I question the idea that modern life has increased the total amount of lunacy in the world. Thanks to the Internet in general, and social media in particular, the volume of the world’s lunatic population has been amped well past 11 … but I think this is less a case of “Twitter creating lunatics” than “online anonymity letting people fly their freak flags openly”. Deliberately avoiding sex and politics, an example: On a road trip recently, I started flipping channels in my hotel room, and I came across a show called Dr. Pimple Popper. I swear, this is absolutely a real thing that exists. Here’s this woman, a dermatologist I guess, rooting around in cysts and boils and tumors and whatnot for the cameras, and … that’s it.
Not only is there an audience for this — which I never would’ve believed — there’s enough of an audience for it that it’s on basic cable. See what I mean? Somehow, the marketing guys determined that yes, there are enough people out there who want to see cysts being cauterized that we can make an entire show out of it. How could they figure it out? Beats me, but unless some suits at TLC had a contest to see what’s the silliest, grossest thing they could actually get broadcast, I’m betting that there was a group of Internet weirdos out there discussing it, and the marketing boys just ran with it.
Applying that to the topic at hand, my guess is that, since it’s so easy for people to be Massively Online these days, the kind of folks with that particular type of mental problem pretty much live on Twitter, where — as anyone who has waded into that cesspit for more than five minutes knows — the Twitterati absolutely cannot distinguish “talking about doing something” from “actually doing something”.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-04.
July 3, 2024
May 30, 2021
The Stanford Prison “Experiment”
In another of the anonymous book reviews at Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten, a look at the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment:
The second most famous psychology experiment in history is the Stanford Prison experiment. Philip Zimbardo split a group of undergrads at random into prisoners and guards. The guards were left free to choose how they would manage the prisoners, and within days the whole thing had to be called off as it had descended into a sadistic torture camp. At least that’s how Zimbardo has described it for the last 50 years. In fact, everything I just said is completely false. The undergrads were not split at random — the scheme had actually been dreamt up by an undergrad called David Jaffe who had run a previous experiment himself on abusing prisoners in a fake jail. He was carefully placed into the guards group. Nor were the guards left to choose their methods, instead they were briefed by Zimbardo and Jaffe that the purpose of the experiment (for which they were being well renumerated) was to see how people cracked under pressure. The experiment would be a failure unless they could put the prisoners under terrible stress. Even Douglas Korpi’s prisoner breakdown on day two, which, captured on camera, became the cinematic face of the experiment, was a fake he put on after discovering he wouldn’t be able to spend the time in jail revising, and being told he would only be allowed to quit if he suffered some sort of serious mental or physical breakdown.
Despite the pressure from Zimbardo and Jaffe, two thirds of the guards refused to take part in sadistic games, and much to their frustration a third continued to treat the prisoners with kindness. Nonetheless when Zimbardo came to write up the experiment about the effects on the prisoners, he realised it would be a much more compelling story if he turned it on its head, and made it about the guards instead. The truth of guards carefully drilled to be sadistic was swept away with a lie of ordinary people spontaneously becoming cruel when dressed in a uniform and given a position of power.
For years no one replicated the experiment — given the results first time round it was thought unethical, but in 2001 the BBC in search of new reality television commissioned a repeat (turns out reality television runs to different ethics than the average psychology department). Now unlike normal reality TV they didn’t bother manipulating the participants to be at each other’s throats — there was no need, in days it was going to be a bloodbath.
The result is the four most boring hours of television ever recorded. Nothing happens. The guards sit around chatting. When tensions arise with the prisoners, they defuse them by talking to them nicely. On day 6 some prisoners escaped. They headed over to the guards’ canteen and all had a smoke together. On day 7 they voted in favour of turning the whole thing into a commune.
May 26, 2021
POV you just turned on the History Channel for the first time in 15 years
Joel Haver
Published 16 Feb 2021Do not try what you’re about to see at home.
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August 8, 2020
“The show exploits the most extreme disaster LARPers, but their visions of the apocalypse are typical”
Jen Gerson does a bit of disaster-watching, or rather not so much watching disasters as watching people prepping for disasters:
If you spend a few hours devoted to consuming episodes of the reality TV show Doomsday Preppers, it becomes impossible to avoid this obvious conclusion: doomsday preppers are probably the least prepared of any of us to survive the apocalypse.
Take Season 2, Episode 14, for example, in which a 44-year-old man in Hawaii believes that he will use his intuition and limited backcountry skills to survive a tsunami — his first such intuition is to get into a boat.
