So, DC conservatives are all (ahem) atwitter over #dontgo, a mobile social networking powered movement dedicated to attacking Congressional Democrats for adjourning without deploying their magical Congress-powers to “solve” the energy crisis. More specifically, the plan is apparently to make hay of the refusal to open up the continental shelf to offshore drilling, which is presumably part of some ecofascist plot by elitist Beltway types to stick the average voter with high gas prices. This is fairly silly, but since I’m an elitist Beltway type, preloaded with the requisite sneering contempt for the wisdom of said average voter, I’ll allow that it might nevertheless be an effective tactic.

The trouble is that reporting on this debate tends to mention the general consensus that authorizing new drilling now would have no discernible effect on near-term gas prices. Even once the platforms are built and the oil is flowing in a decade or so, we’re probably talking about an effect of a couple cents per gallon, by most estimates I’ve seen. So in order to obscure the point, we’re now getting analyses like this one at The Next Right or this from AEI’s Kevin Hassett. I’ll save you ten minutes: Both spend way too many words making the elementary point that current prices embed expectations about future supply and demand.

This falls into the class of observations I’ve previously dubbed outsights. Because just as future supply expectations are priced in already, when economists make estimates of short-term price effects, it’s probably safe to assume that they, too, have already factored in incredibly basic economic principles. Really, this looks like a bit of misdirection: Nobody sane denies that, generally speaking, future supply increases affect prices now. (Of course, the same goes for future demand reductions as a result of competition from alternative fuels.) The question is whether we’re talking about any decrease worth mentioning. Photons from the stadium lights may “affect” the arc of a thrown baseball, but as a rule, we don’t think it’s worth factoring in.

Hassett and others keep alluding to the 86 billion barrels in recoverable offshore reserves, but the same estimates place only about 18 billion of those (though that’s probably a conservative guess) in areas covered by the current moratorium. Nothing to sneeze at, I suppose, but in terms of annual output, a drop in the bucket in a global market. And we’re meant to think this it’s nevertheless going to shift current output, ten or twenty years out, enough to show up at the pump? I won’t say it’s impossible—futures markets are weird, and sometimes relatively small supply shifts generate disproportionate price swings. But I think it’s telling that I don’t see anyone making the case for why we should expect this to happen. The purely theoretical point is true, of course, but useless. Water is toxic at some dose; this isn’t helpful guidance as to whether I should swig any particular bottle of Dasani.

None of which is to say we shouldn’t open up at least some of those currently verboten areas to drilling. Sometimes, wacky as it may sound, it’s a good thing when policymakers look further ahead than the next cycle. But it’s depressing to see it pitched like some kind of late-night infomercial scheme for FREE MONEY NOW! And to make matter’s worse, they don’t seem to be hitting back as hard against actively awful (as opposed to merely ineffective) Democratic proposals, because it looks like McCain wants to get in on the anti-speculation demagoguery as well.

A quick tip for iPhone wielders, because I’m finding this pretty handy.  If you’re like me, there are various different places where events you might want to attend are stored. You’ve got your own calendar on the phone, which is probably the one that reminds you what you’re actually planning to do day to day.  But there’s also whatever you’ve been invited to via Facebook. Maybe there are specific sorts of events you track on Upcoming or Eventful. Instead of scanning lots of individual venue calendars, I like to use SonicLiving to keep tabs on all the local shows being played by the artists I’m listening to on Last.FM or Pandora.

Naturally, this can all get fairly unwieldy. But here’s a neat way to keep it all sorted. With most of the services mentioned above, there’s native support for some kind of feed that can be used to subscribe to the relevant calendar in Google Calendars. Facebook doesn’t support this natively, but you can autogenerate a feed of events you’ve been invited to using the FBCal app. Once you’ve got your subscription list set up, you can just log in to that service once a week or so and quickly scan through what’s coming up in whatever category you’re interested in. And then with another click or two, you can copy the ones you’re interested in, with all the relevant details, to your personal calendar.

Once that’s set up, there’s a free service called NuevaSync that will automatically push your calendar to your iPhone over the air. And then you’re set.  For a modicum of initial time investment, you’ve got a one stop shop for reviewing the events you might want to attend, and it’s all painlessly beamed to your phone calendar, which saves you the trouble of entering the details by hand. Moreover, if you’ve got a shared calendar with some of your friends, say, the additions they make can get pushed to the phone automatically as well. All of which is incredibly useful if you find yourself saying “Oh, crap, that was today?” as often as I do.

Speaking of The Dark Knight, I’ve already had a couple requests for a “FISA analyisis” of the movie (believe it or not), and since Ezra’s already brought it up, I suppose I’m due to throw in my two cents.  Rest of the post below the fold in in the unlikely event that someone reading this hasn’t seen the movie yet.

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Harrison Hoffman at CNET thinks that the sudden elevation of The Dark Knight to the top film at IMDB illustrates a hole in the “wisdom of crowds” model. I think this is a bit off. For one, if we’re taking “the wisdom of crowds” to mean the bundle of concepts articulated in James Surowiecki’s book, then the caveats Hoffman is pointing out about the importance of structuring aggregation to prevent herding effects are already incorporated into the idea.  And I’d always taken the point of peer-production of information to be that we accept the tradeoff in near-term accuracy for a process that yields better results over the long term: Don’t release right, release now. Presumably TDK will eventually slide to a more defensible spot on the list.

The better critique, I’d think, would point to the IMDB rankings without TDK. I realize, of course, that people can haggle endlessly over this or that omission, and at some point you’ve got to shrug and say de gustibus non disputandum—but there are some points where you really can say a list is just plainly indefensible. I’m not going to hold this up as a perfect alternative, but I think it’s instructive to compare the Village Voice’s 100 Best Movies of the 20th Century list. Citizen Kane is at the top, which is where you tend to find it pretty much every time critics are asked to compile one of these lists. The number two movie on the IMDB list, The Shawshank Redemption, is (justly) nowhere to be found. And there’s not the heavy bias toward recent films (even taking into account that it’s explicitly a 20th century list) you find on the IMDB list.

Of course, critics lists have their own biases. Movies like Birth of a Nation and Steamboat Bill, Jr. are really up there because of their historical significance: In a vacuum, taken out of the context of the evolution of cinema, they’re plainly inferior to works ranked far below them. But critics can at least make their rankings relative to a huge body of films. The notable thing about the IMDB list is that, with a few exceptions, it’s heavily loaded with movies that the average person in their 20s or 30s is bound to have seen at some point. And this, it seems to me, runs somewhat counter to the purpose of a list like this. The idea of a “250 best films” ranking is, in large part, to give people some sense of what they might want to watch next time they’re filling up their Netflix queues. But what it’s ultimately picking up is that a lot more people have watched Pulp Fiction or The Matrix than have seen Rashomon or Berlin Alexanderplatz. And indeed, the former two are probably a better choice if you’re looking to have a few friends over for beer, popcorn, and a movie. But the IMDB ranking isn’t actually giving people much useful information: They’re up as high as they are precisely because everyone already knows about them.

So what can we say more generally? Again, most of this ground has been covered by James Surowiecki, but we can note that, above and beyond the herding problem, if you’re going to rely on “the wisdom of crowds” to rank a series of items, you need to account for different levels of exposure to the ranked items. An algorithm like IMDB’s might work somewhat better for music, since the average person has listened to many, many more songs than they’ve seen movies (which require a few hours of your undivided attention), but in both cases, you’d probably get better results by taking a page from John Stuart Mill, who recommended that pleasures be ranked by “competent judges” who are familiar with both. In other words, after gathering a bit of information about (say) genres or periods of movies a user is familiar with, IMDB could present a series of semi-randomized pairwise comparisons, along the lines of Facebook’s “Compare People” application. If and only if the user has seen both films, she simply chooses the one that she believes should be ranked higher.

Update: Commenter Christopher objects that this is just a misplaced demand for any “best movies” list to favor the “top 100 movies of the cultural elite”. Since I expect he won’t be alone in that reaction, I’ll copy my reply up here.

Certainly, as I point out above, part of the problem is that there are lots of different dimensions along which a movie can be “best”: Again, the best movie to sit and watch over beers with your friends, or to see on a first date, might not be the “best” in terms of elegant narrative and character development or innovative cinematography or whatever.

But first, even bracketing that, the exposure problem remains. Let’s say you just want the best action movie or the best kung-fu movie. A handful of people will have seen lots and lots and lots and have a decent basis for comparison; the majority will only be able to vote for the ones that are already well known. If this yields results that aren’t wildly off, it’s going to be primarily because what gets to be well known over time already incorporates a certain amount of expert evaluation.

