Is there some possible legal consequence for this? It doesn't seem like enough to merit a slander lawsuit. But simply publicizing what Fox has done won't be effective. You can't shame the shameless, and the people who watch Fox will never get the news anyway.
Is there a "truth in reporting" clause, like the "truth in advertising" clause? Isn't this deliberate distortion of facts?
I love how, based on the evil photos, you actually probably wouldn't recognize the guys if you saw them on the street.
It must be the outrage fatigue, because all I can think is "Damn, that's some crappy-ass photoshopping. Hire better interns."
There was a time - and I'm dating myself here - when if a network did this sort of thing it wouldn't be an amusing gotcha, it would be a scandal.
Fox News, get off my lawn !!
it wouldn't be an amusing gotcha
It's so amusing that there are no avenues to hold a "news" agency accountable for distorting public opinion!!
Heebie, you have teeth. You couldn't do me.
But simply publicizing what Fox has done won't be effective.
The solution to bad photoshopping is more and better photoshopping--starting with mustaches, devil horns, and blacked-out teeth on the face of every Fox personality. The photoshop gap must be closed.
Heebie, you have teeth. You couldn't do me.
You have weird standards for dating.
I love this.
Many years ago I was on strike, and we were standing around outside the company with the shop steward* (pickets are allowed to stand still in Britain). The steward was a weedy little guy with a somewhat cherubic expression, who couldn't intimidate a kitten. So this press photographer came over and literally lay in the gutter to get a shot which made the guy look looming and heavy (in the paper the next day it mainly looked like he had monstrous nostrils). And when he stood up, he was totally offended and agressive at us because we were all laughing like idiots instead of being suitably scared by his brilliant journalistic coup or trying to grab his camera or whatever. You'd think they'd learn.
*Union organiser
Doesn't this put the lie to their fair and balanced claims?
1: I think lawsuits are certianly possible (i.e., might not win, but would draw publicity and wouldn't be dismissed as frivilous). But I think it might be counter-productive, easily-framed as a whiny liberal response to an obvious joke. But at the very least shouldn't the NYT run a prominent story on this, if only to defend their reporters?
Doesn't this put the lie to their fair and balanced claims?
To put this in context, Brock was almost 13 when he figured out there was no Santa Claus.
13: you know what I mean. Formally.
*I* no longer consider them a trustworthy source of news.
This is for real? Jesus. It's getting close to the point where Fox could fake a photo of Obama with the dead boy, blame an unnamed source, and turn the election. We got a war from this kind of shit.
I guess it ain't all that new, "Remember the Maine" & Thomas Nash, but the techniques are getting better and the enemy bolder.
There is a huge part of me that hopes President Obama goes all-Chavez times ten on the fucking assholes. I'll support real change.
12: I suppose the way to avoid the "whiny liberal who can't take a joke" thing would be to run a prominent story mocking rather than taking umbrage at it. Fox News, so pathetic that not only do they engage in juvenile doctoring of photos to make people look dumb, but even the quality of their doctoring is juvenile.
Remember when Newsweek or whatever cleaned up the picture of the McCaughey parents when the septuplets were in the news? It was sort of a scandal. If this were SNL complaints would be "whiny liberals" but Fox is ostensibly a news channel. I think there's some value in making the point, repeatedly, that the preceding sentence requires "ostensibly" in order to be true.
Even without teeth, I wouldn't let a female-applicant-to-be do me.
In other news, I assume none of you have been watching anything unsavory on Youtube.
I look forward to the segment on the Daily Show where they counter with pictures of Sean Hannity with fangs and a widow's peak and Bill O'Reilly with screws coming out of his neck.
Maybe these people need to look at Fox.
17: We sure could do with a lot more mocking and a lot less umbridge (despite the fabulousness of the word umbridge).
Brock, do you actually believe there was a time when the "fair and balanced" claim wasn't transparently false? I certainly can't remember one.
umbrage, ugh. Maybe 10 cups of coffee is too much. Think I'll take nap.
Brock is joking, people. You're falling into his trap. He feeds on the negative energy.
So this press photographer came over and literally lay in the gutter to get a shot which made the guy look looming and heavy
At some Bar function, I heard John Bobbitt's lawyer speak about the very same thing. This was before the internets.
His main point was that the regular press pretends to be objective, but they would do crap like that to make Bobbitt look aggressive. Whereas, the National Enquirer's coverage was much more even handed.
I like umbrage, especially when made with pork loin and fresh tomatoes.
18: but Fox is ostensibly a news channel
Reading the dialogue from the Fox and Friends show at the Media Matters link, it doesn't sound like a news program, but rather an opinion show of some sort. A talking heads show.
I'm beginning to think that my avoidance and therefore ignorance of the Fox channel is a liability. Just what do they do there? Are all their programs offered under the rubric of news, or are viewers supposed to know, be able to tell, that some are not?
I take umbrage at this America's Most Wanted producer's explanation of why they are doing an episode about a young white guy from Minnesota who was murdered six weeks after he arrived in the big city to teach:
[The staffer, who has local ties to Philadelphia] urged the show to spotlight the case. It stood out from more familiar types of urban crime involving gangs, drugs or retaliation, she said.
"In this particular case, Beau was so young, such an upstanding guy, and obviously he did not deserve for this to happen. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time."
It's awful enough for his family. Do you also have to use him to be racist?
Wait. Just realized that the Fox channel shows all sorts of things, drama and so on. Fox News is one among many, and presumably this Fox and Friends is another.
Sorry. Carry on.
32: Fox News is a channel, not a show.
33: ffs, so there's the Fox News Channel, and then there's the Fox channel?
This is embarrassing. I don't watch tv much, obviously.
I mean, the (plain old) Fox channel shows repeats and stuff.
The Fox channel is a network. The Fox News channel is a news channel which is mostly Republican propaganda in the form of talk shows, with a certain amount of Republican propaganda in the form of news.
2: Heebie, Fox News went to court a few years back to defend their right to lie and call it news, and won the case.
Even without teeth, I wouldn't let a female-applicant-to-be do me.
That's right, John. No shame in having standards.
BTW, MC, it's cod and not mackerel that is required along with Screech. We regret th error.
Breaking: Fox News commentator actually robot in lipstick.
A nice side of roasted fennel is good with umbrage.
My understanding of the case in 37 is that it's not true that Fox can lie and call it news, it's just that the FCC is the only one who can do anything about it. There's no private right of action to enforce the FCC's policy, and the FCC's policy doesn't work with any whistleblower laws to protect people who disclose Fox's lies. But if the FCC wanted to do something they certainly could. The question is why they don't. And, oh by the way, in answer to 24, if was much less transparently false prior to sometime early this century, I suspect for this very reason. I think Fox has little fear of an FCC controlled by the Bush administration. In the 90s it was funny to joke about Fox's right-wing spin. It's since gotten much worse and isn't funny at all anymore.
I think 41 sounds right. It's the result of "in for a penny, in for a pound" thinking. If Fox News becomes Bete Noire #1 for every liberal in America simply by having 100% mildly conservative hosts instead of 80% like CNN does, then it might as well go all the way. And of course it's free to experiment, with the government run by the various cabinet departments' equivalents of Alberto Gonzalez.
