20080229

americanpirate

Earlier this week I went into the local geek store for some comics (um, and then I saw that big shiny new Conan book...)
Anyway, they had a TV running and showing one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, I think it was Dead Man's Chest. So I got to thinking. I differ from some people's opinions (hi, Sra) in that I find DMC the best of the three. Beneath the PG-13 fantasy adventure movie Disney let them actually make, there's the structure of a really vivid and dark fantasy horror movie that I find very compelling. The movie is full of devil's bargains, occasionally literal but more interesting when figurative. All the characters find themselves putting their souls (if you will) at stake, having to risk something precious, having to compromise their sense of what good people they think they are, in order to stay alive and out of prison with even the slightest hope of life, love, and happiness still being at the end of the tunnel. It can be quite interesting and chilling, and it's much more than I expected from a followup to the fun magic action yarn of the first movie.

The third movie does an interesting thing in making a tale of pirates versus the British seafaring interests into a war of freedom versus authority. Real world pirates might have been relatively cosmopolitan and socially loose compared with the societies of the time, but theirs is hardly a story of freedom. Pirates were still all about domination and their social structure had its own kind of authoritarian hierarchy, though the rule-by-the-strong was a little more obvious.
Still, an American movie will infuse itself with American (or more properly, Western Liberal) values, myths, and metaphors. And so we see the story of a diverse bunch of rag-tag freedom-loving good guys overcoming their differences to make a great stand for liberty and justice against the amassed forces of control, privilege, and power. It's a story we love, and we'll tell it again and again with pirates or cowboys or spaceships or gangsters or even stockbrokers.

pledge

I'm going to make some commitment, as one of the growing number of atheistic yahoos writing screeds on the web, not to ever say someone is stupid just for believing in gods. Although I find occasional use of terms like "faith-addled" cathartic at times, I recognize that many intelligent and sincere people have come to the conclusion that some religion or religion-like thingy is true. It is a position I believe to be incorrect, but that demands open discussion, not disparagement and dismissal.

20080226

besthighdiot

Signs of idiocy: they actually think high school was "the best years of our lives."

evil2sphere

I'm inclined to think the evil really does lie in the desire, rather than the act of domination. The "will to power," as it were. If you pay lip service to freedom, but quietly stew over how much you wish you could just make everyone live the right way, that's still evil of a sort. On the other appendage, you might generally want people to pursue their own lives and dreams as best they can, when some particular circumstances make it necessary to cut off someone's choice sphere. Such as if their immediate dreams involve burning down people's homes or something.

I use the phrase "sphere of choices" as a conscious extension of something I read about one's "circle of choice." I think it was in a Thomas Sowell book or something. It just seemed so... flat. "Sphere of choices is a nice three-dimensional metaphor for our spongy two-and-a-half-dimensional minds.

evil

Evil is the desire to command, control, or compel someone in their sphere of choices.

pureperfect

Perfection is a false concept. Attempting to invoke it in reality assumes a completely static universe. The word "perfect" is only ever used to describe things that don't actually exist: the perfect vacation, the perfect man/woman, the perfect job, the perfect martini...
Using the word is tacitly admitting the thing you're talking about does not actually exist.

idiotevol

Signs of idiocy: they think "but it's still a bacteria" wins the point for creationism after someone points out that evolution of new species is routinely observed in microbial organisms.

ETA- not original to me

empathy

Empathy is the foundation of all true morality.

justaregularguygal

It's rather jarring, when looking through books in the mystery/thriller, fantasy, and supernatural/detective/romance/werewolfporn genres, how many main characters are presented as just trying to settle into a nice, normal, relaxed life as a bounty hunter, detective, or even assassin. Granted, in real life, PI is allegedly one of the most dull lines of work there is, but really, a reporter or community activist or dozens of other possibilities (including, shock, a cop) has just as much excuse to travel and get involved in adventurous situations as the inherently unbelievable "just your average working jane/joe bounty hunter."

It's also amusing to wonder which is more silly: the exotic/sexycool/macho name of the lead character, or the exotic/sexycool/macho pseudonym of the author.

20080225

newatheism

As may be inferred from a link in an earlier post, I am an atheist. That is to say I do not subscribe to the popular belief that there is someone in charge of the whole universe.

I find it odd when people respond (or attempt to do so) to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. When people say it is especially angry, agressive, strident, militant, etc., I wonder if maybe they read a different book than I did. On the whole I found it to be a very dry read. The basic pattern is "here's a common reason given for why you should believe in God, here's why that reason is not valid." Repeat, repeat.

"The New Atheism" (a term I first saw on the cover of Wired magazine), is really the same as old atheism. The only noticable difference is mostly attributable to Sam Harris: whereas in the past atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers considered liberal religionists common allies against conservative and fundamentalist religionists, Harris posited that liberal religions share some guilt for the continued strength of fundamentalism. His idea is that liberal and moderate religionists try to elevate faith itself above criticism, and promote religious beliefs as being inherently more worthy of "respect" than, say, political, social, and economic beliefs. This allegedly serves to make people in society more receptive/vulnerable to the kind of fundamentalist religion that elevates faith in an authoritarian god/church above everything else.

