Netflix, giving context to my childhood

As a kid I read a lot of MAD magazine. I believe that the first issue I ever bought had a parody of Superman III, which Wikipedia tells me would date it to December 1983, when I was 9. Following the same list forward and remembering the issues as well as I can, I probably retained the subscription for about ten years and dropped it when I went to college. I still have a box with some of those back issues, although they're not exactly in mint condition and hence worthless.

Thinking back on the experience, I find myself realizing for the first time that a nine year old is not the intended target audience. It had heavy political content which, like The Daily Show, educated while entertaining me, and probably shaped a lot of my political views. (There was quite a lot of mockery of the religious right, which is no friend to satire.) Also, the movie satires were often based on R-rated material, and the artists didn't shy away from drawing semi-nude characters. From the back, or using creative scenery covering, but as a teenager you take what you can get, ha ha.

So MAD sits in an odd place for me, because I remember it as kid's entertainment but it apparently was not. And I enjoyed a plenty of satires of TV and movies that I couldn't or wouldn't see, because of the rating or because the subject matter was a kind of adult that wasn't interesting to me. I never cared to watch watch Dukes of Hazzard or The A*Team, but I did read the fake versions. I remember loving their parody of "The Shining," and yet not seeing the movie until years later.

Netflix is providing an interesting service these days which has really altered my entertainment habits. Ten years ago you rented a movie from Blockbuster, and you paid for each movie you rented, so if you wanted to watch something then it had better be worth at least $4 to watch that particular movie, or you wouldn't bother. Five years ago, Netflix was mostly replacing Blockbuster, but you still had a limited number of discs available at any given time, so you had to carefully choose what you might really want to watch.

That's all changed now. Netflix's live streaming capability covers a good half of their total content, and therefore renting a movie is a lot more like highly interactive television. Pay the monthly fee, and watch whatever you want. With TV, you might be fine leaving a crummy show on as background noise that you only partly pay attention to. Likewise with Netflix, you can watch half a movie and then quit if you don't like it. Run a movie in a computer window and only pay partial attention to it while you do something else in a different window -- that's my preferred viewing method. Also, here in Austin there is very good high speed satellite wifi coverage to support my Android, and the Netflix app works pretty well. If I run out of podcasts and don't feel like listening to books, I can always turn on a TV series, stream the sound through my car speakers, and turn the screen face down to avoid the temptation of peeking when I drive.

As a result, I've got a lot of TV series and movies to catch up on that may not have been quite good enough to rent, but are still interesting for historical purposes. Which really helps for me to understand what those MAD satires were all about.

For example, I recently finished a movie called Jumpin' Jack Flash. Has anybody even heard of this one? It's a 1986 comedy/thriller starring Whoopi Goldberg as a hapless computer genius (in 1986 terms, that means she knows how to replace broken parts and use this arcane program that resembles a chat room). She starts getting mysterious messages from a British spy who is trapped in Soviet Union somewhere -- the Soviet Union being a convenient omnipresent villain in Reagan's America.

What's weird is that this movie has not left a significant mark on the cultural world in any sense, but I remember the satirical version pretty well. It was called "Jumbled Joke Flash."

The main running joke throughout the comic was about the fact that Whoopi Goldberg swears all the time. Nearly every single panel contained some variation of ASCII swear symbols, e.g., "@!#$". I even remember asking my mom how all these symbols should be read for maximum humorous effect, and she says "Why don't you just insert 'gawl dang' everywhere?"

Now I think it's kind of odd, though. Having watched the movie, there is quite a bit of casual swearing, although not much more than most people I know would do when in a stressful situation. Why draw so much attention to this? Was it very novel to have lots of swearing in an R-Rated movie? And doesn't the idea that swearing is silly and embarrassing enough to hang such an obvious lampshade on, support the notion that MAD really is targeted at young kids after all? I dunno, maybe I really was the intended audience.

