The One-Seventh Report

Inception

2010-07-21T22:08:00.001+01:00

I have a pretty active subconscious. When I was studying film, I once had a dream which ended with rolling credits. More recently, I've had political science dreams in which claims are backed with footnotes and citations. I have some common recurring dreams - the naked-in-class dream (although in mine, thanks to a surfeit of modesty, I'm usually in boxers); the driving-from-the-backseat dream. And I have dreams which reference previous dreams; recently, it's been a sequence of half-remembered ones in which I've travelled extensively to Venezuela - and it usually takes me a few minutes after waking to remember I've never been there in my life.

Maybe it's that last series, which in the intense moments between sleep and wakefulness feels like a whole parallel existence, which explains why I liked Inception so much. That's not the only reason, of course - I'll get to the others momentarily - but the idea of a separate dream universe to which we travel back and forth from the comfort of our beds seems more than an intellectual exercise to me. Those parallel universes are the backbone of this movie, which manages to roll together an exploration of the nature of human consciousness and compelling, intricate story.

It's difficult to explain the plot of the movie without spoiling some aspects, but the basic outline is that Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, an 'extraction expert' who specializes in using newly developed 'shared dreaming' technology to steal ideas from the minds of targets when they're asleep and most vulnerable. His team (including Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page) are hired by a Japanese tycoon (Ken Watanabe) to do something even more difficult - inception, or placing an idea in the mind of a target. Of course, it being a Christopher Nolan film, complications ensue and tricks are played both on the characters and the audience. To say more would be to spoil, so I'll stop here.

Normally when I write these reviews, I list some positive aspects of the film and move on to the critique. That's difficult here, as I've been wracking my brains for a critique and can't come up with much of anything. The writing is brilliant, the acting is devoid of a single major weak spot, the pacing hides its 2.5 hour length, the visual effects are stunning, and the music and editing enhance the experience without getting in the way. Most critically, the film signposts: for a story in which multiple realities are layered on top of each other, I rarely felt truly lost (except for during the film's intentionally confusing opening sequence). It works as pure entertainment, as a simulacrum of dreaming and as a thought piece. The film's internal rules are - mostly - consistent, and any plot holes that seep through are trampled down with ferocious efficiency.

My only complaint - and an entirely subjective one at that - is that the film doesn't come close to exploring the thematic possibilities of different types of dreams. A fairly major plot point involves the possibility of training the subconscious to resist incursions; in the film's mythos, projections of other humans act as white blood cells, swarming intruders who disturb the dream too much and eventually killing them, causing them to wake up. These projections are usually depicted as mercenaries of some kind. That's all well and good, and provides a justification for a series of creative fight and chase scenes, but it misses a larger possibility: nightmares. I don't know about anybody else, but I'm pretty confident that my subconscious is capable of summoning scarier guardians than men in suits with rifles.

But that's just my impression. The thing I appreciate most about Inception is that for a $160 million blockbuster, it feels remarkably personal. It feels like the alternate dream universe I occasionally slip into without paying for a ticket, except I can remember the details this time. For that, it's worth the price of admission and maybe a whole lot more.

Iron Man 2

2010-05-04T23:45:00.000+01:00

The more I think about it, the more I realize how much expectations play into our appreciation for the films we see. Even in the case of a movie we have seen no trailer for, read no review of and heard nothing about, the bulk of our opinion of it is shaped by expectations formed in the first few minutes: have we heard of any of the actors, or the director? Where and when is it set? What's the theme of the opening sequence? But that case is increasingly rare; how often do we now go to movies that we know nothing about?

The original Iron Man benefitted hugely from low expectations. It followed a series of disastrous adaptations of lesser-known comic books (Daredevil, I'm looking at you), was helmed by a little-known director and was headlined by an actor better known for his bingeing than his acting. By all rights, it should have been bad, and yet it wasn't. It struck exactly the right comic book adaptation balance: a dash of pathos, a nod or two in the direction of the real world, and loads of over-the-top action and witty banter, helped enormously by the cast's ability to improvise and the director's willingness to let them. And the fact that it was released two months before the summer's other all-consuming superhero epic (The Dark Knight) meant that it was commercially successful as well.

Unfortunately, that success bequeathed to the inevitable sequel a loftier and more difficult set of expectations. With the origin of the characters established by the first movie, Iron Man 2 has the more difficult task of taking the characters to interesting new places in entertaining new ways while building on the themes introduced by the original. That it narrowly fails to do so is not so much a function of the movie's own flaws as it is a demonstration of the effects of high expectations.

On its own terms, much of what's on display here is as it should for a big, flashy effects-heavy summer blockbuster. A cast of well-cast big-name stars both returning (principally Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow) and new (Don Cheadle, Samuel L. Jackson, Mickey Rourke, Scarlett Johannson and Sam Rockwell) trade rapid-fire, reasonably witty dialogue, punctuated with shiny, crowd-pleasing special effects and large-scale explosions. The plot is rather too convoluted to explain in any detail here, but the basic outline is worth laying out: after announcing to the world at the end of the first film that he is the eponymous armored superhero, billionaire former arms manufacturer and playboy Tony Stark (Downey) has used his flying, red-and-gold supersuit to 'privatize world peace.' But all is not well - his company has not made the transition from defense contractor to generalized technology purveyor entirely successfully, while his relationship with his hyper-competent assistant/corporate successor/love interest Pepper Potts (Paltrow) is strained by his refusal to own up to the fact that the continued use of his armored suit is rapidly killing him. Meanwhile, new enemies abound, in the form of a smarmy US Senator (Garry Shandling) who wants to nationalize Iron Man, a competing industrialist who wants the brass ring so badly he can't quite articulate it (Sam Rockwell, perfectly cast) and an insane Russian physicist (Rourke, bearing golden teeth and a homeless/punk hairstyle) whose family has a long-running dispute with Stark and his father. Cue intrigue, and explosions.

The whole endeavor, with six or seven major characters swapping allegiances and agendas, treads dangerously close to incomprehensible but manages to move along with enough vigor that it avoids falling into the trap its own ambition sets for it. The trade-off is that we're not treated to an enormous quantity of character development - although that said, few of the leads seem short-changed, with the exception of Cheadle, who in taking Terrence Howard's role as resident straight man Lt. Col. James Rhodes, is given little of interest to do and does little with it - a rare disappointing performance from the Oscar nominee. There are a couple of particularly well-executed scenes, including the sequence where Rourke's character ambushes Stark in the middle of a Formula One race in Monaco, and a funny bit where Stark gets drunk in his armor at his own birthday party and trashes his mansion. But these scenes don't add up in particularly logical fashion, and there's little here that approaches the sheer joy of the scenes in the first movie where Stark, having escaped captivity and returned with a new outlook on like, exiles himself to his basement and tinkers with his machines until he's created the suit of armor that will allow him to do something meaningful with his life. In those scenes by himself, we saw Downey at his best - brilliant but short-tempered, improvisational but utterly determined - even though he can't quite articulate what he's determined to do, or why.

With its larger cast and larger ambitions, the sequel loses sight of that central truth: that the success or failure of the movie is down to Robert Downey Jr. playing the hell out of a character not too terribly different from himself. Even though there are a lot of other things to like here, the combination of sky-high expectations and fact that there's less of that single critical Downey-based element ultimately relegates the film to expanding the franchise rather than improving it.

The Ghost (Writer)

2010-04-20T00:49:00.000+01:00

Let's get this out of the way first: it's impossible to write about a Roman Polanski movie without addressing the fact that Polanski is awaiting trial for statutory rape. Partly that's because the nature of his crimes are so far beyond the standard celebrity-asshole fare and partly it's because his particular legal situation directly impacts his movies, since he has been unable to set foot in the United States. As a result, The Ghost Writer (shortened to The Ghost in Europe) feels curiously placeless. It's set primarily on Martha's Vineyard, but was filmed mostly in Germany. I knew that detail before I sat down in the theater, so I can't tell whether that placelessness comes from the only partially successful attempts to Americanize the setting or whether it was my own attempts to see through the façade, which were a bit distracting ("Hey, I saw that same car two scenes ago!"). I normally tend to believe that the artist should be separated from the art, partly because I think it's the right way to approach art and partly from the understanding that if we limited ourselves to art made by non-assholes, there would be very little art left to appreciate. But in this case it's nearly impossible to draw that line.

Reinforcing that is the theme of alienation that pervades The Ghost. The film tells the story of an unnamed ghost writer (Ewan MacGregor) who is hired to fill the shoes of another writer who died under mysterious circumstances while working on the biography of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (Pierce Brosnan), who's holed up at his publisher's house on Martha's Vineyard while the International Criminal Court investigates charges that he ordered the British Army to illegally turn terror suspects over to the CIA for torture. To be fair, the movie calls this character Adam Lang, and calls his wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) instead of Cherie, but the disguise isn't even skin-deep. At one point we're even treated to the sight of a Condoleezza Rice look-alike giving words of support to the former PM, and a Halliburton clone is given the name Hatherton. Subtlety isn't really high on the agenda here. The ghost, a fairly feckless, apolitical type, finds himself caught up in the external intrigue between the Langs and their enemies as things fall apart inside the house as well - Adam is sleeping with his assistant, Amelia (Kim Cattrall), which Ruth is aware of and none too happy about.

Lack of subtlety aside, it's a compelling scenario. Unfortunately, much of the acting doesn't live up to the story's potential. Brosnan has the right look and demeanor to play the slimily charismatic Lang, but his attempt to ape Tony Blair's voice comes across awkwardly - I found myself wondering why couldn't he just have stuck to his Bond accent. MacGregor fares a bit better as the Ghost, a cynical but not uncaring sort who seems to blunder his way through everything in his life - his career, his romances and, as the film progresses, his attempts at espionage. But the character's lack of identity undermines him. The one real standout is Olivia Williams, who as icy, unreadable Adelle DeWitt, was one of the best things about Joss Whedon's Dollhouse. Here she plays a character with a large number of similar characteristics - the manipulativeness and the presence of a set of not-necessarily-upfront agendas in particular - but it's to her great credit that she imbues Ruth with a very different persona than Adelle. In a lot of ways, Ruth is a more critical figure to this movie than our nameless protagonist; the process by which she sold out and became involved in the whole shameless operation seems like a much more interesting story than that of MacGregor's character, who starts the movie as a borderline alcoholic hack and ends it as a slightly better-informed alcoholic hack. But despite Williams' performance, we don't get quite enough time with her to do more than scratch the surface of that story.

Maybe that's why, more than Polanski's personal issues and the oddness of trying to recreate Martha's Vineyard in northern Germany, the movie feels so rootless. It's not a bad story, and it's not badly told - it just feels like there's a much better one hiding right beneath the surface.

Kick-Ass

2010-04-06T22:10:00.004+01:00

I haven't been going to the movie theater a lot lately. There are a couple of reasons for that. First, movie-going in London in 2010 is a ludicrously expensive proposition for a poor graduate student: I paid £11.20 for Kick-Ass, which - for reference - was a pound more than I paid to see Avatar last December. In IMAX 3-D. Second, I haven't been all that excited about many films coming out lately. Nor is that likely to change anytime soon soon: I realized yesterday that I could only think of two movies coming out over the summer that I have any interest in (Iron Man 2 and Inception, in case you're curious). But I'll leave that slightly sad state of affairs for another post.

Anyway, Kick-Ass was sort of a departure for me, since I went to see it without first reading any reviews. I suppose you could make the argument that a reviewer should form his or her own opinion of a movie cold, but since I'm less a "legitimate reviewer" and more "some guy writing reviews on his blog that about six people, optimistically, might read," I'm not inclined to be a purist on that point.

The good news was that my £11.20 was well spent. Kick-Ass, directed by Matthew Vaughn (who also gave the world L4yer Cake, a great Daniel Craig gangster movie), is a whole lot of fun. Adapted from a recently-published comic book series, it's the story of a completely nondescript teenage New Yorker named Dave Lizewsky (Aaron Johnson) who wonders why nobody has ever tried to be a real-life superhero, and with an admirably plucky attitude, gives it a go. Johnson, incidentally, is British, but you wouldn't know it from listening to him here. His first crime-fighting effort (as his green-clad alter ego Kick-Ass) nets him a stab wound and a number of broken bones, but he persists and becomes an internet sensation, drawing the attention of a pair of rather more serious costumed crime-fighters, Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage, in his best role in years) and his foul-mouthed, knife-loving 11-year-old daughter, Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz), who are in the middle of a battle against drug kingpin Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong) and his teenaged son Christopher (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, aka McLovin from Superbad). While enormous quantities of violence occur, Dave also has to deal with some more mundane issues, like convincing his crush Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca) that he's not gay.

It being a film based on a comic book, much of what occurs is successfully played for laughs, particularly the not-overlong scenes in the high school, where Dave is carefully sketched as a painfully normal guy rather than a parody nerd, and the numerous but not overwhelming pop culture references. But much of the humor is violence-based. This is a movie that, true to its name, features an enormous quantity of brutality both inflicted and suffered by almost all the main characters: at regular intervals, limbs are broken, people are stabbed, shot, beaten and blown up, and several minor characters meet disturbing ends at the hands of various pieces of industrial equipment. In this, Kick-Ass walks a very, very careful line. As a superhero parody piece which takes a swing at the eternal question of whether costumed vigilantism would work in real life, it has to acknowledge reality - that it wouldn't - while providing entertainment and a satisfying narrative. The movie's approach (minor spoilers ahead) is to simply change its approach to reality over its running time. It starts as a relatively realistic story in which Kick-Ass's crime-fighting efforts are marred by a lack of superpowers, with the exception of the deadened nerve endings he receives in the first of several severe beatings he's treated to over the course of the movie,* and concludes with him battling an army of goons at the controls of an extremely improbable flying machine mounted with a pair of small but highly effective Gatling guns.

As awkward as this narrative structure sounds as I write it, it's probably the only approach that would actually work. If the movie were cartoonish from start to finish, it couldn't really sell the "superheros in the real world" angle, and if it went down Gritty Realism Avenue, the already questionable aspects - like the idea of a vengeance-seeking father training his 11-year-old daughter in the ways of murder and mayhem - would be impossibly disturbing. By making the movie less and less realistic as it goes on, Vaughn manages to avoid plummeting into either one of those pits. But the proof of its effectiveness is that there's no one jarring point where pseudo-realism gives way to wish-fulfillment; the movie carefully doles out increasing measures of ridiculousness so that when Kick-Ass finally appears with his deus-ex-miniguns, the reaction is less "Oh come on" and more "Oh hell yes!"

The inevitable compromise to this that the movie doesn't really have a point. There are a few feints in the direction of a point about society's apathy towards violence, but nothing that adds up to anything. Fortunately, the whole thing is handled with such speed and vigor as to render the absence of meaning pretty much irrelevant. You might not learn anything, but you won't feel like your £11 was wasted, either.

---

* The same beatdown also results in his acquisition of a collection of surgical metal plates throughout his body. "Just like Wolverine!" he enthuses, although as the owner of an admittedly less impressive set of metal implants, I can assure you that as armor plating, they're somewhat worse than useless.

A short vignette...

2010-02-28T23:29:00.005Z

... which illustrates why I will be happy to never, ever live in a dorm ever again. I came back to my room this evening to discover that the fuse that controls the main light for my room and the lights to my bathroom had blown. This has happened before, but since the bathroom doesn't have any windows or other light sources it's kind of a problem. So I went downstairs. The two guys behind the desk are watching "Syriana" (which is, granted, a very good movie).

Me: Hi, I'm in room 632, and a fuse seems to have blown.

Desk Guy (accusingly): What did you plug in?

Me: Uh, nothing. I just got back to my room and the room light and lights in the bathroom don't work. Everything else is still working.

DG: What room?

Me: 632. It's happened before, I know it's a blown fuse.

DG [Pause]: What room?

Me: Six. Thirty. Two.

[long pause]

Other Desk Guy: We'll look into it.

One hour later:

Me: Hi, I was down here an hour ago about a fuse?

DG: Room two-something.

Me: Six thirty two. Have you had a chance to...?

DG: Yeah, yeah, if it's a fuse, we can do it, but if it's something else, it'll have to wait for maintenance tomorrow.

Me: It's just that there's no light in the bathroom, and...

DG (back to watching Fat George Clooney drive through the desert): Yeah, yeah.

I can't wait to move back to an apartment.

Apple vs. Twitter

2010-01-27T23:56:00.008Z

After months and months of endless, endless speculation and rumors, Apple today introduced its new tablet, the iPad. It's intended to create a "third segment" between full-featured computers and netbooks on the one hand, and the smartphone/iPod touch group on the other. As you'd expect from Apple, the thing looks beautiful - a super-thin, 10" slip that's pretty much all screen and no mess. And since it starts at $500 and will offer all sorts of functions, including a keyboard-stand thing that helps with the eternal problem of how you type on the thing you're looking at, I'm sure it'll sell approximately one billion copies.

I don't want one.

I don't mean I don't appreciate it, or that I've given up on Apple products - I own two Macs and an iPod, after all, and when any of them die I will almost certainly replace them with more Apple gear. But between the overwhelming hype, the self-satisfied noise coming from the Apple machine and the simple fact that the tablet does absolutely nothing that my current stable of consumer electronics doesn't, I just don't find myself having fantasies about Owning the New as when Apple introduced new items in the past. Maybe I'm growing up... or, more likely, I'm realizing that my graduate student budget is a bit tight and will remain that way for the foreseeable future.

But there's something else that worries me about it as well. During the endless parade of rumors that led up to today, there was a debate between people who thought that the iPad would be a real laptop substitute running a modified version of OS X and people who thought it would be a giant iPhone with locked-in operating software and a carefully-policed collection of approved apps for purchase. It's very much the latter: the software is hardwired in, which means that - aside from the few hardcore modders who will inevitably jailbreak the device - all iPad users will be doing nothing with their devices that's not in some fashion specifically approved by Apple.

That's not such a problem if you're talking about a peripheral mobile device - your iPhone or iPod Touch. But the iPad is clearly not designed to be another peripheral mobile device. Its capabilities - email, photos, movie-watching, music-playing, web-surfing - are clearly designed to appeal to the majority of computer users whose needs don't go beyond those categories. The iPad is a shot across the bow of the enormous cheap-laptop market - and if the success of Apple's other products are any indication, that shot across the bow will very quickly be followed by a barrage of shots fired directly into the engine room. The iPad has the potential not only to cannibalize the sales of netbooks, but to force other manufacturers to adopt similar strategies.

And that's a problem, because Apple's business plan here relies on extreme centralization. While there's some creativity in app design, all apps have to be approved and sold through Apple. The operating software is proprietary, and coded into the device. It's a closed ecosystem - a safer pond, perhaps, but also a much less free one. And if the iPad is a success and inspires rivals, and that's the future of personal computers, it's a bit scary - partly because I instinctively dislike the idea of centralized control over personal computing, and partly because I think it will go some distance towards stifling user and competitor creativity.

It's exactly the opposite strategy of my perennial bugbear, Twitter. As this Wired article shows. Twitter is founded upon the principle of "radical openness," meaning that users are encouraged to define the system. I still dislike Twitter, for reasons I've laid out before, but I like its philosophy - it's open and (arguably) democratic where Apple is inarguably closed and undemocratic. Granted, Twitter is software and Apple is hardware, and there are fundamental differences between the two, not least of which being that it's sort of difficult to open-source hardware development. But until now, the personal computer industry has had plenty of success selling machines which are anything but closed ecosystems. And the experimentation and customization that those systems allowed set the stage for open-sourced developments like Twitter, Linux and Wikipedia. Open-sourcing is, to my mind, one of the great success stories of the last decade, and one which has brought the world much more benefit than loss - even accounting for Ashton Kutcher's tweetage.

I don't think it's reasonable to argue that the iPad directly threatens open-sourcing. But if it's the runaway success Apple clearly hopes it is and inspires competitors to develop similar systems, I think it could be a bad omen for it. And it would be doubly a shame for that trend to die down, and for its killer to be wearing an Apple logo.

So no iPad for me. And if anyone wants to talk to me about it, I'll be off in the corner watching movies on an old-fashioned computer with a separate keyboard and screen.

Avatar

2009-12-17T22:19:00.002Z

As I was on the way to the theater to see Avatar, I thought I'd take a stab at pre-reviewing the movie based just on the trailers and articles I'd read about it. What I came up with was something along the lines of: "This will be a great movie, but not a great film." Which is to say, I thought it was going to be highly effective entertainment without necessarily being something more substantial than that.

With a pretty substantial caveat, I think that's a pretty apt description of James Cameron's multi-hundred-million-dollar, twenty-years-in-gestation labor of love. It's a spectacular, astonishing thing to sit through, especially if you see it in IMAX 3-D, as I did. But it's also like cotton candy - disintegrating nearly as quickly as you can form any kind of impression of it.

The film's plot pretty much fits into the three-minute trailer: It's 2154, and Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic ex-Marine, takes his murdered twin brother's place in something called the Avatar program, on an Alpha Centauran moon called Pandora. The moon is a dense, bountiful rainforest populated by various wild creatures including the sentient, ten-foot-tall, blue-skinned humanoid Na'vi. RDA, the megacorporation in charge of mining the moon for precious unobtanium (har), grows human/Na'vi hybrids which are driven remotely by human operators in order to study the Na'vi for diplomatic and shareholder conscience-appeasement purposes. They're the carrot. The stick is the company's military wing, personified by Col. Miles Quarich (Stephen Lang, sporting some nasty scars courtesy of the local wildlife), another ex-Marine who sees Jake as a valuable reconnaissance asset for the inevitable throwdown with the locals. This initially puts Jake at odds with his avatar-driving scientist colleagues, Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and Norm Spellman (Joel Moore). But when he gets nearly killed and then mysteriously adopted by the local Na'vi tribe and falls in love with their princess, Neytiri (Zoé Saldana), he begins to question his loyalties. When Quaritch and his sleazy corporate boss Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) decide they need the rich vein of unobtanium under the local village and will simply take it by force, Jake goes native and joins a Na'vi rebellion against the "sky people."

Much of the joy of the movie isn't from its narrative. It's been said over and over again how this movie looked like nothing else, and was steps ahead of anything else being done with CGI. That part of the hype is absolutely true. It's a movie which gets exponentially better by the size of your screen - if you're going to see it, see it on the biggest damn theater you can find. The 3-D effects, while initially a bit disorienting, are done in such a way as to contribute to the film, not distract from it. There are a number of really standout sequences, especially the Na'vi flying through floating, Miyazaki-esque mountains on the backs of pterodactyl-like "banshees," the phosphorescent nighttime forest scenes, and at the end, the astonishing battle where the Na'vi and forest creatures take on the human helicopter gunships and powered armor suits. It really is one of the greatest action scenes ever committed to film.

More importantly, the animation just works - which wasn't clear from watching the trailer beforehand on a laptop screen. Partly it's the superiority of Cameron's motion capture technique, which allows the human actors to clamber their blue alter egos over to the far side of the uncanny valley (a feat that only a few motion-captured creations have achieved before). Partly it's the animators' sheer attention to detail, like the movements of the tiny set of secondary eyes behind the primary pair on the banshee heads. And partly it's that the cast is surprisingly strong, even in tall-blue-person form. Sam Worthington, who was so dull in Terminator 4, is in his element here, as the slightly reticent but cynical wiseass who discovers something about the place that appeals to him without completely falling off the cliff into sentimentalism. Sigourney Weaver is probably the standout of the cast as the prickly but decent Dr. Augustine. Saldana is somewhat limited by her dialogue, which includes many of the film's cheesiest lines, but manages to acquit herself pretty well. Michelle Williams, as the scientists' sympathetic helicopter pilot, makes the most of a limited role. And even Ribisi and Lang, given little to do except demonstrate their characters' moral bankruptcy, leave enjoyably deep teeth-marks on the scenery.

There's no substantial technical aspect of this film, in fact, that lands wrong. The score is James Horner on autopilot, but James Horner on autopilot is still better than 90% of Hollywood music - although you should definitely leave the theater at the predictable final beat in order to miss the ending credits song, which will make you long for a Celine Dion comeback. The editing is deft, and shows off the astonishing depth of the world. And the production design is at its worst only somewhat derivative, and in many cases staggeringly creative. It's almost enough, in fact, to cover for the fairly gaping hole in the entire endeavor.

When the plot was first leaked onto the Internet, Avatar was derisively described by some as "Ferngully in space," or "Dances with Wolves in space." There's a lot of truth to those descriptions. The plot is not the film's strong point. The only thing that comes close to a surprise is which characters Cameron bumps off and which he allows to survive, and even that's not especially surprising (although it was, in at least two cases, pretty disappointing). But the really disappointing thing isn't the simplicity of the plot, since it's entirely possible to make a great film with a straightforward narrative arc. It's the missed opportunities.

There are feints in the direction of really interesting ideas in this movie. The idea of someone literally assuming a new identity at the cost of a previous one isn't explored in anything like the depth that it could have been: Jake returns to his own, crippled body when his avatar sleeps, and says at one point that he's not sure which world is real anymore… but his human world never really felt real to begin with. We know he was looking for an adventure and that the reward for cooperating with Quarich will be an otherwise-unaffordable operation to restore his spine and legs to full function, but aside from that the character's human side isn't really given much depth, which undercuts the transformation - why do we care what you become if we don't know what you were before?

As a mirror image of that flaw, the villains aren't given much - or, really, any - depth. Their only motivation is profit. In some of the background material for the movie, unobtanium is described as a superefficient superconductor, without which the economy and remaining environment of Earth will fall apart. It wouldn't have taken much to work that into the script - a line or two would have done the trick, and would have fleshed out the backstory far more. It is specifically said during the movie that Earth is "dying" thanks to the environmental degradation of the kind we see the human miners beginning to inflict on Pandora, but we're not invited to think anything other than "good riddance."

Of course, giving us a reason to think that would have given moral dimension to the villains, which would have been problematic during the final battle, where Jake and his new friends kill quite a large number of human soldiers without so much as a moment's hesitation. It's much easier to cheer when the helicopter door gunner's head gets used by an enormous banshee as a handle to hurl him to his death if he's just a sadistic gun for hire. Cameron's enemies have always been unthinking, immoral or amoral creations - the Terminators, the Aliens, the iceberg - but it's still disappointing to see him apply that same philosophy to humans. Again, a missed opportunity: we see Neytiri and Avatar Jake express sorrow and thanks when they hunt and kill animals, in one of the many sequences which plays very obvious homage to Native American rituals. But perhaps they should also extend the same courtesy to the soldiers they slaughter? The message of the film - and let's not, please, pretend that it doesn't have one - is a combination of anticolonialism and environmentalism. But it's a silly, half-baked, one-dimensional message: Corporate Humans with Big Machines are Evil and Destroy; Natives who Live With Nature are Purely Good. Never mind that I don't see Cameron giving up his garage full of muscle cars or personal aircraft and communing with nature, or that Avatar was made and sold with corporate money and high technology. The message is more important than the reality. Even if it's the kind of over-the-top message that invites the audience to feel vindictive rather than reflective. As narrative, this lack of subtlety doesn't work, and as a call to action it's worse than useless.

The counterargument, of course, is that trying to work in moral complexity would ruin the movie. I think that's missing the point. Movies like The Dark Knight have shown us that you can have a huge, commercially successful blockbuster with at least a modicum of moral depth, or at least an effort to consider ethical questions rather than present them as settled - a film, in other words, rather than a cartoon. With Avatar, James Cameron has shown us that he has perhaps the best technical skills of any director working today - now he just needs to work on putting something more behind them.

Cynicism and the Anti-West Wing

2009-11-19T22:14:00.001Z

Although it's very unlikely that anything will ever replace Top Gear as my favorite television show on this side of the pond, I do have a new second-favorite. It's called The Thick of It, and it's what you might call political satire. You might also call it dark comedy. It doesn't really have an American equivalent - there was a pilot of an American version made, but it didn't get very far, thanks to the fact that it's somewhat harder to swear on American TV - and swearing is a very big part of the show (and its companion movie, In The Loop, from which the last set of clips comes).

In fact, the closest American counterpart would probably be The West Wing, a show I like a great deal,* but whose general temperament is entirely different than The Thick of It. The West Wing's characters are mostly high-ranking idealistic do-gooders whose selfishness and character flaws are usually (although admittedly not always) balanced out by their ultimate Good Decisions. The Thick of It focuses on mid-level government bureaucrats working in an underfunded social affairs department - the highest-ranked person we meet is the PM's hyper-profane, super-aggro Scottish communications chief Malcolm Tucker. The rest of the cast are dysfunctional in one way or another; the closest the show has to a protagonist is young Labour Party Special Adviser Olly Reeder, who spends most of his time making snide, inappropriate jokes and generally being exactly the kind of smug prick who ruins DC parties. It's exactly the opposite of the West Wing - where the American show often treads the line between compelling drama and schmaltzy feelgooditude by emphasizing the good that can come of working in politics, its British counterpart treats politics as a game played by selfish, insecure prats without regard for the consequences to the public at large. The most West-Wing-ish character on the show, Season 3's new Secretary of State for Social Affairs and Citizenship Nicola Murray, who has a sort of well-meaning if directionless bent, has over the four episodes covering her tenure in office sent her 12-year-old daughter to a terrible school for political reasons, tried to intimidate a reporter, fired the wrong staffer, effectively blackmailed her Shadow Cabinet counterpart and inadvertently gotten her daughter's headmaster fired for doing her a favor. Abbie Bartlett she ain't.**

As funny as The Thick of It often is, the mean-spiritedness of both the characters and the situations the writers place them in can get a little tiresome. The West Wing was at least more various in its depiction of consequences - most of the characters at one point or another made bad or immoral choices, and occasionally the show didn't make everything right by the end of an hour, as when President Bartlett ordered the Qumari defense minister killed. The Thick of it is relentlessly cynical. So maybe it's an unfair comparison. But I tend to believe that our TV shows say something about us, particularly when they're commercially successful. And successful fictional shows taking place entirely or mostly in political settings are a rare breed - aside from these two, I can't think of any that qualify from the last decade. So in a sense I'm compelled to draw comparisons between the two.

And the question that comparison raises is - are the British really that much more cynical about politics than we are? I'm not inclined to think so. It's a hard thing to measure, particularly since this particular example of cynicism is expressed in the form of dark comedy, which has a much longer and more illustrious history in the UK than in the US: our greatest practitioner of it, Stanley Kubrick, did after all relocate permanently to Britain for much of his life. But I think cynicism about politics runs deeper than just what our TV shows look like.

For example, when the big British expenses scandal broke earlier this year, I wondered if there would have been as much anger had it been transposed directly to the US. My guess is that there wouldn't have been - William Jefferson (who was just recently sentenced to prison - finally), after all, had nearly a hundred thousand dollars in cash in his freezer and was re-elected anyway, and that sum dwarfs any of the expenses claims. I follow American politics pretty closely and have at least a passing awareness of British politics, and I get the sense that there are more and bigger scandals in Washington than in London - to my (admittedly limited) knowledge, there hasn't been a British Nixon in living memory. And let's not forget that our voter turnout is amongst the lowest in the world, which may not be a sign of cynicism but certainly contributes to it.

On the other hand, high-level sex scandals in the UK seem to be greeted with laughter rather than impeachment. We tend to vastly overreact; while some politicians can survive their, ah, exposure, most others don't. Britain isn't at the level of France, with Mitterand's wife and mistress standing next to each other at the funeral, but there seems to be a certain level of acceptance that politicians are human and make human mistakes that's often lacking in American politics. We, on the other hand, seem to forget that our politicians are humans, too - and it seems to shock us at a much deeper level when they cheat on their spouses than when they take bribes. Our politicians may be venal and corrupt, but they should at least be sexless, dammit! Still, sex scandals are only one part of how we see our leaders, and it's certainly not the largest part.

I'm fully aware that this is all sort of half-formed. I haven't lived in Britain long enough (especially since St Andrews isn't really representative of anything except... well, St Andrews) to have much personal experience in how people think about politics here. But I get the sense that for all that the British dislike their political leaders, there's not the same depth of hatred towards them that there is in America - no one shows up outside of Gordon Brown's rallies with assault rifles (or whatever the closest legal equivalent in this country would be).

But maybe that's it. Maybe cynical comedy goes some small way towards dissipating public anger towards the government. If that's the case, I think we can't get a real American equivalent of The Thick of It soon enough.

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* Although if I ever meet the person who advised the show's writers on military matters, I will punch them very hard in the face. I say this because I'm fairly confident that this person was not an actual military veteran (who would punch me back much harder) thanks to the vast number of basic errors the show makes about the military and warfighting in general - and when I say basic, I mean "shit you can find out in five seconds with Google" basic.
** I should point out that The Thick of It has made the West Wing comparison explicitly on at least one occasion, where Olly is writing a speech against a deadline and says, "This is exciting, it's like the West Wing," only to have Nicola shoot back, "Shut up, Olly, you're not Josh."

The Show Must Go On!

2009-11-14T13:23:00.005Z

It's early in the afternoon on Saturday, I'm in my office, soaked completely through from rain that conveniently stopped as soon as I arrived and holding a useless lump of an umbrella that the wind turned inside-out as soon as I stepped out the door... and yet I'm smiling, because I saw something so characteristically, hilariously British that I didn't really have any other choice. It was this:

Well, no, that's not really it. That's a crummy picture I took with my BlackBerry in the one moment when the rain slowed down enough that I didn't think it was going to short out and explode in my hand. But that's the tail end of the parade of the Lord Mayor's Show, a hundreds-of-years-old tradition which in its entire history has only ever been cancelled once, for Wellington's funeral. They're not going to let some pesky rain - even a LOT of pesky rain - stop them. Where Americans would probably call the whole thing off and spend the day inside watching Gossip Girl reruns, the British just put raincoats on their horses and plastic bags over their marching band music and go ahead like nothing's wrong. There were even people out watching and cheering the whole spectacle.

