bookisusuallybetter

Alan Moore- Meet the Man Behind the Protest Mask
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/27/alan-moore-v-vendetta-mask-protest?CMP=SOCNETTXT6965

I think it's kind of interesting that Guy Fawkes had been a figure of ridicule in British culture, and also an icon for anti-Catholic sentiment because the real Guy had been for Papal control. Alan Moore is British, knew that, and deliberately chose to invert it for his revolutionary antihero.

In spite of some comic book silliness and 70s-80s Cold War post-apocalypse silliness, the printed V for Vendetta holds up well. The movie was pretty good but had problems where it deliberately stepped back from the comic book's vision. Notably that in the movie the nationalist leader is killed in secret by V. In the book, he's assassinated publicly by an ordinary woman whose life had been ripped up by happenstance in the machinery of State. Also the movie tacks on a romantic love angle to V's relationship to Evey, both unnecessary and seriously detracting from the theme and character.

Mostly, it's that the movie dumbs the message down to social liberal versus conservative (which many of America's Bush-era rightist pundits were coherent enough to notice and get mad about.) In the book, it's very stark, anarchism versus fascism. The neat thing is that Moore lets fascism have every possible advantage. Anything that might make an ordinary person say "of course it's bad, but under these conditions for these reasons it might be necessary," Moore grants them and then says it's still wrong. Moore's postapocalyptic Britain is starved, battered, and one of the only surviving societies after nuclear (and possibly biological) exchange. His fascist leader isn't looking for personal gain but really believes in strength and unity as the greater good. The leader is assisted by a superhuman intelligent computer to make decisions. There are invaders on the outside and plagues within. And the alternative is V who is not kind but brutal, destructive, insane. "Because I love you, because I want you to be free" is a truly chilling line (as much as the better-known Moore line from a later project, "I did it thirty-five minutes ago.")

For this tonal omission, both the delightful early dialogue between V and the statue of Lady Justice ("you always did have an eye for a man in uniform") and the later speech about Authority and the fear of Chaos are cut. The point in the film where it actually uses the word, a robber shouting "anarchy in the UK", is the very point where the book V teaches "this is not anarchy, this is chaos." Movie audiences never heard "anarchy is the absence of leaders, not the absence of order."

I saw it written on a forum, and I fully agree, when watching the movie, the point toward the end where V tips over the domino assembly is where you should stop playback or skip to the end credits (maybe watch the explosions on the way.)

merit

Meritocracy is a useful illusion. It tempts us to identify ourselves with the powerful and against the powerless. Because we are sure our own merits are great and our problems only circumstance, it comforts us that our own gain in future status in is assured. Because we are unfamiliar with others' circumstance and assume their problems are character flaws, it offers us the thrill of looking down on their unworthy laziness. It is useful because it encourages our complacence and discourages questioning our fundamental assumptions.

Saganday(belated)

Yesterday was, or would have been, Carl Sagan's birthday. I think church never really had a chance with me because "Cosmos" plus some illustrated science books had sparked a sense of wonder that the stark walls and bad music at the local Mormon ward could never hope to match. (Who knows what the interplay would have been had our family gone to a more aesthetically evocative church?)

What always stuck in my head as the "Cosmos music" isn't actually the main theme of the show, and first turns up in episode 2 (youtube excerpt that starts partway in with that music, embedding's not quite the style here). This episode has what is still one of the best popular science explanations of evolution available. (If you prefer your explanations from books, I'd suggest Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale or Greg Graffin's Anarchy Evolution which pulls double time as a punk rock biography.)

Americanvalues

America was born in Rebellion. America was born On the Verge, where ideas, ethnicities, philosophies, religions, languages, histories and narratives from around the world came together in the cities, salons, pubs, coffeehouses, courts, churches, lyceums, presses and public squares, to mix, intermingle, and radically transform.

In all of the great moral conflicts that have defined American freedom, there have been those who sought justice and greater human dignity for all, and there have been those who defended established hierarchy and social restriction. The struggle between cosmopolitan embrace of all humanity versus the provincial, factional, traditional and powerful was old in our republic's youngest days.

Ending the rule of kings is a fundamentally radical concept. Abolition, free speech, women voting, civil rights, labor rights, freedom of conscience, have nothing traditional or conservative about them. The truly American spirit is Speaking Truth to Power.

Freedom is the freedom of dissent, disruption. Freedom is not merely freeing the businessmen. The untrammeled right of men of wealth to do as they please and influence decisions without concern for democratic participation is not the radical gift of the American experiment, but rather the ancient way of dominion and empire. Freedom is not merely freedom to live a comfortably unexamined life in one's steady cultural tradition, regardless if that culture is Bantu, Persian, Scandinavian, or the much mythologized and over-marketed American "heartland." Freedom obligates one to engage the world, doubt oneself, and see all cultures as sources anyone might draw from to grow and change themselves.

Goodness is not America's essence but its aspiration. No one gets to assume they're the good guys, especially not trying to justify something they would condemn from anyone less good than they. There never was a Shining City on the Hill, and a city presuming itself to be that one is guilty of pride. That City is not yet built and will never be completed.

