Fueled by Abby taking swimming lessons…
Non-political posts first:
Then political ones:
All posts by Mike
Monday Linkorama
Afghanistan Long Ago
If you read nothing else on the internet today, read this story about what Afghanistan used to be like before the country plunged into the depths of radicalism. I remember seeing pictures like this in the Helmand restaurant in Baltimore (an astonishing restaurant run by the Karzai’s brother).
The amazing thing about Islamic countries is that, up until fifty years ago, they were much more secular than even parts of the west. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali pointed out, a decision was made to plunge the region into the abyss of Wahabism.
Midweek Linkorama
Fueled by my re-discovery of the Purple Rain album.
The Bechdel of Doctor Who
I mentioned the Bechdel test below (and mis-spelled it). I noticed tonight that the recent iteration of Doctor Who tends to do well on that test. Moreover, the best writer on the show — Steven Moffat — writes episodes that pass it with flying colors. It’s a perfect illustration of what I was talking about. Moffat isn’t trying to meet some politically-correct quota on female characters. He’s just writing good TV.
COMPETES
Congress recently passed the America COMPETES Act, a massive science and technology spending bill. Phil Plait has been beating the drum on this for some time. The bill has a lot of supporters in political and scientific circles.
However, I’m going to be ornery here. I’m opposed to passing the Act as written. The COMPETES Act and the justifications for it are an encapsulation of everything that has gone wrong in our government and in the way people think about government.
To be specific, my problems with the bill are:
1) It mistakes spending for progress; and
2) It adds to our massive deficit.
First, the spending. COMPETES claims to support American science and technology. Supposedly, without this injection of funds, America is “eating its seed corn” and destroying its competitiveness.
The problem is that this claim is made about every bill that comes through Congress, even when it involves boondoggles like bioethanol fuel, farm subsidies and highway funding. Every spending bill that ever sifts through Congress is covered with the most glowing prose imaginable about its supposed benefits. Even the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” was touted as an economic stimulus to the region.
While the bill (which I’ve skimmed) seems relatively pork free, the list of those who endorse the bill (see Phil’s post) is a who’s-who of special interest spending. Are we to believe that these pork leaches are suddenly principled and noble when it comes to science?
Moreover, when the government funds something, that creates a crowd-out effect. Technology and science wind up getting funded for political reasons, not economic or scientific ones. This tends to be a net negative on the economy. Don’t believe me? A recent study at Harvard, designed to prove how wonderful government spending was, found the exact opposite:
The average state experiences a 40 to 50 percent increase in earmark spending if its senator becomes chair of one of the top-three committees. In the House, the average is around 20 percent. For broader measures of spending, such as discretionary state-level federal transfers, the increase from being represented by a powerful senator is around 10 percent.
…
It was an enormous surprise, at least to us, to learn that the average firm in the chairman’s state did not benefit at all from the increase in spending. Indeed, the firms significantly cut physical and R&D spending, reduce employment, and experience lower sales.
I’m actually stunned myself to see how clearly they detected this. Libertarians have been saying this for so long, we’re actually slack-jawed to see that we were right.
Most of COMPETES funding seems to be generalized. However, billions are targeted for government agencies whose function seems to be subsidizing big business. The fact is that much seems to have been attached to this bill that has little to do with advancing science.
Now if that were the only problem with COMPETES, I wouldn’t object. That’s the way Washington works. A dollar in legitimate science funding usually comes with a dollar of bullshit. We accept that. But then there’s the second problem — the debt this bill creates.
Some months ago, Congress passed PAYGO to much fanfare. This was supposed to get control of our exploding debt. Since then, Congress has completely ignored the bill, passing spending measure after spending measure without even paying lip service to PAYGO.
This bill, whatever its merits may be, does not cut spending or raise taxes to pay for itself. If the bill is so wonderful, why not make sacrifices to pay for it? No pain, no gain appears to apply everywhere except Washington.
