My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

So the Modesty Survey is starting to make its way around the internet, and for me this is a totally alien subculture. I mean, I was raised Catholic, but being raised Catholic in Toronto is not exactly the strictest form of Christian upbringing, to say the least; the only thing you’re guaranteed to have is a relatively worldly guilt complex and an appreciation of fish on Fridays. Compared to that, this is… really, really weird.

58 percent of them (and bear in mind the “Christian boys” range from 16 to 35, which is pushing it at the upper end, but whatevs) say that a skirt that falls above the knee is immodest! “That’s getting into dangerous territory, especially when they sit down, since it slides up even further.” DANGEROUS TERRITORY! Needless to say, 93 percent have a problem with miniskirts. 84 percent say that a bikini is immodest. “If you understood the purpose of publications like the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue…”1 62 percent aren’t even satisfied if girls wear a tankini instead; 55 percent can’t even handle a one-piece halter-top suit. A thirteen-year-old writes: “They tend to show cleavage and your back is too much of a distraction.”2

66 percent say that a shirt with a “lacy, lingerie look” is immodest. 62 percent worry about girls who wear a transparent shirt over a tank top. 76 percent say that “even an inch” of skin between pants and bottom of shirt is a “stumbling block.” 65 percent have a problem with girls who have to adjust a bra strap in public. 56 percent have a problem with halter-top bras, which is probably the same people who complained about halter-top swimsuits. “This sounds stupid, but I’ll be honest: The strings invite a tug.” You heard that guy, ladies! You shouldn’t wear a halter-top lest he be tempted to assault you!3

But hey, it’s not just clothes the Christian boys are concerned with. 75 percent say that “the way a girl walks” can be a stumbling block. 57 percent are worried about when girls stretch their arms because their chests stick out. 63 percent get tense when a girl bends over and exposes her lower back. 61 percent feel sinful when a girl bends over with her ass towards them, and 76 percent can’t handle breasts bobbling up and down when a girl walks or runs.

Really, I know one should feel contempt for the overt misogyny on display here, but really I can’t be bothered to feel anything other than pity. These “Christian boys”4 are just so goddamn pathetic, a scream in the night of “I am powerless over my dick”:

Sisters in Christ, you really have no concept of the struggles that guys face on a daily basis. Please, please, please take a higher standard in the ways you dress. True, we men are responsible for our thoughts and actions before the Lord, but it is such a blessing when we know that we can spend time with our sisters in Christ, enjoying their fellowship without having to constantly be on guard against ungodly thoughts brought about by the inappropriate ways they sometimes dress.

This sentiment is of course the prevailing one. Sometimes it gets justified in weird ways.

A girl has been given something for which she is responsible. That gift is a beautiful body and mystique which has power over a man, and so in being responsible with that gift, a girl must give thought to men. This is just like how men have been given bodies with a different power – physical strength. A man is responsible for that strength and must not abuse it or be careless with it – be that in the context of other men and children, or with women.

“See, men are big and strong, and we shouldn’t hit people. And women aren’t big and strong, but they are pretty, so they shouldn’t hit people metaphorically with their choice of clothing.”

In fairness, when asked what their responsibility is, most of the Christian boys say straight up that it’s first and foremost their job to treat women respectfully and not lust in their hearts and do all the things they believe God wants them to do. But that adult sentiment is choked off when you read their scorn for women who “flaunt their bodies”:

Yes, you can turn me on, but don’t expect me to respect you. Yes, I might find you attractive on the outside, but that won’t make me think of you as attractive on the inside. Sure you might get my attention, but it will be negative attention.

Given that we’ve established that a simple bikini or an inch of skin between shirt and pant gets “negative attention,” this guy needs his head adjusted. What really gets to me is that these dipshits put everything in their own context. A girl wearing revealing clothing doesn’t get respect because of how she makes the guy feel. These guys keep talking about how they want girls of substance and then demand that “substance” cannot wear sexy clothes; they complain about how hard it is for them not to sin and then request that girls self-police their clothing and behaviour as if the two required equivalent effort.

It’s just sad.