More typically, the television show documents Middle American families who believe they can buy their way out of society’s collapse by burying bunkers and stockpiling food, weapons and tactical gear.
Most of them seem paranoid. A few come off as genuinely disturbed. All of them seem sad.
Ask them what they’re so afraid of and they will list their apocalypse of choice: electromagnetic pulse, financial collapse, famine, drought, coup, a population-devastating plague.
The show exploits the most extreme disaster LARPers, but their visions of the apocalypse are typical. We were all prepared for zombies, and aliens — the surround-sound end-of-the world in which we would take up arms against invading forces and ferry our children to the bug-out Eden in the mountains.
Nobody pictured the apocalypse would like this; stuck at home for months at a time, pounding Oreos and beer at 11 a.m. and watching Doomsday Preppers on Netflix while faking a work day on the couch. For most, heroism has been an act of idleness.
January 29, 2020
Charles Stross on “reality” TV
I don’t watch much TV at all … after catching the Superbowl on Sunday, I may not turn on the TV until the NFL preseason gets underway in the summer, so my impressions of reality TV offerings are gathered second- or third-hand at best. That said, I do recall watching some very early reality TV in the late 80s or early 90s (the one that comes to mind was something like “take a bunch of urban Brits and dump them in a recreated iron age village”). As Charles Stross describes the current crop of shows, I’m very confident that I’ve missed absolutely nothing over the decades:
I watch as little television as I can, and most of it by accident.
Whenever I do catch an eyeful, it usually consists of one of three things: a talking heads news channel, organized sportsball, or a Reality TV show. The first I try to ignore (they’re usually triangulated on the tabloid newspapers with added eye candy, then dumbed down: as information sources this century, TV news channels are useless). The sportsball I leave to my spouse (who is prone to lecturing me interminably about Manchester City). But the latter phenomenon — Reality TV — has all the grisly attention-grabbing potential of a flaming school bus careening out of control into a public execution: I basically have to leave the room in a hurry to avoid having my eyeballs sucked right out of my head by the visual media equivalent of internet clickbait.
What makes Reality TV shows so addictive?
The sector is dominated by a couple of competing recipes. As in so many mature markets, there’s an 80/20 split between a dominant incumbent and an insurgent that isn’t quite successful enough to overturn a monopoly but is too tenacious to die. Think Android/iPhone, or car/pick-up truck (that latter died about a decade ago in the US).
In the case of rTV shows, the 20% insurgent is about people demonstrating competence. Mythbusters was the classic competence-porn show (although it deteriorated into the explosion-of-the-week club after a few seasons): using science!!! and workshop/lab work to evaluate the plausibility of urban legends. Other competence rTV shows include: a team of dudes acquire a car wreck and restore it to good-as-new condition, a former special forces soldier/scout troop leader is dumped on a desert island and demonstrates survival skills, and so on.
But the other 80% of rTV shows are incompetence porn.
Incompetence porn Reality TV, as pioneered by Big Brother, usually aims to get the audience to laugh at or mock the participants in a contest designed to plumb the depths of humiliation. Instead of dropping a fit expedition leader on a desert island, the show dumps a bunch of washed-up B-list celebs in a wilderness of mosquitos and no soft toilet paper. Or perhaps it’s a bunch of Armani-suited sociopaths in a boardroom where they’re expected to pitch business start-up proposals at a washed-up B-list business celeb like Alan Sugar (or, in the American version of The Apprentice, a certain mobbed-up New York property speculator with shady Russian banking connections). Back-stabbing is a given in the celebrity/sociopath driven variant of rTV, as incompetent contestants are shoved out of the show at every episode until only the most obliviously egocentric remains.
(Note that the survivor selection criterion isn’t “competence”, be it at wilderness survival or boardroom brown-nosing: it’s entertainment value. Because these shows, despite the name, aren’t about reality, they’re showbiz.)
But these aren’t the worst.
October 21, 2019
QotD: Poverty versus relative poverty
However, viewers took to Twitter to insist that Andy and Kim Leamon and their two children from Southampton who have £170 a week to spend on food, clothes and socialising after paying their mortgage and bills are certainly not struggling.
It’s not, by local standards, exactly great riches, to be sure. But that is £2,210 of disposable income per person per year. That’s on the fringes of the top 30% of all global incomes. 70% or so are poorer.
