Eurovision

Since I now live in Europe, I find myself drawn in to the Eurovision song contest. On the one hand, it's an international contest even more fraught with under-the-surface (and on-the-surface) politics than the Olympics; one is drawn to root for one's team. But on the other hand, it is a festival of massively-produced pop music. I mean, the live performances use the very highest technology available — massive LED matrices, realtime projection mapping, elaborate robotic sets, even goofy two-wheeled contraptions — and the music is processed to within an inch of its life. Which is actually kind of fun to watch. Of course, all the songs are horrible earworms. So be warned; the video below is lovely and apropos for this blog, but it will be stuck in your head:

Oh, and of course, it's astonishingly gay — the hosts opened with a string of jokes about all the gay fans, and I saw at least as many rainbow flags as I did flags from any nation (should I make that any geographical nation?).

Below the jump I'll post a few others that I particularly liked (that is, they're hopelessly stuck in my head).

In defense of Duck and Cover

Now that the Cold War is over, people will occasionally look back at the horrifying situation — two opposing superpowers threatening the world with annihilation ­— view the threat as over, and laugh at some of the things people said and did back then. Now I know that this is partly because laughter is the only way to deal with such a nightmare, but some of the specifics they choose are just wrong. Take for example this John Oliver clip about nuclear weapons:
 He argues convincingly that there is still a threat, and that we need to do something about it. But he opens by mocking "Duck and Cover", which is actually misguided.

Justice

Available from Amazon

I recently read (listened to? What's the right way to say that for an audio book?) "Justice: What's the right thing to do?" by Michael J. Sandel. It's an interesting book, though rather heavier going than Nate Silver's breezy book on prediction. The basic question it addresses is, how do you decide what's right? Not just what's legal — you need some basis for deciding which laws are just. He talks through several approaches, including some ideas of his own. While he talks about several currently-debated topics, he refrains from stating his position on any of them, instead pointing out what the conflicting ideas of justice are that motivate the two sides.

Police violence and crowd control

In the last few weeks, we've seen a number of events where large crowds of unruly people have gathered. Police response to these crowds has varied substantially, and I think it's instructive to think about what these responses say about us, as a society.

The People's Microphone

I went down to Occupy Montreal the other day. It was pretty impressive, really; the modest park, surrounded by banks, was filled with tents and people making art. Particularly amusing was the statue of Queen Victoria wearing a Guy Fawkes mask (pictured on the right). But what got me thinking was the People's Microphone.