Good Morning!
My father loved Sousa marches. So do I. Sousa was a genius in a very narrow range, but a genius he was. The Liberty Bell was one of my dad’s favorites. Here is a great website to familiarize yourself with the great march-master’s creations; it has instant links to each march.
1. Since it has done such a superb job ensuring world peace, the U.N. moves on to the important stuff… Unesco has issued a report claiming that having female voices in machines like GPS’s, smartphones and personal assistant devices reinforces gender stereotypes and enables the oppression of women. From the Times:
“Obedient and obliging machines that pretend to be women are entering our homes, cars and offices,” Saniye Gulser Corat, Unesco’s director for gender equality, said in a statement. “The world needs to pay much closer attention to how, when and whether A.I. technologies are gendered and, crucially, who is gendering them.”One particularly worrying reflection of this is the “deflecting, lackluster or apologetic responses” that these assistants give to insults. The report borrows its title — “I’d Blush if I Could” — from a standard response from Siri, the Apple voice assistant, when a user hurled a gendered expletive at it. When a user tells Alexa, “You’re hot,” her typical response has been a cheery, “That’s nice of you to say!” Siri’s response was recently altered to a more flattened “I don’t know how to respond to that,” but the report suggests that the technology remains gender biased, arguing that the problem starts with engineering teams that are staffed overwhelmingly by men. “Siri’s ‘female’ obsequiousness — and the servility expressed by so many other digital assistants projected as young women — provides a powerful illustration of gender biases coded into technology products,” the report found.
Gee, that’s funny: I thought the reason a woman’s dulcet tones were used in such devices is because they were easier on the ear than, say, HAL. Nor would it occur to me that a woman was being subservient or submissive when the female voice was coming from a lump of metal and plastic on a table.
FACT: Yes, a consumer should have the option of having a device speak in a male or female voice.
FACT: If the owner of such a device wants to insult it, make sexual comments to it, or crush it with a hammer, that’s none of the U.N.’s business.
FACT: Programming AI to be adversarial to its owner, whatever voice the device is using, is unethical, and, obviously, bad business.
Unesco’s report is the epitome of manufactured offense.
2. List incompetence. I know this kind of crap bothers me more than it should, but it bothers me.
CBS News put a slideshow on-line called “Oscar Best Picture Winners Ranked From Worst to Best.” What was the criteria for the ranking? We aren’t told. Who put this mess together? No clue. Why is it any more authoritative than my list, or anyone else’s? It isn’t. Nevertheless, this list signals its biases and incompetence from the start.
#1 on the list is “The Broadway Melody,” from 1929. The justification for the ranking? Modern critics think the movie “has not stood the test of time.” Ya think? How many things from 1929 have stood the test of time? Was the Model A Ford,
in retrospect a bad car because it wouldn’t meet 2019 safety standards ansd seems ugly and clunky to today’s consumers? “Broadway Melody” blew everyone away because it was the most ambition musical talkie yet produced. “This picture is great. It will revolutionize the talkies”, wrote Edwin Schallert for Motion Picture News. “The direction is an amazing indication of what can be done in the new medium.” That’s why the film was the top grossing picture from 1929, and won Best Picture. The criticism—who is this idiot? I want a name!— is more “presentism,” judging people and things from the past by current standards. It’s unfair to the past, and makes people in the present dumber.
The next worst is the favorite punching bag Oscar winner, Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth,” because it dared to beat out the anti-American Western, “High Noon.” It’s a big, sprawling ode to the circus, with lots of real circus acts, the great Betty Hutton, and the patented DeMille spectacle of a circus train wreck. DeMille’s spectaculars were the super-hero movies of their day, and even now, I’ll watch “The Greatest Show on Earth” over “High Noon” every time, because it’s fun, and “High Noon” (Yes, it’s a great movie ) isn’t.