Note again, this is their disposable income, after housing, bills and taxes, the global income number is before all of that. Or, as we might also put it, this is unimaginable riches by global or historical standards.
Tim Worstall, “Well, yes, there’s a point here”, Tim Worstall, 2017-10-20.
September 28, 2019
American politics as reality TV … maybe “reality” is a bit generous
At Catallaxy Files, John Comnenus guest-posts on The Trumpman Show of US politics:
Donald Trump addresses a rally in Nashville, TN in March 2017.
Photo released by the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.
Politics is reality television, especially American politics where a cast of a dozen contest the primaries. Like a good reality television show, there are set events and episodes, such as debates and primaries, where the weaker contestants are gradually knocked out until one emerges to fight the other side for the ultimate prize – the Presidency.
Reality television shows typically assemble a cast of mismatched characters who bond together and feud amongst each other over tasks that are assigned by the script writers and star. They inject challenges into the cast to create tension and drama that changes the cast’s allegiances and relationships in a way that engages the audience and leads to a cast member(s) being removed from the show.
Donald Trump produced and starred in the highly successful reality television show, The Apprentice, for 11 years. I believe Donald Trump is the first politician to conduct politics as if it were a reality television show. Rudolph Guliani claims the Ukraine story, which blew up this week, was a trap laid for the Democrats who walked straight into it. Trump knew the cast of Democrat Congressmen and Presidential candidates couldn’t resist the challenge Trump injected into the cast.
Succeeding in reality television is about timing that creates the drama that engages the audience and gradually removes cast members. So why inject this Ukraine story now? I suspect Trump injected this script item into the Democrat Party cast now to ensure that he dramatically realigns the cast’s relationships and allegiances as they go into primary season. He wants to do this by removing the front runner. If I am right, Trump wants a viciously divided Democratic Party Convention that can barely stand the nominee the Party selects as the Democratic challenger to Donald Trump.
The Ukraine trap effectively knocks Biden out of the race – he can’t go to a debate with highly credible and growing allegations of corruption swirling around him. The Democrat establishment will ensure he retires for “health reasons” to avoid Democrat corruption dominating the next debate. So the 20%-25% of Democrats who previously supported Biden will need to cast their lot with another candidate. But who?
August 10, 2019
Trump as the American Commodus
In the New York Review of Books, Tom Holland explains that America isn’t Rome, even if the current President does rather remind him of the Emperor Commodus:
The Course of Empire – Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.
When Edward Gibbon embarked on his great history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, he began his narrative with the accession of Commodus. Marcus Aurelius, the father of the new emperor, was a man who, in the noblest traditions of the Roman people, had combined the attributes of a warrior, a statesman, and a philosopher; Commodus was none of these.
“The influence of a polite age, and the labour of an attentive education,” Gibbon wrote sternly, “had never been able to infuse into his rude and brutish mind, the least tincture of learning; and he was the first of the Roman emperors totally devoid of taste for the pleasures of the understanding.” Instead, Commodus delighted in trampling on the standards by which the Roman political class had traditionally comported themselves. Most shockingly of all — as everyone who has seen Gladiator will remember — he appeared in the arena. His reward for this spectacular breach of etiquette was the cheers of the plebs and the pursed-lipped horror of the senatorial elite. To fight before the gaze of the stinking masses was regarded by all decent upholders of Roman morality as the most scandalous thing that a citizen could possibly do — but Commodus reveled in it. So it was, as Gibbon put it, that he “attained the summit of vice and infamy.”
Today, when conservatives contemplate a leader who, far from being merely an enthusiast for World Wrestling Entertainment, has long been an active and flamboyant participant in it, they may experience a similar shudder. Donald Trump, the only president of the United States ever to have been inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, boasted that he had won “the highest ratings, the highest pay-per-view in the history of wrestling of any kind.” The Battle of the Billionaires — a proxy wrestling match fought in 2007 between Trump and Vince McMahon, the owner of WWE — had culminated in a victorious Trump strapping McMahon to a barber’s chair and shaving him bald. A decade later, Trump made clear just how much of an influence the theatrical violence of WWE had had on his approach to politics when he tweeted a video of himself body-slamming and repeatedly punching McMahon.
It was in a similar spirit, perhaps, that Commodus might have posed after decapitating an ostrich. Trump, smacking home his point, made sure before he tweeted the video to specify who his real target was. Clumsily superimposed over McMahon’s face was the CNN logo. “FraudNewsCNN” ran the hashtag. “The speed with which we’re recapitulating the decline and fall of Rome is impressive,” the conservative intellectual and former editor of the Weekly Standard Bill Kristol tweeted in response. “What took Rome centuries we’re achieving in months.”
