Let's Be Worse!

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I'm your host, Zombie Dag Hammarskjöld. On today's episode of Let's Be Worse! world leaders try to show that they're worse than Idi Amin! Let's meet today's contestants, in Roman-alphabetical order:

• Although he isn't really a spider, Boris has spun a deadly web around his nation's already imperiled democracy in favor of a "secession" achieved by election fraud that will only benefit incompetent industrialists and rich bigots! That's a pretty good opener, but not as much fun as his hair! [canned audience laughter]
• Both The Donald and his unindicted coconspiratorreal chief of staff, the Thing on Drumpf's Head, take joy in separating migrant and refugee children from their parents and housing the children in conditions too bad for even a jail. He also likes to threaten Mother Nature with nukes… but given everything else he says nobody ever knows if he's serious.
• From a city once named after a violent revolutionary dictator and now named after someone else, welcome, Vlad! You're really fond of election results, both at home and abroad. A little homophobia never hurt anyone who mattered, did it? Neither did any foreign adventurism… or a history as a spy? Comrade Colonel, we enjoy your little jokes more and more every time you show us your abs.
• We're guessing how to spell your name, Xi, because we don't actually have 5,000 letters in our alphabet, so you're last on the list — but not last in our fears! [canned audience groan at bad joke] The Donald is doing his very best to distract attention from the terrible labor conditions that "enable" your trade policies that he doesn't like (bonus: those "manufacturing jobs" wouldn't actually be "great" in the US… if anyone could afford to buy the things they made), but he's not doing so well in the face of ethnic cleansing, antidemocracy crackdowns that make 1989 look benign (although the tanks have neither rolled nor stopped — yet), and imperialism so blatant that you make your own islands to establish a "territorial right". Well done!

So let's have a warm round of applause for our contestants, because when they win — we all lose! [canned audience applause] At least so far, none of today's contestants have actually eaten any of their opponents — but there's still time to try! [canned audience applause, 4 sec. longer]

I'm so disappointed that we don't have a stage as big as the Democratic presidential debates, because there are potential candidates from Austria through Brazil to Zuckerbergistan, and every letter in between! So, Johnny, what do we have for the losers today?

[announcer's voice, off camera] Dag, everyone in the audience gets a free dose of apocalyptic fear — and like you said, they're the real losers!

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That Bizarre Object Over There

ELI: That bizarre object over there is the one and only Dusenberg we have in stock. When it goes into the river, hopefully we shall not see its like again. So, once the action starts, no matter what happens, keep film rolling. We must have this shot. I therefore order that no camera shall jam, and no cloud pass before the sun.

The Stunt Man (1979), a marvelous performance by Peter O'Toole that garnered an Oscar nomination but had the misfortune to be up against... umm... a make-up award vehicle.

The echoes of Our Dear Leader's latest piece of performance art, in both the rhetoric and the dubious reality orientation, are a bit disturbing. If God could do the tweets we can do, he'd be a happy man.

Clockwork Orange Skull

So Megan Rapinoe stuck it to Orange Skull again. She clearly has a better understanding of reality — and more, better words — than he does. Of course, Ms Rapinoe appears to have actually worked for her undergraduate degree and taken some of that knowledge with her into the outside world.

Orange Skull? Just ask the creator of Maus. Or, more likely, try to suppress it claiming "we're not political", which really opens things up for discussion. Compare to, for example, "With great power comes great responsibility."; "I came to realize that I had more to offer this world than just making things that blow up."; "Yeah, we compromised. Sometimes in ways that made us not sleep so well. But we did it so that people could be free. This isn't freedom, this is fear."; "The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." OK, that last one isn't from a Marvel product, but it rather sums things up well… and makes clear (if only by implication) that censorship by the marketplace, or by market actors, is still a form of censorship. As a recently deceased should-have-been-a-Nobel-laureate noted back in the 70s,

Recently I read in Giovanni Grazzini’s fascinating book on Solzhenitsyn the following passage:

The cultural industry, vanity, the resentment felt by intellectuals at seeing power slipping from their hands, have so obscured the vision of Western writers as to make them believe that not being persecuted by the police is a privilege.

