Not-Borat Speaks!:

A UK newspaper quotes extensively from Sacha Baron-Cohen's out-of-character interview with Rolling Stone, which reveals that the comic believes all those reviews explaining that his Polish Jokes are actually good for you.

Now, after staying resolutely in boorish persona during previous interviews, Sacha Baron Cohen has spoken in depth about his motives in creating his comical anti-hero Borat. The journalist from Kazakhstan who sings anti-Semitic songs and refers to women as prostitutes was created "as a tool" to expose people's prejudices, he said.

The 35-year-old Jewish comedian from London has maintained a long silence over the controversy raised by Borat, whose extreme anti-Semitic remarks have earned censure both from the Kazakh government and from the Jewish community.

In one sketch from Baron Cohen's film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, which premiered this month in London, Borat performs a song called "Throw the Jew Down the Well" in a country and western bar in Arizona.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, the comedian revealed he was a devout Jew, observing Sabbath and eating kosher foods, and he referred to the singing scene to defend his inflammatory comedy.

"Borat essentially works as a tool. By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudices, whether it's anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism. 'Throw the Jew Down the Well' was a very controversial sketch, and some members of the Jewish community thought it was actually going to encourage anti-Semitism.

"But to me it revealed something about that bar in Tuscon. And the question is: did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semitism," he said.

Baron Cohen said the concept of "indifference towards anti-Semitism" had been informed by his study of the Holocaust while at Cambridge University, where he read history. "I remember, when I was in university, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, 'The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.'

"I know it's not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it's an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic," he said.

It's generally depressing to listen to extremely funny comedians get serious.

Udolpho says:

Who cares? But I didn't realize that apathy is best revealed through careful staging, audience prep, video recording, and editing of the results. Is Cohen really such a pedantic git that he thinks getting a bunch of drunken revelers to sing "Throw the Jew down the well" is proof of Western indifference about anti-Semitism? It's not even an indictment of country-western bars. (Cohen knows very well that it would be easier, not harder, to get an audience of Jesse Jackson supporters to sing that refrain. But this would make the urban sophisticates who howl with glee at this "transgressive" comedy very sad, so that's right out.)

To my mind, Baron Cohen and the critics have it exactly backwards. I try to be polite in private and candid in public, but that's not terribly fashionable. The critics are claiming to be outraged that the Americans in the film who were exposed to Borat's anti-Semitism and anti-Gypsyism in private didn't denounce him to his face. Instead, they tended to be polite and tried to change the subject. In contrast, almost none of critics have mentioned Baron Cohen's extremely public anti-Slavism. Complete apathy reigns over Baron Cohen's revival of traditional goyishe kop attitudes toward Slavs. As Lenin said, the ultimate question remains "Who? Whom?." And everybody wants to be on the side of the Who, not the Whom.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Not-Borat Speaks!

A UK newspaper quotes extensively from Sacha Baron-Cohen's out-of-character interview with Rolling Stone, which reveals that the comic believes all those reviews explaining that his Polish Jokes are actually good for you.

Now, after staying resolutely in boorish persona during previous interviews, Sacha Baron Cohen has spoken in depth about his motives in creating his comical anti-hero Borat. The journalist from Kazakhstan who sings anti-Semitic songs and refers to women as prostitutes was created "as a tool" to expose people's prejudices, he said.

The 35-year-old Jewish comedian from London has maintained a long silence over the controversy raised by Borat, whose extreme anti-Semitic remarks have earned censure both from the Kazakh government and from the Jewish community.

In one sketch from Baron Cohen's film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, which premiered this month in London, Borat performs a song called "Throw the Jew Down the Well" in a country and western bar in Arizona.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, the comedian revealed he was a devout Jew, observing Sabbath and eating kosher foods, and he referred to the singing scene to defend his inflammatory comedy.

"Borat essentially works as a tool. By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudices, whether it's anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism. 'Throw the Jew Down the Well' was a very controversial sketch, and some members of the Jewish community thought it was actually going to encourage anti-Semitism.

"But to me it revealed something about that bar in Tuscon. And the question is: did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semitism," he said.

Baron Cohen said the concept of "indifference towards anti-Semitism" had been informed by his study of the Holocaust while at Cambridge University, where he read history. "I remember, when I was in university, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, 'The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.'

