Russell Glasser's blog

Thoughts from a new VR player

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 31 Dec 2017 17:35:00 +0000

We got a Vive for Christmas. Here are a few scattered thoughts about the current state of virtual reality after a week of play.

As I've gotten older, I've noticed I'm getting much more prone to motion sickness in games -- I just can’t handle very long sessions of shooters like Wolfenstein and Serious Sam without frequent breaks.However, I was surprised to discover that VR games mostly don’t make me sick.
This is because VR developers have mostly figured out that motion sickness comes from motion. That is, it’s bad to have your visual sense tell you that you’re moving around, while your inner ear tells you you’re standing still. To address this, VR games either mostly take place in a single location, or handle movement very cautiously.
For example, “I Expect You To Die” is a spy game with comedy elements, which contrives a bunch of situations where you are trying to escape a bunch of death traps sitting in a chair. One level has you trying to drive a car out a plane. Another has you trying to communicate with a contact from a hijacked train. Another seats you behind a desk in a supervillain’s lair, hunting for hidden information.
For another example, there’s Serious Sam: The Last Hope. I love Serious Sam titles, and they’ve traditionally been fast paced run and gun shooters with ridiculous waves of constant enemies. But TLH is basically a shooting gallery. They dump you in an environment like an ancient temple or a canyon, and you pick a weapon to wield in each hand. Enemies charge at you or fire projectiles that can be shot down, so you just stand in this virtual space and try to hit things before they kill you.
For games and environments that require you to explore, a typical strategy is to let you point at places on the floor and press a button to teleport there. When a game does allow free movement, there is often a “comfort mode” available, which restricts your vision to a very small tunnel until you stop moving.
This is all very cool and clever. It feels really neat to be surrounded by a massive 3D environment and feel like you’re in a video game. However, it’s also a tiny bit disappointing that it’s not like scenes from “Ready Player One” for instance, where you’re just moving around like a regular person. You can’t actually go anywhere without bumping into walls.
One of the other really fun aspects of VR is when a game makes you do fiddly things with your body or your handheld controllers. I Expect You To Die puts you in situations where you have to play around with switches and levers, lets you levitate things telekinetically, and sometimes makes you duck and throw things. In Serious Sam, Besides letting you dual wield and aim shotguns and rocket launchers -- which is already super cool -- there’s also a sniper rifle that you actually hold up to your eye with two hands, an exploding bow and arrow that you have to draw back, and a sword that blasts laser waves when you swing it. Superhot lets you physically dodge bullets in slow motion, and punch enemies. That’s all awesome.
Besides games, there’s a whole lot of support for other interesting environments. YouTube has a VR section with videos frequently filmed by people who have a 360 degree camera. Google Earth VR is downright awe inspiring -- you can hover over a mountain, or see the whole Earth as a giant map in your face, with horizons above and below you. It’s fun to turn comfort mode OFF and actually pretend to fly around like Superman. But again, that motion sickness is a constant threat.
Also, some “games” are just brief, mildly interactive experiences, which is still quite entertaining. There’s nothing quite like getting personally murdered by the huge looming face of GLaDOS from Portal, or waving a light around a dimly lit area full of creepy knick knacks.
The main downsides are that the headset can get super sweaty after a lot of use, and games that make you stand around waving your arms can leave you feeling a little strained and sore. Come to think of it, I should really hunt for games that actually make you get exercise, because hey, may as well roll with it.

Most Trusted

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 18 Aug 2017 13:03:00 +0000

I'm writing up a new intro for a "fake news" talk I'm giving in San Antonio last week. Two of my main interests are politics and online technologies. It's always fascinated me how news in general has become decentralized, and also custom tailored to the people watching it.

One of my earliest memories of being aware of news media was seeing Walter Cronkite on TV. I was reading about Cronkite's career, and I kept seeing he was called "The Most Trusted Man in America." That seems like an awfully lofty title to me, so I looked into that and found that it was based on an actual national survey, where people were asked who they trust the most. Cronkite won handily, in at least a couple of different years -- there was a poll in 1974 and another 1985. Admittedly, the number of options in the polls were somewhat limited, but still, the narrative of Cronkite as "most trusted" has persisted.

And I thought that was odd, because the question "Who is the most trusted person in America?" doesn't seem to even have any clear meaning in 2017. Back then, there were three major networks which ran nightly news; today we have thousands of websites that people follow and curate based on how much the sites say things they like to hear.

Still, I looked into this further, and found that a similar survey was done in 2013, and boy, are the results revealing. The most trusted man in America is... Tom Hanks.

Second is Sandra Bullock. From there the list goes:

3. Denzel Washington
4. Meryl Streep
5. Maya Angelou
6. Steven Spielberg
7. Bill Gates
8. Alex Trebek
9. Melinda Gates
10. Julia Roberts

So obviously a bunch of things jump out from these results. Five of the top ten are actors. One is a director, one is a game show host. The first person on the list who is not an actor is Maya Angelou, who is a lovely and interesting person, is primarily known in the public consciousness as a poet, so she's still sort of in the "entertainment" category. So that's eight out of ten who are entertainers, with Bill and Melinda Gates presumably being trusted at least as much for their charitable foundation as for Bill's history as a software magnate.

There's something weirdly, ironically interesting about a list of "the most trusted people in America" being more than 50% composed of people (if we include Spielberg) who make pretend stories for a living. (That's not an insult. I love movies, and I respect actors and directors. I just don't primarily think of them as people to go to for advice and information.)

Nobody who investigates or reports news is anywhere to be seen on the top ten. I know some people would conclude this means that journalists are inherently untrustworthy, but I think that's a little oversimplistic. Instead I'd point out say that that the way people get their information in an extremely fractured way now. As individual, you may trust or listen to one set of voices, but no matter who those might be, there are almost certainly a lot of people who actively, aggressively dislike them and think they are the biggest liars on the planet.

Quick check-in on my life

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 13 Aug 2017 20:44:00 +0000

Hey folks. I don't know if anyone still follows this blog, but it's something that's been on my mind every once in a while this year.

When I look at the final few posts of the blog, it seems a little embarrassing. Like a lot of people, I wrote a number of confident posts pointing out that Donald Trump couldn't possibly win the election, because he's unpopular and terrible. I was in good company, but I was incredibly, comically wrong, and just writing a post to acknowledge that fact that is a big hurdle that I've taken this long to get to.

No, I didn't die of embarrassment or scurry off to a cave to disappear from society. It's just that the fact that this blog still exists, and what to use it for, didn't wind up being a terribly high priority for me.

The election sucked, but also at the end of last year, I got hit in the face with a lot of stuff to deal with at once. My work became significantly more challenging -- I've been writing back end software to build up the Fireside Gatherings website, and it's a real beast. My career is actually going quite well. It's been nine years since I completed my Master's degree, and it took me a long time to settle in to a permanent job, but I've been working for Blizzard for three years now. It's a fantastic company, and I've grown a lot as a software engineer. But the downside is, the more I've focused on work, the less energy I've had to sit down and do things like writing long posts.

On another front, I'm in my second year as president of the Atheist Community of Austin. It's pretty far from a full time job, but it's stressful enough to contribute to the same lack of desire to write posts. It's not a position I went after, but once I was in, I wanted to take some serious steps towards making the organization financially solid, improve donations and build up the TV show that I've been involved with for the past 17 years.

Also, my son Ben is now 15 years old. He's starting his sophomore year of high school, and he's learning to drive. I've always found parenting very rewarding, although raising a teenager is every bit as challenging as I've heard.

When I send personal email, I have a signature line to the various online places where I post stuff. That includes this blog. My main purpose in writing a new post was to make sure that I have a clear acknowledgement that I made mistakes in predicting last year's political outcome, although I still believe in the basic principles behind what I said. Trump was a dangerously ignorant and unqualified candidate, and as a president those qualities have made him even more dangerous. He was unpopular then, and he's unpopular now, but the people who do like him are very dedicated, and that's a reality we have to face in this country.

But also, I've noticed that I'm spread pretty thin in terms of online presence. Blogging doesn't hold the prominent place that it used to in our worldwide discourse; most people have moved on to platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and I'm no exception. I guess a lot of the time I scratch my writing itch by tossing off a quick witticism or comment on a news in a few paragraphs. Beyond that, as a regular host/cohost of The Atheist Experience and The Non-Prophets, I have lots of opportunity to trot out my opinions on some topics, and reach a pretty broad audience. None of that feels exactly the same as when I used to blog regularly, but again, I have a more limited supply of attention to devote to those things than I used to.

I've also been doing a number of talks in various places, to Secular Student Alliance groups and local atheist organizations. Next week I'm giving a talk on "Skepticism and Fake News" in San Antonio. I am thinking about writing a new brief introduction, and it occurred to me that I could post it on the blog to solidify my thoughts.

So I have a few purposes in writing this post now. First, I just want to pop in and say, sorry about not blogging much all year, but I'm still alive and well and things are generally fine for me. Second, I just want to clear out some of the cobwebs and own up to my past mistakes. And finally, I want to leave this as a reminder to post some new thoughts about fake news, which I have generally been doing before a live audience, so it's a good idea to have a written record of some of those thoughts.

Until next time! ... Even if it turns out that next time takes another year or two.

No, Trump won't drop out, and it wouldn't matter if he did.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 11 Oct 2016 15:12:00 +0000

Perhaps I am stating the obvious here, but Donald Trump will never, ever drop out. Obviously, because he is Trump, his ego would not allow him to admit a mistake. But the Republican party members who fantasize about replacing him with another candidate are not grasping a bigger point: there are
a whole bunch of reasons why replacing Trump wouldn't save this election right now.

No, Mike Pence wouldn't win. Paul Ryan wouldn't win. Ted Cruz wouldn't win. Sarah Palin wouldn't win. Mitt Romney wouldn't win. Maybe some of those people could have hypothetically stood a small chance of winning if they had been the GOP candidate from the beginning, and had some time to campaign, but not now.

The die-hard Trump fans are real. They may not be a majority of the country. They may or may not even be a majority of the Republican party. But they are a substantial group -- let's wildly guess at least 30% of the party -- and they totally love what Trump is selling: putting women, uppity minorities, and scumbag liberals in their proper place. The outwardly more stable elements of the GOP, your George Wills and your William Kristols, they can wring their hands and pay all the lip service they want to how that's not really who they are. But that group of die-hards are the ones who Trump bragged wouldn't quit him even if he shot someone in broad daylight. I think that's true. I don't think it's true of all or even most Republicans, but enough of them.

So here's what happens if Trump is somehow forced to step down, or he just flips a table and stalks out on his own. He takes most of those people with him. Either way, they're going to loudly declare that the Republican party has been taken over by a bunch of pussies and cucks, and hey, screw that Mike Pence bastard anyway for throwing Trump under the bus, Pence can't run a country if he doesn't even respect Vladimir Putin.

This is the corner that the Republican party has painted themselves into. They've spent decades denouncing the concept of experts and intellectuals and fact checking. They've made everything out to be subjective, and all they have left to fill the vacuum is the cult of personality that created this monstrosity of a campaign in the first place.

I'm not telling people to get complacent. You should vote for Clinton, because she doesn't just need to win; she needs a landslide. Even if you're tepid on Clinton as a candidate from a personal point of view, it's important that this country firmly and unambiguously renounce the deplorables. Vote. Donate. Phone bank on election week. Don't just make Trump lose; humiliate him thoroughly for all time.

The next election will probably bring on more of the same. If the Republicans bury their heads in the sand and leave the primary process as it is, there are plenty of other Trumps waiting to take on the mantle. If the Republicans DO change their primary system, they'll piss off the deplorables and be left with a fairly pitiful token opposition without that boost. Either way, they'll lose again. Make it happen.

No, Trump won't drop out, and it wouldn't matter if he did.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 11 Oct 2016 15:09:00 +0000

No, Mike Pence wouldn't win. Paul Ryan wouldn't win. Ted Cruz wouldn't win. Sarah Palin wouldn't win. Mitt Romney wouldn't win. Maybe some of those people could have hypothetically stood a small chance of winning if they had been the GOP candidate from the beginning, and had some time to campaign, but not now.

The die-hard Trump fans are real. They may not be a majority of the country. They may or may not even be a majority of the Republican party. But they are a substantial group -- let's wildly guess at least 30% of the party -- and they totally love what Trump is selling: putting women, uppity minorities, and scumbag liberals in their proper place. The outwardly more stable elements of the GOP, your George Wills and your William Kristols, they can wring their hands and pay all the lip service they want to how that's not really who they are. But that group of die-hards are the ones who Trump bragged wouldn't quit him even if he shot someone in broad daylight. I think that's true. I don't think it's true of all or even most Republicans, but enough of them.

So here's what happens if Trump is somehow forced to step down, or he just flips a table and stalks out on his own. He takes most of those people with him. Either way, they're going to loudly declare that the Republican party has been taken over by a bunch of pussies and cucks, and hey, screw that Mike Pence bastard anyway for throwing Trump under the bus, Pence can't run a country if he doesn't even respect Vladimir Putin.

This is the corner that the Republican party has painted themselves into. They've spent decades denouncing the concept of experts and intellectuals and fact checking. They've made everything out to be subjective, and all they have left to fill the vacuum is the cult of personality that created this monstrosity of a campaign in the first place.

I'm not telling people to get complacent. You should vote for Clinton, because she doesn't just need to win; she needs a landslide. Even if you're tepid on Clinton as a candidate from a personal point of view, it's important that this country firmly and unambiguously renounce the deplorables. Vote. Donate. Phone bank on election week. Don't just make Trump lose; humiliate him thoroughly for all time.

The next election will probably bring on more of the same. If the Republicans bury their heads in the sand and leave the primary process as it is, there are plenty of other Trumps waiting to take on the mantle. If the Republicans DO change their primary system, they'll piss off the deplorables and be left with a fairly pitiful token opposition without that boost. Either way, they'll lose again. Make it happen.

Hey Democrats, chill out, we're winning

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 03 Sep 2016 22:56:00 +0000

I don't have a lot of respect for the Republican party, but there is one thing I've always thought they were really good at: confident bluster.

In the 2012 election, polls consistently showed pretty consistently that Obama was going to win re-election. So this whole alternate reality sprung up around "unskewing the polls". Websites popped up dedicated to fudging the math and nitpicking the demographics of mainstream polls. They proved that Romney wasn't just going to win; he was going to win in a landslide. On election night, Karl Rove was sitting on Fox News stating with certainty that the math showed Romney winning easily.

...Moments before they called it for Obama.

Obviously I don't think this bluster is good for them. overconfidence put the Republicans in denial. That didn't just hurt their chances of winning the election; this kind of wishful thinking is pervasive in the way they think and govern. All the same, I hear how pessimistic some Democrats seem to be about Hillary Clinton's chances of beating Trump, and I wish that they would learn to emulate some of the other side's confidence. Her chances of beating Trump are still really good.

Let me get something out of the way first: Hillary Clinton should win. She deserves your vote. Yeah, I know that the primary was contentious, and some people are still disappointed that Bernie Sanders isn't in the race. But all the same, Clinton was one of the more liberal Democratic Senators when she held office. She is one of the more honest candidates running for president in quite a while. And the "scandals" Republicans have tried to gin up have not held up to scrutiny, over and over again. Also, whatever else you might think of her, you don't get these kinds of enthusiastic endorsements by Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren if they consider you "Republican lite."

Clinton is a competent left wing politician. If you don't consider that enough reason to vote for her then maybe pass on reading this post, because I'm not talking to conservatives. What I'm concerned about is the needless pessimism a lot of Democrats have, who rightly think that Trump becoming president would be an epic disaster for this country, but are afraid that he's going to win.

It's to those people that I want to say: Seriously, he probably won't.

Barack Obama was targeted by a lot of right wing hate too; they still literally call him the antichrist. Yet he's leaving office with over a 51% approval rating, which is a pretty solid finish for a two term president. More importantly, Obama won two elections by huge margins. When you look at the national figures it doesn't look that much like a landslide, but when you look at the electoral college, his win over Romney was a crushing defeat of 332 to 206.

There are two reasons I see why that happened:

Obama's team had a strong, successful get out the vote organization. They focused ads on swing states; they set up technology that allowed people to call swing state voters during the run up to the election. Luckily, Obama is in Clinton's corner; and one of her greatest strengths is that kind of ability to do process work. So Clinton's got that piece locked up.
Republicans have gotten really, really bad at campaigning for a general election. The worst. About the only thing they've gotten good at is focusing on a core of resentful, deluded white male douchebags. (#notallmen #justrepublicanmen)

Trump is really popular with resentful deluded white male douchebags, don't get me wrong. But as I've written many times before, pandering to that group comes at a price, and the price is aggressively alienating everyone else. After the shellacking of 2012, Republican Party chairman Reince Preibus wrote an "autopsy" on the election, saying Republicans need to start listening to minorities, stop talking about deportation, and be more inclusive. I thought he made some good points. The primary voters didn't care; they nominated Donald effing Trump.

From a polling standpoint, there is no realistic measure by which he's doing better than Romney -- who, again, lost by an electoral college landslide. Just to take one slice: the last Republican president, George W. Bush, got 40% of the Latino vote. McCain got 31%. Romney got 27%.

Trump is currently polling at 19% with Latinos.

Trump is also polling worse than Romney among black voters, women, and the religiously unaffiliated (a group near and dear to my heart, obviously). Those are voters that aren't coming back any time soon unless Trump does something about them; and Trump has absolutely no intention of ever doing something about them.

Seriously, you need a lot of deluded white dudes to cover up gaps like that. And I know it seems different when you're on Twitter, but there aren't enough.

Finally, Donald Trump isn't just toxic and abrasive; he also has another problem that Romney didn't have: He's thoroughly incompetent and uninterested in running a real campaign. He didn't bother to start setting up statewide campaign offices for a long time; he apparently thought the party would cover that boring kind of stuff for him. He changes campaign managers every month... and the managers he has now are still idiots.

Counterpoint: Trump always wins everything, because he is a winner!

Nope. That is self-serving propaganda. It's championed by people like Scott Adams, author of the used-to-be-a-little-bit-funny comic strip Dilbert, and crown prince of deluded douchebags. Trump is a wealthy pop star. A lot of people confuse Trump's fantasy TV personality of a smart, successful businessman with his actual personality. Being a celebrity is the only thing he was ever all that good at. He's rich because he inherited a bunch of money, and his finances grew at about the same rate it would have if he never owned a business but just dumped everything in an index fund. And that's after declaring multiple bankruptcies that cut off his liability for his failed businesses. Trump is good at conning investors; that isn't the same as winning except by very specific definitions.

That's also assuming that you believe that his net worth is what he claims it is; a dicey proposition since he has refused to release his tax forms.

Trump only won one thing in this political season, and that is the undying love and affection of the asshole demographic. And again: There aren't enough of them to close the gap.

Counterpoint: Trump could make a big comeback if he kicks ass in the debates!

Oh hey, Trump recently said that he's not going to prepare for the debates. I don't blame him, it sounds like hard work. But I'm not running for president. For someone who wants to be president, that's not a decision someone makes who knows what he's doing. It sounds like the decision of somebody who doesn't like to think very hard and is overconfident that he can win without learning anything.

Counterpoint: What about the "Nader effect?"

Please. There are two non-main party candidates in the race right now. This is an oversimplification, but Jill Stein is most likely to siphon votes from Clinton, and Gary Johnson is most likely to siphon votes from Trump. Johnson's current polls are averaging around 8; Stein's are around 3. If there is a Nader effect, IMHO it's more likely to make an even worse environment for Trump.

Plus, the Nader thing happened in one state that was crucial to Gore's victory. This year, there is no such state. With polling right now, Clinton could lose both Ohio and Florida, and still coast to a pretty big victory with the other states. Yeah yeah, I know that Nate Silver also says not to count on statewide polling. I respect Nate Silver, but I think he underestimates the impact that Clinton's ability to actually run a campaign focused on swing states is having.

Counterpoint: Even if you're right, we should pretend to be losing so people will be "inspired" to vote out of fear

People don't get inspired by losers. An underdog story is satisfying, but you know what's even more satisfying? Voting for somebody who's winning, and having them win by a lot. I turned 18 the year Bill Clinton was elected. Now that was fun.

The thing is, it's possible to have confidence that Clinton will win, and also encourage people to vote. And also do the other things you can do to help her campaign, like donating and phone banking. Because saying you helped elect a winner is something you'll always have as part of your personal history, for your entire life.

So if you're still scared that Clinton will lose (and you don't have to be too scared) then please, do those things. Encourage your friends to do them too.

Just, please, stop running around with your hair on fire and saying things are hopeless.

Political lessons from Game of Thrones

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 27 Jul 2016 15:02:00 +0000

This is a repost from my Facebook feed.

One of the reasons I love Game of Thrones -- both books and shows -- is because it provides such great examples of how politics often works. I’ve brought that up often to my friends this election season.

There are two separate areas where any candidate can stand or fall. The first thing is that politicians create policy. Ultimately what we should want most from our politicians is that they will enact good policy. During an election season, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that we’re not just talking about a sports competition, where we hate the other team because they’re our rivals, and their wins and losses make us happy and sad just because they’re part of the tribe.

We want to elect good politicians because we want them to do stuff that matters on a large scale. Build infrastructure. Improve the economy. Keep the populace safe. Make sure the justice system is fair. Etc.

(continued...)

But the other angle of politics is being good at winning the “game” of getting elected. That’s an entirely separate skill. You can have the greatest policy ideas in the world but never win an election, because the things you have to do to win are very unlike the things you have to do to craft policy. Politics involves things like fundraising, and making friends with the right people, and creating good campaign ads, and pushing people’s emotional buttons, and undermining your opponent in ways both subtle and blatant.

In Game of Thrones, there are characters who are good at one thing, but not the other. I won’t give any blatant spoilers, for those of you who haven’t yet watched or read the series and still plan to. But the people who have, should know what I’m talking about.

Take Ned Stark. Ned is a good guy, a competent hand of the king, and cares a lot about what’s best for the country. But he’s bad at politics. And that matters a lot. If he’d won, if he’d been a little more careful about making allies of the right people, and working less openly against his enemies, the story might have taken a very different turn early in the series. Ned would probably have made a great ruler, but he didn’t get the opportunity. It’s not for nothing that the “stupid Ned Stark” meme became a thing (google it or follow the link if you don’t care about spoilers).

At the other end of the spectrum, we have Cersei Lannister. She’s pretty bad. Doesn’t care much about peasants, or the kingdom, or the scary rumors about white walkers. Mainly she cares about what serves herself and her family best, and she doesn’t care who she steps on, as long as she wins. But she does win often, and that’s my point; she’s an exceptional politician, and that makes her uniquely dangerous to the kingdom. More dangerous than Joffrey, who is more overtly evil than Cersei, but he’s also an egomaniacal dimwit who is only effective because he relies on others to get and keep his power. ...For a while, anyway.

But there’s this whole other middle category of people, who are pretty good people and also fairly politically savvy. Tyrion Lannister is the foremost example. He’s definitely not AS nice as Ned, his intentions are maybe not as pure, and he’s got a lot of vices. But on the whole, Tyrion would be better and nicer as a ruler than at least 80% of the other major characters. And at the same time, he’s aware of the game and cares about winning.

Other characters in that category: Varys the eunuch is extremely good at politics, although he doesn’t hold positions of power directly, while also clearly caring a lot about doing what’s best for the realm. Littlefinger is a real scumbag, but he’s not as purely evil as Cersei, and one of the shrewdest characters in the series. Sansa starts out as kind of pure and naive like Ned, but thanks to some character development, she’s learned more and more what it takes to get her way. Jon Snow seemed to be following his father as a well intentioned loser, but he seems to have gotten his shit together lately.

Anyway, my point is that sometimes a Tyrion Lannister or a Varys is the best possible character to root for. They may not be the best and nicest person around, but they are nice enough, and also much more likely to actually win in the end. And winning means you get to enact the good policies that you believe in, even if they’re not the perfect policies.

Because the real life work of politics inevitably requires a lot of social navigation, people who are good at politics often risk seeming manipulative and sleazy. Social climbers are unpalatable. Fundraising for ads seems like something con artists would do. But fair or not, that’s often just part of the job, and having those skills matters if you want to get a chance to govern.

And sometimes, other politicians appear to be totally “honest” and “tell it like it is” only because they have gotten so exceptionally good at fooling people that you don’t even notice that they’re even sleazier than everyone else.

I think it's fair to say that everyone who's made it to a position as high as president or governor or Congressman has this skill set. Some are better than others, and some are also better than others at looking like they don't do the things they do.

In the end, you shouldn’t judge your candidates by a gut feeling or by the conventional wisdom about their reputation. You should look at the policies they’ve actually proposed, and look at their history of getting those policies accomplished, and figure out who’s likely in the long run to accomplish most of the good things that you want done.

Some ambivalent thoughts about democracy

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 25 Jun 2016 15:57:00 +0000

I've been listening to the 538 election podcast talking about the Brexit vote while I wait for my son's band concert to start. Having some weirdly ambivalent thoughts about democracy.

I think one of the most pressing problems in any society is making sure that minorities don't get stripped of their rights. This is a non trivial issue to solve. Appointed rulers (i.e. kings) tend to care about disempowered people very little. Entrenched ruling groups, like an established board of directors for a company, tend to empower people that they like personally, and in practice bring in more people who look and think like them.

But then again, mobs of people don't necessarily make informed decisions, and then they can STILL be indifferent to minority rights when voting. So for example, we have the 1964 civil rights act, which prevents anyone in the entire country from discriminating in various arenas. If it was put to a state by state vote, many states might explicitly give preferential treatment to straight white males. But we prevent them from doing that on purpose, because you shouldn't be able to vote away some people's rights.

I'm not British, so I don't have the most thorough understanding of Brexit. But the sense I get is that those who voted "Leave" are most generally the UK equivalent of Trump supporters -- i.e., cranky xenophobic nationalists. This is probably an oversimplification of both countries, but it's the rule of thumb I'm going with for now. I'm hearing that many Brits are experiencing buyer's remorse, having made a "protest vote" without really understanding the impact of the decision, and having ridiculed and dismissed "experts" such as economists, who universally said this vote would be bad news. In the US it seems like a popular stance to oppose "career politicians" and vote for outsiders who haven't held office before. Donald Trump is like the end game of this strategy.

In politics, as in other areas like science and medicine, I think there is definitely something to be said for weighting the input of experts differently than other people. Sure, power corrupts. But also, it would be great if judgement on a law was made more by people who have had time to study the law and understand the issue better.

But on the other hand, we go back to appointed rulers having likely biases against "commoners." So it's a tough thing to figure out a fair system.

State of the Democratic primary, part 2: Hillary Clinton on LGBT rights

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 07 Mar 2016 17:57:00 +0000

As I said in my previous post, I like Bernie Sanders, and I like Hillary Clinton, and I'd enthusiastically support either of them in their run for president against Donald Trump (the likely Republican front runner at this moment). I also think that Hillary Clinton is probably going to win the nomination, and that's fine with me.

I have heard a lot of people dismiss Hillary Clinton as "pretty good... for a Republican" or say that she's not a real liberal. I totally disagree, and in my next few posts I hope to make a convincing case that Clinton is, for liberals, a pretty good liberal ally, and vastly superior to Donald Trump. (Which, admittedly, is a low bar for me.)

I evaluate candidates based on their overall position on issues I care about. My three main methods for determining someone's positions are: What do they say about themselves in their platform? What do their public voting records indicate about what policies they favor? What kind of approval rating do they get from various partisan and nonpartisan groups who count up and evaluate those votes? If you would care to dive into those links with me, here's what I think you'll find:

There will indeed be some issues you find important where Hillary Clinton is not as liberal as Bernie Sanders. Yes, regrettably, she voted for the resolution to invade Iraq in 2002, along with John Kerry and 58% of all Democratic Senators. That was a bad idea, as Clinton has acknowledged directly since then. I'm not going to whitewash it though; I disagreed with the resolution at the time, so did you, and so did Bernie Sanders. It's too bad Bernie Sanders isn't the nominee (?), but that's where we are now. It's regrettable, but we can still agree that John Kerry was pretty much a Democrat despite that dumb decision. Yes?
On most other issues you care about, Hillary Clinton currently takes a solid liberal position that is plainly visible across the spectrum.

To make this case I'm going to spend a few posts going over what I think are core issues as a liberal, and demonstrate how Hillary Clinton is strong on each of them. These are my six issues:

I want a candidate who supports gay rights.
I want a candidate who does not deny mainstream science; who recognizes evolution and global warming as a consensus point of view, and supports policies that will bolster both of them.
My candidate should be pro-choice.
My candidate should acknowledge gun violence as a cause for concern, and seek active solutions.
On economic issues: Recognize the negative impact that income inequality has on the economy and on the lives of middle class families. Also take seriously the need for a higher minimum wage, which has fallen significantly in purchasing power due to inflation.
Take racial justice seriously. Be on board with the fact that black lives matter, and be vigilant for systemic inequalities that generally hold back minorities.

I'm a liberal, and those are my values. If you don't share them then you probably don't support either Clinton or Sanders in the first place, so this post is not for you.

I also recognize that Bernie Sanders is a good candidate who supports my values. I won't try to argue that Clinton's platform is better than that of Bernie Sanders. I'm simply going to run on the hypothetical assumption that Clinton is winning the nomination at this point regardless of your preference. Hopefully I can persuade a few Sanders supporters who dislike Clinton that she is a good candidate who is worth voting for.

I'll start with gay rights, and then I will eventually move on to the other six points in future posts.

Clinton's position and record on gay rights

The Human Rights Campaign, which is the the largest LGBT civil rights advocacy group and political lobbying organization in the United States, periodically posts a score card for all Senators and Representatives on issues that they consider important. In 2013, the last year that Hillary Clinton was a Senator, she received an HRC rating of 95%.

This score was based on several legal actions which included:

Voting for an amendment to expand federal jurisdiction on hate crimes that include those perpetrated due to the victim's sexual orientation.
Cosponsoring legislation that would equalize tax treatment for employer-provided health coverage for domestic partners and other non-spouse, non-dependent beneficiaries.
Cosponsoring legislation to permit state Medicaid programs to cover low-income, HIV-positive Americans before they develop AIDS.

For what it's worth, on January 19 the Human Rights Campaign endorsed Hillary Clinton in the primary. Among their reasons, they asserted:

"Secretary Clinton has made LGBT equality a pillar of her campaign and recently unveiled the most robust and ambitious LGBT plan any candidate for president has ever laid out."
"Clinton also has a long record as a champion for LGBT rights both in the U.S. and, notably, around the globe. As Secretary of State, Clinton became the first in her position to robustly advocate for LGBT equality throughout the world, making a historic and forceful speech to the United Nations declaring that 'gay rights are human rights.'"

You can click here to see that speech. You can also go here to see her speak forcibly in favor of gay marriage in 2013.

I've heard Sanders supporters object that Clinton changed her position on gay marriage. That is true, and I believe she was wrong when she was against it, so now she's right. I also believe Barack Obama was wrong on this issue. But I don't presume to punish candidates who are strong advocates for my point of view based on the fact that they changed their mind. If somebody used to have a position that was wrong, and they changed to one that is right, I view that as praiseworthy.

I've got no argument with the fact that Bernie Sanders may have support gay marriage sooner and better than Hillary Clinton did. He, also, would be a fine candidate for this reason. By this time, they have both spoken in favor of gay marriage, and they both supported and cosponsored legislation that made life better for LGBT rights.

Want to know what Donald Trump thinks about gay marriage? Well, let's check in with the Human Rights Campaign again:

Trump Said He Would "Strongly Consider" Appointing Judges To Overturn Same-Sex Marriage Decision.
When asked about his opposition to gay marriage, Trump offered this weird rambling metaphor: "It’s like in golf. A lot of people — I don’t want this to sound trivial — but a lot of people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive. It’s weird. You see these great players with these really long putters, because they can’t sink three-footers anymore. And, I hate it. I am a traditionalist. I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay, but I am a traditionalist."
In February, Trump said even more definitively that he would definitely work to overturn gay marriage.

So -- leaving Bernie Sanders aside until he pulls ahead of Clinton and wins the primary -- is Clinton a better candidate than Donald Trump on gay rights? Does that make her worth voting for? I personally think so.

I'll be covering more of the listed issues later.

State of the Democratic primary, part 1: Post Super Tuesday evaluation

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 03 Mar 2016 22:10:00 +0000

Here are a few brief comments about what I think of the state of the Democratic primary so far.

Bernie Sanders is a fine candidate who would make a good president.
Hillary Clinton is a fine candidate who would make a good president.
Neither candidate is perfect. They both have strengths and weaknesses.
They are, however, both miles better in almost every way than Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee.
With a few exceptions, both candidates have run generally positive campaigns, and most likely the losing candidate will be gracious and endorse the winner.
Hillary Clinton has moved to a better and more openly liberal platform due to Bernie Sanders' involvement in the race. Whether Sanders wins the nomination or not, he has been an extremely good influence overall and I appreciate that.
Looking at the Super Tuesday results, and the polling of upcoming states, I think there is a very strong likelihood that Clinton will be the nominee. It's not a sure thing, but I give it good odds.
...And that's just fine.

I know I have many liberal friends who will disagree with me on several of those points. No problem.

I have a lot of concrete reasons for thinking that Hillary Clinton is a decent candidate, and my fellow Democrats should be proud to support her in the general election. I also know that many reasonable Bernie Sanders have not yet conceded my point #7, so I'm a little wary of making them defensive by posting them right now. The question will probably be resolved one way or the other in the next few weeks, or by July 25th at the latest, and I've already voted. So while I do think Clinton will be the nominee, I don't feel strongly about arguing for it right now.

Regardless, I've heard a few Bernie Sanders supporters say they feel very depressed when they contemplate their candidate possibly losing the primary. I understand this disappointment, but I don't share the feeling that Sanders is the one and only candidate who can do the right thing in office for the next four to eight years.

For those people, I will be posting a follow up to this post in the near future, discussing my thoughts on Clinton as the nominee. Should Sanders turn the tide in the meantime, that's fine too; my arguments will not be needed.

2016 predictions

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 04 Nov 2015 22:25:00 +0000

Yesterday was election day for a lot of things that didn't matter much. That means we're one year from picking a new president. I have some expectations for that election. This is almost certainly unwise, you should never put out a record of predicting the future in a way where you can be proven wrong later. But I think it's fun, and I think I have a pretty good track record for broad predictions in the last two presidential races. So here comes my prophecy for 2016. Succeed or fail, you can expect me to link back to this post one year from now.

This post is probably going to make some of my friends angry, so please bear in mind that (1) this is what I EXPECT will happen, not necessarily what I HOPE will happen; and (2) This is far from certain, and I am open to admitting how wrong I was, but I do have enough arrogance to say "I told you so" if I am right. Arguing in the comments will probably not be educational to me or any other participant, but I predict it will happen anyway. :)

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders will be the only candidates in the race very soon. The national polls today show Clinton ahead of Sanders by roughly a factor of 2:1. That gap will shift around a little, he may get as close as 3:2 at some times, but after the day when a bunch of Southern states vote, it will be fairly clear he's not going to win. He will remain in the primary race until at least half the states have voted, but not much longer.

Sanders will accept defeat with relative grace, and will announce that he supports Clinton (with clearly stated reservations). He will probably be offered a cabinet position or even the VP spot. He won't necessarily accept. Many Sanders fans, on the other hand, will be very angry. They will declare that the system is rigged, and threaten not to vote for Clinton or anyone. Some of them will definitely follow through on this threat, although if Sanders does join the ticket then all bets are off.

Donald Trump will continue grabbing headlines for a while. He still be in the news all the damn time six months from now, because he's hilarious to talk about, but he won't be the candidate. After the first few states vote, there will be one or two very obvious choices for the most viable "anti-Trump candidate." Many other Republicans will finally start to drop out, and the remaining primary voters will coalesce around the anti-Trump. I have no idea who this candidate is right now, but I don't think it's Ben Carson. Wild guess: Marco Rubio has a shot. Don't hold me to that one.

Trump will call the eventual anti-Trump a loser in public many, many times, before that person becomes the official GOP candidate. Trump's concession speech will be incredibly petty. The Republican candidate will be more moderate than most of the candidates running today, and Republican voters in general will be really tepid in their support for him, but they'll grumble and go along with it anyway and pretend to like him.

Not-Trump nominee will try to fire up the base by saying and doing things that will alienate a lot of voters who aren't Republicans. He will especially be a complete dick to women, racial minorities, and non-Christians.

Clinton will have a lot of Barack Obama's campaign team on her staff. They will make very careful plans about which states they need to focus on in order to guarantee victory, and they will ask a lot of volunteers to help keep Democrats interested in the race. Republicans will constantly repeat that most people agree with them on all the issues, and that the polls which say otherwise are just the liberal media lying as usual.

Hillary will win the popular vote by a relatively small margin, but her strategists will ensure that she wins the electoral vote by a ridiculous number that is an obvious landslide. Republicans will say the election was stolen, and they'll also focus on the popular vote to say that Clinton has no mandate.

Gerrymandered districts will guarantee that Republicans keep the house, but it's a toss-up whether they keep the Senate. They will immediately begin discussing how to impeach Clinton before her term starts.

I have spoken. You are hereby invited to bookmark this post and dredge it up so you can make fun of me once I am proven wrong.

Trumpmania! and a grand unified theory of the Republican party

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 17 Jul 2015 16:13:00 +0000

Well... it's been two years since I posted here. This blog is in a weird area of my attention, because these days I do so much small scale writing on Facebook and Twitter that I don't feel a strong need to write blogs very often; and when I do, The Atheist Experience blog gets most of my attention. But ya know, political season is almost upon us, and writing about politics is one niche that I think this blog definitely still fills.

Ed Brayton posted the following on Facebook:

"I will win is the Hispanic vote … I’ll create jobs, and I’ll get the Hispanic vote … the Hispanics love me." -- Donald Trump

New poll: 81% of Hispanics have an unfavorable view of Trump, compared to 13% with a favorable view.

Yep Don, they love you. Absolutely love you. That's what happens when you view the world through gaudy gold-plated glasses.

This fits in perfectly with my general theoretical model of the Republican party. Back in 2012, I wrote a post where I predicted (correctly) that Barack Obama would win re-election easily, with a lot of room for error in the electoral college. Here's what I said:

It all has to do with a strategy proposed to Richard Nixon, which has worked very well for Republicans but seems to be backfiring now. In 1971, as described by this piece, Pat Buchanan sent a memo to Nixon under the heading "Dividing the Democrats." In the memo, Buchanan urged Republicans to "cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half."

Increasingly over the last couple of decades, Republicans have followed through on this strategy by trying to harness the energy of angry xenophobic white males.

Then I went on to list, with supporting evidence, the groups that they were deliberately and consistently alienating: Women. Ethnic minorities. The poor. Looking at that list, I think I should also have included atheists, gay people, and foreigners in general.

Hell, for an explicit statement of the people who are "othered" by this strategy we need look no further than Jerry Falwell's infamous pronouncement after 9/11/01:

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularise America, I point the finger in their face and say, "You helped this happen."

As I also said, the problem is that framing matters in this way makes the base of the party more and more extreme, and more and more insulated in their little bubble of superiority. This strategy worked pretty well through the first decade of the 2000's. It was taken for granted that frightened natural born white male Protestants would consistently flock to the polls and beat the evil secular menace.

In this regard, Donald Trump with his ranting about how Mexico is shipping rapists to our country, is merely a logical extension of this trend. Every year, Republican candidates have to get more ridiculous in order to pander to the base that is continually growing jaded to less ridiculous statements. Hence, Donald Trump is well ahead of any other candidate in approval rating among GOP voters, and that totally makes sense to me.

But that is not a winning strategy for presidential elections. Instead, it has the effect of making the "us" group continually smaller, and more unpalatable to the "them" group, which keeps getting larger. When the party gets too weird, there's a breaking point where Republican defectors give up on the lunacy and either stop voting altogether, or actually vote for "anybody else" as a protest. Hispanics have historically been the biggest non-white supporting groups of Republican politics, but the numbers Ed cited demonstrate that there is a horizon of hostility that someone like Trump can't recover from.

If you had asked me eight years ago, I might have said that I was afraid of Trump winning the nomination because there was a very good chance he could win the election. After two victories by George W. Bush, I was once convinced that there is no candidate so extreme that people will overlook his faults and give him the win. But since then we've had two cycles where Obama (not a perfect Democrat by a long shot) not only won, but won by a lot. I just don't see someone like Trump as a threat. He believes his own gibberish, and the base that agrees with him is rabid but much too small to carry a national election.

I like both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, with the edge to Bernie Sanders. I'd be perfectly satisfied to see either in the White House in 2017, even though Clinton, like Obama, is not my dream candidate. Quite seriously, I can't imagine Trump being a genuine threat to either of them. Even if the Democratic nominee is Sanders, and he gets blasted by Republicans for being a socialist (no really, he identifies that way), people who are revolted by Trump will be far more likely to see Sanders as "the lesser of two evils."

I have no idea if Trump will win. He probably won't, just like in 2012 when the front runner cycled out just about every week, with Romney always staying in second place. But if Trump does win the nomination it could be a wonderful outcome, with one likely result being that the large Hispanic population could flip the state of Texas as early as next year.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, revisited

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 15:25:00 +0000

Lynnea and I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind last night. The only other time I've seen it was in its theater release in 2004. It's weird to think how different everything was back then. Ben was two years old, I hadn't started grad school yet, and my first marriage still seemed more or less stable. Hard to believe, but it was nine years ago. I remembered very well that the movie was a good mind screw, but I hadn't remembered all the details, so really I went through the surprises all over again. Lynnea had not seen it before at all.

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!

The thing that struck me most about the movie, and this may be a sign of an older perspective, is that the core relationship between Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, is a Very Bad Relationship. They get back together at the very end of the movie, but it's not a triumphant feeling that all is right with the world. It's more like "Wait, seriously?" They almost didn't get back together, and laid out very cogent reasons why they shouldn't. They remind themselves that he's boring and closed off, and she's a flighty, unstable alcoholic. They got on each others nerves in their original run, and there is no reason to think that the do-over won't be just as disastrous. It doesn't matter that Jim's character had some supremely happy memories of their old life. That still happens in bad relationships.

From the first scene, it became clear that Kate Winslet is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Since I recommended the movie, this made me a bit worried about how it would be played. The character may not have been an overused cliche in 2004, but it definitely is now, and I felt I was on the hook for it.

Luckily... TV Tropes helped me realize that the use of the MPDG in this movie was actually a subversion of sorts. The page for this movie points out a few things. First, Clementine actively resists the trope when she says "I'm not a concept, Joel. I'm just a fucked-up girl looking for my own peace of mind." Second, tropers seem to think that Clementine is "a deconstruction insofar as it shows what happens once the novelty of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl wears off and the meaning of the words becomes apparent." In other words, unlike the usual cliche, her behavior explicitly does not make her a HEALTHY ethereal muse for Jim Carrey. So if nothing else, the story is self-aware.

In the end we agreed: the movie made us both feel kind of uncomfortable, and that appears to be a big part of the point. So, in that sense, it is successful in its message.

That said, where the movie really succeeds is in some amazing cinematography. Lynnea mentioned that it's not easy to pull off a convincing dream sequence, but this is precisely where Eternal Sunshine nails it, repeatedly. All the scenes of reality disappearing, all the jarring time jumps, they add up to a really effective way of getting inside Jim Carrey's head. And "inside his head" is precisely where most of the plot takes place. IMHO it's not quite as good as Inception in this regard, but still pretty good.

The idea of tampering with people's memories ("technically, the whole process IS brain damage" the doctor explains nonchalantly) is a good staple of sci-fi, and I kept feeling like the movie was not doing enough to explore the sci-fi concepts. But in the end, this is not that movie. It really is a relationship movie -- I hesitate to call it a "romance" -- with some sci-fi elements for support. It has a pseudo-happy ending, but it is definitely not a feel good movie. The fact that it appears to be one on the surface level just makes the unsettling aspects of it more effective.

Superman vs. the Klan.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 21:00:00 +0000

I downloaded a series of episodes of the old Superman radio serial called "Clan of the Fiery Cross," which Ben and I have started listening to in the car. These episodes have some historical significance, as told by Wikipedia and this book:

Apparently There was a human rights activist who infiltrated the Klan and documented a bunch of secret meetings. He went to the producers of Superman with this information, and they turned it into a series of episodes in which Superman battles the Klan as the main villain. It helped a lot in delegitimizing them. Naturally, I love stories about using entertainment media to solve real social problems.

It's really funny to listen to old radio shows. As a kid I owned some cassette tapes with selected episodes of George and Gracie, The Lone Ranger, Jack Benny, and Charlie McCarthy, so I'm familiar with the big-talking style of radio stories, but it's new to Ben and he finds it hilarious. We've only heard one episode out of 16 so far, so we've only gotten vague hints that Klan members will show up. What makes it particularly funny is that it's full of slang from the 40's. I simply have no idea whether the dialogue is well written or sounded natural when, for example, everybody keeps referring to one character (a little league pitcher) as a "sorehead." "He's such a sorehead!" "Don't be a sorehead, buddy!" Over and over again.

It also led to a discussion with Ben about why the production values are so low. He mentioned that the radio show -- which obviously has one guy playing an organ for all the background music, heroic or sinister -- doesn't sound as good as a movie or TV show. I pointed out that it costs a lot to compose a professional score and hire a full orchestra, and these guys had to crank out an episode every week, plus the business of radio shows may not have been big enough to justify any kind of serious budget.

What's especially interesting is how thoroughly integrated the advertising is with the show. One minute the announcer will be breathlessly describing the exploits of Jimmy Olsen, and another minute he'll be saying, "Kids, Kellogg's Pep is delicious. When your mom brings you Kellogg's Pep, make sure you eat it ALL and don't waste any. And pass on this important information to your family, so they'll know how to eat Pep properly." These ads would go on for about two minutes, and Pep was the only product being advertised in the first show. (I looked it up, Pep was a competitor to Wheaties and contained toy prizes like Cracker Jacks did.)

It was comically transparent, and it made me wonder whether or not advertising has gotten cleverer or more subtle since then. To be honest, the way I consume media allows me to avoid the most obnoxious commercials. I don't have a cable subscription, so everything I watch is via Netflix, DVDs, movie theaters, or downloads, and I have ad filters on all my browsers. When I see a commercial on TV outside my house it tends to make me cringe. Still, it's probably not as bad as the actors waving products around while doing the show.

You can download the episodes from this archive, or look them up on YouTube.

Election night cheer

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 05:36:00 +0000

Now let's see here... as I write this, Florida, Virginia, and Montana are the only states still considered too close to call, but Obama is ahead in all three. Absent those results, the electoral votes stand at 290-200. Obama could lose them all and he still has the election. If Obama wins them all, that would be 338-200. That would mean that Obama beat Romney and it wasn't close.

Who could have predicted such an outcome?

...Oh that's right, ME.

The technology of election turnout: My experience as a phone bank volunteer

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 17:49:00 +0000

Happy election day, everybody. Nate Silver shows Barack Obama with a 91.6% chance of winning today, and a projected electoral college of 315-223 votes. I look forward to the results at the end, so that I can see whether my "not at all close" prediction from early May will give me gloating rights or make me look foolish. This guy, of course, still believes that Romney is way ahead and has been the whole time. We'll see, right?

This week I used up some of my remaining Paid Time Off days. While I was out of the office, I decided to take a break from the obvious regimen of improving at video games, to visit a local phone bank. I put in six hours on Saturday, and three on Monday.

[...]

These events were sponsored by a group called Organizing For America. They were held in volunteer's houses, and each day 20-30 volunteers would show up, chat about politics, get some free food, and bring their own cell phones, laptops, and chargers to sit around for hours making calls to (in this case) voters in Florida.

I of course love technology and politics, and am delighted to get to see the two working together. The notion of abstract numbers in a computer database to reach out virtually and produce real, concrete results in another part of the world is exciting to me in a way that counts as both my hobby and career. Because of this, it was downright heartwarming to see how well the Obama campaign has harnessed the power of crowdsourcing in their Get Out The Vote efforts.

On Saturday I took packets of paper containing 56 names each. The names were supposed to be from a database of Obama supporters, so there wasn't any need to argue against Mitt Romney much, it was mainly reminding people to get to the polls and telling them how. Over six hours I went through four packets, which amounts to 224 phone calls. According to what the data guys were telling me, approximately 1 in 10 of those calls results in an actual phone conversation. The rest are busy signals, disconnected lines, and people who are simply not home to answer. (We were instructed not to leave any voice messages.)

Each person on the list had a name, phone number, age, gender, county, and the complete information about their polling location address. When a live person was on the line, I would read a script that ran something like this:

"Hi, my name is Russell, and I am a volunteer with Organizing For America. Today is the last day for early voting in Florida. Florida is a really important swing state that will be very close this year, so I was just calling to see if Barack Obama can count on your vote either early today or on Tuesday?"

I didn't reach any angry Romney supporters. I did reach a few people who were disgruntled or even angry about "being asked personal questions" or simply being repeatedly subjected to what they considered phone harassment. On the whole though, a lot of people were fired up about the election. Many had already voted early, in which case I thanked them and exchanged some pleasant and hopeful words. Just a few were actually unsure about how to vote and wanted information that I was able to provide (i.e., "Where should I go?" "What kind of ID do I need to bring?" etc.) There was one guy who didn't have transportation available and asked if I could help with that. I said unfortunately I couldn't, being in Texas, but I suggested some alternatives (taxi, asking neighbors). Any time I talked to somebody who wasn't sure if they could make it, I simply reminded them of the importance of swing states and bumped up their resolve a bit.

After each call I wound up checking a box for the outcome -- no answer, wrong number, don't speak English, or promised to vote, have already voted, promised to vote, did not promise to vote. After finishing each packet I brought them to a person who was responsible for collating the data and entering it into a computer to submit information about whether the leads were good or not.

On Monday, they had an online program available called a predictive dialer. I hadn't had it on Saturday since the access has apparently been sporadic. With the dialer, you enter your phone number in a program and it calls you first. Then you click a button when you're ready to take calls, and it auto-dials numbers on the list. It filters out the numbers with no answer, or disconnected tones. When somebody picks up, you get a beep and have to immediately say "Hello, is so and so there?" (the name pops up on your web browser) or else you risk getting a quick hangup.

This process was a lot more efficient, connecting me with a live person about every minute or so. But on the other hand, it was also a bit more stressful. I found that a high proportion of these people had been subject to regular calls and weren't happy about it. One guy said he's been getting ten calls a day, and it's tiring especially when he already voted. I wound up apologizing a lot and explaining why the Get Out The Vote effort targets them so much. Being in the solid red state of Texas, I have not received any election calls myself. Some were understanding, some hung up pretty pissed off. Still, there were a fair number of legitimate opportunities to remind people to vote and give them polling information, and some people were genuinely happy that we were doing this. One guy I called said he was in the middle of calling other states himself.

To wrap up this post, I just want to say that I'm a big believer in crowdsourcing big jobs. I like wikis, and I like spreading information through Facebook posts and blogs. Spending some of a long weekend doing election work may not be some people's idea of a good time, but I found it very satisfying. The other people at the event were friendly and I enjoyed meeting them so we could discuss our shared point of view.

In 2008 I wrote a post about why your vote matters. I said it's true that your individual vote will not change the outcome of an election, but when you combine the act of voting with encouraging or discouraging other people to vote, that influence can have broad effects of the outcomes of individual states. Convincing like-minded people to vote with you, or just giving them the extra nudge to get to the polls when it's inconvenient, can multiply your own vote by five or ten or twenty, and if you indirectly influence enough people, then that does have much bigger effects on the practical outcomes of elections.

Furthermore, I think it's great that so many people have caught on to early voting. One of the biggest concerns in some swing states is that long lines might make it difficult for people to vote when they want to. I heard a report that some people in Miami Dade county showed up to the polls early in the morning and didn't get out of line until much, much later. That's a serious logistical problem with elections. If more people voted early, as Lynnea and I did, then we could get used to the idea of elections that last several weeks instead of one day, and that problem would no longer exist.

Thanks for voting, my friends.

Election thoughts 2: Momentum and winning with intangibles

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 20:38:00 +0000

In my last post I talked about the long term consequences of the Republican strategy and about why Mitt Romney is losing as a result of it. The question, though, is just how badly he is losing.

I've linked to electoral-vote.com often, since it is a site which breaks down polls state by state and collects them into an overall picture of how the important numbers may shake out in the election. A similar site, with better analysis, is Five Thirty Eight, a New York Times blog run by Nate Silver, which uses some complicated math formulas to forecast the probabilities of each candidate winning. (538 is the total number of electoral votes available from all 50 states.)

[...]

This season, Five Thirty Eight has generally skewed slightly better for Republicans than Electoral Vote has. Today, for instance, EV predicts a victory of 328-221, with 19 approximate ties. Five Thirty Eight, however, predicts 308-229. The difference seems to exist because the latter also factors in the various probabilities that any state could flip the other way, while the former only considers who's ahead right now.

However, another interesting number that is provided by Five Thirty Eight is the overall probability that either candidate will win everything. That number has drifted up and down, and right now it shows that Obama has a 76% chance of winning.

Now, assuming you are hoping for an Obama victory, that's pretty good, but not overwhelming. Personally, I'd feel much better about a 90% chance, or a 95% chance. If I thought there was really a 24% chance of Romney winning, I would never have made the blunt prediction that "Obama is going to beat Romney, and it's not going to be very close."

While I respect Nate Silver's analysis, I've never been entirely convinced that his predictive model factors in all the relevant information that goes beyond raw numbers. There are a lot of intangibles here, which seem apparent to me based on my instincts as a gamer. It has to do with the momentum of winning and losing.

Mitt Romney has been very far behind in the electoral college since he became the de facto candidate in April. (That was when Rick Santorum quit the race, notwithstanding the continued participation of Ron Paul, who is never ever going to win a chance to represent the Republican base.) Where matters stand now, Obama can lose several swing states and still win comfortably; Romney has to win most of them to have a shot. In the last few weeks, Obama's lead on Nate's graph has been widening, at a time when it should be shrinking.

The major opportunities for Romney to turn this around have come and gone -- the Vice Presidential nomination and the convention were the big ones, and neither of those gained him any traction. All that he has left are the debates, and I don't think anybody seriously thinks that Romney will outperform Obama so much that he'll move a very large majority of undecided voters, or get committed Obama voters to switch teams.

Of course, there's still the issue of Romney outspending Obama on advertising. The Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission meant that corporations are now allowed to spend unlimited money in an opaque manner on the candidate of their choice, where previously there were spending limits on individual contributors. Since Mitt "Corporations are people, my friend" Romney is generally preferred by corporations for opposing regulations and business taxes, it was easy to predict that this would greatly benefit the Romney campaign. This prediction panned out because in my estimation, Romney has outspent Obama by a factor of about 6:1.

But the thing is... that already happened. Romney has been the beneficiary of PAC money for the last several months, and that was during the whole time when he was losing badly and never caught up. It's not that I don't think money matters at all in a presidential election; but there may simply be diminishing returns as the media becomes completely saturated with campaign ads. This may be even more true with each election, as people increasingly prefer to entertain themselves with web surfing, video games, and commercial-free Tivo recordings and mostly can't be targeted by the traditional television and newspaper ads. And now, with less than two months to go, Romney has been mysteriously giving up on buying ads in many swing states.

But here's my main intangible reason why Nate Silver's formula might be much too generous in giving Romney a 24% chance to win. Romney is currently perceived as losing, and perception still has six weeks to snowball.

I've written before that I like to look at politics through the lens of competitive gaming. I am a big Starcraft II fan, and a lot of my philosophy of gaming has been influenced by David Sirlin's outstanding writing in Playing To Win. (I'm not kidding... every gamer should read this.) So I read a lot about meta-strategy in games, and I'm frequently reminded of something I read once about judging how a match is going. I'd like to make a Starcraft analogy, but I am aware that this is a pretty narrow niche for people, so I'm going to cast it in a more accessible metaphor about chess.

Very often a game is won or lost based on very small advantages that are achieved early in the game. Suppose one player loses a pawn without gaining any positional advantage in return. An amateur chess player might look at the board and conclude that the player who took the pawn is ahead by a very small amount and it is a close match. But having that advantage can open up a lot of new opportunities: for instance, the attacking player can now set up situations where he confronts one unprotected pawn with two of his own, and therefore makes it easy to increase his lead. When you're ahead, even a fair trade of pieces can increase your lead. When you're behind, your losses provide a bad feedback loop, and also sometimes causes psychological mistakes because the player gets desperate.

So even a seemingly small material lead, in the hands of a good player, can be the source of a very big advantage that isn't apparent if your only method of judging is adding up all they points on the board. From my point of view, it looks like everything Romney does is putting him farther behind, and I don't think Nate's analysis can account for that kind of momentum.

Election thoughts 1: Divide, conquer, and lose

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 21:54:00 +0000

This election season has been great for making me feel overconfident. Back in early May, I predicted that Obama is going to beat Romney, and it's not going to be very close. With less than two months to go, I see no reason to revise that estimate. When I made my prediction the score was 290-215 electoral votes. As of today, it is now 319-206; the lead that was overwhelming before has increased by 38 EVs.

And talking about overconfidence, lately I've been leaning towards a theory that the Republican party is even more screwed than they appear to be. It all has to do with a strategy proposed to Richard Nixon, which has worked very well for Republicans but seems to be backfiring now.
In 1971, as described by this piece, Pat Buchanan sent a memo to Nixon under the heading "Dividing the Democrats." In the memo, Buchanan urged Republicans to "cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half."

Increasingly over the last couple of decades, Republicans have followed through on this strategy by trying to harness the energy of angry xenophobic white males. Let's start with the gender gap: The most recent pew poll shows Obama beating Romney in the popular vote by 52%-46%, but leading among women voters by an enormous 19 point lead of 56%-37%. (Men are about evenly split.) Between aggressively fighting against legal abortion, trying to single out birth control funding as unnecessary and irrelevant, opposing bills that promote equal pay for both genders, generally slut-shaming women who speak up about health issues, and dismissing objections by comparing them to a war on caterpillars, Republicans in this cycle have shown that they don't want to have to win women's votes.

Then we have minorities. In 2000, Hispanics were a hotly contested demographic and the split between Bush and Gore was fairly close. Now, thanks to the draconian law passed in Arizona, and with many other states trying to emulate it, Republicans are all but writing off that vote. Romney trails Obama among registered Latino voters in the famously important swing state of Florida by 40 points, at 66% to 26%. Meanwhile, there was a poll this year where African American support for Romney showed up as 0%. Seriously.

Of course, there's Romney's already infamous not-so-secret contempt for almost half the country -- "47% of the country," a figure which includes children, the elderly, and the working poor, are moochers and losers that he would like to write off entirely.

My perspective on the Republican party is that they're still counting on Pat Buchanan's strategy to hold on to their half of the vote, but "their half" has become increasingly out of touch with reality. The Tea Party, once hailed as a new chapter in Republican grassroots support, is now more hated than Muslims and atheists. Recently, PolitiFact rated a Romney campaign ad as "Pants on fire." The response by a Romney staffer was swift and dismissive: "We are not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers."

Buchanan may have had a winning strategy at the time, but in recent elections "their half" of the electorate has gotten crazier, and Republicans have responded by pandering to the crazies harder each season. Sure, it keeps the base fired up, but over time it's making the base smaller and smaller. That, of course, requires them to pander even more in order to boost turnout, which breaks off more of their base, and so on. I definitely know better than to predict their demise. I'm not so overconfident that I don't realize how dangerous that is. But I do wonder how much longer this strategy can possibly work. You try to focus a campaign on hating "the other"; what happens when there are much more of "the other" than you have on your own team?

This post is, incidentally, edited from a conversation I've been having with my dad, and there is more to the exchange. In a later post I will talk about why Mitt Romney's chance of winning is probably even worse than Nate Silver's otherwise excellent Five Thirty Eight blog makes it appear.

Read part 2.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 08 May 2012 04:17:00 +0000

I enjoyed the latest XKCD so much that I had to actually perform it.

Early election prognostication

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 02 May 2012 17:30:00 +0000

I'm going to go ahead and make my presidential election prediction right now, subject to wild swings as new evidence comes in: Obama is going to beat Romney, and it's not going to be very close.

I'm basing this on largely on the status of http://www.electoral-vote.com/, a site I followed obsessively in 2008, and they wound up being a pretty good indicator of the race.

Electoral map as of 5/2/2012

Since Romney secured the nomination, nationwide polling on Obama vs. Romney has been close enough to be called a dead heat in some cases. This one, for example. Despite this, right now on a state by state basis, the election numbers look really, really good for the incumbent.

Electoral-vote.com takes statewide polls and uses them as a basis for counting up the electoral votes that will be awarded in each area. They use seven categories: Strong, Weak, and Barely Dem; Strong, Weak, and Barely GOP, and Exactly Tied. At the present time, taking all preferences into account including strong, weak, and barely Dem, Obama wins by 290 EV to 215. It's a solid lead of 75 EV with 33 up in the air.

Also noteworthy is the fact that a lot more of Obama's lead comes from "Strong Dem" states (187) than the reverse. There are only 76 "Strong GOP" electoral votes, and in fact, if you add Strong and Weak GOP, they STILL don't add up to total as much as Strong Dem.

There are a few caveats in this assessment. One is that the state by state numbers are probably not as current as the national numbers. Since it is more work to poll in fifty separate states than to randomly sample the entire nation, the numbers at the site are almost certainly lagging behind, and do not reflect Romney's post-primary bump, such as it is. Another issue is that campaign season hasn't really started yet. Since the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission concluded in the Supreme Court, private businesses now have the right to make unlimited campaign contributions without revealing who they are. It's quite possible that this development could strongly favor Romney.

By the same token, though, Obama hasn't properly started his campaign either, and campaigning has always been his strength. Arguably he was a much better candidate than a president. (Although, needless to say, in my eyes he's a better campaigner AND president than Romney would be.) There's no reason to believe that he won't start pulling further ahead once he starts getting out there on the trail. Furthermore, Obama is already vetted. Die hards still believe (and will always believe) in birther conspiracies and so forth, but the "mysterious background" is already a dead issue for most voters, and so is the weakness that he had of being perceived as inexperienced in '08.

Not to be overlooked is the fact that Republicans can't stand Romney. In early April after Santorum dropped out, he had a 34% favorability rating, the lowest of any post-primary candidate in decades. George W. Bush at least had the "beer factor" going for him, the claim that voters thought he'd be a good guy to have a beer with (although I didn't see it). Even among Republicans who hate Obama the most, the overall sentiment about Romney seems to tend towards "Eh... could be worse."

So I'm not setting this prediction in stone, but I'm not yet seeing very many scenarios that lead to President Romney.

Classical music ringtones

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 19:11:00 +0000

I'd like to get some suggestions for a few new classical music ringtones.

Since I got my first Android a year and a half ago, I've made a minor hobby of cutting music clips together into new MP3's that make good ringtones. My all-purpose ringtone up till now has been Vivaldi's Concerto for 2 trumpets in C. (Click the link for a recording on YouTube.) Now that I've replaced my phone, and I'm a bit sick of hearing that all the time, I'm looking for more suggestions.

My dad's got his own personal ringtone: "Jupiter" from Holst's The Planets.

My sister, being a muppets geek, gets some theme music from Labyrinth.

Lynnea's ringtone revolves around a fact about her: Every girl's crazy about a sharp dressed man.

So anyway, I'm looking for more suggestions about music to cut into other ringtones. The clip in question needs to be loud and attention getting, and preferably upbeat so I'll be in a good mood to get the call. It also should be only instrumental. Classical is preferred but obviously some rock fits the bill.

Sloppy statistics failing to show racism

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 16:33:00 +0000

This is a bit silly, but it's a good illustration of a bad statistical understanding coloring the perception of a problem that doesn't actually exist.

Cracked.com is running an article today called "4 Famous Pop Culture Moments Everyone Remembers Incorrectly." Sometimes I enjoy their articles and sometimes not so much. But in this case, example #2 is a little weird and random.

Will Smith Never Says "Welcome to Earf" in Independence Day

Wait, what? He doesn't say Welcome to Earth? I swear I remember him saying that. Look, it's right here in convenient video format.

Oh wait, no! The author of the article actually was trying to emphasize the word "Earf," because apparently "everyone" misremembers the quote as being delivered in some kind of comical ebonics lingo, when it actually wasn't. Everyone, huh? First I ever heard of that.

As proof, he googles up the words "Welcome to earf" and boggles at the awe inspiring 40,000 hits. Come on though, if you are going to prove something with a google search, don't you think a little direct comparison is in order?

