Tag Archives: Culture

The core challenge of our times

I believe that the central challenge, politically, for our age can best be expressed in a single graph from the Economic Policy Institute.

Productivity vs wages

Quite simply, in real dollar terms, wages have been effectively flat for 30 years. This effect has been masked by easy credit, and a real estate bubble, but the underlying core condition is a grave one.

What cannot go on will not go on, House prices cannot rise forever and a consumer driven economy cannot survive if the consumers do not posses the excess money to go out and consume.

I propose no solutions. I know of no magic wand that will reunite these tends but something will happen. Whichever political party or ideology that finds and implements a solution to this will reap tremendous benefits, those that stick their heads in the sand are likely, in the long run, to get their asses kicked.

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The Two Most Influential Science-Fiction Films of the 1930’s

So here’s the next in my continuing essay series. Before I dig into the two films and my arguments for selecting theme, let me talk for a couple of moments about definitions.

Science-Fiction is the genre of literature in which a development, advance, or change in scientific knowledge is critical to the plot, and that the removal of that elements renders the plot impossible.

Influential I touched on lightly in the first essay, but I want to expand here by detailing who and what is influenced. I am not speaking about the general public at large, thought that will nearly always be true as well, but that these films I have selected had an outsize impact on future filmmakers, often for generations.

So let’s get into the next decade, the 1930s.

My first selection is a well-known film, a classic know by huge numbers of people around the world;
frankenstein-1931-laboratoryFrankenstein – 1931 – James Whale

Certainly this tale has been around a hell of a lot longer than this 1931 film from Universal Studios. The novel by Mary Shelley was published in 1818 and has been adapted to stage and screen many times. In fact the 1931 production was not the first. Thomas Edison made a short based upon the novel (And knowing the man I’m willing to bet no royalties were paid,) that featured a creation scene done with a paper-mache monster burned to ash and run in reverse.

However it was James Whale and Universal’s Frankenstein that set the tone and standard for so many films to follow. It is unquestionably a science-fiction film because Dr. Frankenstein explains about visible rays, X-rays, and his discovery of a ray that generates all life. It is harnessing this ray, not sheer electrical power that revitalizes the monster’s corpse-like construction. This film is the granddaddy of all mad scientist movies. The lone inventor/scientist, working in some ruined, desolate, and gothic locale, that’s this Frankenstein and through this film German Expressionism. This is a film that continues to be referenced years and decades later, inspiring filmmakers to this day.

THINGS TO COMEThings to Come – 1936 – William Cameron Menzies

This is a film that is not very well known outside of genre fans, but it is a critical film in the history of science-fiction movies, Based up the works of and with screenplay by H.G. Wells, this movie was a serious attempt to peer ahead and not only see what may be possible but also explain how we move from the present day to that fictionalized future. These days that is old hat in Science-Fiction films, but with this movie it was fairly revolutionary. Metropolis never explains where the city is, how it came to be, but merely waves it into existence and sets the story in motion. H.G. Wells, always the historian, loved plotting about the connecting dots between his times and his imagined futures; in effect he created the concept of the future history. Movies ever since Things To Come, if they were set in the future, have felt a pressure to explain how that future arrived. Things to Come was also the first post-apocalyptic movie and many to the tropes and plot devices of that genre were first established here. Two final aspects that influenced film making for decades, Things to Come gave us the clean art-deco city of the future that lasted all the up to Logan’s Run, and it gave the idea that people in the future would wear terribly silly fashions.

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I think the climate is changing

And I mean the political climate.

Yesterday’s SCOTUS decision was a bad one in my opinion. It’s already having repercussions beyond the Republican obsession with the ACA. (Apparently at least one employer is already wanting to use the decision to discriminate against gays. This was totally predictable.) Now, I am not going to go into why the decision was wrong headed. I already did a post/essay on how I think you slice that gordian knot or individual religious freedom and public accommodation.

What I want to say is that this is really, I think, going to be bad news for the Republican Party when it comes to Presidential Elections.

Here is a graph I made of the female vote for all presidential elections since Reagan. (I selected 1980 because I think that is the point where a new republican started started to be born.)vote graf

Seriously, How is what happened at SCOTUS July 1 going to help that red line get any closer to that blue one? It won’t. Add the hispanic votes walking out the door and the youth vote giving the conservative party the finger and I think things look nasty for the Republicans in presidential elections.

