Wherein I Am Helped Along In My Hatred

I thought about commenting on this story when it first got going.  The refusal of the Republicans to re-up the Violence Against Women Act was so perfect an example of how unmoored they have become from the basic business of not making their country worse, it seemed worth noting, particularly since fully half of their by now inevitable tantrum simply involved not wanting lesbians and transgender[1] women to count as, you know, actual women.

What made me hold back in the end were the Republican's objections to the way the bill deals with the rape of Native American women upon tribal land. Because I didn't understand them.  Not in the standard Republican way of not understanding why they were being such horrible, horrible people.  In the way that I don't actually know how the tribal legal system (or legal systems, more likely) actually function, how they interact with the American system, and without reading the specific provisions in the bill regarding how the transferal of legal authority was going to be handled - and almost certainly I'd need some legal schooling about what I'd read even if I'd tried - I can't be sure the Republicans didn't have a point about the how, as oppose to the why. 

The fact that a white guy can drive onto a reservation, rape a woman there, and there be any question as to whether the worthless fucker will be thrown into jail is obviously outrageous.  The fact that the Republicans show no evidence that they could give two shits about this is equally obvious.  But precisely because I'm so heavily inclined to assume the worse of Republican legislators, I could only offer my suspicions here, not a clear-cut condemnation.

How fortunate for my biases and prejudices then that the Republicans have handily re-written the bill themselves, and cut out all reference to lesbian and transgender women. They've chopped out the provisions for tribal courts as well, of course, but as I say, I'm not qualified to judge that, merely to stare with narrowed eyes at Eric "Most Punchable Creature Ever" Cantor and "hmmm" suspiciously.

With the LGBT provisions excised, however, the Republicans are making a stronger statement than before.  They are not merely objecting to those provisions, they've removed them in order to make a law they think worth passing.  Because - and let's be clear - violence against women is only a problem when that woman was born with a vagina, and into which she only wants a penis inserted.  Because - and let's be clear - the standard Republican position is that a person's right to not be beaten up is directly proportional to how much that person lives in a way Republicans approve of, and Republicans can think about without feeling all icky.

Because wealthy white heterosexual cis Christian male is the origin point of the entire spectrum of humanity, and the straight women are lucky enough to have a law that protects them even if they're black or poor.

Some days it is very difficult to believe the arc of history bends towards anything but our self-immolation.  Some days it is very difficult to believe it won't be deserved.

[1] A word blogspot doesn't think exists, by the way, which pisses me off too.

Sorkin Who? or Show Me The Moneyball!

Statistics and Sorkin?  There was no way I wasn't going to get round to seeing this.

Except... it's not very Sorkiny, is it? Maybe it's Zaillian's influence - an entirely solid writer, but not a particularly flashy pen - but Moneyball's dialogue manages to be economical and engaging, but never particularly rhythmic or funny.  Not that the film's trying to be funny, in fairness, but the end result would be difficult to recognise as involving Sorkin had his name not been in the credits. Even the occasional scene that bears a familiar Sorkin structure - the multiple rapid-fire calls to baseball managers Beane and Brand make as they shuffle players around and off the board being the most obvious one - seem strangely muted.  This might just be a function of Miller's direction, of course.  That said, Sorkin's writing has been getting increasingly austere of late in any case; you can draw a straight line through Studio 60... to Charlie Wilson's War to The Social Network to The Newsroom, with the former being indistinguishable from The West Wing except in whether anybody liked it, and each successive product drifting further and further from rapid-fire banter spat out in corridors.

Which is a shame, because as Sorkin himself has claimed, he's neither a top tier dramatist nor a top tier comedy writer, and his writing works as well as it does because of how good he is at mixing the two. Studio 60...'s biggest failing was both that the set-up relied to much on the comedy, and that his resulting instinct to up the drama didn't work at all in context, particularly after the West Wing (the question of how things would have turned out if you swapped Studio 60... and Sportsnight around in the chronology is an interesting one).  I don't know if the critical and commercial failure of Studio 60... (which continues to be underrated; it's not great, but it's frequently pretty good) led to a deliberate shift in tone - one which did no damage to The Social Network, but made The Newsroom feel a little too cold and distant at times - but there seems to be no sign of it stopping, and it ends up hurting Moneyball.

Or so it seems to me.  Perhaps I'm just ill-suited to judge the film, having little interest in baseball and plenty of interest in the sort of statistical juggling employed by Brand.  Emphasising the former and skirting around the particulars of the latter is unquestionably the right choice for the film to have made, and exactly the wrong way round for me to really appreciate it.  Like a foot fetishist watching Top Heavy Sluts 4, I understand utterly why the camera is focusing in the area it is, but I which they'd point us downward a little more often.

