Espressed Life

Does a can of soup equate to the end of human civilisation?

2014-07-13T17:56:00.001-07:00

Some ponderings for a cold and quiet Monday morning...

I am pondering whether we ever actually get to chose some of the most common aspects of our lives: especially the technological side of it. I ponder this because it has occurred to me recently that the car that I currently drive is the car that I have owned the longest. This is really quite weird.

This car “Trotsky” (because it’s an old red commo, where the powers and privileges of the driver match those of the driven in every way except those which are necessary to drive) was bought for $700 many years ago as a very short interim measure because we needed a six-seater car and couldn’t find a decent one. But it’s a daggy old bucket of bolts. It’s strange how we tend to form our identity, at least partially, on dumb things like the kind of car we drive. Does it matter if we drive a daggy car or not?

I was hearing this story the other day that some fairly prominent female thinkers were arguing about what point in history, what event, thing or factor did more for the liberation of women than any other. Mary Wollstonecraft’s fantastic treatise was suggested, as was the sweep of voting rights around the world, starting with South Australia in 1897 and the two World Wars which threw the female population into the workforce. The winner though, was the invention of the washing machine. It seems strange and practical to the point of being offensive, but the argument that the washing machine was the single biggest blow for the freedom of women is a very strong one. It allowed women time – which is really all they needed to do everything else relating to equality.

With the invention of the steam engine and development of a steam train system, some of the wealthy, ruling classes in Britain worried that the freedom to move would be the death of the class system that existed. If you allowed the working and poorer classes to move around, that would end life as they knew it. They would no longer be a slave to the local production, thus the bogan was born.

Similar concerns existed about the increase in the production of sugar. To an extent, they were probably directly right about these two things. But these two things pale in comparison to the one thing that wiped the ruling classes off the face of the earth, at their absolute high point of wealth, luxury and freedom. This was without a doubt World War One. It destroyed five empires and their ruling classes at the peak of their existence.

Coming into the twentieth century, the ruling classes of the five empires were at their most lucrative, powerful and discriminatory, none more so than in Britain. Sometime toward 1918, they were all broke and in debt without the productive means for recovering ... ever. One hundred years later, we are still in debt to the stupid choices they made. We have to pay for what has always been free.

But is this just the ability of human intelligence (or lack of it)? We have always been willing and eager to cut our own noses off in spite of our faces, even with the knowledge that doing this is pointless.

‘how did we get so advanced then?’ I hear you ask.

And that is a point. If we are stupid, how did we end up rising to the dominant species on the planet? Maybe we’re just the slaves of some groovy green men who visit us, or live amongst us. Some fairly strange things have come out lately about aliens: from the CIA kind of fessing up about Roswell, to the University of California saying that we have always had them amongst us (says so in the bible even) and to the discovery of a planet that could sustain us, less than 16 light years away.

But surely the old adage that the one proof that there is intelligent life forms out there somewhere is that they have never visited us? All joking aside, where are the little green men? The contemplation of the infinite in the universe must lead to the existence of planets lesser and greater than us.

Maybe?

There is an argument from science that states that there are aliens out there. There has to be. There are simply too many planets capable of sustaining life (as we know it) for there to not be one. There are hundreds of billions of planets in hundreds of billions of galaxies, any one of which would do. From a scientific point of view, the maths is beyond convincing. But the problem, the counter-consideration then, is where are they? Why are we not swamped with them? Why is the winner of Miss Universe always from Earth?

An answer may well be that they have all wiped each other out. If these groovy aliens want to come visit us, they have to be able to travel through space – Star Trek style. Well before any civilisation develops the technology to do this, I think it would be a fair assumption to say it must, necessarily, develop the technology to wipe itself out. I’m not talking about mass-killings, genocide or the like; I mean to annihilate its own species. The production of power, the ability to transport its own kind and the ability to economically exist at that level is way beyond the ability to wipe out one’s own kind.

That’s not really the issue though, the issue is – does this have to happen to a species when that species mechanises itself beyond a point? Does the mechanisation of labour necessarily sow the seeds of a species’ annihilation ?

Well, firstly we’d have to ask when did us good old homo sapiens develop the ability to wipe our own species out of existence and how?

I know what you’re thinking dear reader – the atomic bomb and its use. But I don’t think so. It has only ever been used once, and it was used by a power that had it against a power that didn’t. That may well have been our saviour there – atomic warfare was witnessed first on a country that could not return fire. If they could, we probably wouldn’t be here. The witnessing of this power has probably saved us since: and since then, no one really has had the chops to push that button.

There is also a fair argument to say that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had little to no effect on ending the war. The Americans had already destroyed most of Japan by firebombing it.

The Hiroshima bomb was dropped on 6^thof August, 1945, the war didn’t end on the sixth. On the ninth, Stalin ordered the Red Army to invade Japan. The very next day Japan unconditionally surrendered to the United States. I know – you’re saying what about Nagasaki? Well, maybe, but I think we developed our own power a long time before 1945. I think we had easily had it by 1914.

The question then becomes how? What exactly was it that gave us this power?

Transport. Not from sugar or steam or washing machines, but not devoid of them either.

In the first four weeks of the First World War in August 1914, about three quarters of a million people were killed. This figure is a military one, and may not accurately represent civilian deaths as well. Never had anywhere near that amount of people been killed in such a short amount of time. The Belgian forces worried that the piles of dead, German soldiers were creating a decent barrier to their guns and didn’t know whether to shoot through the dead or send out soldiers to try to clear the way. How messed up is that?

So was it the machine gun? While this was the specific device that allowed much of the killing, artillery and conditions did a lot too, but that’s to overlook the fact that armies had, for a few decades at least, the ability to launch many, many bullets at one time. While the machine gun did this more efficiently, it didn’t invent the concept. The supremacy of the British in a great part came from their ability to launch many bullets in a short time. Many accounts of the BEF in the Battles of the Frontier retold their skill with a rifle as far more effective than a machine gun. The statistics of the BEF being able to slaughter 160,000 German college boys at the Massacre of the Innocents of Ypres would support this idea.

The invention of the machine gun does nothing to put someone in front of it.

So guns don’t kill people, people kill people. The people who put the people in front of the guns killed them, not the people pulling the trigger. The reason three quarters of a million people died in a month in August, 1914, is that they were in front of a machine gun, or in range of an artillery shell etc. Never before in human history had this been able to be achieved. Never before was an army able to be so large and so mobile. Never were millions of men able to be alone and divorced from their homeland, occupying or defending on strange lands, while being kept alive.

Most battles prior to 1914 lasted a day or two. The massive defeat of Napoleon in the Battle of Waterloo was over in less than a day. All of a sudden, armies could be mobilised, and they stayed mobilised; they stayed engaged at each other for weeks and months of constant death. Later in the war, on the Western Front, even in ‘quieter’ parts of the conflict hundreds of deaths per day were expected and recorded.

How did this happen? What invention led to this new ability?

Well, probably the humble can of food. Canned food enabled armies to be fed while mobile. It didn’t matter where they were or how many chickens or fish or whatever was there. One soldier’s life became accountable in all circumstance. Humanity had been able to be treated as a standard number. No longer were there good soldiers and bad soldiers. They were now all soldiers.

Maths then replaces honour and skill.

So what happened ? The military had become mechanised. Killing became a mathematic equation. This equation was no longer about life, nor was it about money. An entire army was able to be killed without any thought for the human element or the monetary cost.

Devoid of a lack of a qualifiable element such as money or life, the military looks for some value scale to rate itself. This is where capitalism comes in to probably destroy the human race. This is also where we stop asking how much money it costs to have a military. This has become a silly question; the military then just becomes a necessary part of the modern state. We spend more money on it than anything else. We spend more of our life on this type of death than on anything else.

But we have to, lest we have a lesser military than our neighbours. This is the true destruction of the human race. We can no longer stand still, we have to move forward, and this costs every spare penny we have, and quite a few that we don’t have (let’s just take that away from poor people and families – they don’t need it).

And this is the true destruction that capitalism brings – the inability to be stable. Think about it from a military point of view. There has not been too many changes to the way military types kill each other prior to just over a century ago. If you had the ability to take people out of history and put them in battle, you could take Julius Ceasar’s army and put it into battle against an army that is about a thousand years further along in history (say Charlemagne) and he’d do alright. This is regardless of the fact that there are hundreds of years of human development between them.

However, if you take the worst army from the First World War, the Austrio-Hungarian Army and pitted them against an army from merely a century earlier, say Napoleon, it wouldn’t be a battle, it would be a massacre. It would be a blood bath and you wouldn’t expect too many casualties on the side of the Austrio-Hungarian Army. However, if you take that same Austrio-Hungarian Army from 1914 and put them into battle with an army from less than thirty years later - say the Nazis, and it would be the same result, but the other way around. It wouldn’t be a battle, it would be a massacre. The only difference between these armies is the technology. The people are no different, neither is much of the training. The military itself has become mechanised. The rate of advancement in technology is the new honour, the monetary cost is not regarded at all. We have to spend it, lest our neighbours have a gun with a bigger range or a plane that can fly faster.

This ‘development has crept into all aspects of our life. I can do more on the phone that came free with a contract today that I could even dream of doing with a multi-thousand dollar computer ten years ago. The music quality at times rival my Dad’s old solid state Rotel, and the pictures it takes rival that Nikon F90 the price tag of which made me feel ill a few times when we bought it about fifteen years ago. Yet the pictures I take on it are fairly crappy. I don’t give more than a cursive glance in the viewfinder before pressing the button. Most of the time I couldn’t be bothered finding the HD or whatever is the best version on youtube of the song which has been dancing in my head all day. And I am no better driver in my crappy old, $700 Commodore than I was in its predecessor, an unbelievably expensive and costly Jeep. So I guess I’ll continue to drive around in my daggy old car, named after a communist ...

But I know that capitalism doesn’t have just the seeds of its own destruction, it contains the seeds of ours.

On DaVinci Planes, really big crows and why the guy at 000 is a douche bag.

2014-04-25T23:57:00.001-07:00

You know that the words we speak are the only thing that keep our feet on the ground. The whole thing about gravity is wrong don't you ? The man just tells you that so you keep talking. Apparently scientists have worked out that it takes about four weeks for the weight of our words to work their way through to our feet and then out our toes. We float off into the groove and then beyond the great beyond.

No but seriously. ...

Have you ever thought about what four weeks is? What can we achieve in four weeks that can permanently change us forever? We could learn a language, perhaps start a really decent garden, lose a tone of weight and get in shape. What if we only had four weeks to live? Could we achieve ten years worth of goals in those four weeks? I believe so at one stage. I still do, but only because i have never had four weeks.

The closest I ever came was three and a bit. Then I did fly. I flew over Bribe Island in a sort of daze and all the way as far as the hospital at Caboolture.

This was about six years ago. I had just left a life in Brisbane. Packed up a life and one of those swishy houses and hit the road, hippie style. We got rid of all the expensive crap that life in the city demands we have, the shiney stuff and the stuff that makes noise.

We meant to travel around the country in a campervan, but at the time, half of Queensland was underwater and half of Victoria was on fire. Maybe not such a good idea.

We ended up living on Bribie Island. Looking back now, we really did do the hippie thing way too much. While we still shirk extravagance or money stuff, we were floating too far out in to the cosmos. I am really glad we did though, not that we gained anything from it overly, just as living in the city and then the suburbs teaches some of us that we don’t want to live in the city and the suburbs.

One of the many things that Bribie has going for it is it was the beginning of the Brisbane Line. Part of the job I had left behind involved teaching about Australian political history. One of the essays for this course asked for an answer to when and how Australia became legally independent from Great Britain.

There are basically five answers to this question That Australia was never really tied to Great Britain in the way many think it was; that this happened in 1901 due to section 128 of the Constitution providing for any changes to be made by a referenda of the Australian People, so theoretically, we could have had a referenda on 2 January, 1901 to get rid of the ties to England; thirdly, it happened on the battlefields of both World Wars; fourthly it happened in 1986 and finally, it hasn’t happened yet.

I always meant to write up a book on this subject as I don’t think that it has been ever clearly reviewed by the academy in an all-encompassing way. I will write this book someday, maybe tomorrow. Nah, I’d doubt it.

Anyway, it is one of those areas where legal scholars don’t really take into account what straight political historians say or what sociologists and other parts of the academy says, and visa versa. My whole idea came about as a result of, and in response to AT Ross’s wonderful book, “Armed and Ready – The Industrial Defence of Australia 1900-1945. It’s a very interesting read if your a dork like me due to it painting a very different picture of Australia’s reliance on Great Britain and general niaiveie that main stream history, and certainly political and legal history recall.

The part that I wanted to check out was the Brisbane Line, which starts on Bribie Island. A few kilometres north of the main settlement on the eastern side is a gunner’s nest, then about ten kilometres further up the beach are other things, including an underground hospital that has been (and still is) lost to the world probably by the changing sand bank. I had previously elected myself a military historian of great knowledge yet had never had a lesson.

I set out to see if I could find this lost hospital, ignoring the fact that many people who actually did have some skills in finding such things had been trying for a long time. I think I figured that I’d just fluke it. But mainly what I wanted to do was to look at these gunner’s nests and see if I could figure out whether they were a rouse, that would have been only designed to get the invading Japanese forces to land, or whether they were what the army at the time would have put all the effort into.

I initially thought it was the former with all of them due to where they were and what they looked like –they stood up tall and were very visible, but since talking to a few people about how the sand dunes of the island have changed drastically over the years, I am not sure there is an answer here.

I set out on a push bike and was able to ride about eighteen miles up the beach. I put my bike in the dunes right on the eighteen mile marker as I kept falling off it. Due to the four-wheel drives that cut through and up the beach, the tracks they leave behind create a gutter that will throw you off your bike. I set off further up the coast on foot. By this stage it was mid morning.

It was mid November and the sun was hot that day my friends. I reached the top of the island, pondered my pondering and the like and turned back towards home. I only had a litre and a half of water on me, but I knew that there was another three litres on the back of my bike, which was at the eighteen mile marker.

Then it got really hot. I started to get very worried. I had run out of water and was starting to feel the dizziness that that sort of heat brings. I had a phone on me, but it wasn’t able to reach my wife. I knew that the signal for 000 would be considerably stronger once I called it, but was I really in that sort of situation?

I thought not.

I kept walking. The tide was coming in and pushed me onto the soft sand, which greatly slowed my pace. Still it got hotter. I didn’t think it could. I set my phone alarm for twenty minutes and kept walking. I figured someone would drive by sooner or later. Then someone did. A pudgy bloke in a dual cab hilux ute. I waived. He pretended to not see me.

My twenty minute alarm went off. I thought about what to do. I reset it for another twenty minutes and figured that I’d reassess my situation in twenty minutes. I did this another two times.

By this time I was really worried. But it wasn’t life threatening yet and I knew that I had another three litres of water and some shelter and other stuff at my bike, which was tied to the eighteen mile marker. I had passed the nineteen mile marker almost half and hour ago. It was slow going on the soft sand, but I kept going, figuring that it would be just over the next dune.

I kept in mind that my phone probably would be able to call 000, but was it a life threatening situation yet? I did have water just up ahead ...didn’t I.

I kept walking and then it occurred to me that I was starting to run. I was starting to run because I was being chased by one of those DaVinci planes and this really, really big crow. He must have been about the size of a four storey apartment block.

Now my situation was life threatening I thought. I called 000. Funnily enough, even though I was still thinking quite clearly (except for the DaVinci plane and the really, really big crow) when the bloke answered the phone to ask whether I needed police, ambulance or fire, I couldn’t seem to speak. My mouth was very dry, which made speaking hard, but mainly, I couldn’t seem to control my mouth. The noises I was making were more like drunken grunts than anything.

The person on the other end of the phone became very cross. “This is a emergency line, you’re wasting our time.” he said and threatened to hang up on me and inform the police.
I still couldn’t really say anything. Then I realised my problem was I was trying to explain my situation, rather than just stating the word “ambulance”.

I stated “Ambulance

He stroppily put me through.

Thankfully the guy at the ambulance place knew how to speak to people, told me to check that my phone was charged, which it was mostly, then told me to take three deep breaths and then start again. We got to the end of it. Not too long later I got back to my bike, sipped water on the advice of the ambulance guy, and waited there for help.

I didn’t really ask what help was. I realised that I couldn’t move my legs. I hadn’t even noticed that I’d sat down. There were more cars going down the beach now. Even though I was lying in the middle of nowhere on the beach, they pretended not to see me. I must have

Still more cars came by. None of them stopped. I felt lost, abandoned, I didn’t know where I was but was greatly angry with these unfeeling people for not stopping and for wrecking the beach with their cars and inappropriate tyres.

Now they’re landing a fucking helicopter on the beach. I was really getting cranky. I mean, walking, sure; cars, maybe if need be, but a helicopter? And to make things seem more silly, they were dressed up in ambulance overalls.

Why Defamation should be a Crime, not a Tort

2014-04-25T21:06:00.004-07:00

A few years ago, when I was in my early twenties, we traveled around for half a year and then moved back to the sleepy little town we’d lived in for four or five years previously for me to do my PhD.

Then the strangest thing happened. We had phenomenal trouble getting work. For months, we looked and applied for anything that was open, regardless of what it was. It took forever, but we found work only after someone had told us that a previous employer (who we had listed as a reference) was saying nasty things about us behind our backs. This was very strange for us. We had left employment with him on amicable terms and because we were leaving town to travel for a while. We didn’t know of any ill will between us. I approached him about it. He was friendly to me, denied the whole thing and seemed too genuinely shocked considering he was a bit of an apathetic slob to be believed.

It took forever for us to be told about this. This is a huge problem with something like defamation: the subject of it is usually about the last to know and by then, there is nothing much that can be done to repair or account for any harm.

Once we knew of it, we got my father to ring this bloke (sans information about exactly who Dad was) for a reference to confirm that there was foul things afoot there. I remember Dad got off the phone and was visibly livid from the conversation and he was not a man who ever really let emotion show at all. He refused to tell me exactly what was said. He simply said that I didn’t want to know (which made me want to know more).

Thankfully a friend of ours was a senior partner in one of the local law firms and agreed to smack this guy around the chops a bit. He got his office manager to ring for a reference for us, with no disguise on who she was but allowing an inference to be made as to why she was calling. She then wrote up what was said and was prepared to witness it. The content was ridiculous.

According to this guy, we were “known to the police” who ran us out of town and would not let us come back to our hometown to live (even though we actually did live in the town and hadn’t ever had any involvement with the police or anything like that at all.

At the time, I remember being absolutely furious about this. The injustice, the cowardice and the deceit of it made me want to do everything from smash this guy’s face in to burn down his shop to start rumours of my own. And you know me dear reader – I am not a violent or vicious person.

Time passed on a bit, we got on with things and my friend arranged for a barrister who specialised in defamation to meet with us to discuss the case as he was in town on another case.

The barrister was a nice and talkative old bloke. I remember he was wearing silk (literally) with the most hideously bright suspenders and socks. But then, it was the late 90s and we were still being blackmailed by fashion of the 80s. The barrister agreed that we had a good case. There was clear loss to us. There was no problem in proving it false. There were no evidentiary issues and there was little that could be taken from us if we lost. He agreed to take on the case. But he gave us some good advice – don’t – just walk away.

He said that any lawyer that advised to take a defamation action to court is an idiot and should be shot. The reason for this was clear. Defamation, no matter how costly or large, is essentially statements that exist in a community with the relevance of gossip or innuendo. If that rumour and innuendo is ignored, it goes away, if it goes into a courtroom, in the eyes of the public it comes out as gospel. It doesn’t matter what happens. It doesn’t matter who wins, the court process, by the very fact that it allows the defendant to ignore everything, validates the rumour (which by that stage have usually grown considerably more saucy and specific than the instigators of the rumours started). He said we could get some money, but it would take years and after that, we probably would be run out of town quite literally. I am not sure if he was a fan of Schopenhauer (to be honest, I don’t really know what a Schopenhauer fan looks like) but I guess what he was saying was if a truth is violently opposed, it will become self-evident. If it is ignored, it will lose its reference point and become obsolete. The moon is after all, made from blue cheese.

At the time I thought he was wrong and I was upset about it. But I trusted my friend and he trusted this old bloke, so I took his advice and thanked him for it. Don’t get me wrong – we had our retort against our former employer – he got his ... and then some. We just didn’t need a lawyer to do it (mind you, we would have needed a lawyer if we were caught, but we weren’t).

Funnily, I have just been through the process from the other side. I have been a part time writer now for a while and the responses received from some people are to be avoided if possible – they seem quite obscure: they are like exceptionally drunk friends – they only ever tell you one of two things – how much they love you or how much they hate you. You have people convinced that they were the inspiration behind character x or y and that is either endearing or insulting to them. You have people saying that a particular story was based on a mutually shared experience that you have no recollection of. ]

But defamation is different, in defamation, your words cease to be your words. They are taken out of context and owned by people who are not able to understand their meaning. That’s very frustrating. Being abused by some twit who thinks he is a thousand times smarter than me because he apparently read Descartes in the original French [sic] when his daddy was stationed in Belgium is annoying, but easy to ignore. He is not really criticising me, he is not really even criticising my work, he’s just a dick. He’s not right. He’s not even partially right enough to be considered wrong.

But defamation is speaking to someone who thinks that they own those words, because they think it is about them. You try to understand why he thinks it’s about him, but it’s just a waste of time, the answer is “obvious” yet not forthcoming. What was said was amplified, changed and exaggerated but it was still gossip and innuendo. Until he took it to court.

When this type of matter goes to court, the victim is no longer the victim: they are on the front foot, they are the aggressors, they appear as if they have something to hide. They are the agitators. Nothing will ever really come out of it. It doesn’t matter what happens, but if the slandered party can’t come out of it and tell everyone that the judge considered it the worst case she had ever witnessed and ordered the guilty party to go to gaol for ten years followed by exile to New Zealand, then the slandered party will be labelled as not only as whatever it was the rumour ended up after it had done the rounds, but there is a great potential that there will be implications that the slandered party is also a whinger/ dobber.

But think about it this way – what if defamation were no longer a tort? What if it were solely a criminal offence? It basically is a form of assault, so it does fit in there somewhere. If it were a criminal offence, the victim would stay the victim. The involvement of the police in investigating it would be enough for the victim to justify to people that there was some seriousness in it. The gossip would then be mostly dismissed, if not entirely. The police would give it the integrity that slip-and-trip lawyers lack and the accused would not be bound to respond. S/he could stay silent, as s/he should be allowed to do. In the tort of defamation, every claim has to be pleaded and responded to. If it were a crime, it would simply be a case of “not guilty your honour” and then watch the prosecution try to bumble through a committal.

If found not guilty, the victim can claim that there was just not enough evidence or just bad luck, but be stoic about the way it all happened and the accused can just say, “well, I told you so.” If the accused is found guilty, the victim is vindicated and the accused can be badly done by and suffer some harm at the hand of the state. The punishment would not need to be much as it would be real, as opposed to the very hypothetical punishment that appears in most tort cases where there is no actual outcome.

That would suit everything a lot better.

Damn the Man, Save the Empire - A Tragedy of the Commons.

2014-04-25T15:38:00.002-07:00

It has been said of journalists, but I think it more apt to say of lawyers that – the problem with lawyers is that they don’t read, can’t write and are unable to tell the difference between a bicycle crash and the end of civilization.