This is the "liberalism" I learned from the example of many, and is nothing like the Strawman "liberalism" pundits on the right sneer at, nor the counterfeit "liberalism" focus-group technocrats in the Democratic Party might offer, nor the empty "liberalism" the compromised media occasionally name-check when they need to say something about "both sides."

This is America as I know it and love it.

restatement

Liberals are stupid. Conservatives are evil. The pattern holds true.

Liberal stupidity plays glaringly in the delusion that there is anything like a convicted, stable Middle to be picked up. Were such a thing true, the conservative ploy of stepping further to the right every time would never work. It has worked very well. Therefore, there is no vast unrepresented Middle committed to centrist or moderate positions. There is a vast biconceptual majority who can be persuaded to think more liberally on some issues and more conservatively on other issues, and who will side with the better persuader, not the most centrist position-player.

twobarswhamyagottacross

I don't think there is any being in charge of the whole universe. I also have not been inclined to align with the organization American Atheists. This does not prove to be an exception.

Jon Stewart Mocking American Atheists for Opposing Cross at 9/11 Memorial

If someone were specifically constructing and installing a cross to "represent the faith of the people here," that would definitely be a First Amendment violation, using a public memorial to grant favorable status to a particular religion. In this case, it's a found object among the ruins, which some people have taken as meaningful. It's an emergent part of the narrative. If you go to many monuments or National Parks here around the West, you'll find Native American sites or religious artifacts, as well as historic churches or artifacts of settlers, displayed or pointed out on hiking/driving maps, because they're a significant part of what's there in the story of the area. I don't see that as violation of the First Amendment so long as it's not emphasized in a way to privilege a particular religion or culture in the story.
It's a question of how it's displayed, not whether it's displayed.

communitynotdeity

You've probably heard, every couple months or so, of some town in the U.S. with atheist-themed billboards or bus signs, and angry people reacting with protest, stonewalling, or vandalism. Nontheists tend to see this reaction in terms of "see, they're so crazy even a completely inoffensive sign that we exist sets them off."

Here's another way to see it. If you've told anyone about a regular nontheist meeting or group somewhere, someone's probably asked "What do atheists need group meetings for, isn't that just like church?" In a way it can be; a competing community.

We often get ourselves into unproductive arguments about how much good or harm religion and atheism do. I think that community is the good religion does, the only real good it does, and that the realization that it's not an exclusively religious good but a general human good provokes defensiveness.

If people can fit you into their comfortable worldview, they won't have a problem with your existence even if they don't like you. Unbelievers as iconoclasts offering criticism and overenthusiastic blasphemy fits fine with a conservative religious community's collective worldview. Cold bitter intellectuals writing letters to the editor and occasionally filing lawsuits with the hated ACLU are no threat to them. The question "why are atheists so angry?" is not a simple misunderstanding of your nice intent, but a defensive reactionary attempt to fit you into a category that's comfortable.

But friendly neighbors who invite people to meet and feel welcome, organize charity work, and plan outings with their children, that's a potential replacement. It poses an existential question to a religion, whether the mystic and supernatural part of their religion is as essential as they've assumed. There are communities not specifically religious, but they can tell themselves it's a core of religiosity in people that makes such communities possible. A community that by is core constituency denies the relevance of devotion to the supernatural forces an expansion of their idea of what the community is.

pure

Of course, an interest in heritage, culture, even ethnicity, is neither racist nor fascist. However, an interest in the purity of that heritage or culture or ethnicity, a desire to keep it from dilution and free of anything foreign to it, is the very substance of racism and fascism.
Purity is a corrosive antimoral value that reliably leads people to evil conclusions. Whether in matters sexual or spiritual or cultural, unless you're talking about refining chemicals and ores, purity is not a value or goal worth having.

I'm thinking of two otherwise unrelated things here. One, wishing an easy way to navigate the musically compelling but politically volatile pagan- folk- and black-metal scenes. Another, clashes over the immigration issue. At that debate (three months ago) between United for Social Justice and Utah Minutemen, the assertion there's no American identity to mold oneself to (sorry, forget the exact words) struck me as a good one. Of course one of the Minutemen vocally disagreed. I'm sure they think themselves just normal people wanting what's right (that's what's so insidious about cognitive frames), but their idea of what it is to be American is arbitrarily limited. I align more with Naomi Wolf who identifies being "American" with the attitude of speaking truth to power and willing to free all people from authorities and systems of control. By her account Americans need not have ever trod the soil of this continent beneath their sandalled feet, and probably not even lived while the place bears that name. It's an excessively idealistic, slightly sappy notion, argued specifically to lure those with narrow views of America to expand their horizons, but it's a desirable one that manages to embrace a broader humanity.

kantyousee

Logical corollary to the categorical imperative: Anything you try to justify doing to anyone else, you implicitly grant everyone in the universe permission to do to you. Your only refuge is in highly specific circumstances or in confessing to having chosen to do ill.