tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47640010396421018922024-03-13T18:24:30.316-07:00Kahn's CornerMatt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.comBlogger287125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-37035238662115628972022-01-21T13:39:00.002-08:002022-01-21T13:39:15.362-08:0050 Shades of Grey: An Allegorical-Political Reading<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Fifty Shades of Grey</i> is a Marxist allegory, covering
the development of the protagonist’s class consciousness, while tearing down,
one by one, all non-revolutionary forms or resistance to capitalism generally,
and in America particularly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal">Let’s start
by looking at the names of our two main characters: Anastasia Steele and
Christian Grey.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anastasia is her given name,
which is to say, the name her parents chose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They gave her the name of a famous royal, a class to which they do not,
and could not, ever belong, but nevertheless this is how they choose to think
of themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet the family name is
Steele.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The associations between steel
and infrastructure and manufacturing are obvious (she actually works at a
hardware store), and we cannot forget that the labor movement in the United
States grew in large part from the Pittsburgh steel workers. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her name itself is an example of class unconsciousness,
identifying with a class to which she cannot belong (further, it is a class which
is not supposed to exist in America, and the particular royal was part of the
family overthrown in the communist revolution).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Likewise, Christian’s given name presents a false front.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Obvious connections to the “protestant work
ethic” and the prosperity gospel aside, Christianity promises a moral system,
or some spiritual righteousness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But his
family name is Grey.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shades of Grey
refers to moral ambiguity, not certainty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Grey is in fact unconcerned with morality, Christian or otherwise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And of course the 50 Shades is a pun on 50
States.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Grey is the personification of American
capitalism. (There is also some clever mirroring in the names.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Besides the obvious “steel grey” pun, Grey is
the traditionally British spelling, which, if we consider America’s heritage as
a royal colony, would mirror his family name with her given name.)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>The plot itself begins with Anastasia meeting Christian Grey
for an interview on behalf of her university newspaper. This is the first of a long line of examples
of non-revolutionary means failing to prevent the exploitation of the workers. Neither education nor journalism saved
her. Grey convinces her to sign a
contract to be his submissive sex partner.
This contract dictates what she can eat, where she can go, etc.
etc. This may be so on the nose as to
not need reiterating, but the capitalist convinces the worker to enter a
relationship in which the worker is physically and emotionally degraded and has
their basic life decisions curtailed. Throughout
the continuing degradation and domination, Grey insists that this is love, and
the contract makes them equal partners, right?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Over time, Anastasia begins to doubt this parity, and Christian
co-opts means of non-revolutionary dissent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>After the aforementioned failure of education and journalism, he woos her
by buying her a first edition Thomas Hardy novel (thus co-opting art).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Christian breaks the contract without penalty
(showing the futility of law). Perhaps the most dense example of this is the “Dom
Jeans.” Blue jeans, invented by a Jewish immigrant for physical laborers during
the California gold rush, became popular in counter-culture and youth movements
in the post-war era.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As with much
counter-culture, they were appropriated as a fashion commodity, eventually becoming
banal and innocuous, becoming “Mom Jeans,” something suburban soccer moms would
wear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And thence “Dom Jeans.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even if it takes time, counter-culture just
becomes another commodity for the capitalist class.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>Anastasia grows more and more uncomfortable with the relationship. The novel ends with the two at an expensive
and exclusive restaurant. All food in the
restaurant is made from locally foraged flora.
Food that was grown on public land with no effort or support from the
restaurant is being harvested and commodified. A public and private sphere cannot coexist
without the latter ransacking the former.
It is at this meal that Anastasia breaks up with Christian. In the allegory of the sexual relationship,
she realizes that her devotion was unreciprocated and misplaced; their interests
were fundamentally different. She has
developed class consciousness.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">(<i>If you find yourself taking the above seriously, please direct all comments to E.L James.)</i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-62449196638318021052021-07-31T14:52:00.002-07:002021-07-31T18:58:45.502-07:00Coleman Cox Hates You and Other ObservationsAt a recent trip to a thrift store, I came across <i>Straight Talk from Coleman Cox</i>, a 1928 collection of the "witty sayings" of a Coolidge era sales manager.<div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUgWaLRLlnYRVZYk8ZYeWRdbNDcAfjMKKW-f28DZgqJ9H_v5irroutGkK2e8GuEhW9C9tUET0ylzF7O-wjAvzQEd-Nlfh1MpebM7OR9dBJlbrS3p_TQr2L7Fb_mWPJ_dZ-fHjSa2K2J4A/s1024/Scan+Jul+31%252C+2021+at+111024_1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="727" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUgWaLRLlnYRVZYk8ZYeWRdbNDcAfjMKKW-f28DZgqJ9H_v5irroutGkK2e8GuEhW9C9tUET0ylzF7O-wjAvzQEd-Nlfh1MpebM7OR9dBJlbrS3p_TQr2L7Fb_mWPJ_dZ-fHjSa2K2J4A/s320/Scan+Jul+31%252C+2021+at+111024_1.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiAxcGKaRaL91TGt4PM5R5BYPp-fiEd-iFyuqtegy05wT2-RNq-7CgdfoYy2BTPW7EQv8vsPrSFba-_4RvES6doGU3rw-P63Y-jjtVt8v0QBkPWPJ9np1HdvoKD9am_YArulT_idTq0N4/s1024/Scan+Jul+31%252C+2021+at+111024_2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="727" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiAxcGKaRaL91TGt4PM5R5BYPp-fiEd-iFyuqtegy05wT2-RNq-7CgdfoYy2BTPW7EQv8vsPrSFba-_4RvES6doGU3rw-P63Y-jjtVt8v0QBkPWPJ9np1HdvoKD9am_YArulT_idTq0N4/s320/Scan+Jul+31%252C+2021+at+111024_2.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div>Though advertising itself as containing "more than nine hundred thoughts," it really just contains nine hundred variations on "You deserve to be poor" and "get back in the kitchen, woman!" </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>I'm exaggerating a bit. Some of his thoughts are just basic observations that he thinks are funny for some unfathomable reason. Consider the very first entry in the book:</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVHgFlXgPJmGsI4gkf4CeEA8n0clPhDuNQetxMqIN897r5vPxIws7w-1DKszFEXKZ176YjqC_E-DyJUS2eX6nN7oVHfBk1Cm6EnB-s5qM5AOf5iXS0pU2UDgFm6ZyGNRJeOycGpcojYF0/s2645/COX_001.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1034" data-original-width="2645" height="125" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVHgFlXgPJmGsI4gkf4CeEA8n0clPhDuNQetxMqIN897r5vPxIws7w-1DKszFEXKZ176YjqC_E-DyJUS2eX6nN7oVHfBk1Cm6EnB-s5qM5AOf5iXS0pU2UDgFm6ZyGNRJeOycGpcojYF0/s320/COX_001.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div> A lot of jokes don't age well because the references become obscure, or sensibilities change, but this joke fails wholly on its merits, and the scope of that failure is undiminished over nearly a century. It also fails as a useful, or even interesting, observation. Some business partners don't get along! </div><div><br /></div><div>I want to provide a full unedited page to give you a good sense of how little this man has to say, and how proud he seems to be of saying it.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc2LmKmo1scUpRrIGUvIoHxTVPICCHJ3zh355yfmr-rZ0lqiTSEiHxtiFSnhLPr1t8mAA_WgmXqW2KG78RgeRBfftHLg5lQUcJ7SQ-PskFix_d3KpPJIZg27qVpsgq3XfXjtjajYMgWTk/s1757/Scan+Jul+31%252C+2021+at+11.25_6.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1757" data-original-width="1246" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc2LmKmo1scUpRrIGUvIoHxTVPICCHJ3zh355yfmr-rZ0lqiTSEiHxtiFSnhLPr1t8mAA_WgmXqW2KG78RgeRBfftHLg5lQUcJ7SQ-PskFix_d3KpPJIZg27qVpsgq3XfXjtjajYMgWTk/w454-h640/Scan+Jul+31%252C+2021+at+11.25_6.jpeg" width="454" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>My first inclination would be to describe Cox as the poor man's H. L. Mencken, but Cox hates the poor.</div><div><br /></div><div>His firm belief that wordplay makes wisdom is so unshakeable, that he doesn't even try to make sense half the time. When he says "Traffic officers and not employers are the ones who caution young men against speeding up and trying to go ahead of every one," who is he complaining about? Is he reprimanding the employers? Does he think the young men <i>should</i> behave this way in business? And what the hell is his problem in the last entry on the page? Is he complaining about employees being busy? Does he distrust the phrase "busy as a bee?" I really can't suss out what he's trying to convey here. If you're wondering how this got past an editor, you might be shocked to find out there wasn't one.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Coleman's success as a writer came though self-publishing small booklets that he would sell to business owners, who would then distribute them to their employees. As the blurb on the back of the hardcover puts it "Great executives have distributed millions of Mr. Cox's booklets of advice because they realized these friendly suggestions would help their employees work better and live better."</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoW8rupVkwYxDQ7_ETnL-y_F0PfG1CUVF4R6nAipq1XSY_c3WiXQHpLFS-BWqzbd0o2PHpINAKguYEBB_2ypG_E-rQrbY4Z0QkBZh6le1bmW-mS8-xhtq41UI6Nr4TZk92_lcTvZt8koY/s1200/COX-002.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="472" data-original-width="1200" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoW8rupVkwYxDQ7_ETnL-y_F0PfG1CUVF4R6nAipq1XSY_c3WiXQHpLFS-BWqzbd0o2PHpINAKguYEBB_2ypG_E-rQrbY4Z0QkBZh6le1bmW-mS8-xhtq41UI6Nr4TZk92_lcTvZt8koY/w640-h253/COX-002.jpeg" width="640" /></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoLbfQoSsI5qCCuxvIHYbFzDuMeCPj77QJ9iu_-Z-a7bbM2S1bWvTH0LhKfHAbptP6sDoXDfoKAwpSmrvGitAj7s3Uf98_4_hmcLH-AKq8_cMRmllOBmc4_ljQcv3997P-18MlCOJmuh4/s1246/COX-RAISE_1.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="351" data-original-width="1246" height="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoLbfQoSsI5qCCuxvIHYbFzDuMeCPj77QJ9iu_-Z-a7bbM2S1bWvTH0LhKfHAbptP6sDoXDfoKAwpSmrvGitAj7s3Uf98_4_hmcLH-AKq8_cMRmllOBmc4_ljQcv3997P-18MlCOJmuh4/w640-h181/COX-RAISE_1.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgez_dFJFZDjvflqk3N6UZugu1mTcBj0s5Pi0vvouPUEJPeYVL6rqPAJyIpVwFJuQM9aBl5N3aGpH8MGHLhIUM5m-5z-pG9HytPh8LNw4hyphenhyphengySLexGWK8A0MEi31HTFvLzoZDBjqGcEBKQ/s1206/COX-003.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img border="0" data-original-height="762" data-original-width="1206" height="405" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgez_dFJFZDjvflqk3N6UZugu1mTcBj0s5Pi0vvouPUEJPeYVL6rqPAJyIpVwFJuQM9aBl5N3aGpH8MGHLhIUM5m-5z-pG9HytPh8LNw4hyphenhyphengySLexGWK8A0MEi31HTFvLzoZDBjqGcEBKQ/w640-h405/COX-003.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Fun stuff!</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">If you're wondering, does Coleman Cox have anecdotes that only a man completely lacking in imagination could find profound, then you're in luck!</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr_-AxKnGsKpZMIoDmt4rfF13d_875Wy32W_iaTq6kKI6uGT-XoTlmkXpwdYiLcWjrbz4wTybgCV3i_CWU6drvZBDvjQj__ijHnLjCh0Cv7CJmY_oNQyWD439wYrxUvVpZpqswFywGc6M/s1237/COX_BALL.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="216" data-original-width="1237" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr_-AxKnGsKpZMIoDmt4rfF13d_875Wy32W_iaTq6kKI6uGT-XoTlmkXpwdYiLcWjrbz4wTybgCV3i_CWU6drvZBDvjQj__ijHnLjCh0Cv7CJmY_oNQyWD439wYrxUvVpZpqswFywGc6M/w640-h112/COX_BALL.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I've found that people who greatly overestimate their own intelligence or perceptiveness tend to drastically underestimate the same qualities in others. Does he believe that the meaning is so cleverly conveyed that the reader must go back to grasp it? Does he believe repeating this common idea about perseverance will so rock his audience that they must pause and read it again once the shock has worn off? Perhaps I'm being mean here. After all, he's acknowledging that people who get thrown down can come back stronger, so maybe that's a sign of empathy?</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzGeKA0c5rfVXPXdTxL_p_nPpW-Bu5sMAnMRz-VhCOzKehrPG6VudV1z5QKSwBKuoZMScn3KqhhO7jgpJxusm3UeUpLnWLSLVJssM47sGxSOi7deSFPiZU7b-7Q4EQFuqRKp3-HX0gAJc/s1612/COX_HATES_THE_POOR.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="696" data-original-width="1612" height="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzGeKA0c5rfVXPXdTxL_p_nPpW-Bu5sMAnMRz-VhCOzKehrPG6VudV1z5QKSwBKuoZMScn3KqhhO7jgpJxusm3UeUpLnWLSLVJssM47sGxSOi7deSFPiZU7b-7Q4EQFuqRKp3-HX0gAJc/w640-h277/COX_HATES_THE_POOR.