Anyway, the movie was pretty unremarkable on the whole, and I see that Ebert hated it even though he thought Whoopi Goldberg made a valiant effort to save it through charisma. What surprised me the most was the complete lack of any particular twist that would make the sequence of events a surprise. Sure, there's a double agent who tries to kill her after appearing trustworthy, but that barely counts as a twist at all. I was wondering if "Jack" the mysterious chat room agent, would turn out to be entirely fictional, or right in her office the whole time. Except, nope, at the end of the movie he shows up, and he is indeed a British agent, and they appear to have a potential romance there, and that's the happy ending.

So, yeah. There's a movie I wouldn't have seen without free streaming. On the flip side, Lynnea and I have gotten heavily into Arrested Development, which is a delight.

I guess all I'm trying to say here is that new technologies keep on subtly changing our habits to the point where the old ways of doing things start seeming quaint very quickly now.

It's been a few years since I broke out that box of magazines. I should go search it for more movie recommendations.

Important (?) lessons in children's entertainment

Here's the weirdest thing I learned via Wikipedia today.

As you may know, there are those out there who attempt to influence the content of childrens' television.  We call them "parents groups," although many are not comprised of parents, or at least not of folks whose primary interest is as parents.  Study them and you'll find a wide array of agendum at work...and I suspect that, in some cases, their stated goals are far from their real goals.

Nevertheless, they all seek to make kidvid more enriching and redeeming, at least by their definitions, and at the time, they had enough clout to cause the networks to yield.  Consultants were brought in and we, the folks who were writing cartoons, were ordered to include certain "pro-social" morals in our shows.  At the time, the dominant "pro-social" moral was as follows: The group is always right...the complainer is always wrong.

This was the message of way too many eighties' cartoon shows.  If all your friends want to go get pizza and you want a burger, you should bow to the will of the majority and go get pizza with them.  There was even a show for one season on CBS called The Get-Along Gang, which was dedicated unabashedly to this principle.  Each week, whichever member of the gang didn't get along with the gang learned the error of his or her ways.

That's just... I don't even... what?

I assume that this valuable social message also extends to your mother's favorite line about everyone else jumping off a bridge.

So in the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, for some weird reason they were forced to keep contriving situations for Eric, the whiny cavalier, to complain about what the rest of the group was doing... so that they could promote the message by ultimately making him look dumb or suffer in some way.

I recently read (most of) David Sirota's latest book, Back to our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now--Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything.  I enjoyed it, but at the same time, I found it a little excessively paranoid.  Sirota's thesis is that the movies, shows, and all other entertainment that we consumed as kids in the Reagan era was all part of an overarching propaganda machine, pushing various right wing values like nationalism, consumerism, and the notion that all government is part of an evil conspiracy.  In some cases I saw his point, and in others I just felt like it was a big Rorschach test where Sirota was superimposing his framework on everything he could find.

Anyway, I can't make heads or tails of this "the group is always right" thing, which is one case where there seems to have been an actual conspiracy by a specific group of individuals openly trying to give all shows a consistent message.


On a side note, blogger.com told me today that I should try switching my blog over to their nifty new customizable display format.  So I did, because the group is always right and I don't want to be a complainer.

I haven't spent enough time browsing it to decide if I hate it.  But if you hate it, feel free to let me know.

Penn Jillette on libertarianism

Am I spreading myself too thin here?  Between the Atheist Experience blog (now new and improved on freethoughtblogs.com!), Castles of Air, and other media formats, it seems like this blog is one of the main casualties that doesn't get enough love.  Really short remarks go on Twitter, less short discussions on Facebook, programming stuff goes on CoA, and a lot of comments I just save for the show.  But wait, there is one thing I can always put here: arguments with economic conservatives!  And here we go again.

I have a firm policy of refusing to humor people whose method of arguing is sending me links to YouTube.  But I made a special exception in this case because it's Penn Jillette, and Penn -- while very often wrong -- is always so very, very cool.




So, okay, I watched this video and was, as always, entertained by Penn's speaking style.  And IMHO he's still wrong.

Penn obviously made some reasonable points that are easy to agree with.  "Let's stop the government from doing really stupid stuff."  Well, duh, yeah!  I'm against things that are stupid!  Way to go out on a limb, Penn!  Solidarity, man!

