Moving on

Not that I was great at keeping this blog updated, but I've made a new one. This is more for company purposes but there is also a blog I will help maintain.

Click here si tu veux.

Movie Review: Killing Them Softly

Simple, awesome poster.

I'm a fan of Brad Pitt, I'm a fan of the director, Andrew Dominik, whose first film, "Chopper," is some kind of wonder. His second, "The Assassination of Jesse James," also very, very good. This movie I found satisfying, if a little slight.

It follows the aftermath of a small-time robbery. A mob-run poker game gets knocked over, and Brad Pitt is sent to find and punish the guilty parties.

What I really like about the movie is that it's uncoventional in many ways. It's not a straight up, clean story filled with cliches and bad guys that line up to die. In the first place, every character feels real -- from the body-punching thugs, to Pitt, to the thieves.

And I like how it's shot. Sometimes long takes, sometimes, slo-mo, always beautiful. I like the unbroken take when Ray Liotta's character gets beat up throughout his house -- and it's actually Ray Liotta going throw the window.

I like the effect when one character gets high -- we get a sense of his drug-induced state. And it's a good scene because the other character in the scene is trying to get important information out of his partner, and he's in no condition to answer them.

Throughout the movie, there are references on TV by President Bush and Senator Obama on the state of the bad economy. Even the crooks are feeling it. Money for hits isn't what it used to be. Everyone is taking a cut.

It's a punchy, dark, smartly written movie that successfully avoids many conventions.

Savages

Caution: May include scientific research that doesn't sit with one's liberal ideas

Thanks to books like Jared Diamond's "The World Until Yesterday" and the upcoming "Noble Savages" by Napoleon Chagnon, the places on the Internet I frequent are debating what contemporary tribes tell us about primitive man and, indeed, human nature.

Groups like Survival International (SI) lambaste Diamond and like thinkers in suggesting that tribes are a window into the past, and writing that tribes, ancient and modern, are on the whole more violent than states or societies without a central government.

Their first claim against Diamond is that he says groups like SI deny unpleasant aspects of "traditional" societies. SI they don't, and even link to an article acknowledging infanticide among a traditional society.

But the link is worth reading because the person being interviewed admits there is infanticide, but claims it is rare, tries to explain it away, and labels our culture with the same practice, which is true -- some mothers (and fathers) kill their babies. The question is how often relative to population size, what is the punishment, and what are the motives? And although the link is posed as a Q&A, it is not said who is asking the questions. So they do acknowledge this ugly aspect of traditional societies, but in a way that basically says "Yeah, but..."

So in their link to explain unpleasantness in traditional societies, the article actually tries to explain it away, or minimize it, bolstering Diamond's argument that SI and like groups practice a kind of denial. If you want to know what they really think of tribes, look no further than their blog where they have pictures of happy shiny tribal folk with homilies like "I live in the Earth and the Earth in me." They don't directly say "noble savage," but that is the picture they paint.

They reject the decline in violence a central government brings by pointing out the atrocities of the past. Undoubtedly much of Western expansion was done in an ugly way -- through force, conquering, unintended (or intended) spreading of disease. But this does not discount the decline in violence in today's modern societies.

And nor is it a very persuasive argument to point to the Papua Conflict, decades in the making and execution, and point to this as a sign governments are bad as a rule. And, like most disputes, this one doesn't seem to be just a marching order execution of tribes, but rather a dispute over a resource (land). Do the operators of SI live in a state? If they are so opposed to government, have they left them and live in places without a central one?

SI says it cannot be proved traditional societies are more violent than non, but really what they are saying is "we reject the studies and data that shows they are."

They also say Diamond says traditional people are more violent than we are. This is only true insomuch that when I have a dispute to settle, I can call the cops. Traditional societies cannot. They have to settle their disputes among themselves, either through non-violent means or violent ones (and I guess more often resort to the latter). It is not that they are a more violent kind (how could they be? We are the same species) but that they have to, by virtue of their culture, resort to violence with a greater frequency. This makes sense. This seems to be backed up by people like Diamond that has actually spent time studying and researching these people.

The same could be said of gangs. Gangs are a kind of tribe. They operate outside of Leviathan (government). So they have to settle their own disputes, like ones around territory. The statistic is true that violence is more prevalent among people of color. This does not mean people of color are more violent. Every human being has the same capacity for violence, on the whole. It simply means they have to personally engage in it more frequently because they cannot turn to the police for help.