1. Wait, do people actually still whack it to the Swimsuit Issue? I mean, seriously, porn is so easy to get now. What’s the point of the Swimsuit Issue? Or maybe we’re dealing with people here for whom the Swimsuit Issue is as close as they ever get to porn? Not that they don’t have access to porn, but that the Swimsuit Issue is the most they can conceive of porn actually being? Like, they look at the cover of a Vivid Video flick and think “I bet that sinful video has simply TONS of girls in swimsuits lounging around.” [↩]
2. I suppose we should applaud that thirteen-year-old for being able to appreciate the beauty of a woman’s back at such a young age. When I was thirteen, I think I would have preferred it if girls were made entirely of tits. Like, foot-to-head. All tits. [↩]
3. TUG TUG TUG! [↩]
4. Up to age 35! Forever young! [↩]

I’ve read a lot of reviews of Inception (including the one here) and a lot of thoughts on Inception (including the one here just a little bit ago, which is quite a nice theory. Me, I tend to go for the straightforward ambiguity of “either the ending is entirely real, or else everything up to the ending is real and it’s only the last few minutes that are a dream”. But I do like the idea that Matthew Johnson put forward…and I like that the movie is more ambiguous than the heist flick it seems to be on the surface.)

But the most common negative I hear about the movie is summed up by one of the comments in Matthew Johnson’s post (thank you, Snap Wilson, for inspiring this post, by the way): “Yes, I suppose it’s thoroughly reasonable that a drab, uninteresting person would dream about other drab, uninteresting people taking place in drab, uninteresting environments (or risible Modern Warfare 2 levels, apparently). That doesn’t make it good storytelling. Dreams certainly are capable of being alternately exciting, wondrous, imaginative or terrifying things. Inception was too serious for that, and thus we’re stuck with sterile concrete, glass and steel cityscapes where everyone wears a suit. The dreams of an accountant.”

This is the big complaint most of the people who disliked Inception had, that the dreams didn’t feel like dreams. (In fairness to Wilson, he said he liked the film despite that.) But I think those people are…not missing the point, because I think that’s kind of mean. Perhaps they’re approaching it from the wrong angle, or approaching it without key knowledge. Nolan isn’t making a film about dreams. Nolan is making a film about lucid dreams.

Lucid dreaming is the phenomenon of experiencing a dream with the knowledge that you are experiencing a dream, and using that knowledge to “steer” the dream and control its contents. The result is something like an astonishingly vivid narrative, like living out a movie. (Yes, the parallels are obvious. Nolan is clearly fascinated with the subject; after all, he apparently worked on the screenplay to Inception for something like a decade. You don’t do that with something you’re not obsessed with.)

Lucid dreams feel very different from normal dreams; there’s less of the disconnected dream-logic, the bizarre and senseless structure that comes from synapses firing randomly. You feel like you’re in a real place, talking to real people. There’s a narrative to it…and it’s one you can control. Does this begin to sound familiar? Lucid dreamers even develop strategies to determine whether or not they’re dreaming, although not the same ones as in the movie. (They do things like look at a digital clock, look away, then quickly look back again. In a dream, the numbers don’t stay the same.)

That was where Nolan’s idea for Inception began. The film takes that initial, real-world idea of lucid dreaming, and asks, “What might happen if lucid dreamers could share their dreams?” And then takes it to the next step, “If a lucid dreamer controlled the dreams of a normal dreamer, how would they know it wasn’t their idea?” And then inserts gangsters, corporate espionage, and guys with machine guns and grenade launchers, which is never a bad direction to take a film. The people who point out that Inception doesn’t replicate a normal dream are right…but then again, it’s not trying to.

(Spoilers follow, I guess)

I finally got a chance to see Inception a couple of days ago and while I enjoyed it, there were a few things that puzzled me. Not that the movie was confusing — honestly, one of its bigger flaws was that it often seemed to feel the need to spell things out for the slower kids — but for a generally well-written movie it had some odd flaws. Or were they flaws? Well, probably, but just for fun let’s use the No-Prize method and see if we can’t find in them hints of a deeper, better story underneath the obvious one.

See, a lot of people think that the ending means the whole movie was a dream, but that’s not likely. To begin with, “it was all a dream” is no less of a cop-out just because your movie is about dreams, and if there’s room for multiple interpretations you might as well pick the one that doesn’t suck. More importantly, though, the “real world” sequences include scenes that Cobb, the Leonardo DiCaprio character, isn’t in. When was the last time you had a dream you weren’t in?

