Torontoist made its endorsement of a party in the federal election today. I wrote it.

Admittedly, this is one of the easiest shows to get into, in some ways; the series’ premise is explained neatly and succinctly in under two minutes by the opening credits. The show is little more than a vehicle to make fun of old movies much the way classic horror hosts like Vampira and Ghoulardi did, and the actual premise (mad scientists experiment on the effect of bad movies on the human brain, as measured by a guy and his robot companions forced to watch said bad movies) is just an excuse to make it happen. Every episode is more or less its own self-contained story, and if you can get behind the concept of mocking cheesy sci-fi films, there’s not much more you need to know.

In fact, this is one series you definitely don’t want to watch from the very beginning; first off, the “very beginning” is only available in the form of fan bootlegs, since the series started as a local show in the Twin Cities. (I remember turning it on and thinking, “Ooh! Sci-fi movie! Huh? Why are there guys in the lower right-hand corner of the screen? Ohhhh…this is the BEST IDEA EVER!” I was so disappointed when it went to cable and I couldn’t watch it anymore. (My parents didn’t believe in cable.)) Secondly, the first season is very much all about them getting comfortable with their series; nobody had ever done anything exactly like MST3K, and it took them a while to figure out how to pace their jokes. (Which is “frequently”, by the way…they estimated that in later seasons, they wrote about 700 jokes per episode.) And thirdly, not all the episodes are legally available; the producers got broadcast rights but not video rights to most of the movies they showed, and so the process of releasing the series on DVD is as much an adventure in “What can we get the rights to?” as “What are the classic episodes?” (Fortunately, the series’ creators actually included the phrase “Keep Circulating the Tapes” in the credits for the first seven seasons, and their pro-bootlegging stance has led to a wide network of informal episode trading. So long as you buy the episodes that are commercially available, they seem to be willing to turn a blind eye to bootlegging the ones that aren’t.)

So I’d skip ahead to at least Season Two, perhaps even Season Three or Four to introduce you to Joel (the original host and “man in space” for the first five seasons.) He’s got a laid-back delivery style and a penchant for silly gimmick props (the Invention Exchange, which opens every episode for the first six seasons or so, was an exercise in prop comedy.) The most recent release from Shout Factory, “MST3K Volume XX”, features several later Joel episodes (“Master Ninja” I & II, “The Magic Voyage of Sinbad”), while the next release will feature five classics (the complete “Gamera” collection.) These episodes also feature the classic mad scientist duo of Doctor Clayton Forrester and his dim-witted sidekick, TV’s Frank. Doctor F is perpetually frustrated and grandiose in his schemes by Frank’s incompetence (and his own, which he chooses not to acknowledge.)

In Season Five, Joel left (due to creative conflicts over what would eventually become “Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie”) in the episode “Mitchell”, which may still be available through Rhino. He was replaced with Mike Nelson, head writer for the series, who played a temp at the mad science labs who got shanghaied into doing his own bad movie riffing. Shout Factory’s first DVD set, the “20th Anniversary Edition”, features three excellent Mike episodes…including the departure of Doctor Forrester at the end of Season Seven. (Cast changes are a feature of the series.)

The last three seasons, which aired on the Sci-Fi Channel, featured Pearl Forrester, Clayton’s mother, who vowed to carry on his work after smothering him with a pillow. She acquired her own henchmen (Professor Bobo, an ape from the titular Planet Of, and Observer, a brain in a dish with a human to carry it around) and proceeded to do her own tormenting. This era featured some experimentation with actual storylines, which some liked and some didn’t. If you like the idea, try to watch “Revenge of the Creature” through “The Deadly Mantis”, “The Thing That Couldn’t Die” through “The She-Creature”, “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” through “Agent for H.A.R.M.”, and “Prince of Space” through “The Projected Man”. Watching those out of order will leave you occasionally wondering why Mike is in Ancient Rome, or what Pearl is doing on a planet where apes evolved from men!!! (Luckily, you can always ignore all that and just focus on the movie.)