Of course, you could see on the face of every musician, roller-blader, and marching soldier in the parade - except the few lucky ones sitting inside enclosed vehicles - the same, simple thought: "This sucks!"

And on that issue, there was no cultural disagreement whatsoever.

Predicting

2009-10-21T21:32:00.003+01:00

One of the things I like about LSE is its program of events. In the last year, they've had Dmitri Medvedev and Michael Chertoff (when he was still DHS secretary), and every couple of days there's another interesting-sounding event - so many that you actually have to limit yourself from going to all of them in order to have any time left to actually work. It's one of the things I absolutely prefer about living in cities. In any case, this evening I went to a talk by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, the NYU political scientist who uses a complex game-theoretical model to predict the outcomes of complex negotiations. He's an interesting, charismatic guy - which you can see from his recent appearance on the Daily Show - and I think there's something to his prediction model, for which he claims 90% accuracy.

But something about the whole thing bothered me a bit. Partly, it's arrogance - which is referenced in a mostly-flattering recent New York Times Magazine profile - exacerbated by false self-deprecation (he gave us several variations on "no one listens to me" but bragged about how well he knew Condoleezza Rice, for example). Partly, it's the fact that for all his talk about transparency, he won't actually release the design of his prediction software - there is some complicated copyright arrangement, but it also conveniently means that he has a lock on its use in consulting gigs for corporate and government clients, for which he can presumably charge a decent fee. And partly it's my innate suspicion of anyone who glibly claims a 90% success rate at anything much more complicated and difficult than walking to work without being struck by a bus.

During the Q&A, someone asked about the idea of black swans, unpredictable events that completely change the factors on which predictions are based. Bueno de Mesquita agreed that those can negatively impact his predictions, but he also claimed that he'd written code into his software that allowed him to model the impacts of such events - and, he added, the point about rare and unpredictable events is that they're rare. Which is a reasonable point, although I'm not sure I'd be quite so glib about the power of random and unpredictable events to change history.

I also actually managed to ask a question, based on my sense that there was something else about his approach that I found pretty unsettling. I'll admit I didn't phrase it as well as I might have, but the basic gist of it was that between his game-theory model (which I wasn't arguing the accuracy of, since I had no alternative evidence) and the predictive success of statistical models like the ones Nate Silver uses, is there a danger of complacency in the idea that we can actually predict the future? I don't think he cared for the analogy between his model and stats-based approaches like Silver's - a point he clearly considers very important, since he repeated it with another questioner a minute later. He then basically said that he wasn't worried about broader ramifications since not very many people take him seriously. But I think that's a dodge, really, particularly given that in response to a later question he rattled off the level of influence he had with every presidential administration since Reagan. So I think it's really a failure to engage with the idea that accurate prediction of the future, whether it's in fact possible or not, may not actually be a desirable end.

But getting back to the main point about the presentation, I didn't quite put my finger on it until after it was over what it was that bothered me about it so much. It's because for all his one-liners and charisma - and it was an entertaining lecture - the whole enterprise seems very Robert McNamara-ish to me: it embodies the "systems analysis" model that if you just sanitize your inputs and use the right equations, everything else falls into line. I realize that both computer processing power and the sophistication of game theory have advanced hugely since the 1960s, but the principle remains the same, and I don't think the problem before was that the computers were using vacuum tubes and punch-cards. With better technology and methods, you can get some improvement on your successful prediction rate, but paradoxically that may be ultimately a danger: the higher your rate, the more confident you become in the method, and the more willing you may be to push the envelope and act in (possibly risky) ways that you would not have without the prediction. He referred to "engineering" the results of negotiations based on his tool, which I assume was in reference to his business consulting primarily, but convinced me that despite his studied insistence that game theory is an academic tool, he saw it as something else as well.

I can see that Bueno de Mesquita realizes that he can't make claims that are too absurd for his model's abilities - he included a list in his presentation about "what game theory can't do," and I think his repeated insistence that it wasn't a statistical model was to reinforce the idea that game theory isn't a perfect crystal ball that can predict markets and help you find true love, or whatever. I respect that. On the other hand, I think the renown it's brought him has in many respects gotten the better of him - his new book is called "The Predictioneer," for example, which isn't exactly a subtle approach. And that approach makes me worried that in his attempts to understand and "engineer" human behavior, he's only going to push it to an extreme.

Split the Nobel

2009-10-12T22:00:00.003+01:00

Most people I've talked to (and much of the media commentary I've read) about Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize has been pretty negative. There's a nasty undertone in a lot of it - and not just from the usual right-wing suspects - about him, even though he had nothing to do with the decision to award the prize. Furthermore, I think his comments about it strike exactly the right tone of self-effacement and non-complacency. That said, I agree to some extent that it's premature to award such a distinction to a president who's only been in office for a few months and doesn't have a major treaty or peace agreement to his name. I've been surprised over the last few days how many non-Americans I've talked to who dislike the idea of Obama getting the prize - obviously, graduate students at LSE are not a representative sample of anything, but it undermines the easy explanation that Americans are opposed to the decision and foreigners (or Europeans) are in favor. But I also agree with Rachel Maddow (amongst others) that there are absolutely justifications for awarding the prize to him, even at this early stage. I think and hope he'll take the right lesson from it, and I believe it will have a net positive effect, but I'm not completely sanguine about it.

But in any case, all this ground has been covered before, and I doubt anyone is going to change their mind at this point - and my scribblings certainly won't have that effect. But I quite randomly had an idea that I haven't seen written anywhere else before which I think is worth floating.

Alfred Nobel's will stated that the Peace Prize should go to, "the person who has done the most or best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." Obviously the awarding committee has taken some liberties with that intention - Martin Luther King Jr., for example, obviously deserved the award, but had done nothing to promote "fraternity between nations" or to abolish standing armies. The same is true with the man who many people argue was the logical winner this time around, the courageous Zimbabwean prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai. President Obama's win makes sense using Nobel's original formulation, but makes much less if we stick with the broader formula that the committee seems to have used at least since the 1960s. And the committee has said nothing in its public statements about changing their procedures or considerations.

So instead of arguing endlessly about whether someone like Tsvangirai deserves it more than Obama, I have another proposal. Why not split the Nobel Peace Prize into two?

The first would be a prize basically set up along the lines of Nobel's original proposal, to be given to a person (or an organization) who had done the most for international peace. I think you could in fairly good conscience give this award to Obama, partly because he's redefined the critically important US relationship with the rest of the world on the grounds that he has made some legitimately important decisions: closing Gitmo, canceling the deployment of anti-missile systems in Eastern Europe, and backing up his stand against nuclear proliferation in Iran with the stated intent to slash the US nuclear arsenal. Yes, it's early, but various other Peace Prize winners were given the award despite not having achieved their goals. I think the stronger argument against Obama for an international peace prize is that he's overseeing two wars, one of which only seems to be getting worse and worse, but at the same time I'm not sure who else would qualify - it hasn't exactly been a bumper year for peace, after all.

The second could be a prize for human rights or social justice in more general terms, and that could be awarded to Morgan Tsvangirai, or (posthumously) to Neda Agha-Soltan, or to various other people who have advanced - and in many cases made huge sacrifices for - a particular cause or a broader social justice movement within one particular nation. This award could be given much wider latitude, and allow the committee to recognize particular causes or nations without shorting people or groups who had a truly international impact.

This division would refocus the award and allow it to sidestep this controversy and possible future ones - and if there were no obvious winners in either category, the committee could simply redirect the prize money and hope for a better next year. After all, they've done it before. It may not be a perfect solution, but with the growing sense that the Peace Prize has become increasingly irrelevant, it might be the kind of vast re-organization needed to restore its credibility.

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* That distinction, to my mind, definitely belongs to the decision to award the Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger, with Yassir Arafat a close second.

Afghanostic

2009-10-06T20:42:00.005+01:00

I just got back from a fairly contentious debate at Chatham House on the topic of Afghanistan and whether British troops should be involved there or not. It's an interesting debate to watch from an American perspective, for a number of reasons. For someone who pays quite a lot of attention to American politics, it's interesting to observe a debate occurring in parallel - and a casual watcher of the debate as it unfolds on British TV could be forgiven for thinking that the British had the largest contingent of troops in the country (although, to be fair, the same casual viewer watching American TV would probably think that the international contingent was the setup for a bad joke - a Frenchman, a German and a Briton).

The organizers had done a good job of getting people to cover the bases of the debate. There was the Ministry of Defence official who I ended up feeling pretty sorry for, since he had to toe the government line and was getting it from both sides, an anti-war campaigner, the former EU envoy to Afghanistan, a Scottish Labour MP who clearly didn't care much for his own party's platform, and an academic from the King's College Department of War Studies. It wasn't an American cable news-style smackdown, but there were definitely some sparks, particularly between the MP and the MoD official. Oh, and the anti-war campaigner was accused by an Afghan expat in the audience of "doing the Taliban's work for them." Unlike many of the debates I've seen on the BBC and Channel 4, there was a significant amount of discussion of Britain's role in the war vis a vis the United States, and it wasn't particularly favorable towards the "special relationship" - by and large, the discussants seemed to view the US as simply dictating policy to the UK. Brigadier Howes argued that the UK had helped set American policy from time to time, but didn't seem especially convinced of his own argument, and all in all the opinion in the room seemed to be focused on the idea that the UK needs a more Europe-focused defense policy. That's fair; I'm not enough of an American nationalist to think that the UK's interests or situation are or should be inherently aligned with ours.* And to my (foreign) ears, the argument that British boots on the ground in Afghanistan are stopping terrorist attacks back home ring a bit hollow - as several people pointed out tonight, the much more effective counter-terrorism operations are conducted by British security services operating domestically. But I didn't find the anti-war message - that we should just give Afghanistan over to the Afghans, come what may - especially convincing either.

I guess what the panel reinforced for me is my agnosticism on the topic of Afghanistan. I think it's pretty unarguable that the war was botched almost from the outset, and that we missed a huge opportunity to build functional state and security mechanisms between the Taliban's defeat in 2001 and its resurgence around 2006, in no small part because we (speaking here for both the US and the UK) were occupied with Iraq. Eight years is a long time to ask people to put up with a steady drumbeat of cost and casualties for an uncertain benefit, and the three to five more years that Stanley McChrystal is apparently planning for is difficult to imagine. And I agree with the argument - advanced by various war opponents but with particular eloquence by Ahmed Rashid - that Western military activity is only inflaming the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan and further destabilizing Pakistan,** leading to a potentially devastating wider conflict of some variety. Most vividly, though, the sham re-election of Karzai was a disaster, a slap in the face to everyone who worked (and, in the case of some Afghan, British and American soldiers, died) in order to try and improve Afghanistan's lot and bring about something like meaningful self-rule.

And yet... I also understand the worries of the Pakistanis that if the West pulls out of Afghanistan, the insurgency in their northwest provinces will escalate. I can only imagine the propaganda victory al Qaeda - which, granted, has little presence in Afghanistan these days - would achieve if they could claim that they had helped drive the West out. The "flypaper theory" is mostly BS, but there's every reason to believe that bin Laden and Zawahiri are still in the border region, and keeping a military presence nearby means that they're limited in what they can do, where they can go and who they can meet, not to mention keeping the possibility alive that they might be killed or brought to justice. And as rotten as things still are for Afghan women and girls, leaving would only enable their further oppression. Finally, there are many, many Afghans who would be targeted for their cooperation with Western forces if we up and left, and our record of protecting those kind of people in places we've pulled out of isn't particularly encouraging.

I should say too that I don't find myself caring very much about the domestic political side of the American Afghan debate - I don't buy the argument that Petraeus or McChrystal are trying to undermine Obama in support of some right-wing political agenda. I'm pretty sick of the political scorekeeping getting in the way of real substantive argument in general, and particularly on foreign policy - I want everyone involved making what they see as the best decisions possible, no matter what the outcome of the 2010 or 2012 elections are (although that level of nonpartisan focus is admittedly a pipe dream).

So I'm really, honestly torn, and not for lack of reading or thinking about the subject. I want to believe that Gen. McChrystal and his COIN experts can turn things around, but I don't have any faith in the Afghan government to make the political progress that's an absolute necessity for the war to succeed. I understand the importance of the mission and the desire to be able to answer the question of why we're still killing and dying there, but at the moment even the best outcome of any course of action looks fairly grim. I appreciate that in war there are no half measures and yet expect that since politics are involved, they are inevitable.

Given the topics I'm working on, I can't imagine that my views on this topic will remain unsettled forever, or even for all that much longer. And events certainly seem to be moving along - at the moment, with the elections and the high rate of casualties, pessimism seems to be the reigning opinion on the topic, which pushes the needle further towards the "take our ball and go home" option. But I'm not ready to make that jump just yet. So we'll see what Obama orders and how the Europeans react, and hope that whatever it is, Afghanistan's losing streak ends and ends soon.

---

* One big way in which this is true is the different characteristics of our immigrant communities - as a (very minor and anecdotal) example, in four years of living in New York and Washington, I never saw anything like the Muslim demonstration I saw in North London on Saturday.
** Which is labeled "nuclear-armed Pakistan" with such frequency that I wonder when the country is going to amend its title card at the UN to include a little picture of an A-bomb.

London Week One

2009-10-01T19:27:00.006+01:00

Today I passed an important milestone. No, it wasn't one week living in London, or one year since I started class at St Andrews. It was a much more important event than that: the day I stopped eating off paper plates with plastic silverware. Yes, today I finally got real flatware, like a real adult. Or something.

I'm pretty sure - at least I hope I'm pretty sure - that this is the last time I'll ever live in institutional housing. I don't regret the choice: moving to a new city, starting a doctoral program without a built-in social group means that it's possible that you'll be very, very isolated. A dorm, even one as relatively quiet as mine (I still, after a week here, haven't met three of the ten people on my hall), is infinitely more sociable than what my mom calls "some grotty bedsit" on the outskirts of the city. And you can't beat the location, either. Still, it's odd to think about the fact that while my contemporaries from high school and college are getting married, buying houses and having children, I'm living in a dorm and considering activities as part of "Freshers Week."

That oddness aside, I'm very happy right now. I'm fundamentally more of a city person than a small-town person; maybe that will change when I'm older and have a family, but for the foreseeable future I think I'll stick to urban areas. And London definitely qualifies. One of the things I really prefer about city life is that, with so much more happening, you can accrue a bunch of semi-interesting mini-stories in a week's time:

- The "One and Other" project, which is still running at Trafalgar Square, in which random people living in Britain are invited to stand atop the empty fourth plinth for an hour at a time and do whatever they want. I wandered in that direction with a friend on Friday night, and came across a bizarrely magical scene: a full moon illuminating a woman in a cyan ballgown and a rooster mask playing the theremin.

- The range of transportation options taken by suit-wearing City types. Aside from the seemingly endless supply of Bentleys and Aston Martins, my personal favorite has been the pinstriped gentleman I saw riding a tiny moped with a black apron daintily draped over his pants.

- The street juggler in Covent Garden, who wore nothing but pink shorts which left nothing to the imagination, rode an eight-foot-tall unicycle and juggled machetes and a running chainsaw on a cold, windy evening. He earned my £2.80 like nobody's business.

- The demonstration I saw in Camden Town by about a hundred British Muslims, the men sporting skullcaps and full beards, the women speaking in broad North London accents from underneath their burqas. They had a sign which read "Communism is dead, capitalism is dying, ISLAM is the FUTURE." A few passerby were arguing more or less good-naturedly with the pamphleteers, but I decided that my post-sports practice shower was more important than pointing out the conflation of religion and economic policies on their banner.

- The cabbie who managed to live up to all the bad London cabbie stereotypes during a five-minute ride when he asked why Obama was giving "Gordon Blair" the cold shoulder; I said something about the rumors that Obama has bad feelings about the British because his uncle was tortured in British custody in Kenya in the '40s; he responded by saying, "Well, we should'a drowned the whole bloody lot of 'em then." To his (very partial) credit, he responded to our stunned silence by saying, "Oh, well, I don't actually believe that," but it was a bit late for that...

So you could say things are more interesting here, and mostly in a good way. I've become the Smilingest Man in Central London (which is admittedly not a difficult title to acquire) with the realization that I'm finally back in something like the right place for me. I'm sure that will wear off over time, but for the moment, I'm definitely enjoying it.

More soon.

Scattered Observations

2009-09-25T16:00:00.005+01:00

I'm getting on my plane to London this evening, having spent a couple of days in Pittsburgh visiting my brother and a few more in DC visiting various friends. A few observations from the last few days:

- I had a couple of hours to kill in my old neighborhood, so I went to the new Pentagon Memorial. In stark contrast to the Air Force Memorial nearby, it's stark, tasteful and not in any way overdone. "Like" is the wrong word for a memorial to a recent act of mass violence, but I think it's well-executed and moving. Unfortunately, not everyone understands the word "memorial" - as I was leaving, I passed a middle-aged tourist couple who were taking a photo by the sign for the memorial. The woman knelt down next to the sign and grinned for the camera the way you would in front of a London phone booth or your dog. It was pretty appalling. I remember going to the Vietnam memorial when I was about 15 and noticing that everyone around was either respectfully silent or crying quietly; when I went back a couple of years ago there were kids running around with no apparent supervision and folks blabbing obliviously into their cell phones. I wonder if that's just my impression.

- Being nice does actually sometimes work. I had to get my large, heavy suitcase and large, heavy backpack from one friend's house in Van Ness to another's in Fairlington, which is not exactly a straight shot on public transit. So I hired a Zipcar for a couple of hours for the task (cost: approximately $14). Predictably, everything went wrong. I couldn't get into it when I arrived, so I had to wait five minutes on hold to speak to someone, the Rock Creek Parkway turns out to be closed going south on weekday afternoons, and I got lost in Alexandria, the worst-signed city in America. Twice. So, seeing as I was going to be late anyway, I pulled over into a parking lot to call Zipcar and notify them that I was not going to make it back on time. 10 minutes on hold later, the very nice young lady who answered informed me that I would probably be assessed a $50 late charge. I arrived back 15 minutes late and was indeed assessed a charge. Fair enough; car-sharing wouldn't really work without late penalties, but it bothered me that I had basically been penalized for doing the right thing instead of talking while driving or just arriving late without explanation for the next driver. So I wrote Zipcar a polite note and asked them to consider adding an automated "I'm going to be late" function to their phone tree. They immediately responded, thanked me for the suggestion and rescinded the late charge. I doubt they'd have done that if I'd called up and screamed at them. So score one for being nice.

- I remember getting on the way to St Andrews almost exactly one year ago and feeling, for lack of a better term, a bit nervous. Today - not so much. The next 48 hours look like they might be pretty messy for various reasons too boring to get into, but I'm not feeling any particular nervousness about what comes afterwards. Which is odd, given that I feel like doing a PhD is a much bigger step than doing a Master's program. But this time I'm not moving to a new country, not completely changing my lifestyle from yuppie-lite to grad student, and trading a small town for a city, rather than the other way around. Plus I feel like I did my homework better this time around, and I know what I'm getting myself into a bit better - at least for the first year or so. Beyond that, I might be getting in a bit over my head, but if you don't get yourself in over your head enough to find your way back, what's the point of doing a doctorate?

We'll find out.

Things I Found While Cleaning Out My Old Desk

2009-09-13T03:12:00.004+01:00

Today was the long-delayed Desk Cleaning Day at home. I have an enormous desk that's well out of proportion to the size of my room - I originally got it back in my high school video-editing days to store all of my various computer and display items, and I've been using it as a repository for all sorts of random objects since. Most of them are now on their way to the dump, which is a bit of a shame (if entirely necessary); but since it's not every day that you go through all the detritus of your past, I thought I'd offer this small list of random things I found while deciding what to keep and what to toss. In no particular order:

- A miniature tape recorder, which astonishingly still had charged batteries and contained a tape of some kind of half-comprehensible conversation between me and some high school friends, probably relating to a video we were making at the time. Or, given the number of audible references to guns and knives, just a discussion about Things We Thought Were Awesome. Kept.

- A transcript from the end of my second year at Hampshire, with evaluations from all my courses up until then. The consensus of my professors seemed to be that I was noticeably good at showing up for class (a rare trait at Hampshire, apparently) and speaking up. Furthermore, I somehow managed to bamboozle my Biochemistry teachers into thinking that I knew the first damned thing about Biochemistry. Kept.

- A pair of TI-82 graphing calculators, hooked together with some kind of primitive wire for transmitting entire kilobytes of data. Each one is about the size of, and has approximately the same processing power as, a standard brick. Picking them up brought back instant memories of Pre-Calculus, taught by a man named David Bowie who in all other respects resembled Seymour Skinner. Kept.

- Four ring binders full of heavily-doodled-on notes from high school and college. On the first page of the binder for the Art of War and Peace class at Hampshire, I had taken about four lines of notes and then written, "NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO." Tossed.

- A number of photographs of people from high school who I vaguely remember but can't summon any names for. Kept, for some reason.

- A binder full of my work from high school creative writing class. Tossed with extreme prejudice.

- A strobe light, inherited from an older friend in high school and never to my recollection used by me. Tossed.

- Two Hi-8 tapes containing video projects shot in high school. Kept, to embarrass future generations.

- About forty pounds of phone bills and bank statements for phone and bank accounts I no longer have. Tossed.

- A union ID card in my name, proving that I was - briefly and basically coincidentally - a Teamster. Kept, obviously.

- A mix CD a friend in college made for me which I shamefully never listened to, but upon looking at the track listing, looks quite good. Kept.

- An external CD burner, which, judging by its scorching 4x speed and hyper-modern SCSI bus, dates from approximately 1994. Tossed.

- Three plastic army men and one plastic army man fortification. Tossed.

- And, of course, this, which was posted completely without irony in the bathroom of my first year hall at Hampshire (the Activists and Social Justice Hall):

You can't toss memories like that.

Ghost Stories

2009-09-10T23:45:00.000+01:00

I was at my favorite place in the world this weekend - a family friend's house across the bay from Mount Desert Island, the site of Acadia National Park (which happens to be the single most-visited national park in the country, and for good reason). We've been going there since I was a small child, and I haven't gotten any less fond of it: waking up in the morning eighty feet from the ocean and looking out across the sea speckled with lobster buoys and sailboats to the mountains of the park rising directly from the water is pretty much the best thing in the entire universe, as far as I'm concerned. Her place is a century-old, sprawling summer house that's been repaired piecemeal over the years; as a result, it's got a new roof and a fairly new kitchen, but also peeling paint, creaking floors and a septic system which is apparently "delicate." Speaking as a visitor, I actually like those characteristics - they make the place something special, something more than just another house. But I never thought of it as haunted.

This time around, though, she told us that the woman who cleans the house had reported seeing a ghost upstairs on several occasions. When our friend showed her a picture of her mother, who died a few years ago, the woman said, "That's her." Moreover, she reported that the contractors who had done some renovations on the house had reported seeing an elderly woman staring in through the windows, and that their radios would only receive stations playing classical music - all characteristics of our friend's mother.

It should be said that our friend, who has spent more time in this house than probably anyone else, said that she had never felt the presence of her mother or any other supernatural entity there - or anywhere else, for that matter. I don't believe in ghosts either, but that night, once everyone else had gone to bed, I found myself in a darkened room in an old house that was swaying slightly in a stiff breeze, with a door down the hall swinging open and shut unpredictably every few minutes, and suddenly it was much harder to maintain that lack of belief.

I can't say I've ever seen a ghost, or felt a "presence," or had any kind of experience that I can't explain. I don't entirely discount the possibility that things happen that are beyond science's ability to explain, exactly, but I tend to agree with Carl Sagan's line about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence - and "science can't explain this yet" seems like a simpler claim than "ghosts are real!" But I don't instinctively dismiss ghost stories, and that's partly down to personal experience.

A few years back I was an Emergency Medical Technician-Basic, which meant that I spent about three hours a day providing very basic medical care and transport and about nine waiting in a state of marginally controlled panic for the radio to go off. During the latter nine, the options were either to watch Animal Planet and talk politics with my much older (and overwhelmingly Republican) coworkers in the ready room or seek out a bit of solitude in the cab of one of the trucks in the garage with a book or a pillow.

You'll be shocked to learn that I found myself in the cab quite a lot.

Most of the time, an occupied ambulance is an appallingly loud thing. Between the wind noise, the growling diesel, the siren, the squawking radio and the country or rap-metal your partner is almost certainly listening to, it's already ear-splittingly loud before you add in whatever noise your patient is making. So to climb in and shut the door in a quiet garage and find yourself in an ambulance silent but for the ticking of your watch is... discomfiting. Enough so that I couldn't help thinking about ghosts.

Most of the ambulances at that station were pretty old, especially given their near-constant use. One in particular was a 1997 model with over a hundred and thirty thousand miles on it. No matter how many times or how thoroughly we washed it, we couldn't quite expunge its particular odor - latex and plastic smells layered atop the odors of long-evaporated solvents, saline, bodily fluids and engine leakages. We were always told that nobody dies in the ambulance,* but I know for a fact that's bullshit. Even leaving aside for a moment the bleeding and burned who survived, how many people took their last ride in the back of that very truck, on that very gurney? I transported at least two to "end of life care" in it, and I was there less than a year as a part-timer. My gut feeling says for that one truck, at the time I sat down in it, the number would have easily been in the hundreds, if not higher. By that standard, I'm not sure if I can think of a place that's any more haunted.

And yet... we don't think of ambulances as haunted places. We - as far as I can tell, from the reactions I've gotten when my EMT days come up in conversation - don't like to think of them much at all. It could be that they don't fit our standardized conception of a haunted place - the cobwebs, the musty grandfather clock, the stillness. Nothing about an ambulance fits into that conception, really - we associate ghosts with age and decrepitude, so our ghost stories revolve disproportionately around haunted mansions and old Indian burial grounds and ancient Gypsy curses and so on. We may see cars, computers and other sorts of gear as having frightening sorts of potential, but "haunted" doesn't seem to be in the picture when we talk about technology.

Partly, I think the issue is that our superstitions haven't yet caught up with our technological progress. Take this, for example. The story itself is a fairly straightforward case of friendship-gone-wrong-turns-to-murder. But the victims had lives which stretched onto the growing online social network; although their lives ended suddenly, their virtual avatars did not. When I first read that story, I thought it showed what we might understand "haunted" to mean in the future: the dead living on through the traces they'd left behind on their technology, made accessible to their friends and loved ones (and the rest of the world) via the Internet. But upon more reflection, I think that's another, related phenomenon - something about how we leave our mark upon the world, which isn't quite the same as haunting it. The Internet may be full of anonymous trolls, but being on it entails some kind of interaction with other human beings, no matter how attenuated by distance and technology. Whereas I think when we talk about truly haunted places, we're really talking about a fear of being alone.

And maybe that's why no one tells stories about haunted ambulances. For all the suffering and death that they carry, the sufferers are never left alone in them. Most people's experience of ambulances is of riding in them either as a patient being tended to, or as a friend or family member of the patient. In either case, loneliness isn't the issue. My experience, of climbing into quiet, empty ambulances and imagining them to be full of screaming ghosts, is fairly unusual.** But being alone, in unfamiliar surroundings and facing some version of the moaning wind and the banging door is a pretty universal experience. As is, I imagine, having no idea what it means.

I didn't expect to see a ghost when I finally got up and went to shut the door that had been swinging open and shut in the wind. In fact, by the time I actually got out of bed I was sure I wasn't going to see one. And I was right. There was no ghost, no spirit, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. I closed the door, went back into my room, and went to sleep.

But maybe the ghost had just moved on.

* As a matter of protocol, they're either dead on scene (DOS) or dead upon arrival at the hospital (DOA). EMTs in every jurisdiction I know of lack the authority to pronounce death in the ambulance, and therefore are obliged to continue providing care until such time as the patient is delivered to the hospital.
** But not by any means unprecedented - a good example is Joe Connelly's novel Bringing Out the Dead, later turned into quite a good movie by Martin Scorsese, which features as its protagonist a burned-out paramedic who sees the ghosts of the patients he couldn't save, and comes to believe that his job isn't about saving everyone but about bearing witness to suffering. I don't remember whether I thought about ghosts in the ambulance before I read it, but I sure as hell did afterward.

St Andrews Coda

2009-08-25T23:30:00.006+01:00

Sorry for the radio silence. The last month has been pretty much just me putting the finishing touches on my Master's thesis, which was something more of a project than I thought it would be. It's effectively done at this point - I'm going to give it one more quick read through and then submit it either tomorrow or Thursday. It's not as good as I'd hoped, but then again, it seems like very little I write ever is, and I don't think I'm alone in that regard.

Anyway, the end of my thesis also marks the end of my time in St Andrews. I'm picking up a rental car in Edinburgh on Saturday and driving it with all my possessions south to England on Sunday; then on Monday I'm flying home for nearly a month before returning to start at LSE at the beginning of October. So with only a few days left here, I suppose it's time to take stock.

I have pretty mixed feelings about my time here. I don't think by any stretch of the imagination that it was a waste: I wouldn't have gotten into LSE without it, and I have a better sense of what I want to do (and what I don't) with myself. I certainly met a lot of interesting and cool people, and I got to do quite a lot of international travel. But at the same time, I feel like I've been tooling along in second gear this entire year, partly because there's only so much you can actually do from this particular, highly isolated bubble and partly because the isolation is self-reinforcing. I realize that all schools are bubbles to some extent, but the sense I got from my visit to LSE in June was that it's much less of a bubble than St Andrews, thanks to its location, the fact that it's not a campus university and its links with powerful institutions like the Bank of England, various think-tanks and the British government itself. So while I'm sure the place will have its own flaws, I think it'll be a welcome change from St Andrews - and I think being a research student instead of one of a large contingent of taught Master's students will help as well. I'm sure I'll have more structured thoughts on the comparison once I get to LSE, but at the moment, my brain is pretty frazzled from lack of sleep and too much thinking about Hezbollah and Hamas, so that's all I've got for the moment.

In any case, this blog isn't going anywhere. It's been a useful way for me to keep doing some writing that's in a less formal style and on a broader range of topics than I do in academia. I may not update again until I'm back in Maine, but I have incomplete drafts a couple of longer posts that I'll finish while I'm home, with any luck, along with some new material on whatever catches my interest while I'm there. And once I get to London, I imagine there will be no lack of things for me to write about, and I'll have some interesting things to say about my own experiences, which was part of the point of this exercise all along.

Names at Sea

2009-08-03T14:55:00.005+01:00

In his infinite wisdom, Congressman Tom Tancredo* (R-CO) has launched a bill petitioning the US Navy to name their next $6 billion+, 100,000 ton nuclear-powered aircraft carrier the USS Barry Goldwater. This is annoying for several reasons. First, Goldwater had little to do with the Navy - he was a military pilot, yes, but he flew for the Army, and while he certainly helped pass various pieces of legislation relating to the military, that doesn't separate him from any number of other Senators and Congresspeople. Second, his impact on our politics was mostly down to the rejuvenation of the conservative movement, which - while important - doesn't exactly make him an automatic figure deserving of such a large honor. That's not a partisan complaint, exactly - I wouldn't support naming the ship the USS Teddy Kennedy, either. Instead, it's a complaint partly about the obvious politicization of what is after all a fairly considerable honor, and the process by which these things get decided.

Consider: the United States currently has a force of 11 active-duty nuclear supercarriers. They are enormous, incredibly expensive and currently unique to the United States. Most are named after former presidents, a slightly dull but more or less appropriate naming tradition (Jimmy Carter got a submarine named after him instead, which seems at first like a slap in the face but is probably the appropriate honor given that Carter was a submariner himself). One is named the Enterprise, which is a great name for a ship (although as a sci-fi fan I might be a little biased on that count), and one is named after Admiral Chester Nimitz, who commanded American forces in the Pacific in World War II. Fair enough. The remaining two, unfortunately, are named after ardent segregationists: the USS Carl Vinson and the USS John C. Stennis. Vinson and Stennis were both legislators who worked hard on behalf of the armed forces, which is something of a justification, but not enough in my view to overcome their support for institutionalized racism. Granted, a similar case could be made against a ship named after a fairly famous slaveowner, but that seems to me to be a fairly clear case of the good outweighing the bad, which isn't at all true for lesser politicians.

I doubt Tancredo's bill will get anywhere, but the Navy is in something of a pickle regarding the name for this ship. Every president between Eisenhower and HW Bush now has a ship named after him, with two exceptions: LBJ and Nixon. Needless to say, I very much doubt there will be a groundswell of support for naming a ship after either man. Clinton isn't particularly popular with the military; nor, I imagine, is W. Bush, and in any case I doubt they'd name a ship after presidents of such recent vintage. So the question of what to call the ship is an open question, and therefore, in our hyper-partisan political system, a potential battleground.

It's partly an issue because the ships are big, important symbols and partly an issue because the Navy does mostly stick to established naming conventions. Current submarines are named after cities and states, although in the past they were named, somewhat whimsically, for fish - a tradition I for one would like to see brought back. Cruisers, frigates and destroyers are generally named for heroes, ranging from Winston Churchill to deceased Medal of Honor recipients, the latter of which strikes me as an especially excellent idea. Amphibious warfare ships are named after battles and cities - again, safe choices. The two examples of the new class of Littoral Combat Ships are called Freedom and Independence, a convention which is a good idea in theory but suffers in practice due to the recent politicization of those terms.

