Friday, October 7, 2022

In 1962, having "Jet" in a name still felt futuristic

Andrew Gelman recently did a post on Saturday Morning cartoons of yesteryear, so you know there had to be something that would set off my inner-nerd. In this case:

It’s been often noted that The Jetsons have had an outsized influence on popular memory given that it was only on the air for one season (later forgettable reboots notwithstanding).

The Jetsons didn't just run for one season. It ran for decades. It was just that all those years consisted of the same 24 episodes over and over again, part of the Saturday morning lineup of all three networks. This was very much par for the course for Hanna-Barbera. You see the same thing with shows like Johnny Quest or Space Ghost. The studio was notorious for cost cutting and for squeezing every last drop out of a piece of intellectual property. Since the audience for Saturday morning cartoons was constantly cycling through, it made sense to just keep rerunning the same episodes of popular shows until the ratings started to fall.

When people talk about the Jetsons having one season, they are talking about its original prime time run. ABC in the 50s and 60s was more or less in the same position as Fox in the '90s, a perennial last place and a bit of a joke. This was partially due to the network's origin. It was carved off from NBC as the result of an antitrust action from the government against NBC. Like Fox, ABC tried a lot of out of the box programming including prime time animation. They had a moderate hit with The Flintstones which ran for a number of years. The Jetsons was an attempt to cash in on what they hoped would be a trend.(Jonny Quest also had its initial run in prime time on ABC.) By the late Sixties, no one in the target audience had any idea that any of these shows had ever been anything but Saturday morning cartoons.

In addition to being inspired by The Flintstones which was itself a rip-off of The Honeymooners, The Jetsons lifted most of their premise and many of their gags from the still well remembered at the time movie series Blondie, even going so far as to cast the same lead actress.

Lifting characters and premises from other people's intellectual property was a bit of a Hanna-Barbera specialty. Well it was common practice for cartoon Studios to toss in celebrity caricatures and other references / homages,( see Andrew Gelman's class Foghorn Leghorn) HB took things to an extreme, seldom producing anything that wasn't at least partially lifted from familiar pop culture. For example, Scooby-Doo was a mashup of the Bob Denver character from Dobie Gillis and the fake haunted house genre. (Shaggy is also class Foghorn Leghorn).

And speaking of Hanna-Barbera, did you ever notice how many of their early characters had collars and ties but no shirts (or pants for that matter)? Turns out it comes down to economics.





Unlike the Jetsons, the Banana Splits (another show mentioned by Andrew) pretty much vanished after its initial run, despite being, for HB, a relatively high budget show. (Even for eight-year-olds, some things don't age well.) The legendary Al Kooper contributed a song and check out the writing (but unfortunately not singing) credit on "Doin' the Banana Split."




To give you some idea how little value this Banana Splits IP has. This was the last attempt at a reboot.



On the other hand, a mash-up of Freaky Friday and Friday the 13th sounded like a terrible idea and that actually turned out pretty damned good.


Andrew harshly disparaged Liz Phair's cover of the Banana Splits theme. I thought it was the best track on the album (though I'm not going to defend the lyrics). You be the judge.


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Thursday, October 6, 2022

Twelve years ago at the blog: back when jetpacks were just around the corner

Monday, October 4, 2010

The cusp of coolness

One of the most popular genres of science writing since at least the age of Edison has been the "cusp of coolness" story, where the writer breathlessly tells us how some futuristic development is about to revolutionize our lives.

Here's the latest entry:
Although it may sound more sci-fi than sci-fact, a commercially developed jetpack is actually being eyed for mass production, with plans to eventually release it to the public. Let that sink in for a second. Jetpacks are real, and you might be able to buy one someday soon. Or at least see them among the skies.
I don't think we'll need the full second since jet packs have been around for between fifty and seventy years and you've been able to buy them for much of that time. The Germans had a prototype in WWII (Not surprisingly, Wikipedia has an excellent write-up on the subject). By the mid-Sixties they were flying over the World's Fair and showing up in Bond movies (yes, that was an actual Bell Rocket Belt).

But despite consuming countless man-hours and numerous fortunes (and prompting at least one kidnapping*) over what is now more than half a century, progress has been glacial. Jet packs are and will probably remain one of the worst under-performing technologies of the post-war era.

