Quotulatiousness

March 1, 2012

The plight of Britain under austerity

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:03

Vuk Vukovic wonders why the notion that the British government has imposed austerity still has any traction in the media:

The UK had the one of the strongest fiscal stimuli (relative to the size of its economy) in the world as a response to the crisis, during the premiership of Gordon Brown. The result was making the situation much worse with a rising public debt and the third highest budget deficit in the world behind only Greece and Egypt in 2011, and behind Greece and Iceland in 2010. This comparison is striking since these countries were doing much worse than the UK at the time and were countries with highly unstable economies – Iceland before the restructuring, Greece whenever, and Egypt after a year-long revolution which saw the downfall of a dictator and an inability to consolidate ever since.

So the argument of Keynesians is that this wasn’t enough, and that Britain is crippled with austerity. The media is supporting the former view as well. Britain is running the hardest austerity policy in Europe and this is resulting in terrible growth performance and the inability to start up the recovery. However, Britain is far from austerity. Yes, some painful cuts have been made, tuitions were rising, unions were hit, wages in the public sector are stagnant, a lot of public sector workers have been laid off, but what does the government do with this saved up money? It “invests” in credit easing, housing subsidies, the youth contract and infrastructural projects. On the other hand, it’s guiding private sector investment and centrally planning credit, it announces an increase of the minimum wage, abolishing of the default retirement age, more regulation after claiming to remove regulation, the 50p tax rate and so on. None of these policies are policies aimed at growth. They are all part of a Keynesian response to the crisis.

After all, if one would just observe the spending data for the UK, it is still increasing, both relatively (as percent of GDP) and absolutely.

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” To call a situation where government’s share of GDP is rising as “austerity” requires a brand new definition for the word.

February 27, 2012

Goodbye and good riddance to the architect of “Canadian Content” media rules

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:28

Marni Soupcoff on the lasting legacy of former CRTC head Pierre Juneau, the mandatory “CanCon” ratio for TV and radio:

Former CBC and CRTC president Pierre Juneau died last week at the age of 89, and the requisite obituaries followed. Almost all of them congratulated Mr. Juneau on his most well-known achievement: having mandated minimum standards for Canadian content on radio and television. It is an unfortunate legacy.

The troubles with CanCon requirements are both moral and practical: It is not simply wrong to try to forcibly engineer a population’s taste in music in television. It is also impossible. People like what they like, and if what they like is Canadian, they will watch and listen to it even absent rules dictating that they must. If what they like isn’t Canadian, rules saturating the airwaves with all the Loverboy ditties in the world won’t make them tune in.

So even if you aren’t bothered by CanCon rules’ violation of freedom of expression, you should at least ask yourself how effective the regulations can possibly be — especially today. More and more people are selecting their music and television shows on their own, now, picking an episode from iTunes here, a free song download from a band’s webpage there. The idea that the nation’s culture can be shaped by mandating the nationality of prime-time content on TV networks and radio stations is as antiquated as it was flawed to start with. And we’re wasting money and time by continuing to force media outlets to comply.

And yes, my Cancon blog category is a backhand at the longstanding regulation.

David Friedman: The boy who cried wolf

Filed under: Media, Science — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

Although it mentions the global warming debate, it’s really more about being skeptical in general:

A number of political commenters have compared the current Republican contestants unfavorably with Barry Goldwater. The current crop, we are told, are religious nutcases, or possibly pretending to be. Goldwater, on the other hand, was an intelligent and reasonable man, even if not on the right side of every issue.

I have been reading my parents’ autobiography, and recently got to the Goldwater campaign. Their description fits my memory. What we were being told then — by people almost none of whom could have done a competent job of explaining Goldwater’s positions or the arguments for them — was that he was a dangerous madman. There was even a piece by some large number of psychiatrists, none of whom had ever examined the candidate, explaining how crazy he was. And the TV ad with the little girl, the countdown, and the mushroom cloud.

[. . .]

I am not competent to judge the climate science behind global warming, but I am suspicious of orthodoxies pushed relentlessly in the popular media, orthodoxies that claim that everyone competent agrees on an urgent problem which requires drastic action immediately if not sooner. I remember when we were being assured that it was simply a scientific fact that overpopulation was the cause of poverty and a near term threat to our own well being, if not survival. Also when we were assured that the only way to get the poor countries of the world up to our level was central planning, if possible supported by generous foreign aid.