The conviction that Trump is single-handedly tipping the United States into a crisis worthy of the Roman Empire at its most decadent has been a staple of jeremiads ever since his election, but fretting whether it is the fate of the United States in the twenty-first century to ape Rome by subsiding into terminal decay did not begin with his presidency. A year before Trump’s election, the distinguished Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye was already glancing nervously over his shoulder at the vanished empire of the Caesars: “Rome rotted from within when people lost confidence in their culture and institutions, elites battled for control, corruption increased and the economy failed to grow adequately.” Doom-laden prophecies such as these, of decline and fall, are the somber counterpoint to the optimism of the American Dream.
H/T to Niall Ferguson for this and the preceding Roman-related link.
March 5, 2018
Gender War
Owen Benjamin
Published on 10 Mar 2017Watch this video to understand how men think, how women think, and why this narrative of gender conflict hurts everyone. I do it in a funny way because I’m a comedian, but there is a lot of truth in this. Not because I’m smart, but because I’ve made an unbelievable amount of mistakes in my life and don’t like to repeat them.
if you want to listen to my podcasts or see me live check out hugepianist.com
much love.
H/T to Rick McGinnis for the link.
June 19, 2017
June 2, 2017
QotD: Daytime TV
I’m writing this sentence (who can say where I’ll be in an hour) at the Brooklyn Diner off Times Square (the pastrami frittata is fantastic!). I’m about a block away from the set of Good Morning America, where hundreds of decent, normal Americans are willingly turning themselves into meat props for a three-hour spectacle, two hours and forty-five minutes of which is dedicated to something someone named Kanyé said about someone else; the troubling rise in Pilates injuries; J-Lo’s ass; and breaking news of a puppy making friends with a stuffed toy — from someone’s Facebook page somewhere out in America. I don’t actually know that’s what’s on today’s show, but I’m pretty confident it’s not that far off either.
I don’t mean to single out Good Morning America — The Today Show is equally vapid. It’s just that Good Morning America is fresh in my mind because I happened to watch an hour or so of it earlier this week while waiting for my car at the shop. I would have blown my brains out, but the show depleted my IQ so rapidly I couldn’t manage even the most rudimentary tasks. I got so dumb, Debbie Wasserman Schultz could have beaten me at checkers. But I did learn how Victoria Beckham struggles to have it all as a working mom. I don’t know how she does it. She’s a trooper.
And then there was the long segment on Suzy Favor Hamilton, the courageous former Olympic runner who married her college sweetheart, won a bunch of medals, started a family and a business, and then, “after one night with a Vegas call girl,” decided to become a hooker herself. “That light-bulb moment in my head, wow, why shouldn’t I get paid for sex?” she told GMA’s Lara Spencer. We then learn that her husband knew all about her moonlighting in Vegas, but he disapproved, as all decent husbands would, don’t ya know. You can read all about it in her new book (and so can her daughter). Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that — there’s a book. Contain your surprise.
Now, I’m not going to get all judgey here — because that would be wrong. Hamilton says she had serious mental-health problems, and that certainly seems more than plausible. Besides, we live in an age where having addictions, conditions, disorders, and issues is often a moral get-out-of-jail-free card. I have my own “issues” with that. But that’s a topic for another day.
[…]
And that was that. Hamilton betrayed her family and then compounded that “hurt” by splashing it all across the country — and somehow in a matter of seconds this becomes proof of her heroic struggle. She will have to live with this, but it was worth it because another journalist pandering to an interview subject said something that may or may not be true.
I’m not a big consumer of bipolar tell-alls, but I kind of feel like there are already more than a few out there and that it’s possible — just possible — the genre didn’t need one more, at least this one more. I’m sure this book helped someone, somewhere. But I resent the idea that somehow we’re all expected to celebrate this woman’s struggle and honesty and heroism and blah blah blah. And if we don’t celebrate it, not only are we the bad guys, but our judgmentalism makes her more of a hero.
It seems to me that if you don’t want people to judge you, maybe you shouldn’t herd your demons onto a public stage like they’re contestants in a beauty pageant?
Yeah, maybe her book will help someone out there. But maybe her top priority should be helping her family? I’d bet the book tour isn’t doing that.
