Quotulatiousness

May 30, 2012

More on Robert Mugabe, your Tourism Ambassador

Filed under: Africa, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

In the Guardian, David Smith has more on the farcical notion of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe as an “Ambassador for Tourism”:

With a line-up that includes Drew Barrymore, David Beckham, Orlando Bloom, and Ricky Martin, the UN’s choice of ambassadors has been known to cause raised eyebrows or the odd smirk.

Seldom, however, has there been such anger, or questioning of the organisation’s credibility, as that greeting the appointment of a new international envoy for tourism: Robert Mugabe.

Improbable as it seems, the Zimbabwean president, who is widely accused of ethnic cleansing, rigging elections, terrorising opposition, controlling media and presiding over a collapsed economy, has been endorsed as a champion of efforts to boost global holidaymaking.

Despite that fact Mugabe, 88, is under a travel ban, he has been honoured as a “leader for tourism” by the UN’s World Tourism Organisation, along with his political ally, Zambian president Michael Sata, 75. The pair signed an agreement with UNWTO secretary general Taleb Rifai at their shared border at Victoria Falls on Tuesday.

Perhaps, like Obama’s Peace Prize, it’s awarded in expectation that Mugabe will do much to improve tourism in the future?

May 29, 2012

Is junk science more credible when presented with a British accent?

Filed under: Britain, Media, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:10

In Slate, Daniel Engber talks about how easy it is for British junk science journalism to get republished in the United States:

More damning was the story’s overseas origin. The five-second study arrived in the American press by way of the Daily Mail, which explained in its own coverage that the work had been funded by a manufacturer of cleaning products, and then advised readers to replace their mop heads every three months so as to “minimize risk” from dangerous bacteria. When I contacted Manchester Metropolitan University for more details, I learned that the “researchers” and “scientists” described in media reports amounted to one person — a lab tech named Kathy Lees, who did not respond to my inquiries.

Let’s not single out the Mancunians, though: Industry-funded science fluff litters the whole of the British Isles. Also in the past few weeks, the U.K. press fawned over a comely chip-shop girl from Kent who was found by a national television network to possess a scientifically validated, perfect face, while the British version of HuffPo reported on a mathematical formula for the “perfect sandwich” — produced by a University of Warwick physicist in collaboration with a major bread manufacturer. Spurious mathematical formulae concocted at the behest of PR firms compose their own journalism beat in England: In recent years, we’ve seen the perfect boiled egg, the perfect day, the perfect breasts, and many more examples of scientists getting paid to turn life into algebra. As a naive magazine intern, I once took an assignment to write up one of these characteristically English equations — a means of calculating the perfect horror movie, in that case. The team of mathematicians behind the research turned out to be a couple of recent grads from King’s College London, who’d watched some movies and gotten drunk on vodka on behalf of Sky Broadcasting. “We only spent a couple of hours doing it,” one of them told me, “and didn’t put all that much thought into whether it works or how accurate it is.”

I love the use of the sure-to-be-useful-frequently term “labvertisements” for this sort of science-flavoured PR spam.

May 28, 2012

Three Jubilees, three different Britains

Filed under: Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:18

In The Economist, “Bagehot” looks at the three most recent Jubilee celebrations, to see what the events might show of the state of Britain.

The 1977 Silver Jubilee:

Celebrations in 1977 involved children’s food—sausage rolls and jelly, hot dogs and ice cream—and beer for the grown-ups. There were violent sporting contests, from tugs-of-war to free-form football matches. To conquer reserve, fancy dress was worn, often involving men in women’s clothing. From the West Midlands came news of an all-transvestite football game, with the laconic annotation: “all ended up in the canal.”

London displayed both patriotic zeal (flag-draped pubs in Brick Lane, big street parties in Muswell Hill) and hostility (cheerless housing estates, slogans declaring “Stuff the Jubilee”).

Scotland was a nation apart. A file reports “total apathy” in Croy. In Glasgow the anniversary was called “an English jubilee”. Snobs sneered along with Scots. At Eton College, a wooden Jubilee pyramid was smashed by old boys. At Oxford University, examinations were held on Jubilee Day, in a display of indifference.

