Month: February 2013

No thermometers required:

Alex Knapp explains the significance of this research:

This independent confirmation neatly side-steps some of the controversies around global warming centering on temperature measurements. That’s because many of the claims of skeptics to explain the effect – such as the “urban heat-island” – don’t apply to the proxies. What’s more, the fact that the proxies show large agreement with the measured temperature record provides additional reason to accept that despite the changes in temperature measurement that have occurred over the past century, climatologists have been pretty precise in adjusting for those changes when deriving global trends.

@sullydish Speaking of incompetence, why don’t you trim your beard yourself? Really, it’s right there in front of you. t.co/5ptQumAm5I

— musicaltypist (@musicaltypist) February 21, 2013

Because I’d fuck it up. But first of all, many thanks for all the barbershop recommendations from readers, in both the in-tray and on Facebook. Now for the onslaught:

Would you please stop telling us either how much you like or (mostly) hate New York City.  So you had three bad experiences with lousy and (in the case of the iPad) unprincipled barbers – and that crystallizes everything that’s horrible about this place?  I’m a lifelong New Yorker and don’t have a “love it or leave it” attitude, but I just think you sound as if you’re whining, which is unlike you 99% of the time, and really off-putting.

Another helps explain a little of my entirely unscientific, whiny anecdotage:

Allow me to join the chorus: Why the hell are you in Manhattan? I’m willing to bet that relocating to Brooklyn would remedy at least 90% of your solvable issues. One huge difference is places in Manhattan, especially the more touristy areas uptown, can survive on doling our shitty service, since there’s enough foot traffic to keep them in business without ever getting a repeat customer – not so in most parts of Brooklyn.

Another really lays into me:

Andrew, this whole NYC Shitty thing has starting to become profoundly offensive.

I have lived in this town since 1978.  Yes, I have had bad service; yes, I have had surly encounters – but, Jesus, I’ve had that everywhere: yes, even in your beloved Washington D.C. I’m sorry you have had a bad experience with barbers in NYC (if you’re not going to Astor Barbers on Astor Place, where I’ve been getting my hair cut for the past 25 years, you’re not going to a real barbershop anyway).  But I am beginning to suspect that you are getting back the vibe that you are giving out.  The only people who are consistently treated poorly in this town are, quite frankly, assholes.  You treat people well, and they will treat you well back.

But for you to write something like, “one of the least competent, self-loving cities I’ve ever known,” you have just singlehandedly insulted every single service person in the five boroughs and, brother, you have not lived here long enough to make that kind of sweeping generalization.

Seriously: if people are treating you like jerks, it might be time to look inside.  Because I haven’t had as many bad experiences in 25 years as you have in 25 weeks.  But then I’m a cheerful soul who spent 15 years in a service profession myself, and so I go out of my way to treat anyone else in that role with kindness and respect.

Other New Yorkers disagree:

I couldn’t agree more about NYC being filled with incompetents. To this day, after about 12 years in the city, it still fills me with amazement, especially when you compare the plain experience of any one day with that in any other city. The guy at Chipotle gets your order wrong, after repeating it 3 times. Two different people in adjacent departments at a store tell you the other one is the person able to answer your question. And you get a shitty haircut from someone who acts like they did you a favor. But part of what actually changed for me is finding routines. NYC is a city that simultaneously offers you the most magical moments of spontaneity you could ever hope for – while at the same time demanding that you find a tiny little series of unyielding routines around which you can build a life. It’s the routines that isolate you from the city’s most Kafka-esque moments of surreal discomfort.

I’ll give you an example: The other day, I was fortunate enough to find myself at The Loft, a private dance party thrown by David Mancuso for 43 years. It originated partly as a safe place for gays to dance together in the late 1970s. And today, if you ever get a chance to go, you’ll be dancing alongside music heads, grizzled disco veterans who great each other with salutations like “oh! My friend from the ’80s!”, and a lone Japanese guy in a tie-die shirt who stands in front of a concert-grade speaker for an hour just screaming with joy. I challenge you to find that mise-en-scene anywhere else.

