The Ellis-Fallacy

 TL;DR

Lindsay Ellis was a popular youtuber, a cornerstone of "Breadtube" an informal collection of progressive video-essayists. Lindsay Ellis by the way, isn't dead. I use the past tense because my understanding is she posts exclusively to Nebula now, that creator owned platform that you'll hear plugged by Youtubers and presumably has some lifetime subscribers though I am yet to meet one.

So that's the context. Ellis was particularly popular for critically analysing through video essay form, Disney Animated features, providing much context and commenting on lazyish problematizing tropes that cropped up around Disney princess movies - like Beauty and the Beast is just Stockholm syndrome, the moral of Aladdin is lying gets the girl, the moral of the little mermaid is change yourself for a guy etc.

As such, I would say that Lindsay's video essays are good, if you haven't seen them already. I do not possess the skills and aptitude to improve upon them.

The Ellis-Fallacy though, I put thus:

If A was important to you, then A is therefore important.

And this may not be a fallacy Lindsay Ellis herself ever committed. She just made video essays about Disney movies. But the fallacy was almost certainly committed by some people, most likely the Disney Corporation itself, as evidenced by the changes made in their cash-grab live action adaptations - Ellis herself commented on the new injected feminism in Beauty and the Beast.

Roadhouse

Steve: What if somebody calls my Mama a whore?

Dalton: Is she? 

Patrick Swayze plays Dalton, a "cooler" in the pre-civilised 1980s, and the quote comes from a scene where he trains the bouncers of the Roadhouse. He is specifically telling them to 'be nice' to de-escalate situations, to not rise to bait. 

And he is making a very basic point about empirical observation - not everyone loses their shit to defend their mother's honour.  

We get a scattered spectrum of humanity where despite most people being raised by a mother, forming some kind of attachment to them, as of something like the 1950s onwards, everyone goes through childhood celebrating mothers day and yet some people will commit acts of violence because someone suggests "yo mama so fat" or "your mama's a whore" or even simply "ya mum" and others are all like "whatever..."

And then, as it turns out, well I shouldn't say as it turns out. But if you were to interview some sample of (men) who do or don't defend their mothers honour and everything in between. I'm betting they all will be able to demonstrate a serviceable understanding of the important role and function of motherhood, and be able to talk about whether their mother struggled and sacrificed heroically to do their best, or they appreciate that their mother still mothered despite having every privilege available to them.

So I'm also betting it will transpire, that something close to an objective truth emerges, that boys who grow into men that do not fly into a righteous fury if someone says "ya mum" tend to do better in a number of outcomes like education, incarceration, marriage, finances, mental health and physical health.

Harvey Milk

If it were true that children emulate their teachers, we'd have a lot more nuns running around. ~ Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, Milk, 2008

It's been a while since I watched Milk, like the other side of the MCU and films not being made for grownups and a theatrical release. I believe the argument was, back in the 70s or whatever, and no doubt for some still to this day (certainly it echoes in the Anti-Trans and Anti-Drag activism of the US Far right) that homosexuals need to be kept out of education because 'grooming' which was an idea that people possess the power to make us gay.

The Milk movie is a neat little left-wing counter-argument to what I'd broadly call "media effects" theory, Harvey refers to teachers being gay and a common anxiety that they would teach children (somehow) to be gay.

It's also understandable that many parents of modern history, would have committed a post-hoc-ergo-proctor-hoc or "post hoc" fallacy. Much like the vaccines, their children experience their sexual awakening in high school. Mother discovers them wearing their lipstick or father discovers their male underwear brochure in their sock drawer, then they go to school and identify the most effeminate teacher and blame them.

Basically, pretty much all the research on media-effects indicates that contrary to our intuitions, but in line with pretty much all of our actual experience - media effects are weak. Students decades later, can't remember most of their highschool teachers at all, if they were to resit their final year exams they would likely fail. 90% of advertisements are forgotten, people don't particularly care about brands, almost no boy who grows up reading superman comics turns out to be heroic, and despite having unprecedented access to pornography and a sex obsessed youth culture, teenagers are boinking at record low rates all around the developed world.

Furthermore, when you control for history you can see that media has little impact. While there was no 'manosphere' in the mid-90s adolescent males dropped CDs into their portable stereos and discmen and bopped along to songs about murdering prostitutes. Their fathers listened to ballads by Johnny Cash and Jimmy Hendrix about murdering wives. 

