Jul
30
Venting.
Filed Under personal | 3 Comments
What I have to vent about is my own fault. What is most precious is probably slipping away; what needs to be done is not being done well at all.
I can conceive of things being a lot easier. But they are a lot harder for many more people. I wish I could take that knowledge of privilege and turn it into strength, not mere guilt.
Jul
27
Addendum to “Justice’s Required Redeemer: On The Dark Knight” (spoilers)
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Elizabeth Wolcott has noted that if Joker’s knives are his use of words, then we can account for Joker’s scars. Presumably the scars came from a knife; given that he describes his father cutting him up and him cutting his wife or himself up (I’m not sure of the latter, I forget what happened), and each actor in the story has something to say ending with “let’s put a smile on that face,” it’s pretty clear there’s a teaching at stake here.
We noted earlier that justice conducted via procedure is merely people making plans, people telling one another “it’ll be ok” no matter what awful thing happens because there’s a plan.
Words and knives are the exact same thing – you can kill with words, people who make plans do so every day. The Joker’s scars come from the words/knives. The difference between him and his victims is that he survived such an attack. He became ugly seeing ugliness.
The point might be that he thinks he’s doing the people he’s killing a favor by giving them a horrible, brutal experience before their death. He’s showing that some scars aren’t worth surviving, quite literally. Again, you can contrast with the battered, bruised Batman out of uniform we always see. You can also contrast their relation to money, too. Then you can see yet again why Joker’s point in the holding cell to Batman is accurate – all will turn on you too when they feel you have no use.
Jul
24
Note: I am aware of how hypocritical the end of this is, given that I’m working to be a professor. I’m convinced anyone who stands for anything is prone to hypocrisy – the only way to avoid the problem is to be shameless.
1. Anyone who walks onto a US college or university nowadays is tempted to wonder whether half the people on campus should be there. That sounds like elitism, but I don’t think it is.
It starts with observation of people wearing vulgar t-shirts, making out everywhere or yapping away like there’s no cares in the world: only a minority reads and studies unless it is exam time. Then one moves into the classroom and everyone just seems bored – sometimes listening to their ipods or playing video games during class – or confused, and even in good classes one has to wonder: does anyone ask these students what their ultimate goals are? Are they in a position to put all the knowledge they’ve got together? Were these students even teachable to begin with?
What keeps this rant from being elitist is this simple question: Do the students at institutions of higher learning really want to be there?
Jul
23
Justice’s Required Redeemer: On "The Dark Knight"
Filed Under batman, movies | 7 Comments
Note: Spoilers galore ahead. The movie is well-paced, incredibly dense, and very tense. Please do not ruin it for yourself if you have not seen it – this movie probably cannot be hyped enough.
However: if you can learn what justice is, why so serious about a mere plot?
for Peter Lund
1. Does justice require redemption? Batman Begins assumed this and ran into a problem: how do we know who the redeemer is? Ra’s Al Ghul’s anger at Gotham was perfectly justified, and it was sheer chance that Batman found one good cop – Jim Gordon – who was able to stop Al Ghul from killing him and then causing fear to annihilate the city for good.
Socrates would never demand that we look into necessary causes: those are divine matters, and those who look into the heavens for answers are most unnecessary when our concern is earthly. They would assert that justice is merely conventional anyway, a construct we use to keep ourselves from a more difficult truth. The joke’s on them: they have no clue what willing tools they are when push comes to shove, how ugly the truth actually is.
Jul
22
Quick Post, I Want to Get Back to Work: "Distracted from Distraction by Distraction"
Filed Under education, links | 2 Comments
This article is most certainly alarmist, but has a few points worth considering:
- To what degree are attentiveness and being distracted physiological conditions? The author claims that knowledge of the brain tells us that if you’re driving, and someone is describing something over the phone that requires you to visualize it, a “visual channel” will get “clogged” and you could “lose your sense of the road.”
- More to the point: does this article rely on a conception of “attention = good” and “distraction (or anything that isn’t strictly “attention”) = evil?”
- Something about the metaphors used to describe what’s wrong with Facebook and Myspace in this article doesn’t strike me as entirely credible. The primary complaint is that one goes there for “gossip and social banter,” but then one makes “friends” that not only aren’t real, but could be dismissed with a simple click even if they do offer something worthwhile. I don’t know why this doesn’t resonate with me, but I will offer this: twice I have met people purely online to whom I gave an enormous amount of knowledge and got zilch for it. Both were traditionalist Catholics of the “Latin Mass FTW’ variety (ironically enough – neither were affiliated with UD in any way). They were the only ones to never give anything of any worth to me or even acknowledge my existence after a short while (in their defense: I do accept prayers, and could be wrong about how much they’ve forgotten me). I think the author might be underestimating just how cold and self-righteous we would have to be to completely forget about people we meet online, for we’re online ourselves.
- Towards the end of the article – I’d guess the complaints about kids learning nothing through computer overuse reflect on the kids, not the technology. It is possible to gain an enormous amount of technical expertise online. And any adult who says he doesn’t have the patience for a longer blog post anymore is probably an idiot. He can look in the mirror to figure out where that problem has arisen.