Sad to report the decline of Pixar

I think it's probably time to call it:  Pixar is past its prime and lately producing only passable entertainment that carries little in the way of its early quality.

This is prompted by seeing Inside Out yesterday, inspired as I was by high praise from critics, and despite a trailer which I thought indicated a not very funny or visually exciting film.

Guess what - it was the trailer that was right, not the critics.

I really don't understand their excitement.  The movie was more like an academic exercise to build a story around a psychology book.  So there were ideas there, just not very interesting ones; characters on screen who were hard to identify with (most the characters are the "inside your head" emotions, anyway - they aren't meant to be nuanced) and a visual style that was unexciting and uninnovative.

It was not a bad film per se, just a very forgettable and not very engaging one.  (I actually think Brave was positively bad, so its certainly possible for Pixar to have a complete dud, in my books.) 

As for the big picture at Pixar, the last one I quite liked was Toy Story 3, and that was in 2010.  I have never bothered with Cars2, given that I thought the first was dull and childish; and Monsters University was underwhelming.

Now, part of the problem is how often they are re-visiting the old stories, and it's a bit distressing to see there are probably 4 sequels in their current production line up.  But Brave and Inside Out show they are fizzing on "stand alone" stories too.

Their highlight films for me remain the original Toy Story, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille, with A Bug's Life deserving an entry too.  Brad Bird is the pick of their directors, but he hasn't made enough yet to really see how consistent he can be.
 

Rising Inequality and its apologists

There's a good and enlightening review from last month at The Economist about another book on inequality, this one by British economist Anthony Atkinson.

We get to see this chart:

and these bits of explanatory comment:

Inequality across rich countries was high before the two world wars of the 20th century. It fell to striking lows after 1945 and then began growing again around 1980 (see chart). Rising income inequality is a feature of most rich countries, especially America and Britain, and parts of the emerging world, including China. Sir Anthony is not interested in outlining any fundamental economic rules. Instead he carefully walks the reader through the ways that different forces have pushed incomes apart historically.

In America, for instance, incomes at the top of the scale began pulling away from the rest quite soon after 1945. Yet household inequality—taking account of taxes and transfers—did not rise until what Mr Atkinson calls the “Inequality Turn” around 1980. Several factors contributed to this, including changes for women and work. After the second world war, when female labour-force participation grew rapidly, high-earning men tended to marry low-earning women; the rising numbers of working women reduced household inequality. From the 1980s on, by contrast, men and women tended to marry those who earned like themselves—rich paired with rich; rising female participation in the workforce exacerbated inequality.

This line from the review:

Sir Anthony dwells on one class of contributory factors above all others: the subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways the rich are able to influence government policy in order to protect their wealth.

 put me in mind of some commentators in Australia.  Who could they be*?:

Anyhow, The Economist reviewer is critical of many of Atkinson's suggestions as to reigning in inequality, basically saying they are unwelcome throwback to the 1960's and 1970's.   And to be fair, the criticisms on some points ring true.

But overall the review obviously considers the book an important contribution to an important issue. What irks me most is the effort those in the ABC** collective put into arguing there is no issue at all.

* words in their mouths are mine, but as far as I can tell, represent their positions with only mild exaggeration, if at all in some cases

(** the Australian, Bolt, Catallaxy)

A troubled life

Literary Review - Donald Rayfield on Stalin's Daughter

Well, amongst the many things I didn't know much about until now was the turbulent life of Svetlana Alliluyena, Stalin's daughter.  She defected from Russia in 1967.  This paragraph  from a review of a new biography gives some details of her, shall we say with understatement, troubled life:

Svetlana emerges as a remarkable, largely generous, sometimes heroic
figure. Whatever she inherited from her pathologically cruel and
vindictive father and from her neurotic, suicidal mother she did her
best to overcome (her brother, Vasili, succumbed and destroyed himself
with drink and sex; her half-brother, Yakov, who grew up fostered in
Georgia and did not meet his father until he was a teenager, was
captured by Germany during the Second World War and effectively
committed suicide by provoking his German captors to shoot him).
Svetlana's childhood and youth were as traumatic as any of Euripides's
tragedies: her mother shot herself when she was six; Stalin had nearly
all the maternal aunts, uncles and cousins of his children arrested and,
in many cases, shot. Svetlana's first love was badly beaten and sent to
the Gulag; her first husband was erased from her passport after they
divorced; her second husband was the withdrawn son of one of Stalin's
cronies. She barely saw her father after she ceased to be a living doll
that he could play with: her most searing memory is of Stalin in his
death throes on the floor, soaked in urine, threatening her with a
raised left hand. Yet after his death she negotiated a career for
herself and refused to be a mascot for the party or for anyone else. In
the prestigious Gorky Literary Institute she stood up for the first
dissident writers to fall victim to the Brezhnev regime. She dared to
live openly as Singh's partner.

She did not have a particularly good time after her defection, either, but you can read the review to see what went wrong.

A tad misleading by the publisher?

Maybe I just hadn't bothered to read up on it, but I hadn't realised until now where this new Harper Lee book stood in relation to Mockingbird:

Though “Watchman” is being published for the first time now, it was essentially an early version of “Mockingbird.” According to news accounts, “Watchman” was submitted to publishers in the summer of 1957; after her editor asked for a rewrite focusing on Scout’s girlhood two decades earlier, Ms. Lee spent some two years reworking the story, which became “Mockingbird.”

So, although it is set ahead of the first book, it's a bit like a first draft of the famous one.

I wonder how many people ordered the book on the basis that it was a sequel written after the first?  Because coming to the book on the basis of how it was really written may well lower ridiculously high expectations.

The Guardian did have a lovely graphic/audio accompaniment to the first chapter, though.  (Actually, I don't care for the audio.  It quickly becomes tedious.)

Krugman on Greece

Greece’s Economy Is a Lesson for Republicans in the U.S. - The New York Times

I find Krugman pretty convincing on most things.  His summary of Greece, and implications for American politics, sounds reasonable, too.

That odd topic again

Do I Sound Gay? Film-maker's personal journey explores the 'gay voice' | Film | The Guardian

So, an entire documentary has been made by a gay man about the "gay voice".  Looking at the trailer for it (it's in the article linked), it seems an earnest effort.  Perhaps too earnest.

I think I have written here before that the topic is of interest because I once shared an office with a gay guy, who was surprised to learn that I could readily tell when he was taking a call from a gay friend.  Not one with a terribly masculine inflection at the best of times, his voice clearly became "gayer" when he took calls from certain friends.  As his sexuality was a potential issue for his job (we're back in the 80's now),he was concerned that his voice gave him away.

It's unclear whether the documentary offers any clear explanation as to how the stereotypical gay accent developed (and develops in individuals);  as far as I know there is not really one simple answer.

Sort of encouraging

Richard Ackland's Gadfly column in today's Saturday Paper summaries an article by academic Rod Tiffin a few weeks ago, concerning the diminishing influence of the Murdock press:

It seems the News Corp sheets have a diminishing ability to influence elections. They are simply lecturing to the same ageing, welded-on conservatives and reactionaries, so the “conversion factor” is nil.

Tiffen goes through the data, which is sobering. Last year the total circulation of all Australian daily newspapers was about 2.1 million, one million lower than 15 years ago.

In the past 18 years the “penetration” rate of newspapers has declined to such an extent that Moloch papers, with roughly a 60 per cent share of daily newspaper circulation, are now bought by a gritty hardcore of 4 per cent of the Australian population.

Apart from that, Essential Research has discovered that about half the readers of the Moloch tabs don’t trust what they’re reading.

The ability to influence, because of the uptake of tabloid content by the radio shock jocks, is also limited. Again the elderly listeners are a similar demographic to the readers of these jaunty sheets.

As Tiffen puts it: “Together, the two media form a self-aggrandising and self-referential noise machine, and their volume and bluster should not be mistaken for outreach.”

When it comes to web readership the picture is even grimmer because, of all the newsprint products, tabloids are the most challenged by the digital revolution, with the exception of Britain’s Daily Mail.

Difficult as it is to believe, Tiffen says most visits to The Daily Smellograph’s website are “fleeting”, often only 30 seconds or less, with much less “political impact”.