Then there is religion, enormous amounts of energy are expended by organised religion primarily to replicate itself into the future, but also to somehow mould the flock into some ideal. Transparently to anyone with eyes however, someone's religious beliefs are actually very weak predictors of behaviours. In modern secular nations, religiosity might predict violence, but it is a very weak predictor of violence, the same is also true of charitability.

The fact being, that even in large congregations, for a variety of reasons, very very very few religious people take being a disciple seriously.

I have direct experience of this, because I lived through the years where atheists attained the prefix "militant" and not everyone was Dick Dawkins just being incredibly short with people and spitting Oxbridge acid at believers. The most common experience of atheist cruelty was doing incredibly shallow digging and hitting cognitive dissonance in believers of Abrahamic Faiths. 

I feel it worth the diversion here to use Jonathan Rauch's which I'm paraphrasing from his promotional junket of podcast interviews for 'Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy' where much of the time, Rauch advocates for less militancy and more understanding from atheists because - most believers in at least modern USA actually believe in a very secular God that tends to believe in what they believe in.

And I raise it here, because it seems likely, that never in the history of humanity, has anything had more collective energy poured into it to shape the minds of our fellow human beings, from a young age so that they would go on to shape the minds of their children, and grandchildren when the become elders of their community, than the Abrahamic religions. 

All evidence suggests, that this, and other endeavours like it, are simply not possible. 

Why? I would guess because our minds are made of meat, meat pumped full of hormones. That our thoughts react to.

I'm Lovin' It

I don't know when McDonalds adopted this campaign, but as a concrete example of the weakness of media effects, McDonalds might seem like an unlikely example.

Afterall, this company has gone for total market saturation. The "Big Mac Index" is an actual thing economists use to evaluate if a currency is overvalued or not, because a Big Mac is such a standard finished consumer good that it's price can be compared between nations fairly.

The golden arches are recognizeable, now the brand has an audio signature the 'da da da da daa' they sponsor major pro sporting codes and people know about upselling and happy meals and all of that.

So...

Why can't everything McDonald's does, be used to sell salad?

Just take upselling, McDonald's famous, and now in many jurisdictions, illegal 'Would you like fries with that?'

Offer someone salty fat saturated carbohydrates to go with their burger and milkshake, and we know people most often said 'yes.'

Ask someone 'Would you like kale with that?' and the vast vaaaaaaast majority of people would say 'no.'

Fuck no. 

The secret behind ostensible health-food movements like Boost Juice in Australia, was not the wheat-grass shots, but ice cream. Sugar was the fucking secret to Boost Juices success, much as it was with Starbucks and coffee. 

Sugar, Salt and Fat I believe is the simplest foodmarketing strategy in the world - add more of these three things and sales go up. Beside these, superior branding strategy might give McDonald's an edge over Burger King and Wendy's, economies of scale and market saturation may give McDonald's the edge over Shake Shack, In-N-Out and 5-Guys all generally considered superior by consumers, but salad franchises have to put a lot of fat and sugar and salt in their dressings to stay viable at all against hamburger and pizza joints.

So Did Disney "Steal" Aladdin?

Wouldn't you know it, within days of me beginning to write this up, Lindsay Ellis posted a new video-essay to Youtube. 

Handily however, it is titled "Did Disney Really Steal Aladdin?" In accordance with Betteridge's law of headlines - The answer is 'no' but in contravension of the law, Ellis' headline is paired with a thumbnail that reads "x - yes, x - no, [tick] - it's complicated."

Now, on some level we could define this question into 'importance' by referring to the actual 'new world order' that is for many, so boring their imagination resists it by positing illuminati, Jewish cabals and interdimensional lizard people and AI to displace the possibility that the legal structure known as a corporation is the new world order. Something that has the legal property rights of a living breathing person, but in fact only exists on paper.

So yes, it's important as to whether Disney employees on behalf of Disney shareholders, engage in forms of espionage to take shortcuts on what is essentially R&D to keep consumers from having choices, and workers from having choices and monopolising a market such that for periods of time the world has only one viable animation studio.

But how important it is relatively to other behaviours by Disney - like purchasing Marvel Studios, purchasing Lucasfilm, purchasing 21st century Fox, purchasing Miramax etc. Or Disney's lobbying to extend intellectual property rights out to 75 years, whatever Disney 'stole' to make its 'Aladdin' I would say is not broadly consequential, ie. qualifies as unimportant.

Non-source of information and generally disreputable word-salad cannon Russel Brand had a bit I believe on his old BBC show 'Ponderland' about a newspaper story that revealed a convicted child-murderer was practicing voodoo in jail. Russel's punchline was something like 'Oh no he practices voodoo? I kind of decided he was a bad individual when he murdered children.' 

