AFF's Doublethink

A recent post over at the Fan House asked if the Davis Cup — tennis’s annual tournament that stretches on for nine months out of the year and pits teams of players grouped by nations against each other — is in trouble:

The reasons [the top players in the world] gave [for not playing] were injury, poor schedule-fit, fast-approaching old age, a need to focus on individual needs. Here’s the truth:

This was a boycott. The International Tennis Federation, which oversees the Davis Cup, is in a feud with the top players, and it’s not going to end well for the ITF.

The Davis Cup doesn’t fit anymore. The players have a hard enough time balancing the stress on their bodies with the unrelenting modern-day demands of the tour. To add four weeks of Davis Cup on varying surfaces in all parts of the world at the worst possible times throughout the year?

I don’t disagree that some changes need to be made to the Davis Cup — cut down on the number of rounds, perhaps; condense the tournament into a more tightly wrapped season — but it’s a shame that the Davis Cup has fallen in honor so much in recent years. It’s one of the most entertaining events in sport, the only time tennis fans really let loose and turn the sport into a raucous event. The format is its greatest strength: Every match takes place on the home turf of one of the nations involved. The solution the columnist offers — a world cup played at a host country — would eliminate the chief appeal of Davis Cup play. It’d be a shame to see the tournament continue to suffer due to player disinterest, but it’d be an even bigger shame of the International Tennis Federation to do serious damage to the format by styling a future tournament on soccer’s World Cup.

Over at the League, Scott H. Payne published an email conversation between he and Mike at The Big Stick over the targeted assassination of a Hamas leader by (probably) the Mossad. The most telling comment from Scott is this one, I think:

That being said, choosing to assassinate someone as opposed to engaging in conventional warfare with a group someones doesn’t leave me with nothing in the pit of my stomach, just a different something and, in many regards, of equal weight. But let’s not walk around acting as if there is nothing in the pits of our stomachs because, this time, we chose to assassinate someone.

It is still a decision that we should be torn up about …

Emphasis (and double emphasis) mine. That “should” there is the kicker. Why should we be torn up about a terrorist who is responsible for the deaths of numerous civilians — indeed, who presently acts as a conduit for a terrorist organization to procure weapons that will kill still more numerous civilians — being killed in a surgical operation that inflicts absolutely no collateral damage open other innocent civilians? He was a bad man who deserved to die. In fact, he deserved to die far more than your average soldier on the battlefield who is simply waging an honorable but bloody campaign because politics by other means have failed.

Scott, and others like him who waffle about the righteousness of this attack, simply can’t understand it when someone doesn’t feel a moral twinge when a bad guy gets killed because hey, he’s a person too and we should feel bad when all people are killed.* I’m sorry, but I can’t understand why I should feel guilty about a mass-murdering terrorist meeting a swift and brutal (but not nearly as brutal as he deserved) fate. Not only am I glad he’s dead, but I celebrate his death and wish all such men could be eliminated in the same way: quickly and efficiently with no risk to innocent civilians. The world would be a far better place with them gone. There is nothing immoral about killing an evil man. Indeed, I would argue that it’s immoral to allow him to live and kill future innocent civilians if you are presented with the opportunity to take him out in a way that endangers no one and fail to do so.

*At least, I think that’s what Scott’s getting at. He’s free to correct me if I’m wrong.

Sonny predicted she would win, calling it a “kind of lifetime achievement award”. Yet looking over Bullock’s filmography, I find it somewhat hard to identify the achievements.

That said, Bullock was actually quite good as Leigh Ann Tuohy (TOO-ee) in The Blind Side, the role for which she won the Oscar. But it was an easy, feel-good role. Tuohy is a sassy steel magnolia who, out of the goodness of her heart, gives a home to an inner-city teenager — who later becomes a college football star. There’s just nothing complicated or challenging about the role. Tuohy doesn’t grow as a character. She’s a wonderful person to begin with and then she stays that way.

Blind Side is based on the story of Michael Oher, whose childhood was an inner city nightmare. His mother was a crack addict with twelve children. His father was an ex-con. Basically, Oher had to survive on his own. With some remarkable luck, he became a scholarship student at an expensive private school. He was then taken in by the real-life Leigh Ann Tuohy, who supported Oher as he struggled to get his grades up and qualify for a Division I football scholarship.