We are on the brink of fiscal crisis. It will do no good to pass big spending bills now if we have a debt crisis later. All that spending will be paid for several times with economic ill. It’s no good to plant “seed corn” if a debt crisis burns out the field.
Phil justifies this deficit spending by pointing out how much money we are spending in Iraq. But this is precisely the kind of bad thinking that has gotten us into this situation. It’s as if a family in debt went out to eat at an expensive restaurant and justified it because it was less than the car they spent a fortune on. It’s faulty logic because:
1) two wrong don’t make a right;
2) there is no moral equivalence store where we can trade the Iraq War for a big NASA program;
3) PRECISELY this argument is used all the time to slash science funding, Apollo especially, and will be used in the future;
4) saying we can cut war spending is not the same thing as actually cutting spending. There are no points in this game for hypotheticals.
The last is perhaps the part that offends me the most. It’s like a morbidly obese man gobbling down a cupcake because he COULD get on the treadmill. We have not stopped the Iraq War and the Administration shows no inclination to do so. So we don’t have that money to spend. It is pure dishonesty to ramp up spending on one item and then pretend you could cut another when you have no intention of doing so.
COMPETES is a paradigm of what’s wrong with politics. People want their goodies (more spending on science) without paying the price (more taxes; less spending on other things). It is an embodiment of the view that government is a great golden god, dispensing free goodies that never have to be paid for.
If the people who support COMPETES love it so much, they should be willing to pay the price for it. They should be campaigning to cut spending or raise taxes and identify specific tax hikes and spending cuts. They should refuse to accept the funding from COMPETES until it is paid for. Until that point, we (and as a grant-funded scientist, I’m not exempt) are no better than the other 300 million children we have in this country demanding more and more government for no additional price.
When I was in the UK last week, the new coalition government proposed over six billion pounds in spending cuts, with a warning that this was just the tip of the iceberg. The British are taking their debt seriously and taking steps to fix it. They are not passing massive unfunded programs to add to the problem. But here, everyone still thinks we’re in a free candy store and can spend whatever we like without ever paying the piper. And to even suggest that we should pay for what we spend is to be a Right Wing extremist and to suggest we eat our seed corn.
Of course, these words are in vain. Both of the people who read this blog are likely supportive of COMPETES. But … at least these thoughts are out of my head now. I can go back to work.
The Bechdel Test
I found this to be very illuminating:
This is one of those things that is so fucking obvious that you spend a few minutes slapping yourself in the head for not thinking of it first.
It’s difficult to assess how films do on this test off the top of my head. But after thinking about it for a while, I’m somewhat stunned at just how many films fail it. For example, of the 25 top-rated films on IMDB, going by memory:
Three of the movies — Shawshank Redemption, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and 12 Angry Men have no significant female characters at all.
Eight films — Stars Wars, Empire Strikes Back, the Dark Night, Casablanca, Fight Club, Once Upon a Time in the West, the Usual Suspects and Seven Samurai — have only one significant female character. Same goes, incidentally, for the Star Wars prequels. To be fair, the female characters in several of those films are strong. But they fail the test. My recollection is that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and City of God also fall into this category.
The LOTR movies and Pulp Fiction have several women, but they do not interact.
Goodfellas and both The Godfather films have several female character who interact. But my recall is that they only discuss the men in their lives. Raiders of the Lost Ark has a brief exchange between Marion and Sala’s wife about monkey, but I don’t think that counts. I’m not sure about The Matrix but I don’t recall a female conversation. There’s a reference to an offscreen conversation between Trinity and the Oracle. But that was about Neo.
Only four of the top 25 films meet this test:
Schindler’s List, despite being dominated by its male characters, has numerous scenes of Jewish women discussing the situation.
Rear Window passes the test. Despite Hitch’s icy blonde reputation, he always had interesting female characters. Psycho fails the test, but mostly because of the way the film is structured.
Silence of the Lambs has some interaction between Clarice and one of her friends at the academy.
But even those four are marginal passes.
