Month: November 2009

Sager highlights a story about NYC cab drivers being required to let customers pay with credit card. The cab drivers resisted but are now making more money as a result:

The story boils down to loss aversion blinding the cabbies to two salient facts about credit cards: 1) They make people spend more, 2) They can be programmed with “default” tip amounts much higher than what drivers were typically receiving with cash.

The effect of credit cards on our spending is particularly striking. I think we all have an intuition that plastic makes us spend more. This study (PDF) shows that people will bid more than twice as much for an item (in the experiment, NBA tickets) when allowed to pay with credit card instead of being restricted to cash — far more than even I would have guessed.

Number 63 on Matt Sigl's countdown:

The modest bloodbaths of past slasher films proved too tame for the insatiable bloodlust of 21st Century audiences; we now had an appetite for scenes of distended violence, maximum bloodletting on the side please. The visceral thrills of viscera proved too tantalizing to refrain from indulging. Do, Do, Do…the Strappado! Torture porn is a game of chicken between director and audience. […]

Popular offenders include: Eli Roth's Hostel and Hostel II, Wolf Creek (it's torture mate!), remakes of the The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and its new prequel Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, Captivity and Touristas (a film in which the violence had become so explicit and banal that it felt more like viewing surgery footage than a fictional horror film). Other filmmakers would not want their work to be classified alongside these cheap exploitative pics but Lars Von Trier's recent provocation Anti-Christ and, especially, Mel Gibson's two hour gladiatorial exercise in sadism masquerading as religious devotional, The Passion Of The Christ, are as much part of the genre as is any of Eli Roth's less highbrow entries. The film series that defined what torture porn was all about was, of course, the Saw films.

The Atlantic's James Parker touched upon the genre in his April essay, "Don't Fear the Reaper":

Saw and Hostel succeeded, above all, because they are serious slasher flicks. The extremity of their goriness reclaimed the splatter death from mainstream movies (where it’s become unremarkable to see a man fed screaming to a propeller, or run through with a drill bit). And the immersive nastiness of their aesthetic—decayed bathrooms, foul workshops, seeping industrial spaces, blades blotched with rust—distilled the slasher-flick elixir: atmosphere. No franchise thrives without it. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had it: a choking, sunstruck intimacy, with madness pulsing in the eyeballs. Halloween was suburban-autumnal, a minor rhapsody of long shots and breezy streets and scuttling leaves, the whole effect tingling like wind chimes inside the empty psychosis of the slasher Michael Myers. Friday the 13th was strictly B-movie in its technique, but it succeeded in perforating an American idyll: summer camp was never the same after those nice guitar-strumming sing-along kids got slashed in their lakeside cabins.

Sigli again:

Sadly, as the images from Abu Grahib reminded us, real torture is anything but entertaining. Torture is the ultimate debasement of a person, reducing them and their consciousness to only the most animalistic of impulses. Perhaps torture porn is proof that mass media does respond quickly and effectively to our collective social anxieties. Whether these films adequately and morally confront the real psychological impact that Abu Grahib had on America, I'll leave to the experts. I just hope that torture, whether in our movies or in our politics, does not continue its stranglehold on the American psyche.

Steven Pressfield's thoughts fit nicely in the thread:

When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, your mind becomes powerfully concentrated. You begin to understand that writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you the writer, must give him something worthy of his gift to you. 

Ben Casnocha's two cents:

One way blogging makes you a better writer is it forces you to work hard for your readers' attention. On the web, it takes less than a second to close the page or click a new link. Your readers are busy and distracted.

This means you must engage the reader out of the gate and take nothing for granted. If you start sucking in the second paragraph, you'll likely lose the reader's attention. They click to a new page.

It's brutal. It makes you better.

Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 3.36 pm

Bruce Bartlett defends the "Europeanization" of America:

I don't mean to imply that Europeanization is unambiguously good; only that it's not unambiguously bad, as virtually all conservatives believe. There are many ways I think we could learn from the Europeans and they from us. One way we can learn from them is how to have a tax system that raises considerably more revenue as a share of the economy than ours does without killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

 

At a minimum, I think it's safe to say that Hayek was wrong about the inevitability of totalitarianism arising from growth in the size of government. The collapse of communism is proof enough of that.

Lord Byron is spinning, at 10,000 rpm, in his grave.

(Hat tip: Likecool)

The Atlantic has a wonderful article in the new issue by David Dobbs on how the same genes can be advantageous or debilitating:

Gene variants generally considered misfortunes (poor Jim, he got the “bad” gene) can instead now be understood as highly leveraged evolutionary bets, with both high risks and high potential rewards: gambles that help create a diversified-portfolio approach to survival, with selection favoring parents who happen to invest in both dandelions and orchids.

In this view, having both dandelion and orchid kids greatly raises a family’s (and a species’) chance of succeeding, over time and in any given environment. The behavioral diversity provided by these two different types of temperament also supplies precisely what a smart, strong species needs if it is to spread across and dominate a changing world. The many dandelions in a population provide an underlying stability. The less-numerous orchids, meanwhile, may falter in some environments but can excel in those that suit them. And even when they lead troubled early lives, some of the resulting heightened responses to adversity that can be problematic in everyday life–increased novelty-seeking, restlessness of attention, elevated risk-taking, or aggression–can prove advantageous in certain challenging situations: wars, tribal or modern; social strife of many kinds; and migrations to new environments. Together, the steady dandelions and the mercurial orchids offer an adaptive flexibility that neither can provide alone. Together, they open a path to otherwise unreachable individual and collective achievements.

Kottke:

From a book called Obsolete, a list of things that were once common but not so much anymore: blind dates, mix tapes, getting lost, porn magazines, looking old, operators, camera film, hitchhiking, body hair, writing letters, basketball players in short shorts, privacy, cash, and, yes, books.

And real conservatives.

A gallery of 35 WTFs.