Month: December 2012

A reader writes:

Last night my girlfriend watched A Christmas Story. In light of recent events, she came away from it a little disturbed. In the movie, Ralphie desperately wants a BB gun for Christmas. Even though almost every adult he meets tells him it's a bad idea, at the end of the movie he gets it anyway, and it makes him the happiest little boy in the world. As light and fun and charmingly nostalgic as this film is, at its center is the idea that it's okay to lust after a weapon. Doesn't that condone exactly the same gun culture that has led to so much tragedy?

The gun Ralphie wants is just a toy, but to him it's as real as any other. He has these fantasies about using his gun to protect his family from evil bad guys. It occurred to me that these are the same fantasies that so many gun advocates use to argue that the answer is more guns. "If only I'd been in the school with a gun", they say, "I could have easily stopped the shooter before he did much damage." I'm not an expert, but I suspect most people who believe this are about as likely to succeed as Ralphie would with his BB gun. This seems to me a forgivable fantasy if you're a 10-year-old boy, but not if you want to participate in an adult conversation about how best to protect ourselves. Please, grow up.

Update from a reader:

Ralphie does finally get his BB gun, goes to the backyard, takes aim at a target, fires and the BB promptly ricochets … straight back in to his eyeglass lens, thus smashing it and causing him to run indoors, crying. This condones gun ownership? So, if your reader feels compelled to take a lesson from the movie: You WILL shoot your eye out.

Another:

The central theme of A Christmas Story is not "the idea that it's okay to lust after a weapon", but that it's okay to be a kid with an imagination. I lusted after a BB gun when I was a boy (and eventually got one) because I had the same fantasies that Ralphie had – protecting his family, saving his friends, becoming a hero. As a young boy it's exciting to imagine yourself as the savior of others. And like most little boys who love playing with guns, as I grew up I learned that the road to heroism rarely involves one. If I hadn't been allowed the healthy freedom to explore the fantasies of my childish imagination, I may not have come to the same conclusion.

Another:

So the desire to own a firearm to protect one’s household from intruders is a childish fantasy? People who "lust over a weapon" are part of "the gun culture that has lead to so much tragedy" and need to "grow up"? Please.

I live on a back road in northern Vermont. The closest law enforcement is twenty minutes away – if I’m lucky. If someone invades my home, I’m not going to ask them to kindly wait until the authorities arrive for a proper stand-off. I dread the thought of ever having to use my Glock (a handgun that I regularly practice with and securely store in my nightstand in a biometric safe that only I can open) against anyone, but I sleep better at night knowing I have at least a chance of protecting my family against a home invasion, no matter how unlikely the situation.

The idea of little Ralphie "using his gun to protect his family from evil bad guys" (who do exist, believe it or not) is not a "fantasy" for many, but an unpleasant, if rare, reality and – depending on where you live – a very logical choice. I’m actually sympathetic to idea of reasonable gun control legislation and there certainly are some nutty gun enthusiasts out there, but this kind of silly characterization makes people who have actual experience with firearms roll their eyes.

Ramin Setoodeh takes out his stopwatch:

Twenty years ago, the average running time of the top-five grossing movies of the year was 118.4 minutes. In 2012 that number so far averages to 142 minutes. Longer movies are now becoming a mainstay of the summer—as well as fall and winter. The Avengers, the most successful movie of the year, had a running time of 143 minutes. The Dark Knight Rises, the No. 2 biggest movie, went on for 165 minutes. The Hunger Games (142 minutes), The Amazing Spider-Man (136 minutes), and Battleship (131 minutes) could have used some—or a lot—of tightening. In 1990 Home Alone was only 103 minutes.

Silvia Killingsworth toys around with Inbox Zero, "essentially a rudimentary filing system, popularized by the productivity evangelist and lifehacker Merlin Mann, who founded the blog 43folders.com in 2004." Why Killingsworth is ambivalent about the tool:

For me, Inbox Zero is a coping mechanism for the anxiety created by a constant flux of e-mail: the basic philosophy is "out of sight, out of mind." On the one hand, it feels great not to linger on past conversations; but on the other hand, I forget whole interactions as soon as they’re gone from my screen. I’ve traded short-term memory for a Googleable inbox, which maybe isn’t such a bad thing. As long as you can remember some text from the message, or who sent it, you can call it up in seconds, much like you might Google anything else using keywords on the Internet.