The 2002 Golden Jubilee:

By 2002 and the Golden Jubilee, Britain comes across as a busier, lonelier, more cynical place. The royal family was “just showbiz”, sniffed a diarist from Sussex. There is angry talk of Princess Diana and how her 1997 death was mishandled by the queen. There are fewer street parties than in 1977, all agree. This is variously blamed on apathy, the authorities (whose job it is to organise events, apparently) and above all on health-and-safety rules. In 1977, in contrast, one Wiltshire village cheerfully let a “pyromaniac” doctor take Jubilee fireworks home to add extra bangs.

And finally, this year’s Diamond Jubilee:

Visiting Wimbotsham, Bagehot is shown elaborate plans: cake-baking contests, pony rides, a teddy bears’ picnic, a sports day, a pensioners’ tea. But there will be no tug-of-war (people might hurt themselves) and the face painters have liability insurance. Still, the festivities will dwarf those seen in 2002, locals say. The monarchy endured a “big lull after Diana”, suggests David Long, the driving force behind Wimbotsham’s Diamond Jubilee. As the queen grows older, she is “more highly thought of”. Linda Nixon, a Wimbotsham pensioner, credits Prince William’s royal wedding with reviving enthusiasm. Prince William and his brother Prince Harry are “like everyday people”, she says.

QotD: Don’t read this before lunch

Filed under: Europe, Food, France, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In the kitchen the dirt was worse. It is not a figure of speech, it is a mere statement of fact to say that a French cook will spit in the soup — that is, if he is not going to drink it himself. He is an artist, but his art is not cleanliness. To a certain extent he is even dirty because he is an artist, for food, to look smart, needs dirty treatment. When a steak, for instance, is brought up for the head cook’s inspection, he does not handle it with a fork. He picks it up in his fingers and slaps it down, runs his thumb round the dish and licks it to taste the gravy, runs it round and licks again, then steps back and contemplates the piece of meat like an artist judging a picture, then presses it lovingly into place with his fat, pink fingers, every one of which he has licked a hundred times that morning. When he is satisfied, he takes a cloth and wipes his fingerprints from the dish, and hands it to the waiter. And the waiter, of course, dips his fingers into the gravy — his nasty, greasy fingers which he is for ever running through his brilliantined hair. Whenever one pays more than, say, ten francs for a dish of meat in Paris, one may be certain that it has been fingered in this manner. In very cheap restaurants it is different; there, the same trouble is not taken over the food, and it is just forked out of the pan and flung on to a plate, without handling. Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.

Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and smartness. The hotel employee is too busy getting food ready to remember that it is meant to be eaten. A meal is simply ‘une commande‘ to him, just as a man dying of cancer is simply ‘a case’ to the doctor. A customer orders, for example, a piece of toast. Somebody, pressed with work in a cellar deep underground, has to prepare it. How can he stop and say to himself, ‘This toast is to be eaten — I must make it eatable’? All he knows is that it must look right and must be ready in three minutes. Some large drops of sweat fall from his forehead on to the toast. Why should he worry? Presently the toast falls among the filthy sawdust on the floor. Why trouble to make a new piece? It is much quicker to wipe the sawdust off. On the way upstairs the toast falls again, butter side down. Another wipe is all it needs. And so with everything. The only food at the Hotel X which was ever prepared cleanly was the staff’s, and the patron’s. The maxim, repeated by everyone, was: ‘Look out for the patron, and as for the clients, s’en fout pas mal!’ Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered — a secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel like the intestines through a man’s body.
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933.

May 27, 2012

Fifty shades of suburbanizing stuff to make it boring

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

In the National Post, Darrin Rose laments the “mainstreaming” of BDSM, or badly written erotica, or something:

The erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey has sold 10 million copies in only six weeks of sales, and in doing so has shed a lot of light on what suburban moms are looking for in the bookstore, if not in the bedroom. It has been banned in some U.S. libraries, generating controversy in equal measure for pornographic content and terrible writing. If you like books that read like a triple-X version of your Grade 8 diary, then you’re in luck. But trouble looms on the horizon.