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Well, fuck you too, Coleman. And in case anyone noticing the dialect in the above was wondering, yes, there are racist entries, but they're gross in a way that's not funny or interesting, so I'm not excerpting them here. His misogyny gets personally revealing though.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhUwHkPgYubOQFro739G2gteGrnbcmy1TTxscHE8zmDTthtjI5nw9dH7uo6eyWJAPOuTyqUFHt-1slwlw48i0o_FdFVgH34uKlCjY9UmlFT1nh-f1Q4xRFB-LxiskGg2kkMPlPPlPyRy8/s1224/COX-MURDER.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="456" data-original-width="1224" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhUwHkPgYubOQFro739G2gteGrnbcmy1TTxscHE8zmDTthtjI5nw9dH7uo6eyWJAPOuTyqUFHt-1slwlw48i0o_FdFVgH34uKlCjY9UmlFT1nh-f1Q4xRFB-LxiskGg2kkMPlPPlPyRy8/w640-h238/COX-MURDER.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The first question that comes to my mind is why is Cox going to these cabarets he finds so murder-inducing. I'm also not sure who he's planning on murdering in this scenario.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSxdhR6gYWAERfBiDptbpgKI7DLK-17J4IjvP3m_zG67NHqFs57mZAYBVJ2FhXmhyphenhyphen6dryovEb-rCqSnYTULPqSjYbMUnLk-0k2GKGtdfvsCkS5FqKrCxi1nrSE9JmMViku9YZ0Qva77Gk/s1225/COX_ASSHOLE.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="531" data-original-width="1225" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSxdhR6gYWAERfBiDptbpgKI7DLK-17J4IjvP3m_zG67NHqFs57mZAYBVJ2FhXmhyphenhyphen6dryovEb-rCqSnYTULPqSjYbMUnLk-0k2GKGtdfvsCkS5FqKrCxi1nrSE9JmMViku9YZ0Qva77Gk/w640-h278/COX_ASSHOLE.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div>There's something fascinating in a person who is so lacking in self-awareness and empathy. Everything bad that happens to people is their own damn fault, and how dare my employees cause me to lose money. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>This book is, at its heart, marginalia from the side of the roaring twenties generally omitted when discussing American literature. When we talk about the 1920s, the focus is almost exclusively on the authors of Lost Generation, Algonquin Round Table, or of those who shared similar cultural values. But the flipside of the jazz and luxury was the gross exploitation that succeeded the Progressive Era, and the broad adoption of social darwinism and laissez faire by industry and government in this decade. It's likely that the number of Americans who read Coleman Cox in 1928 is significantly larger than of those who read Ernest Hemingway or Dorothy Parker, despite his now complete obscurity.</div><div><br /></div><div>Well, he has no one to blame but himself.</div>Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-44878102683438271072021-04-20T23:32:00.004-07:002022-06-27T17:46:05.666-07:00Tom Cantor Seems Like a Loser and a MoronEarlier today, I received in the mail an unsolicited autobiography by Tom Cantor titled <i>Changed, </i>which is a recounting of Cantor's decision to accept Jesus (though he insists he's still a Jew and not a Christian). There have been plenty of articles about people offended by receiving the book, but none that have really gone into depth about the content. So, using examples from the book itself, I hope to prove three things. <div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu1OrN_vhhCUKiO1xq3jg6p-W-K6aTiQR2NHShwRlyZAwb0ggLuLo5xM2DeWXv8IXi2hbC3mLm82QC8DylZRvztYDw7OVIDFAPunSZLtF0Nfza7elhvXL9nI57rloT1mp3wIxQh_mdVI4/s2048/IMG_2415.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu1OrN_vhhCUKiO1xq3jg6p-W-K6aTiQR2NHShwRlyZAwb0ggLuLo5xM2DeWXv8IXi2hbC3mLm82QC8DylZRvztYDw7OVIDFAPunSZLtF0Nfza7elhvXL9nI57rloT1mp3wIxQh_mdVI4/s320/IMG_2415.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWuvb1ymgNq_GI99J7se7UdTbIWgkJazfaIGWHUHEclPuhae4GXlxKRsHuNNvjudjR2nTsyyh0ewnW8dH5yhblIa2JyNyUKeQHZsIQKb-6z7kWb1Z_3tcTA_cWMjQsWzGP5ezKu3qQgPo/s2048/IMG_2416.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWuvb1ymgNq_GI99J7se7UdTbIWgkJazfaIGWHUHEclPuhae4GXlxKRsHuNNvjudjR2nTsyyh0ewnW8dH5yhblIa2JyNyUKeQHZsIQKb-6z7kWb1Z_3tcTA_cWMjQsWzGP5ezKu3qQgPo/s320/IMG_2416.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /><div><b><span style="font-size: large;">1. Tom Cantor is a loser.</span></b></div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>As far back as Saint Augustine, the Christian redemption narrative has featured a recitation of the convert's depravity before finding Jesus. This trend continues today. Ben Carson tried to stab someone and Mike Lindell was a crack addict. According to the synopsis on the back cover, Cantor was "expelled from schools" and "broke through the boundaries of morality and plunged into sexual defilement." Sounds saucy. Let's start with the expulsions. Cantor was expelled from a private military school at the age of eight. What did he do? Well, he was told not to touch the fire alarm, and frequently did so anyway. One time he accidentally set it off, and his fellow students quickly gave him up. By his own account, he only intended to <i>touch</i> the fire alarm, and setting it off was an accident. This is enough for him to caption a picture of his seven year old self as "Trouble Maker in Disguise" and cite this incident as proof of his underlying perversity. "Accidentally pulling a fire alarm" is the least bad thing someone could do to get expelled. If Saint Augustine stole pears he didn't need, Tom Cantor touched a pear at the supermarket and accidentally knocked it to the floor. This is the first of five bad things Tom Cantor does in his life. Or rather, the ones he treats as bad things. See section 2 for the actually shitty things he does, but never seems to acknowledge are awful. The next horrible, sinful act he perpetrates is when he gets caught shoplifting records at the age of 15. Yes, despite describing himself as a died-in-the-wool terror, there's a seven year gap until the next thing he finds worthy of mention. The result of this arrest? Daddy sends him to a boarding school in Switzerland. The third bad thing happens on the boat there. He was "so loud and annoying to the other passengers that the Swiss Police...picked me up by the ear and told me that I was a guest in their country." How does this rebel without a spine react? He behaves himself for the rest of the trip. He was loud, and was told to quiet down, and did. This is proof of his "rebellious nature." </div><div><br /></div><div>His fourth bad thing is probably the worst. After being in Switzerland for a couple months, he got caught being drunk and getting into a fight, which leads to expulsion and finding a new boarding school. Is this good? No. Is this shocking for a teenager sent halfway around the world (or who has friends with a parent out of town)? Also no. We're talking about a man who, as a senior citizen, recounts <i>accidentally</i> pulling a fire alarm when eight years old as one of the worst things he's ever done. This is not a rebel or a trouble maker. This is a loser who is desperate to think of himself as having a bad streak, and briefly being loud on a boat hits his top five bad boy moments. This is someone who desperately wants a cool redemption arc, despite being Milhouse's lamer older brother.</div><div><br /></div><div>But hey, maybe the fifth moment is a doozy. We still haven't come to the "sexual defilement" and whatever can be found on the other side of "the boundaries of morality." It's 1960s Switzerland, who knows what freaky stuff he could get into. Maybe BDSM, prostitution, orgies, consensual sex with women who weren't truly in love with him ah shit it's consensual sex with women who weren't truly in love with him isn't it? Here, in its entirety, is the sexual defilement of Tom Cantor:<br /><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span> </span> "During those trips my sexuality woke up. I hoped that sexual intimacy would fill my emptiness and bring me peace and happiness. I turned to women looking for comfort and love. But, the women I turned to were not looking for love, they were were only looking for a new passing excitement. Those sexual encounters not only left me feeling emptier, but, worse, they made me feel filthy inside. I FELT DIRTY INSIDE!"</span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Tom Cantor managed to hook up with a random girl and was shocked, <i>shocked I tell you</i>, that she wasn't in love with him. Him, the bad boy who tried and failed to steal motown records from a supermarket! The dashing bandit who briefly bothered some transatlantic passengers, and would have kept doing so had he not been asked to stop! But the unnamed, undescribed, totally real European girls didn't fall for his dangerous allure, or his inflated ego, or his almost certainly clammy hands (even though they once accidentally pulled a fire alarm). </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">After this, he feels so dirty that he takes a hot shower! with soap! for two hours! But this doesn't cure his terminal case of feeling icky! </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><b>2. Tom Cantor is a terrible partner</b></span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div>Tom Cantor moves back to the US to go to college at Miami University in Ohio. After trying a shower once didn't cure his sense of defilement, he decided that he needed a "girl that was wholesome and pure" to "cleanse" him. So he goes to the library to "hunt for that serious student." He discovers that the study rooms each "had a square window that I could look into." He describes his reaction to this discovery as blurting out "Pefect! Window shopping!" This alone is worse than any of the things Tom Cantor has actually felt bad about. He sees a girl he likes, and then proceeds to lie to her, first claiming there are no other rooms available. He presents her as believing this to be true. "Appearing to be sorry that there were no booths available, she agreed." He then finds out she's studying French, offers to evaluate her accent, then has the clever idea of negging and lying to her again. "Seeing an opportunity to spend time with her I told her that her accent was terrible and that I could help her with her accent even though I knew I had a terrible Swiss accent." He doesn't present this as a bad thing he did that he now regrets. He just lied to this woman he didn't know with the hope of seducing her so she could cleanse him of sin.</div><div><br /></div><div>After coming back to college after visiting family for the summer, he proposes to Cheryl, who tells him that she had been raped and was now pregnant. This is terrible news. For Tom. Yes, Cheryl has PTSD and nightmares and sinks into depression. But that's not the most important thing here. </div><div><br /></div><div> "Impure, she was no longer better than I. No longer could she rescue me from my own impurity. <b>What was worse </b>[sic] <b>about the rape of Cheryl and the pregnancy was that it forced me to be reminded of my own sexual defilement. </b> Her pregnancy was a glaring reminder of my own acts and defilements." (emphasis added)</div><div><br /></div><div>To be clear, according to this man, the worst thing about the woman he loves being raped and impregnated, was it reminded him of the time he had emotionally unfulfilling consensual sex as a teenager. Fuck this guy, right? This is sociopathic. This is worse than pulling a fire alarm <i>on purpose</i>! But of course Tom Cantor doesn't see it this way. The rape of the woman he claims to love is a tragedy, but mostly because it makes him feel bad. </div><div><br /></div><div>Even if we put aside how morally atrocious this is, how much of a moron do you have to be to actually put this in a book about your come to Jesus moment?</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><b>3. Tom Cantor is a moron.</b></span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div>Ostensibly, the purpose of sending this book to random Jews is to convert Jews. And yet, in an 85 page book, he feels he needs to stop and explain what a moyle is. Yes, he spelled mohel "moyle." He also needs to explain what Yom Kippur is, what Baruch Atah Adonai means, etc. He also does not seem to understand anything about how the world or any religion works. If you're wondering how someone can accept Jesus as their personal lord and savior, but still consider themselves to not be a Christian, Tom Cantor explains his reasoning. </div><div><br /></div><div>"I had always been taught that people who were not Jewish were either Christians or Moslems... I knew my three co-workers were not Moslems, they must be Christians... Right in the middle of them talking about their extra-marital relationships, I announced, "You fellows need Jesus Christ."... I was trying to find out if being Christian meant having Jesus Christ... From their response, I learned that a person could be a Christian and not have Jesus Christ or, expressed differently, I learned that a person could have Jesus Christ and not be called a Christian." </div><div><br /></div><div>Completely putting aside religious faith, this is quite possibly the dumbest thing I've ever heard. This is grown man from a major city in the twenty-first century, and his entire argument is predicated on only three religions existing. Even if we agreed with his conclusion that his coworkers were Christian and didn't have Jesus (after all, they're not Muslim or Jewish, so there is literally no other option), the reverse isn't automatically true. Everyone who isn't a doctor is a lawyer or an accountant. My acquaintances aren't lawyers or accountants so I will assume they're doctors. I asked them if they have residency at a hospital. They said no. Therefore, a doctor does not need to have residency at a hospital or, expressed differently, a person can have residency at a hospital without being a doctor.</div><div><br /></div><div>Q.E.D.</div><div><br /></div><div>Look, I grew up in a pretty Jewish area. I'm not super well-versed in the New Testament. But Tom Cantor is either bafflingly ignorant or hamming it up for effect. </div><div><br /></div><div>"The first book in the "New" section was a book called "Matthew." What became obvious to me was that this was a book about Jesus. This book was all about Jesus, Jesus, Jesus... As I came to the end of the book of Matthew, I was shocked to read of how Jesus was hated, betrayed and tortured to die a slow, agonizing death on the cross. I felt so disappointed that the person I hoped could help me was now destroyed."