I accept Hobbes's thesis that without a strong, central government, life is nasty, short, and brutish. I believe the Enlightenment ushered in values that have made my life safer and better. No culture is perfect, but some certainly have objective benefits over another. There's a reason why so many of the ancient skeletons we dig up show signs of physical trauma -- they were constantly fighting over resources: food, land, and women.

I find it odd many feminists I know are critics of Diamond and view him as a new kind of colonialist. What do they think women's rights are in traditional societies?

Movie review: Deadfall

Between Deadfall and (the much better) Hanna, I bet Eric Bana is tired of movies set in snowy places.

I don't recall how I heard about this movie. As far as I can tell it did not play in theaters. I wanted to see it because it stars Eric Bana, an actor I admire. Then I learned it was directed by the same person that directed "The Counterfeiters," a great drama set in a concentration camp.

Although overall I thought it was middling, it did have some strong moments. I liked the fight scene between Bana and the old Native he finds on the road. I liked the other main character, the boxer, and his earnestness. I liked the attempt at giving each character an arch, even though I don't feel like it came together as a satisfying whole.

The least of the storylines is the female cop looked down on by her boss/father and the others in the department. Undoubtedly sexism exists in police work (as it does in any other work, but especially of those male-dominated), but every character is just a whole hog sexists. She can do no wrong, they can do no right. It just felt clumsy and easy to make her such a victim.

The next least is the other female character, Bana's sister, who is a crook with a heart of gold. Bad parenting, you see. I like that she develops feelings for the boxer character, and wishes to spare him the fury of her brother, but the scenes where she exorcises her demons just ring false. She unpacks her hearts with words and they don't feel sincere. We are less invested in her than other characters, by mere virtue of the way movies work. So to hear her backstory is inherently less interesting than that of our lead(s). Also, we get two sex scenes with her set to two pop songs. One would have sufficed.

The four main characters are given enough screen time that I would not say this is any one person's story. But if it's anyone's, it's the boxer's. One because we are rooting for him to move beyond the mistakes of the past. We fear this girl is going to lead him down another path. But he really isn't given much to do besides try to get home for Thanksgiving. So if he is our protagonist, we don't spend enough time with him, or have much shared hope with him, beyond a generic hope he doesn't go back to jail. And his whole fleeing what he thinks is a murder is a plot hole -- he didn't check the pulse of the guy he knocked out?

Bana isn't the hero -- we learn that early on when he shoots a cop. We are not rooting for his success. And the unseemly attraction for his sister feels a little bit like pop psychology. I don't buy it.  And although the script tries to humanize him, in the way he murders a spouse abuser, and how he promises not to hurt the boxer's family, it comes at an expense of credibility. Rather than the friendly chat he has with the boxer's mom, down the barrel of a gun, I think it's more believable he ties her to a chair and hides her away while he finishes his trek across the border.

Moar guns

It's not violent video games or violent movies. It's not novels, magazines, music or the evening news, for that matter. Or competitive sports.

It's men with bad ideas with access to weapons. We should limit their access to weapons. A hammer can be a weapon, yes, but it's also a handy tool, so it's dumb to compare a gun to a hammer. And no one can commit a mass murder with a hammer. Except the guy from "Oldboy."

Culture is not the problem. Men are the problem. We can't get rid of men. We can limit the means they have to kill innocent people.

Cars and Guns

What sane, educated person wants to own one of these?

I've seen people making the argument that cars kill more people than guns, and we don't ban cars.

It should be self-evident this is a poor argument, but in case it's not:

Cars have enabled us to improve our lives. Most of us use one every day, to run errands, get to work, and travel. We have expanded our cities, rather than being crammed into a small area (although this expansion has problems of its own). Our world is not longer limited to a few square miles.

There are more cars in use every day than guns. So of course the number of car-related fatalities will be higher.

When a car accident results in a person's death, it's an accident. Something has gone wrong, usually user error. A car is a poor weapon.

We accept the risks of driving knowing that the benefit of cars outweighs the unlikely chase we will be killed in an accident. We also have safety measures like seat belts and airbags.