In all seriousness, Penn and I agree on a lot of things, because many of his beliefs are already in the Venn diagram that includes liberals.  Let's stop killing people we don't know for reasons we don't understand: check.  Let's stop bailing out rich people: check.  No more tobacco subsidies: check.  Stop wasting time locking up people with marijuana, okay.

But then he gets to the part where a libertarian and a liberal would disagree... and he just chickens out.  He says "You can make that argument that we still need education, and we still need infrastructure, and you'll probably win with me."  Woot!  I beat Penn Jillette without saying a word!

Actually, let me make this response explicit.  Hey, Penn.  We still need education, and we still need infrastructure.  That is stuff that government does well and libertarian candidates don't propose a good and practical alternative to it.  In fact, let's go back to the beginning of the video, and see why Penn Jillette thinks we don't actually need public education anymore.  "I believe the tools are in place for people to learn on their own... I think that education is going to come from the web."

And that is, as Penn himself might say, "Bullshit!"  Yes, most people have access to the web now.  NO, that doesn't mean that it's an acceptable substitute for having actual teachers who spend individual time with students and react to their needs.  You'll notice that despite all his praise of the internet, Penn states that he sends his own kids to "fancy ass private schools," and good for them!  They're lucky to have a dad whose net worth is $175 million.  But hey, if you're a poor kid then you can damn well flail around on web sites and educate yourself.

If you want to make me waste time on this (and I hope you won't, because it's too bloody obvious) I'll slap together some statistics -- yet again -- that show that countries which have solid public education systems have a more educated populace; and people who have a high school diploma -- yes, even  from one of those dreaded public high schools, like me -- are better off and more successful (statistically, as a group) than people whose only education comes from "the internet."

See, the argument is not that some elitist government has to bring "enlightenment" to people.  It's that it is a social good and in all our best interests for our citizens to be educated.  And in the event that we have kids whose parents can't send them to fancy-ass private schools, we provide publicly funded alternatives to them rather than just throwing them under the bus and saying "Here, Timmy, play with this smart phone.  See you in twelve years!"

And I'd gladly argue with Penn about bridges and infrastructure, too.  But as I already said, I can't, because in this particular video Penn conceded that without a fight.

Current TV watching status

Just for the hell of it, and to keep this from being a dead blog, here's my report on what TV shows I've been watching on Netflix.  Obviously this doesn't exactly count as earth-shattering news, but what the hey.

I usually don't sit and watch TV while doing nothing else, but I'll frequently have it on in the background while doing other activities.

• Finished season 5 of Doctor Who on Netflix instant watch this morning (which is why I decided to create this list).  Now I have to wait for season 6 to end so I can start queuing it.  I enjoyed it immensely.  Lynnea will not watch it because as far as she's concerned, David Tennant is the last Doctor Who.  Won't even give Matt Smith the time of day.  Poor Matt.
• I've been streaming audio of the BritCom The IT Crowd on my Android in the car.  Nearly done with the series.  The only time this does not work is when they do musical interludes with lots of laugh track, as there is clearly some visual comedy going on that I'm missing.  Almost done with the entire series.  It's enjoyable, but kind of a stupider version of Big Bang Theory, which is unfortunately not available on instant watch.  Stupider because in BBT, you can tell that the nerd jokes are authentic and loving.  In ITC, half the time they are clearly speaking complete gibberish for laughs.
• I finished rewatching (or relistening to) Buffy a while back, but I never did get through Angel.  Nearly done with Season 2 now, but it's been lower priority for me than "Who".
• Lynnea and I are now about two seasons behind Dexter.  Added Season 5 to the DVD queue as it's not available on instant.
• Got Ben hooked on Third Rock From the Sun.  One of the all-time great comedies, IMHO.  I'm saving episodes for when he's around and we have nothing else to do.
• Watched a single episode of Breaking Bad.  Promising start, I think, so I'm saving more episodes for later.  It was recommended by a coworker who, in turn loves Game of Thrones and has to put up with my constant danger of spoiling the series.
• Speaking of which, season 2 of Thrones starts up again in April, so I'll be going to my sister's again for screenings.  Woohoo!
• We still have about one and a half seasons of Quantum Leap that Lynnea's never seen, and we watch it at the rate of about one episode every two months.  That oughta take a while.