I ponder this thought as I am having to put up with being unsuccessfully sued by a creepy looking chick and a guy that looks like he could be his own grandfather. I write as I am waiting in court, listening to two barristers with pasty skin, looking exceptionally cheap in expensive suits, argue one way and the other for whether a bloke could get his driver’s licence. The person in question isn’t actually in court today, as is too often the case, but listening to various arguments he is described in simple facts.

He is in his early thirties, had lost his licence eight years ago after a string of driving offences and other crimes. Both barristers and the judge muse that these were “obviously” concerned with his involvement with drugs that was the cause, and all else was the effect.

Does it strike you, dear reader, that when someone says “such and such is obviously...” what they really mean is “please don’t ask me to explain what I mean, cause I don’t understand it”?

But anyway, I digress. At the time that he lost his licence, the judge ordered that he never be able to get it back again. This decision was made because of his history, including the then latest event, which involved speeding away from police in a stolen car and colliding into another car causing serious injury to the lady driver. She had to spend seven days in hospital due to her injuries.

In this situation, you immediately feel for the other driver don’t you? You put yourself in her shoes, in her car. She was probably on her way back from the chemist caring for a sick, orphaned child while knitting socks for lost puppies. When simple facts are presented, they result in simple truths, and the truth is never simple, only misunderstandings are. For all I know, she could have been a crack smoking kiddie fiddler on her way home from murdering a string quartet.

But she is the victim, so she is nice.

The guy lost his licence as a result, apparently the law has the ability to permanently deny someone their driver’s license, but the law also provides for this permanent decision to be cancelled, thus making it kind of stupid to use words like permanent. But the law deals in absolutes and simple truths, which is why it uses these words and may be half the reason it is quite useless.

In the eight years since losing his licence, our boy has been in and out of gaol and still might have a thing with drugs (apparently we can presume that fact because his affidavit doesn’t specifically say otherwise). In recent times, he may be turning things around: he is a bit older and wiser and has found employment that may lead to a plumbing apprentice providing he can get his driver’s license (thus the whole process began). His boss has also told the court that if he can’t get his license, there is little chance that he will be able to continue with his current work.

Now we all feel for him don’t we? We think about the stupid and reckless things that we did when we were kids and think “well, that could have been me”. Surely he (I) deserve a second chance.

This story takes a little over an hour for the court to deal with, mainly because there is so much speak of tiny little legal facts: standards of proof, standing of the people in the court, the actual name of the case - apparently the police don’t know their own name and filled in the initial form wrong which takes another five minutes to deal with.

The judge then, in a very long winded judgement, allows the bloke to get his licence back while making me cringe because he used the term “for all intensive purposes” (which we’ve discussed before haven’t we?). We always knew he would give the bloke his licence back, but just had to figure out the reasoning – the rules. We knew because to say no would be unreasonable.

“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

Now, the thought occurs to me that the guy was always going to get back his licence, the decision was made on grounds that in no way resemble what the rules are. We like to pretend that we are above our base instincts, and the more removed from how we live, the more this is true.

However research such as the Kill Whitey Project and the various Trolley dilemmas prove that our decision making faculties have little if anything to do with our reason. We are just monkeys with car keys. The less we have to provide for our own lives, the more we forget this and sitting here in the Supreme Court building, I am surrounded by people who are so greatly removed from having to look after their own lives.

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.”

Things that allow us not to look after our own lives also seem to convince us that we are more developed. People who choose to cook their own food are seen as less evolved than people who pay for others to do it. The same can be said for most facets of life: growing or catching food, cleaning, gardening, building...

The best one we have come up with is rules. A series of rules allow us to think that we are making reasoned choices about things. We can give this guy his licence back because the rules allow us to. We are not deciding his fate, we are simply observing the rules. If the rules apply to everyone, then they are apparently fair. Their true genius lies, as John Stuart Mill pointed out, in the fact that if there is a complete system of rules that could cover the events of life, they could never possibly be known by anyone. The list would be too long and contrary.

That same contrary point can be seen in the current case: is it fair or just that the guy gets his licence back? That is really what is being asked here. It’s not a question of law, it is a question of opinion. Does his want to keep his job outweigh the want of safety on the roads or vengence of the prior events' victims? In our hearts, we think that eight years is long enough.

The contradiction in the answer is hidden by the rules. The rules say that this guy is capable of having a driver’s licence, but they hide the claim that a driver’s licence exists to stop people from driving away from police, in stolen cars and crash into our puppy-sock-knitting orphan nurse.

The rules say that people can feel safe on the roads due to the rules allowing for it. There has to be a ‘defcon one’ for this to have any chance of working. If there is no absolute, then what is the point of having a driver’s licence system? Why don’t we just burn down the courthouses, kill all the lawyers, remove safety labels from everything and let nature take its course?

The answer- The rules don’t allow for people to be safe, or even feel safe. That's not the point. They allow for the state to own what was once owned by the people. If you need a licence to drive on a road, you have to respect the courts and the whole system. The state has purchased the roads and the very concept of travel from us. We now rent it back from them at a great cost. At one stage, roads and tracks were able to be trodden on freely. We built them, not the state. There was a time when we grew and caught our own food. Now we purchase it from people who don’t grow or catch it, but they have licences from the state to ensure that the food is not going to make us sick, or be misleading or the like – the state, the law guarantees us this.

The people that get sick or are mislead are seen as the exception to the norm, rather than the norm itself. It is never much considered that this is mere proof that the whole system doesn’t provide for us, it takes from us. The state gives out mining leases to large corporations so that they can dig a massive whole in our land and put up a big fence that says “get out and stay out” with more force than we currently advise refugees. I ponder if this is the same feeling Indigenous Australians had when white settlement first arrived. So many people were slaughtered mainly for killing a sheep or a cow that “didn’t belong to them”. Imagine being brought up in a tribe, catching or collecting your food, then these people come and tell you that they own that food. How can you own food you would ask? Those people must be crazy. Then those people have, somewhere along the way, convinced us that they do own the food, water, shelter and everything there is. If we would like to be, we cannot be and be free.

“Comrades!' he cried. 'You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink the milk and eat those apples.”

The Death of Teaching as a Profession ?

2014-03-06T15:46:00.002-08:00

Speaking as someone who has had to defend a defamation claim from a teacher I barely know, I was recently horrified by the NSW District Court in allowing such a claim against a twenty year old kid. Just recently, this twenty year old kid, Andrew Farley, was ordered to pay a teacher, Christine Mickle $105,000 plus legal costs for writing something nasty about her on Twitter. This begs the question: is teaching still a profession, or has it moved to the trades? Is law still a profession if it entertains this type of claim?

Piecing through the information about this case, apparently the young bloke didn’t ever have Ms Mickle as a teacher, presumably barely knew her. He had a grievance regarding her taking over his father’s job when his father left due to health reasons. NSW District Court Judge Michael Elkaim stated that “There is absolutely no evidence to substantiate that belief,” while also being critical of Farley because he "abandoned his interest in the proceedings" and did not appear at the trial; two seemingly contradictory statements. If there was no evidence to support a belief of the plaintiff’s actions, when the defendant did not appear at the trial, presumably this has no bearing on the truth as the defendant has not attempted to present it.

Farley apparently ignored the initial letter from Mickle’s lawyers, but removed the material and unreservedly apologised for it after further letters, probably containing severe threats. The matter then went to trial where his defence of truth was struck out because he had previously apologised for the material. Importantly, in defamation cases, when a defendant raises a claim of truth or honest opinion, the onus is then on the plaintiff to prove otherwise. If the defence doesn’t come to trial, it would be hard to see how the plaintiff can do this.

The end result is that the defendant will probably be bankrupted, if Ms Mickle’s solicitors are silly enough to pursue the matter; Ms Mickle will end up paying a huge legal bill; a District Court Judge can give himself a good old pat on the back for being so up-to-date and we will all shake our heads and wonder what happened to the concept of a professional.

Professionalism is hard to define in times where one can apparently be a ‘professional’ anything, from carpet cleaner, lawn mower or bug killer through to hair dresser or brick layer (areas which have always been trades).

Traditionally, the professions were restricted to specific areas: law, medicine, religious instruction and the military. Over history, teaching, nursing, accountancy, engineering and other disciplines have been added to the class, muddying the concept. But the concept has still remained. A true professional may well define professionalism’s most basic quality as being one who would always put the greater good above their own, monetary standing. This means that if you choose your own finances over the profession, you are no longer a professional. If you choose to seek $105,000 by doing something that disgraces the profession of teaching, you are no longer a professional. My parents were teachers most of their working life. They were regularly called everything from fools through to paedophiles and thugs. Yet they got up every day and did their job. They did this because they knew who were the professionals and who were the children.

It would appear Ms Mickle does not share this point of view. One must also worry about the competence and abilities of a teacher who can be rendered unable to teach because of the words of someone she has never taught. I know I certainly don’t want my children taught by someone of such thin skin.

About eighteen months ago, I wrote an article which in part witnessed some stuff. While this article didn’t specifically name anyone, it did raise the attention of someone to employ a lawyer and try to sue me for defamation. I barely knew this guy, but had witnessed inappropriately acting, most of the article was not about him and the part that was didn’t name him.

The letters of his lawyer were threatening to the point of being childish. I largely ignored them until the threats increased to include using the legal process to stealing all the computers in my house. A court claim was lodged and counsel retained. Thankfully this counsel was useless and I was in a situation where I had the time and legal knowledge to defend the matter myself. I would hate to think what people who cannot attend court or do not have the knowledge or expertise to lodge a defence would do in such a situation. They would probably do what Andrew Farley did and agree to the threatening requests of a lawyer. In my case, I agreed to a compromise, mainly because I did not want to waste time on the matter. The plaintiff, apparently never had any intention of honouring his agreement and proceeded to tell everyone that he had successfully sued me immediately after signing an agreement which demanded he do the opposite.

It would be easy in this situation to blame ‘the lawyers’, but given I am one, that would be a bit sadistic. Could we blame bad teachers? That would stir up too much of a polarised response. I think we can blame people pretending to be professionals: People in the professional classes who put their own needs and wants above the greater good. A lawn mower man can be a professional not by mowing lawns for a living, but by mowing his elderly neighbour’s lawn for free when she can’t afford his rates. A lawyer cannot be a professional if they seek to fill in their billable hours at the expense of the teaching profession or if they don’t have the courage to tell their client that they simply don’t have a case. A teacher may be a professional if their work pursues the greater good. They can be a non-professional if they choose to sue a little kid with a sick dad rather than take the high road.

Being a Valentine...Being someone’s One.

2014-02-13T20:07:00.000-08:00

On Valentines Day, I have been pondering about what is the best love song of all time? And before you start to sway you hips and sing the Eveleigh Brothers while pretending that you’re just as sexy as Patrick Swayze or Demi Moore, I mean more what qualities it has, what exactly does it say rather than embarrass ourselves and sing WAM.

On the one hand, there is the possessive, consumptive love song: Led Zeppelin’s ‘How Many More Times’ or more comically Lonnie Donnegan simply saying he” wants all my chidren to look like me”

“I'll give you all I've got to give, rings, pearls, and all.

I've got to get you together baby, I'm sure, sure you're gonna crawl.”

Dude, that ain’t love. That’s possessive masturbation.

Then there is the ‘you and me ... doing stuff in a tree’ type song.

Yuck, yuck and more yuck...

Not to hang the Zep, they did do a lot of ones that told a groovy story didn’t they? Like What is and What should never be, Fool in the Rain and Dyer Maker, but it’s telling a story using private language. Maybe that’s all love it.

Then there is the good old fashioned sex thang – Paradise by the Dashboard Light, the Lemon Song or Deanna which is about possession, albeit maybe temporary. At least these songs aren’t hiding what they’re saying. But it ain’t love.

I wonder if the best version of love songs would be songs that I believe are more speaking of love than psychotic possession and ownership masturbation. I am thinking of Blues Traveller’s wonderful “Maybe I’m Wrong.

“Now it’s none of my business but I think I can make you happy.

But it really doesn’t matter if it’s me or someone else

All that I know is that I think you’re kind of special.

And one way or another I’m going to see if I can treat you well. “

Groovy.

21: The Inside Story of a Group of Maths Geniuses from MIT who can’t Count.

2014-02-11T22:49:00.000-08:00

[Alternatively, the inside scoop on the first shit Kevin Spacey movie I’ve seen]

Today’s thought is a conspiracy theory of sorts. The theory is that the entire concept of card counting is a marketing ploy by casinos themselves to draw in the punter.

Long bow to draw I know, but let me explain. Did you know that the highest risk group of compulsive gamblers are male, university educated, between the ages of 25 and 35? Second highest, same except for female, not male.

Firstly, that old analytical philosophy problem –

On getting the promised folding bed, the manager feels quite bad about not having decent accommodation left for the three guests and as he orders one of his staff to take up the folding bed to the room, hands the boy five dollar coins and asks him to distribute this money evenly to the three guests as a discount and apology. The boy, not being that smart, cannot work out how to distribute $5 between three people, so pockets $2 and gives each of the guests a one dollar refund, with a heartfelt apology.

So the three hippie wannabies have paid nine dollars each for the room (3 x 9 = 27) plus the two dollars pocketed by the bellhop, gives us $29. Question is – what happened to the other dollar?

And now back to the main event...

IN Australia, we live in a culture that has a bipolar approach to the understanding of success, intelligence and destiny. We live in a country without a head of state, we love the monarchy at times, while at the same time yearn for the freedom that a republic will apparently bring. We live in the ‘lucky country’ but in many situations, the reliance on luck at the expense of knowledge or value appears un-Australian. By the same token, the smart, savvy know-it-all is the villain in many Australian cultural stories.

It is the Aussie larrikin who still relies on advice and gumption that we admire, but only to a certain level of success. We admire this person not because they are successful, but because they have learnt to tap into a secret code of success. This is why they are successful, and by the same token, this is why we may be successful too, if only we knew the language. We admire stories that give pay dirt to this; the Da Vinci Code; Waltzing Matilda; the Packer Dynasty; the ANZACs and so on. All these stories are stories of luck and courage mixed with reliance on a certain form of intelligence.

To take a specific case in point: counting cards in the game of Blackjack. This is seen as tapping into a secret code; a Da Vinci style understanding; a shibboleth of mathematics over reality. This code will make you successful if you both understand it, and have the courage and luck to take it further. It is the perfect contradiction of luck and knowledge. Courage is relevant too, but not to break the law or transgress social norms. It is more to take on the ‘big guys’ and dare to beat them.

Technically, in most jurisdictions, counting cards is not illegal. The point at which an action breaches the law is when it interferes in some way with the natural order of a game. By this understanding, card counting falls into a grey area in some states, in other states it is not an offence as it does not in any way interfere with the play of the game in the way that marking cards or shuffling them inappropriately would. In many works of fiction, novels, cinema and television dramas, we may learn that card counting is not illegal, but ‘robs’ the casino of profits, and indirectly the general public lose out by the casino not having as much money.[1]

The act of card counting itself is not very mathematically complicated. The game of Blackjack is a simple game; two cards are dealt to each player, the player closest, yet still under a 21 score wins. Face cards are worth ten, aces are worth either one or eleven (whichever is more favourable to the player) and the other cards are worth their numeric value. Players may ask for more cards, up to three (at which point the player wins automatically), but if the value of the cards in front of them is higher than 21, they automatically lose.

Card counting works on maintaining knowledge of what cards have been dealt out of the shoe as a basic average value, and thus the average value of the cards left in the shoe. As most casino croupiers are instructed not to deal themselves higher than 17, the higher the average value of the cards that remain in the shoe, the higher the chance that the player may beat that 17.

There are many practical problems with this simple understanding though. The main and more obvious two are: firstly the greater the chance of a 10 value card coming out of the shoe is always equal across all players at the table, including the dealer, not just the players counting cards. Secondly, casinos were built by conmen and gangsters for conmen and gangsters, and as such are very good at detecting when the law of large numbers is not being adhered to; when someone is cheating, or using a successful system of any kind.

Many stories of strange dyes, chemical compounds or X-ray glasses that enable a player to know the value of a card before it is dealt are recorded throughout history. One may guess that many more stories of how to cheat have been lost to history; most likely the more successful ones. Whether they are true or not, whether the gamblers were exposed as cheats is horses for courses really. It is not the way casinos deal with it.

For example, if a gambler starts winning a large amount of money, someone pushes a button. If a gambler continues winning a large amount of money, many more buttons get pushed, or signals are raised in whatever way. Casinos don’t need to know how and why someone is winning a large amount of money to exclude a player. They don’t need to be fair; they don’t have to be open to everyone who wants to enter. They do not have to prove that a player was cheating, or explain themselves to an independent arbiter (such as a court of law) ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ as the state does; at least in theory.

The most wonderful story of card counting is the urban myth of the uber-smart students from MIT that apparently took Vegas ‘to the cleaners’. This has been the focus of speculation and romantic notions of brain over brawn the world over. It has been moulded into a very widely selling “non-fiction” book ‘Bringing Down the House’ and an ultra-Hollywood movie ’21’. The hook of this story is that in gambling (as in life?), there is some way that people may beat the house. In a pure game of chance, there is some knowledge, some secret, some Da Vinci Code, secret order, or perhaps some not so secret order to things that if one can tap into, one will win and be kissed on the arse by fairies forever.

In reality, the deconstruction of the situation provides that the only people that this kind of story favours are the casinos. When people gamble too much, whether it is out of a non-specific impulse control disorder or just a slight, once off miscalculation; almost all the time can be simplified to an explanation of the patron thinking that they knew something; had some sort of control over the randomness of the situation. In the very least, the money lost by the casino for every one person that is actually able to control themselves enough to successfully count cards, would be made up for a hundred times over by a thousand gamblers whom only thought they could.

It is hard to trace the story of the MIT students who were involved as there are so many incantations of the story across time and circumstance. One of the simplest versions of the stories revolves around an MIT first year student named Andre Martinez, although other variations of this story refer to ‘real life’ inspirations of the MIT team being John Chang, J.P. Massar, Jeff Ma and Bill Kaplan. Interestingly, the movie and book both white wash these names; anglocising them; Kevin Lewis and Ben Campbell are the central characters.

Andre Martinez was apparently “an absolute genius”, so smart that on his third day as a first year undergraduate, he was “fast-tracked ... to graduate-level seminars”[2] by the never named maths professors at MIT.

Yeah, right... MIT just decided to forgo the hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition fees.

Every once in a while, this story is retold with reference to Professor Edward Thorpe, also at MIT, and a real genius from the era of Bletchley Park fame; but a generation and a half earlier. When this happens, the role of Martinez is that of a student of Thorpe’s controversial 1962 book; Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One but one who was able to understand something that Professor Thorpe missed. The key ingredient in the being kissed on the arse by fairies spell that it would seem, no one else has understood.

The explanation as to exactly what the 1990s MIT team came up with is never given. The notion that they played in a team, with spotters, gorillas and Big Players to avoid detection has been floated around. Apparently, according to the myth, the Las Vegas Casinos have never thought that people may signal to each other in teams on the gaming floor, and were unprepared for this outcome. There is also usually a further story about players being able to cut the deck to a specific number of cards down to bring out an ace. That an ace is of very little value on its own, without a ten value card is never really discussed.

It is at this point that the already shaky story falls apart a little more than somewhat. This is the part of the story where maths geeks from MIT went to Vegas and were able to instantly transform into any random character that they thought may be a laugh; from a rich dot-com kid, to an Eurotrash brat to a woman, the theatrical abilities of these mathamagicians are capable of fooling Vegas casino floor managers. Everyone seems to forget, when hearing stories such as this, that if a maths geek is good at pretending to be someone that they are not, there is only one persona that they would wish to take on; that of someone capable of having sex.

Remember that old joke; ‘How do you tell if a mathematician is an extrovert or an introvert...if he’s an extrovert, when he speaks to you he’ll look at your shoes rather than his own”.

The idea that a Las Vegas Casino floor manager, who are required to pick a cheat, liar, drunk, thug or fraud out as part of their job would be fooled by something as silly as this is all but beyond belief. But the story also loses its grasp of maths at the same time as it loses its grasp of the realities of the abilities of maths geeks. For example, the actual state of play, as told by Nigel Goldman, in his recent book ‘Great Gambling Scams’ telling the story of the initiation of a new recruit into the MIT team,

“...Then, quite suddenly, with only half a dozen or so hands left to go until the end of the shoe, Martinez suddenly bet $1,000. Kevin upped his ante to $500. The dealer dealt them both queens, and herself a five. Kevin’s next card was the ace of hearts, winning him $750, while Martinez’s was another queen. Martinez, against all casino etiquette, split the queens, receiving a face card on each, and then the dealer drew a nine, followed by a ten to bust. They had just won $4,750 on that one hand alone. ... The cards were coming out: Fisher got a ten, and Martinez a queen. The dealer received a five, and Fisher matched his ten with a nine, while Martinez received another queen. He had $1,400 in the box, and he chose to split the queens, normally a dreadful decision, but in these circumstances a fabulous play with the odds massively in his favour. ..... out came the cards, an ace and a ten. Bingo! The dealer dealt himself a nine followed by a jack to bust.”[3]

The mechanics, the maths of this story are way off. The idea that Martinez in both instances receives two queens is highly improbable to the point of ridiculous. This is matched by the idea that both players in both situations received a ten value card and one nine, while the dealer received a five on both occasions. On both occasions, the reason that the players won was that the dealer bust. It had nothing to do with counting cards.

A better example of this is in the movie ‘21’. We see our now very European looking ultra-genius surrounded by seedy characters in an Asian casino, downtown. He is signalled by his Asian team member; giving off a slight inferiority issue; by an incredibly awkward arm gesture, then using the word ‘magazine’ in a sentence to indicate +17[4] from a pre-determined code. This is done in a way so awkward that everyone in the room would have known it was a code.

Our Anglo-hero Ben narrates that the count is +18 after he gets a blackjack and the dealer received a 7, then 8. No it’s not Ben, you ultra genius. Here is the point where another of the severe failings of card counting in practice can be seen: while a pack may get to the improbable, yet possible mathematical understanding that it is +15, +16 or higher, to indicate the severe uneven distribution of cards dealt that have added an advantage to the player, every single card that is dealt after this point will diminish this count back to zero; the count must return to zero at the end of the shoe unless there are cards missing.

To take the example of Goldman’s second play above, the table has been dealt two queens, a jack, two tens, two nines, an ace and a five. By the rules of card counting, this one hand would remove at least five points from the value of the deck, more if there are other players at the table. So a ‘magazine’ (+17) would become a +12 (a gaol bait?) in that one hand. And the main reason the players won is because the dealer yet again received the five, which is improbable to say the least.

Even in the highly unlikely event that the shoe is still ‘hot’ after losing this much value, every winning hand will diminish the count by this sort of figure, so while the maths may work; it will not work for very long. The truth of card counting is that while it does work, it doesn’t give the player a very high advantage and it doesn’t work very quickly, you need to do it for a very long time to win any kind of advantage.

The role of the character of Cole Williams plays a strange part in the saga. Cole is, in the initial stories, a clever security chief who catches the MIT card counters in the most bizarre way.