Guns have not made our lives better in the same ways cars have. The only reason I can see wanting to own a gun is for recreation and hunting (and self-defense, but I am happy to leave that to a trained police force).

Those pastimes do not require magazines that can hold 15-30 rounds.

When a gun kills someone, it has served its intended function. Guns are made to kill and that is all they do. Cars are made to facilitate travel. To try to compare them is a poor argument.

Piracy

Piracy is stealing. Stealing is a crime. I can't think of any exeptions to that syllogism.

As a reader of video game news sites, I find a disturbing number of people happy to defend pirating copyrighted material. This is just a bit of what I would say to them if I could remember my log in and password to those sites:

To the people arguing piracy is nothing more than "trying before you buy," show me any statistic that piracy leads to a purchase.

The cost of not knowing what a game is like is not knowing what a game is like, not pirating it.

You wouldn't walk into a Best Buy, tuck a game under your shirt, and walk out. How is that any different than downloading a copy of a game or movie you did not purchase? Would you say to the arresting officer "I didn't want to blind-buy?"

And I've heard the excuse "They didn't lose my money because I wouldn't have played/watched it anyway." The price of not seeing something is not seeing something, not finding a way to see it and not pay for it.

And to the people who say it doesn't hurt the industry -- of course it does. A certain segment of the population is stealing instead of paying. That is lost revenue by any measure.

The Sweet Tears of Mitt Romney

"I'll say what you want me to say, dear electorate. Over mountains and waves and seas."

Mitt Romney, who hurls every epithet he can at Obama, including the ridiculous socialist label, has called Obama's statement that Mitt shipped jobs overseas as a "personal attack."

No, Mitt. A personal attack would be something like you belong to a fringe Christian sect that believes the way into heaven is passwords and handshakes, in addition to good, clean living.

A legitimate criticism is to say that when you claim you are king in the private sector, calling forth jobs like a divine creator, the facts do not appear to match that, you boot-strappin', out-sourcer.

Hey, I don't care what you do. Really. Cut costs, pay people pennies, and rake it in for yourself. That's fine. But don't be surprised when you are running for public office that somebody calls you on your greed and your feeble attempts to explain it away. "I was saving the Olympics," you say. So you had no idea what was going on at Bain Capital? When, if ever, did you become aware of outsourcing? Did you think it was OK when you did become aware? Or are you so bad at that job you leave the ship to other people and don't care what they do so long as you get your checks? Did you like the extra bucks it puts in your accounts? 

The Last Boy Scout

On my honor I will do my best. That much I can agree with.

If I ever need to know where to send my son to learn irrelevant "skills" like knot tying and basket weaving and learn to discriminate based on sexuality, I'm pleased to know the Boy Scouts is still carrying the torch.

I'm an Eagle Scout, although if I had my choice I would have dropped out after I was 12. It's an outdated, conservative organization that still believes you can measure a man's worth by his love of God, country and the out of doors. I love none of those things.

I did not choose to be heterosexual. I doubt anyone chooses to be homosexual. Even if they did, what is that to me? How will it affect me in the slightest? It's a silly belief to have, judging a person on their sexuality. It makes as much sense as judging them on race.

Shame

I'm wealthy and accomplished and get plenty of sex. Yet this movie thinks something's wrong with me.

"Shame" is about a successful guy, played by the ubiquitous Michael Fassbender, with a high libido. Internet porn, call girls, and even regular gals -- all within the same week. The status quo is interrupted when his lovable goofball sister needs a place to crash. She mucks up his lifestyle. She makes him feel guilt, shame I guess is the word I should use, since that's where the filmmaker wants me to go, about his sexuality.
He tries to have a "normal" relationship with a co-worker. He can't perform. He needs it fast and kinky. Involve the heart and he's not interested.
He's not a family man. He cares for his sister, sure, kind of, but would rather not talk to her if possible.
By the end of the movie, we're led to believe this is all awful stuff, his predilection for sex and his preference of solitude. His sister tries to kill herself. We're led to believe he's mostly to blame. If he were a better brother with a wife, she's be OK.
Nonsense. This is an NC-17 movie with PG themes. Who cares if all he wants to do in life is get his rocks off and be alone? That's perfectly fine! I envy him in a lot of ways, with my family and monogamy and modest life. Naturally, I prefer mine to his, I would definitely grow lonely, but if he doesn't -- why pass judgment?
And I hate how it's shot. It's pretty, all right, but who cares. Visuals should serve the story. In this movie, the visuals serve themselves.




