Living the Dream

Earlier we gave readers a glimpse into the thuggish adventures of 8dayswithoutme, comparing them with those of Eric Wright.

But is she still . . . stylin‘?

Giapet’s Hair: Twitter is Magic

giapet Am I rockin’ a side ponytail? Awww yeah.

bakatanuki You need one on each side to balance out the tsun and the dere

giapet Then they wouldn’t be side ponytails, they’d be pigtails.

moritheil Are you proposing that @giapet unleash twintails?

bakatanuki Exactly. Are you ready for the greatness?

moritheil If @giapet goes as far as twintails, will she go as far as twin drills?

giapet Not sure I could mold my hair into drills =p

moritheil I’m not sure anyone can, actually At least, without model glue.

omonomono they’re called hair extensions.

giapet I’ve seen FEATHER extensions, but drills?… o_o

omonomono they iron the hell out of the extensions first, then attach drills

moritheil So if @giapet does this she’ll be on the cutting edge of cosplay?

omonomono you make a silly point

moritheil It’s a silly cause. I’m not going to say it’ll cure cancer.

giapet How did this get even sillier than where it started?

Peter Carr is Wrong: Civic duty should not be condemned

In his article of December 2010, Peter Carr asserts, “Everyone at Le Web is Wrong: Wikileaks Should be Condemned not Celebrated.”

First Carr writes, “I hate the fact that he’s trading on a myth that We The People have a right to know everything our governments are saying and doing in our name.”  While this objection is perhaps understandable, he then goes on to say people have “no real business – beyond a basic prurient interest” in knowing what is being done and said in their name.

Are we talking about democracies, still? Are these governments of the people, for the people, and by the people? This article just mentioned the biggest reason aside from mere curiosity that people might be interested, and then deliberately overlooked it in favor of invective.

Understand that public interest is not entirely abstract. For example, does the name Henry Kissinger ring any bells? Some people are still pretty furious about the deals he cut, and would have liked to know something about them before the corpses started piling up.  We trust our officials to do things for us, but that trust doesn’t have to be blind trust.

Anya_fennec: He does have a point about how information will be more closed among those who use it though

So what should Assange do? What should a man do, who has information about, say, a government killing civilians?  Should he do nothing and let things go, in the hopes that maybe those who perpetrate it are going to be less tight-lipped about it in the future?

I agree that Wikileaks supporters are no saints.  (I’m not surprised by it, nor indignant, as Carr seems to be.)  I agree that the choices are far from optimal, and I’m hardly interested in defending every leak, but to argue against the very idea of openness on the grounds that people will anger the big bad elites and they will stop being nice is completely counter to the point of democracy.

If Carr doesn’t care about things like whether or not his government is providing training and material support to dictators who butcher peasant families (as allegedly happened with Kissinger), then it’s his right to ignore this stuff. But it’s not his right to sign away the interests of every other voter.  We shouldn’t assume that everyone who might care is acting out of “prurient interest” when we’ve already brought up more responsible motivations.

The Feminism of Legends

I consider myself a feminist.  In the proper company, I would not hesitate to characterize myself as a “radical feminist.”

But I must admit that there are times when the feminist paradigm is questionably applied.   Go Make Me a Sandwich is a blog that strives to critique gaming products from the feminist perspective, which is surely a sorely needed bit of feedback.  Some of its more recent assertions, however, have left me scratching my head.

Forgot About Fennec

anya_fennec: orange forgot about me ~_~ my life has no meaning

Ya’ll know me still the same ol’ trap
But I been low key
Hated on by most otaku
With no cheese, no deals and no G’s, no wheels and all crap
No aliens, no time travelers and no elves
Mad at me cause
I can finally afford to provide my nendroids with shelves
Got a dakimakura and it’s all full of holes
To add to the wall full of scrolls
Hangin up in the office in back of my house like gold
But ya’ll think I’m gonna let my blog freeze
Ho Please!
You better bow down on both knees!
Who you think leeches when you up seeds?
Who you think came after the OGs?
Icystorm, Lolikit, Metanorn and R-A-N-D-O-M C?
(And a group that said muthafuck the blog scene)
Gave you a tape full of chiptunes
To bump when you scroll through songs on Zune?
And when your RSS subs drop too soon
Who’s the fennec that they told you to go see?
Ya’ll better listen up closely
All you otaku that said that I turned gay
All obsessed with the ho yay
Ya’ll are the reason Fennec ain’t been getting no sleep!
So fuck ya’ll all of ya’ll
If ya’ll don’t like me blow me
Ya’ll are gonna keep fuckin around with me
And turn me back to the old me

Nowadays everybody wanna talk like they got a template of phrenic
But nothin comes out when they move their lips
Just a bunch of hypocrites
And muthafuckas act like they forgot about Fennec

Nowadays everybody wanna talk like they got a template of phrenic
But nothin comes out when they move their lips
Just a bunch of gibberish
And muthafuckas act like they forgot about Fennec

Art by glaceon

-With apologies to Dr. Dre and Eminem

Just a shirt?

J-list’s “Looking for a Japanese Girlfriend” shirt has spawned quite a bit of controversy, including at least one angry blog post and manga critic Deb Aoki’s nomination for inclusion on a list of things to never wear.  Asked if in her opinion men could never wear it ironically and explain it as such, Aoki responded:

@moritheil I’m just saying you can tell yourself you’re wearing it “ironically” all you want. It’ll still look douche-y.

I think this response is worth examining.  The meaning of art generally hinges on the interpretation of the viewer.  However, if you’re trying to assess why someone wore a specific clothing article, it’s their intent that really matters.  On the one hand, a literal wearing of the shirt means that the man is indeed a fetishist for Japanese women. It’s not hard to see why some women might consider that problematic.  (Not all women, of course – women being perfectly capable of being only interested in sex.)

On the Gervais Study

I don’t think the Gervais study is saying precisely what Jezebel seems to conclude it is.

In a new study, the only group participants found as untrustworthy as nonbelievers were rapists.

One of the main issues in studies of behavior and stereotype is the desire to avoid telegraphing to the subject what he or she is “supposed” to do. But in explicitly selecting “religious” people from the USA via an internet survey company, Gervais – a foreigner – may have been unconsciously prompting them to act more in accordance with common stereotypes of religious Americans.

Furthermore, the way in which the questions were asked is definitely not as it was explained on Jezebel.  Jezebel would have the reader believe that the test subjects, for no particular reason, homed in on atheism to explain immoral or selfish behavior.  But that isn’t exactly what happened; read the study setup and you may find that the participants were, well, set up:

Across subjects, we manipulated the target groups to which the man might belong by asking participants whether they thought it more probable that the man was a teacher or a teacher and (a) a Christian, (b) a Muslim, (c) a rapist, and (d) an atheist. In this way, we evaluated the degree to which people find an untrustworthy description to be representative of atheists, relative to a majority religious ingroup (Christians), a religious outgroup (Muslims), and an unambiguously distrusted group (rapists).

Let us presume that the average person, knowing both positive and negative examples of Christians, is willing to consider being religious a positive, negative, or neutral matter.  Being asked how “strongly religious” they are by the very terms of the study, Christians, who consider being Christian at least neutral, are primed to consider being atheist not a neutral matter, but a negative matter: it clashes with their avowed identity, and they feel an obligation to act out that identity.  (Studies have shown that reminding people of cultural, ethnic, or other stereotypes produces a similar reversion to type, even if that stereotype is seen as negative.)

Further, we already have one positive piece of information – the character is a teacher, generally a fairly selfless role in society.  There must be some negative element to counterbalance this given positive, or the result is essentially, “this man is a jerk for no explainable reason.”  It’s sort of a game of “which of these is not like the other?”  Being a rapist is categorically not like any of the others.  Being an atheist is not like being a religious believer, and so also not like the others (or at least, more dissimilar than being a Christian and being a Muslim.)  The pressure on the respondent is to pick something to account for the behavior.  It’s at least equally valid to look at this study and say that the respondents are surprisingly free of bias against Muslims as it is to say that they are astonishingly biased against atheists.

As an aside, I question whether rapists truly constitute a proper “unambiguously distrusted group:” while we all consciously say we don’t accept rape and abhor it, as a population this is simply not true.  Feminist studies assert that men often have mental blind spots that cause them to effectively downplay the likelihood or severity of it.  According to the more cynical of these sociological studies, this is what enables men to bond with other men and work together on matters that do not touch their personal histories.  In other words, it’s more that men are wired to mute their outrage over rape than that America morally equates atheism with violent crime.  This is a hidden cognitive bias that, if present but not accounted for, could easily skew interpretation of the results.

When deciding whether it is more probable that Linda is a bank teller, or that Linda is a bank teller and a feminist, most participants incorrectly choose the latter option—that is, they commit the conjunction fallacy— because they heuristically judge that the description sounds representative of a feminist, even though logic dictates this option is necessarily less probable. People only commit the conjunction fallacy when the target’s description (single, outspoken, and liberal) is deemed representative of the target’s potential group membership (feminist).

Well, certainly.  According to models of how our minds make sense of the world, we wish to tell tales that account for the given facts.  If making Linda a feminist makes the whole story more plausible and easier to remember, then it is unsurprising that we are willing to believe it.  If “atheist” implies “not dedicated to a fixed moral code” (falsely, in many cases, but widely believed) then it may be invoked to make a story of opportunistic actions easier to rationalize and believe.  Also, the conjunction fallacy is easy to commit where there is no penalty for guessing wrong; I would be interested to see an economic study where the participants are asked if they are willing to bet $20 on the bank teller being a feminist with no supporting evidence, or similarly on the selfish man being an atheist with no supporting evidence.

A far better study design would be to take reactions from thousands of people, and only mine the data later for the relevant reactions.  This avoids the issue of prompting people to behave like stereotypical fundamentalist Christians.  It would also be best to even out the response options so that rapist and atheist are not two options that might be perceived as too strongly dissimilar to the other options, or rather, to eliminate options which are too similar.  If testing distrust, why use “rapist” and not “used car salesman” or “telemarketer”?  Finer gradations would more precisely pinpoint the level of bias the public has against atheists without necessarily throwing everything to the apparent level of violent crime.

Neojaponisme’s Economic Review

Over at Neojaponisme W. D. Marx has begun a systematic, economic overview of Japan of the sort that I have been urging people to do for years. While he surely didn’t hear the idea from me, he does a credible job of examining the links between the flow or absence of money and the resultant cultural void.

I really wish we could see some data on the effects of international reactions to Japanese culture.  For example, China and Korea, long customers to Japanese anime and manga, have repeatedly exhorted their own artists to match or exceed Japanese artists.  How much money went into that?  Was it successful in drawing off some of the demand?  Can we say this sort of thing actually affected the Japanese industry significantly?  In short, was it money well spent?

When we discuss the fact that sales in mens’ suits fell since 1997, does that mean there are fewer jobs, or just fewer white-collar jobs?  If the latter, what parallels can we draw with the US, where after 9/11 a lot of white collar jobs were replaced with blue collar jobs?  How well does that correlate with spending money?

Consumers were once engaged with pop culture most actively through the act of consumption — buying a CD, book, or video game — but not only have they ceased buying goods, they are increasingly not even participating passively when media is virtually free, like in the case of TV.

I wonder: is this a long-term strategic flaw?  Is it unique to the culture, or is it something that happens every time there is an economic depression and consumers have been taught to equate consumption with participation?

Anyone with a computer may publicly speculate on anime and society, but for doing research and raising all these important questions, I salute Neojaponisme.

Precious Bodily Fluids

In something straight out of a satire, a man is suing because his stripper ex-girlfriend took his semen and used it to impregnate herself without his awareness, so that she would have kids and he would pay alimony.

General Jack D. Ripper: I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women uh… women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I, uh… I do not avoid women, Mandrake.
Captain Lionel Mandrake: No.
General Jack D. Ripper: But I… I do deny them my essence.

I’m not sure if Dr. Strangelove is a better fit for this demented reasoning, or Astarotte no Omocha, for the “we have ulterior motives for obtaining your genetic material” angle, but this surely is not something we expect to see in normal reality.

At the NY Post, comment logs are full of the usual incendiary postings. Some feel sympathy for the man; some for the woman. I feel bad for the kids.

Buildup

When is a buildup too long?