Your move!

Robocop with Peter Weller. I of course have seen this movie many times before this post but because it is such a good movie I am compelled to review it. Why is it so good? Because it's gritty, darkly satirical and just plain awesome. There's no dichotomy of good and evil; the creator of Robocop is a ruthless entrepreneur who celebrates his success with hookers and cocaine. Incidentally, his death scene, which I had completely taken out of context as a child, likely shaped my attitude on drugs: the man snorting cocaine out a a prostitute's cleavage gets shot in the legs and blown up with a grenade. More effective message than anything DARE ever taught. Robocop fights all forms of crime: robbery, rape, murder, drug trafficking, corporate crimes, he does it all. What's more, you're made to hate each villain well before they're oh so gruesomely killed. There's never any ambiguity in his reasons for killing them. He only uses enough force to complete his mission and he always waits for the bad guys to initiate hostilities, "Your move, creep." Though his tactics are extreme you can never say anyone was a victim of police brutality at the hands of Robocop. Then again, he never misses. I think it's also interesting that while some people would had to have claimed police brutality against him, because he's not human he cannot be personally tried for it. And if that technicality were ignored he wouldn't be protected by city lawyers but by OCP. Their expert legal team would defeat any case filed against him. So the instrument of good is protected from the litigious by an evil corporation. That's just cool. Which brings me to the reason why this movie is unique: the bad guys hardly ever come close to winning. They didn't follow the formula of the powerful protagonist being indestructible at first and only later in the film do the bad guys discover his weakness. Robocop has no weakness, except Directive 4. Even when pitted against the superior strength and firepower of ED-209 he's barely scratched. It takes a whole precinct of cops armed with armor piercing rounds to just slow him down. And even then that's the good guys turned against him that do the most damage. That's why, among other reasons the sequels weren't very good. The unique thing about Robocop as a superhero was that he actually was so powerful he couldn't be defeated.
I watched this movie because I was in a pissy mood, and as always it cheered me up. You wouldn't think it a feel-good flick, but it made me feel good.
Finally, out of curiosity, I checked out how the Spanish and French dubbed ED-209 sounded and to my amazement the French one actually sounded scarier than the Spanish one. Which is saying something considering he just sounds like an angry power droid.

Bastards

So we got burglarized on Monday. They took my laptop, the backup hard drive, my camera and pretty much every single electronic device they could get there worthless hands on. By pure chance I had taken my mini flash drive to school with me and because my adviser wanted sample writing all of my college documents were on it. Had I lost that, I would have lost everything. My resume, grad school data, all my data on my thesis, I would have been irrevocably fucked. Also, by pure chance, there was a drive image backup of my laptop at my parents' house from late January. So instead of losing every song, game and photograph I ever owned in the past three years I only lost about 10 months worth. Now, I was considerably more emotional on Monday than I am today but some of my attitudes are still the same. I am not absolutely ruined as I had initially thought, so things are looking up, somewhat.
Also, while I was and still am thoroughly pissed about losing all my stuff, I regard the loss of the GameCube, all its games, my MP3 player etc. as inconveniences. I've never been particularly attached to material things, I suspect that's why I'm difficult to shop for. But the loss of my laptop and camera are much more than material things. I could not email, print nor even type up a paper due the next day. I lost all the photographs I had taken since the last drive image. As a student my life depends on access to a computer. Photography is my hobby, and without a camera or place to store my photos I'm deprived of something that brings me joy. They also took the tape recorder I was using to get interview for my final project in one of my anthro classes. More than material things, these were tools and storehouses of knowledge. They made off with about three grand worth of my stuff, you'd think they'd at least have the goddamn common courtesy to leave me my backup hard drive.
Which leads me to my next point. While I generally agree with the Swedes on economics and some social and legal points, I feel they're too forgiving. Granted, no system works in every environment and the Swedish system works pretty well for them, but rehabilitation does not work in the US. It can work in Sweden because they're culturally and economically more or less homogeneous and any aberrant behavior is just that, aberrant. It's uncharacteristic and as such can be trained out of them. In the US, there's such socioeconomic diversity and differences between subcultures that rehabilitation is impossible with anything short of brainwashing. You are the person you're going to be for the rest of your life by the time you're 18. After that, you can't correct a learned culture and outlook on life. Case in point is in Philippe Bourgois' book In Search of Respect where in one section he documents the attempts of crack dealers who grew up in East Harlem to enter the legal job market. Despite their best efforts they are incapable of adjusting to this different culture and occasionally in frustration steal from the company to get back at them. Bourgois notes that they were often victims of discrimination but most of the time it was their own damn fault that they couldn't keep a job.
What's my point? You can take the lion out of the jungle but you can't take the jungle out of the lion. You cannot rehabilitate a culture that happens to be incompatible with our own. (Then again, it's not like American prisons even try to rehabilitate prisoners so I may not be 100% correct.) So what's the solution? On Monday I would have said kill them. If you believe society functions like an organism then individuals who wish to maximize their success at the expense of others are essentially cancer cells. The body is full of single cells that all used to be individuals but all banded together for mutual benefit. Still, they used to be individuals and every so often they'll behave like individuals and act only in their own self interest. This happens all the time and its your body's job as a whole to destroy these cancerous elements, so it's not unlike a government trying to stamp out crime. But eventually the body cannot do this as well as it used to and cancer develops, hence why it's not normally a disease of the young. You could make a similar case with planned utopian communities that are seamless for a few years or even decades, but eventually the individualistic traits of the members emerge and the society decays.
Still, we're not cells and killing people for having a different culture, even if it is injurious to everyone and can never be unlearned, is inhumane. So my solution is this, send these prisoners overseas to developing nations. Make them dig trenches, harvest sugarcane, and other awful jobs people have to do over there. Give them good, nutritious meals, of course, I'm no Stalinist. The profits of their labor of course go to the locals who would have had to toil themselves for a meager wage. We won't have them do all the work for the locals, that would foster dependency, but give them a break. Let them regain their strength, accumulate wealth and live for more than work. Once you have a society which is healthy, wealthy and has time to spare, they can prosper. And there is little chance for survival for the prisoners should they escape; without medicine they'll succumb to malaria or other diseases, they can't blend into the society if they can't speak the language, if the locals have a hard time getting food, they'll have an even worse time. And these cultures are much less forgiving of murderous, thieving outsiders should they get caught...
So there you have my social plan to help developing nations, fix our overcrowded prison system in the US and make use of drains on society. And hell, maybe it'll rehabilitate the scumbags after all.

Only time I wish the Earth had been eaten

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer with Lawrence Fishburne and no one else worth a damn. This one actually was worse than the original, I didn't think it was possible, but I'll be damned. At least they didn't make it as blatantly bad with product advertising as they did in the last one. I hate all the characters, with a special emphasis on the Human Torch, though the Invisible Woman almost won the annoying contest. Enormous plot holes are the thing that got to me the most. Like, say, why do they need to keep the team together if you can combine all their powers into one person and have them be much more effective than the four of them? Also, his name is Von Doom and he came back from the dead, what more evidence do you need that you can't trust him? Why didn't the Invisible Woman spy on him instead of confronting him like a moron? And lastly, if the Silver Surfer can destroy Galactus that easily, why the hell did he wait all that time serving him when he could have just taken the job of herald and then turn and kill him right then and there? I will give them points for making Galactus a bit more ominous than a giant human in a silly helmet. Normally I hold off on spoilers but this one isn't worth my restraint.

Darwin

The Reluctant Mr. Darwin by David Quammen. A required reading for one of my classes, but a decent read nonetheless. You learn all about Darwin and his personal life and his reactions to the scientific world around him, and dispels some of the myths about his beliefs and motives. We all agreed that after having read about him, we would not have wanted to be his friend. Even though he was chronically sick his whole life, he never went to visit anyone unless it was a tangible benefit to him, his friends were all people who could help him advance his career and he missed the funerals of his father, his favorite daughter and Lyell, the man who made Darwin's career. Not to mention the fact that his reason for marriage was that a wife would make better company than a dog. The man never committed to anything unless he absolutely had to, once he was put into a situation he performed admirably but he had absolutely no gumption. Had Wallace, who was a totally awesome, albeit chronically unlucky guy, not sent Darwin his ideas on evolution to be forwarded to Lyell, Darwin would never have gotten around to publishing his own theory of evolution. Another interesting tidbit, not in the book but provided as background by the professor, was that while Darwin would say he didn't subscribe to Social Darwinism, he never stopped or corrected people who twisted his theory. And since he came from money and from how he interacted with those of higher and lower classes, he kinda, sorta did believe in Social Darwinism. So the bottom line seems to be Darwin was a smart guy, but a total prick.

In one of my other classes, Sociobiology and Evolution of Cooperation, we're talking about the evolutionary benefits of altruism. Which leads to one of my least favorite debates of all time: is there really such a thing as altruism? I mean, if you derive any measure of satisfaction or reward for an (huge, pseudo-intellectual finger quote gesture) altruistic act then it really is a selfish act and that means there is no such thing as altruism. Basically, you would have to utterly hate doing something, but do it unhesitatingly and never derive any benefit from it, directly or indirectly no matter how distant in the future that possible reward might be. So in that case, yes altruism does not exist because it would be utterly counterintuitive and stupid. But for the rest of the world that doesn't subscribe to that stupid philosophy altruism does exist because it means giving without any outside reward expected in return. If you do a nice thing for the sake of it and you happen to be rewarded for it that doesn't make it any less altruistic. Nor does feeling good about it make the altruistic act selfish, any more than it's OK to steal from someone as long as you feel bad about it while you're doing it.