Revolutions

There will be no education revolution before there is an employment revolution.

Either/Or

I felt immeasurably happy the moment I found this passage in Kierkegaard's Either/Or. I remember reading this when I was younger (in high school); finding it again cheered me up and made me feel less alone in the world.

My Friend!

... I think of my early youth, when without clearly comprehending what it is to make a choice I listened with childish trust to the talk of my elders and the instant of choice was solemn and venerable, although in choosing I was only following the instructions of another person. I think of the many occasions in life less important but by no means indifferent to me, when it was a question of making a choice. For although there is only one situation in which either/or has absolute significance, namely, when truth, righteousness and holiness are lined up on one side, and lust and base propensities and obscure passions and perdition on the other; yet, it is always important to choose rightly, even as between things which one may innocently choose; it is important to test oneself, lest some day one might have to beat a painful retreat to the point from which one started, and might have reason to thank God if one had to reproach oneself for nothing worse than a waste of time...

And although my life now has to a certain degree its either/or behind it, yet I know well that it may still encounter many a situation where the either/or will have its full significance. I hope, however, that these words may find me in a worthy state of mind when they check me on my path, and I hope that I may be successful in choosing the right course; at all events, I shall endeavor to make the choice with real earnestness, and with that I venture, at least, to hope that I shall the sooner get out of the wrong path.

Two stand-ups

Stewart Lee on Skins



Russell Brand On Newsnight

Avatar: The Last Airbender (cont.)

me
You know what I think when a western martial arts related film and animation is set in a snow covered setting? I think, "Oh boy, there is going to be some allegory related to Tibet" - and this constant reference and inflation of some of the worst orientalism...

...I have to say, the fidelity to the martial arts movement sequences are incredible

V
Yeah, it's a good show, but your commentary on it is terrible.

me
Haha

V
There are references but they aren't dogwhistles, and they don't fit into any consistent or substantive or meaningful narrative.

Aang's son in the new series is named Tenzin and his monk tutor is named Gyatso, but this doesn't really mean anything, since the Fire Nation is so over-the-top Japanese. They are so aggressively Japanese: visually, culturally, symbolically, linguistically... I mean, the derive their power from the rising sun? They are ruled as a feudal empire? Their names are orthographically almost Japanese: Azula, Sozen, Ozai, Iro...

A 'Sozin's Comet' moment - a beautiful illusion

I was particularly struck by the scene in which Azula loses her mind, and in a state of paranoia cuts locks of her hair. "What a shame," Azula hears a woman's voice and and sees her mother's image in the mirror: "You always had such beautiful hair," the image laments...

"Even YOU fear me." Azula says coldly, resentfully.

"No; I love you Azula, I do," her mother's image responds, and clasps its hands together in benediction...

GoT on HBO

Not promising. There are two executions in the first 15 minutes of the show, there's no economies of scale in the violence, and it reeks of desperation to create this grim dark atmosphere for the show.

The screen writers for this show are terrible. For one, the physical direction is awful. Twice, the prologue Nightwatch characters have come across a suspicious circumstance in the woods and they draw their swords, but these are very short weapons and i would imagine they'd be useful only in very close combat. So why would you even bother, if you could see all around you?

Is having a sword drawn meaningful preparation? Or is this just a trope? Like the police office drawing his gun as he investigates the suspect's house?

Ugh, part of me want to skip the TV series and just reread to the books. But I'll be on watch for two scenes: 1) Ned's fevered dream about the Tower of Joy and 2) Maester Aemon's Reveal.

Avatar: The Last Airbender

V: The show's internal consistency, long story arcs, and inventiveness with its basic premise illustrate a lot of love and care on the part of its creators

They cared enough to pay this kind of attention to detail.

Still in the dark

The Springtime of Peoples

R: As all good things in the Middle East, Springtime started with a noble cause and ended up a tool of regional politicking. This is not a revolution anymore, its everyone settling scores.

The sun rises for everyone

""

Star Wars

V: The ‘Star Wars’ universe has just become pathetic. The original series of licenced fiction were bad, but the official materials in the past few years have just destroyed it. Well, the original films paint this picture of a gigantic, sprawling galaxy. Then the films and ancillary material make basically everyone important know everyone else. And then rigourously map out and explain as much as they can. Making the universe seem simple and trivial.

