Quotulatiousness

July 23, 2010

Define, or be defined

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 22:28

Jesse Walker looks at efforts to take the notion of “capitalism” and wrap it up in the more user-friendly term “free enterprise”:

[T]here’s an effort afoot to rebrand “capitalism” as “free enterprise.” On the face of it, I like the idea. Capital is going to be a central part of any modern economic system, whether or not there’s a lot of government intervention. By contrast, the phrase “free enterprise” implies economic liberty.

Unfortunately, MSNBC identifies the chief force behind the idea as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a group whose commitment to economic liberty is so strong that it came out for TARP, the Detroit bailout, and the 2009 stimulus. If the Chamber were more honest about its outlook, it would reject “free enterprise” for a more frank label, like “corporate welfare.” But I suspect that wouldn’t be good branding.

In the same way we had to give up the historical meaning of the word “liberal” to folks who used it to imply almost the opposite, we should probably abandon the word “capitalism”. For a start, the word was popularized by that great pamphlet writer Karl Marx, and it has a pejorative connotation to most people who hear it used. “Capitalists” are folks in top hats who ride in chauffeured limousines and have no sympathy or respect for “the working man”. Try subbing in “Plutocracy” or “Rich F*cking Bastards” and you’ll get close to the popular image of the current term.

In any argument where you try using terms that have been appropriated by your opponents, you’re already ceding the high ground. “Capitalism” is a word that comes pre-loaded with all the negativity your opponents delight in — don’t play their game by their rules!

Nick Gillespie predicts next season’s key moments in Mad Men

Filed under: History, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 22:14

I’m not qualified to judge, as I’ve never watched the show (in spite of the enticement of casting Christina Hendricks in a vital role). How do Nick’s predictions match your expectations for the new season of the show?

My recollections of the era aren’t relevant: I was four years old, and living in another country at the time.

July 22, 2010

Theme music retrospective

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 17:40

I spent too much of my childhood TV watching time hiding behind the couch whenever this program was on. I was too scared to watch, but wouldn’t let my mother turn off the TV:

Listening to all of them now, it’s only the first one that really sets the hair on the back of my neck quivering . . .

H/T to Rob Beschizza for the link.

Cultivating a taste for parody

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:36

The Economist reviews The Oxford Book of Parodies by John Gross:

Writing a parody is hard. In the 1940s, a competition in the New Statesman invited readers to parody Graham Greene. Greene himself entered under a pseudonym and only came second. Get it right, though, and you have a withering form of criticism and an immortal entertainment rolled into one. John Gross’s new anthology of parodies in English (with a few foreign titbits) has samples both high and low of this diverse genre.

[. . .]

Any well-known poem or character is fair game. A.A. Milne’s Christopher Robin is revisited as an ailing pensioner who has retired to Spain (“He peers through a pair of bifocals;/He talks quite a lot to a bear that he’s got/Who is known as El Pu to the locals.”) Ezra Pound wrote a wintry variation on “Sumer is icumen in” (“…skiddeth bus and sloppeth us…”) But why limit oneself to a single writer? Portmanteau parodies let writers do two voices at once, thus “Chaucer” rewrites Sir John Betjeman (“A Mayde ther was, y-clept Joan Hunter Dunn…”) and “Dylan Thomas” redoes “Pride and Prejudice” (“It is night in the smug snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug household of Mr and Mrs Dai Bennet and their simpering daughters — five breast-bobbing man-hungry titivators, innocent as ice-cream, panting for balls and matrimony.”)

[. . .]

Documents, philosophies and schools of thought can be good fodder, too. H.L. Mencken did a “Declaration of Independence in American” (“When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody . . .”)

Gay characters on British TV: still (mostly) negatively stereotyped

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:00

British TV, bastion of high-brow entertainment (at least to foreign audiences, who only see the “good stuff”), still has trouble coming to terms with how gay people are portrayed:

Gay people were portrayed positively and realistically for just 46 minutes in 126 hours of TV programmes, a study by Stonewall has found. They were shown as predatory, promiscuous or comical stereotypes half the time they appeared.

Soaps and reality shows such as Hollyoaks, I’m a Celebrity . . ., How to Look Good Naked and Emmerdale gave most screen time to gay, lesbian and bisexual characters or issues, but they were almost invisible in talent shows and dramas.

