April 2005

Zoe Williams has an interesting article in the Guardian about howThe Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is now a nostalgia item. In the US, the Hitchhiker’s Guide was more nerd samizdat than cultural phenomenon. However, I’m attracted to the idea that my generation is seeing the nostalgia media complex turn the 80s into something that we don’t recognize.

Of course, people whose formative decade was the 60s say exactly the same thing. When Tony Blair made his ill-considered attack on that decade’s legislative liberalism some months ago, I asked my mother what the 60s were like, and she said: “They really were a lot like the 50s.” The historian Dominic Sandbrook, writing in the Sunday Times last weekend, gave us the killer fact about this era: “There were almost 60 million people in Britain and, at most, only 1 million bought the best-selling single of the week. In comparison, 20 million regularly tuned in to watch The Black and White Minstrel Show.” It wasn’t liberal, and it wasn’t cool. It’s news like that that turns your world upside down. Next we’re going to find out that there wasn’t really a war on in the 40s.

I’m one of the bloggers who got to see the Enron¹ documentary “The Smartest Guys in the Room.” (It’s remarkable the extent to which this Onion review stole my thunder. I soldier on.)

There are so many ways that the filmmakers could have gone wrong. It could have been a dull parade of talking heads, or an airy exploration of the “culture of greed” with minimal specifics about Enron. It could have been a thin, unsatisfying hit piece like Bush’s Brain. It could have been incomprehensible to viewers without an accounting degree.

Instead, it’s the cinematic equivalent of a well-structured business book like Liar’s Poker. A film which spends about as much time talking about the Dabhol power plant in India as it does talking about strippers² is taking its subject matter seriously. There’s an admirable depth and scope; I had the feeling that the filmmakers knew a lot more than they could fit in. It does an especially good job at explaining some of the big issues: how the institutions which should have blown the whistle (banks, lawyers, accountants, and analysts) had perverse incentives to keep Enron going, and how the pressure to beat expectations led to escalating fraud every quarter. The section on California is particularly infuriating to folks who remember how concerns about market manipulation were treated with blithe condescension.

Like many historical documentaries, the film tells the story of events that didn’t happen on camera, so it succeeds or fails on the strength of its editors. Luckily, the editing does a skillful job of mixing “real” footage (largely Congressional hearings), stock footage with voiceovers, and interview clips. The quick pacing and chapter-like structure help make the movie feel shorter than it is. It looks great, like someone took their time.

I have a few quibbles. It’s a touch light on the details of Enron’s financial chicanery. (I’d really like to know what “Death Star” meant, for example.) At points when I disagreed with the angle that the filmmakers were taking, I realized that there wasn’t much effort spent representing opposing views³.

But it’s an admirable, intelligent documentary about complex subject that captures many of the pleasures of a good nonfiction book. Well worth the time.

¹ Full disclosure, as it were: I worked as an analyst at Enron in the London office for about six months in 2001, almost to the end. I’m not bitter; I didn’t get burned on stock and learned quite a lot.

² Albeit with some pretty gratuitous visuals.

³ For example, some people had most or all of their retirement accounts invested in Enron stock. That’s an important part of the story. It would also have been appropriate to show someone, anyone, pointing out that these people had made a horrible, foolish decision on their own. UPDATE: Atrios notes that Enron’s 401k matching contributions were paid in Enron stock, which I didn’t realize.

Don’t know about you lot, but this Glenn Reynolds shortie conjured up some unfortunate images in my mind.

Brad DeLong’s transformation into a political scientist appears to be advancing rapidly.

And this paper on voting in the mediaeval church provides some evidence that social choice theory is an outgrowth of Frances Yates’ Hermetic Tradition (it mentions in passing that Ramon Lull and Nicholas of Cusa anticipated some of the key arguments of voting theory a few centuries early).