The list goes on with more indefensible presentism (“Cimmeron” and “The Great Ziegfeld”), then alerts us that whoever assembled this is “woke” by ranking last year’s “Green Book” as lousy (if you recall, the movie suggested that blacks and whites could learn to like and respect each other—can’t have THAT), and irredeemably disqualifies itself for serious consideration by ranking “A Man For All Seasons” as the 18th worst Best Picture Winner (out of 92). It doesn’t give us any reasons, so one has to assume it’s because the anonymous critic doesn’t know a great movie, great themes, brilliant dialogue, and one of the most memorable acting performances in film history (by Paul Scofield as Thomas More) when they are right in front of him, her, or it.
Thus it comes as no surprise that this bone-head ranks “The Sound of Music” and “Ben Hur” as below average “Best Pictures,” and not as worthy as “The Deer Hunter” ( the political bias of the list comes into focus) and “The Hurt Locker.” I would scoop out my eyeballs with a melon spoon rather than watch “The Deer Hunter” again.
3. Here’s how extremist wackos will manage to alienate feminists’ sane male allies. (You know, like me. ) At the Cannes Film Festival this week, Quentin Tarantino was asked by a female reporter from The New York Times why actress Margot Robbie wasn’t given more to say or do in his latest film “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” He said, “Well, I just reject your hypotheses.” What I would have said: “ I tell the stories I want to tell and feel I can tell effectively. The characters speak lines that advance my creative vision. I don’t count words, and a character doesn’t have to speak the most lines in a movie to be important and memorable. What a stupid question.”
Yes, they are counting lines now. BBC News:
Female characters in Game of Thrones speak about three times less than male characters in the show, according to new data given to BBC 100 Women…The data by research group Ceretai suggests that across all eight seasons, male speech amounts to about 75% of all speaking time in the series… Lisa Hamberg, co-founder of Ceretai, told the BBC that by analysing Game of Thrones, they wanted to make viewers aware of the wider problem of how women are portrayed in the media.
“We are not doing this to make people stop watching, but to make them aware of the fact that it’s an unfair representation of the world”, she says.
“The world”? There are dragons and monsters in “Game of Thrones.” It’s not supposed to be a representation of the real world. However, in the real world, men do talk more than women. This is the justification for some sexist professors limiting male students’ participation until all the women in the class have had a chance to speak.
Take heed: this mysandry and discrimination will never stop, and eventually, men will stand up to the madness. California has installed gender quotas on corporate boards, some Democrats are demanding that legislatures have at least 50% female members, and gender quotas for lines in movie and TV scripts makes just as much sense as either of these “reforms.” [Pointer: Jim Treacher]
Ethics Alarms 
Good stuff. Basically just posting because I don’t want you to get depressed about the holiday weekend’s typically low traffic.
That’s kind of you.
The movie list is pretty stupid.
It looks like they just took the score off of Rotten Tomatoes and that formed the basis for the ranking.
It is not based upon anything but the reviews of the viewers.
-Jut
What do you guess is the median age of Rotten Tomatoes reviewers?
Rotten Tomatoes is setting up a ‘verified review system’ as more valid than the plebian masses. You may ask, how do you get verified so you can review? Buy your ticket through Fandango.
Assuming you want to both pay more for your ticket and be allowed to leave a verified review. Guess you can’t review it if you won tickets or free previews, or saw it later on cable. There’s also no verified reviews to help with opening days either. So there will be like four tiers of reviews, with Hollyweird critics and Fandango customers being more ‘true.’ (Fandango’s tying their owned review site to generate income directly, it’s a strange coincidence that woke movies lose thousands of ‘wrong’ reviews for a protected movie that eventually regains the low rating)
Personally it’s not Fandango’s business to have my personal and credit info to review a movie. This trick should sink like a rock, but they don’t want to face criticism. When did getting bronzed to reviews become a horror?
Not only the median age, but the political leaning.
Rotten Tomatoes has notoriously given stunning reviews to bad movies so long as the movies have enough “woke” talking points. Time after time there has been huge gaps between viewer scores and in-house reviewer scores, and when those scores get too disparate, Rotten Tomatoes has previously done things like delete tens of thousands of review scores to try to buoy the metascore.
Now, Rotten Tomatoes has announced that it is deleting all non in-house accounts and will charge people money in order for them to be able to offer reviews. Really.
An appropriate event for this Memorial Day.