It's particularly bothersome when someone attempting to respond to "the new atheism," repeats that "well, Hitler and Stalin are examples of atheism run amok" crap. All of the recent wave of pop-atheism books have at least a whole chapter devoted to countering this claim. (Quick sum-up: Hitler in fact claimed to be Catholic. The features that make Nazism, Fascism, and Communism so egregiously horrible are those features they have in common with politically powerful religions in the past. And these political ideologies are quasi-religious in that they have a faith in a purified model of society, considered in itself so inherently good that anything done to achieve it is justified.) Yet so many people thinking to discredit atheism repeat the myth without even addressing the counter. It's one thing if it's a "yes, but" where you acknowledge the defense then provide a reason why the attack still works. But most responders don't do that, they just repeat the same lie that "atheism caused Hitler and Stalin." This strongly implies they never actually read the books they're responding to. I guess intellectual integrity is too much to ask of some people.

nothateamerica

I don't know if the Hannityites, Dittoheads, and FauxNews Masses still say things like "why do you hate America so much?" But the correct response is and always has been, "Why are conservatives like you trying to destroy everything that makes America worthy of love?"

preselec

Nader's dumping himself on the American Presidential race again. The guy's an obsessed technocrat who perhaps serves a useful function in consumer advocacy, but what merits he has would be useless in the duties and functions of the U.S. President. Hopefully even his starry-eyed followers who make up a portion of what passes for the far left in America will realize his participation in past elections has been, on the whole, detrimental.

There, satisfying my idiot conviction that someone might actually care what I think.

20080224

liveblogsis

So last Sunday (ha, talk about regular, frequent updates) I attended the Live Blogging Thingy '08. Not as one of the featured bloggers, of course -this thing is barely started- but as one of the half-dozen audients. It was kind of neat. I was there meeting my sister, of Bunsnip, who can -now that she knows I'm online- proceed to criticize my linguistic inadequacies in the same endearing way she does others'. (I kid)
She suggested maybe if I kept this up I might be invited next time. To think, I could become so famous I can gather a dozen people together to hear what I say. Come to think of it, I can already do that, sort of. Yup, that's me, worming my way into the whole intarweb.

Afterwards, the three of us saw The Spiderwick Chronicles, which I went into expecting to at least enjoy Tony DiTerlizzi's creature design. It's not the equal of Labyrinth or Legend, and suffers from trying to be more Epic than it needs to be, but it stands up well to most any other fantasy movie in the last couple decades.

20080217

Time

As a kid I had no sense of time. Sure I could read clocks and watches, and had some sense that events were scheduled. But I don't recall really connecting it all. I had to go to school, but that was a matter of melding into the patterns of the family. I had favorite TV shows, but it only occurred to me later in childhood that there was any use in finding out their scheduled times. Just flip the switch and see what's on. After school hours with friends or alone just flowed together into a timeless activity block between school and dinner, dinner and sleep, whenever those actually happened.

In my teen and young adult years, my dad always said he was amazed how I could get by without a watch. It really was no major thing to me. Clocks are nearly ubiquitous, as are other people with watches, if you actually find you need to know the time. I can keep track of passing time if I need to, but timekeeping doesn't play a role if deadlines are loose or absent. Now with everybody carrying wireless phones, I wonder how watches even sell at all. (Until they finally deliver on those computer/phone/video/watches we were all promised by Dick Tracy and Inspector Gadget.)

I'm not nearly so much the night owl many of my friends and acquaintances are (and my cat pretty much insists I get up to feed her every morning about six) but I find I enjoy the dark hours, at least in part because they are so timeless. One hour merges in with the next. With no externally imposed schedule, I find myself wondering how much a sense of time any of us have. If you're not meeting someone else's deadline, does it really matter to you if it's six or seven, one or two? In the dark hours, only my own fatigue and current activity/interest are my guides. Time is a quality that is useful at times, but not essential to the human experience. One may attempt to objectively measure a duration of time if one finds a need, but the human mind can make time's passing an ephemeral thing.

In relativity, no two events can properly be said to occur simultaneously. In some of the proposed solutions to uniting quantum mechanics and general relativity, time divides out of the equation. I can't really pretend I understand what that means, but the articles in the science rags say that time isn't necessarily a variable against which other variables change, the other physical variables simply change as a function of one another. "Clocks don't measure time, 'time' is whatever it is clocks measure." Maybe the universe doesn't care what time it is in those dark hours either.

20080213

Beginning

Coming late to this party, I've started this thing to give my thoughts somewhere to rattle around other than the inside of my head. Maybe it will create some interesting ripples in the civilization pond. Or maybe it will just be external memory.
 
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Additionally, for clarification I grant that "unauthorized commercial use" generally only applies if the work itself is the object of exchange, and specifically that a site with click-through or advertising income is welcome to share it (attrib, no-deriv, otherwise non-com), so long as the work shared is openly available to all and not subject to sale or paid access. Any elements of my works that might be original to others are Fair Use, and you are left to your own to make sure your own use of them is likewise.