Well, that about covers it.  I know it sounds like I watch a lot of TV, but as I said, I often play it as background noise in the car and while working on other stuff, and it took me over three years to get through Doctor Who, so, you know...

Where are the progressive atheists? Right here.

I can't believe I actually have to work at an argument FOR the idea that atheists tend to be liberal, but I had to respond to this ridiculous article from an Australian columnist commenting on the supposed prominence of "right wing war-mongerers" in the atheist movement.

I would post this on the Atheist Experience blog, but we don't officially support a political persuasion in the group, and this is easier to discuss on my personal blog.

This is how I replied:

Hi Jeff, I'm a progressive atheist from Austin, Texas, one of the hosts of a show called "The Atheist Experience."

Your question about where all the progressive atheists have gone is a little odd to me. I can't speak to the situation in your country, but here in the United States, "godless liberal" is a term frequently tossed about as an insult by the far right wing, who are inextricably wrapped up in the religious right. Among people who claimed no religion in exit polls in our last two elections, 67% voted for John Kerry over George Bush in 2004, and 75% voted for Barack Obama in 2008. In both cases, this makes up a significantly higher proportion for the Democratic candidate than the general public. I'm willing to bet you'd find similar majorities in your own elections if you go by statistics rather than anecdotes.

In fact, I hope you don't mind my saying so, but your own penetrating analysis showing that atheists are right wing fascists seems to rely heavily on cherry picking a couple of individuals and assuming that they represent the entire group. There are two other atheists prominently featured at your link, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, both very strong liberal voices. Dawkins can be seen here calling for votes for the Liberal Democrat party in England. Gregory S. Paul recently wrote in the Washington Post, not only in defense of atheism, but also in favor of important progressive ethics such as civil rights, environmentalism, and opposition to US torture policies. Peter Singer, a prominent atheist philosopher from your country, is also generally considered extremely left wing. PZ Myers, one of the most popular atheist bloggers, is regularly attacked by the right wing for his outspoken liberal views.

To the extent that atheists could in any way be described as "anti-Islam," by and large we don't favor blanket military actions against them based on their religion, nor do we want to stop them from freely practicing their religion as they choose. Rather, atheists argue with the doctrines of fundamentalist Islam in exactly the same terms that we oppose the doctrines of fundamentalist Christianity: we don't want to see the curtailing of freedom of speech, or gender equality, and we think that nobody should fear a threat on their life for speaking out against harmful religious practices.

Christopher Hitchens is actually quite liberal in many other areas outside his foreign policy beliefs, describing himself as a "Marxist" as recently as 2006, and joining with the American Civil Liberties Union in the same year to oppose the Bush Administration's warrantless spying on U.S. citizens. His views on the Iraq invasion, while they have been as you describe, are by no means in the mainstream among the majority of atheists.

Where are the progressive atheists? Anywhere you find atheists, there they are.

All those Amway "loosers"

Lynnea has been cleaning up my 15 year old Amway web page, and made a brief comment about the frequency of people who, in their hate mail to me, have misspelled the word "loser" as "looser." I've noticed this before and even mentioned it at the top of the site's guest book, because I don't see that particular typographical issue in many other places.

After some thought, I think I know why it comes up so often in this context. It's a unique meeting of three conditions:

1. "Loser," while it seems like a simple enough word to me, has an unintuitive spelling in the sense that a single "o" makes the "oo" sound.
2. People in written conversations don't use the word all that frequently. Amway people use it a lot because of the nature of the motivational material and how they're taught to regard those who criticize the group.
3. Not to overgeneralize or anything, but it seems like a lot of them are pretty dumb.

And now, some politics

I really need to get in the habit of blogging Facebook threads quickly. These days I'm not posting much here on Kazim's Korner, but I am having the occasional heated discussion on Facebook. Unfortunately, Facebook posts are not searchable in any graceful way, which means that they become effectively impossible to find after a month or two has elapsed. These discussions are exactly the sorts of things I enjoy coming back and reading again a few years later, so I'm synthesizing the discussion from the one I just linked so I can have a record of it.