Interestingly, the scenes without him all feature Ellen Page, whose character is oddly underdeveloped and inconsistent considering how prominent she is. She’s set up heavily (Cobb remarks on how she’s a natural at manipulating dreams), has a heavily symbolic name (Ariadne) and gets a number of scenes without payoffs (for example the scene where she makes her totem, the chess piece.) But in the actual action of the movie she’s not very important, being mostly a vehicle for exposition — the “new guy” that other characters can explain things to, as well as the person who ferrets out Cobb’s backstory. There’s nothing wrong with that, except that there’s another character who plays a similar role — Saito, the one played by Ken Watanabe — and at first glance, at least, the movie would be stronger if he had the role to himself: he has an emotional investment in learning the rules of the game and understanding the plan (since he wants it to succeed) and there’s tension added if he learns about Cobb’s issues with his wife (since he has the power to reunite Cobb with his children), while Ariadne is both uninvested and undermotivated. In fact, her motivation changes several times throughout the movie: at first it’s just professional interest, then a desire to protect the other team members, and then finally (for no clear reason) she’s determined to complete the mission even at the risk of her and Cobb’s lives.

So here’s my attempt at a No-Prize: none of these things are mistakes. The whole movie that we see is a dream, but Cobb isn’t the only real person in it: Ariadne is there too (and maybe Joseph Gordon-Levitt, what the hell.) She has inserted herself into Cobb’s dream because he is still stuck in limbo from his experience with his wife — when he experienced her “dying” that was her waking up, but he’s still asleep. The mission is actually to rescue him; like the fake mission explained to Cillian Murphy in the hotel room, it’s a fiction designed to make him rescue himself. That’s why she plays coy at first — the trick of getting the dreamer to do the work for you — then draws out his emotional issues, and in the end is determined to complete the mission at all cost. It also explains her name: Ariadne, after all, was the one who got Theseus out of the labyrinth.

But why was she so determined? Because Cobb has been dreaming longer than he realizes — ten years or more — which explains another motif with no apparent payoff, the hiding of his children’s faces throughout the movie. Ariadne is his daughter.

FLAPJACKS: Hey, you remember how two days ago you were all “oh I want to see new stuff” and then you pretended to be, like, all cool about Thor even though you’re a giant nerd?
ME: I am a nerd, but I’ve never been one of those nerds with a giant boner for Thor. Not least because at this point it is canon that Superman can beat him. Thor’s okay. He’s just not that cool to me and never has been. Jack Kirby, Walt Simonson, I don’t care – it’s all badly mangled medieval English and shouting to me.
FLAPJACKS: So you won’t go see it?
ME: Sure I’ll go see it. I’m just not waiting with aforementioned giant nerd-boner.
FLAPJACKS: Ah, but the trailer is online! I bet you get a giant nerd boner.
ME: We should probably stop talking about giant nerd boners.