Sensing that there is a team at work counting cards, he makes an assumption that this team would be made up of college students and orders a copy of every single college year-book in the country and studies them all. As the story goes, the MIT team used their college year-book photos on a fake California ID cards used in the casino. The likelihood of this story being true is all but zero. The number of colleges there are in America, all of whom have tens of thousands of students, not to mention staff (who would represent a considerably stronger assumption on Cole’s behalf) coupled with the sheer volume of visitors to a Las Vegas casino would make the odds of someone correlating black and white photos in the tens, if not hundreds of millions to one. As previously stated, Vegas was built by mobsters and conmen, for mobsters and conmen; the way they identify cheating is the signal when someone wins large amounts of money, regardless of the circumstance. Then they beat them up, or spike their drink.

But the role of Vincent Cole gives validation to the story. He is the one guy whose determination and gumption undoes the skill and smarts of our all American, all-anglo geniuses. Cole gives the story the understanding that it is easy to get away with counting cards, by juxtaposing the amount of effort and determination required to catch someone at it.

In the movie, Cole’s character takes on so much more. ‘His’ casino was ‘taken’ for a seven figure win by Professor Rosa when he was absent from work. He was at his father’s funeral no less. As a result of this event, Cole was fired.

Also of note is Cole’s character in the movie is played by the very talented, yet very non-European actor; Lawrence Fishbone.

In the movie, an exaggeration from the book, Cole is depicted as the end of the old ways of things. He and his company and knowledge are being replaced by technology; “Biometric Facial Recognition Software” which will apparently make his role redundant. We hear him talking about whether card counting beats the system, only to see him pointing to his brass knuckles clad fist and stating “this is the system”.

The book, Brining Down the House has faced some criticism and scrutiny since its publication in 2002 regarding the truth of what happened, by whom and when. John Chang, one of the real life inspirations behind the character of Mickey Rosa, stated that “I don’t even know if you want to call the things in there [the book] exaggerations, because they’re so exaggerated they’re basically untrue.”[5]

Ben Mezrich, the book’s author, claimed that “Every word on the page isn’t supposed to be fact-checkable ... I took literary license to make it readable ... The idea that the story is true is more important than being able to prove that it’s true.” This last statement: that something may be true in contrast, or at the expense of being able to be proven true is so vague that it bears little need for analysis. It is important to note, however, that the entire book is presented as a work of non-fiction; from the subtitle ‘The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions’ to the prose and chronological structure of the book itself; it is very much written, and intended to be read, as a work of fact.

The movie ‘21’ brings Hollywood to Vegas. There is a love story; betrayals of friends and students; back room punch ups and Sir Isaac Newton being labelled a plagiarist. The opening sequence is of a poor kid, quite drably dressed, riding an old pushbike surrounded by cars zooming past. The boy, as we later find out, was raised by his mother, widowed and working class. He is poorly dressed, even though he works in an upmarket clothing store and is seeking only to attend Harvard Med School on a scholarship. To get this scholarship, he needs ‘life experience’ to ‘dazzle’.

The movie introduces a love interest and a vengeful and vindictive professor character. The love interest, Jill Taylor, is older, smarter, considerably better looking and more popular, yet she spends the entire movie shy and subservient to Ben Campbell. She is comes from a gambling family. Her father and uncle lost a fortune on blackjack, and used to play blackjack every night with her as a child. The love story can be seen as the joining of the natural, yet innocent talent of Campbell with the experienced and pure talent of Taylor.

The role of the vengeful and vindictive professor, played by Kevin Spacey, brings completely new dimensions to the story. Professor Mickey Rosa, a maths professor at MIT gives the all-American Hollywood lecture. It appears to last for three or four minutes as opposed to the traditional two hours; it does nothing more than pompously ask a question about Newton being a plagiarist; then provides an insanely brief account of a maths paradox the ‘game show host problem’ [sic] which gives surprise to everyone, including the professor, when our hero can answer it. This is made especially more surprising given that Ben is able to explain it, while omitting the main element that makes the equation work and seemingly misses the point completely. But the key understanding, that secret code, the Shibboleth; that private language is mentioned ‘variable change’ by our hero, and Professor Rosa is taken back by not knowing this student who had been in his class, sitting in the front row all year, yet had escaped Professor Rosa’s attention until now.

Campbell makes that wonderful understanding when asked if his choice is being lead by a game show host, trying to use reverse psychology to trick him into losing. “I wouldn’t really care [if the game show host is trying to trick him] my answer is based on statistics, based on variable change.”

Ben Campbell stated that he would change his gamble based not on the actions of the game show host, but on statistics and variable change. He explains it as “when I was originally asked to choose a door I had a 33.3% chance of choosing right. But after he opens one of the doors and reoffers me the choice it’s now 66.7% if I choose to switch.”

In reality, the ‘game show host paradox’ – generally referred to as the Paradox of Betrand’s Boxes proves the direct opposite point of view, that mathematics is a human invention, a language set up to explain the world that has massive failings in some circumstances. Bertrand’s Boxes sets up three possible boxes and asks one to make a choice about which one has the marble in it. A choice is given, then one box is removed by the host, leaving two choices, one of which being the original choice and one more. The language and rules of mathematics tells us in this situation that the probability of one’s original choice being right is 33.34%. This remains the case when one box is removed. So sticking to that choice, maths tells us, gives us a 33.34% of being right. If we were to change our choice to the other box mathematics tells us that we would have a 66.67% chance of choosing the box with the marble in it.

The point of the paradox is that this simply is not what happens in the real world. In the real world the chance of winning is only increased where the game show host knows which one is the winning one. Remove this point and you’ll remove the paradox.

There can be a wedge drawn between mathematical theory, reality and outcome. These can be viewed as only two issues; firstly the inability of western thought to deal with the two concepts (or perhaps one concept) of zero and infinity. Secondly is the divide between addition and multiplication (or subtraction and division) that are falsely taken to be equivalent. There is perhaps another explanation in the notion that maths is purely analytical truth; that two plus two does not equal four, it merely is four by virtue of the definition of what four is.[6] But this veers too much into British philosophy for a story about gambling.

Three hippie wannabes arrive just in time for the Woodford Falk Festival and ask for accommodation at the local backpackers’. Unfortunately, the only vacancy the place has is a tiny room with only two beds. The manager offers to get an old folding bed he has lying around to accommodate three people if they would like. The three are quite put out; however as it is the only room left in town, decide to take it. The room rate is $30 per night, and the three each hand over a ten dollar note. On getting the promised folding bed, the manager feels quite bad about not having decent accommodation left for the three guests and as he orders one of his staff to take up the folding bed to the room, hands the boy five dollar coins and asks him to distribute this money evenly to the three guests as a discount and apology. The boy, not being that smart, cannot work out how to distribute $5 between three people, so pockets $2 and gives each of the guests a one dollar refund, with a heartfelt apology. So the three hippie wannabies have paid nine dollars each for the room (3 x 9 = 27) plus the two dollars pocketed by the bellhop, gives us $29. Question is – what happened to the other dollar?

The end of the movie sees a typical Hollywood wrap up; the same old American ‘Mighty Ducks’ meets ‘Police Academy’ with a little sprinkle of ‘Ocean’s Eleven’. The protagonist loses his edge by losing his sense of identity then alienates his friends and contemporaries. He has a chi moment, asks for the trust and confidence of his friends both old and new, which they give to him (evidently they have not read Derrida). He then earns their trust back by pitting the bad guys against each other so that talent and honour win out over common sense and reality.

Campbell gets his ‘dazzle’ for the scholarship, which he does not get, and the movie ends with a narrative from Campbell about how he went to Vegas 17 times and won “hundreds of thousands of dollars” and gained life experience and identity in some way. The viewer is left with yet another mathematical error: if Campbell had won his $350,000 in a one fifth share of takings (minus expenses) he would have to have won multiple millions, not hundreds of thousands.

Gambling success, like most things in life, follows the rule that the better educated and disciplined you are, the greater your chance of winning. John Chang, the supposed real life inspiration for Professor Rosa’s character pegs the yearly income for someone on the MIT Blackjack team to be $25,000.[7]

Mike Aponte, the real life inspiration behind the Fischer character, claims that the most the team ever won was $500,000 in one trip. His personal highest winnings he estimates at $200,000. For some reason he can’t recall his greatest achievement to the cent, even though all gamblers can always tell you ever slightest detail about their ‘greatest win’.

More importantly he has stated that the most the team apparently ever lost in a trip was $130,000.[8] These two have also greatly disputed the lack of discipline in Ben Campbell’s character in the movie, seeing it as a plot development solely to end the movie. Chang has stated that “Starting from the part where Ben loses control at the Red Rock and loses 200K, the movie takes off on a tangent that has no resemblance to reality. Our players were far too disciplined to even think of doing something like that.”[9] These two points taken together: that the team were very disciplined; and that they were able to lose $130,000 in one trip can be taken to understand the MIT Blackjack team’s operation as purely gambling. While they perhaps used strategies to make them better than the average, that is not the point. The point I wish to make is that they were gambling at a game of chance, with little to no control over the situation. They were using maths to hide this fact, and their loses, which is a true characteristic of a compulsive gamblers.

There is yet a further observation to make. The real story of a person from MIT taking on Las Vegas happened more than thirty five years earlier.

Professor Ed Thorpe, an MIT professor and a mathematician interested in gambling, but a generation and a bit before, tells the story in a different way. It’s the same story, but set in the 1950s and doesn’t paint the Las Vegas casinos as places of fun and tolerant of card counters.

In “Fortune’s Formula” William Poundstone retells stories of the noble Professor’s drink being spiked, to the point that he could no longer concentrate after drinking it, of friends being beaten quite randomly and of the Las Vegas casinos dealing with card counting in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Firstly, by not cutting the deck and playing with a blind eight deck shoe, and then finally by not playing the last portion of the shoe. This was the total and complete destruction of someone’s ability to count cards, no matter how much of a genius they were. The relevant part of a shoe; the last few hands, were simply not dealt.

Have you thought of my main point yet? Have I made the point?

...

Well, one final observation - while it is a very long bow to draw to say that this entire concept is a casino run conspiracy, it is true to say that the main people who benefit from the promotion of this type of story are the casinos. To seek to convince people that they can go to Las Vegas with a system that will allow them to win money is not something that will hurt a casino’s bottom line; it will most likely do the exact opposite. If that isn’t enough to arise one’s curiosity and cynicism, bear in mind that the movie 21 was financed by none other than the Metro Golden Mayer Corporation, owners of that iconic casino, the MGM Grand.

* * * * * * * * * *

[1] For example, see the American Television drama show “Las Vegas” where this theme is constantly raised.

[2] Goldman 2007 pp74.

[3] Goldman 2007 pp84, 88

[4] In the case of +15, this is the equivalent of saying for every ten value card dealt, fifteen low value cards have been dealt and thus the average value of the shoe remaining is high.

[5] Boston Globe FIND REFERENCE

[6] The counter argument states while that two plus one is three (as opposed to equally three) because it may only be stated as (1+1)+1; two plus two equals four do to there being two formulations [(1+1)+(1+1)]; or [(((1+1)+1)+1)]

[7] BlackJackInfo.com

[8] BlackJackInfo.com

[9] www.mickyrosa.com

Two paths through the yellow woods and you have to wonder, “what the hell are yellow woods?”

2014-01-29T19:39:00.000-08:00

Have you ever had a vision, a glimpse of something that you have long since forgotten about that, at the time in your life when it happened, “grabbed you by the wrist and directs you where to go?” This is something that seems to be happening to me a lot lately.

There are two kinds. Firstly, there is the glimpse of a point in history where events converged, or didn’t converge to make you take a particular path. Looking back on it, you see that there was a choice there that was made, or perhaps an omission, but it didn’t seem directly and consciously pre-empted by you. Then there are the glimpses you have of a point in your life when you changed the path. You may not have known what path you were on and what path you were changing to, but you were deliberately making this determination. You stood on top of your own rusting kennel and screamed that you had found your identity. And then you forgot about the whole thing for years until a glimpse of it wacks you fair in the bottom of your soul.

For me, the latter glimpse, the conscious choice, came as clear and as sudden as a car crash. Out of the blue I remembered a feeling, a decision from more than twenty years ago. Nothing much really, it was of being rushed past while I was walking down a corridor. The guy that rushed past me and I worked in a radio station in Toowoomba. I would have been about fifteen or sixteen at the time. I thought it was cool that I borrowed some of my qua from ‘Chris in the Morning’. I guess I still do. At the time, I never thought that he would have known the happenings of Cicely, but looking back on it now, I dare say he would have been well versed in it.

He rushed past me down a corridor to yell at the guy on the mike. The image was one that changed me forever. Black, stovepipe slacks; pointed-toe, elastic sided boots; a button up, collared shirt about three sizes too big and shoulder length hair that looked like he’d passed out on a newly-met friend’s floor the night before (although now that I have hair like this, I realise how much time and effort go into making it look like it has no time and effort spent on it).

He was somewhere between the lead singer of Ratcat with a slight sprinkling of the ostentatious class of Vic Reeves. I wonder why it was that point in time which occurred to me so much as the point at which something asked me to choose. Why was it this guy? Why wasn’t it someone that looked like (and was) a doctor? Why wasn’t it someone that looked like (and was) a lawyer? Why was it this guy? Was it just a destined point, one of a few, but the one I have chosen? Was my life always to be swayed by this sort of qua? And if so, was I this person before I made this choice? Can one chose their identity or is it all laid out for them? As Uncle Jean Paul said, “Existence precedes essence.”

Maybe, but then there is the problem of evil isn’t there? But I digress.

I got a glimpse of him the other morning and the memory that came flooding back was so comforting and at the same time so alarming. He was rushing down the street, pointed boots and stovepipes swishing to an imaginary tune. His baggy collared shirt and messy hair were flowing back with the wind and the movement perfectly.

Except for it wasn’t him. It was my own reflection in a shop window. He smiled at me. “I give you the uber-Michael. Michael is nothing if he is not a thing to be surpassed.”

This story gets complicated when it’s mixed with another glimpse, but one of the former type: where a path was taken, but not chosen. A glimpse of sitting on a pile of wooden pallets, abandoned and lost, yet at the same time, fairly drunk and surrounded by people. .. girls. It’s not as clear to me now, but at some point I must have had an inkling of what was going on. I must have known that there was a foul plan in motion, there was a black moon. Whether that was due to the deliberate actions of another person or just due to time itself mocking my claimed autonomy, I am not sure. Yet I don’t think that this matters too much. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but it changed me. It changed the way I acted around people that I don’t give the time of day to. I started to give them the time of day, my day. I started to allow, even need a smile from a person incapable of smiling. I asked for my needs to be met from people who should not know how to withhold these needs.

But I think I place too much intelligence and foresight into my being at that point. There are three possible outcomes to that situation. There is what happened, there is me falling for the trap and then there is me realising the trap, getting all snooty and leaving in disgust. The problem with this situation and its finite outcomes : it took away any ability I had to be me. It took away my ability to rush past myself in pointed boots and a baggy shirt. Over the years since, this ability was further removed from me, until just recently when I braved the heights of my rusty kennel and screamed, “I am here, and hang the expense. “ This is made all the more obvious by playing out the potential other timelines. Looking back on where I was at the time, what happened just afterwards and with whom, it would have worked out perfectly in any event, providing I had the ability to walk past myself. I lost that for a while. I want it back. I will myself to become that which is worthy of being surpassed again.

This post’s groovy, identity-seeking quotes:

“You cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew.” Albert Einstein.

“Cogito Ergo Sum is the thoughts of a person who has never had a decent toothache.”

Accusing and Accosting Alma

2013-12-30T21:09:00.000-08:00

On New Year’s Eve in 1921, the body of twelve year old school girl, Alma Tirtschke was discovered lying naked in Gun Alley, off Little Collins Street in Central Melbourne. She had been raped, strangled, washed of evidence and left by a sewer in a back alley off a then prominent arcade during the early hours of the morning.

This crime caught the public attention and horrified people all over Melbourne, Victoria and the nation.

The trial of the man who would be hanged for this crime, Collin Campbell Ross, was a first in many different ways. It was the first and only time in centuries that a man would be executed based almost entirely on three contradictory hearsay confessions. It would be the first time the Australian High Court heard a criminal appeal regarding a death sentence. It would be the first time scientific evidence comparing hair samples was used in court to such a degree and correspondingly, it may be the first time that scientific evidence overstated its own strength, provided certainty where none was to be had and as such, condemned an innocent man to death.

The case is a champion case against the death penalty. The way Mr Ross was hanged together with the idea that he was almost certainly innocent provide fertile grounds for anyone seeking to oppose capital punishment. The incompetence of the hangman meant that the noose did not tighten enough so as to knock the prisoner unconscious, yet had the knot have worked properly, it would have decapitated the prisoner given the drop greatly exceeded the maximum eight feet as dictated by the Home Office. This meant the prisoner suffocated to death, taking anywhere up to twenty minutes to die.

Mr Ross was almost certainly innocent. The crime was calculated and smart; leaving no clues, witnesses or evidence behind. Mr Ross was generally a hot-tempered and emotive thug, known to police for threatening his former girlfriend with a gun if she didn’t marry him and setting up the violent robberies of drunken customers. He was not the calculating and refrained type. The real killer was.

The scientific evidence was, like it is today, an overstatement of the abilities of scientists to explain events. Hair samples pulled from two blankets at the prisoner’s home were identified under oath as belonging to the victim. No such correlation ought to have been found. Re-examination of this evidence in 1999 found that the hair samples do not belong to the victim. Yet in court, this evidence convinced a jury of an infallibility of the Crown’s case and British Justice in general. As it is still today, expert witnesses presenting scientific evidence mislead a jury by failing to admit their own inadequacies.

The main evidence of the Crown in convicting Mr Ross was the testimony of three career criminals, the main one of which had a previous hostile relationship with the accused. Two of the three testimonies give detailed accounts of a confession from Mr Ross, the third partially corroborates it. Mr Ross went to the gallows pleading his innocence. 86 years later, his name has been officially pardoned of any wrongdoing in the rape and murder.

The detailed accounts of this case, firstly by defence barrister TC Brennan in 1922 and more recently by Morgan (2005) identify many problems with the case that should have lead to many, many reasonable doubts about Mr Ross’s guilt. Morgan, in interviewing family, goes on to identify the then husband of the vicitm’s cousin at the time potentially attacking Alma’s sister Viola and theorises that this man is both clever and capable of the crime. Little is known of him, but he does seem to fit the bill as one who ought to have been questioned had it not been for the police dogmatically thinking that they had their man.

This story may well be incorrect too. After more than 90 years, it is hard to prove too much and the culprit, like Alma and Mr Ross, would now certainly be dead. It presents an interesting conundrum though. On the one hand, if you believe Morgan’s account, or similar, you have to accept that this rape and murder essentially happened inside the sanctity of the family: the one true security that we all pretend to have. The victim’s sister Viola recalls having nightmares about her cousin’s then husband seeking her out during the night and laments that these are not dreams, they are memories. Many witnesses to the last hours of the victim’s life recall her looking scared and over her shoulder and being followed suspiciously too closely by a man. Viola also tells of speaking with her grandmother about it, only to be disbelieved and silenced about it. So this, or a similar story like it is one idea.

On the other hand is the story that the courts and the jury accepted as the truth. Ivy Matthews, a disgruntled former employee of Mr Ross’s who was suing him and his brother for lost income and partnership in their business gave an account to the police, the Coronial Inquest and to the Supreme Court about Mr Ross confessing to her and of her directly witnessing the victim being given drinks and accommodation in Mr Ross’s wine saloon. The other testimony, from Sydney John Harding tells the story of Mr Ross apparently confessing and telling the whole story to him while they were both in prison. It is now known, and more than likely was known at the time, that Ms Matthews lied about her age, name, marital status, occupation and history to police, the Coronial Inquest and the Supreme Court. Mr Harding had a long history of criminal activity including theft, robbery and fraud. It is a true point to state that the only things that these two accounts agree on regard information that the police already had known from external sources. On times, places and sequences of events, these two testimonies contradict each other in most other detail.

The one exception to this is that they partially agree on, is the actions of the victim leading up to her rape and murder. Both claim to have seen the victim being liquored up by Mr Ross in his wine saloon. Mr Harding’s recounting of Mr Ross’s supposed confession claims an unbelievable slander on the victim, painting the twelve year old schoolgirl as an alcoholic slut. Tales of the victim being of an age to want the attention of men and approaching Mr Ross, requesting an alcoholic drink underpin the stories of both Ms Matthews and Mr Harding. It is the victim’s wish to be a part of the goings on of a wine saloon and to draw the attention and affection of the men inside this saloon necessarily underpin of the story that executed Mr Ross. The victim is painted as, at the least in part, being responsible for her own undoing. This is a stark contrast to the opinions of her family, friends and teachers who all paint her as a polite, quiet and smart young girl.

In the testimony of Mr Ross at his trial for murder, the jury were told a third viewpoint: that he was being framed by the police who were angry with him for not being able to pin a shooting and robbery on him previously. While the investigating officers in the murder case had not been a part of the robbery investigation, in Mr Ross’s point of view, the police all acted together as one, corrupt and vindictive entity.

The point of all of this is that the jury were left with the decision between understanding that the accused had been set up, framed to hang for a crime he did not commit; at the very least, that a portion of the evidence was tampered or helped by police and the alternative; that the victim was brutally and viciously attacked, from within her own family without warning, rhyme or reason.

How much of a factor in Mr Ross’s conviction was the point that for him to be guilty, so must the victim? At least to some degree, the victim allowed herself to be in Mr Ross’s company, and that of his wine saloon’s clientele. This paints the picture of a society where we can keep our pure and sweet young children safe from harm’s way. It is only when they voluntarily put themselves in harm’s way, by a certain moral dubiousness, that bad things happen. The members of the jury were able to compartmentalise the horror of what happened by externalising themselves and society from what happened. They put this event behind a locked door, of which, the guilty do not have a key.

Then there is the point of view of the trial judge, who ought to have been a lot more battle hardened from the horrors of the world from his days on the bench. He ought to have realised that a jury could not convict Mr Ross of murder on the testimony of Ms Matthews and Mr Harding as, given both retold a story of accidental death, it could not have been constructed as willful murder.

There is one story about a twelve year old girl who approaches a stranger in order to get a drink and/or be noticed by men. The other story tells of a girl who is raped and murdered by a family member in the situation where the family ought to have known due to the accusations of the victim’s sister about her cousin’s husband. At the very least, with twenty-twenty hindsight, there ought to have been a raised concern about a potential risk that faced the girls. Is it the case that the jury chose the story that held the wolves at bay? The story where the wolves were behind the gate, and it was the victim, in crossing that gate who created an extraordinary event. This is so much more calming than the idea that there isn’t a gate and the wolves own the whole place. People will not only die for this convenient fiction, it appears they will kill for it too.

My gorgeous children won a national film contest

2013-11-25T23:20:00.000-08:00

I know, I know... I have been a neglectful blogger lately, but just have a look at this - my children won the 'say no to bullies' national ACMI film making contest...proud dad much?

http://www.acmi.net.au/screenit.aspx

A letter from a non- practising friend.

2013-11-07T20:12:00.001-08:00

Dear X,

I hope this finds you well and happy, although probably not too happy. I write this letter anonymously and not directly to you so as to not be seen to either illicit a response, offer an apology or brag about what happened. The reason I write is simply to have a joint observation of what happened in the light of an understanding of how wonderfully vulnerable people are to the elements and to each other.

