Category Archives: Popular Culture

Popular Culture, Social Commentary

What Movie?

28 Comments

…makes you laugh the hardest?

I don’t know how to answer that question, because I think it’s a time-dependent variable. I know what movies made me laugh hard in the past, though I couldn’t quantify it, but I’m not sure I’d find them as funny today, either because they would have lost something in rewatching, or because I’ve grown, or at least changed, over time, and have a different sense of humor. Obviously, something you might have found hilarious as a child might leave you cold today. On the other hand, you might have seen something as a child that your parents laughed at uproariously, but that you didn’t get. I think that a lot of young people miss a lot of humor in The Simpsons because they aren’t familiar with the cultural referents.

But just off the top of my head, I recall Blazing Saddles, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Dr. Strangelove, The Wrong Box and other Peter Sellers movies as side splitters at the time. Also Woody Allen and Steve Martin.

Mathematics, Philosophy, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Logical Fallacy

In a review of a movie trailer (and a forties movie reviewer) by Lileks:

Let me just go on record as believing that it is not a good or necessary thing to make comedic action movies about 12-year-old girls who shoot people in the head. Because this is what I think of when I read a quote about the loss of dignity and importance – the way a culture, not individuals, loses its sense of dignity and importance by finding opportunities to leach the innocence from anything previously regarded as sacrosanct.

The comments on the HotAir thread are full of the usual scoff-talk – why, comics were once considered corrupting to children! Elvis was forbidden to be seen from the waist down! Piano legs were covered by Victorians! Christians chopped peeners off Roman statues! and so on. If there was once a standard now seen as silly and puritanical, it must mean our current standards are the same.

This is the same fallacy as that engaged by someone who, in response to a critique of his loony ideas cries, “They laughed at Einstein, too!” To which the rational rejoinder is, “They also laughed at Soupy Sales.” It’s an unjustified extrapolation, and a more robust defense is required.

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Taking The Modern Age

31 Comments

…for granted.

The engineers, the people who actually make this stuff work (not to denigrate the financiers, marketers, etc. whose efforts are also necessary to fund the engineers) are underappreciated in society. As is technology in general. As he points out, people are complaining about having twenty-minute delays on a trip that would have taken their ancestors (and not distant ancestors — great-great-grandparents) months.