"I know it's not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it's an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic," he said.

It's generally depressing to listen to extremely funny comedians get serious.

Udolpho says:

Who cares? But I didn't realize that apathy is best revealed through careful staging, audience prep, video recording, and editing of the results. Is Cohen really such a pedantic git that he thinks getting a bunch of drunken revelers to sing "Throw the Jew down the well" is proof of Western indifference about anti-Semitism? It's not even an indictment of country-western bars. (Cohen knows very well that it would be easier, not harder, to get an audience of Jesse Jackson supporters to sing that refrain. But this would make the urban sophisticates who howl with glee at this "transgressive" comedy very sad, so that's right out.)

To my mind, Baron Cohen and the critics have it exactly backwards. I try to be polite in private and candid in public, but that's not terribly fashionable. The critics are claiming to be outraged that the Americans in the film who were exposed to Borat's anti-Semitism and anti-Gypsyism in private didn't denounce him to his face. Instead, they tended to be polite and tried to change the subject. In contrast, almost none of critics have mentioned Baron Cohen's extremely public anti-Slavism. Complete apathy reigns over Baron Cohen's revival of traditional goyishe kop attitudes toward Slavs. As Lenin said, the ultimate question remains "Who? Whom?." And everybody wants to be on the side of the Who, not the Whom.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

1491

Charles Mann's book summarizing recent research into life in the pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere is quite interesting, although a little slippery. His main theme is how enormous the population of the Americas was before the epidemics introduced by the Conquest, but he tends to slide back and forth between whether he's talking about America north or south of the Rio Grande. For example, he talks a lot about Cahokia, or Monks' Mound, near St. Louis, which had a population of about 15,000 around 1000 AD, before falling apart a couple of centuries before Columbus. But this appears to have been just about the only sizable urban center north of the Rio Grande, which raises questions in my mind about just how densely populated the future U.S. was. If it was densely populated, why was it so little urbanized, especially compared to the enormous number of cities in what's now Latin America? There are a lot of dirt mounds in Midwest, but as tourist attractions, they are lacking compared to what you can see in Latin America.

Perhaps the problem was that corn was a rather late arrival in the future US from its origin spot in Mexico, and urbanization would have followed. Or perhaps, North American Indians just didn't see much point to building big cities and future tourist attractions.

The urbanization of Mesoamerica and the northern half of South America was quite high. We're all familiar with a handful of well-visited monumental ruins like Chichen Itza, the huge pyramids outside of Mexico City, or Machu Pichu, but there are countless others. Something that Mann doesn't quite realize is that urban life was more feasible in the New World than in the Old World precisely because of the lack of contagious diseases that was the downfall of the New World when the Spaniards arrived bearing Old World germs into a region with no immunity. In the Old World until late in the 19th Century, cities were typically "demographic sinks" where the death rate was higher than the birth rate due to infectious diseases. Cities had to be constantly replenished with newcomers from the healthier countryside or they would disappear.

The disease burden was particularly severe in Africa, which is a major reason why Africa is so lacking in monumental ruins. I would bet that Guatemala alone has an order of magnitude more ruins of impressive scale than all of sub-Saharan Africa. In Africa, when the population density got too high, diseases would wipe out the populace, which is a big reason why Africa was thinly populated until recently. This doesn't appear to have been anywhere near as severe a problem in tropical America, presumably because Indians didn't bring many disease with them from Siberia, and because they had so few domesticated animals to pick up germs from.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Malcolm Gladwell's opinion of me

"Dealbreaker: A Wall Street Tabloid" has a funny post on my feud with Malcolm Gladwell and what Malcolm said about me in a bar.

The pattern underlying whom I choose to repeatedly pick on -- Gladwell, Steven Levitt, Michael Barone, Jared Diamond, etc. -- is that they each have the potential to do really good work. So, my ragging on them is a compliment, but it's also only natural that they take it personally.

The funny thing is that everybody gets what he wants: I'm right and they're rich. So, what's not to like?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Malcolm Gladwell on how to write hit movies

Gladwell has a looong article in The New Yorker entitled "THE FORMULA: What if you built a machine to predict hit movies?" about some market researchers who claim they can analyze unmade screenplays statistically and tell you how much money they will make, and how to make them more profitable.