Wo be unto they that play with their joysticks.

In the same vein, there's a new pop science book out called "The Decline of Guys." It's about how porn and video games are making men isolated, ineffectual, and unable to thrive in relationships.
The Walkman and iPod didn't kill us off, but by gum the PlayStation and YouPorn sure will.
This is nonsense. This wouldn't be worth addressing if not for the fact that most people believe it.
This premise is flawed from the outset. Culture does not works this way. Human beings are not blank slates on which behavior is written. Anecdotal stories about how men are perceived and conventional wisdom is not scientific fact. A world without porn would not make gentler, more thoughtful and romantic men.
So before Internet porn and video games, men were more romantic, better conversationalists, and all around superior to us 21st century lug heads? Of course not.
In cultures where these media are non-existent or suppressed, do men thrive and women swoon?
Why only these media? Why not books and TV and movies? Why not politics and live theater and music? Why not iPads and Twitter? Why not art galleries? Why don't they have the same alleged deleterious effect?
Porn and gaming are easy targets because so many men use them with considerable frequency. But some version of porn and gaming is as old as civilization and somehow humanity has forged ahead. The worst criticism one can level at games is that they are a waste of time. But so is so much else we find enjoyable. To suggest that they somehow are ruining men is to misunderstand how the mind works, how behavior is formed, and to ignore the reality that if porn and games were as pernicious as believed, this world would have gone to pot a few months after Pac-Man and Marilyn Chambers arrived on the scene.

Out of Work

Here's a secret. Sometimes I regret moving to California. Sometimes I think it was a mistake. Sometimes I feel like a fool on a fool's errand.

But here's something else. At least I have a job (at the moment). Had I stayed in Utah, and had I stayed at the Salt Lake Tribune, I would most certainly be out of a job now. If not with the folding of IN Utah This Week (or whatever they changed the name to), then certainly today with the cut.

Thinking on it, the number of people I was closest to at the Trib that still work there is getting smaller and smaller.

Waffle fries and Morality

What profiteth it a man if he should eat a fry and lose his soul?

I was telling my 4-year-old about waffle fries (she had asked what we were having for dinner) and told her the best place to get waffle fries was from Chik-Fil-A. I told her we'd go there the next time we're at a place that has one.

But then I remembered all the money they gave to block homosexuals the right to marry like us heterosexuals and thought, I can't give them money that they use to fund movements I abhor.

I explained this to my 4-year-old. Maybe we shouldn't visit a place that refused a certain segment of the population the possiblity to marry. "That's not fair," she said, "Everybody should be able to get married."

I agreed.

Clockwork Oranges

This is a review I posted on Amazon that I am also posting here regarding "Free Will" by Sam Harris.

I came into the book thinking I'd be further convinced that free will is an illusion but, after reading it, I'm more skeptical than I was before. Well, I learned a word for what I am -- compatibilist.

To me, the more lucid and resonating arguments from the book came from Daniel Dennett and others Harris quotes in opposition to his thesis that we're puppets on unseen strings. I agree that consciousness is not ultimately in charge, but my CEO brain still retains the power to "deliberate and choose and act," as I am doing with this review, or when I choose to say something sarcastic or not (and have done both), or whether to take advantage of the broken candy machine or not (and have done both). True, I don't inspire the urge to be sarcastic or steal a Snickers, but I have the ultimate say in whether I do it or not.

Or is Harris really saying men who cheat have no say in the matter? He never brings up this scenario, but I guess if he feels murderers can't help themselves, neither can adulterers. I disagree. Men may be, for biological reasons, more prone to cheat, but that does not mean those who cheat do so unavoidably.

Harris focuses somewhat on the extreme choice of murder, and seems to want to equate murderers with tumors in their brains to murderers who have unlucky genes, bad parents, and an unlucky environment. Well, we can see and remove the tumor in the former (though I still don't know what an apt form of justice would be to such a person), but what do we do to the person who kills for the fun of it? Could such a person be reformed? Could they develop enough willpower not to yield to the urge to kill? Isn't that a kind of free will, then?

If there's no free will, how does anyone ever effectively diet? How does Alcoholics Anonymous work? How can one have the atoms to abuse alcohol and then never touch it again? The conscious self never makes a decision in any of this?