This is even without all the badness of the prequel films. The prequel films tried to normalise all these little interesting features of the original films. The original films hint at some allegorical parallels, but the prequel films just go over the top trying to cast each new species introduced with an existing ethnic group. So now all the flying things are Jews, the trade federation guys are all Chinese, the floppy eared guys are all Jamaicans. And it's this constant theme of racial essentialism. Humans are the only species which show any variation in accent, culture, or personality.

Then lots of weak fan service. The videogame lets you fight and beat Darth Vader. The television shows that Jabba the Hut is, like, Luke's brother-in-law, and Chewbacca bagged his groceries at the supermarket. Oh, and then lots of really stupid political content.

The ‘Battlestar Galactica’ prequel series ‘Caprica’ had this, too, which is what made it so incredibly boring. Very dull, simplistic political plots. It's like if you took the love triangle stories from any average soap opera and just replaced ‘X loves Y’ with ‘X is allied with Y‘. No consistency or realism, and just lots of names and dates to memorise, but no real thematic content.

This isn't even touching the bad acting and just general dumbness in plots. There's an episode of ‘Clone Wars’ where the main characters stumble across an enemy Jedi's base. And one of the supporting characters is, like, let's finish our main mission first. But, no, they decide to set a trap for the evil Jedi, but they do it so incompetently, the enemy Jedi side steps it trivially, and they have no real backup if he exploits the obvious flaw of their trap.

So he kills the supporting character and gets away. And at the end of the episode, the main characters are, like: "Man, war is so bad. We lost a good man today". Even though it was their own decisions and incompetence that precipitated everything that happened in the episode.

It's one of those shows where, like, the good guys will take a bad guy hostage without checking him for hidden weapons, and then the bad guy will conveniently escape at just the right moment to advance the plot.

One good example of how they take something that was interesting in the original movies and then beaten to death is Yodi's speech patterns. In the original movies, there is this conceit where he speaks in this sometimes reversed English. He is this oriental master of some sorts. But this is done very naturally as just a little ornamentation of the character. But in the movies and the series, they decided to make this a central feature. So now he always speaks in this exact same fashion, which just comes across as lame, clumsy, and annoying.

As you can see, it's such a stupid conceit, they can't actually give the character any good dialogue, because the addition of too many relative clauses would quickly make him incomprehensible. So it has this side-effect of disallowing the character from ever speaking more than the simplest of phrases.

Modern Slavery (in the Big Apple)

V: "The slave whips himself harder than the master, in hope of destroying the whip."

me: Sounds like some cheesy line from Ayn Rand

V: The opposite. It is mocking you for working hard to make money to not have to work.

me: No. Ayn Rand would mock you for not being a genius who righteously crack the whip on the huddled masses.

V: Well, she grew up under a brutal, insane regime - I can forgive her some madness.

me: It's the same incalculated personal exceptionalism experienced by the privileged

V: You're feisty today

me: I'm just being exceptional

V: It's surprising how little money means to me anymore.

me: According to Bloomberg, the average millionaire feel they need $7.5 Mln to feel secure. I am guessing you already have that amount of money.

V: No, but I have become numb to it since my days of poverty.

me: Numb in your palatial suite eh? In the city at the center of the world while making six digits? I can see how it all could feel like a dream.

V: Numb to the misery of middle class slavery

me: You sound like a proper ibanker, for a moment I thought you were going to row out the galley slave analogy and complain bitterly about how you have to work ten hours a day and then go home to your penthouse.

There is no better form of self-aggrandizement.

Power and Prerogative

9:39 PM

V: I wonder how this Net Neutrality thing will pan out.It is interesting, because I have difficulty conceiving of the telecom industry as being particularly astute in any fashion.

But it's quite amazing so far how much they seem to have accomplished. Well, let's ignore the actual merit of the arguments for a moment. Let's just look at who is on what side. Content providers all want net neutrality, because this is how can ensure their own survival. This means Google, Netflix, Hulu, Facebook...

Carriers wants net neutrality done away with, because this could lead to all sorts of market advantages in terms of optimising revenues or pushing their own content businesses.

I guess this could be a skewed portrayal, but it does really suggest a different type of management. It suggests on one side you have a bunch of much more agile and competitive companies trying to ensure a level playing field - that they do not have to compete in terms of basic access but in terms of services.

It gives this feeling that these carriers are just these lumbering giants who can only think in terms of their monopolies. I get this same impression from how some big media companies seem to operate. That they almost begrudge the need to create a product. That it is this burden for them to have to actually make something so that they can transfer money from your wallet to theirs, and if they could just find a way to charge you directly without this unnecessary intermediary of providing a good or service, they would happily do so.