Confused over the "culture war"

Culture War Two: conservatives get high on their own supply | Jason Wilson | Comment is free | The Guardian

Jason Wilson's discussion of the culture war raises in my mind the uncertainty of what can or cannot be included under the umbrella of that idea.

Wilson says that it all started as follows:

Culture war arrived in Australia as a wedge tactic borrowed from US Republicans. There, it was crafted in the late 1980s, as a way of shifting debate from the inequalities brought about by Reaganomics to the more advantageous terrain of morality and values. Culture war also allowed conservatives to substitute an internal enemy for the collapsed USSR.

In Australia, Howard used an adapted version to court the votes of blue collar conservatives – Howard’s battlers, who were promised “An Australian nation that feels comfortable and relaxed about three things: about their history, about their present and the future”. The ABC
“luvvies”, who had been tarnished by their association with Paul Keating, became the enemy.

What started as a cynical ploy has apparently become a deeply-held belief for some conservative politicians and pundits. The right are now high on their own supply, and some of them may never come down.

Seems to me that the article suffers a bit by lacking a definition of "culture war".

Gerard Henderson is quoted as saying that Howard lost the culture war with the ABC.  By which he means, ABC analysis still typically skews soft left.   (What Henderson overlooks is that this does not necessarily help the political Left:   the Labor reforming governments of the 80's were often attacked on ABC current affairs from the left, too.)   The reality is that journalism is always going to appeal as a career to people on the soft Left.   Obsessing about that is like complaining there are too many gay guys serving you your drink on Qantas:  it's not going to make any difference in the big picture, even if you would prefer to be handed your scotch by an attractive woman, and running a campaign against it is going to make you look like a  controlling nut.

I tend to view the big "culture war" issues of my lifetime as being the silly post-modernist movement and its rub off effect on history and education (and, possibly, sexual identity politics.)

On these matters, I say the Left mostly lost - no one treats post modernist guff seriously anymore, and despite the complaints of old time culture war warriors writing in the Australian, extremes in education theory have swung back to an evidence based centre, as has history.   And starry eyed views of aboriginal issues influenced by such things are not so prominent now as well.

The one area where you could perhaps say the Left had a spectacular culture war win has been sexuality (what with gay marriage.)   But it's a bit hard to pin down the Left/Right divide on that - I mean you have the libertarian Right supporting gay marriage as much as former "anti-marriage for anyone" Left.  And I have a theory that a change in public attitude towards heterosexual reproduction, with the technological revolution in simple contraception and IVF, has had a big influence on how people perceive homosexual relationships.  I don't think it was so much the Left driving the culture change here; it just evolved through several strands of societal change.

Next you get to the tricky area of how culture war ideas effect economics theory.  I guess there is appeal in saying that Thatcher's "no such thing as society" sounds like a "culture" statement, as does Libertarian fetishism over doing what they want whenever they want to ("how dare you propose locking me out of a Club at 4 am even if I have never wanted to go there at that time before"), but I suspect these are more properly characterised as ideological or philosophical positions rather than cultural ones.

In any event, there is no doubt that the political Left has tended to become more centrist in it adoption of economic policy over my lifetime - another way in which you can argue the Right has been the "winner".

I'm think Wilson's article supports the view parts of the Right have gone rather nutty in several respects because it has already had the reasonable wins it could expect, and has been left with a sense of no where else to go.   (Amusingly, pop analysis of the Labor movement is that it has lost its heart because of falling relevance of trade union membership.   This is simply a factor of rising wealth and a move to the sensible centre.  And yes,  a move to centrism can represent an identity problem for either side, but to its credit, it's not Labor which has swung to an anti-evidence ideological extreme in response.)

So, unfortunately, much of the Right has chosen to be ideological over evidence based, and to unjustifiably interpret everything through a "culture war" lens no matter how inappropriate or redundant that approach may be to the practical matter at hand.   In a weird role reversal, they have become the ones now who think evidence is unimportant, not because (as the Left thought for a while) that everything is relative and a social construct, but because they think everyone else except them are the ones making stuff up.  They already know from their ideology how the evidence should really go.

A sad situation...

Little doubt what people would have assumed...

Cairns bomb plot: Accused had car full of fuel, court hears | The Courier-Mail

Some fascinating details here from a court case of an alleged plot to blow up an Australian Naval base, which appears to have been prevented in the nick of time.

I can just imagine how, if this happened, the media speculation (and Abbott's reaction) would have been assuming it was a likely Muslim terrorist attack.

Tiny hero?

Ant-Man Reviews - Metacritic

Surprisingly, this Marvel entry is getting some good reviews.  As there appears to be humour in the film, possibly it is worth seeing.  Silly science fiction can be quite OK, if it is reasonably funny along the way.

Philosophy in comic form

I was fairly amused by this installment of Existential Comics.

Actually, the previous installment was good too.   Perhaps I need to spend a while at that site...

Weather comment

So, we are now clearly in an El Nino, and one that is quite likely to continue strengthening.

I can't remember what the winter in Brisbane was like during the last strong one, but my impression of this current one is that the nightly temperatures have been unusually cold/cool for quite a protracted time, by local standards.

Yet down South, as far as I know, it has been cold but with relatively little snow.  But a very large system of snow bearing weather is about to hit, apparently.  At IPA headquarters, the cabal will be rubbing their hands with glee.  

The true effect of this El Nino won't really be apparent until our summer.   The likelihood of terrible drought in Western Queensland (and New South Wales) becoming ever worse seems pretty high, though.

An issue with maturity

It has to be said:  what with David Leyonhjelm's continual sweary ripostes on twitter; his 70's era attempt at humour about how to trick a woman into letting her breasts be fondled; and Helen Dale's spectacularly high regard for her own abilities (yesterday's example from Facebook:  "Since I have probably forgotten more about how to write well than most people will ever know, any and all literary advice is received with due consideration and a grain of salt")  I can't help but conclude that there is a glaring problem with immaturity in the Australian libertarian scene...

As for Jeff Sparrow's lengthy re-visit of the Demidenko affair:  it seems quite an accurate account that aligns with my understanding, although I do think the connection with the wind turbine enquiry is a bit of stretch.  

Helen Dale actually deserves a backhanded compliment for letting the cat out of the bag about her and her boss being mainly interested in infrasound sickness as a means to an ideologically motivated economic policy end.  In that social media episode, her problem was being too honest, not dishonesty.

Bad timing for Tony

I would bet my last dollar that someone in Tony Abbott's office, if not Abbott himself, has said in the last 24 hours "*$&#...why did Heydon have to let Shorten appear on State of Origin final day?"

Shorten's appearance is being desperately oversold as a matter of interest by political journalists - especially if they write for The Australian - but I strongly suspect the public's interest is fairly limited.  Here's Grattan's less hyperventilating take on it, anyway.

The things scientists go looking for...

Nerves found to exist in male spider genitalia: A trio of researchers working in Germany has discovered that male spiders do indeed have nerves in their genitalia, overturning prior research that has suggested otherwise.

Carbon economic modelling uncertainty and its real mis-use

This post is inspired by a couple of tweets by Jason Soon, who links to a short article by Mark Lawson in the AFR citing Robert Pindyck's recent paper arguing that the Integrated Assessment Models used to predict economic costs of action (or non action) on climate are actually so full of uncertainty they are useless.

A few observations:

*  I started quoting other sources for pretty much the same argument a year or two ago.

*  It's pretty clear that Lawson, who wrote a book with the title "Climate Change Lunacy" which was launched by Ian Plimer (who shares the same publisher), wants to rely on this uncertainty argument to suggest no government action is warranted because no one can be sure of the economic benefit.   But in fact, Pindyck has been arguing for some years now that the best response is to price carbon and adjust the price as needed.   He wrote in a Cato publication in October 2013:

I have argued that we simply don’t know the SCC and won’t be able to determine it from the set of IAMs currently available. If we focus on “most likely” scenarios for which temperature increases are moderate and effects are small, the SCC is probably in the $10 to $40 range, justifying only a small tax on carbon emissions. But the “most likely” scenarios are not the ones that should be of major concern. We should focus more on the unlikely but devastating scenarios, i.e., the possibility of a climate catastrophe. Depending on the probability, potential effect, and timing, that might lead to an SCC as high as $200 per ton (although I have not tried to actually estimate the number).
That leaves us with two policy priorities: First, we should take the $20 Interagency Working Group estimate as a rough andpolitically acceptable lower bound and impose a carbon tax (or equivalent policy) of that amount. Of course, climate change is a global problem and we should pressure other countries to adopt a similar abatement policy. There will always be “free riders” (China, for example), but that is not a reason to delay action.

Would anyone reading Lawson's article quoting Pindyck get the impression that this is what Pindyck actually advocates?   I think not.

*  While the Cato Institute has been giving room for some to argue the case for carbon pricing, this is the line up of its "experts" on energy and environment part of their website:

  I don't recognize every name, of those I do, they are a rogues gallery of discredited climate science "experts" all determined to convince that government should take no action.

*  With a line up like that, and in Australia the likes of Sinclair Davidson, and the Senator who, by his own staffer's admission on twitter, is interested in infrasound mainly as a backdoor way of attacking an economic policy he doesn't like, the libertarian wing of the Right be it in the States or here remains a determined enemy of good policy response to climate change.

Fish and a certain river

Last weekend, people would have heard the odd but sad story of a 5 year girl killed by a jumping sturgeon on the Suwannee River in Florida.

Overlooking the human sadness element of this, Googling about it has led to a few improvements to my general knowledge:

1.  I never knew sturgeon, a weird looking fish I first became aware of as a child because a giant one features in an Uncle Scrooge story, had such a wide range.   Although, now that I look back on it, the Uncle Scrooge story in question was actually set in North America.   Sorry, it must be my later reading about Russian sturgeon and the caviar business that must have made me imagine that were mainly on another continent.

2.  Is the Suwannee (or Suwanee) River the same as the Swanee River of politically incorrect song fame?   Yes, turns out it is, and according to Wikipedia, Stephen Foster never saw it, and it doesn't even make much sense as the setting for the song.   (It's also the river the subject of the Al Jolson "Swanee" song, with music by Gershwin.)     Other sources say that Foster in fact first wrote the song using the name of a different river (the Pedee - which seems to now be called the Pee Dee - Americans seem to have trouble with consistency in river names)  and that river, being located in the Carolinas, makes a bit more sense for the song's story.

3.  Googling the Swanee song led me to this Youtube of Hugh Laurie doing a version of it.  I knew he sang, but he really is quite the jazz pianist:

But all cheese is magic...

Frenchwoman behind Chile 'magic cheese' scam jailed for three years | World news | The Guardian

Michelle Grattan on this weird government

Q&A affair has become theatre of the absurd: Has Q&A put some spell of madness over the government and their media mates?

I would like to point out that I was making references to mental illness on this issue before Michelle. 

No questions asked

The current revolution in the West in terms of both private and State treatment of homosexuality is, as I have argued for years, based on an assumed certainty of human psychology that reflects more of a social zeitgeist than a solid scientific understanding.

There are two things on the net recently which I think back me up on this.

One is the outpouring of Facebook support for a young male of indeterminate age looking sad and making the statement that he's homosexual and is worried that people won't like him.

I find it remarkable that (as far as I can see) no media outlet dealing with it has questioned the delicate matter of the age of the boy.   The reason is pretty obviously because it has become terribly, terribly politically incorrect to question whether a person is clearly understanding their own sexuality, regardless of their age.  (And sure, there are some people in threads following reports on this who are questioning whether the kid is "jumping the gun" here, but my point is that journalists seem loathe to raise the matter.)

Some media reports put him as a "young teen", which many would say is an age at which the sexuality self identification may very well be established.  Apparently, the Facebook site he appears on never reveals age, so it is all a guessing game.  (It's very hard to be sure, but I would say he is pre-teen.)   To some commenting about him, he could be as young as 7 or 8, and the issue of at what age kids clearly understand their sexuality simply doesn't matter to them.  

I know this for sure as I was listening to a discussion of the Facebook post on local ABC radio yesterday, where the two people specifically thought he looked all of 7 or 8, and the matter of whether he fully understood self identification as homosexual at that age was simply not an issue to them at all.

So, at what age do most adult gay people say they realised they were gay?  I've heard it said in a couple of places lately (one was Julia Zamiro - a dislike of whom I find impossible to fathom - talking to British comedian - who I don't find very funny - Matt Lucas, who came across as much more likeable than I expected) that it was a case of waiting for an expected attraction to the opposite sex to develop as a teen, but it never arrived.   I think this makes some sense, and appears confirmed by some survey evidence:

A national survey of 1,752 college students found:

48% of self-identified gay and bisexual college students became aware of their sexual preference in high school while 26% found their true sexuality in college

20% of self-identified gay and bisexual men knew that they were gay or bisexual in junior high school, and 17% said they knew in grade school

6% of self-identified gay or bisexual women knew that they were gay or bisexual in junior high school, and 11% knew in grade school."

Allowing for the fact that there may well be a bit of retrospective revision going on here (where what at the time of grade school was an understanding that they were different, with a later identification that it was homosexuality)  I think it seems pretty safe to say that a clear self identification as homosexual at the age of 7 or 8 is quite unusual.  Dare I say, but it may not even be entirely reliable. 

So why do people not factor that in to their response to this story?    It's clearly a case of an over-reaction to previous conservative shaming or even criminalization of homosexuality, but can't people see an over-reaction when it's in front of them?  


The second story is the terribly interesting one about the attack a decade ago on J Michael Bailey, who questioned whether all transexuals' self understanding was really accurate.   This is dealt with in a recent book which is mentioned on Greg Laden's blog, but I first read about this via a link earlier this year from Jason Soon to some (I think, conservative?) site that had a lengthy interview with Bailey.   Bailey's theory, as explained by him, sounded quite plausible to me, and I meant to link to it at the time but forgot to.

I see that Bailey is probably continuing to upset the transgender activists by weighing in on the "Caitlyn Jenner" kerfuffle, where, again, it is viewed as completely improper to question the self reporting of transexuals as to how they got there, so to speak.  Here's Bailey talking about it:

WT: Do you believe that Caitlyn Jenner is autogynephilic? If so, why?
MB: I believe it is very likely that Caitlyn Jenner’s transition was motivated by intense autogynephilia. I believe this because the best science suggests there are two completely different reasons why natal males become women: because they are feminine androphiles (lovers of men) or because they are autogynephilic. Jenner’s history shows none of the former and is very consistent with the latter. I refer specifically to his previous heterosexual marriages and secretive crossdressing.
WT. She says she always had gender dysphoria and that there was no erotic component. Would she say this if she were autogynephilic? Why?
MB: Autogynephilic individuals experience gender dysphoria, typically beginning in adolescence, when their intense erotic longing for female characteristics almost always begins. There is evidence (John Bancroft published an article long ago) showing that after changing sex, some show memory distortion. They begin to assert that their gender dysphoria began in early childhood and was far more overt than they had alleged before. They also deemphasize the erotic component, even if they admitted it before. I think they do this for at least two reasons: shame (because: sex is involved) and the desire to believe they really have the brains of women (as Jenner suggests she does–um, how does she know that?). I think also that Jenner (and others in the spotlight) likely enjoys the media spotlight, and the mainstream media loves the “was always a woman trapped in a man’s body” story and can’t deal with the “experienced intense sexual arousal when crossdressing or imagining I had a woman’s body” story.
WT: If Jenner doesn’t want people to think her transition was due to autogynephilia, why shouldn’t we just go along? 
MB: This inaccurate denial of autogynephilia is not for the good, because being honest could help lots of males struggling with their autogynephilia. (And there are lots who are.) It might help them understand themselves. It might help them accept themselves. It would at least say “Autogynephilia is nothing to be ashamed of.” I would say that people who admit and deal with their autogynephilia are even admirable.
Falsely misrepresenting one’s gender issues is also bad for science. It’s not good for people to believe false things merely because journalists don’t want to go certain places. Even among scientists, too many don’t bother to learn about the relevant literature and just listen to transgender people’s explanations (“I have the brain of a woman.”). This leads to bad scientific studies and ideas.

Well, that'll upset the transgender support movement, which appears to be reaching some sort of zenith at the moment in the West.

Update:   Some survey results from 2013 in the US (although not with all that many participants) indicates that relatively few adult gays find their sexuality is a "negative" factor.