Kind of like in the 2004 election, when Rush Limbaugh woke up in the morning and burst out laughing. "You know what? I bet I don't even have to do all these insinuations and leaps of logic. I can just go on the air and say 'Tom Daschle might very welll be Satan himself', and I'll get just the same reaction I always do. So why not?"
My impression was that they started off mixing a bit of outright lying in with their standard propaganda, but it was tentative, like they were afraid they'd get hit on the nose with a newspaper. As the years went on and nobody called them to task for it, they got more blatant. This doesn't change the fact that from day one, organized propaganda was the entire point.
I think from day one turning a filthy profit was the entire point.
It really wasn't, Brock. Rupert Murdoch and News Corp were already filthy rich, and what they really wanted was power. A fortune like Murdoch's is very much subject to fluctuations with political events. It made sense for him to not just have money, but to ensure a political climate that was favorable to his money.
I think all of this is well documented, somewhere.
I think from day one turning a filthy profit was the entire point.
I don't buy it at all. Or at least, money was the motivator but only indirectly. Maybe that's what you meant.
I know it's been recommended here before, several times, but reading The Authoritarians has made the whole Fox News thing both crystal-clear and terribly pitiful. The outrage is now dulled by understanding, with the hope of change.
The book is written extremely badly, unfortunately, with eye-rolling clichés and mixed metaphors, but the points it makes are pretty solid and interestingly constructed. Plus, tons of personality tests! (I'm a 25 on the RWA scale, btw, which is not shocking since I'm a poster child for Demand Resistance Disorder.)
Bave's blog is doing a book club on it next week.
45: Seems I recall that from Crazy Like a Fox:The Inside Story of How Fox News Beat CNN.
(The RWA Scale Test starts on page 10 of the book, if you want to skip to it.)
AWB, is that book different than "The Authoritarian Specter" (same author)?
Why yes, it is. Although it looks as if it covers a lot of the same ground.
BTW, I'm going to be in DC this weekend if anyone wants to have a meetup!
Ooh, I also got a 25. It seems past a certain elementary dedication to liberalism you shouldn't be able to get above 30 -- the only times I chose anything other than the strong agree/disagree response was on things like "there is absolutely nothing wrong with nudist camps", where I admit that I don't find the idea personally appealing and am not so live-and-let-live that I wouldn't make fun of it.
That said, I think I'm more of a sucker for authority than the test gives me credit for.
That test was really stupid. Each question was either filled with right wing code words or left wing code words. If you simply respond by stating you acceptance for either left wing cant or right wing cant, you will score either a 20 or a 30.
I scored a 20, but that is mostly because when I looked at questions like #12, I knew that "old fashioned values" is being presented merely as conservative code. I was kinda tempted to say--why yes, we can learn a hell of a lot from reading old school moralists like Aristotle and Boethius. But I knew that was not what the question meant. It was more Cotton Mather than Cicero.
I got confused by statements like this:
There are many radical, immoral people in our country today, who are trying to ruin it for
their own godless purposes, whom the authorities should put out of action.
I "strongly agree" with the first part of that -- like the President, for example! and John Yoo! and a lot of motherfuckers. So that part got a 4. But then the "godless purposes" didn't sound right, but I wasn't sure. -2, for a total of +2. "[W]hom the authorities should put out of action? Maybe. Okay, that would be cool, if there were authorities who could do that. +2? So I put down a total of +4. Which didn't seem right.
My total score was 47, but I think the results were skewed.
Yes, the writing is bad, and I feel like the test doesn't work very well for low-RWA types. But the graphs where he shows American and Canadian politicians' responses are really interesting. The average Mississippi Democrat scored way higher than any of the average Republican groups, though the Republicans are all quite tightly bunched to the high end. A lot of the book is about the behavioral and cognitive patterns of high RWAs and why and how they're politically manipulable for the purposes of directed aggression and bigotry.
I got a 102, but I think the test is utter bullshit, for some of the reasons described in 56.
It's not a political affiliation test. It's a measurement of social and political zealotry. You can be a Democrat liberal and be high-RWA.
And the test is completely transparent--I could have easily scored a 20 or a 180 if I'd wanted to, but I was trying to play it fairly. But that made it tough on a lot of the poorly written questions. "So do I pick the anti-authoritarian answer, or read the words differently and choose some more moderate answer?"
56: But the grammar of the sentence prevents you from reading "radical, immoral people" as referring to John Yoo. The clause "their own godless purposes" is clearly a defining one. The sentence refers to "godless" immoral radicals. Now you know immediately who it is talking about.
It is the same with "whom the authorities should put out action." You now know that the amoral people here can only be read as people who are aligned against traditional authoritative figures. The question isn't asking "if Superman were here, would he destroy all nuclear weapons." It is 'Do you think the current batch of politicians and judges should stomp out their opposition."
A test of "social and political zealotry"? Does a "zealous" democrat score a 20 or a 180?
Yes, the writing is bad, and I feel like the test doesn't work very well for low-RWA types.
And a high-RWA type wouldn't take the test, because such a person wouldn't read the book.
My assumption is that it works when he gives it to his college freshmen on the first day of the semester every year.
I feel like some of these questions are addressed by the book, but I don't have enough faith in personality typing to defend it myself.
But the test specifically says that where you agree with one part of the statement and not another, that you allocate scores to each part, and then add up the total. You're not supposed to let each clause influence your reading of the other clauses.
It uses a lot of political code words for something that is not a political affiliation test.
The test is so transparent I don't see how any politician could take it and not simply give the responses he feels would be most in touch with his base.
61: but it's not just that question, rob, the whole test is full of shit. "The only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional values, put some tough leaders in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading bad ideas."
Look, this is OBVIOUSLY a question an "authoritarian" would agree with, and if I were gaming the test I'd have chosen VERY STRONGLY DISAGREE. But I do fundamentally agree with it. Except I'm thinking of traditional values like the rule of law. And tough leaders like "not going to cave to Republican oppostiion". And silencing Michelle Malkin. (Not through first amendment violations, of course but through giving her no public voice in the mass media.)
Did Adorno cover all this in 1950 with The Authoritarian Personality
I applied my same answers to the questions at "What Sex and the City Character Are You?" and found the results much more telling.
Brock, we're on the same side here.
Brock, which way did you go on nudists?
68: the use of "Only" in that question is another classic mistake, since a statement containing "only", "never", "always" is almost guaranteed to not be the right choice.
Personally I think that one of three ways our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional values, put some tough leaders in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading bad ideas. But there's also the possibility that our country can get through the crisis ahead if Superman is elected president, or if influenza kills everyone in Asia.
Dammit, I'm surprised how angry this is making me. My pulse is noticeably elevated.
I actually like the use of personality typing in psychology. I find categories like introvert and extrovert and stable and unstable to be particularly useful. This makes me dislike bad personality typing more.
Similarly, I think psychologists should take evolution very seriously, but loathe evolutionary psychology.
It looks as though Republican criminality is starting to victimize the party itself. The College Republicans have always been at the forefront of Republican criminality -- College Republican conventions are fraud contests, with the most effective cheater going on to big careers.