ME: Okay, so to guard the hammer in the middle of the wide, flat desert which nobody can lift, they have set up multiple storeys of brightly lit scaffolding. This serves the double purpose of not only being basically useless but also actively working against the whole “secret agents” bit of S.H.I.E.L.D.
FLAPJACKS: But it looks awesome!
ME: And then Thor beats up a bunch of security guards. Why is this impressive? He is Thor. He can, like, mash their faces by shrugging.
FLAPJACKS: But it looks awesome!
ME: And then he gets captured anyway. Way to go, Thor!
FLAPJACKS: He probably held back because he is a noble god and so forth.
ME: A building explodes! That will teach that building to mess with Thor.
FLAPJACKS: He probably hit it so hard all the bricks spontaneously combusted. That is what happened, I bet.
ME: And the big reveal is… he’s Thor! Well, it’s a trailer, I guess.
FLAPJACKS: Chris Hemsworth looks so much like Thor.
ME: If you mean that he is a big guy with long blond hair, then yes.
FLAPJACKS: Why do you gotta be like that?
ME: Okay, I’m pretty impressed with Asgard. It totally looks like Minas Tirith, but metal-plated. That is a compliment. There’s actually a lot of the original Kirby design in this.
FLAPJACKS: Odin speaks! About honor!
ME: Isn’t it one of the things about Thor comics that Odin is, generally speaking, a giant dickhead? Like, Thor comes home and he’s all “father I have slain the dreaded Ogre of Laffafafhafannahaf and saved the villagers” and Odin would be like “yes, that’s very nice, Thor, but what did you learn about yourself in the process?”
FLAPJACKS: So you’re saying Odin is a hippie?
ME: Not exactly.
FLAPJACKS: Volstagg! Fandral! Sif! Hogun!
ME: What’s the over/under on the number of lines they get in this movie, do you think? I’m thinking four for Hogun, nine for Fandral, thirteen for Volstagg and twenty for Sif.
FLAPJACKS: You don’t know! They could be really important!
ME: Based on what we’ve seen so far and the fact that Odin is lecturing Thor right now, I bet the storyline is something like “Odin condemns Thor to go be a human on Earth until he learns to be a proper hero and crap.” Sif and the Warriors Three do not feature heavily in that sort of storyline. I bet they show up right at the beginning, then sit around looking increasingly worried while Loki does Bad Things, and then they get a bit of fight sequence towards the end.
FLAPJACKS: A HA but why are they in the trailer then?
ME: Where did this air? Comicon. This is the movie studio equivalent of foreplay.
FLAPJACKS: That mental image is worse than the one for “giant nerd boner.”
ME: Also, Hogun appears to be holding a colander on the end of a stick.
FLAPJACKS: Maybe he likes pasta.
ME: Ahhhh, there’s the Odin I’m used to. “Thor, you’re an asshole.”
FLAPJACKS: Loki! He’s being sneaky!
ME: There is nothing there that is sneaky.
FLAPJACKS: Black Heimdall!
ME: I can hear the nerds in the far distance saying “I’m not racist, but this godly being should be white, okay?”
FLAPJACKS: …okay, you were right about the Thor being exiled thing.
ME: It’s the most obvious storyline if you want to connect him to Marvel Earth, frankly. I’m not complaining. The story that makes sense is never a bad pick. Unless you’re David Lynch.
FLAPJACKS: What would David Lynch’s Thor be like?
ME: It would feature a meteorologist who dreams surreal dreams of being a Norse god in olden times, drinks beers at O’Denn’s Bar and Grill, and then inexplicably sprays lightning when he masturbates one morning. This would lead him on a vision-quest where he ends up being transformed into a 1967 Chevy El Camino.
FLAPJACKS: I like his delivery of his second line. I personally like it when Norse gods have English accents.
ME: You were expecting them to have Scandanavian accents of some kind? Come on, this is an American movie. English accents are code for “better than you.”
FLAPJACKS: They could sound like Stellan Skarsgard. He always sounds like a badass.
ME: That is true, but shut up I am looking at Natalie Portman because she is pretty.
FLAPJACKS: Magic is like science!
ME: Looks like Marvel is wussing out and going with the “they aren’t really gods, they’re like… aliens or something” deal that gets trotted out whenever they’re worried about pissing off whiny Christians. Right now the comics are in full-on “no, they’re gods” mode. Maybe this is gonna be the next big switcharound, like when the Spider-Man comics had him shooting organic webs from his wrists.
FLAPJACKS: And Thor can’t lift his hammer because he’s not worthy of the power of Thor!
ME: Which is also kind of predictable, but again, nothing wrong with it. Gives Kenneth Branagh an excuse to do a “this is what a hero REALLY is” plot. Thor will help old ladies cross the street and will build wheelchair ramps into buildings for the disabled and give kittens to small children.
FLAPJACKS: What if the children are allergic to cats?
ME: Then Thor will give them goldfish – oh, wait, seriously, are they having Thor do the “drop to your knees and go “NOOOOOOOOO”” bit? Really, Marvel? I mean… really?
FLAPJACKS: Shut up. It is dramatic because he cannot play with his hammer. Oh man I just thought of a dick joke.
ME: And another exploding building means that it’s montage time! Okay, so we’ve got Asgardians walking like they are Reservoir Dogs.
FLAPJACKS: An evil looking… monster thingy!
ME: Odin dies! Loki becomes the King of Asgard. Or whatever.
FLAPJACKS: Thor carries a small child to a pickup truck. I bet he learns to become a hero that way!
ME: Heimdall appears to be a vampire of some kind.
FLAPJACKS: Loki has his curvy horn helmet! He is so mad!
ME: An exploding car. There are a lot of explosions in this movie given that it’s about guys who fight with swords and hammers.
FLAPJACKS: Makeouts! The Warriors Three and Sif again – aw you’re probably right about them.
ME: Another exploding building. All of these explosions seem to be in the same town.
FLAPJACKS: I wouldn’t want to live in that town. Because of all of the explosions. “Hey, Bert, didja see Jerry? He was supposed to gimme a lift to the DMV.” “Yeah, I saw him, but then his car exploded.” “Aw, shucks. Now I’ll hafta -” and then he explodes.
ME: Thor and Loki fighting. I guess they’re actually saving the good stuff for theatres in this case.
FLAPJACKS: And title. That looks good.
ME: But wait, there is more – ahhh, the Destroyer armor. That is what was causing all those explosions.
FLAPJACKS: Well, it would do that.
ME: It would indeed.
FLAPJACKS: So are we going to go see it?
ME: Of course we will.
FLAPJACKS: So are you going to take back what you said and admit that Thor is the awesomest thing ever?
ME: Of course I won’t.
FLAPJACKS: How about we watch the trailer for Yogi Bear next?
ME: I may have to beat you with a cudgel.