"Cusp of coolness" stories are annoying but they can also be dangerous. They give a distorted impression of how technological development works. Columnists and op-ed writers like John Tierney (whose grasp of science is not strong) come away with the idea that R&D is like a big vending machine -- deposit your money and promptly get what you asked for.

It's OK when this naive attitude convinces them to clear out space in their garages for jet packs. It's dangerous when it leads them to write editorials claiming that the easiest way to handle global warming is by building giant artificial volcanoes.


*from Wikipedia:
In 1992, one-time insurance salesman and entrepreneur Brad Barker formed a company to build a rockeltbelt with two partners: Joe Wright, a businessman based in Houston, and Larry Stanley, an engineer who owned an oil well in Texas. By 1994, they had a working prototype they called the Rocketbelt-2000, or RB-2000. They even asked [Bill] Suitor to fly it for them. But the partnership soon broke down. First Stanley accused Barker of defrauding the company. Then Barker attacked Stanley and went into hiding, taking the RB-2000 with him. Police investigators questioned Barker but released him after three days. The following year Stanley took Barker to court to recover lost earnings. The judge awarded Stanley sole ownership of the RB-2000 and over $10m in costs and damages. When Barker refused to pay up, Stanley kidnapped him, tied him up and held him captive in a box disguised as a SCUBA-tank container. After eight days Barker managed to escape. Police arrested Stanley and in 2002 he was sentenced to life in prison, since reduced to eight years. The rocketbelt has never been found.
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Wednesday, October 5, 2022

Thursday Tweets -- a day early in case something happens to Twitter









Politics

"Berry had stated that she would be in favor of bringing the MSC back for early voting next year." Just in time for the 2023 midterms.


Gingrich. Trump. Walker.... Christ.


Remember when the mainstream press got the vapors when Joe said semi-fascist?

Last time it was "Crimes by Jews."

Hello to all the Tucker Carlson fans in the crowd.

 

I have a feeling there might be a lesson here.


Pastor Jones continues to stay in there slugging.





Dobbs




I, Robot


 

Not sure what to make of Mankiw and Krugman being on the same page.


Weak grasp of the metaphor.




Kudlow has one of the few perfect prognostication records.

 


RBG undid all of her considerable good works when she became convinced she was indispensable. The coverage from journalists like Totenberg was a big part of the problem.




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Tuesday, October 4, 2022

More musings on higher ground

From last week's hurricane post.

A common, perhaps even the standard framing of rising sea levels is that it's a existential threat for all coastal cities, and while I understand the desire not to downplay the crisis, this isn't true. For cities with relatively high elevations like Los Angeles (a few low-lying neighborhoods, but most of it hundreds and some of it thousands of feet above sea-level) or cities with at least moderate elevations and little danger from tropical cyclones (like almost all major cites on the West Coast), we are talking about a problem but not a catastrophe (The remnants of hurricanes we do see in California are generally more good news than bad. Kay broke our recent heat wave and gave some relief to firefighters). Some beaches will be lost and a few people will have to relocate, but compared to drought and triple-digit temperatures, that's a fairly manageable situation.  

Of course, the real tragedy of this framing is not that it overstates the threat to the West Coast, but that it dangerously understates the immediate and genuinely existential threat to many cities on the East and Gulf Coasts. 

While New York City is not in danger of total oblivion the way Miami or Jacksonville are, it is far from safe from the threats associated with rising sea levels. The area has frequently been hit by hurricanes including two category 3s in the past hundred years. Given climate change trends, the city probably won't have to wait nearly so long for the next one.

This is one of the things that makes the following New York Times article from a while back so strange.

What do you do when the sea comes for your home, your school, your church?

You could try to hold back the water. Or you could raise your house. Or you could just leave.

An estimated 600 million people live directly on the world’s coastlines, among the most hazardous places to be in the era of climate change. According to scientific projections, the oceans stand to rise by one to four feet by the end of the century, with projections of more ferocious storms and higher tides that could upend the lives of entire communities.

Many people face the risks right now. Two sprawling metropolitan areas offer a glimpse of the future. One rich, one poor, they sit on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean: the San Francisco Bay Area (population 7 million) and metropolitan Manila (almost 14 million).

Their history, their wealth, and the political and personal choices they make today will shape how they fare as the water inevitably comes to their doorsteps.



I have been meaning to write something about this article since it came out, but recent events in Florida have made it too timely to put off any longer. The New York Times felt the need to go all the way to San Francisco to do the story despite the fact that New York City has more people, lower elevation, and faces a far, far greater risk from tropical cyclones. This is not quite as bad as the San Francisco Chronicle doing features on earthquakes and wildfire smoke and using NYC as one of the two examples, but it’s close.

Not to say that the Bay Area doesn't have some low lying country and we do experience storm surges and king tides or that fixing these problems won't require considerable money and political will (and possibly a small degree of managed retreat), but for the most part they can be fixed, and compared to California's real environmental crises (droughts, heat waves, non-coastal floods, mega-fires and their smoke), rising seas and storm surges are low on our list of worries.

Even out of that context, the article is still bizarre and with its depiction of first world problems, cringe-inducing. The devastation of a city of almost two million people hit by five to seven typhoons a year and vulnerable to tsunamis is unironically listed next to rich people losing beach houses.

[What about the threat of California mega-floods you’ve been hearing about? This is very much a real problem with frightening and relatively recent precedents -- as recently as the 1860s, Governor Stanford had to take a rowboat to his inauguration – but other than both being caused or exacerbated by climate change, these risks have almost nothing to do with the problems described in the NYT piece. The flooding described here is non-coastal.]

The different elevations of Manila and San Francisco and how they affect the impact of rising sea levels is largely undiscussed. There is exactly one mention of tropical storms, none whatsoever of tropical cyclones, and the fact that certain areas are more vulnerable than others is almost completely ignored. All coastal cities are treated as effectively interchangeable.

As we've said before, the all coastal cities are equal narrative embraced by the New York Times is extraordinarily dangerous. It inevitably underplays the to cities from New York all the way to Houston along the coast, particularly in Florida. The States largest city, Jacksonville, is only a few feet higher than Fort Myers. Miami is actually lower (Miami Beach is effectively zero). Even before climate change kicked in, Florida had been playing a decades-long game of Russian Roulette. With more frequent and powerful storms, we will almost certainly see death tolls and property damage that dwarf the impact of hurricane Ian, and we will see them in the not too distant future.



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Monday, October 3, 2022

It's been a while since we made fun of homeopaths

From That Mitchell and Webb Look:







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Friday, September 30, 2022

What happens when the government believes its own propaganda?

This is Joseph.

Tax cuts cause dynamic growth is a common talking point that fails most of the tests of being a clear and universal principle. There are high tax nations (Germany, 48%) that have strong and robust economies (US$ 45.7K per capita). There are low tax nations that struggle (Greece, 35%) with US $17.6K GDP per capita. 

This is especially true with the idea that it is tax cuts on the wealthy that drive growth. The United States had it's highest income taxes on high earners in the 1950's -- hardly a period of sustained slow growth. Now this is not to say that taxes have no effect, but that it is a complex relationship with feedback that is not really subject to simplistic analysis. But there are simple examples which should make you question the unthinking conclusions of "taxes always lower growth" but it is also the case that the contrary isn't true. It is my suspicion that it is all about how the taxes are spent and the efficiency of government that is driving these factors. 

As we mentioned a few days ago, the UK did a serious of massive tax cuts. The consequence appeared to be the markets thinking that the government had lost its mind and a sudden massive increase in borrowing costs, requiring the central bank to intervene. Pension schemes faced serious risks of insolvency as they suddenly watched the value of their bond holdings plummet. Home sales are collapsing as banks pull back mortgages that are suddenly unprofitable. One internet pundit annotated the following chart to show just how destructive this is:


Even after a GBP 65 billion intervention, borrowing costs increases alone are as large as the budget for housing. The net deficit is >10% of the 2022 budget and exceeds education, and is about 2/3 of health care costs. It's just crazy. 

Now just listen to the Prime Minister's radio tour to try and defend these policies. It is true that there are some external shocks, mostly due to the war in Ukraine, but the tax cuts are an unforced error that has increased interest rates and dropped the value of the Great British Pound. Nor does it help when the Prime Minister won't answer a question on whether people's pensions are safe and tries to shift responsibility to the Bank of England. That isn't going to increase economic uncertainty at all, is it?  

