Traitor is a slightly better than average suspense thriller with a significantly better than average performance by Don Cheadle in the lead role. Sadly, however, the same cannot be said of his co-star, Guy Pierce, whose American accent isn’t too awful until it is revealed through dialog along the way that he’s supposed to be a Southerner, too. Pierce is a good actor, but we might consider going back to those halcyon days when honest-to-goodness American actors, or at least Canadian ringers, were cast in such roles. Constant Viewer knows all about the wonderfully talented Hugh Laurie in House and all that, but enough is enough.
CV suspects Traitor may slip in and out of your local cineplex before you notice it was there, as it was not produced by one of the major studios and received precious little pre-release advertising. As the contemporary crop of Middle Eastern terrorists versus U.S. intelligence agency films go, Traitor is a perfectly respectable entry. If you like such movies but you waited to see it on DVD, though, you wouldn’t miss much at all.
* * * * * * * * * *
If you waited to see Babylon A.D. on DVD you wouldn’t miss much, either. Then again, that’s equally true if you don’t bother seeing it at all. Vin Diesel turns in an acceptable Vin Diesel performance in this hyperactive but unengaging road movie. The road in question leads from Russia over the Bering Straits, across which Diesel’s character must transport a young woman (Mélanie Thierry) and her governess (Michelle Yeoh) from Mongolia to Manhattan. There are nice performances in comparatively small parts here by Charlotte Rampling and Gérard Depardieu, but the plot is so tissue thin and the directing so uneven and distracting their efforts are largely wasted. As was CV’s time.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
In Muted Defense of Gridlock
In Mr. Babka’s “Why I Don’t Want United Government,” reader Jeff Hebert makes some very interesting comments, including the following excerpt:
I certainly agree with much of Mr. Hebert’s characterization of both the Bush Administration and of John McCain. If we were discussing Obama versus a third Bush term, I'd be more inclined to agree as well with more of Mr. Hebert’s reasoning. As matters stand, however, and subject to change on a daily basis, Democrats are likely to increase their control of both the House and the Senate, so the question becomes not which candidate successfully pursuing his agenda poses the greater threat but which candidate is least likely to successfully push his agenda.
I'm no McCain fan or supporter. The man is an autocrat and, from just about every insider report I've ever heard, one of his many homes is in Cloud Cuckoo Land. The question is whether giving McCain yet another residence, this time on Pennsylvania Avenue is more likely to perpetuate or worsen Bush’s imperial presidency versus what sort and how much damage is likely to occur in an Obama Administration.
I continue to believe that what genuinely troubles the Democratic Party is not the immense and increasing power of the presidency but merely the fact that it’s not currently theirs to use. I agree with Mr. Hebert that there are worse things than socialized medicine. Perpetual war, for example, springs to mind. Furthermore, as offensive as a return of the Fairness Doctrine would be, it isn’t exactly like John McCain is a staunch defender of free speech. But, whining from progressives aside, there is absolutely nothing I know about Obama to lead me to believe he would be cautious in his use of executive power once it was given to him or, frankly, that he would not pursue a far more leftist agenda than he has so far proposed. Like McCain, he is not a man who tosses and turns late at night fretting with self-doubt.
Speaking of which, does Mr. Hebert really like to hear a candidate promise to “overturn those laws or executive decisions that I feel violate the constitution”? Feel? Okay, so maybe Obama was speaking somewhat informally or imprecisely. But just how does he plan to go about overturning not merely executive decisions but laws as well? Let's at least hope not by fiat.
The key to winning the presidential election in the U.S. continues to lie in campaigning sufficiently close to whatever the political middle happens to be to wrest away swing state (electoral) votes from your competition. If Obama announced his intention to press for legislation requiring universal “public service” nonmilitary conscription of 18 year olds and a 50% increase in all marginal tax rates, he’d win Massachusetts just the same but he’d lose Virginia for sure and probably Ohio, too. If McCain announced his intention to reinstate the military draft and abolish the Department of Education, he’d still probably win Mississippi and Arizona but lose Virginia and Ohio. Okay, so maybe my examples can be argued, but there are dead certain red states and dead certain blue states and a slowly shifting handful of swing states where the battle will be waged.
But none of that has anything to do with how the winner governs. Politicians all lie. Maybe not all the time but whenever necessary. If McCain really gave a damn about Obama’s lack of experience he sure as hell wouldn’t have picked Palin as his running mate. If Obama really gave a rodent’s hindquarters about change he wouldn’t have picked long-term Washington insider Joe Biden. They’ll both do and say what they believe they need to do and say in order to get elected. Once elected, they’ll do what they bloody well want to do.
Unless another branch of government stops them.
I hesitate to make the next point, but sooner or later it must at least be put on the table. If it is true, and it is, that Obama’s race is a factor in the election, then it is also almost certainly true that Obama’s race would be a factor in Congress’s relationship with his presidency. I don’t know how that would play out and I am not accusing Obama of anything so crass as “playing the race card” either now or should he be elected. I do think, however, that members of Congress will have to weigh one more factor in any decision to oppose or criticize a President Obama and that is whether such criticism or opposition even hints of racial animus.
Perhaps not. Perhaps even raising the issue shows a disconcerting oversensitivity to such matters on my part. Even so, all other factors being equal, I must believe there is a far greater likelihood of a Democratically controlled Congress standing up to a white Republican president than a black Democratic president regardless of the merits of whatever issue is under consideration.
Libertarians aren’t going to get minimal government any time in the foreseeable future, so minimally damaging government is the best they can hope for. Minimally damaging government tends invariably to be government that does the least regardless of how big it already is, so maximal gridlock is the best possible outcome from a libertarian perspective.
But best possible outcomes can be nearly as far removed from ideal outcomes as worst possible outcomes. I haven’t decided to vote for or otherwise support McCain. Far from it, in fact. But I certainly can understand how other libertarians, perhaps reasoning as I have here, might decide that, contra Mr. Hebert’s comments, voting for McCain is the most proactively libertarian thing they can do this time around. Doubtlessly (well, hopefully, anyway), they’ll be holding their noses as they do so.
This much I do know, though. If monopolies and collusive oligopolies really are bad for the general public, then undivided government and political “bipartisanship” ought to be prohibited on antitrust grounds. And that would still be true even if the president and every member of Congress were self-styled “Libertarians.”
I find it very surprising that anyone seriously concerned with libertarian issues would support a Republican President this time around. The Bush Administration has had a sustained, hard push over the last eight years to make the “Unitary Executive” doctrine the de facto law of the land. It’s hard for me to imagine anything worse for our liberties than a chief executive with the powers and privileges of a monarch, and yet that’s exactly what Cheney, Bush, Yoo, and company have been working steadily towards.
John McCain has surrounded himself with people who hold the most extreme neo-conservative views in the party. He’s not just going to be four more years of Bush, he’s going to be four more years of the worst parts of Bush. If the idea of “anything’s legal if the President does it” doesn’t scare you way, way worse than universal health care (plenty of other Western countries have it and yet shockingly their nations have not imploded), expanded union power (ditto), and some changes to the way the FCC works, then I would respectfully suggest that your priorities are way out of whack.
We’ve been witness to a full frontal assault on the concept of separation of powers and the enshrinement of a monarchical executive, largely unnoticed by the vast majority of the country. When asked what he would do with his first 100 days in office, Obama said “I would call my attorney general in and review every single executive order issued by George Bush and overturn those laws or executive decisions that I feel violate the constitution.” That’s exactly what I want to hear.
I certainly agree with much of Mr. Hebert’s characterization of both the Bush Administration and of John McCain. If we were discussing Obama versus a third Bush term, I'd be more inclined to agree as well with more of Mr. Hebert’s reasoning. As matters stand, however, and subject to change on a daily basis, Democrats are likely to increase their control of both the House and the Senate, so the question becomes not which candidate successfully pursuing his agenda poses the greater threat but which candidate is least likely to successfully push his agenda.
I'm no McCain fan or supporter. The man is an autocrat and, from just about every insider report I've ever heard, one of his many homes is in Cloud Cuckoo Land. The question is whether giving McCain yet another residence, this time on Pennsylvania Avenue is more likely to perpetuate or worsen Bush’s imperial presidency versus what sort and how much damage is likely to occur in an Obama Administration.
I continue to believe that what genuinely troubles the Democratic Party is not the immense and increasing power of the presidency but merely the fact that it’s not currently theirs to use. I agree with Mr. Hebert that there are worse things than socialized medicine. Perpetual war, for example, springs to mind. Furthermore, as offensive as a return of the Fairness Doctrine would be, it isn’t exactly like John McCain is a staunch defender of free speech. But, whining from progressives aside, there is absolutely nothing I know about Obama to lead me to believe he would be cautious in his use of executive power once it was given to him or, frankly, that he would not pursue a far more leftist agenda than he has so far proposed. Like McCain, he is not a man who tosses and turns late at night fretting with self-doubt.
Speaking of which, does Mr. Hebert really like to hear a candidate promise to “overturn those laws or executive decisions that I feel violate the constitution”? Feel? Okay, so maybe Obama was speaking somewhat informally or imprecisely. But just how does he plan to go about overturning not merely executive decisions but laws as well? Let's at least hope not by fiat.
The key to winning the presidential election in the U.S. continues to lie in campaigning sufficiently close to whatever the political middle happens to be to wrest away swing state (electoral) votes from your competition. If Obama announced his intention to press for legislation requiring universal “public service” nonmilitary conscription of 18 year olds and a 50% increase in all marginal tax rates, he’d win Massachusetts just the same but he’d lose Virginia for sure and probably Ohio, too. If McCain announced his intention to reinstate the military draft and abolish the Department of Education, he’d still probably win Mississippi and Arizona but lose Virginia and Ohio. Okay, so maybe my examples can be argued, but there are dead certain red states and dead certain blue states and a slowly shifting handful of swing states where the battle will be waged.
But none of that has anything to do with how the winner governs. Politicians all lie. Maybe not all the time but whenever necessary. If McCain really gave a damn about Obama’s lack of experience he sure as hell wouldn’t have picked Palin as his running mate. If Obama really gave a rodent’s hindquarters about change he wouldn’t have picked long-term Washington insider Joe Biden. They’ll both do and say what they believe they need to do and say in order to get elected. Once elected, they’ll do what they bloody well want to do.
Unless another branch of government stops them.
I hesitate to make the next point, but sooner or later it must at least be put on the table. If it is true, and it is, that Obama’s race is a factor in the election, then it is also almost certainly true that Obama’s race would be a factor in Congress’s relationship with his presidency. I don’t know how that would play out and I am not accusing Obama of anything so crass as “playing the race card” either now or should he be elected. I do think, however, that members of Congress will have to weigh one more factor in any decision to oppose or criticize a President Obama and that is whether such criticism or opposition even hints of racial animus.
Perhaps not. Perhaps even raising the issue shows a disconcerting oversensitivity to such matters on my part. Even so, all other factors being equal, I must believe there is a far greater likelihood of a Democratically controlled Congress standing up to a white Republican president than a black Democratic president regardless of the merits of whatever issue is under consideration.