The remains of a sailor killed during the attack on Pearl Harbor – which were unidentified for decades until last year – are set to be buried in Athens, Alabama on Memorial Day. The community will have a service in his honor before the burial.
https://www.al.com/news/2019/05/north-alabama-wwii-sailors-remains-to-be-buried-on-memorial-day.html
Kalifornia seems hell-bent on running their corporate tax support out of the state. Reckon they’ll quit when the revenue dries up?
I am betting they trot out the scifi ‘citizenship tax’ we once thought could never happen.
See, the theory goes, if you were ever a citizen of the taxing entity, you always owe them taxes, regardless where you get the money and where you now live. This is in addition to any taxes owed where you live now. Since corporations are now persons, it would not take much to try this with them, as well.
You heard it here first.
My understand is that NewYork was considering such a tax because of the outmigration to the sunbelt.
Nope. Then they will just tax the public more.
2. I hate those lists. They are always subjective and generally published when there’s some resurgence in a type of film or actor’s popularity so that the list-writer can ride the coattails of whatever is “in” at the moment.
Kinda like how every other celebrity talked about how much they were inspired by Roy Orbison…but only after he’d just died.
I never cared for “Broadway Melody”. The song was catchy, but I hated Eddie falling in love with Queenie and leaving the steadfast Hank. I slept through most of “The Greatest Show on Earth”. I do have a soft spot for “The Great Ziegfeld”. That cast! Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger and Myrna Loy (as Billie Burke). And the great Dick Powell. Makes me want to go watch “The Thin Man” right now.
The giant rotating wedding cake thing for “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody” and that incredible curtain should have won the Great Ziegfeld an Oscar all by itself. That’s the Ben-Hur chariot race of stage musical numbers.
#1) Seems like a case where there would be criticism whether a male or female voice was chosen (aka, damned if you do and damned if you don’t). If a male voice had been the dominant choice, I’m sure they would have pointed out that this is also reinforcement of gender stereotypes and enabling the oppression of women. “Why wasn’t a female voice chosen? Men have to dominate everything? Only men have the answers and can give direction. Etcetera.”
What next? How come we don’t have more female game show hosts 🙂
Edward, yes, that would have been one criticism. The other would be that asking questions, only to be responded to by a male voice reinforces mansplaining, when a female voice would be equally capable of explaining how long how many years are in 1 Octillion seconds (a favorite question in the Gory household).
-Jut
That’s the trap, and they continue to try to use it even though it’s obvious to all what their game is. Here we have people complaining that too many AI’s have female voices, while simultaneously complaining that women in a TV show don’t get enough speaking lines. Flip it around, and the complaints would be just as loud, with equally ludicrous “reasoning”. One could be forgiven for thinking that the goal has little to do with equality and much to do with obtaining power over others.
That’s just a trend with these kooks isn’t it? I wonder why they can’t stand a picture which lionizes a character executed for his convictions by a faddish new regime abusing the levers of state power and presenting false witness. A paranoid man might construe that as ominous!
Why does word count matter. The Gettysburg address was of relatively few words compared to most speeches and said a hell of a lot more.
Its not verbosity that counts. It is that which is said that matters.
Has UNEP managed to locate those 50 million climate refugees?
https://ethicsalarms.com/2011/04/17/global-warming-advocates-flunk-ethics-and-credibility-again/
The Rush Limbaugh-created pejorative “Feminazi” makes so much more sense now than back in the 1990’s when I first heard it.
What happens when a woman asks Siri if the outfit she wants to wear maker her look fat?
Would that make Siri explode?
Siri: “It’s not the dress that makes you look fat.”
“Yes, it does make you look a bit frumpy. Perhaps you should buy a new outfit from Amazon Prime. You can try before you buy, you know.”
Bezos didn’t get rich by missing opportunities to make a sale.
1–“Since it has done such a superb job ensuring world peace, the U.N. moves on to the important stuff”
You mean to tell me that it has enough left over after overseeing its criminally insane arm, the UNIPCC, to…um…reposition Mother Gaia’s wealth?
Wasn’t this pioneered by the Air Force and by airlines? I seem to recall reading that the Air Force did some sort of study that showed that men would react either better or faster to a woman’s voice than a man’s.