I suspect that this type of action is the result of "noble lies" told to benefit the well off being repeated so often that the people in charge no longer realize that they were lies and have begun to believe the propaganda and I fear that rarely ends well. 

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Thursday, September 29, 2022

High ground and the lack thereof

Another thread we've been hammering for a awhile. 

A common, perhaps even the standard framing of rising sea levels is that it's a existential threat for all coastal cities, and while I understand the desire not to downplay the crisis, this isn't true. For cities with relatively high elevations like Los Angeles (a few low-lying neighborhoods, but most of it hundreds and some of it thousands of feet above sea-level) or cities with at least moderate elevations and little danger from tropical cyclones (like almost all major cites on the West Coast), we are talking about a problem but not a catastrophe (The remnants of hurricanes we do see in California are generally more good news than bad. Kay broke our recent heat wave and gave some relief to firefighters). Some beaches will be lost and a few people will have to relocate, but compared to drought and triple-digit temperatures, that's a fairly manageable situation. 

 Of course, the real tragedy of this framing is not that it overstates the threat to the West Coast, but that it dangerously understates the immediate and genuinely existential threat to many cities on the East and Gulf Coasts. 

 From CNN:

• Storm surge: Some 12 to 18 feet of seawater pushed onto land is forecast Wednesday for the coastal Fort Myers area, from Englewood to Bonita Beach, forecasters said. Only slightly less is forecast for a stretch from Bonita Beach down to near the Everglades (8 to 12 feet), and from near Bradenton to Englewood (6 to 10 feet), forecasters said.

Lower – but still life-threatening – surge is possible elsewhere, including north of Tampa and along Florida’s northeast coast near Jacksonville.

 What's happening in in Fort Meyers is horrifying...

But imagine what an eighteen foot storm surge would do to the slightly higher but far more populous Jacksonville.

From Wikipedia:

Fort Meyers
Elevation
    10 ft (3 m)
Population (2020)
 • Total    86,395

Jacksonville
Elevation
    16 ft (5 m)
Population (2020)
 • Total    949,611

And while we're at it...

Miami

Elevation
    6 ft (1.8 m)
Population (2020)
 • Total    442,241 


These storms are going to get stronger and the seas will continue to rise for the foreseeable future. Look up the elevation for cities that are likely to be hit by hurricanes. Anything less than twenty-five or thirty feet is basically playing Russian Roulette.


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Wednesday, September 28, 2022

Academic hiring

This is Joseph.

Just the public part of this Substack post by Ilya Shapiro is amazing. Like how disconnected do you need to be from academic hiring to make this complaint:


The idea that the diversity piece might have been what sank his application ignores his CV. Honorary fellow at the University of Mississippi and adjunct teacher at George Washington University Law School from 2005 to 2007. Now he has published books ad done a lot of think tank work so it might not be silly to have had his name in the pool. But he was approached by a faculty member on on the search committee and had limited academic experience. That lack of institutional academic experience was far more likely than the diversity statement of the competing candidates to have been decisive. 

That said, that he was never given a rejection letter is just rude. Sadly, not sending rejection letters is common in academia but also clearly something that we should do a lot better about. 

That said, we are not talking about a person who has been driven into destitution by these decisions. For example, the Georgetown position he declined ended up getting him a national speaking tour about free speech, so I'd say he ended up doing ok. Even if it is a bit too easy to point out the contradiction between "I have been silenced" and "I am on a national speaking tour":


I mean it is fine for Ilya to complain about how things have worked out for him professionally. I think all of us have had our professional disappointments and we have all had job that ended up not being good fits for us that we had wanted in the abstract (before the bad stuff became clear). But I also think that we need to be clear that he ended up with a prominent and important job that is probably more desirable than law school Dean. Or, if not, it is hardly a major step down from it. 

And that brings me to my final thought here. There is an odd reaction in modern right-wing circles to being able to "dish it out but not take it". See Radley Balko (hardly a left-wing flower):


Now it is perfectly fine to have emotion-based opinions on different nominees for the supreme court; it is an important institution and strong feelings over life-time appointments are sensible. But freedom to speak does not mean freedom from criticism and a person with strong and polarizing opinions shouldn't be surprised when they elicit strong reactions from others. 

