All this means is that the Billboard K-pop chart is only 51 weeks old

[koganbot]

Of the top fifty songs on last Thursday's Billboard K-pop chart, seven of them have been charting for ten weeks or longer. Here they are, in ascending number of weeks:

Busker Busker "It's Hard To Face You" 10 weeks
Verbal Jint "Good Morning" 10 weeks
Juniel "Illa Illa" 10 weeks
Wonder Girls "Like This" 11 weeks
Big Bang "Monster" 11 weeks
Kim Tae Woo "High High" 12 weeks
Shinyoo "Hands Of The Clock" 51 weeks

51 weeks doesn't mean that "Hands Of The Clock" began its run 51 weeks ago. It just means that the Billboard K-pop chart is only 51 weeks old, and that's when they started counting. The track could be years old, for all I know. Maybe decades old. The singer looks a couple of decades younger than I am, but I'm more youthful at heart. Here's a live version that was uploaded to YouTube in December 2009:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESNBkv_4akM

It's currently at 32, the highest it's been in the Billboard K-pop era.*

We've talked about it before. Me: "In the olden days, this would have been my stereotype of what Asian pop sounds like." Also, "Presumably, it's old people who listen to this. I'm an old person, and I like it." (Probably like it somewhere between 4 and 6 points, but let's not quibble.) arbitrary_greay: "Holy cow that sounds like some generic Chinese karaoke staple. I can hear the color change scrolling through the karaoke captions on a flickering blue screen." davidfrazer: "You might enjoy Bret's visit to the noraebang from Flight of the Conchords."

In other chart news, T-ara's "Day By Day" almost held steady, dropping one from 9 to 10; on the Gaon Chart it fell from 10 to 13. Would expect it to have been somewhere between 5 and 8 had there been no uproar, but I don't know that. Is still behaving like one of the hits of the summer, and isn't taking nearly the hit I expected.** I could speculate as to why, but that's all it would be: speculation. (All right, some of these explanations contradict one another, but: a good song's a good song, still getting a boost from rubberneckers, Netizens and entertainment sites are less of a big deal than they appear, at least some members of the K-pop public have critical thinking skills [haven't been following this story as closely as I might, to tell you the truth, but, as far as I can tell, actual evidence of actual bullying is as nonexistent now as it was back on July 25th]), human beings getting into scraps doesn't necessarily make fans and onlookers like them less.) Not that I think things will be all right for T-ara going forward. Eunjung seems to have been dumped from a couple of TV shows (stories translated on allkpop seem uncertain, which doubles the uncertainty given allkpop's unreliability in general). And what image to go for now may be a real quandary for T-ara.

In regard to the bracketed material in the previous paragraph: Something else that's been on my mind is Niall Ferguson writing some misleading text — apparently deliberately misleading — in his Newsweek attack on Obama, and Paul Krugman and a host of others taking him to task. I say "apparently" because so far I've decided not to read the article, just as I've decided not to go through all or even very many of the purported examples of T-ara's bullying. I'm not claiming the two situations are parallel, but there is a similarity in my decision not to look further. Not that I'm dropping attention to either story, just that I think I already know what I need to know about several aspects. E.g., I have little idea of what happened group member to group member in T-ara, but I've decided that no photo or gif or game-show/variety show/reality show clip of T-ara is going to contain evidence of bullying, and that people are idiots for thinking that such things would and do. I believe I know this without having to look at any more of the clips than the few that I already have. All this deserves a post of its own.

*Unless my Ctrl-F skills are failing me, it's not on the Gaon Chart at all. Maybe it's barred by some statute of limitations. I assume that when Billboard says "weeks on chart" it means "weeks in the Top 100."

**For comparison, "Sexy, Free, and Single" by usual chart toppers Super Junior, which started more or less at the same time, give or take a week or two, is down to 46 on Gaon and is no longer top 50 on Billboard. And tracks by Brown Eyed Girls and Ga-in haven't done much either, though I don't believe they got big featured promotions.

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

It isn't really clear (from this post) what your position on Krugman/Ferguson actually is: what it is that you believe you already know without having to look. It SEEMS as if you're saying that it's impossible that any of the fisking of Ferguson's piece will demonstrate that he intended to mislead DELIBERATELY (as opposed to his being mistaken or lazy or stupid or confused).

How I wrote it was confusing

[koganbot]

What I wrote above really does leave too much out,* which is why it ends up confusing you. What I SEEM to you to be saying isn't what I actually meant.

I changed my mind a couple of times in how to word it; I originally had "apparently misleading text" before altering it to read "misleading text — apparently deliberately misleading." I should have either kept it as I'd had it originally, or gone with "apparently misleading — and apparently deliberately so." And then written a slightly different followup.

Fwiw, what I decided I definitely don't need to explore further is whether what Ferguson wrote was misleading. I'm taking it for granted — without checking the Ferguson piece or the CBO report myself — that Krugman, DeLong, Klein, et al. couldn't themselves have misread or distorted (deliberately or otherwise) either Ferguson's piece or the CBO report so badly that they were wrong about Ferguson's passage being misleading. That is, (1) Krugman, DeLong, Klein, et al. are correct about what the CBO report actually says, which is that the Affordable Care Act doesn't increase the deficit, and, (2) not only does the Ferguson passage as quoted make it seem as if the CBO report says that the Affordable Care Act does increase the deficit, there isn't anything a few sentences further in Ferguson's piece that makes it clear that the CBO report is stating that the Affordable Care Act doesn't increase the deficit. So I'm assuming with 99.99999...% certainty that you don't have each of ten or so of these guys in Krugman's circle either botching it or deciding to deliberately mislead us; in fact, I doubt that you'd even have two: they wouldn't allow each other to botch something so simple, or to deceive.