Libertarians aren’t going to get minimal government any time in the foreseeable future, so minimally damaging government is the best they can hope for. Minimally damaging government tends invariably to be government that does the least regardless of how big it already is, so maximal gridlock is the best possible outcome from a libertarian perspective.
But best possible outcomes can be nearly as far removed from ideal outcomes as worst possible outcomes. I haven’t decided to vote for or otherwise support McCain. Far from it, in fact. But I certainly can understand how other libertarians, perhaps reasoning as I have here, might decide that, contra Mr. Hebert’s comments, voting for McCain is the most proactively libertarian thing they can do this time around. Doubtlessly (well, hopefully, anyway), they’ll be holding their noses as they do so.
This much I do know, though. If monopolies and collusive oligopolies really are bad for the general public, then undivided government and political “bipartisanship” ought to be prohibited on antitrust grounds. And that would still be true even if the president and every member of Congress were self-styled “Libertarians.”
Jitters Bugged?
Old joke:
Two Roman Catholic theologians, one a Jesuit and the other one a Dominican, are arguing about prayer and smoking. (Hey, I said it was an old joke. This was before smoking became a secular sin only slightly less heinous than child abuse.)
So, anyway, the Jesuit says there’s nothing wrong with praying and smoking at the same time, while the Dominican is equally adamant that it’s disrespectful to God and thus sinful. The argument goes on and on and finally they decide to submit the question to the Vatican, which they both do.
Months pass as, left to their own devices, months will, and finally the Jesuit and Dominican meet. As they see each other big smiles break out on both their faces. “I told you so!” the Dominican almost shouts. “What are you talking about?” the Jesuit says, “I just got word back from Rome recently that I was right.” “That’s impossible,” the Dominican says. “I just got word back from Rome telling me that I was right.” The two theologians stand there silently and bewildered.
Finally, the Jesuit smiles. “Wait a minute,” he says. “What exactly did you ask?” “I asked exactly what we were arguing about. I asked if it was a sin to smoke while you were praying.” “Ah ha!” the Jesuit exclaimed. “I thought so! That’s the problem. You see, I asked if it was a sin to pray while you were smoking!”
To borrow from Wittgenstein, while we may not constantly be bewitched by language, we are always in danger of being misled by some sort of linguistic stage magic, and this is true even though much of it is unintentional and some is even self inflicted. How we characterize something (e.g., “pro choice” or “pro life”) already inclines us to one sort of judgment versus others.
But that’s not simply to note that words have emotional connotations as well as objective denotations. Wittgenstein, again. “Can one play chess without the queen?” What question is being asked? Certainly not whether one can continue playing chess after one or both queens are captured. What then? Whether one could play a game like chess except without queens? Again, ignoring how good a game it might be, the question fairly obviously is yes. What about whether such a game still ‘really’ was chess or still ‘should’ be called chess? Is that a factual question? One that perhaps still requires more data to resolve or, as is typically true in philosophical disputes, one that calls more for a decision which, in turn, will depend on how we go about weighing this consideration versus that?
So, also, are performance enhancing drugs in athletic competitions per se unfair? Doesn’t it depend on how and why they enhance performance? Philosopher / physician Carl Elliott raises that question in a current Atlantic piece, arguing that, at the very least, what counts as performance affects out answer to that question. Is the ability to perform in public under intense pressure an integral part of the very athletic ability being judged, or should an otherwise gifted athlete’s greater sensitivity to pressure and higher state of anxiety be considered irrelevant?
Beta-blockers (a common class of anti-hypertension drugs), for example, tend to reduce the physiological effects of anxiety. Not the anxiety, itself, mind you, but only of some of its outward effects such as hand tremors. Thus, their use is banned in some competitive sports, but the validity of the rationale for their ban depends on whether we’re talking about smoking while at prayer or praying while having a smoke. Elliott:
I have no dog in this fight. (By way of Truth In Bloggistry disclosure, it happens that I take beta blockers for hypertension, but I’m not inclined to public performance anxiety and, besides, there are no performance enhancers of any sort that would make me an athlete. If instead of Dr. Bruce Banner I’d gotten the gamma rays, the Hulk would have been an overgrown but still uncoordinated doofus.) I don’t care whether either amateur or professional athletes are permitted to take beta blockers or, for that matter, any other performance enhancing drugs. My only point here is that how one answers these sorts of questions depends in large measure on how one frames the questions in the first place.
That settled, feel free to take out your prayer beads now and, oh, yeah, smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em.
Two Roman Catholic theologians, one a Jesuit and the other one a Dominican, are arguing about prayer and smoking. (Hey, I said it was an old joke. This was before smoking became a secular sin only slightly less heinous than child abuse.)
So, anyway, the Jesuit says there’s nothing wrong with praying and smoking at the same time, while the Dominican is equally adamant that it’s disrespectful to God and thus sinful. The argument goes on and on and finally they decide to submit the question to the Vatican, which they both do.
Months pass as, left to their own devices, months will, and finally the Jesuit and Dominican meet. As they see each other big smiles break out on both their faces. “I told you so!” the Dominican almost shouts. “What are you talking about?” the Jesuit says, “I just got word back from Rome recently that I was right.” “That’s impossible,” the Dominican says. “I just got word back from Rome telling me that I was right.” The two theologians stand there silently and bewildered.
Finally, the Jesuit smiles. “Wait a minute,” he says. “What exactly did you ask?” “I asked exactly what we were arguing about. I asked if it was a sin to smoke while you were praying.” “Ah ha!” the Jesuit exclaimed. “I thought so! That’s the problem. You see, I asked if it was a sin to pray while you were smoking!”
To borrow from Wittgenstein, while we may not constantly be bewitched by language, we are always in danger of being misled by some sort of linguistic stage magic, and this is true even though much of it is unintentional and some is even self inflicted. How we characterize something (e.g., “pro choice” or “pro life”) already inclines us to one sort of judgment versus others.
But that’s not simply to note that words have emotional connotations as well as objective denotations. Wittgenstein, again. “Can one play chess without the queen?” What question is being asked? Certainly not whether one can continue playing chess after one or both queens are captured. What then? Whether one could play a game like chess except without queens? Again, ignoring how good a game it might be, the question fairly obviously is yes. What about whether such a game still ‘really’ was chess or still ‘should’ be called chess? Is that a factual question? One that perhaps still requires more data to resolve or, as is typically true in philosophical disputes, one that calls more for a decision which, in turn, will depend on how we go about weighing this consideration versus that?
So, also, are performance enhancing drugs in athletic competitions per se unfair? Doesn’t it depend on how and why they enhance performance? Philosopher / physician Carl Elliott raises that question in a current Atlantic piece, arguing that, at the very least, what counts as performance affects out answer to that question. Is the ability to perform in public under intense pressure an integral part of the very athletic ability being judged, or should an otherwise gifted athlete’s greater sensitivity to pressure and higher state of anxiety be considered irrelevant?
Beta-blockers (a common class of anti-hypertension drugs), for example, tend to reduce the physiological effects of anxiety. Not the anxiety, itself, mind you, but only of some of its outward effects such as hand tremors. Thus, their use is banned in some competitive sports, but the validity of the rationale for their ban depends on whether we’re talking about smoking while at prayer or praying while having a smoke. Elliott:
Beta blockers are banned in certain sports, like archery and pistol shooting, because they're seen as unfairly improving a user’s skills. But there is another way to see beta blockers—not as improving someone’s skills, but as preventing the effects of anxiety from interfering with their skills. Taking a beta blocker, in other words, won’t turn you into a better violinist, but it will prevent your anxiety from interfering with your public performance. In a music competition, then, a beta blocker can arguably help the best player win..... The question is whether the ability to perform the activity in public is integral to the activity itself.
I have no dog in this fight. (By way of Truth In Bloggistry disclosure, it happens that I take beta blockers for hypertension, but I’m not inclined to public performance anxiety and, besides, there are no performance enhancers of any sort that would make me an athlete. If instead of Dr. Bruce Banner I’d gotten the gamma rays, the Hulk would have been an overgrown but still uncoordinated doofus.) I don’t care whether either amateur or professional athletes are permitted to take beta blockers or, for that matter, any other performance enhancing drugs. My only point here is that how one answers these sorts of questions depends in large measure on how one frames the questions in the first place.
That settled, feel free to take out your prayer beads now and, oh, yeah, smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em.
Friday, August 29, 2008
♫ Who are those (not so) tall, (not so) dark strangers there? ♫
Okay, so it isn’t quite official yet, but major news outlets are reporting that McCain has picked Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his vice presidential running mate.
I admit, between having an African American presidential candidate and a female vice-presidential candidate who isn’t the laughably inept Geraldine Ferarro, this race suddenly looks more interesting than the average TweedleDeemocrat versus RepubliDumbican contest. (In as much fairness as I'm ever likely to grant Ferarro, if Walter Mondale had picked the Pope as his running mate in 1984, he probably wouldn't have carried the Vatican.) Geez, who’d a thunk the Libertarian Party ticket represented the only traditional offering of two middle-aged white guys?
Palin has next to no experience, making even Obama look like a senior statesman by comparison, but both Carter and Ford proved decades ago and George W has since confirmed that there’s no such thing as minimum required qualifications, the Constitution aside, for serving as president.
Meanwhile, I was amused that some accounts claim Palin is also a self-described “maverick.” I hope James Garner is getting royalties for this.
I admit, between having an African American presidential candidate and a female vice-presidential candidate who isn’t the laughably inept Geraldine Ferarro, this race suddenly looks more interesting than the average TweedleDeemocrat versus RepubliDumbican contest. (In as much fairness as I'm ever likely to grant Ferarro, if Walter Mondale had picked the Pope as his running mate in 1984, he probably wouldn't have carried the Vatican.) Geez, who’d a thunk the Libertarian Party ticket represented the only traditional offering of two middle-aged white guys?
Palin has next to no experience, making even Obama look like a senior statesman by comparison, but both Carter and Ford proved decades ago and George W has since confirmed that there’s no such thing as minimum required qualifications, the Constitution aside, for serving as president.
Meanwhile, I was amused that some accounts claim Palin is also a self-described “maverick.” I hope James Garner is getting royalties for this.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Just Wonderin'
Mind you, I don't pay any credence to the rumors over presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, presumptive president, presumptive messiah and just plain presumptive Barack Obama's citizenship qualifications, but if by any stretch of the imagination it turned out after he won that he wasn't constitutionally a natural born citizen, shouldn't that mean the Republicans can run this guy in 2012?
On With The Show!
Wait a minute! You mean I missed the Olympics? (Who won the prenatal gymnastics medal?) Dayum! And here I was so much looking forward to watching people of every gender, race, creed, color, sexual orientation and nationality vie against one another in a bogus spirit of brotherhood and good will!
Oh, that’s right. I can get the same thing watching the Democratic National Convention, another mostly staged event, this week.