I see the military as basically pragmatists — if something will work and save lives, then that’s what they do. If the equation is that a woman’s voice equals fewer crashes and fewer dead aviators? Is the UN in favor of crashing planes?
My dad was a Air Force pilot and I remember him saying the same thing. Warning systems used female voices because they were easier to understand and more quickly understood among all the other sounds in the cockpit.
At least among the F-15 fighter pilot community, the female voice that announced calmly that you were about to suffer some dire fate was referred to as “Bitchin’ Betty.”
The first aircraft with a voice warning system was the B-58 Hustler. The voice was recorded by actress Joan Elms and known as “Sexy Sally” by the crews. I got to know several former B-58 crew while stationed at Grissom AFB. There is a beautiful B-58 on display there, one of only about 7 left.
John, the Air Museum at Galveston Airport has one. Beautiful bird.
I can’t get over Ben-Hur being ranked lower than The Hurt Locker. For the first few seconds it didn’t make sense from any perspective (Hurt Locker isn’t very overtly anti-American or anything) and then I thought “oooh…female director.” That makes a good but forgettable two hours of shaky-cam pointed at some great actors ad-libbing half their lines better than Ben-Hur.
I’m mainly commenting to help with the traffic. Stay-at-home, homeschooling mothers don’t get holidays either, so if a comment can help the numbers, I can oblige.
I always considered myself a feminist. I want to be able to work in any field I am qualified for. I want to be considered on my merits, not my sex. I want the same opportunities as a man. And I want equal pay for equal work. Hmmm… I can work in any field I am qualified for. I am not considered by my merits, because I get advantages based on my sex, which also means that I don’t get the same opportunities as a man, I often get more. As for equal pay for equal work, see Google. I am against the exploitation of women that abortion allows. I also want men to act like gentlemen.
This leads to two conclusions. Either, I am not a feminist and have “relinquished my woman card” as my progressive relatives claim, or, to truly be equal, women must act responsibly, accept fault for their own errors, roll with the inequalities that life gives, act like ladies, and focus on the preset and future, not the past.
Current feminism has driven me away. An electronic voice is not a woman, so get over it. Word counts rarely have much to do with emphasis. A 500 word book has more trouble being published than a 200 word book. Who cares who had the most lines? I was always taught that behind every great man, there was a good woman. I have begun to think that feminism (generally speaking) needs to adopt a theme song. The Eagles sang a great one for this occasion. “Get Over It.”
Perhaps a new label is needed for those of us who strive for real equality among people, rather than the re-litigation of centuries of grievances in order to get the upper hand for our particular identity group. “Feminist” has been ruined for that use. “Egalitarianist” is a clumsy word, but it’s the closest I can think of offhand.
Can someone define equality as it relates to social structures and economic choices.
Does the state of equality end with conditions of opportunity or with the outcome of some opportunity?
If two people otherwise equal in all aspects are hired to perform a service but one has a reservation wage of 10 dollars and the other has a reservation wage of 8 dollars for the same work and both are paid 10 dollars doesn’t the person with a reservation wage of 8 dollars commanding a premium for what that worker would have done for a lower wage?
( reservation wage is the minimum amount required by the worker to offer that unit of labor)
If a male and female worker are equal respects and both are to be hired at the same time but the offer is made to the female first and she negotiates a wage of $15 does the male hire have an equal ability to negotiate after the employer agrees to pay 15 to the woman?
Equality is elusive.
Reminds me of the following story.
Matthew 20:1-16 New International Version (NIV)
The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard
20 “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. 2 He agreed to pay them a denarius[a] for the day and sent them into his vineyard.
3 “About nine in the morning he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. 4 He told them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ 5 So they went.
“He went out again about noon and about three in the afternoon and did the same thing. 6 About five in the afternoon he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’
7 “‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered.
“He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’
8 “When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’
9 “The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. 10 So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. 11 When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. 12 ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’
13 “But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? 14 Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. 15 Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’
16 “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
Footnotes:
Matthew 20:2 A denarius was the usual daily wage of a day laborer.
