Pen-Elayne on the Web

Are You A Good Glitch, Or A Bad Glitch?

Well, Blogger may have been frustrating these past couple days, but for once our cable system is being nice to us. Not deliberately, I assure you, but some weird circumstance has affected one of our boxes and we're receiving a few channels we previously couldn't, making our $85 monthly bill almost worth it. Almost. So we're taking advantage of this doubtless brief bonus to watch stuff on Showtime, and last night we took in a couple episodes of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, which were pretty good. The show, as you might expect, concentrates on debunking charlatans and myths, often with the complicity of hidden whistleblowers (some of whom are former charlatans themselves and have, I guess, discovered along with P&T that there's sometimes just as much money to be made exposing bullshit than perpetuating it). Last night had two back-to-back episodes. The first dealt with Talking to the Dead, and contained little I hadn't heard before about cold reading and other methods used by these hoodwinkers, as well as the obligatory nod to the SCICOPs, although I admit I hadn't known that much about the massive release forms with their non-disclosure clauses that audience members had to sign. I was moved to tears by Penn Jillette's (yes, Teller stays silent, unless he's masked or something) righteous indignation at the idea of taking advantage of people's grief to make a quick buck, particularly when he went into how he felt since his own parents died a couple years back. The second episode covered Baby Bullshit, folks who make money off of professing to be experts in how to make babies smarter (and oh by the way here buy this stuff they're selling); and Second-Hand Smoke, which certainly told me stuff I didn't know (that the original study finding 3,000 deaths per year from "passive smoking" and referred to by all the usual organizations to pass anti-smoking legislation was in fact deeply flawed). I had a few problems with this segment:

I found it hard to sympathize given my personal aversion to breathing in cigarette fumes, even though Jillette assured the audience that he shares that aversion. I have a lot of friends who smoke (and gah, I realize how much that sounds like "some of my best friends are..." and I apologize) but they have manners, they care about people around them who choke on the smoke and make concerted efforts not to exhale it towards them. I remember living in Bensonhurst, land of people with no manners at all, going into restaurants that claimed they had non-smoking sections and still let people smoke and I was so nauseated I couldn't eat even though I was in the NS section that the restaurant itself had set up! So you know, I have a fundamental disagreement with the libertarians (Jillette's "heroes" of choice for this segment) on this matter. If people are going to act like assholes, and their actions affects me, and asking them nicely (I always try civility first) doesn't work, and complaining to management doesn't work, then maybe, just maybe it's a good idea to pass a law that disallows their assholery that's affected me. It's a sad fact of life that more people can't be nicer to each other, I've had to deal with that vis a vis noise pollution too, but there's a reason there are house rules saying you can't make noise that bothers your neighbors, and there's a reason there are laws saying you can't exhale smoke that affects the appetites at the next table, and those reasons don't need to have anything to do with health (on that I actually agree with Jillette, I wish they had touted civility instead of health as their reasons). They ought to just be common sense, the Golden Rule, that kind of thing.

I have problems sometimes with libertarians anyway, many of whom are right-wing Randian creeps who believe individual freedom means "my freedom to be as rude or as rich as I want to, which trumps your freedom to not be bothered by me or to suffer because of me, and damn the social good or civility." They simply reek of this veneer of smug privilege, and I'm a little sensitive about that sort of thing nowadays.

Mostly, I didn't think this was a good "debunking" topic compared with the others. Anti-smoking groups, as far as I know, aren't making a buck by preying on people's gullibility. That would be, oh I dunno, cigarette companies. Aren't most anti-smoking orgs non-profits?

All in all, for me it was two hits and one miss, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this show to any people able to receive Showtime.

And while I'm on the subject of lies, damned lies and statistics, I'll leave you with a couple meaningless numbers for now. We're Number 452, We're Number 452! The way I've been feeling after the last couple days of work, being called an "insigificant microbe" is rather par for the course. But there's something seriously wrong when I'm higher on the microbial scale than Anne Zook and Cyndy and Mikhaela and Tim Dunlop, all blogrolled on the sidebar. Come on, folks - Peevish? Road to Surfdom? These are amazing blogs, significant microbes. You know what to do (^TM Atrios). Also, for people who care about these sorts of things (and with my current self-esteem level I admit to being one of them), I'm currently #5 on the online Hall of Fame "all time" list for PopCap's Bookworm. (Okay, "all time" in this case is like a week, but still...)

Miscellaneous notes: Bryant Gries (newly blogrolled at sidebar) informs me by e-mail, "I attended the Tallahassee performance [of Lysistrata], right in front of our excessively phallic state capital, and took pictures and sounds. Posted them at my website. The play was sparsely
attended but dozens of people walked by and watched for a moment or two and got a flier." If you want to continue joining with women organizing for peace, check out the CodePink activities this weekend (via Lisa English, link at sidebar).

And darn it, Google took down their logo featuring Michelangelo's David. Even if he was suspiciously emasculated, it was still cool to see him there.