The book has become part of the zeitgeist, leading to all kinds of new sexual ideas in the suburbs. I should confess that as a city dweller, I like to encourage the notion that urbanites lead sexy, dangerous lives already. But the suburban soccer moms who make up the majority of the book’s readership are discovering a sexy, dangerous world of bondage, discipline and sado-masochism, also known — by lazy people and perverts — as BDSM. While BDSM is currently a risqué, fun activity, the suburbs will do what they always do when they find a new sexy idea — turn it into an exercise you do at the gym, thereby simultaneously destroying its sexiness and enjoyability. They did the same thing to the Lambada and stripper poles.

[. . .]

The same thing happened to stripper poles, which you can find in the aerobics room of many gyms these days. It takes a really asexual person to see a stripper pole and think “that’d be great for low impact muscle development.” So stripper poles were installed in the sweat factories, and real life took a hit. If you go to a strip club and think the best part is the gymnastics, you’re really missing the point. They did the same thing to lap dances and stripteases, two related disciplines now doled out in 60 minute lessons at strip malls across the nation.

And now Fifty Shades of Grey has BDSM lined up next for the exercise treatment. That way middle-aged women can take flogging classes, where personal instructors literally beat you into shape. We’re probably a couple years away from spending 30 minutes on the elliptical machine while a personal trainer whispers in your ear “do you like that?” and “you’re such a dirty little jogger.” A workout seems much more intimidating if you need a safety word to make it stop, but I would rather be spared the sight of a gym full of moms being spanked while they do hamstring curls.

The anatomy of the standard “kids these days” moral freak-out story

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:11

Nick Gillespie explains what the next media meme intended to alarm parents will look like (because they all do):

Don’t you dare think just because no one is actually doing something that it’s not about to become the next big thing: “Although there’s only been a few cases, county public health toxicology expert Cyrus Rangan says it could signal a dangerous trend.”

The hand-sanitizer story is a classic of the particularly powerful news narrative that might be called “The Kids These Days” story. The recipe is as simple as it is intoxicating: Take kids, a wholesome product or activity (cleanser, say, or a sleepover), throw in drugs, booze, or sex (preferably all three), some form of vaguely scary technology (teh Interwebz, cell phones), and shake vigorously (like Mentos in a 2 liter bottle of Pepsi, or maybe Pop Rocks with a Coca-Cola chaser), and let it rip!

While we await the next fake news trend about teens and sex and drugs — and the coming federal ban on so-called bath salts and fake marijuana — here are five classic freakouts to contemplate.

May 26, 2012

Neil Davenport reviews Tony Judt’s final book

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:13

As I just started reading Judt’s best known work recently (Postwar), I was unaware that Judt had died not long after that book was published. In the sp!ked review of books, Neil Davenport reviews Thinking the Twentieth Century: Intellectuals and Politics in the Twentieth Century, by Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder:

In 2008, Judt discovered that he was suffering from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), an incurable degenerative disease. Over a two-year period, Snyder records and transcribes a series of conversations that cover both Judt’s life and intellectual pursuits by way of the tumultuous events of the last century. Judt died in August 2010, 62 years old, just a few weeks after dictating a final afterword to this book.

The format works surprisingly well. Judt relishes his role as a public intellectual and makes accessible huge swathes of history and ideas throughout the book’s 400 pages. There are never any lapses into impenetrable jargon or academic riddles. The book is tremendously lucid and informed, thoughtful and engaging. Credit must be given to Snyder who, rather than stamping on the coat tails of Judt’s intellect, proffers sharp questions and observations only intermittently. When he does, it serves as a striking reminder that this is a conversation, not an academic monologue. Mostly we are left to marvel at Judt’s command of his material, his knowledge, intellect and insights, as they’re casually reeled off into a digital recorder. The working-class ex-grammar school boy makes attractive and vital something that has been relentlessly and scandalously attacked in recent decades: a liberal, humanities-based education.

