A child can see through it

Seth Kurtenbach is on CFI’s Course of Reason, an On-Campus blog. He wrote an essay using very simple words, and he wrote it as A Fifth Grader’s Response to the CFI Board’s Statement. It’s a wee bit elliptical, but read carefully…it’s actually rather seditious.

Sometimes the person being mean or bad is really smart, and will pretend that what he is doing is no big deal. He will say, “hey, let’s be respectful about our disagreement.” This can make the mad person look like the unreasonable one. This will make the mad person even more mad, because they are not the ones being disrespectful, it is the bad or mean person! It is a mean trick that bad smart people play sometimes. You should be careful about this if you ever disagree with someone about something. If you are the bad or mean person, you should try to not be so bad and mean, and you should also apologize for being bad and mean.

Sometimes it is really hard for a person to admit that he was disrespectful. The best thing to do is to do the right thing and apologize for being disrespectful. The worst thing to do is to pretend you weren’t disrespectful, or to ignore the other person’s feelings. This will never make things better. You should keep this in mind if you ever accidentally disrespect someone and make them mad.

I get the impression some of CFI’s people are a little bit displeased.

The new American Morality Police?

The TSA has a new mission, apparently: to make sure young women are wearing appropriately modest attire.

Here’s what happened, as my daughter described it in text messages to us: she was at the station where the TSA checks IDs. She said the officer was "glaring" at her and mumbling. She said, "Excuse me?" and he said, "You’re only 15, COVER YOURSELF!" in a hostile tone. She said she was shaken up by his abusive manner.

You can see a photo at the link. She looks like an ordinary, casually dressed teenager, nothing particularly scandalous or revealing. But now in addition to making sure travelers are safe by preventing weapons from coming aboard, security services are adding a new mission of blocking excess exposed skin.

By the way, TSA, if you’re going to pick on someone, try to make sure it isn’t Mark Frauenfelder’s daughter. Unless you want to get splashed all over BoingBoing.

Quit picking on Marissa Powell!

All right, as we’re seeing splashed all over the news now, Miss Utah, Marissa Powell, fum-fuhed a question about resolving income inequities. Here she goes:

And I say, so what? No one expects a dissertation in the feel-good blurb you’re allowed to give in a beauty pageant. She clearly hadn’t thought about the question before, and was simply floundering to come up with an answer…and the one she stumbled out wasn’t inherently bad. She’s trying to recommend education as a solution.

So, not an inherently wrong answer, poorly expressed, and contrived on the fly by a young woman who wasn’t really prepared for it. I dare any of the people who are dressing her down to get on the air before a national audience, get a question on a subject they’ve never really thought about, and answer it as well.

What’s really going on here is an effort to find supporting evidence for a bias that women in beauty pageants are stupid — and the media are happily jumping on one instance of a clumsy, misspoken answer as confirmation.

Man of Steel, Movie of Wreckage

A couple of things are driving me to distraction in the recent crop of superhero movies. Maybe Man of Steel was a fine piece of entertainment — they certainly threw money at the screen — but it also contained a fine collection of irritants.

  • Lens flare. WHY? What does it mean? How does it add to a scene except to remind you that this is being seen through a camera? And not even that — I think a lot of it is added in post-production. What next? Dirt on the lenses? Fake scratches on the digital film stock? I hope that a decade from now, people will look back on the film output from this era and wonder what the hell they were thinking.

  • The falling woman trope. It’s everywhere. The poor woman is plummeting to her doom at the terminal velocity of 200 km/hr, and superhero swoops upwards at even greater speed and catches her. This doesn’t work. At that speed, invulnerable super-strong arms are like blunt blades and are going to messily trisect the victim.

    There’s a variant! Women fall and need to be rescued; men fall and land on their convenient flying vehicle/mount. Just stop it.

  • Slugfests. In every case, bad guy meets good guy and you know that shortly they’ll start throwing roundhouse blows at each other. This is not how people interact with each other, except when they’re very drunk and stupid. These are supposed to be super-intelligent, powerful beings, and their standard response to any challenge is to punch someone in the nose.