Increasingly over the last 2-3 years Republican operatives have been feathering their own nests even at the expense of the party. One guy bilked a campaign committee out of most of its bank account. Abramoff, Ralph Reed, et al were no longer helping elect Republicans, but just facilitating graft. In this case the College Republicans must have decided that the Republicans are electorally doomed, and the time had come to milk the suckers one last time.
Not really off topic.
YOU HAD YOUR CHANCE TO ELECT SUPER-WOMAN PRESIDENT AND YOU BLEW IT FOR A NICE SMILE AND A GOOD SPEECH
68: See, the difference is that I don't have a lot of faith in any traditional values, and am as cynical about the "Founding Fathers" as about Christian fundamentalism. I answer low there because I truly believe that there are new ways to deal with social justice that may involve creative re-interpretations of the (say) Constitution, which, let's face it, was written by a lot of self-interested property-holding white guys who were quite willing to let women and people of color think they were included while not guaranteeing their inclusion at any step. While I disagree, of course, with the dumbasses who argue that all those guys were fundamentalist evangelicals (which is outrageous), I don't in any way believe that they made the protection of true minorities a priority. So that's why I gave that question a -3.
Did the test mention the Hog Farm Governmental Oversight Plan?
65: Those instructions can't override the logical structure of English. I would have been happy to break any of those statements into pieces and evaluate the pieces separately if they had any logical joints to cut them along.
I agree with everything you said in 79 (and that was said in 73, for that matter), which is why I only "moderately agreed" with the statement.
77 made me nine parts happy for all the money that wasn't going towards electing Republicans and all the old bigots getting shellacked, and two parts unhappy for the genuinely lost people who bankrupted themselves and the myriad assholes who got rich but not caught.
Still, good ratio.
Here is the F-scale from Adorno et al. in interactive form. It is a bit more subtle.
Maybe I took the test incorrectly, I don't know. I'm sure if I hear a politician say, for example, "The only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional values, put some tough leaders in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading bad ideas", with no other context I'd know without a doubt that he was a VERY BAD DUDE, so maybe in that sense I very strongly disagree with the statement. But that's not because I fundamentally disagree with the statement itself; it's because it's full of code words.
Brock and Rob: you go to war with the test you have, not the test you wish you had.
This one is a very blunt instrument, and you have very subtile minds.
Meanwhile (via Ezra), this new book from Dick Morris has a subtitle so magnificent I'm still laughing at it. (Also, he apparently is citing the same discredited "Gitmo prisoners returned to the battlefield!! zomg!" numbers as Scalia. He says these are the facts, so it must be true! Stupid liberals.)
Meanwhile (via Ezra), this new book from Dick Morris has a subtitle so magnificent I'm still laughing at it. (Also, he apparently is citing the same discredited "Gitmo prisoners returned to the battlefield!! zomg!" numbers as Scalia. He says these are the facts, so it must be true! Stupid liberals.)
Yeah, I think he's making an explicit connection between people who respond to those kinds of code words in a lot of different times and places. Later, he does the obvious thing of offering some translated Nazi cheers to some American and Canadian high and low RWAs to see their responses, and while low RWAs are self-defining as people who resist that kind of coding, high RWAs embrace them totally.
And it's also interesting to note that while low and mid RWAs seem to think being as low as possible on the scale would be a good thing, high RWAs think it would be best to meet the median score, because many of their ambitions are to be taken for the "majority" when the people who'd wholeheartedly embrace that sort of stuff are obviously a minority. Possibly Kung-Fu's 27%?
I got a 2.3 on Adorno's test. There were actually questions in that one which were on the one hand obviously fascist code phrases but I couldn't help agreeing with albeit weakly, such as the question about respect for parents.
On the F scale, I'm a 1.9333 ("whining rotter"). I did agree mostly that we have a kinky, kinky country.
Fatherhood makes patriarchs of us all, Rob. You'll only get worse. At Age 60 you'll be hunkered down in your compound with your automatic weapon. I just thought I'd tell you, for your benefit.
The noun "compound" is not derived from the French word componer, as the verb is, but from the Malay word kampung.
I'm merely a liberal airhead. But I've read about Greek and Roman sexuality, and I know they are hard to top.
You know, the problem with the 27% theory is that it includes the equivalent of the "yellow dog" Democrat. It's slightly blinkered, but it's hardly crazy to believe that any Republican victory is better than any Democratic victory.
90: I also softened on the parents.
87: Wow. Usually people with long titles try for a little rhetorical elegance. That's a mess.
The link in 87, 88 is a gem. They should be paid to subtitle right wingers' books.
93: That's a pretty lame excuse for having become a Fascist.
87: Aiiigh! That man worked for Bill Clinton!
I've read about Greek and Roman sexuality, and I know they are hard to top.
Half of all participants found this false.
The name "Adorno" doesn't come up in a search of Altemeyer's book. I'm surprised. I thought he'd at least acknowledge that this had all been done.
The Clintons brought in a lot of creeps. Dick Morris, Lanny Davis, Mark Penn, and James Carville.
I liked Carville at one point, but the combination of his policy positions and his odious wife ruined him for me.
The DLC-ers will have deeper seats in hell, but Dick Morris seems appropriate for special bile on this planet, given that he's a flatulent kook.
2.9... :(
i mean so close to 3, i blame infections
Stupid liberals
Hey, who do they think let those people go? Rumsfeld!
Two notes on Adorno:
1. In college, we sang "I want Adorno" to the tune of Liz Phair's plaintive "I want a boyfriend" in "Fuck and Run". Because we were hard like that.
2. I was really interested to read about the relationship between Adorno and Dr. Frederic Wertheim, who testified to Congress against EC Comics. Wertheim is of course thought of as the father of nanny-state censorship, but his concerns were directly from Adorno's study of authoritarianism. His analysis wasn't off, but it had no business being in the hands of, well, authoritarians.
Cynicism about our fallen world, probably common here, is a prerequisite for wanting someone strong and trustworthy to just solve the problems. Why it seems like yesterday that Emerson had something insightful to say on this very point. Sandy Berger is another Clinton creep, now happily marginalized
But in our case, we know the only thing that can save us is a strong and trustworthy procedure.
Rob & Brock & possibly others:
I'm a bit behind, because I just read a fair chunk of the book. He's well aware of all the issues you bring up. He's been doing a version of this test for almost 35 years. He knows all about the Adorno test - it's, according to him, more primitive, based on a more simplistic understanding of both attitude tests and authoritarianism.
The bottom line is that most people, when some guy with a lab coat and a clipboard asks them questions, answer straight up. But he's very explicit that individual answers aren't reliable, for some of the very reasons you give. But the testing has happened on hundreds of groups all across North America, with very consistent results and tendencies.
Lastly, getting away from merely echoing the author's positions: Yes, it does seem that people would try to game the test. Yet they don't - what read to us like super-obvious and tendentious positions nonetheless get about a quarter of any given population to agree with them strongly. And those people, when tested further, tend to have other attitudes that are about what you'd expect - for instance that Lt. Calley and Nixon were innocent men, and that hippies should be jailed and, if necessary, tortured and killed (seriously; RWAs will support such positions without irony).
Process liberals, unfortunately, have never succeeded in developing paramilitary branches of their movement.
