HT Alastair Roberts, "I hate strong female characters".
Insert scare quotes around "strong female character" as the article is thematically a summation of comparable ideas blogged a few years ago over here. The repetition of Joss Whedon's waif-fu trope withstanding, this meme in popular entertainment does not mean we're getting strong female characters just because someone like Megan Fox asserts that her character in the Michael Bay Transformers franchise was a strong female character.
HT Phoenix Preacher, Salman Rushdie states that our age is defined too much by what we take offense at and not what we love.
Carl Trueman proposes that the cultural transformation paradigm of the new Calvinism isn't new and that's got no evidence to show it has worked. And, yes, we can all talk about Christendom and the West until the cows come home but this is not quite the same thing as revivalism as it has emerged in the continental United States.
A set of posts over at The Art of Manliness caught my eye, thanks to Alastair Roberts. He just linked to part 3. I'll link to three parts.
... experiments by Dr. Ariely and others have shown that far from being a deliberate, rational choice, dishonesty often results from psychological and environmental factors that people typically aren’t even aware of.
The greater the psychological distance between our dishonest actions and their consequences, the easier those actions become to rationalize as morally and ethically acceptable.
Or as Ariely puts it:
“Passed from person to person, dishonesty has a slow, creeping, socially erosive effect. As the ‘virus’ mutates and spreads from one person to another, a new, less ethical code of conduct develops. And although it is subtle and gradual, the final outcome can be disastrous. This is the real cost of even minor instances of cheating and the reason we need to more vigilant in our efforts to curb even small infractions.”
Chris Rosebrough over at Fighting for the Faith discusses the anatomy of religious money scams.
HT Jason Engwer of Triablogue, organized skepticism has seen better days. Turns out that on either side of the "evangelism" divide evangelists for skepticism or old time religion can end up committing identify fraud, sexually harassing people, revealing racial or ethnic bigotries and generally behaving like jerks regardless of the values they ostensibly promote, whether reason or charity. It's hard to blame secular humanists for a not-so-sneaking suspicion that organized skepticism will quickly get you the same problems we've all seen show up in organized religion.
Then again, as I've written in the past, [I]n a time such as ours it's a lot sexier to talk about how impersonal a bureaucracy is than to talk about how it helps the sick get better, how it can save the lives of people who would die without the help of institutions, or how institutions can help those going blind to see.
Episode 267: Elysium, where all the wealth is concentrated, for some reason, on a spaceship.
You can skip all the way to minute 20 before listening to the podcast. That Elysium itself doesn't seem to have any foundational economy that produces anything (production is all planet-side, it seems) makes the dystopia a little tough to take as given. I mean, class divides have been the subject of films since, oh, Fritz Lang, but in Lang's dystopian future the relationship between the two classes and, crucially, the interdependence of them, is the whole focus of the film.
In Elysium we get, well, a big build-up to the idea that though Elysium is a doomed society that expends limited resources that the best thing to do is to use all those resources to provide medical care to an already overpopulated planet rife with disease. The end, where everyone planetside can be considered a citizen, seems altruistic enough but what it accomplishes in terms of emotional beats is the little girl gets cured of leukemia, no small good there, obviously, but it remains to be seen how a system as limited and insular as Elysium will be able to remedy a whole planet of people.
There's also nothing indicating why people would keep needing to use med beds to heal themselves unless there's a condition or two the med beds can ameliorate but not completely fix. Per the pscyopath played by Sharlto Copley (who does a memorable job chewing through every scene) what if repeated reliance on med beds has had unforeseen consequences? A common trope in folklore is that those who are able to attain immortality lose morality. It could be that this could be explored a bit more directly, if that's where the director wanted to go, that Kruger has relied on med beds to fix fatal conditions to a point where he's been re-atomized enough times he isn't the self he once was. But how re-atomization actually works is never explained and simply a given. It has no flaws in terms of methodology or diagnostics. It is just assumed to work. But if the sort of fission/fusion that "reatomization" would imply has become possible by the 22nd century then, hey, why not use that technology to convert toxic waste into, I dunno, organic compounds that can be used for food? In fact why did nobody in Elysium seem to come up with this? Because the film is a strictly political parable about the here and now rather than an exploration of possibilities.
If a political parable about how the haves have medical technology you don't have and want to keep immigrants out (and one of the gaping questions, literally, is how Elysium's atmosphere is retained in the donut in space) then the putative science is immaterial. There's enough scarcity that Elysium is said by its own director of security to be doomed but there's still enough resources on the thing to ... heal everyone on the planet? Well ... that's enough links and rambling commentary for a post.
Not that I didn't find some enjoyment from the film, by the way. Copley is a fun actor to watch. If you want to know why the hippo did it you can feel free to catch the film as a matinee. ;)
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