When I see news headlines about global warming having shrunk horses to the size of cats, along with a picture comparing a cat sized dog to a modern Morgan — you have to read down a bit to discover that the ancestral horses shrank to the size of cats from the size of dogs, from 12 pounds to 8 1/2 pounds, and spent tens of thousands of years doing it — I suspect that what I am seeing is driven at least as much by what people want other people to believe as by the evidence for believing it.

February 6, 2012

Brazil fights back against celebrity oppression

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

John Conroy on the recent backlash in Brazil against foreign celebrities using domestic issues as platforms for moralizing:

Film director James Cameron, responsible for Terminator, Titanic and, more recently, Avatar, has been working on a considerable side-project for a few years now. Cameron film fans shouldn’t get their hopes up, however. This side-project is more political than filmic. He has been trying to prevent the Brazilian government from constructing Belo Monte, the world’s third-largest hydroelectric dam, on the Xingu river which runs through the Amazonian rainforest.

[. . .]

But then something very curious happened. Another tribe of Brazilians, normally so fearful of being seen outside of their natural habitat, fought back. Geeky university students and their professors made a film with zero production values undermining every argument used by Cameron, the NGOs, the Kayapo and TV Globo. These are the myths they challenged:

  • The Indians will have nowhere to live. Actually, a student from Brasilia University who has done little else but study the impact of the project on indigenous lands responded that not one of the indigenous lands in the region will be flooded. There are 12 indigenous territories near the project in an area of 56,000 square kilometres with 2,200 indigenous people living on them. That’s two-and-a-half times the size of Wales. Thirty consultative meetings were held in tribal villages and recorded on video.
  • The dam and its reservoirs will flood and destroy 640 square kilometres of rainforest. Not exactly. The reservoirs will cover an area of 502.8 square kilometres of which 228 square kilometres are already within the body of the river itself.
  • The dam will starve the Xingu National Park of water. This is not true. The students displayed a map revealing that the park is in fact 1,300 kilometres up river of the dam.
  • For eight months of the year the region above the dam is nearly a desert making the dam inefficient and only capable of generating a third of its installed capacity. The implication here is that there is insufficient water to drive the turbines at full power. However, during the high-water period of the year, the river empties 28 million litres of water per second at the point of the turbines, creating an extraordinary potential energy generation of 11,233 megawatts (MW). Even at the river’s lowest levels in the month of October, it delivers 800,000 litres per second. The annual average energy production of Belo Monte will be 4,571MW, or 41 per cent of the potential generating capacity, not one third. This will power 40 per cent of Brazil’s entire residential energy consumption.

February 4, 2012

“Fake the oath” to become the new “Jump the shark”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:26

Chris Selley wonders why anyone outside the Ottawa media bubble would care about the Sun Media (or as Paul Wells usually spells it in his tweets, “Sun Meida”) faking the citizenship ceremony for a TV broadcast:

“Let’s do it. We can fake the Oath.” That is the universally accepted money quote, courtesy of a Sun News producer, to come out of this week’s fracas involving the fledgling cable news network, the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration and a citizenship ceremony that wasn’t quite what it seemed. On Oct. 19, during Citizenship Week, Sun viewers were told they were watching 10 people become Canadian citizens. Instead they were watching 10 citizens, six of whom were federal bureaucrats, reaffirm their Canadian citizenship.

“Congratulations to all of the new Canadians here,” co-host Alex Pierson gushed. “Ten of you here at Sun News Network, finally Canadian citizens!”

“Fake the Oath” certainly has the ring of legend. I think it could be to the Canadian media what “jump the shark” is to situation comedy. An example: “Oh for God’s sake, [insert media outlet], a talking dog on YouTube is news now? You guys have finally faked the Oath!”

But having gone through the documents behind this story, which were obtained by Canadian Press through Access to Information, I’m struggling to understand the amount of coverage this story got. Well, OK, I sort of understand it: Pointing and laughing at Sun Media is a national pastime among journalists and liberals these days. What I can’t figure out is how this matters.

In praise of Her Majesty the Queen

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:33

Conrad Black goes full monarch in his latest column:

The Queen has an outstanding record of absolutely unblemished service, through tumultuous changes and always having to endure suggestions of impending obsolescence — not just of the monarchy itself, but of its various separate functions, especially the ambiguous positions of head of the Commonwealth and supreme governor of the Church of England.