Jonah Goldberg, “Our Culture Makes a Virtue Out of Victimhood”, National Review, 2015-09-18.
May 10, 2017
QotD: “Reality” TV
“Reality”-based game shows, by no means a U.S.-driven or U.S.-invented phenomenon, may recruit individuals who appear truly random. In practice, the contestants are selected for extreme personality features that the format elicits quickly. The future annals of reality TV will tell how little time it took for shows like Survivor to abandon their original regular-folks pretense — it was a matter of weeks in the case of the U.S. Survivor. Within months the more typical reality-competition show was something like Real World/Road Rules Challenge, i.e., a cauldron of freewheeling pathology spiced with sex and violence.
At any rate, everyone who appears on an actual television program has passed an implicit “can be on television” test for looks. The test is not strict: I was a semi-regular on a deep-cable panel show, and look at me. But try walking in the downtown of any major city and counting the number of people who have tics or wens or facial asymmetries that would disqualify them outright from TV. Needless to say, you don’t hear quite the same range of accents you do at a food-court MacDonald’s, either. It is probably to the good that we are disconnecting from television as a total environment, a multidimensional image of society plunged into at birth: those of us who were reared under those conditions must have weird, unfixable blind spots.
Colby Cosh, “On the ignominious downfall of Jared from Subway”, National Post, 2015-08-20.
April 30, 2017
QotD: Famous for being famous
Every country that has television, which is all of them, must have celebrities who are famous for almost nothing. The U.K. practically specializes in this. But the “almost” is important. Even the weird layer of U.K. celebrity that subsists on the old country’s old-fashioned panel and reality shows normally tends to demand that a celeb have been a member of Parliament or received a surgically enhanced bosom. If possible, both.
Colby Cosh, “On the ignominious downfall of Jared from Subway”, National Post, 2015-08-20.
March 25, 2017
When reality TV goes feral
In the Guardian, a sad tale of a failed reality TV show that went off the air … but the people involved were not told about it:
After a year cut off from modern life in the Scottish Highlands, imagine re-emerging to find a world where Donald Trump is US president, Britain has left the EU and Leicester won the Premier League.
For the contestants of the Channel 4 programme Eden, coming back from isolation means not just coming to terms with 2017 but also the news that their year of toil in the wilderness barely made it on to television.
The programme, which first aired in July last year, was billed as a social experiment where 23 strangers were brought to the remote west Highlands of Scotland to build a self-sufficient community away from technology and modern tools. The year-long saga would be recorded by four crew members and personal cameras.
However, only four episodes of the show – covering March, April and May – were screened, as viewing figures dropped from 1.7m to 800,000. Sexual jealousy, infighting and hunger also meant that over the year, a reported 13 of the 23 contestants left the show, though Channel 4 would not confirm the dropouts.
Despite the show being taken off air, those still toiling for survival in the wilds of the 600-acre estate on the Ardnamurchan peninsula were not informed that their ordeal had not been broadcast since August.
So much for those dreams of fame and fortune from “starring” in a reality TV show.
H/t to Colby Cosh for the link.
September 20, 2015
Perhaps this is the real reason Bruce became Cait
Dr. Helen Smith may have figured out the key motivation for Bruce Jenner’s decision to become Caitlyn:
Really, Kris is now happy for Caitlyn and didn’t want to talk to her when she was angry? Why wasn’t she that considerate when Caitlyn was Bruce? Even Caitlyn mentions what crap she was treated like in their marriage when he (she) was just Bruce for years. If you doubt me, take a look at the past episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians where Bruce’s opinions were ignored; he pretty much lived in the garage and anger was thrown his way with abandon by the family and Kris in particular. Sound familiar? This is the way many men are treated by families every day, and no one gives a crap. After all, they’re just men and probably have no feelings.
Now that Bruce has come out as a woman, his feelings are treated with care, and everyone, including Kris, is walking on eggshells. Why? It is socially unacceptable to trash talk women, particularly transgender women. Kris must feel angry inside, but can’t really express it. She has to pretend to be happy for Cait. To profess otherwise makes her into the bad guy. Now, if Cait were a man, she could talk with abandon and her anger would be justified. But she has been one-upped by Caitlyn. Maybe more men should transition to women as an act of self-defense as misandry spreads. Bruce joined the winning team and really, who can blame him?
I don’t know how much water this theory holds, but I have to admit that I had to Google search the phrase “Keeping Up with the Kardashians”, so perhaps it’s not something I really need to have an opinion on…