I vaguely remember, no, not the beginning of American political parties, but a time in the 50s and 60s when some honest-to-gawd political business other than marketing was conducted at these conventions. Mind you, much of that business was conducted behind closed doors in (ah, the good old days!) smoke-filled rooms and not on the almost equally smoky convention floor. Still, deals were cut, party platform planks (mostly meaningless even then) were bickered over and sometimes even who the candidates were going to be was decided by multiple ballot. Sadly, however, conventions have shifted from political Super Bowls to World Wrestling Federation championship events. Except, of course, that the WWF has the good sense not to tell the viewers in advance who will win.
A Positive Liberty reader recently commented sarcastically on another thread discussing the legacy of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, saying with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek that “1968 was the pivotal moment in all of human history, past and future.” Speaking on behalf of my terminally self-important Baby Boomer generation, I will note only that America’s major political parties did begin to conduct their business differently after 1968. Not so much because of the protests (“Yippie!”) outside the convention center -- after all, it isn’t like a guy named Richard Daley would be mayor of Chicago forever, is it? -- but because of the resulting McGovern-Fraser Commission and the subsequent shift to state primaries as the method of deciding delegates and, thus, selecting candidates.
Another “lesson” from 1968 was the increasing importance of television and therefore the need to control convention and convention related events as much as possible. I don’t think Nixon beat Humphrey in 1968 simply because of the violence in the streets of Chicago during the convention, but it sure as hell didn’t help Humphrey, either.
Needless to say, I won’t be watching either the Democratic or the Republican National Conventions in real time. Any really juicy gaffs or other “must-see” moments will be on YouTube before the evening wrap-up, so I’ll catch Ted Kennedy’s likely swan song, Hillary’s dagger-eyed stares, McCain being reminded how many homes he owns and where he left the keys, etc. in TiVo time.
Oh, that’s right. I can get the same thing watching the Democratic National Convention, another mostly staged event, this week.
I vaguely remember, no, not the beginning of American political parties, but a time in the 50s and 60s when some honest-to-gawd political business other than marketing was conducted at these conventions. Mind you, much of that business was conducted behind closed doors in (ah, the good old days!) smoke-filled rooms and not on the almost equally smoky convention floor. Still, deals were cut, party platform planks (mostly meaningless even then) were bickered over and sometimes even who the candidates were going to be was decided by multiple ballot. Sadly, however, conventions have shifted from political Super Bowls to World Wrestling Federation championship events. Except, of course, that the WWF has the good sense not to tell the viewers in advance who will win.
A Positive Liberty reader recently commented sarcastically on another thread discussing the legacy of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, saying with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek that “1968 was the pivotal moment in all of human history, past and future.” Speaking on behalf of my terminally self-important Baby Boomer generation, I will note only that America’s major political parties did begin to conduct their business differently after 1968. Not so much because of the protests (“Yippie!”) outside the convention center -- after all, it isn’t like a guy named Richard Daley would be mayor of Chicago forever, is it? -- but because of the resulting McGovern-Fraser Commission and the subsequent shift to state primaries as the method of deciding delegates and, thus, selecting candidates.
Another “lesson” from 1968 was the increasing importance of television and therefore the need to control convention and convention related events as much as possible. I don’t think Nixon beat Humphrey in 1968 simply because of the violence in the streets of Chicago during the convention, but it sure as hell didn’t help Humphrey, either.
Needless to say, I won’t be watching either the Democratic or the Republican National Conventions in real time. Any really juicy gaffs or other “must-see” moments will be on YouTube before the evening wrap-up, so I’ll catch Ted Kennedy’s likely swan song, Hillary’s dagger-eyed stares, McCain being reminded how many homes he owns and where he left the keys, etc. in TiVo time.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Selfishness, Egoism and Altruistic Libertarianism
It is a cliché among many psychologists and economists that human beings behave self-interestedly. Moreover, since Adam Smith’s somewhat theological, somewhat anthropomorphic “invisible hand” metaphor, it has been almost an article of faith within the latter discipline that the collective, societal result of individual self-interested behavior is ironically salubrious.
It is a faith to which I also ascribe, although like all but the most zealous of religious fanatics I season that faith with the occasional heresy here and there. Crucially, however, it needs to be noted at the outset that not just any sort of self-interested behavior contributes to the common wealth and greater good. Specialization and trade, voluntary association, bargained-for exchanges, common rules and some sort of enforcement mechanism to address rule breaking are all necessary elements for human society to flourish economically, for the invisible hand to prove, as it were, optimally dexterous.
Most importantly, “self-interested” is not synonymous with “selfish.”
Discussions about selfishness elsewhere on this blog got me thinking about these things. I am no Ayn Rand scholar, nor do I purport to be an Objectivist. Undoubtedly, however, Rand’s followers constitute a significant and vocal segment of the libertarian community. (It’s a non-gated community, after all, noted for its lack of zoning regulations, restrictive covenants or entrance requirements.) Anyway, given that Rand published a collection of essays entitled The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism, it should be clear just from the title’s use of the word “egoism” that she or Nathanial Brandon, as the case may be, intended to give the word “selfishness” a special, technical meaning in the overall context of Rand’s worldview.
But selfishness and egoism are two separate things, a fact I assume Rand understood perfectly well when she deliberately invoked the apparent contradiction of selfishness as a virtue for its rhetorical impact. Whatever Rand’s standing as an intellectual and participant in the history of political philosophy, she was also certainly a polemicist with a particular political agenda in opposition to what she correctly perceived as the 20th century’s greatest threat to humankind; namely, the threat of collectivism. You simply cannot read Rand fairly without bearing that in mind.
The important point is that selfishness is a common language concept, not a technical term. Anyone fluent in English knows what it means and knows, more importantly, that it entails a negative moral judgment. Selfishness is by definition a bad thing. It’s using up all the hot water in the shower when others are waiting, eating up all the cookies instead of sharing them with friends or family, and so forth. (Except, perhaps, at the Ayn Rand School for Tots, although Ms. Sinclair couldn’t have really been much of an Objectivist since the first thing she did was violate Maggie's pacifier property rights.)
Selfishness moreover logically entails and presupposes that there is some preexisting community to which the individual belongs and some moral commitment to that specific community. I, for example, live with my family in a household where there is a finite supply of hot water and cookies. If I stand in the shower for an hour shoving one increasingly soggy chocolate chip cookie after another into my mouth until both supplies are exhausted, I am acting selfishly relative to my family. It is less clear that I am being selfish when I buy the last package of cookies at the store, thus depriving the next cookie junkie from his or her fix, or when I purchase the big, heavy-duty water heater for my house. It is less clear, still, that it is properly called selfishness to eat any of those cookies or use any of that hot water knowing that many millions of people across the globe have neither cookies to eat nor any hot water to shower with.
To be sure, there are those who claim that the last is selfish, although the overwhelming majority don’t really believe it based on how they, themselves, actually live. The notion that we as individuals have moral obligations to humanity at large is, to put it mildly, very problematic. The point, in any case, is that we wouldn’t be inclined to call all sorts of behavior like eating a cookie selfish simply because every cookie eaten is, necessarily, a cookie no one else can eat. The morality of sharing does not require splitting my cookie into several billion pieces so everyone can have some.
Egoism, by contrast, is not an ordinary language word or concept. Mothers don’t scold their children for being egoists when they selfishly eat the last cookie. Indeed, if you peruse its Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry you will discover that there is not even a single technical sense of the term.
We pause now while I grind a philosophical axe for a moment. There is a critical difference between, on the one hand, the theory of psychological egoism, the theory that claims it is simply a fact that human beings always and under all circumstances behave self-interestedly and, on the other, ethical or rational egoism. These theories contend that morally right behavior or rational behavior, respectively, simply is self-interested behavior.
These latter may be right or wrong and are certainly subject to criticism, but at least they both admit of the possibility of unethical or irrational behavior. That is to say, the ethical egoist acknowledges that people are capable of behaving other than self-interestedly, she simply argues that they shouldn’t. So, too, the rational egoist doesn’t claim that we always act rationally, i.e., self-interestedly, but only that we should or that it is only when we do that our actions deserve the appellation “rational.”
Psychological egoism, by contrast, obliterates the normative force of self-interested behavior, whether for good or bad. Indeed, it obliterates normative considerations in the same way all strong forms of determinism do: if “ought” implies “can” but one cannot act differently than one does then it is absurd to claim that one ought to have acted differently. Moreover, if all behavior is, by definition, self-interested, then it is a fair question to ask of this non-falsifiable metaphysical theory what sort of substantive claim, if any, it really is making.
Axe grinding concluded, I’m reasonably confident that Rand was an egoist in both the ethical and rational egoism senses. In retrospect, however, it is perhaps unfortunate that she chose to use “selfishness” as a rhetorical device to describe her egoism because it opens both Objectivism in particular and libertarianism in general to the sort of prejudicial criticisms Mr. Hanley recently bemoaned.
In fact, Rand aside, there is nothing at all incompatible about libertarianism and altruism. Not, at least, if altruism is understood not as Rand technically used the term but simply as the opposite of mere selfishness. It is hardly altruistic, in the ordinary sense of the term, to coerce other people to behave in supposedly selfless ways in order to achieve your personal vision of the greater collective good even if that greater good is thereby realized. But it is unarguably immoral to coerce others using that rationale when, in fact, it becomes painfully obvious that the exact opposite results.
Indeed, if we’re looking for a single lesson from the history of the 20th century, we could do much worse than conclude that, no matter how noble their advocates’ intentions may have been, collectivist social and economic orders yield disastrous results. Obviously, therefore, noble intentions are no guarantee of success. Libertarianism has never claimed that in a libertarian world order everyone will win and "all must have prizes." In fact, as far as I know, only utopian collectivists and Lewis Carroll's Dodo have made that claim.
But then Carroll, of course, knew he was talking nonsense.
It is a faith to which I also ascribe, although like all but the most zealous of religious fanatics I season that faith with the occasional heresy here and there. Crucially, however, it needs to be noted at the outset that not just any sort of self-interested behavior contributes to the common wealth and greater good. Specialization and trade, voluntary association, bargained-for exchanges, common rules and some sort of enforcement mechanism to address rule breaking are all necessary elements for human society to flourish economically, for the invisible hand to prove, as it were, optimally dexterous.
Most importantly, “self-interested” is not synonymous with “selfish.”
Discussions about selfishness elsewhere on this blog got me thinking about these things. I am no Ayn Rand scholar, nor do I purport to be an Objectivist. Undoubtedly, however, Rand’s followers constitute a significant and vocal segment of the libertarian community. (It’s a non-gated community, after all, noted for its lack of zoning regulations, restrictive covenants or entrance requirements.) Anyway, given that Rand published a collection of essays entitled The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism, it should be clear just from the title’s use of the word “egoism” that she or Nathanial Brandon, as the case may be, intended to give the word “selfishness” a special, technical meaning in the overall context of Rand’s worldview.