The 1950s were a constant round of independence ceremonies, mainly for countries that had a very rocky start and little aptitude for premature emancipation from unfashionable colonials status. This made for ever larger and more incongruous Commonwealth meetings, as the shared British traditions that supposedly united the “British Dominions, realms and territories beyond the seas” frayed and became always more threadbare except, perhaps, among the former so-called “white Dominions.”

In this present time of glaring, intrusive, nasty media, it is hard to imagine the proportions of the Queen’s achievement in serving 60 years, every one of them as one of the most prominent and publicized people in the world, without one gaffe, one embarrassing photograph, one injudicious utterance or slip on a banana peel, literal or metaphoric.

[. . .]

Queen Elizabeth II has personified the British middle-class virtues: moderation, unflamboyant consistency and unflappable reliability. It hasn’t always been exciting, and in satirical magazines such as Private Eye and on the BBC, she has paid a price for that and was lampooned for decades for stiff formality and stilted phrases — “My husband and I,” etc.

February 3, 2012

Walter Kirn profiles Gingrich

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

A new column in GQ on the 2012 presidential race:

There are some things you don’t know you want until you get them and some that you don’t know you don’t until they’re yours. Take perfection. Now that Republicans have found in Romney pretty much all the qualities they’ve clamored for in modern presidential candidates—an aura of personal and public decorum, a record of civic-minded accomplishment backed by a record of fierce free-market self-enrichment, all wrapped up in a senior-edition beach bod and a profile fit for a gold coin—they don’t seem as wild for them as as they once were. Sure, they’re proving willing to accept Mitt (largely on the assumption that others will like him, which is how social-climbing teens choose prom dates) but what many of them now lust for in their hearts, as do certain non-Republicans who’ve caught the fever despite themselves, is something they never imagined tolerating, let alone secretly, irresistibly craving: a primordial walking gargoyle of pre-monogamous political id. Newt Gingrich, who seems to inhabit a middle state between swamp thing and statesman, frog and prince, is an arresting specimen in his own right, but as the fascination of a party whose base holds that man was created in God’s image without any scaled or beaked transitional versions, he’s an unaccountable astonishment.

He’s also an unshakable addiction. Like a drunken traveling salesman who hits on a freaky new sexual position during a night of Motel Six carnal fumbling, Newt has managed to put his stubby finger on a collective pleasure center—some undiscovered orgasmic political ganglia—that will require quadrennial stimulation from here on out. Whether he wins even one more delegate hardly matters in the screwy new scheme of things. As a style, as an archetype, he’s already prevailed, changing forever the nature of the game and earning the love of everyone who’s felt the game becoming sclerotic recently, the way games do when the money grows enormous, the press coverage relentless, and the players remain the same. Just as JFK and Reagan accustomed Americans to a higher standard of dashing glamor in Oval Office types, Newt has habituated a numbed electorate to a new level of effervescent perversity. He’s probably unelectable, it’s true. He’s entirely unforgettable, that’s truer. He has opened a process that’s routinely disparaged as a mere horse race, shallow and routine, to a whole new animal: the bred-for-mayhem Georgia kicking mule.

February 2, 2012

Repost: A tribute (of sorts) to Wiarton Willie

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

John Scalzi, several years ago, wrote a tribute to Wiarton Willie, who was in the news in an unaccustomed way at the time:

To tell you the truth, the most disturbing thing is not that the groundhog died — certainly this animal earned his eternal rest — but that his handlers couldn’t think of anything better to do but tell a festival crowd that he had croaked. Those kids in the crowd will be forever traumatized. Groundhog Day will no longer be a happy time, but a constant reminder of death and mortality in the bleak midwinter. 10 years from now, I expect that Wiarton, Canada will become the new North American epicenter of dark, gothic teenage poetry.

Lying frozen in the snow
The groundhog soul resides far below
Gone to a place of doom and gray
Now winter will always stay.
Die Groundhog Die!
Mommy and Daddy Lied!

But wait, there’s more:

Now, on to the groundhog Wiarton Willie, who, as you know from yesterday’s entry, died before Groundhog Day and whose body was photographed lying in state in a dinky little pine coffin. Or was it? Now news comes from the sordid little burg of Wiarton, Canada, that the rodent corpse in the coffin was not Wiarton Willie at all, but a stuffed stand-in. The real Willie was apparently found so decomposed that the gelatinous remains were unsuitable for public display. So the town elders found a stuffed groundhog that just happened to be lying around (apparently the body of a previous “Wiarton Willie,” who was no doubt poisoned by the current, and now rotting, Willie in an unseemly palace coup), plopped it into that Barbie coffin, and presented the remains to a horrified public. Here’s the groundhog you’ve all been waiting for! And he’s dead! Winter for the next ten years!