(Spoilers - by which I mean mention of historical events - below the fold)

Will Chuck Get Chucked?

This letter (via Balloon Juice) has to be the funniest thing I've read in weeks.  For those who haven't come across this issue, President Obama is trying to get himself a new Secretary of Defence, and a significant minority of Republican Senators are throwing a fit over his selection.

What makes this so interesting is that the candidate, Chuck Hagel, is a Republican.  This has pissed off a lot of Democrats, who've argued - not unreasonably - that replacing Obama's first Republican Secretary of Defence with another Republican Secretary of Defence rather cements the idea that Democrats don't have what it takes to handle the defence of the country.  Personally, I think that argument carries more than a little weight, though it may be I'm still pissed off from the amount of airtime Republicans were given in 2009 to bitch that Obama's cabinet was only one-third Republican and thus insufficiently bipartisan.  You get no prizes for guessing what proportion of Bush's cabinet was Democratic, nor for guessing exactly how much time the cowardly hand-wringers on TV spent worrying about bipartisanship back then.

At the very least, though, you'd think Republican Senators would think twice before arguing a former Republican Senator was egregiously unqualified for a government post.  Of course, thinking twice requires thinking once.

Hagel's confirmation hearing and the following Armed Services committee meeting in themselves pretty bleakly comic.  Watching that many American politicians argue another American politician isn't fit for an American political post because he doesn't love Israel enough is funny anyway, but seeing a Republican Senator channelling Tailgunner Joe (step 1: make some shit up about someone; step 2: insist it must be true if that someone can't - or won't jump through the hoops you insist are necessary to  - prove it isn't) was funnier still.  It didn't get to truly hilarious levels though until it transpired that one of the main props of the GOPs hissy-fit marquee - that it was rumoured someone heard someone else say that someone implied maybe that Hagel had received money from a group called "Friends of Hamas" -  came from a reporter making up a ludicrous-sounding political group for comic effect, which the entire American conservative noise machine then swallowed whole. 

(Clearly Friedman should have shot for the stars, here.  Why go with "Friends of Hamas" when he could have gone with "Supporters of Dead Babies as Entrees" or "Self-Fellating Hitler Worshippers"?  I don't believe either of those are too crazy for Breibart.com to run with as genuine organisations, actually, but if you're surrounded with idiots you may as well have fun with it.)

All of this associated insanity - the unbearable idea that a man who was once mean to Israel and who's not willing to turn over the entirety of his financial returns so Ted Cruz can check nothing in the credit column is written in Arabic - led to Hagel being filibustered last week.  That doesn't mean he won't be Secretary of Defence, it just means these Republicans can stomp their feet and scream at clouds on national TV for another week.  Hagel is pretty much a lock, unless his haters can pull something extraordinary out of the bag.  Like, perhaps... a strongly worded letter?

Nothing like this has ever been done to a candidate for this post before.  Pretty much nothing like this has ever been done to any cabinet candidate before, it generally being agreed upon that a president should get to pick who works directly for him.  Which is why this line got me laughing so hard:

It would be unprecedented for a Secretary of Defense to take office without the broad base of bipartisan support and confidence needed to serve effectively in this critical position.

Get it?  Never before has such an insane baseless vendetta been kicked off by such whining, camera-hungry posing cranks, so clearly Hagel is going to have to go.  Could the President start taking his responsibilities more seriously, please, and find an eminently qualified Republican politician who no-one's ever joked about?  Preferably one with Netenyahu on speed-dial, kthanxbye?

Someone suggested the other way that the entirety of the Republican congressional delegation has become so utterly unmoored from reality Obama could get everything he wanted immediately by just going on television and saying he's desperate to get the exact opposite.  At this point, I'm starting to think that's more than plausible.

...And You Shall Know Us By Our Trail Of Ads

I don't think Kevin Drum would object too much to me calling him something of an old fuddy-duddy in some respects.  He's done valuable work over the last few years keeping his "You kids get off of my lawn!" outbursts to a minimum, and recognising his lapses when they happen.

So when I read this (very short) post, I wondered if there was a generational thing at play, or whether I'm in a minority overall.  Am I the only person who loves trailers at the cinema?  I've always thought of them as lovely little bite size pieces of entertainment that are almost always more fun than whatever I end up watching after them in any case.  The suggestion we might get more before a film strikes me as kind of nifty - up to a certain point, at least, and that point is definitely higher than seven.

Is anyone else with me on this?  Or does everyone else wish they could fast-forward the trailers, like on a DVD?