This may just be the single most random post ever on Crooked Timber, but I, er, soldier on. Perhaps an entomologist or two reads this blog? Leftist entomologists who are sticking it to the man with their ground-breaking research in Roraima? So, I live in Singapore, where we’ve got lotsa ants. Big soldier ants. Little stinging ants. Medium-sized stinging ants. Demi-hemi stinging ants. And so on. When I walk my daughter to school we often see them running in little glistening jointed rivers, 15 ants wide, streaming from the corpse of a snail to the detritus at the edge of the sidewalk. And when the new queen ants are making their maiden flights we are tediously overrun by drones, even on the nineteenth story. They throng to the lights if you forget to close the windows. They also tend to induce menlancholy “to dust thou shalt return” feelings, being, as they are, so poorly put together. Their wings fall off at the feeblest provocation, leaving them to crawl around on the floor in circles. It’s as if a heartless Nature has put them together with the least possible care, thinking, “well, if they haven’t made it to the queen by that time…”. I have to kill dozens of them, usually smushing them with a wadded-up paper towel which I then throw away. This seems a peculiarly modern response; “I’m done with this insect—let’s throw it away in the trash!” But what I am I supposed to do, herd them back to the balcony in some Jain fashion? If they’re in my apartment, they ain’t impregnating the queen. Anyway, if I were to brush against them even slightly, their stupid wings would fall off. This wasn’t my point, though. Yesterday, I went out for a swim with my daughter around 4 o’clock. There is a waist-high stucco wall all around the pool. When I went to put our things on a chair, I noticed a strange sight. The top edge of the wall was thronged with ants, all of whom had their abdomen flexed up at a 90 degree angle to their thoraxes. They weren’t interacting with each other much, and were mostly all facing the same direction. When I leant over to look they rippled back in waves, then slowly edged back to their original positions, abdomens high as flags. WTF was up with that, then? I was struck with the vague thought that they were cooling off, but that didn’t really make any sense. When I got out of the pool 20 minutes later, they were still there, rippling back and forth, peculiarly bent. Thoughts?

There are many good reasons not to vote Labour in the forthcoming UK general election. Giving Tony Blair a bloody nose over Iraq, punishing the government for its pandering to anti-immigrant sentiment, withdrawing support over ID cards or the government’s handling of terrorists suspects: all are worth mentioning. Some will want to add the PFI and university tuition fees to the bill of indictment. I could go on. But I don’t find the fact that Liberal Democrat policies “are more in accord with my own views”:http://www.stalinism.com/shot-by-both-sides/full_post.asp?pid=984 than Labour’s are provides me with much of a reason for switching. After all, nobody, including the Liberal Democrats — currently 150/1 at bluesq.com — expects them to form the next government. And because of that, the Lib Dems can offer the voters they wish to seduce (Labour’s base) a portfolio of policies that are straight out of Guardian-reader central. In the circumstances it is a surprise that they aren’t offering philosophy lecturers in their 40s free beer on the NHS, but I suppose principle has to kick in somewhere. I’ll probably vote Labour (currently 20/1 on), but may vote Lib Dem for the aforementioned bloody-nose reasons. I certainly won’t be favouring the Lib Dems because they have better policies: talk is cheap.

Socialist Worker has “an interview with Les Roberts”:http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php4?article_id=6271 who led the team which conducted the Lancet survey which estimated 98,000 excess deaths in Iraq since the war began. (via “Lenin”:http://leninology.blogspot.com/ .)

It’s a well-known fact that new Popes are always in need of advice. For instance, the late Pope John Paul II could have saved a terrific amount of theological confusion amongst under-twelves if, before his “visit to Ireland”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/04/03/when-the-pope-came-to-ireland/ in 1979, he’d been told to make sure everyone knew that the word “Suffer” in the phrase “Suffer little children to come unto me” actually means “Permit” or “Allow.”

What bit of advice should we give the new Pope, I wonder? On the Biblical side, I’m a fan of “Micah 6:8”:http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=micah%206:8;&version=31, myself. (“And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”) But you may have a different ideas.

You take your kid to the specialist to talk about persistent symptom x and he says, “Well it’s probably harmless thing A, or maybe harmless thing B. And there’s a very small chance it’s the horrible and ultimately fatal genetic disorder C.”

If I were rational, this conversation would not have upset me as much as it did.

_Update:_ Given all the parents in the world who really do have serious child-health problems to deal with, and worse besides, I now feel ashamed for even bringing this extremely remote possibility of bad luck up here. It wasn’t even meant to be the point of the post, just a springboard for an observation. Don’t be surprised if the post disappears altogether soon, having died of embarassment.

Yup, Thomas “Airmiles” Friedman is off on one again. Globollocks back in full effect, this time reminding us of the War For Innovation going on in his head. He’s got a book of this stuff out, apparently, bless.
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So, let’s assume for a moment that you had a real personal stake in who became next pope and are beyond horrified at the ‘election’ of Ratzinger. Let’s also assume you go to Mass on a fairly regular basis (though maybe you haven’t been to confession since you were a teenager…), and know that from now on, you’ll be asked every week to pray for his holiness, Pope Palpatine, sorry, Benedixt XVI. And that’s the easy bit.

I’ll take it that you know there is no way for a mere lay person, and a woman at that, to have any real voice in the doctrinal decisions of the church. And also that loyalty can only mean the lie of silent apostasy. Is exit the only option?

Chris Mooney has a great piece of investigative reporting at Mother Jones detailing Exxon’s funding of anti-global warming groups ranging from Steven Milloy’s one-man disinformation campaign at junkscience.com to the American Enterprise Institute. Bottom line: there’s now an overwhelming scientific consensus that human caused greenhouse gases are causing the world’s temperature to rise. Many previous skeptics (e.g. BP and Shell) have now been convinced on the basic facts of global warming. Yet Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute, an organization with which Exxon has close links, have sought to cast doubt on this consensus through funding spurious “reports” and other publications that don’t meet the minimal standards to get published in peer-reviewed journals.[1]
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“It’s Ratzinger”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/international/worldspecial2/19cnd-conclave.html, as Benedict XVI. Oh boy.

A fellow user of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) has created a wonderful hack for Google Maps using Greasemonkey. By installing the script in Firefox, it is now possible to get addresses to overlay on the CTA system map. This was a feature seriously lacking on the Transit Authority’s own site and has caused many frustrations for me in the past. This is an awesome feature. [thanks]

The Washington Post has a piece on the battle between “family friendly” editors who sanitize films for conservative family consumption and film directors, which poses some interesting political questions. On the one hand, I reckon that leftwingers should be supporting conservatives on principle in this fight. As I wrote at the beginning of this year (in one of the worst-titled posts of all time), there’s a strong argument that conservatives should have the right to ‘remix’ bits of the culture that they don’t want to consume. Why shouldn’t they be able to take the sex out of Hollywood movies that their kids watch (just as leftwingers might want to protect their kids from rampant consumerism)? On the other, there are clear costs to this:

Family Flix, which claims to have the toughest standards, removes “sexual innuendo,” including suggestions or depictions of homosexuality. It recently edited “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie,” an animated film with a PG rating, to eliminate a scene in which a male starfish character sings and dances while dressed in fishnet stockings and high heels.

I’m strongly attracted to what might be called, for want of a better term, BoingBoing socialism. That is, I buy the argument that some of the key goals of the left can best be achieved through maximizing individuals’ control over the conditions of their consumption (and, by extension, maximizing their ability to remix and re-produce cultural goods). But what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Empowering people to make cultural choices we might ‘like’ is also going to empower them to make choices that we might dislike too – to separate themselves from what many of us would consider to be a minimal shared social consensus on homosexuality. There are some extremely vexing questions about the appropriate relationship between the common culture and dissenting sub-cultures like the one that Christian conservatives have very successfully created, a difficult balance to be struck. As individuals’ ability to remix their cultural consumption increases, so too will these questions become more urgent. At the moment, I don’t have any very good answers to them.