Other nations generally follow similar rules, with a notable exception being the British, who have some ships named after royalty and some named after intangible, high-minded concepts. Also, they've named a bunch of ships HMS Invincible, which you have to respect just for the sheer chutzpah. You might as well name your ship the HMS I Dare You To Sink This Ship. My personal idea would be to paint the ships hot pink and name them things like the USS Daffodil and USS My Little Pony, just for the look of sheer horror and confusion on any potential enemy's face, but that's unlikely to be adopted. In seriousness, though, I'd like to dispense with some of the unnecessary political hagiography and bring back some of the more estoric names our ships used to have, like the Constellation.

This might seem all a bit silly, but here's why it's important: The Navy hasn't fought a real sea battle for decades.** Most of the Navy's combat units have never fired a shot in anger, and none, to my knowledge, has fought an enemy more fearsome than a pirate skiff or Iranian powerboat. The real operational purpose of the Navy these days is not sinking enemy fleets - there aren't any that can hope to stand up to it - but rather supporting military operations on land and engaging in what might be termed (somewhat inaccurately) soft power, ranging from conducting humanitarian and training missions to protecting sea lanes from pirates and simply showing the American flag. Those are important missions, and I don't mean to imply otherwise. But success in them isn't down to traditional naval metrics - tonnage or firepower or fleet size. The importance and prospects for success of those missions are in no small part down to perceptions.

Names, while they may seem like silly irrelevances, are actually important to the battle of perceptions, which even plays a part in conventional war: consider that both Stalin and Hitler placed enormous, disproportionate emphasis on Stalingrad thanks to their perceptions of its propaganda value. When we send the Navy off to perform its missions, no matter what form they take, the ships are a tangible representation of national policy. Letting politicians write their ideological affinities onto the ships' hulls only undermines that.

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* Tancredo is, for anyone who doesn't know, a spectacular piece of work. He at one point suggested that the appropriate American response to another mass-casualty terror attack would be to "take out" the holy sites at Mecca and Medina, and he had as a speechwriter a man who got drunk, screamed racial epithets at an African-American woman and then attacked her with a karate chop.

** In this, it's hardly alone - unless I'm missing something, I don't think there has been a naval battle any bigger than a skirmish anywhere in the world since 1945.

Dollhouse

2009-07-30T21:59:00.003+01:00

I'm fairly late to this party, but I just finished watching the first season of Dollhouse, and since it's been renewed for a second season, I think it's worth commenting on. It has to be said first of all that I'm not a rabid Joss Whedonite; I enjoyed Firefly and Serenity without too many reservations, but I've never seen so much as a minute of Buffy or Angel. It's worth mentioning Whedon's other shows because even as a fair-weather fan I can tell that he has a very distinct style - his characters generally have mysterious pasts, insane fighting skills and quick wits. Some of that distinctiveness shines through in Dollhouse, but it also seems like he might be trying for something a bit more ambitious this time around, raising questions about memory, identity and humanity. I certainly applaud any TV drama (especially one on a major network) that raises those issues, but based on the first season, I'm not sure how much justice they're done here. Also: spoilers ahead, in case you haven't seen the whole of the first season.

The show basically revolves around a woman named Caroline (Eliza Dushku), a college activist who gets involved with a secretive organization called the Dollhouse. The Dollhouse takes people in for five-year terms during which their personalities are copied to a hard drive and their bodies used as templates for other personalities culled from a database of hundreds of thousands, from computer nerds to specialists to bank robbers and commandos. These "actives" are then hired out at great cost to do basically whatever the client who's paying an inordinate sum is asking them to, whether it means becoming a prostitute, an assassin or just a playmate. In other words, it's the ultimate escort service. The Dollhouse is run by Adele DeWitt (Olivia Williams), a stiff-upper-lip Brit, with the aid of generic antisocial computer genius Topher Brink (Fran Kranz), hard-edged security chief Lawrence Dominic (Reed Diamond) and Boyd Langton (Harry Lennix, a sound-and-nearly-look-alike for the current President of the United States), who initially serves as the handler/bodyguard for Caroline's new identity, an active named Echo. Meanwhile, FBI agent Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett, best known as Helo from Battlestar Galactica) is trying to track down Caroline and the Dollhouse, despite the fact that he's the only one who believes it's more than an urban legend.

I'll get some of the immediate problems out of the way first. Biggest of these is the fact that I really, really don't care about the Paul Ballard subplot. The character isn't particularly interesting; he's like the Family Guy joke about Harrison Ford, where he just runs from one random passerby to the next yelling, "WHERE'S MY FAMILY?!?" He's so dedicated to his mission that he violently assaults pretty much everyone around him, including one of his fellow special agents. Despite his violence and lack of allies in the Bureau, he's treated as a threat by the Dollhouse, to such an extent that they permanently detail two actives (who are implied to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per day) to mislead him. Having worked inside a federal law enforcement agency, I can attest to the fact that while federal job security is pretty good, assault is one of the things that gets you thrown out on your ass pretty much immediately. The Dollhouse wouldn't really need to do anything - just wait for Ballard to punch his way down from federal agent to shouty conspiracy blogger who everyone ignores. If they wanted to really be sure, they could always send an active into his apartment with a nice big bag of weed to hide under his sofa and then call an anonymous tip in to the cops. The FBI is, after all, particularly strict about its drug policies. Sadly, Penikett, who was much better cast as the goodhearted, jocular Helo than as Agent Nutjob, isn't really up to the task of doing anything with the dullness.

In a similar but more serious vein, Eliza Dushku probably wasn't the best choice to play Caroline/Echo. She's certainly pretty enough (for obvious reasons, the actives are chosen for their physical characteristics), and the brief moments we've seen of her as the idealistic, spunky Caroline worked well enough, but the role requires her to assume multiple, completely independent personalities every episode, which is a tall order for any actor. She does Echo's natural state of blissful blankness pretty well, and once in a while she nails it on another assignment, but she doesn't really convince as a severe hostage negotiator with a dark past, a blind cult member, a tough aspiring singer from South Boston or... well, you get the idea.

In fact, the acting overall isn't especially strong. Of the leads, only Harry Lennix as the ex-cop with a conscience is particularly good; Olivia Williams has a couple of interesting moments where she lets her all-business façade down but not much is done with them, and the rest are middling. The acting on Firefly wasn't exactly a Gielgud-Olivier reunion, either, but you felt it less: the show took itself less seriously and the actors were all perfectly capable of delivering the witty patter they were given. Dollhouse, as a Serious Show about Big Issues, does away with much of that patter - rightly, I think - but at the same time I get the impression that Whedon and his casting people didn't make the necessary adjustments from "telegenic" to "compelling" when they sat down to give life to the characters. You can see that failure in little things, too - the way many of the minor roles are filled with not-particularly-strong-but-generically-attractive actors and actresses, the general shininess of the universe, right down to its elegantly designed grungy bits.

Dramatic television is, of course, supposed to entertain, but it seems pretty clear that Whedon wants this show to be more than just a good-looking trifle. One of the reasons Firefly worked was that insofar as it had a message, it was pretty bite-sized: individual freedom is Good, and even better if you live on an awesome spaceship full of endearing kooks. It was fun - sometimes cheerful fun, sometimes fairly dark fun, but fun. Dollhouse, on the other hand, takes place in a universe which is either supposed to be our own or fairly close to our own. It is unapologetic about its serious, provocative themes: what makes us individuals? What makes us human? Can our souls and personalities really be reduced to simple data, and then written onto another storage unit? Important questions all - and as I said, I'm very glad they're being raised on network television. I'm just not sure they've gotten the entertain/provoke balance quite right.

There are, again, a few problems with the premise (or at least the way the premise has played out so far). A central aspect of the entire series is the idea that your personality can be copied from your brain by scanner, held on a storage unit and then transferred at a later date back into your body - or into someone else's. Obviously, in reality we're nowhere close to the technology necessary to perform such an operation (especially as it's demonstrated in the show, with basically a dentist's chair with some lights on top), but that's well within acceptable suspension of disbelief. What's not is the idea that we - or the lion's share of what we are - is reducible to electrical impulses that can be copied onto a flash drive. I'm no biologist, but I know that's not true. A huge part of what we feel and want and experience is down to the way our minds work within the chemical context of our bodies - see, for example, this story of a man who lost his testosterone and discovered that it fundamentally changed his personality and his view of the world. As a sci-fi fan, I love the idea of being able to transcend my (slightly too) fleshy vessel, but I'd really like to see the show acknowledge more that there's more to it than just the wiring.

And there's another problem: what we call "data" is basically a series of impressions of a storage medium, whether that's a human brain or a hard drive. You can copy data, but you can't really move it. So even if you could reduce a human being to a series of electrical signals on an artificial storage device, that "stored" copy wouldn't be you. When the actives first get their minds blanked, that would be it for them. Sure, you would know intellectually that someone exactly like you would sooner or later wake up in one body or another and go on living, but when the blue lights at the top of the dentist's chair came on, that would be it. And on those grounds, the idea that the Actives sign up more or less voluntarily is awfully hard to believe. In order for the thought-provoking aspect of the show to work, we don't need to have absolutely everything in the show make perfect scientific sense - but it has to be close enough that we can believe. And it's not there yet.

Still, I think Dollhouse has a lot of potential. That holds especially true with the introduction of the reliably charismatic Alan Tudyk as the rogue active Alpha and the subsuming of Paul Ballard into the Dollhouse's fold. And plenty of good shows took at least one season to really hit their stride. But it won't be easy. Joss Whedon and his crew have set themselves an awfully ambitious goal in trying to create an entertaining drama about some of the fundamental questions of existence, and it remains to be seen whether they can live up to it... though I'm certainly glad the network has given them a second season to try.

Assassination and War

2009-07-26T23:59:00.003+01:00

When I was an undergrad, I was lucky enough to have a teacher who had served for many years with Britain's Security Service, MI5, and thereafter with a variety of international organizations whose missions often dovetailed with it. This was during the 2004 election season, when the War on Terror was a very active topic, particularly amongst us international-relations focused types. I remember one particular discussion in his class where he asked us as a thought exercise how we would fight a War on Terror.

One girl ventured, "Well, I think America's special forces are the best in the world, and we should just unleash them and let them take care of all the terrorists."

Our teacher replied, "Take care of... you mean kill. Alright. So you send out your snipers to take out the terrorists. Does anyone know what kind of bullets sniper rifles fire?"

No one else said anything, so I stammered, "Um... big .50 caliber ones that go through people and keep going through whoever's in the next room?"

"Right. So if you kill the terrorist and the innocent woman in the next room, what exactly have you accomplished?"

Silence. Which was pretty much the answer he was looking for.

I've been thinking about that conversation a lot since the news broke of the mysterious CIA assassination program. I don't have any reason to believe our teacher had anything to do with assassination, but he certainly knew more about counterterrorism than the rest of us put together. And I think his hesitation to endorse the idea of gunning down terrorists John-McClane-style is a good guideline for considering assassination in the context of war.

It's an understandable immediate reaction to the revelations to say, "So? Why is it a problem that the CIA had a program to assassinate al Qaeda leaders? Isn't that what we should be doing?" There are two responses to that. The first, practical, response is that the scandal isn't exactly about the morality or legality of offing al Qaeda bigwigs. It's about the fact that the CIA is obliged to disclose such actions to Congress (especially important given the agency's Cold War habit of doing end runs around Congress), and also about the fact that the order to keep Congress in the dark apparently came from Dick Cheney, who unless I'm reading my Constitution very wrong, had absolutely no statutory authority to order anyone to do squat, and it's incredibly dangerous when elected officials or executive agencies start acting outside the law as a matter of course.* But seeing as there are still conflicting reports as to whether the program was operational or not, whether it had ever been operational or not, and even the specific nature of the program, I'll refrain from judgment until the facts are clearer.

But the second response is more fundamental: what is the place of assassination in war, especially in a war which hasn't been confined to traditional battlefields? War is nothing if not the application of violence in pursuit of a political goal; targeted assassination certainly could fall under that rubric. Indeed, if the CIA located Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in a cave somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, I doubt too many people would make the case that it would be ethically wrong (or, arguably, even illegal) to make him dead by whatever means came to hand.

But the means are part of the problem. I can't claim any particular method of assassination techniques, but based on published reports it's hard to imagine any method being used even half as much as airstrikes from our fleet of accurately-named Predator and Reaper drones. Since we're talking about the means, it's also important to draw a distinction between these drone strikes and other forms of air war being carried out in theater, which generally falls into the category of Close Air Support (CAS). CAS is mostly the province of heavily-armed fighters, bombers, gunships and attack helicopters whose role is to provide fire support for NATO troops on the ground, allowing them to vastly overpower their opponents even if substantially outnumbered. By contrast, the drones are relatively lightly-armed, but can loiter for over a day and are relatively unobtrusive, which makes them ideal for tracking down and delivering their lethal payloads to selected targets in the border regions - not to mention the fact that their use over such dangerous areas doesn't endanger their pilots, who are sitting safely in a trailer hundreds of miles away.

And that is part of the fundamental difference between assassinations and other acts of war. Leaving aside the question of civilian casualties for the moment, there is nothing inherently morally questionable about air support in combat, even against an enemy with no significant means of defense against such attack. While the laws of war forbid all sorts of cruel and unusual tactics and weapons, there is to the best of my knowledge no prohibition against having more powerful weapons than your opponent. But there's a fundamental difference here: close air support (again, in the abstract) is not controversial because it is targeted against enemy fighters who are party to a battle. Assassination by drone is different partly because the enemy has no countermeasure whatsoever, and partly because they are either prospectively party to a battle, or have been in the past. The assassin is in no immediate danger and can therefore approach killing as a task rather than as a life-or-death decision. While I'm sure policymakers prefer the safety of the control trailer to the danger of more traditional forms of assassination, both in terms of the physical safety of the operator and the political safety it affords them, the distance that assassination by robot affords is morally dangerous. Limiting the danger means that the decision to kill is easier, and can be taken more lightly, which increases the risk of mistakes.

And mistakes are a huge part of the problem. By "mistake" I mean everything from entirely mis-targeted bombing missions that take out wedding parties rather than insurgent headquarters, to the nearly-unavoidable killing of civilians who just happen to be within the blast radius when the missile hits. Both types of mistake have killed hundreds or thousands of unaffiliated civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the last few years, and the result has been mixed at best. To be sure, many potentially dangerous individuals have been killed. But so have many innocents, along with many targets whose interrogation might have saved many more lives than their deaths prevented. To a large extent this is in the territory of the unknowable - but what is sure is that the strikes, no matter how frequent, have not stopped the insurgency or prevented its spread dangerously far into Pakistan. Much of this resiliency can be attributed to the ill-will created by the inevitable side effects of the attacks - to the point where even some of the leading lights of the counterinsurgency movement have called for a moratorium on their use.

So technology can keep the assassin out of harm's way, which seems like a net plus. But it can't minimize the effects downrange - in fact, given how much more powerful a drone's Hellfire missiles are than an assassin's bullet, combined with the lack of situational awareness that comes from peering through a black-and-white screen linked to a flying camera hundreds of miles away, it may have the exact opposite effect. And, since the negative effects aren't immediately apparent, the use of drones gets built into a self-reinforcing loop which gives them nearly unstoppable inertia even when those negative effects start to manifest. That's not a recipe for sound decision-making in any sphere of endeavor, but least of all in a war fought partly in a nuclear-armed, politically unstable nation, where "negative effects" have some truly scary possible consequences.

The counterargument to all this is that this is a new kind of war and therefore necessitates throwing away the rule book and doing things that would not have passed muster in previous conflicts. I don't buy that, entirely. I won't deny that it is a new kind of war, and as much as I generally buy into the idea that new tactics and new technologies are driving the evolution of warfare and necessitate adjustments, I don't believe that should be an excuse to throw away all existing guiding precepts. Clearly, under some circumstances, the risk of inaction outweighs the risk of action - I don't mean to argue otherwise. But we can't be fooled by the power long-range robotic assassination seems to give us: using it on terrorist suspects may seem like a moral no-brainer, but the ground truth seems reluctant to cooperate with that image.

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* Obviously, this isn't the only case where that's been an issue, torture being the other obvious example, but those are a bit beyond my scope at the moment.

One Party State

2009-07-21T01:51:00.002+01:00

So here's where I defend the Republican Party.

I don't mean to defend the current incarnation of the Republican Party. There's very little to defend in that organization - the Democratic wave of 2006-8 certainly sent a number of the most obnoxious Republicans packing (George Allen, Curt Weldon, and Rick Santorum come immediately to mind), but it also had the paradoxical effect of clearing out the Republican delegations from New England and the Northeast. And the Republicans from those areas are traditionally the most moderate members of the party, at least on social issues. So what's left is, in many respects, the most conservative, most die-hard part of the party, the part responsible for Sarah Palin's continued popularity and apparent relevance. They're angry. They're feeling disenfranchised. And - barring unpredictably massive event of some kind - they're demographically doomed.

That's not only dangerous for the Republican Party, it's dangerous for the whole country. Having one dominant party isn't a recipe for sane governance, and the longer the Republican Party holds the Opposition position without being capable of true opposition, the less democratic our nation will become.

Let me explain: I'm a big ole liberal and have never voted for anyone who wasn't a Democrat, but I don't support the party blindly. There are plenty of corrupt villains with a D after their names, like Rod Blagojevic, "Dollar Bill" Jefferson and - though it pains me slightly to say it about a decorated veteran and principled Iraq War opponent - John Murtha. There are many, many more slimy, hackish Democrats, like James Carville, Paul Begala and Lanny Davis. And even the ones I generally like, including our president, have all done at least a few things that have disappointed me, often seriously. But given the absence of any credible alternatives, I imagine I'll continue to vote uniformly Democratic for the foreseeable future.

That doesn't mean that I think that a permanent Democratic supermajority would be a desirable outcome. Parties in power for the long-term tend to develop corruption at a level far above your garden-variety political scandal - look at the depth of Jack Abramoff and Tom Delay's dealings in the mid-2000's Republican Congress. Or the corruption of the Democrats in the late 80s and early 90s. Or, looking (a little bit) abroad, the PRI in Mexico, whose 70-year reign grew increasingly fractious and corrupt as it went on. Or in Britain, where the Labour Party seems to be staggering towards imminent defeat in the next elections, dragged down by a combination of infighting, economic downturn and various scandals. Party change is good for the maintenance of democracy.

But it has to be a responsible party change. The Republicans took Congress from a corrupt and fractious Democratic Party in 1994, and proceeded to shut down the government in a fit of pique and wildly overstepped their bounds in their efforts to villify and eventually impeach Clinton. The presidency of George W. Bush wasn't much better, and although it's not my intention here to categorize all of his faults and failings, the party certainly marched with him in lockstep (with a couple of exceptions over immigration policy and Harriet Miers) to their electoral drubbings in 2006 and 2008. And John McCain's campaign took a man at least capable of honorable opposition and turned him into a poster boy for the hardest-edge, least-compromising aspects of the party, as evidenced by his pick of Sarah Palin over much more qualified candidates - Joe Lieberman, Tom Ridge, Kay Bailey Hutchinson - who were unacceptably moderate to the base.

The scope of Republican losses in the last four years has provoked a certain amount of soul-searching from the party's incipient moderate wing, personified by people such as David Frum, Peggy Noonan and Ross Douthat, but their influence remains marginal at best. The GOP Congressional leadership remains dedicated to a political strategy a la Attila the Hun, salting the earth as they go. The most visible leaders of the party at the moment are hard-core throwbacks like Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich; newer faces like Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney have abandoned any hints of moderation in their pasts to better appeal to the all-powerful base, while the party's titular head, Michael Steele, seems most comfortable in his often-successful efforts to out-gaffe Joe Biden. Perhaps most tellingly, there were the recent Young Republicans leadership elections, in which a pragmatic candidate who called for broadening the party's appeal across racial, class and religious barriers was soundly defeated by a woman who thought it was funny when a friend wrote racial epithets on her Facebook wall.

None of this is to say that the Republicans can't come back. The Democratic Party is dominant enough in Congress that one election cycle would almost certainly not be enough to unseat them in either house, but it's not beyond the scope of imagination that it could happen in two. And Obama, after riding six months of bouyant polls, is starting to weaken slightly - perhaps inevitable given the state of the economy, although declarations that his presidency is going the way of Jimmy Carter's are staggeringly premature. A stubborn economy, a big scandal, a botched military operation - none of these are remote possibilities, and some combination of them might well be big enough to give Democrats potential cause to worry for 2010 and/or 2012. But for the moment, even in the Era of the Permanent Campaign, things still look fairly positive for the near-term, while the momentum of demographics is favorable in the long run.

What I mean to say is that at the moment, the Republican Party is in no shape to provide either loyal opposition or a reasonable alternative government, and it's incredibly important that they be able to do both. They need to be able to offer the American people at large a reason to remain engaged with politics. One of the beautiful things about the 2008 election was a sense that people had woken up, looked at their country and decided to kick the bums out. And then, having treated ourselves to a lovely pat on the back for having elected our first black leader, we've by and large gone back to not caring about politics. I can't pretend to be immune - I get regular e-mails from various members of the Barack Obama Team, which I almost always delete without reading. In the meantime, the fate of our economy, our foreign policy and our health care system, amongst other minor issues, are being decided. Part of this is down to the technical nature of a lot of these negotiations - I can't claim to be intimately familiar with the details of the competing House and Senate health care plans. But a lot of it is down to the fact that the Republicans aren't in any shape to offer unified, coherent resistance, and the internal struggles amongst the Democrats are a lot less visible and a lot less interesting than open partisan bickering would be. People need to feel like they have someone speaking for them in the fights that matter; otherwise they give up.

A more extreme example of that principle is provided by the rapid growth of the really-loony right, from the undying Birther movement (folks who insist, despite the utterly clear and convincing evidence, that President Obama is not a US-born citizen, and may in fact be A SECRET MUSLIM) to the lunatics who think that what we really need is an al Qaeda nuclear attack, to the disgusting prick who suggested that a US soldier captured by the Taliban was a deserter who deserves death at his captors' hands.* None of these extremists exactly crawled out of the woodwork on January 20 - God knows the Clinton years saw their fair share of similar nutjobbery - but the combination of endless wars, a comatose economy and a feeling of complete political disempowerment spurred by the present irrelevance of the GOP might lead people to abandon conventional politics altogether. And as easy as it was to mock the Google-illiterates who brought us the tea party movement, the secessionist rumblings that accompanied it are real, and potentially very dangerous. It's easy to look down upon civil unrest in other countries and say, "It can't happen here," but it has, and can again. And it's easy to simply dismiss Birthers and die-hard evangelicals as the kind of people to whom we shouldn't extend the courtesy of argument, but that only pushes them further away from rational politics and towards whatever other options are out there.

We - as progressives, as Americans - don't want that. Or shouldn't. Democratic participation is the pressure release valve of society; even if these people are using their freedom of speech to argue that I shouldn't have mine, I'd rather they were shouting it than shooting it out. And right now, most of what's standing between those two options is a weak, fractured and incompetent conservative party. And that's not enough of a guarantee.

There's probably not much we on the progressive left can do. A "third way" party is an appealing idea, but unfortunately the structure of our government has developed both constitutionally and procedurally to a point where it would have to be born fully-formed, or else wither and die instantly. And as tempting as it is to say that we should abandon our comparatively minor ideological differences with the moderate Republicans and help them rebuild a better, more tolerant, more honest version of their party, there's no way that interference would have the desired effect. As with American interference in Iran, it would surely backfire. Our best choice is to encourage our leaders to govern progressively, to rebuild the constitutional walls torn down by the previous administration, to always bear in mind that the 24-hour news cycle is much less important than our long-term demographic advantages - and, perhaps most importantly, to quietly make it clear that the objective is not a one party state. With any luck, the real loyal opposition will do the rest.

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* I know some people might take issue with my classification of Ralph Peters as an extremist, but between his despicable call for the death of a captured American serviceman, his suggestion that the military should kill critical journalists, and his general bullshit macho chickenhawkery (despite his age, rank and bloodthirstiness, he never saw combat), he goddamn well deserves it.

McNamara and the future

2009-07-07T17:38:00.007+01:00

Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara died yesterday, and for some reason, I've been thinking about his death quite a lot - certainly more than the more-remarked-upon celebrity deaths which seem to have clustered in the last couple of weeks.

I met McNamara once, very briefly, when I was an intern at a nonprofit. He was attending a meeting we were hosting, and I happened to be the person who opened the door for him. I didn't even know the former Defense Secretary was going to be attending, so it was something of a shock for me to open the door and find him standing there with a smile and a hearty "Hello!" I didn't have anything like a conversation with him - I think I managed something like "Please come in," before our executive director came out and ushered him into the meeting room. I did however sit directly behind him in the meeting room, and was amazed by how lively he was, especially for a man who was, at the time, 89 years old. He was practically beating his fists on the table as he argued his point about the futility of nuclear deterrence - a point no doubt reinforced by his experience during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when as one of the few voices of reason on the National Security Council's Executive Committee, he stood with the Kennedy brothers and helped de-escalate a situation that could have very easily culminated in nuclear war. There aren't very many people who can claim to have saved the world; Robert McNamara could at least argue that he helped.

That's not meant to absolve him of his immense guilt for the war in Vietnam. Few doubted McNamara's intelligence, but clearly it carried with it an equal or greater burden of arrogance. I won't claim to have much perspective on the decisions that led him to endorse that strategy, so all I can do is recommend some of the more thoughtful reflections about his life, or better yet suggest watching Errol Morris's fantastic documentary on the man, The Fog of War. It's not clear how much responsibility he ultimately took for the disaster in Vietnam; reasonable answers range between "basically none" and "not quite enough, at least not publicly." It's not clear whether his post-resignation stewardship of the World Bank was meant as some kind of moral recompense; nor, now that he's passed away, will we in any likelihood get any further answer than we've gotten to this point. So the debates over whether he succeeded in redeeming himself will likely continue indefinitely.

But what really strikes me about him is that his story is that of someone who tried to come to intellectual grips with war and failed. He never served in combat, although he held an administrative position with the US Army Air Corps (predecessor to the USAF) during the Second World War; and his job included statistical analysis of the effectiveness of strategic bombing. He carried that analytical, businesslike mindset through to his appointment at a young age to be Secretary of Defense under John F. Kennedy, trying to apply his statistical models to the strategic questions that faced the United States at the time - how to defeat the revolutionary forces at work in Vietnam, and how to contain or defeat the Soviet Union. The problem is the problem with most, if not all, attempts to use mathematics to explain complex and violent human behavior: the only way to check your answers is with blood. And when the bloody calculations were completed, it turned out that McNamara was wrong, at least on the first count.

Part of the problem, I think, was that McNamara only started to understand war as something more than a numbers game when he stopped having anything to do with it. I can't claim to know whether he would have made the same decisions if he'd been an infantryman instead of a USAAC number-cruncher, or for that matter whether he'd have gotten into the position to make those decisions. And certainly being in combat does not turn every man against war - the greatest military theorist of modern history, Carl von Clausewitz, fought in the Napoleonic Wars and was held captive for a year before he wrote On War. But whether it's written by hardened combat veterans or civilians, the greatest writing on the topic of war acknowledges that even as it, like all other human activities, can be narrowed down and fit into theoretical boxes, there is always something about it that doesn't quite go in there; an unpredictability and seriousness that has ultimately foiled every effort to tame, understand or control it.

In contrast, there's something deeply bloodless about McNamara's approach, something inhuman, something that I'm afraid we're on the long-term track towards, even as our military - probably temporarily - slews towards human-focused counterinsurgency strategy. Our strategists speak in bullet points about Effects-Based Operations and collateral damage; the language of war and that of public relations brought together by the technology that threatens to make McNamara's ideas reality. Even the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is on record saying that the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will probably be "the last manned fighter" before it is replaced by robotic combatants which can fly longer and harder and aren't encumbered by fear or self-preservation or morality. In the language of McNamara's systems analysis, they'll clean up the inputs and allow our policymakers to predict the result with greater certainty.

Except that it won't. Because of that undercurrent of uncertainty and unpredictability, all our remote technology and neutered language will do is allow us to pretend that we've turned war into accountancy, until we realize that all we've done is hide the blood. We can go a ways towards changing war, maybe render some aspects of it unrecognizable. But we can't alter the fundamentals of violence, and if we don't respect that, it will destroy us. I don't know if Robert McNamara ever came to that conclusion himself - I certainly hope he did, for his own sake - but it's pretty clear to me that that's the lesson of his life.

Public Enemies

2009-07-04T14:53:00.000+01:00

Spoilers ahead, but given that you already know how the movie ends... anyway, you've been warned.

Here's the problem with Michael Mann's new Public Enemies: He's already made this film. It was set in present-day Los Angeles, it starred Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, it was called Heat and it was definitely one of the finest crime films (and arguably one of the best dramas) ever made. Public Enemies, sadly, is not the evolutionary advancement from Heat that you might expect given the fifteen-year gap between the two. That isn't to deny the film its charms, as it is in at least one respect superior to the earlier film, but it is something of a hollow victory.

Public Enemies, like Heat, is the story of a charismatic crook and the lawman out to catch him. In this case, the crook is Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger, and he's played with ruthless charisma by Johnny Depp. The lawman is FBI agent Melvin Purvis, played by our generation's Stoic Incarnation of Justice, Christian Bale. And already we've come to the first respect in which Public Enemies doesn't live up to Mann's own precedent: we're not really given enough material to get into the heads of either of these men. Dillinger is funny, charming, deadly and possessed of a deeply guarded sentimentality; the much more thinly-drawn Purvis is relentless, efficient and moral. But that's all we learn. Although they get one scene together, it's nothing like the famous coffee-shop conversation between De Niro and Pacino; it's just Depp in a jail cell and Bale coming by with a tight-lipped smile to inform him that he'll only get out of it on his way to the gallows, which Depp smirks off. There's no spark, no sense of recognition or understanding of each other - just the lawman on one side of the bars and the crook on the other.

There's at least a reason for this. With Heat, Mann was free to write and shape the characters as he pleased - while both De Niro's Neil McCauley and Pacino's Lt. Vincent Hanna were based on composites of criminals and police officers Mann knew or had read about, he was free to give them relationships, character traits and choices which played neatly into the overall storyline. That's not the case in Public Enemies, with its cast of real characters with real names and real histories. Mann is a careful director, and that care shows through in every facet of the movie - but unfortunately, it also has the effect of neutering it, since in the interest of historical accuracy he refrains from giving Dillinger or Purvis all that much in the way of real character. The supporting cast is mostly hamstrung by the same requirement - although well-cast, most of the supporting actors seem a bit lost in the big, sprawling storyline. Even Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard is left floundering a bit as Dillinger's lover, Billie Frechette - she has the beginnings of an interesting backstory but her main character trait seems to be a love for Dillinger that's never explained or explored in any great depth. The two exceptions are Peter Gerety (who fans of The Wire will recognize as Judge Phelan) playing a grandstanding attorney who helps Dillinger out of a tight spot, and Billy Crudup (thankfully normal-sized, clothed and not blue), playing the incompetent, paranoid J. Edgar Hoover with just the right tightness of facial muscles and 30s speech patterns. Hoover apparently hounded Purvis out of the Bureau after Dillinger's death as he viewed him as too popular (and therefore a threat to Hoover himself); sadly, that dynamic doesn't present itself here, as the relationship between the men on the bleeding edge of the law and their office-bound superiors is a dynamic not explored in Heat which could have really set this movie apart.

The ambitious scope doesn't help either; Mann sticks to the last year of Dillinger's life, but it was an eventful one and there are a lot of banks to rob and subplots to cover. That robs the film (if you'll pardon the pun) of the propulsive, right-now feeling that Heat and other crime dramas set over a shorter period have working in their favor.

The other major problem is the sound. One of the few naturalistic directors working with big-budget Hollywood movies today, Mann apparently didn't use any studio sound at all, which should help immerse you in the movie but unfortunately often leaves you wondering whether there isn't more going on that you just missed because someone next to you was breathing. It was one of the few movies I've ever seen in a theater and wished I'd seen instead in my own living room, where I could have rewound certain sections to see if they contributed to the overall story or were just color. Granted, that might have been partly the fault of the (small, crowded, low-rent) theater I was in, but when a movie's budget is in the tens of millions, it shouldn't be an issue.

It's not all bad news - even as we're wondering what exactly is driving him, Johnny Depp is great fun to watch - he's cold and ruthless, but strategically deploys humor and lightheartedness just in time to prevent the movie from sinking under the weight of its self-seriousness. Then there's the fact that no director is quite as good at staging shootouts as Michael Mann - there are quite a few in this movie, particularly a brutal nighttime battle at the Little Bohemia Lodge, a motel in the middle of a Wisconsin pine forest. I'll cop to a bit of confusion at the end of that scene, but otherwise it's nearly as good as the ludicrous bank robbery setpiece in Heat (which is my pick for Best Action Scene Ever Of All Time). And of course, there's the cinematography. Oh lord, the cinematography. This is without a doubt the best-looking film I've seen since... honestly, I can't remember the last time I saw a film so visually amazing. Children of Men comes to mind, but the source of its visual splendor was technical genius; you admired the sheer outrageousness of staging a battle between rebels and a tank brigade across sixteen blocks or a ruined port city, but in Public Enemies, Dante Spinotti's digital camerawork just oozes beauty and craft in every way, from the reflective shine on the freshly polished hood of a V-8 Ford getaway car to the way Dillinger swoops elegantly past the camera as he leaps over a bank counter. Most action directors would slow that shot down and linger over it for precious seconds; Mann throws it at you in a moment and if you miss it, it's your loss. His willingness to tell a story that you may seem a bit confusing at first viewing is another mark in Mann's - and the film's - favor.