What David Brooks Can't Do (Because He's Staggeringly Ignorant)

In the name of all things good and true, New York Times, will you keep fucking idiots like David Brooks out of my wheelhouse?  It's just embarrassing, is what it is.

One would have thought that after Brooks went on national TV to explain how Nate Silver's election model was an example of cupidity and intellectual overreach, only for said model to end up not so much correct as spot on to a legitimately terrifying extent, he'd have the good sense to shut his pie-hole regarding the nature of data manipulation.

But no!  Not this man!  Not this man who's teaching a university class on humility and making his students read his own fucking book on humility (next semester: Silvio Berlusconi will show up to fuck as many co-eds as necessary before they understand the importance of virginity).  Once again it's critically important that someone - who always happens to be David Brooks - must stand up and argue that only the arrogant believe the discipline they've dedicated their lives to can do what they say it does.  One might think the true arrogance lies in a man with no detailed knowledge of a field lecturing us on what that field's limitations are, but since Brooks is an expert on humility, you'd look pretty stupid trying to point that out to him. It's not like humility is an easy concept to grasp without training, after all; it's not statistical analysis or anything.

I could rebut "What Data Can't Do" point by point, starting with the idea that the human mind is bad at maths because you can't calculate an irrational number in your head - roughly equivalent to arguing the human mind is bad at language because lot's of people can't spell chrysanthemum - and moving on to more serious points, such as his entire paragraph on data haystacks is countered using exactly five words: "Bonferroni correction, you smug prick".

Mainly, though, it's not worth the effort, because Brooks thinking regarding statistics suffers from the same problem as his thinking on everything else; a tireless desire to paint intellectual laziness as a principled position. At least 80% of the Brooks pieces I've read (and I admit that's not a huge sample, life being too short and all) are based on or at least involve the same maddening logical fallacy: "I don't know how you would do this so I don't believe it can be done". That in itself, of course, is just a gussied-up version of "I don't have the knowledge needed to rebut this argument I dislike, so I'll insist you don't have the knowledge either".  Brooks course on humility sounds like the worst use of university time since my alma mater let Tony Blair in to get bloodstains all over our new building, but if he wanted to teach a course in using ignorance as a weapon, I'd sign up for it like a shot.

The aforementioned haranguing of Nate Silver (in which Brooks referred to him and statisticians like him as "wizards" living in "silly-land") is just the most obvious example of this particular brand of strategic ignorance, but his latest article comes close.  Brooks knows sweet fuck-all about how to construct, test, improve and implement a statistical model (seriously, he doesn't think we have ways of dealing with the lack of a control group?), but that doesn't mean he should have to feel uncomfortable slapping together the thoughts he came up with in the shower and showing it in exchange for money to millions of people, many of whom could have put him right in seconds had he asked.

How fucking humble of him.

A Tale Of Cocktails #38

Indian Summer

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Ingredients

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2 oz Kahlua
1 oz vodka
1 oz gin
2 oz pineapple juice
2 oz tonic water

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Taste: 6
Look: 7      

Cost: 8
Name: 8
Prep: 8

Alcohol: 4
Overall: 6.8

Preparation: Stir all non-fizzy ingredients with ice.  Strain and pour into a wine glass. Top up with tonic water.

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General Comments: This was one of those rare occasions when I tasted something utterly without precedent.  Not in the sense of it being incomparably good, that's not it at all.  Just something I'm completely incapable of likening to anything else.  The last time I remember trying a drink so far outside what I could comprehend, it was root beer, and even that is basically Dr Pepper mixed with mouthwash.  I'd probably have to go all the way back into my childhood and that time I mixed milk with Ribena for a comparative paradigm shift.

How does one describe the indescribable? Well, all five elements can be tasted, so there's that.  Beyond that, it's basically fizzy alcoholic coffee with pineapple, only with some presumptive effect against malarial infection.  I don't even know whether I like it or not.  But it's certainly something I recommend everyone try at least once.  Genuinely new forms of taste-bud stimulation are hard to come by.

(I also quite like the idea that when things got particularly hot in colonial India the accepted solution was to add a South American fruit, a Mexican liqueur, and a Russian spirit to one's gin and tonic.  That sounds like an awful lot of effort to go to on the Subcontinent in July, but then I guess the Venn diagram of those preparing this drink and those drinking this drink had a pretty much empty intersection.)

Friday Talisman: Parselmouth

On today's paint bench we have the Warlock.

This is the first time I've seriously deviated from the colours suggested by the character card (other than painting the merchant black in the interests of diversity).  I actually quite like the "official" scheme:

but the model itself is just so obviously Voldemort there seemed no point in fighting it.