So is this indicative of extensive sexism in Hollywood? Yes and no. One problem is that a number of those films deal with subjects — war, crime, prison — which have historically been male-dominated. Others take place in circumstances where there few women — 12 Angry Men, for example, was written when juries were usually all-male.
In addition, IMDB’s top 25 movies among women is little different. Most of the women-favored movies are identical to the male-favored list and the new ones aren’t exactly breaking the mold. Amelie and Forest Gump I don’t recall well enough but think they fail. Gone With the Wind passes (more on that in a second). I’ve not seen American History X but doubt that it passes. To Kill a Mockingbird and Beauty and the Beast pass, I think. Up fails, as does WALL-E. So one could argue that women aren’t exactly demanding movies that pass the Bechdel test. Even the conventional “chick flick”, if I can use the term, is mostly about romance.
However, that misses the point, in my opinion. The problem is that our movies have, for the most part, been heavily divided between “chick flicks” about romance and “guy movies” about everything else. This doesn’t have to be the case; it simply represents a blind spot in the mostly male writers, producers and directors of movies and TV. Almost all of the top 25 movies could have passed the Bechdel test if writers gave two shits about creating more than one interesting woman character. The movies that do pass the test didn’t exactly go out their way to do it. They just rounded the movies out a bit, made them fuller and more realistic.
In the end, this trend may be less of symptom of sexism than sexism convolved with writers attempting to economize on character development. One thing I’ve noticed in movies and TV is the startling number of characters who are single children, have deceased parents or have no children of their own. This is mainly because it gets so complicated to write about real people with real families and real circles of friends. Writers also tend to write exclusively male characters since it’s so easy to write your own gender and “Gary Stu” the damned thing. (As an unpublished writer myself, I used to be that way. But I eventually started writing female characters and found them far more interesting.)
As an example of how things could be different, you can contrast Star Trek: The Next Generation against Babylon 5. The latter had interesting female characters who frequently talked about something other than men. The former, however, danced on the blade quite a bit, never seeming to know what to do with its female characters (although it still usually passed the test). This was a principle reason why, in my opinion, B5 was the better show.
As another example — the most successful movie of all time — Gone With the Wind — is a vast war epic that has numerous interactions with women that are not just about men (just mostly about men … Oh, Ashley!) Titanic and Avatar dominated the box office and, I think, both pass the test or at least dance on the blade.
I’m not saying that people should rewrite movies to make sure they pass this test. If nothing else, I don’t want to watch a movie and hear my brain shriek “Bechdel scene” when some pointless all-women conversation is shoe-horned in. The Bechdel test is a thought experiment, not a recipe. Some movies and genres are simply unsuited to having multiple dynamic women characters — Lawrence of Arabia or Master and Commander, for example. “Bechdelling up” books like LOTR would be misguided and smack of tokenism.
No, I think the lesson here is that Hollywood still has a blind spot. Not about women, but about life.
Midweek Linkorama
The Cartel
A great interview with the director of The Cartel, a documentary on our broken public school systems:
In a similar vein, there’s this story looking into NYC’s school system.
When I rage against the school system and the unions, I’m often misunderstood. I’m not anti-union, per se, and I’m certainly not anti-education. I’m not even anti-government-paying-for-education. I just think the government monopoly on education — and the unholy nepotistic relationship between teachers unions and the Democratic party — are destroying the futures of millions of young children.
The failure of inner city schools, of course, is not “just” a social problem. It’s an economic one as well. We are spending billions of dollars to destroy trillions of dollars in future productivity from a well-educated citizenry. Having seen some of these things first hand, I can tell you that they system is the problem. There’s no question in my mind.
I used to tow to the Democrat line on this — that the solution to our education woes is more money, bigger salaries, smaller classrooms. Granted, that was partially because that line was spoon-fed to me by my own public school teachers.