</div><div><br /></div><div>According to Tom Cantor, he, as an adult, began reading the new testament and was surprised to find out that it was about Jesus Christ. We were all impressed when people went months without spoiling <i>Infinity War</i>, but Tom Cantor managed to go about 20 years without finding out about Jesus being crucified or resurrected!</div><div><br /></div><div>Obviously, this is a lie. It's a very stupid lie that serves no purpose. He mentions travelling around Europe; was he confused by all the buildings that had a big letter "t" with a dude nailed to it? Did his Christian girlfriend who happened to be carrying a bible with her when they met just never mention it? When people tell obvious lies and expect to be believed, they either think their audience is dumb or foolishly think they themselves are exceptionally clever. Tom Cantor is the latter. That's the reason I'm treating this as evidence that Tom Cantor is a moron. It fits a pattern we see in the book, where he acts real self-satisfied about convincing people of obvious lies. His entire story of meeting his wife is just a series of lies that he recites as if it were proof of what a clever wooer he is. He has no sense of his own limitations. The purpose of this book is to convert Jews, but show me one of us who doesn't know that the New Testament is about Jesus. Show me one who hasn't heard that Jesus gets crucified and [spoiler alert!] resurrected. Not only is this a dumb lie, it directly hinders his goal.</div><div><br /></div><div>Based on this book, Tom Cantor doesn't seem to understand Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the fact that those aren't the only options, syllogisms, how lying works, how empathy works, the fact that your girlfriend being raped isn't all about you, that Dennis the Menace isn't history's greatest villain, the definition of "defilement," or that an 85 page book shouldn't have 31 chapters. </div><div><br /></div><div>Tom Cantor is a loser, a terrible partner, and a moron.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Q.E.D.</div>Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-51670713643338655692018-12-10T21:31:00.003-08:002018-12-10T21:39:30.749-08:00Everybody's Dystopia: The Ambivalent Politics of The Hunger GamesYou've probably seen the meme that's been going around for a couple years, generally some variation on a particular idea: This generation was raised on <i>Harry Potter</i> and <i>The Hunger Games</i>, <i>of course</i> they're not going to stand for Trump's authoritarianism. Whatever the generational political demography may be, there is a problem with this claim. The politics of <i>The Hunger Games</i> (and <i>Harry Potter</i>, and others that I have little knowledge of) are almost studiously ambivalent on political issues.<br />
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In <i>The Hunger Games</i>, any political perspective beside outright totalitarianism can be projected onto Katniss and her compatriots. The world of Panem is one in which the wealthy exploit the labor of the poor by demanding unwavering patriotism and convincing oppressed peoples to distrust each other. They demand cultural and ethnic homogeneity. A reluctant hero becomes a symbol of a resistance movement, aiming to convince the population to overthrow the ruling class and establish a more equitable society, though it turns out the leader of the resistance is just as bad as the old leader. Also... The world of Panem is one in which a centralized state power enslaves rural populations by disarming them. They demand that everyone work without hope of personal advancement. A reluctant hero becomes a symbol of a militia aiming to overthrow tyranny and establish a fair society, though it turns out the leader of the militia is just as bad as the old leader. Both of these descriptions are perfectly accurate. What's more, the coding in the books and films are just as ambiguous. The denizens of the capital dress in a fashion reminiscent of European aristocracy and adopt the gilded age's condescending attitude towards the poor. (So it's a class issue! Get the guillotines!<i> ¡Viva la revolución!</i>) At the same time, they're effete urban elites who control the media. (See, it's a government issue! Can't let them gubmint bastards boss us around!) Katniss herself (See! A female protagonist! #Resist) is ambivalent (See! She just wants to protect her family, as any good woman would! #FamilyValues) about the political aspect of her role as spokesperson of a resistance movement, and ends up more or less opting out of having any role in the development of a new society. This is generally true of <i>Harry Potter </i>as well, though we tend to forget that given J. K. Rowling's frequent political statements. <i>Harry Potter </i>is more explicit politically, the parallels between the Death Eaters and Nazis being so evident that denying them is downright silly, but, as strange as it is for me to have to type this, outright denouncement of Naziism was less politically controversial ten years ago than it is today. A running gag in video game communities of the time held that there were five types of enemies you could kill without any controversy or guilt: Aliens, Robots, Zombies, Terrorists, and Nazis. Only moral reprobates (of which there are disconcertingly many) wouldn't side with Harry and his pals. Still, it is only the outright Nazi beliefs of the Death Eaters that qualify one as a villain in this series.<br />
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To be clear, I'm not trying to criticize YA series, but rather point out that most of the political content we see in them is projected. I really don't want to get into a long screed about the efficacy of counter-hegemony so I'll just end the post here.Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-20172857488443286792018-08-14T10:42:00.000-07:002018-08-14T10:42:14.849-07:00"Assassination Vacation" and the Reliquary of the Damned<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Sarah Vowell's <i>Assassination Vacation </i>(2005) is part pop-history and part travelogue. Vowell sets off to visit the places associated with the Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley assassinations, from Ford's Theater to the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, where you can see a piece of Charles Guiteau's brain floating in a jar. Vowell argues that the almost obsessive devotion to maintaining and visiting these sites is like a secular version of Catholic pilgrimages, that the shards of Lincoln's brain or the ominously vague "Piece of John Wilkes Booth," serve a similar function to the relics of saints. Overall, I recommend the book, as a good introduction to the aforementioned assassinations in general, and for a wealth of detail on the tangential or minor figures attached to the event. But I have some thoughts of my own regarding her claim about the relic-like nature of the artifacts of assassination, at least regarding the assassin. </div>
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While the fallen leaders and their belongings may possess the qualities of relics, we still have to wonder why there is such a draw towards the killers. With maybe the exception of Pontius Pilate, there isn't much lasting interest in individuals who kill holy figures. And yet, Charles Guiteau is nearly as famous as President Garfield, and most Americans can name only one 19th century actor: John Wilkes Booth. What makes these men so alluring, not ideologically or morally, but nevertheless drawing our attention? Why do I know more about Leon Czolgosz than every member of McKinley's cabinet?</div>
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The power of religious relics lies in their connection to the divine, while historical relics draw their power through their connection to History. Even if we know this to be ontologically untrue, we can't help but feel that an object's proximity to some great historical moment or personage imbues that object with some essence, preserving some tether across time and space. We have a sense of History as an actually existing entity. We see its motive power as "trends and forces" or "great men" or some combination thereof. In the way that, for a pilgrim, a saint represents a closer connection to the divine forces that they believe underlie our world, a historical figure has a closer connection to natural forces that we believe underlie it. One cures a leper, the other cures polio. But assassins are usually the opposite of great men, and the killing is often the only notable thing about them. They represent an unnatural disturbance of history.<br />
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In her book, Vowell describes the assassins as overturning the will of the electorate. The trends and forces that got the person elected and the future actions of a great man are swept aside by one brief and violent action. While our society has a prurient interest in crime and violence, the assassin is of a different class from the rest. We hold Booth and Oswald and James Earl Ray in a different class than Al Capone or Jack the Ripper. Because an assassin doesn't simply kill a person, they impress their will on history itself. Booth didn't just murder Lincoln, he switched the tracks of American history. Of course, who knows how society would be different if Capone hadn't existed, or if one of the Zodiac killer's victims would have gone on to prominence. But while we don't know how Reconstruction would have been different under Lincoln, or whether Robert Kennedy would have won the presidency in 1968, that history would be substantially different if they hadn't been killed is a certainty. For most assassin's changing history is not just an effect of their actions, but the <i>intent</i>. And the fact that someone, often a loser or a lunatic, can so drastically affect the world at large, can overturn the will of the electorate, is frightening, because it shows our beliefs in the logic and comprehensibility of history to be unfounded. Whereas the relics of the great figures connect us to the ebb and flow of history, the assassins' connect us to the chaos, the absurd truth that history is not a river, but countless individual incidents, and that the current we feel is just a post facto generalization, a desire to add order to something that has none.Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-17246993590698659532018-08-07T12:49:00.002-07:002018-08-07T12:55:26.907-07:00On the True Origins of the Conspiracy Theorist<br />
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The common
explanation for how otherwise reasonable people end up believing in
conspiracy theories is straight-forward and easy to empathize with,
only having the fault of being completely wrong. According to common
wisdom, some people, when faced with a shocking or upsetting act of
violence (e.g. the Kennedy assassination, 9/11, any mass shooting),
are unable to accept the chaotic violence of the world and buy into a
conspiracy theory as a coping mechanism. After all, isn’t it more
comforting to pin all the blame on some shadowy organization that we
can fight? This is comforting for us non-conspiracy theorists, with
the added bonus of being subtly patronizing towards CTs (i.e. conspiracy
theorists. I don't feel like typing it a hundred times). This
explanation means that, deep down, they realize the same chaos we do,
but they’re just really bad at coping, the poor dears. That it
doesn’t make sense has been no obstacle to it becoming commonly
accepted. The argument that CTs find this conspiracy-haunted world
comforting is identical to the claim they make about those of us who
don't buy in to their grand conspiracies, that it must be nice to
live in a world where individuals are responsible for the bad things
they do, and we can trust our institutions, etc. Further, our
explanation absolutely fails to address things like, say, 9/11
truthers. 9/11 wasn't a lone wolf assassinating a president or some
freak accident. What emotional need is satisfied by shifting the
blame from Al-Qaeda to the Illuminati/New World Order/etc.? It's
much easier to fight Al-Qaeda than a shadowy secret organization that
nobody believes to exist.
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The answer to how
people come to believe in conspiracy theories is pretty simple: The
same way as they come to believe in anything else. Let's take the
Kurt Cobain murder conspiracies as an example. When a person is
faced with new information, that information must be assimilated. If
that information fits in with the things you already know, it's a
smooth process. (N.B. I'm using the words "know" and
"knowledge" to mean statements that one holds to be true,
regardless of their factual accuracy.) This is why there aren't as
many conspiracy theories about the deaths of Jimi Hendrix or Amy
Winehouse. Even their fans know that they both did drugs and that
drugs can have tragic consequences. In regards to Cobain, one of the
frequent claims made by those who believe he was murdered is that he
wasn't suicidal. They know how suicidal people act, and they know
that Cobain wasn't acting that way before his death. When this
knowledge is contrasted with the knowledge that Cobain died in the
way he did, some piece of knowledge must change so the new
information can be assimilated. Maybe suicidal people act
differently than I thought they did? Alternatively, the new
information must be denied. Cobain <i>didn't</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
commit suicide. A more recent theory </span><span style="font-style: normal;">is
that Cobain faked his death, though the prominent theory is the
Courtney Love had him killed. But how do we get from "Kurt
didn't seem suicidal" to "Courtney Love had Kurt killed?"