The people of Wiarton meant well, I’m sure. But I’m having serious doubts as to their combined mental capacity. First off, the real Willy was found in a state of advanced decomposition, which means he had been dead for weeks. Weeks. How could that happen? This rodent is the cornerstone of Wiarton’s entire tourism economy for the month of February, and no one bothers to check on him from time to time? Did they just stick him in a cage after last Groundhog Day and then forget to feed him? Every kid in the world had a hamster they forgot to feed, but you’re usually, like, five at the time. These were actual adults. They say he was hibernating when he died. Sure he was. I used that excuse about the hamster.

January 30, 2012

Rick Mercer: Liberal Optimizer Strips

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Politics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:04

January 28, 2012

Photoshopping images is so passé: using game footage is the new trend

Filed under: Gaming, Media, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:35

At the BBC website, Phil Coomes shows some side-by-side images of real events and modern FPS game images. The recent flap over clips from the game Arma 2 being cited as genuine film captured from the IRA is only the first of many incidents we should expect to encounter, as games get better (and advocates remain as dedicated to advancing their causes as ever):

Today we are used to seeing real time reports from across the globe, technology has advanced and anyone with an internet connection can travel to far-off places, even imaginary worlds, from their armchair.

The world of video games has progressed too. Some seem real, as highlighted by a recent Ofcom ruling that ITV misled viewers by airing footage claimed to have been shot by the IRA, which was actually material taken from a video game.

Labelled “IRA Film 1988”, it was described as film shot by the IRA of its members attempting to down a British Army helicopter in June 1988. However, the pictures were actually taken from a game called Arma 2.

[. . .]

So I went through my photos taken from various combat zones, and attempted to replicate them in a computer game.

The game Arma 2 was ideal — it’s more of a war simulation than an all-out blaster, with the correct uniforms, vehicles and weapons as well as varied terrains and bang-bang firefights.

Plenty of hours fiddling within the gaming environment, alongside Ivan who developed the game, produced some pretty remarkable results.

In some cases it is actually quite hard to tell the difference between my photographs and the computer version, which is deeply worrying. The level of detail is so precise that the virtual war zone is as convincing as the real thing.

January 26, 2012

What is really meant by the term “market failure”

Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:10

Posting on the Institute of Economic Affairs blog, Tom Papworth tries to clarify what the term “market failure” actually means, in comparison to how it’s commonly used by politicians and journalists:

Firstly, it seems to blur the distinction between ‘the market’ and ‘the markets’ — a very common error in current discourse. The market is an economic concept that describes the myriad of choices and exchanges that take place between people every day; the markets are the very real institutions created for handling major financial transactions. It is not clear to me that this article acknowledges that distinction. This manifests itself primarily in the title and main theme: indeed, as Jan (and at least one commentator) does tacitly acknowledge, the financial markets are so shaped by government intervention that it would be a surprise if they did correspond to a model market.

And that brings me to the second problem: the suggestion that markets don’t fail when they ‘respond rationally, quickly and often brutally to conditions as they find them’. While that description is true, it has little bearing on the concept of market failure. Market failure typically refers to situations where the effects one would expect to see in a theoretical market economy do not in fact manifest themselves in real life. As the great man himself would be — and perhaps was — the first to point out (though without using these terms) markets fail because of factors such as monopoly and externality — monopolies undermine competition and so markets do not clear; externalities enable costs to be passed onto third parties and prevent all beneficiaries contributing to the production of goods. Information asymmetry is often presented as another source of market failure.

Now, to be fair to Jan, that precision of language is hardly prevalent among the politicians he is criticising. When they speak of market failure, it seems almost as though market success is defined by a number of uneconomic measures such as social justice, or even (that ultimate weasel-word) fairness.