But selfishness and egoism are two separate things, a fact I assume Rand understood perfectly well when she deliberately invoked the apparent contradiction of selfishness as a virtue for its rhetorical impact. Whatever Rand’s standing as an intellectual and participant in the history of political philosophy, she was also certainly a polemicist with a particular political agenda in opposition to what she correctly perceived as the 20th century’s greatest threat to humankind; namely, the threat of collectivism. You simply cannot read Rand fairly without bearing that in mind.
The important point is that selfishness is a common language concept, not a technical term. Anyone fluent in English knows what it means and knows, more importantly, that it entails a negative moral judgment. Selfishness is by definition a bad thing. It’s using up all the hot water in the shower when others are waiting, eating up all the cookies instead of sharing them with friends or family, and so forth. (Except, perhaps, at the Ayn Rand School for Tots, although Ms. Sinclair couldn’t have really been much of an Objectivist since the first thing she did was violate Maggie's pacifier property rights.)
Selfishness moreover logically entails and presupposes that there is some preexisting community to which the individual belongs and some moral commitment to that specific community. I, for example, live with my family in a household where there is a finite supply of hot water and cookies. If I stand in the shower for an hour shoving one increasingly soggy chocolate chip cookie after another into my mouth until both supplies are exhausted, I am acting selfishly relative to my family. It is less clear that I am being selfish when I buy the last package of cookies at the store, thus depriving the next cookie junkie from his or her fix, or when I purchase the big, heavy-duty water heater for my house. It is less clear, still, that it is properly called selfishness to eat any of those cookies or use any of that hot water knowing that many millions of people across the globe have neither cookies to eat nor any hot water to shower with.
To be sure, there are those who claim that the last is selfish, although the overwhelming majority don’t really believe it based on how they, themselves, actually live. The notion that we as individuals have moral obligations to humanity at large is, to put it mildly, very problematic. The point, in any case, is that we wouldn’t be inclined to call all sorts of behavior like eating a cookie selfish simply because every cookie eaten is, necessarily, a cookie no one else can eat. The morality of sharing does not require splitting my cookie into several billion pieces so everyone can have some.
Egoism, by contrast, is not an ordinary language word or concept. Mothers don’t scold their children for being egoists when they selfishly eat the last cookie. Indeed, if you peruse its Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry you will discover that there is not even a single technical sense of the term.
We pause now while I grind a philosophical axe for a moment. There is a critical difference between, on the one hand, the theory of psychological egoism, the theory that claims it is simply a fact that human beings always and under all circumstances behave self-interestedly and, on the other, ethical or rational egoism. These theories contend that morally right behavior or rational behavior, respectively, simply is self-interested behavior.
These latter may be right or wrong and are certainly subject to criticism, but at least they both admit of the possibility of unethical or irrational behavior. That is to say, the ethical egoist acknowledges that people are capable of behaving other than self-interestedly, she simply argues that they shouldn’t. So, too, the rational egoist doesn’t claim that we always act rationally, i.e., self-interestedly, but only that we should or that it is only when we do that our actions deserve the appellation “rational.”
Psychological egoism, by contrast, obliterates the normative force of self-interested behavior, whether for good or bad. Indeed, it obliterates normative considerations in the same way all strong forms of determinism do: if “ought” implies “can” but one cannot act differently than one does then it is absurd to claim that one ought to have acted differently. Moreover, if all behavior is, by definition, self-interested, then it is a fair question to ask of this non-falsifiable metaphysical theory what sort of substantive claim, if any, it really is making.
Axe grinding concluded, I’m reasonably confident that Rand was an egoist in both the ethical and rational egoism senses. In retrospect, however, it is perhaps unfortunate that she chose to use “selfishness” as a rhetorical device to describe her egoism because it opens both Objectivism in particular and libertarianism in general to the sort of prejudicial criticisms Mr. Hanley recently bemoaned.
In fact, Rand aside, there is nothing at all incompatible about libertarianism and altruism. Not, at least, if altruism is understood not as Rand technically used the term but simply as the opposite of mere selfishness. It is hardly altruistic, in the ordinary sense of the term, to coerce other people to behave in supposedly selfless ways in order to achieve your personal vision of the greater collective good even if that greater good is thereby realized. But it is unarguably immoral to coerce others using that rationale when, in fact, it becomes painfully obvious that the exact opposite results.
Indeed, if we’re looking for a single lesson from the history of the 20th century, we could do much worse than conclude that, no matter how noble their advocates’ intentions may have been, collectivist social and economic orders yield disastrous results. Obviously, therefore, noble intentions are no guarantee of success. Libertarianism has never claimed that in a libertarian world order everyone will win and "all must have prizes." In fact, as far as I know, only utopian collectivists and Lewis Carroll's Dodo have made that claim.
But then Carroll, of course, knew he was talking nonsense.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Democratic ’08 Ticket: O.- B., But No GYN
Two or three semi-random thoughts on Obama’s selection of Joe Biden. First, my son’s intelligence (read: information, not I.Q.) from working this summer on a “Blue Dog” Democrat’s re-election campaign turned out to be entirely accurate. (Note to Self: Remember to listen to son occasionally in the future.)
Second, given Biden’s solidly liberal record, Obama has determined that he does not need to position himself to appear closer to the political middle in order to win. (Yes, I know there are even more liberal Democrats Obama might have chosen, but a quick perusal of the infallible, inerrant and entirely trustworthy Wikipedia entry leads me to the conclusion that a “moderate liberal” is someone who purports to oppose the Castro regime in Cuba.) It suggests, also, that Obama thinks (I think correctly) that he is vulnerable regarding foreign affairs and that Biden will provide additional credibility.
Most intriguingly, however, is that Obama chose a man. Hey, black men got the vote before white women did, too, so he’s just being traditional, right? Seriously, though, and aside from ensuring that Hillary Clinton will now work tirelessly, day and night, to see to it that Obama loses in November, does Obama believe that too much demographic “change we can believe in” is a loser in the general election? Does he believe (I suspect correctly) that liberal white women can be taken for granted come November just as black voters have historically been taken for granted by the Democratic Party? Does he believe that there really aren’t any sufficiently qualified women out there? (Hillary included?)
Finally, does he really believe Joe Biden is the best qualified man not merely to help him win the White House but to serve as Vice President? Nah, whatever else is going on, it sure as hell couldn’t be that. Could it?
Second, given Biden’s solidly liberal record, Obama has determined that he does not need to position himself to appear closer to the political middle in order to win. (Yes, I know there are even more liberal Democrats Obama might have chosen, but a quick perusal of the infallible, inerrant and entirely trustworthy Wikipedia entry leads me to the conclusion that a “moderate liberal” is someone who purports to oppose the Castro regime in Cuba.) It suggests, also, that Obama thinks (I think correctly) that he is vulnerable regarding foreign affairs and that Biden will provide additional credibility.
Most intriguingly, however, is that Obama chose a man. Hey, black men got the vote before white women did, too, so he’s just being traditional, right? Seriously, though, and aside from ensuring that Hillary Clinton will now work tirelessly, day and night, to see to it that Obama loses in November, does Obama believe that too much demographic “change we can believe in” is a loser in the general election? Does he believe (I suspect correctly) that liberal white women can be taken for granted come November just as black voters have historically been taken for granted by the Democratic Party? Does he believe that there really aren’t any sufficiently qualified women out there? (Hillary included?)
Finally, does he really believe Joe Biden is the best qualified man not merely to help him win the White House but to serve as Vice President? Nah, whatever else is going on, it sure as hell couldn’t be that. Could it?
Friday, August 22, 2008
Constant Viewer: The House Bunny
Constant Viewer had never seen or at least never noticed Anna Faris before today, and a quick review of her career to date makes it pretty clear why not. CV isn’t exactly part of the target audience for the Scary Movie franchise, after all, and he simply didn’t notice or remember her from Lost In Translation. Apparently, however, she has a loyal and growing fan base, so CV was a bit disappointed today when he saw her performance in The House Bunny. Okay, so the material was predictable, crudely directed and, worst of all, not all that funny for extended periods of time. CV had read, however, that Faris’s performance shines above this otherwise indifferent movie. Perhaps so, but not all that much above and, frankly, that’s damning with very faint praise at best. Comparisons to Reese Witherspoon’s Legally Blond flicks are pretty much unavoidable in any consideration of The House Bunny, and neither Ms Faris nor this new movie fare well in that comparison. Still, CV would very much like to see her in something better than this mostly failed effort, the sort of movie that might, at most, be worth a viewing from one of those supermarket $1 video rental booths.
"Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors ... and miss." *
There shouldn’t be a minimum legal drinking age, although I probably wouldn’t mind too much if it were set at, oh, say, six. If Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the rest of the Uber-Nannies out there want to keep pre-schoolers from bellying up to the bar, well, okay. After all, it’s for the children.
Syndicated columnist and (inexplicably) frequent reason contributor, Steve Chapman offers scraps of arguments against a proposal from an advocacy group called Choose Responsibility to lower the legal drinking age to 18. To date, the proposal has been signed by over 120 college presidents, predictably incurring the irrational wrath of MADD and other quasi-professional scolds.
Chapman’s arguments, such as they are, pretty much boil down to the assertion that many people under the age of 21 are too immature to drink and that more of them will drink and suffer problems as a result. As a corollary, if 18 year olds can buy alcohol, those under the age of 18 are more likely to have more ready access to booze because high school seniors will buy it for sophomores and freshmen, etc.
Here, however, is the money quote from Chapman’s lamentable column:
Mr. Chapman, if you don’t think 18 year olds who vote for Republican or Democratic candidates are imperiling innocent bystanders like me, you obviously haven’t been paying attention.
Seriously, though, there’s so much wrong with this mindset it’s hard to know where to begin in rebutting it. Here, however, is the principal objection:
The mere fact that something is dangerous or harmful to some members of a group is never sufficient justification to prohibit all members of a group from using or having access to it. The fact that some members of group X will abuse access such that members of the general population are harmed is equally insufficient to prohibit all members of that group from having access.
I accept the fact that institutional rights and privileges, e.g., voting, driving on public roads, necessarily involve some sometimes arbitrary regulation. Moreover, I certainly accept the fact that libertarianism is, for the most part, an NC-17 rated show. Children do require restrictions on their liberty for their own good. The question, however, is whether the default agent responsible to impose such restrictions should be the state or their parents. Admittedly, some parents sometimes fail in those responsibilities and the state must then intercede. See, however, the immediately prior paragraph as to why that fact alone does not justify depriving all parents of properly parental authority.
Serving your 16 year old daughter a half glass of wine at Thanksgiving or sharing a beer or two with your 17 year old son as you both watch the game or accepting the fact that your 19 year old college student may well get drunk on campus as opposed to driving off into the woods with friends specifically to go binge drinking, thus creating an even more dangerous situation isn’t an abrogation of parental responsibility. Imposing a universal prohibition to reduce abuse by a few and inadvertently but predictably creating such even more dangerous situations is.
Moreover, effectively arguing that it should be easier for the typical high school student to buy illegal drugs (never mind that they should be legal, too) than a six-pack of beer is, at best, a fairly odd case on utilitarian grounds as to why eighteen year olds shouldn't be permitted to drink. If Mr. Chapman doesn't understand these things, I trust the rest of the good folks over at reason do.
(* - Robert Heinlein)
Syndicated columnist and (inexplicably) frequent reason contributor, Steve Chapman offers scraps of arguments against a proposal from an advocacy group called Choose Responsibility to lower the legal drinking age to 18. To date, the proposal has been signed by over 120 college presidents, predictably incurring the irrational wrath of MADD and other quasi-professional scolds.
Chapman’s arguments, such as they are, pretty much boil down to the assertion that many people under the age of 21 are too immature to drink and that more of them will drink and suffer problems as a result. As a corollary, if 18 year olds can buy alcohol, those under the age of 18 are more likely to have more ready access to booze because high school seniors will buy it for sophomores and freshmen, etc.
Here, however, is the money quote from Chapman’s lamentable column:
Why permit 18-year-olds to vote but not drink? Because they have not shown a disproportionate tendency to abuse the franchise, to the peril of innocent bystanders.
Mr. Chapman, if you don’t think 18 year olds who vote for Republican or Democratic candidates are imperiling innocent bystanders like me, you obviously haven’t been paying attention.
Seriously, though, there’s so much wrong with this mindset it’s hard to know where to begin in rebutting it. Here, however, is the principal objection:
The mere fact that something is dangerous or harmful to some members of a group is never sufficient justification to prohibit all members of a group from using or having access to it. The fact that some members of group X will abuse access such that members of the general population are harmed is equally insufficient to prohibit all members of that group from having access.
I accept the fact that institutional rights and privileges, e.g., voting, driving on public roads, necessarily involve some sometimes arbitrary regulation. Moreover, I certainly accept the fact that libertarianism is, for the most part, an NC-17 rated show. Children do require restrictions on their liberty for their own good. The question, however, is whether the default agent responsible to impose such restrictions should be the state or their parents. Admittedly, some parents sometimes fail in those responsibilities and the state must then intercede. See, however, the immediately prior paragraph as to why that fact alone does not justify depriving all parents of properly parental authority.
Serving your 16 year old daughter a half glass of wine at Thanksgiving or sharing a beer or two with your 17 year old son as you both watch the game or accepting the fact that your 19 year old college student may well get drunk on campus as opposed to driving off into the woods with friends specifically to go binge drinking, thus creating an even more dangerous situation isn’t an abrogation of parental responsibility. Imposing a universal prohibition to reduce abuse by a few and inadvertently but predictably creating such even more dangerous situations is.
Moreover, effectively arguing that it should be easier for the typical high school student to buy illegal drugs (never mind that they should be legal, too) than a six-pack of beer is, at best, a fairly odd case on utilitarian grounds as to why eighteen year olds shouldn't be permitted to drink. If Mr. Chapman doesn't understand these things, I trust the rest of the good folks over at reason do.
(* - Robert Heinlein)
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Nibble, Nibble, Little Mouse! Who's That Burglaring My House?
Leda Smith heard someone breaking into her home, so she found the revolver kept by her bed, confronted the burglar and forced him at gunpoint to call 911. Then she and the seventeen year old intruder waited until the state police arrived to take him away.
Leda Smith is eighty-five years old.
Leda Smith is eighty-five years old.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Ezra Levant Update
Back in January, I urged readers to check out the blog of Canadian journalist Ezra Levant. Levant was subjected to a year-long investigation by the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission following a complaint by the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities over his publication in the Western Standard of the Danish Muhammad cartoons that had so many other publishers cringing in fear. I'm happy to report that the complaint has finally been dismissed and, as a friend at a forum site I frequent said, Canadians are at least tentatively embracing free speech.
As can never be noted too often, speech about which we already approve doesn't need legal protection.
More to the point, I would refer readers again to Mr. Levant's web site and specifically to his taping of the complaint hearing interview available here. I will repeat what I said originally: Levant’s responses to the bureaucrat seated across the table from him during the taped hearing is precisely how free people should deal with government officials under such circumstances.
Congratulations, Mr. Levant.
As can never be noted too often, speech about which we already approve doesn't need legal protection.
More to the point, I would refer readers again to Mr. Levant's web site and specifically to his taping of the complaint hearing interview available here. I will repeat what I said originally: Levant’s responses to the bureaucrat seated across the table from him during the taped hearing is precisely how free people should deal with government officials under such circumstances.
Congratulations, Mr. Levant.
"Who Can I Sue?"
Soon, you'll be just a mouse click away from the answer!
I have very conflicted feelings about this sort of thing. Feelings, I might point out, that are not widely shared by my fellow libertarians, the majority of whom I believe fail to appreciate the value in principle of a rigorous and easily accessible civil litigation system.
Still, there is no denying that the system as it is currently structured and operated is in dire need of reform. I have no problem with lawyer advertising (its frequent tackiness aside) or with the actual (and actually harmed) plaintiffs acting as unofficial attorneys-general and, when appropriate, winning punitive damages judgments far in excess of their actual damages. I do have a hard time accepting the plaintiffs' bar (aka, trial lawyers) reaping 40% of those judgments, and don't even bother with arguments about how speculative these lawsuits are and how much risk these law firms undertake. Such firms rarely take clients on a contingent-fee basis unless they have already determined that the likelihood of a settlement or judgment in their client's favor is good.
There's gotta be a better way, though I admit to not knowing what it is. Meanwhile, "Who Can I Sue," websites do not strike me as a step in the right direction.
I have very conflicted feelings about this sort of thing. Feelings, I might point out, that are not widely shared by my fellow libertarians, the majority of whom I believe fail to appreciate the value in principle of a rigorous and easily accessible civil litigation system.
Still, there is no denying that the system as it is currently structured and operated is in dire need of reform. I have no problem with lawyer advertising (its frequent tackiness aside) or with the actual (and actually harmed) plaintiffs acting as unofficial attorneys-general and, when appropriate, winning punitive damages judgments far in excess of their actual damages. I do have a hard time accepting the plaintiffs' bar (aka, trial lawyers) reaping 40% of those judgments, and don't even bother with arguments about how speculative these lawsuits are and how much risk these law firms undertake. Such firms rarely take clients on a contingent-fee basis unless they have already determined that the likelihood of a settlement or judgment in their client's favor is good.
There's gotta be a better way, though I admit to not knowing what it is. Meanwhile, "Who Can I Sue," websites do not strike me as a step in the right direction.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Patent Nonsense
One of the things that distinguishes intellectual property from the more intuitively obvious tangible variety is that the very notion of intellectual property requires a justification in the sense that tangible property almost never does. Utopians of one variety or another have tried, almost always with disastrous consequences, to abolish the institution of private property, but as far as I know there has never been a society that has denied the existence or necessity of property rights of any sort at all. Typically, their alternative has been to assert some sort of collectivist or communitarian ownership; but while it may be that the clan or the tribe “own everything in common” or the “people (collectively) own the means of production,” woe be any rival clan or tribe or people who happen by and start asserting similar property rights in the same stuff. Wars have been known to start that way even in utopia.
The obvious thing about tangible property is that, being stuff, it’s there whether we call it property or not. That is, whether ♫ This land is my land (or) this land is your land ♫, this land is here whether we say so or not, let alone whether ♫ This land was made for you and me. ♫ And so are its flora and fauna and minerals and water running through it or beneath its surface, etc.
How human society has gone from the realization that the world is filled with stuff to the notion that some of it is our stuff (or your stuff or, most importantly, my stuff) is an interesting topic, but not one with which I wish to concern myself here in any detail. If you care, I’ll merely note in passing that I reject all “natural right” theories of property, personally, especially including the so-called Lockean “labor + stuff = property” theory.
Still, I constantly run across fellow self-described libertarians who believe in one sort of natural rights theory or another and a fairly large number of them believe that their theory justifies the notion of tangible personal property (whether, forgive the legalism here, real or chattel) but not intellectual property. Intellectual property – by which I mean here the usual unholy trinity of patents, copyrights and trademarks – is on this account the equivalent of a state enforced and, worse yet, state created monopoly. To which I respond:
Yes, that’s true. Exactly like the state-created and state-enforced monopoly any owner of any sort of property whatsoever enjoys versus any non-owner. To be sure, the land would still be there with or without a state enforced legal system, but it wouldn’t be anyone’s property. Not in anything like the sense we mean by property now, that is. All of our philosophical twaddle about what should or shouldn’t or can or can’t be deemed property aside, the ownership of a patent or trademark is no different from the ownership of an automobile or a condominium. They are all creatures of the state or, more specifically, of a state enforced legal system one of the principle justifications for is the sorting out of competing claims over the same resources.
Ah, say my opposition, but land and the stuff we find and trap or kill or take and make new stuff out of on the land (and sea) are quintessential examples of real resources; namely, natural resources. Patents and trademarks and copyrights are mere fictions.
I agree. But they are highly useful fictions, and if my libertarian confrères would get off their pseudo-Kantian high horses about absolute right and wrong and concentrate instead on the far more useful questions of pragmatic good or bad, I think they’d be more inclined to agree with my perspective. Which is as follows:
(1) The state of the law of intellectual property is in need of serious reform, but (2) we would all be better served by, for example, a reformed law of patents than by the entire abolition of patents. For you theorists, I will add (3) there are no serious theoretical reasons, ethical or otherwise, precluding us from, as it were, saving the baby even as we throw out the dirty bathwater here.
By way of giving an example of the sort of unnecessary and counterproductive infanticide I have in mind here, let me quote extensively from a recent Kevin Carson piece over at Art of The Possible. Carson makes his point by quoting a commenter there, and because I am too lazy to edit extensively I will do the same, as follows:
Okay, so let’s clear the air here a bit. In the first place, whatever may be the truth about the claim that “[p]atents are often justified by the allegedly high cost of developing drugs,” the better question is whether we will have more and better drug research and development with patents or without them regardless of whether those patents go to “big pharma” or to “small start-up firms.” That is, we shouldn’t really care who the incentive of profitable patent rights is spurring on to do research, and that is true whether such research is on cancer drugs or toe fungus drugs.
If Mr. Carson or his commenter believe that there are better ways to encourage such research, they should by all means argue for them. I, however, know of no better incentive than self interest and until I am shown fairly compelling evidence to the contrary, I am not inclined to believe that removing the profit motive from drug research is likely to produce a better, more readily available or affordable pharmacopeia.
Now, that said, no one bothering to read this far should leave thinking I’m an apologist for the pharmaceutical companies. Their successful efforts some years back to retroactively extend the life of patent protection (and similar so-called “reforms” in copyright for the entertainment industry) constitutes nothing more than massive theft and the politicians who voted for such theft should all be horsewhipped. They all created and / or invented whatever they did when the state of the law provided a certain term of proprietary rights and they should enjoy the benefit of that bargain, but nothing more. If the case could be made for patents or copyrights of longer duration, whether for drugs or novels or whatever, fine. But such revised laws should take effect only prospectively. Retroactive extension deprives the public (you and me) of our rightful future expectations with regard to these properties, future expectations we have been paying for throughout the life of the original patents or copyrights. Moreover (okay, go ahead and get back on your Kantian high-horse for a moment here), fair’s fair and a bargain is a bargain.
I don’t deny that the current state of patent law should be extensively reformed (starting with repealing the patent extensions granted “big pharma” in the recent past). It is also true that, to use Mr. Carson’s phrase, patents “distort the market ... [skewing it] toward where the money is.” But, ignoring the emotive connotations of “distort,” it is true of all property schemes that they provide incentives toward certain sorts of behavior and against others.
Perhaps the current system does encourage gaming of sorts which we want to discourage, instead. Perhaps we permit new patents on new drugs that are too closely similar to previously developed drugs. I say perhaps. In fact, I don’t know whether it does or not. The point, however, is that there are all sorts of ways of changing the existing system short of simply abolishing it.
And replacing it with what? The milk of human kindness as a spur to research or, what I fear is the real intended replacement, more massive government control and funding?
Do you want more invention and innovation or less? Do you want more creative works of art or fewer? Those, I think, are the critical questions in any useful discussion of intellectual property. And at the risk of repeating myself, details aside, I know of no better means of getting more of both than by encouraging self-interest through the creation of private property interests in the fruits of such invention and creativity.
Do you?
The obvious thing about tangible property is that, being stuff, it’s there whether we call it property or not. That is, whether ♫ This land is my land (or) this land is your land ♫, this land is here whether we say so or not, let alone whether ♫ This land was made for you and me. ♫ And so are its flora and fauna and minerals and water running through it or beneath its surface, etc.
How human society has gone from the realization that the world is filled with stuff to the notion that some of it is our stuff (or your stuff or, most importantly, my stuff) is an interesting topic, but not one with which I wish to concern myself here in any detail. If you care, I’ll merely note in passing that I reject all “natural right” theories of property, personally, especially including the so-called Lockean “labor + stuff = property” theory.
Still, I constantly run across fellow self-described libertarians who believe in one sort of natural rights theory or another and a fairly large number of them believe that their theory justifies the notion of tangible personal property (whether, forgive the legalism here, real or chattel) but not intellectual property. Intellectual property – by which I mean here the usual unholy trinity of patents, copyrights and trademarks – is on this account the equivalent of a state enforced and, worse yet, state created monopoly. To which I respond:
Yes, that’s true. Exactly like the state-created and state-enforced monopoly any owner of any sort of property whatsoever enjoys versus any non-owner. To be sure, the land would still be there with or without a state enforced legal system, but it wouldn’t be anyone’s property. Not in anything like the sense we mean by property now, that is. All of our philosophical twaddle about what should or shouldn’t or can or can’t be deemed property aside, the ownership of a patent or trademark is no different from the ownership of an automobile or a condominium. They are all creatures of the state or, more specifically, of a state enforced legal system one of the principle justifications for is the sorting out of competing claims over the same resources.
Ah, say my opposition, but land and the stuff we find and trap or kill or take and make new stuff out of on the land (and sea) are quintessential examples of real resources; namely, natural resources. Patents and trademarks and copyrights are mere fictions.
I agree. But they are highly useful fictions, and if my libertarian confrères would get off their pseudo-Kantian high horses about absolute right and wrong and concentrate instead on the far more useful questions of pragmatic good or bad, I think they’d be more inclined to agree with my perspective. Which is as follows:
(1) The state of the law of intellectual property is in need of serious reform, but (2) we would all be better served by, for example, a reformed law of patents than by the entire abolition of patents. For you theorists, I will add (3) there are no serious theoretical reasons, ethical or otherwise, precluding us from, as it were, saving the baby even as we throw out the dirty bathwater here.
By way of giving an example of the sort of unnecessary and counterproductive infanticide I have in mind here, let me quote extensively from a recent Kevin Carson piece over at Art of The Possible. Carson makes his point by quoting a commenter there, and because I am too lazy to edit extensively I will do the same, as follows:
2) Eliminate drug patents. Patents are often justified by the allegedly high cost of developing drugs. But as frequent AoTP commenter quasibill observed, the main source of the expense is not developing the version of the drug that is actually marketed, but gaming the patent system. He challenged the popular misimpression, encouraged by smarmy drug company ads,that what big pharma is researching is cancer meds. It’s not. In the rare instances that big pharma produces and markets such medicines, it has purchased them from small start-ups that themselves are the result normally of a university laboratory’s work. When big pharma cites to billions of research costs, what it is talking about is the process whereby they literally test millions of very closely related compounds to find out if they have a solid therapeutic window. This type of research is directly related to the patent system, as changing one functional group can get you around most patents, eventually. So you like to bulk up your catalogue and patent all closely related compounds, while choosing only the best among them, or, if you’re second to market, one that hasn’t yet been patented.
This work is incredibly data intensive, and requires many Ph.D’s, assistants, and high powered computers and testing equipment to achieve. But it is hardly necessary in the absence of a patent regime. In the absence of patents, (and of course the FDA), you could just focus on finding a sufficient therapeutic window, and cut out the remaining tests.
Patents also grossly distort the market, leading drug companies to focus most of their research on “me too” drugs that tweak an existing formula just enough to enable it to be repatented, and use it to replace the older version that’s about to go generic. Then the drug reps hit the hospitals and clinics, drop off some free samples and pamphlets, and (most M.D.s relying on drug industry handouts for their information on drugs that come out after they leave med school) the “me, too” drug becomes the new standard form of treatment.
The license cartels and drug patents are two examples of essentially the same phenomenon: First, the government creates a honey pot by enforcing a monopoly and making particular forms of service artificially lucrative. Then the market skews toward where the money is, as practitioners adopt the more lucrative business model and crowd out affordable alternatives.
Okay, so let’s clear the air here a bit. In the first place, whatever may be the truth about the claim that “[p]atents are often justified by the allegedly high cost of developing drugs,” the better question is whether we will have more and better drug research and development with patents or without them regardless of whether those patents go to “big pharma” or to “small start-up firms.” That is, we shouldn’t really care who the incentive of profitable patent rights is spurring on to do research, and that is true whether such research is on cancer drugs or toe fungus drugs.
If Mr. Carson or his commenter believe that there are better ways to encourage such research, they should by all means argue for them. I, however, know of no better incentive than self interest and until I am shown fairly compelling evidence to the contrary, I am not inclined to believe that removing the profit motive from drug research is likely to produce a better, more readily available or affordable pharmacopeia.
Now, that said, no one bothering to read this far should leave thinking I’m an apologist for the pharmaceutical companies. Their successful efforts some years back to retroactively extend the life of patent protection (and similar so-called “reforms” in copyright for the entertainment industry) constitutes nothing more than massive theft and the politicians who voted for such theft should all be horsewhipped. They all created and / or invented whatever they did when the state of the law provided a certain term of proprietary rights and they should enjoy the benefit of that bargain, but nothing more. If the case could be made for patents or copyrights of longer duration, whether for drugs or novels or whatever, fine. But such revised laws should take effect only prospectively. Retroactive extension deprives the public (you and me) of our rightful future expectations with regard to these properties, future expectations we have been paying for throughout the life of the original patents or copyrights. Moreover (okay, go ahead and get back on your Kantian high-horse for a moment here), fair’s fair and a bargain is a bargain.
I don’t deny that the current state of patent law should be extensively reformed (starting with repealing the patent extensions granted “big pharma” in the recent past). It is also true that, to use Mr. Carson’s phrase, patents “distort the market ... [skewing it] toward where the money is.” But, ignoring the emotive connotations of “distort,” it is true of all property schemes that they provide incentives toward certain sorts of behavior and against others.
Perhaps the current system does encourage gaming of sorts which we want to discourage, instead. Perhaps we permit new patents on new drugs that are too closely similar to previously developed drugs. I say perhaps. In fact, I don’t know whether it does or not. The point, however, is that there are all sorts of ways of changing the existing system short of simply abolishing it.
And replacing it with what? The milk of human kindness as a spur to research or, what I fear is the real intended replacement, more massive government control and funding?
Do you want more invention and innovation or less? Do you want more creative works of art or fewer? Those, I think, are the critical questions in any useful discussion of intellectual property. And at the risk of repeating myself, details aside, I know of no better means of getting more of both than by encouraging self-interest through the creation of private property interests in the fruits of such invention and creativity.
Do you?
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Constant Viewer Ponders The Movie Business
Not so very long ago a movie had to gross $100 million to be considered a bona fide summer blockbuster. Today, however, $200 million is the new $100 million and a movie that grosses a mere tenth of a billion doesn’t even hit the top 400 all-time domestic grossing movies. That’s not adjusting for inflation, by the way. Gone With The Wind grossed a mere $198 million dollars, but, hey, they were 1939 dollars and a dollar bought just a teeny bit more back then. (In round inflation adjusted numbers, GWTW grossed around $1.5 billion.)
The summer of 2008 has had its fair share of blockbusters, in any case, even at the new $200 million threshold: Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, Hancock, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Iron Man and The Dark Knight, the last three having already grossed over $300 million each and several, especially including The Dark Knight, still raking in the box office cash.
The interesting question to Constant Viewer at this point is how far The Dark Knight can go. Obviously, it’s got sprinter’s legs, having beaten Mummy III this weekend and stayed in the #1 slot in its third week out. But, let’s face it, Mummy III is probably the weakest of this summer’s big movies. Still, earning so far just $5 million shy of the $400 million mark, The Dark Knight now ranks 8th all-time in domestic gross, probably marking the first time Warner Brothers has had a film in such rarefied company since Bogart. (Okay, CV just made that up. Basically, however, aside from the Harry Potter franchise, WB hasn’t exactly been a major player for a long, long time. And CV has the handfull of Time-Warner shares to prove it, too!)
This isn’t going anywhere, in case you were wondering. CV simply finds the business of show business, the industry part of the film industry, interesting in and of itself. So when a movie like The Dark Knight comes along (and CV actually plunks down the purchase price of a ticket twice for it!) he wonders just how big it might end up being.
One thing’s for sure. The Dark Knight is not going to come anywhere close to striking range of, oh, say, Titanic. Here’s a Box Office Mojo page devoted to comparing the two, together with Shrek 2 and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace just for good measure. Notice that Titanic (a) didn’t open all that big, but (b) ended up with a domestic gross of over $600 million. That makes it the biggest PG-13 movie and roughly the fifth or sixth highest (inflation adjusted) grossing movie of any sort, period. Why was it so big?
Because it was a romance men didn’t mind going to see. Or it was an action / disaster movie women didn’t mind going to see. Take your pick. But the next huge, history making movie isn’t likely to involve superheroes or animated characters of any sort and it won’t have to be rated PG or G, either. Somewhere in Hollywood someone is studying Titanic and figuring out that romantic adventure, not romantic comedy, is where the money’s at. At least that's Constant Viewer's best guess. Now, if only he could figure out a cleverly tragic, romantic way for the hero to die in front of his lover in the last act of his screenplay!
The summer of 2008 has had its fair share of blockbusters, in any case, even at the new $200 million threshold: Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, Hancock, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Iron Man and The Dark Knight, the last three having already grossed over $300 million each and several, especially including The Dark Knight, still raking in the box office cash.
The interesting question to Constant Viewer at this point is how far The Dark Knight can go. Obviously, it’s got sprinter’s legs, having beaten Mummy III this weekend and stayed in the #1 slot in its third week out. But, let’s face it, Mummy III is probably the weakest of this summer’s big movies. Still, earning so far just $5 million shy of the $400 million mark, The Dark Knight now ranks 8th all-time in domestic gross, probably marking the first time Warner Brothers has had a film in such rarefied company since Bogart. (Okay, CV just made that up. Basically, however, aside from the Harry Potter franchise, WB hasn’t exactly been a major player for a long, long time. And CV has the handfull of Time-Warner shares to prove it, too!)
This isn’t going anywhere, in case you were wondering. CV simply finds the business of show business, the industry part of the film industry, interesting in and of itself. So when a movie like The Dark Knight comes along (and CV actually plunks down the purchase price of a ticket twice for it!) he wonders just how big it might end up being.
One thing’s for sure. The Dark Knight is not going to come anywhere close to striking range of, oh, say, Titanic. Here’s a Box Office Mojo page devoted to comparing the two, together with Shrek 2 and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace just for good measure. Notice that Titanic (a) didn’t open all that big, but (b) ended up with a domestic gross of over $600 million. That makes it the biggest PG-13 movie and roughly the fifth or sixth highest (inflation adjusted) grossing movie of any sort, period. Why was it so big?
Because it was a romance men didn’t mind going to see. Or it was an action / disaster movie women didn’t mind going to see. Take your pick. But the next huge, history making movie isn’t likely to involve superheroes or animated characters of any sort and it won’t have to be rated PG or G, either. Somewhere in Hollywood someone is studying Titanic and figuring out that romantic adventure, not romantic comedy, is where the money’s at. At least that's Constant Viewer's best guess. Now, if only he could figure out a cleverly tragic, romantic way for the hero to die in front of his lover in the last act of his screenplay!
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Constant Viewer: The Mummy: Curse of the Dragon Emperor
The Mummy: Curse of the Dragon Emperor is not, rest assured, a French movie. In fact, it is in many respects an anti-French movie. It’s dumb and it knows it’s dumb. It may even be a little proud of how dumb it is as it revels in over-the-top action scenes and dazzling special effects. None of its characters have anything like an introspective or existential identity crisis or, for that matter, would know it if they did. There’s never a moment when the viewer has any reason to suspect that the writers or director or cast seriously thought “Oh no! We can’t do that! It would be too preposterous. The audiences will never buy it!” Nope, Mummy III knows it's all about the cheap thrills and delivers them up by the pallet load.
Brendan Fraser is the poor man’s Tom Hanks, assuming Hanks was dumb enough to try his hand as an action hero, eminently likable in large measure precisely because he’s an everyman type and not an action hero type. That he’s made a fairly nice film career playing against that obvious fact only goes to prove, as William Goldman so deftly put it, that in Hollywood nobody knows anything.
Jet Li makes a fine bad guy here and the rest of the cast are likewise as plausible as you’re likely to find in so implausible a movie. It’s all Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Lost Horizons meets every CGI battle scene made in the last ten years meets every zombie movie made in the last 20 years, and if the comedic touches sometimes wander into farce territory at least there’s not a single scene where someone languorously smokes a cigarette wondering what it’s all about.
In passing, you might wonder why on earth Mummy III and so many other movies in the last five or ten years have been centered in or at least had a major scene or two shot in China. There are no Chinese mummies, after all. Are there? Well, whether there are or not, this much is clear. There are a whole hell of a lot more Chinese than Egyptians and nowadays, unlike back in the old Red China days, more and more of them go to the movies or rent or buy DVDs. And here you round-eyed devils thought you were still the target audience!
------
In response to a few comments from CV’s loyal readers about his recent evisceration of French filmmaking, it should be noted that CV’s theory of movie reviews is that it’s just practical emotivism. You find a reviewer whom you discover yells "Boo!" at the same movies you dislike and "Hurray!" at the same movies you like or even vice versa and then you've got a fairly reliable guide to help you pick what to see. Of course, it has to be tarted up a bit, but there's really nothing more to it than that.
There've been several mentions of noir, aka film noir, too, which is of course a French critical invention (film criticism being to movie reviews what prescriptivism is to emotivism). Hollywood just thought it was turning out B-movie gangster stories back then. Then again, Hollywood is almost always oblivious about those rare occasions when it accidentally creates art, too.
The thing about film noir is that it almost entirely contradicts the auteur theory if both are taken seriously. In the first place, these were almost all quintessentially studio movies, not directorial statements of any sort. None of the supposed genre’s directors set out to make a noir movie the way others set out, say, to make a screwball comedy or, for that matter, some socialist or communist writers were in fact trying to promote certain political themes in various post-war movies. (N.B., this isn’t an implicit defense of the notorious Hollywood Blacklist but simply an acknowledgment that some of the writers of that era were, in fact, intentionally polemical.)
These movies were all shot in black and white because, well, duh, just about all cheap movies were shot in black and white in the late 40s and 50s. Their cinematographic technique relied heavily on shadows and skewed camera angles because that was discovered to be a (cheap!) way to build psychological suspense and, frankly, just because it was trendy then in the same way those damned "let's swing the camera around the subject three or four times like an orbiting moon" shots are practically required by law in every movie made today.
Sure, there were a few movies of that era in which the female lead was a conniving vixen leading the poor, gullible protagonist to ruin, but you'd be hard pressed to make that claim about many of the most classic noir movies, e.g., Sunset Boulevard or even The Third Man. Finally, two of the greatest ‘noir’ movies of all time – Blade Runner and Chinatown – fit none of the noir theorists' criteria except the most important one: mood.
The fact is that the film noir genre is a garment that fits few movies of the era very well regardless of how many movies it will more or less badly fit here or there. It is, in the end, a hole that is neither round nor square nor any definite shape at all into which very, very few movie pegs can be fitted easily but just about any drama or movie of suspense can be pounded into with a heavy enough rhetorical hammer. So much for French theory, too.
Brendan Fraser is the poor man’s Tom Hanks, assuming Hanks was dumb enough to try his hand as an action hero, eminently likable in large measure precisely because he’s an everyman type and not an action hero type. That he’s made a fairly nice film career playing against that obvious fact only goes to prove, as William Goldman so deftly put it, that in Hollywood nobody knows anything.
Jet Li makes a fine bad guy here and the rest of the cast are likewise as plausible as you’re likely to find in so implausible a movie. It’s all Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Lost Horizons meets every CGI battle scene made in the last ten years meets every zombie movie made in the last 20 years, and if the comedic touches sometimes wander into farce territory at least there’s not a single scene where someone languorously smokes a cigarette wondering what it’s all about.
In passing, you might wonder why on earth Mummy III and so many other movies in the last five or ten years have been centered in or at least had a major scene or two shot in China. There are no Chinese mummies, after all. Are there? Well, whether there are or not, this much is clear. There are a whole hell of a lot more Chinese than Egyptians and nowadays, unlike back in the old Red China days, more and more of them go to the movies or rent or buy DVDs. And here you round-eyed devils thought you were still the target audience!
------
In response to a few comments from CV’s loyal readers about his recent evisceration of French filmmaking, it should be noted that CV’s theory of movie reviews is that it’s just practical emotivism. You find a reviewer whom you discover yells "Boo!" at the same movies you dislike and "Hurray!" at the same movies you like or even vice versa and then you've got a fairly reliable guide to help you pick what to see. Of course, it has to be tarted up a bit, but there's really nothing more to it than that.
There've been several mentions of noir, aka film noir, too, which is of course a French critical invention (film criticism being to movie reviews what prescriptivism is to emotivism). Hollywood just thought it was turning out B-movie gangster stories back then. Then again, Hollywood is almost always oblivious about those rare occasions when it accidentally creates art, too.
The thing about film noir is that it almost entirely contradicts the auteur theory if both are taken seriously. In the first place, these were almost all quintessentially studio movies, not directorial statements of any sort. None of the supposed genre’s directors set out to make a noir movie the way others set out, say, to make a screwball comedy or, for that matter, some socialist or communist writers were in fact trying to promote certain political themes in various post-war movies. (N.B., this isn’t an implicit defense of the notorious Hollywood Blacklist but simply an acknowledgment that some of the writers of that era were, in fact, intentionally polemical.)
These movies were all shot in black and white because, well, duh, just about all cheap movies were shot in black and white in the late 40s and 50s. Their cinematographic technique relied heavily on shadows and skewed camera angles because that was discovered to be a (cheap!) way to build psychological suspense and, frankly, just because it was trendy then in the same way those damned "let's swing the camera around the subject three or four times like an orbiting moon" shots are practically required by law in every movie made today.
Sure, there were a few movies of that era in which the female lead was a conniving vixen leading the poor, gullible protagonist to ruin, but you'd be hard pressed to make that claim about many of the most classic noir movies, e.g., Sunset Boulevard or even The Third Man. Finally, two of the greatest ‘noir’ movies of all time – Blade Runner and Chinatown – fit none of the noir theorists' criteria except the most important one: mood.
The fact is that the film noir genre is a garment that fits few movies of the era very well regardless of how many movies it will more or less badly fit here or there. It is, in the end, a hole that is neither round nor square nor any definite shape at all into which very, very few movie pegs can be fitted easily but just about any drama or movie of suspense can be pounded into with a heavy enough rhetorical hammer. So much for French theory, too.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Constant Viewer: Tell No One (Ne le dis a personne)
So there Constant Viewer was, standing in front of one of those – gulp! – Art Houses looking for an excuse to eat popcorn. But first, a brief digression.
Lewis Black does a comedy routine about candy corn. You know, the little yellow cones with the orange tips (or is it orange with yellow?) that you still see once in a while in candy dishes among the sort of people who have candy dishes in the Halloween through Thanksgiving season. The routine is, essentially, that candy corn tastes like crap, everyone knows candy corn tastes like crap and yet every year we somehow manage to fool ourselves into believing that maybe this year’s candy corn won’t taste like crap until we taste it and, lo and behold, rediscover that it tastes like crap.
Okay, so an even briefer digression would be Lucy convincing Charlie Brown once again to run and try to kick the football.
Both of which lead CV to the real topic: French movies. Now, you understand that people with university degrees in watching movies would never write “French movies.” They’d write “French cinema” or “French films” or even more pretentiously “French film.” But Constant Viewer couldn’t afford to fritter away his undergraduate years in anything so impractical as film studies. No Siree, Bob! He got his degree in philosophy, by golly!
Anyway, here’s the thing about French movies. They suck. They don’t all suck equally badly, but anyone applying a standard industrial suckometer to any French movie will get a positive reading. Moreover, the reasons why they all suck to one degree or another are fairly obvious.
First, nothing really ever happens in 99% of all French movies except a lot of talking and a little sex. Back in, oh, let’s say the 60s and 70s, this didn’t detract from their popularity in the U.S. In fact, Americans went to French movies specifically to see naked breasts and a bit of simulated sexual intercourse, neither of which were available for viewing in Hollywood movies. This was all because of the law back then which basically read: “French speaking naked sex is art; English speaking naked sex is pornography.” (Spanish speaking naked sex was porn, too, since none of those judges took Spanish classes at Harvard and every real porn movie they ever saw at I Felta Thigh came from Mexico.)
These days, though, it’s hard to find even a Disney movie in which there isn’t a bit of bare-breasted rutting by the end of the second or third reel and, besides, Ivy League schools no more bother nowadays with French than they do with Shakespeare or any of the other trappings of civilization.
Anyway, if you’re still with CV here, the point is that the bottom fell out of the French erotic film business so badly that French movies these days don’t even bother with rutting scenes any more, thus leaving even more time for talk. Worse yet, all of this talking is done in, you guessed it, French.
Still, like Charlie Brown being urged on by Lucy or a man with a sweet tooth eying a chafing dish filled with candy corn, there CV was standing in front of the ticket counter weighing his options among movies which very soon no one outside the NYU and UCLA film studies departments would ever hear about again when he opted to go ahead and see Tell No One (Ne le dis a personne). After all, the average of 26 real-life (read: paid) reviewers as calculated over at MetaCritic had given it a score of 81, and CV knows for a fact that some of them didn’t study French at Harvard, so what the hell?
Okay, here’s the review. It sucked.
And the basic reason it sucked was because everyone talked too much. Way too much. Of course, if they hadn’t talked and talked and talked and then talked some more the movie would have been completely meaningless instead of merely being hopelessly convoluted. True, it was based on a Harlan Coben novel which CV can only suppose is hopelessly convoluted, but that's no excuse.
You want the basic story? Okay, here goes. In Tell No One, a doctor whose wife was apparently murdered eight years ago becomes a suspect again when two bodies are discovered not far from the scene of the wife’s apparent death. Are you picking up on “apparent” here? That’s okay, it isn’t really a spoiler because the doctor then begins getting messages via the Internet (They have the Internet in France? Who knew?) suggesting that his wife is actually still alive and that he must, well, “Tell no one!” Then we learn about a wealthy family whose son abuses poor orphan children (There are poor orphans in France? Who knew?) who come to work at patrician Daddy’s stables – because that’s what orphans need for a better future: experience mucking out stables – where the doctor’s sister works, the sister’s lesbian lawyer partner, a serial murderer whose name in French CV thinks might have been McGuffin, various corrupt or maybe not so corrupt police officials, a street criminal (from les banlieues, of course) with a tattoo of The Godfather logo on one arm, a hemophiliac son and ready access to plasma TV sets, handguns and a Ford SUV, the supposedly dead wife’s parents and, toward the end just to complicate matters further, the doctor’s own, albeit deceased father.
But you see, French filmmakers – I'm talking to you now, and this is important, so please take notes – movies are not books. It will not do to spend the last twenty minutes of a movie of suspense having someone talk you through all the confused and confusing things you saw the first hour and forty minutes as though that makes up for everything. And please don’t throw The Usual Suspects in CV’s face as a counterexample here. France doesn’t have any actors nearly as interesting as Kevin Spacey because if they did those actors would learn English and make movies in Hollywood where the real money is.
Also – you’re still taking notes, right? – movies are not plays. Theater (or Theatre, if you went to one of those Ivy League schools) is all about dialog (or dialogue if, oh, never mind) and that’s why both the English and the French still have excellent theater because, in their respective ways, they speak far better than we loutish Americans do.
Movies, however, are about movement, about action. They are a medium in which the audience primarily perceives visually and not audibly, and this is why “movies” or “motion pictures” are superior to “film” as a way of distinguishing the medium from live theater and literature. And, by the way, that’s not to say that all there is to making a movie is non-stop action, dazzling visual effects, cardboard characters and hackneyed plots. Unless you’re George Lucas, that is.
In fairness to Tell No One, it’s makers actually did spend a few production budget francs, er, euros on a couple of chase scenes and a bit of violence here and there, even including a highway collision. That is to say, this film actually and obviously aspires to being a movie, and that’s a good thing. Its fatal flaw, alas, is that the story it attempts to tell is simply way too complicated to work in a mere two hours without, as already discussed, having to talk its way out of its mare’s nest of plot threads.
CV thinks the many positive reviews were, whether the reviewers knew it or not, really just acknowledgements that writer / director Guillaume Canet and his cast all know what a good motion picture should look like and were really trying to make one. That they came closer by far than the average French film of CV’s experience is, to be sure, praiseworthy. Alas, however, we’re talking movies here, not horseshoes. Close doesn’t count.
Lewis Black does a comedy routine about candy corn. You know, the little yellow cones with the orange tips (or is it orange with yellow?) that you still see once in a while in candy dishes among the sort of people who have candy dishes in the Halloween through Thanksgiving season. The routine is, essentially, that candy corn tastes like crap, everyone knows candy corn tastes like crap and yet every year we somehow manage to fool ourselves into believing that maybe this year’s candy corn won’t taste like crap until we taste it and, lo and behold, rediscover that it tastes like crap.
Okay, so an even briefer digression would be Lucy convincing Charlie Brown once again to run and try to kick the football.
Both of which lead CV to the real topic: French movies. Now, you understand that people with university degrees in watching movies would never write “French movies.” They’d write “French cinema” or “French films” or even more pretentiously “French film.” But Constant Viewer couldn’t afford to fritter away his undergraduate years in anything so impractical as film studies. No Siree, Bob! He got his degree in philosophy, by golly!
Anyway, here’s the thing about French movies. They suck. They don’t all suck equally badly, but anyone applying a standard industrial suckometer to any French movie will get a positive reading. Moreover, the reasons why they all suck to one degree or another are fairly obvious.
First, nothing really ever happens in 99% of all French movies except a lot of talking and a little sex. Back in, oh, let’s say the 60s and 70s, this didn’t detract from their popularity in the U.S. In fact, Americans went to French movies specifically to see naked breasts and a bit of simulated sexual intercourse, neither of which were available for viewing in Hollywood movies. This was all because of the law back then which basically read: “French speaking naked sex is art; English speaking naked sex is pornography.” (Spanish speaking naked sex was porn, too, since none of those judges took Spanish classes at Harvard and every real porn movie they ever saw at I Felta Thigh came from Mexico.)
These days, though, it’s hard to find even a Disney movie in which there isn’t a bit of bare-breasted rutting by the end of the second or third reel and, besides, Ivy League schools no more bother nowadays with French than they do with Shakespeare or any of the other trappings of civilization.
Anyway, if you’re still with CV here, the point is that the bottom fell out of the French erotic film business so badly that French movies these days don’t even bother with rutting scenes any more, thus leaving even more time for talk. Worse yet, all of this talking is done in, you guessed it, French.
Still, like Charlie Brown being urged on by Lucy or a man with a sweet tooth eying a chafing dish filled with candy corn, there CV was standing in front of the ticket counter weighing his options among movies which very soon no one outside the NYU and UCLA film studies departments would ever hear about again when he opted to go ahead and see Tell No One (Ne le dis a personne). After all, the average of 26 real-life (read: paid) reviewers as calculated over at MetaCritic had given it a score of 81, and CV knows for a fact that some of them didn’t study French at Harvard, so what the hell?
Okay, here’s the review. It sucked.
And the basic reason it sucked was because everyone talked too much. Way too much. Of course, if they hadn’t talked and talked and talked and then talked some more the movie would have been completely meaningless instead of merely being hopelessly convoluted. True, it was based on a Harlan Coben novel which CV can only suppose is hopelessly convoluted, but that's no excuse.
You want the basic story? Okay, here goes. In Tell No One, a doctor whose wife was apparently murdered eight years ago becomes a suspect again when two bodies are discovered not far from the scene of the wife’s apparent death. Are you picking up on “apparent” here? That’s okay, it isn’t really a spoiler because the doctor then begins getting messages via the Internet (They have the Internet in France? Who knew?) suggesting that his wife is actually still alive and that he must, well, “Tell no one!” Then we learn about a wealthy family whose son abuses poor orphan children (There are poor orphans in France? Who knew?) who come to work at patrician Daddy’s stables – because that’s what orphans need for a better future: experience mucking out stables – where the doctor’s sister works, the sister’s lesbian lawyer partner, a serial murderer whose name in French CV thinks might have been McGuffin, various corrupt or maybe not so corrupt police officials, a street criminal (from les banlieues, of course) with a tattoo of The Godfather logo on one arm, a hemophiliac son and ready access to plasma TV sets, handguns and a Ford SUV, the supposedly dead wife’s parents and, toward the end just to complicate matters further, the doctor’s own, albeit deceased father.
But you see, French filmmakers – I'm talking to you now, and this is important, so please take notes – movies are not books. It will not do to spend the last twenty minutes of a movie of suspense having someone talk you through all the confused and confusing things you saw the first hour and forty minutes as though that makes up for everything. And please don’t throw The Usual Suspects in CV’s face as a counterexample here. France doesn’t have any actors nearly as interesting as Kevin Spacey because if they did those actors would learn English and make movies in Hollywood where the real money is.
Also – you’re still taking notes, right? – movies are not plays. Theater (or Theatre, if you went to one of those Ivy League schools) is all about dialog (or dialogue if, oh, never mind) and that’s why both the English and the French still have excellent theater because, in their respective ways, they speak far better than we loutish Americans do.
Movies, however, are about movement, about action. They are a medium in which the audience primarily perceives visually and not audibly, and this is why “movies” or “motion pictures” are superior to “film” as a way of distinguishing the medium from live theater and literature. And, by the way, that’s not to say that all there is to making a movie is non-stop action, dazzling visual effects, cardboard characters and hackneyed plots. Unless you’re George Lucas, that is.
In fairness to Tell No One, it’s makers actually did spend a few production budget francs, er, euros on a couple of chase scenes and a bit of violence here and there, even including a highway collision. That is to say, this film actually and obviously aspires to being a movie, and that’s a good thing. Its fatal flaw, alas, is that the story it attempts to tell is simply way too complicated to work in a mere two hours without, as already discussed, having to talk its way out of its mare’s nest of plot threads.
CV thinks the many positive reviews were, whether the reviewers knew it or not, really just acknowledgements that writer / director Guillaume Canet and his cast all know what a good motion picture should look like and were really trying to make one. That they came closer by far than the average French film of CV’s experience is, to be sure, praiseworthy. Alas, however, we’re talking movies here, not horseshoes. Close doesn’t count.
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