We were friends and colleagues for years, and then we weren’t. You chose your career over your responsibilities to act appropriately. While I can observe and even accept that, I also observe that my response was heavy handed and brutally effective. I don’t think you can cry foul over that one, you knew me for long enough prior to that point that you ought to have known my response would probably have been such. There is a certain point where nothing else exists apart from winning. Winning dirty is even better, but win nonetheless. While the aim of life and civility is to avoid outcomes where this is all that is left, one must never shirk from this outcome when it happens. Or at least I used to think that. I still mostly do. If people think that they are right without question; they have no interest in anything that resembles civility, then they would be well served by a harsh wake up call from life itself to adjust their understanding. It’s a sort of ‘do unto others as you would wish to be done to yourself, but do it to them first’ morality to bastardize Mill. This is what you very much got from my response, but I recognise that the severity and effectiveness of my response was, in a major way, guided by external factors.

You see, I have recently come to terms with a whole bunch of stuff that happened way back in the day. But this letter is not about that either. I observe that my actions and responses were very much guided by past fears and circumstances that were not present in the circumstances. Yet my perception of your actions horrified me due to these past events. The fear and misery that was inside me guided my hand to destroy your world. Your actions did not deserve that. Your actions were a spark, yet the severe amount of fuel it ignited and the accuracy of the burns inflicted were caused by external forces. I had five plans in mind. Dumb pranks that were designed to destroy. I never went through with the last two. The accuracy of the first three amazed me. I raised my glass to the destruction I had caused and took pride in what I had done. The last one, which I never went through with, (perhaps because a sense of fair-play kicked back in, but probably because I was no longer motivated by anger and just kind of forgot) would possibly have put you on a collision course that may well have ended your life. It would certainly would have ended your career.

I have recently understood the idea that we are not our minds, our minds are a sixth sense, when we think something, we don’t think something any more than we see something or hear something. It is the observation of that thought that frees us from the vast emptiness that the laws of nature inflict upon us. That and the knowledge that only through persistence may we overcome this. This too shall pass as much as it will be replaced by the eternal that will allow us another chance. As Uncle Fred said, ‘that which does not kill us, will make us stronger.’

I know: your thinking, ‘...only he would be arrogant enough to lecture me on Buddhism and existentialism to avoid saying sorry.’ Maybe you’re right. But this isn’t about that. I don’t write for forgiveness and I wouldn’t accept it if it were offered. It is not about the either judging the other. It is about what is.

So I write so that you may observe these points and, in their observation, you will be freed from the misery that this situation has caused and hopefully not be swayed either way the next time something happens that may make you act from the fear and misery of the past.

Be careful. Strive to be happy.

Kind regards

New Work - Self Portrait

2013-08-01T17:00:00.003-07:00

This work represents a person as nothing more than the connection between three words. Am I nothing more than a choice to do or not do something? Is it in this decision/indecision that our personality and identity is delicately held together?

Sociopath is so, like, the new vampire?

2013-07-03T18:59:00.002-07:00

I recently came across one of the stupidest things the internet has to offer: a blogpage and subsequent book purporting to be flying the flag for being a sociopath. Or at least it would have if the author had dared put her actual name on it, which of course she didn’t. And let me tell you, while I may empathise with the plight of a sociopath, I also probably don’t because, according to this totally accurate and unquestionable diagnosis, I am one. On a side issue, that is probably a concern; how can a sociopath empathise with other sociopaths? Sounds like this post’s lame joke, but it’s not.

But it got me wondering why it is that anyone would want to claim to be a sociopath, and when you think about it, a huge portion of people lay claim to their own identity and moral goodness by identifying with being something that they’re not, and then pretending to not actually be true to that nature due to their moral strength. I know, confusing...but let me explain.

Vampires...

When I was a kid, vampires were scary. They were also evil. They didn’t have a past. They were strong, however not strong enough to stand up to the two Corries and a grandfather who regarded them as the one thing he could never stomach about living in Santa Carla (cue Echo and the Bunnymen). Then Dracula got a back story (I know, we’ve talked about this before). Speculative fiction, vampires in particularly always present an easy reference to the rule of the Aristocracy and can also easily see connections to women’s rights and animal rights issues.

Vampires; these cool, strong vicious beings exist solely at the expense of their prey. They suck the blood, the very existence out of their fellow man without fear or favour, almost without conscious thought of what they are doing. The same way many people chow down a steak or drink a glass of milk without thought to what that has cost to produce. The same way people eat chocolate that has been made by slaves; the same way people wear clothing that has been produced by people who would actually be in a better situation if they were slaves (they’d have more to eat).

But I digress...

Think about Michael Emerson’s situation in the Lost Boys; new town, new people, people who are very strange...then all of a sudden there’s this uber-groovy chick. He pursues her only to find out that she’s part of an uber-cool group of dudes who have their own mega-cool pad.

Everything now has limitless possibilities for Michael. They live in an abandoned, luxury resort. They live outside the scorn and rules of the everyday for some reason. They spend their time mucking around and having fun. They don’t seem to work, yet they have access to massive resources. They were just cool. Then, all of a sudden, you get to see why. You get to see the source of their lifeblood. You get to see what monsters they are. You can see the easy reference to the Feringhees and the like (and by that I mean the English, not the fictional Star Trek race, although there may be something in the presence of fangs and fixation with consumption over production; having, over doing).

In the Lost Boys, there is little to be said about why the vampires are bad, although Michael was tricked into drinking the blood, and it is implied that so was Star and Laddie. So there may be an assumption that all of them were in a similar situation at one stage.

There is a strong presence of a possessive love in The Lost Boys. Star wants not only to impress and love Michael, but to possess him, to consume him, as does David. David’s claim that his blood is running through Michael’s blood is such as statement of ownership, of consumption. Then he dies in a very Christ-like pose.

David’s death is a break away from the traditional understanding that bad guys should die because they are bad guys. Think about Dirty Harry’s defence that he didn’t beat up the bad guy “...because he looks too good.” Bad guys should die because they do bad things, rather than are bad people. David’s death reintroduces the predominance of action over character. The history of Western thought can be boiled down to that statement of Jesus “I am the way, the truth and the light”, being boiled down to him just being the light thanks to Newton, Darwin and Freud. This morality brings back the existential; the moral character is the definition of action in a continuum, not in isolation.

The moral rule introduced by this is that the good guys can’t just kill the bad guys, if they do, then they’re bad guys as well. The good guys now have to wait until the bad guys try to kill the innocent guys and then they can kill the bad guys while trying to save the innocent guys. This is the only way the good guys can do bad things (murder) and still be the good guys. Action takes precedence over character. The problem with this is that the bad guys can be not bad guys by refraining from acting as much as the good guys can be bad by failing to refrain from acting, which is a contradiction as it brings back chance and circumstance into the moral worthiness of a character.

Then Le Stat and Louis de Pointe du Lac came along and their existence and relationship seemed to muddy the sexual/gender boundaries. They were very much presented as strong, dominant-classed males, but their sexuality was hugely distorted toward bi-sexual, slanting more towards gay than straight. They were dominant characters, but they were not dominant males, their gender was ambiguous. Louis’ relationship with Claudia is more a mother-daughter relationship in the context of Le Stat being the father figure. This story is a story of possessive love, of consumption at the expense of the other (I know, you’re shaking your fists at me and screaming ‘well that’s not love then, it’s rape’...the love of a sociopath). Louis’ repression of his inner self gave him moral power over Le Stat. It gave him a refined intelligence that the animal-like Le Stat never possessed. He was good because he was refraining from bad. He was good because he killed the bad guys after the bad guys killed the innocent guys (Claudia). He was made better because he freely chose to brag about this to Daniel Molloy. He is the perfect post-structuralist, disenfranchised self: he is strong and powerful, yet moral only because he chooses to not use this power; to not be true to himself. Meet the paradigm of the modern retail monkey or public service office dweller.

Then along came vampire characters such as Angel and Vittorio di Raniari whose stories were tragic and forgivable. These stories were different; while most of them were still first person narratives, you couldn’t help but be enthralled by the character’s evil, female vamp lover/sire. Their story was almost as tragic and forgivable. But they were stories of strong and lost moral figures who had succumbed to love and fallen prey to that love, but had then become owned by it. They were love stories of a new kind. They reversed the gender roles, giving the historical female sire the power, knowledge and ownership of life that, at the point in time when the stories were set, were completely owned by the patralinear, male hierarchy. Yet the female sires were not completely a male image; they still aesthetically tricked their lovers in both stories. They still became very subservient to their new, empowered lovers.

You’re sitting there knowing that I’m going to bring that up aren’t you?

Yes, well, then there was Twilight, that spun that same love story back around to the traditional gender roles, but with a further twist which didn’t sit well. The vampire was a male again, but was he really a male? As a character, Edward was not dominant, either conversationally or physically. Bella is the pursuer, the whole way through the series. Even with Jacob, who is the more stereo-typical male role, it is still very much Bella who is the pursuer. Bella is also peculiar in her knowledge; she is well-read and scientifically minded; beautiful yet unaware of this. She exaggerates her knowledge and undervalues/downplays her aesthetics, a very stereotypical male thing to do.

The last thing Edward wants to do is to consumer Bella, to possess her due to that being his true nature. At the same time, it appears that nature itself has made Bella for him by his inability to read her. He is that killing beast, yet chooses not to be in order for peace and love and skittles to rain upon everyone. The Cullens are all this way; they are bloodthirsty beasts, they are animals, but they chose not to be. Their power, knowledge and abilities would appear god-like to an average human, yet they chose to not use this at all, especially not for personal gain.

The bad guys in the story, the James Coven, are just the older definition of a vampire. They would completely fit in in Santa Carla. What exactly is wrong with them? That they are true to their nature. The Volturi are not overly believable as a concept, the inability of the strong to accommodate the weak will eventually make them weak, but we’ve talked about that before too.

Sociopaths...

Have you ever noticed that a lot of people seem to greatly over-exaggerate their own health conditions? There seems to be a correlation between how dull a person is, and how great their imaginary, wiki-diagnosed conditions are that they keep at bay.

I remember many years ago, when I was younger, many people who would get a slight headache would run around and say that they ‘always’ got the most severe migraines imaginable. Being around people who actually got migraines, it kind of annoyed me that some people would over-exaggerate their condition. But it seems now that people don’t get migraines or headaches anymore, they get fibromyalgia. I must have come across this claim ten or more times in the last little while.

We don’t ever get the sniffles anymore, yet our incidents of bird flu does seem to greatly exceed the reasonable expectations. We’ve talked about the wonders of social media before and the like but one other thing life in two dimensions tends to give us is a polarisation of our existence. No one ever gets depressed anymore, we all get Bipolar, which is the new black. We all get depressed, while standing up for the people who are depressed, but only those people who are excusing their appalling behaviour with it, never the person who actually suffers from it.

At the very least we get clinically depressed. I am not sure what the difference between depression and clinical depression is, but the later sure sounds more worthy of our concern, doesn’t it? I recently found out that this long-time friend of mine has been suffering from clinical depression for decades. I really couldn’t work that one out given that depression is generally feeling down in the dumps without an ability to change that and without an explanation as to why that is. Yet if I were living that guy’s life, working his job and married to his wife, I’d be depressed too. I think there’d be something wrong if he weren’t depressed given what he puts up with.

Nowdays, we all have access to the wonders of Wikipedia, where we can log on and diagnose ourselves with whatever excuse we want, and it gives us references for us to pretend to have known. “The internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it's really given us is Howard Dean's aborted candidacy and 24 hour a day access to kiddie porn.”

So there is this Sociopath blog and subsequent book that is purported to have been written by a seemingly self-diagnosed socio-path who is also a legal academic, Sunday School teacher and Mormon. In reality, it is probably nothing more than a good reason as to why a lot of people should choose a career in middle management rather than study comparative literature. She identifies sociopathy as "...a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others" It is interesting to note that this definition seems to come from the very outdated, 1987 version of the Dignostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Perhaps the updating of the DSM in 1994 and since which removed the word Sociopath and replaced it with a broader category of ‘antisocial personality disorders’ , is to blame. This doesn’t sound nearly as PG13 scary sexy now does it?

This person claims that she “...might have been a good lawyer but I gave up practice a few years ago, because it got boring, and I realised I am not very interested in helping people or corporations. I would much rather indoctrinate them, which is why I became an academic.”

What a load of rubbish. The sector of the legal community who are interested in helping people would also recognise a sociopath in about three seconds. We have to, it’s our job and our safety depends on it.

This person also claims to have had sexual encounters that, the way they are described, would constitute rape in most states, but gosh do they sound naughty...

She “...occasionally [has] liaisons with men or women outside of my principal relationship, when a person happens into my life whom I feel a desire to possess...” She goes into detail about this one time, at band camp, she strangled her;

“..."date" in my parked car. We had talked before about sexual domination, and so by then I felt I had implicit permission to bruise and strike, which is to say that I was reasonably certain that there would be no retaliation for my violence. I turned toward her and could see the question in her eyes: were we about to kiss?

I slapped first - hard across her face so that I could feel the memory of high, sharp cheekbone on the palm of my hand for several seconds afterward. I could see the shock flash across her face, then turn into fear, finally settling into a soft understanding, and then an open and hungry desire. She later told me that she did not feel out of control until I wrapped my hands around her neck and began to squeeze, because she knew that I was strong enough to really hurt or kill her. She said, though, that she trusted I wouldn't hurt her and therefore felt adored.

I have strong arms and I might have killed her if I thought there would have been no consequences, but there were myriad reasons for not hurting her that had nothing to do with my feelings of adoration, not least of which was her prohibiting me from doing it again. I wanted to do it again, and I would several times after that night.”

Well Sinead O’Rebilion...shock me shock me shock me with that deviant behaviour.

The problem is, you can’t just pick up the DSM and say “hey, I sometimes lie to people, I have borrowed money off family in the past, get restless sometimes, has spent more on gambling than I used to...hey...I must be a pathological gambler”. Especially given I don’t actually lose money gambling. You see, in order to pick this book up, I would have to have an event that has led me there – a totally breakdown in my ability to control my life due to this behaviour.

The reason as to why our sociopath in question picked up the book was “she started to see a therapist...remembered a casual diagnosis a co-worker of mine made years earlier that maybe she might be a sociopath.” So she picked up the word, the term...wikipedia...

There has to first be a reason as to why you (or preferably a trained psychologist) picks up that book. That’s the premise under which the book was written. There has to be an event, a breakdown, a failure of the mind that indicates that you are in some way “maladaptive and inconsistent with developmental level”. You also can’t pick up on one section of the book, one page, one diagnosis and take it out of the context of the rest of the axioms of the book.

But now we have this champion of the intellectually disenfranchised; this person who deals with the unsatisfactory nature of daily life with an emotionless and rational calculation. All these boring as fuck admin bods now have a new Edward Cullen to dream about, only this time, it’s themselves. It’s their apparent ability to destroy everyone around them while they do not engage this ability that makes them good and worthy. They don’t have to do anything for this identity; they don’t need to learn something, get fitter, get fatter, get anything, but they, in their own mind, will get an acceptance of sort over their life.

So the end of all of this is an understanding that there is a great deal of people who regard morality and strength as the possession of a weakness that makes them strong (sociopathy or being a god-damn, shit-sucking vampire) but it is in the rejection of that inner most quality that makes them good. Some people will be a lot happier to live the life more ordinary if that is a choice to remove the beast within them. When that beast isn’t there, they make one up. That eternal struggle, that dualism has been destroyed, the Apollo in us sings loud, but this is not good unless, and only if it is a conscious ache for the repression of the Dionysian, the animal that will mindlessly consume friend and foe alike if we let it.

I am not sure about this.

BTW - Sorry for the excessive links in these last few posts, I won’t do it again, except for this one about why men don’t listen, which you know is going to bug you until you click it...

This post’s groovy, identity seeking quote:

“What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.”

This post’s lame jokes:

A guy goes in to see a psychologist. He says, "It seems I can't make any friends. Can you help me, you fat slob?"

***************

A man goes to a Psychologist and says, "Doc I got a real problem, I can't stop thinking about sex."

The Psychologist says, "Well let's see what we can find out", and pulls out his ink blots. "What is this a picture of?" he asks.

The man turns the picture upside down then turns it around and states, "That's a man and a woman on a bed making love."

The Psychologist says, "very interesting," and shows the next picture. "And what is this a picture of?"
The man looks and turns it in different directions and says, "That's a man and a woman on a bed making love."

The Psychologists tries again with the third ink blot, and asks the same question, "What is this a picture of?"

The patient again turns it in all directions and replies, "That's a man and a woman on a bed making love."

The Psychologist states, "Well, yes, you do seem to be obsessed with sex."

"Me!?" demands the patient. "You're the one who keeps showing me the dirty pictures!"

This post’s inappropriate over-share:

Recently, I’ve notice that I sometimes find myself singing ''bi di doo'' quietly when talking to someone on the phone to end the conversation - they either think their phone is going flat or I'm going slightly mad...either way, it's all good..

Bye now...

[cough]

Bi di doo

[awkward]

When I woke up this morning, I heard a disturbing sound

2013-06-13T14:36:00.000-07:00

This guy, and to avoid getting nasty comments, letters or being sued, let’s just call him Reverend Cleophus the Third...unless James Brown or John Landis is reading this... unlikely I know, but maybe we should call him Sid. Anyway, Sid made a troubling remark to me. He said “no one ever sues anyone for hundreds of thousands of dollars due to an attitude or dodgey look”, or something like that. I disagreed. I don’t think that he was right and the more I think about it, the more I think he is absolutely wrong. The more I think about it, the more I think that the only reason someone ever does something like sue someone else is due to a bad attitude or a dodgey look. A few more well travelled solicitors I know would tell you that the reason is that the courts (especially family) are not about justice, fairness or even the law. They are about resolution. They are about getting two people who have a dispute and wearing them out, tying them up in procedures, process and paperwork until they get to a point where any solution, no matter how stupid, would be better than continuing with their dispute, and then sending them the bill. But do we learn from our pettiness, our inflated sense of self?

There is a far bit of work going on in this area: exactly why and how do people disagree? Relational Contract Theory is fascinating, albeit American understanding of why people won’t disagree when they should. We’ve talked before about happiness and morality and how in the fight between emotions and reason, emotions will win. Especially emotions like disgust, vanity and pride. Then once we have made up our mind on that, we will stick with it way beyond the point of sanity. This is the point where our lovely confirmation bias kicks in and keeps us from re-evaluating the facts.

I live in this nice little quiet street, right on the beach where everyone , well, most people, get along really well. I’ve lived here for a few years now and the place was a clear change from my last abode, especially in terms of the neighbours. My last home was neighboured by druggies on one side and alcos on the other, so a street where most people say hello and are happy and look out for unusual or odd events is a wonderful change. The only problem is; it comes at the expense of the blue house.

The blue house is directly opposite us. When we first moved in, everyone in the street was welcoming and happy to talk to us. They all also warned us about those people in the blue house. They were not welcome. There were stories of having to call the police time and time again due to noise, swearing and fighting. The blue house’s cat was responsible for most of the ills of the street; from lounges and outdoor furniture being ruined to plants not growing properly.

I never had any issue with the people; they seemed nice and kept to themselves. I am not sure whether this is due to their character or that they knew no one liked them. There was only one night that I heard any fighting or yelling, and that didn’t last very long and wasn’t too intrusive, save for a radio being thrown on the road. But upsetting the neighbours on one occasion in over a year is quite alright with me. It’s a fair bit better than my usual average.

Then they moved out. There were stories that they were on the run from the law, that they were on the run from something else, had just run away, or that they had moved to the mines and the like. The house stayed empty for a while and then everyone was relieved when it was tenanted by ‘nice’ people.

Not long went by before the ‘nice’ people, while still being nice, this niceness had qualifications; they were nice, but drove a car that was too expensive. Then the teenage daughter left a light on overnight and was a little noisy. Another brief period of time passed before how they had acted on a particular occasion became who they were. “They did the wrong thing by upsetting...[well, let’s just call her Mrs Murphy]”

Another thing that has happened is that next door has been renovated and another person has moved in. The lady that lives next door is in her nineties and has lived in that house for fifty years. She still has an English accent that is almost too think to understand at times. She pays a grumpy old fool to mow the front lawn, but the back lawn is mainly overgrown weeds and clover. For a while now I have been meaning to spend a few hours mowing and then weeding the yard as it needs doing. This is not only cause I’m just that nice ... [cough] ... fine then... but it is also because it would save a lot of weeds coming through to our yard for a while. So while this was a helping-out-a-neighbour idea, there was also benefit for me in it.

But then her daughter moved in. And then her daughter swore at the neighbours for using a chainsaw too loudly. And then her daughter swore at me for using a sander one Sunday arvo.

“I’m just so sick of all this noise. Could YOU people make any more noise?”

Never ask an Aussie man if he could make more noise after you’ve annoyed him. You’re not going to like the answer. There may not be a valid reason for using a drop saw and a petrol powered pressure cleaner at the same time; come to think of it it’s probably a tad bit dangerous, but I do believe it answers her question.

But here’s the thing: now I am not inclined to help with the back yard at all.

Why is this? Am I justified in just saying ‘well stuff them then, they can mow their own yard’ when I know that they clearly can’t? I lie to myself and say that I have too much on my plate as it is and couldn’t really spare the time.

I have witnessed the daughter have a partial tantrum at a council worker who was planting trees, prettying up the street; due to their being a palm tree there many decades ago (probably before this guy was born) that caused them some concern. So maybe I don’t want to be subjected to an onlooker. Maybe I don’t want to allow myself to be judged by an unwelcomed external source.

Maybe, and maybe not. But the point is that for some reason, I am a less kind person, I am a lesser person than I was and I can not explain why. If I say it was caused by her, I would have to admit that she has some sense of power to do that, which I don’t want to do. Maybe she’s just cranky and lonely and I should cut her some slack.

Australia has a fairly good track record at being able to turn the other cheek as a country. We don’t get all pissy when our leaders do something stupid. The closest we’ve ever come to civil war or rebellion was over rum and we didn’t throw a tantrum and dump a whole bunch of tea into a river or try and blow up parliament house with gunpowder, we just found him cowering under his bed and sent him back to England. “This one’s no good,” we said, “but no harm done, just send us another one.”

By the way, sorry for all the cheesey Blues Brothers references and links... here’s one more to make a lie out of my apology. It’s my son’s new all time favourite movie. A while ago I lamented that the greatest joy in life is watching four children eat their breakfast and sway in time to ‘Love in an Elevator’. It’s been topped by those same kids not wanting to go to the school disco because the music is terrible... “I’d go if they played a little SRV or Beatles Dad.” ... you kids rock.

This post’s lame joke:

Most people don’t realise that Heaven isn’t above us and Hell isn’t below us, they are side by side. One day, Satan threw a huge kegger and ended up burning down a few sheds and the big fence that separates the two areas.

The next morning, God is out there and he is mad. I mean, he is really mad.

“You’ll fix up this fence and quickly.” He yells at Satan.

Satan, bleary eyed and hung-over, replies “yeah, yeah, we have tonnes of tradies here in hell. We have concreters, builders, builder’s labourers. It’ll be done in no time.”

A few hours later, God is surprised to see the fence has not only been completely rebuilt, but it is far more magnificent than the last one. When God inspects it a little closer, he notices that the fence is actually three metres on the heaven side of the boundary.

“You bum” God yells at Satan, “You won’t get away with this, I’m going to sue you for this.”

“Really?” Satan responds, “and where are you going to find a lawyer?”

