Monday: Hili dialogue

53 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

1. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
   Civilizations in decline are consistently characterized by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity. -Arnold Toynbee, historian (14 Apr 1889-1975)

   1. So historians of the future will blame the USB-C connector for the downfall of western civilisation, right?

   2. I would need some examples… North Korea seems the most standardized and uniform civilization in history and it seems they were like that from the get-go. Sure, they’re in some form of decline, but a declining civilization can stick around for centuries…look at Rome.

      Though I would like to say thanks for providing these “Thoughts for Today” they’re a fun and thought-provoking addition to Hili’s dialogue.

      1. Thought provoking is exactly what I am hoping for.

2. I have often reflected on the place that movies play in American culture. I would say that they are more important than plays and possibly even novels as a mechanism for establishing a shared culture. When I was a kid in the 70s, there were movies on almost all day: morning, early afternoon, after school, in the evening, late night, and even more on the weekends. I feel about Betty Davis the way McWhorter feels about Katherine Hepburn, so I would definitely swap in “The Philadelphia Story” for “All About Eve.” I would also swap “The Maltese Falcon” (1941) for “Rear Window”, “The Wizard of Oz” for “Forty-Second Street”, and “Buck Privates” for “Cabin in the Sky.” I’d probably also expand the list to twenty-five. . . .

3. My top ten:
   1 Quintet (Altman)
   2 Stalker (Tarkovsky)
   3 Woman In The Dunes (Teshigahara)
   4 Days Of Heaven (Malick)
   5 McCabe And Mrs. Miller (Altman)
   6 Dersu Uzala (Kurosawa)
   7 Black Robe (Beresford)
   8 Nashville (Altman)
   9 Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors (Parajanov)
   10 Safe (Haynes)

   1. Woman in the Dunes is a film adaptation of Kobo Abe’s novel of the same name. As per usual, I liked the book better, but the movie was excellent. A few of Abe’s novels were made into movies by Teshigahara and they’re all good, especially The Face of Another. People have called Abe the Poe of Japan, and he is indeed macabre, but most of his novels are so bizarre and unique, I don’t think he’s comparable to anyone. And I’m sure his novels are better in Japanese than English.

4. Recently watched Bad Day at Black Rock. From 1955, stars Spencer Tracy.

   From IMDB:
   “Following World War II, a one-armed stranger arrives in a tiny California desert town, but finds the residents hostile and protecting a terrible secret they want to keep hidden, by violent means if necessary.”

   Only 1h20m long, best to watch without spoilers because the mystery is a big part of it.

   1. That is a great movie. Great cast alongside Tracy.

   2. Terrific film.

5. My wife forbids me to give either academic or career advice to our grandchildren because she says that I am out of touch with their world of today. Maybe she is right because this morning I realize that even with an early 70’s MS in physics, I cannot understand today’s Google doodle.

   Oh and I just noticed that this Friday afternoon’s weekly physics colloquium at my old department is titled “Majorana Quasiparticles in Superconducting Vortices”. I grow old, I grow old….

   1. Thank you for that admission. Just proves I was right to not even try to understand it.

   2. I don’t understand it either. Similiar age and education.

      1. The only thing that I understand on the weekly colloquium announcements these days is the last line that says that “coffee and refreshments are served at 3:30”. A former department chair once explained to his junior physics majors that if you eat the cookies and drink the coffee at 3:30, then you are morally obligated to attend the colloquium at 4:00.

         1. This reminded me of my long-ago graduate student days – another grad student and I would put together the weekly schedule of events that included free food and drink. 🙂

6. I would recommend “The Counterfeit Traitor “ starring William Holden. My father took me to see it when I was in grade school and it had a profound impact on me. It is # 2 on my top ten list. (#1 being “Little Big Man”. )

   I recommend “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” which is also in my Top Ten.

7. No Star Wars? No LOTR? No French Connection? No Gladiator? No Saving Private Ryan? No Black Hawk Down?

   Apostasy.

   1. I think McWhorter was looking for even older classics.

      I recently rewatched 12 Angry Men and found myself thinking it’s just the sort of picture teens should see – excellent performances in a single room as jurors wrestle with fairness, truth, and each other.

      1. I second “12 Angry Men.” A friend of mine in her 20’s (I’m in my 60’s) recently saw it and was impressed. Another courtroom drama I’ve seen over and over and never tired of is “The Caine Mutiny.”

