In the comic strip Pearls Before Swine, I find Rat to be the most unpleasant character so it is disturbing when I find myself similar to him in any way.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
In the comic strip Pearls Before Swine, I find Rat to be the most unpleasant character so it is disturbing when I find myself similar to him in any way.
I had been looking forward to seeing this biopic because Leonard Bernstein was a charismatic multi-talented artist, composer, conductor, and teacher who seemed to enjoy not only creating music and but also making it more accessible to regular people. The film is really a joint biopic focusing on the relationship between Bernstein (played by Bradley Cooper) and his wife actress Felicia Montealegre (played by Carey Mulligan), starting with when Bernstein is just 25 years old and catapulted into fame when he is called in at the last minute to fill in as conductor of the New York Philharmonic when the regular conductor fell ill, and was a rousing success. His career took off after that.
But I found the film to be a let down. Especially in the first, half I found it difficult to get engaged with the lives of Bernstein and Montealegre. Their acting did not seem convincing, artificial, as if they were trying too hard. I am not a high-brow viewer who usually notices such things so for it to register with me is telling. Also for some reason, the first fifty minutes of the film was in black and white, then abruptly changing to color. I later read this article tries to explain why. The article also said that the film’s aspect ratio switched from time to time, something I had not noticed. (Did I mention that I am not a high-brow viewer?) I kind of get the reasoning but found it jarring while watching it and wonder about the benefits of making artistic choices in films targeting the general public that only a few will appreciate or, if they even notice, will be baffled. Often the dialogue was unintelligible, making it frustrating. Since I was screening the film, I had the option of rewinding the film but that would have broken the continuity. The story was also disjointed, with some scenes that lasted too long and others that did not seem to serve any purpose.
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For the longest time, many police officers who abuse ordinary people during their interactions with the public have been shielded from repercussions under what is known as ‘qualified immunity‘ for their actions.
Qualified immunity is a type of legal immunity that protects a government official from lawsuits alleging that the official violated a plaintiff’s rights, only allowing suits where officials violated a “clearly established” statutory or constitutional right.
…When determining whether a right was “clearly established,” courts consider whether a hypothetical reasonable official would have known that the defendant’s conduct violated the plaintiff’s rights. Courts conducting this analysis apply the law that was in force at the time of the alleged violation, not the law in effect when the court considers the case.
…Although qualified immunity frequently appears in cases involving police officers, it also applies to most other executive branch officials. While judges, prosecutors, legislators, and some other government officials do not receive qualified immunity, most are protected by other immunity doctrines.
Remember the Y2K panic? There were fears that computers that came into widespread use in the mid-twentieth century, when the year 2000 seemed very far away, had been programmed with internal clocks that assumed that the first two digits of the year was 19. There was concern that when the year 2000 rolled around, many systems would crash because the computers might think the year had suddenly reverted to 1900 and thereby go awry. There were fears of planes crashing, power systems going down, the banking and financial sectors going haywire, and so on.
There was a lot of activity among computer professionals to take steps to solve the problem before the end of 1999. I personally did not do anything since I am not a computer professional. I also tend not to wait up on December 31 until the New Year rolls around but on that day I did decide to stay up until midnight to see what might happen. And there was … nothing. Everything was just as before.
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The group Moms for Liberty has been in the news quite a lot recently. I have said many times that when a group has words like ‘Moms’, ‘Parents’, ‘Liberty’, ‘Family’, ‘Faith’, ‘Values’, and ‘Freedom’ in its name, there is a very good chance that it is pushing a right-wing extremist agenda.
Adam Laats writes that groups like this that purport to stand for parental rights have always been around and follow a similar trajectory. They quickly rise to prominence and gain a lot of attention by seizing upon some current culture war hot button issue but that also carries the seeds of their eventual downfall. One factor is that they cannot control the message and many of the people who join the group say even more extreme things, going well beyond what the leadership thinks is politically palatable and they have to keep disavowing them. They also attract militant violent groups and other undesirables who see them as advancing their own goals and that association sinks them.
Laats tells the story of Alice Moore.
Everyone loves moms. Everyone. And that’s a problem for groups like Moms for Liberty.
The group revels in its inflated reputation as a “national powerhouse,” but its century-old playbook has always had a fatal flaw.
As the 1970s story of Alice Moore shows, white conservative mothers have always had great initial political success, but that appeal tends to spiral quickly out of their control.
Moore’s story might sound familiar. She rocketed into national prominence in 1974 by taking over her local school board, blocking books and fighting for “parents’ rights.” She ran as a nonpartisan “mother,” but in truth, she was an experienced activist for conservative causes. Long before she ran for school board, she had fought against abortion rights and against sex education in schools. She railed against public schools’ alleged progressive agenda, accusing them of “destroying our children’s patriotism, trust in God, respect for authority and confidence in their parents.”