This post’s groovy, identity seeking quote:

(you know the one I’m going to throw at you already don’t you dear reader?)

This is the Court...which has its decaying houses and its lighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give — who does not often give — the warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!"

This post’s inappropriate over share:

Continuing on from the theme of pettiness, or a variation of it, I can’t stand people who say “for all intensive purposes”. What on earth does that mean? I know they meant to say ‘for all intents and purposes’ but what is an intensive purpose? What isn’t? Are they even listening to what they’re saying? Why are non-intensive or less-intensive purposes not allowed? I know it seems little but man does it get under my skin. It’s like all these bogans who slush out the supposed ANZAC poem and say “...age will not weary them, nor the years condemn.” What does that mean ? Why would the years condemn them? That doesn’t make any sense. The years may contemn them, that would make sense.

I guess I’m just small minded and petty...

To be or not to be...That’s actually not the question...not even close

2013-06-06T20:38:00.000-07:00

Something that has worried me of late is can you do a bad thing, that may have a bad consequence, and be showered in glory when a good thing happens as a result? This has come about as I have noticed what seems like an infestation of bogan pride on social media lately that proudly states that hitting a child in discipline in not wrong due to the person in question apparently being hit as a child ‘...and it never hurt them much hey.’ Do you ever wonder whether Hamlet was wrong, he was being deceived, but killing his uncle was a good idea as he would have been a terrible king...could that act be right while being ill-informed?Someone, Nagel I think, asked us how far we can torture a disobedient child while we are stuck under wreckage in a car that is just about to crash. Can we break their arm to get them to free us and save us both?

Can you do something terrible (hit a child) with a good intention (disciplining the child) and expect to be praised as a result of performing a bad act (child behaves according to expectations) ?

A friend of mine sent me a wonderful link on the subject – an add about children copying which is brilliant. If you are going to listen to one thing on Youtube today, well listen to Dazed and Confused, after all, it’s Friday and you need to get a groove on already. But if you’re listening to two things....well, you know.

We’ve talked about the Heinz Dilemma before and how it expresses whether a person is wrong to steal, over-charge and the like for medicine;

A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000, which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said, "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

But it can be complicated by a few things.

Firstly, is action more morally meaningful than inaction? Consider the two neighbours, Alf and Deb; both live in absolute luxury by virtue of the fact that they are the trusted protector of their very wealthy, multi-billionaire, two year old, orphaned niece. If Alf’s niece, or Deb’s niece die, Alf and/or Deb will inherit billions as the only remaining relative. Alf and Deb both absolutely hate their respective bratty nieces and resent looking after them.

One day Deb has had enough and, while her niece is in the bath, grabs her head and gently but forcefully pushes her under the water and her niece drowns.

As luck would have it, at exactly the same time Alf is bathing his niece and leaves for a second to grab a towel. When he returns, he noticed that his niece has accidentally slipped, fell, hit her head on the side of the bath and is currently not able to breathe. Alf doesn’t do anything. He steps back and waits for the bath to, of its own actions, kill his niece.

Both Alf and Deb are now billionaires and free from the trials of looking after their nieces. But is Alf’s conduct any less than Debs? Does it matter that he didn’t actually do anything to end the life of his niece?

Let’s warp the story a little more. Say neither niece die. Say that both Deb and Alf recanted at the last second and brought their kin back to life. But in this instance, their nieces both had book clots in their head which, being held under water for a little minute, were cured by the pressure of the water rushing in and blasting the clots out through their eyes. Should we praise either of them for curing the blood clots of their kin? Should Deb be praised more than Alf due to her actively changing actions?

Now, the more smarmy in our merry band will be shaking you fists at me screaming “This is the Doctrine of Double Effect and has been answered by everyone from St Augustine to Jerry Seinfeld.” And you’d be right, it has, but my favourite version of it; The Trolley Dilemma and the Kill Whitey Project, is where this blog is going today. And hey – if you already know the answer, skip ahead, but don’t spoil it for the person sitting beside you.

The essential question is – ‘what is the role of reason and emotion in moral questioning?’ We like to call ourselves advanced and say that emotion is bad and reason, devoid of emotion , equates to an advanced morality. Especially when you look at people like Piaget, Kohlberg and those following, there is this linear approach to moral development. The trolley dilemma and the kill whitey project present this wonderfully archaic, yet researched viewpoint that our morality is just as much a slave to our emotions, especially emotions like disgust, as they were to the hypothetical caveman who started the whole debate. It states that we are not further developed by our reasoning faculties at all.

The question is very much about Normative reasoning, of which there are two general schools of thought: consequentialist and deontological, albeit there is a third school – virtue ethics which has a considerably better answer to these questions, but it’s not a task for us today.

The basic version of the trolley dilemma asks would you kill a man in a particular situation, and then presents a situation where this may be acceptable.

In the first instance, you are out walking one day and see a dilapidated train track. You follow it for a while and find two tunnels up ahead: one with five workmen in it, the other with only one workman. Then all of a sudden, an out of control train comes screaming down the track. You look down and, as luck would have it, you are positioned right beside the track changer which controls which tunnel the out of control train is headed. You notice that it is headed toward the tunnel with the five men in it. So do you act? Do you change the track to kill one man, deliberately and unashamedly just to save the lives of five?

Funnily enough, more than 90% of people faced with this dilemma would switch the tracks and kill one person.

In its second incarnation, the same situation happens, except rather than standing next to the track changer, you are standing on a footbridge on top of the entrance to the tunnel. You realise that you might be able to jump down in front of the train to stop it, but you would be way too skinny. Thankfully, standing beside you is a portly gentleman whose girth would easily stop the train. Do you push the man off the footbridge? Do you kill a man to save the lives of five?

In answering this question, most people say the exact opposite; almost everyone would let the five men die.

A third incarnation is where you are a doctor on duty in an ER, rushed and over-worked. A motorcycle accident victim comes in. He is pretty much dead, but there is a chance that an emergency procedure to open up his skull/brain area to relieve pressure has a 2% chance to save his life. It is a highly risky operation and no one would be the wiser if you accidentally slipped by half a millimetre and cut the wrong cord, killing the motorcyclist. You have five other patients, one who needs a lung transplant, one who needs a heart transplant, one who needs kidneys etc. And they need this within the next few hours or they will die. The motorcycle accident victim is a perfect match for all five patients and will most likely live in a brain-dead comma for a few days if left unoperated. Do you kill the motorcyclist? Do you perform the operation to the best of your abilities? Do you kill one man to save the lives of five?

There has been a great deal of research dedicated to trying to say why this is the case; from people being brain scanned while making these choices, to theories about our evolutionary background failing to come to terms with the significance of a switch.

Our sense of highly developed moral reasoning would say something like “the end never justifies the means” or perhaps “do the act that results in the least net harm” or something similar.

Then the Trolley Dilemma goes through a fat elvis stage; race and nationality are brought in. People are in a lifeboat which has one too many persons in it. You draw straws as to who has to leave (and drown). It comes up Tyrone Paton gets pushed off. Is this moral? Does saving the lives of the five men on the boat justify killing Tyrone. Almost all liberal voters would say no, almost all conservative voters would say yes.

In a second incarnation, you draw straws as to who gets pushed off and Chip Elsworth the Third’s name comes up. He gets pushed off the boat and drowns to save the lives of the five remaining passengers. Is this a moral choice? Is the killing of one man justified by the saving of five lives? Most liberal voters would say yes, most conservative voters would say no.

In further warps of the same logical problem;

· is the killing of innocent civilians during a military campaign justified to end a war/restore peace in the situation where civilian casualties are minimised, but expected. In one setting, it is Western troops that are doing the fighting, and Iraqi civilians doing the dying; in another setting, it is Iraqi insurgence that are doing the fighting, Western Troops that are doing the dying.

· is there a limit to the freedom of speech? Can someone burn an American flag? Can someone draw a malicious cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed? Which is freedom of speech and which has gone too far.

In these examples, the conservative/liberal divide comes through loud and strong: a liberal would have no problem killing Western Troops and burning the American Flag, but would see killing Iraqis and laughing at Mohammed as unacceptable. Conservatives go the opposite way.

Then something really interesting happens: people are given the same dilemmas to answer, but rather than political affiliation, they are first asked to unscramble a word. One group is given a word that is synonymous with patriotism, the other a word that is synonymous with multiculturalism. The findings, quite amazingly mirror the conservative responses in those given patriotism words, and the liberals in those given multiculturalism words.

What’s even more amazing is that people, when alerted to their moral inconsistencies: who will agree with the bombing of Hiroshima while at the same time being adamant that the end never justifies the means etc will change and adapt their understanding to new stimuli.

But irregardless, the findings of all this seems to be that we are not liberal, conservative, deontologists, consequentialists or the like; we have a morality like a bag of tricks, to be pulled out when we find it appropriate. This begs the question: why do we chose one moral principle in some settings, while find it abhorrent in other settings?

The answer, weak though it may be, is that we favour connectedness to a familiar view. We will do our best to preserve our own understanding of the world, to the point of absurdity at times, but we greatly exaggerate and over-estimate our own abilities. The confirmation bias, or as I’ve always said, “the one thing that unites us as humans is that everyone thinks that they are an above average driver.”

So is it right or wrong to hit children? I would say it is never acceptable...but why? Firstly, it doesn’t work, secondly it is violence, and violence is always wrong. Violence is always wrong. The only thing to be learned from it is to avoid it because it is the point where reason, thought...indeed humanity itself stops working. But then what about a situation where someone about my size was beating up a kid, an elderly couple or something and they weren’t listening to reason? Is it wrong for me to hit that person a few times...bugger, there goes that theory. What if the aggressor is considerably smaller than me?

What if it is the case that most people would pull the level to kill a person, but not push a fat man onto the tracks is because our evolutionary make up hasn't dealt with the concept of switches and buttons yet, however, we all know too well the effect of direct violence. Perhaps. Perhaps it is because we have never seen the effect of a switch, yet all of us have seen the effect of being pushed, in the school yard or in the workplace. Some of us know the effect of doing the pushing.

Then maybe it is because we have to see the man being pushed, we have to see the motorcyclist die. We see him watching us and dying. That breads the association that we fear and are disgusted with.

Is it just a case that I am not a pacifist, I see violence being used and chose to identify with the child that was hit, the child that will learn to mistrust these people, fear them, hate then and grow distant from them where other people would associate with the authoritarian parent figure and pretend that they learned respect from that action. Let’s just take that as a comment hey?

This post’s groovy, identity seeking quote:

'“People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do. If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance.”

This post’s lame joke: `

A man and a woman who had never met before, but who were both "married to other people," found themselves assigned to the same sleeping room on a trans-continental train.

Though initially embarrassed and uneasy over sharing a room, they were both very tired and fell asleep quickly, he in the upper berth and she in the lower.

At 1:00 AM, the man leaned down and gently woke the woman saying, "Ma'am, I'm sorry to bother you, but would you be willing to reach into the closet to get me a second blanket? I'm awfully cold."

"I have a better idea," she replied. "Just for tonight, let's pretend that we're married."

"Wow! That's a great idea!", he exclaimed.

"Good," she replied. "Get your own damn blanket."

After a moment of silence, he farted.

You were right...tell your sister you were right.

2013-05-29T17:09:00.000-07:00

More about Star Wars and Nazis

Have you ever noticed that during the final battle of Return of the Jedi, after one of the bad guy’s ships gets shot down and runs into one of the good guy’s ships, Lando says “Looks like they’re heading for the medical frigate.”? What would such a medical facility treat you for? Being blown up? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

I know, we’ve talked about Jung and Star Wars a recently, but still, it is a good topic because a whole generation grew up to know who was good and who was bad based on how good they looked in dressed in black. Johnny Cash Ethics? The Emperor looked weird and kinda fat, Vader looked awkward and stunted, whereas Luke just looked freaken cool.

Yeah, I know, another lame post about identity and personality...well I wrote a novel, my first, a few years back now and while it had been on my bucket list for a while, the framing point of it came one sunny Sunday afternoon in Sunnybank Hills, pushing a pram and listening to the week’s pod-downloads. On one of them was an interview with a philosopher turned House of Lords Politician speaking about Sartre in an informative and nice way, but she made the most bizarre claim towards the end of the interview: that Sartre, Derrida and their ilk became “deliberately obscure”. I’ve heard this claim before and all, but she painted it to that wonderful Sartre statement that “Existence precedes Essence...Whatever that means...” she stated.

I was horrified. I rushed home and wrote this weird little story about music that afternoon, which spurned into a novel over the following few months.

Existence precedes essence. That’s just freaken cool. You get to choose who you are. You get to be before you get to decide. Isn’t that a wonderful dream?

So the question of identity. Does one get to choose their essence and what is the effect of this on their freedom, on their very humanity?

One thing that has always puzzled me about Star Wars is why the Dark Side of the Force call themselves the ‘Dark Side’. From their point of view, if they truly saw themselves as being part of the correct understanding of the use of the force, wouldn’t they just refer to themselves as the Force, and the Jedis would be the scrawny side of the force?

Darth Vader as a character is most pertinent at this point as he was both at different times. In the first movie, nothing much is known of Darth Vader apart from a brief description by Obe-Wan describing him as the person that killed Luke’s father, Anakin. Vader’s actions in the movie are portrayed as irrational, yet exceptionally strong and courageous. His understanding of being correct is solely concerned with a natural order to things that he is in line with; the Force. While choking one of other bad guys, he is reprimanded for acting irrationally, immaturely almost, and apologises. He represents the epitome of fear and dread in all who deal with him, a role that continues through the trilogy, except for Luke’s latter dealing with him. It is essentially Luke’s tuning in to this irrational course of action, in very similar vein to his father, which results in the good guys winning.

Also mention must be made of Han Solo’s intervention, a very irrational act that lands him in hot water later on, but is true to the understanding of who he sees as himself through the eyes of the very lovely Princess Leia.

In the second movie, Vader’s character completely changes. He is passionate, quite orderly and his potential association with his long lost son is a source of pride and angst for him. We see him understand things and pre-empt things that the Emperor does not, or cannot.

As he describes it, the dark side of the force is the true nature of the force and is also considerably stronger. This may be two points, or it could be the same point. As there is no considered discussion on this point, it leaves open the question that the dark side of the force is either the better side due to a truth it perceives and/or it is the better side solely because it is stronger. However one must be careful here to understand good as being anti-strong. This is hard to console with the idea of an all-powerful deity.

In the second movie, there are the beginnings of references to qualities like anger and fear being powerful tools for the human mind; however, these are also the path to the dark side as proclaimed by both sides of the force. Yoda, Obe-Wan, Vader and the Emperor all hint at this.

The reason as to why the good guys win in the final movie is firstly due to the same point as in the first movie, but rather than Han Solo, it is Vader who has a reassociation with his son via his own perception of an internalised other. He acts completely irrationally, using emotion over fear as it were. Or at least he acts in line with the person who he thinks he should be in the eyes of his kids. His relationship to what is good is redefined and it is his relationship with his son that wins out against the dark side. There was still ‘good’ in him “...your were right...tell your sister you were right.” Quite disgustingly we see in the final scenes a Vader then is weak and useless...but good.

In the final movie, the character of Luke changes completely. Not only is he now wearing black, he goes from a definite wimpy and rationally composed character to a cold and emotive warrior. He changes without blinking as it were, from attempting to bargain with Jabba for the life of his friend to merely recognising that there is no existing relationship left, and killing everyone except for his friends. Is he still a good guy by doing this? He is now the epitome of strength, facing crippling odds and does not even flinch. His enemies now appear more an inconvenience than a real threat.

But the most important occurrence is the supposed final battle between good and evil, between the dark and the not-so-dark sides of the force. Luke defeats his father by becoming angry, but then controlling that anger at the most opportune time. It is Vader’s recognition of a similarity between his scars and those of his son’s that forms a certain empathy, which is then described as not having all the good drawn out of him by the dark side. So good, in Vader’s eyes, is only the want to repel the ever-present evil.

Most notably to bring out this point further is the actions of the Emperor in tricking the good guys to pit the two armies directly against each other in a way that the stronger side will easily win. Then it seems that either the stronger did not win, or that the Empire was not the stronger. The two questions that concern us are; does the stronger side always win and what makes the good guys into the good guys and the bad guys into the bad guys outside of issues of strength?

But how do we, as people, attempt to understand whether we are good guys or not? Put yourself in the shoes of one of the Imperial troops for a minute. It must have been a common occurrence for Imperial troops to ask themselves this, to look at their uniforms, they sort of look bad, Russian or Chinese almost; then look at the colours that people have painted their ships, not to mention that the big one is called the Death Star, rather than the Groovy Star, Star of Hope or something like that. They would have to notice the fact that they are being lead by a weird robot dude that chokes everyone, and a weird old guy in a black cape who laughs in a sniggering way.

Wouldn’t you, in this situation, ask yourself, ‘Hey, I’m not a bad guy am I?’? But in the Star Wars movies, the troops who asked themselves this question would have to also understand that they outnumber their commanders by tens of thousands. So regardless of whether you’re an evil-robot-choking-everyone kind of bad dude, or whether you’re a black-cape-wearing, lightning-out-of-your-fingers kind of bad guy, the real source of your power comes from the inability of people to examine their lives and their roles in the situations that face them. True power isn’t their ability to use ‘the force’; it is in the minds of the people they are oppressing. As Malcolm X said, the most valuable tool of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

Perhaps a huge part of the Nazi rise to power and the war that resulted was the German people’s Christian belief in ‘giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s, giving to God what is God’s,’ In this context, it is in not realising who their leaders were and where they were being led. Too many people see this as something belonging to the ghosts of Christmas past, but we would do well to always assume that this can happen, that this indeed is happening right now, all the time. This, of its own rationality is a weakness, a failing of the worst kind.

So to come back to the main point; what makes the bad guys bad? What makes the good guys so good? What makes the Nazis bad and the allies good? In the end, in both situations, the good guys win, without favour, from way behind, in a way that they really should have lost big-time. The only explanation that we are given in Star Wars is that the Emperor is overconfident, and that is his weakness, but this then eludes us back to the point where strength, or at least winning equals good, and weak or losing equals bad. God smiles on ‘the right’ to make them victorious. The problem with this is that it only happens when God exists. Thankfully, to come back to real life, we can sort out a reason as to both why the Nazis were bad, and why they lost.

Maybe one could just review the concept that Hitler belonged to the wrong century. Compare the actions of Hitler with that of Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great or William the Conqueror. Is there really much of a difference in what these people did and how? Do you think that it is just that we are too close to Hitler today to remove ourselves from it? Everyone can still lay claim to having a relative, acquaintance or close association to someone who was directly harmed by the actions of the man.

With hindsight, especially given that at the time, maybe the difference is that Hitler wrote out what he was going to do and why. Perhaps this is the source of the fascination with him. It is also amazing that the political leaders of the west didn’t really take any notice until it was really too late.

The rationality of strength, that good equals strength equals winning, which allowed the rise of the Third Reich can also be seen as its undoing. It can be seen as a great comfort to the end of Modernism, and the beginning of Post-Modernism that cultures of violence and injustice such as the Third Reich fail by their own hand, hoisted on their own petards. They should have realised that the English academics had broken the Enigma machines, they should have realised that the English had a working radar system and they should have realised that the Red Army weren’t being beaten that badly. It is, as it were, necessary to an unjust system that it contains the seeds of its own destruction: violence, decentralisation and deskilling.

The main element that Hitler brought to the table in warfare was the Blitzkrieg, lightning war. The Red Army had time to respond to this: the scorched earth.

The Red Army were engaging the Nazis and essentially allowing them to break the line, but then retreating very quickly. The Nazis didn’t expect the Red Army to last long against them, and made huge advances into the USSR very quickly. The problem was that they weren’t really crippling the Red Army and the land that they were taking had nothing on it to support them, no buildings, supplies, machines, nothing. Everything had been either removed or destroyed. Stalin had been able to mobilise the whole country, not just the military, but the civilians as well. So many historical and cultural places, homes and farms were simply destroyed under the idea that it is better that they are burnt than fall into Nazi hands.

With all these examples what was happening was that the Nazis were being decentralised and deskilled. Why would you go find relevant intelligence when it is easier to torture someone? Why would you admit a failing to a superior who would kill you or choke you to death as Vader did?

Then by not admitting these types of day-to-day events, there is no reliable central intelligence formed. The Nazis should have known that the Red Army were not being beaten that badly, that England were not being bombed that badly, that they were facing an ever-stronger enemy. Having said that, everyone was acting purely and wholly reasonably and rationally. Everyone was acting in their own self interest, yet without honour, without reference to a natural order or external reasoning of some kind, the end result will always be to become weak and wrong.

Essentially the strong, by their failure to accommodate the weak, became the weak. Strength without honour is just weakness postponed. Perhaps this is what Luke Skywalker was referring to as overconfidence.

This post's lame jokes:

Q: What side of an Ewok has the most hair?
A: The outside.

Q: How many Sith does it take to screw in a hyperdrive?
A: Two, but I don't know how they got in it.

Q: How many stormtroopers does it take to replace a lightbulb?
A: Two; one to screw the bulb in, the other to shoot him and take the credit.

On Pirates, Trolls something something and Really Bad Eggs

2013-05-25T21:16:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered why we should be worried about pirates nowdays? People who breach copyright laws, steal movies and music, for some reason, are called pirates. If you think about it, it’s a strange term to give them. Why not video vampires; music moles or sega snitches?

Our collective subconsciousness is filled with images of scary types that would grant an evil personality to someone accessing a movie, song or game without paying for that right. But why a Pirate? Surely there are many other labels that would instil the impersonal fear of these fiscal outcasts in the general population more adequately and aptly than a pirate? How about a vampire; troll; goblin; leprechaun or werewolf? What is it about pirates that made intellectual property rights peeps change the arrrrrrrrgument?

Ba-da – cha... thanks, I’m here all week...

If we can learn anything from history, apart from the fact that we don’t learn anything from history, it is that pirates have been part of our collective subconscious for many centuries, and have been given greater credence and villainy than their acts deserve. The word goes back to at least the thirteenth century and can be linked to the Latin pirata (sea robber), the Greek peirates (one who attacks). From about 1620, the Spanish word Picaroon was used to mean a sea-robber. However, in 1701, there was recorded the term from the Latin peritus to mean a person who takes another’s labour without permission, forward through to 1913 where it was coined to mean an unlicensed radio broadcaster probably similar to this one. Of course, this is to completely ignore the Vikings and many other groups that were essentially pirates.

Like most GenXers, I grew up with pirates being bad and Robin Hood being good. Then, somewhere along the way, pirates became good (thanks to Johnny Depp) and Robin Hood got really bad (thanks to Kevin Costner and Russell Crowe). Pirates were the bad guys in Treasure Island, the Swiss Family Robinson and Peter Pan. They were not only bad; they were ruthless, unreasoned and cold: they were not human. Then things changed a little.

The Goonies retold the pirate story from a different angle in searching for the treasure of One-Eyed Willie. Fighting through deadly booby traps and the Fratellis, in the Goonies, it is more dumb luck that saves the day, the concept of piracy is told to have been captured for so long, freed by a final booby trap, the film ends with the pirate ship Inferno, sailing away unmanned and free.

The Princess Bride introduced the Dread Pirate Roberts as a more cultured and reasonable person. “Good night Wesley, get some sleep, I’ll most likely kill you in the morning” turned into a very reasonable want to retire and be replaced by our heroin, whom we already knew and liked. All of a sudden, we are introduced to the back story of (one of the) Dread Pirate Roberts, and it makes perfect sense to us.

