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Thursday, December 24, 2009 - 9:18pmSanction this postReply
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Thanks, Ed. Spot-on. I do have to add that I heard a bit of quiet laughter during the movie...in all the wrong spots. There certainly wasn't any outbreaks of applause or "hell yeah!" moments.

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Thursday, December 24, 2009 - 9:59pmSanction this postReply
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I'll repeat this here, Ed, because I think the message is bigger than the original thread.

полезный идиот

"Third, the most remarkable technology - their Avatar link-up - was shown to be naturally duplicated by nature (in Pandora). Most technology today consists of lessons or examples of things we have seen done in nature (photosynthesis anyone?)."

Q. What do you think of Science Fiction?

A. It's a legitimate form of literature, but its seldom good. Science fiction used to be original and sometimes interesting. Today it's junk. I dislike it because it's too freewheeling. You can invent anything you wish and say that's the science of the future. They go too far that way.

Ayn Rand Answers, p 222.

"In the end, the villains in the movie ARE BAD, and the heroes in the movie ARE GOOD AND BRAVE."

Well that's a shock.

But is the badness of the villains realistic, because that's the way corporations and U.S. Marines are? Or is their badness an arbitrary construct the nature of which one must evade to accept? Is the goodness of the heroes realistic, because that is how we expect stone-age mother-goddess worshipping tribesman to be? Or is that an arbitrary construct the nature of which one must swallow blindly to accept?

In case you don't know the true nature of mother-goddess worshipping tribesman, think of the reputation of Hera. Think of the reputation of Kali. Think of the pre-Indo-European goddess-worshipping peoples of Europe and the near east. Until the horsemen came out of the Russian steppe those cultures were agricultural police-states ruled by witches. They used poison as a tool of state and they hobbled men at birth or before using them at stud. Their goddesses survive in myth today. We call them Lilith, Circe, Tiamat, hags, harpies, medusae, All the chthonian combination snake-woman-vulture monsters of classic mythology are what remains in our culture of theirs.

All of which information you may find it even easier to evade because from our Universities, to our Sit-Coms, to the Primate of the Anglican Church we are taught that god is a jolly fat black lesbian, and that the rapist, the exploiter, the destroyer of worlds is a white man in a business suit.

There is a word for the Oprah-fan who doesn't think she has anything to do with the fact that we just raised the debt limit to 12.4 trillion ($41,333, not per taxpayer, but per US citizen) and the person who thinks that his royalty payments to hollywood leftists have nothing to do with a stolen senate seat and a 60-39 vote to socialize medicine. Lenin had a phrase: poleznyj idiot.



(Edited by Ted Keer on 12/25, 2:59pm)


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Friday, December 25, 2009 - 4:48pmSanction this postReply
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another review on par with Ed's.. http://www.doczero.org/?p=13880

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Friday, December 25, 2009 - 5:34pmSanction this postReply
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I'll repeat this here, because I think the message is smaller than the original thread.

--------
Aside from Cameron's choice of villain, everything else works well unless you a) can't resist over-intellectualizing a run-of-the-mill storyline (convincing oneself of something that is not reasonably in evidence), and b) are spoiling to start a fight over a cherry-picked interpretation.

Honestly, I think that interpretation is being stretched so as to enable starting a fight, and also I think that when we start fights over questionable interpretations or premises, that we undermine our credibility, and therefore our ability to make the points when it is really crucial to be heard.

I think the honest complaint against Avatar is solely in its depiction of "big business" (capitalism) as the villain. The other arguments, I think, are more a representation of over-reaching personal bias, than of any serious validity.

Consider this, most of the people with whom we interact every day probably do not share our Objectivist ethical premises. Do you spend your time seeking out the differences and basing your interaction with them solely upon the differences in your thinking? Or do you simply recognize those differences, and interact with them based upon your respect of those values you have in common? In other words, do you always seek out the worst to base your decisions, or do you also recognize what is good when basing your decisions?

We can find evil everywhere, easy enough. We don't have to focus all our energies in trying to find it. Try too hard, and sometimes you miss the whole point, or worse, that there wasn't any point really being made except what you wanted to see.

I'm no Pollyanna, but I just can't see the value in trying so hard to find the wrong message. It's like playing the "White Album" backwards.

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If you are a glassmaker, you may see a brick on the sidewalk as a missile, anyone else may only see the brick. In Avatar, while I deplore Cameron's use of industrialist/capitalists as the villain, otherwise I still see a good example of people exercising their rights to protect their own property.

And the truth is, apart from the poor choice of villain, what every other moviegoer is seeing - is people standing up to protect their rights and property. I don't have any problem with that message. Wish we did more of that in the US.

jt


(Edited by Jay Abbott on 12/25, 5:47pm)


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Friday, December 25, 2009 - 6:00pmSanction this postReply
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Have you ever listened to, or read "Our Cultural Value Depravation," by Rand, Jay?  It's printed in "The Voice of Reason."


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Saturday, December 26, 2009 - 1:28pmSanction this postReply
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Teresa,

I'll check it out.

jt

Post 6

Tuesday, December 29, 2009 - 8:16pmSanction this postReply
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Taken out of context and purely on its own merits, Avatar is really delightful, certainly one of the most transcendantly beautiful movies ever made, very likely the best, in fact.

I don't like Cameron's politics or take on industry and technical progress.  However, as the main character states, ~"We don't have anything to offer them (the natives).  They have all that they need and don't need our jeans or Ipods."  And, accepting the premises of the story and world, he's right.  The ability of the Pandorans to physically and mentally link with other animals or plants or with the stored memories and experiences of their ancestors itself is a profound advantage over anything that corporate earth civilization could offer them.  Effectively, they have a form of personal immortality, living on in the consciousness of the planetary mind.

That's assuming that it's either/or.  In fact, there was the potential, although it wouldn't have made much of a shoot-em-up action flick, for cooperation and trade, instead of war.  Bringing the analytic power of technological, scientific civilization to bear on the mechanisms by which the Pandoran paradize worked could have yeilded incalculable benefits both for humans and for the natives.  Sigourney's character was doing her damnest to try to make that happen.

However, corporations are inherently moral monsters.  Not that every person who starts a corporation is evil or that every corporation turns to the dark side, but the potential is there in the very structure and legal heart of the corporation, literally a child of the state, and the essence of what the term fascism refers to.  As Mussolini put it, another term for facism is "corporatism."

Thus, to make the corporation, which offloads risk onto innocent victims via state fiat and is thus a criminal by nature, a stand-in for true capitalism is profoundly wrong to begin with.  Corporations have become increasingly the mechanism by which quick profits are extracted at huge long-term expense to the rest of us.  The legal cap on liability has made that inevitable.  This practice of general irresponsibility has grown and pervades the business world of today. 

However, I don't recall Cameron ever making use of the term "capitalism" or "free market" in the movie.  The corporate bad guy who would "rather" have made peace, but who will follow the money regardless, is simply a typical corporate player.  People who are moral and take responsibility and think long-term are a liability if you are playing corporate games, and they would not likely have made it to that point of corporate power, any more than Howard Roark would have made it to the top echalon of Franchon, Inc., or Hank Reardon to the Board of Directors of Oren Boyle's company.

One could easilly imagine a parallel to Cameron's take in which the Pandorans work with human scientists and legitimate businessmen to understand the biology of Pandora on the one hand, and to provide techno fixes to the limitations of the Pandoran Eden, without doing violence to either parties.  But, that wouldn't have been as exciting as that spectacular air battle, would it?


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Tuesday, December 29, 2009 - 8:42pmSanction this postReply
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"One could easily imagine" that work will make you free?



"One could easily imagine" peace in our time?



"One could easily imagine" the brotherhood of man?



(Edited by Ted Keer on 12/29, 8:48pm)


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Wednesday, December 30, 2009 - 8:10pmSanction this postReply
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Actually, people who have actually seen the movie have somewhat more credibility.

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Post 9

Wednesday, December 30, 2009 - 8:30pmSanction this postReply
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How, actually, does being the victim of a con-artist gain one credibility?

I have seen, heard and read more than enough to smell this bullshit before I step in it.

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Post 10

Wednesday, December 30, 2009 - 8:44pmSanction this postReply
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Phil:

I don't like Cameron's politics or take on industry and technical progress. However, as the main character states, ~"We don't have anything to offer them (the natives). They have all that they need and don't need our jeans or Ipods." And, accepting the premises of the story and world, he's right. The ability of the Pandorans to physically and mentally link with other animals or plants or with the stored memories and experiences of their ancestors itself is a profound advantage over anything that corporate earth civilization could offer them. Effectively, they have a form of personal immortality, living on in the consciousness of the planetary mind.


You should probably read Mike Dickey's take on that.

However, corporations are inherently moral monsters. Not that every person who starts a corporation is evil or that every corporation turns to the dark side, but the potential is there in the very structure and legal heart of the corporation, literally a child of the state, and the essence of what the term fascism refers to. As Mussolini put it, another term for facism is "corporatism."

Thus, to make the corporation, which offloads risk onto innocent victims via state fiat and is thus a criminal by nature


I'm not sure I understand what you mean by a corporation being able to off load risk, I'm assuming you're talking about bankruptcy. Every entity in our country has the legal ability to off load risk onto someone else. Individuals can file for bankruptcy just as a corporation can.

So I guess we're all evil.

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Thursday, December 31, 2009 - 11:16amSanction this postReply
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Phil -

One could read the message of Avatar in the way you suggest. Corporatism means businesses allied with governments (or even using private armies) to get their way. One might also argue that in the fictional context, because the Na’vi are linked in a kind of collective consciousness with trees and critters, they want to preserve their forest world as it is and the company folks have nothing to offer them.

(I agree that even in the Pandora context there is a place for science. I would add that a curious Na’vi might want to understand even more about the world and thus invent the sciences of physics, astronomy, etc. etc. and develop the technology necessary to this task.)

But I’m sure that only a handful of Objectivists will come out of the theaters saying “Boy, that movie really exposed the nature of the corporatist enemies of true capitalism, those damned fascists who oppose true laissez-faire.” They will take corporatism and capitalism to be one and the same.

This shouldn’t stop one from enjoying the special effects of this visually stunning movie. I’m just pointing out what I think the message is that Cameron intended and that anyone who actually pays attention to the often-clichéd dialogue will likely take away.


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Thursday, December 31, 2009 - 11:21amSanction this postReply
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True - tho life among them would, to a civilized person, be boring over time - they actually are living like animals, and one wonders, in the context of their gaic world, why would intelligence be developed - what purpose of needed advancement does it really serve to induce being evolved...

Post 13

Saturday, January 2, 2010 - 2:20pmSanction this postReply
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A smidgen of Hindu metaphysics might come in handy here.

Allegedly - since I can't read the original sanscrit - the core of Hindu ontology is this:

Time is unbounded and infinite.  Thus, anything that can happen will and has happened, an infinite number of times.  Thus, we could be said now and at any other time to be living at the pinnacle of evolution. 

In that infinite time, there has been plenty of time for the emergence of the highest form of intelligence that is possible.  Call it God.  God, however, when he becomes too much of the universe, finds that he cannot then perceive himself.  Any mirror he creates may be just a figment of His imagination.  Objectivity becomes impossible and becoming bigger, more powerful, better integrated has reached a logical limiting point.

So, in order to get around this and prevent it from happening, God divides himself into various aspects - Kali, Shiva, Krishna, ect. - and forgets that he is one being.  The dance of life then becomes the working out of the infinite possibilities of interaction between these different aspects, played out via the contest of evolution toward Godhood among His creations, e.g., you and me.

The Pandoran Gaia is in a similar fix, like a miniature Vedic God.  Such a being is still capable of error and still needs the same kind of feedback and mirroring of mind that any consciousness in the real world would need to remain sane.  Thus, the development of human equivalent intelligence among some subset of its subject entities would be natural, desireable and likely inevitable, along with volition, despite the risks entailed. 

The Pandoran natives do not spend their lives plugged into this Gaian entitiy, but rather, appear to have as much curiousity and free will as humans.  This mini-God has its limits, and those include both the natural computational limits of mental focus, meaning that no such entity could directly apprehend and control an unlimited number of subjects - the laws of physics preclude that - and also the limits on how much influence should be exerted, given that a function of the Pandoran natives is to mirror the consciousness of this being.

Slaves or robots cannot perform the function of objective perceptual reaffirmation that Branden discussed in "The Virtue of Selfishness."  Thus, the Pandorans have been engineered to have free will.  However, they also have the ability  to directly apprehend the consciousness of other beings who have the correct software, hardware and interfaces, including their God.  This is done sparingly, as it tends to undercut the reason for creating them to begin with.  I.e., getting to close to God undermines their independence as a check on His error.

This Pandoran Gaia would likely be quite curious about the humans and what they might offer, just as any highly intelligent volitional entity would be.  However, from its standpoint, the humans are also pretty scary, as they do not have the ability to literally see through another's eyes, and are thus clearly more prone to make choices that do not take into account the welfare and rights of others.

My impression is that the Pandoran Gaia, while obviously post-human in many respects and capabilities, is still relatively a child, partially because, in spite of the free will of the native humanoids, it has not ever had the opportunity to deal with a completely independent intelligence that has not grown up within its control.

Maybe Cameron could run with this idea for a sequel...

I didn't watch any of the new Battlestar Gallactica series, but I've read somewhere that the Zylons - a robot species that had migrated to silicon from being biological entities - finally gave up their attempt to wipe out humans when they reached the logical conclusion that the humans had something that they lacked and could never have and which was valuable to them - namely true consciousness. 

I have written elsewhere, going back a couple decades, that one of the real technical problems fast approaching our own civilization is that we will eventually, probably in the next couple decades, develop something that is smarter than we are.  If that something is a non-conscious computational entity, which is quite possible, then it will be crucial to avoid the "Terminator" syndrome, in which the genius level computer concludes that humans are just in the way.

The only long-term solution that I know of is the same one finally achieved with the Xylons.  This super smart, but non-conscious entity will have to be shown and tested to understand that no matter how smart it is, it lacks something fundamental that makes keeping humans around and respecting their rights essential to its own welfare.

Another way of looking at this is with respect to "Halting states," or similar epistemological dilemnas that minds are subject to.  You cannot have a mind that can both challenge its own assumptions and also not be subject to potential lethal loss of contact with reality.  It is the grounding in perceptual reality that is our most basic and essential safeguard against drowning in delusional constructs of our own consciousness.  A purely robotic mind, consisting of executable code, does not have that safeguard.  Predictably, it will run head on into a halting state that cannot in theory be predicted or avoided.  Thus, it is implicitly dependent upon other entities - us - who do have that perceptual guard to guide it around such glitches.

Because of the importance to our own survival of solving this problem BEFORE someone pushes the Terminator's ON button, I find movies such as "Avatar" particularly valuable.  Even if there are things about the movie that one disagrees with, at least it opens up discussion and attention where there was little before.


Post 14

Saturday, January 2, 2010 - 2:55pmSanction this postReply
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BTW, here's an interesting link on corporations:

http://rushkoff.com/books/life-incorporated/


I heard this guy - Douglas Rushkoff - interviewed for about 30 minutes on "Digital Village" this morning. 

http://www.digitalvillage.org/

 Eventually they will have the show in its entirety available at their site, or you can probably access it now from the KPFK site.


There is a growing public awareness that a system that could produce the amazing debacles of recent years must have something drastically wrong.  From the interview, it sounds like Rushkoff may have gotten a bit closer to answering just what that is than most.


He made a point in his interview of stating that he is NOT against free markets, trade, private property, or capitalism, but that the corporation is incorrectly identified with the latter, while in fact it is in essence a vehicle for state power and is in fact capitalism's greatest enemy, along with the state-credentialed banking system.

 


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Sunday, January 3, 2010 - 7:09amSanction this postReply
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If you really must watch a cinematic release this winter centered on computer-animated, talking, intelligent animals with surprising talents who triumph against deceitful, violent, incompetent humans, I suggest ...



(Edited by Luke Setzer on 1/03, 7:15am)


Post 16

Sunday, January 3, 2010 - 7:55pmSanction this postReply
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Saw the movie last night. I thought it had awesome special effects and a moving storyline, a happier, sci-fi version of a great book I just read, "Thirteen Moons" by Charles Frazier.

Yes, the movie was clearly directed by a leftist, tree-hugging person, and bits of that kept leaking through and momentarily spoiling the willing suspension of disbelief.

But, the reality is, capitalism or technology can be harnessed by evil people to achieve bad ends. And, in the movie, some evil people wish to use technology to advance non-Objectivist pursuits -- they want to steal the land belonging to others via force. And, some of the technologically proficient people in the film end up having huge problems with that NIOF violation, and fight back.

And, on that basis, despite the lefty greenie slant provided, I felt that the plot was emotionally satisfying and I thoroughly enjoyed the movie.

I've read about half of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" (thanks for the hint, Ted) so far, and yes, that was an instance of crony capitalism and technology being used to further awful ends by Hitler, who used both socialists and capitalists to further his aims until he no longer needed those particular individuals, then discarded them.



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Sunday, January 3, 2010 - 8:48pmSanction this postReply
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Saw the movie last night. I thought it had awesome special effects and a moving storyline, a happier, sci-fi version of a great book I just read, "Thirteen Moons" by Charles Frazier.

Yes, the movie was clearly directed by a leftist, tree-hugging person, and bits of that kept leaking through and momentarily spoiling the willing suspension of disbelief.

But, the reality is, capitalism or technology can be harnessed by evil people to achieve bad ends. And, in the movie, some evil people wish to use technology to advance non-Objectivist pursuits -- they want to steal the land belonging to others via force. And, some of the technologically proficient people in the film end up having huge problems with that NIOF violation, and fight back.

And, on that basis, despite the lefty greenie slant provided, I felt that the plot was emotionally satisfying and I thoroughly enjoyed the movie.

I've read about half of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" (thanks for the hint, Ted) so far, and yes, that was an instance of crony capitalism and technology being used to further awful ends by Hitler, who used both socialists and capitalists to further his aims until he no longer needed those particular individuals, then discarded them.


Rationalization.

Or try this.




(Edited by John Armaos on 1/03, 9:01pm)


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Post 18

Monday, January 4, 2010 - 5:32pmSanction this postReply
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Phil:

BTW, here's an interesting link on corporations:

http://rushkoff.com/books/life-incorporated/


I heard this guy - Douglas Rushkoff - interviewed for about 30 minutes on "Digital Village" this morning.

http://www.digitalvillage.org/

Eventually they will have the show in its entirety available at their site, or you can probably access it now from the KPFK site.



No links, just tell me in your own words how a corporation is evil for off-loading risk onto others when the same can be said of any individual living in this country?

There is a growing public awareness that a system that could produce the amazing debacles of recent years must have something drastically wrong.


Well no shit. It's called a mixed economy.

Post 19

Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - 8:54pmSanction this postReply
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Phil, no response to your ridiculous notion that corporations are inherently evil for off-loading risk when individuals do the same?

You know Phil, if you can't rationally defend your own positions, then you should abandon them. That's assuming you actually value objectivity.

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