Finally - and this is something that usually nags me about movies, because most of the films I watch tend to involve some level of violence - this is a film that takes violence seriously. To some extent it has to, since these aren't aliens or generic baddies or SS-uniformed extras being blown away; they're representations of real people who lived and died. But Mann steers clear of the two dangerous poles of filmed violence: he doesn't make live-action cartoons like Michael Bay or John Woo with their prepubescent fantasies of thunder and lightning which doesn't acknowledge the real damage being done. Nor does he fetishize it like Eli Roth or Zack Snyder, who seem to agree that killing people is awesome and have the frankly twisted notion that what's really cool about it is the way that bones break and blood splatters and so on, and therefore linger over scenes of torture because they want to see how much they can get away with. Here, there's a combination of brutality (a couple of scenes of Dick Cheney's kind of "enhanced" police interrogation; pretty detailed shots of bullet wounds, etc.) and glamour (squealing tires, BAR's and tommy guns spitting crosses of flame at each other) that achieves the difficult goal of acknowledging both the excitement and terror of a Depression-era life of crime.

That glamorous side can't be ignored in telling this story. The criminals weren't driven just by the desire to beat the system, just as the cops weren't driven solely by steely-eyed desire for justice. Christian Bale's character misses that subtlety, which is partly down to writing and partly to acting (seriously, he's a good actor - just watch The Prestige if you don't believe me - but he really needs to stop taking these Asskicking Personification of Justice roles; it's getting boring). There's another great glamour scene, much remarked upon by other reviewers, in which Dillinger strolls into the "Dillinger Bureau" of the Chicago police force and has a look around, even asking the cops there who's winning the baseball game they're listening to. But that wasn't what struck me the most. The scene that said the most to me was at the very end (which I'm going to describe now - you've been warned).

Stephen Lang plays Charles Winstead, one of the hard-ass Southwestern lawmen brought into the operation by Purvis after Dillinger's gang kill a few inexperienced, accountant-type G-men. He's a taciturn, blue-eyed man the Marines of Generation Kill would refer to as a "stone killer." In the movie's version of events (and on this point there's some historical confusion), he's one of the two who finally bring Dillinger down with a few well-placed pistol shots fired through a crowd of departing moviegoers one summer night on a downtown Chicago avenue. Afterwards, he goes to visit Billie Frechette, who's already locked up as a Dillinger accomplice, to whom he - without using one more word than necessary or changing his catatonic inflection one bit - offers a cigarette and then passes on Dillinger's last words: a callback to the first time he met her. As she quietly sobs in recognition, he watches sympathetically for a moment, then stands up, doffs his hat, and leaves without another word. It's a hell of a scene. Another director would have put Christian Bale there, and amped up the hysterics a bit. But not here; here, we get a character with no more than ten lines in the entire film walking us through the door. And with that, we know that there's a whole world of astonishing stories that this movie just hints at; Billie Frechette has one and Charles Winstead has one and you get the strong sense there's another down every darkened alley and Depression-hit street in this film. I just wish the ones we actually got from the movie lived up to that feeling.

Happy Fourth of What The Hell?!

2009-07-04T10:49:00.004+01:00

So... Sarah Palin resigned.

To which I think the only reasonable response is... What? Of course, that's the only reasonable response to most things involving Gov. Palin, but of all the nuttiness she's subjected us to over the last ten months, this might just take the cake.

First, let's talk about the timing. In politics, Friday afternoon is generally considered the "bad news dump" - if you have to release something you don't want splashed all over the headlines, you release it as most reporters are tired out from the week and looking forward to going home and relaxing for the weekend. That goes double (at least) for the Friday before a holiday weekend, like - just picking one at random here - the July 4th weekend. Given that even her backers were surprised, if not shocked, by the announcement, it seems highly unlikely that it had been, as she claimed, "in the works for a while."

Then, there's the - for lack of a better term - sheer stupidity of the move. In her rambling, self-serving remarks*, Palin kept hammering home the theme of not quitting, of taking the right road rather than the easy one. Or, in her words, "Only dead fish go with the flow." A reasonable point, if more befitting a Successories poster than a political speech. The one teensy little problem is that she was deriding "the quitter's way out" IN HER RESIGNATION SPEECH. Honestly, you just can't make this kind of thing up. And assuming, as I think it's fair to, that she's making this move with an eye towards her further political ambitions, you wonder who the hell is giving her advice: she's been governor for just over two years, some months of which she spent not really governing, but running around the lower 48 accusing Barack Obama of "palling around with terrorists." Back then, his three years in the US Senate compared favorably with her record; if she's thinking about 2012, how will she make the case that her half-term as governor qualifies her against a man who's been president for four?

As I see it, there are three major possibilities here:

1) She basically means what she says; she's sick of being subjected to criticism locally and nationally and just wants to be left alone with her family.

2) She actually thinks this is the best way to launch a more ambitious political career, whether it involves running for Senate in 2010 or President in 2012 or 2016.

3) The iceberg cometh.

I'll admit I'm not particularly a fan of Palin, which I'm sure will come as a huge shock. But in any case, I'd like to believe it's 1). Her family has been exposed to a fair amount of scrutiny and criticism, and I can see that being very difficult for a mother to take. On the other hand, though, she hasn't exactly acted to shield them from it. Palin complains that there's a double standard; her kids are attacked and President Obama's are left alone. But there's a fundamental difference there: you don't see Obama putting Sasha and Malia up on stage and trying to turn them into national spokespeople for teen abstinence the way Palin has with Bristol, or holding up their birth as a sign of commitment to a pro-life agenda the way she has with Trig, or in any other way using them as political props the way she's done with her family. And let's not forget that back when she was first announced as the VP nominee and the media started reporting on Bristol's pregnancy, then-candidate Obama pointed out his own mother had given birth to him at age 18 and said the media should leave Palin's family alone - which she never acknowledged, let alone thanked him for. So as much as I'd like to, I really don't believe it. Her use of her children as political props points to a kind of ambition that flies in the face of that explanation.

Number two is more probable - Lord knows she's capable of ignoring good and sensible advice in the interest of pursuing what she sees as her own agenda. There are, I should point out, conflicting reports on this - apparently some sources say she's giving up on politics and others say she's described it as some kind of tactical move. But I cannot see how this benefits her in the future. There's something to be said for quitting while you're ahead, as Gov. Tim Pawlenty in Minnesota is said to be doing, and letting someone else take the fallout from your policies while you focus on a bigger election. But that's contingent upon finishing the term to which you were elected. There are some people apparently willing to go on record saying this move is brilliant, but they're Mary Matalin and Bill Kristol. Who are, not to put too fine a point on it, hackish morons vomiting forth the same line they've been shilling since they first met Palin and decided against logic and reason that she was the future of the GOP. Palin doesn't have a problem with the (increasingly small and isolated) GOP base, who are the only people who'll applaud this move. The rest of the country, the ones she needs to win over if she wants to have any hope whatsoever of climbing to higher office, will probably see her shock resignation as, well, quitting - and quitting in the middle of a rough time. And they'll want more of an explanation than she's apparently willing to give. So we'll call the political aspirations explanation possible, but momentously stupid.

That leaves number three, the iceberg. That's the term observers in Alaska have started to use to describe persistent rumors that an as-yet-undisclosed scandal is about to strike; one big enough to put all previous Palin scandals (and there are many) out to pasture; one big enough that she didn't want to be in office when it struck. It's possible that the accumulation of minor scandals was finally too much for her to bear, particularly with this week's further airing of dirty 08 campaign laundry, but that doesn't explain the timing. With so much attention focused on Palin, and so much unflattering material having already come to light, I can't imagine what this turboscandal would actually be. Given her stubbornness and ambition, a scandal that would cause her to preemptively quit would have to be something really staggering, like a previous career as an abortion doctor or something. Huge scandals are of course possible, but I'm really struggling to imagine a situation where someone like Palin would choose to run away from a fight before it had even started.

When I started writing this, I thought the iceberg was the most likely explanation, but thanks to my failure of imagination as to what form the iceberg could take, I'm honestly undecided. Matt Cooper provides a few other explanations, as does Marc Ambinder, and Chris Cillizza is convinced it's a step towards a 2012 run. I think the only thing that's really clear at this point is that Sarah Palin's political career is in much worse shape today than it was at this time yesterday.

And on that note, Happy Fourth of July!

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* I prefer to read her remarks than to listen to them. Also, the official transcript reads very slightly less like a teenager's LiveJournal entry, but it still closes with a remark she misattributes to General Douglas "Nuke the Chinese" MacArthur.

What is internet?

2009-07-03T17:43:00.003+01:00

I'm not dead. Really. My home internet has been out for nearly two weeks now, and while I'm promised that it will be fixed soon, the soon was "within six days" as of yesterday. So I'm a bit isolated, especially as St Andrews in the summer isn't exactly the social capital of the galaxy. Unless you're a golfer. Which, a few ill-fated lessons this spring aside, I am not.

But the isolation has me thinking about the ways we're integrated into networks at the personal level. Shortly after my internet went down, a very large news story apparently occurred. I was in my apartment with no internet and the television switched off - and yet the story reached me (via text message from a friend) within about an hour of it being initially reported. I don't suppose there's any way to actually prove this, but I'd guess that the news of Jackson's death was known by half the world within about six hours. Going further out on that already creaky limb, I'd suggest that more people knew about it more quickly than any other unanticipated* event since perhaps 9/11, and possibly, given the exponential growth in social networking and internet access since 2001, even farther back.

This wouldn't have struck me if I'd been living in a city. In a modern city, you pick up news by osmosis - by the radio broadcasts in taxis, by news crawls on downtown buildings, by the headlines visible at newsstands or in newspaper machines. You overhear conversations, and you are simply more connected. In a small town like St Andrews, on the other hand, it is entirely possible to pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist. It takes active effort to maintain your connection with the outside world, and sometimes even events nearby don't filter through - it took me a few days, for example, to learn that one of the fighter jets based at RAF Leuchars just up the road from here had crashed while on maneuvers... and, ironically, I discovered the news in the process of working on this post. I suppose some people like that kind of isolated life, particularly the kind of people who say things like "I don't watch the news, it's too depressing."

I'm not that kind of person.

Trying to maintain your connectivity can become an addiction, though. I read so much electoral analysis leading up to the presidential election last year (at least two or three hours a day) that for a few days afterwards, I fell into what kind only be described as a pathetic, wonkish form of post-partum depression: with no more news or analysis of the election forthcoming, it was basically the abrupt termination of my connection to a network - being forced to quit something cold turkey. Of course a lot of that depended on my personal investment in the outcome - I don't want to think about how long the depression would have lasted if McCain/Palin had won - so it can't entirely be ascribed to the loss of connection. But it's a (small) illustration of how powerful the interconnections we've built have become - and how profound those effects, writ large, can be.

* Probably the news of Obama's victory spread farther faster, but that was in large part because as an election, news organizations had already arranged to give the results wall-to-wall coverage.

The Twits, Revisited

2009-06-22T00:14:00.002+01:00

I suppose you could call it the anti-backlash backlash, or perhaps The Twitpire Strikes Back. As part of the ongoing Iranian revolution (or unrest, or whatever it ultimately turns into), various commentators have played up the role of Twitter both in organizing protests domestically and in advertising them to the wider world. The service, which I previously dismissed as a dumb gimmick (even as it gave us some highly entertaining political comedy), was suddenly being talked about as a guarantor of freedom, a mechanism for popular democracy and the Next Big Thing in communication. When it looked like scheduled Twitter maintenance might take the service offline at a critical moment, the State Department made a request for the operation to be rescheduled. So clearly, Twitter is having its moment.

But I still don't buy it. I'll grant that there is something new and important about the amount of locally-sourced information coming out of this revolution relative to other revolutions of recent memory, and that Twitter has played a part in that. But I wouldn't rate its significance particularly highly - I think from an internal organizational perspective, relatively old technologies like e-mail and cellphones (not to mention good old fashioned word of mouth) have been more important, while from the perspective of an external observer, what can be seen the transformation via YouTube and LiveLeak of any civilian with a camera phone or point-and-shoot into a source of photographic and video evidence of the insurgency is a much bigger development than Twitter.

The basic problem with Twitter as a source of information is that it's broad but not deep. In other words, while a great deal of information is being sent out via Tweets* from a huge number of people, each one by design can only contain a small amount of information. That makes it very difficult to include important details which would ease verification and lend all-important context. Meanwhile, the vast amount of Twittering going on makes it infinitely more difficult to strain out the good information from the incorrect, misleading stuff, of which there's an enormous amount, both from the misunderstandings and fog of war inevitable under such circumstances and thanks to intentional disinformation spread by regime loyalists. Not that more traditional sources of media are immune to that problem, of course, but with Twitter's inherent lack of context it's much easier for disinformation to blend in and dilute the blended picture that the aggregators and analysts are trying to create from the Twitstorm.

The point of Twitter, of course, is to be democratic; to permit anyone to contribute to a huge flow of data in tiny chunks. But I think it misses the forest for the trees: if every individual piece of data in a mosaic of millions of pieces is too concise to contain vital context, than the entire thing loses something vital as well. Yes, something important is happening in Iran, and Twitter is one of our sources of information on it. But let's not confuse the medium for the message - particularly when the medium has so many inherent flaws.

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* I still hate the language of Twitter, and will continue to as long as the service has any kind of relevance whatsoever.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

2009-06-20T01:39:00.004+01:00

Perhaps I spoke too soon with respect to Terminator 4. After seeing Michael Bay's latest contribution to the "giant robots fighting" genre, I'm not sure McG's little catastrophe was really all that bad.

Let me backtrack a bit. The original Transformers was a terrible, terrible movie - it was a jingoistic, stupid, sophomoric two-hour GM commercial. But despite all that it had, well, something. I won't waste one word defending it as a good movie in any respect, but it was so ridiculous and un-self-serious that it was sort of carried along on a wave of generic good feeling, particularly amongst people (like me) who both had the original Hasbro toys and watched the 80's animated series. I have very fond memories of watching the first film in a raucous DC theater on a steaming July day in 2007 and, with a large fraction of the audience, jumping up and applauding loudly when Optimus Prime made his first entrance a third of the way through. Without that novelty (or perhaps re-novelty) of resurrecting the transforming car/robots with modern CGI and a huge budget, the new film has to work a bit harder. Unfortunately, Michael Bay and his screenwriters, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (who also, mysteriously, simultaneously scripted the infinitely better Star Trek revival) seem to confuse "harder" with "longer," and the result is two and a half hours of pain.

I could write all day and all night and still not manage to enumerate the things that pissed me off about this movie, so I'll just touch on a few of the most trenchant. The important thing is that they all add up to a common theme: the fact that this movie is frustratingly, insultingly, arrogantly stupid. Not happy-go-lucky, explodey-stupid like its predecessor, but the kind of aggressive stupidity that invades the wrong country and brands anyone who points that out a worthless hippie traitor. The kind of stupid that lovingly, spectacularly wrecks priceless archaelogical treasures for a cheap thrill. A few examples:

- Its insulting sense of geography. At one point, the protagonists end up at the National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center in Reston, VA, not too far from Washington DC. Fine - except that when they resurrect an aged Transformer on display there, he crashes through a wall and runs outside... into the AMARC aircraft boneyard outside Davis-Monthan airbase in Arizona. Shortly thereafter, they're teleported to an archaelogical site in Egypt, near Cairo - from which they can see another archaelogical site in Jordan. It's strongly implied that the two sites are about 15 minutes' drive apart, which sort of ignores the existence of the Sinai Desert. And Israel. This is reinforced when the Bad Robots show up and the "locals" show up to help - two Black Hawks from the Jordanian Army, which are blown apart by the Bad Robots within about 15 seconds. Maybe it's nitpicking, but if I was under attack by robots (or anyone else, really) in that part of the world, I might consider calling in assistance from one of the world's most advanced, experienced and advanced militaries - the Israeli Defense Forces. But acknowledging that anyone else in any other part of the world might be useful for anything other than upping the Background Exoticism Quotient would get in the way of the Awesome Ooh-Rah Climax, where - having dispensed with their obnoxious civilian overseer (more on that in a moment), the US military gets to blow shit up real good, saving the world in the process.

- Its politics. The first movie was relatively apolitical; it featured a brief appearance by a caricature George W. Bush, whose only action was to request Ho-Hos while resting aboard Air Force One. Jon Voight played a vaguely Rumsfeldian Secretary of Defense with a much bigger role, but he was generically competent and didn't seem to espouse any particular point of view. He's also not present in the second installment, which is much more overt. The President is mentioned as wanting to pursue "diplomatic options" which might include surrendering to the vile Decepticons. He also sends a prevaricating, obnoxious civilian overseer to meddle with the good, honest shit-smashing that the all-American (except for one nameless Brit) special forces unit is trying to engage in. This nerdy, glasses-wearing civilian douchebag is eventually parachuted into some random part of Egypt by the special forces guys, which leaves the military to finally Act Decisively without any apparent civilian oversight, thereby saving the world. Oh, and the president whose cowardly liberal peacenikitude leads to much senseless slaughter? At one point, he's explicitly named. You've heard his name before. It's Obama.

- Its mindless prejudice. Two new Autobots (good robots) are introduced in this movie, taking the form of two nearly-identical Chevy subcompacts. That is, when they're not in their alternate forms, which are horrific African-American stereotypes. I mean, really, really horrific, enough to make Jar Jar Binks look like the ACLU's next mascot. They sound like a white person's impression of what black people sound like if their only exposure to African-American culture had been a few rounds of 50 Cent: Blood in the Sand. They both have half-golden buck-teeth. I couldn't make this shit up if I tried. It's only slightly better with respect to women - there's one female Transformer, who gets blown up halfway through her only line, and three female humans of any consequence, all of whom are defined by their relationships with our protagonist, Shia LaBeouf - his girlfriend Mikayla, his mother and a slutty blonde who tries to seduce him and turns out to be a Terminatrix, er, Decipticonette. Needless to say, none of these is exactly a breakthrough role. The one with the most screen time is Mikayla, played by the staggeringly vapid Megan Fox, has two roles: to pout and to bounce. She's good at the latter, at least. Oh, and to complement the stupidity of the entire premise, there's also a brief but pointed dash of anti-intellectualism, in the form of a cameo from the usually dependable Rainn Wilson as a useless, lecherous astronomy professor.

- The three separate scenes which involve humping. And the scene which involves a massive Transformer built from construction machines, and its pair of dangling wrecking balls. Yeah. If you ever wondered if Michael Bay had the sexual maturity of a 12 year old, you'd have been insulting the maturity and restraint of the 12 year old community.

Part of the problem is that movies like this are designed to bypass the higher thought centers of your brain and directly stimulate your lizard brain. Michael Bay, despite his ham-fistedness and general worthlessness as an artist and as a human being*, is generally pretty skilled at this magic act - I'm fairly sure that given a few weeks to let the Transformers 2 bile drain, I could go back and watch the first and still punch the air and yell inarticulately at the designated ass-kicking moments. But something about this entire enterprise is so lacking, so ponderous, so offensive that after about 20 minutes, my real brain snapped back on and wouldn't turn off again for the rest of the film. And that's all it took to reveal this godawful piece of shit for what it is.

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* My personal fantasy in the wake of this movie (as it was in the wake of Pearl Harbor, and Armageddon, and... well, pretty much all of his movies) is for Michael Bay to be permanently exiled from the United States and forced to live in one of the countries he clearly thinks of as just a backdrop to be exploded upon by Americans.

And then perhaps eaten by wolves. Robot wolves.

Politics is war. War is chess.

2009-06-19T00:51:00.002+01:00

I'm still mulling over the Gladwell piece, and some of the bigger ideas that he only touches on. More precisely, I'm trying to get my head around the idea that war is reducible to a simple set of rules, like any game. I'm not sure it's necessarily accurate, but it might be a helpful conceit.

One of the most famous (and widely repeated) ideas in the study of war is Clausewitz's maxim that it is "politics continued by other means." The implication is that when "conventional" political means to solve a problem are exhausted, the State (which was always assumed to be the political actor) uses its prerogative of violence to achieve its goals, either directly or indirectly.

I've been thinking about this a lot in the last couple of days while watching the Iranian elections. There's a pretty striking theme here, even as reports from inside the country are still pretty unclear and sometimes contradictory. First of all, it's staggeringly obvious that there was some kind of funny business with the vote, as Juan Cole pointed out. I'm not anything like an informed observer of Iranian politics or society, so I'm just going on what I've read on the intersphere, but the most likely scenario looks something like an Iranian repeat of what happened to Eduard Sheverdnadze in Georgia in 2003 - a too-late overreaction by elements of the government to falsify vote counts or otherwise overcome an unfavorable outcome. Put another way: I could have believed that Ahmadinejad had won the election. I maybe could have believed that he won the 50%+ that would have avoided a potentially hazardous recount election. But I can't believe he won two-thirds of the total vote. And judging from what I can see on the BBC, neither can a large number of Mousavi-supporting Iranians, who are stone-throwingly pissed now - and paying dearly for their anger.

Aside from the obvious moral issues - can we take it as read that I don't care much for President Beardy McNutjob or his brand of anti-semitic, xenophobic extremism, please? - there are some interesting issues of strategy at play. It's hard, of course, for even an informed, Farsi-speaking observer to get a clear sense of what exactly is going on through the censorship and cloud of unverifiable reporting via Twitter, YouTube and blogs - for a non-Farsi speaking, relatively uninformed person like me, it's like watching a chess game where you can only see the pawns. You can see that a game is being played and even get a sense of its outlines, without being able to see all the moves, predict its outcome or, when that outcome arrives, necessarily understand how it occurred. Of course, that is not necessarily any different from a military campaign - the story told in the contemporary news reports or even the history books might very well miss critical issues, hidden either by classification or simply by the fog of war.

But just as the blogs and Twitter feeds of Iranian students and protest videos smuggled through the regime's firewall and planted on YouTube and LiveLeak have opened the story of the Green Revolution to contemporary observers, the story of war has been opened with a wider audience through the DIY reporting of soldiers and noncombatants alike. The sudden proliferation of instantly-available information and commentary on violence and political crisis hasn't changed the essential nature of either, of course, and it has brought with it new dangers - we cannot, for example, assume that we can see the board better simply because more information is available - to use an analytical term, the information we see is "raw" and unfiltered, and might very well produce an emotional reaction in the viewer that prevents them from accurately assessing the real situation. It is their capability to shape public response during a crisis that gives these developments their power. Imagine, for example, if the pawns in our chess game bled when taken - it would be much more difficult to dispassionately watch, wouldn't it?

There are some advantages to seeing, as Gladwell clearly does, all forms of human oppositional behavior from board games through politics to war as part of the same spectrum, answerable to the same very basic framework of rules and guidelines. But we can't assume that because we've figured out the rules, we can simply produce a Unified Field Theory of Human Conflict. After all, look at chess: with only 64 squares and 16 pieces, with very specifically defined capabilities, and it's still more art than science. At least for human players.

So I don't know where the Iranian protests are going. No one, not even the best-informed observers, or the most central participants, do. All we can do is wait, watch, and hope for the best.

Forever Wars

2009-06-16T21:58:00.006+01:00

It's an oddity of graduate education that you do so much reading that you forget to read for fun. It's especially odd for me because a very large part of my life involves reading - if I'm not reading for classwork or long-term research projects, I'm going through my probably-too-extensive list of online reading material, trying to read and absorb everything of interest from the Beeb, the Guardian, CNN, the Washington Post and about twenty different blogs, which leaves me with a lot of information but a very real danger of information overload - too many facts, not enough time or space to process. And there's a very real sense in which it turns reading into a chore - you have to work to remind yourself that reading is a pleasure. The other effect is to limit your attention span - read enough five-graph news articles, blog postings and Wikipedia entries and your ability to maintain focus through a long-form piece of writing starts to suffer. And that absolutely has to be combated if you ever want to be able to seriously engage on intellectually challenging topics.

I haven't been particularly good about that - I read about one novel every six months, and when I do, it's always a revelation that I actually haven't lost the ability to sit down on the couch with a good novel and just plow through it. It helps, of course, to have a couch. And an apartment where one can sit undisturbed for a few hours.

Anyway, since I've got at least a bit of free time at the moment, I read a book I've been meaning to for quite some time: The Forever War. There are actually two books by that name; one a science fiction novel by Joe Haldeman, the other an account of the war on terror from NY Times reporter Dexter Filkins. I'd quite like to read the Filkins at some point (even if he shamelessly ripped the title off from Haldeman) but the one I actually read today was the sci-fi. It's the humanist's Starship Troopers, and much better-written - I've never been much of a Heinlein fan, really, both because his politics are often pretty appalling and because I frankly think he's not a very good writer. But Haldeman strikes just the right chord for me; he's cynical but cares about his characters, and he's interested in the nerdy "hard" side of sci-fi (physics, spacecraft, weapons) but not to the extent that it becomes a distraction from the story.

The main storyline is pretty simple: William Mandella, a bright but cynical physics grad student, is drafted by the UN in the early years of humanity's colonization of space to take the fight to a newly-discovered species of aliens called Taurans who are contesting humanity's moves into space. After some brutal training with his squad, they fly at relativistic velocity to a distant star, where they fight first against a fairly unprepared, under-equipped group of Taurans - then, thanks to the time dilation experienced during travel, return to Earth decades into the future and vastly changed. When they ship out again, the Taurans have had decades to prepare and are much more advanced. Faced with an Earth he no longer understands or has much connection to, Mandella re-enlists and ends up promoted to commanding officer, in charge of a company of soldiers born centuries after him and whose customs, language and way of life are completely incomprehensible to him.

Haldeman fought in Vietnam, and the book was widely seen as his attempt to render the alienation of that war in science-fictional terms. But it's relevant in some ways to our present situation as well - although Mandella and his soldiers are all draftees, the concept of an endless war (by the book's end, it's been going on for over 1100 years) against an inscrutable enemy which gradually encompasses and deeply affects all of human society strikes fairly close to home, and the idea of small forces being sent on endless rotations far from home sounds very much like an intergalactic version of the "Overseas Contingency Operations" which have rhetorically replaced the Global War on Terror. Even in the parts of the book where Mandella is home, the war has shaped the entire world: food shortages have led to all currency being replaced by a calorie-based economy and violence is rife. An extreme scenario compared to our current predicament, to be sure, but not out of the question in a world where the effects of war seem to never be far from the public eye.

I'm certainly thinking along those lines a lot lately, since I'm trying to put my head together to start my all-war-all-the-time PhD. I suppose the challenge for me is to keep focused on why it's important; that to have any hope to limit or end war people who don't think of war as sport must understand it as well as those who do. And if that means that even my fictional breaks just take me from the real world of war to an allegorical one, well... I'll figure out how to take a real vacation one of these days.

Terminator Salvation

2009-06-03T22:39:00.003+01:00

I couldn't decide on a subtitle for this, so I'll let you choose:

A) Now I know why Christian Bale was so pissed.
B) In which low expectations don't help.
C) A Disjointed Series of Explosions.
D) McG, please go away (and grow a real name while you're there).

In case I haven't been frank enough: this is a bad movie. In fact, I'd hesitate to even call it a movie - McG, whose previous work was mostly in commercials (and let's not forget the Charlie's Angels films), doesn't seem to be able to hold together a coherent narrative for more than 30 seconds, so what we have instead is a series of short vignettes. Despite their failure to add up to anything coherent, they all pretty much follow the same pattern, which I'll repeat for you here:

1) Fade in on a desert. There are some humans wandering around in dirty overcoats.
2) Some self-serious words are exchanged.
3) Some Bad Robots arrive, killing some of the unimportant humans in the process.
4) The remaining humans produce heavy artillery. Gunfire is exchanged, and the audience goes temporarily deaf.
5) Fade to black.

That's pretty much it, over and over and over again. It's not that the technical side of things is bad, exactly - except for the parting shot of a flight of Hueys flying into the sunset that could have been rendered in Battlefield Vietnam, the special effects are good and there are some carefully considered details, like the toneless, terrifying sounds the larger robots make and the duct-tape-and-patches look of the Resistance's A-10 jets, it's pretty clear that a lot of thought went into what a post-apocalyptic war against machines would look and sound like. But those touches are disappointingly few and far between. Despite its enormous budget, I'd estimate that at least 75% of this movie takes place in various darkened tunnels and damp rooms; understandable, perhaps, given that we're in with a group of humans trying to avoid death at the hands of nearly omnipotent robots. But that necessitates two things: that the scenes outside the tunnels be really spectacular, and that interesting things happen in them. Neither is true here.

I can't really decide whether the writing or direction is more at fault. Certainly neither is good. The characters are basically mannequins, given nothing to do except scream "HOLD ON!" and "GET BACK!" and occasionally, once in a while, emotionlessly intone one of the franchise's well-known catchphrases. Meanwhile, the movie has the feel of something which was assembled from the parts of three or four other films - there's a good story somewhere in Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), the death-row inmante whose post-apocalyptic resurrection as an existentially confused cyborg drives what little narrative there is, but we never really get a sense for why we should care, partly because his dialogue is so choppy and awful, and partly because Worthington can't decide whether his character is American or Australian. This confusion means that his ultimate fate is delivered as a dull coda rather than an emotional climax, robbing the movie at a stroke of what could have been its most powerful image. Similarly, John Connor (Christian Bale) should, by all rights, be an interesting character: tormented as the man who saw the apocalypse coming but couldn't stop it and searching for solace and meaning in the cryptic tapes left behind by his mother (the extremely welcome, if all too brief, voice of Linda Hamilton, the original and best Sarah Connor). But all he does is shoot some things and get into shouting matches with Michael Ironside. Why?

That one word question just echoed through my head the entire film. Why? The franchise peaked with Terminator 2, which to my mind is probably the greatest action film ever made (the other serious contender being Aliens, which was also directed by James Cameron years before he decided to stick Leonardo DiCaprio on an ocean liner). Between the strong story, the effective writing, the solid (if unsubtle) acting, the still-impressive special effects and the uniformly excellent technical work, it adds up to a coherent narrative. Terminator 3 wasn't a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it made the best of its limited imagination, and at least told a story. This can't even manage that. It's just explosions and grunting. You'd be much better off spending two hours with a video game.

Gladwell talks insurgency

2009-05-31T23:58:00.002+01:00

Or, to use his title, describes how Davids beat Goliaths.

I actually mean to to post this about three weeks ago, when the article actually came out, but for some reason kept getting sidetracked. Mostly I've been distracted by studying for exams, but I've also been securing myself some new housing for the summer - I'm writing this from my new apartment, which is all the things my old place wasn't - centrally located, clean, appealing, quiet and occupied by people I don't actively loathe. In other words, I'm on the up and up.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I do like Malcolm Gladwell - I've read all three of his books and found them thought-provoking although sometimes a bit oversimplified (this is a good example of what I mean). But he has a good point here about the way we conceptualize war and fighting, and I think his choice of basketball as a metaphor is quite apt. Of course, Gladwell isn't a strategist or a military historian, and his point is broader than just war (or sports). He's talking about the whole concept of opposition, whether it takes place on the battlefield, the sports field or across a game board. I think his point falls into the category of "things so basic that we often forget them." And on that score, he's absolutely right.

Basically, Gladwell's point is that there are Rules, and there are rules. Capital-R Rules are the immutable aspects of oppositional scenarios: The rook can move the full length of the board but only in straight lines. Once you grab the ball, you have to either pass or shoot. An infantryman with a rifle can't bring down a fighter jet. Then there are rules, which are the more informal guidelines that have evolved over time into restrictions that almost everyone follows, whether for convenience or because of some kind of unspoken gentleman's agreement or some other permeable reason. This category includes things like the ceding of half the court in basketball game, or agreeing to abide by certain laws of armed conflict. What seems to separate those who successfully beat the odds is that by and large they seem to understand where the latter category can be ignored or altered to their advantage, without re-writing the immutable rules.

There are, of course, counterexamples: the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka broke every rule of war imaginable and pioneered the use of suicide bombers, IEDs and insurgent naval and air tactics, but seem to have finally been defeated. Hizballah, on the other hand, took what by all rights should be one of the immutable rules - that insurgent groups can't stand and fight modern militaries in the open and win - and pretty much turned it on its head. So I would categorize the distinction as more of a guideline for thinking about succeeding in conflict than a hard and fast rule, but one worth considering nonetheless.

A note, also, on my schedule: I'll probably write a few more things this week, but next week I'll be travelling and may not post much or anything at all. After that, though, I've got the entire summer to write a 15,000 word thesis - in other words, I'll have plenty of time to write here.

Oh no, a roboswarm!

2009-05-19T16:22:00.004+01:00

Cutesy techno music and iPod-styling aside, this is a bit unsettling. Actually, it made me immediately think of the scene from Minority Report where DC police in 2054 send a squad of tiny, creepy spider-bots into an apartment block in an effort to locate Tom Cruise. As goofy as a lot of that movie was, that part seems frighteningly plausible, and probably much sooner than 2054.