While padded with endless human interest material about some not very interesting humans, it's less obviously fallacious than many of his recent efforts. The big problem is, as so often, Gladwell's nice-guy credulity, as he fails to push these researchers to document their claims to accurate prophecy. Having been in the market research business for many years, I can assure you that it's easy to draw up a list of right predictions you've made in the past, as these guys did for Gladwell, but it's a lot harder to predict the future. One of the businessmen says:

With Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion,’ people always say, ‘Who could have predicted that?’ And the answer is, we could have.”

Well, swell. I could have, too. Granted, I didn't, technically speaking, predict that. But I could have.

What Gladwell should have done is tell them, "I'm Malcolm F****** Gladwell, the highest earning magazine journalist in America, and if you want me to write a huge article in the New Yorker about what geniuses you are, then you are going to have to pass my test. Here it is: Pick any ten movies scheduled for release over the next three months, read their shooting scripts, and then write down how much money they will make over their first four weeks of release. If you thoroughly beat the Hollywood Stock Exchange predictions, then I'll write the article. Otherwise, I won't."

It drives Gladwell crazy that I rag on him about how much money makes and how Leonard DiCaprio is signed to play Gladwell in the movie version of Blink. He goes through and deletes my comments on his blog (which he appears to have given up on, not surprisingly after all the embarrassments he has been through involving his blog this year). But, he misses the point, which is that I think it's a good thing that a magazine writer can make so much money, because somebody getting paid that much can afford to do a better job than the typical journalist.

The average business writer can't afford to make a cool-sounding start-up company wait four months to prove their bona fides in a test designed by the writer. Instead, Joe Journalist has to read the press release, make a few phone calls, and churn out some copy. Gladwell, in contrast, can afford to subject his subjects to whatever torture tests he devises. He can say, "I'm Malcolm Gladwell, bitch! Prove it!"

But he doesn't. Unfortunately, Gladwell isn't enough of a jerk to insist that his subjects prove their worth. His problem is that he's not egotistical enough. He's always getting wowed by the overwhelming genius of somebody with a complicated-sounding line of patter. He doesn't do simple reality checks on theories that smart-seeming people tell him because he's just not cynical enough. He really, truly admires all these people he writes about and believes they are all brilliant, even though their theories often contradict each other. (That's why his bestseller Blink made no overall sense whatsoever.)

As Gladwell wrote after breathlessly retailing a couple of economists' dubious explanation of Ireland's recent prosperity and getting shot down by Jane Galt and commenters on his own blog:

"I will confess to having a slightly reverential attitude toward academia. I'm the son of an academic. Much of my writing involves taking academic research and trying to translate it for a more general audience. And I've always believed that if you set out to write about the work of academic specialists, you have a responsibility to treat that work with respect-- to acknowledge your own ignorance and, where appropriate, defer to the greater expertise of others."

No, your job as a journalist is not to defer to the greater expertise of others, but to figure out what the key questions are to ask your subjects so readers can see if they really are the experts they claim to be.

Of course, you apparently can't become Malcolm Gladwell unless you are as big a sucker as Malcolm is. I'm sure PR flacks are inundating the New Yorker office daily with ideas for Gladwell stories because he doesn't have a skeptical bone in his body. And readers like that. Gladwell seems so genuinely confident that somewhere out there is some genius who can tell his readers exactly how to get rich, and that Malcolm will find him for them. And Malcolm's trusting nature is genuine. He believes in his own stories more than even his most devoted fans believe in them.

As for this article, it raises some interesting questions.

The first is the researchers' confidence that the screenplay is by far the key element in the money-making equation. In truth, I think the key to predicting box office is the budget. There's a reasonably high correlation between the overall expenditure and the box office take. Studios aren't stupid about what properties to invest heavily in.

Still, it's hardly unreasonable to to focus on the screenplay. The amount of acting talent that could do a reasonable job with most scripts is enormous these days.

