Last Week Tonight Discussion : Brazilian Election+Law and Order (9/25/22)

[TheGlyphstone]

So the show is still on hiatus and will be until the end of February, but he put out a short web exclusive in the meantime...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kfx2fANELo

Go to hell, John. Chex Quest was the best DOOM game ever made.

[Oniya]

Junk food using 'play' to attract customers is nothing new.  When was the last time you saw a 'Free toy inside!' announcement on a box of Wheaties or Grape-Nuts?  (While we're at it, why call them Grape-Nuts?  They don't even have raisins in there!)  Some of those old cereal boxes even had little board games on the backs of the boxes (use sugary cereal for game tokens!  But you have to cut up the box, so get Mom to buy two!)

Honestly, I'm more annoyed by PETA's attempts to get on the video-game-as-advertisement bandwagon.

[Humble Scribe]

Apologies to Glyphstone, but I'm posting this week's minisode, which went up today, on John's frustration with a stupidly simple puzzle in The Da Vinci Code. It's quite funny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX5IV9n223M

There was a similar moment for me in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, which is kind of The Da Vinci Code for people who went to college. The hero is trying to get into the locked computer of his murdered colleague (murdered because of a fake conspiracy theory involving the Templars that they both made up for laughs, which some nutters now genuinely believe in - I mean talk about prescient of our times!). The computer asks:

DO YOU KNOW THE PASSWORD? >_

The correct answer, of course, is: 'no'. It took him half the book to work this out. Sigh.

The Da Vinci Code is a fictionalised version of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, written by three English eccentrics, one of whom was a documentary maker. I read it back in the 80s and it was entertaining but clearly bullshit. Holy Blood starts from some reasonable questions, like: was Mary Magdalene Christ's wife? [Probably]. Then it somehow posits that the Merovingian Kings of France were lineal descendants of Christ. Then that a secret society called the Prieure de Sion kept this secret knowledge, infiltrating the Templars, the Rosicrucians, and whoever else. And there's some nonsense about a place called Rennes le Chateau in France and a secret treasure. A lot of it comes from some documents planted in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris by a conman called Pierre Plantard, who later admitted he'd made the whole thing up, including the stuff about Da Vinci being the head of the Prieure de Sion. And no, for the record, I don't think that's Mary Magdalene in The Last Supper. But of course, once you're invested in a conspiracy, mere denial by the person who dreamed it up isn't enough to put you off the scent. 'They' got to him, of course, his recanting shouldn't be taken at face value. Do Your Own Research, as the Q-Anons say. The thing I love the most is that they tried to sue Dan Brown for plagiarism when The Da Vinci Code came out. Their case failed because the judge pointed out that they said their book was factual, and you can't plagiarise facts.

But yeah. Apple.

[Oniya]

I remember listening to that book on a long car ride.  (Series of car rides, actually.)  Got the answer to that riddle in one.

The fact that I have experience in cutting apples might have helped.

[TheGlyphstone]

I actually read an article about Focault's Pendulum a few days ago on Cracked, of all places. Comedic minds must think alike.

[Oniya]

The way the book jumps back and forth between flashbacks and the present does sort of mess with the whole 'half the book' aspect, though.  It was still a laughable password and a lot of 'overthinking'.  Some of his logic wasn't too bad, though - people do tend to use important words for passwords - but it was like playing chess with an average five-year-old and expecting something more behind their strategy than 'horsie can jump!'

[Sara Nilsson]

I kept expecting something clever.. like

well obviously it isn't apple, someone like him would come up with something smarter.. and then.. i dunno.. something...

people kept raving about how good the book was.. I mean it had its cool points but.. but holy shit the next book was.. BAD! Like.. wtf... I only finished angels and demons out of sheer perverse need to punish myself and see how much worse it could be.. and it never disappointed..

[Oniya]

I thought he wrote Angels and Demons first?

In any event, take a miss on Inferno.  Dante is currently weeping on Beatrice's shoulder.

[Sara Nilsson]

did he? perhaps.. I just know I read that after and it sucked even more.. i .. don't even want to look it up :)

[Oniya]

I vaguely remember DVC referencing events from A&D.  I will say that the ambigrams were cool.

