Jonathan Last says whatever you do, don’t go see Justice League. I was curious to see more Wonder Woman.
Category Archives: Popular Culture
Net Neutrality
Those protesting the decision are going after the wrong targets:
Fifteen years ago, when I started blogging, it was common to hear that “the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” You don’t hear that so often anymore, because it’s not true. China has proven very effective at censoring the internet, and as market power has consolidated in the tech industry, so have private firms.
Meanwhile, our experience of the internet is increasingly controlled by a handful of firms, most especially Google and Facebook. The argument for regulating these companies as public utilities is arguably at least as strong as the argument for thus regulating ISPs, and very possibly much stronger; while cable monopolies may have local dominance, none of them has the ability that Google and Facebook have to unilaterally shape what Americans see, hear, and read.
In other words, we already live in the walled garden that activists worry about, and the walls are getting higher every day. Is this a problem? I think it is.
Yes, it is.
Tech Leaders
How could such smart people be so stupid?
There are different kinds of “smart,” not to mention a lot of ignorance and maleducation.
[Update a while later]
As Glenn notes, this seems related: Thoughts on the arrogance of ignorance, and being “well educated.”
Thanksgiving Dinner Discussion
It’s a couple years old, but it’s that time of year again for instructions on how to discuss Star Wars over dinner with your ignorant rebellion-supporting uncle.
And speaking of Thanksgiving dinner, here is my recipe for cornbread, sausage, wild-mushroom and pomegranate dressing.
Fake Meat
As I tweeted to Ron (he hasn’t responded), my concern is that, being derived from soy, it won’t have the same nutritional value as actual beef.
Bill Clinton, Reconsidered
Well, this is refreshing. Caitlin Flanagan excoriates feminists for letting him off the hook for decades for his sexual abuse. I wonder if this also means that the truth will finally come out about all their other corruption and crimes, now that they seem to have been defenestrated?
It takes some serious gall to spend 20 years pimping Bill and Hillary Clinton like they're the last prostitutes in town, and finally admit he's a sexual predator only after they're most useful as a cudgel against Republicans.
— Mo Mo (@molratty) November 14, 2017
[Update mid-morning]
Hell has frozen over. The NYT has defended Juanita Broaddrick.
[Update at noon]
“The thing is, going after him now — when they don’t need him anymore, and when they’re trying to hustle Hillary off the political stage for 2020 — doesn’t make up for what they did then. Rather, it underscores it.”
[Wednesday-morning update]
The dam seems to be bursting. Now Democrats are saying that the years of defending Bill Clinton were morally indefensible. Gee, ya think? That’s why I swore never to support another Democrat two decades ago. Even Matt Yglesias now realizes he was wrong, and that Clinton should have resigned. But he still has this wrong:
In the midst of the very same public statement in which he confessed the error, Clinton also mounted the defense that would see him through to victory — portraying the issue as fundamentally a private family matter rather than a topic of urgent public concern.
“I intend to reclaim my family life for my family,” he said. “It’s nobody’s business but ours. Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life.”
To this line of argument, Republicans offered what was fundamentally the wrong countercharge. They argued that in the effort to spare himself from the personal and marital embarrassment entailed by having the affair exposed, Clinton committed perjury when testifying about the matter in a deposition related to Paula Jones’s lawsuit against him.
What they should have argued was something simpler: A president who uses the power of the Oval Office to seduce a 20-something subordinate is morally bankrupt and contributing, in a meaningful way, to a serious social problem that disadvantages millions of women throughout their lives.
But by and large, they didn’t. So Clinton countered with the now-famous defense: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” Ultimately, most Americans embraced the larger argument that perjury in a civil lawsuit unrelated to the president’s official duties did not constitute high crimes and misdemeanors.
It’s wrong on two levels. First, both things were terrible (and as Flanagan notes above, the behavior with Lewinsky destroyed the credibility of the feminist argument against relationships in the workplace of disparate power). Second, he (as do and did most Democrats) continues to minimize what Clinton did legally. No, he didn’t merely “commit perjury.” He suborned perjury from others, including Betty Currie, Monica Lewinsky, and Linda Tripp, via bribes, and physical threats to the family of the latter. This was a major obstruction of justice in order to prevent another woman upon whom he had predated with the power of the state, from getting a fair trial. And he did this after having taken an oath to see that the laws were faithfully executed. As George Will wrote at the time, Bill Clinton may not have been the worst president, but he was probably one of the worst men to ever be president.
I’m glad that the scales are finally falling from some eyes over this, but some of the blindness persists.
[Update a while later]
If Roy Moore wins, it will be because of Democrats.
[Update a few minutes later]
Michelle Goldberg struggles to figure out what to say.
That can be a problem when you’ve been a lying hypocrite for decades.
[Update late morning]
Flash from the past: Democrats standing and applauding Bill Clinton after his impeachment in 1998. They had no shame. Most of them still don’t.