         Some foreign films I saw when I was young that got me interested in films as an art form: the “Apu” trilogy (India); “The 400 Blows” (France); “La Strada” (Italy); “The Bicycle Thief” (Italy); “Rashoman” (Japan).

8. The (alleged) link between vaccines and autism isn’t quite so clear. Some of the specific links (MMR, Thimerosal) have been debunked. However, the broader issue still exists. The number of vaccinations of children has soared since WWII (from 3 to 17+). Could vaccinations have some cumulative adverse impact? Hard to prove either way. For a completely different theory. There is a claim that Asians have brought a (otherwise harmless) virus to the US that triggers (in some people) Autism. This theory helps explain the allegedly high incidence of Autism in SV. For a completely different theory. There is a claim that the incidence of Autism has not increased, but it (Autism) is better diagnosed than it was.

   Is any of this true?

   The practical benefits of vaccines are easily overstated. Most of the reduction in morality occurred before vaccines and antibiotics were invented/used.

   1. I don’t know anyone who gets 17+ vaccines. Not even close. I’ve understood that the bar for diagnosing people to on the autism spectrum has been lowered, and the benefits of that is that it enables more services for kids while in K-12.

      1. “Not even close.”

         Here are the current CDC guidelines. I count 12 different vaccinations before age 15 months and 2 more after that. It appears to be roughly three dozen doses, not including the annual COVID and influenza vaccinations.

         So, yes, it appears that a “compliant” parent will climb close to the “72 vaccinations” often referenced by the antivaxxers. There is no doubt that this huge increase in doses over the number given several decades ago is setting some people up to “see” a causal link. But human “reasoning” working like it does, I don’t know whether any number of studies will persuade the most resistant. CDC could help matters by not being stupid–the annual COVID vaccine recommendation for healthy children is simply stupid.

         https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/imz-schedules/child-adolescent-age.html#table-1

   2. “Could vaccinations have some cumulative adverse impact? Hard to prove either way.”

      Well, since vaccine injury is has not been verified to increase as more vaccinations are routinely administered, but has verifiably decreased as vaccines have been made safer (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7252257), Occam’s Razor holds it very likely no cumulative adverse impact exists. From a reality-based perspective, the burden of support is therefore on those making contrary claims. RFK Jr. demonstrably does not share that perspective, however.

      “The practical benefits of vaccines are easily overstated. Most of the reduction in morality occurred before vaccines and antibiotics were invented/used.”

      Freudian slip? By conventional morality, the benefits of vaccines currently in use can scarcely be overstated! In the USA, the benefits include the verified orders-of-magnitude reduction, and even the abolition, of childhood mortality and morbidity from infectious diseases under the modern vaccination schedule (https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/us-infant-mortality-rise-not-linked-vaccines-2023-11-13/). Again, IMHO the burden is on RFK Jr. and his advisors to show otherwise.

      [Edit: This is my first comment on WEIT. I love the timed, post-submission editing feature! MA]

      1. I have been a pro-vaxxer (supporter of vaccines) for essentially forever. That puts me in good company. Mississippi consistently has a higher vaccination rate than California. However, the pro-vaccination argument isn’t quite perfect. It is good (and better than the alternatives), but has some flaws.

         The first flaw is timing. In most cases, death rates fell by 90+% long before vaccines were introduced. Most folks don’t know this, but it is true (see https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/ORLEG/bulletins/234774c). Why did death rates fall so much before vaccines? It turns out that water chlorination had a profound effect on death rates. Essentially every improvement in mortality we attribute to medicine, is actually a consequence of water chlorination (and a few other factors).

         Lesser gains (but far from zero) can be attributed to HVAC (death rates without indoor heating and AC would be considerably higher) and improvements in the supply of food. Many decades ago a German chemist by the name of Fritz Haber invented a way to manufacture Ammonia industrially (he also invented poison gas and was married to Taylor Swift). His goal was to enable Germany to fight WWI (it was assumed that the British would cut off the supply of Chilean nitrates needed to manufacture explosives and fertilizer).

         Of course, he succeeded (Carl Bosch took the idea from a laboratory bench experiment to large scale production) and changed the world. Food is now cheap (by historical standards) everywhere. The very famous Normal Borlaug created ‘miracle’ crops that could be planted in developing countries with fertilizer without ‘toppling’.