[Beorning]

I've read DVC and I agree it's simply a mediocre book. It only got this big due to the subject matter.

As for Foucault's Pendulum - I freaking love this book, it's amazing. Regarding the "No" puzzle - keep in mind that the book is in multiple flashbacks, so it's not like the lead character actually spends half of the story trying to solve this puzzle...

[stormwyrm]

I read it myself years ago, and even before that I'd come across Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince's The Templar Legacy (which Brown seems to have drawn upon even more) as well as Foucault's Pendulum. The Da Vinci Code is some pretty meh writing though oddly enough one keeps on reading it anyway. All of his books seem to follow the same general pattern of some kind of earth-shaking mystery kept secret by some contrived puzzles. The last book of his I read, Origin, clearly demonstrates his ignorance of the process of science as it's done by actual scientists. If Kirsch really found a way to simulate the origin of life in his computer, that would hardly constitute proof of anything, much less something people would kill over. A lone scientist working alone rarely produces earth-shattering discoveries.

Oddly enough the only book of his I haven't yet read is Digital Fortress. I'm afraid to pick it up, since it's based on my own specialisation, and I've heard that he gets shit wrong so badly. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson at least didn't make me cringe as it did make some effort to get stuff right.

[Humble Scribe]

I read it myself years ago, and even before that I'd come across Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince's The Templar Legacy (which Brown seems to have drawn upon even more) as well as Foucault's Pendulum. The Da Vinci Code is some pretty meh writing though oddly enough one keeps on reading it anyway. All of his books seem to follow the same general pattern of some kind of earth-shaking mystery kept secret by some contrived puzzles. The last book of his I read, Origin, clearly demonstrates his ignorance of the process of science as it's done by actual scientists. If Kirsch really found a way to simulate the origin of life in his computer, that would hardly constitute proof of anything, much less something people would kill over. A lone scientist working alone rarely produces earth-shattering discoveries.
Oddly enough the only book of his I haven't yet read is Digital Fortress. I'm afraid to pick it up, since it's based on my own specialisation, and I've heard that he gets shit wrong so badly. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson at least didn't make me cringe as it did make some effort to get stuff right.

Dan Brown is a terrible prose writer, and rightly much mocked for it, but in spite of that he has that successful touch that someone like Jeffrey Archer also has - he can do plot and pacing. It's pulp, and I quite enjoyed it in spite of myself. The only other one I read was Angels and Demons, which had me eye rolling at the battery-powered antimatter, and finally lost me at the parachuting cardinal.
Neal Stephenson has some good ideas but his books are like lectures. The first and last parts of Snow Crash are great, but the centre is just a massive info-dump on Sumerian language and culture that goes on for ever. Cryptonomicon should have been about half the length. I mean, 1100 pages? That's Tolstoy - no techno thriller should be that bloated.

[Oniya]

I'm afraid to pick it up, since it's based on my own specialisation, and I've heard that he gets shit wrong so badly.

This may be why Inferno disappointed me so badly.  I've read Dante - in a couple different translations - multiple times.  While I wouldn't call myself a scholar of the Divine Comedy, I'm at least deeply familiar with it.  After that, I couldn't even pick up Origin.

[Beorning]

You know, I checked the summaries of other Dan Brown books. Now I feel offended... based on the summaries, these books just look stupid. How come this stuff is popular..?

BTW. Something that puzzles me about Origin - the plot hinges on that supposedly world-shaking discovery by Kirsch... which turns out to be the fact that he ran a computer simulation showing that life might develop naturally. Seriously, this was the thing that was supposed to render all the world religions obsolete..? At the same time, the book (at least based on the summary I've read) skirts over the fact that Kirsch, apparently, developed the world's first fully sapient AI... Now *that* is a discovery that could change the world. And yet... it's just a subplot...

BTW 2. Isn't the ending of Inferno completely... bleak? From what I gather, the thing that happens there should completely shake the modern world. Did Brown deal with this event in Origin..?

[Oniya]

BTW 2. Isn't the ending of Inferno completely... bleak? From what I gather, the thing that happens there should completely shake the modern world. Did Brown deal with this event in Origin..?

