FtttG
User ID: 1175
For those of you who've never seen Mad Men, AMC's critically acclaimed period drama set in the advertising industry in the sixties, there's a well-known scene in the first season. After protagonist Don Draper invites his boss Roger Sterling over for dinner and Sterling makes a drunken pass at Draper's wife Betty (which she politely rebuffs), Draper hatches a scheme to exact his revenge on Sterling. Immediately before an important client meeting, Draper treats Sterling to a boozy lunch of oysters and vodka, then pays off the lift operator in the company's office building to tell Sterling that the lift is out of order, forcing Sterling and Draper to walk up dozens of flights of stairs to their office. Being older and less fit than Draper and a chain-smoking alcoholic, Sterling is not prepared for this level of physical exertion, and by the time they reach the office he's so exhausted that he promptly projectile vomits on the floor, directly in front of the clients he's eager to impress.
HBO recently produced a 4K remaster of the entire series for their streaming platform HBO Max. Supposedly, something went wrong during the production of this remaster, resulting in numerous shots in which crew and equipment are visible when they should not be. And we're not talking about the reflection of a boom mic just visible in someone's glasses: in the scene described above, the crew members operating the vomit hose can be clearly seen kneeling behind the cast.
My first thought was "ha ha, how clumsy and incompetent can you get". My second thought, less than a minute later, was "I bet they did that on purpose to gin up free publicity". As Scott would say, it's bad on purpose to make you click.
I'm not the only one to have this thought, and I find it almost impossible to imagine how such a thing could be the result of an honest mistake. Consider how many pairs of eyes must have approved this thing before it was made available for streaming on HBO Max. Errors of this kind most commonly happen as a result of remastering a piece of visual media for an aspect ratio different from the one it was originally intended for: many 90s TV shows were filmed in widescreen with the intention to crop the image to a 4:3 aspect in post-production, and many directors and DPs paid very little attention to the content of the shots on the extreme left and right of the image, knowing that it would be cropped out before broadcast anyway. As a consequence, HD widescreen remasters of, for example, Friends usually make it painfully obvious when one of the actors has been replaced with a stand-in in a reverse shot. (In fairness to these directors and DPs, they had no way of knowing that 16:9 would eventually become the industry standard in televisions and other monitors, still less that anyone would have any interest in watching Friends two or three decades out from its original broadcast. How many 90s sitcoms are popular enough to warrant the HD remastering treatment? Even the idea of buying entire seasons of TV shows on VHS or DVD was unheard of at the time of Friends's original broadcast.) But that excuse obviously isn't applicable here: Mad Men was originally broadcast in a 16:9 aspect, and so is the 4K remaster. I don't know what this "remastering" consisted of: the cheap option is just to take the original video file and run it through an AI upscaling program, while the more expensive option is to redevelop the original negatives (the first three seasons of Mad Men were shot on film, before transitioning to digital for the rest of the show's run) with a higher resolution, drop the resulting video files into your NLE, then replicate the shot composition and edits of the original broadcast. This is a labour-intensive task, but not one that strikes me as especially prone to error: display the original broadcast on one monitor and the remaster on the other monitor. Copy the original's homework. It's not rocket science.
So, I surmise that HBO did this deliberately: they'll apologise for the "error" and promise that their editors are working around the clock to prepare amended video files with the errors fixed. Two weeks from now, these amended video files will be pushed to HBO Max. But of course, these "amended" video files will be the original video files approved and signed off on a year ago: most likely, they made the proper remaster first, then a bullshit version thereof with all of these incredibly blatant errors in.
And it occurs to me that just about every high-profile mishap in the entertainment industry over the last decade has been met with comparable accusations of having been deliberately staged for promotional reasons. When Steve Harvey announced the wrong winner of Miss Universe 2015, that was staged, or so the Internet thought. When Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced the wrong winner of the Oscar for Best Picture in 2017, that was staged. When Will Smith took the stage during the 2022 Oscars to slap Chris Rock across the face*, numerous people (including those in attendance) assumed that it was a pre-planned skit; nearly four years later, after Smith tendering his resignation from the Academy, receiving a formal ban from attending any Academy events and his film Emancipation being delayed owing to the negative publicity, I still routinely encounter people who are convinced the whole event was staged.
And I'm concerned about what this trend implies for political sense-making.
As established, I don't think the entertainment industry is above staging mistakes and blunders for the sake of a little cheap publicity. But this fact should not cause us to ignore a more fundamental truth: mistakes do happen. No one is immune from carelessness or errors. Even Homer sometimes nods. While remaining agnostic on whether the 2017 Oscars thing was staged or not, considering the amount of moving parts involved in a live event like this, someone reading out the wrong winner at the Oscars was bound to happen sooner or later, especially given the Academy's predilection for having the winners announced by established Hollywood lifers as a "passing-of-the-torch" gesture, people who by definition have poorer eyesight and are more prone to senior moments than younger people (when they made the erroneous announcement, Dunaway was in her late seventies, and Beatty in his eighties). Indeed, we should have a much higher prior on these mistakes being legitimate errors when they happen in live settings like award ceremonies.
But there's a certain kind of person** who's extremely keen to claim that advertising doesn't work on him and he only buys products based on merit, and who can't stand the idea of falling for a publicity stunt which was disguised as something else — it makes him feel like a mark, no better than someone who eagerly replies to a 419 email. As such, whenever he encounters an event which seems to fit the broad contours of a disguised publicity stunt, he reflexively concludes that it must be, engaging in a lot of armchair theorising about how if it had been real then X would have happened, but because Y happened, it must have been staged. And a reflexive assumption that any apparent gaffe or blunder committed by any individual who works in the entertainment industry must have been deliberately, laboriously and painstakingly premeditated by the Powers that Be to garner clicks: I mean, it's not too much of a reach to see how this could push people into a more conspiratorial mode of thinking, is it? As Scott observed, it's "doing the very conspiracy-theory-ish thing of replacing a simple and direct picture of the world with a more complicated one without having enough evidence to justify such a move." A year and a half ago, Thomas Crooks shot Trump in the ear, and the attempt on his life was immediately met with accusations of Trump staging it as a publicity stunt. Compare the armchair theorising about the Will Smith slap ("A slow walk up, an open hand slap, no stagger, slow walk back with no scuffle and no security personnel stepping in? Feels absolutely staged for publicity") with the idle speculation about blood splatter packs concealed on Trump's person and how bullet wounds don't look like that (arguments usually made by people who proudly admit never to having handled or fired a gun in their lives) — I mean, they're not the same, but they certainly rhyme, don't they? Distrust of mainstream media narratives has traditionally been a right-coded phenomenon, but in the case of the attempt on Trump's life and the successful assassination of Charlie Kirk, it's been progressives who've been the most vocal in their disbelief of the official narrative (granted, many rightists, most prominently Candace Owens, also have alternative hypotheses about who's ultimately responsible for Charlie Kirk's death).
To head off one obvious objection: I don't think this trend is evidence of media consumers becoming more savvy and clued-in, less gullible, less prone to falling for state propaganda dressed up as objective, disinterested journalism. Rather, it's a toxic stew of motivated reasoning, Gell-Mann amnesia and isolated demands for rigour: we've all become postmodernists when it suits us, believing the mainstream narrative when it fits our worldview and jumping to paranoid, conspiratorial explanations when it doesn't. The BBC or the Washington Post are, at once, trustworthy outlets when we agree with them and establishment Pravdas when they don't. I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that any sufficiently politically active American of either stripe believes that American elections are simultaneously the most and least secure elections in the world, literally the dictionary definition of doublethink. As someone who believes that Biden was elected legitimately in 2020 and that Trump was elected legitimately in 2024, I find this intensely concerning. People will scoff at me and tell me that our brains didn't evolve to seek the truth but rather to help us survive and propagate and so it's silly to get so worked up about biases and motivated reasoning when these things are the water we fish swim in. But I don't care: I do not believe that it is psychologically healthy to hold two beliefs at the same time which on their face seem mutually exclusive and contradictory. It is not conducive to good mental health to simultaneously believe "The [2020/2024] (strike out as necessary) American presidential election was secure and legitimate, but the [2020/2024] (strike out as necessary) election was rigged and manipulated".
I don't like that HBO almost certainly included these "errors" in the Mad Men remaster deliberately. For people who fall for it, they'll think HBO are incompetent and careless, and I think it's profoundly unbecoming for someone to present themselves as stupider than they really are just to get attention (and hence revenue) in the short-term. I particularly don't like that HBO will probably blame their perfectly qualified editors for a decision made by the executives and/or marketing department. But for people who don't fall for it (like yours truly), it's providing additional evidence for the "major media companies are lying to you and the sheeple are falling for it hook, line and sinker" mindset. It's contributing, however indirectly, to the erosion of social trust, the assumption that we cannot accept what huge media conglomerates (and large corporations, by extension) say at face value. Per "Bounded Distrust", we expect companies to make technically-true-but-misleading claims about the qualities of their products. Historically, we did not expect companies to intentionally release substandard products as publicity stunts which they pass off as the result of human error, only to release the quality product after the fact.