Although the film does get a bit syrupy, it works because it’s based on a true story. Charity is a lot harder to practice than it is to imagine. It’s good to have the occasional film that reminds us of the better angels of our nature.

I mean that literally, unlike Phil Collins’ song about the plight of the homeless. I spent the past few days in Anse Marcel (photo above) on the Caribbean island of St. Martin. The title of Collins’ song is a reminder of how hard it is to enjoy good fortune without reflecting on those who don’t have it.

I admit, I didn’t spend all that much time in St. Martin thinking about the suffering of others (although like many Caribbean islands, St. Martin is a collage of first-world luxury and third-world poverty). There is plenty of time to do that now that I’m home.

A: Whichever one is in higher demand.
B. Whichever one costs more to produce.
C. They should all cost the same, especially if they’re all of different races.

I think that most economists would answer A; most crazy leftists would argue C. Because, you see, it doesn’t matter how much a good costs to produce or how high the demand for it is — race trumps everything, as Wal Mart recently discovered after it priced a black Barbie doll half as much as its white equivalent:

“To prepare for (s)pring inventory, a number of items are marked for clearance, ” spokeswoman Melissa O’Brien said in an e-mail. “… Both are great dolls. The red price sticker indicates that this particular doll was on clearance when the photo was taken, and though both dolls were priced the same to start, one was marked down due to its lower sales to hopefully increase purchase from customers.”

“Pricing like items differently is a part of inventory management in retailing,” O’Brien said.

As anyone who has worked in retail — or is familiar with basic economics — will tell you, that’s an eminently reasonably course of action! If something isn’t selling well, you need to reduce the price in order for it to sell. But, but … one’s white! One’s black! Racism, yes?

Walmart could have decided “that it’s really important that we as a company don’t send a message that we value blackness less than whiteness,” said Lisa Wade, an assistant sociology professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles and the founder of the blog Sociological Images.

Last year, Wade posted a blog entry on another case where a black doll was apparently priced less than its white counterpart at an unidentified store. Wade said that when white dolls outsell black dolls, it’s usually because black parents are more likely than white parents to buy their children dolls of a different race.

Sigh. Just when you think we are going to move past stuff like this…bam! Racist Wal-Mart.

(h/t to Rod Dreher)

Hollywood redundancies will keep the film rudimentary and lacking in social, philosophic and aesthetic meaning. A new mind is needed to work upon the rudiments and extend them. Hollywood will not supply that new mind. Hollywood is vested interest. Hollywood is uninspired competence–at its best. Hollywood is empty facility.

I’ve been reading through my copy of American Film Critics for a piece recently, and I stumbled across that quote from Harry Alan Potamkin…in 1929. The next time someone complains about the juvenile stuff coming out of Hollywood and praises the indie directors, the European and Asian directors, the people working outside the system…think of that quote. Critics have been complaining about Hollywood since the dawn of film criticism. I’m not going to say it’s a complaint that’s entirely without merit, but come on. Let’s find a new line of attack, shall we?

Sean Penn, on journalists who describe Hugo Chavez as a “dictator“:

Because every day, this elected leader [Hugo Chavez] is called a dictator here, and we just accept it. And we just accept it. And this is mainstream media, who should – truly, there should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.

Note to Armond White: THAT would be a violation of a journalist’s First Amendment rights.

Via Will at the League, I see this great, rousing story about a neighborhood in Detroit trying to defend itself from criminals:

Some hire middle-school kids as drug couriers, training them for a life of crime. “These guys have literally taken over these neighborhoods, and they’re the only ones hiring in the neighborhood,” Jackson says. “They’ll hire your kids to run back and forth between the house and the cars. They give them commission.”

Some hoist the smaller kids into the milk chutes still in the walls of the old homes here, where they climb into the house, steal what they can and pass things outside through the narrow opening.

