So I've been taking a few recommendations for movies to watch recently. Most recently, I've watched Love Actually, You've Got Mail, and When Harry Met Sally. I don't tend to enjoy romantic movies usually. I often feel like the values are off (I'm not talking about sex, but about how people view life and treat each other.), or that it's taken for granted that you should be rooting for a couple or a person (convince me), or that one person is far, far too good for the other, that the situation is cliche, the writing is lazy, that they don't capture real people or scenarios, or some combination of the above. Is it that romantic movies as a genre are more prone to being intolerably dull and irritating? Maybe, or maybe it's just that, when writers and filmmakers get lazy, they go to romantic movies for girls and action movies for guys, because it will sell no matter how low the quality. That said, when romance makes its way into otherwise non romantic movies, it can be even more irritating (The Great Raid.). In fact, I think the reason that I got the majority of these recommendations was my statement that I don't like romantic movies. I won't get into a review of every romantic movie I have ever seen. I'll just summarize by saying that when I am supposed to be crying, I am laughing, and when I am crying, it's because I fear for the future of a world in which these movies are made and bought.
So I got some recommendations, and, in an exercize in procrastination, I watched them.
Love Actually.
It was ... ok. The premise was decent, a movie about love, rather than about a specific group of people, the different guises love can take, the different ways it can come about, and the different good and bad endings that stories can have, with the general thesis that love is everywhere, even with all the bad stuff that goes on in the world. It could have worked, and it could have made an amazing Christmas movie, but it didn't. They took a decent premise and applied lazy writing and ended up with a mediocre movie. None of the characters were developed enough to really be rooted for, and I'm not sure if there was even one three dimensional character in the whole movie. The situations, too, were lacking in originality, the man in love with his best friend's wife, the girl who's had a crush on a guy for years, the guy who finds his girlfriend is cheating (and goes on to fall in love with someone else), the man who wants to get closer to his son. Even when they hadn't been done before, they were merely reworkings of fairly basic ideas. Granted, there wasn't time in the movie to fully develop what, ten characters? Or to pursue five complex and interesting storylines, and that's why what was in the movie had to be amazing for it to work, and it just wasn't.
When Harry Met Sally.
When Harry Met Sally was better, I suppose it gets a "decent" rating. It wasn't special. It was a little pretentious. It was a little dull. The movie seemed more concerned with stylistic matters than ones of substance, which was a problem. Neither Harry nor Sally was a particularly complex person. They were both likeable enough, but neither one had been developed to the point of being really interesting or someone you could really relate to. I also got a little annoyed with her for getting so upset near the end. I know the movie needed a climax (badum chhhhh), but I thought that was a rather poorly chosen one, or rather that it was done rather poorly. Hate was a rather harsh term, and he needed to do something pretty bad to deserve it. They wanted to end the movie with her saying she hated him but that she actually loved him, and though his acting in that scene was excellent, I don't think the scene, itself, could have worked in any movie. She didn't have justifiable reason to say she hated him, but if she did, the fact that they were in love should not have been reason alone enough to forgive him, so either way, it doesn't work, though the writers seemed to be really attached to that ending.
You've Got Mail.
Excellent. Wait what? That's right, you heard me, excellent. In fact, I'd probably have to watch the movie again in order to list off everything good about the movie, and the bad? Essentially nothing. It's true that some of the emails back and forth at the beginning were a little forced, but that's extremely difficult writing, and for it to be just "a little forced" is actually excellent. From the dream break up scene to a perfect representation of a horrible night, the movie wasn't cliche, and it didn't draw on the standard movie tricks just to sort of get its point across. It was original the whole way through and the premise was amazing. And if you're still wondering about her having closed the shop, she became a children's book author, something she could be remembered for, rather than simply following her mother, her own individual destiny, so that actually worked out for her, too. The writing was tight and well crafted, the characters were human, and you could identify with both of them, you could see why they liked each other, and the problems they faced, and their getting over them were actually believable. I can't think of another romantic movie that I think of as highly as this one.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Monday, June 21, 2010
Unions ...