         This history has given the anti-vaxxers a legitimate argument against vaccines. Overall, I judge them wrong. The hazards of vaccines are still well below the gains.

         For a time, the anti-vaxxers in the U.S. claimed that Thiomersal (a Mercury compound) in vaccines was responsible for the autism epidemic. At the time, my response was ‘we should only be so lucky’. Of course, a proven Thiomersal/Autism link would have crushed the vaccine industry. However, the more serious scourge of autism would have been lifted. As it turn out, we were not so lucky. Thiomersal was removed from vaccines years ago, and we still have Autism.

         In Europe, the scapegoat wasn’t Thiomersal, but the MMR vaccine. It was widely claimed (in Europe) that the MMR vaccine was responsible for the European Autism epidemic. Not true as it turns out,.

         At this point it should be clear that no single vaccine and no single vaccine additive is the cause of the Autism epidemic. However, there is still reason for doubt. One or two generations ago, kids got 3 vaccinations (roughly). Now they get 20 (roughly). Could Autism be in part triggered by cumulative weight of vaccines? Such a linkage hasn’t been proven (to the best of my knowledge) or disproven (to the best of my knowledge).

         I rank it as ‘important if proven’.

         1. Thank you for engaging, Mr. Youell. As a WEIT newbie, I haven’t seen much controversy in these comments yet, and I don’t want to stir the pot if it’s not warranted. I’m pretty sure you and I are in vehement agreement about most things, including collective responsibility for public health. I don’t think you’re trying to undermine existing pro-vaccination policies. But since you commented, I thought I’d respond. I will cop to hypervigilance for anti-vaxxer tactics on publicly accessible fora.

            It’s understood that the history of vaccination and overall mortality/morbidity rates offers some support for skepticism, as well as showing clear meliorative trends both in adverse effects of vaccination and in public health; I needn’t repeat my previous response, except to emphasize that vaccination obviously is not the sole factor in the latter trend, but contributes quantitatively to it.

            We appear to be starting from different positions, however. AFAICT (https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/the-evidence-on-vaccines-and-autism) the absence of a link between autism and any number of vaccinations is ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ (SJ Gould). All arguments for a link to vaccination timing are post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacies, i.e. sheer unhappy coincidence, sadly exploited by dishonest people (https://www.autismspeaks.org/do-vaccines-cause-autism). The complaint that “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence” is shaved away by Occam’s Razor: how many times does a link need to be looked for and not found, before we’ll stop looking for it?

            The upshot for me: it’s unfortunate that public health authorities must give credence to fears founded on fraud, conspiracism and ignorance of probability. I presume you don’t disagree. Thanks again.

   3. “Most of the reduction in morality occurred before vaccines and antibiotics were invented/used.”

      I know you meant “mortality” but I REALLY like the typo.

      Still, I wanted to comment that the purpose of vaccines isn’t to reduce mortality – or rather, that’s an important benefit. The purpose of vaccine is to prevent or reduce the severity of illness from infectious disease. No serious person, scientist or not, can deny that vaccines have been effective in the same way antibiotics have been in improving long term health.

      1. “The purpose of vaccine is to prevent or reduce the severity of illness from infectious disease.”

         I’d say that’s one important purpose, but there is also the collective obligation to limit the spread of infection, and protect those who can’t be vaccinated or have elevated risk. Otherwise I agree with you, FWIW.

9. A serious problem with most (but not all) movie lists is that they are limited to US movies. Of course, I am just as guilty as most others, in this respect. Have great movies been produced in foreign countries. Of course, the answer is Yes. I have even met (very briefly) Hayao Miyazaki.

   1. Frank, have you heard of Sight & Sound, the monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute (BFI)?
      Every 10 years the magazine polls various experts from around the world on what are the best movies of all time (since 1992 there are 2 polls: one of film directors and one of film experts). Read about the most recent poll (2022) here:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sight_and_Sound_Greatest_Films_of_All_Time_2022

      The 2022 poll of 1,639 film critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics yielded a list of the greatest 264 films of all time (it was to be a list of 250 movies, but because of ties in the ranking it includes 264 movies).