And exploring critically the possible shady practices of Disney in the development of one of their renaissance features, in this sense feels like face-value trivia. We are talking about a movie watched by millions of children around the world, whose opening musical number 'Arabian Knights' performed by Robin Williams playing a merchant featured the line 'it's barbaric but hey it's home' and where Robin Williams as condition of accepting the role of the Genie of the Lamp, demanded Disney downplay his role in promotion so as not to draw attention away from his passion project 'Toys' scheduled to release at a similar time to Aladdin, which Disney just flat-out betrayed him on.

Aladdin came out in 1992, the 90s was a decade were globalisation was just really taking over. This was a decade where Blanka, the Street Fighter II character whose backstory involved being orphaned by a plane crash in the Amazon Rain forest and learning electric powers from electric eels was one of only three Brazilian personalities a tv-segment shot in Spain found, could be recognised by all participants along with Pele and Gisele Bundchen. That was in 2008, so Spaniards apparently recognised Blanka over Ronaldo and Ronaldino both of whom played in Spain for Barcelona FC and Real Madrid, though I haven't researched the timelines.

Prior to September 11, 2001, Aladdin was probably the major source of information and impressions most of the Anglosphere and perhaps continental Europe too, had about...well what? Arabs, certainly. Is there any real overt messaging about Islam and Muslims in Aladdin?

Aladdin made half a billion dollars in early 90's money. That's $1,164,593.73 in today's money, but even that doesn't really paint a picture of how many people saw it, because I'm reasonably confident that ticket prices, including childrens consessions have increased much faster than the CPI. I think it is safe to assume that tens of millions of children went to see Aladdin at the movies, and hundreds of millions watched it on home video, including its cheap shitty sequel(s?) and Saturday morning cartoons. 

It's major impact: nostalgia. Forget Blanka, I'd bet if you asked people on the street who 'Iago' is, Gilbert Gottfried's parrot would beat Shakespeare's most heinous villain every time. 

Of the hundreds of millions of people that saw Aladdin at an impressionable age, the lasting impression is likely to produce a word cloud like "Prince Ali Abubuu" "Jasmin hot" "Never had a friend like me" "Robin Williams" "A Whole New World" "Do You Trust Me?" "Street Rat" in other words, trivia.

If you draw a pie chart, we will find a relatively small percentage of total people who have seen Aladdin ten or more times, actually had their imaginations captured by it.

Disney fanatics are kind of like Royal fanatics, they are a sizeable, monetizable minority. If Disney made a billion on sales of home video copies of Aladdin, they made hundreds of thousands on Aladdin merchandise, cups, posters, toys, licensed limited edition Mattel Barbies, SNES video games, direct-to-video sequels. 

And the impact? The cultural impact? Minute. Tiny. Negligible. That's my whole thesis. I'm going to assume it is safe to say, that Ellis' Nebula views are likely a fraction of what her Youtube views are. That fraction might be as large as a half, or 3/4, I can't really get the info, but generally Youtube is the kingmaker. Ellis' most viewed Youtube videos as at writing are her video on how Disney screwed over Robin Williams (which is probably where I learned Disney screwed over Robin Williams re:Toys) with 8M+ views, after that some legal drama involving properties I can't recognise at almost 5M views a piece (two videos).

Now, Youtube views are very different from a half-billion box-office in the 90s. For one thing, box offices undersell the cultural impression of a G-rated animated feature because we forget the VHS views at home, particularly the repeated views. Aladdin is clearly a much bigger phenomena than say Evil Dead 2, a super-influential cult movie by director Sam Raimi beloved by film buffs and nerds and horror nerds for which the most viewed video essay I could find has a respectable 800k+ views, The Blues Brothers, an iconic non-cult movie though it did produce a cult following, similar maxing out at 800k+ views (and this is less a video-essay than a mythbusters type edutainment video where someone is tallying the property damages the Blues Brothers inflict).

So Aladdin is huge, it is popular. But that does not make it, broadly important.

I can appreciate and respect, that there's people out there that likely, just statistically, can testify that Aladdin '92 got them through their parent's divorce/cancer/suicide. That it was a piece of entertainment that functioned almost as a dependable companion they could escape into. That Jasmine's "I am not some prize to be won!" speech left an indelible impression on them, served as their retrospective feminist awakening.

The effect sizes though, will prove to be small. Most women will never be in a position to experience Greer's "Eternal feminine" construct of being the trophy men vying for status and power compete over. Roughly half will struggle mostly with getting romantic attention from any people they desire at all, while enduring harassment from complete strangers of no discernible status.