Researchers watched the 20 programmes most popular with young viewers for 16 weeks between last September and January 2010. Lesbian, gay and bisexual people were portrayed for five hours and 43 minutes in total — but 36% of that was negative, according to the report Unseen on Screen, and 31% was realistic but showed them as upset or distressed.

Stonewall monitored shows on BBC1, ITV1, Channel 4 and Five including The Bill, The X Factor, EastEnders, Blue Peter, The One Show and Strictly Come Dancing. It found that BBC1 portrayed lesbians for just 29 seconds out of nearly 40 screen hours.

July 20, 2010

Paywall experiment not going to plan

Filed under: Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:37

A drop in use was probably expected when the Times put up a paywall on their website, but I doubt they expected the drop to be on the order of 90%:

The Times has lost almost 90% of its online readership compared to February since making registration mandatory in June, calculations by the Guardian show.

Unregistered users of thetimes.co.uk are now “bounced” to a Times+ membership page where they have to register if they want to view Times content. Data from the web metrics company Experian Hitwise shows that only 25.6% of such users sign up and proceed to a Times web page; based on custom categories (created at the Guardian) that have been used to track the performance of major UK press titles online, visits to the Times site have fallen to 4.16% of UK quality press online traffic, compared with 15% before it made registration compulsory on 15 June.

These figures can then be used to model how this may impact on the number of users hitting the new Times site. Based on the last available ABCe data for Times Online readership (from February 2010), which showed that it had 1.2 million daily unique users, and Hitwise’s figures showing it had 15% of UK online newspaper traffic, that means a total of 332,800 daily users trying to visit the Times site.

If none of the people visiting the site have already registered, the one-on-four dropout rate means that traffic actually going from the registration site to the Times site is just 84,800, or 1.06% of total UK newspaper traffic – a 93% fall compared with May.

I have to admit that the paywall meant I just didn’t bother going to the Times at all, and no longer link to anything there (because most of my readers wouldn’t be able to open the link anyway). The Times might as well have gone out of business, from the online perspective.

July 19, 2010

QotD: “Happy now, whiners?”

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:33

On Thursday, I hoped that Apple CEO Steve Jobs would admit there’s a problem with the new iPhone’s antenna and apologize for pretending there wasn’t. I didn’t get that apology. Not even close. Instead, in a defensive press conference at Apple’s headquarters on Friday, Jobs argued that the new iPhone offers terrific, out-of-this-world reception. He blamed the media for whipping up a frenzy out of a “fact of life” that affects every phone on the market. As Jobs sees it, the only problems with the iPhone 4 are the pesky “laws of physics,” which pretty much ensure that anyone who holds a mobile phone in her hands is asking for trouble. The only reason people have been focusing on the iPhone is that blogs keep singling Apple out, perhaps because “when you’re doing well, people want to tear you down.”

Still, if you want to be a total jerk about it and keep insisting there’s a problem with your magical iPhone, Jobs has an offer for you. “OK, great, let’s give everybody a case,” he said. Happy now, whiners?

Farhad Manjoo, “Here’s Your Free Case, Jerk: Apple’s condescending iPhone 4 press conference”, Slate, 2010-07-16

July 18, 2010

Has the Reality-Distortion Field failed?

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

Eric S. Raymond does a happy dance over the discomfiture of Steve Jobs in the (ongoing) iPhone 4 antenna debacle:

The stench of desperation must be getting pretty thick on the Infinite Loop. Can it be that the generator for Steve Jobs’s notorious Reality Distortion Field has finally broken down?

Two days ago, we learned that Jobs knew of the iPhone 4’s antenna problem before launch. They had warnings both from an in-house antenna engineer and “carrier partner”, presumably AT&T. Yes, this means all the Apple fanboys who had hissy fits at me when I said fifteen days ago that Apple was lying about the problem now get to go sit in the stupid corner.

[. . .]

A day ago, we got to watch Jobs tap-dance his way around the problem. This was a first; I cannot recall any previous instance in which the Turtlenecked One, rather than effectively controlling the agenda, has had to operate in full damage-control mode. He could have manned up and said “OK, we messed up on the antenna design, we’re recalling,” but no. Instead it’s bumper cases for all and a truly smarmy attempt to claim that everyone else in the industry is just as bad.