      If we just look at the top 30, the breakdown by nationality of the director is:

      English: Hitchcock, Kubrick, Charles Laughton

      US American: Orson Welles, David Lynch, Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, Frances Ford Coppola, John Ford, Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee

      Japanese: Yasujirô Ozu, Akira Kurosawa

      French: Jean Renoir, Agnès Varda, Claire Denis, Céline Sciamma, Claude Lanzmann, Robert Bresson, Jacques Tati

      Belgian: Chantal Akerman

      Iranian: Abbas Kiarostami

      Hong Kong: Wong Kar Wai

      German: Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau

      Swedish: Ingmar Bergman

      Soviet Union: Dziga Vertov

      Czechoslovakia: Věra Chytilová

      Denmark: Carl Theodor Dreyer

      It’s pretty diverse. Personally, I disagree with Belgian director Chantal Akerman’s movie Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) being voted the best film. It would not make my top 50. In 2012, this movie was ranked #36. Then in 2022 it was ranked #1. What happened? Wokeness – an obsession with gender/sex, race, and sexuality. Now the best movie had to have been made by a woman. Before 2022, never had a movie by a woman ranked first. I think the top rank had gone to Citizen Kane (Orson Welles), and then to Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock). In 2012, the top-rated film by a female director had been Akerman’s movie, ranked #36.

      Anyway, the poll is an interesting one and the coverage is worldwide.

      1. Re Jeanne Dielman: I agree, wokeness, yes. It’s ending is what probably sent it to the top among the wokerati. I thought the ending really brought the movie down significantly. My Letterboxd review:

         A middle-class Brussels widow keeps her home as meticulously as she keeps to her routine, while she takes care of her remote but obedient son, and, jarringly, turns a daily trick, all as the invasive city lights and sounds trickle in through her windows. Her life is not emotionally rewarding, but it feels safe, passing without major incident, and despite her deep isolation, the film’s gentle rhythms, and its static and stately angles, are soothing and hypnotic…until things slowly (though in the context of her methodicalness, sometimes heavy-handedly) begin to unravel. We wonder what trauma has befallen her, but alas, the film takes an unwise turn in its overheated and psychologically evasive finale. Still, deeply, deeply affecting. (More or less remade as Abba’s ominous 1982 single “The Day Before You Came”.)

         1. Danny, I watched the Criterion Collection edition that came with an interview with Akerman – and her interpretation of the surprising thing that her character Jeanne Dielman did at the end of the movie threw me for a loop. I mean I watched the movie and didn’t even get the why of the surprising thing she did. I’m not blaming myself for this.

            Jeanne Dielman must be one of the most overrated movies there is.
            When I look at the top 30 of the critics poll, Dielman and Close-up by Abbas Kiarostami do not belong there. Really, Close-up is better than La Strada (not even on the list of 264 movies. Fellini has 8 1/2, Armacord and La dolce vita on there.)?

10. I have recently rewatched “Das Boot” (also available in English) and it still holds up as the pinnacle of German cinema.

    1. Agreed. A truly great movie.

       1. Please read the Roolz about frequency of posting on a thread. Thanks.

    2. IMO Lang’s Metropolis (1927) is also a contender.

11. Iran: as always, we’ll see. Opinion pieces have appeared periodically to argue that the Iranian regime is about to collapse, providing an incentive for the leadership to negotiate or moderate. We’ll see. Maybe one day, but they do seem to be bent on obtaining a nuclear weapon. Having been weakened in the Israel-Gaza war, one might think that the Iranians would be more inclined to push toward a nuclear weapon than less. Hope springs eternal, but reality is always in vogue.

    1. Agree.

       Plus I don’t trust the Ayatollahs to hold to any agreement they might sign.

    2. Really? Reality seems to be out of fashion in US international relations lately.

12. Parts of RFK’s brain were eaten by a worm, according to his own statement. That is why I think he actually believes what he said about autism.

    1. The Most Dangerous American, nepobaby, and worst US cabinet member EVER, RFK, is a fascinating psychological case. He’s a complicated, dangerous case study.
       Like a venomous snake without the beauty and charisma of the snake.