[. . .]

Judt gave much of his early career to the history of the French left, but could not buy into their assumption that the Russian Revolution was merely the continuation of 1789. And to his credit, he saw through the cultural studies, Marcuse-era left of 1968, too. As he rightly puts it, ‘my residual socialist-Marxist formation made me instinctively suspicious of the popular notion that students might now be a — the — revolutionary class’. He was also spot on about how the cultural left fragmented history as a discipline into competing ‘narratives’.

These are all sharp, well-observed points. So it’s a pity that, like so many left-leaning academics before him, he retained that most durable of illusions: belief in the credibility of the British Labour Party’s social democracy. For someone so well versed in Marxism and interwar radicalism, it’s surprising that he remained steadfastly quiet about the real purpose of social democracy. And if he was feeling generous about its achievements, he doesn’t nail down social democracy’s strengths during its postwar heyday, either. Although he used the social-democracy banner to describe contemporary politics both in Britain and Europe, there’s no awareness of how ‘parliamentary socialism’ has come to mean something very different in the twenty-first century.

May 25, 2012

“SWATting”

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:34

This is a rather disturbing development:

At 12:35 a.m. on July 1, 2011, sheriff’s deputies pounded on my front door and rang my doorbell. They shouted for me to open the door and come out with my hands up.

When I opened the door, deputies pointed guns at me and ordered me to put my hands in the air. I had a cell phone in my hand. Fortunately, they did not mistake it for a gun.

They ordered me to turn around and put my hands behind my back. They handcuffed me. They shouted questions at me: IS THERE ANYONE ELSE IN THE HOUSE? and WHERE ARE THEY? and ARE THEY ALIVE?

I told them: Yes, my wife and my children are in the house. They’re upstairs in their bedrooms, sleeping. Of course they’re alive.

Deputies led me down the street to a patrol car parked about 2-3 houses away. At least one neighbor was watching out of her window as I was placed, handcuffed, in the back of the patrol car. I saw numerous patrol cars on my quiet street. There was a police helicopter flying overhead, shining a spotlight down on us as I walked towards the patrol car. Several neighbors later told us the helicopter woke them up. I saw a fire engine and an ambulance. A neighbor later told me they had a HazMat vehicle out on the street as well.

Meanwhile, police rushed into my home. They woke up my wife, led her downstairs and to the front porch, frisked her, and asked her where the children were. Then police ordered her to stand on the front porch with her hands against the wall while they entered my children’s bedrooms to make sure they were alive.

The call that sent deputies to my home was a hoax. Someone had pretended to be me. They called the police to say I had shot my wife. The sheriff’s deputies who arrived at my front door believed they were about to confront an armed man who had just shot his wife. I don’t blame the police for any of their actions. But I blame the person who made the call.

Because I could have been killed.

A “prank” phonecall that could easily have gotten the victim killed. Difficult to describe that as a mere “prank”. Bordering on terrorism, if not over the line.

It actually happened. The phenomenon is called “SWATting,” because it can bring a SWAT team to your front door. SWATting is a particularly dangerous hoax in which a caller, generally a computer hacker, calls a police department to report a shooting at the home of his enemy. The caller will place this call to the police department’s business line, using Skype or a similar service, and hiding behind Internet proxies to make the call impossible to trace. Anxious police, believing they are responding to the home of an armed and dangerous man, show up at the front door pointing guns and screaming orders.

That is exactly what happened to me. It is a very dangerous hoax that could get the target killed.

QotD: Sherlock and the fickle tide of fashion

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

[Y]ou can see why men wanted to get the look. Perhaps they noted the effect Cumberbatch, by no means your standard telly hunk, had on lady viewers […] and decided it must have something to do with the clobber. So it is that Britain’s latest men’s style icon is a fictional asexual sociopath first seen onscreen hitting a corpse with a horse whip. Surely not even the great detective himself could have deduced that was going to happen.
Alexis Petridis, “No chic, Sherlock”, The Guardian, 2010-09-04

May 23, 2012

Chris Selley on the disproportional sentences handed out by the “court of public opinion”

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

People can be idiots. Some of them are idiots all the time. Others are only idiots every now and again. When the idiotic events happen to co-incide with fluctuating public opinion, the sentence for public idiocy can often vastly exceed the impact of the original idiotic action:

It has been a tough week for notorious, misbehaving young people — well, outside of Quebec anyway. On Monday in a New Jersey courtroom, Dharun Ravi was sentenced to 30 days in jail for having briefly spied, twice, via webcam, on his Rutgers University roommate’s romantic encounters. He was 18 at the time. And on Tuesday, Swansea University, in South Wales, made it clear that 21-year-old Liam Stacey is forever unwelcome on its campus, where he was nearly done studying biology. Mr. Stacey just served half of a 56-day jail sentence for publishing some flamboyantly racist tweets. “Go suck a ni–er d-ck you f–king aids ridden c–t,” one read.

Both individuals are unredeemed pariahs. Yet on either side of the Atlantic, and across the political spectrum, their cases have sparked an interesting debate over whether criminal justice was the proper means through which to express polite society’s revulsion at their actions. I think it was not, for the simple reason that the charges bore little relationship to the true nature of the outrage.

[. . .]

The context of Mr. Stacey’s crimes is less tragic. On March 17, before a television audience of millions, Premier League soccer player Fabrice Muamba collapsed of a heart attack. (He has since made a remarkable recovery.) In response, an admittedly soused Mr. Stacey Tweeted the following: “LOL. F–k Muamba he’s dead!!! #Haha.” That astoundingly insensitive missive was what elicited society’s outrage; it is still quoted at least 100 times in the media for every mention of the torrent of racist abuse that followed, when fellow tweeters complained.

Twitter is not, generally speaking, a racism-free zone; earlier in this year’s NHL playoffs, it hosted some jaw-dropping invective against Washington Capitals forward Joel Ward. And British white trash can match or exceed anything their North American counterparts are capable of. So here it is even clearer: Mr. Stacey’s problem wasn’t “inciting racial hatred,” the charge of which he was convicted, but doing it at the wrong time and getting noticed.

In the end, while two months was a remarkably harsh sentence for mere words, it’s hard to feel sorry for Mr. Stacey. One can argue for unfettered free speech, and equal application of the law, without defending this particular oik.

Giving up on politicians

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:34

A post from Jan Boucek at the Adam Smith Institute blog:

What with the ongoing eurozone crisis, G8 summits and NATO confabs, politicians from around the world continue to dominate the headlines — but things don’t seem to be getting any better. Amid all that hot air, though, were a couple of nice pearls of wisdom in the past week. Both suggested salvation from beyond the world of politics.

At a press conference on the occasion of his receipt of the Templeton prize, the Dalai Lama blamed last summer’s riots on young people “being brought up to believe that life was just easy. Life is not easy. If you take for granted that life will be easy, then anger develops, frustration and riots.”

Indeed. Politicians spend a lot of time promising to make life easy, alleviate risk and absolve individuals from the consequences of their behaviour.

Meanwhile, in a BBC interview prompted by the government’s scrapping of nutritional regulations for school lunches, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver said “I’ve given up on politics. My focus for the next 15 years is business and people. That is where the hope is. Governments are too short term. They’re too transient… They really don’t understand. There’s a political agenda but when you make these changes there’s very physical things that happen that they know nothing about which is very dangerous.”

May 22, 2012

Reason.tv: Is Austerity to Blame for Europe’s Economic Woes?

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:50

Lucasfilm fires Parthian shot in “retreat”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

In the New York Times, Norimitsu Onishi reports on recent developments (if you’ll pardon the expression) in Marin County, California:

In 1978, a year after “Star Wars” was released, George Lucas began building his movie production company far from Hollywood, in the quiet hills and valley of Marin County here just north of San Francisco. Starting with Skywalker Ranch, the various pieces of Lucasfilm came together over the decades behind the large trees on his 6,100-acre property, invisible from the single two-lane road that snakes through the area.