And “liberals'” sudden condemnation of Bill Clinton is cynical and self serving. No kidding.
Moon Versus Mars
Alan Boyle reports on the “debate” in Seattle on Thursday at the space event sponsored by The Economist (which was overall very interesting and worthwhile, other than this). As I noted at the time, it was a false choice based on a false premise.
It started out annoying, and got worse with time. Talmadge said something like (I’m paraphasing) “Before we start this, let’s see if we’ll be able to change some minds. How many think we should go to the moon first.” Hands go up, not mine. “How many think we should go to Mars first?” Other hands go up. “How many think we shouldn’t do either, and should take care of the earth?” Very few, if any hands went up, given the audience. My hand obviously didn’t go up at any of them.
And then they launched into a debate on those three topics, with Naveen Jain making the case for the moon, Chris Lewicki doing the same for asteroids, and poor John Logsdon having to defend the premise that we shouldn’t be doing things in space (something that he doesn’t believe).
So that was the false choice (that is, he didn’t ask the fourth question: “How many people think “we” don’t have to make such a choice, and that some will do one, some will do the other, some will do some other things not mentioned, and some will stay home?”).
The false premise, of course, is that this debate has some relevance to policy, and that unless “we” have a societal “consensus” on what the next step will be, it won’t happen. This is Apolloism.
I think that Chris made the best case, which was basically, we should go anywhere we find useful. And of course, John’s argument isn’t that we shouldn’t settle space, but that we probably won’t. But his example of Antarctica as a harsh environment that hasn’t been really settled (ignoring his arbitrary rule that a settlement requires more than a couple thousand people) fails to persuade because, as Jeff Greason pointed out in audience discussion. On Antarctica, people cannot own the land, they cannot dig the land, they cannot sell the output of their labor, they cannot pass on anything they do there to their descendants.
What he didn’t point out, which I would have, is that the reason for this is the Antarctic Treaty. And if we don’t settle space, a large part of the reason is that the Outer Space Treaty was modeled on it, and it was enforced.
Bright Star
We did take a break from plumbing last night to go see the musical at the Ahmanson. It had some of the same cast as the Broadway production, including the lead, who was fantastic. Here’s the original review (spoiler free, with which I largely agree).
I saw Steve Martin live when I was young, during the Carter administration, and he was doing his SNL schtick, with the arrow through the head. But even then his banjo playing impressed. We also saw his band with Edie Brickell (co-author of the musical) at the Hollywood Bowl a couple years ago. I really think that Steve Martin is one of the most talented men of our age.
[Tuesday-afternoon update]
Jon Gabriel defends Steve Martin from James Lileks. I don’t often disagree with James, but Jon is right.
[Bumped]
Busy
Watching football while replacing all the plumbing under the kitchen sink. Trap is clogged, and while we were renting it a decade ago, some idiot glued in two-inch ABS down there that’s impossible to get apart without cutting it off. It will give me a chance to get the disposal off to replace the old web in its throat, and put in separate traps for each sink, plus make it much easier to work on in the future.
[Monday-morning update]
Well, that turned into an adventure. Ended up replacing everything under the sink, including disposal, and still not sure I solved the drain problem, and won’t know until I go get an extension for the dishwasher drain hose.
[Monday-morning update]
Got all the plumbing put together, and determined that the drain problem was indeed downstream. Just paid a plumber $160 to snake it, and now it’s running clear. All in all, job cost about $450, but that included a powerful quiet new disposal. Hate to think what a plumber would have charged to do everything I did.
The Trump Takeover
In another thread, I learned that, apparently, I am not to criticize the God-King. Jonah is getting tired of it, too:
What I find so shocking is not so much the capitulation but the terms of the surrender. Or, rather, I should say the term — singular — of surrender, because there seems to be only one requirement expected of Republicans: Lavish praise on Donald Trump no matter what he does or says. Or at the very least, never, ever criticize him. Policy is an afterthought.
Yup. This is a cult (just as it was with Obama). Of course, I feel even more free to dispense such heresies, given that I’ve never even been a Republican. And then, this:
I’m more interested in the psychological factors animating commentators and the rank-and-file Trumpublicans of the GOP.
They also talk about wanting to get things done and the importance of fulfilling the Trump “agenda.” But they reserve their purest passion and most sustained vitriol not for people who don’t vote with Trump, but for people who do vote with Trump but who also refuse to remain silent. The same holds for Trump himself.
Why? Well, in the president’s case, the answer is obvious: his own Brobdingnagian yet astoundingly fragile ego. Because Trump cares so little about policy, he can forgive policy differences quite easily. What he can’t forgive is anyone even hinting that the emperor’s new clothes are, at best, invisible to the naked eye.
He’s a child. I’m glad she lost, I’m glad he’s stealthily rolling back regs, and I’m glad that he’s fixing the judiciary, but I weep at what someone in the same position, not so flawed, could be accomplishing.