January 24, 2012

Sorting out the proper terms of address, American style

Filed under: Media, Randomness, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:44

In an lengthy aside in his weekly NFL column, Gregg Easterbrook provides a useful summary about how to address current and former holders of various offices (answering a few questions I had about this topic):

In the Republican debate just before the South Carolina primary, John King of CNN addressed the candidates as “Governor Romney,” “Senator Santorum,” “Speaker Gingrich” and “Congressman Paul.” Only Paul actually holds the post connected to the title. [. . .]

Should the news media use titles such as Governor and Speaker for candidates who are not in fact governors or speakers? The authority here is The Protocol School of Washington, which teaches etiquette and, name aside, is located in Columbia, S.C. It maintains a lengthy website on terms of address; the section on addressing former officials is here. The basic rule is that if there are many persons in a category then a former official keeps his or her title when being addressed, while if there is only one of someone, the former person to hold that job does not keep the title.

Since there are many governors and senators, “Governor Romney” and “Senator Santorum” are correct terms of address. But there is only one Speaker of the House, so Gingrich should not be addressed as “Speaker Gingrich.”

The one-or-many rule is the reason judges, generals, admirals, governors, mayors and members of Congress keep their titles for life — but presidents, speakers and cabinet secretaries do not. The Protocol School notes that former president Bill Clinton should not be addressed as “President Clinton,” though having been a governor, he may be addressed as “Governor Clinton.” Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice should not be addressed as “Secretary Rice,” she is addressed as “Dr. Rice.” When Dwight Eisenhower left office, he asked to be addressed as “General Eisenhower,” because addressing him as “Mr. President” would have been disrespectful to the sitting president, John Kennedy. Dick Cheney and Al Gore, the Protocol School notes, should not be addressed as “Vice President Cheney” or “Vice President Gore,” because there is only one vice president, though they may be addressed as “Congressman Cheney” or “Senator Gore.”

Thus addressing Next Gingrich as “Speaker Gingrich” is improper and disrespectful to the sitting speaker, John Boehner. As a former member of the House of Representatives, Newt should be addressed as “Congressman Gingrich.”

Considering Gingrich frequently proclaims his great knowledge of history, and considering he misses no chance to savage the media, why doesn’t he correct journalists who improperly address him as “Speaker Gingrich”? Perhaps because being called “Speaker Gingrich” makes him seem more important.

Why do members of the news media address Gingrich improperly? Because it makes them, by reflection, seem important. When news types call him “Speaker Gingrich” or “Mr. Speaker,” it sounds like someone of power and standing is in the room. A relationship of mutual phoniness is established — Gingrich and any journalist addressing him as “Speaker Gingrich” both pretending to be more important than they are.

We don’t have as many different ways to refer to our politicians: they’re generally either “The Honourable” (cabinet ministers, MPs, and senators — they retain the title after retirement if they are members of the privy council, and former cabinet ministers are always members) or “The Right Honourable” (Prime Minister, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and former Governors General). The current Governor General, as personal representative of the monarch, is addressed as “Your Excellency”.

Scottish Americans: nostalgia compounded of Braveheart, whisky tours, and castles

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:35

The BBC looks at the views of Scotland held by Scottish Americans:

It’s the time of year when Americans everywhere get in touch with their Scottish roots, however tangled and distant they might be, as they celebrate Burns Night.

The concept of Scottish identity has recently been invigorated as plans for a referendum on independence take shape in Holyrood. So what do Americans with Caledonian ancestry make of the debate?

[. . .]

Their vision of Scotland is mostly taken from movies like Braveheart, Mel Gibson’s 1995 tale of Scottish rebel William Wallace, who leads an uprising against an English tyrant, says Mr Forbes.

Few have any idea what modern Scotland is like, he adds, and if they do it will have been picked up from dark and twisted tales like Trainspotting or Shallow Grave.

“There are elements of truth in what people believe the whole of Scotland to be but it is not the whole truth. If you look at the marketing of Scotland, you see these broad mountainous vistas, these sparkling lakes, these old castles.

“They don’t talk about the Silicon Glen, they don’t talk about the industry around the northern oil fields.”

[. . .]

Members of a Gaelic speaking society are, apparently, still smarting after their inquiries about promoting the language in Scotland were batted away by Scottish government officials, who told them that more people speak Farsi than Gaelic in modern Scotland.

John King Bellassai, former president of the DC St Andrews Society, says Scottish Americans tend to let romance cloud their judgement when it comes to an independent Scotland

January 20, 2012

The anti-Top Gear crowd: “In certain quarters, Clarkson-bashing has started to replace tennis as a favourite pastime”

Filed under: Britain, Humour, India, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Patrick Hayes on the tut-tutting, disapproving folks who only watch Top Gear to generate more outrage at Jeremy Clarkson’s antics:

I wonder what proportion of the five million viewers of the Top Gear India Special over Christmas were desperate-to-be-offended members of the chattering classes? Skipping the second instalment of Great Expectations, they no doubt sat through the show solely to tweet about how awful Jeremy Clarkson and Co’s monkeying about on the road to the Indian Himalayas was.

In certain quarters, Clarkson-bashing has started to replace tennis as a favourite pastime. He was chastised for offending blind people when he called former UK prime minister Gordon Brown a ‘one-eyed Scottish idiot’, censured for driving while sipping a gin and tonic en route to the North Pole, and generated fury when a couple of years ago he called for the Welsh language to be abolished. But never has he generated so much controversy as the Twitch-hunt that took place against him at the end of last year, after he made a quip that public sector strikers ‘should all be shot’.

This was so evidently a joke, although a crap one, that you had to wonder whether the tens of thousands of ‘offended’ people who took to their keyboards to campaign to get him sacked were for real. Is it humanly possible to be that po-faced? Evidently so. Irony-phobic Labour leader Ed Miliband led the way, calling the comments ‘absolutely disgraceful and disgusting’. A sour-mouthed trade union rep even compared his comments to the atrocities carried out by former Libyan tyrant Muammar Gaddafi.

[. . .]

For these petty censors, it’s not enough simply to change the channel. The danger, so the argument goes, is that Clarkson could become a red-blooded role model to millions of impressionable viewers who will mimic his expressions and share his juvenile, PC-averse passions. Attempts to tame Jezza are invariably attempts to try to reform the viewing public, too. If not stopped now, it would seem, Top Gear could generate an army of misogynistic, environment-despoiling racists-in-the-making.

The danger doesn’t come from Clarkson, however. It comes from these Clarkson-bashing killjoys who are intolerant of informal banter, suspicious of anything ‘fun’, taking every word said in jest literally and moaning to the authorities because Clarkson sets a bad example. These are the ones who, to steal a phrase from the man himself, ‘should be avoided like unprotected sex with an Ethiopian transvestite’.

January 17, 2012

The media angle on the Costa Concordia wreck

Filed under: Europe, Italy, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

Tim Black points out the most common media memes about the Costa Concordia have much more to do with snobbery and disdain than with human interest or concern about the actual causes of the shipwreck:

The sequence of events that led to the sinking of the luxury cruise liner, the Costa Concordia, is now pretty much established. But facts have not got in the way of a variety of commentators who are using the accident to parade their prejudices about too-big ships and ignorant passengers.

[. . .]

These are the tragic facts so far. What no one knows exactly is why it happened. Explanations have been mooted, of course: a power blackout affecting the ship’s steering; inaccurate navigation charts failing to show the rocks; or human error, in particular by the ship’s captain, Francesco Schettino. Yet while the exact reason for the ship straying off course remains unclear, that has not stopped another object of blame coming to the fore in some of the coverage. That is, the real, underlying reason for the Costa Concordia accident is to be sought not in the actual events of Friday evening but rather in the profit-driven, build-‘em-high cruise industry and, by association, in the sea-faring ignorance of all those who sailed aboard her.

This is why so much of the coverage seems obsessed with the size of the Costa Concordia. Over the past few days, we have been repeatedly told that cruise ships have doubled in size over the past decade. While this is true — and as the twenty-sixth-largest liner in the world, the Costa Concordia is far from the most impressive of this new breed of ships — the Concordia’s size does not actually tell us why it was three miles off course. Nor does it explain why the ship’s crew was unaware of the rock outcrop despite having navigation equipment. Yes, perhaps ship size does affect manoeuvrability, but would a smaller vessel not have suffered a similar fate that befell the Concordia? In fact, the obsession with the ship’s size sheds very little light on what happened to the Concordia on Friday evening.

What the convenient obsession with size draws upon, rather, is an antipathy towards the cruise industry, a sense that it is little more than the ocean-going equivalent of that other right-thinking person’s bête noire, Dubai. In other words, a vulgar testament to profit and sky-high consumption. So although size here is not really relevant as a cause of the Concordia’s capsizing, it appears relevant to certain commentators as a symbol of commercial hubris, of complacent materialism.

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