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The Non-Utility of the Bechdel Test

Hmm what’s this I see? A hornet’s nest? Let me get a stick surely nothing bad will come from probing it, right?

There has grown in popularity a test for sexist bias in film and other media known as The Bechdel Test. This test simple, composed of three elements, and if a film or piece of writing passes all three elements it is considered to have passed. Passing is good because that means your work is less sexist than the works that fail.

I think the Bechdel Test is far too blunt an instrument to be used in anything other than a light conversational manner.

Before I continue let me state without equivocation that I want strong well-realized characters of all genders, orientations, ethnicities, creeds, and all the other bewildering array of conditions that humans inhabit.  In now manner am I defending works where women are seriously presented in lazy, sexist stereotypes.

That said, sexism is far too broad a thing to be tested so simply.  The Bechdel test has three elements:

1)   The Film must have more than one named female character.

2)   The Female characters must talk to each other.

3)   Their conversation must not be about a man.

This has a witty simplicity and certainly there are scads of films where the female characters exist solely as wives/girlfriends with no other dimension to their character. However I contend that is the Test fails by producing both false positives – scoring a film as good when it’s depiction of women is sexist and stereotypical –and also false negatives – scoring a film as a failure when it’s females characters have real depth and characterization beyond a simple love interest – then the test has no real utility.

So here’s an example of a false positive: The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.

Element 1

Named female characters 2 or 3, Betty Armstrong, Lattice, and it’s debatable if we should could Animala/Pammy. After all she’s not a real woman, but a construct of one from 4 Forrest animals.

Score – Passed

Element 2

Betty and Lattice have more than one conversation together.

Score – Passed

Element 3

The conversations are about shopping, cooking, their loves of dresses, and who cleans up in the kitchen. They do not in fact discuss their husbands.

Score – Passed

Now if you have seen this film you know that these two women are presented deliberately as bad stereotypes of wives. They have little self-direction, are subservient to their husbands, and in the words of the director/writer set back man/female relations half a century. While this film presented it as comedy and satire, any number of films earnestly presenting the same material would have passed the test, despite having horrid sexist tones throughout.

Now for the False Negative: Marvel’s: The Avengers

Element 1

Named female characters, 3. Natasha Romanoff, Pepper Potts, S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Maria Hill.

Score – Passed

Element 2

None of these characters have a conversation with each other. All their conversations are with men.

Score – Failed.

Element 3

Since they did not have conversations, this too is a fail, but I suspect if they had engaged in conversation they would have still failed as it would have been likely that the subject of their discussion would have been the film’s antagonist, Loki, a man.

So Joss Whedon’s screenplay and film fails the Bechdel test. It must be sexist, right?

Of course this film has three very smart, capable women who hold their own against the male characters and prove repeatedly that there is far more to them than just a pretty face. Pepper maintains her own way in the headwind that is Tony Stark – not a minor feat, Hill has the spine to buck Nick Fury something even Coulson doesn’t do, and of course Romanoff is so talented she outwits Loki the god of trickery, winning valuable intelligence while the men uselessly debate torturing the captive deity.

 

The Bechdel tests is capable of both false positive and negatives, making it for me a tool not to be trusted. Ferreting out sexism in a piece of art can require a subtle eye, it is not achieved by a test less complex than Buzzfeed’s which Game of Thrones House are you?

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A Brief Return to Politics

After a couple of film related posts, here’s a bit of politics for those who are inclined to hear my thoughts on the matter. This time I not interested in a particular  event or controversy , but rather an element of modern political life that had me feeling like an outsider.

Conflicted support.

It seems from most of people I have as friends on my Facebook page, or follow along on Twitter, or know in real life have a fairly easy time deciding who is right and who is wrong on any political issue. Naturally the right/wrong axis matches pretty closely to their side and the other side. I rarely feel so certain that one philosophy or strain of through has got it all worked out.