As for the second issue, I don't care so much about whether Ferguson was misleading the reader on purpose; but in fact, though I haven't made up my mind about that (and may never), I do think further research, such as reading the Ferguson piece in full, reading other Ferguson posts and writings, etc., could give me a better or even definitive idea on this. So I indeed gave you the wrong impression. And though I don't care that much about Ferguson's state of mind, I do think it's an interesting issue, though I'm probably not going to explore it further unless Krugman or DeLong or someone one of them links continues to bring it to my attention. My guess (emphasize guess) is that Krugman and Klein (at least) are jumping too quickly to assumptions about Ferguson's attributes and intentions, even if I bear in mind that they've been reading him for years whereas I've only seen him quoted a few times. Not knowing much about Ferguson other than "professor of history at Harvard," my intuition is to find it incredible that he'd think he could deliberately mislead on something so checkable and get away with it ("getting away with it" meaning something different to a Harvard professor than to a right-wing radio pundit). But "lazy" or "stupid" doesn't seem correct either (though it would in reference to a lot of the general public, as would "poorly informed"). Initially, "editor or copy editor screwing up the paragraph" crossed my mind as a possibility, but Ferguson's followup (as reported by some of the other bloggers) precludes it. Klein was originally going to at least allow for the possibility of "mistaken" and "confused," since Klein says there was more than one CBO report, only one of which made a statement about the ACA's overall impact on the deficit. But he thinks that Ferguson's own followup eliminates that and brings us solidly to "deliberately misleading." I'm not so sure; I think "hurried and confused, and later too macho or embarrassed to admit to it" is a possibility (the mildest). "Something else going wrong with the guy" is also possible (but I need to emphasize again that I've not read Ferguson except as quoted by others).

I think what's keeping me interested is the question, "Is someone here willing or able to recover from being wrong?" — "someone here" most crucially being "people at Newsweek."

*Didn't want to go into my thoughts too much, wanting to save for a later post.

[koganbot]

P.S. Ferguson could have tried to save himself by making an argument parallel to the one that Krugman just made about the Congressional Budget Office report on one of Paul Ryan's plans, which is that the CBO was forced to take Ryan's revenue numbers as givens, even though the CBO report itself says that Ryan has specified no path that would generate such revenues. In fact, Ferguson, in a later post (at least as quoted by Joe Weisenthal), does seem to go for a similar argument about Obama's Affordable Care Act, quoting the CBO as saying that it's unclear that the ACA's cost reductions can be achieved. But Ferguson manages to shoot himself beautifully in the foot by (1) quoting the CBO, but (2) cutting the quote off in midsentence, so that anyone who goes back to the original will once again suspect that Ferguson is trying to deceive. To my ignorant eyes, what the CBO wrote in the full sentence is somewhat ambiguous; but it at least is suggesting something opposite to what Ferguson says it says. The CBO seems to be saying that the ACA has a couple of different potential paths by which costs will be cut, but the ACA doesn't specify which path will be taken. What's ambiguous to me is that the CBO sentence is written in the passive voice ("such a reduction can be achieved," without the word "will" [maybe there'd be no ambiguity if I'd read the whole report]), so I don't know for sure that the ACA guarantees that the cost reductions will take place no matter what. But that's because I don't know the ACA. (Weisenthal seems certain himself.)

In any event, Ferguson may have an argument to make, but he doesn't make it. Instead, he (apparently) cheats in his quotation. Just as he'd (apparently) cheated in his Newsweek citation of the CBO report.

Once again, take my "apparently" with a grain of salt. I don't know that Ferguson cheated, but I'm strongly believing the people who say he did, since they're citing and in some instances quoting the CBO report themselves and seem to be acting as if you can't get away with misrepresenting the CBO report, and no one in their crew is calling them out, so presumably they're not misrepresenting it, or Ferguson.

But — again — I'm not quite certain about "cheated," since I really wonder what's going on with Ferguson, as he seems to dig himself in deeper.

[koganbot]

Brad DeLong wrote a post yesterday entitled "Trying And Failing To Understand Niall Ferguson" in which he takes to task a couple of other people's glib assertions that Ferguson's actions can be explained as an attempt to bolster his fees on the speaking circuit. DeLong doubts this anyway, but especially doesn't see how quoting the CBO while chopping the quote off in midsentence can be expected to achieve this (I assume that DeLong is taking it as understood by most of his readers that the full quote can be easily checked and Ferguson's contention countered). Of course, my own hypothesis — that there's something going wrong with Ferguson — doesn't explain anything, since it doesn't say what's going wrong. "Going wrong" is a stand-in, could mean anything from "insomnia" to "flipping out." I don't pretend to know what is going on with Ferguson, except that stupidity and malice and greed just don't seem likely.