Eventually, the series ended…but it’s definitely not gone. Joel is currently doing “Cinematic Titanic”, a live stage show where he and several MST alumni riff on bad movies (they also have some DVDs available), while “Rifftrax” features Mike Nelson and other MST alumni riffing on major studio releases through the magic of downloadable MP3s that you can manually synch up with films like “Iron Man”, “Twilight” and “The Happening”. (They also have some DVDs available.) All are recommended.

I’ve tried to cover the basics, but really, it’s a wide and sprawling show that I’ve barely scratched the surface of. (Just think, all this space and I haven’t even mentioned “Manos: The Hands of Fate”.) Feel free to share your favorites, and remember to “repeat to yourself, ‘it’s just a show, I should really just relax!'”

So after Obama releasing his birth certificate yesterday the birthers made appearances on all the MSNBC shows and the MSNBCers just lost it. I mean, Chris Matthews and Lawrence O’Donnell aren’t calm little bunnies, generally speaking, but there’s their usual level of shoutiness and then there was this: Matthews was plainly and visibly furious with the birthers who showed up on his show, and O’Donnell actually cut off Orly Taitz when she started spewing the birthers’ new line of crap (which, for those not in the know, is that Obama supposedly forged his Social Security number at some point and… therefore he’s not President, or something).

You kind of get the feeling that these guys really felt that, if the question of Obama’s birth was finally answered, that finally the birthers would shut up because they wouldn’t have any real ground to stand on. It’s not that they didn’t think the birthers weren’t racist: they knew that. But they thought that the birthers would play by some sort of rules. “Here is the proof you have demanded; you can demand it no more.” But of course this was never about proof; this was about hating and fearing B-Rock the Islamic Supashock, and there aren’t any rules for that.

We’re in postmodern politics now, and the tribalism can only get rawer from here.

A couple of people asked for:

The age old debate of Ameritrash v Euro.

Which, even for a nerd site like this one, is definitely getting into esoteric territory, so explanation is in order. Among serious boardgamers –

– No, wait! If you’re not a boardgamer, stick around! I promise something at least slightly profound by the end! –

– ahem. Anyway. “Ameritrash” and “Euro” are the names for the two major “serious” styles of boardgame design.

Here is Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game. It is considered “Ameritrash.”

“Ameritrash” is code. It means, roughly, the idea of a game as a thematic experience first and foremost. Battlestar Galactica is a board game that positively drips with theme: it mirrors the show by having the players be important humans on the Galactica, like Adama and Tigh and Roslin and Baltar, and they’re playing a cooperative game to get to Earth before the Colonial Fleet starves to death or runs out of water or fuel or commits collective suicide or get blown to shit by the Cylons, just like in the show, and secretly some of the players, randomly selected, are actually Cylons bent on making sure the humans lose.1 Thus, the actual mechanics of the game are twofold: there are the rules which explain how you fight Cylons and jump from star system to star system, but there’s also the real game, which is figuring out who at the table is a Cylon and who isn’t, and who’s lying and who isn’t. If a Cylon can manage to stick an innocent human player in the brig, they often win.

To further aid in immersing players in the theme, Battlestar Galactica has bits. Lots of bits. It has umpteen different decks of cards to randomize all the events that could possibly happen. It has little plastic Vipers and Cylon raiders to fight in space. It has dials to measure how much water and food and fuel the fleet has left. It has rules for the extra advantages the President and the Admiral get, and the chain of command among the players for each position to descend. The rulebook for this game is thirty pages long. There are, so far, two additional expansions, which introduce the Pegasus and New Caprica and the Ionian Nebula as additional playable elements of the game and heaps more rules and characters and options.

All of this makes for the quintessential Ameritrash game. Lots of attractive bits. Lots of rules to cover every possible fiddly little idea the players can come up with. Lots more bits. A theme that’s usually either fantastic or epic if not in fact both. And lots of bits. “Ameritrash” isn’t a derogatory term: it’s one spoken with affection.2

And then, at the other end of the spectrum, there is Caylus. Which is a “Euro.”3

Caylus is ostensibly a game about building a castle and its surrounding town for a king, but really, that is crap and everybody knows it. Caylus is a supremely complex mathematical problem in game form. The game’s victory condition is simple: who has the most points at the game’s end. You can get those points in a variety of ways: by building the castle, by building buildings other players use, by getting the “royal favour” again and again and again and using it every time for points, and so forth. But while you’re getting points, you’re also trying to set up the board to ensure that you have what you need to get more points as the game progresses. And so is everybody else.