In some ways, the Inbox Zero system is just a game of whack-a-mail—as soon as you reply and archive one thread, up pops another. And what about when you actually reach Inbox Zero? It doesn’t feel like winning. It feels like staring into the abyss.

(Photo by Hyperdashery Badges)

Victor Menaldo explains:

[L]egislatures, along with political parties and courts, allow a dictatorship to formally institutionalize their political power by defining who qualifies as a regime insider and who does not, what political insiders’ rights are, and what tools they can avail to defend their rights and pursue their interests. Along these lines, legislatures allow a dictator to do two important things. First, usher in a stable distributional arrangement, in terms of who will benefit from rents produced by the coercive power of the state and its politicized regulation of the economy. Second, help a dictator credibly commit to protecting the property rights and vital interests of regime insiders—not only in the immediate present but in the uncertain future, and even when the identity of key individuals who helped launched the regime into existence has changed.

Gary Marcus explains why robotic helpers aren't coming to an apartment near you:

The two biggest challenges to making general-purposes robots are, as they always have been, hardware and software. Neither challenge is insuperable, but both are harder than one might think. On the hardware side, there are now lots of robots that can do incredibly cool things. One robot runs faster than the fastest human, another dances Gangnam style. Still another, PR2, folds towels and fetches beer.

The catch is that, at the moment, each new robot is like a proof of concept. The ones that are fast and physically powerful, like AlphaDog, a quadruped robot, and the headless but amazing PETMAN, are, for now, still dependent on hydraulic actuators powered by industrial-strength pumps and gasoline engines; they work fine in a laboratory-test environment, but you wouldn’t want one roaming around your home. Others, like Baxter and PR2, are capable of fairly sophisticated movements, but at speeds that are still too slow to be practical around the home. It might take five minutes just for PR2 to grab you a beer.

Adam Lankford has studied the question:

Psychologists have long theorized that there’s a connection between rage against others and rage against the self. According to my findings, the shooter’s likelihood of committing suicide or suicide by cop appears to be 1.16 times higher (controlling for the attacker’s age and sex) for each additional victim that is killed. This suggests that those who have the most rage toward others – and therefore end up killing the most victims – would also feel the most guilty and ashamed about their crimes. They are therefore more likely to engage in “self-punishment” via suicide or suicide by cop. After the initial explosion of rage causes them to open fire, active shooters who see many dead or dying victims around them may feel a correspondingly higher need for self-punishment than shooters with fewer victims.

The Princeton historian James McPherson, reviewing a number of new books on Lincoln, deconstructs criticisms of the Emancipation Proclamation, focusing particularly the claim "that Lincoln 'freed' the slaves in areas where he had no power, and left them in slavery where he did have power":

Nothing could be more wrong. For one thing, tens of thousands of ex-slaves lived in parts of the Confederacy that were occupied by Union forces but were not exempted from the proclamation. They celebrated it as their charter of freedom. For that matter, so did many slaves in exempted areas, which included the four slave-holding states that never left the Union (Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland) as well as Confederate areas that had been returned to Union control, such as New Orleans and the forty-eight Virginia counties that would soon become West Virginia. They recognized that if emancipation took hold in the Confederate states, slavery could scarcely survive in the upper South.

The proclamation officially turned the Union army into an army of liberation—if it could win the war.

And by authorizing the enlistment of freed slaves in the army, the final proclamation went a long step toward creating that army of liberation. If the Emancipation Proclamation was merely a piece of paper that did not actually free anyone, as skeptics then and later charged, the Declaration of Independence was likewise a mere piece of paper that did not in itself create a new nation. Both outcomes depended on victory in a war to which these documents gave new purpose.

Previous Dish on Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation here.

(Image: "Emancipation from Freedmen's Viewpoint," an illustration from Harper's Weekly circa 1865, from Wikimedia Commons)

A reader keeps the discussion going:

I think the piece you're missing from the equation are the advertisers themselves. For years they've counted on the interruptive model. And the advent of digital showed everyone how bogus those circulation numbers were. And quantitative metrics on engagement with display have shown how useless those units are.