Way to recover your damaged reputation, Stevie boy! Time was when the wunderkind’s reality-distortion field would have somehow soothed everyone into glaze-eyed insensibility, but that’s not the way it’s going down today. Instead, there’s public pushback from both RIM and Nokia, and neither company is being shy about specifying just how far his Jobness has rammed his head up his own ass.

And there is absolutely no one else to blame for this; it’s obviously Job’s fetishism about cool industrial design, the aesthetic of the minimalistically slick-looking surface above all else, that compromised the antenna design and led him to ignore the warnings. The exact quality that Apple fanboys have been telling us would ultimately win the game for Jobs turns out to be the tragic flaw instead. And now he’s reduced to telling everyone to wrap a big ugly rubber on, it, sparky! Hubris and nemesis; this epic fail could be right out of Aeschylus.

Apple will survive this, but they need to rally the damage control teams and be pro-active, or their reputation will take years to recover . . . and it’s the reputation that allows Apple to charge more than the competition for broadly comparable goods.

July 16, 2010

Another round of anti-drug hysteria?

Filed under: Food, Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

In times of economic uncertainty, we seem to get more off-the-wall panics about other things. Things like kids trying to find legal ways to get high. Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent me this link saying “. . .this is not The Onion! But it is hard to tell. I think I’ll try it when I get home.”

It’s not even news. Nutmeg’s (very mild) hallucinogenic qualities have been known for centuries. As they allude to in the video, the required dosage is so high that it’s the equivalent of smoking a rope: there may be a benefit, but it’s not worth the effort.

Stock up on nutmeg for your ordinary cooking needs, as this inevitably will lead to hysteric calls to ban the substance, or to have it only sold in registered outlets with a log kept.

July 15, 2010

The Guild will return to comic form, too

Filed under: Gaming, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 19:00

A second comic series based on Felicia Day’s The Guild will be published in 2011:

Dark Horse will officially announce at Comic-Con International in San Diego that Felicia Day’s “The Guild” is set to return to comics in 2011. Day’s popular web-based video series, which entered its fourth season this week, follows the offline adventures of the Knights of Good, a guild within a massively multiplayer online role playing game referred to simply as “The Game,” though recognizable as a “World of Warcraft” analogue. Day writes and produces the series, as well as starring as Codex. This year’s three-issue “Guild” comic series served as an origin story, both for Codex’s gaming life and for the guild as an entity. The sequel series, however, will find each issue focusing on a single character and illustrated by a different artist. The first issue will star noble guild-leader Vork, and is co-written by Jeff Lewis, the actor who portrays him.

Facebook usage patterns differ by gender

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

I have a Facebook account, but I use it infrequently (the vast majority of my FB activity is just status posts echoed from my Twitter account, actually). For certain groups, however, Facebook is far more critical to their lives . . . young women, for example:

According to a new report released by Oxygen Media and Lightspeed Research, about one-third of women on Facebook between 18 to 34 in age check this social networking site in the morning as the first thing even before going to bathroom. Some of the other astonishing facts deduced from this research on young women are as follows.

* 21% of women age 18-34 check Facebook in the middle of the night
* 63% use Facebook as a networking tool
* 42% think it’s okay to post photos of themselves intoxicated
* 79% are fine with kissing in photos
* 58% use Facebook to keep tabs on “frenemies”
* 50% are fine with being Facebook friends with complete strangers

Clearly there haven’t been enough stories about people losing their jobs over inappropriate posts on Facebook . . . maybe they aren’t being posted to Facebook itself.

July 9, 2010

Matt Ridley on the onrush of DOOM!

Filed under: Environment, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

Matt Ridley is about the same age as I am, and he clearly heard all the same warnings, predictions, and prophecies of doom that I heard when I was a teen:

When I was a student, in the 1970s, the world was coming to an end. The adults told me so. They said the population explosion was unstoppable, mass famine was imminent, a cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was beginning, the Sahara desert was advancing by a mile a year, the ice age was retuning, oil was running out, air pollution was choking us and nuclear winter would finish us off. There did not seem to be much point in planning for the future. I remember a fantasy I had — that I would make my way to the Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland, and live off the land so I could survive these holocausts at least till the cancer got me.

