Descent Into Tastelessness
Contest: make up the worst title for a pornographic Broadway musical. My suggestion:

"Stop the Sex! I Want to Get Off!"

Anybody top that?

- posted by Scott @ 12:07 AM (0) comments

 
I, Robot
I just saw "I, Robot". I liked it. Looking around at some of the reviews on RottenTomatoes, most of the "positives" are leaning toward "fun, but nothing special...."

I disagree - Will Smith does some good stuff here. This is not just another "Fresh Prince of Blue Screen" flick. Yes, Sonny is stereotypical, yes, Bridget Moynihan is both stunning and wooden, yes, Chi McBride comes off as Principal of the Precinct.

Still...Smith and McBride work well together outside the precinct offices. Two scenes in particular - in a bar after a hard day, and in a tunnel after a bad break. Del Spooner represents the adage "Just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean they're not out to get you." Smith turns it around nicely: they ARE out to get Spooner, but that doesn't mean Del isn't paranoid. Something is beaten and broken inside him from the start of the film - he may want to give his chief a reason to back him, but he can't bring himself to work for it.
- posted by Scott @ 12:51 AM (1) comments

 
Can't Pull the Veil Over My Eyes
There is something I've never understood about John Rawls' Veil of Ignorance/Original Position idea. Here's my understanding of it (more here):

Our town decides to form a perfectly just government as follows: you hire a Vulcan who knows nothing about you. I hire one, too. So does everybody else in our town. We are each paying our Vulcans to get us the best deal possible, but they don't know anything "morally irrelevant" about our lives (rich/poor, male/female, old/young, etc.) - this is the Veil of Ignorance. The Vulcans aren't allowed to learn anything about us, except for some very general idea of what "justice" means to humans in our culture - this is the Original Position. From there, the Vulcans hash out a distribution of resources that they can all agree on, and send it back to us. If they can't agree, we all hire new Vulcans who know even less about us and try again, stripping them of "morally irrelevant" data until we get a unanimous solution back. We adopt the measure without further debate. Bam! Perfectly equitable society - everybody fights for their own advantage, without the confusing knowledge of who we actually are. So, e.g. Vulcan agents of parents don't argue that parents should control their children's resources out of simple selfishness - they don't know that they're working for parents, so the argument must be from pure conviction.

The idea seems to be that we only fail to reach a perfectly equitable society because of parochialism.

I can't say I agree with that, but it doesn't matter - that's not what I find confusing. The confusing bit is, what do we do tomorrow? And next year? And so on? Surely the equitable society is only a metastable State - wait a moment, and it will drift.

We can reject the metastable assertion, and say human beings will stay on the right course once put there. This idea seems unlikely - so unlikely that I'd bet the economists can kill it outright with a well-turned proof. But I could be wrong there.

We can keep going back to the Vulcans for more advice. The frequency with which we do so will be new, relevant information about the best distribution of resources, unless you want to claim that the stability of the solution is not a factor in its correctness. But the cost of asking the Vulcans has got to be pretty steep, and how useful is a society that's truly just for only a second?

The Vulcans can incorporate the future in their debate - but we don't know which or how many resources will be available, what the average lifespan or population is at any moment, or how long a future to account for. Quick question: which are there more of today, living humans, or dead humans (counting every Homo Sapiens that's ever existed)? Which will there be more of in 500 years? It depends on the population-doubling time and the average lifespan of people, both of which are changing. But how can those numbers be "morally relevant" to the treatment of individual people?

Perhaps the Vulcans give us a whole system of policy choices, to be implemented when certain conditions hold in the future. That exposes the redistribution process to politicized social measurements and endless debates on what the situation really calls for. Looks kinda like our current system.

So I don't understand how Rawls accounts for the ticking clock. Suggestions and more expertise welcome.....




- posted by Scott @ 12:23 AM (0) comments

 
Currently reading....
The "Fools Gold" trilogy, by Jude Fisher - never heard of him, apparently his other book credits are "Illustrated Guides" for the LOTR movies. Only the first two books are out - both are decent reads, with a creative plot and interesting characters that aren't buried under too many layers of stereotype.

Most high fantasy trilogies get the hero out into the wilderness as fast as possible, and march him into the maw of hell by the scenic route, hitting all the major map points on the way. Fisher keeps circulating his characters around the same small world. This works - the same issues arise between characters as they meet up in different places, or as they return to their families, only to strike off again, and return once more. Only a few characters are out of their natural element - but they've been thrust into human civilization, rather than Darkest Fantasyland, which only heightens the foreign nature of these characters. The rest of the cast is dealing with their known world, but the times, they are a-changin'....

Fisher's prose style is a little like the original Star Trek series' music, unfortunately - something important just happened? Time for a grim fanfare and a zoom-in on the captain:

....On its very apex, a detached rock stood out, balanced precariously on its seaward lip. He narrowed his eyes, and as he did so, the sun crested the mountains of the island's interior and cast their [sic] light across the cliffs so that he was suddenly able to make out - instead of a rock - a tiny figure, its red hair haloed by the sun.
    Katla!

Ignore the weird pluralization mistake - this kind of crap sneaks into every book now that we've outgrown full-time editors and have the keys to the spellchecker. The real sin is in that final microparagraph. There is only one redheaded character in this saga who goes rockclimbing. Her name is Katla, and she is the first character we meet in book one (Sorcery Rising). Nine hundred pages into the story, we don't need the reminder "Katla!" to tell us that her father (no dummy) has figured out who's on that cliff. Read it again, without the excess:

....On its very apex, a detached rock stood out, balanced precariously on its seaward lip. He narrowed his eyes, and as he did so, the sun crested the mountains of the island's interior and cast their light across the cliffs so that he was suddenly able to make out - instead of a rock - a tiny figure, its red hair haloed by the sun.

Which choice holds the tension better?
- posted by Scott @ 11:14 PM (0) comments