But the evidence is now overwhelming that the “more money recipe” simply does not work. The turning point for me was an argument made by Walter Williams, which runs approximately so: poor people have decent cars. They’re not Rolls Royces, but they move. Poor people have decent clothes. It’s nor Armani, but it’s wearable. Poor people tend to have livable homes. It’s not suburbia, but it’s a roof and walls. Poor people tend to have decent food. In fact, obesity is higher among the poor than the rich. However, they have terrible educations. As bad as the poor’s choice in clothing, cars, food and housing might be, they’re choice in education is far worse. If they ate, drove and slept like they learn, they would be driving broken cars, living on sewer grates and eating rotten food.
What’s the difference between those things? Education is provided by a monopoly; the rest by the market. We have long decided that having the government actually make people’s food, sew their clothes, build their homes and assemble their cars was a recipe for disaster. So, instead, we give poor people money to acquire those thing from the market, to level the playing field as it were. Education is the exception. And it’s not a shining one.
Prior ranting on this subject here.
More UK Linkorama
Some genuine posts coming up soon, I promise. It’s just hard to concentrate when I’m not sure what time zone I’m in.
UK Linkorama
Weekend Linkorama
The Churchill Problem
Why do I distrust the social sciences? Stuff like this:
By 2090 future generations will no longer recognise Winston Churchill, new research revealed today.
It seems hard to believe amid the current political storm, but research commissioned by the Royal Mint found that, in 80 years’ time, people will not recognise the former Prime Minister.
As part of the survey, carried out to mark this week’s 70th anniversary of Churchill’s prime ministerial tenure, more than 1,136 people were asked to identify three prominent 20th century PMs including Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.
One in five (19%) adults failed to name Churchill, with the figure rising to 32% of 25 to 34-year-olds and 44% of those aged 16 to 24.
Following the pattern, researchers projected the rough date when the leaders would no longer be recognised, with Churchill’s demise predicted in 80 years’ time.
Two reasons this study is likely garbage:
1) They asked people to identify Churchill from photos. Historical figures are remembered as names, not images. There are many many historical figures I know very well that I wouldn’t recognize in a police line-up.
2) There is a screaming problem here — age. It’s like that the higher knowledge of adults represents more life experience, more learning and more attention to history. Almost all of the history I have learned — from American History to that of the Roman Empire to my recent efforts in Chinese History — has come long after I turned 24. When I was young, I might have been able to tell you who Mao was. Now, I know precisely who he was and how many millions he murdered. And there are entire historical figures — Septimus Severus, William Tyndale, Cyrus the Great — who I wouldn’t have even known about after I graduated from an expensive liberal arts college.
Historical knowledge is tricky to track. Much trickier than this kind of survey.
Bad Parenting?
A follow-up article chronicles the saga of the Bozeman Bandit, the woman had the temerity to leave her kids at the mall in charge of her 12 y/o daughter. When the daughter left the younger kids alone for a short time, the mall called the cops. Read the rest of the story to see the hell the mother was put through.
As a devotee of Lenore Skenazy’s blog, you can imagine what I think of this nonsense. Bozeman must be a wonderful place where leaving a kid at the mall is considered the height of possible abuse. I can’t imagine what these people would have done with some of the families I knew growing up, where drunken beatings were routine or kids came home to empty houses.
What crossed me most as I read the article was the courses this woman was forced to take and the money she or the state were forced to spend on them. Are we seeing another industry spring up that exists entirely because governments force people to use their wares? All for the benefit of the “children” of course?
I think we may be. It would not surprise me at all if some of these classes were found to be paying kickbacks to judges and lawyers. Think of it as the touchy-feely version the scandal that rocked my state when a judge was taking bribes to send kids to an expensive juvenile detention facility.
There’s a growing industry of people leaching off of our court system, especially the family and probate courts. Mandatory “anger management” classes, mandatory parenting classes, etc., etc.. I blogged a few weeks ago about the horrific things going on in probate courts when seniors are declared incompetent and their estates are burned to pay for expensive (and unnecessary) senior care.
Someone needs to put a stop this.