Wannabe xkcd

MoDo

Some time ago, I commented to Nick that I found it weird that nobody was referring to Bernie Madoff as a sadist, since he'd caused too much pain for me to believe that he wasn't, at least in part, getting off on it. Today Nick points out to me that, of all people, Maureen Dowd read my mind.

There Is Such A Thing As A Free Lunch

Amid the many TARPs, stimuli, bailouts and nationalizations that are either being floated, implemented (badly) or bastardized beyond recognition in Congress, the key word seems to be tradeoff.  TARP all the bad assets and recapitalize the banks, and you've "privatized the profits and socialized the losses," creating a "moral hazard."  Put a moratorium on foreclosures and force banks to accept "cramdowns," and you've left the banks with shittier assets on their hands, lowered revenue streams, and created a "moral hazard" (in the other direction).  Plus, you cause other banks to have to write down their loans, causing contraction in lending markets which you don't want...  A stimulus package targeted at infrastructure is limited by the number and size of "shovel-ready" projects, meaning that some of the monies won't reach the economy until 18mos-2yrs from now, if then.  You may also "crowd-out" private investment, although nobody really knows whether that's true, and certainly not to what degree.  Lowering taxes provides a shot in the arm, but it's unclear what size multiplier you get, and you certainly decrease government revenues in the future (the Laffer curve remains a joke).  Plus, you have to fight Republicans if you ever want to raise them again.  Nationalize the banks and you've get the upside of TARP (taking the losses off the banks' balance sheets) without the attendant moral hazard (because the consumers keep the "good bank" assets as well), but you've given up on a central tenet of capitalism as we understand it (that markets should set at least most prices; now we'd have the Fed or its equivalent setting both the price of risk and the price of liquidity.)

So, fine, I don't have any real suggestions/opinions that haven't been raised elsewhere, other than that Greg Mankiw is intellectually dishonest, and high speed rail is great. Except, legalize weed. It's the mythical free lunch, which, if served, we'll all be hungry enough to devour. First, you move a huge black market (isn't MJ the number one cash crop in the US? Why, yes.) into the actual market, enabling it to be taxed. Hooray, revenues! Since the revenues from the current indirect weed tax (the cost of dealing with illegality, from people arrested for smoking, to businesses having their employees face the possibility of getting arrested/shot) accrue to "criminal" enterprises, legalizing weed functionally amounts to a tax on crime (the government takes their revenue stream). Of course, the other benefits of legalization are myriad and would also probably act as a stimulus. The prison guards wouldn't like it, but the cost savings in the form of lowered imprisonment would certainly ease the burden on already stretched state budgets. We could pare back the DEA, significantly. We would lower court costs across the board, and likely see better results as prosecutors, public defenders, judges, and cops see a massive time-sink disappear off their collective calendars. Anyway, weed legalization being a good thing isn't a new idea, but I haven't seen anyone mentioning it as a stimulus-y idea. I would also make the point that Yglesias does, that good policies should virtually always be implemented, regardless of the economic climate. The current economic climate makes some ideas that are in normal times bad ones (bank nationalizations) potential good ones. But a good idea that isn't stimulus-y enough for the current bill (like high speed rail, apparently) should still be implemented.

It's also very much related to another idea that I'll do a post about, which is the counter-intuitive one that WARS ARE INCREDIBLY EXPENSIVE.

Separated at Birth (The Triumphant Return II)

Schemer Charles Ponzi:

and Jay Chandrasekhar (from Super Troopers)

Granting God's Request

Here's the cover of Percival Everett's Wounded, which I haven't read yet:

Here's the cover of Nick Antosca's Midnight Picnic, which I also haven't read yet:

Of Few Things I Am Certain

One of them is that I intensely dislike Terry McAuliffe. Hate is a strong word, to be reserved for...well, no, fuck that. I hate Terry McAuliffe. Of course, most of you would not find this surprising.

McAuliffe is noteworthy not because I hate him, then, but because I'm confident that I would have hated him whenever I was exposed to him. For many contemptible people, it's not hard to imagine liking them, if certain circumstances were different. If I'd met him before that bitch of a girlfriend poisoned him, I might have liked him. I bet he was really chill until he got that job, or didn't get into that school, or became gay. Before he got old and became insane, he was probably a reasonable professor.

Not so McAuliffe. If, in some alternate universe, Terry McAuliffe the boy and I had lived next door to one another, I would have hated him. If we'd been in homeroom together, I'd have hated him. When he's 90 and some sort of éminence grise in the Democratic establishment, or wherever his political ambitions land him, I will hate him. If we volunteered at the same soup kitchen; if I were to marry his daughter; if he simply, for no reason, gave me $1,000,000, I would hate him.

