Month: December 2012

Today on the Dish, Andrew outlined the similarities between the movements for legal weed and marriage equality, reviewed new evidence proving that John McCain has been an intellectually-dishonest douche, and recommended a Quentin Crisp quote as representative of Israel’s settlement mindset – in addition to joining Koplow and Ibish to decipher Netanyahu’s related intentions. Our popular Roid Age thread continued with Andrew further elaborating on his support for legalized steroids. Also, he and others continued The Daily’s post-mortem and considered the best mediums for long-form journalism.

In political coverage, we featured more letters from millennial voters, rounded up reax to the GOP’s opening fiscal-cliff offer, and hoped for a second-term carbon tax, while John Judis put GOP moderates on the political endangered species list, Tom Ricks emailed in his disappointment with MSNBC, and Michael Moore fared-well in the making of his capitalism documentary. Looking internationally, Charles Kenny pointed out how the multi-allied US is a major reason there aren’t many invasions anymore, we surveyed the depressing (and largely neocon-enabled) worldwide terrorism stats, and in Syria the struggling Assad regime assembled some of its chemical weapons.

In assorted coverage, readers contributed their own examples of imperfect novel endings – a problem that another reader indicated applies to video games as well. Alyssa applauded how the unborn royal will inherit the throne no matter its gender, Frank Dikotter explored Mao’s Stalin fixation, Scott Sherman highlighted how a 1962 press strike changed the course of the media industry, and while Leslie Jamison tried out gangland tourism, Julia Phillips mushed along on a 685 mile dog sled race in Russia. Jazz was not dying as readers responded to last week’s post about the Great American Songbook. Munchausen syndrome flourished online and Cienna Madrid explained why. We also heard arguments for including servicewomen in combat, lamented the possible loss-by-consolidation of Virgin Atlantic, and profiled the Amazon e-threat to brick-and-mortar retail. Then Jon Michaud noted how peanut butter was originally an upper-class health food, McKibben shared his concerns about the health of our oceans, The Economist looked at the self-centered salaries of powerful men, Maria Popova looked to literature for the meaning of love, and Alexandra Lange tracked the rise of the butter knife.

The 2012 mega-mashups have started and our MHB looked at the year’s pop music, readers narrowed down this week’s VFYW contest to Sausalito’s Glen Avenue, Germany’s president mulled over his punch in our FOTD, Monte Carlo dawned through the VFYW, and honestly, the last Batman movie really did suck.

– C.D.

Maria Popova ponders what great writers can teach us about the greatest emotion:

Kurt Vonnegut believed you’re only allowed to be in love three times in your life. It has been described as a matter of bravery, a limbic revision, the greatest insurance against regret. For Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, it is simply, sweetly walking hand in hand. But how, exactly, does love take hold of the heart?

She finds an answer in the 1822 treatise On Love, by Marie-Henri Beyle (aka Stendhal):

For the very young, love is like a huge river which sweeps everything before it, so that you feel that it is a restless current. Now a sensitive person has acquired some self-knowledge by twenty-eight; she knows that any happiness she can expect from life will come to her through love; hence a terrible struggle develops between love and mistrust. She crystallizes only slowly; but whatever crystals survive her terrible ordeal, where the spirit is moving in the face of the most appalling danger, will be a thousand times more brilliant and durable than those of the sixteen-year-old, whose privileges are simply happiness and joy. Thus the later love will be less gay, but more passionate.

(Light installation from the series The Transference Field by James Tapscott via My Modern Met)

Last month, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, “We would never propose a carbon tax, and have no intention of proposing one.” Elizabeth Kolbert hopes Obama will reconsider:

This was taken by some to mean that Obama was opposed to the tax and by others to mean just that he was not going to be the one to suggest it.

In either case, the White House is making a big mistake. Pigovian taxes are rarely politically popular—something they have in common with virtually all taxes. But, as Obama embarks on his second term, it’s time for him to take some risks. Several countries, including Australia and Sweden, already have a carbon tax. Were the United States to impose one, it would have global significance. It would show that Americans are ready to acknowledge, finally, that we are part of the problem. There is a price to be paid for living as we do, and everyone is going to get stuck with the bill.

