Sunday, October 15, 2017

The Problem with Anarchy

 The tenets of anarchism never made much sense to me.  Sure, governments are hard to trust, and we'd be better off doing away with some of them.  But without a government there is nothing to protect us against a foreign invasion.  We could all defend it ourselves, but there would be far less efficiency, intelligence, and technological prowess if our tax dollars weren't diverted to a strong defense system.  Also, laws would go out the window.  Only property owners would have them.  Effectively there would be no court system and every property owner would be able to punish "criminals" their own way.  This medieval system offers little to protect those that are falsely accused of crimes.  I wonder how an anarchist would feel if they found out one of their ancestors was tortured and killed by a landowner who'd falsely charged them with as simple a misdemeanor as trespassing.  What if they'd just been looking for a helping hand, say a place to sleep or a plate of food? 

Anarchy is not the answer.  Anarchists are naive enough to believe that reason will prevail in a society without rulers.  No, the Middle Ages happened for a reason.  There was general lawlessness, no school system, and entities like the Church had the most power simply because they had the most money.  They had the money, so they wrote the rules- kind of like us, but at least the poor have some recognition in congress.  Like it not, our education system prevents political philosophies like these from taking root.  It teaches us to respect the law and those who have earned their place in government.  In an anarchist society, schools would be run by those with the most money, and only the privileged would have enough of it to be educated.  Aside from that, schools run by institutions like corporations and churches would only serve to indoctrinate us into consumerist and devout lifestyles.  

Saturday, October 14, 2017

The Real Horror of Nightcrawler

The horror in a film like Nightcrawler doesn't come from all the violence and blood.  It doesn't come from the fact that someone would take pleasure in filming brutal crime scenes either.  It's that we as humans are attracted to these disturbing images so much that we, as a civilized society, collectively take pleasure in seeing the misfortunes of others; or that we need to know about the crimes of others in order to help us feel better about ourselves.  Seeing the mutilated bodies of others allows us to shake our heads in contempt at the rest of humanity. 

It's not just in video games that the cultural fascination with violence is evident; it's also in the market that seemingly upstanding adults, who would otherwise castigate violent games and movies as promoting it, pay tribute to it by boosting their ratings.  Watching the news these days is a lot like playing a violent game.  All the local crimes are broadcast on it, because if we aren't fascinated by artificial crime on the television we certainly are in real life.  Such hypocrisy in the adult world wouldn't be so alarming if the same people who shunned violent games and movies weren't the same ones watching violence on the news to feed their fascination. 

Jake Gyllenhaal was amazing this film- the best acting I've seen from him.  He did a tremendous job as a renegade cameraman stalking the streets for news clips at random crime scenes. 

 

Saturday, October 7, 2017

Space Jazz

Strike the drum, rattle and hum, 
The sound of music blasts through the medium, 
Across a dark distance, the light held a-strum 
Some chords fixed on time's continuum, 
Pulsing with a rhythm beating through each atom. 
A Bossa Nova supernova the band erupts, 
Gyrating planets on centrifugal cusps, 
The piano soft, the trumpets hard, 
Every instrument played by the bard, 
Building the stars out of nebulous shards. 
Atmospheric rhapsodies sedate the prelude, 
Settling the spheres in sonic infinitude, 
An etude subdued by comets crude, 
Orchestrating the mood on to the interlude. 
Time passes, the notes travel on, 
Filtering through the galactic marathon, 
Be-boppin' and hoppin' non-stop 'till the stars drop, 
Cropped out of some horns waxed in a shop; 
In tiptop shape they pop and they swap 
Melodies atop the backdrop of a mountaintop. 
At night we listen as the zodiac plays, 
Through a maze of rays, a crashing heard skyways, 
Jitterbug blues in lazy orbit, for the rest of our days.

Software

My body is the motherboard, With circuits that calculate The answer to every imbalance. My eyes are the monitor With rods and cones intercep...