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Life, the Universe and Everything – on Film

Posted November 5, 2005 By Dave Thomer

Every once in a while I read a book I desperately wish I had written. The Philosopher at the End of the Universe by Mark Rowlands is one of those books. I’ll write a fuller review in the near future, but I wanted to give it a mention now. Rowlands is a philosophy prof in the UK and a big fan of science fiction stories. He argues that the high concepts of a lot of blockbuster movies are actually explorations of thorny philosophyical issues like personal identity and the reliability of knowledge. Since Star Wars is probably one of the things that got me thinking about ways of understanding the universe as a kid, I’m not one to argue. In fact, I just showed an episode of Babylon 5 to one of my classes to kick start a conversation about identity and the mind. And of course everyone has heard about the connection between philosophy and The Matrix.

What I like about Rowlands’ approach is that while he’s not dismissive of the movies, he also knows that a good exploration of the issues they raise requires more depth than you can get in a two-hour movie. So he expands the conversation to include key texts and arguments from a number of philosophers. He has a sense of humor, but he uses it in the service of a serious discussion. It’s a really nice piece of work.

Filed in Philosophy

And So It Begins

Posted November 4, 2005 By Dave Thomer

Welcome to This Is Not News. If this is your first time here, this is a site that tries to help create the kind of democratic community envisioned by American philosopher John Dewey. More on that here.

If you’ve been here in any of the site’s earlier incarnations and are wondering why I’ve gotten on the blog bandwagon, that’s a good question. It’s been five years since I first launched Not News, and it’s had two significant periods of dormancy when I couldn’t muster the time or energy to produce lengthier articles on a regular schedule. But I still have a lot to say about the topics that led me to launch the site, and I think the informality of the blog structure might be more conducive to that. I have also seen sites like Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo use the blog model to help foster a certain kind of electronic community, and I think I’d like to get a little bit more involved in that conversation.

The message board and site archive are still here, and I have no plans to take them down any time soon. In fact there’s a good chance that lengthier blog pieces might work their way into a more permanent form in one of those two areas. I’m still working out how this is all going to work, and trying to tinker a little bit under the hood here, so please bear with me for a while.

Filed in Site Comments

Loose Canons

Posted August 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

I have been a member of numerous fandoms in my life. And if you participate in any fandom long enough, you will eventually find yourself in the middle of a canon discussion. Philosophers have spent thousands of years contemplating the nature of reality, but they are rank amateurs compared to two fans of a fictional creation debating what “really� happened to the creation in question.

If you’ve never encountered such a discussion before, “canon� with regards to a fictional universe refers to the set of stories that are considered “official,� such that future stories in that universe will be expected to reflect and not contradict the earlier tales. (Comic fans, who have been grappling with this issue for decades, tend to use the term “continuity.�) The goal is to have an internally consistent master narrative built from a series of smaller stories. It’s a noble goal, but one seldom achieved. Contradictions pop up, some trivial, some major. At that point, something has to give – one of the contradictory elements must be jettisoned. And then there’s the matter of stories that, for one reason or another, a fan would like to ignore and forget about, to the point of never wanting so much as to risk seeing it referred to again. At this point the campaign to have said story expunged from the canon begins.

To be dismissed from the canon is, in the eyes of many fans, tantamount to being branded a leper. For these fans, the possibility that a story would contradict stories they have already read, or that future stories would not reflect its consequences, takes so much of their enjoyment away that the merits of the individual story don’t matter. They only care if it “counts,â€? and to be non-canon is a seal of disapproval. Last year the BBC announced a series of animated Doctor Who stories would be presented on the Web and on DVD. Many fans were excited by the prospect of new stories in a visual medium. (The Doctor has had a steady career in books and audio dramas since he went off the air.) But a significant minority turned up their noses. If it wasn’t broadcast on television, it wasn’t “proper Doctor Who,â€? and they weren’t interested. These fans went into paroxysms of joy when the BBC announced a new television series to air next year – at least until they started worrying about whether this new series would fit into the established canon of the previous series. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Culture and Media

We Need the Power

Posted July 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

Energy policy has become a nexus through which so many seemingly disparate issues connect. Energy affects the economy because of fuel prices and production costs. It affects national security because of our dependence on oil from foreign countries, including some that use their oil profits to fund terrorists and other destabilizing forces. It affects the environment and public health because energy consumption creates pollutants that contribute to global warming, smog, and the presence of irritants and toxins in the atmosphere. (And when you get down to it, every one of those other issues carries an added economic cost with it.) It’s not surprising, then, that energy policy has become a significant issue in the current presidential election. It seems like a good idea, then, to look at the two major candidate’s plans as a starting point for a discussion of where we should go in the future.