For starters, I recommend this article.

Liberals pride themselves on being tolerant. Are they really just suckers?

Good article. Hits many of the points that I like to highlight in my typical political posts. As I've said before, I am often frustrated by the fact that liberals (and, to a lesser extent, many atheists) are so married to the idea that they must be "reasonable" that they tend to try to compromise as quickly as possible. In falling all over themselves to give ground in every argument, they crippling their ability to negotiate effectively.

I often tell this joke about the kids haggling over a cake (see the post linked in the previous paragraph) to highlight a truism: if one side starts out taking at an extreme position, and the other side reasonably starts in the middle, then the extremist will usually be happier in the end. That's because if you start from the middle and then negotiate a "middle ground" between those positions, that ground must be much closer to the extremist's position than it is to the the reasonable person's position. Therefore, I would like people who agree with me to start out saying what they really want, and then fight to reach a compromise which is as close as possible to what they wanted all along.

Here's my party affiliation in a nutshell. I am a liberal because I believe two things. First, people should have the right to do pretty much whatever they want with their private lives that doesn't hurt others. Second, it is a demonstrable historic good to have a social infrastructure that provides education, roads, a social safety net, and pooled resources for scientific research, among other things.

When I look at the Democratic Party Platform, I agree with most of it. When I look at the Republican Party Platform, I disagree with most of it. Hence I am a Democrat. I do not start from the position "I am a Democrat" and then reason out my positions based on asking "What would my party do?" I am a Democrat because with any given issue I care about, I find that the Republican party nearly always lands on the wrong side of my beliefs.

I tend to get into political arguments with three kinds of people:

1. People who agree with Republicans on social issues (i.e., religious intrusion in government, abortion, gay rights, war on drugs).
2. People who agree with Republicans on economic issues (often libertarians, generally encompassing shrinking or eliminating social safety net programs, cutting spending on education and national infrastructure, replacing our existing tax structure with something far more punishing to people lower on the income totem pole).
3. People who do not appear to have any significant political principles, but are opposed in general to supporting any political party, in order to be contrarian.

I very rarely get into arguments with people who agree with Republicans on both social and economic issues, except in artificial situations such as taking calls on The Atheist Experience. This is simply because there is so little common ground between us that there is little to be gained from such a discussion. They are plentiful out there in the world, but they're a very small part of the universe of people I'd typically spend time with.

As a result, when I argue politics with somebody, it's nearly always someone who falls into one of the above three categories. It follows that those people are neither Republicans nor Democrats. Category 3 is, by definition, unaffiliated. Categories 1 and 2 can be shown not to belong to either party, because if they were Democrats they'd likely agree with me on both social and economic issues, and if they were Republicans they'd likely disagree with me on both social and economic issues. QED.

Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.

To my friends who substantially disagree with me on economic or social issues, and cannot find a party to call home, all I can say is: You and I have fundamental disagreements on the best way to run a country, and I will never persuade you to vote for candidates that I would like. As the Republican party doesn't suit your needs either, all I can do is wish you luck in finding a candidate who matches your interests, although when you find such a candidate I will most likely vote against him.

But also, every time I do a political post, I can count on a number of people showing up from the third category. They seem to agree with me on what policies are desirable, but argue that the party platforms are trivial and irrelevant. Examples from the thread:

So is it worth associating yourself with the right or left? or any political parties in particular? I mean some Democrats have good ideas and not so good ideas. Some Republicans the same way. It really depends on the times you live in. To me it always seemed foolish to tout party lines or vice versa label (project your ideas) on someone who naively associates themselves with a political party.

And:

Both parties are crap. The only difference is that one is a pile of lying crap that wants to take away your right to abort a fetus, while the other doesn't.