The steps are pretty easy to trace. If Kurt didn't commit suicide,
then he must have been murdered. One of the earliest theorists was
a public access host who got footage from a window outside the crime
scene and noticed much less blood than he would expect from a shotgun
blast to the head. The host, and those who agreed with him, </span><i>knew</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
how much blood to expect. Also, if one accepts that Cobain was
murdered, someone else must have written the suicide note. </span><span style="font-style: normal;">After
all, the note doesn't look right. Which is to say, it doesn't look
the way you'd expect it to. And everyone knew Courtney Love was only
in it for the money and didn't really care about Kurt. </span>
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<span style="font-style: normal;">My
point here is that conspiracy theories and theorists don't start with
a full-fledged master plan. To give one more example, consider the
various Shakespeare authorship theories. Typically, people just
write them off as snobbery, but the reason is a bit more complex. It
also shows that</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> the</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">type</span><span style="font-style: normal;">s</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
of things </span><span style="font-style: normal;">we "know"
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">are</span><span style="font-style: normal;">n't
always as concrete as in the Cobain conspiracy. The lack of
contemporary documentation about Shakespeare isn't unusual, as even
many Oxfordians, Baconians, and Marlovians will acknowledge. The
real problem is that what we do have shows Shakespeare to be, well,
boring and occasionally unpleasant. As James Shapiro shows in
</span><i>Contested Will</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, it was
not Shakespeare's class that dismayed early CTs, but the fact that
the few things we know about him show his stinginess (e.g. suing a
neighbor over a small debt)</span><span style="font-style: normal;">,
and</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> that he retired to his
estate in Stratford rather than continue </span><span style="font-style: normal;">writing
in the last six years of his life was unacceptable. Everyone knows
that the greatest </span><span style="font-style: normal;">literature</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
in the English language must have been written by an equally gr</span><span style="font-style: normal;">eat</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
spirit. Even we who accept Shakespeare of Stratford as the author of
his plays feel this disappointment, yet it is a disappointment based
on our assumptions about the way the world works. Most of the
supporting evidence for these conspiracies are based on accepting
certain unproven premises (e.g. the sonnets are autobiographical)
which can be construed to prove nearly anything, or by
misapprehensions (e.g., there are no records that Shakespeare went to
grammar school, therefore he did not. However, there are no grammar
school records of any of Shakespeare's peers, some of whom went on to
attend Oxford).</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> But the
reason there are conspiracies about Shakespeare at all is the belief
we have about the personal qualities of a great artist.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">We
can see in the given examples how conspiracy theories arise
logically. Logically, if not reasonably. They are logical in the
sense that they take a set of given conditions (this is how suicidal
people act, this is what a great artist behaves like), and then apply
logic. If he didn't kill himself, who wrote the suicide note? If
vaccines cause autism, why are doctors saying they don't? </span><span style="font-style: normal;">If
these people standing outside a mass shooting aren't behaving how
survivors behave, then who are they? </span><span style="font-style: normal;">To
bring it back to my initial point, what's comforting about believing
that your favorite musician's killer is still at large, or that the
government is dispersing toxic chemicals from airplane jets?</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Conspiracy
theories, by their nature, have a tendency to broaden their scope.
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">Let's say</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
you start with the knowledge that the US intelligence agencies are
close to omniscient and that middle eastern extremist groups are
unsophisticated, </span><span style="font-style: normal;">and then
came to the conclusion that 9/11 was an inside job. On the one
hand, this would need to implicate a lot of people not directly
associated. If you 'know' how a building would appear when it
collapses, and countless structural engineers say differently, then
they must be lying. On the other hand, this would tie into other
conspiracy theories already held. If you believe that there is a
Jewish plot to control the world, you'd find a way to tie 9/11 to
that. </span>
</div>
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<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">U</span><span style="font-style: normal;">nderstanding
why people believe in conspiracy theories, and how those beliefs
develop is important. I hope it's already understood that most
conspiracy theorists are not violent or bigots. But as online
communities continue to supplant physical ones, we have to take a few
things into consideration. First, groups like Stormfront (the white
supremacist forum) have a history of trying to recruit from places
like reddit's conspiracy page, not because the</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> groups targeted for recruitment are necessarily </span><span style="font-style: normal;">racist,
but because if (as the neo-nazis believe) there are shadowy Jewish
groups controlling everything, why not try to make your case to
people who already believe there is a shadowy group pulling the
strings? Second, many of the views espoused by conspiracy theorists
are socially unacceptable. (In the cases where they accuse innocent
people, entire ethnic groups, or survivors of tragedies of
unspeakable crimes, I'd say this unpopularity is justified.) Online
communities are still communities, and fulfill that need.</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
Communities form identities and protect themselves from perceived
threats, even if that means protecting bad behavior within a
community. Third</span><span style="font-style: normal;">, there is
still a general feeling that online is not real, not just in terms of
community but in terms of actions. </span><span style="font-style: normal;">As
such, harassment of people accused of complicity in a conspiracy </span><span style="font-style: normal;">has
become </span><span style="font-style: normal;">a serious problem,
since there are so rarely any actual consequences</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
for the harassers</span><span style="font-style: normal;">, even </span><span style="font-style: normal;">when
their activities are clearly illegal.</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
</span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">There
have always been and will always be conspiracy theories. What needs
to be discussed is not how to stop them overall, but how prevent harm
to innocent people caught up in them, whether we're talking about the</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
anti-semitic</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> results of "The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the careers destroyed by
McCarthyism, or the harassment of bereaved parents after a school
shooting. On the part of conspiracy communities, the answer is
better self-policing, primarily in regards to preventing co-opting by
hate groups and, as a community, establishing a clear sense of
opprobium for harrassment.</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
On the part of broader society, we need to take online actions
seriously. Criminal harrassment and death threats must not be
consequence free simply because they are carried out online. </span>
</div>
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<br />Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-47403863685721488592017-10-10T08:35:00.000-07:002017-10-10T08:35:13.356-07:00Review: Mr. Holmes (2015)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>Director: </b>Bill Condon</div>
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<b>Runtime: </b>104 minutes</div>
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I finally got around to watching <i>Mr. Holmes </i>on Netflix. The film, based on Mitch Cullin's 2005 novel <i>A Slight Trick of the Mind</i>, focuses on an elderly Sherlock Holmes struggling to come to terms with senility. Holmes retired from the detective business decades prior to the events of the film, and has decided to write the true account of his last case, the one that drove him from London to a quiet life of beekeeping. Unfortunately, his memory is fading, and he has trouble remembering details, though he is helped along by the housekeeper's precocious son. <br />
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I've always found Sherlock Holmes fascinating. Not the character, per se, or even the Doyle stories. I have a soft spot for metafiction and the crossover between pop culture and history (cf. my review of <a href="http://www.kahnscorner.com/2016/02/review-fifth-heart-by-dan-simmons-2015.html">Dan Simmons's <i>The Fifth Heart</i></a>, where Sherlock Holmes teams up with Henry James), so this seemed right up my alley. I was underwhelmed. <br />
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Without divulging too much, the central mystery of the film (what were the details of Holmes's last case, and why did it cause him to quit for good) doesn't have a satisfactory resolution. The resolution is unambiguous, but unconvincing, for while I can understand Holmes's distress, for a man who is routinely involved with murder and espionage, this isn't nearly enough to justify his response. Meanwhile, Holmes's relationship with the housekeeper's son Roger is touching, but not something that we haven't seen a million times before, even if the acting, from both McKellan as Holmes and Milo Parker as Roger, is above average.<br /><br />As a Sherlock Holmes story, it's uninteresting. As a story about aging and mortality, it's sweet but unoriginal. As a comment on the Sherlock Holmes mythos (of, as the poster says, "the man beyond the myth") it's a real letdown, as it doesn't really add anything except to point out that well-known misconceptions (e.g. the deerstalker) are misconceptions, or to ask "what if Sherlock Holmes were old?" <br /><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: 14.85px;">Rating: </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 32px; line-height: 24px; text-align: center;">★</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 32px; line-height: 24px; text-align: center;">★</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 32px; line-height: 24px; text-align: center;">☆</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 32px; line-height: 24px; text-align: center;">☆</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 32px; text-align: center;">☆</span><br />
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<br />Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-78272196937577165702017-09-29T02:38:00.003-07:002017-09-29T02:38:49.980-07:00Like looking in a mirror...Just thought I'd share a couple photos that I've taken. The first is an "American goods" store in Stratford, England.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhus4WDS0dDKUwoc9e3qU3ySs6tP75nZv96eGum7M-q9tsMuZEITTHcQC7WtAVGpSwJxf9J5Vhyo1I8lU4Z3GlBFCFOOF9v0t0mOJ2eivYVzMHom1LYlz-fHXvG1e2Vf24pMCjub0C9kkI/s1600/spangles.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="717" data-original-width="960" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhus4WDS0dDKUwoc9e3qU3ySs6tP75nZv96eGum7M-q9tsMuZEITTHcQC7WtAVGpSwJxf9J5Vhyo1I8lU4Z3GlBFCFOOF9v0t0mOJ2eivYVzMHom1LYlz-fHXvG1e2Vf24pMCjub0C9kkI/s400/spangles.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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The second is a "British goods" store from Ventura, California.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFQbasLfPrvjLCvzBR6QkXxlhIuNIb9Y0c9tT2apLzKKHOuDrNEoRtofkVi3qjlmKF9msrZ0hH-mQGMMLMvTPp1iyJ6gfBNois16kU8IKJWC5ch6Bv5W4arci6btKPfMc4LMwcLKLEYzE/s1600/IMG_1335.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFQbasLfPrvjLCvzBR6QkXxlhIuNIb9Y0c9tT2apLzKKHOuDrNEoRtofkVi3qjlmKF9msrZ0hH-mQGMMLMvTPp1iyJ6gfBNois16kU8IKJWC5ch6Bv5W4arci6btKPfMc4LMwcLKLEYzE/s400/IMG_1335.JPG" width="300" /></a></div>
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I don't have any point to make here. Our special relationship seems to be going strong (cheerio!)</div>
<br /><br /><br />Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-79155142061190924322017-09-27T08:13:00.000-07:002017-09-27T08:13:25.519-07:00Velcro® makes a music video about why you shouldn't say "velcro"Intellectual property law is complicated. I can't tell you how many people I've seen spend hours arguing a point about copyright, but who aren't willing to spend the five minutes it takes to learn the basic differences between copyright and trademark. An almost certainly apocryphal rumor holds that there is some employee at Xerox (or Kleenex, or Q-Tips) whose sole function is to search for uses of the brand name as a general term for the product, and send a cease-and-desist letter. This is because, to maintain a trademark, trademarks must be distinct. This is why I can't start a laptop manufacturer called "Laptops" and sue everyone. However, if a term so lapses into general usage, it runs the risk of no longer being distinct enough to be a legal trademark, which leads to often over-zealous protection of trademarks. To this end, Velcro® produced a parody(?) music video admonishing the public to not say "velcro" unless they mean "velcro®."<br />
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<iframe width="320" height="266" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rRi8LptvFZY/0.jpg" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rRi8LptvFZY?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
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Personally, I take solace in knowing that at some future date a music video of actors pretending to be lawyers singing about IP law may be played in an actual court of law. God bless America.Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-80625907123975909692017-07-14T12:44:00.000-07:002017-07-15T00:51:49.162-07:00A Proposed Taxonomy of Conspiracism<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"> Not
too long ago, I read Jesse Walker’s <i>The United States of
Paranoia</i>, which covers
conspiracy culture in US political history, ranging from colonial
fears of Indian insurrection to 9/11 truthers. Where Walker’s book
excelled compared to others I’ve read on the subject is his
decision to focus on paranoia as opposed to conspiracism, thereby
avoiding the pedantic delimiting of the grey area between the two.
His thesis, in simple terms, is that a) paranoid thinking has played
a non-neglible role in American history since
its beginnings and b) that despite claims by other researchers of the
subject (especially Hofstadter),
this paranoia is not only prevalent on the fringes. Walker makes a
point of refuting claims that it is only during extreme cases that
paranoia becomes rampant across the political and social spectrum
(e.g. the Satanism scares in the 1980s). While he accomplishes this,
he does so at the expense of a useful taxonomy of
paranoia/conspiracism. Walker defines five types of paranoia that
can be mixed and matched, namely the Enemy Within,
the Enemy Outside,
the Enemy Below, the Enemy Above, and the Benevolent Conspiracy.