Frum is onboard:

A tax of $20 a ton, rising at a rate of 4% per year, would over the next decade raise $1.5 trillion, according to an important new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That $1.5 trillion is almost twice as much as would be recouped to the Treasury by allowing the expiration of all Bush-era tax cuts for upper-income taxpayers.

The revenues from a carbon tax could be used to reduce the deficit while also extending new forms of payroll tax relief to middle-class families, thus supporting middle-class family incomes. 

Meanwhile, the shock of slowly but steadily rising prices for fuel and electricity would drive economic changes that would accelerate U.S. economic growth.

A reader writes:

I read with interest your post on the failure of many great books to come up with a satisfying ending. It's hard enough to end a book, but I'd wager that it's even more difficult to end a video game.

Video games are a young medium, but they've always had a strange relationship with their endings. Early arcade games don't end so much as break. If you get far enough into, say, Pac-man, and you're confronted with a "kill screen" where the game no longer functions properly. Your reward for getting through an NES game could be hugely disappointing. For instance, my brother and I spent one Saturday afternoon toiling away at Rampage only for the game to end with "CONGRATULATIONS" and nothing else splashed across the screen. There's a sense that these games could be excused for their lame endings, as they were monstrously difficult to complete and were suffering under crushing limitations of budget and memory.

Today, you've got games with budgets equivalent or greater to that of Hollywood movies. Naturally, expectations have risen.

We'd like some kind of narrative in our games – at least the ones which can support a narrative, mind you. The problem is that a game is not being watched; it's being played. You have to take into account player input, because in a sense, you (as a developer) are sharing storytelling responsibilities with the player. Thus, your ending has to respect the themes your story has set up in the previous hours, but it also has to respect the player's accumulated gameplay experience. It's difficult to convincingly kill off the main character in a first-person shooter, for instance, because the player has seen his avatar carve his way through thousands of bad guys. Oftentimes the solution is to kill off the character in a cutscene, where control is taken away from the player, but this generally comes off as something of a cop out. One of the only games I've seen pull this off is Halo: Reach; your character dies, but does so as a function of actual gameplay after completing his mission.

It's even worse if your game allows some kind of choice system. The most pertinent modern example is the ending to the Mass Effect series of games. The central promise of the series was that choices the player made – which faction to support, which system of morality to endorse, etc. – would end up mattering greatly in the end. I'll spare you the aggrieved nerdrage (Worst. Ending. Ever.), but when the various endings to Mass Effect 3, the final game in the trilogy, ended up being largely identical [illustrated in the above video], the backlash was so severe – the overall critical score of the game is a 93, while the user score is 40 points lower – that the developers released a free add-on essentially adding cosmetic differences to the ending.

The strange thing was that the ending to Mass Effect 2, the previous game, was widely praised – it's No. 19 on this list (Halo: Reach is No. 2).  It's as if developers practically luck into making particularly great or horrible endings. There seems to be less thought being put into this than there should be, but given that word-of-mouth can end up costing a game much-needed sales, I'd wager that it's a topic being discussed at most major developers.

Anyway, sorry to nerd out about this, but the election is over so I figure I can indulge in a bit of frippery.

Major Mary Jennings Hegar, a decorated Air Force veteran, explains why she is suing the government for excluding women from combat units:

If there is one thing I’ve learned about the differences between us all throughout my years of service, it’s this: putting the right person in the right job has very little to do with one’s gender, race, religion, or other demographic descriptor. It has everything to do with one’s heart, character, ability, determination and dedication.

That’s the problem with the military’s combat exclusion policy. It makes it that much harder for people to see someone’s abilities, and instead reinforces stereotypes about gender. The policy creates the pervasive way of thinking in military and civilian populations that women can’t serve in combat roles, even in the face of the reality that servicewomen in all branches of the military are already fighting for their country alongside their male counterparts. They shoot, they return fire, they drag wounded comrades to safety, they engage the enemy, and they have been doing these heroic deeds since the Revolutionary War. They risk their lives for their country, and the combat exclusion policy does them a great disservice.

Adam Cohen presents Hegar's case:

Many military women — who are 14% of the 1.4 million active military — object to the policy because it blocks them from applying for some 238,000 jobs and excludes them from certain promotions. This is particularly unfair because the ban doesn’t actually protect women in service.