Worse yet for me I happen to have a number of positions that end up being mutually exclusive in our crude national political culture. For example I fully support marriage equality and I also support Second Amendment rights. It’s fairly difficult to find a person to vote of that fits both those bills. (yes I know about the Libertarians  but there are aspects of modern life that requires modern governance and you can have my FDA when you are my personal Guinea pig.) This of course is not my only internal political conflict, I do not believe in progressive taxation and I do support the ACA (‘Obamacare’ for the rest of you.)

I am forced in each election to put my beliefs through a grueling grinder to produce a hierarchy  and I am always for to sacrifice some to advance others. This doesn’t make me a terribly happy person with the votes I must cast, but it the reality of the universe. You cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and some progress is better than a principled stand to yields nothing.

However when I look around it seems to me that my relatives and friends and associates hardly seem to suffer this sort of conflict at all. Left is the way! Right is the Way!

I know that there is n end in sight for me. I will forever be balancing the times, my priorities, and what can be achieved, but  I dream of a day with more people will be open to their own conflicts and less religious in the certitude.

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The usefulness of a character study

In my writing I often employ a character study as a tool to help me out when I am stuck or confused about a character in one of my pieces. I try to dissect the motivations ad the perception of my character and from that I can usually see the event of the plot in a fresh way.

The thing is I will also turn this critical eye upon myself from time to time. All humans are composed of conflicting ideas, perception, beliefs, and morals. We like to believe that our values spring from a consistent worldview, held in a just and reasonable manner. In reality our views are a collection of odd bits picked up here and there like an indecisive shopper at the worlds largest swap-meet.

Know this I like to try to root out my inconsistencies and/or find the deeper values that are driving my surface reactions. In short do a character study on myself.

I have long maintained that I have libertarian political leanings. I do support the general principle that the government that governs best is the one that governs least. I do not like, nor do I approved of that state directing or attempting to direct the actions of individuals. I am passionate in the my support for the concept of equality, and try to live up to that lofty concept and not just pay it lip service.

Consequently for many years I registered and identified with the Republican Party in this country, the Party that pays the most verbal service to libertarian thought. But years ago I broke with them and more and more I have had a gut reaction that their view of libertinism and mine were somehow at odds. I could not simply walk off though, I need to know for my own sake what is at the root of the divergence. Why do I feel this way? Continue reading

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Thoughts on hysterical arguments

I don’t mean arguments that intent or by accident become terribly humorous, but rather arguments that are expressed in terms of hysteria, usually by overt and terribly applied hyperbole.

I get a lot of political discussions with my friends and family. (Almost never with anyone else because it’s too volatile a subject to broach with people I don’t know well.) It doesn’t matter if it comes from the left or from the right, I am often treated to some wildly over the top hyperbole about the evils of the enemy.

Bush is a fascist.

Obama is a communist.

You know the drill. These arguments can really bug me because they show such an utter disregard for the truth and for the language. In the early 90’s Rush Limbaugh used to say quite a bit on his show that ‘words mean things.’ Oh that is something I can get behind very strongly. The first casualty  in any heated political argument seem to be the English language. (I assume it true for other languages, but as I speak and read no other, I’ll stick with English.)

Something else that has occurred to me recently is that the more hyperbole that is used, the more it strikes me that someone is panicking about their position. That this feels like the rearguard action of a collapsing front. It not only is unpersuasive it makes your argument feel weaker, no matter the truth that may lay under your position.

This little rant by myself won’t change a thing. No one I know uses the hyperbole as a conscious tactic, and as such they will continue to lob them like errant grenades, but I wanted to get my thoughts out there.

 

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Personal Moral Standard and Public Accommodation

With the furor in the new and on the net over Arizona’s SB 1062, ‘Turn away the gay’ bill, there has been a lot of talk, discussion, argument, and name calling over the issue of people who run businesses and want to have those business conform to their personal moral standards. So, here I am wading into the minefield with my own idiosyncratic ideas.

First off, let’s take as a given that forcing someone to act in a manner directly opposed to their deeply held moral map is a touchy proposition and one that should be handled with deft care and an eye to personal freedom.  Few among us would consent if the government forced up to kill a puppy to get out tax returns.

That said I do think there is a qualitative difference between your personal actions and the actions of a business, even if it is a business that you own. Your business is not you. A business does not have a deeply held moral map, it is an artificial construction not a person.