Walker’s desire to prove
that paranoia is not only on the fringes limits the depth of what is
otherwise a fantastic overview of the subject. In the aim of
furthering his thesis, Walker created a taxonomy in which the only
valid distinction is
who is the
subject of paranoia,
but where the degree of paranoia is irrelevant. So within Walker’s
taxonomy, a man who has been investigating the banking industry for
decades and considers it completely untrustworthy, an economic
populist who distrusts centralized banking as part of a broader
political view, and a man who believes that all the banks in the
world are owned by the Rothschilds to further a Zionist new world
order, would all fall into the same category of paranoia.
Walker’s categories are insufficient.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"> But
speaking of conspiracy, rather than paranoia in general, how should a
taxonomy be devised? The main goal is to identify useful
distinctions. I don’t think there’s a significant distinction
between someone who believes the CIA killed Kennedy because he was
getting in their way and someone who thinks the FBI killed Kennedy
because he was getting in their way, although the belief that he was
killed because he was going to publicize the existence of reptilian
overlords <i>would </i>be
significantly
different. I have a tentative taxonomy
of conspiracy theories that consists of two factors: scope and
perpetrators.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"> Scope
can be broken down into only two categories: limited and open-ended.
Every real-world conspiracy theory (from the Tuskegee experiments to
Iran-Contra) has fallen into the former category. A limited
conspiracy is the use of conspiracy for ultimately non-conspiratorial
ends. The moon-landing being faked for the propaganda purposes would
fall under this category, because “winning the cold war” isn’t
conspiratorial. This is not to say that the ends achieved by a
limited conspiracy must be legitimate. Some flat-earthers believe
that the reason governments keep the earth’s shape a secret is so
they can use the space programs as shell companies to shuffle money
around off the books. While hiding funds may be conspiratorial in a
legal sense, it isn’t anymore conspiratorial than the claim that
“the government doesn’t always want us to know what it does with
all its money.” If, however, a flat-earther believes
that the governments of the world were hiding the shape of the planet
so they could funnel money to create a single world government to
enslave us all, then this would be an open-ended conspiracy. People
who believe that the contrails from planes are actually chemicals
designed to affect the public, tend to fall into the open-ended
category, as the purpose of the chemtrails is generally part of a
larger, more sinister ploy. Notably, most open-ended conspiracies
tend to focus on a new world order, often some form of single world
government. Whether this is run by the Illuminati, the Jews, the
Jesuits, the Reptilians, Satan, etc. depends largely on when and
where the conspiracy arises. </span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"> The
second taxonomy, perpetrators,
can be split into three
categories, which I call:
Mostly Harmless, Partisan,
and Cabal. While I’ve
named this “perpetrators,”
this is more than just a simple <i>cui bono?</i>
As indicated by the first category
of perpetrator, the supposed
victims of the conspiracy are taken into account. In the first
category, even according to the conspiracists, there is little actual
harm done. At most, it’s the truth that is harmed, and the
deception is itself the greatest evil involved. Who benefits is, I
believe, of secondary importance in these examples. Those who
believe that the moon landing
was faked or that evidence of
Bigfoot is being systematically hidden would fall into this category.
No one is being seriously harmed by the perpetuation of these
conspiracies. Children
aren’t being pimped out of a pizza parlor, skyscrapers aren’t
being blown up, aliens aren’t taking over the earth. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"> “Partisan”
would refer to cases where there is one large group that benefits at
the expense of another. While only a small number of people need be
aware of the actual conspiracy, it benefits the entire group. Some
of those who believe that the Sandy Hook shooting was a ploy to enact
gun control laws would fall into this group. Within this conspiracy,
only a small number of people would actually be complicit, but all
who advocated for gun control in its wake would benefit. Likewise
people who thought that the Bush administration was responsible for
9/11 to aid the popularity of Bush and his party, or that FDR allowed
Pearl Harbor to happen to stymie isolationists. It should be noted
that many Partisan conspiracies focus on the same events as “Cabal”
conspiracies. The main difference between the two is that in the
latter, it is only the conspirators who benefit, not everyone on
their side. (e.g. people who believe that Sandy Hook was meant to
lead to the confiscation of guns and the enslavement of all
Americans, regardless of their position on gun control, would fall
into the “Cabal” group).</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
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<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"> I
think the best example of a Cabal conspiracy is the anti-vaxxers. In
their view, the medical industry is intentionally giving kids autism.
Most people who are pro-vaccine are not part of the conspiracy, but
as opposed to liberals who
participate in “the war on Christmas,” those who unwittingly aid
the conspirators are themselves harmed. The Cabal can also be
clandestine. As opposed to something as visible and publicly debated
as anti-vaxxers, this could be a Rothschild secretly tightening
control on the banking systems, waiting for the right time to strike.</span></div>
Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-81272489184455278052017-06-25T09:41:00.000-07:002017-06-25T09:41:20.196-07:00Review: The Code Book by Simon Singh (1999)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFyBSAvdyfH8AyVQ0EtW0B8xdl80S-3P8kb4oR0jIa197Mq3vRs3BL99Piq1jsfZaspgx3XaFeKd8Qwp66bSkPQHV5fd5dSA0PCJY9kUi5bNpnHQeDMnimOl8PFhPM4pQuo7RN92Saprs/s1600/code_book.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="458" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFyBSAvdyfH8AyVQ0EtW0B8xdl80S-3P8kb4oR0jIa197Mq3vRs3BL99Piq1jsfZaspgx3XaFeKd8Qwp66bSkPQHV5fd5dSA0PCJY9kUi5bNpnHQeDMnimOl8PFhPM4pQuo7RN92Saprs/s320/code_book.jpg" width="209" /></a></div>
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<br />
I have what is either a very bad habit or a very good habit. Whenever I come across a reference to a book on a subject I know very little about, I put everything else I want to read aside and read that book instead. In this case, the subject was cryptography, and the book is Simon Singh's <i>The Code Book.</i> Covering the history of codemaking and codebreaking from ancient civilizations, through the development of mechanical enciphering (esp. the Enigma machine and Bletchley Park) and up to public key encryption and the possibilities implied by quantum computing. All of this, with a brief detour into the deciphering of Hieroglyphics and Linear B, is explained in terms that a layman (i.e. me) can understand. <br />
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One reason I hesitate to review books like this is my knowledge on the subject is so scarce that I can't really speak to its veracity. Unlike some non-fiction books (*cough* <i>Freakonomics</i> *cough*), there are no obvious problems that stick out. This is not a bad thing, but could indicate a very good book or a book that seems very good to someone who doesn't know what they're talking about (i.e. me). Anyway, assuming Singh's work is as well-researched and accurate as it appears to me, it's a good primer on a subject that will only become more relevant to the average person as time passes.Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-24559055645680717252017-06-12T05:34:00.000-07:002017-06-12T05:34:05.757-07:00The Problem of Eternity in Barnes' "The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters""The Dream," the final chapter of Julian Barnes' novel in stories <i>The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters </i>(1989), takes place in heaven. It begins with the unnamed narrator of this chapter declaring that "I dreamt that I woke up. It's the oldest dream of all, and I've just had it." Heaven is the place where you get everything you want. To the narrator's delight, he has unlimited access to the best food, he can play golf every day, and have sex with beautiful women every night. As one of heaven's employees (whether they're angels, or former people, or something else entirely is never clarified) states, "'the principle of heaven [is] that you get what you want, what you expect.'" There's no hell, just "something we <i>call</i> Hell. But it's more like a theme park. You know, skeletons popping out and frightening you..." The only positive thing on earth that's absent in heaven is dreaming. But as perfect and wonderful as heaven is, "there aren't an infinite number of possibilities." The narrator eventually gets so good at golf that he hits a hole in one on every shot. Eventually, he completely masters every sport. Asking one of the employees what will happen, eventually, and what heaven was like in the old days, he discovers that "If you want to die off, you do. You just have to want it long enough and that's it, it happens" and "everyone takes the option [to die], sooner or later." Eventually, the narrator decides that the time has come, so he goes to bed, planning to decide on death once he wakes up. The next and final line of the story is "I dreamt that I woke up. It's the oldest dream of all, and I've just had it." While it's possible to read this line as a simple restatement of the opening, the fact that this line takes place immediately after the narrator goes to bed and decides to start dying, and the fact that Barnes specifically established that people don't dream in heaven, suggests that the story is cyclical. Once you get so tired of eternal paradise that you want to die, you start over. The idea of a cyclical afterlife is not rare in fiction. But it usually describes hell.<br />
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The earliest work I know of to present a cyclical afterlife is Flann O'Brien's <i>The Third Policeman</i> (written in 1939-40, though not published for a couple decades), in which an unnamed narrator finds himself awaiting execution in an increasingly surreal environment until, at the end, he discovers that he has been dead throughout, and the sequence of events that unfolded, and which he has already begun to forget, will repeat as a punishment for his sins. A sort of <i>Dante in Wonderland</i>. I can think of a few other examples off the top of my head. "Judgment Night," an early Twilight Zone episode, features a German waking up on a British cruise liner during WWII, not knowing how he got there or why he is certain the ship is going to be sunk. It turns out he was a Nazi submarine captain who ordered the passenger ship torpedoed, and now spends eternity living and reliving the suffering he caused. Stephen King and Neil Gaiman have both written stories that deal with a cyclical hell ("That Feeling You Can Only Say What It Is in French" and "Other People," respectively, although I personally think the latter may be purgatorial rather than infernal). In Joshua Fialkov's comic series, "The Life After," suicides relive the same day for eternity. <br />
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So why, if endless repetition is consistently presented as divine punishment, is it heaven in Barnes's novel? Perhaps the answer lies in how we construe heaven. Putting aside religious literature* for the moment, how is heaven, as an afterlife, portrayed in modern fiction? Well, when it is portrayed, it often ends up as a kind of "happily ever after" scenario (as in, e.g., the Albert Brooks movie <i>Defending Your Life </i>(1991)). Other times, it serves as a useful plot element, usually as a way to let the dead speak (e.g., Alice Sebold's <i>The Lovely Bones </i>(2002) or Vonnegut's <i>God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian</i>, a series of radioplays where Vonnegut interviews dead historical figures). The point I'm getting at, is that the experience of an eternal life in heaven is rarely dealt with in modern fiction. What would something like that look like? One example that sticks in my mind comes from Jhonen Vasquez's graphic novel, <i>Johnny the Homicidal Maniac </i>(1997) in which the titular character, touring the afterlife, visits heaven, only to find millions of people sitting quietly and staring into space. When he asks what the deal is, he's told that all the people there are perfectly content. And so they sit there. Eternally. (Well, except for a brief spate of hyper-violence, anyway). <br />
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If this endless, passive contentment doesn't sound appealing, what type of eternity could we have? We could consider an eternal soul that is stripped of our human desires, that becomes something fundamentally different from what we were when we were alive, but then you can't say that it is "you" who are in eternal paradise, anymore than it is "you" who would be absorbed into the soil after burial. What Barnes has realized is that perhaps eternity is inherently hostile to human consciousness. As Barnes' narrator concludes, "Heaven's a very good idea, it's a perfect idea you could say, but not for us. Not given the way we are." But the alternative is non-existence. The underlying unease in this chapter can be summed up by one question: What if this is the best possible scenario?<br />
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*By religious literature, I mean works that are specifically aimed at a religious audience and that claim some spiritual value, whether this be a Lloyd C. Douglas biblical epic or <i>Left Behind</i>. Heaven, for these writers, is a oneness with god, and is a theological issue, not a narrative one. <br />
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<br />Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-58925175796332510962017-05-24T07:34:00.000-07:002017-05-24T07:36:24.876-07:00Run Program by Scott Meyer (2017) review<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i style="font-size: medium; text-align: start;">Run Program </i><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">will be released on June 20th, 2017</span></td></tr>
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<i>Run Program</i> follows Hope Takeda, who works at a tech company as a lab assistant in an experimental A.I. development program. The job is far less rewarding or stimulating than it sounds. Or rather, it was, before the A.I. escaped. What makes this different from any of the countless "A.I. on the loose" stories is that the A.I. (named Al) is the mental equivalent of a six year old human.* His motives, personality, and intellectual abilities are akin to those of an average first-grader, if the average first grader could control airplanes with his mind and transfer vast sums of money through online banking apps. Unsurprisingly, the government isn't too happy about this, and so begins the quest to locate and contain Al, who has plans of his own, dragging in everyone from disgruntled scientists, surprisingly profound soldiers, and a self-declared genius who has decided to call himself The Voice of Reason.<br />