I actually like the use of personality typing in psychology. I find categories like introvert and extrovert and stable and unstable to be particularly useful. This makes me dislike bad personality typing more.
Again, according to the author: 70% reliability is considered adequate for personality typing in general; he gets 90%.
I'd say that if you're really having a problem with this, you need to read the whole book, and not base your judgments on the test alone.
JRoth, I'm certainly willing to believe that someone who scored especially high on the test would almost certainly have strong authoritarian tendencies. But I both (a) did my best and scored a 102, and (b) could have easily scored a 20 (or a 180). Am I fascist?
you need to read the whole book, and not base your judgments on the test alone
Thanks for taking all the fun out of it, JRoth.
Well, I'm not going to have time to read the whole book, so perhaps I should quiet down.
I don't know why I didn't get any hits for Adorno when I searched in the book. Acrobat's search function is wonky.
The name "Adorno" doesn't come up in a search of Altemeyer's book. I'm surprised. I thought he'd at least acknowledge that this had all been done.
OK, seriously RTFBook. Chapter 1's footnotes don't name Adorno, but they talk about the F-scale:
People were basing their analysis on a theory and scale developed during the 1940s, which has long been discredited and abandoned by almost all of the researchers in the field. So (1) Don't pay much attention to your score on the RWA scale, and (2) Realize how easy it is to perceive connections that aren't really there.[...]
"Smiling and nodding" was at the heart of the hairy mess that early research on authoritarianism got itself into. All of the items on the first "big" authoritarian follower measure, something called the F (for Fascism) scale which came out of that 1940s research program mentioned in the previous note, were worded such that the authoritarian answer was to agree. So its scores could have been seriously affected by "yea-saying." But other researchers said, "Maybe 'yea-saying' is itself part of being a compliant authoritarian follower. Let's get some authoritarian followers and find out." "Uh, how are we going to get them?" "Let's use the F scale to identify them!" "But that's what we're trying to decide about!"
Many researchers were swamped by this dog-chases-its-own-tail whirlpool of reasoning until the mess was eventually straightened out by a carefully balanced version of the F scale. It showed that the original version was massively contaminated by response sets. These studies led to the development of the RWA scale, which was built from the ground up to control yea-saying, and studies with the RWA scale have made it clear that authoritarian followers do tend to agree more, in general, with statements on surveys than most people do. It is part of their generally compliant nature. It only took me about twenty years to get all this untangled, and would you believe it, some people still think fixated researchers have no fun!
115.2 to 112: "Don't pay much attention to your score on the RWA scale." It's not about individual scores, it's about groups.
And gaming the test is irrelevant - in a large group, it's just noise, and, as thousands of studies have shown, people as a whole don't intentionally game research. We're a trusting species (esp. the RWAs, but that's neither here nor there).
I will not read the book, and I will continue to criticize it whenever and however I please. It's a free country, and you are not the boss of me.
117: See, now there's a non-RWA. Give that man a 20!
Oh, one other thing on Brock's troublesome score: most people, regardless of test-taking ingenuousness, are really susceptible to buzz words, even obvious ones. I mean, think about the whole "Mission Accomplished" thing. In any sane world, Bush would've been laughed off the ship. But in reality, most people took it at face value, even if they didn't quite buy it. I mean, shit, Nixon's "Law and Order" campaign - it's like a joke, right? But it sure as fuck worked.
115: Like I said, I blame the acrobat search function.
Re: gaming the test. Perhaps the problem here is that the tests that work well in large scale surveys are not the sort of tests that allow the individual reader to having amusing or important insights about themselves. That is, real personality tests make crappy magazine personality tests.
I actually use my own magazine style personality tests on philosophical issues as a teaching tool. My goal is not to generate data, but to spark reflection. This test would do a crappy job of that.
I'm a 2.47 liberal airhead on the F score. Seems about right.
My goal is not to generate data, but to spark reflection. This test would do a crappy job of that.
Excellent distinction. Altmeyer doesn't give a crap about whether any of his subjects clues in. When you read about his experiments that extend from the test, you see that participants almost never know what's going on in their group relative to others (there's a kind of terrifying one in which, on successive nights, he runs the Global Change Game, which uses ~67 people to simulate 40 years of world history. The first night, it's low-RWAs, and they cooperate and do a good job at reducing military expenditures, avoiding war entirely, reducing corruption, and working together to address poverty, hunger, and environmental challenges. The next night, the high-RWAs go at it, and they blow up the world. Given a second chance, they still have a huge war, plus competing military alliances, rampant corruption, starvation, and no attempt at all to deal with environmental issues. They're psychopaths).
Oh, and it's not Acrobat's fault - I don't think he mentions Adorno, just the F-scale.
Rob is also a Nazi, as I have already explained.
I hate dealing with imaginary Nazis all the livelong day.
Yeah, I really think the book is worth reading, even if the prose is irritating. There's some subtlety missing, but he's not talking about subtle nuances. He's looking for those people who have no problem with the fascist statements on the RWA test and then asking those people to perform various tasks, like running world-domination simulations and stuff. The combination of high RWA plus high "Social Dominators" (the scale that asks similarly in-your-face questions that you'd think no sane person would say +4 to, but plenty do) makes for leaders like GWB, which he explicitly states. He's a high "follower" (claims to believe in homophobic blue-eyed Jesus and tradition and all that) but also an opportunistic manipulator.
I, on the other hand, am sort of borderline on Social Dominance---I take charge of every group I'm in, am a natural "teacher" figure, like manipulating people etc.---but very low RWA. I'll never be president, in a sense, because although I enjoy being an authority figure, I don't really respect people who buy into my authority. I like to be challenged and even knocked around a bit by a clever adversary. I'd get no pleasure from politics.
JRoth, have you gotten to the part where he runs the Global Change game with all high-RWA's who are low Social Dominators and they're all such sheep they don't make any initiatives for two and a half hours? Hilarious. Then he throws in seven double-highs and monitors them. Four of them claim the Elite positions, one becomes a shadow dictator, and another becomes a revolutionary, leading a violent coup to overthrow their Elite. The seventh double-high lays very low all game long.
In any sane world, Bush would've been laughed off the ship. But in reality, most people took it at face value, even if they didn't quite buy it. I mean, shit, Nixon's "Law and Order" campaign - it's like a joke, right? But it sure as fuck worked.
Most people have no actual connection to anything that any politicians have ever actually accomplished or even claim to have accomplished. Therefore, the most salient difference between the politicians is "Random guy who talks about Law And Order, vs. Random guy who doesn't talk about Law And Order". Well, all else being equal...
I guess my point is that there isn't nearly enough partisanship in our politics.
Yeah, one of Altemeyer's points is that it's not very tempting to court low RWA's politically because they tend to (a) require consistent logic from their politicians, and (b) to be wary of in-groupy slogans about power, social order, or "the enemy." When it's so easy to invoke Satan and get a solid third of US citizens in a quaking religious fervor, why not do it? They'll buy out everyone else's vote if they can, anyway, because even those with nuanced nits to pick will recognize the power of that third.
Like, the Moral Majority never was moral or a majority, but who wants to side with the "Immoral Minority"? Just us radical authority-fucking moonbats, I guess.
I really liked The Authoritarians.