So how would I cleave this knot?

Let’s look at businesses and their owners in terms of how the assets are different in terms of protection.

Subject A as a private person decides to host a free carnival for the neighborhood. There is a spill of a slick oily mess, and though warned about it, Subject A does nothing. When a person slips, falls, and breaks their neck from this danger, Subject A is in danger from a civil suit, a civil suit that take everything Subject A owns, cash, stocks, their home, in restitution for the damages to the person with the broken neck. Subject A and their assets are fully at risk for their action and fully responsible for their actions.

Subject B form a business, an LLC or some other artificial construction for the purpose of throwing their neighborhood carnival. They too have a slippery oily mess, they too are warned, and they too do nothing. The person falls, breaks their necks and the business is at rick of lawsuit. The lawsuit can take everything the business owns as part of a damages award, but the business owner has their personal assets protected, but the shield that is the artificial construct the ‘business.’

Any lawyers among you will see that this is a gross simplification by a layman, but the concept is clear, Subject A was operating entirely from the personal sphere, while Subject B was operating from the public one. Subject B utilized laws passed to protect and shield business owners, putting distance between their business and their personal property.

In my opinion, and what I think should be legal opinion as well, any business that utilizes the public sphere, LLC laws, incorporation, and so on are ineligible to claim personal moral codes and restrictions. They are not their owners and by taking advantage of public laws in their benefits they surrender any claim for discriminatory practices.

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A documentary series I have really enjoyed

I am a nut for documentaries. Last year when I was home recovering from sudden surgery I watched a ton on Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. A week ago i discovered one on Hulu that has simply blown my mind.

Warlords is a study of the mental games played by four of the leaders in the lead up to World War II. It delves into aspects that, for me, have previously been skipped over in the retelling.

For example, it’s well known that Stalin ignore the warnings that Hitler was going to invade the USSR. The intel was solid and it came at him again and again. It made no sense to me that Stalin, the murderous paranoid dictator, somehow had a blind spot when it came to Hitler and just couldn’t believe he would attack. This series shows that he did know Hitler wanted to destroy the USSR, he did know that Hitler could not be trusted, but also explains the reasoning going on in Stalin’s head as to why he thought the intel was part of an elaborate ruse, one he was determined not to fall for.

The second episode has dealt with Churchill and Roosevelt. Wow. Roosevelt does not come off looking good in this one and Churchill comes off a bit like a battered spouse willing to believe the lies just one more time.

I cant’ recommend this series enough.

 

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Some Thoughts on Political Tribalism

A Broadway, or perhaps off-Broadway I’m uncertain on that point, show was proclaim in verse that the internet is made for porn. That’s only partially true, it’s also made for flame wars. Among the most heated and viciously fought of these wars are the political ones, and it is there that you see the purest distillation of political tribalism.
It seems to me that tribalism must be in some ways very liberating. Freed from doubt, freed from choice, you always know exactly what is the right answer, who is the right candidate, and what is the right position. You trust your sources of information and all others are suspect, subject to your tribes vetting before their data can be evaluated.
Now, I am not talking about have convictions. I am not talking about having a philosophy. I am talking about having a team and the team’s position is always correct, even when it changes, it can only change from correct to correct. You have seen the tribes on the Internet. They are the people who never ever surprise you with their political posts. It doesn’t matter if they are sharing a meme, commenting on an article, posting a link, without even looking you know what the position is going to be, you know who is going to be attacked, who is going to be praised, and what is going to be reviled. That must be easy.
I have cast a few votes over my life. I have wrestled with the choices laid out before me. I can look left and I can look right and in both directions I can see things to admire, objectives worth striving for, and freedoms worth defending. What I do not see are enemies, and at it’s heart that is what tribalism always is about, the enemy.
It doesn’t matter if it comes from the left, or if it comes from the right, the tribe is about defining the enemy and drawing a circle that proclaims those on the outside are not like us, they are the enemy and they are not to be trusted.
Doubt is not allowed and doubt to me is essential. Anytime I feel absolutely certain about anything a nebulous as politics, I know I haven’t given the subject serious thought. Politic is culture and culture is big and messy, it is not given to absolutes answers, those are illusions obscuring our understanding.

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