Harris is right when he says we cannot go back in time to see how someone might have reacted differently, but we also can't see the situations where a store wasn't robbed, when a family wasn't murdered, when a home invader decided not to drop the bat on the patriarch's head. What in those situations? Is not beating someone with a bat still evidence of no free will? The genes just didn't have it in them at that time?

Or maybe Harris and I agree more than I think, and we're just defining free will differently, because he does says that choices matter.

And as a final criticism, the book did feel breezy, heavy on rhetoric, light on evidence and real world application. Harris brings up a couple of real world scenarios, but doesn't really develop or probe them in meaningful ways. The awful scenario he opens the book with never gets brought up again, for example. We're left to think Harris thinks what was done to that family was essentially unavoidable. The book feels like Harris spent a couple of weekends writing it.

A book that treads some of the same ground, but with more efficacy, depth, rigor, and power to persuade, is Incognito. I'd recommend that book over this one.

Incognito

I haven't published anything for a while because of a lack of things to say and because I got a Kindle and so I've been reading much more than I usually do. The increase in reading has brought two things to the fore: I've begun writing short stories (and a novel, but that seems so long) and I've been looking into neuroscience as a possible path since working as a paid fiction writer of any kind seems less and less likely to happen (but I keep plugging away).

The best books lately have been Incognito (I forget the subtitle ... and the author) and The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer. Both are excellent. The first is about all the unknown processes the brain does as it sits in total darkness in our heads. The best, and most difficult to accept chapters, revolve around free will, especially as it relates to crime.

Shermer's book continually drives home its thesis -- beliefs come first, then we seek out evidence to confirm those beliefs -- by applying it to everything from religion, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, politics, ghosts, and even science.

The New and Improved Prophet

Even as a believing Mormon, I thought it was silly the way certain figures have come to be represented over the years, from the Americanization of Jesus to the modernization of Joseph Smith. Compare:

Big nose, slightly bug-eyed, looking like the 19th century military and spiritual leader he saw himself as.

More prophet and less theocrat. Looks like a man burdened by God.

Hey, the all-American boy. Handsome, strong, clothes and features completely removed from reality. Those marketers sure can do their job.

Video Games and Values

The Supreme Court recently ruled a California law banning the selling of M-rated, violent video games to minors was unconstitutional. Justice Scalia, whom I dislike in just about every way, wrote the majority opinion.

The ruling is welcome, but the law was misguided in the first place. Almost no one thinks minors should be allowed to play violent video games. Stores already have practices in place to prevent their purchases. Even I, at 29, have to show my ID most of the time.

Also, the games, like movies and music, are "rated" so that parents know what kind of content is in them. And you know, if I had a 13-year-old boy, I would buy Call of Duty for him, or Fallout, or pretty much whatever game. Maybe not some of the really crass and vulgar ones, but those titles are fine for a teenager, if they're interested.

The reason people are worried about it is the idea that violent imagery begets violence in people. Video games must be worse because they're interactive. This is based on the false notion that we are blank slates with brains that are putty-like and adopt whatever they are exposed to. This is not so.

That's not to suggest environment can't shape us - it can and does. But generally not through mediums of entertainment, like books, movies, music, video games, and even pornography. A few people might be genetically disposed to be more affected by such things, but here's an easy test to the effect of violent games on youths: has crime risen or declined in the years since Grand Theft Auto? If violent video games were a instigator, wouldn't we see a dramatic rise in aggressiveness from the $18 billion dollar a year industry?

Instead, the effects of video games are minimal. They get blamed because they are a relatively new technology, just like people thought the Walkman was the end of conversation. The iPod, too. And how Twitter is allegedly going to make us dumb and only able to communicate in 140 characters and unable to have the attentions pans we're supposed to.

The medium is not the message. Behaviorism got it wrong. If you want to ban violent games, you would have to logically extend that to every other medium as well.

Mike Hammer

That's Mike, all right. Women can't keep away from him, and he can't care less.

By happenstance, I read the new Mike Hammer book, Kiss Her Goodbye, and saw perhaps his most famous movie version, Kiss Me Deadly, this week. It was my first Mike Hammer experience, though I'm familiar with the character. The author, Mickey Spillane, is dead but another author is finishing and publishing his manuscripts. I checked out the move because a new Criterion edition is due out this week.