The theme is besides the point: what matters is the gameplay, and Caylus is a brainburner of first order as you sort out your moves in order to generate best advantage. The idea that you’re collecting food or dye or stone or gold in order to build the various buildings is entirely besides the point: they’re just wooden cubes in various colors and combinations that you require. This is the quintessential Euro.

Of course, both Ameritrash and Euro can commit sins of excess or laziness. With Euros, gamers have coined the phrase “JASE” (“Just Another Soulless Euro”) to describe Eurogames that rehash the same old variety of mechanics all over again – worker placement, auctions, area control, role selection – for no purpose other than to get victory points in a slight variation on the formulae other, superior games already used the first time through.4 Ameritrash games can concentrate so deeply on their theme that they can forget to have an actual game be present, turning the whole affair into a boring slog because without some decent mechanics at its heart, a game’s play just becomes a joyless exercise in mental calisthenics.5

Despite this, however, plenty of gamers have taken up the banner of nerd supremacy (or, if you like, competitive geekery), proclaiming the innate superiority of Ameritrash or Euro. Which is silly, really, because a game is a game is a game and I believe what we come to play games for is not the actual exercise of the game – although that’s important – but the rituals inherent in playing that game. There’s a reason gamification theory has become so prevalent in modern marketing: we love ritual, we’re trained to love it, and every game has its own set of rituals.

As a longtime patron and occasional part-time employee at Snakes and Lattes, Toronto’s boardgame cafe, I can safely say that despite the staff’s best attempts to get people to adventure a bit and play more advanced games like Power Grid6, the most popular games are stuff like Jenga and Hedbanz. Hedbanz is really just a game manufacturer’s clever method of getting people to spend money to play Twenty Questions, but the ritual of putting on the silly plastic headband is one that people find endlessly entertaining. It doesn’t matter that there are better block-stacking games than Jenga (for example, the always-awesome Bausack) – people love the ritual of stacking up the pieces almost as much as they enjoy playing the game itself.

Ameritrash and Euro enthusiasts each begin with a starting premise I think is false, which is that they downplay ritual in favour of a specific experience. For Ameritrashers the allure of ritual is obvious: the thematic games they play are steeped in it, and lend themselves to injokes, traditions and unique ways of approaching each game. Eurogamers might want to pretend that their games are less ritualized, but that’s crap. The most abstract strategy games like chess and go have their own sets of rituals, and just because they’re less overt doesn’t mean they’re not there. Go to a chess tournament sometime and watch people playing “serious” chess and you’ll see it. Using one hand to simultaneously move your piece and capture your opponent’s piece. Hitting the timer on your clock with the piece you just captured. The ceremonial tipping over of the mated king. The Eurogaming experience is no different, if more varied in how it’s approached because of the variety involved.

In the end boardgaming, whether it’s Ameritrash, Euro or Hedbanz, is about socialization. It may offer different rewards (mental immersion into a setting, challenge of brain calisthenics, or the opportunity to wear a plastic headband), but the method of offering them is ultimately the same. All we can do is extrapolate our social selves and put them into the game. Otherwise you might as well just be doing sudoku on your couch.

1. Yes, yes, I know that by the end of the show we all knew who was a Cylon and who wasn’t. Shut up. It’s a game. [↩]
2. Well, usually. [↩]
3. Okay, I could have gone with Agricola for this example, but firstly I think Caylus is a purer example of the form, and secondly I hate Agricola with the passion of a burning sun. It is a boring non-interactive game about FUCKING FARMING. [↩]
4. Or, as some people have suggested, “getting wooden cubes so you can make other wooden cubes to buy more wooden cubes.” [↩]
5. Steve Jackson Games makes plenty of these. [↩]
6. Which everybody should play. [↩]

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

If you’re not Canadian, you might not appreciate how unbelievable the last of this set of best-case scenarios is:

For the sake of comparison: you see that 43 in the Liberals’ Conservatives’ best-case scenario for the New Democrats? 43 seats is the most the New Democrats have held in any Parliament ever.

(via Threehundredeight)

I don’t know if you’ve heard or not lately, but dad-made billionaire Donald Trump has been capturing the attention of the nation by suggesting he might possibly run for President of the United States. This is actually one of those things that happens every decade or so; some massively rich person like Trump (or Perot or Forbes) announces that they’re going to run for President because they’re successful businessmen, and “they can run this country like a business.” For some reason, this quote is never greeted with the guffaws of hilarity that it deserves; somehow, we never hear about famous directors announcing that they’re going to run America like a production of “Guys and Dolls”, or successful ranchers announcing that they’re going to run America like a cattle farm. When businessmen announce that they’re going to run America like they ran IBM, though, we can’t get enough.

Probably it’s just that we’re easily impressed by businessmen in America. We might not know much about governing, but pretty much everyone has tried to make money, and we all know how hard it is. So when someone who makes a lot of money talks, we tend to say, “Wow. He must be smart, if he can make that much money.” (We tend to forget options like, “He must be incredibly unethical,” or “He must have a rich daddy whose money he squandered to the point where he had to declare bankruptcy multiple times.”) But maybe, just maybe, these businessmen have a point. Let’s look at some of the ways Obama could run America like a business.

1) Cut out the middleman. Right now, the United States has a military budget that dwarfs its discretionary spending. A large part of that comes from the research, development and purchase of military equipment. Back in the days when peacetime meant considerably less spending on weapons technology, it made sense to contract this work out, but this is the 21st century. We’re a military superpower now, and it’s time to accept that we’re constantly equipping our troops. So Obama should use eminent domain to confiscate the assets of companies like Honeywell, General Dynamics and Pratt & Whitney and nationalize them, passing the savings along to the American taxpayer.

2) Cut our losses on unprofitable projects. At this point, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost us trillions of dollars without achieving any of the goals we set or generating any kind of return on our investment. Any good businessman would take the hit, write off the losses, and proceed to something that makes a profit.

3) Explore alternative revenue streams. The federal government makes money by taxation. (It spends money by providing services to its customers, a vital difference that makes it impossible to apply traditional business models to government, but we’re pretending that’s not true right now.) So if you want to make extra money without tax hikes, you need to find something else to tax. The currently-illegal drug trade is a multi-billion dollar industry that currently goes completely untaxed, due to our insistence on throwing both producer and consumer in jail. Legalizing drugs would not only save us billions of dollars a year in enforcement costs, it would generate billions more in tax revenue. Sure, some might complain about the morality, but we’re running America like a business now, and it’s the bottom line that counts!

4) Expand your revenue base through mergers and acquisitions. Right now, one of the most contentious issues in American politics is immigration. People want to defend the borders, people want to make sure that Mexicans have a path to citizenship, people want to make sure that Mexicans can continue to provide a labor base to the agricultural industry. In addition, people want to make sure that the Mexican drug trade doesn’t cause problems for America. The obvious solution? Annex Mexico. You have a much smaller southern border to defend, the Mexicans become citizens and don’t have to worry about hostile borders, and the drug trade becomes legal (see point number 3.)

5) Ensure a consistent long-term vision from the top. Elections every four years? A new CEO every eight years, one that could wind up with a diametrically-opposed viewpoint to the current head of the company? No sane business would even dream of operating this way. No, it’s time for Obama to abolish the electoral process and declare himself CEO For Life. It’s the only way to make sure that the long-term goals of America get recognized.

6) Get rid of unnecessary middle management. What does Congress even do, other than get in the President’s way and neuter his bold plans for America’s future? Fire ’em all, and deal directly with the governors. (Who are, of course, free to fire their state legislatures as well, so long as they understand that they can be replaced if they don’t do what the boss says.) The savings in Congressional salaries alone would be worth millions.

7) Outsource unprofitable divisions. Look, there’s really no nice way to say this, but…there are some states that just aren’t pulling their weight. They’re always near the bottom in education, employment, and a host of other standard-of-living categories, and they constantly demand federal money while decrying federal interference. It’s time to just go ahead and “downsize” the populations of these states (humanely, of course) and replace them with cheaper citizens from China or India. Just bring them over here, put them to work, and let them help make America great again!

These are just a few of the great strategies I have, and I’m not even smart enough to have a rich dad like Trump! I’m sure that a CEO as President would usher in a new Gilded Golden Age for this country, and I don’t see why we should wait for 2012 to start implementing it.

Most of my readership are, unsurprisingly, Americans, so this column should be read – and widely dispersed – by them.

Seriously: polling indicates that four-fifths of the United States opposes raising the debt ceiling. In economic terms, this is like four-fifths of the United States wanting, say, New York City to be blown up with a nuclear bomb; even technical default (e.g. allowing debt to hit the debt ceiling but not defaulting), and the USA’s position as possessor of the world’s reserve community currency1 ends the same day.

Which for me would be pretty awesome because the US dollar would plummet against the loonie and I would be able to buy lots of stuff from Amazon with Canadian pennies, which would suddenly be of incredible value to Americans. Until I lost my job in the inevitable recession that would hit me and everybody else in the world thanks to the USA collapsing, but rest assured that my Amazon shipments would include everything I would need to become the Gyro Captain from The Road Warrior.

1. D’oh! [↩]

Occasional poster Lee “Leeee” Wang sent me this and I thought it was worth a wider audience, so here you go.

Many of you Whovians have probably seen this Youtube (which is almost half a year old now) (and for you SYTYCD trainspotters, yes, that’s Paula van Oppen), but with the new season less than a week away, it’s as apt a time to revisit at least one of the themes that Craig Ferguson mentions, to wit:

On the surface, Craigy Fergy sounds like he’s spot on, because the Doctor saves the day in nearly every story by showing just how clever he is, the nerdy appeal of which should be obvious. Except, does the Doctor really represent the triumph of pure reason over brawn?

Looking for now at the revived series, it gets a little complicated, I think. On a couple of occasions, we’ve seen suggestions of the Doctor’s immense physical powers, either extant (the baroque imprisonments of the Family of Blood) or burgeoning (the powers that River Song alluded to in “Forest of the Dead,” such as snapping to open the doors of the TARDIS). (Oh, and let’s remember that the Third Doctor had his Venusian Aikido.) Of course, “Forest of the Dead” is written by Moffat, the current showrunner, so it’s fair to suspect that we may be seeing more amazing powers to go with Matt Smith’s gigantic chin, like oh I don’t know head-butt mind-melds? The upshot is that behind every adventure in which the Doctor flexes his cleverness is the implicit threat that if his brain proves not up to the task, then he’ll just trap you in “every mirror in existence.”

Sure, maybe he has these powers because he’s Gallifreyan (in which case it’s worth noting that he’s all-but-abandoned his native powers, a point I’d like to return to in a bit), but they’re still there, which compromises the purity of the brains-over-brawn triumphalism. All the same, this reading of the Doctor’s character still speaks to nerd fantasies, though ones more nuanced than “intellect over brute strength.” Instead, the fantasies are more akin to the secret desire within the hearts of all nerds to possess immense but hidden strength that will show our tormentors that our outward meekness is actually for their benefit. Not to be too autobiographical or anything.

To return briefly to the Doctor abandoning his Gallifreyan birthrights, it’s interesting to think about how he tracks with British culture. The First Doctor — an elderly patriarch with an air of unilateral authority disdainful of those he viewed as inherently inferior to himself — premiered as Empire was in stark decline and withdrawing from its role as a global hegemon. He gave way to incarnations (clownish, affable, eccentric) that were far less authoritarian as Britain’s came more to exert international influence less through geopolitical might than through culture (an admittedly US-centric way of viewing things). (Since my familiarity with the classic series is nowhere as deep as John Seavey’s, and also since I’m pretty much an pig-ignorant Yankee, commenters should feel free to fill in the blanks.)

