Wednesday 29 May 2013

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



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.



Saturday 25 May 2013

On Pirates, Trolls something something and Really Bad Eggs


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

Wednesday 22 May 2013

An Apology and an Explanation



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.