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<i>Run Program </i>is a comedy, though not of the wacky <i>Hitchhicker's Guide </i>variety. To get a feel for Meyer's sense of humor, you can check out his webcomic <a href="http://www.basicinstructions.net/">Basic Instuctions</a>. There's a lot of observational humor, and a lot of that is workplace humor, which isn't for everyone. Really, go check out some of his webcomics. I think that'll be the best indication of whether or not you'll like the book. </div>
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* On a side note, the idea of raising an AI from childhood seems to have been getting more popular within SF in the last decade (and was handled extraordinarily well in Ted Chiang's 2010 novella, <i>The Life Cycle of Software Objects</i>). Meyer doesn't go deep into the theoretical or technical background on this, but is more focused on the immediate impact of a child with practically unlimited power, and the odd results of that situation.<br />
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Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-20678072469399272472017-05-16T05:30:00.000-07:002017-05-16T05:30:29.397-07:00Fake It Til They Make a Movie About You<span style="font-family: inherit;">Con artists work by gaining your confidence. Hell, it's in the name. Sometimes this is done by creating a thorough and plausible identity. Other times, they just wing it and hope no one will ask questions. Perhaps one the most ballsy types of this scam are people who claim to be close relatives of famous people, especially when those people do not exist. I recently heard about the case of <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8131424/Con-artist-faces-jail-for-fraud-after-claiming-to-be-the-twin-daughters-of-TS-Eliot.html">Alison Reynolds</a>, who in 2003 went around claiming to be TS Eliot's twin daughters, Claire and Chess, while scamming the British theater establishment for large sums of cash. There are two basic problems here: TS Eliot had no children, and Reynolds was incapable of being in two places at once. She was forced to drop the identity "<span style="background-color: white;">after theatre staff became suspicious that they had never seen Claire and Chess in the same room." What's baffling is that she was able to get away with this in the age of Google. I'll be honest, I'd watch a movie about a con woman claiming to be the non-existent twins of a famous playwright and, if history is any indication, we might well get one. </span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A similar scam was perpetrated in Manhattan in the early 1980s, when David Hampton went around claiming to be Sidney Poitier's son. (Poitier has six daughters, but no sons). His story was the basis of the play and movie <i>Six Degrees of Separation</i>. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">But of course, if we're talking about celebrity impostors, we have to acknowledge the infamous Alan Conway, who didn't settle for pretending to be related to Stanley Kubrick, but claimed that he <i>was </i>Stanley Kubrick. If you think it's a bit funny that a con artist would be named Conway, well so would he, considering that he chose the name for himself, after being charged with numerous frauds. But this is just the kind of boldness you'd expect from a guy who, despite being British, clean shaven, and having "</span><span style="background-color: white;"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/1999/mar/14/andrewanthony">had apparently only seen a couple of Kubrick's films</a>," managed to keep convincing people he was the real deal. The <a href="http://www.stopsmilingonline.com/story_detail.php?id=777">story of his unmasking</a> is worth a read. It was largely left up to the real Kubrick's assistant, Anthony Frewin, who later went on to write a screenplay about the ordeal, titled <i>Colour Me Kubrick</i>.</span></span>Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-59255074162951920732017-05-15T05:30:00.000-07:002017-05-15T05:30:12.552-07:00Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Much Did You Chafe Today?Every now and then, it's nice to remember that president's are still people, who have the same problems as the rest of us. And, the persistent use of secret recordings in the Oval Office from FDR up through the Nixon administration, gives us the ability to hear some of the more mundane difficulties that presidents face. Such as finding a pair of pants with enough room to "let your nuts hang." LBJ's call to his tailor is scandalous in a different sense than most secret white house recordings.<br />
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<br />Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-54007713561985836632017-05-13T08:55:00.000-07:002017-05-13T08:55:11.247-07:00The Flynn Precedent<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
While there have been a lot of comparisons made between Trump and Jackson (by supporters and opponents), one important similarity keeps getting overlooked. As far as Jackson was concerned, there was only one quality that proved someone's character: Loyalty to Andrew Jackson. While this caused plenty of turmoil within the cabinet (most notably the Eaton Affair), there's one particular event I want to bring up.</div>
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Samuel Swartwout had a checkered past. A military man with plentiful New York political connections, he <span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; font-family: inherit;">was rounded up as part of the Burr conspiracy but was eventually released. During the election of 1828, he was a vocal campaigner for Jackson, so the new president decided to give Swartwout a cozy patronage position, as Collector of the Port of New York. To quote from Remini's "Life of Andrew Jackson:"</span></div>
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"And when Van Buren learned that Jackson intended to appoint Samuel Swartwout to the office he almost collapsed. Not only did Swartwout have criminal tendencies but the [Albany] Regency detested him. Van Buren alerted the President immediately and warned him that Swartwout's appointment would 'not be in accordance with the public sentiment, the interest of the Country or the credit of the administration.' Unfortunately, Jackson refused to listen. He liked Swartwout because he had been an early supporter -- unlike Van Buren -- and so he went ahead with the appointment. In time, of course, Swartwout absconded with $1,222,705.09. It was a monumental theft...<br />
When the scandal broke, Jackson's opponents doubled over with laughter. All the talk of rooting out corruption in government, they said, and here the greatest theft in the history of the Republic..."</div>
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Jackson, like Trump, campaigned on a promise of fighting corruption and waste in government, but, through his own shortcomings, appointed people who were more corrupt than those they replaced. </div>
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<script src="//z-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/onejs?MarketPlace=US"></script>Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-30519416102551088262017-04-16T03:07:00.001-07:002017-04-16T03:13:29.994-07:00The Itsy-Bitsy Spider Has a Name, pero Solo en la HispanidadOne fun thing about living abroad and meeting expats from all over the world is seeing how bits of culture make their way from place to place and the often unpredictable changes they undergo in the process. I was speaking with some grad students from Bolivia and China, the latter explaining how, due to the difficulty most westerners have with pronouncing the different tonalities in Chinese names, she uses a transliterated version of her real name pronounced in Spanish or English, depending on who she's talking to. (N.B. This is actually a trend I've noticed among Chinese students here in Madrid, although many I've met have chosen a typical American/Spanish name rather than a direct transliteration of their real name.) Her name, in Spanish, is pronounced "Huizi" (woo-EET-zee), which the Bolivian pointed out was just like the name of the spider from the kid's song she grew up with.<br />
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<dd style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0.1em; margin-left: 1.6em; margin-right: 0px;">Witsi Witsi Araña trepó a la canaleta,</dd><dd style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0.1em; margin-left: 1.6em; margin-right: 0px;">vino la lluvia y se la llevó.</dd><dd style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0.1em; margin-left: 1.6em; margin-right: 0px;">Luego salió el sol, y la lluvia evaporó,</dd><dd style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0.1em; margin-left: 1.6em; margin-right: 0px;">y Witsi Witsi Araña de nuevo subió.</dd><br />
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"Witsi Witsi" seems to be the most popular version of the name, but there are variations ranging from "Huitzi Huitzi" to "Gusi Gusi." Otherswise, the lyrics are pretty much identical to the English version of "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider," as is the melody. Any suspicion that this might have been a local variation or the creation of a particular teacher evaporated when one of the student's friends arrived and recognized the song. The friend was from Ecuador. (For those without maps handy, Ecuador and Bolivia aren't exactly neighbors.)<br />
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I haven't drawn any special insights from this. I just think it's an interesting example of cultural transmission.<br />
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<dd style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0.1em; margin-left: 1.6em; margin-right: 0px;"><br /></dd><dd style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0.1em; margin-left: 1.6em; margin-right: 0px;"><br /></dd>Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-91183991569321498392017-01-23T05:30:00.000-08:002017-01-23T05:30:14.909-08:00#95 Mulengro by Charles de Lint<i>Mulengro </i>(1985) is the fourth novel by Canadian author Charles de Lint (1951- ). De Lint is a frequent World Fantasy and BFA nominee, and won the former in 2000 for his collection <i>Sweetgrass & City Streets</i>. <br />
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As the cover notes, this is "a Romany tale," which is to say that the novel is largely based on gypsy lore and culture (which the author admits to not being an expert on, and, my own expertise being less than his, I really don't know enough to evaluate for accuracy). The main character is Janfri, a gypsy who lives among the gaje (i.e., non-gypsies) in Ottowa, whose house is burnt down by an unknown enemy. Meanwhile, another gyspy from Janfri's kumpania is murdered in a bizarre fashion, and the death is investigated by two policemen, Briggs and Sandler who don't have time for any of this magic nonsense. Neither of them actually say, "I'm getting to old for this shit," but I always felt that that would be the next line whenever they showed up. Anyway, many of the gypsies believe that the killer is a dark magician, bent on purifying the gypsies, who he feels have been tainted by modern society. Janfri is sent to find Ola, a young gypsy woman with great power who's the key to stopping the killer. And while Janfri is searching for Ola, the police and the killer are searching for him. <br />
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On the one hand, it's neat to see an urban crime mystery set in Canada, which we don't get much of. While the forays into Romany culture were often interesting, I was underwhelmed. As I said before, I don't know enough about gypsy culture to call anything out as wrong, but I couldn't help shake the feeling that the gypsy kumpania in <i>Mulengro</i> was very carefully crafted to be a template of gypsy social groups, kind of like the difference between a model house and a house people actually live in. </div>
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In the end, <i>Mulengro </i>is an entertaining horror/urban fantasy/mystery novel, but I don't really see anything to set it apart from other books of the same type.</div>
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Just the stats:</div>
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Published: Oct 1985 (Ace Books paperback edition), Canada</div>
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Pages: 357</div>
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Awards:<br />
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Placed 12th for 1986 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel<br />
Nominated for the 1986 Prix Aurora Award for Prix Casper - English<br />
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<script src="//z-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/onejs?MarketPlace=US"></script><br />Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-34377457104600381982017-01-16T14:30:00.000-08:002017-01-16T14:30:29.450-08:00Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) - David Cross #18<div style="text-align: center;">
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<b>Or, Star-Crossed Lovers</b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDGoSJSr9Mj-66294wFrgBEcrwunAVfdD46a5l0hXXYVyjD5zrw3Bl8X2cv-q9Pq5zqhy-_A51YQDHuMmdL3dPKM6MMzaXLh_fr7Z4sc6umYrAgNFpU1cxNYaf867xKU_HVBxmcjWkwSU/s1600/eternalsunshine.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDGoSJSr9Mj-66294wFrgBEcrwunAVfdD46a5l0hXXYVyjD5zrw3Bl8X2cv-q9Pq5zqhy-_A51YQDHuMmdL3dPKM6MMzaXLh_fr7Z4sc6umYrAgNFpU1cxNYaf867xKU_HVBxmcjWkwSU/s400/eternalsunshine.jpg" width="270" /></a></div>
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<b>Director: Michel Gondry</b></div>
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<b>Runtime: 108 minutes </b></div>
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I've seen <i>Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind </i>multiple times before. This is Michel Gondry's second feature film, and second time working with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (<i>Human Nature</i> (2001), both of whom won the Oscar for best original screenplay for this film. Kate Winslet received a best actress nomination, losing out to Hilary Swank in <i>Million Dollar Baby.</i> </div>
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The film begins with Joel Barish (Jim Carey) ditching work to go to the beach in Montauk in the middle of winter. He's a tightly wound guy, not particularly communicative, and essentially the opposite of the talkative and artsy Clementine (Kate Winslet).</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN7JLdtY3xdHZvy7qZmYgPMfuqGCUQje4iJ2k3UxQ7HQ6JyzyS0cA2YyxHneBbVbIAEXD__HMCVEuY-p1CMauKGe8xwj5nLRCaQuqkozsZ0T871imUrxPmmhJM3vqL1lyXeRYsV_QZI_Y/s1600/eternalsunshinecharacters.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN7JLdtY3xdHZvy7qZmYgPMfuqGCUQje4iJ2k3UxQ7HQ6JyzyS0cA2YyxHneBbVbIAEXD__HMCVEuY-p1CMauKGe8xwj5nLRCaQuqkozsZ0T871imUrxPmmhJM3vqL1lyXeRYsV_QZI_Y/s320/eternalsunshinecharacters.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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They meet on the beach, and quickly fall for each other. We then cut to the relationship having fallen apart, and a heartbroken Joel running to his friends Rob and Carrie (David Cross and Jane Adams) for advice. Things get strange, his friends had received a letter from a medical clinic claiming that Clementine has had all memories of Joel erased. Joel drives to the clinic, and demands the same procedure. Most of the remaining movie either takes place in Joel's deteriorating memories or among the employees and technicians performing the memory wipe (played by Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood, and Mark Ruffalo. (And on a sidenote, does anyone else realize how much of a weirdo Elijah Wood's characters tend to be? Not only in this movie, but in <a href="http://www.kahnscorner.com/2016/04/chain-of-fools-2000-david-cross-10.html"><i>Chain of Fools</i>,</a> where he plays a teenage hitman who just wants a friend, or <i>Sin City</i>, where he plays a cannibalistic serial killer.)</div>