  • Ever-escalating explosions. And frantic pacing. Superhero movies have become giant demolition derbies, vying with one another to provide the biggest booms and demolish the most real estate. Superman, his military allies, and his enemies basically flatten the town of Smallville before moving on to turn New York into rubble.

  • There are no human costs. We see skyscrapers fall, entire New York city blocks destroyed, invulnerable super-bodies flung through office buildings like missiles, and never see a single person injured or killed. We see one death and Superman howls in anguish, and I just wanted to say, “Hey, Supe, when you smashed that IHOP? You probably turned half a dozen people who were just trying to have a pancake into bloody mush. I don’t even want to try to get a body count from that imploded building over there. So why are you upset over the quick and painless demise of that one jerkwad?”

  • There has to be a witness. This is a corollary to the absence of deaths. A couple of the secondary human characters face the most traumatic event ever — one of them is stuck under a pile of rebar and concrete (don’t worry, they pry her out and she’s completely uninjured!) so they can stand around and gawp as the superclowns rampage all over their city. Titanic forces are shattering whole buildings, but they stand there getting a little dust in their faces, and that’s it.

  • Specific to this movie: Pa Kent is a goddamned evil idiot who makes his adopted alien son feel like a shameful criminal every time he does something good. I would have cheered when he died, except Kevin Costner looked so smug and sanctimonious about shaming the superboy into not saving him when he could have easily. They also make a point of the Kents being Christian, which fits that pious humble-bragging attitude so well.

So yeah, there might have been an interesting movie buried under all the metaphorical rebar and concrete rubble of the detonation of special effects, but in the real world, it’s not going to crawl out alive afterwards.

Addicted to Reality TV

I really hate reality TV — I saw a few episodes of the original Survivor when it first aired, and the petty bickering and the conniving and the efforts of the creators of the show to aggravate the conflict just completely turned me off. It was artificially Darwinian to an extreme. Every other reality program I’ve heard about since seems to follow the same vicious and invidious formula.

And then I stumbled onto Strip Search. I watched the first couple of episodes because I’m a fan of Maki’s webcomic, Sci-ence, and then found it addictive. The premise is simple and basically the same as a lot of reality TV programs: a group of people are set up in a house, and every day they are given a challenge to meet, the winner gets immunity, and two of the others have to up against each other in an elimination challenge…so the population gets slowly winnowed down to a final winner.

But here are the differences: the people are all webcomic artists. The challenges are all testing elements of what it takes to succeed with a webcomic, so in some ways its more like a training boot camp. Most importantly, all the people being tested seem genuinely nice; they get along, they aren’t scheming to screw each other over, they like each others’ work. The way the dynamic is set up, it’s the two show creators, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, who judge the work in the elimination rounds, who are the force of selection — so it’s not the players working to get each other kicked out of the house, it’s players cooperating against an external agent.

It’s very Kropotkinesque, and that makes it a pleasure to watch.

The final episode airs next Tuesday, so I don’t know who’s going to win yet (and the nice thing is, I don’t care; I got into it by following Maki, but I’ve gotten to like all of them), and I can’t spoil it for you. But it’s a webseries so you can easily start from the beginning.

I may have just consumed the entire weekend for some of you, who will start watching the whole series just now.

Leaders stand up for what is right

Wow, Australia, are you trying to shame the US by example or what? While rape is endemic in our military, and old greyheads waffle about in committees avoiding stating anything clearly about the problem, look at Lieutenant General David Morrison of the Australian army laying down the law.

Yes. The time is long past due to recognize that equality by race and sex and sexual orientation is a moral obligation. I commend Morrison for being at least one man who stands up for that obligation.

But what about us? Rebecca Watson is exactly right.