But it’s not until the recent Pirates of the Caribbean and its sequels that the pirate story is told in the positive. Like all great action movies, these movies are in part a ‘Gospel according to Cool’ that made us buy the headbands and wristbands of Capt Jack and forgive Keira Knightly for the Phantom Menace and part a retelling analogy of freedom and justice. Piracy in these movies is regarded not as history records; ruthless and merciless monsters. Rather, the pirates of these movies are akin to nobility in many ways: from the bloodline that runs from to the son from an unknown father (Bootstrap Bill) to the concepts of freedom and justice, while in some ways a divine gifts, are given to the pirates, rather than the English, to be upheld.

So now pirates are the new black.

Walking along in any given marina nowdays, you would be unlucky to not see at least one ship with the Jolly Roger flying loud and proud. This is a very strange thing given that before July 2008, flying this flag would constitute an offence in Queensland liable to life imprisonment.

And there are other types of groovy pirates nowdays, a Facebook Pirate, we can learn, is an “...[i]ndividual that[sic] proceeds to steal everything you post on your facebook wall and post it on their wall without giving any credit thus taking all the glory of your genius” used to complain about someone “stealing my Lady Gaga video again and he has 30 comments and I only have for [sic]” There are Pit Pirates, who “...focuses his entire life around his own ego. EVERYTHING is always about him. If you've cooked it, he's cooked 10 times as much and of course BETTER! If you've been there, he been there SEVERAL times! If one of your kids is cute.... well then he just doesn't care....because it's all about HIM!!!” There is also the Digital Buccaneer who “...obtains large amounts of video or music over the internet, usually by pirating or other questionable means”.

So it seems our pirates have gone from bad to misunderstood to good to just plain annoying.

Vampires have a similar stroll through history. From a weird poem by Lord Byron that inspired the sickness of Bram Stocker; to a Dracula whose story was unknown, he was just bad. Then he was, like others, misunderstood into a life against God due to bad fortune and trickery. Through the wonderful stories of Anne Rice, vampires became understandable and human, and through stories like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Lost Boys, they were even more human, if still bad. But then there’s Twilight, isn’t there? Vampires became pooncey and annoying...just like pirates.

We’ve talked about Darth Vader in this light before have we not? Yet there is a lot more to his story that fits the same mould. The first movie that came out, he was barely human; he was a cold and ruthless killer. In the second movie (The Empire Strikes Back) this is even worse in his dealings with his henchmen, using the force to strangle them over the intercom; he couldn’t even be bothered to travel to their ship to weird force-strangle his 2IC in person. Yet in the third movie, he becomes human. He turns into a good guy and dies, but we don’t really understand that. But insert the new Star Wars trilogy, especially the third movie; Revenge of the Sith, where we not only learn how Vader becomes that person, we understand it. Anakin gets tricked into hooking his wagon onto the bad guys horse to save the love of his life....awwwww...isn’t that sweet?

No, seriously, it’s not only sweet, it’s understandable. It all makes perfect sense, down to the retelling of the story of Sir Galahad, stealing the metaphysical conundrum that free will and divine determinism can so easily confuse our heroin. Anakin is ‘fulfilling his destiny’ in the eyes of Emperor Palpatine, but at the same time chooses his actions, lest he not be responsible for them... he wants more, when he knows a Jedi shouldn’t. A notion that is exaggerated at the end of the movie by Obe Wan not killing him because he is unarmed, juxtaposed against Anakin’s fight with Dooku at the beginning.

So what has all this got to say about bad, do we know what’s good for bad? Do we know what’s bad for bad? We got to grow up with a version of the devil, Vader, that was then warped by reasoned explanation. We get to understand what the devil did, more than that, we get to forgive him for it. What the previous generation had seen in communists, the one before that in Catholics and the one before that in Chinese and Germans, we got to understand ours. Maybe this next generation will be the first to finally transcend notions of good and evil in morality.

And I know you’re now shaking you fists in frustration at me, screaming, ‘what about the Terrorists’? Are they just our generation’s communists or Catholics? Maybe, maybe not. But they are terrorists, rather than a particular identifying feature. It is their actions that condemn them rather than their beliefs or nationality.

I know, a pretty weak distinction.

There is another thought troubling me about this: in all these types of stories, bad is not just beaten, it is eradicated; it is completely removed from the world. Vader destroyed the Sith completely. Dracula, who originally was just bad, was given a back story in our lifetime. His service to the lord was mocked by the trickery that destroyed his wife. This was never in the original stories, but the idea of killing him was. He was the one and only to be removed; once dead, bad was gone. But my concern is, can bad ever be removed from anything? As Uncle Fred said, "But what if pleasure and pain should be so closely connected that he who wants the greatest possible amount of the one must also have the greatest possible amount of the other, that he who wants to experience the "heavenly high jubilation," must also be ready to be "sorrowful unto death?"

You could use this point to argue that Jesus was wrong to refuse the Devil’s third logic in his forty days of wandering, but that’s another post in itself.

Back to pirates...

Interestingly, one of the anti-movie piracy ads here is Aus, which portrays a ‘pirate’, who seems to look more like a blacksmith than a pirate or a computer geek, states that one of the reasons we should turn away from video piracy is that it ‘funds terrorism’. This claim has been made by many, but interesting has been made by John G. Malcolm, a deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division at the United States of America’s Department of Justice before a formal House Judiciary Committee proceedings, or in short, someone who ought to know better. The link is a clear one too. "Organised crime syndicates are frequently engaged in many types of criminal enterprises, including supporting terrorist activities", Mr Malcolm explained. Unsurprisingly, he could not, when pushed on the matter, name any case where this actually happened, but "it would surprise [him] greatly if the number were not large".

So if I drive a car, and some people use cars to go through drive-thrus, I think it follows that I am a hamburger. But really...If a person breaks the law, they are part of a sub-class of people who can be labelled law breakers, some of whom fund terrorism. Therefore, breaking the law funds terrorism. Did someone say McCarthyism ?

SuPERB

There’s another ad that asks “would you steal a handbag?” ...then ... “Would you steal a car?” while presenting the types of situational crimes that Routine Activity Theory would explain all too well.

But are they actually stealing something? And if so, are they doing it for the types of reasons that the traditional pirate did? It may well be a too simplistic statement to say that the reasons for traditional piracy is simple scarcity caused by the greediness of the upper classes. Is that not the case still today?

As a part-time author, I have very little concern about people reading my stuff without paying for it, as long as this doesn’t happen too much and as long as they are not actually Stealing it (capital S for claiming ownership/authorship of it). But this may well be because I am, through most of my work, not being paid at six percent of the jacket price of my work by the people that are really pushing the anti-piracy bandwagon. I get to keep somewhere between forty percent and two thirds of the price, depending on where my work is sold. I also get to keep complete control over my work. But what is the opposite? Think about that for a minute; an author who has written an entire work of whatever, laboured through thick and thin, if s/he chooses a book-deal over self controlled publishing, s/he gets only six percent of the revenue from that work. Artists and musicians appear to be in similar situations; the are making more for the endless stream of accountants and marketing gurus out there than they are for themselves. But at least they are actually making something, creating something that this world may ponder and smile upon for a second or more. Kudos for that.

So I guess the term pirate is quite apt. Historically, it is not that pirates stole from the creators of products that made them bad, it was that they were better at it and had considerably less overheads to contend with than the government and the quazi-creative industries that leech off talent from the creators. This is still true of video pirates today I guess.

This post’s groovy, identity-seeking quote:

“Nobody can build the bridge for you to walk across the river of life, no one but you yourself alone. There are, to be sure, countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would carry you across this river; but only at the cost of yourself; you would pawn yourself and lose. There is in the world only one way, on which nobody can go, except you: where does it lead? Do not ask, go along with it.”

This post’s lame jokes:

Q. Why don’t pirates sail to the moon?

A. Because it’s too faaaaaaaaarrrrrrr

Q. What kind of socks do pirates wear?

A. Aaaaaargiles.

Q. What do pirates do when they injure their knees?

A. Get Arrrrrrrthroscopic surgery

Q. Why do pirates read Playboy?

A1. For the Arrrrrrticles

A2. For the booty

An Apology and an Explanation

2013-05-22T23:14:00.002-07:00

One of the funniest things, and at the same time, one of the saddest things that you come across in life is the concept that people always turn into that which they hate the most. Have you heard this claim? Jung was a fairly big believer in it, albeit he had a get-out-of-jail-free card which is another post in itself. Socrates’ claim that an unexamined life is not worth living can be viewed as this same sort of exit; Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky have a better claim, but the central part of it is that you only notice bad things about others that you fear of yourself. While I have always been an enthusiastic follower of Jung, I really don’t understand this claim fully. While there are traits in other people that I discredit them for that I am fearful exist in my own personality at some level, the things that bug me the most about some people, I have no doubt do not exist in me, nor do they have any chance of coming forward...or do they?

Some things that I am not overly fond of in others that I do fear in myself are things like disorganisation, wasting talent and potential and the like (and yeah, I hear you say ...ooo way to really criticise yourself there Chad). I know, to be honest, there are a few things that I never thought that would ever be an issue with me that have become so lately: weight; tolerance and substances... I was always a gauntly skinny kid, never learned to watch what I ate (which was mainly bananas and wheat bix) and could run on the smell of an oiley rag. I remember stupid behaviour as a teenager, daring each other to pull the quick-release from the brakes on our bikes and go down the Toowoomba Ranges just cause we were bored on a Sunday morning. What I wouldn’t give to be fit enough to not notice coming back up the ranges (especially after a Saturday night of John Player Specials and box wine. Now as an adult, I am fascinated by the fact that I am not that pillar of psychotic fitness that advanced my youth. I never thought I’d see myself in that light, and cringe at the constant criticism of others for this trait.

But the people that really bug me? The people that really make me go out of my way to ruin their day are the people that I have no fear of becoming: the people that a loud and obnoxious, think that they know everything and do not listen. They’re always happy to see you, but only when you see them first. They are always at the forefront of the latest fad, but never at the actual time... you know the type dear reader. They are the catch-cries of mediocrity, wasting their time and being on shiney things .

Perhaps this is because I have the Birthday Blues at the moment...I once talked to a pshychology academic about this (he had never heard of the term) and he believed that it was nothing more than my subconscious preparing me for an inevitable disappointment that was to come. When I was a child, my birthdays always seemed so exciting just before they happened. The expectation of a day of my own. We were always allowed to choose the breakfast cereal the week of our birthday, meaning that it was the only week of the year we didn’t have either weetbix or god-awful muesli (complete with orange peel....yeeuwwwey). It was generally a toss up between Cocoa-Pops or Fruit Loops. But the presents...the presents always brought a massive wave of joy and smiles to my face...until the actual day. I remember one day getting what I thought was a groovy, hippie, brown-checker, cloth brief-case for my birthday. That was the biggest joy for me... the cred I would get from school would be so above anything I had known. It was exactly the kind of bag that Hendrix or Joplin would have had.

Then I opened it.

It was a rug...

A brown rug.

Folded in a strange way and given to an imaginative kid.

As a result of which, apparently I get the Birthday Blues. A feeling of being down and kinda grumpy usually about two weeks or so before that day. According to a few psychology peeps that I have spoken to, most of these types of situations are other-thought by people: the simplest explanation is usually right. But there is another element to it: another year gone, what have I to show for it? It’s this latter part that generally is the end of all the Blues, because, like most artistic souls, I can quite happily think that, while I haven’t done enough and have wasted some time doing some dumb stuff, by and large I am grooving to the tune along and about where I want to. I haven’t finished those two books that I promised myself I’d finish by my birthday (a few years ago), but I am still working in that sort of area. I am still living, still loving, still breathing, still being.

In that I am happy.

But am I moving towards that person that Jung feared I would be?

I always loved the last episode of Northern Exposure for the example of this.

Yes and no – I am further along that path, but not as far as I ought to be. Birthday blues are good to reaffirm one’s commitment to a life outside the explainable.

This post’s lame joke:

Q: How many lawyer jokes are there in the world?

A: Just the one, the rest are all true.

As a side note – a big shout out to those few who have joined our merry band for nasty reasons and may well have been mislead by the title of this rant – but if you’ve read this far, that’s pretty funny. Stay around, you may just learn how to mean something.

Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas?

2013-04-17T17:53:00.001-07:00

Vanity of vanities ...all is vanity...and the vexation of the spirit. It appears that the only way to end this cycle is the self realisation. How are we supposed to deal with the complexities of modern day, day to day life, with the seemingly inconsistent need to leave a mark, a legacy of some kind that states that we were here, and we did ... well, something? How does this translate any kind of purpose to our lives?

The reason I ponder this is that I find myself constantly fighting with people. I worry that I remember my father dedicating most of his life; most of my childhood, to what I believed were trivial disputes. I still do. Yet I look back at the progression of my children’s childhood and find it all too easy to measure time in terms of who I was arguing with at a particular point.

We’ve talked about weird little teachers and their inability to live up to the standards that society asks of them while at the same time, holding a label which society greatly approves of. It the last little while, one of these annoying little people provides the current case in point. It seems that there is this endless progression of people wanting to be recognised by me, and to do this they will go out of their way to start a dispute. This chick is going out of her way, putting her very employment and reputation at risk just to get some sort of standing with me. Just to get some sort of acknowledgement that I am listening to her and her petty claims and invalid understanding of behaviour. I couldn’t really care about it at all, I think her whole understanding, her very existence is pointless and I don’t really want anything to do with her. I paint her as the version of humanity that some of us have been lucky enough to transgress and surpass. They live in the bigger cities with their shiney, identity seeking materials that will prove to all and sundry how spiritual they are. They sit in a metal coffin on their way to work stuck in traffic, never realising that they aren’t stuck in traffic, they are the traffic. I should just point a silent and mocking yalp to the pointlessness of her life, however, I can’t seem to just stand by and let her dictate terms to me as to how I can act and what I can say.

Do you know what I am talking about dear reader? Of course you do; you’re just as cool aren’t you? And I hear you say, “just walk away, vanity is vanity after all.” You’re right, I know that you’re right, but let me ask you this, “have you ever?”

Didn’t think so.

I have no idea why this is the case. The LoML thinks that it’s because I am too cool and don’t grant people enough lee-way; that I should consciously compliment people more often when they don’t deserve it so as to avoid petty little disputes and an indifferent attitude to develop into an out of control hostility where everyone just gets fed up.

Many years ago, in one of the first major legal cases that I was involved with, two families basically destroyed each other rather than walk away. This may be because they saw walking away as acquiescing to the request of their now rival. This may be true, the language that is used in disputes first and foremost seeks to own the path of resolution, to put a fence around it that says “pay the fare or else”.

These two older men, both from very wealthy families with many generations of wealth and prosperity formed a company that exaggerated their status and cunning to turn their many millions of dollars into serious money. Then the strangest thing happened; a sister of one of them broke a wine glass at a dinner party. It was not too much of a big deal at the time; easily solved with the promise of a replacement glass. It was an exceptionally expensive glass, but the price tag meant little to our heiress, who duly gave, as restitution, a set of six glasses of equal or perhaps better value than the one that she broke. The problem was: the one that she broke was part of a set of twenty. She replaced one wine glass with six, but this was not regarded as due restitution by the other family.

Then, by chance or design, who knows...the brothers met again as normal over tea and the brother whose family hosted the dinner party (and had their wine glass broken) ‘accidentally’ broke an antique tea pot belonging to the other. One family saw this as a deliberate response, the other pleaded that it was an accident. Then the lawyers got involved, their business partnership was dissolved and the many, many boxes of paperwork which detailed the dealings of this partnership, from innocent transactions right through to accounts which identify criminal activity from them (fraud, larceny, tax evasion and the like) were in the hands of the lawyers.

Fast forward a few years and this dispute is still going. The two men were reduced to a laughing stock due to them destroying their position and privilege just to seek to get back at the other. Neither man recognised any point at which they ought to have just walked away, regardless of the loss of face. Yet everyone else looking onto the dispute could hardly see a time where this wouldn’t have been the appropriate thing to do. It’s the language of a dispute, it’s the point where one identifies themselves as the injured party and refuses to give up on some vague concept of justice or a fair outcome that the vanity blinds them from the realisation that this does not exist, or if it does, it is not available to them. One of the stories retold by Mark Twain in his travel writings: Life on the Mississippi is of a dispute between the Darnells and the Watsons in the deep south; two families who started as kin/squattocracy and, over the generations had bitterly shot each other almost out of existence. Our arrogance and vanity blinds us from happiness.

As I’ve always said, ‘if arrogance is misconstrued as shyness, well then I wouldn’t be arrogant.’

Yet, as Aristotle wonderfully said “there is no way to happiness, happiness is the way.”

The problem is that I find myself way too much of a passionate and moral person to be able to let things go; and that this makes me different from other people. However, it appears most people are the same. I say moral in the sense of ‘how many times does a buttmuncher like Ms X here come across a person like myself? Not that I am arrogant about that (well, not too much, I am not overly arrogant, I have bad eyesight and get bored with dumb people very easily), but it appears to me to be the part I play in scheme of things is very greatly coloured by the fact that I have been given certain privileges and skills that enable me to respond quite strongly to these people whom society has granted a comfortable existence, well beyond their contribution to that society. But then this makes me greatly vain.

Have you ever been unfriended by someone of facebook? Of course you have, haven’t you dear reader. But when you happen by chance to realise this, isn’t it the funniest feeling? You have this need to say, ‘hey, you’re not allowed to do that, you were my pity friend for like years and now you’re all snoochy about it?” We’ve talked about social media and trolling before, and the strange and unrealistic situations that it gives people. It gives a voice to people who, in real life, don’t have a voice (sorry to use the term real life as opposed to life online, but I’m not sure how else to draw a dichotomy). But the need to identify themselves in the most simple and non-dismissible way seems inversely proportionate to their abilities in real life. But can you simply walk away from that without getting upset, without thinking “is there a way I can have them know that there’s dogpoo on their windscreen wipers, and it’s because of their inabilities in life, their very vanity made me put the poo there?” Or is it my vanity?

However, is the absence of vanity the answer to all this? I am not sure that recognising the vanity of my actions and removing it is the right course of action. To be selfless is not about being removed or ignorant of the world. It is in recognising that one is part of a greater all. An all that we realise our part in and thus truly transgress vanity. We play our part in the world, our experiences and skills enable us to do great things, but we must never forget that it is only a part we are playing.

Without the play, we are nothing, but we would be wrong to assume we would be better off without the play. There is no us without the play, both metaphysically (how can we label something that we cannot know?) and morally (if we remove ourselves from the play, others will be left with missing lines). Ignorance is not bliss. The withdrawal of belief in something does not spur belief in nothing, it spurs belief in anything. Then we are left with a nothing that is hard to comprehend and harder to listen to. As Uncle Fred said, being human, all too human is tough, we should give our darkness one big old hug and howl for the eternal yes.

So what if we get so caught up in our own vanity. The current version of non-realism, which is generally referred to as science seems at best the latest version of vanity and arrogance spurned on by a failure to understand the wonder in meaninglessness. Meaninglessness is the most wonderful, yet also the most misunderstood and feared quality that our beautiful world has to offer us.

Well, if you don’t count sex and guitars.

I found myself revisiting the Bible this last week. I have been a lapsed Catholic for almost as long as I was a Catholic. Short of some vision or calling from the big man, this year will mark a point in my life where I have spent longer as a non-Christian than as a Christian. I remember back to the days of my youth when I believed that there was someone at the wheel, keeping everyone to account (which we’ve talked about). Remember when you thought that so long as you stayed close to your parents, you were safe, nothing could harm you. I’m providing that for my children at the moment and it scares me. It scares me because I remember the day that it all ended for me. That day when you realised that you were never safe, you were always as vulnerable to the whims of the meaninglessness of the world. I hope I can keep up the pretence with my children long enough for them to find it easier to forgive me for holding up a conception of meaning in what we do and why. But remembering what it was like to honestly be part of the fold. You sing and put cardboard-tasting discs in your mouth and you had nothing to worry about. Even the time when you were falling out of that group, but faking it cause you wanted to get with the girl down the road who still went to church most Sundays. There’s beauty in that. Well, not in that dear reader, I meant the mindset of that. With regard to the other thing, sure there is beauty in that as much as there is beauty in the lesson learned of be careful what you wish for. Another thing social media has ruined: my memory of her. The memory of shock as I realised I completely misunderstood who she was, how pure she was by being dominated and used. That contradiction between loving being used as a toy for a time while being quite angry that she completely disregarded the rules of chess and threw the game just to get her own way. But now, thanks to the joys of social media, I learned that the years have not been kind. I didn’t want to know that just as much as I did want to know that. But there is nothing to be done about it. Maybe this is why a passage from the Bible came and stuck for a minute. What wonderful passages there are to be found inside what can be regarded as a predominant history of the West and what joy there is to find, in this book, something that is akin to that wonderful Pink Floyd understanding of the metaphysics of morals.

The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after. I the Preacher was king over Israel in Jerusalem. And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven: this sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith. I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. That which is crooked cannot be made straight: and that which is wanting cannot be numbered. I communed with mine own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been before me in Jerusalem: yea, my heart had great experience of wisdom and knowledge. And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

This post’s groovy, identity seeking quote

“But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”

This post’s lame joke:

This guy, Tom, goes to his priest and says “Father, I think my marriage is in trouble”

“Well,” says the priest, “it’s good that you realise that and are seeking to do something about it before it’s too late. Especially in today’s world, the role of the mother is vexed and complicated and as a result, some men feel that their marriages come second.”

“Oh, no father,” replied Tom, “it’s nothing like that, she’s great with the arranging everything and keeping on top of things.”

“Well,” says the priest, “Sometimes being a mother will remove a woman from the complexities of the modern world and she will start to appear quite boring and plain during early child raising.”

“Oh, no father,” replied Tom, “It’s nothing like that, she keeps up to date with everything, is an avid reader and we talk into the wee hours about all types of topics...from current events to art, music, politics,... whatever.”

“Well,” says the priest, “Sometimes the role the modern, working man, with its stresses and fatigue can destroy the attention and patience needed of a father.”

“Oh, no father,” replied Tom, “It’s nothing like that, she keeps the kids out of my hair when I’ve had a bad day, but that doesn’t happen too much and they’re great kids anyway.”

“Well,” says the priest, “Sometimes the role of a mother can interfere with the want for physical love and as a result, the husband can feel unloved and unwanted.”

“Oh, no father,” replied Tom, “It’s nothing like that. She’s an absolute firecracker in the sack...she’s always up for it and willing to try new things and is a wonderful lover.”

“Well,” says the priest, now quite at a loss as to what to say, “why don’t you tell me why you think that your marriage is in trouble.”

“Well father,” Tom started, “It seems a bit silly now, especially after talking with you. Don’t worry about it, it nothing... It’s silly.”

“No, no, tell me my son, no matter how silly.” the priest replied.

“Well,” Tom hesitated, “It’s just every once in a while, not very often, maybe once a fortnight at the most...usually after I’ve had a tough day...come home to find the kids good and fed, bathed, then , even though I’m exhausted, she’ll want sex...then ... when she thinks I’m asleep...she’ll lean over and with such passion and force in her voice...well”

“Go on my son” the priest encourages.