Aw Shucks and All-Star Anya: cha cha. Anya’s makeup is horrendous. Kent started dancing this with some genuine Latin flavour and then suddenly it just all went away as he stopped dancing from his hips, which is disappointing because there have been many more cha chas on SYTCYD which have been far more complex than this one. He also really fucked up that last final big lift by not letting Anya down easily. Mia complains that Kent still has dorkface, to which Kent basically says “but I like having dorkface.”

Robert and All-Star Kathryn: contemporary. Nice little reversal by Stacey Tookey having the girl be the going-away soldier rather than the guy. Anyway, this was quite excellent, and really the biggest single justification for the All-Star concept is getting to see Kathryn dance basically every week, as she is probably the dancer most unfairly excluded from the finals in the show’s history and is awesome. Robert was good in his usual forgettable way. This was good. Really, I don’t have much else to say here.

Adechike and All-Star Courtney: jazz. This was great fun, not least because I can’t recall at present the last time a jazz routine was actually danced to jazz music on this show. Adechike outdanced his partner for what I think is the first time all season, continuing his general trend of steady improvement. Inventive choreo from Tasty, too.

Not Legacy and All-Star Comfort: hip-hop. So that’s two-for-two with Jose dancing hip-hop with Comfort and not doing it very well, which is doubly bad because Comfort, unsurprisingly, nailed it. Nigel explains that Jose hasn’t been in the group routines because Jose has injured his groin, which makes this approximately four billion injuries this season.

Lauren and All-Star Allison: Broadway. Oh, Tasty Oreo, why must your Broadway choreo be so boring? It’s like the moment somebody says “imagine this is on a stage in New York City” he turns into Dark Tasty. Anyway. Predictable, unremarkable choreography, danced very well, which was expected.

Billy and All-Star Ade: contemporary. Ade only did two big lifts in this routine. I believe that is a record low for him. Genuinely fantastic work from all concerned; Billy hits his high point with this. Stacey Tookey is having an excellent night, isn’t she? Nigel explains that not eliminating injured Billy last week was the right call. Ashley, sitting somewhere else, swears at him.

Aw Shucks and Not Legacy: Broadway. Kent’s dorkface was in full display here, which was really the only complaint one can make about his dancing. Jose was honestly quite good as well, not as good as Kent was, but of course this was quite in Kent’s wheelhouse and not in Jose’s. (Jose’s wheelhouse is basically nonexistent.) Jose genuinely is improving as a dancer all around; now he’s at the point where other dancers get eliminated from the top 20 in the first week. Spencer Liff’s Broadway is about ten thousand times better than Tasty’s.

Lauren and Adechike: foxtrot. Finally a foxtrot! And… not a very good one, to be honest. Lauren postroutine looks like she is going to collapse, and if Lauren has to leave the show because of an injury then I am just not gonna watch the rest of this season because whoever wins (IE, Kent) will have basically an asterisk over their victory forever, because they didn’t beat Alex, Ashley OR Lauren.

Billy and Robert: Bollywood. Boy I sure am glad Billy’s knee injury healed up totally after one week so he could dance this. It is like a miracle! (No, not really. He was limping afterwards.) The dance was good; I think Bollywood routines get overpraised because the judges don’t really know how to judge them, and this is no exception, but it was fun and there have been many worse Bollywood dances on the show.

Should go home: Jose and Robert.
Will go home: Jose and Adechike.