I recently came across another piece of the puzzle, which is 'how do you become/live as/not experience logical dissonance if you are an RWA?'
God knows how I got there, but this piece on Biblical Parenting was as good a look at what creates that mindset as any I've seen. The rest of that series (on her blogroll) is illustrative as well.
I just read the link in 128 and am not sure I understand the connection that you're trying to draw, Megan. Keep in mind this may be because I myself am apparently a fascist.
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Would any of the procrastinating Germanophones here like to translate a couple (long) sentences for a friend? If so, head over to her AskMe question. Or if you're willing to translate but not a member there, you could email it to me and I'll send it to her. Thanks.
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Part of the profile of RWA is that they respect authority without question and they are extremely good at compartmentalizing, experiencing no logical disconnect in the face of contradictory facts. That parenting technique (when a kid acts out, narrow her boundaries and take away control) struck me as a way to make people have those characteristics.
I re-read that after I posted it. Man. They fought a toddler for a year and a half over food before the kid broke? Wow. Bet that kid learned his lesson.
130: "My god, I have an axe in my head!"
After you have digested Altemeyer, and still feel like reading for hours, you can move to Sara Robinson's two series at Orcinus, Altemeyer applied to her work with "former fundamentalist" support groups. Which is a little more prescriptive and optimistic than just descriptive. She's good.
I grew up, obviously, in a high-RWA environment, the extreme right of the Southern Baptist Church, but we had a very low-RWA pastor while I was a kid. He mostly preached about the history of translation, philological studies of important Biblical words, etc. Drove everyone else out of their minds with boredom, but I loved him. He was also extremely committed to a separation of church and politics, and was very wary of cultish fascisty stuff like group chanting and Pentecostalism. Then I'd go to Youth Camp and it was all Pentecostal writhing-in-the-aisles, cast-out-Satan stuff. Meanwhile, the pastor died and was replaced by a hellfire dude.
My experience of the church, when it changed, was not that these people were "hypocrites," which they of course were, but that these were people without any need for internal coherence of ethics or doctrine, who in fact preached against coherence. I remember one camp pastor shouted that everything that comes from the heart is from God and everything that comes from the head is Satan. Well, pardon me, but that was exactly the opposite of everything I'd ever learned about Christian ethics. I tried taking this issue up with my youth leader and with my parents, and I ended up getting asked to leave the youth group. My questions were boring to everyone else, and, they suggested, threatening to their faith. "You're very mature to be able to ask those questions, and not everyone is." "Are you?" I asked the youth leader. "No, I'm not," he replied. "My faith is like that of a little child, as Jesus has asked of me."
Fucking dumbasses. I struggle with these people when teaching aesthetics, too. They think every aesthetic movement in the history of British art and literature is, "Like, about being real, and like, honest about the world." I'm like, you can't say that about metaphysical poetry, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the Victorians, Aestheticism, and Modernism without sounding either crazy or like a total asshole.
Demnach werden hohe Anforderungen an die Wahrscheinlichkeit und Bedeutung des Erkenntnisgewinns eines Projekts der Grundlagenforschung gestellt, damit dieses einen Tierversuch zu rechtfertigen vermag, während bei angewandter Forschung im medizinischen Bereich ein "einsehbarer" Zusammenhang zwischen dem Tierversuch und dem Schutz der Gesundheit genügt. Dass Forschungsuntersuchungen an Tieren "allen Regeln der Wissenschaftlichkeit genügen" müssen, wird als unabhängige weitere Voraussetzung postuliert: ''Insbesondere müssen die angestrebten Ergebnisse eindeutig über das Bekannte hinausweisen; die zu prüfend Annahme muss sinnvoll, das gewählt Verfahren erfolgversprechend und dem jeweiligen Stand der Forschung angepasst sein
hott.
A sample, from the second series:
Leaders: Identify and IsolateMy experience has been that we non-authoritarians -- especially more progressive ones -- tend to discount the central role leaders in authoritarian organizations. Generally (and especially compared to RWAs), we don't pay a lot of heed to authority in our lives. When we do encounter it, we take its measure, reckon its limits, and give it only the required level of credence and respect.
This loose approach to authority can lead us to underestimate the overweening power authoritarian leaders exercise within their organizations. If we're going to be effective, we need to understand their importance, develop radar that picks out these high-SDO personalities quickly and accurately, and understands the subtleties of how they're operating. Books like Dean's are a great basic education.
Get Out Your Shovel -- Once the leaders are identified, they need to be isolated. The best way to do this is to discredit them in the eyes of both the public and their followers. For that, you need dirt.
Fortunately, these guys seem to move more dirt than the Mississippi. The tediously predictable amorality of high-SDO authoritarian leaders means they've got piles of bones buried in their back yards -- many of which can be dug up with surprisingly little effort, especially in these days of electronic public records and global Web access.
God, that biblical parenting link was so sad. I hope that someone is creating a non-insane space for those kids.
Wrt GTMO, the FBI is about as close to a paramilitary as procedural liberalism is going to get. They didn't shoot anyone, or stop anything, but they wrote some stern emails. Internal emails.
I dunno. I figure that as long as kids and people in those systems aren't confronted with anything else, they're probably content. For all I know, their subjective happiness is pretty high.
(I like a hierarchy myself, so I can imagine it being satisfying.)
Perhaps like Megan, I'm cautiously pro-hierarchy. Liberalism sort of has difficulty with the significance of hierarchy and tradition in human societies. On the other hand liberalism has had a lot of success in reducing exploitation, which is the obvious dark side of hierarchy.
I liked the link in 128. I've often sort of admired the way that many home-schooled evangelical kids truly seem to respect and get along with their parents. While for mainstream parenting it seems to be assumed that kids will go through an adolescent stage of really resenting and disliking their parents. But is that really natural and necessary?
I don't know how I'll strike the balance if I ever have kids. I want to bring them up as atheist pro-abortion devil-worshippers who honor, respect, and love their parents! WHERE IS MY SUPPORT GROUP?
I'm sceptical about the strategy (getting out one's shovel) in 136.
First, there are too many leaders or leaders-in-waiting to discredit: one week there's a scandal about so-and-so, the next week someone else steps up to take the mantle.
Second, it's not always easy to figure out what counts as "dirt" to the RWAs -- I'd think that just about anything I hear about e.g. the Bush administration (torture, secret wire-tapping, Scooter Libby, faith-based initiatives, NCLB, etc.) would be the best "dirt" one could find. What to do, when one man's dirt is another man's policy?
And for what it's worth, I'm a 1.9333 whining rotter and a 23.
139, 140 -- It's the desperate, petty-tyranical fear of the "child's" wishes having any role to play that seeps through that website that makes me so sad for the kids involved. There are ways of instilling discipline onto your kids -- loving them and respecting them -- that don't have anything to do with what the linked site is talking about.
Who knows how their family actually works in practice, of course, and maybe it's really a wonderful and loving home. But the fact that the Mom feels the need to write a long screed on the internet reassuring herself about the godly basis for her strict discipline makes me more than a little nervous.
143: Yeah, I read more of those articles at the link and got the same sort of queasy feeling you're probably referring to (especially in the "obedience" section in the second article). They seem to be bringing up their kids to believe obedience is a good in itself -- which would be something that would conflict with my values.