Directors get more publicity than screenwriters, even though the screenplay is probably more essential. A major reason is that the director's job is far harder to do. It's like the difference between a staff general who draws up a battle plan on paper during the long years of peace and the line general who must execute it in the fog of war. Military historians like to praise Gen. Schlieffen, who drew up an elaborate plan for how Germany could win a two front war against France and Imperial Russia, and to denigrate Gen. von Moltke the Lesser, who botched Schlieffen's plan in 1914. Shlieffen, though, worked with relative leisure, while Von Moltke had to make decisions in real time.

Second, the article walks through a close analysis of the original and revised screenplays for "The Interpreter" an indifferently successful 2005 drama about goings-on at the UN starring Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn and directed by Sydney Pollack. Their advice boils down to, in effect, make it cheesier, more like "The Bodyguard." The marketing researchers' revised plot is exceptionally idiotic.

Since "The Interpreter," while trying to be a smart movie, ended up pretty dumb, that wouldn't have been much of a loss. But, that's not how Hollywood works. While "The Interpreter" was kind of stupid if you knew much of anything about Africa and the UN, it didn't seem stupid to Kidman, Penn, and Pollack (who don't). They wouldn't have made the movie if it was intentionally a lowest common denominator effort. It would have ended up getting made with, say, Josh Lucas and Sienna Miller in the lead roles, and then the studio wouldn't have given it much of a promotional budget because it didn't have big stars attached, and it still wouldn't have made much of a profit.

The scary truth is that Hollywood would make even lousier movies if everybody in town weren't constantly telling each other that they are geniuses who should save themselves for artistic cinema. Putting up with the inflated self-regards of Hollywood artistes is the price we pay for the occasional non-moronic movie.

Third, what you can't systematically predict based on the past is The Next Big Thing. Audiences eventually get bored with what they liked in the past, but you can't tell when. And what you definitely can't tell from your database is what they'll start liking in the future.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

How Big is "Borat" vs. How Small Is "Idiocracy"

How Big is "Borat" vs. How Small Is "Idiocracy:" A reader points out that Google now has recorded 96,000,000 pages with the word "Borat" on it, compared to 24,000,000 for "Titanic," which is only the biggest money movie of all time, one of the most famous incidents in 20th Century history, and a normal adjective in the English language.

In contrast, Mike Judge's similar but superior "Idiocracy" is being shot like a rabid dog by the same studio that has promoted "Borat" so deftly. A reader writes:

It seems Fox's filicide of Idiocracy at the box office wasn't enough: now they want to bury the corpse. They've set a release date of January 9th, the notorious post-New Year's dead spot for movies, and are pricing it at a ridiculous $27.95, which is an absolutely unheard-of price for a disc that's not in the Criterion Collection. Fox must really, REALLY hate this movie.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Why the "Dumb and Dumber" of 2006

gets drafted into the Great American Status War: A reader writes:

It's pretty simple. "Borat," at its most basic level, is Stupid Foreigner humor. Look how much more enlightened we Americans are than these stupid people who beat their wives and drink horse urine. Isn't it funny to watch the foreigner make an ass of himself? This is totally politically incorrect (and indirectly nationalistic) and so they have to convince themselves that he's actually anti-American and thus politically correct. But if the Borat laughs *really* came from watching the 'stupidity of America unveiled', why did he still get laughs on SNL where everyone was in on the joke?

The tendency of politically correct critics to develop meta-justifications for politically incorrect comics like Sara Silverman and Dave Chappelle -- "They're not getting laughs from ethnic stereotypes, they're, uh, getting us to laugh at the stereotypicality of the stereotypes, you see. It's all very meta." -- might be pretty funny if the comedians themselves sometimes didn't fall for this nonsense.

The Jewish comedians like Baron Cohen and Silverman generally know how to play this game. Silverman, for example, occasionally throws in an intentionally stupid, untrue racial stereotype ("Mexicans smell bad") so all the nice white liberals in the audience can pretend her other stereotypes ("Asians are good at math") are dumb too, and that they are actually laughing at all those idiots conservatives who believe Asians are good at math, as if there is any such thing as race. Or math, for that matter.

But at least Silverman will occasionally tell the kind of Jewish joke that other Jewish comedians won't. Her best is:

I got in trouble for saying the word “Ch*nk” on a talk show, a network talk show. It was in the context of a joke. Obviously. That’d be weird. That’d be a really bad career choice if it wasn’t. But, nevertheless, the president of an Asian-American watchdog group out here in Los Angeles, his name is Guy Aoki, and he was up in arms about it and he put my name in the papers calling me a racist, and it hurt. As a Jew—as a member of the Jewish community—I was really concerned that we were losing control of the media.