I am not making this up. By the time I was 21 years old I realized that nobody had ever said anything optimistic to me — in a lecture, a television program or even a conversation in a bar — about the future of the planet and its people, at least not that I could recall. Doom was certain.

The next two decades were just as bad: acid rain was going to devastate forests, the loss of the ozone layer was going to fry us, gender-bending chemicals were going to decimate sperm counts, swine flu, bird flu and Ebola virus were going to wipe us all out. In 1992, the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro opened its agenda for the twenty-first century with the words `Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being.’

And as we all know, it all came true . . .

Ridley’s latest book is The Rational Optimist, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. I didn’t always agree with it, but it was refreshing reading material. Recommended.

July 7, 2010

Recycled propaganda still doing its job

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:05

Strategy Page points out that even recycled propaganda can be effective:

Palestinian media, both Fatah and Hamas controlled, have undertaken a media campaign to arouse popular anger against Israeli plans to destroy the al Aqsa mosque. The problem here is that there are no Israeli plans to destroy al Aqsa. This complex is built on the site of two Jewish temples. The last one was destroyed by the Romans nearly two thousand years ago. Israel has always provided security for al Aqsa, but the Palestinians find it convenient to keep alive unfounded fears that Israel will, at any moment, destroy al Aqsa and rebuild their temple. This is what some religious extremists (Jewish and Christian) want, and one reason for the tight Israeli security around al Aqsa (which is otherwise controlled by Moslem religious authorities.) This fear mongering is a big deal among the Palestinians, but generally ignored, or simply unknown, outside Israel.

The numerous al Aqsa scare stories in the Palestinian media (replete with cartoons straight out of similar 1930s Nazi propaganda) are rarely recognized as a reason why Israel and the Palestinians cannot negotiate a peace deal. Arab and Western nations are again trying to organize peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis, with the goal of achieving a peace deal, and an independent Palestinian state. The “al Aqsa threatened by the Jews” propaganda campaign is one reason why these peace talks tend to go nowhere. The Palestinian strategy, which they make no secret of, is to keep harassing Israel until, as many Palestinians believe, the Jews will flee the Middle East and Israel will disappear. On Palestinian maps, it already has.

The naked truth about nudity

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:37

A review at The Economist strips Philip Carr-Gomm’s A Brief History of Nakedness down to the basics:

When, where and how much you take your clothes off matters a surprising amount. A plunging cleavage is nothing remarkable in the right circumstances. Elsewhere it can get you fired — or stoned to death. Nipples are fine in parks in northern Europe (and many Mediterranean beaches) but not on American television, even when covered with a tassel. Male genitalia are OK in the greatest works of classical sculpture, but not, even when they measure just one millimetre, in children’s books. The female pudendum is strictly for pornographers, gynaecologists and feminists trying to make a point. Given that everyone ran around naked only a few thousand years ago, and that we all look more-or-less similar once unclothed, this is quite puzzling.

[. . .]

Philip Carr-Gomm’s lushly illustrated book takes a long and enthusiastic look at the politics and culture of nakedness. Nudism attracts eccentrics, and their stories, he feels, deserve to be told. But his po-faced treatment of their antics can be unintentionally comic. Mr Carr-Gomm is a self-professed Druid and a practitioner of Wicca (a modern form of paganism that can involve a lot of larking around naked) and enjoys stripping off his clothes during country walks. Halfway through the book many readers will feel they have read quite enough reverential descriptions of naturist and pagan cults in 1930s Britain.

July 6, 2010

Men at Work to pay 5% for infringement

Filed under: Australia, Law, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:37

Following up from a post earlier this year, an Australian judge has avoided penalizing Men At Work the maximum for using a riff from another song:

A judge in Sydney has ordered the Australian band Men at Work to hand over a portion of the royalties from their 1980s hit Down Under, after previously ruling its distinctive flute riff was copied from a children’s campfire song.

But the penalty he imposed of 5% of the song’s royalties was far less than the 60% sought by publishing company Larrikin Music, which holds the copyright for the song Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.

Kookaburra was written more than 70 years ago by Australian teacher Marion Sinclair for a Guides competition, and the song about the native Australian bird has been a favourite around campfires from New Zealand to Canada.

That seems like a remarkably sensible judgement: the song clearly does infringe, but only for a small portion of the entire recording: it’s not critical to the success of the song, but it does contribute to its overall atmosphere.

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