The format war officially ended two years ago. Blu-Ray is the new standard of the land, every Wal-Mart and Best Buy has a dedicated Blu-Ray section, and prices are down to the point where the average person can afford them. So the question then becomes…do we actually need to care?

No, I’m serious. Set aside the automatic “but it’s an upgrade!” reaction that comes second nature to geeks. (I’m not saying I don’t have it too. I have a Blu-Ray player, and I don’t even have a hi-def TV to watch the discs on. Long story.) I’m asking whether we actually need a new format, now or ever. Sure, the picture quality is better. Put two TVs side by side, one playing a DVD and the other playing a Blu-Ray DVD, and people will be able to tell which one is which. But it’s not the same as the difference between VHS and DVD. It’s not between “okay” and “amazing”, it’s between “amazing” and “near-perfect”.

Do we need “near-perfect”, though? Already, some films are having problems being converted to Blu-Ray because the format is so perfect that you can see imperfections in the film used to shoot the original master edition. The differences are so small as to be almost subliminal. DVD is immersive enough; Blu-Ray improves, but can you put a dollar amount on the exact improvement…and more importantly, is that dollar amount equal to the difference in price between DVD and Blu-Ray?

Perhaps I have a slightly different perspective on this than some fans, because I’m a Doctor Who fan. We get our series one story at a time, eight stories a year, and there are twenty-six years of stories to go through. It took them almost literally the entire life of the format to release all the existing episodes of the classic series on VHS, and by the time they put out the last one (“Invasion of the Dinosaurs”, if memory serves me right) they’d already started putting out the DVDs. Which means I’m very familiar…perhaps uncomfortably familiar…with buying the same thing twice.

As a result, I can’t help but think that Blu-Ray is mostly–not entirely, but mostly–a way to get you to buy the same thing three times. Let’s face it; at a certain point, even the best movie stops making money for the studio, because the market’s saturated. Everyone already has it. The only solution is to find a new way to repackage it, so you’ll buy it twice. And improvements in technology are a remarkably convenient way to do that. And, to get back to the question at the beginning, the question in the title…at what point does the improvement become incremental enough, insignificant enough, that it’s not worth buying into the new format? Is Blu-Ray that point?

Oh, I should have mentioned at the beginning, this is one of those columns where I don’t actually have an answer. (Except for myself, of course. I have one Blu-Ray disc, and I got it as a gift. The player was on sale for cheap. I won’t buy any DVD over ten bucks anymore…after all, I’ve got plenty to watch, and the prices always come down eventually. For me, market saturation’s a big saver!)

A lot of people have emailed me asking about Comicon and what I am most hyped about and usually my answer is “none of it.” (Well, other than TRON Legacy, but we already knew about that.) Most of what gets advertised at Comicon nowadays is adaptation piled on top of adaptation, and although I’ll doubtless go see the Avengers movie and probably enjoy it very much, seeing the actors all in a line doesn’t juice me like it does some people; I at least need a trailer, you know? And this goes for most things at Comicon. I’m looking forward to seeing The Walking Dead on AMC, but I’m not really deeply excited about it. New Rocketeer comics? Well that’s nice I guess. And so on and so forth.

This is an exception, precisely because it is new. God knows I’ve ripped on Zack Snyder before, but I’ve never really had a problem with his visual style of directing per se. (Sure, you can make fun of the stylized slo-mo Matrix-lite bits easily enough, but they’re an easy and predictable target, much like Brian de Palma’s endless tracking shots or Michael Bay’s absolutely everything he does.) My problem with Snyder’s movies has always been that he has a tendency to take an existing work and become worshipful towards it, turning 300 and Watchmen into adulations of the source material rather than good movies in their own right.

But this – this is his own thing. That alone holds a lot of promise for me. That it is his own thing that also has dragons, samurai, giant mecha robots with bunny faces, Nazis, mobsters, spaceships, and apparently everything else in the world that is violent makes it even more something that excites me. And that is all I want: something new.

I was at the bar with friends last week and discussion turned to the G20, mostly because I hadn’t seen most of them in a while and I wanted to tell them all my good G20 stories (IE, “the ones I won’t publish online because they were off the record”), and subsequently it turned into a discussion about protests. First of course there was the criticism of the protest movement that mostly echoed last Wednesday’s post, but then it turned to something that I think was more interesting, which is: is protest, as we currently understand it, outdated? The arguments in favour of that hypothesis seem fairly strong.