Both George W. Bush and John Kerry provide outlines of their plans on their websites. Both outlines are extremely vague on a number of points, such as Bush’s claim that he “remains actively engaged with our friends in OPEC, as well as non-OPEC producers from around the worldâ€? in order to reduce gas prices or Kerry’s non-specific promise to “improve fuel efficiency of cars to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.â€? How are you going to engage them? What’s the payoff of the engagement? How much are you going to increase efficiency? How will you motivate manufacturers to make those improvements? Even in those vague statements, however, there are clearly differences in priorities, and there are some concrete proposals to consider as well. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Public Policy

Reform Begins at Home

Posted July 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

The challenge of a Deweyan reformer is to somehow form a functioning community out of a vast society – to create close enough links between geographically disparate people such that one will consider the effect of his actions on the other even if they never become acquainted in person, or indeed ever become specifically aware of the other’s existence. It is a difficult task, even if the reformer successfully exploits the technological and media tools available to her. It may be tempting, therefore, for the reformer to focus her efforts on the national scale – writing essays for national magazines, staging events designed to be covered by the large news networks, etc. Dewey, however, was quite cognizant of the role of local communities in the eventual establishment of the Great Community, and the democratic reformer ignores this role at her own peril.

Vibrant local communities are vital to Dewey’s vision of a flourishing democracy. Many social challenges will need to be addressed at a local level, and the experience of working together to address said problems will give citizens the skills and mindset to tackle larger issues in a similar fashion. The impetus for change often begins at the local level as well, as a grass-roots response to a particular local problem calls attention to a larger issue and galvanizes feeling about it. If a national reform movement is to be a true model for the desired democratic society, it too must function as a network of thriving, coordinated local reform movements.
Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Philosophy

On the Up and Up(grade)

Posted July 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

I’ve been using personal finance software for years to track my expenditures and have some sense of where my money is coming from, as well as going. I tend not to use too many features beyond the electronic check register and the occasional simple report or graph, but one thing I have become quite accustomed to is the ability to download transaction information from my credit card company. It saves some typing, allows me to keep things synchronized, and is in many other ways simply nifty. So I was slightly perturbed when I learned that Intuit would stop supporting that capability in the version of the software I own, which I bought a little over four years ago. I would need to jump ahead at least to the 2002 version, and I’m sure deep down Intuit wanted me to go get the brand spankin’ new 2004 edition.

The most significant problem with that strategy is that Amazon reviews and Usenet comments achieved the almost unanimous conclusion that Quicken 2004 was best suited for use as a coaster rather than an actual piece of software. (The problems seemed to be largely felt by people upgrading from prior versions with years’ worth of accumulated data – in other words, folks like me – and so they didn’t show up as much in the professional reviews I read in the computer press.) Further research suggested that the 2002 version was probably the most stable, so I snagged a copy of that from eBay and bought myself at least another couple of years.

Truth be told, even if 2004 had been a good year for Quicken, I still would have tried to go the secondhand route. The idea that a part of the functionality I originally purchased could be turned off in order to get me to re-purchase something just rubs me a bit wrong. Yet I can’t deny that it seems to make perfect sense in an upgrade-happy culture whose economy depends on folks always going out and Getting More Stuff, a world where it’s cheaper to throw out an appliance than it is to get it fixed. To get a sense of the cultural impact this has had: the producers of Sesame Street recently turned the Fix-It Shop into a Kinko’s/post office hybrid called the Mail-It Shop, because kids today just can’t relate to the notion of getting their toaster repaired. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Life in Practice

Reviewing an Old Curse

Posted June 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

Once upon a time, I wrote a humor column for my college newspaper. I eventually appropriated the title of that column for this very site. As my sister graduated from high school this month, I got to thinking about one column I wrote back in March 1995. I thought I’d share it on today’s Not News as a tribute to her and as a glimpse at this site’s roots. Also, subsequent events have served to make the column funnier in retrospect than it ever was at the time.

When I was about 10 years old and, like all 10-year-old males, found the opposite gender utterly confusing (actually, this is not that different from all 20-year-old males, now that I think about it), I made a vow that I would never, ever so much as look at a female in a romantic light, let alone start a family. The onset of adolescence rendered this vow moot rather quickly; however, I recently renewed it, for vastly different reasons. I had a preview of the Parents’ Curse.