But who says traditional media companies have to be the only ones publishing content? There's a nascent brand journalism industry forming, with varying levels of sophistication and commercial intent. A lot of it is just brand and audience building. Bring in as many people as possible with content they would find entertaining elsewhere, but you don't have to serve them any ads. Because the brand OWNS the page. (See: theadrenalist.com and Unilever, tablespoon.com and General Mills)

We're still a long ways off from the quality of content a normal publisher can achieve – but how far out are we? A brand has the money to pay writers, and they're not beholden to pageview models for revenue. Now, brands of course can't be responsible for public service journalism, but they might be able to underwrite non-profits to cover government and industry. Or maybe not.

Today on the Dish, Andrew caught us up on the fiscal cliff negotiations and responded to how Speaker Boehner seems unwilling or unable to accept a deal. He also took on the Greater Israel Lobby’s smearing of Chuck Hagel (which Beinart later detailed) and was troubled by the rising popularity of reality TV shows that seem to show the decline of the middle-class.

In continuing coverage of last week’s school shooting, we reviewed the political affiliations of gun owners and considered stats that suggested mass shootings weren’t increasing, while Hanna Rosin and others debated the ethics of publicizing your child’s mental illness, Danny Hayes anticipated a decline in press coverage, Douthat suggested more police, Max Fisher debunked the linking of American gun violence to video games, and we looked at achieving gun control through bullet control, later adding analysis from Weigel and Ambers. Also, Shafer offered his explanation of last Friday’s journalistic screw-ups, Nate Cohn recommended that Obama stand back on gun control, Kevin Roose reviewed a private-equity firm’s decision to ditch the firearm business, McArdle earned a Malkin for suggesting that we teach kids how to gang-rush shooters, and readers wrote in with their personal reflections on the potentially negative profile the shooting has given those with Asperger’s Syndrome.

In political coverage, Nicola Abé passed along the story of an Air Force drone operator, a reader responded to the morality of those depicted in Zero Dark Thirty, we rounded up reactions to Obama’s latest fiscal cliff offer, and we parsed polling that showed a rising acceptance of climate change. Looking abroad, Eric Trager expected Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to prove an almost impossible ally for the US, Olivia Solon reported on the private radio network being used by Mexico’s drug cartels, and a reader explained how Finland’s automated welfare-system results in people’s deaths sometimes going unnoticed for years.

And in assorted coverage, readers mistook Burma for Kerala and Hoboken in their quest to win this week’s VFYW Contest, David Samuels explored the pitfalls of winning the lottery, Zara Kessler thought Apple’s Mapocalypse would result in even greater love for the company, Ambers tried to be realistic about what we can do to combat obesity, Grant Cogswell detailed the history of cockfighting, and Jodi Ettenberg told us to stick to the lines if we wanted to eat safely abroad. Readers also continued to discuss the varied ways to wish someone a season’s greetings, while Michał Oleszczyk highlighted the best seven movie-minutes of the year, Korn + Taylor Swift equalled our MHB, we visited Ecuador in the VFYW, and David Kuo shared his fears (and hopes) regarding death, as well as starred in our reader-submitted FOTD.

– C.D.

As the year-end lists roll in, Roger Ebert Michał Oleszczyk takes a moment to remember the little guys:

Enrico Casarosa's "La luna", the animated short distributed alongside Pixar's adventure flick "Brave," is one of the most beautiful, rich and moving films I saw this year, and yet it's unlikely it will top anyone's list — as if seven minutes weren't enough to cast a spell, fall in love, or make history.

Ebert Oleszczyk has a soft spot for films starring the moon:

It is true that Ms. Moon (as I was taught to call her by someone very dear to me) has recently been slumming in the atrocious "Twilight" series, but I always think back to her screen glory days and the two beautiful turns in a pair of movies scripted by John Patrick Shanley: "Moonstruck" (1987) and "Joe Versus the Volcano" (1990). Her huge, quizzical face hanging down from the sky in both films served as a sign of renewal for the long-depressed characters. She is the ultimate now-you-see-it-now-you-don't object and, in that, she resembles the happiness we try to pursue and every so often attain.