Well, I did have one of those magical moments recently. A friend took me to some Russian baths – a mise-en-scene that came like a bolt from the blue. Some of the most beautiful men I have ever seen were parading in front of bikini-ed female admirers; there were Jews and gentiles; there was food and even something called “plotzing” where some dude whacks you with a tree branch as a form of massage. So my friend booked me one when we arrived. It was timed for 3.45 pm. It never happened. We waited till 5 pm and gave up. The lockers were all numbered randomly. Talking to customer service, one quickly realized there wasn’t any. Another reader:

Today, the Dunkin Donuts I go to every morning, where they start making my drink the minute I walk in no matter how many people are on line, where they hand it to me on the side and scan the barcode on my iPhone app without bothering anyone else, and where they always have huge smiles for my 10-month-old son Ethan … today, for some reason, when I took a sip of my iced coffee, I realized that they had put sugar in it. How dare they. I don’t take sugar in my coffee.

Pray tell, what the fuck is wrong with this godforsaken city?

Thomas Hackett calls the Oscar-nominated Beasts of the Southern Wild “patronizing and borderline racist”:

[Beasts] comes to us as one of those movies “the industry can be proud of,” which the great bullshit detector Pauline Kael called out in her famous 1969 essay “Trash, Art and the Movies”—a film we feel honored to acclaim. It skims the surface of serious matters without asking us to actually grapple with their complexities: We can feel guilty, virtuous, and indifferent all at once.

Beasts does this primarily by turning poverty into a kind of sentimental, specious poetry. Sentimentality has its uses, of course, not the least of which is to mask unpleasant realities with comforting hooey. Basically, it’s a form of moral and intellectual pornography, an easy way of getting off that, in the case of Beasts, begins and ends in patronizing attitudes of racial superiority. Just as nineteenth-century readers were endeared to the “funny little specimen” of Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, audiences and reviewers have also taken complete leave of their critical faculties over Beast’s Hushpuppy with her big eyes, shock of Don King hair, precious voice-over narration, and cutesy-pie name. [A.O.] Scott calls the girl an “American original”; in fact, though, Hushpuppy is just yet another iteration in a long and cherished line of pickaninnies.

The actress who plays her, Quvenzhané Wallis, is the youngest ever nominee for Best Actress, at the age of 9.

Gerson and Wehner argued that, based on economic fundamentals, Romney should have won in 2012 and that other factors cost the party the election. Seth Masket counters that “the evidence suggests that the Republican Party is as competitive as it ever was”:

 Richard Nixon strongly outperformed the economy in 1972, possibly due to his relative moderation compared to George McGovern’s extremism (a point that Gerson and Wehner note). And Lyndon Johnson may have had an advantage in 1964 running against a deeply conservative Barry Goldwater. Some political science studies have noted that members of Congress who vote too ideologically or too often with their party tend to pay an electoral price for it. And, to be sure, while polarization is occurring today among both parties, the Republicans appear to be running to their extreme more quickly than the Democrats are running to theirs. What we don’t see, however, is evidence that this extremism is hurting Republicans electorally, at least not yet. If the economy had been experiencing a recession last year instead of modest growth, Mitt Romney would be president today.

Bouie adds:

If reform happens, it will be because Republicans find themselves out of power for an unusual amount of time. A setback in 2014, a loss in 2016—those are the things that will prompt a reevaluation of the party’s policies and priorities.

Earlier Dish on Gerson and Wehner here.

Will Saletan attempts to put civilian casualties caused by drones in context with other weapons used for similar missions:

Drones kill a lower ratio of civilians to combatants than we’ve seen in any recent war. Granted, many civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other such wars were killed by our enemies rather than by us. But that’s part of the equation. One reason to prefer drones is that when you send troops, fighting breaks out, and the longer the fighting goes on, the more innocent people die. Drones are like laparoscopic surgery: They minimize the entry wound and the risk of infection.

Over the years, I’ve shared many worries about the rise of drones: the illusion of withdrawal, the militarization of the CIA, the corruption of law, the evasion of congressional restraint, the risk of mission creep, and the proliferation of signature strikes. But civilian casualties? That’s not an argument against drones. It’s the best thing about them.