Recently, I’ve been discussing and sometimes arguing with friends about the current state of the skeptic and atheist communities. It is my firm belief that we are, as a “movement,” cowardly, and that is why we ultimately will fail. There are too many of us, and especially too many people in positions of power, who are unwilling or unable to take any real action that might help stop the incessant harassment of women in our ranks, or to take any other real moral stand. I’ve seen people who think of themselves as allies actively covering up sexual harassment at an event and then going on to invite the harasser back to speak. I’ve seen “skeptics” write blog posts defending Brian Dunning as a hero instead of an embarrassment. I’ve seen organization employees privately rage about the nonsense their boss is spewing but then refuse to even try to hold him accountable. If we’re going to get anywhere, we have to demand better. We need leaders who are more like Lt. Gen. Morrison.

I feel that American leadership in a lot of domains has been crippled by that Clintonian disease of triangulation — straining to find a position that accommodates a maximum number without regard to truth or moral status. That’s a dangerous approach when the majority is not moral, and often, not even right.

Television “science”

Are you a film crew person looking for work in the UK? Multiple opportunities have opened up for the crew for a documentary!

A new Covent Garden-based film company seeks a producer of marketing and distribution, a researcher/presenter, a camera operator, a sound person, a runner, and an editor, for its first documentary, called Laughing with Women. Why are women, on average, slightly less funny than men? Does gold-digging in particular impair women’s joke-making ability? If women publicly reject gold-digging, do they become as funny, or funnier than men?

If the radical and revealing street-based social experiment at the centre of our documentary proves gold-digging does make women less funny (as pre-production research suggests) then our findings will make headlines around the world, our film’s two minute teaser trailer attached to all those news and blog articles. The full documentary will be shot to a broadcast-quality standard and format, giving mainstream television companies worldwide the opportunity to purchase broadcasting rights (if they’re feeling brave enough) whilst we maintain a virtually guaranteed revenue stream from our already established hardcore of supporters and fans around the world, who, along with everyone else we intrigue, will be able to enjoy Laughing with Women on newly launched pay-per-view channel, Vimeo on Demand (VoD) – where VoD itself takes a very modest 10% cut. The documentary has the potential to be translated into several languages – gold-digging a familiar if hidden story in every country, until now.

Positions available…

Producer of marketing and distribution

Researcher/presenter

Camera person

Sound person

Editor

All positions paid at the minimum national wage or above, to be negotiated.

Shooting dates…

The main shoot, testing the documentary’s key hypothesis, and the kind of fireworks it will generate, will take place from August 1st, for 10 days, in central London. Eight to ten other shooting days will be organized for soon after. If interested in getting involved, please email your show-reel and/or CV, along with a paragraph or two saying hello, explaining in a little detail why you are specifically interested in working on Laughing with Women – and what your individual take on it all might be – also outlining your availability. Interesting respondents will be contacted for a Covent Garden meeting soon, where the whole plan, and a closely linked follow-up project can be discussed.

That isn’t a documentary. They’re not building a story around an established science fact, they’re inventing a premise that they simply assume is true, and are then designing an “experiment” (more likely a contrived set of sight gags) to “prove” their claims on video. I can roughly predict what they’re going to do: they’re going to approach women, insult them by suggesting that they’re venal gold-diggers, and then demonstrate that angry women don’t have much of a sense of humor about sexist assmonkeys harassing them. Hypothesis proven! Of course, if women were actually funnier than the men in their sample, you know that wouldn’t get aired — they have a prejudice, and by god, they’re going to make it appear true.

And then they hope that people will be “brave enough” to make their video go viral when it confirms conventional bigotry. If their little dog-and-pony show doesn’t get picked up any broadcasters, it isn’t because they’re afraid to pander to stereotypes — turn on your TV and look, that’s never a problem — but because this “documentary” will be so patently slanted and dishonest that it is a slap in the face to real documentaries everywhere.

Wait a minute…they’re looking for a people to do camera and sound, a produce, a presenter, and an editor, for a show that is going to be a series of confrontations and requires almost no writing. So there is basically no crew at all right now, just a no-talent hack sitting on his ass in his office dreaming of putting together a show to prove to the world that women lack a sense of humor and are all gold-digging bitches. He sounds like every MRA in the world.

I called it. This is the dream of no-talent hack Tom Martin, who brings nothing to the project other than a resentment of women.