So, to summarize, the failure to be hired on one's first try as a law school Dean is not an exceptional or unexpected outcome. I have failed many, many job searches in my academic life and that is as a person focused on that pathway. Dozens and dozens of hours have led to form letters and or silence from a prospective employer, even when there were people at the institution would would have liked to hire me. We can be glad that Ilya Shapiro ended up with a job he appears to enjoy and that lets him continue to advance his views, even if I find them quite disagreeable myself. But in no way does this make him a martyr to the culture wars. Instead, it is just the sad state of academic hiring. 

Just look at people like Ashley Ruba who do a ton of outreach on AltAc (alternative to academia) jobs for highly educated professionals and you can see many stories of people with impressive skills choosing to do an non-academic career, just because academia is a challenging place to have a career right now. Rather than the story of an exceptional, it is just a normal tale of people finding alternative careers outside of the academy. 

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Tuesday, September 27, 2022

Tuesday Tweets -- Headless Horses and other Absurdities

This is Twitter at its best. Smart people having interesting converstions.





Exceptional bit of propaganda from Ukraine (better with the sound up).



And he's not even one of Thiel's candidates.


Katie Porter (who is good at this) already has an ad about the national abortion ban running in the LA-Orange TV market.

All four of these states (particularly Arizona and Florida) were net pro-choice before Dobbs, and the data we've seen since have suggested that Roe has grown more popular.

State Mostly Legal Mostly Illegal Net support
Louisiana 36.00% 59.00% -23
Arkansas 38.00% 57.00% -19
Mississippi 39.00% 55.00% -16
West Virginia 40.00% 55.00% -15
Alabama 40.00% 55.00% -15
Tennessee 40.00% 53.00% -13
Kentucky 41.00% 53.00% -12
Utah 43.00% 53.00% -10
Idaho 43.00% 50.00% -6
South Dakota 47.00% 50.00% -4
North Dakota 47.00% 50.00% -3
Texas 46.00% 48.00% -2
South Carolina 45.00% 47.00% -2
Indiana 46.00% 48.00% -2
Nebraska 46.00% 47.00% -2
Wyoming 48.00% 49.00% -1
Missouri 47.00% 47.00% <+1
Kansas 48.00% 47.00% 1
Georgia 49.00% 46.00% 2
North Carolina 49.00% 44.00% 5
Oklahoma 49.00% 45.00% 5
Iowa 52.00% 45.00% 7
Ohio 52.00% 43.00% 10
New Mexico 52.00% 42.00% 10
Montana 52.00% 42.00% 10
Virginia 53.00% 42.00% 11
Wisconsin 54.00% 41.00% 13
Pennsylvania 53.00% 41.00% 13
Arizona 54.00% 41.00% 13
Minnesota 54.00% 40.00% 14
Illinois 56.00% 40.00% 15
Michigan 55.00% 39.00% 16
Florida 56.00% 38.00% 18
California 57.00% 38.00% 20
Colorado 57.00% 37.00% 20
Delaware 58.00% 37.00% 21
Alaska 60.00% 35.00% 25
Washington 61.00% 34.00% 26
Oregon 62.00% 35.00% 27
Maine 62.00% 34.00% 28
New Jersey 62.00% 33.00% 29
Maryland 63.00% 32.00% 31
New York 63.00% 32.00% 31
Nevada 63.00% 32.00% 32
Rhode Island 64.00% 30.00% 33
New Hampshire 65.00% 30.00% 35
Connecticut 65.00% 29.00% 36
Hawaii 66.00% 29.00% 37
D.C. 70.00% 26.00% 44
Massachusetts 70.00% 25.00% 45
Vermont 70.00% 24.00% 46


In black swan season, you should try to have viable candidates in even long shot elections. Case in point.


Our last comment on the royal family.




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Monday, September 26, 2022

Trickling down?

This is Joseph.

There is a idea in economics that giving money to the wealthy will result in faster rates of economic growth than giving money to the poor and middle class. To be fair, it is not completely daft to ask whether there is a specific way that taxes could be adjusted to simultaneously increase revenue and economic growth. While that seems ambitious for even a good policy, it is to be remembered that a bad policy might manage to hurt both revenue and growth at once. 

You can easily see cases where targeting benefits at the wealthy might not work so well. The idle rich are unlikely to be active investors creating new capital. The rich have the options to invest elsewhere and might use their increased revenues to drive economic growth in other places. The recent British tax cuts seem to have created a lack of confidence, for example:

Or:

Massive tax cuts when there is a problem with inflation suggests that there are about to be some exciting moves in interest rates. Which, going back to the first tweet, is a great opportunity to shift into investing overseas where growth will be a lot easier than the place that is trashing its economy.

In general, I have always wondered about the wisdom of investing in the wealthy. It's been a common historical strategy and it seems to weaken states and not strengthen them. In particular, concentrating power in a small group seems to have the unpleasant effect of making it easier for them to co-opt the normal machinery of the state. We do not see an aristocracy or a strong elite class as a sign of freedom, and that includes elites like the Roman Senate that outsiders could (at least in theory) join.  

As a more general critique, there has been an increasingly odd movement to believe in the opposite of what the data shows. Brexit seemed to posit that putting trade restrictions in place would increase prosperity. Giving more money to the rich is the opposite of helping the poor. Even in housing you have this odd belief that restrictions on development are not behind higher prices. I get that these are complicated systems and that there can be some odd outcomes and incomplete explanations, but in the normal course of life one would assume that the direct effect would be the most likely to dominate. 

Similarly, taxes have a distributional impact. Selectively cutting taxes on the wealthy in the midst of a cost of living crisis is not going to have immediate and helpful effects on poverty. The UK has around 10% inflation and is about to have an energy price crisis -- this is a fairly heroic view of how fast one expects the economic growth to happen to help out the working poor. 

PostScript: This story in the Guardian reported here with this excerpt:


Really puts the cost of living crisis in perspective. Remember, the idea here is that the government will give massive tax relief to those with high incomes.  Look at the list of cuts:
  • Cancellation of a planned rise in corporation tax to 25%, keeping it at 19%, the lowest rate in the G-20.
  • A reversal in the recent 1.25% rise in National Insurance contributions — a tax on income.
  • A reduction in the basic rate of income tax from 20 pence to 19 pence.
  • Scrapping of the 45% tax paid on incomes over £150,000 ($166,770), taking the top rate to 40%.
  • Significant cuts to stamp duty, a tax paid on home purchases.
  • A network of “investment zones” around the U.K. where businesses will be offered tax cuts, liberalized planning rules and a reduction in regulatory obstacles.
  • A claim-back scheme for sales taxes paid by tourists.
  • Scrapping of an increase in tax rates on various alcohols.
  • Scrapping of a cap on bankers’ bonuses.
Some of these will help the parents of starving children but there are big cuts focused on those making large incomes (people making $165,000 per year are not short of money for basic foodstuff). 


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Friday, September 23, 2022

If you need another Columbo fix...

...or just need to get away from the news for an hour and a half this weekend, here's is one of the rare cases where YouTube's algorithm came up with something I actually wanted to watch. [Following up last month's post.]

Murder by Natural Causes is prime Levinson and Link with a first rate cast and a plot where you may see the broad strokes coming but the the details will probably catch you off guard. 

Good, mean-spirited fun.








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Thursday, September 22, 2022

Five years ago at the blog -- No special relevance here. I just like talking about this stuff.

Friday, September 29, 2017

Thoughts on a Ouija board


As previously (and frequently) mentioned, I've been chipping away at a couple of essays about 21st century attitudes toward technology. The incredible spike in innovation of the late 19th and early 20th centuries plays a big role. Unfortunately, the more I dig in, the more I find new aspects to the subject.

I came across yet another when watching this Bob Chipman movie review of Ouija [Now apparently off line -- MP]. My general rule for movie reviews and criticism (Chipman falls more in the latter but is also pretty good at the former) is to only check out writing on movies that I either have seen, or care so little about that they can't really be spoiled. This one fell in the second category.

Chipman is exceptionally good with historical and cultural context. He started this review with a brief historical overview of the popular board game, suggesting that the filmmakers could have gotten a more interesting and original film had they mined the actual history of the Ouija board rather than opting for something standard and derivative. What caught my ear was the fact that the Ouija board was first marketed in 1891 as an attempt to cash in on the spiritualism craze of the era.

Here's Linda Rodriguez McRobbie writing for the Smithsonian:

As spiritualism had grown in American culture, so too did frustration with how long it took to get any meaningful message out of the spirits, says Brandon Hodge, Spiritualism historian. Calling out the alphabet and waiting for a knock at the right letter, for example, was deeply boring. After all, rapid communication with breathing humans at far distances was a possibility—the telegraph had been around for decades—why shouldn’t spirits be as easy to reach? People were desperate for methods of communication that would be quicker—and while several entrepreneurs realized that, it was the Kennard Novelty Company that really nailed it.

The facts weren't exactly new to me, but somehow I had never thought about the peak of the spiritualism movement coinciding with the explosive scientific and technological advances of the era. I'd always tended to think of that form of spiritualism as quaint and old-fashioned, particularly when compared with the sci-fi infused New Age mysticism of today. Now I'm wondering if I got that exactly backwards.

Particularly in America, the period from around 1880 to 1910 was one of unprecedented technological change, reordering every aspect of society to a degree that hadn't been seen before and hasn't been seen since. It was also, not surprisingly, and era of wild speculation and fantasy. Most of HG Wells' best known scientific romances came from the 1890s. The idea that Mars harbored not only intelligent life but great civilizations had started gaining popularity a decade earlier.

Perhaps living in a time of impossible things makes people credulous, it might even be a form of adaptation. People not only excepted the incredible, they craved more. This gave rise to and army of metaphysical conmen exposed by the  Seybert Commission in the 1880s. While it is always dangerous to generalize from outliers, it is certainly interesting that the greatest age of progress was also remarkable for producing dreamers and suckers.

 

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Wednesday, September 21, 2022

American agency

This is Joseph

This tweet needed to be seen to be believed:


I find that World War 2 is a fertile ground for this theory that everything bad comes from the United States. When I was younger there was a huge debate about whether the US knew about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in advance and that this somehow reduced Japanese culpability. Now, pre-knowledge of the attack might have had implications for the leadership being indifferent to casualties instead of setting an ambush, but it is common for intelligence to go astray. Look at the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union:
Stalin also ignored his own spies, who, from such locations as Germany, Japan, Romania and Switzerland, reported with increasing frequency that the Nazis were about to strike. In early 1941, for example, an undercover source in Berlin asserted that “war with Russia has definitely been decided on for this year,” whereas in Bucharest a German commander was quoted describing the upcoming clash as “something that goes without saying.” Border guards heard much the same from captured enemy saboteurs, and railroad workers observed huge numbers of Nazi soldiers moving east. Though not every report proved reliable, Soviet intelligence purportedly named the exact, or almost exact, date of the invasion no fewer than 47 times in the 10 days before “Operation Barbarossa” went into effect.

Now, to be clear, Japan attacked the United States and then Germany declared war on the United States. It is implausible in the extreme that this process was driven by the United States in any meaningful sense of the term and Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda goes back to far earlier eras, like the book Mein Kampf. 

Now World War 2 was atypical in that there was a pretty clear event that started the war and the other side uniformly declared war on the United States. Further, it was pretty clear that the Axis countries were conducting atrocities on defenseless conquered populations. It is rare that the lines are so clear as with the US involvement. I think this is uniformly true of the Allies, in general, but I think it is clearest with the US which was not central to the pre-war diplomacy as the UK, USSR, or France. 

This strange brand of anti-Americanism continues to the modern era, with people still needing to debunk that the defensive NATO alliance was the cause of the 2022 war. To be clear, some US interventions are questionable -- I think serious people can ask hard questions about the wisdom of the Vietnam war or the invasion of Iraq. There are many US foreign policy decisions that are questionable.

But saying the US is always a bad actor is as naïve and silly as calling the US as always being a good actor. Nation-states are famous for making all sorts of unfortunate decisions in the name of national interest and the US is no exception. But it is ridiculous to try and make the record worse than it actually is. To be honest, on a historical scale, the US has tended to be an atypically ethical and restrained great power. 

Reflexive anti-Americanism is very  unhelpful in generating a useful pathway to improving US foreign policy and these sorts of silly arguments drag oxygen away from actually working to make the US more ethical and more restrained as a great power. 



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Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Tuesday (Themed) Tweets -- Getting increasingly difficult to avoid the obvious comparisons

Presented without comment.

 








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