Children who escaped into Aladdin to get through rough times in 1995 will discover their analogues in people older than them who escaped into The Goonies and Back To The Future in 1989, and people yet older who escaped into Narnia, and the Georgian intrigues of Jane Austen, Blyton's Secret Seven and Fantastic Five, the Hardy Boys.

A close critical reading of the text and subtext of Aladdin will predict almost nothing but common attitudes of the times, just as the remakes when held up and critically evaluated against the originals will reveal the subtle point that both releases tended to reflect the prevalent attitudes of the times far moreso than shape them. But likely also poorly reflect the prevalent attitudes of the times, almost like children's movies are not written by thought leaders, but beholden and compromised employees of cynical, publicly listed companies seeking large box-office returns, merchandising opportunities and award consideration.

That when the impact of "culture" is measured against a control like a person's immediate social environment, it is minute. That is to say, you are more likely to grow up to resemble your parents and friends, than Wayne from Wayne's World.

Oxygen

Why is the Ellis-Fallacy important?

Yale Professor Timothy Snyder served up a delicious paradoxical argument when he said (paraphrasing): "Say you think that ideas don't have consequences. Well that sentiment is itself an idea and it has consequences." Right, the idea that ideas are inconsequential is just fundamentally false.

Importance is a different idea though to consequences. The Ellis-fallacy is important because of priorities. It is the fallacy by which we arrive at screwed up priorities. 

Disney animated movies might be important to you because they are full of ideas, consequential ideas. Those abundant ideas may serve as landmarks you use to navigate the schema you have constructed of your own identity. 

I will happily concede to anyone, that Disney animated movies, or fucking Eminem albums, or International Cricket, or holy books are important to you. 

That importance though, may screw up your priorities. Take something that is unambiguously important to people - their own children, their importance to you, may screw up your priorities if say, you have the authority to launch a nuclear strike, and someone takes your kids hostage so you fucking nuke Ukraine and fuck the lives of billions of people who have important children of their own.

This is the important/not-important distinction. When I was a teenager, I was a huge fan of Batman, by early adulthood and two Christopher Nolan movies, somewhere in there I came to the realisation that Batman was a poor role-model. People talk about Batman being a fascist, or just an arsehole vigilante. For me it was as simple as recognizing that Bruce Wayne has incredibly poor mental health. That is the whole premise of the Batman character, someone who cannot deal with grief. He is miserable.

But for some reason, it is plainly obvious to me, that Batman is just not important. He doesn't need an overhaul, a re-imagining, a mental health check because Batman's actual ability to shape the character of impressionable children into adult Bruce Wayne's is pretty much nothing at all. 

Yes, Stephan Colbert pointed out that more US born women had grown up to become actual princesses than Supreme Court Justices and still notably, Presidents. But again, I'm sure a rigorous analysis of history will find no correlation between Disney making fairy-tales salient, and women achieving social upward mobility through marriage. 

I've digressed again, my point being, and tying back to Snyder's paradoxical argument; that if you disagree with my thesis that media effects are small-to-the-point-of-negligible, congratulations, you have a data point to support my thesis, because you've read this post, been exposed to my idea of consequence and simply rejected it. Just as people do with most of the ideas they are exposed to via media every day of their lives.

I'm asserting, you believe that media is important for emotional reasons, not reasonable reasons. The idea brings you comfort that society might just need a new boot-disk to solve all its wicked problems. That's a problem for me though, because it is important more people get uncomfortable, to use up less oxygen trying to reform Bratz dolls and the Wynx fairies, and more addressing tax-codes to create behaviourist conditions that can tackle existential threats like climate change.

The left used to be all over this, they knew immediately that guns kill people, not Marilyn Manson CDs. The left also recognised that scripture didn't kill people, tiny minorities of people who took scripture seriously killed people.

Then for fucking reasons, in the mid-2010s the left embarked on a disastrous undertaking of fucking up priorities, and those reasons were likely great reasons - being that neoliberal economics embraced identity politics as its most cost effective way to kick the can up the road - and its main effect was in transferring wealth from Disney shareholders to MRA youtube grifters with shit takes and shit ideas masked by the low hanging fruit of pointing out that the new Star Wars was shit, the new Star Trek was shit, MCU phase 4 was shit, Dinsey+ TV series were shit etc. etc. puke, puke, puke.

That and creating whole new swathes of single-issue voters to polarise and destabilise democracy around the world.