There are, as far as I'm concerned, two somewhat contradictory ways of looking at the rapid development of robotic mobility and networking. The first is that it will be a boon to the military and (potentially) law enforcement: using machines like this to search potentially hostile buildings would far less dangerous both to their operators and to noncombatants inside. It also demonstrates a welcome creativity in military procurement: at a time when the military budget is the source of endless dispute and congressmen and contractors are talking up the virtues of huge, expensive, unproven conventional weapons, a $2.5 million program to develop little rolling wifi hotspots with autonomous navigation and cameras seems like an excellent investment, since it might offer huge dividends in both counterinsurgency and conventional urban warfare scenarios.

The second viewpoint is slightly less immediate but I think raises issues that need to be addressed now, while these technologies are still in their infancy. The first is privacy, which is obviously (and rightly) not a particular concern on the battlefield, but with increasingly militarized police forces this kind of technology can seep across the military/law enforcement divide fairly quickly, and a swarm of self-organizing, pocket-sized surveillance drones carry with them some very serious privacy implications. I wouldn't have an issue with devices like these being used, say, by a SWAT team during a hostage situation, but as they (inevitably) get smaller, stealthier and more mobile, the temptation to use them to circumvent traditional means of surveillance would be very strong. I don't mean to argue that new technology can't be used without compromising basic liberties, but it requires planning, forethought and reasoned debate. The deployment of nonlethal weapons by police and military forces is a good case in point: technologies that initially showed promise have lurched forward unevenly, hamstrung both by immature technology and a legal and administrative framework that can't quite seem to find the right way to monitor and regulate their use without discouraging further development. Similarly, simply handing this kind of surveillance technology over to law enforcement is begging for it to be abused, which will ultimately lead to regulatory overreaction which will stymie future development.

Looking farther into the future, though, we see that surveillance is just the beginning. As swarms of tiny robots become capable of more complex tasks and better coordination, their capabilities will increase exponentially. What is now basically a ruggedized, camera-toting Roomba may soon be capable of more than just surveillance - already, its larger cousins have been equipped with infantry weapons, and it's not too hard to imagine an enterprising infantry platoon rigging these robots up with C4 or claymores and turning them into the world's smallest kamikaze brigade. Official modifications might equip them with lethal or nonlethal ranged weapons, or electronic warfare capabilities. Increased capability will require increased swarm size, which will drive autonomy requirements up as well. In other words, while the current iteration of this technology is a relatively easy-to-manage squad of four robots rolling around and taking pictures, it's not that far from there to a platoon of 20 networked 'bots carrying a variety of surveillance and EW tools along with lethal and nonlethal weapons, which would need a fair amount of autonomy to be effective, as anyone who has tried to micromanage an army in a real time strategy game during a firefight can attest. And that's where it gets tricky - what degree of autonomy are we willing to grant to these things? How far are we going to let them go towards developing their own behavior and their own techniques for completing the missions we give them? As complicated as these questions are for individual war robots, they take on another layer of complexity when we're talking about a potentially huge swarm of interconnected machines whose behavioral might be far more unpredictable and uncontrollable.

As I said, I'm not a Luddite; I'm not going to argue that these technologies don't have very substantial benefits. But instead of dismissing this kind of concern as science fiction, we need to start talking seriously and soon about how we maintain our rights and our standards of legitimate warfare when we have swarms of machines at our command; otherwise, the technology will far outstrip the debate, to no one's advantage.

Midnight Thoughts from a Field in Scotland

2009-05-14T00:50:00.004+01:00

The last couple of days I've felt pretty gray - despite the fact that the weather's been alright, my classes are finished and I still have another week before my first exam. It's some combination of poor sleep, lack of things to do aside from studying and a general feeling of being done with St Andrews. I'd probably get more done if I had an office or some kind of space away from my room, but my only option is the library, which at this time of year is super-crowded and super-loud, neither of which is particularly conductive to studying. So, at least until exams are done, I've effectively become a hikikomori.*

I got so sick of my room/cell today that I just up and walked out the door at a few minutes past midnight, with no particular destination in mind. It was a calm, still, cool weeknight, and as I walked out towards the edge of town (not a particularly long haul from my apartment, sadly) I couldn't find a single sign of anyone else being awake. The streetlights around here thin out awfully quickly, and there's a whole lot of unlit farmland around, so it was very, very dark. Maybe someone else would have found it creepy, but one of the nice things about growing up in a small town in a rural state is that the idea of being very far from other human beings seems pretty normal. Even, in some ways, desirable. Which goes a little way towards explaining how I found myself standing in the middle of a field with a few distant streetlights and a purple glow in the sky from another village the only visible signs of humanity.

I'm a city person, really. I don't much care for St Andrews, as pretty as it is, in large part because there's very little to do here unless you're an undergrad surrounded by thousands of other undergrads or you have a family. Or, I suppose, if you're a dedicated golfer, or a student of sheep husbandry. But as none of those things, I've found it quite dull. I'm very much looking forward to my move to London, which has pretty much everything St Andrews doesn't; and when I think about where I'm probably going to end up in the long term, I've always thought the most likely place is Washington DC, which is not without its flaws, but strikes a nice balance between being a walkable, manageable-sized city and having enough going on to hold off boredom.

That all said, though, there's something magical about standing in the middle of a field and having the entire world to yourself. And I think it's something I'm going to miss when I move back to a city.

* I realize that's the collective term, but I can't seem to find the word for an individual in the group. Sean, want to help out?

Experiments in Responsibility

2009-05-10T23:56:00.002+01:00

I'm probably a bit late to be commenting on Fuck My Life, but there's an interesting aspect to it that I think deserves mention. If you're not familiar with the site, it's a compilation of short, user-submitted stories which begin with "Today," tell an embarrassing, humiliating or sad story in a couple of sentences, and end with "FML." It's oddly comforting - the volume of stories of accident and humiliation is enough to remind you that you're not the only person who's ever said something tactless or been clumsy or otherwise screwed up.

The interesting feature to me, though, is the ranking. Underneath each story is an option to basically judge the storyteller; every user has the option to choose "I agree, your life is fucked" or "You deserved it." The totals are displayed in the same line, so you can see at a glance what the general consensus for each story is.

What interests me about this function is the dynamics of blame. Take, for example, this one:

Today, I received my passport in the mail. They got my birthdate wrong. Then I picked up my birth certificate that I had sent in with the application. Turns out my parents have been celebrating my birthday on the wrong day for 16 years. FML

Unfortunate, no doubt. And not in any way the writer's fault, as the 239,000 people who voted "I agree, your life is fucked" would indicate. But as of this writing, nearly 12,000 people had clicked "you deserved it." Some of them are trolls, no doubt, but I don't believe that all of them are. Then, of course, there's the inverse:

Today, I forgot to do my French homework, but since it was an online worksheet, I told my teacher my internet wasn't working. I told her with an e-mail. FML

No part of that is NOT the writer's fault. Yet nearly 8000 people have agreed that it was beyond his/her control (compared to the 174000 who gave the other answer). This can't really be explained by trolling; given that trolls seek to mine humor from the discomfort or distress of others, it would be odd for them to be in the position of reassuring someone that they aren't responsible for something that they're, well, responsible for. This would be more like misplaced sympathy.

But the really interesting part is how few of these stories evenly divide opinion. While no case elicits absolutely unanimous support or opposition, I've seen very few that had anything close to a mixed result. I wonder whether that would be different if you prevented site users from seeing the results until they'd voted. My guess is it would, although my evidence is entirely anecdotal: I'm remembering a team-building exercise I did a while back in which we were told a silly story about two lovers divided by a river, the boatman who offers to take the woman across in exchange for sex, and a couple of other participants whose roles I've since forgotten. We were then told to individually rank their behavior from most to least ethical and compare notes. After we'd done so we discovered that our rankings, which I'd thought would be fairly consistent, were all over the place None of had us wanted to get into an argument about who was more or less at fault, but since we didn't have a chance to reach a consensus before laying out our cases, we realized that we'd all interpreted the (fairly bare-bones) story differently.

Then we were told the rest of the story, where it turned out that the sketchy-seeming boatman was in fact the woman's husband, and he just wanted one last night with her before she ran across to her cheating boyfriend across the river. That pretty much threw all of us for a loop. And it does make me wonder where on the true/exaggerated/bullshit spectrum the bulk of the stuff on FML (and the similar Texts From Last Night page) lies. There's no way to police the FMLs for honesty, of course, but I do wonder how much the results of the voting would change if the authors were allowed more than three sentences to tell their stories...

Star Trek

2009-05-10T01:15:00.007+01:00

Here are seven words I never thought I'd be typing: The new Star Trek film kicks ass.

And, while I'm at it, here are a few more in the same vein: JJ Abrams has returned to my good graces. I hated his take on Mission: Impossible (not that John Woo's was that much better, but still), am more or less ambivalent about Lost, and after seeing the first episode of Fringe decided that it would take an act of God to make me watch any more. But now he's un-blacklisted. Star Trek somehow manages to balance the mostly-competing imperatives of being exciting, summery entertainment and being faithful to its source material. It's actually one of the best blockbusters I've seen in a long time.

Let's back up a bit here. I will confess that I like a lot of things about Star Trek, but I'm far from a Trekkie. I also can't think of anything Trek-related that's come out since about 1997 that was anything better than mediocre. For every thought-provoking episode or plot point, there were half a dozen spots where the writers wrote themselves out of a corner by re-routing plasma or antimatter through some conduit and making cheesy special effects just fix everything. For every moment of real emotion, there were dozens of ham-fisted non sequiters. For those of us who were willing to suspend disbelief enough to enjoy a good space opera but not enough to accept simply anything on screen, it could be a pretty rough ride. The two TV series that followed The Next Generation had promising premises and a few good episodes, but were let down by limited budgets and acting that was, well, uneven. And let's not even talk about Enterprise, with its ooh-rah sensibility and attempts to replace diplomacy and thoughtfulness with third-rate asskicking.

A lot of these problems could be traced to the difficulties in making a science-fiction TV series. But the more recent crop of Trek movies haven't fared much better. Generations was boring and hackneyed. First Contact was a decent action movie marred by the bizarre decision to give the leaderless Borg collective a leader, and the other two were simply awful. It felt like the series, which in a lot of ways defined popular science fiction, was dying a drawn-out and undignified death. The attempt - some might say desperate attempt - to revitalize it by putting Abrams in the captain's chair, bringing on the guys who wrote Transformers to script it and hiring a bunch of handsome young actors (with mostly TV experience) to take a crack at the main roles could have gone seriously wrong very easily, and indeed I think a lot of the overwhelming critical praise for the film is simple relief that it didn't. But why not?

As with any good film, a lot of this movie's quality is technical. This is a gorgeous, gorgeous movie: from the panning shots across Kirk's home of Iowa (somewhat transformed by distant, mile-high towers and gigantic starship construction facilities) to Spock's Vulcan homeworld, with its deserts and upside-down skyscrapers to the scenes in space which pit the shiny hot-rod Enterprise against the enemy Romulan ship, an enormous tower of spines and evil black metal. Unlike any other Trek product I can think of, the little details felt real, from the radio chatter to the industrial design of the ship's engineering spaces to the sight of Starfleet cadets in their goofy red uniforms sprawled out on the lawn in between classes. It's not that other Star Trek films haven't had the money, exactly - the most recent, Nemesis, had a budget of $60m, but none of them really knew how to use it, and as a result never really felt like the universe-straddling adventures they were supposed to be. This does.

There are, of course, a few little quirks. For example, a major part of the plot centers on the destructive properties of "red matter," which is capable of creating black holes, but while a droplet of it is apparently enough to swallow an entire supernova, a ball the size of a St Bernard apparently creates a much smaller and less destructive vortex. Not sure why. But mostly the film blasts past such logical flaws with such force and style that they're hardly noticeable. Not that Trek's record on fealty to relativity and thermodynamics is unblemished, of course, but in any case I'm willing to accept a bit of pseudoscientific gloss in the service of an approachable and likeable story. And, of course, it's come out at the beginning of the summer movie season, which also goes a long way towards immunizing it against the Physics Police.

More important, though, are the film's human qualities. I'm not going to claim that any of the performances are Oscar-worthy, but the acting on display here is light-years ahead of the Trek standard - although some credit too should go to the screenwriters, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who scrap a lot of the famous Trek technobabble in favor of lines that sound like they were written both by and for human beings, while throwing in a few of the classic lines in ways that don't feel too forced. Chris Pine's Kirk is a charismatic prick, but then again, the character was never supposed to be anything else. His father dies heroically during his birth (the movie's opening scene), which along with a brief scene of tweenaged Kirk destroying his stepfather's vintage Corvette, gives us some clue to his rebelliousness, but he's not a deeply conflicted character. Emotional conflict isn't a particularly strong feature for most of the characters, but they are all ably played, with special credit going to Zoë Saldana as Uhura, who sets out in a radically different direction from her predecessor and doesn't miss a beat, Karl Urban's hilariously grizzled, alcoholic, space-phobic Dr. Leonard McCoy and Simon Pegg's late-arriving but enjoyably breezy Scotty. Eric Bana also makes the most of his limited time on screen as the Romulan miner driven to madness and genocide by interstellar disaster, but he's not in the film for long enough to really drive it.

Fortunately, Zachary Quinto's Spock, the half-human, half-Vulcan prodigy who loses his logical cool, along with his mother and nearly his entire species when the villains destroy his homeworld, provides much of the emotional core of the movie - particularly when he comes face to face with his future self, played - of course - by Leonard Nimoy. Yes, the movie features time travel, which is an overused conceit in the Trek-verse, but it's handled with aplomb here. It also gives the screenwriters a neat excuse to sidestep the potential controversies inherent in revisiting the pasts of the well-known original characters: here, time travel creates an alternate, parallel timeline, meaning that the events in this Trek are not meant to coincide with the previously-established reality. In other words, having signalled their acceptance of the previous storylines, Abrams and company are free to do whatever the hell they like, which, given the box office so far, will very likely be at least one sequel.

As much as I generally dislike the proliferation of Hollywood sequels, that would be one that I would wholeheartedly endorse. Any way I look at this movie, as sci-fi fan, critic or general audiencegoer, I find plenty to like, and plenty of future potential. It would be easy to simply close the door on the Trek universe, declare that it had run its course, and move on. But we shouldn't. For all its flaws, Star Trek is one of the two most recognizable brands in science fiction, and the more human and humane of the two. It's a huge relief to see that a bunch of talented people were willing to work hard and well to prevent it from just slipping away into the night.

Milestone Day

2009-05-05T21:16:00.005+01:00

Tomorrow it will be exactly four months since I returned to St Andrews after Christmas break. That is, if I remember correctly, the same length of time I was in Russia in 2000, which until now was the longest time I've been continuously away from home since I was seven - and I hardly remember that, so it doesn't really count. It seems like as good a time as any to take stock (and, as you've by now surely noticed, play with the format of the blog a bit - I was getting quite tired of the old look).

It has to be said first of all that I'm not wild about St Andrews. I'm certainly enjoying my time here more than I enjoyed Hampshire, but that's not saying very much - and one year vs. four isn't a fair comparison in any case. And there's the fact that at 25, I'm definitely more comfortable in my own skin than I was at 18. There have been a lot of good things about my time here - primarily the many good folks I've met, the traveling I've done, the things I've read, studied, and learned and last but not least, fact that without it, I wouldn't have gotten into LSE. So it hasn't been anything close to a waste.

But at the same time, there have been some pretty major disappointments. First, I made the same mistake that I did when I went to Hampshire, which was thinking that an isolated institution in a small town would keep me occupied and busy. At 18 that was a forgiveable mistake; this time I really should have known better: I'm a city person (or at the very least, a suburb-near-a-city person). It's a pretty town, no doubt, but the charm wears off pretty fast. I think as an undergraduate there's a decent social life that's more or less closed off to the postgrads - especially us transient, one-year MLitt kids. Second, while I'm not sure this was necessarily a mistake since I probably couldn't have known better, my living situation has been not only disastrous but expensively disastrous. There's also the overarching problem that I've felt like I've been operating at about 25% capacity while I've been here.

I'm not sure how else to describe it. Partly it's the feeling of being in a bubble, separated from real life. Partly it's the fact that we have so little time actually scheduled per week. Partly it's low (or lowish) expectations - two classes per semester with ~5000 words per class isn't a particularly high workload for Master's students, all things considered, and the prospect of a 15,000 word thesis written over three months with nothing else to do in the meantime isn't exactly terrifying either. The grading is tough at the very high end (I'm not going to get a distinction) but smoothes out very quickly below that, to the point where it's not particularly hard to do reasonably well. Generally speaking, I work better when I have more on my plate - when I've got less, it's unfortunately quite easy for me to slide into complacency and do mediocre work, and this place hasn't really motivated me.

As with Hampshire, I feel like a lot (though by no means all) of the things I've learned here have been what you might call negative reinforcement: I'm not a regional studies person. The small town life isn't for me, at least not at this stage in my life. I need more going on to feel like I'm being as productive as I'm capable of. I'm guilty of excessive grass-is-greenerism. Et cetera, et cetera.

I think - hope - that I'm being more realistic as I move into my second grad school adventure. Certainly I have a few concerns: whether living in London as a PhD student will be an alienating experience; whether I'll be able to motivate myself sufficiently to get the head start I need to on my work; whether I'll like the people at LSE or living in London. Certainly I think I've got a more realistic appraisal this time around; hopefully that will be enough. But I won't find out for another four months.

Wait, Really?

2009-05-02T11:53:00.003+01:00

No, seriously... really?

Aside from the fact that the guy doesn't, um, look or sound like someone who would be particularly effective as a crimefighter - even with his pepper spray and handcuffs - there's another problem with trying to be a real life superhero. In comic books and their movie adaptations, the heroes are always simply coming across crimes in progress to be stopped with a few punches and a quip or two. For reasons of maintaining dramatic integrity, you can't show the hero wandering around for weeks on end without coming across anything more serious than someone not cleaning up after their dog. But that's exactly what would happen, even if you stuck to the sketchiest neighborhoods - and I can't imagine a nasally-voiced kid in a mask doing that for too long. I think the cop's look in the first clip really says it all: he can't quite believe what he's seeing, but he's amused by it rather than annoyed. That's supported by the local reporting, which seems to indicate that he's got a fair amount of support - although the sourcing is a bit vague.

On further thought, I wonder if Shadow Hare (fair enough, I suppose most of the good superhero names have already been taken - by comic book writers) or any of the other costumed vigilantes he works with have seen The Dark Knight. I assume they have - and I wonder if they realize that they're basically the Batman imitators from the beginning of the movie. There's a great exchange between one of them and Batman after they try to break up a drug deal, forcing the actual superhero to come in and do it right:

Batman imitator: We're just trying to help. What's the difference between us and you?
Batman: I'm not wearing hockey pads.

Oh Lord, he has a Myspace, too. No comment from me - I'm going to stop piling on here, since he's sort of an easy target, and his heart seems to be in the right place. There are serious issues with vigilantism, but I don't think this qualifies as serious vigilantism - the Minutemen are probably a better example of that phenomenon. My guess is most of these people will discover after some weeks or months that endless, fruitless foot patrols without any kind of compensation will get harder and harder to maintain, and eventually give up. But we'll see.

State of Play

2009-04-29T00:15:00.006+01:00

I'm probably not the right person to fairly review State of Play. Let's list all the things that biased me in its favor before I plunked myself down in the theater:

1) It's a political thriller. I love thrillers, and I love politics. The combination of the two will often blind me to a movie's other flaws.

2) It has Helen Mirren in a major supporting role. If I was King of Hollywood, Helen Mirren is one of the performers I would cast in every movie in production.

3) It's set in Washington, DC. Despite its flaws, I do love my adopted home town and any movie which shows more of it than the stock aerial views of the Capitol and the Pentagon gives me a warm feeling inside.

4) I came across exterior filming for the film on 18th St NW one cold night in March 2008, less than a block away from the building I worked in my first summer in DC.

5) It has Russell Crowe as a doughy, workaholic reporter. I like it when macho gunbattle-film actors are mature enough to play the kind of 90s-Ford-Taurus-shaped people who inhabit the real world.

6) This one doesn't really count, as I didn't realize it until I actually saw the film, but it has a pivotal scene set at the skeezy Hotel Americana in Crystal City, about 500 feet from my old apartment.

7) It has Rachel McAdams, who somehow manages to be both cute as a button and hot.

8) Jason Bateman plays a drugged-out, bondage-club-going PR agent. No joke.

9) The script was partly written by Tony Gilroy, who wrote some of my favorite action thrillers - the Bourne movies.

10) It was adapted from a BBC TV series, and that worked out pretty well for The Office. (Okay, that's a crappy reason, but I was one short of 10.)

Now weigh that against the one thing I can think of off the top of my head which biased me against it to begin with:

1) It has Ben Affleck.

Just based on those lists, I'd expected it to be a good-to-excellent movie. Having seen it, I'd put it towards the lower end of that spectrum, but it's good enough to recommend seeing, at least via DVD rental. Being a political thriller, I can't go into too much detail on the plot without ruining the whole thing, but the basic premise is pretty clear from the trailers. Russell Crowe is the aforementioned potato-shaped reporter for the fictional Washington Globe, who was the college roommate of Congressman Ben Affleck (side note: even with some strategic grey flecks in Affleck's hair, I can't believe the two of them as the same age). Affleck is investigating a Blackwater/Xe standin called... actually, I've already forgotten, so I'm just going to call it Blackwater, since that's clearly what they were talking about. He's also screwing his research assistant, who very early on is helped to her end at the business end of an Orange Line train at the Rosslyn Metro stop (of all the bad places to shuffle off this mortal coil). There are also a couple of unrelated homicides in Georgetown, and Russell Crowe and his young blogger partner (McAdams) start to unravel the wider conspiracy that connects them.

Fairly straightforward, then. But there's also some commentary about the decline of the newspaper business, played out mostly between Crowe's old-school reporter, McAdams' wet-behind-the-ears blogger and Helen Mirren's arch editor. That message is well taken, and timely to boot. But where the film starts to come apart is with the Blackwater conspiracy. When your central conspiracy idea has been previously played out by everything from other films to Metal Gear Solid 4 to the pilot episode for the new Knight Rider, for chrissakes, perhaps you should choose a different path. There's nothing deeply wrong with the plot or how it unfolds, although some elements feel more fleshed out than others - the idea of private military companies as Perhaps Not The Most Upstanding Individuals Ever is just a bit trite at this point.

The other technical elements of the film are more consistent. Russell Crowe does surly very well, and I appreciate that, like George Clooney in Syriana, he's really willing to lose the muscle-man physique for the sake of really inhabiting the character of a slovenly man whose only focus in life is his career. Rachel McAdams strikes a nice balance with Crowe, although her character doesn't have many settings between "shocked," "determined" and "perky." Mirren is just fantastic, especially when she curtly shuts McAdams up by saying, "Don't give me those dewey cub reporter eyes, it makes me nauseous." Jason Bateman is always a pleasure to watch, perhaps here more than I've seen before as he's very much playing against type. And amazingly enough, Ben Affleck isn't terrible. That's about the highest praise I can offer him, as he has a couple moments of voice-cracking, red-faced overacting that made me want to hide on the floor amongst the discarded popcorn and unidentifiable stains. But other than that, this is a pretty solidly-acted film. The cinematography gives a real sense of the city, which many films set in DC but primarily filmed in LA or Vancouver really don't, and the editing and score have the good sense to stay the hell out of the way. There were a couple of oddities apparent to a former Washington resident - the DC Metro police car that shows up in Arlington, and the attempt to pass off the Department of Housing and Urban Development's very distinctive headquarters as a hospital - but nothing that detracted from the overall feel of the movie.

There were a few fairly major breaches of journalistic ethics, as detailed by the Washington Post journalist who served as technical advisor for the film. Again, as someone who worked on the periphery of journalism in various capacities, they're noticeable but they don't deeply disrupt the suspension of disbelief. But they do add up to something.

Which is in some respects more than can be said for the film itself. Between the film's identity crisis over whether it's about the death spiral of American newspapers or the insidious danger of private military companies - and the various shootings and bits of stock film from Iraq and Afghanistan that punctuate the story - it never really gels into something the size of the sum of its parts. The parts are nearly all good, but it's not dramatic enough for a pure thriller or sharp enough to be seen as a pure political film. As much as I like the idea of the movie and loved certain aspects of it, it's much like the first newspaper article on a story: it's got the outline, but not quite a narrative.

On Torture

2009-04-27T19:19:00.003+01:00

Updated: May 6. Minor edits and cleanup.

I meant to post this last week, before the swine flu thing started to overshadow the torture debate, but paper-writing intervened. But whether pandemic or panic, we can't just abandon the debate about torture, as it's simply too important.

It's a fairly appalling sign that we're even having this national conversation right now. The first appalling part is that we're even arguing over what torture is. When government memos written by high-ranking members of the executive branch clearly spell out permission to use techniques favored by the Khmer Rouge, or scenarios reminiscent of the final torture applied to Winston Smith in 1984, we're not talking about "enhanced interrogation" or "taking the gloves off." We're talking about torture. When torture defenders talk about their conception of "real torture," they usually mention fingernail-pulling or the use of power tools. In other words, they're talking about the absurd definition that Jay Bybee and John Yoo dreamed up: torture is only torture if it causes lasting physical disfigurement. In other words, torture is only torture if the sole intention is the infliction of maximum physical pain, which is the equivalent of defining murder as solely killings carefully planned and carried out accordingly. It's reductionist nonsense. As frustrating as it is that this is even a debate, it's not even that, until we agree that the question is simply whether our torturing terrorist suspects is morally justifiable.

As various people have pointed out, this breaks down into two questions: 1) Is torture effective? and 2) is torture moral? The problem with that dichotomy is that it supports a false narrative: that if we can enhance the effectiveness of torture and/or decrease its immorality, we can cross the barrier which prevents us from seeing it as effective enough to justify its immorality. This narrative is supported by the "ticking-bomb scenario," reinforced by popular culture icons like 24 which regularly hand us situations where the good guys have a bad guy in question, torture him, and get the location of the bomb just in time to defuse it. Never mind that there is no known case of anything like this scenario ever actually occurring, and for good reason: it would rely on our intelligence services a) having the correct person in custody, b) knowing that there was an imminent attack of some kind, c) knowing that the prisoner would have information which would permit the attack to be stopped and d) knowing what coercion exactly would cause the prisoner to give the information in time, and yet NOT knowing anything more about the attack itself. And even if all those (mutually highly unlikely) conditions were met, it's very hard to imagine why a prisoner who knew that he only had to hold out for 24 hours (or whatever) wouldn't just unleash a torrent of false information and false positives, which would tie up the resources that could be used to track down the actual attack - not to mention destroying his own credibility if he suddenly had a change of heart and decided to give up the correct information.

The ticking-time-bomb myth is used to force torture opponents to answer a question whose "right answer" is inconvenient for them: "Would you permit torture of a known terrorist if it would save x American lives?" This is pretty easy to unpack, rhetorically and argumentatively. If the torture opponent says yes, they're really on the side of the torturers but just too weak-stomached to accept What Needs To Be Done To Guard Freedom. If they say no, they're unwilling to defend Americans and therefore on the side of the terrorists. It seems like a win-win. But the situation that question presupposes is a story, a fantasy. In high school debate, we came up with scenarios exactly like that to argue the virtues of the theory of moral utilitarianism - would a doctor be morally permitted to harvest organs from one healthy patient to save six lives, for example. As simplistic demonstrations of the difficulties of applying moral theory to human behavior, they have their uses. As an actual basis for an argument about a serious question of national policy, they have no place whatsoever.

Outside of the "ticking-time-bomb" scenario, why are we arguing about whether torture is effective? It's simply not. As Andrew Sullivan pointed out, even the Luftwaffe, during WWII, realized that torture was a tool for obtaining false confessions, not actionable intelligence. "Matthew Alexander," a former USAF interrogator who helped catch Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, says the same thing here. The defense of torture as necessary and effective seems to be a very weak one to me: the people making the case who would be in a position to know are the ones who would be facing very awkward questions (and a distant but growing possibility of prosecution) if it were shown to be ineffective or not national-security critical. Abu Zubaydah seems to have given up most of his useful intelligence before he was waterboarded 83 times. Christopher Hitchens allowed himself to be waterboarded once, under extremely controlled circumstances, and declared it torture - 83 times over the course of months can't be anything short of unimaginably destructive psychologically. And let's not forget that the United States was on the winning side in both the largest war in history and the greatest ideological clash of the 20th century, facing in both cases much greater existential threats than we do from any terrorist group, and we prevailed without recourse to torture or full-scale retreat from our moral obligations.

That said, while I do think that the officials who planned and excused torture need to be brought up on charges for their roles, I do basically agree with President Obama's decision to lay off any CIA officials who, acting under the legal advice provided by the Bush Administration, carried out the actual torture (although it's not really his call to make). If I were in his position, I would - very quietly - reassign anyone who'd carried out those acts to desk jobs at Langley, or give them large severance packages, or otherwise ensure that they never saw fieldwork again, but I'd rather see a prosecutionless Truth and Reconciliation-type outcome than a repeat of Abu Ghraib, with a few low-ranking people charged and the truly responsible escaping.

But there's another level to the torture issue, and that is morality. There are, I should say, some moral issues that I can understand both sides of even as I endorse only one. Abortion, for example - I believe entirely in a woman's right to choose, but I don't begrudge anyone their opposition to abortion for moral reasons. To some extent, that also applies to the death penalty; I'm opposed under all circumstances but wouldn't try to convince a murder victim's family not to ask a court for the highest sentence.

Torture is not in that category. Partly, it's the overwhelming evidence that torture is ineffective at best and utterly counterproductive at worst, but to a much greater extent it's the issue of what it says about us. Let's not get confused here: this debate is not about The Terrorists, or whether we should give them one spoonful of sugar or two. I didn't mourn when we killed Zarqawi or Saddam's sons, and I spend quite a lot of time hoping that Osama bin Laden doesn't live out his natural life in the safety and comfort of his cave. There are plenty of Americans who did or would make any sacrifice for their country precisely because of what our opposition to torture says about us.

The "liberals only care about the rights of terrorists" line is just another distraction from the real issue, which is what torture says about us. We don't give terrorist suspects rights because they're swell people and/or expressing our deeply seated hatred for the United States. We give them rights because we're better than they are. We give them rights because "innocent until proven guilty" is part of what makes us a civilized society. We give them rights because it means that when they don't do the same for us, we can make the case to the great vast rest of humanity that we have the moral high ground... and be right about it. We give them rights because when we identify ourselves as American, it should damn well mean that we stand for something more than doing whatever seems most expedient at the time.

But of course it wasn't most expedient. The people who argue that our torture kept us safe have a very interesting definition of safe. Since 9/11, it's true, there has not been an attack on the homeland of the United States. But thousands of Americans have died overseas, fighting - amongst others - people radicalized by the revelations of Abu Ghraib and the black sites. Terrorists have struck in Bali, Madrid, London and elsewhere, and those we know of who planned terrorist attacks on the US homeland seem to mostly have been foiled by their own incompetence rather than the sweat of a torturer's brow. We took a moment of spectacular international unity and support after 9/11 and turned the world against us for years with nothing more than some flexcuffs, some water and some ingenious cruelty.

I wonder sometimes why torture defenders aren't confronted with a simple counter-argument to the ticking time bomb scenario. If, instead of torture, the most expedient way to get the vital information from a captive was to offer them amnesty and maybe the keys to a shiny new Cadillac, would they? I'm guessing most torture defenders would balk at this idea (which, by the way, I'm not by any stretch of the imagination endorsing). Even if it were proven to be a more effective method of attack prevention than waterboarding or "fear scenarios," I don't think most torture defenders would be comfortable with the bribery approach. They might very well be right not to be. But in doing so, they'd also give the lie to their manly determination to do "whatever it takes" to defend the United States. Why else, in these scenarios, is torture always the only answer, the only possible way to extract information?

It's because at its heart, torture isn't really about information. The SS and the KGB understood that, which is why they mostly used it to extract false confessions or to break the spirit of dissidents - most notably symbolized by the final fate of Orwell's Winston Smith. We never really got revenge for 9/11 - the people who green-lit the operation are still very much at large, so anger is understandable. But using that anger to justify the sacrifice of our morality is not, even if we cloak it in the language of intelligence-gathering. We are smart and good and confident enough to keep ourselves safe without compromising our basic moral code and lowering ourselves - wittingly or not - to the level of the villains who struck us. We are certainly good enough not to use a tactic which is about punishment, and control, and inspiring fear, but not about keeping us safe.

The Cabinet vs. The Congress

2009-04-23T02:33:00.005+01:00

So here are three clips (all thanks to the video geniuses of Talking Points Memo TV) of Obama's cabinet members being placed in pretty stark contrast with Republican members of Congress. The first, which is kind of painful to watch, is Energy Secretary Chu answering Rep. Joe Barton's (R-TX) question about "how the oil got to Alaska." Chu is, let's not forget, a Nobel Laureate in Physics, and probably one of the smartest people ever to serve in the federal government. Barton, with his elementary-school level (no joke) question, actually thought that he stumped Chu. And he announced his "victory" via Twitter, which really says all that needs to be said about that. Seriously, Texas, you're a great state and all, but if you can't send smarter people to Congress, we might have to take Rick Perry up on his offer and let you secede...

The second is short and sweet: Secretary of State Clinton telling Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) that she doesn't view Dick Cheney as a reliable source. Rohrabacher doesn't like that answer.

The third, though, might be the best of all: Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) trying to muster up some literary outrage over President Obama's handshake with Hugo Chavez by quoting Natan Sharansky. Secretary Clinton, in just-slightly-not-measured tones, proceeds to take Pence out to the woodshed. It's brilliant.