I am very slow indeed. I puzzled over that sentence for three days before I understood what Grazzini meant. He meant, of course, that it is not a privilege, but a right.

Ursula K. Le Guin.

Headline-Evading Link Sausage Platter

Disturbingly closely related link sausages that carefully avoid the issues dominating the headlines… because you don't need me to tell you that the headlines, and the stories behind them, are ridiculous.

• One of the fundamental problems with performance arts is that nobody pays much attention to infrastructure — either its needs or its costs. At the moment, this is obvious with symphony orchestras. Forty miles from each other, the Baltimore Symphony and the National Philharmonic are going through a crisis of inability to pay their large staffs. Part of the problem is that the public (and, for that matter, the trust-fundies who attend all of those wine-and-cheese parties) has little, if any, conception of just how many highly trained people it takes to put on a musical performance. One of the problems with classical music is the meme that no multipurpose facility is adequate, so there must be dedicated (and expensive) buildings ranging from La Scala to the Sydney Opera House that can really only do one thing: Unamplified group-ensemble performances lasting between 90 and 150 minutes. That meme isn't entirely wrong; an unstated consequence, however, is that nothing else can contribute to the construction, the upkeep, the staffing, etc.

  More to the point (especially in Baltimore), though, is the disdain for the back-office staff, especially in contrast to the never-ending conflict between front-office staff pay and musician pay. Bluntly, with most orchestras there's no excuse whatsoever for front-office staff, especially at the management level, being paid comparably to the musicians — it's orthogonal. But show me a symphony, anywhere in the world, where the top beggars fundraisers/party MCs make less than the concertmaster (ordinarily a violinist with three-decades-plus of experience, and usually at least a dozen years at that orchestra); care to guess who is actually more important to any particular performance? I'm not saying "don't reward the nonperforming staff at all"; I'm saying that the contests for who "deserves" more have got to stop.

  And the less said about the median remuneration for artists versus gallery owners and museum management, the better.

• Which leads to the fascinating dispute between the repeat-World-Cup-champion US women's football (soccer) team and the US soccer federation — the counterpart of the USOC and USA Gymnastics — over the pay rate offered to the women, especially compared to the men (who didn't even qualify for the last World Cup and have never made it beyond the quarterfinals in the modern (1958 and thereafter) competitions). The underlying numbers simply are not comparable (as the men's team players note, in support of the women's team players!), but are nonetheless all that we've been given. All of this rather ignores the self-fulfilling-prophecy and confirmation bias problems resulting when women's teams (or sports) are put into fourth-rate facilities with fourth-rate infrastructure against historically-not-competitive opposition with a backdrop of gender-based pay inequality. Let's put it this way: I wouldn't pay the same price for a ticket to a Reign FC match at Starfire as I would to a Sounders match at CenturyLink (or whatever its official name is these days, which is part of the point, too); my back can't handle bleacher-like seating!

  The comparison to the preceding item (especially given the overwhelming inherited-wealth nature of "management" in both areas) is a bit too much before coffee. For that matter, it's a bit too much before a couple of twelve-year-old single malts at the end of the day, in a dark-wood-appointed lounge with… damn, that's my point, isn't it?

• Confirmation bias also works the opposite direction in the arts, too, especially for anyone who is not the beneficiary of an organizational copyright holder. This piece at BoingBoing epitomizes the problem, primarily because its dataset is so badly conceived and lumps disparate populations — not just samples — together for a statistically indefensible analysis. The conclusion that is implied — that outright piracy of material that failed of formalities disfavored by governing international treaties and standards, particularly since those formalities were imposed on people (authors and, especially, their heirs) with no expertise and at a future-discounted non-volume-related cost of several times the unfair-competition-dominated market value, is ok because "nobody" cared about it in the first place — improperly treats disparate works and holders/authors alike to draw that conclusion. The example of L. Frank Baum illustrates it rather well. Baum wrote a helluva lot more than just the Oz books; indeed, the Oz books represent well under 30% of his copyrightable output. Only the Oz books were ever renewed, though. Commercially, this made sense — after 28 years, nobody wanted old chicken-farming manuals. But the conclusion that renewal is therefore somehow "disfavored" or "irrelevant" for the Oz books on that basis — as implied by both the article and the dataset chosen for misanalysis — does not follow. Indeed, looking at the universe of the types of books (because the pecularities of periodicals and registrations make the datasets internally discontinuous) that were renewed, at least on the sample basis that I did in 2005, leads to almost the opposite conclusion for several types of books. And in turn, that is inconsistent with "one size fits all" copyright, something that is almost required by the Bleistein Problem.