On the other hand, secular culture often holds up following random personal desires as a good in itself, with an added romantic attraction when it leads to disobedience to others. That can be just as bad in certain ways.
It's the culture war!
Well, for the record, the parenting approach my sister takes (and I follow, 'cause it seems good and because I would generally follow a parent's lead in childraising) is very nearly the opposite of the biblical parenting described there.
Did you notice that the author (who isn't the blogwriter, I don't think, but a third party) said that she would have compromised with the toddler over fod if it weren't for her husband's strictness?
141:See the word "sample". The comment is a link to a series, not a complete strategy.
144.2:"Do what you will is the whole of the Law."
Or have I misread my Kant?
I want to bring them up as atheist pro-abortion devil-worshippers who honor, respect, and love their parents! WHERE IS MY SUPPORT GROUP?
Right here. That's the way my kids turned out. They mostly skipped the whole obnoxious adolescent thing. I figured we'd done it reasonably well when we got a call late one evening saying they'd had too much to drink to drive home and they were going to sleep over at the party place. They were about 19 and 17 at the time.
Obligatory biblical parenting link.
I know they are hard to top
/snicker
Also, seriously, that's some weak Photoshop right there. The problem is, suing their asses into the ground can be played as whiny liberals using the courts to win the fights they couldn't, again, and mocking it turns it into something to laugh at but not do anything about. It's lose-lose. They either make objectors look like spoil-sports or affirm taht the whole news business is one big chuckle-fest unworthy of being taken seriously.
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This right here is the funniest damn men's couture I have ever seen. Look at the models' faces!
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They either make objectors look like spoil-sports or affirm taht the whole news business is one big chuckle-fest unworthy of being taken seriously.
This seems to be the perspective of the average citizen already.
153: Damn. The one with the giant pink horns? Is that supposed to fit into the Renaissance Fayre theme, too?
Most of them, unfortunately, look like that Peter Pan dude's Little Lord Fauntleroy collection.
That's one big joke, right? There's no expectation at all that those clothes will ever be worn.
The models all have that expression that says "yes, God, yes, I know, but at the end of this someone's going to write me a fat check."
That's one big joke, right?
I have no idea! Theatrical costumers don't usually do couture shows. Most couture doesn't get purchased, for that matter, although I understand that at least a few items from most collections will get made up to order. The couture shows are massive money-sinks for the big brands and serve as a kind of advertising and branding; they have the secondary purpose of creating a vision for fashion's future, etc. I haven't heard of this brand before, so I don't know what their story is.
OK, obviously I'm an idiot, but I didn't know any of that. So the big fashion shows with the models and the flashing lights and Hansel are all there to show off clothes that literally no one ever wears ever? Amazing.
Most couture doesn't get purchased, for that matter
Right. Doesn't French Vogue (or american Vogue -- I haven't looked at either for a while) advertise fashion that it's obvious no one will wear? Bizarro-land stuff.
The couture shows are massive money-sinks for the big brands and serve as a kind of advertising and branding
I don't understand this. Outlandish costumes by whomever serve as branding for what: less outlandish lines by those designers? Forgive me my naivete here.
I think those sorts of shows end up having a small but discernible effect on general-wear clothing. Like, there was that "Edwardian" trend a few years ago and all the shows looked like goofy SCA crap, but, lo and behold, I ended up buying a close-fitting puffy-shouldered short-waisted little blazer like everyone else. I'm not saying we'll all be wearing 16th-century pantaloons and corsets, but some of that might creep into the shapes of our clothes if the virus spreads.
Some of the runway shows feature clothes that'll end up in stores! That's usually more the prét-à-porter stuff, not the really really high-end couture stuff, like the Dior couture dresses you can see on the New York Mag site (soooo pretty). The thing about couture is that it's built to order: one woman, one dress. The designer might even rejigger the dress shown on the runway for the client, sending her sketch after sketch. I knew a guy who drew for one of these couture houses; even though he wound up creating half the dresses, his sketches always went to the client with the designer's signature at the bottom. Anyway, that sort of dress is for celebrities on red carpets and oil-sheikh's brides: easily upwards of $10,000 per, and just forget about the big frou-frou ones with lots of beading and embroidery.
Outlandish costumes by whomever serve as branding for what: less outlandish lines by those designers?
Well, yes. The biggest money-makers of all of course are perfumes, followed by makeup. If you keep the Chanel brand associated with high fashion, the most glorious and glamorous, then the attainable commodities carry with them a whiff of that world, and the consumers will be willing to pay, say, $60 for a bottle of Chanel No. 5, which cost them $.60 to manufacture. If you lose control of your brand (as Calvin Klein did, with its too-many franchises), people think it's no longer worth spending that additional $15-$20 on CK underwear; if you stop renewing the brand's image (as Givenchy did for a long time there), then you end up catering solely to old ladies, who have a tendency to die off, see. So the runway shows are a way to stay visible, stay relevant, and stay self-defined.
Also, the fashion journalists and the immediate circle of gossip and prattle can be really powerful. The shows are part of the necessary routine.
Sure, I understand the made-to-order, red carpet dresses and such, as well as what JM described as "the secondary purpose of creating a vision for fashion's future." I'm still puzzled about the really outlandish stuff, not just beading and embroidery, but weird sci-fi looking things, pink fronds wafting up from the neckline to frame the head, say.
Suffice it to say that I've taken such things to be part of a performance, not just on the runway, but as salaciously depicted in the pages of glossy mags. Theater, costume design. Yes. Not clothing. Not something anyone wears except in ...
Ah ... and I begin to answer my own question.
Sorry, I sound like I'm talking past you, Jackmormon, as though you're not in the room. I didn't preview.
Talking past people is perfectly OK, Parsey. If it isn't, I'm in deep trouble.
Cool. The business model seems bizarre, though -- tons of work for one custom made $20,000 dress and some nebulous brand boosting. But I guess it's that you can price your mass market stuff at a big price increase if everyone knows you're also designing for the $10,000/dress market?
A lot of the brands have shut down their couture businesses. There aren't many left, and I've lost track of which ones count as the real deal these days. Most of what you see on the runway is prét-à-porter. Actually, most of the brands are owned and managed by the LVGM group, if I'm remembering the acronym correctly. Putting together a runway show is pretty much mandatory to being considered important and relevant and, well, financially solvent. A lot of crappy brands show on runways too, even though the professional buyers do their serious shopping in more private venues.
Parsimon, I like the far-out science-fiction stuff! It at least advertises the fact that its pretenses are to art, not clothing.
I guess I never thought of JM as our couture expert before.
Ack. I read as far as the Christian parenting link, and then I had too much of a backlog of thinks to hold back.
These thinks have been occupying my head.
1. How can you say that Altmeyer isn't designing a political test when the quality he is measuring is "right wing authoritarianism"
2. I didn't have to get too far into the Christian parenting link before I felt kinship. Look, you need to reason with your children to teach them about the process of reasoning, but if the adults don't control the household, you will never fucking sleep. When you reason with your children, you are doing it to teach them about reasoning, not because they are actually good reasoners or really deserve a say in the way the house is managed. Children's autonomy is entirely a student council affair, a pretend government.