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As I've mentioned before, I'm not a huge Jim Carey fan. He's fantastic at a style of humor that I don't particularly care for, which is really just a matter of taste, and probably why this is one of my top three Carey movies (along with <i>The Truman Show</i> and <i>Man on the Moon</i>).<br />
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<i>Eternal Sunshine</i> takes a drama about the collapse of a relationship, and uses creative narrative techniques to turn it into an emotionally powerful tale about loss and the unavoidability and necessity of pain in any personal growth. It's a beautiful film.<br />
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<b style="background-color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: 14.85px; line-height: 20.79px;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Rating:</span></b><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 32px; line-height: 24px; text-align: center;">★</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 32px; line-height: 24px; text-align: center;">★</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 32px; line-height: 24px; text-align: center;">★</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 32px; line-height: 24px; text-align: center;">★</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 32px; line-height: 24px; text-align: center;">★</span><br />
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<h3>
<b>The Cross Section:</b></h3>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqYoFEcPi9CWbfggkZ6rwrVoNEh5ZHat_z9cRDCu4jSsKrpvtS2qJDPWSVX2bymW6xWAwpl-b177p9ibgGKKrtKQWfHYoHyj1aTwrhMLSEtrobNCO9jTNU6uQWZub1vyGhKTK9zDnc7hw/s1600/Eternalsunshinecross.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqYoFEcPi9CWbfggkZ6rwrVoNEh5ZHat_z9cRDCu4jSsKrpvtS2qJDPWSVX2bymW6xWAwpl-b177p9ibgGKKrtKQWfHYoHyj1aTwrhMLSEtrobNCO9jTNU6uQWZub1vyGhKTK9zDnc7hw/s320/Eternalsunshinecross.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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David Cross plays Rob, a friend of Joel Barish. His longest scene is by the beginning of the film, after Joel and Clementine's breakup. We only get brief glimpses into his life and his presumably troubled relationship with his girlfriend (or wife? fiancee? It's never made clear). The character is a bit acerbic, but otherwise there's nothing that sticks out about him. </div>
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<script src="//z-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/onejs?MarketPlace=US"></script>Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-1699063105054809402016-12-12T02:56:00.000-08:002017-01-11T09:18:27.378-08:00Review: Old Man's War by John Scalzi (2005)<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3J9IfYl32cQaC_5DVgoIM4MEi6kRfwDjTAtTdKPbuy9UrzBZIyoFZEwqj6x9_vg7i-y7f-FUmjWToEEhAZdrhdMXl2O5RIiQ1PIRVKDqIsv6vAwjHc3VNQ0WhzM9adt5F9-gQ8PEt6DI/s1600/old_mans_war_hc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3J9IfYl32cQaC_5DVgoIM4MEi6kRfwDjTAtTdKPbuy9UrzBZIyoFZEwqj6x9_vg7i-y7f-FUmjWToEEhAZdrhdMXl2O5RIiQ1PIRVKDqIsv6vAwjHc3VNQ0WhzM9adt5F9-gQ8PEt6DI/s320/old_mans_war_hc.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cover art: Donato Giancola</td></tr>
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The bits I'd heard about Scalzi's Hugo nominated first novel suggested that it was your standard military scifi, with a twist: In this society, it's the elderly who are sent to war, not the young. This is a technically accurate description.<br />
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In <i>Old Man's War</i>, humans, represented by the Colonial Union, are just one of the numerous species seeking to colonize the far reaches of space. Information from off-Earth is practically nil, and the CU isn't interested in sharing its technology, which is drastically superior to what's available on Earth. The only way to travel the stars is to be a colonist (an option only open to refugees from the parts of the world that were nuked in a somewhat recent war) or to join the Colonial Defense Forces as a senior citizen. Our protagonist, John Perry, does the latter. If you're wondering how a military with a minimum age of seventy-five is able to function, the answer is simple. Recruits' consciousnesses are quickly transferred to a souped-up clone of their younger selves (with a green chlorophyll tint and cat-like eyes, as well as enhanced strength, stamina, etc.). So, a couple chapters in, and the old guys ain't old anymore. They're still old on the inside, of course, though they could just as easily be forty or fifty as seventy-five.<br />
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The one thing <i>Old Man's War </i>manages to do exceptionally well is walk the line between escapist shoot 'em up fantasy and "war, what is it good for?" The ethical considerations are present throughout, without themselves dominating the narrative.<br />
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</div><div>Despite the novel premise, <i>Old Man's War </i>is a solid, but otherwise pretty run of the mill, military sf novel. If you're a fan of that sub-genre, you'll probably like it. If not, I'd recommend Joe Haldeman's <i>The Forever War </i>(1974) instead.<br />
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<b style="background-color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; line-height: 20.79px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Rating:</span></b><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 32px; line-height: 24px; text-align: center;">★</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 32px; line-height: 24px; text-align: center;">★</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 32px; line-height: 24px; text-align: center;">★</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 32px; text-align: center;">☆</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 32px; text-align: center;">☆</span><br />
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Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-87362249579945936072016-11-17T10:00:00.000-08:002016-11-17T10:00:42.172-08:00"The Sum of His Many Squalid Parts"The recent political situation got me thinking about Thompson's masterpiece, <i>Fear and Loathing: on the Campaign Trail '72</i>, which led to remember my favorite bit of Thompson marginalia, the obituary he wrote for Rolling Stone on the occasion of Nixon's death. For those who aren't fans of Thompson's work, it should be pointed out that Thompson hated Nixon. I mean really hated the man, on an intensely personal and sincere level. The last line of the obituary reads:<br /><br /><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">"</span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream."</span><br /></span><br />
And "diseased cur" may be one of the nicest things Thompson calls him. But besides the catharsis I find in this obituary, there's one moment that struck me as particularly relevant today.<br /><br /><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 18px;">"Some people will say that words like </span><i style="background-color: white; font-size: 18px;">scum</i><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 18px;"> and </span><i style="background-color: white; font-size: 18px;">rotten</i><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 18px;"> are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place...</span><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 18px;">You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful."</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">Of course, one of the main problems today isn't objective journalism, rather the surge of pseudo-journalists and pundits. But the fact remains that the actual journalists, the ones that still put in the work and respect the responsibility that a free society demands of the press, dropped the ball, </span></span>Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-91322049819182572322016-11-16T10:49:00.003-08:002016-11-16T10:49:27.096-08:00Vonnegut's Last (Published) StorySince Vonnegut's death in 2007, four volumes of unpublished work have been released, three of which are primarily or exclusively comprised of short stories. Fans of Vonnegut know that his last published short story appeared in 1972 in the second installment of Harlan Ellison's genre-defining <i>Dangerous Visions</i> anthology series. In his introduction to "The Big Space Fuck," Ellison claimed that it might be the last piece of fiction anyone would ever get from Vonnegut. At the time, Vonnegut was working on <i>Breakfast of Champions</i>, but claimed he was abandoning the project. Many reviewers and fans took <i>Breakfast of Champions</i>, published in 1973, as Vonnegut's declaration of retirement. While fans of Vonnegut know that he published seven more novels, and plenty of non-fiction, they also know that he never published another short story during his lifetime.<div>
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Except for "Merlin."</div>
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It was published in 1996, and appeared exclusively on the label of a specialty beer in Denver. (Making Chipotle's cups a couple decades late to the party.) This wouldn't be worth remarking on if it weren't for the fact that this was the only short story Vonnegut published for the last thirty-five years of his life. The best background on the beer (called Kurt's Mile High Malt) comes from sports columnist Woody Paige's<a href="http://www.denverpost.com/2007/04/12/my-muse-more-or-less/"> obituary of Vonnegut for the Denver Post.</a> The recipe is Vonnegut's grandfather's from before prohibition. And while it seems the beer <a href="https://untappd.com/b/wynkoop-brewing-co-kurt-s-mile-high-malt/338915">is being brewed again</a>, there's no indication that new bottles/cans include the story. <br /><br />As with the few other blog posts I've found about "Merlin," I'll end by requesting that anyone out there with the text of the story please send me a copy (or tell me where to find it).</div>
Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-52942195968074735352016-10-24T02:49:00.000-07:002017-01-11T09:21:14.449-08:00The Devil and Daniel Webster (From Page to Screen to Screen)<b>The Story:</b><br />
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</b> Stephen Vincent Benét, best known for <i>John Brown's Body</i>, had "The Devil and Daniel Webster" published in <i>The Saturday Evening Post </i>in 1936. The story is presented as an old New England folktale, about the time a down on his luck farmer, Jabez Stone, sold his soul to the devil for seven years good luck, only to regret his decision and ask Daniel Webster (the real life congressman and orator, often held to be one of, if not the, most eloquent and honest men to ever serve in the US government) to represent him and get him out of the contract. The devil agrees to a trial, stocks the jury with cutthroats and traitors from American history, and sets an unrepentant judge from the Salem witch trials to justice. Old Dan'l speaks all night and convinces the jury that a man's freedom is too valuable, and the sinners relent, giving Jabez Stone his life back. <br />
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The story's themes of perseverance through tough times, and the resilience of the American people (especially farmers), would strike a special chord with audiences in the middle of the great depression. It's a wonderful story and you can read it <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602901h.html">here on Gutenburg Australia</a>.<br />
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<b>The Films:</b></div>
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<b>Director: William Dieterle</b></div>
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<b>Runtime: 107 minutes</b></div>
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The first film adaptation was released in 1941, with a screenplay co-written by Benét. The plot is much the same as the story, with some additions, most notably a seductive demon (at least that's what we're led to assume) that supplants Jabez's wife. There's more time devoted to the plight of poor farmers, and the corrupting influence of wealth is hammered down a bit more, in a way that may seem trite today. There's a lot of folksy New England humor, like when Jabez's Ma points out that "hard luck - well, we made New England out of it. That and codfish."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jabez and Ma Stone</td></tr>
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While the entire cast ranges from adequate to great, the standout star of the film is Walter Huston (father of John Huston, Academy Award winner for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), who plays the Devil, or Scratch, as he's often called in New England.<br />
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Unfortunately, the scene I wanted to embed wasn't on Youtube, but if you have six minutes, watch Webster's speech to the damned.</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bXfU2AaJDEQ/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bXfU2AaJDEQ?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>
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<i>All That Money Can Buy </i>(which was titled as such to avoid confusion with <i>The Devil and Miss Jones</i>) was a flop at the box office, despite receiving an Academy Award for its score (which is great) and a best leading actor nomination for Huston. A restored version of the film was released in the 1990s, with the intended title, <i>The Devil and Daniel Webster</i>. While certain aspects have aged poorly, it's nonetheless a great film.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwhq1KsUJ6YN-lgAK9spoTnVE-X7QBtEguyPQR2Imuso2QURCh1CkqRlh7BKo4RSaMT9WE4w0wsi_vJwwD9g4i1-e8kTodXiL72MTDnbyQ9Svs7iV3mxwHUtgOXM3mGKfJDXSB41fyIV4/s1600/shortcuttohappiness.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwhq1KsUJ6YN-lgAK9spoTnVE-X7QBtEguyPQR2Imuso2QURCh1CkqRlh7BKo4RSaMT9WE4w0wsi_vJwwD9g4i1-e8kTodXiL72MTDnbyQ9Svs7iV3mxwHUtgOXM3mGKfJDXSB41fyIV4/s400/shortcuttohappiness.jpg" width="268" /></a></div>
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<b>Director: Alec Baldwin</b></div>
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<b>Runtime: 106 minutes</b></div>