You know what I’m talking about, I’m sure. At the point where our parents’ frustration reaches the point where they’re looking like Warner Bros. cartoons, they pull out the Curse and say, “When you grow up I hope you have children just like you.�

We shrug this off as kids; we figure, hey, we’re such great individuals that raising carbon copies would be a breeze. It’s not our fault our parents are so out of touch, right?

Hah. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Special Order Speeches

Knowing Things

Posted June 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

One of the blessings, and curses, of the Net is the access it gives to information. Properly harnessed, it’s a great research tool, as many traditional sources of information are easily accessible while millions of everyday people record their own contributions to humanity’s collective knowledge. (Indeed, David Brin has argued in The Transparent Society that in an upcoming “Century of Aficionados,â€? the effect of “armies of individuals pursuing their own private, passionate interestsâ€? will ensure that “almost nothing of recognized value that is now known about the human past or present will ever again be lost.â€?) The trick is in using those tools effectively. I like to think I’ve learned a thing or two about that over the years, so I thought I’d discuss some of the sources I’ve found most effective. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Life in Practice

About Those Huddled Masses

Posted May 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

At the beginning of 2004, President Bush proposed a set of reforms to U.S. immigration policy that would have, among other things, allowed a number of workers currently inside the country illegally to attain a guest worker status for up to ten years. The proposal never really took off, as it was antithetical to the hard-line position on immigration taken by much of the President’s Republican base and other issues quickly caught the public’s attention. It’s a shame that we never had a really serious discussion of immigration policy, because it seems fairly certain that the current system isn’t working too well. The question is, how do we fix it?

The answer can not help but be complex, because immigration regulations implicate, or are implicated by, a host of other policies, from free trade to the minimum wage to tax policy and beyond. To say we’re going to talk about immigration is really to choose a particular vantage point from which to discuss this whole network of policies. Like any vantage point, it will emphasize some elements over others, but them’s the breaks.

Before getting into the details of policy, it might help to focus on the different philosophical approaches one takes to immigration. Is it something to be promoted, tolerated, or even discouraged? What expectations do we have for those that come to the country? What expectations should they have of us? Generally speaking, I tend to adopt something of a “more the merrierâ€? approach in principle. Given the nation’s history, and the image that we like to promote to the world, I think it’s important that we continue to welcome new people – and the new perspectives and talents they bring with them – to the country. And I’m generally uncomfortable with the notion that Americans – most of whom are here as a result of immigration – would decide to lock the door behind them and say, “We got here, you’re out of luck.â€? At the same time, I think it’s reasonable that we have some expectation that immigrants will assimilate and become a part of the civic life of the country, even if that requires giving up some cherished traditions or practices. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Public Policy

We Can’t Handle the Truth

Posted May 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

Three distinct cases from April and May concerning the current military operation in Iraq have raised questions about the control and dissemination of information in wartime conditions.

Item 1: The Pentagon has had a policy of not allowing any publicity for the return of soldiers’ bodies from Iraq and Afghanistan. In two separate recent incidents, those images finally became public. In one case, a contractor on a plane carrying the coffins home took a picture of the soldiers carefully attending the flag-draped coffins; she sent the image to a friend, who then sent it to the Seattle Times, which published it. In the second case, Russ Kick – who runs a site called The Memory Hole – filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to get copies of photos the Pentagon had taken of the coffins and their reception at Dover Air Force base; in what the Pentagon is now calling a mistake, he received the photos and posted them to the site. Both the Seattle Times and Memory Hole images soon spread to other newspapers, online news sources, and TV networks.

Item 2: Nightline decided to devote its May 1 program to reading the names and showing the pictures of the over 700 American soldiers killed in action in Iraq. Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which owns a handful of ABC affiliates and which has donated substantial money to the Republican party, charged that Nightline was trying to make the President look bad and refused to air the program.

Item 3: American soldiers serving as prison guards in Iraq – specifically in Abu Ghraib, formerly one of Saddam Hussein’s most notorious torture camps – took photos of themselves humiliating prisoners, including stripping them naked, attaching wires to their bodies and threatening them with electrocution, and forcing them into sexually suggestive positions. These photos were passed along to military police and eventually made their way to CBS. CBS sat on the photos for two weeks at the Army’s request before airing them as part of a special report on 60 Minutes II. It has since come out that an army report completed in February has identified over 50 incidents of abuse toward prisoners, that at least two prisoners were killed by their guards, and that there are dozens of ongoing investigations into the action of American military personnel and contractors. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Culture and Media
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