The impending demise of reproductive rights

Let me get specific about what prompted that last qualifier. Pro-choice is one of my issues. As I recently discussed on the Non-Prophets, there has been a recent rush of state laws which deliberately violate Roe v Wade. This article by Dahlia Lithwick documents that:

Since the start of this year, 916 measures seeking to regulate reproductive health have been introduced in 49 states. According to the Guttmacher Institute, by the end of March, 15 laws had been enacted in seven states. These laws include an expansion of the waiting period in South Dakota from 24 to 72 hours and a requirement that counseling from "crisis pregnancy centers" include scientifically flawed data on risk factors. There are new regulations in Utah and Virginia governing abortion clinics. Legislation has been introduced in 13 states requiring that women have an ultrasound procedure before having an abortion—and in seven of those states, the woman must view the fetus and listen to a detailed verbal description as well. Measures have been introduced in 17 states copying a Nebraska law banning abortion at 20 weeks, on the theory—again based on questionable medical data—that this is when a fetus can feel pain.

As a result, abortion is rapidly becoming effectively illegal in many parts of the country right now, even though these statutes are deliberately running afoul of established supreme court rulings.

You would think that pro-choice groups like the National Organization for Women would be challenging these laws left and right, and you'd ordinarily be right, except for one tiny little snag:

The risk of challenging these clearly unconstitutional laws and then losing at the Supreme Court is evidently so high, according to Terry O'Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, that it's not worth taking. As she explained last week to Rachel Maddow, the fear that Justice Samuel Alito would vote to overturn Roe is so deep that reproductive rights groups may be opting to leave the state bans in place. And, as she conceded in that interview, wherever unconstitutional state abortion bans go unchallenged, they become law.

In 2004, Bush beat Kerry and won a second term. As a direct result, Bush was able to replace two liberal-to-moderate Supreme Court justices with Alito and Roberts. They are now the swing votes that could strike down Roe if a case ever came before them that gave them the opportunity to reopen it. Therefore, pro-choice groups are afraid to challenge these state laws. However, if they don't challenge them, then the laws stand, causing abortion to become completely inaccessible to many women.

I draw a clear, direct line between the victory of one political party and the massive curtailing of women's freedom. If you don't think that is a bad thing, if you disagree with me on this issue, that's fine; you are in category 1, and this doesn't apply to you. But if you are not in category 1, if you are bothered by this curtailing of these rights, then you should not see the differences between the parties as trivial on this particular issue.

The ACLU and you

Another example. Most liberals are with the American Civil Liberties Union on most issues that I know of. They're the ones who focus on separation of church and state issues, free speech rights, allowing accused criminals due process of law, and so on.

Every year, the ACLU puts out a position paper indicating which issues they care about. In addition, they examine which politicians voted the way that they would like on key policy proposals, and give a rating.

This is the ratings list for 2008, which I think is fairly typical.

Read that list and you'll see an obvious trend. Among 390 total House members, Senators, Governors, and executives, on issues that the ACLU cares about, 105 of them were on record as voting with them 100% of the time.

Those 105 were all Democrats. Every single one. No exceptions.

On those same issues, 160 politicians were shown to vote with the ACLU 33% of the time or less.

All 160 of them are Republicans. No exceptions. Count em.

If you have serious disagreements with my desired political outcomes, I'm not talking to you. You're right, the Democratic party does not represent you. Yes, yes, Obama hates your freedoms, everything Congressional Democrats do is a secret Muslim Communist Satanist plot, etc. Vote for someone else, or protest and don't vote.

But if you want the outcomes that I want, you can't continue claiming that the difference between the parties doesn't exist. It is objectively false.

Do Democrats, as a broad group, suck at politics? Yep, they do. Do they act like pussies when it comes to defeating a bunch of loud, angry bullies? Repeatedly. Is it desirable, in the long term, to eliminate blue dog Democrats and bring in more liberals with spine like Bernie Sanders and Anthony Weiner? Hells yeah. And are there some Democrats who are genuinely more conservative than some Republicans? On an individual basis, there are a few.

Looking at the big picture as a purely statistical issue, though, party affiliation does provide a good indication of which side of the issues they are on, and it's clearly disingenuous to say they are the same. You can't teach statesmen the lesson that they aren't fighting hard enough for what you want, if your method is to sit by allowing the people to win who are actively fighting against what you want.