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The fact that Alec Baldwin used a pseudonym for his directorial credit should be a sign of how this 2003 film turned out. Baldwin (who also produced the film) stars as Jabez Stone, a down-on-his-luck writer in Manhattan with a bit of talent but no success. After a fantastically bad day in which he loses his job, is humiliated by a publisher (whose name is Daniel Webster, played by Anthony Hopkins), finds out a friend of his has sudden remarkable success (making him jealous), is mugged, and later kills an elderly woman by throwing a typewriter out a window, Stone is approached by the Devil, who is played by Jennifer Love Hewitt. She offers to give him ten years of success (and unkills the old lady) in exchange for his soul. Jabez agrees. As opposed to the original story and the 1941 film, in which the deal is made official by a contract signed in blood, Stone and the devil seal the deal by, well, <i>sealing the deal</i>.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6sFssgDY1Dy-PSEV09ZM9BSsoeyZSuBAiHtTyOu3-5THCt7LxXydBMDb-RAqXSfybVUmZGBFsIQvjcDy6GRT8X8fpFkPPGKPY_l_Siq1EwAu3e2WAU9I6ZTTTeodtN0U9MXhR64H4K00/s1600/shortcutto+happiness.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6sFssgDY1Dy-PSEV09ZM9BSsoeyZSuBAiHtTyOu3-5THCt7LxXydBMDb-RAqXSfybVUmZGBFsIQvjcDy6GRT8X8fpFkPPGKPY_l_Siq1EwAu3e2WAU9I6ZTTTeodtN0U9MXhR64H4K00/s320/shortcutto+happiness.PNG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">fig. 1.1 Contract Law</td></tr>
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The first half hour or so of the movie works pretty well, but things quickly devolve from their. This may be the most over-edited movie I've ever seen. Nearly every other scene ends with either an iris in/out or with tonally inappropriate wipes, as well as an inexplicable frequent use of slow motion shots, which don't make things more dramatic, as the editor intended, but merely more baffling. <br />
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This film has a great supporting cast, including Anthony Hopkins, Dan Ackroyd, and Amy Poehler, although the latter two never get much chance to prove how funny they can be. Like in the original story, Jabez ends up regretting his deal, and enlists the help of Daniel Webster. The Webster in this case has no connection to the historical figure. He's just a publisher named Daniel Webster who happens to have considerable experience in suing the devil. The courtroom scene is a real mess, with Webster using at least a few different defenses, and no real emotional power like the 1941 version. Hewitt's devil isn't sure whether to be menacing, erotic, or inscrutable, making the performance none of the above (although this isn't Hewitt's fault. There's only so much she could have done with the script). One point that bugs me deals with the jury in this case. Stone has become a massively successful author, though one that's critically panned. The jury, rather than traitors and scoundrels, is composed of authors. Only four are named, though many are identifiable by appearance (e.g. Woolf and Joyce). The four named authors are Truman Capote, Jacqueline Susanne, Ernest Hemingway, and Mario Puzo. Susann and Puzo are best known for writing books that were massively successful but critically panned, so putting them on the jury doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. Anyway, Webster and Stone win the case, and time is reversed to before the deal is made.<br />
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<script src="//z-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/onejs?MarketPlace=US"></script>Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-83700793388350061252016-06-27T05:30:00.000-07:002017-01-11T09:22:42.523-08:00Men in Black II (2002) - David Cross #17<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9uG3vwNYoxvnA3zY_Nr-u8LZG62pxl9b1XQPEi8sZupFFWsMzpB4Jku4-D-pIUWIpqllC89LrUtb6ZUOrC7CAdnv4c6HWMiQgRF9mRVE_KB9mCZg-Gq7G8rDe6yTyB57KcXqktV1Imw0/s1600/miib.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9uG3vwNYoxvnA3zY_Nr-u8LZG62pxl9b1XQPEi8sZupFFWsMzpB4Jku4-D-pIUWIpqllC89LrUtb6ZUOrC7CAdnv4c6HWMiQgRF9mRVE_KB9mCZg-Gq7G8rDe6yTyB57KcXqktV1Imw0/s320/miib.jpg" width="220" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b>Director: Barry Sonnenfeld</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b>Runtime: 88 Minutes </b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><br />
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</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Everyone remembers the 1997 modern classic, <i><a href="http://www.kahnscorner.com/2016/02/men-in-black-1997-david-cross-5.html">Men in Black</a></i>. It ends with agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) asking agent J (Will Smith) to erase K's memory, so he can retire and lead a normal life. The first act of MIB 2 is mostly about undoing the ending of the first film. The movie opens with exposition via a public access quality conspiracy tv show, explaining that an evil Kylothian named Serleena (Lara Flynn Boyle) wants to steal the light of Zartha. It turns out the light is still on earth, and only K knows its location. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">There are a lot of problems with this movie, especially the over reliance on comedic relief characters. Remember Frank the pug from the first movie, and how funny that one scene with him was? One scene is really all that you can stand. Likewise the worms, and the two-headed Johnny Knoxville.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Insert your own "pair of boobs" joke here</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Also, the product placement is far from subtle.<br />
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</div><div>All that said, <i>Men in Black 2</i> isn't really <i>that</i> bad. I mean, it's pretty bad, but it's not as much of a trainwreck as I remember it being. I was worried that it would be unwatchable, but much of it is entertaining. It's a big decline in quality from the first film, but not a completely irredeemable one.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Rating: </b></span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 32px; line-height: 24px; text-align: center;">★</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 32px; line-height: 24px; text-align: center;">★</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 32px; line-height: 24px; text-align: center;">☆</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 32px; line-height: 24px; text-align: center;">☆</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 32px; line-height: 24px; text-align: center;">☆</span><br />
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<div style="text-align: left;"><b>The Cross Section:</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><br />
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</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">David Cross plays Newton, the conspiracy minded nerd who runs a video rental store and lives with his mom. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUZWHd3O4v3BzP1cqBbtBDgluKXjUNtCp19FGjVz9KYajJI0J5q3oMTj6OatwRjT5_SFem3E4lrHOP2rrdgtRSg90iGryKS5B14lKO5BmsG_f-ldlhc8IIdpE2v6Ca2WXOpEELu6xCo_4/s1600/cross+miib.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUZWHd3O4v3BzP1cqBbtBDgluKXjUNtCp19FGjVz9KYajJI0J5q3oMTj6OatwRjT5_SFem3E4lrHOP2rrdgtRSg90iGryKS5B14lKO5BmsG_f-ldlhc8IIdpE2v6Ca2WXOpEELu6xCo_4/s320/cross+miib.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This is actually one of the funniest scenes in the movie, which unfortunately does not appear by itself on youtube.</div></div><br />
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<script src="//z-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/onejs?MarketPlace=US"></script>Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764001039642101892.post-39701735565404486352016-06-25T10:52:00.000-07:002016-06-25T10:52:22.850-07:00There are plenty of reasons why such a large portion of all discussion on the internet is nothing more than vacuous bullshit, rote recitation of talking points, and "witty" insults. There's the fact that the people who feel the need to make every conversation about their pet interest tend to have the least nuanced understanding of that interest, and the least tact. There's the fact that, because anyone can (and feels compelled to) chime in, any specific issue turns into an us vs. them referendum on a major socio-political issue, even if that issue was only tangential to the original point. But those of us who are annoyed by this can't stop other people from spending more time complaining about something than actually learning about it. (I've watched people spend hours arguing about intellectual property law, with arguments that entirely depend upon not having even a surface understanding of the difference between copyright and trademark.) But there is a mindset we all too easily slip into, one that exacerbates the situation. Basically, we treat any internet discussion not as a discussion, but as debate club.<br />
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Why is this a problem? Well, how do you win a debate club debate? The entire purpose of the debate is to convince a third party that your side is right, even if you don't believe your own arguments. At best, it's organized sophistry. The goal is not to engage with the person you're debating, but to demonstrate to the spectators how wrong he is. I see too many people I know repost or share things whose message I agree with, but which contain utter bull, who mistake clever one-liners for serious rebuttals of complex opinions, who, in short, focus more on convincing people they are right than arguing in good faith. Not only is this exasperating, it's also counter-effective.<br />
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First we need to honestly appraise what our purpose is in any online argument. Is the goal to put forth clearly our point of view? To convince the person we're arguing with? To convince the spectators of the argument that we're right? And then we must ask "Is this the best way to do this?" The answer to the latter is usually "no."<br />
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One thing that we need to acknowledge is that every group sees itself as not only correct, but as being attacked by social and political forces. Whether or not this is true is beside the point, but whether we're talking about atheists or fundamentalists, pro-choice or pro-life, conspiracy theorists, laissez-faire capitalists or socialists, civil rights activists or hate groups, all see themselves as fighting against a larger tide. What I'm about to recommend should be understood to apply only to online interaction, and to have an exception for public figures. <br />
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There's a quote I like from Browne's <i>Religio Medici</i> that is relevant here: "[W]here wee desire to be informed, 'tis good to contest with men above ourselves; but to confirme and establish our opinions, 'tis best to argue with judgments below our own, that the frequent spoyles and victories over their reasons may settle in our selves an esteeme, and confirmed opinion of our own." It feels good to argue against people who are clearly half-wits. But does it do any good? Generally speaking, responses that are hostile or condescending or contemptuous are going to have the opposite of the effect that you want. If the point is to persuade people to your way of thinking, does tearing down people who have no interest in the truth accomplish anything?<br />
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I should clarify that last statement. When I say "no interest in the truth," I don't mean anyone who disagrees with you. Different positions on a lot of major issues boil down to a difference of priorities, or an honest disagreement over an ethical point. It's entirely possible, and common, for people to look at the same set of data, consider it honestly and with an open-mind, and come to different conclusions. People who have "no interest in the truth" are disingenuous and they make no attempt to even understand the position of those they disagree with. I'll give two common examples:<br />
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If humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes? Checkmate, Atheists.<br />
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If god knows everything that's going to happen, then there can't be free will. Checkmate, Christians.<br />
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Both of these are disingenuous, because spending five minutes looking for an answer would show that the other side has actually thought about this. (Says the atheist who quoted Thomas Browne a couple paragraphs ago.) All this is to get to the point that arguing with people who are disingenuous does more harm than good. It's not going to convince the person you're arguing with. If they actually cared about understanding opposing opinions, they wouldn't be disingenuous. But who watching this is going to be convinced? There's an adage I like, "Never argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience." People who agree with the idiot won't change their minds, because they've either heard what you have to say or don't care to find out. At best, you'll bat .500 with people who are on the fence. These, after all, are the people we're trying to convince, right? If you're hostile, or condescending, etc., you'll lose a lot of them right away, especially if you're on a site that primarily caters to the position you're against. This goes back to the sense of victimization that every group has, deserved or not. People on the fence, especially in fringe communities like conspiracy theorists or MRAs, tend to join these groups in large part for the sense of community. They feel like outcasts, and they may not agree with everything these communities claim, but anything that they regard as an attack will lead them to close ranks. Attacking makes people defensive, including people on the fence. <br />
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Those who are disingenuous, or delusional, will have a response for any claim you make, regardless of how well-phrased and well-researched it is. Research and clarity hold no sway, so you either have to disengage (e.g., they think they won because they got the last word) or allow yourself to be dragged down to their level, where they will beat you with experience. So what, then, is the proper response? Silence. The approach of making other groups look foolish, to bring them down with ridicule, only serves to push people away from the center, to increase an us vs. them mentality. Responding to a disingenuous and intentionally provocative comment, post, tweet, etc. doesn't help. Spending hundreds or thousands of words explaining why the second law of thermodynamics doesn't disprove evolution won't do anything, because the only people who believe that are the ones who don't have a desire to actually understand it, and further, it gives credence to the disingenuous person because it seems like there's actually an argument to be had.<br />
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If a person makes a facebook status and no one comments, if no one retweets or shares, if a reddit comment is downvoted with no responses, this is more damning than any amount of criticism and argument. What we must do, to improve the state of public discourse, is condemn dishonest argument, condemn disingenuousness, and refuse to be dragged down to the level of idiots. This includes people on our own side. While none of us want to be "that guy," there are people on Facebook that I can go to and say, "I agree with the sentiment of that infographic you shared, but the facts are wrong." Posting stuff like this, as funny and satisfying as it may be, only serves to misinform the people we agree with, and diminish our credibility with people who aren't on our side. The only people that this will convince are people who don't bother with fact checking or critical thought, and who will be drawn back to the other side by something equally dishonest. <br />
<br />Matt Kahnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036604086152459854noreply@blogger.com0