In case anyone doesn't want to know

Yes - the main bad guy is set on releasing an airborne contagion on such-and-such a day, and the plot is all about trying to find where he's stashed it.  Turns out that he lied about when he was releasing it, and had been releasing it over time in a very popular tourist area.  (Restaurant, as I recall, with lots of water features to help disperse it.)

The contagion turns out to be something to render large portions of the population infertile, with the aim of reducing Earth's total population and lowering humanity's impact on the environment.

So, yes - the ending is pretty bleak.  The good guys don't 'win'.

That said, I don't know if he dealt with it in Origin.

[TheGlyphstone]

Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide

Does he at least quote Ozymandius from Watchmen?

[Oniya]

Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide

Does he at least quote Ozymandius from Watchmen?

In Inferno?  Not that I can recall.

[TheGlyphstone]

As the big man himself says, "WE'RE F******G BACK, EVERYBODY!"

And we're starting this season off with a doozy, too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EICp1vGlh_U

That's right - Critical Race Theory, the terrifying boogeyman that every conservative hates and is terrified by, despite its presence in schools being about as prevalent as the presence of asbestos in baby food.

[TheGlyphstone]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gd8yUptg0Q

This week, John is discussing sex work and sex workers, and all the ways the law and society are set up against them. I know this topic has come up previous here in PROC, with several threads discussing the legalization/decriminalization of sex work, FOSTA/SESTA, etc., so hopefully we can get some discussion going this time.

I think what struck me the most here is a line from the interview at 10min15sec:

In the transgender community, not carrying condoms is a death wish

...

[Oniya]

So - in one of my previous lives, I was in the IT department of an AIDS research lab.  Prior to that, I'd had a good friend die from AIDS-related complications. 

I would think that statement would extend to the sex-worker community in general, just due to the multiple unknown partners aspect.  Even for one of the 'simpler' STDs, (the ones that you can treat with standard antibiotics), infection would mean a period of lost wages - assuming that they had access to treatment.

[Humble Scribe]

Last Week Tonight continues to be educational. I had no idea that sex work was illegal almost everywhere in the US. Once again in the UK we do it slightly differently. Paying money for sex is perfectly legal here, but then there are laws that hem in almost every aspect of sex work. Sharing premises with another sex worker is Keeping a Brothel - illegal. Using the proceeds of sex work to pay for accommodation etc is Living Off Immoral Earnings (even the title of the law shows how old it is). It's illegal to solicit on the street for sex work and belatedly since 2010 it's also illegal for customers to solicit sex ('kerb crawling'). There is a mess of laws around advertising sex services.

In general it's not a high priority crime for the police, though, so it's often left alone unless there are complaints from local residents (or of course evidence of more serious crimes like trafficking, rape, assault etc). Some local authorities have experimented with the Nordic Model, others with decriminalisation or 'managed zones', and there's an ongoing debate about the best way to deal with it. Unfortunately it's too hot a potato for too little gain for most politicians to be interested in actually dealing with it (see also drugs). Conservatives often crack down by instinct, on the left some feminists have decided that no women would do it voluntarily and therefore they're all coerced or trafficked and hence it needs to be expunged. I guess in general we're slightly less prudish than the US about such things, but it's still a bit depressing that we can't have an adult debate here.

[greenknight]

Of note, the episode's working definition of sex work excludes exotic dancing, a swath of pornography (larger or smaller based on legal definitions of sex), and other activities and occupations that could be defined as "sex adjacent" without including specific sex acts.

[TheGlyphstone]

It also leaves out online camming, which is also a form of currently legal sex work (likely because it is technically pornography because a camera is involved).

[Sara Nilsson]

I remember when Sweden changed the law to the now so called Nordic Model and a lot of people screamed it would just harm the sex workers. Forcing them to go underground basically. And that is what happened. Several of my trans friends back then did that to afford to live (good luck getting a job as a transitioning person) and the times I had to hold them as they cried over what a client had done. Not like the cops would do anything if they went to them. I am still angry after all these years.

Personally, I am all for making it legal. Give these men and women rights, healthcare, etc. It will make it better for everyone as far as I am concerned, and I would imagineit makes it easier for the police to actually look for those that don't want to do it. Being trafficked or addicted and just needing help. If the workers can go to the police/social services with their problems and observations.. I mean.. why not?! Its work like any other.