By way of @muskrat_john (John Kovalic), who wrote “Love the Pogues. Love my Subaru Forrester. Saw Forrester commercial use Pogues song. Surprisingly, I died a little inside.”:
November 13, 2010
Some music just doesn’t belong in commercials
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November 11, 2010
Even more reason to believe that ACTA is a bad deal
From the folks at BoingBoing:
New revelations on ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a secretive global copyright being privately negotiated by rich countries away from the UN: ACTA will require ISPs to police trademarks the way they currently police copyright. That means that if someone accuses you of violating a trademark with a web-page, blog-post, video, tweet, etc, your ISP will be required to nuke your material without any further proof, or be found to be responsible for any trademark violations along with you. And of course, trademark violations are much harder to verify than copyright violations, since they often hinge on complex, fact-intensive components like tarnishment, dilution and genericization. Meaning that ISPs are that much more likely to simply take all complaints at face-value, leading to even more easy censorship of the Internet with nothing more than a trumped-up trademark claim.
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November 9, 2010
How to create false sympathy for “victims”
Adrian MacNair gives a couple of examples of how to manipulate your reader into a sympathetic view of someone who isn’t actually a victim:
In the first instance we have a story about a court pondering whether a person can agree in advance to unconscious sex. It’s not a particularly edifying piece of news as it discusses an Ottawa court case involving a kinky couple who were involved in sex involving asphyxiation.
Although the article focuses on the court’s upcoming ruling of “sexual autonomy”, a quote from a woman’s legal advocacy group, and the background details of the alleged assault, we only learn in paragraph nine about an extremely important detail:
“The woman took her complaint to Ottawa police two months after the alleged assault, when she was seeking custody of the couple’s toddler.”
Two months after the fact, while embroiled in a custody battle. Sounds like something that could have been delivered a little higher in the story. Indeed, one could rewrite it in such a way that implies this parent is using the legal system in a manipulative way that challenges sexual autonomy just to win her kid.
The second case involves the new parents who “lost their seats” on a flight:
And then we get to salient information in paragraph 11. The couple arrived through security 20 minutes before takeoff, and then decided to run their baby [to] the bathroom because he soiled his diaper. This diaper changing took so long that apparently the airline gave away their seats to standby. Sorry, so sad. Too bad.
Journalism students are taught to find a hook or an angle to make the story of interest to the largest possible audience, but these two cases sound like the story is actually being distorted to fit a pre-decided agenda.
Do you read SF? Do you like free stuff?
If so, you really ought to read this post:
Every single Vorkosigan book available for free from Baen
If you’ve never plunged into the mysteries and adventures of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, now is the time to do it. Every novel and story is available for free at Baen right now, in a variety of formats.
Here’s the link. Have fun!
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November 8, 2010
We’d love to talk about this First Amendment case, but we’re not allowed to
I sometimes wonder if there was ever any point in the US founding fathers putting that pesky Bill of Rights in place, when it’s so easy for those rights to be circumvented:
Liptak, who has seen part of the secret 10th Circuit order that keeps the amicus brief sealed, says one reason the appeals court gave for its decision is that allowing distribution of the brief would help I.J. and Reason publicly make their case that Reynolds is being persecuted for exercising her First Amendment rights. One of their goals, the Court said, “is clearly to discuss in public amici’s agenda.” Obviously, we can’t have that.
It bears emphasizing that the I.J./Reason brief is based entirely on publicly available information. It does not divulge any confidential grand jury information, protection of which is the rationale for sealing the documents related to Reynolds’ case. The only purpose served by sealing it is to make talking about the case harder.
Discouraging public dissent, of course, is how this case got started. Tanya Treadway, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted Stephen and Linda Schneider, was so irked by Reynolds’ public defenses of the couple that she unsuccessfully sought a gag order telling Reynolds to shut up. Later Treadway initiated a grand jury investigation that resulted in subpoenas demanding documents related to Reynolds’ activism as head if the Pain Relief Network (PRN), including a Wichita billboard defending the Schneiders and a PRN documentary about the conflict between drug control and pain control. Those subpoenas, supposedly aimed at finding evidence of obstruction of justice, are the subject of Reynolds’ First Amendment challenge.
First there were those secret laws in the wake of 9/11, now you’ve got courts ordering information on First Amendment cases to be kept from the public. One fears to ask “what’s next” for fear that they’ll already have an authoritarian answer teed up and ready to go.
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November 6, 2010
Creating a more privileged class of commenter
I don’t normally read comment threads at the Globe and Mail website (actually, I rarely get too far in comment threads anywhere . . . too many comments, too little time), so the creation of Globe Catalysts was news to me earlier today. Elizabeth mentioned that certain prolific commenters at the Globe website had been given privileges which makes their individual comments much more visible and (apparently) keeps catalyst comments near the top of the thread.
It must have appeared to Globe management that the comment threads were getting too unruly, so they’ve appointed class monitors or “trustys” to keep the unwashed masses in line.
It’s nice that they chose a name for these folks that allows the group of them to be referred to as “the Cattle List”.
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The geeks are not the “elite”
Virginia Postrel looks at TV and what it reveals about popular culture:
American culture is experiencing one of those periodic waves of anti-elitism that have roiled and defined the country ever since Andrew Jackson’s day. Intellectuals, symbol manipulators, universities and people who think they’re so damned smart are out. Regular folks are in.
Yet “The Big Bang Theory,” the CBS sitcom featuring Sheldon and his three almost-as-elite geeky friends, is among the most popular shows on TV. Kicking off the network’s now-dominant Thursday-night lineup, it attracts about 15 million viewers a week. Now in its fourth season, it’s the top-rated Thursday-night program among adults 18 to 49 years old and those 25 to 54.
[. . .]
Something more is going on. Surveying the fall TV lineup for Harvard Business Review’s blog, the anthropologist and marketing consultant Grant McCracken suggests a trend behind the show’s success. “Our heroes used to be the people who stole lunch money,” he observes. “Increasingly, they are the people from whom it was stolen. This has got to have something to do with the rise of Silicon Valley and people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.”
[. . .]
As anyone who has been abroad knows, American culture exists. But rather than a monolith, it’s best understood as a set of overlapping subcultures. Assume yours is the norm, the “real,” or the best expression of true Americanness and you miss a lot of important aspects of the culture as a whole, making it much less interesting and devaluing a lot of other people’s lives.
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Robert Fulford on Dierdre McCloskey’s latest book
As a dabbler in economic thought (but not an economist), I’m always interested in new books on different aspects of economics. Robert Fulford has probably prompted me to buy Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World:
In a time of sharply limited budgets, this gives a special urgency to the ideas of Deirdre McCloskey, an economic historian at the University of Illinois. She thinks she knows how economic growth works.
Why did northwestern Europe begin growing rich in the 17th century, a process that continues to this moment? Why did various countries elsewhere in Europe have similar success, along with countries created by Europeans, including the United States and Canada?
McCloskey sets aside most of the reasons for prosperity that her academic peers identify. Scientific innovation, natural resources, education, Protestant theology, trade agreements — these can be important but they do not explain global patterns. Often, they are present in societies that have failed.
The West’s success, McCloskey believes, turns out to be a question of imagination, attitude and sensibility. It depends on how we talk and write about business — in fact, how people in the West feel about it.
Fulford also points out that McCloskey has had a very unusual life:
It’s not possible to write about McCloskey without noting the most remarkable aspect of her life, which she described eleven years ago in Crossing: A Memoir. In 1995, Donald McCloskey, a 52-year-old professor, married for 30 years, a father of two, realized that his real identity was as a woman. He began a program of hormone treatment, multiple surgeries and electrolysis, emerging as Deirdre.
As a scholar, she noted that this physical change involved a cultural transformation as well. Having been both a man and a woman, she drew up a long list of changes she’s discovered in herself. Here are a few of them. She cries, she likes cooking, she’s more easily startled by loud noises, she listens intently to stories people tell of their lives and craves detail. She can’t remain angry for long. She’s less impatient, drives less aggressively, has more friends. She’s stopped paying attention to cars and sports. And she feels duty-bound to wash the dishes.
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November 4, 2010
Chutzpah, or the new Cook’s Source plagiarism service now open
Did you know that the internet is not public domain? The editors at Cook’s Source apparently thought it was, because they printed an article without the permission of the original author, and then told her that she should be happy they didn’t bill her for editing it. (It’s an article on medieval cooking, with original spelling preserved from the source texts: of course it would look weird to a modern eye.)
The exchanges between the original author and the editor make for amusing reading:
After the first couple of emails, the editor of Cooks Source asked me what I wanted — I responded that I wanted an apology on Facebook, a printed apology in the magazine and $130 donation (which turns out to be about $0.10 per word of the original article) to be given to the Columbia School of Journalism.
What I got instead was this (I am just quoting a piece of it here:)
“Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was “my bad” indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.
But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free!”
H/T to John Scalzi for the link.
Something I’m adding to my Christmas list
H.L. Mencken was a literary giant in the 1920s and into the 1930s, but fell from the pinnacle of popularity as the Great Depression hit. His consistent opposition to FDR and the New Deal moved him further and further away from the limelight, and his outspoken opposition to the war rendered him all but unpublishable from 1941 until his death. A large collection of his shorter works from 1914 through 1927 were published in Prejudices, running to six volumes.
The books are back in print, in two large volumes, through Library of America. An excerpt from the New York Review of Books just starts to get interesting before the cut-off for non-subscribers:
The material that H.L. Mencken published in a series of six volumes under the title Prejudices was a collection of his journalism written between 1914 and the late 1920s. Most of it, he told a good friend on publication of the first volume in 1919, was “light stuff” with an occasional “blast from the lower woodwind” that would “outrage the umbilicari, if that is the way to spell it.” Such books, he added, were “mere stinkpots, heaved occasionally to keep the animals perturbed.”
Most of the pieces in the first volume — or “series,” as it was called — had originally appeared in The Smart Set, the magazine he had edited since 1914, but they also included articles published in newspapers, as well as material written especially for the book. A painstaking editor of his own work, Mencken also did a good bit of rewriting; stinkpot or not, this was not to be a quick harum-scarum hustling of secondhand goods but a high-quality piece of prose from a master.
Its commercial success surprised him as well as his friend and publisher, Alfred Knopf, who seemed to realize for the first time that Mencken had a promising future, or, as he expressed it to his author, “that H.L. Mencken has become a good property.” The book was quickly followed by Prejudices: Series Two, Series Three, and so on to a final Series Six in 1927, by which time Mencken had developed from a good property into the most exciting literary figure in the country.
H/T to Mark at Unambiguously Ambidexterous for the link.
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November 1, 2010
It’s not liberal bias: it’s statist bias
Radley Balko uses the media positions on California’s Proposition 19 as a proxy to determine the actual bias:
For the last few months, my colleague Matt Welch has been tracking the positions of California’s newspapers on Proposition 19, the ballot measure that would legalize marijuana for recreational use. At last count, 26 of the state’s 30 largest dailies (plus USA Today) had run editorials on the issue, and all 26 (plus USA Today) were opposed. This puts the state’s papers at odds with nearly all of California’s left-leaning interest groups, including the Green Party, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Service Employees International Union, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; progressive publications such The Nation, Salon, and The Huffington Post; and a host of prominent liberal bloggers. According to a CNN/Time poll released last week, it also pits the state’s newspapers against 76 percent of California voters who identify themselves as “liberal.”
On this issue, the state’s dailies are also to the right of conservative publications such as The Economist and National Review, prominent Republicans such as former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, a growing portion of the Tea Party movement, and even Fox News personality Glenn Beck. (Beck has said he favors marijuana legalization, although he has been typically schizophrenic on Prop. 19.) So who are the newspapers’ allies? Nearly all of California’s major elected officials are against the measure, and the No on Prop. 19 campaign has been funded mainly by contributions from various law enforcement organizations, including the California Police Chiefs Association, the prison guard union, and the California Narcotics Officers Association.
It’s telling that the loudest voices opposing pot legalization are coming from the mainstream media, politicians, and law enforcement. The three have a lot in common. Indeed, the Prop. 19 split illustrates how conservative critics of the mainstream media have it all wrong. The media — or at least the editorial boards at the country’s major newspapers — don’t suffer from liberal bias; they suffer from statism. While conservatives emphasize order and property, liberals emphasize equality, and libertarians emphasize individual rights, newspaper editorial boards are biased toward power and authority, automatically turning to politicians for solutions to every perceived problem.
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October 30, 2010
Shakespeare in the original pronunciation
It doesn’t sound much like your traditional Shakespeare production does it?
Like an archeologist reconstructing the fossilized skeleton of an ancient species, a University of Kansas theatre professor has pieced together the bones of a form of English that has never been heard in North America in modern times — the original pronunciation of Shakespeare.
Thanks to the work of Paul Meier, audiences can get a sense of what it might have been like to eavesdrop on opening night of “Hamlet” or “Romeo and Juliet” at the Globe Theater in London or to listen in on a shipboard conversation on the Mayflower as it approaches the shores of the New World.
“What did English sound like back then?” Meier said. “Was it posh or down to earth? Was it anything like today’s British or American English? Would we understand it?”
H/T to A Blog About History for the link.
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October 29, 2010
“When I was taking dope, I was fully convinced that my body is my temple”
The longevity of Keith Richards is a point of bafflement for drug warriors and rock groupies alike:
The Rolling Stone’s autobiography reveals a lifetime of substance abuse. Why on earth hasn’t it killed him?
His name is synonymous with rock ‘n’ roll excess, his memoirs detail a lifetime spent ingesting a Herculean quantity of illegal drugs and he only gave up cocaine, aged 62, after he split his head open falling from a tree while foraging for coconuts.
At 66, Keith Richards’ continued survival is a source of widespread bafflement.
According to addiction expert Dr Robert Lefever, director of the Promis recovery centre in Richards’ native Kent, there is only one possible explanation for his longevity: “He must have the constitution of an ox.”
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October 28, 2010
Help some Canadian bloggers against “lawfare”
Richard Warman is suing several Canadian bloggers (among many, many suits he’s launched), including Kathy Shaidle:
As many of you know, I — along with Ezra Levant and others — are already being sued by former Canadian “Human Rights” Commission employee Richard Warman.
Now my husband Arnie — a.k.a. the blogger BlazingCatFur — is also being sued by Warman, also for criticizing his activities at the CHRC.
Warman is suing for $500,000.
Arnie has already spent $10,000 in legal fees. We’ve put off asking for help for more than a year, but we now are coming to you for assistance.
Among the issues in the latest suit is the claim that merely linking to a “far right website” (in this case, SteynOnline) can be considered actionable.