       D.A.
       NYC

       1. +1

13. Desert Island Films (Baker’s Dozen):

    Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford [The Shakespeare of American Cinema])
    Wagonmaster (Ford)
    The Quiet Man (Ford)
    Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman)
    Winter Light (Bergman)
    Cries and Whispers (Bergman)
    The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges)
    Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa)
    The Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel)
    Avanti (Billy Wilder)
    Brief Encounter (David Lean)
    Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah)
    The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah)

    1. Wagonmaster is an obscure pick for a Ford film. I’ve only seen it once, and had to go out of my way.

       1. I quote French director Bertrand Tavernier. This is how he described Ford’s poetry of style: “How can you criticise “Wagonmaster” – it would be like critisising the Niagara Falls.” I think Tavernier was absolutely right…

14. Some non-US movies:
    La Strada, Il Ladro di Bambini (not to be confused with Ladri di biciclette), L’albero degli zoccoli, Una giornata particolare, Raise the Red Lantern, De Smaak van Water (Dutch for The Taste of Water; a movie about a child hidden in a closet for most of her life).
    Our host has mentioned Ozu and Kurosawa multiple times so I won’t mention them here, but they would complete my Top 10.

15. All of these films are worth watching.

    Citizen Kane (1941)
    The Maltese Falcon (1941)
    The Fountainhead (1949)
    Twelve O’Clock High (1949)
    The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
    Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
    Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
    Lust for Life (1956)
    Forbidden Planet (1956)
    Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
    Twelve Angry Men (1957)
    The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
    The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)
    Psycho (1960)
    The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
    The Haunting (1963)

    1. +1

16. In general, I’m not as big a fan of movies from the 40s or 50s as McWhorter. The one exception is Casablanca. Since it’s one of my favorite ‘war’ movies, I urged my son to watch it before he went backpacking in Europe. He took my advice, and it paid off – literally. With Casablanca fresh in his mind, he placed a bet on 22 black on the roulette wheel when he went gambling in Monaco – and won.

    Otherwise, I find movies from the next decade – the 60s – to be much superior, overall. I was reminded of how great 60s movies could be when I recently rewatched The Graduate. Another great, but forgotten, movie from that decade is The Diary of a Mad Housewife.

    Re: RFK Jr. I’ve read a lot that is written by and about this dangerous loon, and let me assure you, he absolutely does believe that the measles vaccine causes autism – with a sprinkling of blame for fluoride, food dyes, and other ‘toxins’ on top. But autism is only one of a long list of terrible harms that he and other anti-vaxxers attribute to vaccines.

    On top of inventing harms caused by vaccines, RFK and his anti-vax pals also specialize in minimizing or denying the dangers of the infectious diseases that vaccines are intended to prevent. One constant tactic is to attribute cases of morbidity and death due to vaccine-preventable diseases to any and every cause other than the diseases themselves. E.g., in the case of the Texas kids who died of measles, RFK first tried to blame their deaths on ‘malnutrition’ – i.e., he claimed they would have survived, if they had had healthy (‘natural’) diets. Then, when that didn’t catch on, he endorsed the anti-vaxxer claim that the reason the kids died was because their doctors ‘failed’ to give them the correct anti-vax doctor-recommended miracle cures:

    [RFK Jr] has also claimed that the inhaled steroid budesonide and the antibiotic clarithromycin resulted in “almost miraculous and instantaneous” [recoveries in kids who are sick from measles]

17. Lots of great movies mentioned.
    I watched Singin’ In The Rain for the first time in about 40 years about 2 weeks ago and was surprised by how good it was.

    A couple that I’d add to the list:
    High Noon (1952)
    Godzilla (1954)

18. 10 movies that I think are excellent:

    All about Eve (1950, Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
    Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder)
    Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder)
    Ikiru (1952, Akira Kurosawa)
    Come and see (1985, Elem Klimov – one of the best movies about the holocaust; the action takes place in Belarus)
    The red shoes (1948, Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)
    Peeping Tom (1960, Michael Powell)
    Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock)
    Blue angel (1930, Josef von Sternberg)
    Raise the red lantern (1991, Zhang Yimou)

    1. Sunset Boulevard for sure. Best black comedy movie of all time.

19. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is terrific.

    I’m glad to see 42nd Street on McWhorter’s list, though personally I prefer (by a smidge) Golddiggers of 1933. Love those fast talkin’, witty dames.

    I’d add Double Indemnity and The Apartment (how could McWhorter have not included at least one film of Billy Wilder’s!? Oh, John), Psycho, Metropolis, and, for sheer technical brilliance, Snow White. (The original, obviously.)

    I’m sure there are plenty more but I’m too tired to think of them.

20. John Ford story, from George Eell’s “Hedda and Louella” (Hopper and Parsons)–

    [Hedda Hopper and John Ford] were good friends, but once, in a fury, she called Ford “an Irish son of a bitch”–and he reprimanded her for being redundant.

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