"will smith welcome to earf"
About 14,300 results
"will smith welcome to earth"
About 18,100,000 results

So... when you say "everyone," I guess you mean "Less than 0.1% of everyone," eh?

Am I the only one who finds Ron Paul's strategy creepy?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:37:00 +0000

First the TL;DR version of this video: The Paul campaign dismisses elections as "beauty contests" and is extremely proud and smug about their ability to game the system. They hope to score the nomination, not by convincing a majority of people that Ron Paul is the best man for the job, but by taking advantage of loopholes in the way the election is organized. They envision a scenario where they can "win" a lot of states even while technically losing badly in the elections of those same states.

Longer version: This dude, who enters the video at around the 6:30 mark, is Doug Wead, senior adviser to the Ron Paul campaign. You may have noticed that Ron Paul is still in the race despite the fact that he hasn't won an election in a single state, and polls don't show him as the likely winner of any future state.

In this and a previous interview with Maddow, Wead proudly explains their strategy, which somehow involves "winning" in delegate states despite not actually winning the popular vote in any single state. Now the mechanics of electoral politics are complicated and honestly kind of boring, so I'm probably going to explain this wrong in some way. But the gist of it seems to be something like this. In some states, delegates are awarded proportionally to the number of votes they get, rather than "winner take all" for the state's popular election.

So the idea is: let's say for the sake of argument, Maine is allowed 13 delegates to the national Republican Convention. But the state election yields a pool of more than 13 delegates -- let's say 200 -- and they will then choose from among those delegates. So let's say maybe Rick Santorum won the election and gets 100 delegates, Romney comes in second with 80 delegates, and Ron Paul gets just 15 because he's not actually that popular among Republicans. The other 5 can be Stephen Colbert write-ins, I guess.

But in the Paul camp's mind, rather than wasting time on actually winning the vote, their best plan is to somehow badger the state party into letting only Ron Paul delegates go to the convention. That means that, in this example, Maine picks 13 delegates, and all of them are Ron Paul delegates even though they won only a small fraction of the vote, and all 185 not-Paul delegates are left out in the cold.

In the video, Doug Wead constantly grins and chortles over the pure genius of this plan, while Rachel looks sort of goggle-eyed and asks questions along the lines of, "Isn't that sort of ignoring who the people actually want to elect?" Wead repeatedly, over and over again, dismisses the actual voting process as "A beauty contest."

Now maybe he's right, that the system the Republican party uses is hopelessly corrupt, and that makes it possible to game the system in this way, and the Paul campaign is perfectly within their rights to take advantage of this and maybe even win.

But what I'm hearing from Wead is total contempt for elections as a means of picking a candidate. Look, I personally think the entire slate of Republican candidates is abysmal and would hate to have any of them win the presidency, Paul included. But this sort of blanket dismissal of elections as a beauty contest indicates what sounds like a much deeper hostility towards democracy as a whole.

Birther fail... again

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:24:00 +0000

It seems that last week a "birther" case, brought by professional loony and Zsa-Zsa Gabor impersonator Orly Taitz, was legally dumped. In the ruling (see PDF), Judge Malihi stated, yet again, that Barack Obama is in fact a U.S. citizen. The birther case was so bad that they lost even though neither Obama nor a lawyer representing Obama wasted their time showing up.

Needless to say, the right wing blogosphere is going nuts over this, to the point where searching Google News for "Malihi" will mostly bring up hysteria-laden headlines like "Georgia Judge Michael Malihi is a cowardly traitor."

Though much more low key, this article by "the Conservative voice of Arizona" manages to hit all the silly points after starting off with a reasonable summary of the facts.

"Using Malihi’s analysis, anyone born in the United States is a natural born citizen. In other words, according to Malihi, children born within the United States to illegal aliens, tourists and/or terrorists are natural born citizens and are, therefore, eligible to become President of the United States."

Well, um, yes. It's kind of established legal precedent already, I thought. Hey, you know what I could do? I could look it up!

All the original Constitution said about the birth issue was, "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States."

The Fourteenth Amendment, though, says: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

And then the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 1898, that a man born in the United States to two citizens of China, was a legal citizen of the United States, based on the Fourteenth amendment. Stupid old activist judges in the 19th century.

In other words, this isn't controversial law, and hasn't been for well over a hundred years.

But hey, nothing our friends at the right wing rag can't obfuscate with an analogy to a faulty syllogism.

"Malihi’s conclusion is more analogous to saying: All dogs are mammals and all cats are mammals and therefore, all cats are dogs."

Noooooo... What Malihi said was:

All people born in the United States are citizens.
Obama is a person born in the United States.
Therefore Obama is a citizen.
Dumbass.

I'm paraphrasing a bit, but as far as I can remember my logic classes, that is a valid Modus Ponens. Especially the last part.

Netflix, giving context to my childhood

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

As a kid I read a lot of MAD magazine. I believe that the first issue I ever bought had a parody of Superman III, which Wikipedia tells me would date it to December 1983, when I was 9. Following the same list forward and remembering the issues as well as I can, I probably retained the subscription for about ten years and dropped it when I went to college. I still have a box with some of those back issues, although they're not exactly in mint condition and hence worthless.

Thinking back on the experience, I find myself realizing for the first time that a nine year old is not the intended target audience. It had heavy political content which, like The Daily Show, educated while entertaining me, and probably shaped a lot of my political views. (There was quite a lot of mockery of the religious right, which is no friend to satire.) Also, the movie satires were often based on R-rated material, and the artists didn't shy away from drawing semi-nude characters. From the back, or using creative scenery covering, but as a teenager you take what you can get, ha ha.

So MAD sits in an odd place for me, because I remember it as kid's entertainment but it apparently was not. And I enjoyed a plenty of satires of TV and movies that I couldn't or wouldn't see, because of the rating or because the subject matter was a kind of adult that wasn't interesting to me. I never cared to watch watch Dukes of Hazzard or The A*Team, but I did read the fake versions. I remember loving their parody of "The Shining," and yet not seeing the movie until years later.

Netflix is providing an interesting service these days which has really altered my entertainment habits. Ten years ago you rented a movie from Blockbuster, and you paid for each movie you rented, so if you wanted to watch something then it had better be worth at least $4 to watch that particular movie, or you wouldn't bother. Five years ago, Netflix was mostly replacing Blockbuster, but you still had a limited number of discs available at any given time, so you had to carefully choose what you might really want to watch.

That's all changed now. Netflix's live streaming capability covers a good half of their total content, and therefore renting a movie is a lot more like highly interactive television. Pay the monthly fee, and watch whatever you want. With TV, you might be fine leaving a crummy show on as background noise that you only partly pay attention to. Likewise with Netflix, you can watch half a movie and then quit if you don't like it. Run a movie in a computer window and only pay partial attention to it while you do something else in a different window -- that's my preferred viewing method. Also, here in Austin there is very good high speed satellite wifi coverage to support my Android, and the Netflix app works pretty well. If I run out of podcasts and don't feel like listening to books, I can always turn on a TV series, stream the sound through my car speakers, and turn the screen face down to avoid the temptation of peeking when I drive.

As a result, I've got a lot of TV series and movies to catch up on that may not have been quite good enough to rent, but are still interesting for historical purposes. Which really helps for me to understand what those MAD satires were all about.

For example, I recently finished a movie called Jumpin' Jack Flash. Has anybody even heard of this one? It's a 1986 comedy/thriller starring Whoopi Goldberg as a hapless computer genius (in 1986 terms, that means she knows how to replace broken parts and use this arcane program that resembles a chat room). She starts getting mysterious messages from a British spy who is trapped in Soviet Union somewhere -- the Soviet Union being a convenient omnipresent villain in Reagan's America.

What's weird is that this movie has not left a significant mark on the cultural world in any sense, but I remember the satirical version pretty well. It was called "Jumbled Joke Flash."

The main running joke throughout the comic was about the fact that Whoopi Goldberg swears all the time. Nearly every single panel contained some variation of ASCII swear symbols, e.g., "@!#$". I even remember asking my mom how all these symbols should be read for maximum humorous effect, and she says "Why don't you just insert 'gawl dang' everywhere?"

Now I think it's kind of odd, though. Having watched the movie, there is quite a bit of casual swearing, although not much more than most people I know would do when in a stressful situation. Why draw so much attention to this? Was it very novel to have lots of swearing in an R-Rated movie? And doesn't the idea that swearing is silly and embarrassing enough to hang such an obvious lampshade on, support the notion that MAD really is targeted at young kids after all? I dunno, maybe I really was the intended audience.

Anyway, the movie was pretty unremarkable on the whole, and I see that Ebert hated it even though he thought Whoopi Goldberg made a valiant effort to save it through charisma. What surprised me the most was the complete lack of any particular twist that would make the sequence of events a surprise. Sure, there's a double agent who tries to kill her after appearing trustworthy, but that barely counts as a twist at all. I was wondering if "Jack" the mysterious chat room agent, would turn out to be entirely fictional, or right in her office the whole time. Except, nope, at the end of the movie he shows up, and he is indeed a British agent, and they appear to have a potential romance there, and that's the happy ending.

So, yeah. There's a movie I wouldn't have seen without free streaming. On the flip side, Lynnea and I have gotten heavily into Arrested Development, which is a delight.

I guess all I'm trying to say here is that new technologies keep on subtly changing our habits to the point where the old ways of doing things start seeming quaint very quickly now.

It's been a few years since I broke out that box of magazines. I should go search it for more movie recommendations.