And even as his fame grew, Mr. Lucas earned his neighbors’ respect through his discretion. Marin, one of America’s richest counties, liked it that way.

But after spending years and millions of dollars, Mr. Lucas abruptly canceled plans recently for the third, and most likely last, major expansion, citing community opposition. An emotional statement posted online said Lucasfilm would build instead in a place “that sees us as a creative asset, not as an evil empire.”

If the announcement took Marin by surprise, it was nothing compared with what came next. Mr. Lucas said he would sell the land to a developer to bring “low income housing” here.

“It’s inciting class warfare,” said Carolyn Lenert, head of the North San Rafael Coalition of Residents.

It’s lovely to see NIMBY-ism spiked on its own hypocritical underpinnings. Just the threat of allowing “the other” into their lovely 1% outpost will be enough to rattle cages and upset the (self-nominated) “great and the good”:

Whatever Mr. Lucas’s intentions, his announcement has unsettled a county whose famously liberal politics often sits uncomfortably with the issue of low-cost housing and where battles have been fought over such construction before. His proposal has pitted neighbor against neighbor, who, after failed peacemaking efforts over local artisanal cheese and wine, traded accusations in the local newspaper.

The staunchest opponents of Lucasfilm’s expansion are now being accused of driving away the filmmaker and opening the door to a low-income housing development. That has created an atmosphere that one opponent, who asked not to be identified, saying she feared for her safety, described as “sheer terror” and likened to “Syria.”

Update: Jesse Walker comments at Hit and Run:

Lucas hasn’t always been a force for good in land-rights fights: His same statement that complains about the barriers to building on his property also complains that he wasn’t able to put up similar barriers himself when a developer built a neighborhood nearby. But that’s forgiven now. You have to appreciate a move that will simultaneously achieve four worthy goals: making housing more affordable for the poor, showing up the hypocrisies of the local limousine liberals, taking revenge (whether or not Lucas wants to call it that) on the people who restricted his property rights, and setting off a reaction that promises to be far more entertaining than any of the director’s recent movies.

May 21, 2012

The perils of misreading

Filed under: History, Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:05

I saw a Twitter update from MHQjournal, linking to a brief news piece:

#Theater: One-Man Play Takes Controversial look at Robert E Lee http://goo.gl/news/SyBu Hope they did enough research to get the nuances right.

I slightly misread the name of the play as “Robert E. Lee — 50 Shades of Gray”, and thought it was a very odd notion to have the very paragon of an upright, pious southern gentlemen reading from a modern erotica novel…

The answer to that burning question “Are libertarians misitreperted?”

Filed under: Humour, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:55

An interview with Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie in Salon gets the garble-for-comedy-gold treatment through Google Translate and Contentbot:

Chips Gillespie and Matt Welch, the writers of your primary libertarian distribution&Number160Reason, see pray for their many other People in the usa raising disenchantment while using governmental process. For their new publication &Promise of Independents: How Libertarian State policies Can Fix Whats Inappropriate With North america, they realize that independents now account for the best bloc of voters near your vicinity and craving far more defections from the two significant events. Only by taking apart this hierarchical process of electric power, they retain, will any of us achieve true deregulation of authorities-manage solutions, that will result in elevated shopper decision and a far more carefully democratized contemporary society.

Say what you want to about libertarian reasons, but they will be constantly entertaining to go about. So that we sat all the way down with Gillespie and Welch the 2009 weeks time and talked about their beliefs over the sushi the afternoon meal:

Your publication cravings the United states consumer to embrace an unregulated market free from authorities management. However you also have a quotation from Julian Assange, a self applied-described libertarian, stating that &a complimentary market results as being a monopoly if you do not power it to be free. You to get, some alternative entire body has to are available so that the liberty of an market &Number8212 doesn’t that imply that free financial markets are inextricable from some sort of authorities management?

H/T to Nick Gillespie for the link.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress