Interesting Links for 13-04-2018

[andrewducker]

Poison used on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury attack was novichok nerve agent, confirms chemical weapons watchdog

(tags: russia weaponry chemistry )

Was Yoda the worst Jedi?

(tags: StarWars )

People want homes, jobs, a future: no wonder they distrust capitalism now

(tags: capitalism history society )

Giant blue penis painted on Stockholm apartment building

(tags: penis art sweden )

Yoda is a Muppet

(tags: muppets StarWars epicfail )

Children read more because they can

(tags: Children reading )

Curing disease not a “sustainable business model,” Goldman Sachs analysts say

Which mostly tells me that we need different funding models for some forms of disease.
(tags: disease business )

The gender pay gap and the media's pursuit of balance

(tags: bbc gender pay inequality )

Sydney to be split into three cities

(tags: australia cities )

World's first electrified road for charging vehicles opens in Sweden

(tags: sweden electricity transport cars roads )

'There will be no negotiation strands': Brussels crushes Davis hopes for detailed trade talks before Brexit (Also, still deadlocked on Ireland)

(tags: uk europe )

Comments

[drplokta]

The problem is that as well as jobs and homes, people want cheap stuff, and no one has any workable proposals for any way to provide that other than capitalism.

[andrewducker]

Yup.

Maybe some kind of more moderated capitalism like they have in Denmark. Or Sweden.

Or a basic income.

[simont]

These unflattering interpretations of Yoda's competence remind me somewhat of a commentary I saw years ago on the Mission: Impossible film series¹ which said that basically the IMF itself is the biggest danger to national security, because the antagonists in the films keep being rogue IMF agents or former IMF agents or otherwise people with IMF training, to the extent that if the whole organisation hadn't existed in the first place then it would surely have been a net win.

The problem with both analyses is that they lay the blame where it doesn't belong, because both Yoda and film!IMF are subject to a circumstance which is genuinely beyond their control and does not reflect on their choices or competence in any way at all, namely, they are at the mercy of scriptwriters who are paid to ensure things keep going wrong for them on a large and epic enough scale to justify further movies. Under those circumstances, Yoda could be the best and wisest of sentient beings, with Force precognition up the wazoo and an unerring ability to balance compassion against justice, and the IMF could have an esprit de corps, loyalty, and employee retention rate of which even the tightest-knit real-world military intelligence units could only dream, and it still wouldn't help either one of them – the scriptwriters would find some other way to justify making another film so that they could earn their Big Bag Of Cash.

The only way Yoda could really have averted all those disasters would have been to lightsaber his way through the fourth wall, hitch a ride on a seedy smuggler freighter passing by Earth on the way to (say) Kessel, land his escape capsule somewhere near the film studio, bamboozle his way into the producer's office, and do Jedi mind tricks to persuade them to go and inflict a further film on some other franchise instead.

---

¹ The original M:I TV series never succumbed to the Hollywood tendency to have the antagonist come from the same background/organisation/training/family as the protagonist to ensure they're a worthy adversary or that the hero is conflicted about confronting them or (preferably) both. The critique I'm remembering was specifically about the film spinoffs, which wholeheartedly embraced that trope.

[momentsmusicaux]

Yup, it's the principle of 'Well if they hadn't done that, there'd have been no story'.

[simont]

I think it is also actually an argument against continuing to milk long-running fiction franchises, because the more you do it, the more their internal plot consistency becomes prone to this kind of increasingly obvious distortion of the laws of probability making it harder and harder to suspend disbelief.

In a standalone film (or book, whatever), even a statistically savvy viewer can tolerate a couple of unlikely coincidences, on – as you say – the anthropic-principle basis that probably the rest of the happenings in the imagined universe were closer to the mean and it's not a surprise that we're focusing on the one that makes the best film.

But the more films you set in the same universe, especially if they're near to each other in time and space and reuse the same characters, the more and more obvious it becomes that an external force is warping the course of history to pile unlikely happenings on top of each other beyond plausibility. And if you keep doing it even beyond that point, then even less statistically savvy viewers start to find it implausible.

Denmark? Sweden?

[lsanderson]

Well! If we ain't invented it here, we ain't gonna use it! At least in government! Stores, well that's another kettle of fish.

[franklanguage]

Here in NYC, we got a giant penis mural from the same artist—Carolina Falkholt—not far from where I live, and it created the same kind of dialog.

There's a whole public discussion already going on about the legality/illegality of graffiti, even to the extent that building owners can be fined for not keeping them clean and graffiti-free. Sad—I came to NYC for the graffiti, particularly on the subways.

[andrewducker]

I disagree. Doylist approaches to understanding why X acted in way Y are interesting, but if I'm discussing the characters and events of a fictional work then generally speaking I'm only interested in the explanations internal to the work. An explanation of "Because the story had to wrap up in 45 minutes, including adverts" is not one that interests me particularly, and any work which depends on that style of explanation is, frankly, not worth experiencing as fiction.

[simont]

I agree – and that's really the point I'm getting at in the follow-up comment, because it is specifically the cramming of more and more and more filmworthy experiences into the lives of the same established characters that causes this steady warping of the laws of probability in the fictional universe, and hence, the more you do that the more you push things to the point where the Watsonian explanations cannot avoid being hopelessly implausible. And therefore, by your criterion here, less and less worth experiencing as fiction.