Vimeo of the Day: "The Fruit Hunters"

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I read yesterday at The Atlantic about a 2012 documentary called The Fruit Hunters. It's a Canadian production, but somehow I missed it -- maybe because it got little attention at the time.

Below is the trailer, and here's the description:

Exotic fruit obsessives, adventurers, detectives and even movie star Bill Pullman are the subjects of the dizzying new film from acclaimed director Yung Chang (Up the Yangtze, China Heavyweight). A cinematic odyssey through nature and commerce that spans prehistory to the present, The Fruit Hunters will change not only the way we look at what we eat but how we view our relationship to the natural world. 

I love fruit. A lot. And I want to see this doc. And to eat as much of this glorious fruit as possible.

(By the way, Up the Yangtze, which I have seen, is excellent. Sad and depressing, but excellent.)

The Fruit Hunters - Official Trailer : in theaters November 23, 2012 from EyeSteelFilm on Vimeo.

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July 4, 2013 -- Independence Day

By Michael J.W. Stickings 

We had our day three days ago. Now it's the Americans' turn.

Happy Fourth of July, my American friends and family!

Go watch some baseball or eat some apple pie or something.

**********

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Tea Partier: Louder-shouting Republican

By Frank Moraes

Yesterday, Ed Kilgore wrote, "Please Listen Up, Political Reporters: What Ted Cruz Means When He Says He Mistrusts Both Parties." In it, he took on Ted Cruz and his habit of claiming that he doesn't trust either political party. As Kilgore noted, "Does it mean, as political reporters often blandly repeat, that 'Tea Party' pols like Cruz are hardy independents who care about principle rather than about the GOP, and represent a constituency that is up in the air?" He provided two answers: "No" and "Hell no!"

This is an issue that I've been hammering on for a while. The only difference between the Tea Party and the Republican Party is that the Tea Party is only made up of the stronger Republicans. So it makes no sense to even have a different name for the Tea Party; they are just the base of the Republican Party. What's interesting is that the Democratic Party has a progressive base too but no one labels it as a separate party. And that's strange when you consider that the this base is far more likely to abandon its party than the Tea Party is.

As you all know, I am constantly disappointed in the Democratic Party. Yet when someone asks me, I tell them I am a Democrat. I think it is disingenuous to say otherwise. This comes from my many conversations with conservatives who claim to be "independent." (This doesn't tend to happen with liberals; the independents who tend toward the Democrats really are in the muddled middle.) You aren't an independent if you agree with everything the Republicans say but think they aren't quite pure enough. And that is exactly what Ted Cruz is all about.

What the Tea Party movement was about from the beginning was the Republican base upset that it lost big in 2008. It was the outgrowth of the widely held opinion that the 2008 crisis and the presidency of George W. Bush were caused by not being conservative enough. There was also all that racial insecurity. "I'm losing control of my country!" I won't go as far as Bobcat Goldthwait who says they are just racists, "Obama's a... a... a Socialist! What's a Socialist? I don't know, but they like fried chicken." But there is a lot of that. The whole birther movement is not because Obama is black but because he is "other."

Whenever talking about the modern Republican Party, all roads lead back to Life of Brian. The only ones the People's Front of Judea hate more than the Romans are the Judean People's Front. So it is madness to suggest that the Tea Party is somehow independent of the parties. That makes it sound as if its members disagree equally with the two parties. But the fact is that they always (By definition!) disagree with the Democratic Party. And they always agree with the Republican Party. Except, of course, they shout louder. But what they shout is same thing.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

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Affinity bias and the White House scandals

By Frank Moraes 

I've been thinking a lot about why so many journalists I follow went so wrong on the supposed White House Scandals this week. I think it has a lot to do with affinity bias. And that does not speak well for the state of journalism.

A lot of people wonder why, for example, conservatives often hold opinions that are just wrong. Throughout the Bush administration, Fox News viewers were systematically misinformed about important issues. Why was that? It's quite simple: they trusted Fox News. And that is not only acceptable, it is necessary. We can't independently become experts on every issue we hear about. So we find people who we trust as experts and believe what they say.

Of course, it pays to be selective. Anyone who gets their information from cable news is cruising for a bruising. In general, I think that MSNBC is a lot better than Fox News. But that isn't always case. I think Fox News has done a better job under Obama than they did under Bush. It's all been pretty bad, though. MSNBC has done better generally, but I think they were soft on Obama during the campaign. At times they act as apologists for the Obama Administration -- especially certain shows. Regardless, I think that MSNBC does a better job of informing liberals than Fox News does informing conservatives. Of course, the best conservative print publications are better. Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review and Josh Barro of Bloomberg View are both fact based. I wish a lot more conservatives got their news from people like them.

There really is a difference between what liberals and conservatives think about things even when they are working off the same set of facts. And that should be enough. But instead, generally conservatives get different facts than liberals do. I think this is about 90% the fault of conservative media, but it hardly matters. My point is that we've got to trust someone.

I've worked very hard to find people who I feel I can trust -- people who will not knowingly deceive me and will admit when they are wrong. I still feel very dependent on these people. But not always. For example, most of them went crazy this last week. They acted as though there was something to all these scandals. There were damned few people like me who were pushing back against this. And my question is: why?

I think there is a problem with being too plugged into the media structure -- something that I cannot be accused of. And in this case, all the liberal commentators were trying to prove that they weren't just partisans. If the Obama administration had done something wrong, they were going to hold it accountable. The problem is that this kind of thing is just as bad as blind partisanship. From Monday on, there was no information that implicated the White House. Yet much of the reporting was of the type that I saw coming from Greg Sargent: very cautious concern.

This week I wasn't exactly kind to Obama. I blasted him about firing Steven Miller. And I've been very hard on him about the Associated Press, even though the scandal is systemic and not especially Obama. But I didn't fall for the theatrics, which I correctly labeled a "perfect storm of bad sandal-like news."

So why didn't the others see this? I think it is the same thing as for all of us: we have people we trust. Unfortunately, many of the people I trust, themselves trust Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Politico. (I avoid reading them if I can.) They are the very definition of "Washington Insider." And they create a kind of sports reporting approach to politics. Indeed, in his "nothing to see here" article yesterday, Ezra Klein wrote, "On Tuesday, it looked like we had three possible political scandals brewing. Two days later, with much more evidence available, it doesn't look like any of them will pan out." But the evidence that became available between Tuesday and Thursday didn't change the facts as the Monday CNN report did change Friday's ABC "facts." All that changed was that the commentariat had a chance to calm down.

The whole thing reminds me of The Ox-Bow Incident. The media depended upon its trusted connections to believe that something happened that the facts just didn't support. Ezra Klein and others are always quick to note that a stunning revelation could turn any of these supposed scandals into real scandals. But that's always true. It could turn out that Obama got an Oval Office blow job by an intern. Or that Michelle had Vince Foster killed. Or maybe they both fired the people in the travel office to give their friends a job. Any of this could be true. But barring any actual, you know, facts, it is just a big game of telephone played by journalists who really ought to be smarter than the average cable news viewer.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

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