(MGK EDITS TO ADD: I think Lee’s theory about the Doctor tracking to British culture is pretty spot on. Consider the second, third and fourth Doctors as being a response and eventually acceptance of the 60s/70s counterculture, with the fifth through seventh being the response to Thatcherian authoritarianism, and the ninth through eleventh as embrace of the basic nerdity of the premise as well as of technological salvationism. But that’s just spitballing. Somebody else can write the thesis.)

So Scott Adams has been busy of late getting a reputation as a jackass, and he feels this is unfair, so naturally he published a long blogpost about how everybody is being unfair to him just because he created a sockpuppet account to go on Metafilter and give himself props:

As a general rule, you can’t trust anyone who has a conflict of interest. Conflict of interest is like a prison that locks in both the truth and the lies. One workaround for that problem is to change the messenger. That’s where an alias comes in handy. When you remove the appearance of conflict of interest, it allows others to listen to the evidence without judging.

Well, yes, not telling people who you are does remove them of the ability to respond to you, but I have to respect Adams’ ability to try and present lying to people as a positive. People will tend to get offended when you lie to them, and unfortunately just because Adams had reasons for lying to them doesn’t make it not rude to the Metafilterites who honestly engaged his sockpuppet.1 It also manages to conveniently overlook the fact that, even though Adams’ identity was not known by his debate partners, they still disagreed with his points, rendering his “well they would have disagreed with me just for knowing who I was” line of argument basically invalid.

This week for example, I’m the target of Men’s Rights advocates, Feminists, and one bearded taint who is leading an anti-creationist movement. What do those folks have in common? In each case they are using the same strategy. They take out of context something I’ve written, present it to the lazy Internet media who doesn’t check context, and use it to demonize me to gain publicity for their respective causes. That’s how advocates get free publicity. They find a celebrity to target.

Now this deserves honest examination.

Adams portrays himself as the undeserving target of multiple groups, characterizing their anger at him as being the spawn of misunderstanding – either accidental or purposefully created by a nasty third party. The problem is that, for someone who’s complaining about “lazy Internet media,” he’s being awfully lazy in characterizing these attacks. Men’s rights’ activists aren’t pissed at Scott Adams over a misunderstanding: they’re angry at him because he called them a bunch of pussies.2 Feminists aren’t pissed at Scott Adams over a misunderstanding: they’re angry at him because he compared equal work for equal pay to a child wanting candy for dinner and minimized the difference in amount of sacrifice necessary to maintain a job and family that exists between the genders, not to mention the fact that defining weakness by use of the word “pussies” isn’t something feminists traditionally like at all.3 And scibloggers… well, we’ll get to them.

Adams does this regularly: he says something that even an idiot would know is offensive (or at least gratuitously stupid), then gets hurt when people are offended and says “I was only joking” or “it was a thought exercise!” or something else that expresses the general sentiment that it’s everybody else’s fault for taking him seriously when he says something in a thoughtful-seeming tone, even when his actions after the fact make it perfectly obvious that he knows he’s been bad.

Fine, then. Here is a thought exercise. A man repeatedly says things that are obviously likely to provoke people into anger, then, when they get angry, claims that they shouldn’t be getting angry because he was not sincere. Is this A) his fault or B) everybody else’s fault?

The same thing is happening today with a Republican official who emailed some friends a humorous photo of President Obama’s face on a chimp and a punch line about his birth certificate. If your only context is what the Internet says about this story, you assume it’s a typical racist act by a Republican who is already guilty by association.

It’s funny that Scott Adams, in this rant, is complaining about the media being “lazy” by characterizing her as a racist. Why is it funny?

But if I add the context that Googling “George Bush monkey” gives you over 3 million hits, and most of them are jokes where President Bush’s face is transposed on a monkey, you see what’s really going on. Democrats and advocates of civil rights are using the media to further an agenda at the expense of a woman who was probably so non-racist that the photo in question didn’t set off her alarms as being a career-ending risk.

Well, no, it’s not funny because Scott Adams just compared the tired old joke about George Bush having a chimp-like face to the historical racial slur of black people being compared to monkeys, which is a painfully false equivalency because white people also generally don’t get upset when you call them the n-word. It’s because this woman “who was probably so non-racist” has previously defended other people for making racist jokes and statements. It’s a shame Adams didn’t bother to find this out before championing the aforementioned racist, who of course has it just as bad as Adams.4 5

If you wonder how the evolution rumor started, it’s partly because I made the following argument: The evidence for evolution, by its nature, seems fishy to the average non-scientist independent of the underlying truth. That’s a statement about human perceptions, not the objective reality of the theory.

