinery against him. Obama, as perhaps we all know, has enjoyed until recently a compliant and fawning media, that do not criticize their darling, nor hesitate to suppress news that would be unfavourable to him. Obama’s tactic has been to draw attention constantly to himself. He has something to say on every subject, empty of content, but dramatically insistent in its repetition of the first person singular. By contrast, Harper goes out of his way to distract attention from himself, and when he can’t, to avoid vehemence of any kind, or anything resembling drama.

This is not to say he isn’t ruthless, as a political operator, and backroom settler of scores. Anyone associated with Christian causes, such as the defence of human life, will know how he rules his pro-life backbenchers. His intention is to keep the party “on message,” with a message that will not excite media attention, so he can get on with normal administration. His strength is his reputation for management: he has not, like Obama, made a hash of everything he has touched. The Canadian budget is actually in surplus, and while our cumulative debt is substantial, and we face the same unfunded welfare liabilities to an aging population, we have not the bottomless debt and fiscal chaos into which Obama and other irresponsible politicians have delivered the United States. (Notwithstanding, when they crash, it will be right on top of us.)

But of course, this is a “democracy,” and the great majority of our population, as those in all other countries, are almost entirely ignorant of public affairs. Like children, they get bored with good government, but unlike children they have, collectively, the power to do something about it.

David Warren, “Ottawa in the news”, Essays in Idleness, 2014-10-23.

October 16, 2015

Learning Lessons From Loos – Bulgaria Enters The War I THE GREAT WAR – Week 64

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Published on 15 Oct 2015

By the numbers the Battle of Loos was a defeat for the British Army but they learned valuable lessons for the future on the Western Front. The creeping artillery barrage is used for the first time successfully and it is apparent that assault tactics have to be rethought completely. On the Balkans, Bulgaria officially declares war on Serbia and joins the Central Powers Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. On the same day they invade Serbia which is now in real trouble.

Hollywood’s pay gap is quite real

Filed under: Business, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Nicole Russell says that Jennifer Lawrence was quite justified in her complaint about being paid less than her male co-workers, and that the problem is industry-wide:

The equal pay gap is the issue du jour this week. It was a hot topic at the Democratic debate Tuesday night, and in Hollywood, actress Jennifer Lawrence recently discovered she made less on a blockbuster hit than did her male peers.

Unfortunately, equal pay has gotten a bad reputation on the Right, due to misinformation the Left likes to peddle. The record is easy to set straight, and the good news is that Hollywood isn’t the real world and the real world isn’t Hollywood.

[…]

Turns out, Lawrence realized what statistics have shown about Hollywood for decades: That place is a sexist desert. Being a woman in Hollywood, whether as an actress, screenwriter, producer, or the like is akin to wearing a cloak of invisibility.

After the Oscar nominees were announced this past year, the Women’s Media Center found “149 men are nominated versus 35 women” across 19 non-acting categories. There were seven Oscar categories with no women nominated, and “since 2012, only 19% of all non-acting Oscar nominations have been for women.”

Actress Charlize Theron discovered from the same Sony e-mails that her co-star Chris Hemsworth made $10 million more than she did on a film. As The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway reported earlier this year, a study by The Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film found only 9 percent of the top 250 domestic-grossing films of 2012 were directed by women. According to researcher Susana Orozco, who went through every single spec script sale from 1991 and 2012, women wrote only 14 percent of spec scripts sold between 1991 and 2000.

The rules of war, US edition

Filed under: Law, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tom Kratman read through the latest edition of the US government’s Law of War Manual, so you (probably) won’t have to:

I thought I was free of one thousand plus page books of the driest prose imaginable when I finished law school. Sadly, no such luck; the Department of Defense released, back in mid-June, its Law of War Manual, which is eleven hundred and seventy-six pages of painfully sere verbiage. Go ahead and divide the number of pages by the number of days since about 15 June, 2015. Yeah, that dry.

But, dry or not, it’s not that bad. Nothing that induces the legal LibLePRs (Liberals, Leftists, Progressives, and Reds) of ICOTESCAS (the International Community Of The Ever So Caring And Sensitive) to denounce it as something that “reads like it was written by Hitler’s Ministry of War,” could be all that bad.

[…]

The left’s grasp of law of war is tenuous at best, often mistaken and frequently fraudulent. For example, one of their usual charges, also much heard during the campaign in Iraq and especially at Fallujah, was that incendiary weapons are banned, per the Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapons (Protocol III). The fraud there is that incendiary weapons are not banned there or anywhere. Their use under some circumstances is restricted or banned, but the weapons themselves, and their use for other purposes or other circumstances is perfectly legal.

That’s just one example of the fraud the left has perpetrated with regard to the manual. There are numerous others, too numerous to list here. I will limit my comment, therefore, to the observation that attacking a legitimate military target in proximity to a civilian or civilians is not quite the same thing as carte blanche to attacks civilians, qua civilians, generally. ICOTESCAS seems to harbor some confusion about this or to pretend to confusion to cover their fraud.

One aspect, in particular, that has the left up in arms about the manual is in its treatment of journalists. I suppose in their ideal world, camera teams from Al Jazeera should be able to do reconnaissance for groups of guerillas and terrorists, scot free. Too, one suspects, in the ideal lefty world, the presence of a journalist, even if he happens to be carrying ammunition for the other side, should protect all combatants around the “journalist,” lest the journalist’s expensive coif be mussed.

Sadly, for that set of values and outlooks, in the real world, once the soldiers realize that some “journalists” are helping the enemy, those journalists are going to be killed as quickly and conveniently as possible, as they should be. Aim true, boys, aim true.

The rules, as outlined in the manual, for journalists are actually pretty reasonable. To paraphrase:

  1. If you are a journalist and among the enemy, your presence will not protect them. Their presence will endanger you and the closer you are to them the more you will be in danger. We will neither aim expressly for you if we know where and who you are, nor avoid targeting places you might be, if we don’t know who and where you are, nor avoid targeting places where you are, if we know or suspect the enemy is there, too. You knew it was a risk when you undertook the profession.
  2. If you take part in hostilities, to include by providing reconnaissance or by spying, you will have lost your immunities as a civilian, but not gained the privilege of a combatant. We can kill you.
  3. If you act as a spy and we catch you, we can try you as a spy, give you a judge and jury who may not much care for you or your profession, then stand you against a wall and shoot you.

Fair Trade: Does It Help Poor Workers? (Everyday Economics 7/7)

Filed under: Economics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 8 Jul 2015

Elizabeth, an Everyday Economics viewer, asks: “How does the purchase of fair-trade goods affect wages in developing countries?”

Great question! The “fair trade” movement has become popular as a proposed way to increase living standards in developing countries. In this video, we look at whether fair trade does just that.

For a good to be considered “fair trade” it must meet various requirements developed by a handful of fair trade organizations. In the developing world, who is better positioned to meet these fair trade requirements — large producers in wealthier countries or small producers in poorer countries? To answer this question, we take a look at the the example of fair trade coffee produced in both Costa Rica and Ethiopia. How does fair trade affect wages and overall quality of life in those countries?

And, if fair trade isn’t the best way to improve living standards in developing countries, how else can we maximize employment options and well-being for poor workers? This question is at the core of an entire branch of economics — Development Economics. To learn more, check out MRU’s Development Economics course.

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