Let’s start off with a simple definition and say that protest movements exist to do two things: change the minds of the public on an issue, and empower individuals to work together to force elite decisionmaking in favour of the “protest” side of the issue. (Okay, also they exist for social reasons and there will always be those who are just there for an adrenalin rush. Let us assume that the primary reason for protests is social change.)

The problem is that your standard protest model is, nowadays, bad at doing both of these things. Even in those situations where protests don’t dissolve into a cacophony of various messages of dissent only tenuously connected to one another, the standard protest model suffers from a problematic catch-22: in order to significantly impact the news cycle, a protest must be really big, but the larger a protest becomes, the more likely it is to be ineffective due to lessened public support due to the inconvenience of the protest and the perception that it’s a one-off stunt. And even when a protest significantly impacts the news cycle, it’s still a one-off event in a modern culture which has trouble remembering what happened in the news three months ago.

“Aha,” you say, “but what about the Tea Party? What about European labour protests?” And these are interesting discussions. The Tea Party isn’t really a good counterexample. Although they have had a number of protests and have had some impact on public debate in the United States, they also aren’t following the traditional protest model, which is “have a really big protest and then that’s it for a while in terms of public visibility.” Granted, liberal protesters might argue that they don’t get any public visibility outside of protests due to media complacency, and they have a point there. But that right there is why the Tea Party has had more impact on the media: they’re essentially sponsored by a cable news network, which has allowed them to outlive the news cycle and become a constant presence.1 Since most protests will not get that advantage, pointing to the Tea Party as a measure of protest success is erroneous. On top of that, for all the visibility the Tea Party has enjoyed, they haven’t really had that much success at shifting public opinion; there has been no groundswell of support for their pet issues and the movement has remained mostly confined to conservative Republicans despite halfhearted attempts to reach out to libertarians. Really, the Tea Party is more reflective of the current state of the Republican party base than anything else.

As for European labour protests, sure, they work – but they work because when European labour movements go out and protest, that’s not a protest fringe doing it; that’s a hefty chunk of the country. People talk about how the G20 protest was big, but it was a drop in the bucket compared to, say, the antiwar protests conducted five or six years ago – and those in turn are equivalent to a smaller European labour protest, except that the American antiwar protests were mostly one-day or very occasionally two-day affairs, whereas European labour protests can go for weeks if need be (and have). European labour protests aren’t analagous to the modern North American protest movement expressly because they aren’t interested in shifting public opinion2, but rather in representing a large portion of the public. This makes the “swaying public opinion” part of the protest model null; all these protests are designed to do is sway elite decisions.

So, if traditional protest is no longer good for swaying both the public and the elites, what can do it? This is where I come up empty; none of the existing options seem to work. In the US, phone-in campaigns to Congressional offices have had some success at pushing representatives on important votes, but quite apart from the fact that phone campaigns don’t sway public opinion at all? Even if we accept that the phone system is a solid answer – and I don’t think it’s nearly as effective as some claim – simple numbers seem to make it essentially non-duplicable outside of the United States. There are about 700,000 Americans for every representative in Congress. Most other nations have a much lower citizens-to-representative ratio, generally ranging from 100000:1 (the United Kingdom) to 150000:1 (Australia). If you want to flood their phonebanks, phone campaigns need a participation rate essentially six times as high as happens in the United States. This seems unlikely.

Facebook/Twitter/other internet petitions and polls are flawed from a different end. Phone calls and letter-writing are the traditional weapons of choice for people attempting to make their voices heard to their representatives, but both of these methods require a person to really, really care about an issue.3 This is why politicians have traditionally multiple-counted people doing these things: the assumption is that since one person was angry enough about the issue to contact their representative, therefore there are X more people who feel the same way and will be less inclined to vote for the representative (at a minimum). But internet petitions have almost no disincentives attached to them: there’s a degree of anonymity involved4 and there’s next to no effort required, which means that representatives/politicians not only don’t multiple-count the people involved, they sometimes even discount them (in the “this person will never change their vote based on issue X” sense). Even when they don’t discount, the numbers taken at face value are almost never big enough to influence decisionmakers. Fair Copyright For Canada’s 87,543 members means an average of 284 members per riding, which isn’t enough to swing anything other than the absolute swingiest of swing ridings.