Baron Cohen, in contrast, simply makes fun of the enemies of the Jews, whether from the 19th Century (the Slavic peasant Borat), the 20th Century (the Austrian Bruno), or the 21st Century (the Pakistani-Brit Ali G), with zero self-reflection. There's nothing wrong with that, but let's not get carried away about how brave or brilliant it is for an overdog to stick it to various underdogs.

The tragic case is Chappelle, who actually fell for the critics' wheeze that he wasn't poking fun at blacks, no, he was exposing the stereotypes held by bigoted white people who thought about blacks in the way Chappelle portrayed them. Then one day, a white man on his set laughed so hard, in such an un-meta way, that Chappelle finally realized that the whole meta theory was just white jive to justify laughing at funny black people. So, Chappelle ran off to South Africa and walked out on his $50 million contract.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Future Prime Minister of Britain calls for criminalizing free speech

Tougher hate law reforms mulled

LONDON (Reuters) - Racial and religious hatred laws may need reform after a court cleared a far-right leader for the second time this year over a speech in which he called Islam a "wicked, vicious faith", ministers said.

Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, was found not guilty on Friday of inciting racial hatred during secretly filmed speeches in 2004.

Two senior ministers said the comments had upset most Britons and British Muslims needed reassurance that the laws would protect them.

"Any preaching of religious or racial hatred will offend mainstream opinion in this country and I think we have got to do whatever we can to root it out," Chancellor Gordon Brown told the BBC.

"If that means that we have to look at the laws again, I think we will have to do so."

Constitutional Affairs Secretary Charles Falconer said the country had to show it would not tolerate attacks on Islam.

"If you say Islam is wicked and evil and there is no consequence from that whatsoever, what is being said to young Muslim people in this country is that we ... are anti-Islam," he told the BBC.

Of the country's 60 million people, some 1.6 million are Muslims...

Griffin maintained throughout the trial that his comments were not racial and were designed to stir his audience to political activity.

Perhaps Tony Blair's presumed successor, Gordon Brown, should shepherd through Parliament an ex post facto law and bill of attainder specifically naming Nick Griffin as going to prison for violating in 2004 the Anti-Free Speech Law of 2007. And why not get rid of trial by jury while he's at it? Who can afford to care about 991 years of English constitutional liberties anymore when 2% of the population is Muslim?

More seriously, Americans should start to re-assess their tourism plans in light of the British Government's desire to criminalize free expression. How much longer can you afford to take the risk of vacationing in Britain when you could be arrested for, say, some comment you posted on somebody's blog? I can't imagine any other kind of arguments than "Tourists are money!" having any impact on getting Brown to rethink killing free speech.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

All "Borat" All the Time

A reader points to the August 13, 2004 article in The Forward by Nathaniel Popper about the notorious "Throw the Jew Down the Well" sing-along scene:

A very different picture, though, emerged from a conversation with the treasurer of the company that owns the bar, Carol Pierce, who said that she herself is Jewish. Pierce could be seen during the segment on HBO, laughing heartily behind her goateed husband.

In explaining her light-hearted take on Borat, she pointed out that what television viewers saw was only a few minutes of the two-and-a-half-hour performance that Borat gave when he came to Tucson, Ariz., in April. The rest of Borat’s performance, in which he sang about throwing his wife and family down the well, made it perfectly clear to Pierce that the man performing was a comedian in disguise — who was very funny.

“You could tell by the way they presented him. They brought him in and said he was an up-and-coming country music star,” Pierce recalled. “You could tell right away it was a wig he was wearing, and a fake mustache. I would say 99% of the people in here saw that, too.”

Well, actually it's his own hair. In fact, I used to have hair and a mustache just like Borat, about 1985. Good times, good times ...

What's annoying about the critics' hyping of ""Borat" is that they just can't let it be a funny movie, like "Dumb and Dumber." It has to be drafted into the Great American Status War. Look, it's not "Schindler's List." It's an expertly-done string of Polish Jokes. Why isn't that enough?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer