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Friday, July 05, 2002 |
Masked & Anonymous
Here's a dispiriting, depressing, but alas all-to-believable report on the screenplay to the Dylan movie, Masked & Anonymous, on rec.music.dylan. Some suggest this post, or the screenplay the author of it recieved, might be a hoax. But it reads true to me, and doesn't seem at all the kind of thing a hoaxer would write.
One of the crew guys:
"I'm sick of this merchants' time, businessman's time, clocks and bells signaling the hours. It's all just some gimmick, this physical time. I just wanna live in psychic time .did you ever notice when you dream a dream seems to span several hours, but it actually lasts only a few minutes. That's what I mean by suspended time."
It's hard to tell from the entry in the newsgroup message, whether this is one person speaking or not, for some reason the poster uses ? instead of ' or " which makes it tough to read. But that voice does sound to me like Bob Dylan's voice. What it does not sound to me like is a character, real or imagined, speaking dramatic thoughts or in a dramatic way.
I'm hoping stuff like this comes across better on the screen than it does reading it. (And many thanks to the poster of the message for what must surely be going out on a limb and posting it.)
11:00:40 AM Permalink
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How to argue with Microsoft
Dave Winer has a nice paragraph about arguing with Microsoft. "Why is it pointless to argue with Microsoft people? Answer: because they hold you to a higher moral standard than they themselves support. When discussing their transgressions, they argue that they have the right to do that. They overstate your case and rebut that, leaving you stuttering 'But I didn't say that.'" But this seems to be the case with "debate" in this country in general these days. Things seem to be said at a shout, people argue with straw men instead of real points, and dissent is traitorism. In some ways I do the same things myself.
10:32:44 AM Permalink
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The Simulation Argument
Are you living in a computer simulation? Apparently serious, scholarly investigations into the notion that you (not me, I hasten to add, I live in the real world) may be living in a computer simulation. Looks to be a much deeper set of links that one might first imagine. The papers are pretty technical:
This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the transhumanist dogma that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.
Heady stuff! That's just the abstract, and as much as I, for one, am likely to read. The rest of the paper is largely written using a pretty technical philosophical language. As fascinating as it is, it's hard for me to go to deeply into it. Good material here for lots of science fiction, though we've been down much of this road before (Dick, The Matrix, etc.).
10:09:13 AM Permalink
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That Damned Liberal Press
Nice editorial from Eugene Oregon's Register Guard (via the wonderful Progressive Review) about the virtual monopoly that the right-wingers have on talk radio.
ONCE UPON A TIME, in a country that now seems far away, radio and television broadcasters had an obligation to operate in the public interest. That generally accepted principle was reflected in a rule known as the Fairness Doctrine.
... However, by 1987 the Fairness Doctrine was gone - repealed by the FCC, to which President Reagan had appointed the majority of commissioners.
That same year, Congress codified the doctrine in a bill that required the FCC to enforce it. President Reagan vetoed that bill, saying the Fairness Doctrine was "inconsistent with the tradition of independent journalism." Thus, the Fairness Doctrine came to an end both as a concept and a rule.
In a car trip down the California coast this week, my son and I struggled to find English-language radio that wasn't filled with right-wing, anti-liberal messages. These people don't have anything to say beyond the liberals are liars and want to give all your money to the government, the government can't do anything right, and if you say anything negative about the military or (this) president, you're a traitor. Oh, and of course, it's all the fault of the liberal press and the pointy-headed college perfessers.
Here's the story of the radio lineup in Eugene:
For two hours each weekday morning, KUGN has just added nationally syndicated host Bill O'Reilly. Although he occasionally criticizes a Republican for something other than being insufficiently conservative, O'Reilly is clear in his basic conservative viewpoint. His columns are listed on the Townhall.com web site, created by the strongly conservative Heritage Foundation. That's 55 hours of political talk on KUGN each week by conservatives and Republicans. No KUGN air time is programmed for a Democratic or liberal political talk show host.
KPNW carries popular conservative Rush Limbaugh for three hours each weekday, and Michael Reagan, the conservative son of the former president, for two hours, for a total of 25 hours per week.
Thus, between the two stations, there are 80 hours per week, more than 4,000 hours per year, programmed for Republican and conservative hosts of political talk radio, with not so much as a second programmed for a Democratic or liberal perspective.
And of course, they all spend much of that time hollering about how the 'conservatives' have no voice!
Political opinions expressed on talk radio are approaching the level of uniformity that would normally be achieved only in a totalitarian society, where government commissars or party propaganda ministers enforce the acceptable view with threats of violence. There is nothing fair, balanced or democratic about it. Yet the almost complete right wing Republican domination of political talk radio in this country has been accomplished without guns or gulags.
9:55:31 AM Permalink
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Live with out decisions
Wise editorial by Elizabeth Shawn calling for us to live environmentally with the decisions we make:
Friends of mine tell me that their daughter will only eat meat if she knows the name of the animal that died to produce it. She'll eat the pork roast from pigs grown on our farm -- but not the anonymous bacon offered up in the college dining hall. Adherence to this one simple guideline ensures that she has the kind of environmental and health information that isn't always easy to come by.
...If we worry about water purity, we could demand that the water coolers in the boardrooms of every company that dumps waste into a waterway be filled with water from the affected sources.
Nice thoughts. The key point is it has to be direct. Many of us do live with direct consequences of our actions. Air pollution is a direct consequence of our decision to drive to work when taking the bus or riding a bike or walking would work, yet our freeways are crowded and our air dirty; we figure it's the other guy who should get out of his car. We pay higher garbage bills to handle all our trash, but we don't make the connection between that higher cost and the amount of packaging in our products. Taking it to the level she discusses, with the water in the boardroom would likely mean that board members would just bring bottled water. [SciTech Daily]
9:41:52 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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