Second, I want to push back at least somewhat against the idea that the “cultural elite” preference is just some kind of niche demographic taste, like “what’s popular in Omaha”. People who are really really into movies display a degree of convergence about which are the great films, and while this may in part be attributable to groupthink, in part it’s because they’re picking up on powerful visual or narrative techniques that anyone could appreciate with a well cultivated eye. Being part of the “cultural elite” just is developing the kind of eye that responds to more complex and original (or, if you will, “better”) visual storytelling. If what’s constitutive of your niche demographic is that it’s composed of people who are better attuned to good filmmaking, then yeah, their preferences probably should be more salient. Not because they’re inherently wonderful people, but because they’re further along the curve that you, too, average moviegoer, would traverse if you watched many movies attentively.

Normally I steer clear of vegevangelism, but surely it says something about the ethics of how we feed ourselves today that when someone actually does take it upon himself to defend modern factory farming, the result looks like this. Perhaps “defend” is putting it strongly: Wesley J. Smith’s strategy isn’t to offer any kind of affirmative justifications, but rather to build an organic, non-GMO straw man, woven from all the batshit craziest notions ever spouted by members of PETA.

Smith’s case is based on the earthshattering observation that animals are killed in the process of raising and harvesting crops, too.  One obvious response is that the killing pigs and cows seems morally more problematic than killing insects and rodents.  And indeed, Smith sees this response, but doesn’t actually have anything substantive to say in reply. He just points out that Ingrid Newkirk once said something nuts about how “a rat, is a fish, is a dog, is a boy.”

The other obvious response is that livestock also eat crops, that of course we cannot live without causing any animal deaths, and that the point is to avoid surplus suffering or unnecessary suffering. Here, too, Smith sees the obvious response, he just doesn’t want to deal with it, so he avers that this is not the “real issue” because “The argument made by animal-rights activists is that meat is murder, while veganism is supposedly cruelty-free.” Which is to say, Smith is too terrified of serious ethical questions to engage with anything weightier than a slogan.

We get one very feeble attempt to engage the utilitarian argument, by way of a passing reference to a paper arguing that more animals are killed on land used for crop cultivation than on grazing land. There are a number of rather glaring problems with this paper. For one, the underlying per-hectare death toll used to calculate the net difference in animals killed appears to be, in essence, a guess. Since that underlying number gets multiplied by a few hundred million over the course of the argument, it would be something of an epic understatement to say that the conclusion is apt to be tainted by any initial imprecision. The paper  operates on the utterly implausible Newkirk premise that a mouse and a lamb and a cow are all to be treated he same way. It also focuses on death rather than suffering, which is an important distinction for anyone who’s fundamentally concerned with cruelty: It is not of particular concern to me if field mice are being instantly killed in threshers.

But all these concerns are, believe it or not, secondary.  Smith himself actually brings up the most fatal problem with this argument, and either fails to notice or pretends not to. Earlier in the article, Smith quotes an ethicist as follows:

It takes 3 ¼ acres to feed an omnivore for a year; 20 vegans can be fed from that same space. Therefore, to the extent that there is harm caused to sentient beings by the production of plants, that harm is only multiplied by the omnivore.

I have no idea whether the 20-to-1 figure is right, but I’m pretty sure it’s on the right order of magnitude, and Smith never contests the idea. Which you’d think would be pretty significant, given that the methodology employed by the paper Smith cites depends on holding constant the amount of agricultural land in the United States and projecting the result under different mixes of land use. In other words, the calculation just ignores the fact that—as Smith has told us only moments earlier—an omnivorous diet requires vastly more land. This is like claiming a set of encyclopedias will take up less shelf space than a dictionary, because after all, each volume is thinner. At this point, our options are limited: We can assume Smith is so stupefyingly dim that, though he is apparently writing a book on this topic, he has not noticed this incredibly obvious problem with his argument. Alternatively, we can assume that Smith assumes his readers are stupefyingly dim, and has no qualms about making a transparently invalid argument if it might help him needle the hippies.

For all that, the chief fault of this piece is not dishonesty, or even stupidity; it is cowardice. At every opportunity, Smith flees from difficult questions or serious debate, preferring to instead bat around the nuttiest views of the most extreme animal rights activists. In other words, like any bully, he’s full of bravado when picking on the weakest targets. So just this once, I’ll make an exception to my general rule and actually advocate meat cultivation: Mr. Smith, grow a pair.

D’oh!  I would have posted a recommendation earlier if I’d realized that Joss Whedon’s bizarro musical Dr. Horrible—told through the video blog of Neil Patrick Harris’ dorky aspiring supervillain—wasn’t going to be available for free online viewing indefinitely, but it’s still worth clicking through and dropping $4 for the iTunes download.  If you’re either a fan of Whedon’s previous projects (Buffy, Firefly) or of Venture Brothers style comics retrospoofs, give it a look. It is, as Sally Struthers used to say, less than the price of a cup of coffee—at least if you’re drinking a grande soy mocha.

Also, I’d been deciding between Danger Mouse and Mike Allred’s Madman for next Halloween (yes, I think about it this far ahead) but I do already have a pair of those vintage goggles…

Rob Harper at HuffPo decides to illustrate a manifestly dumb argument:

No matter what any one says, whether they are black or white or even God himself (not that he would use the word), it is never, ever OK to use the ‘N’ word. In a joke, in a song, in private conversations, never, ever should the word be seen as acceptable to use. There are no exceptions.

…with a metaphor that’s almost perfect in its inaccuracy, which means it actually fits:

It’s like body odor. No matter how you try to cover it up with cologne or spray, body odor is body odor, no matter whose body it comes from. The only way to get rid of it is to wash it away. Or, more crudely, crap stinks, no matter how you try to mask the smell. Likewise, the ‘N’ word is demeaning, hurtful, and derogatory no matter who says it.

Of course, like most other scents, the offensiveness of body odor is pretty radically contextual.  It does vary from person to person, it can be effectively covered by colognes and sprays (why else do we use deodorant?), and one’s experience of it is highly subjective: Spend a day running around in the sun and you get inured to your own funkiness pretty quickly. Our own modern intolerance for ordinary human smelliness is a cultural construct of fairly recent vintage. Not to say medieval peasants were fond of BO, but it’s a safe bet that people didn’t find it quite as off-putting as we do through all those millennia before the invention of Right Guard. “History” doesn’t get to “define” our reactions to odor any more than it gets to determine the connotations of a word in all contexts for all time.

In short, I’m with the late George Carlin on this one: Context is king, and offensiveness inheres in intent. If you have to convince people that a word is always offensive—including the very people to whom it’s supposed to be most offensive—that seems like sufficient proof that it isn’t, at least some of the time. More on this from Ta-Nehisi Coates.

I see they’ve added the indefinite article for the online version, but I saw the headline “Cast of 300 Advises Obama on Foreign Policy” in the New York Times this morning and did a very confused double-take.

I’ve been memed by Radley Balko, who asks that I name the five most embarassing tracks on my iPod. Except since my actual day-to-day iPod is my phone, which only holds 8 gig, there isn’t really anything that embarassing on it, because it only holds 30 or so albums. There’s some fun-dumb stuff (Neon Neon, Hercules & Love Affair, Justice) but scrolling through, the only thing I might feel vaguely sheepish about fessing up to here is Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Birds of Fire. As a rule, I don’t feel guilty about my pleasures—and certainly not my current ones—so there’s not going to be much in this category.

Still, in the interests of proper self-humiliation, let’s see what’s buried in the full music library I keep on an external drive, and at least pull out the schlock that I have to cop to a residual affection for.

• I had forgotten I’d somehow acquired four albums worth of Jamiroquai at some point. But I used to have my computer set to wake me up to “Black Capricorn Day” every morning, and just typing it now is causing a sort of involuntary head-bop.
• I see there’s also a fair amount of Dave Matthews Band lingering in there. I haven’t actually listened to any of ‘em in ages, but pretty sure I still know all the words to “Too Much.”
• Ah, here’s one I actually have put on recently. The Wannadies’ “You and Me Song” from the Baz Luhrman Romeo & Juliet soundtrack.
• Nine Inch Nails, “Something I Can Never Have.” Excuse me while I go buy some black nail polish.
• Ani DiFranco & Utah Phillips, The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere. Every bone in my body wants to mock this. Anarchist/wobbly spoken word remixed by the poster girl for earnest folk rock over a bunch of guitar loops. If that description were a Jeopardy question, the answer would (or anyway, should) be “What is my private soundtrack in the ninth circle of hell?” — but I like it despite myself.

I tag Spack, Jill from Feministe, and either of the guys at Dial M for Musicology.

I sympathize with Megan, who’s too often on the wrong end of this from morons, but I’m going to demur from her “Grow up, Internet” post. Sometimes, someone makes an argument that’s so dumb it’s funny. This is not unusual on the Internet, but sometimes the person making the argument his sufficiently high-profile that it merits drawing attention to. And sometimes, the argument is dumb enough that it really is a waste of time to refute it: The vast majority of reasonably intelligent people who read it will recognize that it’s nonsense unassisted, and the remainder aren’t worth convincing. Life is short. Not everything I link is actually worth engaging. And a joke is never funny if you have to explain it.