I think that companies of this sort actually can be very successful and profitable, but that it's not sustainable. This kind of operation does not lend itself to astute or clever action, so these organisations have no ability to actually compete on merit.

This is a very interesting political battle, because it is really a fight between two large corporate groups. It isn't the public against corporations (since we already know that the public almost always loses in these cases.)

You too can be good if you have enough money from perpetrating evil

Google 2.4% Rate Shows How $60 Billion Is Lost to Tax Loopholes

I tend to treat organizations with purported good intentions with great skepticism, because it is easy to talk about those things when you have the money, money from tax evasion no less.

M01

me: Here is the operative anime formula: have a silly philosophical idea, inject some violence, add a boy meet girl situation and/or fan service. If that doesn't work then it means you haven't dialed it up far enough.

V: The counterpoint to anime structure is that regular western programmes are themselves so adolescent - western animated shows have no choice but be worse.

me: Really? Even for films like Toy Story?

V: Toy Story is good, but it is good children's entertainment. Calling something children's entertainment generally means it's bad, but that's only because this country doesn't care what it feeds its kids.

Houston, we hardly know ye

Trinidad

From Trinidad

Over the Gulf of Mexico

From Trinidad

From Trinidad

From Trinidad

From Trinidad

Port of Spain

From Trinidad

The two lane roads are narrower, yes, narrower. In my haste I forgot to take pictures of driving down Waterloo.

From Trinidad

Busy streets

From Trinidad

If one gets the impression that there are not enough pictures of the inhabitants then the fault is entirely one of the photographer

From Trinidad

The Red House

From Trinidad

The building where the Jamaat staged their coup in 1990

From Trinidad

Port of Spain by night

From Trinidad

The Lion House (Naipaul's ancestral house), Chaguanas

From Trinidad

lions

From Trinidad

Green mountains

From Trinidad

Green building

From Trinidad

Chaguaramas

His eyes always that of an outsider

V: I had a discussion with one of the traders last week about how he wanted to make sure his kids grew to respect hard work and the value of a dollar.

I think it's very easy to ignore one's own privileges. He talked about how he had to work from being a poor boy to where he was and so on and so forth, and he had a lot of pride in having accomplished what he has. But this does not seem quite correct. Because if he were urban minority poor, I think he could have worked just as hard but still ended up nowhere.

Similarly, I should thank my background for the advantages it has given me. If I were white, I'd probably belong to some unimpressive but competent professional class. A good amount of my analytical skills are a direct result of my background, I think.

me: Yes, the consequence of being an outsider

V: Actually, that is it exactly. If I were not an outsider, I wouldn't have such a strong desire to rebel intellectually, and I would be much less curious and much less analytical.

...

V: Being an outsider means that even if it's easy to make friends, it's still very easy to remain dis-integrated.

me: I'm not so certain I want to become fully integrated

V: Why not? It's lonely otherwise.

me: You can be integrated and lonely

V: Really?

me: Is that not a possibility?

Happy New Year!

Avatar

11:49 AM

V: ... the natives present this unified cultural force, right? We're supposed to support their choice to retain this primitive culture that is close to nature, because it's presumably the most environmentally intentioned.

But this seems flawed, because they are hunters and gatherers. They don't seem to farm, but they are still predators, despite whatever pseudo-religion they practice after their kills. (Unfortunately, it's never explored whether the killed creature really appreciates or cares being dispatched in such a natural spiritualist fashion.)

These hunting techniques the native aliens use could potentially be extremely ecologically damaging. In fact, I would suggest that, given their primitivism, they probably have a very poor understanding of preservation.

Though our own ideas may not apply to this world, which seems to be full of movie-style predators. Predators without behaviours realistic to earth animals. Like, completely omnivorous across all species. Like a grizzly bear eating snails.

Yeah, this is a pretty shite alien planet. Yeah, this is still neocolonialism. It fails to really understand nativist resistance.

12:49 PM

V: Wow, this movie is so bad. A decent sign of a bad movie is probably how many lines of dialogue are devoted to `woo!' `yeah!' `nooo!'

Also, I guess, in the end, it's the white man's burden to help the natives. And they are lost without him.

Man, I wish this movie had been made better. And it would have been pretty easy to do.