“Well, she’ll say, full of infatuation and strength she’ll think I’m asleep and say ‘Die, when are you going to fucking die you son of a bitch.”

On Karma; Are we the sum of what we do and is what we do the sum of what we are?

2013-02-12T20:26:00.003-08:00

Do you believe that people will be judged by their actions and have their existence at some point altered accordingly? It’s a strange thing to wonder. While it’s easy for people to see others acting poorly and shrug their shoulders and say “they’ll get theirs” do we really believe that? Surely even the most blessed among us would find it hard to truly state that there is some sort of cosmic balance; a ledger between good and bad, between right and wrong that at some point, or points, has to be accounted for. It becomes even more problematic when you are talking in the past tense: when they’ll get theirs becomes ‘they got theirs’.

CS Lewis has wonderfully stated that :

“[E]very time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state of the other.”

But then Lewis was a very strong Christian, and the one advantage that Christian metaphysics has over karma-based metaphysics is that the judgment, while it is to happen, it hasn’t happened yet. Karma is different. The theory of karma is about it happening, will happen but also has already happened. This is a separation from the idea that we are the sum of our actions and our actions are the sum of us, although there is no logical or metaphysical separation between the two points.

The reason that this has been on my mind recently is I really don’t feel comfortable with the concept. There have been two people that I vaguely knew a long time ago that have briefly reappeared in my life in bizarre circumstances that have forced me to ponder the existential of who we are and how. Who I am and why.

Firstly, there is this person that I used to know and never had much time for; I always thought she was a total brat and skeeze basically. I found out recently that life has basically provided for her equal to what it should, or to put it more simply, she got hers. One of the things that has happened to her is she has a disabled child and my first thoughts were of the horrible view that you reap what you sow, or, instant karma’s going to get you, but do we all shine on?

Imagine my disgust in my otherwise sunny disposition that I thought, even for the briefest moment, that her having a handicapped child was in some way punishment for actions. What does that say about the child?

More importantly, what does it say about me? But isn’t that what we think of when we say “they’ll get theirs”? Isn’t that exactly what we wish for them; a life of servitude and restricted abilities brought on seemingly by fate itself; by an object that, no matter how many times she disgraces herself and those around her, she will never be able to break those bonds. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying the children with special needs are bad, but they are for her. The one thing that she has always run away from is accountability, and they’ll bring it in spades.

The second person that has me pondering this thought is a guy I barely knew, but used to work with many years ago. He is a druggy sinchelectual who you hope is a nice guy, because he doesn’t have much else going for him. You know the type don’t you? Passed over by friends and family, has a girlfriend and the mother of his child who treats him like crap and screws anyone and everyone she wants while he’s at home with the bub, amazingly unaware. I always quite arrogantly regarded him as someone that the modern tertiary education system has failed by not kicking out. He would make a decent bus driver or council worker, but he simply isn’t anywhere near smart enough to be in the professional arena. But the strangest thing happened: after not knowing him for about five years, he’s turned a little nasty. I guess that it was bound to happen.

I’m a big believer in the idea that a relationship of any kind, but in particular a work or business one can reach a point where there is no future between the parties. They hate each other, they mock each other and there is no use in reconciliation or compromise and there is only one thing left to do: Win...Win dirty if you can, but win...rub your opponent’s nose through so much horsepoop that you will never look back in anger or pity or anything. And they will learn from the experience too. They will learn that they are vulnerable, which is the starting point of all morality and character. I don’t believe that anyone will get to the end of their life and say “mmm the one thing I regret is going too far to ridicule that chump from XYZ”. Maybe we may.

If I will, it may well be about what I did to this guy’s bosses, my former supervisors. I may tell you about that at some stage in the future, but for now it’s a digression. Let’s just say they treated me poorly, they treated me like a dog, which gave me the perfect excuse to act like a jackal.

I guess it’s a long story, but the short of it is that I was happy to walk away from a life I didn’t want and make a mockery of all who made me not want that life. Then years and years later, this guy contacts me and starts trolling comments about me, most of which I couldn’t really understand. I think he was probably stoned when he was writing them. His aggression and attempt to rehash an old dispute was an attempt to set things straight in his eyes, but in reality, it did the opposite: it just proved that I was right to leave and that after all these years, they are still bamboozled by it all, putting me up on a pedestal to be contrasted or compared with, which is a worry.

Here’s the point though: he still works at the same place, filled with most of the same people, who have not progressed him at all even though they all seem to have progressed in their way. He is being used by them as a junior and lesser worker than he should. However, the lot in life that he has obtained there, for my mind at least, is greatly beyond his abilities. So there is this apparent contradiction. They are using him, but at the same time, he is getting more out of his life than he ever would be able to if they were not using him.

He is divorced from his actions by luck and ignorance, and they are divorced from their actions by some claim that they may be actually helping him up. So then is he the sum of his actions? Are the people using him accountable for doing a good thing or a bad thing? It becomes troublesome and one is tempted to just regard this as not a moral issue at all, it is amoral, it just is, it is not right or wrong.

There’s no wrong or right; no more or less right or wrong. So what is left? I wonder if so much of our understanding of the metaphysics of morality comes from a belie that there is right and there is wrong. But is this the case? How many of our actions do not have a right answer or a wrong answer?

Have you ever been on a crowded bus when a pregnant lady gets on? You get up and offer your seat don’t you dear reader (I know you do). What about a handicapped or very old person gets on? Maybe you would ask , maybe you would just stand up and offer it to them. But what about an older person who is not overtly incapable in any physical way? Offering them a seat can, and has in the past with me, been a type of insult. “you’re old and need special attention cause you are not fully capable, sit down before you die” Have you ever seen a gaggle of older ladies on a bus concern themselves as a young and fit mother with a pram enters. Should they give up the elderly, handicapped and pram seats? Does a pram beat age? Does rock beat paper?

I was driving along a freeway some time back when a car beside me and to my right put his indicator on. I slowed down a little to let him into the lane ahead of me. I wasn’t in a rush and certainly don’t drive in a proud or silly way. At least I don’t think I do. He gives me a slight wave, which I can’t help but judge as being too casual. I was a great deal nicer than this half-hearted wave from him would have you believe. I pondered what an appropriate wave would have been and can’t come up with an answer. An over-the-top wave would have been treated as mocking or sceptically, an underwhelmed wave would have been considered (as it was) as showing a clear lack of understanding of how nice I am. I don’t really know if there is an appropriate wave.

Then about two minutes later, the same thing happens to the car that I let in: a car to his right and slightly ahead puts her indicator on. What does he do? He speeds up.

I couldn’t believe it. The inhumanity of it, is he doing the wrong thing? Technically he is not breaking the law, but he is being totally rude. It occurs to be that I am judging him by a standard that I live up to (niceness), which he has recently and directly profited from, but he never consented to this standard, so who am I to judge him according to my own standards?

The one thing that unites us all as humans is that we all believe we are above average drivers.

This post’s lame Joke

A man was driving to work when his wife called.

“Be careful today sweetie, I just heard there was an idiot driving the wrong way up the freeway.” his wife says.

“One idiot,” replies the man, “there are hundreds of them.”

This post’s inappropriate over share:

One of the main things they never tell you in parenting brochures, fathering brochures in particular is how to deal with kids needing something in that time just before you normally get up, when you’re already up. I find myself unable to hide or do anything at that time due to the nature of the male body at that time of the morning. This is partly due to a change in things lately as I’ve discovered that apparently having sex with a full bladder is really bad for men which was usually the solution to this problem. I guess I may have to start getting up a little earlier, or later, whichever way you look at it.

On Parenting, Moral development and Groundhogs

2013-02-04T13:59:00.000-08:00

“It’s always February 2^nd, and there’s nothing I can do about it”

I re-watched one of my favourite movies of all time, Groundhog Day, on Saturday, which is befitting given that Saturday was February 2^nd. I remember watching that movie in a tute/lecture about Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return. Actually, it was a bit of a bludge for that one lesson, but the point was the same: how is it we gain truth? Do we study facts and concepts and learn stuff, or do we create ourselves as a better so that the truth, when it feels right, will consider us worthy of our knowledge of it? Is truth found in fact or beauty?

I love the progression of Bill Murray’s character, Phil Connors through the movie. When he first realises what is happening, he seeks to abuse the situation, firstly lying to get some from Nancy, then robbing a bank, then trying and failing to get with Andy McDowell’s character, Rita. By the way, I really am not sure that Andy McDowell cuts it as that role...I mean, she is just too much of a poor man’s Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. Anyway, I digress, he is at first vane and arrogant, picking up on little atoms of knowledge that are considerably more knowable to him given his reliving of the same day. Then he starts failing miserably, his arrogance is destroyed by a lack of being able to control and manipulate a situation with Rita. Despair sets in after a brief delusion of tolerance of the situation.

So what happens to make him able to surpass the person he was at the beginning of the film? Acceptance. At first, it was just a partial acceptance, but it’s acceptance nonetheless. He realises that he cannot save an old man from dying, no matter how much it is ‘his day’ but he accepts that. He accepts his place in the scheme of things, at first quite mildly, but then this acceptance grows. He then seeks to create himself as a better person, by learning the piano, by learning to ice-sculpt and by helping others out who are known to him to be in need due to him reliving the same day. And then it happens, he has transgressed himself and surpassed his existence by a step or two. He has embraced the concept of happiness as an end in and of itself.

Aristotle said “There is no way to happiness, happiness is the way.” Eudemon. He also thought that a virtue is something that exists at a half way point between two vices. The Buddhists have similar thoughts on both although they have a concept that a virtue is the opposite of two vices. Hating something can be the same as loving it. You are repelling the impersonal in something and holding onto the inner, or at least the perception of the inner.The opposite of love isn’t hate, it's indifference. Hatred is holding onto the unpleasant in something and dismissing the pleasant. Greed is a further opposite of hatred; it is collecting the pleasant and repelling the unpleasant. Finally indifference is the opposite of greed, which completes the spiral.

Many years ago I was completely into the concept of writing a way of morality that is based on this relationalism between virtues and vices: I may still well do this one day. I was trying to create an analytical understanding of how all this happens, mapping out virtues and vices into a broader family tree. I had this thought that there were three levels: the knowable, the perceivable and the unknowable, uber vices, of which I thought everything could be related back to on some linear plane (similar to Tractus philosophy in language). The problem was I couldn't really get myself three or four uber-vices that worked well. I played around with integrity, tolerance, temperance and a few others, but wasn't overly happy. Then one day I was watching a Russell Crowe movie and just before Crowe road off into battle he turned to his long time friend and, in a pretty gay gesture, said "Strength and honour". Bugger, that was brilliant and now I couldn't use it.

The reason I am pondering these thoughts lately is that I have been really at war with my kids lately over getting them to be better people. Nothing out of the ordinary struggle of a parent and I have changed tactics lately and have had a lot more success. But the thought occurs to me, can you tell someone, instruct them, on how to be a moral person? Or is the role of a parent, or of a mentor to maintain the particular situation and place long enough for the person to walk through the necessary journeys through self-involvement, arrogance, deceit and despair etc so that they come to the same conclusion you did?

Lawrence Kohlberg had a similar type of thing: he thought that there were six stages of moral development that one goes through: obedience; self-interest; conformity; law and order; human rights and universal human ethics. He asked people to justify a response to a particular moral dilemma, the Heinz dilemma:

Do you think that:

Heinz should not steal the medicine because he would consequently be put in prison, which would mean he is a bad person.
Heinz should steal the medicine because it is only worth $200, not how much the druggist wanted for it. Heinz had even offered to pay for it and was not stealing anything else.
Heinz should steal the medicine because he will be much happier if he saves his wife, even if he will have to serve a prison sentence.
Heinz should not steal the medicine because prison is an awful place, and he would probably experience anguish over a jail cell more than his wife's death.
Heinz should steal the medicine because his wife expects it; he wants to be a good husband.
Heinz should not steal the drug because stealing is bad and he is not a criminal;
he tried to do everything he could without breaking the law, you cannot blame him.
Heinz should not steal the medicine because the law prohibits stealing, making it illegal.
Heinz should steal the drug for his wife but also take the prescribed punishment for the crime as well as paying the druggist what he is owed. Criminals cannot just run around without regard for the law; actions have consequences.
Heinz should steal the medicine because everyone has a right to choose life, regardless of the law.
Heinz should not steal the medicine because the scientist has a right to compensation. Even if his wife is sick, it does not make his actions right.
Heinz should steal the medicine, because saving a human life is a more fundamental value than the property rights of another person.
Heinz should not steal the medicine, because others may need the medicine just as badly, and their lives are equally significant.

My younger son has just started school this last week and he is not coping with it very well. Things will improve, but it really amazed me that his teachers didn’t immediately warm to him. They even thought he has listening and defiance issues. You have to know that he is the dreamer of the family (well, apart from yours truly). The others are very methodical, very clever in their own avenues, but he is the dreamer. He is the only one to have had an imaginary friend, who still appears every once in a while to get more lollies or treats. He is the only one who decided to come up with his own name for our new puppy Gus (Spartacus), who he calls Superdog. One really hot day when I asked the kids to turn off the tap after I had finished watering, turning it into a game to spray them and cool them down, he appeared out of nowhere with an umbrella. He’s a step or two ahead and quite a few steps to the side at any given time, kind of like me I arrogantly say to myself.

"Gus" or "Superdog"

So the school teachers mistook this as a defiance and listening problem. I am sure that he will have them eating out of his hands in no time, but it was such a start for me. I have never had anything but praise about my kids from school teachers. So he’s in his own world and doesn’t listen to you when you’re saying boring crap? We should all be so lucky as to have that luxury. We should not discourage people from being like that, we should champion them for their ability to resist the boring monotony that modern life reflects onto us too often.

And what if my son loses his individuality to the inflexibility of most people to be able to encourage and foster this type of life? What will that do for his moral development later on in life? Will he have to be retaught all these things that he has unlearned?

This Post’s Lame Joke.

Q: How many Analytical Philosophers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: 5

This Post’s Inappropriate over share

The problem with inappropriate over shares is that it is really difficult to come up with ones that indicate a lacking in me. As George Orwell stated, auto-biographies are only to be believed when they reveal something unpleasant and unlikeable about a character. But look at this, I’m trying to make a point here and I’m quoting Orwell for Pete’s sake. I don’t think I am very good at this. The point is, the majority of these have in the past, been too edgy and biased to do what they were supposed to. I guess I could say that I once well...no, come to think of it, I can’t say that now can I?

[1] Kohlberg, Lawrence (1981). Essays on Moral Development, Vol. I: The Philosophy of Moral Development. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row.

On Star Wars, ANZACs, Superman and a little bit of Jung

2013-01-21T21:21:00.001-08:00

The recent news that there is going to be another Star Wars trilogy made has brought out all the usual sinchellectual nonsense about Star Wars the original movie being a dud story with bad acting saved by a vague use of technology and other heathen misunderstood rants. However, reading one of them the other day has me thinking about what it is about Star Wars that made it such an iconic film and such a huge step forward in the sci-fi genre. Battles in space; mythical beings that could use clairvoyance and telekinesis, light sabres and the rest of it were not overly new concepts. Even Darth Vader’s look and sound can be traced back through history to see an earlier incarnation of them in some way, such as the 1938 films The Fighting Devil Dogs:-

Many of the ideas are taken right out of Flash Gordon and many common fairy tales such as the Frog Princess and other collective subconscious ideas of our society. I know that you are probably wondering if I’ve changed my mind from last week’s rant that Genius can take what talent borrows, but this is not what I am asking. What I am asking is - what is it about the original trilogy, and even more so, the original film that was such a step forward?

Reality.

For my understanding, Star Wars was the first sci-fi movie that was totally accepted by our culture where the characters were actual people and the story was quite believable. Sci-fi stories had, up that point, been plagued by obscure and awkward narratives and characters that one couldn’t really relate to. Speculative fiction as a genre has a long history of being outside of any form of reality. From modern day vampires that sparkle right back to the beginning of it all, stories of vampires, ghosts and the like have a long history of being told “A long, long time ago, In a galaxy far, far away.” Their authors seem to be as confused by the scene as one would expect reading Lord Byron’s vampires with food poisoning,

However, Star Wars was not. Star Wars was a story with scenes and characters that could have taken place in the current era, in the current day. Why? Because Luke Skywalker wasn’t anything more than a farm-boy, as were the ANZACs and many other successful military people history has recorded, then morphed into something else. Luke Skywalker, as he was introduced by his best friend toward the end of the original movie, was “...the best bush pilot in the outer rims.” He is this normal guy, working on a farm for his uncle and aunt, wanting to get away from it all and then a few things happen and boom, there he is blowing up the Death Star and sticking it to the man. That could be you in a month or two couldn’t it? You didn’t come from Krypton, but you are an ordinary dude, aren’t you?

Looking back through history, Lord Byron started Bram Stocker on a rant about a certain villain, Dracula. Interestingly, in the original book, there is no understanding given as to why Dracula is the way he is, how he became it or why. The characters seem lifeless and infallible. Scan forward to the1992 retelling of the story and there is a huge recounting of a noble and strong lord being tricked by his enemies, lost his wife to suicide and cursed his God for His lack of passion.

In HG Well’s The War of the Worlds, the beings are not really known to us, nor are the heroes because there really weren’t any. No one won that war, the Martians lost due to a strange incompatibility that existed. Stories from Superman and Spiderman and all these other speculative fiction franchises never really presented a character that we could like. Did anyone actually want to be Superman? I remember wanting to be able to fly like he could, to be as strong as he was and, especially as I grew older, wanted that whole vision type thing. But did I want to BE him? No...not really...he was kind of a dick. At the very least, he wasn’t really a person. He wasn’t believable as a character. Neither was Louis Lane, who apparently was a good reporter that at the same time couldn’t see through the unbelievably complicated Clark Kent disguise. Damn those glasses, who could ever have penetrated that disguise? Then, from my experience, the Louis Lanes of the world don’t really see glasses or the eyes behind them, they are looking elsewhere.

But there is this supernatural nature behind all these stories that glosses over the main plot-development story. Did Superman deserve to be Superman? He just was, there was no why, when or how. But the simplicity of this type of story breeds a lack of relatability to the characters and can be un-humanised easily to the point of absurdity. Did the whole plot scene just fall on its own sword with a little bit of prodding around the incompatibility of a person from Krypton to live on Earth and dig Earth chicks? How could Superman live a normal life even if he wanted to? A modern relationship with Louis or any woman would have killed him. He couldn’t possibly ever have gotten any, because in order for them to have sex, he would have to wear condoms made out of kryptonite, given that that would be the only substance capable of stopping the little guys. Or what is the alternative? Unprotected sex? Surely that would leave many pissed off little Superboys flying around and growing up with single mums that could not have plagued our collective imagination in those times, or even now for that matter. Then what happens when Superman gets a super-STD? The alternative, we are lead to believe, is that he was abstinent. Yeah right....he’s looking buff as, all the time, even when deliberately nerdifying himself as Kent, he still gets serious lady cred, he can fly around and see things (see through things) and he’s not after any? Yeah right.

Fast forward to Star Trek, where there is a lot more humanity involved in the scene. While there is this ever present God-like Spock, it is usually the very human Kirk who is the hero. While Kirk does have a military background and persona, and takes on a persona more akin to the six million dollar man or the like, he is a character with flaws and phobias that we can relate to. We are able to know him.

But Luke Skywalker...who didn’t want to be him? Or Han and Leia for that matter? They were real people. And that is what makes a good story – you have to be able to relate to it in some way, the characters can’t be super-awesome all the time. They have to be fallible. It is in their ability to fail that makes them able to succeed. Think about Superman for long enough and his seemingly inability to fail and you start to wonder whether cheering for Lex Luther would be more to our liking. Lex was the underdog: cunning, rich, ruthless and the like, but he was always biting off more than he could chew. It was only when Superman became vulnerable due to criminals from his planet who matched his power and then some that he became kind of interesting.

So who would we rather be, Luke Skywalker or Superman? Luke or Vader? We associate with Luke because we like that he is fallible and so are we, so we crave him as a hero. Vader is cold and seemingly all-powerful while being beyond ruthless (at least in the first two movies). Luke could have been an ANZAC, he would have fitted right in. But then there is the obvious problem: ANZACs haven’t always been like that. While Luke would have fitted in with our version of ANZAC today, he would not have fitted in with the historical ANZACs, but Vader would have been right at home.

I guess there is the old question as to what the purpose of war is. Is the main feature of a good warrior that he dies or at least risks his neck for Queen and Country? Or is it that he kills for Queen and Country or just because that’s who he is, that’s what he does. As Bono so wonderfully puts it “... What's the glory of taking a man from his bed and gunning him down in front of his wife and his children?” Yet isn’t this what Luke Skywalker does at the end of the first movie? A battleship that big would have to have thousands of living quarters for family of crew. Schools, children’s clinics, health clinics, socio-legal research centres of excellence and do we care? No, they’re all blown up cause the good guys have to win.

But you don’t have to go back too far in history where apparently there is a different story to be told. The historical ANZACs were ruthless killers whose bloodlust was not only marked, but kind of feared by the British at the time. They certainly wouldn’t have preferred having a yarn and a game of cricket with the enemy, this is a modern invention . The ANZACs were successful because they were great at killing people. The British War Correspondent, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett wrote, in the Argus in May, 1915 that

“In less than a quarter of an hour the Turks were out of their second position either bayoneted of fleeing. But then the Australians, whose blood was up, instead of entrenching, rushed northwards and eastwards, searching for fresh enemies to bayonet...These raw colonial troops in these desperate hours proved worthy to fight side by side with the heroes of Mons, the Aisne, Ypres and Neuve Chapelle. Early in the morning of April 26 the Turks repeatedly tried to drive the colonials from their position. The colonials made local Counter-attacks, and drove of the enemy at the point of the bayonet, which the Turks would never face” [1]

So in 1915, the ANZACs would have appeared more like storm troopers really: ruthless and unfeeling. Years ago, that made them successful, now it would make them the bad guys. So what happened? Well, history was revised and rewritten. Bill Gammage’s 1974 study The Broken Years, Patsy Adam-Smith’s 1978 The Anzacs and the movie Gallipoli replaced the true nature of the First World War with a clean and innocent young group of men who didn’t know what they were getting themselves into[2] and didn’t shirk from their responsibilities to die for King and Country (as opposed to kill for King and Country).

Peter Costello, the then Deputy Prime Minister in 2003 stated that “There are problems in the world today just as there were in 1915. You cant turn your back on them...and young Australians, even today, are serving in the Middle East because they want to make a difference...And you think back how their grandfather and great grandfathers would have felt the same in 1915.” [3]

I guess Kim Beazley makes a decent point when he thought that without the modern myth of the ANZAC, no Australian government would be able to justify sending troops to war[4]. But also think of the expense of it all. While an army is perhaps necessary for peace in historical terms, have we not grown beyond that nowdays? Thomas Hobbes theorised that peace is not the absence of war, it is the absence of the threat of war. Surely in today’s Australia, the army represents the biggest threat to that peace rather than the protector of it.

So there goes my theory about Star Wars, and it’s a little lame to say that it was the first movie that presented the modern version of the warrior hero, although notice the tight timeline between these few points in the late 1970s.