Pointing to Saletan’s comments in the early stages of the invasion of Iraq, Freddie deBoer counters:

One thing people get frustrated about with our media is the way in which there is no accountability or consequences for past mistakes, particularly when it comes to foreign policy. But a lot of the self-same people who make that complaint continue to take seriously people who should have been renounced long ago. Saletan is one such person. He hasn’t just gotten war wrong. He has gotten the specific question of humane warfare, collateral damage, and the technological capacity of our military spectacularly, incredibly, unimaginably wrong. People forget. But I don’t.

Yes, but Will has copped to his errors of judgment, which is by far the most important thing. Freddie should focus more on those like Charles Krauthammer who was the intellectual architect of the worst foreign policy disaster since Vietnam and is still treated as a foreign policy and military expert in Washington.

Previous Dish on the defensibility of drones here, here, here and here.

(Photo: A Pakistani victim of US drone attack rests on a bed after she arrived with her brothers and sisters from the North Waziristan area of Ghundai Village for treatment in Peshawar on November 3, 2012, after US missile hit near their house on October 24. A US drone fired two missiles at a suspected militant compound in northwest Pakistan, killing three people, security officials said. By A Majeed/AFP/Getty Images)

Charles Murray argues that early intervention has been oversold:

The take-away from the story of early childhood education is that the very best programs probably do a modest amount of good in the long run, while the early education program that can feasibly be deployed on a national scale, Head Start, has never proved long-term results in half a century of existence. In the most rigorous evaluation ever conducted, Head Start doesn’t show results that persist even until the third grade.

Let me rephrase this more starkly: As of 2013, no one knows how to use government programs to provide large numbers of small children who are not flourishing with what they need. It’s not a matter of money. We just don’t know how.

Earlier views on universal pre-K here and here.

Jesse Walker wants them to stop:

In fact, the prepper community includes a lot of political and cultural variety. If there is right-wing survivalist DNA here, there is also the DNA of the Whole Earth Catalog and several generations of bohemian back-to-the-landers, plus a fair number of families whose inspiration isn’t much larger than the Boy Scout motto, “Be Prepared.” Tour the online prepper communities, and you may well run into people who have embraced the long-lived conspiracy yarn in which the Federal Emergency Management Agency is plotting to put us inconcentration camps. You may also encounter FEMA itself, which currently has anadvertisement on the front page of the American Preppers Network. The ad asks, “Do you meet President Obama’s minimum Prepper Standards? Are you ‘FEMA Ready’?” Talk about all-encompassing diversity.

@aaronpaul_8 feel sort of “vindicated” that you sped through a show and are lamenting it’s completion sort of like how I did yours.

— xTx(@xtx33) February 20, 2013

Christopher Mims critiques Netflix’s decision to release the entire season of House of Cards at once:

By giving up the level of constant social media chatter that accrues to shows that are released episodically, Netflix missed out on the kind of sustained conversations that help a show find its widest possible audience. … As media critic David Carr points out, one of the things that sustains shows like Game of Thrones and Homeland is the social dimension: People tweet along with the show as its broadcast, share their feelings on recent episodes on Facebook, and read episode recaps when they miss the show. By making it a little too easy for viewers to access all of House of Cards at once, Netflix has missed out on the multiplicative effect that happens when the conversation around a show is concentrated in time.

But Wayne Friedman questions the link between social media buzz and ratings:

New TV shows’ social media metrics still aren’t witnessing comparably strong initial traditional TV viewership. The best social-ranking new show, ABC’s “Zero Hour,” is now at a 6.1 “involvement score,” according to social media watcher General Sentiment, … [which] factors involvement in looking at news, social and Twitter social-media areas. But “Zero Hour” didn’t light the world on fire — at least from its Nielsen initial live-plus-same-day numbers.

And Emma Roller views House of Cards as “a ploy by Netflix to prop up its new brand identity as a quasi-network”:

According to a survey by Cowen and Co. released last week, 86 percent of Netflix subscribers said having the access to watch House of Cards makes them less likely to cancel their subscriptions. One important caveat is that a majority of subscribers surveyed also said they’d cancel their Netflix subscriptions if Netflix raised its current $7.99/month price.

Previous Dish discussion here and here.