Indeed the vitriol I feel for the man is probably irrational. I tried to make a list of his deplorable qualities, and it isn't that impressive:

• He's chirpy - ugh.
• He's a liar - fine/reasonable.
• He's totally unhinged from reality when it suits him to be - ugh (understandable).
• He's enthusiastic - ugh.
• He's unintelligent - ugh.
• He's utterly, totally, insanely shameless - ugh.
• He hunts - ugh.
  

There was a kid, MP, who played baseball with my brother for a number of years. MP was a hustler in the David Eckstein model: a mediocre-to-bad player who ALWAYS hustled, even when it made no sense to. He was the kind of catcher who would dive for foul balls that were clearly going over the backstop and out of play. The kind of kid who would score sliding when there wasn't even a throw to the plate - in warmups (gotta be the first to get the uniform dirty!). The kind of kid who was always "firing up" his teammates by screaming incoherently at them while they were trying to focus on hitting - with a metal stick - a small, white ball flying at them at the speed cars travel on the freeway. The kind of kid who was always yelling about how many outs there were, even if he was wrong. Terry McAuliffe is a grown-up version of MP. I hate Terry McAuliffe.

(Incidentally, this line from Eve Fairbanks' pre-Gubernatorial profile of McAuliffe is pretty funny: "The idea of Terry McAuliffe babysitting an autistic child seems a patently bad one.")

Irresistable

On another note, here's Ross Douthat's much-ballyhooed meditation on torture post-9/11. I think it not at all intellectually honest, which is what most of the people who disagreed with it would have said if they didn't like Douthat personally. It's mostly argument by non-sequitur; here's the bright insight that motivates the piece:

That while the Bush Administration's policies clearly failed a just-war test, they didn't fail it in quite so new a way as some of their critics suppose ... and moreover, had I been in their shoes I might have failed the test as well.

He proceeds to go on and on about just war theory, invoke an atomic bomb comparison, and obliquely argue against The Dark Side. What he does not do, however, is more telling.

He does not, once, in some 2100 words, mention efficacy. Or effectiveness. Torture's lack thereof is well-established (incidentally, this is an argument Mayer's made many times, upon which Douthat fails to comment). Assumed throughout Douthat's piece is that torture works. While Douthat doesn't come right out and say so, his phrasing gives him away:

But I certainly remember how I felt about interrogation in the aftermath of 9/11: I felt that we were all suddenly in a ticking-bomb scenario, that the gloves have to come off, and that all kinds of things needed to be on the table.

As Rugby Dan has pointed out before, the ticking time bomb scenario is tendentious as generally posed: You have a responsible party before you who holds some piece of information critical to saving thousands of lives, the lives of people who will otherwise perish in some short amount of time. Do you torture him to get the info? Rugby offers a categorical no, based on this phrasing of the question. I've heard it offered with the following modification: The only way to get it out of him is to torture. Do you? In this case, the answer is probably "toss me the razor and the blowtorch," although it's close. The problem is that the second scenario explicitly, and the first implicitly, assume that torture will achieve the desired effect: saving the people. Which it won't in the first case, and only will in the second case because it's specified as part of the hypothetical. Douthat does not address this issue in the follow-ups (1, 2) to his post. He did finally, kinda get around to it a couple of days ago.

Here's his verdict:

But I know at least some people in Washington for whom this isn't the case: People who argue, with a reasonable degree of knowledge and no self-justifying incentives, that whatever one thinks about the morality of waterboarding, the Bush Administration's interrogation policies up made a substantial difference in our ability to disrupt al Qaeda in the aftermath of 9/11.

Nothing that's been made public to date has left me convinced that they're right. (And even if they are right, it probably wouldn't change my judgment that the Bush Administration's broader record on detainee policy looks like a moral fiasco.) But I'm entirely convinced that they're sincere - and I think that any sincere proponent of what the United States did to its high-value detainees should be willing to see those policies defended more fully and publicly than they've been to date.

(emphasis mine)

Astonishing, no? He defends the decision to torture, decries the results, and then admits that the best evidence he can offer that torture works - that we were, post-9/11, actually in a ticking-time bomb scenario - is that some people he knows are sincere in their belief that torturing hundreds if not thousands of people helped us disrupt al Qaeda.

I am having a difficult time making myself clear to Richard Berger

In reply to my reply, Rich writes:

the oscars have rules about what can be up for best picture (http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/rules/rule02.html), so if i were you i would have assumed that i (rich) had just assumed the same films that are up for oscars are up for my mythical awards. while this issue is valid and interesting to discuss on the whole, it was not an important part of the post and you are blowing it out of proportion.

ps a movie could "rip off" another movie, but still be a great movie in its own right for a given year. e.g. the departed was a remake that won best picture. furthermore, what if someone made a sweet mash up of only found footage from casablanca and the departed (a la the grey album in music) and it was genius. should that be allowed? interesting questions. but where do you see me shutting down this line of thought in my original post?