That said. Moll-E is going to bed, so I need to devote my attention to Jo-E.
But I guess it's that you can price your mass market stuff at a big price increase if everyone knows you're also designing for the $10,000/dress market?
Think about those D&G t-shirts, which retail at about $50 and are virtually identical to Hanes. Or those craptacular nylon or PVC Prada bags that were everywhere for awhile, which were so much like the cheap knock-offs made in China that I can't help thinking that similarity started the whole counterfeit handbag trend.
The metaphysical prestige means big business, which is why the companies are getting government involved in cracking down on counterfeits. Magasines publish articles about "how to tell the real thing": training consumers to value the quality of a bag's lining or whatever for that additional genuine price tag. My honey's mother is a buyer for a big fancy retailer, and one day the president of the Christian Louboutin company tried to intimidate her into protecting his brand by only stocking HIS red-soled shoes. The red soles, I have become aware through myriad fashion spreads and celebrity photos and whatnot, are a signature for Louboutin. Is it a trademark protected by law? My honey's mother didn't seem to think so.
I guess I never thought of JM as our couture expert before.
Oh, I like clothes, I just prefer to get them at the Goodwill. My ex used to work for one of the houses and knew a whole bunch of people in that world.
Is it a trademark protected by law? My honey's mother didn't seem to think so.
I'd be very surprised if it wasn't. Maybe the particular shade? I did some (academic) work on some intellectual property cases that involved the trademarking of particular colors and their placement and the corps usually win.
Parsimon, I like the far-out science-fiction stuff! It at least advertises the fact that its pretenses are to art, not clothing.
Exactly: I like seeing it too. Beautiful (sometimes). Though it does make me laugh to the extent that anybody pretends that it's clothing.
There is a strong disjoint, though, between real people wearing clothes and the body and its garb as a work of art. And it's problematic. Obviously. Er, goes without saying, even.
Children's autonomy is entirely a student council affair, a pretend government.
As a parent (fascist) I totally agree. The problem we're facing is where does that stop.
Magasines
Take the foreigner lady in for interrogation.
There is a trend (God help me, I probably read it in the NYT) of the super-wealthies painting their Louboutin soles black to avoid the tacky advertisement aspect.
Ha! Here is Martha Stewart's servant painting her soles black, while here is some Yahoo asking how to paint her black rubber soles red.
Well, that's a second way to lose those walking blues.
And this kind of shit is tacky, Steve Madden. Let Payless do knockoffs. Have some fucking pride.
Maybe the particular shade?
I don't really know what the deal was. The way she told the story, M. Louboutin or whoever pulled a shoe that happened to have red soles out onto his desk and said something like, Madame, one of my people bought this in your store! And she said, listen, young man, I am too old to be intimidated by the likes of you. What are you going to do about it? And that was all she told me. I've sort of wondered whether there was going to be any follow-up action on Louboutin's part.
Um. I had no idea what you were talking about.
It seems that SM has copped the red sole on occasion, and the above Louboutin knockoff is no longer offered at their website. Another of their shoes seems to be called "Sumee," which sounds suspicious. Maybe there's some kind of annoying competition going on? A company called Oh Deer apparently also does a red sole.
I just don't see what any self-respecting person is doing buying $200 knockoffs that scream "Hi! I'm a Louboutin! Really!" You know people ask you about your damn shoes if you're wearing something that looks designer. Are you really going to pass them off as CLs? And if you do, is that good in any way for the SM brand? If I were to buy a knockoff designer shoe, I'd buy an actually cheap knockoff. (As it is, I buy my designer shoes at vintage shops and then never wear them because I'm not cool enough.)
184 to....?
Actually, you're saying you have no idea what people are talking about a lot lately. But there's no shame in being out of step with the mainstream.
175-- hey, something I kinda know a little about. Actually fashion patterns are a bizarre exception to copyright (not trademark) law -- there's an opinion by Learned Hand, the title of which I can't recall, that basically holds that b/c fashion is girly and frivolous, it doesn't desrve copyright protection. The same reasoning has been largely adopted elsewhere. The brands are protected under trademark law (no knock off prada) but designs very generally aren't. Of course there's no real reason why you should be able to have copyright in a crappy painting but not in a high value fashion design..
Note that this legal rule is pretty much based on pure sexism. Note also that the Learned Hand.is what hardcore male readers of Nerve.com, epecially lawyers, use every night to put themselves to sleep.
I just don't see what any self-respecting person is doing buying $200 knockoffs that scream "Hi! I'm a Louboutin! Really!"
I dunno, my honey's mother is terrifyingly stylish. Maybe she stocked the other, lesser red-soled shoes for the hoi polloi, or maybe this Louboutin guy and his silly color schemas don't rank with her.
184 to 179-182.
you're saying you have no idea what people are talking about a lot lately
Have I? A fit of honesty. I do hope that lack of familiarity with designer shoe trends doesn't constitute being out of step with the mainstream. Though.
187: Wow, that's interesting, RH. The case I was looking at was not a fashion case, and the corporation won. I had no idea fashion design wasn't protected at all. It explains a lot of those weird singularity-moments when all women's clothing stores seem to be selling exactly the same ugly dress at exactly the same time.
I saw a woman on the train last weekend whose dress just knocked me out, and in that particular way in which I didn't know whether to be grateful to humanity that it had produced such a thing or whether to covet it mercilessly and beat her up if I had to to find out where she got it. My better angel won.
I've heard that the bigger brands are lobbying for a revision of that law now that companies like H&M can have a million cheap copies in stores a month after the orginal version walked down a runway. H&M and TopShop and Forever 21 are reaping the profits from the fashion-luxury oversaturation. LHVM (or whatever it is) spent good money marketing the brains out of an entire generation or two! and it's totally not fair!
LVMH. I used to work in that building.
(Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, for some reason)
191 -- Yes, that's right. If I wasn't in the middle of something right now, I'd look it up, but there's something like the high end fashion brand act that's going through Congress. I don't know what the chances are for passage, though.
Without giving away to much, the opposing lawyer in a case I spent a lot of time on, who I had an unusually nasty relationship with, spent most of his career working for LVMH trying to shut down small immigrant businesses in LA's fashion district. I always thought that was particularly evil work, even though you get used to decent people working on the side of evil in the law world.
194 - It's quite funny shopping in Santee Alley when the law enforcement people come through. I swear, either they've got some arrangement to alert the shops ahead of time, or there's an incredibly efficient silent alarm system. Suddenly, for seemingly no reason, all the shops start closing up boxes and shutting down displays, all at once, and you're looking around, wondering wha--? And sure enough, a minute later, the cops.
Aside from the Louboutin knockoff issue, we were re-watching Amadeus a couple of weeks ago and Mozart's first appearance as an adult features these AWESOME AWESOME classic 18th c black, buckled men's shoes with bright red soles and stacked heels. So covetable.
Back in the day, until like, oh, the 1970s, it made some sense not to enforce copyright on fashion ideas since neither clothes nor clothes consumers travelled as much and most people made their own clothes. Now it really is giant multinationals battling it out, just like in most other industries.