  None of which does a very good job, at the next level of implication, of explaining why Cloudflare is willing to take its platform away from political speech (however reprehensible) but, as a policy matter, won't even consider taking it away from thieves and pirates — not even when given a site analysis demonstrating that 90% of a given site's content consists of less-than-20-year-old pirated copyrightable material. Oh, wait: Confirmation bias again. Not to mention money-in-the-pocket bias again.

• And, unfortunately, medical "replication" issues fall prey to the same flaws, especially when applied to nonmedical circumstances. The irony that that article doesn't see its own confirmation bias as an issue is just a bonus: Bayesian statistical analysis has its own problems with boundary conditions.

Catching Up With the Future

At 3:57a.m.on Sunday, August 3, 2019, James Connor Quinn pulled off his headset and sat back in his chair, sweating and sucking air, sure now, but hardly able to believe what he alone in all his world knew.

"Jesus Christ," Jimmy breathed, meeting the future by turning to the ancient past. "Holy Mother of God."

He rubbed his eyes and combed his fingers through his tangled, scribbly hair and sat, staring blankly, for a few moments longer. Then he called Anne.

Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (1996). Now if we could only find intelligent life inside the Beltway…

Master Debaters

Let's get one thing out of the way first. The last two nights on CNN (and the preceding iteration) were not a "debate." They were a bloody talent show all too similar to the Miss USA pageant, with just about as much relationship to reality, to merit, and/or to elections. Bluntly: Policy decisions are not made on a stage under lights in response to questions from marginally informed reporters whose primary job is to enhance network ratings. Neither, for that matter, are voting decisions… something that the thing on Drumpf's head demonstrated that it understood all too well in 2016. This wasn't even a three-penny opera; it lacked Macheath as a moderator, and in place of the Queen's intervention at the end we had "we've run out of time."

The fundamental problem with public charades of this nature is that reality doesn't present chief executives with problems that have neat, simple, boundaries and neat, simple, one-dimensional solutions… that don't overlap with anything else, that never require balancing of different priorities and side effects (anticipated or otherwise), that are never undermined by opposing personal interests (or institutional interests, let alone historical imperatives). No moderator has ever asked even so simple a follow-up question as this:

How would you implement a policy concerning the opioid crisis of addiction while simultaneously acknowledging the need for pain relief and low availability of continuing medical care in the regions most hurt by opioids?

And that doesn't even get into "OK, now how do you implement that in the face of strong moral objections from really noisy objectors, especially any in Congress?" or "OK, now how is it going to be paid for?" or "OK, what's your medical evidence that strategy could work?" All too often, the candidates were talking to themselves, running down prepared points of what they (and their handlers) wanted to hear instead of even engaging with difficulties… let alone opposing viewpoints.

Worse, though, is this possibility — a question that, so far as I've been able to determine, has not been asked of a presidential candidate in a public debate since they were first telecast over half a century ago:

This is a follow-up to the previous question. [An outside force of some kind] absolutely prevents you from implementing that policy. Tell me how you would respond.

Because Napoleon was an optimist. It is not just "the enemy" that kills off plans — it is reality. An unexpected hurricane or earthquake that results in lots of orthopedic and soft-tissue injuries, for example, putting additional stress on the medical system while also increasing the demand for long-term pain relief, would be an obvious possibility, and is precisely the sort of thing that actually faces chief executives.

* * *

I am carefully refraining from comment about how Boris the Spider is trying to demonstrate that Anglophone executives "elected" through a combination of voter suppression, voter deception, and restricted voting populations invariably turn into clowns, when they weren't clowns to start with. Except, of course, this one.