Once on the school board of Kanawha County, West Virginia, Moore ignited a dramatic boycott of a new series of textbooks. She inflamed conservative opinion nationwide by claiming that the books trampled on parents’ rights. Moore warned that the new books would force white kids into feeling guilt and anguish about America’s racism.
Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the US Supreme Court, various states have passed draconian laws to prevent abortions, and women seeking them have gone to other states where it is legal, most recently the case of Kate Cox in Texas. As a result, the anti-abortion people are advocating for ever more bizarre measures to prevent them.
A string of Texas localities have passed controversial ordinances banning so-called “abortion trafficking” – and another city may soon join their number.
Over the last several weeks, the city of Amarillo, Texas, has become embroiled in a debate over whether to pass an ordinance to block people from using the city’s roads to transport pregnant people seeking abortions in other states. The city council will meet on Tuesday to debate the measure. It is not expected to vote.
This type of ordinance has sprung up as part of a new anti-abortion tactic to undermine people’s ability to flee states with abortion bans. Since the fall of Roe v Wade, abortion foes have scrambled to find a way to cut off what they see as “abortion trafficking,” even though many experts argue that the US constitution protects the right to interstate travel.
What next? Imprisoning all pregnant women until they give birth to make absolutely sure that they cannot get an abortion?
The anti-abortion forces are fighting an unpopular war since most people favor at least some right to abortions, that it should be allowed with certain limitations. Roe v. Wade struck a tenuous balance on abortion rights that seemed to come close to where public opinion lay,. Overturning it has resulted in some people thinking that they can have a complete ban.
Moves such as this travel ban will only serve to reinforce the idea that the anti-abortion forces are unhinged extremists.
I read the new book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by neurobiologist Robert M. Sapolsky where he outlines the biological basis for why we have no free will. I will discuss the main arguments of the book in a later post but here I want to outline what he says about an objection that believers in free will often raise, and that is that if we say that all our actions are determined by our genes, history, environment, and random factors, and that we did not freely choose to do them, then people who commit crimes should not be blamed and punished. He agrees that such people should not be blamed for what is after all outside their control and that retributive and punitive punishments, that form such a large part of our criminal justice system, have no place. But that does not mean that we simply do nothing.
He sets up his argument by recalling how things have changed so dramatically over time in the way that we respond to people with illnesses like epilepsy or schizophrenia that cause them to act in ways that are dangerous to themselves and to others. (Chapter 13, pages 300-340) In the past, it used to be thought that their actions were freely chosen ones and they were punished accordingly, often in horrendous ways. Not anymore. Now we realize that they are victims of illnesses that cause them to behave in those ways, and we have changed our response accordingly. As he says: “Once, having a seizure was steeped in the perceptions of agency, autonomy, and freely choosing to join Satan’s army. Now we effortlessly accept that none of those terms make sense. And the sky hasn’t fallen. I believe that most of us would agree that the world is a better place because sufferers of this disease are not burned at the stake.” (p. 316)
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Amazon has become a retail behemoth, driving out much of the retail competition. It did this by providing low prices for an immense array of goods and fast delivery, and with those methods managed to develop a huge customer and supplier base. The way it did that was by selling below cost and offering incentives to sellers and in the process running up huge deficits in the initial years. By those methods, it persuaded manufacturers and other retailers to sell through the site. I read about a company that sold diapers online and was doing well. Amazon tried to buy the company but when the company turned down its offer, Amazon cut the prices of its own diapers well below cost and drove the rival out of business. That kind of tactic is only possible for companies with large cash reserves or huge amounts of venture capital and other financing.
Initially, both manufacturers and consumers got a good deal. But once they all got hooked and Amazon became almost a monopoly, Amazon started squeezing them by raising prices. It is an old trick. Since manufacturers who sold through it had to guarantee that their product would not be available cheaper anywhere else, what they did was raise the price of their product everywhere outside of Amazon to be higher. Someone I know recently went looking for a part to fix his dishwasher. He found that Amazon had the lowest price but that the part at the manufacturer’s own site was a few cents more.
The Federal Trade Commission is currently suing Amazon for this and other monopoly practices.
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I recently watched this Korean film that has received a lot of praise. It tells the story of a Korean immigrant family (parents, two children, and the wife’s mother) trying to make a life for themselves in rural Arkansas and the increasing tensions between the parents as they worry about money and disagree as to whether they should stay or go back to California, and the complications caused by the arrival of the grandmother. (Youn Yuh-jung won an Academy Award for her role as the grandmother role and Steven Yeun was nominated for the role of the father.)
Here’s the trailer.
It is a curious film in terms of its narrative structure. Rather than pursuing one story arc, it is a series of vignettes about the family grappling with internal tensions, caused by different ambitions of the father and mother. The father wanted to move to this location to pursue his dream of creating a successful farm growing vegetables that are favored by Koreans, while the mother does not like the idea of leaving the California city they used to live to move to a mobile home set far away from any town, where the nearest hospital is an hour away. This is of particular concern because her young son has a congenital heart murmur that requires him to not run or otherwise exert himself.
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