I wouldn't have said this a year ago, but... Go Hillary! I did say when her selection as Secretary of State was announced, that I wouldn't have picked her. And it's very nice to be able to say that so far, it looks like I was very wrong.

Update: Not Cabinet-related, but you should also watch these two clips. Shep Smith is a Fox anchor, and Judy Miller was Scooter Libby's BFF and leading New York Times war cheerleader, so normally I doubt I'd agree with them. But they're just stellar here, talking about torture. Smith in particular uses, ah, blunt language to get right to the heart of the matter: It's not about them, it's about us. And we do not torture. I'll probably post something longer about this debate in a few days, but at the moment I have another paper to finish...

Bad times in Dubai

2009-04-15T01:33:00.003+01:00

When I started here, seven months ago, I wasn't sure what I was going to do with myself after I finished. I was fairly sure I didn't want to move straight back to the US, having come to all the trouble to move overseas and all, but aside from that I wasn't sure. Further school was an option, but I thought it was entirely possible that I'd be sick of school after a year and want to go back to the working world. I thought that maybe, in the interest of changing scenery and seeing a part of the world that I was studying, I might go live in the Gulf for a bit. We went to a jobs fair early on with some British speakers working in the Gulf; one seemed very pleased with it and the other was ambivalent, but not enough that it completely tamped down my desire to give it a shot.

Now? Not so much. I've read some things from Johann Hari before that felt a bit exaggerated to me, but what he's written about Dubai echoes what I've read from Misha Glenny and heard from a few other people. Aside from the fact that I have a plan for the next few years and it involves simply going to London, I don't think I could in good conscience live in a place built on the backs of an effectively enslaved class of foreign workers. And based on the conversations that Glenny and Hari report with expats, I doubt I'd much care for the company, either.

That said, I still think I'd like to visit. Partly because I kind of have to see the Burj Dubai and the Burj al-Arab with my own eyes, and partly because I'm curious as to what it's like to see perhaps the single most visible sign of the boom-and-bust cycle of the international economy in the world. And there's an interesting social point - what happens now, with hundreds of thousands of under- or unemployed foreign laborers with no passports, no money to get home? If Dubai's rulers have any sense, they'll step in and send those folks home - I doubt many of them want to stick around, and the longer they do the more likely they are to take some kind of direct action. I wouldn't call Dubai a failed state, at all, but for those of us interested in the specific ways governments fail and how nonstate groups step in to replace them, I think it bears close watching.

I suppose it's only fair to include the rebuttal as well, but I don't buy it. Yes, Britain has social problems, but despite the writer's best efforts (and backhanded attempts to maintain the moral high ground) the two aren't remotely comparable. In order to find anything that compares to importing millions of foreign laborers and treating them as slaves, he has to go back sixty or seventy years to the heyday of the British Empire. And, most importantly, it doesn't specifically deny any of the criticisms of Dubai - it just responds with the equivalent of, "Oh yeah? Well you suck too," which only serves to impugn the writer and strengthen his opponent's arguments.

Righteous Beat-Down

2009-04-09T12:00:00.004+01:00

A few months ago, St Andrews got a new principal (roughly equivalent to the president of the school at a US institution), Louise Richardson. She came to us from Harvard and is an expert on terrorism, so she already had my attention, although I have to confess I haven't read her book. Yet. I did see her give a talk here prior to her installation, which was very impressive, and I was also impressed with her nonchalantly dismissive response to the sexism of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of Scotland, which extended membership to the two previous (male) principals but not to her. But now I'm really, really impressed with her.

There's a posh, men-only fraternity-type thing at St Andrews called the Kate Kennedy Club. I mostly ignored them, on the theory that they were probably just harmless cranks who liked to parade around and do whatever they do in their darkened headquarters. But our intrepid principal had a different opinion, and just sent out the following e-mail:

---

Dear Members of the St Andrews community

I understand that the Kate Kennedy procession is a wonderful day in St Andrews and I hope it may continue to flourish as an important traditional event in our local calendar of activities.

The University will not, however, be participating officially in the procession this year nor continuing its recognition of the Kate Kennedy Club.

As Principal, I do not believe that a university can endorse a student club – even a club like the KK which is renowned for its charitable activities - from which so many of our students are excluded at birth.

The official endorsement of any club or society which excludes people because of their gender or race would be completely at odds with the values of this University and our commitment to foster an open and inclusive international community of scholars and students in St Andrews.

I look forward to the day when membership of the Kate Kennedy Club is open to every student of St Andrews at which point the university will be delighted to treat the Kate Kennedy Club in the same way as all other clubs and societies.

Louise Richardson
Principal and Vice-Chancellor

---

I don't know if there were discussions with the KK's beforehand or anything, but either way, despite the polite, measured language, I don't think there's any other word for it than "smackdown." Especially coming from a brand-new school administrator. The principal's position seems to be the best possible combination of acknowledging that people have the right to organize themselves in private how they see fit and also decisively refusing to tie the school's prestige to a sexist, exclusionary group.

So good for you, Madame Principal, and I'd say you're off to an excellent start.

Various Random Things I Learned In Holland

2009-04-07T21:13:00.005+01:00

In no particular order:

1) The Dutch really, really do love their bicycles.
1b) They do not, however, necessarily obey traffic laws on bikes any more than Brits or Americans.

2) Hot food purchased from a machine is always, always disgusting.

3) The amazing thing about the Dutch and language isn't that they all speak English, which they do. It's that they all speak perfect idiomatic English, to the point where I initially thought a number of them were Americans.
3b) I am totally jealous of the Dutch and their ridiculous and apparently nationwide gift for linguistics.

4) Dutch itself, sadly, is not a particularly pretty-sounding language. Although I will grant that if you think German is a pretty language, you will probably think Dutch is beautiful.
4b) Judgments of language are entirely subjective.
4c) Every American I've talked to about Amsterdam agrees with point 4.

5) While I'm all in favor of legalized prostitution, the inevitable side effect - pimply 18 year old boys wandering around with fanny packs full of condoms and a leering attitude towards women - is a bit depressing.

6) The Amsterdam metro in 2009 = the New York City subway in 1989. Complete with graffiti.
6b) Ride the Amsterdam metro far enough and you will end up in the world's largest - from an architectural point of view - most terrifying-looking housing projects. Ride it one stop further and you will end up in bucolic countryside, complete with canals, horse farms and a sign in front of your hotel saying "Amsterdam - 8 km."

7) It is not possible to get into the Anne Frank House without waiting in line until approximately the end of time.

8) Schiphol Airport is, with the possible exception of Helsinki-Vantaa, the nicest airport I've ever been to.

9) As an American, it is easier to cross the border into the Netherlands than to cross the border into the United States.

10) The Dutch put art everywhere. In public squares, on train cars, in the middle of the street, wherever. It's an excellent use of public funds, as far as I'm concerned.

11) We paid €10 to see an exhibit of modern artists' take on religion at the Nieuwkerk (New Church). The exhibit included an 8-hour, grainy black and white video of a woman dancing naked with a bag on her head, a box with some fat in its corner, and a large potted plant. The church, which you could actually see a bit of once you'd wandered through the gallery, was spectacular. The lesson is that on one or two very specific things, such as "how to represent religion in art," the 16th century was ahead of us.

12) More cities need canals.

13) Also trams.

14) Apple pie and coffee are totally delicious together. Even for a non-coffee-drinker.

15) If you go away at least every two months or so, St Andrews doesn't seem like such a bad place to come back to.

UPDATE: Remembered another one:

16) When people say that it's an open society, what they mean is that you will end up taking a shower in a room with no doors and nothing between the tub and the street except for a slightly tilty window.

The Bowler Hats of Defiance

2009-04-01T13:46:00.003+01:00

If you're like me and have a love-hate relationship with your computer, where you can't work without it but find the Internet a frighteningly efficient distraction machine, this might help. It's a little program (Mac only at the moment) which disables your internet access for a user-specified amount of time and refuses to reactive it unless you restart your computer. I've tried turning off wi-fi and unplugging ethernet cables, but both are simple enough to reverse that they don't really make much difference. Freedom, on the other hand, serves to put enough of a block between you and Facebook that you have no choice but to work. I'm going to be trying it in the next few weeks as various deadlines approach; hopefully it'll help roll back my frightening inability to focus when in front of an open link to the Internet.

Also, this NY Times article about the G20 summit and associated protests has a great line: "Those working in the financial district were told to dress casually or work from home, but some decided to wear bowler hats and pinstriped suits in a gesture of defiance." If that's not the first time bowler hats have symbolized defiance, I'd really like to know about it.

I'm also particularly interested in things happening in London as it looks like I'm going to be there in the fall. I've been accepted into the London School of Economics and Political Science to do a PhD in International Relations. As you might imagine, it's a pretty exciting opportunity, for lots of reasons. My assigned supervisor is Christopher Coker, the head of the IR department, who has written various books on the future of war and grand strategy, which are seriously interesting and exactly relevant to my interests. I'm excited about the prospect of living in London, one of the most diverse and exciting cities in the world. I'm happy that I don't have to go back to the job market during one of the worst recessions in modern history. And, because I'm a nerd, I can't help but make the comparison between the libraries at Hampshire, St Andrews and... LSE.

Bit of an improvement, don't you think?

Also, LSE at one point had students representing more countries than the UN, which is the most badass statistic I've seen all month. So when I move to London, I may have to change the name of this blog.

Wait, this actually fools people?

2009-03-31T11:24:00.004+01:00

Look, I know people want to believe what they read and all, but this is just ridiculous. A couple of days before April Fool's, and you expect people to believe that you've built a flying hotel based on some not-especially-good-CGI and a Twitter page? And people actually believed this?

Leaving aside the fact that any new (or extensively modified) aircraft would have had to go through extensive and very public FAA certification, and that there would have been a huge paper trail along with news articles, photos, video and other evidence of, you know, actual existence - this would be a really, really bad idea. Aside from the questionable safety record of a 40 year old Soviet helicopter (which in actuality looks, shall we say, somewhat less glamorous), there's also the problem with noise. Helicopters are loud. Dual-bladed helicopters are louder. An enormous dual-bladed helicopter built for pure lift capacity rather than comfort would probably sound like the Apocalypse, or at least the mosh pit at a Slayer concert, which would clash somewhat with the "luxury" image. There's also the immense cost of running such a thing, which would probably force the operator to charge tens of thousands of dollars per passenger per flight. And, as a number of bloggers pointed out, the pictures of the interior were lifted directly from the website of Yotel, a company which runs small hotels inside airports in Europe. So I'm going to go out on a limb and assert that the chance that the hotelicopter is real is... zero.

So I guess I'm wondering what the point of the exercise is. If it's a hoax, it's not an especially good one, although someone clearly went to quite a lot of trouble to put it together. Is it some kind of commentary on how easily people are fooled? Some statement about excess and materialism? Or just someone's computer animation project, packaged in unusual form?

Update: Sandy points out - probably accurately - that it's likely to be a stealth advertisement for Yotel. Which would be pretty brilliant - you put out an obvious hoax, publicize it enough to get some attention, and then let the inevitable attack of the Internet Detectives direct loads of traffic to your site. If that's the truth, then well done, Yotel.

Finales, or What's Wrong With a Little Ambiguity?

2009-03-26T01:20:00.001Z

A story, as we all know, is a series of dramatic events that starts with a fictional supposition and builds logically to a conclusion. Having tried my hand at writing stories at various points in my life, I know how hard it is to take that incredibly simple idea and turn it into reality. It's hard enough to write a high-quality short story; I can't imagine the level of attention and care that must go into creating a story told over the course of the better part of a decade - let alone one that has to hew to a thousand different restrictions large and small, from budgetary limitations to broadcast standards. So I understand that, as complex as telling a good story is, telling a good one on television is exponentially more difficult. So when I criticize TV writers for being lazy, which I'm about to do, I don't mean that they haven't worked hard; I'm referring instead to something like a lapse of judgment. Also, for reasons that are about to become entirely clear, spoilers ahead.

So, even though there was less press about it than about the end of Tony Soprano's reign over HBO, you may have heard that the new Battlestar Galactica came to an end last weekend. I've followed BSG pretty religiously for most of its run, starting one evening in January 2005 when I came across a repeat of the initial 2003 miniseries on TV and watched for long enough to get hooked without knowing what it was I was watching. Ironically, if the broadcaster had identified it, I probably would have switched off the TV; the original late-70s series was a monument to campiness, and I probably wouldn't have given the new one a chance based just on that pedigree. But a few minutes with the darker, less spangly, more (relatively) realistic new version made a convert out of me. Ron Moore and his team of writers and designers made a series of good choices for the universe they chose to set their show in. They eschewed most of the trappings of sci-fi: their characters dressed in modern garb, talked on telephones with cords, fired bullets out of their rifles and had to rely on recognizably modern trauma surgery when they were injured. It's what you might call minimalist science fiction: invent the parts of the universe that you need for narrative purposes - in this case, mostly Faster Than Light travel and sentient robots - and simply adapt the rest from reality.

The fictional setting also allowed them to pose interesting moral questions that might not have been acceptable in other genres - during one of the series' finest (and darkest) moments, the human survivors of a holocaust at the hands of their rebellious robotic creations, the Cylons, have settled on a cloudy, miserable rock called New Caprica. The Cylons find them, thanks to the failings of the brilliant but amoral new human president, Gaius Baltar (a spectacular, bug-eyed James Callis), and place the planet under military occupation, with Baltar as their Quisling. With their protective fleet AWOL, the human forces on the surface resort to insurgent tactics which eventually include a suicide bombing. The suicide bomber in question is a minor but agreeable character, a former fighter pilot who goes by the callsign Duck, and he's sent to his end by the cantankerous-but-oddly-sympathetic Col. Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan, looking and sounding frighteningly like a certain ex-POW Senator from Arizona). After the explosion, which kills dozens, President Baltar visits his predecessor and nemesis, Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell), who's being held in connection with the bombing, and demands that she look him in the eye and tell him that she approves of suicide bombing. She can't, quite, giving Baltar a rare moral victory. It's an amazing scene - well written, brilliantly acted, and framed perfectly in the context of the story. And, perhaps more importantly, it would never have happened in a story set in the real world. Can you imagine a network executive at NBC or CBS or any network at all greenlighting a show that depicts real-world suicide bombers as anything other than crazed, irrational killers? I can't. The only other time I can think of where I've seen suicide bombers portrayed as human beings was in Paradise Now, which didn't exactly get a wide US theatrical release.*

I could go on about my favorite scenes, themes and elements of Battlestar - Lord knows the show has many devoted fans, including in the political science and military communities, who appreciated its willingness to mostly hew to realistic standards of military and political conduct and discourse, especially compared to shows like Star Trek.** But I think my favorite part of the show was its willingness to embrace ambiguity. The Cylons were never simply a bogeyman or a plot device; even in the first season, when they came closest to playing that role, the show spent quite a lot of time with Sharon "Boomer" Valerii (Grace Park), a Cylon posing as a junior pilot aboard the one remaining human warship (the eponymous Galactica), who was struggling with the question of what she was, right up until the moment she shot the human military leader, Commander Adama (Edward James Olmos), in the chest. In later seasons the show spent some time with the Cylons and gave us a look at their culture, their religion (monotheistic, vs. the polytheistic humans) and some of their internal struggles. While the scenes set amongst the Cylons were a bit uneven (partly due to the major problem of depicting the internal workings of an advanced robotic race on a weekly TV budget), they demonstrated that the show's writers had broader ambitions than just making a kickass show about space dogfights and stirring speeches. They wanted to actually tell a story that didn't ask simple questions or give simple answers - or, much of the time, any answers at all.

And that's why I thought the season finale was so utterly, utterly disappointing. The show always walked a delicate line between the political and the spiritual. For my money, I thought the political stories were always much stronger, such as in the final season's high point, a two-episode coup which had been quietly brewing for some time. In the first two seasons, the spiritual element was doled out in acceptably small quantities, and made a certain sense given the space-operatic setting of the entire show. But starting in the third season, themes of destiny and fate started to crowd out the simpler issues of life on the run in space. The more those themes took precedence, the more we found the characters spouting weighty, portentous lines and furrowing their brows to indicate How Very Serious All This Stuff Is. But it was unnecessary, redundant (given that the show starts with nuclear holocaust, it doesn't need to play for seriousness points) and often not integrated particularly well, particularly with hotshot pilot/Special Destiny Girl Kara "Starbuck" Thrace (Katee Sackhoff), who started as a fantastic character and jumped lightyears over the shark after dying and being reborn.*** I always liked the show's ambitiousness, but it seemed that when it came to the big spiritual questions, the writers had bitten off more than they could chew.

Nowhere was that truer than in the finale. First, we told in unambiguous terms that Starbuck was, in fact, an angel, but her last line is something like "My journey here is done" - more appropriate for a soft-focus Touched by an Angel guest spot than for a character whose definining characteristics included promiscuity, a fondness for booze and smokes, and a Rambo-sized body count. We're also shown, again unambiguously, that the immaterial visions of Baltar and Cylon #6 that appear to each other in one of the show's most unconventional but effective plot devices are in fact angels, sent to guide humanity to its real home - Earth 2, our Earth, 150,000 years ago. The final piece of the puzzle leading them to Earth (2) turned out to be the awful, twangy cover of All Along the Watchtower, which I can't help but feel that Ron Moore decided to include one evening after taking a monster bong rip with his Best of Dylan CD on in the background. What would have been wrong with subtlety, or chance? Why not leave the mechanisms by which the story reaches its conclusion a little more shrouded in mystery?

There were a lot of other problems with the finale - Why did Baltar's groupies, who we'd spent so much time with, just disappear? How is it that there are primitive humans on this planet who are genetically compatible with the people of the Fleet? Why were so many people willing to go on a suicide mission to rescue one little girl? - but the biggest one by far was the desperate desire to tie up the overambitious questions into as small and neat a bow as possible. It was the question of what the apparitions of Baltar and Six were which made it interesting to watch them; declaring them to be angels beyond a shadow of a doubt not only weakens the finale, but makes it hard to take the earlier episodes seriously in retrospect. Nothing about the nature of good storytelling demands that every question be answered, or every theme given its own moment in the sun. I respect the writers of Battlestar for having the courage to address - but like so many movie and TV writers before, they can't quite stand to leave them unanswered. But their ambition got the better of them, and they wrote themselves into a place where they had no choice but to answer the questions - and, to be fair, no answer was ever going to be satisfying.

I think the writers could have learned a lot from Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock came up with the term MacGuffin - a device, important to the characters, which drives the plot forward but whose exact nature is irrelevant (and therefore unrevealed) to the audience. The mystery suitcase in Ronin is the most literal example I can think of offhand, but the term can also be applied to concepts rather than physical objects. Just as revealing the suitcase to contain drugs, or a nuclear weapon, or anything else would have weakened the suspense of Ronin, coming to abrupt and pat conclusions about the nature of the forces at work in the BSG universe drains it of interest and reduces it from food for thought to eye candy. If writers were more willing to see their Big Questions as unanswerable MacGuffins, maybe that would be a rarer occurrence.

We can only hope.

---

* It should go without saying that I don't think suicide bombers are getting a bad rap, or that they're just misunderstood gentle souls, or anything stupid like that. But as with the Nazis, pretending that they're anything other than human doesn't do us any good at all; it just makes them cardboard boogeymen - at least until one of them kills more of us, since we haven't taken the time to understand their motivations and consequently how to stop them.

** Don't get me wrong. I like Star Trek. But the crew rarely, if ever, acted as though they were entrusted with billions of dollars worth of hardware and thousands of lives. I'll give one example (because I could do this all night): Can you imagine the captain, executive officer and air wing commander of an American aircraft carrier discovering some unexplained phenomenon on the shore and deciding to investigate it themselves, leaving a junior lieutenant in command and bringing no escort with them whatsoever? If they survived, they'd be court-martialed within a week. But the Star Trek team does it all the time. On BSG, they'd either send some nice expendable Marines or, if a senior officer went along, at least give him a big armed escort. And when they broke that rule, someone would be given some dialogue calling them on the violation of standard operating procedure that it was. End of rant.

*** Name me a show where a character has died and come back to life in a way that wasn't just a desperate, transparent ploy for ratings. Go on. I'm waiting.

A One Question Test of Americanness

2009-03-25T19:24:00.005Z

This occurred to me while walking to school and listening to my iPod in beautiful weather this afternoon:

Q: You are driving along and Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Freebird" comes on the radio. What do you do?

A) Change the radio station.
B) Turn the volume down.
C) Leave it alone and perhaps smile slightly and/or gently tap your fingers at various points during the song.
D) Turn the volume up to 11, accelerate, and steer with your knees to free up your hands to play air guitar as you sing "AAAAAAAAAND THIS BIRD YOU CANNOT CHAEAEAEAEAEANGE" loud enough for the guy three cars behind you to hear... and join in.

The correct answer is... well, obvious, isn't it?

Can we please have more reporting like this?

2009-03-18T14:37:00.003Z

A couple of notes in relation to my complaint about the Hollywoodized view of international relations the other day. Something I meant to include but didn't really get around to was the idea that we need dramas that are a little more adventurous in terms of making the audience see through the eyes of someone they don't necessarily automatically empathize with. That's a tall order - I know that as a film viewer I relate more easily to characters who speak like me or who I share cultural touchstones with - but it's necessary nonetheless. Obviously there are plenty of stories which can be told entirely from an American perspective - but once the setting moves abroad, refusing to broaden that only weakens the narrative, and the realism.

Outside of the film world, that means that we need more reporting like this, desperately. If I were running things I'd send Anthony Shadid around the country with a shiny medal and a large purse to recruit Arabic-speaking Americans to go into the Middle East and report stories the way he does: by listening, and by being willing to accept that the vast majority of the time, Westerners are at most supporting players in the story. But the stories we read and see day in and day out couldn't be farther from that ideal, and we're weaker and blinder for it.

The Twits

2009-03-18T14:13:00.004Z

Anyone who was lucky enough to have read Roald Dahl as a child* will recognize the title of this post as also belonging to one of his books about a distasteful and grotesque couple who are horrifically cruel to animals. Unfortunately for them, the animals happen to be sentient and capable of some devious and cruel revenge, which is doled out in satisfyingly Dahlesque fashion. It's not a soothing bedtime story, exactly, but it's the kind of creepy fun that certain kinds of kids, like me, adored.

I suppose Dahl is more popular in the UK than in the US, which might explain why the American founders of Twitter decided to go with that particular name. I can't really imagine anyone in either place familiar with the man's work giving them company a name with such unpleasant connotations. I suppose they focus-groupped the name and decided that it was evocative of the chirping of birds or something harmless, but I read it and immediately thought: vacuous, constant, make it stop.

Not that the service itself does the favor of defeating that gut reaction, either. It limits all "Tweets" to 140 characters - I assume the idea was to promote brief, regular updates, but the effect is to reduce complexity and iron out interest. Except in the rare case where a politician does something stupid via Twitter, I haven't found much about Twitter that I can think of in a positive light. I realize there's a counter-argument: as newspaper space limitations force journalists to adapt and write extremely-information intensive prose, Twitter might force Tweeters (or whatever they're called) to improve their writing skills to meet the limitation. But I don't buy it. First of all, the reason newspaper journalists face those limitations is a very specific, very real one: the large amount of information to share vs. the very limited amount of space in your typical broadsheet page, a limitation still faced by most papers (except, of course, those that have gone all-digital). Second, newspaper reporters have a specific mandate: explain an event or theme to their readers in concise format. Twittererers don't have that; the ones who might have interesting feeds are much, much better served by their blogs than their Tweets, while everyone else seems to be just broadcasting their daily thoughts and activities 140 characters at a time.

Okay, fine. Not every Web service or trend has to appeal to everyone. I never got into the Xanga/Livejournal thing either; you'll notice that there's very little about my personal life on this blog, which is exactly the way I like it and intend to keep it. I don't particularly feel the need to get hourly updates on anyone's existence, but maybe there are others who need or enjoy that level of connectedness, and I won't begrudge them it. And perhaps my fairly boring daily existence wouldn't lend itself particularly well to Twitterization, since every day would look something like this:

9:31 am: Woke up groggy. Had some weird dream. Possibly fighting aliens; possibly strange convo w/ person I vaguely remember from middle school.
10:10 am: Breakfast. Cereal and toast. Exciting.
12:14 pm: Getting to work.
12:19 pm: HEY GUYS LOOK AT THIS COOL LINK I FOUND.
1:38 pm: No, really, getting to work now.
2:57 pm: Decided to play Spore instead of working. Built cartoonish replica of Empire State Building.
4:45 pm: Relocated to library. Can't focus; hate noisy undergraduates.
6:15 pm: Leaving library. Hatred for undergraduates transforming into all-consuming vengeful loathing.
10:38 pm: Read academic articles about Central Asia for twenty minutes without distracting self. Victory!

So maybe I'm just a cantankerous, boring, prematurely old crank. Fine.

But what I really object to is the fact that Twitter is being sold as some kind of alternative to, well, everything else on the web. That's utterly ridiculous. As Farhad Manjoo points out, why the hell would I want to get my news from a bunch of random people when I have immediate access to the website of every journalistic organization worth anything in the entire world? As much as I like being up to date and being as or more informed about developing events than the next person, I also realize that the world isn't going to end if I have to wait an hour to get the same information from the AP or the BBC. And not only is it being promoted as a transformational tool, but other organizations have started to copy it, too: the incredibly controversial new Facebook setup is clearly a Twitter ripoff (a Twittoff?). I tried to post a link this morning on Facebook and discovered that there was a new limit of 160 characters on link comments, which is seriously limiting. I know my writing can be a bit long-winded and self-indulgent (I do have a blog, after all), but that's just ridiculous. And during Barack Obama's inauguration, Facebook teamed up with CNN to show a live-feed of global Facebook status updates. Those watching the feed were treated to a bombardment of "OMG THIS IS SO AMAZING" messages which gave that staggering moment something of the feel of Total Request Live. I know it's important, thank you, I can see the gigantic, multi-ethnic crowd of tear-stained faces - do we really need constant, unregulated commentary to reinforce the message?

Look, I'm a big believer in transformational technology and the power of open-sourcing - my whole idea for a doctoral thesis is based on the ability of technology to enable new forms of organization which will fundamentally change the face of warfare and organized crime. And I think that in certain, limited, formats, Twitter could be an interesting tool - for example, it was used in conjunction with other new tech to keep track of the IDF's strikes in Gaza during the recent war. But its uses are severely limited by its own built-in limitations, and trying to sell those limitations as the dawn of some new age of communication is not only ridiculous but counterproductive.

I take a fair amount of pride in being a well-read, literate person (not that I am, but we'll go with my self-delusion for argument's sake here), and I've noticed over the last few years that my attention span has decreased in fairly strong proportion to the amount of time I spend frenetically browsing the internet. It takes me weeks to finish a book, because I'm so used to reading short-form articles that after five or ten pages, I hit the limit of my attention span and either go to sleep or wander off to do something else. And that's a huge problem. The reason we have books, after all, is that most arguments and ideas can't be expressed in 140 characters. No one is seriously arguing that Twitter makes books obsolete - yet - but I don't think you can separate either from the basic questions of how we as a society communicate and interact. Arbitrary limits on the complexity of what we read and write will become de facto parts of our information processing, and we'll rapidly lose our ability to slow down and deeply understand complex issues when we're forced to. The more we attempt to substitute "right now" for "right," the more the name Twitter will justify my initial gut reaction.

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* If you didn't read Roald Dahl as a child, turn off your computer and go to the nearest bookshop. Or fire up Amazon. Either way, you can start with his two part autobiography describing his experiences in British public school and as an RAF pilot during WWII (Boy and Going Solo, respectively), before moving on to some of his writing for adults, which is as brilliant as it is twisted. I don't think he was entirely right in the head - nearly being killed in a fiery plane crash will do that to you - but he was an utterly brilliant writer.

Cavalry Endings

2009-03-14T19:57:00.006Z

So thanks to my meagre graduate student lifestyle, I've found myself watching quite a lot of movies lately. I wish I could say that I'm taking the opportunity to acquaint myself with the great French New Wave filmmakers, or going through the entire catalog of Kurosawa movies, but I'm not. It's mostly big Hollywood junk. In the last few weeks, I've seen some surprisingly good movies, some decently smart ones, and some others that... weren't. Watching a lot of movies over a short period is a good way to realize how limited Hollywood really is - the same narrative techniques get used over and over and you start to realize their limitations very quickly. Especially when it comes to the way movies end when the screenwriters dig their heroes into a hole and have to extricate them in such a way that the movie only lasts 120 minutes.

You probably know the kind of ending I'm talking about. The good guys are pinned down, surrounded, outnumbered and outgunned by the evil horde. All hope seems lost; noble last words are exchanged... and then at the last minute, an army of good guys rides over the hill, trumpets blaring, and beats the everloving hell out of the bad guys, who flee in terror or are wiped from the face of the earth. The cavalry ending. It's a fairly common conceit in everything from Westerns - Stagecoach, which probably has the archtypical cavalry (false) ending - to fantasy movies - the Lord of the Rings films feature three or four each - to Bond films - although the last Bond film with such an ending was 1997's forgettable Tomorrow Never Dies, so maybe they've given up on them.

I'm going to go ahead and admit that I'm a sucker for those moments, but mostly in movies made with enough care that you actually feel some empathy for the characters. That should, after all, be the point of storytelling - to create an emotional bond between the audience and the story, to the extent that when something happens to the characters, you feel it. It has to happen organically. It's incredibly easy for a screenwriter to put the protagonists in a situation where they face mortal danger and then rescue them from it at the last moment, but endless repetition of this situation has drained it of its emotional immediacy. How many bombs have you seen disarmed with less than five seconds left on the convenient red-number countdown timer? How many heroes saved by an ally's intervention just as the baddie's finger tightens on his trigger? Yawn. Likewise, the sheer joy of realizing that your favorite characters' imminent doom has been indefinitely postponed so you can watch their would-be executioners get wiped off the planet is sort of limited by the realization that you've seen this happen so many times before that you didn't really expect the good guys to die anyway.

This kind of repetition can't help but work its way into our perception of reality, and it leads to two thought problems. The first is simple. You'd think, as a regular moviegoer, that the cavalry is always over the next hill, ready to swoop in to the rescue as soon as things start looking ugly. It's not. History's full of disasters and massacres that not only weren't stopped by the timely intervention of a powerful and well-intentioned force, but never even made it to the sort of international recognition accorded to the Holocaust or the Rwandan Genocide. I'm talking about the dead in the "Democratic" Republic of Congo (5.4 million over a decade, according to some estimates) or those killed in a hundred brushfire wars and "small-scale" conflicts where the world simply didn't care enough to do more than write angry notes - if they even cared enough to do that. Even on a smaller scale, how often do we hear about rampage shooters being stopped before they fire their killing shots, or terrorists interdicted before they can set off their bombs? It happens, sure - but more often than not, the cavalry just doesn't make it in time. That scenario doesn't make it into too many films.

The other problem is more fundamental. Simply put, the idea of a guns-blazing rescue just isn't the solution most of the time. That's not to say that applied force can't ever solve problems: for example, I tend to believe, per Romeo Dallaire, that a bigger, better-equipped and more aggressive UN force in Rwanda could have stopped the genocide and likely limited the death toll to thousands rather than letting it spiral to nearly a million. But thanks in part to the limitations of the medium and in part to the conventions that have built up in filmmaking, we're led to believe that all problems have a villain at their heart, and that the measured application of a weapon (be it magical sword, 7.62mm NATO round or laser, depending on the setting) to said's villain cranium will sort the problem out now and forever. Prisoners are freed, refugees escape to safety, flowers blossom, and all is well, thanks to a little bit of awesome violence. I wish it were enough just to dismiss that kind of thinking as obviously unrealistic, but given how often our decisions seem to have hewn to that line of thought, I don't think it's the case.

Take, for example, the Iraq War. In terms of international law or traditional IR theory, it makes no sense whatsoever. The justifications given in the leadup were so convoluted and self-serving that they don't merit rebuttal - especially given that the last few years have proven almost all of them to be empty. But Saddam was, helpfully, a classic villain archetype - the power-hungry, tyrannical madman. He had the moustache, he had the cult of personality, he even had a personal mad scientist who worked on superweapons for him. If ever there were a case where we could sell a war as the full-scale equivalent to a movie's cavalry ending, it was Iraq. Dictator abuses civilians, good guys swoop in, kick his ass and make it right. All it needed was a few more one-liners and a credits sequence possibly set to "Beautiful Day" by U2.

Didn't really work out like that, did it?

The obvious counterargument is that movies, especially of the type that have cavalry endings, are mindless entertainment, or simple escapism or something of the like. And no, I'm not arguing that people are consciously making their voting or foreign-policymaking decisions based on action movies. But movies are much more powerful than we - or even, I'd argue, most filmmakers - really give them credit for. They give us a framework for visualizing and understanding the world that's much more emotionally powerful than any article in Foreign Affairs.

Sometimes, that framework is so far into the realm of fiction that it's not worth getting upset over - I can't, for example, gin up much outrage over Transformers, despite jingoism and commercialism so thickly layered it'd embarrass Leni Riefenstahl, because it's a movie about good alien robots that transform into General Motors products and evil ones which transform into - booo - Ford products. But I've recently watched a couple of more reality-based movies about US intervention in Africa: one fictional (the excerable Tears of the Sun) and one fact-based (the possibly-even-worse Black Hawk Down*). They both operate under the assumption that the problem in Africa ills is simply that sunglasses-wearing Bad Africans are oppressing Good Africans, and the solution is for heavily armed Americans to descend upon the continent, shoot the Bad Africans in the head and then wearily receive the thanks of the Good Africans, which are usually expressed in the form of generic chanting. Without denying that the US (including the military) can do enormous good in Africa, that view of things is simplistic, inaccurate and, more importantly, ignores the fact that perhaps the Africans would like a say in who gets shot in the head and who gets to do a charming little dance for Bruce Willis?

I suppose what my argument boils down to is this: If you're a screenwriter, and you're going for the fairly easy emotional jolt of a cavalry ending, make sure the rest of your script stands up first. And, if the movie is in any way realistic, if people might under any circumstances be tempted to conflate it with real-world events... please spare a moment and try to think of it as something other than escapism before you send it in and cash your check.

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* I'd actually seen this one before - I reviewed it for my high school newspaper when it came out in theaters, just after 9/11. I gave it an F, not for technical reasons (it's a Ridley Scott film, after all) but because it shows the Battle of Mogadishu entirely out of context - there's no mention, for example, of the botched US air raid days beforehand which killed 73 civilians, which might explain why the Somalis were so angry at the US; instead, they're just an angry black mob. This was not a popular point of view at the time, given that not only had the US just been attacked by Islamic terrorists, but my post-industrial, lily-white hometown was also in the process of receiving 2,000 Somali immigrants. Oh, and the Ranger who was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu was from the next town over. So I got hate mail. But going back and watching it again... I was right. It's an appalling movie.

Who Watches the Watchmen? I did, but you shouldn't.

2009-03-09T01:01:00.006Z

(Spoilers ahead.)

Alan Moore is said to have described his seminal graphic novel Watchmen as unfilmable. After watching the brand-new film version, I'm inclined to agree.

I suppose it would be fitting to describe Zack Snyder's labor of love as "ambitious." And, speaking as someone who's read just the first of twelve volumes of the original work, it does seem loyal to its source. But as a movie, it's a wretched, pretentious failure whose stylized visuals attempt to mask a disturbing penchant for extreme violence and adolescent nihilism.

It's probably worth describing the setup of the movie at least briefly. Set in an alternate 1985 where Richard Nixon is still president, the movie follows a group of "costumed adventurers" who are effectively superheroes, although only one (Dr. Manhattan, a frequently naked blue muscleman with the voice of Billy Crudup) has what might be called real superpowers, thanks to the kind of nuclear accident that in real life has somewhat less amazing consequences. The first group of adventurers were active around the 1940s, and the second took over sometime in the 1960s before being banned by an act of Congress in 1977. As the movie begins, we see how their exploits have altered history - the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, looking quite a lot like Robert Downey Jr. after gorging himself on pasta and steroids) assassinates JFK, then Woodward and Bernstein; Dr. Manhattan uses his ability to become huge and make people explode at will to win the Vietnam War for Nixon.* Once the credit sequence is over, the Comedian is assassinated by an unseen opponent and Rorschach, the one remaining active adventurer and a right-wing paranoid type with a shifting inkblot mask, becomes convinced that his assassination marks the beginning of a campaign against the costumed adventuring community. Meanwhile, Dr. Shinyblue McBucknaked has a fight with his ex-adventurer girlfriend, Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman) while being accused of giving former friends and associates cancer, and takes his big blue penis (which we're treated to various shots of - apparently being an ubermensch means not wearing pants) to Mars, giving those nasty Reds and President Corrupty McJowls the excuse to take the world to the brink of nuclear war.

If I sound a little bit flippant, it's because I can't quite take the whole thing as seriously as it wants to be taken. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that the acting is almost uniformly bad. Billy Crudup comes off the best, but his dialogue is so painful and he's saddled with so much CGI baggage that he can't make much headway against it. Jackie Earle Haley also makes a reasonable showing as Rorschacht, although dialogue which might have come across as enjoyably pulpy on the page comes across as straight ridiculous on the screen. The music isn't well-advised, either - while I like Jimi Hendrix's cover of All Along the Watchtower as much as the next man, it seems like Snyder just picked out a "Most Famous Songs of the 1960s and 70s" album and let it play over the whole movie, as Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin'" and Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" also make appearances. The pacing isn't bad at first, but by the time and hour and a half had passed I found myself drumming my fingers on my chair and wondering when something would happen that I actually cared about. A more serious problem is that the entire film is in slow motion - Zack Snyder apparently loved how it looked so much that he decided to run the whole thing at 60% speed, the better to admire each splatter of blood, dismembered corpse and arm snapped against itself.

And there are plenty of those to admire. As I've said before, I'm not a pacifist, and I don't object to the concept of violence in movies - provided that it serves a narrative purpose. The violence in Watchmen cannot make that claim. There is, for example, a scene in which two of the main adventurers, out of costume and on their way to dinner, are accosted by a group of toughs in an alleyway. Interspaced between shots of the televised interrogation of Dr. Manhattan (obvious Godfather references, anyone?), they beat the everloving hell out of the gangsters, snapping arms like pencils and sticking knives into necks as casually as you or I would fork an errant Chicken McNugget. This scene has three possible points:

1) To demonstrate that the film's New York is a tough and merciless place, which has already been endlessly established.
2) To demonstrate that the two heroes in question, Silk Spectre II and Batm... I mean, Nite Owl II, are still in prime ass-kicking shape. Which is also amply demonstrated elsewhere.
3) To show off how cool it is to snap a dude's neck.

I suppose you could also make a case for 4) It's in the original comic. But I wouldn't - the film is a very, very long 160 minutes already (although, granted, at regular speed it would probably only be about 90), and various things were excised or changed to make even that length, so there's no independent narrative reason to include it. The first two reasons can also be easily dismissed as redundant, which leaves us with the somewhat disturbing conclusion that the only reason it's in there is because Zack Snyder loves him some violence - and thinks that we do, too.

And, to a point, he's right. He's made two previous films - a remake of George Romero's zombie flick Dawn of the Dead and the proto-fascist 300. They were both violent and both commercial successes, so in terms of keeping the studio money managers happy, there's no reason to tone down the violence. And, to be fair, it's not like the comic was a pacifist wonderland. But this is a mass-market movie, and Snyder does nothing to indicate that any of the bone-snapping violence is anything less than entirely justified by the dark, gritty world of the film. He's got two very thin justifications for his sadism, and he runs with them like an MVP wide receiver.

I'm really and truly sick of this. It's one thing to make a legitimately dark and gritty movie, and quite another to use the excuse of a dark, gritty dystopian fantasy to show off how awesome it is to be allowed to run around kicking the everloving shit out of people. Filmmakers who seek to condemn violence, or at least demonstrate how dehumanizing it is, don't slow the camera down so you can admire the "artful" way they framed the bone snapping through the flesh, or the rotary saw tearing through the bad guy's arm. They don't give their protagonists one-liners to spout after inflicting searing pain on their opponents, and they absolutely do not end their movie with mass violence leading directly to a peaceful and happy future.

That's right - this gritty, dystopian fantasy ends with the villain Ozymandias carrying out his plot to set off massive explosions in the center of five or six of the world's largest cities, blaming Dr. Manhattan and forcing the world to cooperate against him. We then skip ahead a few years to a rebuilt New York City in which everyone is driving a hybrid, holding hands and cooperating across borders, and where Silk Spectre and Nite Owl have taken up with each other openly and happily.

I swear to God I'm not making that up.

I'm going to admit here that I don't know exactly how the original comic book ended. I understand that it's a bit different than the movie, that Moore spends more time dwelling on the staggering violence inflicted to bring about that end, but I don't know for sure. Yet at the same time, I don't care. Filmmakers have a responsibility for creating a work that stands on its own merits, regardless of the original source. To argue otherwise is the filmmaker's version of "I was just following orders." And it's here, I think, that's the movie's greatest weakness lies. It was certainly the point where I graduated from simply wanting it to be over to seriously thinking about launching a petition to revoke Zack Snyder's directing privileges permanently.

A generous interpretation of the violence and misery that pervades the first ~155 minutes of the film is that it's a warning, a referential but altered look at the dangers of nuclear war and unchecked violence and avarice. But the end gives the lie to that interpretation. Everything worked out in the end; the arrogant, scheming (and yet incredibly uninteresting) villain was vindicated in that only murdering tens of millions of people could save humanity from itself. Our main heroes BatNiteOwl and the Bland Spectre end up happily in each other's arms, and New York City gets rebuilt from a wretched hive of scum and villainy into a shiny new metropolis with less crime and more cooperation. There's even a joke about how America won't ever elect a cowboy like Ronald Reagan as president - hah! So we have a violent and nihilistic world which can only be redeemed through - you guessed it - stylized and awesome violence. The only thing the viewer understands is slow-motion force.

I'm not sure I can really put into words how much this disgusts me. It's beyond the usual Hollywood attitude towards violence, which generally doesn't take itself too seriously and can usually be more or less dismissed. But in the carefully constructed Watchmen/Snyderverse, violence is the only action with moral weight. All else is pointless equivocation, an invitation to be taken advantage of by those stronger and more amoral than you. There is no violence in this universe except that which can only be stopped by a greater application of violence. And yet, somehow, a huge application of violence, whose overwhelming negative consequences we're basically shielded from, leads to lasting peace. To call this argument bullshit would insult both bulls and their feces.

The only character who even takes a stab at engaging with the fundamental weakness of this foul nihilism is Dr. Manhattan, who becomes world-weary about a third of the way through the film and heads off to his custom-built flying crystal palace on Mars to reflect on the universe, which he sees in nonlinear fashion. It's one of the movie's few interesting ideas, although it's not really explored - his ability to see the future is blocked by the timely application of lazy screenwriting - Snoozy McBlondVillain simply says that he spent a lot of money to block it, and lo and behold, it works. With his view of the future blocked, Dr. Manhattan is drawn into an argument with Silk Spectre about the futility of his trying to save humanity from itself. To defend his inaction, he says that nothing ever ends.

Fortunately, Watchmen did. Eventually.

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* Counterinsurgency point: I know the dangers of trying to make a "realistic" argument against a comic book movie, but in the case of one that strives so hard for political relevance I think it's legit. Anyway, I don't see how Dr. Manhattan could have "won" us the war in Vietnam. The US, with its vastly superior air force, artillery, navy and armored forces could already effectively do the one thing we see Dr. Manhattan doing - killing enemy infantry in open terrain - but it wouldn't have won the hearts and minds so vital to lasting victory in unconventional warfare. Manhattan's destructive capabilities are (quite self-consciously) based on nuclear weapons, which the US also had in abundance. Maybe seeing a giant glowing blue dude kill your friends is more intimidating than having them killed by bombers flying at 30,000 feet, but I doubt it would make the difference. Anyway, it's a side point; even if it was a realistic conceit it wouldn't have saved the movie.

Why can't I play a good 4GW video game?

2009-03-01T21:17:00.004Z

Since I've revealed my true nerdiness by analogizing the plight of our modern interconnected society to sci-fi, I might as well go full pocket protector with a question that's been rattling around my head. Namely, why can't I play a video game that accurately models the processes of the new generation of warfare?

This is more than an idle question, really. Video games have come a long way since I was a kid trying to get Mega Man out of the way of the evil robots with their spiky hats and lasers. More specifically, they've acquired what can only be described as narrative significance. Games in the world(s)-spanning genre, like Civilization or Spore, tell an open-ended story about the progress of history, technology and culture; games like Halo stick to a more limited and conventional narrative with heroes and villains. But they're stories, and as processor capacity and storage media grow, they will only get more ambitious and have more room for merit. They're also fundamentally different from other forms of media in that they're organically interactive - attempts to involve readers, viewers and listeners in their books, films and music are gimmicks at best. I'm not arguing that the kill-the-bad-guys storylines that predominate in video games have much merit, but there's room there for engaging stories with - gasp - something to teach us.

I'm more of a casual gamer than anything - the only game I've bought recently has been Spore, and the only video game system I own (a Wii) is gathering dust in my parents' basement in Maine, a victim of the difference between American and European video standards. But over the years I've logged a decent amount of time with what I think is a pretty representative sample of shooter and strategy games, from Halo and Ghost Recon to Starcraft and Command and Conquer. These fall into two broad categories: shooters and strategy games.

At first glimpse, the shooters seem like a more realistic bunch, particularly the "tactical shooter" variety, like Ghost Recon and Raven Shield, in which you command a squad of soldiers or counterterrorism operatives with relatively realistic weapons, equipment and abilities. But their scope is inherently limited: the realism is mostly in the weapons mechanics and tactics, without necessarily making any deep or durable point about war. Insofar as there's anything to learn from these games, it's that violence always works and generally speaking, the more the awesomer. But when it comes to real warfare, that's clearly a mistake.

One of the rules of counterinsurgency, for example, is "use the minimum force necessary," which would presumably disappoint the legions of BFG-toting, team-killing hormone zombies who make up a large part of the audience for shooting games. Given that we're talking about warfare, that by itself would probably doom the commercial prospects for a realistic insurgency simulation: although some games in the "stealth" genre, like the Metal Gear series and the Splinter Cell games, emphasize stealth and guile over brute force, the point always comes down to a goal achievable by killing a large number of bad guys, and the scenes where the player is encouraged to get their kill on are clearly doled out as rewards for all the sneaking and non-killing. Games in this genre tend to emphasize the visceral, which is unlikely to teach the player anything about the nature of war other than "it's exciting." (That part is probably true, but it's far from the whole truth.)

So we're more likely to be looking at something like a real-time strategy (RTS) game. Few of these make many concessions to realism - many of them are set in fantasy or science-fictional settings. They also tend to vastly oversimplify the economic and military tactics of war. The classics of the genre (Warcraft, Starcraft, Age of Empires and Command and Conquer) all operate on more or less the same basic principle: you build a base, gather resources, build (ludicrously quickly) an army of increasingly powerful and large units, and then more or less throw it at the enemy. There's no logistics to speak of, as units are almost always self-supporting once they've been constructed, very little in the way of tactics and only the most basic attempts to balance the skills of one sort of unit against another - even in a good RTS like Command and Conquer III, you can generally win by building a huge army of one or two types of the largest units and simply rolling over all opposition - after all, there's no penalty for losing half your Mammoth tanks, and you can just build more if you need them. A few games that I've played have made more concessions to the realities of war - the old time classics Total Annihilation, which despite its science fictional setting balanced units much more effectively, and Myth, which did away with production altogether and forced you to accomplish missions with the troops you were given at the outset, using tactics, formations and terrain to your advantage. But neither of these had much to say about asymmetry, which is the defining characteristic of modern war.

The Command and Conquer series has made a few gestures in that direction of asymmetric warfare, with the evil Brotherhood of Nod representing a stateless, terroristic threat against the industrialized, hierarchical Global Defense Initiative (read: USA). But in terms of actual game mechanics there's not much difference: Nod has bombers and heavy armor and superweapons too, they just work slightly differently than GDI's. GDI suffers no penalty for losing hundreds of infantry or bombing civilian structures in the course of fighting Nod; nor does Nod suffer any penalty for using suicide bombers against GDI. I haven't played the modern-war-themed Command and Conquer: Generals, but from what I've read the mechanics are pretty similar: the terrorist faction has weaker units than the American or Chinese factions, but due to play balance issues they end up with units and abilities that no stateless actor would ever have in real life. The problem is partly that game designers haven't been particularly creative in how they balance factions. In all of these games, they simply give all the factions comparable categories of units with slightly different stats. In Command and Conquer III, for example, both GDI and Nod have medium tanks - GDI's is slower and more expensive but more heavily armed and armored. Never mind the fact that a real stateless actor wouldn't bother to waste time and resources building tanks that would almost certainly be obliterated by the overwhelmingly powerful air force of an industrialized foe, we'll just fix that by giving the terrorists planes too. So what's supposed to be a battle between industrialized/mechanized and distributed/stateless plays out like a less organized, smaller Battle of Kursk, with lasers. Fun, maybe, but in no way accurate. What I haven't seen any game do is accurately simulate how two completely different forces would actually fight each other.

I'd like to see a game that gives the industrialized force vastly more powerful units, but also huge restrictions to operate under - you can have heavy tanks and strategic bombers galore, but if you blow up that hospital you lose half your money and your opponents get a bonus. You'd also have to deal with logistics* issues: one of the biggest vulnerabilities of real industrialized armies is their constant and overwhelming need for more bullets, beans, bombs and (especially) gas, which is why we're in a pickle right now in Afghanistan with the closure of the Manas airbase. I'm probably in a very small minority of gamers who want their games to have more logistics rather than less, but honestly it bothers me when I can send an armored force halfway around the map behind enemy lines with no support and expect it to fight effectively and indefinitely. I'd like to see the effects of non-military forces on the battlefield: public opinion and media coverage, for example, which if properly managed could be a boost to your war effort or could seriously hinder it. I'd like to see organizational hierarchies represented in the simulation: a powerful military dependent on the survival of its leadership vs. a decentralized insurgency only defeatable through comprehensive methods, not simply destroying their headquarters building. And I'd like to see a game that offers some serious penalty for wanton killing of civilians, although most strategy games solve that conundrum by simply removing them from the equation, or rendering them bulletproof, which gives a spectacularly unrealistic view of the 21st century battlefield.

I realize that these suggestions don't necessarily automatically equate to fun. And I'm not arguing that smooth and intuitive gameplay should be sidelined by the need to endlessly direct supply trucks from Base A to Forward Outpost B, or by forcing the player to go into the Katie Couric Interview Simulator every ten minutes. But think about a game like Civilization, which managed to streamline the running of an entire civilization into an enjoyable, engaging and (dare I say it?) informative experience, all without washing out important details the way its spiritual successor Spore does. The video game audience is huge and increasingly composed of adults, and if you could work even a few details about the way modern wars are really fought, it might seep into the collective imagination. And from there, some more sense might even make it into our national conversations about war and peace.

A long shot, maybe. But the fact that video games are interactive positions them uniquely to speak directly to their audience, and deliver a message in a way that no book or film could.

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* The one series of games that I can think of that addressed these issues was the Civ series, which allowed you to choose a Democratic or Republic form of government which incurred substantial social bonuses but charged you and hurt your public opinion if you went to war or deployed military units outside their home cities. What I'm saying is that I'd like to see that implemented on a smaller scale game.

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You know, I write this whole post only to find out that I'm completely wrong. What could be more realistic than taking control of 50 Cent as he runs around the Middle East killing terrorists? That's fourth generation warfare right there. I stand corrected.

Psychohistory and the Importance of Being Resilient

2009-02-28T13:24:00.004Z

I think it's important for me to point out before I write this that I'm an optimist. I don't think that humanity is inherently doomed, or even that our best days are behind us. I also don't really believe in specific prognostications, since a disproportionate number tend to be excuses for the prognosticator to say "I told you so" if right rather than a legitimate effort to fix or prevent a future problem.

That all said, this is a fascinating read. It's a speech by an author named Dmitry Orlov, a Russian-American who wrote a book comparing the decline of the Soviet Union to the decline of the United States. Interestingly, the book was published last year, when it was only a slight stretch to argue that the United States was in fine shape, but unfortunately the time since publication seems to have proven Mr. Orlov right about the underlying weaknesses in the American system. Given the topic, the speech is awfully upbeat*, but it hammers home an uncomplicated if somewhat unintuitive point: the Soviet Union, for all its organized weaknesses, was much better set up on the individual level to survive large-scale political and economic collapse than is the United States. Given the level of uncertainty about our immediate (never mind our long-term) future, it's very sobering.

I'm not going all survivalist here - I'm not advocating that everyone start stockpiling canned beans and .30-06 ammunition because tomorrow start the riots, but there's something here. Maybe it's just my natural (personal, not political) conservatism or my desire to not be caught flat-footed by things, but I do think there's something to be said for planning for the worst even if you're not convinced it's inevitable. If you're wrong, the worst thing that can be said about you is that you're a bit of a crank. If you're right, you might actually do yourself some good in the collapse that follows. But for a moment, let's assume that Orlov is basically right, and that the collapse of the United States as a functioning and self-sufficient nation (let alone a superpower) is closing in, and with it the collapse of the entire world financial system. It'll be a fun thought experiment.

The scenario Orlov is presenting makes me think of a certain series of sci-fi novels, and their eponymous Foundation. Asimov's books were based on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but there's something universal about imperial collapse - I'm sure the Byzantines and Romans and Ottomans and Soviets all had variants of the same debate even as the masonry fell from the ceilings above them. Asimov's idea was that a group of scientists and thinkers, given a warning by a predictive science called psychohistory and provided with the sum total of human knowledge and a barely-inhabitable rock at the edge of the universe, would harness their creativity to survive, thrive and limit the impact of the collapse. The books veer off into loopiness at some point, when psychics and immortal robots and hot women representing a linked consciousness start playing major roles in the plot, but the central idea is interesting and relevant to real-world decline. Obviously we don't have a working predictive science or immortal robots to make it work, but is there any reason we can't build organizations into society that will serve to safeguard against the worst possibilities of decline?

My idea is much less romantic than Asimov's. It wouldn't be composed of a scientific elite; instead, it would be more like a shadow government, capable of providing replacement functions (schools, provision of basic supplies and shelter, conflict resolution), much as organizations like Hizballah and Hamas do in parts of the world where the central government can't, won't or doesn't function. I don't mean to argue that Hassan Nasrallah is the living incarnation of Hari Seldon - far from it, since groups like Hizballah have served to destabilize much more than they have stabilized. But as political organizations, they have characteristics which aren't widely understood or accepted in the West which account for their continued popularity and indispensibility to their populations - provision of vital services and government replacement functions, primarily.

Dispensing with the moral question of learning from violent religious fundamentalists for a moment: any organization that seeks to continue operation and even grow in the face of complete collapse will need to operate in some respects like them in terms of the ways in which it provides services to citizens and inspires confidence in itself. The difference is that as a stabilizing actor, it will have to take a different approach to replacing government functions. Instead of simply evicting or killing government representatives, it has to demonstrate its capability to provide services in a nonthreatening fashion. As the trends which lead towards societal reorganization or collapse continue, the government has already started to delegate more and more authority (this is already happening with regard to the use of private security forces and other forms of contractors). With any luck, the "Foundation" would probably be able to operate more or less openly. In the event of collapse, it will have to immediately provide services better than the government and better than possible competitors (religious groups, warlords, identity groups, and so on), which means that it will have to be able to defend itself. It will have to be eminently capable of providing basic services quickly and efficiently regardless of mitigating factors. In other words, it will have to be a government of sorts.

But it cannot be exactly a government, because it would either be vulnerable to the same forces that brought governments down in the first place, or become simply the owner of another little feudal plot. It needs to be fundamentally, organizationally different than alternatives - it needs to have redundancy and resistance to abuse built into the system. And it needs a scientific/technical aspect - in order to be able to fulfill its primary function of providing government replacement services, it needs to be able to offer things like medical and manufacturing services without relying on the sort of centralized heavy industry that currently produces most of our technology and consumer products. Asimov didn't predict open-source, but a major point in the first Foundation book is that the Foundation develops more useful technology than the Empire precisely because of its resource starvation. The Empire has an entire galaxy's worth of resources and thinks in grand scale, with kilometers-long battlecruisers and generators that power entire planets, while the Foundation develops personal shields and small, incredibly fast vessels, along with the most critical resource of all: understanding of the technology and the ability to fix it when it goes wrong. The Empire's collapse is in no small part due to the fact that its infrastructure has gotten so gigantic and complex that it can't really be managed anymore - Asimov mentions at one point that the capital world, Trantor, is so overpopulated and specialized that it has 40 agricultural worlds solely dedicated to feeding it.

One thing the Foundation explicitly does not do in Asimov's book is do anything to prevent the collapse of the Empire. I don't remember offhand whether that's an intentional gambit to clear the old junk or whether it's just unaddressed, but it brings me back to the part where I disagree with Mr. Orlov. I don't think a real-life Foundation should be solely designed for the worst-case scenario: that's like waiting by your canoe for the city to flood instead of helping shore up the levees: there's no reason why you can't do both. Since I don't buy into the inevitability of collapse, I think a real-life Foundation would be primarily purposed with building resiliency into existing society by reinforcing and localizing vital services, which both builds up a secondary capability in case of failure and takes the strain off of the central infrastructure. I don't see why we can't have both.

There's an argument to be made that this is in fact should be part of the role of the government, but I'm not sure that's the case. Clearly government should be working at its end to make society as resilient and crash-resistant as possible, but I'm not sure that the top-down approach is ideal for creating true resiliency. Government is inherently a centralized architecture, which isn't ideal for this kind of application, although it can certainly create a favorable environment for it to function.

I don't know if any organizations like this are operating yet - my guess is that there are plenty that have some of the features but none that are explicitly dedicated to this idea. If my guess is right, then it's probably past time to get on it. Who knows where exactly it's heading, but the world isn't getting more stable by the day.

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* Sample joke: "My grandfather had a donkey while he was living in Tashkent in Central Asia during World War II. There was nothing much for the donkey to eat, but, as a member of the Communist Party, my grandfather had a subscription to Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, and so that’s what the donkey ate. Apparently, donkeys can digest any kind of cellulose, even when it’s loaded with communist propaganda. If I had a donkey, I would feed it the Wall Street Journal."

Things That Happened To Me In The Last Week

2009-02-25T15:46:00.007Z

1) I turned 25.
2) I got food poisoning.

The reason I haven't actually posted anything is mostly 2). I had a couple of things more or less ready to go when I ate some questionable meat pizza which triggered a shooting war inside my stomach. After all, it's sort of hard to make points about fourth-generation warfare while on alternating 15-minute cycles of normalcy and pain. It seems to be receding now, thankfully, so with any luck I'll be able to resume something like normal service.

Anyway, I did come across a few things that are worth mentioning in between bouts of lying on my bed and swearing to never, ever again consume anything with the name "Meat Feast," no matter how late at night or how hungry I am.

First, there's this, which is just unbelievably goddamn fantastic. David Vitter (R-LA) is one of the least appetizing characters in the US Senate, which is not a particularly appetizing place to begin with (must... resist... urge.. to make... Meat Feast joke...)*. He got caught red-handed (or something) using the services of DC Madam Deborah Jeanne Palfrey a couple of years ago, despite his strident condemnation of President Clinton's adultery and general self-righteousness. Somehow he made it through the scandal with his Senate seat and his marriage intact (despite his wife's pre-revelation comment that she was "more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary Clinton"). But he's up for re-election in 2010, which means he's vulnerable during both the GOP primary and the general.

One of his potential primary challengers is Tony Perkins, who is a run of the mill right-wing family-values type, which means that he probably - this being Louisiana - enjoys the romantic company of alligators or something. The other is more straightforward: her name is Stormy Daniels,** and she's what newspapers euphemistically refer to as an "adult film performer." There's a clip of her speaking to CNN and it's, well, kinda charming. I'm not sure what's more awesome: the idea of running a porn star against a hypocritical, Bible-bashing, diaper-wearing, prostitute-using dimwit, or the fact that she comes across as much more articulate and likeable than the dimwit in question.

---

The other, unrelated, cool thing I found while sick - hat tip to my brother - is called Spotify, which is a music streaming service with an intuitive, easy interface. It's free (although you have to listen to a 20-second ad every half hour or so; a £10/month version does away with ads), has good music quality, an enormous catalogue and nifty features like a "radio" panel which allows you to select certain styles of music and decades to custom-build a station which will introduce you to new music. It's amazing, but sadly only currently available in Western Europe. However, since I'm currently in Western Europe - iTunes, you are SACKED! FIRED! OB-SO-LETE!

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And one, entirely random question - why is it that when you have food poisoning, food doesn't actually taste good? It's not like I've been eating gourmet or anything, but still...

Update: Okay, one good thing did come out of that miserable experience, which - thankfully - seems to be on its way out. I was describing my symptoms to a friend, and when I said that I'd been alternating between freezing and burning up, he said, "Dude, what did that pizza give you - malaria?"

---

* Damn it's hard to write this without loading it up with double-entendres. Probably because I'm incredibly immature.
** Perfectly safe link. Really.

Lessons From My First Golf Class That Are Equally Applicable To Life

2009-02-16T15:29:00.005Z

1) Relax more.

2) Having learned to play baseball at a young age is not necessarily an advantage.

3) Always check to make sure you have cash in your wallet before stepping out the door.

4) Did I mention that you should relax more?

5) Once in a great while, Scotland has a nice day (or nice part of a day). On that day, do not stay inside.

6) Square those shoulders!

7) Listening to the instrumental score from "Batman Begins" on the way somewhere does not make you better at the thing you're on your way to do. Or anything other than a dork who listens to movie soundtracks.

8) Humiliation is an essential part of self-improvement.

9) Your best shots always come when the instructor is looking somewhere else.
9b) Instructors are not generally impressed when you point out that you just hit a really good shot but they didn't see it.

10) RELAX.

Activism vs. PR

2009-02-15T18:06:00.001Z

Okay, so here's an interesting story about my alma mater, Hampshire College. Hampshire was the first school in the country to divest from the South African apartheid state, in 1977, a fact which the school is (rightly) proud of. Invoking that tradition, along with the school's general reputation for social justice and activism, the school's pro-Palestinian activists have made a case for the school to divest from companies doing business with the Israeli military or settlers. This week, the school made some news on the front, but the story's a little more complicated than it first appears.

Before I go any further, I think I need a few disclaimers - I generally try not to comment too much on Israel-Palestine, on the grounds that it's an issue that people get really emotional about, and has perhaps the highest number of Godwin's Law violations of any debate topic, and of course loads of awful (but occasionally hilarious) prejudice on both sides. My general take is that the US needs to send an impartial negotiator with the full support of the federal government, someone as level-headed and technocratic as possible, to spend the enormous amount of time necessary to basically wear both sides down until they're ready to make the kinds of concessions necessary for a lasting peace. So I was very pleased when President Obama appointed George Mitchell for the position, and not even because he's a fellow Mainah.

It's also worth saying that my purpose here isn't to take sides for or against divestment, exactly - it's to point out how individual tactical decisions can imperil what might otherwise be a successful political action. I should note as well that I don't have any personal knowledge of the series of events I'm commenting on: I haven't set foot on the Hampshire campus since 2007, so I'm basing this on what I've read on the Internet.

Back when I was at Hampshire, the Palestinian and Israeli activists engaged in a prolonged series of engagements designed to prove that they could outbid each other in obnoxiousness and willful disregard for facts or civility. The pro-Israeli kids wrote ludicrously misleading articles in the school's unedited free speech publication, the Omen, and the pro-Palestinians staged faux Israeli checkpoints outside the library and cafeteria, hassling students and demanding "identity papers" in flagrant disregard for the fact that everyone they stopped either a) agreed with them entirely, b) disagreed with them and could never be made to change their minds or c) professionally didn't give a shit. Neither made it past the low, low bar I set for any kind of Hampshire activism: Are you actually accomplishing anything more than annoying me and making me dislike your cause, regardless of its merits?

Don't misunderstand - I'm all in favor of activism. I'm all in favor of people standing up for their cause, whether I agree with them or not. And there were some folks at Hampshire who did really and deeply care about their causes on Israel/Palestine and other issues. But unfortunately, another of my cardinal rules of activism comes into play here, which is sound over light. Put another way, the bright, talented, motivated activists usually got overshadowed by those whose only talents lay with being loud. That's especially true in an environment like Hampshire, where there's a lot of energy for activism but relatively little room for it, since the school is out in the middle of the countryside in a state that's one of the most liberal and politically engaged in the country.

So, had the Hampshire Students for Justice in Palestine (HSJP) actually compelled the school to divest some of its (relatively small) endowment from companies doing business with the IDF, that would have been a big deal, and they would have been entitled to their self-congratulatory press release. But it doesn't look like that's what happened. That press release from HSJP was the first public comment on the matter, and it was accompanied by commentary to the effect that the school would release a the entire Hampshire community was sent an e-mail on behalf of the school administration and the Board of Trustees, which read, in part:

We write to correct numerous reports circulating about actions taken by the Hampshire College board of trustees on February 7, 2009. The facts are as follows:

• On February 7, 2009, the Hampshire College board of trustees accepted the report of its investment committee, which earlier had voted, without reference to any country or political movement, to transfer assets held in a State Street fund to another fund.

...

• The review of the State Street fund was undertaken at the request of a sub-committee of the investment committee, to address a petition from a student group, Students for Justice in Palestine. The investment committee’s decision, however, was based on the consultant’s finding that the State Street fund included 100-plus companies engaged in multiple violations of the college’s investment policy; the decision expressly did not pertain to a political movement or single out businesses active in a specific region or country.
• No other report or interpretation of the actions of February 7, 2009 by the Hampshire College board of trustees is accurate.

Full release here. In other words, either the school is covering its ass by divesting and then refusing to admit that that was their intention, or they're being completely upfront and saying that they moved stocks in a way that only divested by accident. But it doesn't really matter which it is - the school isn't now going to turn around and say, actually, hey, we're just kidding and actually we DID mean to divest from Israel. There are too many people invested (as students, faculty, alumni, donors, parents, etc.) in Hampshire who take a more pro-Israeli position to allow the school to just about-face like that; if they did, they'd end up with everyone angry with them and without any moral high ground to stand on. The school isn't in a particularly good position as it is - partisans on both sides will find reason to criticize the place - but having at least tried to walk the tightrope, they can make entreaties in both directions and hopefully minimize the damage.

That's not possible for the activist group, which hopefully realizes how badly they've screwed up. By going public with their "divestment" release before the school said anything publicly and thereby writing a check Hampshire wasn't willing to cash, they forced the school to openly deny their version of events. Now the school looks weak and mealy-mouthed, but more importantly, the activists look like they were trying to game the system. As a result of all this, what could have been a stark moral message the way divestment from South Africa was has turned into a circular firing squad. Had they exercised a bit of patience and talked about a unified message with the administration before fronting their press release, the story could have been "Responding to a student activist group, Hampshire College divested from Israel, although in somewhat sideways fashion." Instead, the story is "Students claim Hampshire divested from Israel, school denies it." And most people will give a lot more credence to the second part of that sentence than to the first. The best thing the activists have going for them is that their highest-profile opponent is Alan Dershowitz, the kind of guy who took his own credibility and tortured it to death, but that's not really enough to declare victory.

People who already agreed with the activists probably won't agree with my assessment, but that doesn't make much difference - the battle lines are so clearly drawn on this issue that the way to make forward progress is by reaching across them. I realize how corny and appallingly naive that sounds, but I'm actually serious: both sides are stuck in a mindset that the way forward is by "sending messages." And when those messages aren't received, they have to send "clearer," "more unambiguous" messages. Meanwhile, the Israelis are in the process of electing a government ever more hawkish and the Palestinians are digging out and no doubt swearing revenge. I don't think we need more clear, unambiguous messages, unless that message is: let's all calm the hell down and work something out.

Ants, bankers and terrorists

2009-02-10T20:19:00.006Z

Via Political Wire, a throwaway line about how on September 18 of last year, the Federal Reserve estimates that... well, I'll let it speak for itself:

According to [Rep.] Kanjorski, on September 18, 2008 the Fed tried to "stem the tide" by pumping money into the financial system but it didn't work and decided instead to announce an immediate increase in deposit insurance to $250,000 per account to stop the panic.

Said Kanjorski: "If they had not done that, their estimation is that by 2 p.m. that afternoon, $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system of the U.S., would have collapsed the entire economy of the U.S., and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it."

I'm no economist. I think I have a reasonable understanding of the basic underpinnings of economic theory, but it's far from my specialty and my hippie college did not require any kind of economics (or math, or history or... much of anything specific, really). Nor do I know to what extent Kanjorski, or the Fed, really knows the truth here. I'm inclined to think that on balance the pessimists are somewhat more accurate, especially after watching two smart observers - Nassem Nicholas Taleb and Nouriel Roubini - try to wade through a fog of economic denial on CNBC. Taleb and Roubini have nothing to lose by being honest, whereas the CNBC folks are probably under some pressure to keep their broadcast at least minimally optimistic, so the heavily-invested folks watching don't tie themselves to a ceiling beam en masse. Kanjorski is in a slightly more complicated position, since he's a Congressman, but it's important to note that he made this comment on a C-SPAN call in program, and had just been screamed at by the last caller (not an uncommon event on these programs), so his desire to placate might have overcome his natural politician's tendency to avoid panicking the constituents too much. I don't know for sure, but I doubt he would have said as much in a press release - certainly no one in the government said, "By the way guys, the world economy was two hours away from collapse today, FYI" back in September.

As frightening as this all is, it's also instructive for me. Much of the research I'm doing and planning to do for my PhD is based on the idea that the infrastructure that underpins our society and forms the foundation for our lives is undergoing fundamental change and is much more vulnerable than we like to think. That my research is directed mostly at vulnerabilities exploited by oppositional groups (terrorists, criminals, insurgents, etc.) doesn't change the fact that the infrastructure vulnerabilities are inherent - that is to say, it isn't just human malfeasance that can bring them down; they're equally if not more vulnerable to collapse from other factors, especially in the case of worldwide financial systems that have become too big, too fast and too complex for any one individual or body to have effective control over. Which of course got me thinking about whether it's possible to construct mega-infrastructure that's more resistant to both decay and sabotage.

Oddly, I was also reading this tonight - I'd much rather read the full book, but given the paucity of choice in our local bookstores and school library, the review isn't a terrible replacement. At first glance, ants, terrorists, and bankers have very little to do with each other, except maybe as three things that most people don't care for these days. But I think there's something to be learned from the ants: despite their seeming lack of individual intelligence, they've organized themselves in such a way that they're not only resistant to virtually every environment (they're present all over the world) but also adaptable to changing circumstances: apparently fire ants, upon their accidental introduction to the United States, entirely changed their form of organization from centralized, disconnected (and sometimes warring) colonies into one gigantic decentralized colony which spans virtually the entire country, and which does not recognize internal boundaries. Another species has, over a period of over 60 million years, developed a form of fungal agriculture and refined and protected it so well that the type of fungus the ants originally farmed is now only found in ant communities.

And these accomplishments have not come about by chance. Ant colonies are scrupulously organized and have extremely specific, extremely defined labor categories - from specialized "production" jobs tending the fungal gardens to "construction" jobs building and expanding the colony to sanitation workers who take out the trash and morticians who cart off the dead. It's a huge and complex system, built by the will and back-breaking labor of hundreds of millions of individuals obeying not a central command structure but some as-yet-mysterious organizational process. And all of this has been proven by millions of years of evolution to be incredibly resilient, adaptable and survivable.

Except, of course, when some jerk humans come along and pour concrete down their tunnels.

Anyway, I don't think ants have insurgencies to test their infrastructures - though if I'm wrong please tell me, because that would be incredibly interesting to look into. And they don't have banking systems in danger of collapse because too many of them wanted to move into luxury nests. What they have is incredibly complex systems which have walked through pretty much everything nature's thrown at them. More than that, actually - which have thrived and grown in evolutionarily difficult circumstances. Whether that could possibly translate to human terms is an entirely different question, and one that I'm at the moment completely unprepared to answer - but I think it's a strong argument that the kind of thinking that'll get us out of jams both economic and strategic in nature is much more cross-disciplinary than what we've seen from our leadership so far.

Bah

2009-02-09T00:05:00.003Z

Sorry, I haven't written anything in a while. Unfortunately, I can't even really blame being busy - I've had almost nothing to do since I got back from vacation. The problem actually seems to be the opposite - I have so little to do that it's hard to do anything at all. Aside from some obnoxious, post-application paper wrangling for my grad school applications, those are all done, my classes don't start up again until Tuesday, and my only current assignment is a 200-word proposal for my Master's thesis which isn't due until Friday and in any case is based on the research I already did for my PhD proposal, so it doesn't really rate any kind of panic. As a result, the last nearly-a-week has been an exercise in futility - get up, read blogs, play flash games, take a walk, read more, play Spore, go to bed. Rinse and repeat. Also, you can put "check Facebook" in between each one of those activities, but that would have weakened the sentence a bit, I feel.

Honestly, it's frustrating - and I think it's part of the reason I've felt vaguely dissatisfied with the whole experience of being a Master's student here. I haven't been in actual honest-to-God class for nearly two months. When class is in session, it's four hours a week. We're actually told things like "don't start your thesis before May" and advised to avoid "overburdening" ourselves with a third class, since six hours is apparently too much for one person to bear. I don't want to claim that I'm not learning anything, since I am, but I can't shake the feeling that I could be doing, and learning, a lot more. That's in no small part my own fault - if I were a better-disciplined person, I would have used this downtime to read "Terror and Consent," which has been sitting by my bedside for six months, or do some research into guerrilla movements or organized crime, or something else. But no.

It also doesn't help that there hasn't been much in the news lately that's caught my eye. I'm trying to keep the mundane details of my life out of this, in that I'd rather post nothing than note after note about my roommates, my shopping trips, what I do on weekends and so on. Hopefully with classes starting up again I'll be more motivated both to do work and to observe and comment.

The Cats of Istanbul

2009-01-29T16:24:00.002Z

It's an odd thing what you notice about a city the first time you visit it - especially if the city in question is almost completely unlike anything you've been to before. Istanbul, for example, is nominally European (well, the half we're staying in, anyway) but with its continent-straddling setting, it is a [insert well-worn metaphor here] of European, Asian and Middle Eastern influences. I've never heard a call to prayer before, except in recordings - which don't do the experience any justice at all. And then there's the food (excellent) and the insane pushiness of absolutely every kind of commercial business - from restaurants and carpet shops (seriously? What the hell am I going to do with a frickin' 8x8 carpet?) to guys just trying to hustle a few Euro as "tour guides," more people have called me "my friend" in the last three days than in the last three years.

But all that was stuff in the guidebook. What nobody told me about was that this is a city occupied first by humans and, as a close second, by cats. I remember stray dogs in St Petersburg, and there are a few of those here, but the cats are everywhere - you can't walk down the street without a few tabbies darting between cars, or sit on our balcony without listening to their yowling and screeching. In the Aya Sophia this morning, there was one who even took up residence on a little podium in front of a giant decorative granite orb, calmly letting the tourists take his photo. Presumably that had worked out well for him in the past in terms of food-gettin'. I christened him Sultan Abd al-Mittens the 473th. They're as fearless as the pigeons in Central Park and just as omnipresent. And unlike the pigeons, they actually perform a useful function: I haven't seen a single rat since I've been here. We joke at home about the cats being the actual rulers, but I'm pretty sure they'll be here after we humans have taken our ball and gone home.

Who knows how long that'll take, though. One of the things that struck me about St Andrews the first time I visited was the palpable age of the place - the ruins at the end of town are a good 800 years old. But they're sprightly young things compared to the Aya Sophia, which was originally built in the 6th century, making it nearly twice as old. And unlike the ruins, it's still standing - and massive. I took quite a few pictures but none of them really capture the scale of the thing. You could park a Space Shuttle in the middle and still have room for a mid-sized political convention around the booster rockets. And it was built with only simple tools, basic mathematics and a whole lot of (presumably not volunteer) labor. It's unreal.

I'll have some more, hopefully more organized, observations when I'm back and not so exhausted from trying to get a good picture of a city of 11 million in four days.

Vacationtime!

2009-01-25T17:18:00.003Z

I'm taking a bit of a vacation - I'm going with a couple of classmates to Istanbul for a few days, and then taking the Friendship Express to Thessaloniki, where we're spending another night before coming home. It's pretty exciting - I'll be the first member of my immediate family to set foot in Asia (even if it is about as Western as Asia gets), and the first to go to Greece, where my dad's family is from. In fact, his mother's side is even from Thessaloniki, although given that my knowledge of Greek is limited to one swear word, I doubt I'd be able to have much of a conversation if I happened to run into any of them.

It's the first time in a very long time that I'll have been to a country where I really and truly don't speak the language. Even when I arrived in Russia in 2000, I knew a few phrases in Russian and had some very limited idea of how to pronounce words, and perhaps more importantly, was traveling with people who actually spoke the language. I don't know the first thing in Turkish, and neither do the friends I'm going there with (Greece is less of a problem, since we're meeting up with our classmate who lives there). Fortunately, I'm told by various people I know who've been there that (at least in Istanbul) most people you'll need to deal with speak English. I don't much care for the idea of forcing other people to speak my language in their country, but if I lived by that rule I'd only ever go to the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and a couple of other places. So we'll see how it goes.

I'm not taking my laptop and so if I do manage to post updates, they'll either be from a pay-as-you-go machine in an Internet cafe (most likely with Turkish keyboard) or from my iPod, which means anything I post will likely be short and likely filled with grievous misspellings. But I will absolutely be taking the camera and filling its memory card, most likely to the annoyance of my traveling companions.

Meanwhile, enjoy perhaps the funniest New York Times article ever, on the topic of Hilarious British Place Names. I was surprised to find that the writer was a woman - given that it celebrates the humor of places called East Breast, Penistone and Wetwang, you'd think it would be a man. But on the other hand, any male writer given the task would probably have been unable to finish; I know I would have been. And it of course reminded me of one of the best Daily Show moments of recent memory. Anyway, there's actually a good one here in St Andrews that didn't get a mention - a small alley on campus called Butts Wynd.

Snicker.

What it means

2009-01-19T22:05:00.002Z

I thought about writing a big, portentous piece about the Big Day tomorrow, but there's no point. Every half-assed (or full-assed) political pundit, correspondent and blogger in the country and three quarters of the rest of the world are penning or have already published a Big Obama Inauguration Piece, and there are a limited number of things one can say to mark the day. So I thought instead that I'd just share a couple of personal reflections about it.

My earliest political memories are of Bill Clinton, and I grew up in a house where the dominant emotion related to him was constant disappointment: my parents voted for him but didn't care for much of what he actually did. In our home, during the 2000 election, we didn't talk much about George W. Bush - mostly we were disgusted with Al Gore's poorly managed campaign which seemed to do so little to sell the successes of the previous eight years and so much to remind us of the failures. We knew Bush wouldn't be great, but I remember thinking that there was only so much harm he could do.

How wrong I was.

I turned seventeen less than a month after George W. Bush took the oath of office. In my family, you couldn't help but be politically aware from an early age - my mom proudly tells the story, lost to my memory, of six-year-old Jacob in class the day the Gulf War started, standing up to tell the cheering kids to shut up because those were real people being killed. But the bulk of my political life has been under George W. Bush. I crossed the line into adulthood with the impression that our leaders were corrupt and incompetent, and in my daydreams I found the piece of evidence that finally corroborated their criminality and got them locked up. From 2001 on, good news was something that happened in the tiny spaces between what seemed like an ever-increasing series of disasters, something you clung onto and locked away in hopes that someday the news wouldn't all be bad.

I didn't really give any thought to the idea that that day would ever actually come.

I'm what you might call a cynical optimist - I do think at some deep level that things are basically going to turn out okay in the end, whatever that entails, although the road there is painfully long and never, ever clear. I don't especially trust politicians, and I know that Obama is going to do things I don't agree with, make mistakes and otherwise disappoint the ludicrously high expectations he's being set up for. But I don't think there's been a single political event in my adult life that has been as good as this. Which might be why I can't quite seem to put it out of my mind.

Delegating Death

2009-01-19T03:52:00.001Z

Via Slate, I came across an interesting piece about the decision-making process for (in this case British) nuclear command and control. According to the article, each British Prime Minister within the first few days of their term must write a letter to the commanders of the UK's four Vanguard-class nuclear missile submarines, which are now the sole weapons in the nation's nuclear arsenal. The Letter of Last Resort, as it's called, contains the Prime Minister's orders in the event that he and his designated alternate have both been killed. Right now the only person in the world who knows the contents of the letter is the man who wrote it, and he's not talking. But it presumably boils down to one of three things: launch, don't launch, or use your own judgment. Given that it would only ever conceivably be used to execute a second strike after the entire nation had already been devastated, it takes on a moral rather than strategic tone: does a nation already collapsing into fire and rubble strike back and ruin its enemies in its last act? Or does it take the opportunity to spare the millions of civilians who would be killed in such a strike?

I know where I come down on this question, with absolutely no ambiguity: I'd order the captain to dump his warheads in the deepest part of ocean and sail for the nearest friendly port. And I have a sneaking suspicion that at least some people in the kinds of position where these are actual questions don't disagree with me. I was once a fly on the wall in a meeting with a former extremely high-ranking member of the American defense establishment,* who indicated - vehemently - that no elected politician would ever actually be able to issue the order that would lead to a full-scale nuclear exchange, and as a result nuclear weapons should simply be abolished. I basically agree with that sentiment, even though I'm not sure exactly how to put the atomic genie back in the bottle. But then again, a lot of very smart, well-meaning people have put a lot of time and effort into the subject and haven't got a plan, either.

The basic issue is that in order for deterrence to be effective, you have to streamline the launch procedures enough that the weapons can be launched before they can be destroyed by the enemy. And that means placing an enormous amount of moral responsibility in the hands of the national command authority and in the crews who are directly in charge of the weapons. I haven't heard of a similar system in place for the United States, but our Presidential succession order is much more established than that of the UK, which seems to only have two people in the loop (at least as regards nuclear orders). I did read an article not too long ago about American ICBM officers, who have one of the most bizarre jobs in the world. They sit for 24 hours at a time in sealed underground concrete eggs mounted on massive shock absorbers and wait for an order that will probably, hopefully never come. If it does, their work is over within about two minutes, and they themselves are not solely responsible for launching a missile: the "two keys" of so many fictional depictions is true, but is also not enough to launch. Each "field" of missiles is connected to a number of these eggs and requires two "votes" of launch teams before a missile is launched. It's all part of the same balance: appropriate delegation of authority vs. maintenance of centralized control.

The whole scenario reminds me of a science fiction story I read years ago. I don't remember the name of the story or the author (I want to say either Clarke or Asimov, but I can't be sure). The whole story unfolded in the course of an audio recording from the President to the men aboard a weapon of final retaliation: a nuclear-armed space station in orbit around the Moon. As the recording of the now-dead President's voice details the events that have brought them to this point, the soldiers are grimly and singularly focused on revenge. But the President finishes his message with the order that they jettison their weapons and place themselves at the disposal of their victorious enemy: the United States of America. The point, of course, was the inversion of expectation in the last words, but it also points us towards the universality of the moral questions of nuclear deterrence: ideology is the first casualty amongst billions.

All this is by way of saying that nuclear weapons are far from irrelevant. I wrote my senior thesis on nuclear nonproliferation; it didn't concern deterrence theory directly but you can't talk about nukes without knowing about the theory. And I worked at a couple of nonprofits that did nukes and thought for quite a while that it was going to be my career in some sense. It ended up not working out that way because I realized that in order to move farther into the serious nonproliferation world I was going to need a lot more hard science, which with my brain is like trying to park the USS Nimitz in a one-car garage. So I've moved more towards thinking of the future of warfare as a whole.

But, as a matter of fact, nuclear weapons can tell us something about that future, too. A large part of the history of warfare can be described as moving the killer increasingly far from the killed - first with spears, then bows, then cannon and muskets and rifles, then artillery and bomber aircraft, and on to nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles. Nuclear weapons will probably never be used in conflict (and if they are, there probably won't be historians left to record it), but the mechanisms we've created to control them tell us something about the newest way we distance ourselves from our violence: automation. Airborne drones already do much of our killing in our war on the Afghan/Pakistan border, and it won't be long before their counterparts on the ground join them. For the conceivable future, these aren't true robots - while craft like the MQ-9 Reaper have the ability to fly autonomously, firing weapons requires a human operator, a state of affairs that the Pentagon claims not to have any interest in changing. But change it will, inevitably. Firing weapons from the air at static targets with little or no ability to shoot back is a relatively detached affair to begin with and the difference between doing it from the cockpit or from a trailer in Nevada is trivial both tactically and morally. But ground robots faced with enemy opponents in the flesh will likely need a quicker reaction time than satellites and radio can provide. Sooner or later, to provide the increase in combat capability that generals and civilian defense officials always demand, the human will be taken out of the loop. In all probability, this will happen in stages - first the human will be required to designate an area in which the robot can act autonomously, then the geographic area will expand and finally, when behavioral-recognition software is good enough, the robots will simply be activated, armed and sent off to kill, in much the same way that nuclear weapons are armed and sent to kill without further input, and with the same moral detachment.

It's a terrifying prospect. Civilians caught up in battle, the wounded and surrendering troops all count upon the moral reluctance of human soldiers to kill them. God knows this reluctance has failed time after time in history, but it is a powerful force. One study by Army historian SLA Marshall in the wake of WWII showed that 75% of American combat troops failed to fire their weapons, even at attacking enemies. We're not actually wired to kill each other, and it takes either powerful indoctrination or moral distance to overcome that: there was no such problem with Army Air Force bomber crews or the gun crews on battleships, even though their weapons were much more powerful than the infantryman's rifle. It wasn't insufficient moral distance that kept us from using nuclear weapons - if it was, Harry Truman would not have ordered the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or Paul Tibbets would have arranged to have engine trouble over the Sea of Japan. It was the lack of a prospect of retaliation, which hasn't existed since the first Soviet nuclear test in 1949.

Drone warfare doesn't have that problem. No one is proposing a Nonproliferation Treaty for automated weapons, since their use isn't necessarily any more violent than the use of conventional, manned weaponry. There has been and will be no hesitation amongst soldiers or politicians to "send in the drones," especially as they become more advanced and capable of more varied and difficult missions. But they will also lack the capability to read a letter, interpret its moral intent, square it with their own and act accordingly. And that may prove to be a delegation too far.

* I looked up this person's public position on nuclear deterrence on the Internet and found that it was slightly more moderated than what he said in the meeting, so I'll skip over naming him.

Defiance

2009-01-18T12:33:00.004Z

(Spoilers below).

I'm going to make an assertion here: Edward Zwick is the most middlebrow director working in Hollywood today. Lasse Hallström makes a fairly strong case for himself, but he can't touch Zwick's combination of feel-good sentimentality, well-meaning but superficial approach to Big Societal Issues, and broad accessibility. Once in a while Zwick gets it right, as in 1989's Glory, and The Siege, his pre-9/11 movie about terror and civil liberties, certainly had its moments, even if on the whole it was a bit of a mess. And sometimes he gets it seriously wrong, like in the fairly appalling Tom-Cruise-as-Great-White-Ninja pic The Last Samurai. But like most Hollywood directors who get it into their heads to do a Picture That Means Something, he either can't delve too deeply into the questions at hand, or he thinks his audience won't follow him if he does.

And that's a problem. Defiance is a pretty good movie in technical respects - the acting, script, cinematography, editing, even the accents are all good - but it falls into a weird thematic crack. On the one hand, it's the stirring survival story of a group of Belorussian Jews led by the Bielski brothers, mostly the two oldest (played by Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber) who hide in the forests from the Nazis and survive the war. On the other, it's a morality play about revenge with strong moments, including Craig's cold-blooded murder of the police captain who killed his parents and the man's two sons, and the fatal bludgeoning of an SS man captured by the partisans. There's even a ripped-from-Coppola scene where a wedding is intercut with a partisan attack on the Nazis. And on the third, it's an action movie with a closing scene where Screiber goes all Legolas, coming to the rescue just in time by shooting a bunch of Wehrmacht troops who've cornered Craig before jumping up on top of a Panzer III, killing the machine-gunner and dropping a grenade down the hatch. Clearly the intended effect is to make the audience pump their fists and shout "WOOHOO BOY KILL THAT NAZI SUMBITCH DEAD!!" ...Which is pretty strongly at odds with the ambiguity we're clearly supposed to feel about the earlier acts of violence.

I'm all in favor of movies crossing the lines between genres - my two favorite movies of all time, Heat and Dr. Strangelove are both genre-crossers - but it has to work within the context of the movie. And it has to be done seamlessly. There are a number of comedic moments in Defiance, which is no bad thing given the grimness of the topic. But they're oddly placed. In fact, the whole movie is very oddly timed; it starts with grainy black and white footage of Hitler and marching stormtroopers and turns to color to show Belorussian Jews being deported and executed. Then we go straight to the Bielski brothers returning home and finding their parents dead and then jump-cutting through their first few days in the woods. It goes something like: tear-jerking scene, comic moment, cat scare, comic moment, action scene, comic moment, reflective pause, comic moment, action. And so on like that, until about halfway through the movie where things slow down massively during the cold, hard Belorussian winter. Normally such pacing problems are a result of studio tampering during postproduction, but I haven't heard anything about problems of that sort in regard to this film. I think it was just poorly paced, with the inevitable negative thematic results. We also never really get a sense of character - Craig is the more humane and Schreiber the more violent and revenge-driven, but that's about all the development they're afforded, although each man carries out his limited role well. There are a few cardboard characters to be discarded in dramatic death scenes later on: the weakling intellectual turned heroic, the wise rabbi, and so on, but none of them really make an impact or connect as anything more than a stereotype.

As I said, Defiance does a lot of things right. But it's let down by the thematic compromises, the uneven pacing and what feels like a tacked-on conclusion. All these flaws are more of a shame than in the regular unwieldy Hollywood issue movie, because the story of the Bielskis is such an amazing one, and quite richly deserved telling. I'm just disappointed it was done in such hackneyed fashion.

A final note: What exactly would Hollywood do without Nazis for villains? As you might expect, precisely zero sympathy is expended on the Germans - the two* we see as anything other than sneering Jew-bayoneters are offered the opportunity to plead for their lives and claim sympathy based on the fact that they're family men, but the scene isn't about them, really. It's about the moral question of executing them, and the presentation of their families is just to underscore that question. Normally I wouldn't have thought much about this, but normally I don't watch these films with Germans - and this one I did. My friend was talking afterwards about his grand-uncles, both of whom were in the Wehrmacht (NOT the SS) and one of whom disappeared and presumably died in an ambush on the Eastern Front. It's easy to go along with the Hollywood movie clichés and see the German troops in World War II movies as the moral equivalents of the Imperial Stormtroopers or the titular Aliens, rather than humans. But that's not helpful. The Germans weren't machines - they were humans who for whatever reason went along with their leaders in perpetrating one of history's greatest crimes. Writing the human part out of the picture won't help anyone come to terms with the biggest question of all - the why.

* Technically one German and one collaborating Belorussian police captain, but the film doesn't do a whole lot to differentiate.

I'm sorry, I can't help you, my spaceship is stuck in reverse

2009-01-17T01:21:00.005Z

I finally bought myself Spore - the game that was years in development and promised to be SimEverything, the Ultimate Video Game. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, you start as a single cell and evolve into a creature that you design yourself, and from there into a tribe, a global civilization and then a galaxy-spanning empire. It was designed by the people behind SimCity, the Sims, and a number of other extremely successful (and mostly endlessly entertaining) SimFranchises. So by all rights it should be great.

Except it's not. I'm not the first person to note the humdrum gameplay mechanics - the problem with having effectively five games in one is that none of the games feels particularly well fleshed out. The cell stage is a fun little minigame, but nothing you couldn't find in an Internet flash game. The creature stage is pretty well realized - it's a lot like a 3D version of that old Super Nintendo game EVO: The Search for Eden - but you get sort of railroaded through it. The tribal stage is like a ludicrously easy version of Populous without the Godlike powers, but it's mildly diverting. The civilization phase is also pretty basic - there are 12 cities on the planet, without fail, and you can only build four different types of buildings in each of them, along with three different types of vehicles. Imagine Civ for beginners and you're there.

But the biggest disappointment by far is the Space stage. Granted, the first time I scrolled out all the way and saw the unimaginable scope of the game's galaxy - thousands upon thousands of star systems with multiple planets in each, often teaming with life - it took my breath away. And it is very cool to explore such a huge, detailed, beautiful universe. But... once you try to interact with it you realize how poorly thought out the actual gameplay mechanics are. The Space stage is a step backwards from the Tribal and Civilization stages, where you took the role of a disembodied God-Emperor and had control over effectively your entire civilization. Instead, when you get to space, you're demoted to starship captain without a wide-view control scheme for your empire. That's fine in theory, except when you abdicate your throne, no one fills it. Your colonies halt all construction, charge you to buy necessary equipment for your ship and pay you in miserly fashion for doing one of the stupid, repetitive missions the game gives you (eg. go to Planet X and kill five of Creature Y, or go to Planet B and abduct three of Plant Species Who Gives A Crap). They don't even defend themselves when they're (regularly) attacked by pirates or beset by environmental maladies - they just issue plaintive calls for help and don't pay you when you've nearly died saving their worthless asses. It's like arriving at your five-star hotel to discover that in fact it's a log cabin that you need to assemble yourself.

And the interface is incredibly poorly designed. The Tribal and Civilization stages work like any real-time strategy games, and that's fine. But the Space stage relies mostly on mouse controls, even when fighting, which gets very carpal-tunnelly very fast. And my ship had a bad habit of getting locked in reverse during combat, so while my useless colonists were getting the living hell bombed out of them by aliens, I was gaily sailing around the planet backwards, getting occasional glimpses of my colony in increasing stages of destruction. That's when I quit.

There are a few other inexcusable oversights, as well. The save system might as well be on a 1991 Super NES game (one slot per game - so don't save if you think you've made a mistake - and no autosaves). It's a bit crashy, and seems to randomly decide when I boot it up whether or not there are updates available. And it - like the Sims - seems to have been intentionally released without certain features, so as to enable the release of a swarm of obnoxiously-priced expansion packs, which might, if you're lucky, actually put some game into it.

But that all said, it does two things very, very well. The various creators are actually more fun to play with than the game itself, whether you're being whimsical and making a flying bed or nerdy and trying to make the most accurate replica of the SR-71 Blackbird possible. There are a few annoying limitations, like the fact that almost everything you make has to be symmetrical (sorry, no BV 194 modelling for you airplane nerds out there), but it's both entertaining and amazingly well-integrated into the game, except for the slight oddity when you're fighting a fearsome predator designed by some random other player to look like a goofy tree.

The other thing Spore does well is something not a lot of video games are actually good at - telling a story, and letting you make it to some extent your own. My backwards-spaceship race started off as a herbivorous cell, evolved into a mostly friendly tribe and conquered its planet through religious conversion (although I admit I gave in to temptation and bombed a couple of cities into submission). My conscious choice to emphasize plant-eating and negotiation led to bonuses for diplomacy, which allowed me to make friends and bypass the awkward and difficult process of bombing absolutely everyone into submission. It encourages the gamer to think about questions most games don't even hint at - causality, scale, our place in the universe. Given the subject matter, maybe it's appropriate that it's not more fun. I just wish it were.

Languages

2009-01-08T01:01:00.002Z

It occurred to me today, while walking around St Andrews and listening to the various languages spoken by students and tourists, that amongst my peers I'm a bit of a monolingual oddity,* despite my efforts: forgetting the only foreign language I ever spoke fluently (German), not following through on six years of French or a year of Russian backed by four months of living in Russia, and taking doomed stabs at Farsi and Arabic.

Yes, I know the old joke about what you call a person who only speaks one language (American), but thankfully for us monomericans, the days where that mattered might be coming to a close. I'm no expert on linguistics or software development, but I do have a piece of free software on My New Favorite Toy which translates to and from some thirty languages based on an internal database. It's not quite the Universal Translator of Star Trek, and probably won't be for some years, but it's still impressive. There are obviously technical hurdles - a machine which rotely translates words or speaks phrases from a database is much, much simpler to build than one which understands the subtleties and idiosyncracies of both languages or recognizes spoken answers. And machine translation undoubtedly suffers from the same basic problem that plagues efforts to build robotically-driven cars: namely, that certain things that come as second nature to modern humans turn out to be very difficult to teach to machines. But that said, based on the aforementioned vast increases in processing power and portability, I'd venture a guess that within a generation or two machine translation powered by open-source engines will be cheap and accessible enough that speaking a foreign language will become more a hobby than a skill.

Or maybe that's just my monolingual insecurity speaking. In English, natch.

* Counting my Scottish friend who, when asked how many languages he spoke, replied, "Two - English and Scottish." In a job interview. Apparently it worked!

I'm Baaaaaaack

2009-01-06T12:41:00.002Z

After a long and not wonderful trip (the highlights being a desperate run to catch my bus to Dulles and the Aer Lingus staff loudly announcing at 4 am that it was time to do duty-free shopping) I'm back in Scotland. I didn't really intend my vacation to be a vacation from blogging as well, but it ended up that way. I've got a few things that I've been working on and will hopefully post in the next few days, but I'm also studying for exams next week, finishing applications to doctoral programs and planning for a trip to Turkey and Greece later this month. Oh, and I got a copy of Spore, which after just a few minutes of messing around seems like it could be a dangerously addictive thing.

In the meantime, have a look at this article. Anthony Shadid is one of the best American reporters on Iraq, helped by his Lebanese ancestry and fluency in Arabic. He wrote Night Draws Near, an empathetic account of the war from a perspective too often ignored by American writers: the Iraqi civilians caught up in the mix. A humanitarian and a fantastic writer, Shadid compares the situation in Iraq to the situation following the 2003 invasion; a country in the middle of what is not so much victory as "the day after," exhausted after a paroxism of violence and facing a totally uncertain future.

A Comparison

2008-12-26T05:31:00.004Z

I've spent most of today slightly obsessed with my new toy, a 2G iPod Touch. I feel like the term iPod sells it short, though - with less than an hour's worth of searching on the Application Store, mine is now less an MP3 player and more a small computer, capable of doing everything from finding me on a 3d-rendered map of the earth to picking a random restaurant according to criteria that I set and telling me what to expect there. It's a marvelous little thing. But aside from the obvious happiness that comes with getting something shiny and new, it got me thinking a bit about technological progression.

My first computer, about ten years ago, was a Power Macintosh Performa 6400. It was a mid-range machine for its day, with a 180 MHz processor, 32 MB of RAM, a 4x CD-ROM drive and a 1.6 GB hard disk. To those base specs, I'd added an internal 100 MB Zip drive and (much later) some kind of G3 extra-power chip that boosted the processor up to 250 or 300 MHz, I can't remember exactly. All this was encased in a tower slightly larger than my torso and heavier than a stack of Buicks.

My new iPod, by comparison, has a 533 MhZ processor, 128 MB of RAM, and 16 GB of memory. And it's all in a package smaller than my hand. It's not just the hardware, either - in 1997, the idea that you could watch streaming movies on demand on a device with no wires connecting it to anything was ludicrous, and the kind of satellite imagery I can pull up on Google Earth was the sole province of intelligence analysts. If I could have traveled back in time with this little gadget and its software and showed it to 1997 Jacob, who was all proud of the fact that he could run Myth on his Performa, his head would have quite literally exploded.

I'm not going to argue that technology is without drawbacks, or that the energy that goes into making shiny new toys wouldn't be better spent on more necessary endeavors. But as a tech geek, it's exciting to think about the level of advancement this sleek little thing represents - and what it means for the next ten years.

Merry Christmas, indeed.