There was a hullabaloo on the home-sewing blogs a while back about how some Project Runway (or some such show) contestant submitted as her final project a dress that all of the experienced sewers recognised immediately as the famous Butterwick pattern [number]. Ha ha! they all triumphed. So incomprehensibly stupid of her!
What cracked me up about the whole thing was how far apart the worlds of high fashion and home sewing really have become. None of the fashion people I knew sewed. Not at all. My ex hated sewing, which wasn't even the main reason he'd gotten out of the business. One of his friends was started up an independant fashion line and showed us the samples he'd ordered put together to impress the financiers. "The clothes are kinda awful," I told my ex afterwards. "That doesn't matter," he replied. It was all business.
Anyway, enough from me tonight: to bed.
Totally, I've seen the same thing. It's amazing, though, since the LAPD devotes a ridiculous amount of resources to shutting down all IP violations and yet we have pirate alley flourishing a mile from their HQs. Fortunately, it's OK that they spend time on those worthless assignments because it's not like there's a massive cop shortage or any actual crime in Los Angeles to try and prevent.
You know what I always coveted from that movie? The chestnuts in brandied sugar, nipples of Venus or whatever it was called. What is that? It sounds so delicious.
Actually fashion patterns are a bizarre exception to copyright (not trademark) law
I thought designs of "useful articles" in general weren't subject to copyright, with a handful of statutory exceptions. (One of the weird things rolled into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was an exception granting copyright to designs of boat hulls.)
Re: Capezzoli di Venere:
http://cardamomaddict.blogspot.com/2005/10/while-im-still-thinking-of-it.html
I tried to get a screen shot of the shoes, too, but they don't show up very well in the low-res videos on YouTube.
200 -- Yeah, that's the basic distinction, but the reasons why a specially-designed fashion pattern shouldn't be subject to copyright whereas an architectural design or the script for a crappy movie should be are largely arbitrary, and IMO based essentially on sexism.
On the amadeus shoes -- I don't remember them, but the thought of aping any men's fashion from the pre-1930 era fills me with chills.
I would covet them for my own--girlish--fashions.
Les talons rouges! Valmont wears them in the Frears Dangerous Liaisons, too.
Yeah, that's the basic distinction, but the reasons why a specially-designed fashion pattern shouldn't be subject to copyright whereas an architectural design or the script for a crappy movie should be are largely arbitrary, and IMO based essentially on sexism.
Probably you are right about the sexism. But I can't help but think that more things should be feminized as "merely useful," which is to say, demoted from the, let's say masculine and rather dubious heights of artistic genius and originality, than the other way around. There are too many copyright restrictions as it is, and though it's often presented to us in terms of protecting artistic innovation and so on, it too often ends up being about profits for corporations. Typeface design is a case in point. Font designers argue that they are original artists and that their work should be copyright-protected (which it isn't: a font file for a computer can be protected, but not the actual font design). But if font styles were copyrighted, probably we would have to pay royalties to Adobe or something every time we used our computers.
Font designers argue that they are original artists and that their work should be copyright-protected
Thus committing an absurd non-sequitur. I'm in favor of spreading the notion of "art" and "artist" pretty broadly—and of obliterating the art/craft and art/design distinctions—precisely to abolish the notion that they're anything particularly special. (Jed Perl had an essay in the 6/25 New Republic claiming that Koons produces design, not art, and proffering a ridiculous criterion for the difference; I don't see why that is the right tack to take in arguing that his objects aren't worth the time of day.)
206 -- I agree that copyright law currently goes way, way too far and as a good internet IP skeptic I agree that, given current copyright madness it shouldn't be extended to fashion design. Actually, the fashion industry is a damn good example of a creative industry that has done just fine w/out an overly restrictive IP regime. But in the current climate I do the fashion companies and their designers (who based 100% on stereotypes I've taken from movies I assume are swishy gay men and bitchy, hardened chain smoking fifty year old women ) are getting screwed out of some sweet, sweet government-sponsored monopoly profits.
For anybody interested in seeing what goes on behind the scene in a fashion house, BBC4 did a great documentary series on Chanel a year or so back, which you should keep an eye out for. It looked like basically the fortunes of an entire multinational fashion industry rested on the shoulders of several dozen Parisian old ladies.
I'd say that the problem with copyrighting fashion designs is in the space between not copyrightable because it's functional, and not enforceable because the copy is inexact. Obviously it would be crazy to let someone coyright a shape of dress generally; the shape is mostly a functional thing. (And the red soles is psycho. If it were a trademark, maybe, but there were shoes with red soles before any particular designer. The idea of "making the soles red" isn't intellectual property any more than making jeans blue, just because the shoes happen to be expensive.)
So you'd have to be talking about exact, stitch for stitch, duplicates of clothes. And there's no reason to do that -- copying the general idea is quite close enough. Think of it in painting -- if you look at a Hudson River School painting, like it, and ask your competent but uninspired artist buddy to paint you one just like that (you know, not copying exactly, but just that kind of painting) so you can hang it over your couch, she's going to come up with something that is obviously unoriginal and derivative if you know her model, but isn't a copyright violation. But that's exactly the situation of designer knockoffs -- they don't usually match button for button, stripe for stripe, they're just close enought that they're clearly the same kind of idea.
To be workable at all in the visual arts, copyright has to apply to exact copies, or you end up with a world where someone owns "Misty views of a river from a wooded hillside" or "Nipped waist Edwardian jackets". Both of those are ridiculous and intolerable, but anything less wouldn't do the fashion designers any good.
210 is a bitter reminder of how much the blog suffers from LB's getting a real job. I'm thinking about ginning up some kind of scandal that will force her back into the private sector.
Alternatively, maybe once she qualifies for civil service protection we'll see a little more of her.
Copyright in architecture is interesting, because it functions on two levels (this is purely a workaday explanation - I've no idea what the actual law says, or how it's really applied) - famous architecture and regular architecture. Gehry I'm sure has some sort of copyright on his buildings, and would presumably sue someone who tried to duplicate Bilbao (how anyone could do so is another matter; why yet a third). The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation/Taliesin Fellows would most certainly sue anyone who got caught reusing a FLW design (which would be comparatively easy to do). I don't know how such suits would work in practice, per LB's 210, but I'm quite certain they would be brought.
For us regular architects, we put copyrights on our drawings out of some vague hope that they will provide us with a little more leverage in a dispute with an owner and/or contractor who want to build our design after cutting us out of the job. There would also presumably be some value in going after an ex-employee who wants to use, say, a particular floorplan for repetitive housing.
It looked like basically the fortunes of an entire multinational fashion industry rested on the shoulders of several dozen Parisian old ladies.
Including Ogged's mom! This explains a lot of the shoe posts.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation/Taliesin Fellows would most certainly sue anyone who got caught reusing a FLW design (which would be comparatively easy to do).
My understanding (which could well be wrong, this isn't my area of copyright law) is that they couldn't: architectural designs have only been subject to copyright since 1990, and there was no retroactivity. (This is distinct from architectural plans/drawings, which were always subject to copyright as drawings.)
architectural designs have only been subject to copyright since 1990, and there was no retroactivity.
Huh.
Perhaps their angle, then, is preventing anyone from using an FLW design and calling it such, which would be unauthorized use of his name and likeness, or some such.