The question isn't whether a particular movie should be eligible for an Oscar. The point is that, in determining what should win an Oscar you can't merely consider a movie's intrinsic quality (but rather also its place in the intellectual history of movie-making).

The reason why I stress this is to explain to Richard, why this idea:

How about making the Best Picture the one that brings the highest combination of profit to filmmakers and enjoyment to viewers. Have exit polls at every screening of every movie and tally the enjoyment ratings in some manner (details TBD).

won't work. To wit: if you only (or even primarily) consider profits and enjoyment (exit polls), you'll be taking into account only the movie's intrinsic quality and not its context. People don't care that Yes Man is a rip off of Liar Liar, and this will be reflected in their dollar votes and exit polls. However, when determining who should win an Oscar, presumably we do care about originality (and therefore exit polls and dollar votes are inadequate metrics for Oscar-worthiness).

Any port in a storm

Rich writes:

3. This paragraph is classic condescension/wanting to make a funny:

The above two symptoms hint at the gangrene that infects Rich's entire premise: when we say "Best Picture of 2008" we are not trying to approximate "The movie released in 2008 that provided the most total pleasure to movie watchers". Proof: even if a re-release of Star Wars killed the game in terms of clitoral stimulation, we wouldn't want to give it "Best Picture" since it was made 30 years ago.

You are putting words in my blog post that aren't there and making false assumptions about what I wrote. I never explicitly said "only new releases" because I didn't realize that I had to be so rigorous in a blog post to avoid ridicule. I'm (sincerely) happy to hear your take on this stuff, but I would prefer to hear substantive disagreements.

You wish I'd put words in your blog post.

At first blush, my example -- a re-release of Star Wars winning "Best Picture" -- doesn't seem troubling. After all, you could always (as Rich suggests) add the caveat "only new releases can win Best Picture". My point, however, is that it's impossible to adequately define "new release" (for this purpose).

What about a re-release of Star Wars that included 5 new shots? Can this be considered for "Best Picture"? What about a shot for shot remake of Star Wars by another director? What about a movie that just rips off its central premise (like "The Wizard" rips off "Rain Man", as Kristen astutely points out in comments). What if a movie ripped off its main artistic technique (e.g., another movie in which time is reversed, a la Memento).

The point is that, when considering a movie for "Best Picture", you can't merely think about its intrinsic quality. Rather, you have to take into account is place in the history of movies, whether what it's trying to do has been done better (or worse) before, etc. If you don't, you'll never be able to exclude movies that, though they're pleasurable to watch, are unoriginal rip-offs of other movies.

Is it a mistake to wage war against Richard Berger on two fronts simultaneously?

Richard cautiously (yet laudably!) shuffles into the world of ideas in his latest post:

Maybe "best" needs to be redefined. As currently understood for something like the Oscars it's a fairly arbitrary decision that pretty much only rewards dramatic movies that are judged to be well-acted and have some serious themes. Fairly limited, eh? How about making the Best Picture the one that brings the highest combination of profit to filmmakers and enjoyment to viewers. Have exit polls at every screening of every movie and tally the enjoyment ratings in some manner (details TBD).

First of all, Richard, on behalf of myself and Malcom Gladwell, welcome to the world of ideas!

I think the "Best Picture" case is substantially more complex than you grant (does that hidden complexity intimate a larger problem? Yes). For example, why profits instead of gross revenue? It's "Best Picture", not "Best Picture per dollar spent to make it".

Exit polls of enjoyment are problematic as well -- a scary or otherwise upsetting movie might bias watchers' immediate responses, even if they would later admit that the movie was good. Furthermore, what if the watcher just doesn't get it (this is a problem even among well-educated Jews as evinced by the friends of mine who don't like Adaptation)? Or what if the main idea depends on getting some reference, or being a certain age, or having lived through certain events?

The above two symptoms hint at the gangrene that infects Rich's entire premise: when we say "Best Picture of 2008" we are not trying to approximate "The movie released in 2008 that provided the most total pleasure to movie watchers". Proof: even if a re-release of Star Wars killed the game in terms of clitoral stimulation, we wouldn't want to give it "Best Picture" since it was made 30 years ago.

Likewise, even if a movie doesn't completely copy another movie, but rather just rips it off substantially, we wouldn't want to give it "Best Picture" either (even if no one noticed and everyone loved it).

The point is that you can't effectively crowdsource the selection of the year's "Best Picture" because the criteria aren't available (or even easily definable). There's a plausible case that experts do a better job here since they have a good intuitive understanding of what makes a "Best Picture" (though comedies tend to get the short shrift -- and what am I saying; they're all idiots; whatever.).

That said, if you could define what makes a "Best Picture" (in the same way that you can define what makes a good encyclopedia article -- Wikipedia has a tome of guidelines), I think you could also effectively crowdsource its selection.