I'm a fan of noir and tough-minded protagonists, but Mike Hammer is too dated. His sexism and machismo have thankfully gone out of favor, and so to hear the way he describes women in terms of their physique and himself in terms of his hardness made me cringe and chuckle, respectively. The story itself is pretty interesting, but much more detail is given to Hammer's day to day gumshoe-ing rather than delving deeper into the plot. It's skimmed over in favor of Hammer's vanity.

I wasn't impressed with the earlier film, either. I liked the beginning, but it didn't really hold my interest after the first half hour or so. I finished it, but didn't really care about the story.

The God Delusion

Would it have killed him to smile?

A recent Gallup poll found that 93% of Americans believe in God. That is astounding. Such a high percentage. On what other subject do so many Americans agree? The number of people who are certain there is a God is 73%. I guess those lucky folks don't have to live by faith anymore.

What astounds me, as someone who became an empiricist nel mezzo del cammin di sua vita, is the lack of evidence for a God and yet so many people believe in their god while denying the rest - Ra, Buddha, Allah, Moloch, Baal, Zeus - and the rest of the many hundreds (maybe thousands) of Gods that were once worshiped but have know fallen out of favor.

Believers will probably tell me to look at the simple fact we exist or a baby's face and the diversity around me and tell me to deny the evidence of God. And I will. There are natural explanations for those things, biological evolution chief among them. Then maybe someone would say that a god started and guided that process. I'm still doubtful, but open to the possibility. But that god is certainly different than the God I was raised to worship, the Heavenly Father who hears and answers prayers and intervenes (and sometimes chooses to not intervene) in the lives of his children.

I'm talking about real evidence. Something that points to a supernatural being instead of a natural answer that requires no such thing. First hand witnesses of God are no good, unless they happened to be caught on tape. I would bet a large number of that 93% that believes in God still thinks that a person who says he has seen God (and converses with him regularly) is a kook (and yet Joseph Smith and others get a pass).

Feelings are useless as evidence, by the way. How far would a lawyer get if he based his case on a feeling rather than evidence? I get the same sensation from a movie as what I used to think was the Holy Ghost.

There's that stupid saying, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Actually, it is evidence of absence. Until there's evidence, we have no reason to think anything is so. Who is agnostic on the existence of unicorns, dragons, elves, fairies and Santa Claus? There is no evidence for any of those things, and none of them have a large following (except children on the last one because of stories adults tell them).

Yet so few people are agnostic or outright disbelievers in God even though there's just as much a paucity of evidence and much more plausible explanations for things people like to chalk up to a divine being.

Fogeyism

Of course he dislikes TV. The man uses a typewriter. Older is not necessarily better, sir. Why not write longhand, then?

I've never read a David McCullough book and now I really don't care to. In an interview with Time, he was asked what he thought future generations might say or wonder about us, the same way we wonder about otherwise intelligent men who denied women the same rights as men, and owned slaves. McCullough's answer - "Why we watch so much TV."

What a lame answer to an interesting question. Is TV not worth watching when you are on it, Mr. McCullough? PBS? The evening news? A good comedy or drama? Do you never seek pleasure, Mr. McCullough? Do you think reading is inherently superior to watching? Are you a determinist who thinks that watching TV has some kind of lasting impact on our capacity to learn, socialize and behave?

There is a lot of TV that is not worth one's time, just as there are many books, hobbies, paintings, sports, pastimes, movies and whatever else that is arguably not worth one's time. Why Mr. McCullough singled out television, I do not know, but I do not think it was a worthwhile answer at all.

Bodies

It's late now, I've just returned from work, and the following thought just occurred to me as I was brushing my teeth. I mention the late hour as an excuse in case it doesn't make any sense - why would God, if this life is a "test" for us to choose him again, make us out of bodies that spend a third of the day sleeping, another few hours for eating, and are susceptible to all kinds of infection? The pat, useless answer on the last one is so that we can know the bitter from the sweet.

But wasn't there some other material he could have used? Something more durable? Something that didn't require rest or continual nutrition? Just seems like a lot of the day is spent on tasks where we accomplish nothing but survive, and that if the object of our creation is to find and serve the correct god, we're not exactly machines suited to the task.