Some steal the infrastructure, the very skeleton of the neighborhood. “It was a Saturday, and Jack called me in the morning, said he’s following two guys with a fire hydrant over here, heading to the junkyard,” says 55-year-old Keith Hines, Jackson’s neighbor and partner in crime fighting. “These two drug addicts had taken that hydrant and put it in their car.” He and Jackson accosted the scrappers at the junkyard, had the yard owner block their car from leaving, even interrogated them on video until police arrived. Next to their car was a pile of street signs someone else had sawed off and brought in.

But hey, I’m sure the residents of that neighborhood would be safer if handguns were outlawed, ammiright?

It appears as if Armond White — the New York Press iconoclast who Roger Ebert once defended then referred to as a troll after being exposed to his work — has found himself in a spot of trouble over his trollishness recently. Reportedly, White said that he thought director Noah Baumbach is an “asshole,” and much else besides:

Look at the movies. That’s how I know. You’re aware of what D.H. Lawrence said about writing…? Trust the tale, not the teller. So, Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, they can tell you what they believe they’re about. They can get on a podium and say, “This is what I believe in, this is what I feel, this is what I love, this is what I dislike…” Can’t trust any of that. You’ve got to look at the movie. You look at Noah Baumbach’s work, and you see he’s an asshole. I would say it to his face. And, of course, he gets praised by other assholes, because they agree with his selfish, privileged, stuck-up shennanigans. I don’t need to meet him to know that. better than meeting him, I’ve seen his movies.

I’ll be honest: Baumbach’s work isn’t really my cup of tea either. But I don’t know if I’d go around calling him — or any other artist whose work I had a problem with — an asshole. Not even a real piece of work like Michael Moore, or Jeremy Piven. I wouldn’t do this because it’s unprofessional, mostly, not to mention rude and at least a little immature.

Anyway, for his comments White has been excluded from press screenings of Baumbach’s latest film, Greenberg. Apparently there are some emails floating around calling on other critics to take a stand with White, to say that if he’s not allowed into the screening then none of them should go either in solidarity. Included in those emails, according to Jeffrey Wells over at Hollywood Elsewhere, is this line:

I objected that they were infringing upon my First Amendment rights as a journalist. In a second phone call, [the rep] apologized but informed me that I was still blackballed.

Now look: Focus may be doing any number of things wrong here, but they are by no means infringing on your first amendment rights, Mr. White. They are not obligated by the first amendment to allow you to attend an early screening for free so you can write a review of it. The first amendment says nothing about corporations stonewalling reporters/reviewers. If they went to the mayor of NYC and had you arrested for what you said, Mr. White, then Focus would be attempting to infringe upon your first amendment rights. As it is, they’re just pushing back against what they see as an unreasonably biased reviewer.

And you know what? I find it hard to blame them for doing so. Why would they think they’ll get a fair shake from White at this point? He’s already said that he thinks Baumbach’s a privileged asshole whose work reeks. I think studios have an obligation to let critics in who won’t necessarily give their films positive reviews, but I think that obligation ends once the critic in question makes things personal. You don’t get to call your host an asshole then act surprised when he ejects you from his party.

One of the reasons I always look askance when someone describes a policy position in terms of fundamental rights is this ridiculous story and others like it:

The poll, which collated the answers from more than 27,000 people across 26 countries and was conducted on behalf of the BBC World Service, found that 87 per cent of interne t users felt that web access should be a basic right. More than 70 per cent of non-users felt they should have access to the net.

In Japan, Mexico and Russia, nearly 75 per cent of respondents said they could not cope without their internet connection. Ninety per cent of those polled in Turkey believed web access was a fundamental human right, making it the strongest supporter of the widely held sentiment.

The respondents to this poll who claimed that having access to the Internet is a fundamental human right are all ri-goddamn-diculous. So let’s say you can’t afford the Internet (or maybe you can’t afford it after paying rent/for food/for a cell phone/for cable/for Netflix): Someone’s supposed to just give it to you, free of charge? Because that’s what they’re saying when they call something a “fundamental human right,” akin to freedom of speech or religion. It’s the same argument you hear with health care, that it’s a fundamental human right, which is similarly ridiculous. Having access to a good or service provided by others regardless of your ability to pay for it is not a fundamental human right. I’m sorry, it just isn’t. Even if that means you won’t be able to surf the web.