Allow me to have another swing at it. Jung made a distinction between sagas, fairy tales, myths and legends. In particular focus on a fairy tale, he made observations about them and the characters within them. The hero never expresses emotion, he is lifeless; he kills the bad guy because he is the good guy; the bad guy generally does what he does out of compulsion or the like, certainly not out of self-interest or controlled rationalism. Luke Skywalker goes from being a normal person in the first movie, to the ultimate fairy tale hero in the last movie, right up until just before the end. He kills Jabba the Huttt because he wants his friends back. He doesn’t show any emotion about it. “You can either profit by this, or be destroyed” he tells Jabba, not threatening or skiting, just telling it the way he sees it. He is slightly conflicted meeting Yoda again, but then kills the bad guy (well, cuts off his hand and overpowers him). He then stops being the fairy tale hero: he throws down his sword. I mean, how cool is that? He enables his father to redeem himself. That’s even better than killing all the bad guys and saving the girl, he’s not only a good guy, he’s a good guy we can again relate to.

Or maybe it’s just the cool swords we all wish we have.

This post’s lame joke : You might be a bogan Jedi if

You ever uttered the phrase, "May the force be with yuz"
You have ever used your light saber to open a box of goon.
At least one wing of your X-wing is primer colored.
You have ever had a B-wing up on blocks in your yard.
Wookies are offended by your B.O.
You have ever used the force to get yourself another beer so you wouldn't have to wait for a commercial.
You have ever had your R-2 unit use its self-defense electro-shock thingy to get the barbecue grill to light.
You have a ‘love it or leave it’ Aussie flag painted on your flight helmet.
You kinda think that Jabba the Hutt had a pretty good handle on how to treat his women.
The REAL reason you got into a fight in the cantina was because you ordered Fosters Light...and they didn't have it.
You knew Princess Leia was your sister all along.

This post’s inappropriate over share:

There was this one time, when I was about 17 that

[REST OF POST REMOVED BY ADMINISTRATOR]

[1] See Lake and Reynolds What’s Wrong with ANZAC? The militarization of Australian History.

[2] ibid

[3] ibid

[4] ibid

Genius takes what talent borrows

2013-01-14T22:19:00.003-08:00

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a genius? Have you ever wondered what it actually means to be a genius? What rights does it give you? Like most people, I decided that I was going to be a genius long before I decided what I was going to be a genius about. I am still pondering on exactly what, although I have the basics worked out. I have met many people who claim to have genius-like talents: uber-intellegence; photographic memory; above and beyond a normal ability to comprehend and maintain access to trivial facts: inappropriate body odour and other things, but their claims have all crumbled when put to a simple test on the subject matter.

I’ve been thinking about this for a few reasons lately. Firstly, I have seen a few movies and read a few books lately that deal with the understanding that genius is something more than humanity, or something outside of it. It has me wondering why our culture is filled with stories that externalises genius as a concept. Genius seems to be retold as an externality to humanity. It is the work of God, Satan or some other factor. I found myself re-watching the classic “Crossroads” the other night. There are two competing versions of genius in that story.

Firstly, Robert Johnson’s abilities as a musician, like that of Blind-Dog Fulton, when briefly talked about, were the work of a deal with the devil. Albeit it wasn’t a spell or talent that was given, they were given lessons from the devil, but nonetheless, it was super-human. The obvious points that tend to get a bit lost in all this is that the music for the movie was provided by the very talented and very human Steve Vai and Ry Cooder who both learnt how to play guitar by skill and perseverance. But are they geniuses? Can they take from wherever they want? Ry Cooder is particularly interesting here as his work in ethnomusicology has been scorned for doing just that – taking from a culture that he has no claim to. Secondly, the Blues, as a concept of music does not stand out in the scheme of things. It can be placed on a continuum between the Romantics, the Jazz era and the modern Rock era. While it is outstanding music, it fits in perfectly in a spectrum of human history and artistic development. No external forces were needed for it.

Interestingly, in ‘Crossroads’ it is in Eugene’s return to classical music, a very Mozart inspired song by Steve Vai - “Eugene’s Trick Bag” that defeats Jack Butler. This is interesting because Mozart is another case in point about a man who history tends to regard as not possessing or actually having the talent that he was credited with. He was possessed by the angels or the like, and his talent was devoid of, and removed from that bratty young man who apparently died penniless from syphilis in his thirties.

The second feature is that the film’s plot sticks closely to the main character wanting to find a supposedly lost and unheard-of, 30^th song of Robert Johnson’s, so that the main character could blast his way into the blues scene by taking something that was not his and combining it with his genius to get showered in glory. What if he had done this? The character has a clear musical genius – young and capable of out-playing the devil, or so it would seem. Could a genius take an unknown blues song and, using outstanding musical skill (to the point of genius) turn it into a new work of art that he alone gets credit for?

The more savvy of our lot here will be thinking ‘mmm...musicians who take obscure old blues tunes and, through their genius, turn them into brilliant works of art...sounds like you’re talking about Led Zeppelin, not Crossroads’. And you’re right I am.

There seems to have been a resurgence in tall poppy bashing about Led Zeppelin lately. And they did take a fair bit, but the question is, were they entitled to? This is probably more than one question and more than one depth of appropriate appropriation. Songs like “Black Mountain Side” were seemingly just taken and not improved upon at all from the original save for the addition of drums; at one end of the spectrum. Songs like Stairway and How Many More Times, where you really need to creatively listen to the supposed ‘original’ to hear any decent similarity at the other end of the spectrum.

Perhaps a response to the former end of the spectrum, Black Mountain Side - would be ‘who cares’ – that’s not a very ledded, Led Zep song, not like Dazed and Confused. But have a listen to what people claim is the original of that; the, Jake Holmes’s version. It sounds like that stoner brother of the boring girl you went too far with when you were a teenager, doesn’t it? He still scares you doesn’t he? And you still don’t know if he ever knew and was just playing with your mind, or whether he was that annoying and grumpy.

The baseline, the melody, the drums, the lead guitar and almost all of the words (except for those three little words of the title) were completely changed to create one of the greatest rock songs of all time, the Led Zeppelin version. But should it have still been credited? Should Jake Holmes have gotten some dosh for his song? What about old blues songs like ‘You Shook Me’ or “The Hunter” that were recorded by an artist or two, but were traditional blues songs; why should Led Zep have credited them when that meant giving them money for something they themselves took from somewhere else. Surely all art stands on the shoulders of the giants who came before.

Shakespeare is another case in point. There is yet another movie which I fell asleep in this week, ‘Anonymous’ which presented another weird take on why Shakespeare wasn’t actually responsible for Shakespearean plays and verse. At least it’s not Francis Bacon credited in this dog of a film, but it presents a reason as to why Shakespeare is so far removed from normal, that genius itself is so far removed from normal: possession and insanity of some kind. The author (who is not Shakespeare, himself is possessed and keeps writing “merely because it is the only way the voices stop” or something like that (I am sorry for the inaccuracy, but I fell asleep for half the movie, and was half asleep for the rest). So again, Shakespeare the person is divorced from Shakespeare the genius due to the genius coming from either insanity or supernatural voices/beings.

But what is the reason? Well, maybe it gives us some comfort knowing that genius is beyond our reach and beyond our control. We then don’t have to compete with it or excuse our lack of genius. If Shakespeare the genius is a spirit, a ghost or possessed man of some kind, I can feel at ease not being as good of a writer.

Hell, I can even not put a full stop at the end of this sentence

Maybe I can even put an emoticon in here, J ...lol

But returning to the first point; can a genius take from society without acknowledgement? Can a band like Les Zeppelin simply take old blues songs and give them a new look and claim to be their authors? The answer I guess would have to be yes, but that depends on how much the appropriating artist has given to the song and how cool the artist is. I think that this is a big consideration – how cool is the appropriating artists in comparison to the artist whose work has been appropriated and other relative standing between the two points of view. If Vanilla Ice were cooler than David Bowie (I know, it’s hard to image that, for two reasons; firstly, it’s freaken Bowie we’re talking about here, and secondly, it’s freaken Vanilla Ice we’re talking about here). But what about the Culture Club and the Violent Femmes (albeit the Femmes did credit their work)? They were so much cooler, but is it removed enough? What about Jeff Buckley’s version of Hallelujah; is it removed enough from the original Leonard Cohen to be considered a work of art in and of itself? On the question of coolness and talent, this is probably an unfair question given Buckley is one of the most talented singers ever, whereas Cohen sounds like Darth Vader would the morning after he’d been to a AC/DC concert.

On top of all this, I have been reading some more of one of my favourite authors, George Orwell’s Decline of the English Murder. And yes, I know, I know, I am that tragically daggy (well, actually I’m not that person, because I actually do read his stuff and don’t go around telling everyone that I do, and to prove it, for those who doubt, I think Nineteen Eighty Four was one of the worst books he ever wrote). But he had a decent swing at Salvador Dali on this point (as well as calling him a fraud and a coward). Dali, in the eyes of Orwell, could be admired as an artist and spat upon as a man. Further, that it is not the case that Dali could say or do anything at all, so long as it was said artistically. For Orwell, we could still openly spit on the man while enjoying his work. I am not so sure that this is a correct point, but Orwell makes a good point.

“[T]he first thing we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet, even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.’ Unless one can say that, one is shrinking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being,”[1]

Apart from the general freedom of the artist, surely there has to be a line, a point in which someone has created a completely new piece of art from a vague appropriation, but that should not mean crediting the appropriated any more than just recognising them in the continuum of human progression in the arts.

Take a listen to John Coltrane playing “My Favourite Things” At the start, the melody is recognisably appropriated from ‘The Sound of Music’ and Rogers and Hammerstein ought to be credited. The rhythm, phrasing, orchestration, the very feel of the song is completely removed though. However, by the time the song gets to the end, there is no similarity to the original work of art. Somewhere along the way, it became a new composition...but where and exactly what?

So is it mere recognisability? Does Patti Smith owe anything to Van Morrison apart from a tongue in cheek ‘that’s how it’s done Chad’ type comment for her version of the old Van Morrison tune? Or is it in the concept as an atom? Does Aerosmith owe a debt to the Yardbirds for their concept “if you can judge a wise man by the colour of his skin, then mister you’re a better man than I’? Do they owe a debt to the Kinks for their concept Lola/Dude looks like a lady?

Or is it more appropriate to say that we should stop externalising greatness. We should be thankful that there is so much talent and creativity and beauty in our world, and stop cutting down tall poppies.

This post’s lame joke: Why do violin players put a handkerchief on their shoulder before they start playing?

Because a Violin doesn’t have a spit valve on it.

This post’s inappropriate over share: When I am editing my writing lately, and I’ve done this for a while, I have this kooky need to not delete everything from a word that I am changing. It’s as though changing all the letters of a word will mean bad writing, bad consequences or something and the more of the original word that I keep, the better the writing will be.... and by the way, I know you’re thinking “and this post is what you’ve come up with...dude”.

[1] Benefit of Clergy p26-7 in The Decline of the English Murder and other Collected Essays.

In my time of dying, I want nobody to mourn...

2012-12-26T22:03:00.001-08:00

What is it about some deaths, disappearances and murders that capture our attention so much? As this year draws to a close, one thing that is fascinating is the events that catch our attention, or at least the media’s attention more so than others. Politics, Economics and self-interested rambling of the media aside, there doesn’t seem to be anything more fascinating that a decent murder, especially one that is wrapped in mystery and preceded by debauchery.[1] While in any given year, there are around 1.2 reported murders per hundred thousand people in Australia, how many murders are not reported? More to the question is: can we, as a populace, let alone those fuzzy control freaks that make up the media and political circles, deal with the seemingly severe lack of control that we have over our lives?

What is it about looking from a distance at a family who has lost a loved one through violence? We rubber neck through the facts and try to find a reason as to why this wouldn’t happen in our house, yet we are fascinated by it. We can’t seem to stop at just sinchelectually deconstructing the facts and motives on the players. We go beyond that, to lay blame on the victim, or worse, to excuse them. We look at the Jill Meaghers and the Baden-Clay families around us and moralise and philosophize as to why they are different to us. Why we would never be a victim or be guilty of a crime like that. Crime dramas still plague television and movies more so than most other genres, and the news of someone being killed, being raped and/or going missing still dominates over other stories. I wonder whether the main reason for this is that there is no voice of the victim in a homicide related crime; so we can speak for them, or at least, speak about them without fear of them telling us we’re wrong. There is also an asymmetry of ability to respond available from the culprit. Take for instance, the inability of 2day FM’s Mel Greig and Michael Christian to be able to say something like “The idea that someone would top themselves over a dumb prank is just plain bullshit [and] If you’re dumb enough to fall for a prank like that, you at least deserve to be fired, and so does your boss, who ought to have known better than to release such info.” However, if that were said, there would be further outrage from people who seek to “speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongue.”

Looking into it a little more, there tends to be a polarisation of these interest stories. We are fascinated by two types of death stories. Firstly, and mainly, the ones that involve a respectable member of society, both of the victim and the accused, that is able and willing to plan out an elaborate series of events that hide the motivations and premeditations of the scene and people. They then seemingly slip up somehow on the most bizarre or uncommon occurrence that begins to unravel their disguise; as if God herself took a moment to intervene. We wonder at the marvels of the Inspector Grishams of the world who always get to the bottom of things, regardless of how carefully planned the murder was. We hide every experience we have ever had with real life police, who generally have trouble finding their way to McDonalds without tasering themselves in the pills, let alone have any ability to solve a crime.

The second type is the polar opposite. The victim may be one of us, but the accused is not from our realm. The accused is without morals, without education and without social standing. He is a gutter dweller that has slightly graced our realm, bringing the horror of Dionysian dualism to our newspapers, radios and television screens to mock our sense of control. The police here are what we want them to be, stupid Neanderthals that bash up the clearly guilty persons, for they are not guilty of an action, they are guilty of simply being who they are. They are murderers, rapists and paedophiles. It is not in their actions that these types are guilty, it is in their very existence that they are guilty and as such, they have no rights, no reason to seek redress from brutality toward them.

When crimes are reported, the ones that are reported generally do not match the average of that crime. This year, the violent deaths that have captured our attention are only a few: Alison Baden-Clay; Jill Meagher; Azaria Chamberlain. The common theme of murder doesn’t seem to get reported, as it is, at least partially, here. The theme of the reports is about trying to lay blame somewhere. Some may say that the victim brought it on herself by the way she acted or dressed, others may lay blame at the family and friends, yet more lay blame on society at large in an attempt to hide from the very real horror that there is nothing stopping us from oblivion just as there wasn’t anything stopping the victim from meeting her end. Are we trying to lay blame or create a reason as to why it will not happen to us? Do we not have control over our own safety?

To start with the sheer numbers; the Australian Institute of Criminology reports that somewhere between 250 to 300 people are reported as being the victim of murder or manslaughter each year. This seems to have been continually decreasing over the years, and many peeps have pointed to the development of medical science to explain this trend, as it also matches with a growing number or assaults, so the theory is that people who, in past times would have died from their attack are now getting medical help and living and as such, their assailants are getting nicked for assault rather than murder or manslaughter.

But then, that is only the reported crimes. Given that the Australian Federal Police tell us that someone gets reported as missing every 15 minutes, the reported crimes may be only a tiny portion of the actual occurrences of people getting killed by someone. Notwithstanding the fact that 95% of people reported missing turn up in the first week, of the 35,000 people reported missing each year, 1,600 a year seem to stay missing. It would be a fairly decent assumption to say that a good deal of these people are buried in someone’s yard. And yet again, these are only the people reported as missing; which means they have to be missed by someone, which would probably not include the murderer, unless they were stupidly trying to create a type of explanation and alibi.

In Brisbane, the disappearance and death of a former beauty queen, mother and wife in the leafy suburbs, Allison Baden-Clay who is then found ten days later, 14 kilometres from her wealthy home captured the attention for weeks. For some reason, the media and facebook posts all showed shock about the husband being charged with her murder, despite allegations of a troubled marriage and wandering eyes and hands and despite the statistics that overwhelmingly show the family home to be by far the preferred location for violent crimes. After all this, a further twist revealed the possibility that Mrs Baden-Clay may have taken her own life. That she had high levels of an anti-depressant medication in her blood and an empty box of some Mother’s little helper in her newly leased car. This type of suicide is blanketed by ads asking if you are, or know anyone that’s a little depressed, which we’ve spoken of before.

These silly little wankers seem to blanket most of the reports about the case of the English nurse, Jacintha Saldanha who supposedly killed herself, and supposedly killed herself after allowing two DJs from Sydney access to the future Queen of England’s private nurse.

The idea that a dumb prank could be seriously held to blame for an apparent suicide is a nonsense and hides from the notion that any person or organization that holds personal information of any sort on someone must have considerably better standards in place to stop this type of thing happening - the most noticeable element about the prank itself was how ludicrous it was and they really didn’t sound very convincing.

During the prank, the DJs even commented that “Are they putting us through?...if this has worked, this is the easiest prank call we’ve ever made...your accent sucked by the way.” They sounded more like Barry Humphrys than the Queen and that was probably supposed to be the joke, that they would and should have been hung up on, as the DJs later confirmed - the idea that it worked is such a concern - if anyone, whether they be a nurse, doctor, lawyer, accountant or whoever hands over such information on what was clearly a stupid hoax to any reasonable person, they ought to be close to being shut down.

Funnily enough the boss of the relevant hospital, John Lofthouse ... ”denounced the action as foolish and regrettable.“This was a foolish prank call that we all deplore,” he said. “We take patient confidentiality extremely seriously and we are now reviewing our telephone protocols.”“

SuPERB

If you have nothing in place to stop a staff member at a hospital from revealing very personal information to a dumb prankster about the future head of state , then it’s a bit thick to say that you take confidentiality seriously guvna. The reports were then about possible criminal charges, police looking into it etc, however it apparently escaped police’s finest minds if impersonating the head of state is actually a crime...

But that’s dodging the main issue: that you can’t say that someone who kills themselves; a wife and mother of young children who takes her own life can be blamed can she? Her family and friends can’t be blamed can they? It’s much easier to look at a weird joke from two larrikins and blame them. Walk into a room with a corpse, a suicide and don’t look at the note, don’t look at the family, don’t look at the friends, don’t look at the don’t look at any of the circumstances, but then see a copy of ‘the Catcher in the Rye’ in the corner, or a painting on the wall, or a CD in the player; something that can be removed, something that should have been removed; and you can lay blame and throw it out with the rest of the crap that a life cut short collects. And you can reason that you have that control; to be able to throw out that element that doesn’t deserve to be in our realm, as it didn’t in that poor lady’s.

The (hopefully) final verdict on what happened to Azaria Chamberlain was given this year. This is the perfect case, and always has been, about our ability to create an ‘other’ out of our fellow human being. Mrs Chamberlain in particular has always been scrutinised way beyond the point of absurdity; that she didn’t act like a grieving mother should, that she was a witch or that she was one of those religious cult types, we have always repelled the notion that, in some circumstances, in most circumstances, a dingo is never very far from our door and there is little we can do about that. Instead, we hide from that fact and create an ‘other’ out of people who have been through such circumstances.

Then there was the troubling case if Jill Meagher, an ABC journalist in Melbourne disappeared after a late night party and was found dead and raped. At the time, there was so much facebook, faking about whether she was dressed appropriately, whether one of the ‘marrieds’ should act/dress/be like that; whether society could be blamed; whether it is a symptom of a sickness in society that such an event could happen to ‘one of us’. People honestly saying things that equate to laying blame on the victim. How dare she drink, enjoy herself and not cover herself up. Very strange. There is an element of naivety or throwing caution to the wind, but the element in all these types of comments is one of ‘that wouldn’t happen to me or mine because I could/can/do control the whole situation away from that happening.’ I can keep the dingo, the rapist, the murderer from my door.

Another story that didn’t overly catch the public eye, but almost did, was the tell-all tale of Major General John Cantwell (ret.). The one thing that I am talking about is his recollection of the American strategy in the first Gulf War called ‘industrialised killing’. In order to avoid trench warfare, the put bull-dozen blades on the front of tanks and buried the Iraqi soldiers alive. The theory is that this would result in considerably less allied loss of life than traditional warfare. But doesn’t it strike you as wrong? Soldiers dying in battle by being buried by sand from the waring opposite army sounds so much worse than the same soldiers being shot by the opposing army. Is it because they don’t have a chance to shoot back? Well, they never really would have against such a well organised and well funded force and they did what they were supposed to do. It’s hard to remember that point I guess. Soldiers are trained to die. The good ones are trained to avoid this, but in terms of a war, the victor is the army that inflicts a heavier casualty on their opponent than their opponent has placed on them. This is why the ANZACs, the Red Army, the Vietcong, the IRA and the like were so successful, they inflicted greater loss on their opponent relative to their own situation.

The poor Iraqi soldiers though, buried alive and probably didn’t even ever realise how. All of a sudden, these soldiers stop being the invaders of Kuwait and the bad guys and become these people, these anonymous to us people that we may identify with and object to their demise based on the idea that when someone dies, when anyone dies, there should be some sense of justice. You should be able to understand, to reason or to negotiate with the person or thing that comes along to kill you no matter how bad you have been. What a silly notion this is.

This post’s lame joke

When Seamus died at the age of 89, there was a problem, rigor mortis set in and they couldn’t close the coffin lid. The undertakers called in Seamus’ wife, Dot, to see the problem.

“Well, what do you usually do in this situation?” Dot asked.

“Well ma’am,” replied the undertaker, “We generally cut it off and re-attach it to his body...you know... around in the back.”

Dot thought the whole thing strange, but the undertakers assured her that this was quite common practice and no-one would know.

The next day, Seamus’ funeral was a beautiful affair; a solemn, yet beautiful ceremony filled with distinguish guests, family and well-wishers.

Dot was very happy with the turn-out. Looking into the open coffin of her late husband, Dot knew that he was in a better place, at peace with everything and at the same time, looking as though Seamus was still very much a part of her life; there with her, loving her. Some condensation from the humidity of the day collected around Seamus’ cheeks and then formed a droplet of water that ran down his face. Dot loving reached over to wipe it up. With a smile on her face she quietly whispered to her dearly departed husband, “See, I told you if freaken hurt.”

This post’s inappropriate over-share

I used to like a few bands that either now, or at some stage, I stopped liking because of other people. Guns and Roses were an example. For a few years, I really liked their stuff, then all of a sudden, all these dorks at school liked them and, just like that, I stopped liking them. Not only that, I actually sold off the albums that I had of theirs and turned my back on the whole thing. Years later, I got back into it a little, but never too much. But just recently I have been trying to collect some music from here, there and everywhere for car tapes and running type compilations and have remembered this really groovy cover that Avril Lavigne did of some song that used to be on an old mini-disc player, blaring out at me on my morning ride to work. I found the song, here, only to find out that it is a Metallica song...like really...Metallica...now I don’t really like it. I have thought about the idea that I can’t stand the Culture Club, but quite like the song ‘Do you really want to hurt me’, so long as it is sung by the Violent Femmes. But I guess I am just vain at heart.

[1] Then again, I am not sure that the public’s attention is ever really grabbed by something as much as the media would have us believe; the constant talk of the 24 hour news cycle seems a furphy. Listening to most media outlets, it would be more accurate to call it a 24 day news cycle, because that’s about the time most editors seem to take to realise that there is no interest left in a given story.

1:37...that’s an excellent time

2012-12-19T00:15:00.002-08:00

sorry folks, but I promised to removed this post if a statement of claim were received... it has been, and it's now 7:35 on Wednesday 29 May, 2013...it will return when this matter has been dealt with fully.