The sciblogger community isn’t pissed at Scott Adams because they think he’s a creationist: they’re pissed at him because he raised a bunch of easily debunked arguments and treated them as reasonable evidence that creationists had a point, then backpedaled and claimed he was only engaging in a “thought exercise” once people pointed out that his arguments were stupid and that all he had done is prove that creationists survive by peddling lies over and over again.6 People don’t get offended by the process of examining why creationism gets a toehold. They get offended when Scott Adams does it really, really badly and in a way which gives unfair credence to creationist arguments.

Besides which, it’s not like Adams ever comes up with anything novel out of these thought experiments.

I will add some context though. Keep in mind that creating the hapless Dilbert character largely in my own image launched a twenty year career of daily self-deprecation. Likewise, about half of what I write outside of the comic is unambiguously self-deprecating. I’m a short, near-sighted, bald, over-the-hill guy with a bad sense of direction and an astonishing lack of competence at 99% of life’s challenges.

Yes, but Adams is also a millionaire many times over, so really, self-deprecation on his part isn’t charming. (Also, frankly it’s amazing that this self-deprecation all of a sudden disappears whenever somebody points out that Adams has said something really dumb, which makes it seem less like humility and more like a minstrel show.)

Let’s take a moment to call back the discussion of how the messenger changes the message. A large number of you are reading my explanation of the evolution rumor and dismissing it as my pathetic attempt at revisionist history. I’m back pedaling! I got caught being a moron and now I’m trying to save face!

See how this works? The messenger with a strong self-interest is automatically non-credible, and should be.

And this is why Adams had to lie about his identity on the internet!

There are some types of information that can only be communicated by an unbiased messenger. And the most unbiased messenger in the world is one that is imaginary, such as my invisible friend, PlannedChaos.

This is simply drivel. An imaginary messenger is by definition biased towards its creator, because that’s how creators roll. “PlannedChaos” wasn’t ever going to give anybody a reasonable, even-handed critique of Adams’ controversial writings, because he was Adams. Of course, possibly Adams will now claim that he was trying to point this out all along and we’re the stupid ones for falling into his trap, but for someone complaining about laziness on the part of his critics, this is the worst kind of argument if it’s intentional, because it’s baiting, pure and simple. We can either assume that Adams is sincere when he initially writes on any topic, or assume he’s full of crap when he writes anything: when you have someone who claims to be baiting people, those are your only two options for dealing with them efficiently.

On the scale of immoral behavior, where genocide is at the top, and wearing Spanx is near the bottom, posting comments under an alias to clear up harmful misconceptions is about one level worse than Spanx.

“HEY YOU GUYS THERE ARE MURDERERS AND RAPISTS AND STUFF OUT THERE SO WHY ARE YOU GETTING ALL MAD AT MEEEEEEEEEEE?”

1. His complaint that Metafilter is a “cesspool” is just kind of nuts, because Metafilter is probably one of the most balanced and fair discussionblogs on the interwoobs, but whatever. Maybe Dogbert wrote it. [↩]
2. Rightfully. [↩]
3. And also there’s the fact that Adams soon deleted the post from his blog, demonstrating that he knew perfectly well that he had written something offensive, and then maintained afterwards that no, that blogpost he hastily deleted was totally cool you guys. [↩]
4. Maybe she was engaging in a “thought exercise!” [↩]
5. To say nothing of the fact that his argument is just boneheaded. Seriously: who in the hell doesn’t know that you don’t compare black people to monkeys? Like, ever? [↩]
6. See also: Adams’ comments on atheism. [↩]

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

A while back I said that Canadian politics was less interesting than Rebecca Black. Apparently somebody decided that this merited a truly horrible combination.

And of course Jack Layton doesn’t merit a mention. It’s probably because of the moustache.

(h/t Carl Sack)