I've had a growing fascination with unions recently. How can something which seems so good be so bad? They are corrupt, government lobbyists, which act for their own needs instead of the needs of the people they are meant to represent. I'd really put unions up with corporations and government as one of the three dangerous entities of modern society, getting back to my centralization and decentralization argument from a while back, one of the three major power centers. In fact, I'll probably get back to that once I finish up with my thoughts on unions in general at this point.
Unions emerged as a strong force in the 1920s in response to a specific problem. Industrial workers, miners, and probably other segments of society, faced serious exploitation, and something had to come in to stop it. There were essentially two options available. One was for the government to come in and implement certain rules and regulations to prevent this exploitation. The other was for the unions to come in and provide protection to the workers through, for instance, organizing strikes.
My suspicion is that the problems arose when both were introduced.
Acting on their own, government laws and regulations would have made it illegal to treat workers in certain, unfair ways, going against the corporations directly.
Acting on their own, unions would also have gone directly against the corporations, striking and campaigning in individual cases of exploitation.
Acting together, what has happened is that unions lobby the government for the government to force certain concessions to be made to them, or indirectly to them through the workers. They have turned into an unproductive organization which works for a profit and uses the government to help ensure that it earns that profit.
An example of this is minimum wage laws. Unions collect a fee for each of their members, and, in some cases such as the teacher's union, there is also a fee for abstaining from joining the union. Now, back in, say, the 1920s, wages were exploitively low. The unions could, and did, come in and organize strikes to help people protect themselves from this exploitation, essentially forcing factories and other companies to raise their wages. Another way of going about it would be to have a minimum wage law without a specific union entity (the minimum wage was not introduced in America, incidentally, until the 1950s). As it stands, we have unions campaigning for higher and higher minimum wages, and this reduces the ability of people who are not members of unions to compete economically with union members by prohibiting them from asking less, as they do not pay money to the union. In addition, higher wages paid to the workers (largely in order to fund a largely unproductive, if not destructive, entity), causes prices to go up, which causes the cost of living to go up, which is then used as the rationale for an increase in the minimum wage, and it is a cycle. It is pretty clear at this point why the concept of a floating minimum wage should never become a reality.
Going back to the decentralization argument, acting on their own, each would have simply acted as a check to the corporate power center, but acting together, they formed a new power center which has gradually become closer to the government power center to create an even stronger one.
I suppose the question then becomes, "Which should be gotten rid of?." That's a hard one. I think the government should take the role at this point in time, I think. The problem I see is that the unions became government lobbying organizations before, and I suspect a standard set of minimum rules, laws, would probably do more to help workers than unions would. There are problems for businesses with these rules, even if it is possible that they might not be exploiting people when the rule affects them, but unions have also caused a tremendous amount of damage to small businesses and large corporations alike.
Unions emerged as a strong force in the 1920s in response to a specific problem. Industrial workers, miners, and probably other segments of society, faced serious exploitation, and something had to come in to stop it. There were essentially two options available. One was for the government to come in and implement certain rules and regulations to prevent this exploitation. The other was for the unions to come in and provide protection to the workers through, for instance, organizing strikes.
My suspicion is that the problems arose when both were introduced.
Acting on their own, government laws and regulations would have made it illegal to treat workers in certain, unfair ways, going against the corporations directly.
Acting on their own, unions would also have gone directly against the corporations, striking and campaigning in individual cases of exploitation.
Acting together, what has happened is that unions lobby the government for the government to force certain concessions to be made to them, or indirectly to them through the workers. They have turned into an unproductive organization which works for a profit and uses the government to help ensure that it earns that profit.