“Elusive” is an understatement. When I say “equality”, I’m talking only about access to opportunity and basic rights. It’s sheer madness to think that outcomes can be equalized (but that doesn’t stop some fools from promising such, and even bigger fools from believing those promises).
Re No. 1; Siri gets schooled.
Talk about a manufactured controversy. You can program the machine to use whatever voice you want. What a monumental waste of time.
Re: No. 2; Lists in General.
Lists generally serve no value unless there is some objective criteria used to create the list. For instance, gross sales, weeks on the charts, box office receipts, or number of downloads maybe good measuring sticks. Otherwise, they are subjective and useless.
I follow a couple of fan pages for my beloved Rush. Routinely someone will post the “Top 10 Best Songs.” I mean, how can I, a member of the Rushinati (“We Have Assumed Control”) answer that?! Each song, in and of itself, is the best, at that moment, but when taken as a whole, a body of work, each song makes up that collection of greatness. What am I going to do? Do I say I like my right ventricle more than my right tibia? Does that not diminish me amongst the whole?
jvb
John Phillip Sousa. Who wrote better Sousa marches than John Phillip Sousa? Nobody. I’ve long thought of him as the Mozart of marches. Not a note out of place, elegant, miniature symphonies. I was lucky to play trumpet in our grade school band and get to play Sousa marches in concert. That was really fun.
I wonder when Jeff Bezos’s kiddie corps at his paper (or Eugene Robinson?) is going to somehow disavow Sousa’s “Washington Post” march as white supremacy or antiquated patriarchal militarism or something otherwise reprehensible?
What ever happened to immigrants like the Sousas who gladly became Americans. The American March King who’s father was born in Portugal and mother in Hesse State. He didn’t make America diverse, he did a great deal to make America what it is, American.
And nice picture of a Model A. That’s a 1928 or ’29. I had a 1930 four door with suicide doors. We had a lot of fun in that car. Mechanical brakes, not sealed beam headlights. wooden floor board, updraft carburetor, a-ooo-gah horn. Unsafe on 1960s highways but I survived. Needless to say, I stayed off limited access highways. I was supposed to get my cousin’s ’32 Ford with a 289 Chevy V-8 but older heads prevailed. I’d have killed myself pronto at age 16 with all that horsepower in a very light car.
I’m reading Brands’ “American Colossus” book right now. The various immigrants that came here and became Americans, from Jacob Riis the muckraking journalist to John Roebling – the visionary behind the Brooklyn Bridge – is inspiring. They overcame obstacles because they didn’t focus on their setbacks, but on their strengths.
Until today, I’d always assumed Sousa was himself born in Portugal but he was born in D.C. His father João António de Sousa (John Anthony Sousa) is listed as being of Spanish and Portuguese descent. Wiki doesn’t say where he was born. The senior Sousa was a trombonist in the Marine Corps Band. I’ve yet to see the downside of assimilation.
I tell my google home to “shut the fuck up” sometimes when it starts babbling (more often than you might think). Works really well.
I do not talk to people like that, but if they make google assistant any more natural language able I’m going to start feeling guilty
…
…might start adding please at the end
I don’t get the U.N. complaint. I don’t use Siri (I’m an Android man, myself), but I know you can change the voice, just like you can with the Android phone’s voice. Just do that if you don’t want to hear a woman’s voice. Also, never thought about it as talking down to the phone. You’re asking it for help, and yeah it does give help, but it’s the one guiding you. Phone decides to tell you to take a wrong turn, how are you to know that it’s wrong, if you aren’t familiar with the area?
“FACT: Programming AI to be adversarial to its owner, whatever voice the device is using, is unethical, and, obviously, bad business.”
I dunno, could be entertaining, depending on HOW adversarial.
“However, in the real world, men do talk more than women.”
Must…not…make…sexist…joke…
I should have figured out that all they did was use the Rotten Tomatoes scores. Silly me: I assumed that some actual critical analysis was involved. If the headline was “The Rotten Tomatoes Ranking of Oscar Best Pictures, Worst to Best” I’d have no beef. But such collective, e-poll numbers are meaningless.
Any system that ranks “Argo,” a nice, middling, well-done movie that will be forgotten in 10 years, higher than “Mrs. Miniver” is absurd.