Fully 85% of women who have served since Sept. 11, 2001 report having served in a combat zone or an area where they received combat or imminent danger pay, according to the lawsuit, and half reported being involved in combat operations. At least 860 female troops have been wounded and 144 killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In fact, as Major Mary Jennings Hagar’s suit argues, the ban on putting women in official ground combat positions actually puts them in greater danger. In many cases, women fight alongside men in "female engagement teams" that endure the same conditions — but, because they are deemed not to be combat-eligible, they may not have received proper training. 

German President Joachim Gauck speaks with a child from the Carl von Ossietzky school while drinking mulled punch during the illumination ceremony for the Christmas tree at Bellevue Presidential Palace on December 4, 2012 in Berlin, Germany. The 12-meter (40-foot) tall Colorado blue spruce (Picea pungens) was planted in 1994 and is being supplied to the president for the second time by Werderaner Tannenhof Christmas tree farm in the town of Werder, just outside of the German capital. By Adam Berry/Getty Images.

Alyssa Rosenberg celebrates a welcome change:

No matter the gender, Kate's baby will be heir to the British throne. Six months after William and Kate's wedding, the British Commonwealth countries finally scrapped the rules that gave boys precedence over girls in the royal line of succession. So if this royal baby is a girl, Will and Kate won't have to get to work on a boy immediately—or ever.

Alyssa later adds:

If Kate has a girl, she gets to be Queen, period, without any worry that she’ll be leapfrogged by a younger brother. That’s awesome, and shockingly overdue.

A brutally honest take on the last Batman movie:

First, McArdle lays out some of Amazon's business advantages:

[E]conomies of scale used to work in favor of [big-box giants like Best Buy]. But Amazon’s scale is even bigger: instead of hundreds of stores, they have 40 vast warehouses scattered throughout the U.S … Amazon can now site and open a new warehouse in under a year, in an industry where three- to five-year build cycles are the norm. Every holiday season, just as demand starts to spike, they open more. Best Buy likes to point out that 70 percent of Americans are within 10 minutes of a Best Buy. But 100 percent of continental Americans are just a click and a day from an Amazon warehouse. And they don’t even have to change out of their pajamas.

Is there any way for brick-and-mortar stores to complete? Marcus Wohlsen looks to eBay Now, which "lets shoppers order just about anything in stock from nearby chain stores such as Target, Best Buy, Macy’s, and Home Depot for delivery in about an hour":

By connecting shoppers with already existing local stores, eBay extends its reach from buying and selling online to buying and selling on the ground … If eBay can spread that model to cities and towns across the country, it becomes a national platform for local commerce — and a way for eBay to get people what they want faster than Amazon can, without the huge costs and risks of maintaining its own inventory of products or building warehouses.

After growing up in Santa Monica, Leslie Jamison describes the bizarre experience of taking a gang tour in LA:

Alfred is the guide. He’s a marine turned gangbanger turned entrepreneur. He’s cracking Inner City Jokes. His phrase. We don’t need the windows open cuz we don’t do drive-bys. Also, we can’t have them open because the bus is air-conditioned. He’s hired three other guys to help lead the tour — ex-gang-members who had trouble finding other jobs with felonies on their records. They’ve turned their experiences into stories for travelers. They are curators and exhibits at once. When they’re not giving tours, they’re doing conflict mediation in the communities these tours put on display. The $65 will fund this work.

Jamison doesn't shy from her unease with the tourism aspect, but the account of the tour is fascinating: 

From downtown, you head to South Central and finally to Watts. The towers are eerie and wondrous — like something a witch made — pointing ragged into a blue sky. Capricorn tells you he’s climbed them. Every Watts kid climbs them.

A lot of guys get them tattooed on their backs or biceps — the distinctive profile of their bony cones. One of the Missouri girls asks, "What’re they made of?" and Capricorn says, "What does it look like they’re made of?" You like this kind of tour, where there is such a thing as a stupid question, though this — to you — doesn’t seem like one. What are they made of? Capricorn finally mutters, shells and shit. He’s right, you find out later — they’re made of shells, steel, mortar, glass, and pottery. An immigrant named Sam Rodia made Italian folk art the template for generations of gang tats.

(Photo of the Watts tower by Joaquin Uy)