Wait — intentionally putting out a substandard product as a publicity stunt, just so you can pull it and replace it with the product you intended to sell all along. Is the Mad Men remaster just New Coke all over again?
*Not strictly a "mistake", as Smith intentionally struck Rock, but certainly an instance of a live entertainment event not going as the showrunners purportedly intended.
**People like us, really.
FtttG
5hr ago
A long time ago I heard someone observe that progressive messaging makes a lot more sense if, whenever you read "misinformation", you mentally substitute "blasphemy".
FtttG
14hr ago
One-third of the way through Cryptonomicon. The likelihood of my finishing this book before the end of the year is narrowing.
FtttG
19hr ago
I'm in the same boat as you, I've received nine rejections from literary agents in the last three weeks. I've no idea where I'm falling down, if it's the quality of the writing or if the query letter isn't grabbing their attention.
If you'd like some feedback on your query letter, feel free to DM me.
Even if AI can act, it can not match the real thing in scandals and messy divorces.
It's interesting because this is a double-edged sword. Messy scandals and divorces indisputably garner publicity for actors and by extension the movies they star in. On the other hand, actors being human means they sometimes have to be sent to rehab to dry out (holding up production on their latest movie and costing the studio millions), or get arrested for sexual harassment or domestic abuse (meaning the studio has to just sit on their latest movie until the scandal blows over), or simply express a controversial opinion in an interview that goes viral
There's no doubt that there are financial benefits associated with actors being flawed, imperfect human beings, but there are also costs. I have no doubt that there are individual films which have posted a loss specifically because one of the lead actors did something suspect. I think it would be legitimately difficult to definitively say whether the fact of actors having private lives outside of their work is a net help or a net hindrance to movie studios.
Renaming a park because it's named after a Jew and, decades later, some unrelated Jews did something you don't approve of strikes me as the definition of petty.
FtttG
3d ago
If the decline is in part caused by schools being too willing to indulge blatantly unwarranted requests for "accommodations" for students who clearly do not suffer from any disabilities which would have a meaningful impact on their academic performance, at whose feet should we lay the blame for this state of affairs? The administrators? Legislators? Assorted departments of education?
I'm reading Cryptonomicon and came across this line:
Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be — or to be indistinguishable from — self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.
Uhh — something you guys want to tell me?
FtttG
3d ago
I never claimed that the average Arab Israeli is an enthusiastic supporter of the Zionist project, or that the majority of that group are, merely that it's misleading to claim that all of them are opposed.
A survey from a year ago found that 58% of Arab Israelis believe the most recent conflict has "fostered a sense of shared destiny between Jewish Israelis and Arab Israelis". An earlier survey found that 55% consider themselves "proud citizens of Israel".
That's not exactly unreasonable, the Israeli Arabs aren't enthusiastic participants in the Zionist project.
Some and some. There's at least one sitting Knesset member who's part of Bibi's Likud party, for example. Likewise, many Israeli Arabs have served in the IDF.
FtttG
3d ago
“Insecure narcissists demand omnipotence from others and detest omniscience” is vacuous. It’s a fully general argument. Any time you want me to do something, you’re demanding omnipotence, and any time I dare to disagree with you, I’m just mad about your omniscience.
I understand if you find TLP's writing style and personal vocabulary frustrating in a Continental philosophy sort of way (hell, I agree with you: Sadly, Porn was probably the single most impenetrable book I've ever read, bar none). But this is really just a flowery way of saying "insecure narcissists demand that the world bend over backwards to validate their preferred image of themselves, and become extremely hostile and defensive when the world refuses to do so, seeing the narcissist as he is rather than as he would like to be seen." Maybe you disagree with @gog's application of the concept in this context, but the concept in itself seems sound – pretty close to a dictionary definition of what an insecure narcissist is, really.
Echoing @gog below, I agree that gaming the system isn't necessarily indicative of TLP-style narcissism, if you're fully aware that that's what you're doing and have no illusions about it.
Think back to the Varsity Blues scandal, in which various wealthy parents (including your woman from Desperate Housewives) were found to have bribed elite universities to get their children places.
Now, if these parents were thinking "I know Little Jimmy isn't too bright, but I really want him to go to Harvard, and if that means I have to pay some apparatchik under the table, so be it", that's not narcissism.
But if, on the other hand, they were thinking "Little Jimmy is a genius, but he has a special kind of intelligence that can't be captured by a blunt instrument like the SAT. I know that once he gets to Harvard he'll flourish, and if I need to pay someone off to get him in, so be it" - well, yeah. You see where I'm going with this.
In real life, I imagine there are some parents who have no illusions about how smart or capable their children are, and are just using every exploit they can think of to get their kids into top universities they never could on their own merit, including spurious requests for accommodations for disabilities their children don't have. Nothing narcissistic about that – dishonest, yes; selfish, yes; burning the commons, yes; making it harder for the legitimately disabled to be taken seriously, yes – but not narcissistic.
But I agree with @gog that there are a nonzero amount of parents who really think their children are exceptionally intelligent in a way which, for some reason, never manifests in an SAT-legible form, and for which special accommodations are required so that it can express itself. That is narcissism.
FtttG
3d ago
Exactly, it's blank-slate thinking all the way down.
One might have thought that even progressives would be willing to concede that a non-verbal child who is physically unable to feed himself or use the toilet is not as intelligent as Albert Einstein – but apparently not, according to Lutz.
I recall reading an article a few years ago (I'll see if I can dig it out*) that claimed that the absolute number of black Americans with engineering degrees actually declined in the years after affirmative action in university admissions was introduced.
The reasoning was elegantly simple. Like it or not, everyone in a classroom setting is acutely aware of where they sit in the hierarchy of their peers when it comes to how effectively they are understanding the material: people at the top of the class know they are, people who are struggling know it, people who are getting by know it. If you're a mediocre student in a mediocre school, you'll be doing okay: if you move that mediocre student into an elite school, he will be struggling, almost by definition. Ask yourself who's more likely to drop out of an elite school: someone getting straight As with ease, or someone barely scraping by with Ds?
This article argued that affirmative action in university admissions essentially migrated a huge number of mediocre students out of mid-tier colleges (in which their skill level would have matched the content they were expected to master, at the pace they were expected to master it) and into elite Ivy League colleges (in which they were bound to be near the bottom of the classroom distribution: if they wouldn't be, they wouldn't have needed affirmative action to get in). Faced with the demoralising prospect of always being near the bottom of the class, far more of these students dropped out before completing their degree, when compared to an earlier cohort of black students who attended mid-tier colleges. I don't know about you, but I think going to a mid-tier college and getting a degree is more impressive than going to Yale and dropping out after a year because you can't hack it.
It wouldn't surprise me if we end up observing a similar trend here. No genuinely smart student actually needs "accommodations" to get into an elite college, so the only ones who try to game the disability system to do so will be mediocre students. Like the black students in the paragraph above, they will find themselves near the bottom of the classroom hierarchy, constantly struggling to grasp material their classmates master with ease. Consequently, they will be far more likely to drop out without receiving a degree.
You're correct that getting the skills and the credentials is only one reason people go to college, end networking opportunities and so on are also a big part of it. But if you're doing a four-year degree and you drop out one year in, it stands to reason you'll have max one-quarter the networking opportunities that someone who completes their degree will have, so it may end up being a waste of your time anyway.
*I'm not sure if this is the article I was thinking of, but it makes the same general argument.
FtttG
3d ago
Performance-enhancing drugs can also fuck up your judgement when abused. See DOGE, FTX among many others.
FtttG
3d ago
How is failure to “fight the decline” cowardly?
That almost sounds like a tautological statement. If something is getting worse over time, you're in a position where you could do something to arrest that decline, and you choose not to – well, maybe not "cowardly" by definition, but do we have any positive adjectives for the person who makes that choice? Selfish? Lazy? Shiftless? More-than-me-job's-worth? Above my pay grade? Head in the sand?
FtttG
3d ago
Not that I'm aware of. I've been meaning to watch it for a long time. Have you seen it? Is it any good?
It honestly feels like the ceasefire in Gaza has only incensed widespread Irish antisemitism* even further. Two stories from this week:
For the Americans, the Eurovision Song Contest is a musical competition held every year, hosted by the European Broadcasting Union, in which musical acts representing various nations get up on stage and perform gloriously garish and tacky pop songs. Despite the name and the majority of the competitors being European, countries from outside of Europe are eligible to compete, and Australia and Azerbaijan have taken part at various points over the years. Israel's participation has always been controversial, but it kicked into overdrive since the start of the war in Gaza two years ago. Israel placed second in this year's popular vote, an announcement which was immediately met by accusations of vote-rigging (not sure how that's supposed to work but whatever). Ireland has now joined Spain and the Netherlands in boycotting next year's contest in protest over Israel being allowed to participate.
As I mentioned many months ago, there's a small park in Dublin named after Chaim Herzog, who was born in Belfast, grew up in Dublin and went on to serve as Israel's sixth president. Some time ago there was a social media campaign to rename the park after Hind Rajab. After much discussion, this motion has been officially vetoed by Dublin City Council.
I no longer find it credible that these campaigns and demands are motivated solely by sympathy with the people of Palestine and horror at the war in Gaza. The level of ambient hostility towards anything with the most tangential connection to Israel just seems wholly disproportionate to me. As Eamonn Mac Donnchadha notes in the second article linked above, no other nationality is subjected to this treatment: Pakistanis and Chinese people in Ireland are not habitually called upon to denounce the behaviour of the governments of their home countries. The ongoing Uyghur genocide did not prevent Dublin City Council from observing Chinese New Year.
It's starting to make me really uncomfortable. We should have left these attitudes in the 1940s, and yet eighty years later we're still falling back on the same familiar tropes of cunning, conniving Juden Zionists manipulating public opinion from behind the curtain. My own mother (generally a very sensible woman) recently saw a movie about the Israeli hostage situation in 1972 and immediately jumped to the conclusion that those monstrous Jews Zionists had financed the movie's production in order to curry favour for their genocide in Gaza. A cursory Google quickly showed that the movie went into production months prior to the October 7th attacks – but then, I suppose those were staged by Shin Bet and Mossad as a false flag, weren't they? It never bottoms out.
More than anything I'm just struck by how petty all of this is. "Israel is singing in the contest, so we're not going to sing in the contest" is just embarrassing, fucking Mean Girls "you can't sit with us" energy.
*I'd have been hesitant to label this behaviour as such two years ago, but honestly, at this point it's become so deranged that no other word seems appropriate.
FtttG
3d ago
Because I wanted to avoid people saying I was begging the question by simply saying "better" and taking it for granted that kinder laws are better.
That's exactly how your original comment came off to me.
Also you seem to have an unorthodox definition of "kind".
Interesting. Imagine four people who call themselves Catholic:
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Alice goes to Mass every day, observes the Sabbath, and follows every papal edict to the letter.
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Bob professes to believe every papal edict and tenet of his faith – but in practice, he never goes to Mass, doesn't observe the Sabbath, eats meat on Fridays, doesn't give up anything for Lent etc.
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Carol goes to Mass every day, observes the Sabbath, gives something up for Lent etc. – but her actual worldview is functionally indistinguishable from any of her woke friends, which entails major doctrinal disagreements with the Church on abortion, homosexuality, pre-marital sex, divorce etc. She also doesn't believe in transubstantiation.
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Like Bob, David is non-observant, and like Carol he has major doctrinal disagreements with the Church, including disbelieving transubstantiation (I think this accurately describes an absolute majority of nominal Irish Catholics).
I'm sure most people would say that Alice is the "most" Catholic, or most "authentically" Catholic, or a "central example" of what we call Catholic. Equally, most people would say that David is only nominally Catholic, neither walking the walk nor talking the talk.
I'm torn on whether Bob is "more" Catholic than Carol, or vice versa. On the one hand, Carol "walks the walk" in making at least some of the sacrifices her faith demands of her, including getting up early on Sundays. On the other hand, if Catholicism is a belief system first and foremost, then holding the correct beliefs ought to be seen as far more important as following the rituals – observing the rituals when you don't believe in any of the beliefs underpinning them strikes me as sort of insincere and performative.
[Edit: by pure coincidence, the morning after writing this post I was re-reading an old post of Scott's which includes this gem of a quote from CS Lewis: "Going to church does not make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you a car."]
Authentic membership in a religion is a special case, as it's usually determined based on privately-held beliefs and active, observable behaviour. For a lot of the other categories I discussed above, authenticity is often based on only one or the other. While support for animal rights and opposition to factory farming are beliefs commonly held by vegetarians, they're not generally considered rule-in criteria: as far as I'm concerned, anyone who doesn't eat meat is a vegetarian, regardless of their worldview. Saying "I'm a vegetarian who doesn't eat meat, but I don't really have a problem with factory farming" doesn't sound incoherent to me in the way that "I'm Catholic and I go to Mass, but I don't believe in transubstantiation" does.
FtttG
3d ago
Accommodations that allow for disabled lawyers to work those jobs will lead to kinder, better laws where disability accommodations are concerned.
Your use of the word "kinder" is rather a transparent applause light. I don't doubt that disabled lawmakers would be more likely to pass laws or make legal judgements which will favour the interests of disabled people (at least in the short-term), but I'm not at all persuaded that this would be beneficial for society at large.
I mean, sure, if a country which passed a law which made it illegal for an employer to fire anyone with a disability, I guess this would be "kinder" to any currently gainfully employed disabled people. But I would have a hard time describing such a law as "better" legislation than what a reasonable person would come up with.
Huh, might pick this up as a stocking-stuffer.
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