An example of this is minimum wage laws. Unions collect a fee for each of their members, and, in some cases such as the teacher's union, there is also a fee for abstaining from joining the union. Now, back in, say, the 1920s, wages were exploitively low. The unions could, and did, come in and organize strikes to help people protect themselves from this exploitation, essentially forcing factories and other companies to raise their wages. Another way of going about it would be to have a minimum wage law without a specific union entity (the minimum wage was not introduced in America, incidentally, until the 1950s). As it stands, we have unions campaigning for higher and higher minimum wages, and this reduces the ability of people who are not members of unions to compete economically with union members by prohibiting them from asking less, as they do not pay money to the union. In addition, higher wages paid to the workers (largely in order to fund a largely unproductive, if not destructive, entity), causes prices to go up, which causes the cost of living to go up, which is then used as the rationale for an increase in the minimum wage, and it is a cycle. It is pretty clear at this point why the concept of a floating minimum wage should never become a reality.
Going back to the decentralization argument, acting on their own, each would have simply acted as a check to the corporate power center, but acting together, they formed a new power center which has gradually become closer to the government power center to create an even stronger one.
I suppose the question then becomes, "Which should be gotten rid of?." That's a hard one. I think the government should take the role at this point in time, I think. The problem I see is that the unions became government lobbying organizations before, and I suspect a standard set of minimum rules, laws, would probably do more to help workers than unions would. There are problems for businesses with these rules, even if it is possible that they might not be exploiting people when the rule affects them, but unions have also caused a tremendous amount of damage to small businesses and large corporations alike.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Objective Truths ...
Woohoo, 100 posts! And to commemorate it, I've come up with a name for the blog. Maybe it'll change, but, you know, I quite like it right now. I also changed the bio. I think I know more where the blog is headed at the moment, even if it's going to get there very, very slowly.
So, the subject of subjective and objective truths has been on my mind recently, particularly with regard to ethics. It's come up in a few conversations I've been having, but I also think it is a fascinating and fundamentally important topic.
At first, the idea of subjective morality is an appealing one. Broad, black and white statements, such as "murder is wrong" don't seem to capture the complexity of the subject of ethics, and, furthermore, what makes, say, polygamy, wrong if the people participating think it is right?
A little deeper, though, and it is a problematic concept.
If Hume, Firth, and the popular notion of cultural relativism are correct, then it was, indeed, wrong to be homosexual in the 1800s. Female circumcision is acceptable, because it is in keeping with the norms of the culture in which it takes place. Furthermore, honor killings are the right thing to do, if you happen to be a member of a culture which condones them.
Furthermore, there is the question of whether one culture has the right to impose its ethics on another, as a matter of morality. I've often heard the incredible brutality with which the Japanese treated POWs in WWII defended with the statement that "it was their culture. They thought that death was preferable to the dishonor of surrender."
I've equally often heard America criticized for trying to export democracy, because some cultures just don't want it (more on this later ... ).
So, not only is it a theory with many challenging circumstances to account for, it's also one which contradicts itself.
I've decided that I think the single, concrete moral truth is that you never have the right to intentionally deprive other people of their rights, except to prevent them from doing so to you or others.
Obviously, this must be qualified, too. I think it should be clear that intentionally overcompensating in your defense of threatened rights counts as an initiation of taking away other people's rights, making you morally culpable. Rights means the right to live, and to do anything as long as you are not violating the above rule. Also, any acts to prevent rights removal, defensive actions, must be aimed solely at the person attempting to take away the rights, with the sole intention of stopping those actions.
It is around that truth that everything else must be built. For instance, I do believe that people have a responsibility to help people who can't take care of themselves, but they do not have the right to force other people to do so. Polygamy only becomes wrong if any of the parties isn't knowing or willing, and honor killings only become right if the person to be killed, her(in most cases)self states that she wants that (highly likely, isn't it?).
This also has implications for politics.
I've heard this argument before, many times, but today I was reading a book about Belarus, Belarusian culture, and Belarusian politics. The author defends the authoritarian system of government in Belarus, saying that it has a lot of benefits, and that it is widely accepted. Culturally, he argues that Belarusians would rather have economic prosperity than freedom. Well, most of them would, anyway. He also criticizes western attempts to democratize the country, saying that attempts to "enlighten" the people about the advantages of democracy are misguided.
And shouldn't people have the right to be under an authoritarian government if they want to?
The answer to that is yes, but ...
The people of the government do not have the right to take away the rights of any member of the population of the country, except for defense purposes.
Essentially that means that people have the right to want an authoritarian style of government, but that government does not have the moral right to exist (unless, of course, it exists without taking away the rights of any member of the population, except for defense purposes).
(It has a lot more implications than that, obviously, and I don't advocate the west intervening in Belarus, partially because, according to the rule, that would mean that western governments were forcing their citizens to participate in such endeavors, which is wrong.).
So, the subject of subjective and objective truths has been on my mind recently, particularly with regard to ethics. It's come up in a few conversations I've been having, but I also think it is a fascinating and fundamentally important topic.
At first, the idea of subjective morality is an appealing one. Broad, black and white statements, such as "murder is wrong" don't seem to capture the complexity of the subject of ethics, and, furthermore, what makes, say, polygamy, wrong if the people participating think it is right?
A little deeper, though, and it is a problematic concept.
If Hume, Firth, and the popular notion of cultural relativism are correct, then it was, indeed, wrong to be homosexual in the 1800s. Female circumcision is acceptable, because it is in keeping with the norms of the culture in which it takes place. Furthermore, honor killings are the right thing to do, if you happen to be a member of a culture which condones them.
Furthermore, there is the question of whether one culture has the right to impose its ethics on another, as a matter of morality. I've often heard the incredible brutality with which the Japanese treated POWs in WWII defended with the statement that "it was their culture. They thought that death was preferable to the dishonor of surrender."
I've equally often heard America criticized for trying to export democracy, because some cultures just don't want it (more on this later ... ).
So, not only is it a theory with many challenging circumstances to account for, it's also one which contradicts itself.
I've decided that I think the single, concrete moral truth is that you never have the right to intentionally deprive other people of their rights, except to prevent them from doing so to you or others.
Obviously, this must be qualified, too. I think it should be clear that intentionally overcompensating in your defense of threatened rights counts as an initiation of taking away other people's rights, making you morally culpable. Rights means the right to live, and to do anything as long as you are not violating the above rule. Also, any acts to prevent rights removal, defensive actions, must be aimed solely at the person attempting to take away the rights, with the sole intention of stopping those actions.
It is around that truth that everything else must be built. For instance, I do believe that people have a responsibility to help people who can't take care of themselves, but they do not have the right to force other people to do so. Polygamy only becomes wrong if any of the parties isn't knowing or willing, and honor killings only become right if the person to be killed, her(in most cases)self states that she wants that (highly likely, isn't it?).
This also has implications for politics.
I've heard this argument before, many times, but today I was reading a book about Belarus, Belarusian culture, and Belarusian politics. The author defends the authoritarian system of government in Belarus, saying that it has a lot of benefits, and that it is widely accepted. Culturally, he argues that Belarusians would rather have economic prosperity than freedom. Well, most of them would, anyway. He also criticizes western attempts to democratize the country, saying that attempts to "enlighten" the people about the advantages of democracy are misguided.
And shouldn't people have the right to be under an authoritarian government if they want to?
The answer to that is yes, but ...
The people of the government do not have the right to take away the rights of any member of the population of the country, except for defense purposes.
Essentially that means that people have the right to want an authoritarian style of government, but that government does not have the moral right to exist (unless, of course, it exists without taking away the rights of any member of the population, except for defense purposes).
(It has a lot more implications than that, obviously, and I don't advocate the west intervening in Belarus, partially because, according to the rule, that would mean that western governments were forcing their citizens to participate in such endeavors, which is wrong.).
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