So what’s the solution? I’m not sure, to be honest. A combination of social media petitioning to raise public awareness of the issue above and beyond current standards combined with phone-ins coordinated to a degree as yet unexperienced seems like it could work, but it also seems like it would be extremely difficult. Something entirely new, of course, always has potential, but the problem with something entirely new is that I don’t know what that is. Better minds than mine, etc.

1. The more you talk about a thing being a thing, the more likely it is that that thing will become a thing. [↩]
2. I know anarchist commenters here have said they’re not interested in doing that either, but let’s just assume that the majority of left-wing protesters aren’t idiots. [↩]
3. Calling is easy, but has an invasive edge to it that most people instinctively avoid; letter-writing is time-consuming and costs you a stamp. [↩]
4. Or, at the very least, the perceived semi-anonymity people assume exists on the internet and almost never does. [↩]

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Kenny Ortega is your special guest judge, and he’s quite nice! Replacing nobody, however. Also, this week Billy is injured, which is three weeks straight with an injury. Some have suggested that the routines are getting too athletically intense in the pursuit of spectacle; at this point I am undecided, but noting that Alex tore his ACL after doing what essentially amounted to a throwaway double split jump is certainly evidence in favour.

Lauren and All-Star Twitch: hip-hop. This was very solid. To be sure, Twitch outdanced Lauren, but that’s more or less the problem with this entire format, isn’t it? At least Twitch didn’t outdance Lauren badly; she performed quite well – maybe lacking a bit of flavour in the first fifteen seconds or so, but after that she found her groove and stuck to it quite nicely.

Not Legacy and All-Star Allison: contemporary. You know what? This was genuinely quite decent. Not great, and certainly Allison outdanced Jose. But decent; Jose’s partnering was definitely the best he’s been all season, and his dancing, while still rudimentary, was fully realized and felt organic. So naturally, after weeks of him dancing weakly, the judges just shit all over him for not having technique and doing “pedestrian contemporary” when every single dancer on this show ever who is not named Alex Wong has had pieces tailored to their skill level in every given genre. Seriously, judges.

Robert and All-Star Lauren: jazz. Tasty’s jazz is so much better than his Broadway. I know I’ve said it before, but it’s never not true. This was perfectly good dancing in a sort of not-very-noteworthy way; not quite as sexy as perhaps the judges sold it, but it was good. Nobody will remember it in three weeks or so, but good.

Aw Shucks and All-Star Kathryn: jazz. I didn’t like this. Not for the quality of the dancing, which was fine; I didn’t like it because it felt like Sonya’s trashbag of every move she wasn’t able to fit into a routine, all stuffed together into a frenetic uptempo song. (And I like Janelle Monae.) Mia calls out Kent’s aw-shucks face, which should have happened weeks and weeks ago. Of course it doesn’t matter because Kent is most likely going to win now.

Adechike and All-Star Comfort: hip-hop. Adechike fucking murdered his role here. I think this was more lyrical than hip-hop, but whatever; this was just really good. Tabitha and Napoleon are really being consistently good this season after a couple of dreadful years; one suspects it’s because they actually get to work with actual hip-hop dancers.

Lauren and Robert: samba. A pretty solid performance, albeit not deserving of all the compliments it got; if either would have been paired with Pasha/Anya they would have looked less able, but the general level of talent didn’t create a disparity here. That having been said: Lauren was better than Robert, but only somewhat and not so much so that Robert wasn’t good. Perfectly acceptable dancing.

Not Legacy and Adechike: paso doble. An all-male paso is actually really apropos, and the general concept of the choreography worked for me (although I would have liked the “battle” portion of the choreo to be more extended than the pre-fight posing portion), but Jose was in his usual form, which is to say not good enough; just the opposite of fluid in his movement, so that “stiff” isn’t enough. Adechike was impressive.

Kent and Billy Substitute Twitch: stepping. Kent is the whitest person alive today. Kent is so white he makes Sarah Palin look like Oprah Winfrey. Kent is so white he shits marshmallows. Kent is so white when he’s in the Arctic polar bears can’t see him. Kent is so white that when he wears a red hat people mistake him for an ambulance. Kent is so white he sweats two percent milk. Kent is so white that he didn’t dance this very well at all. Kent is so white and he’s still probably going to win.

Bottom three should be: Billy, Jose, Kent.
Bottom three will be: Billy, Jose, Adechike.
Should go home: Jose.
Will go home: Jose.