Interstellar Review

It is actually a film that pretends to be about big ideas but that lacks even a single decent one.

What's the Big Idea Nolan presented to us? Space-time relativity? Wow. Welcome to the understanding of the nature of reality that Einstein established at the foot of the last century. This is the science that makes the GPS in your car possible. It isn't a theme which unfolds into meaning.

The special effects depicting space-time distortion are beautiful and the software that rendered them was engineered from equations worked up by a respected physicist. When the attempt is made to put the theory of relativity into the mouths of characters, however, the dialogue is bad. At one point, Nolan has one scientist explain that black holes aren't really holes but spheres to another scientist. They both might be expected to know this already, but the one explains it to the other anyway as if the one were some guy who slept through high school and the other was that dude at the party who watches a lot of Nova.

Outside of that subject, the movie tries out a handful of other ideas, none of which are all that good. Some contradict each other.

The hero is a reluctant, unhappy farmer whose career as a NASA pilot was forestalled by the nearing End of Days for life on planet earth. The nature of the apocalypse that befalls Earth in Interstellar is left vague and what is established makes no sense whatsoever. Nukes and war and avarice are mentioned here and there, but the main mechanism of Earth's demise is a blight which withers the planet's vegetation. Now only corn will grow and massive dust storms sweep the continents. It's un-fixable, we gotta build spaceships and evacuate Earth. That's what a secret cabal of what is apparently earth's only scientists concludes. The rest of the population is shambling around in the dust, growing corn and expecting the whole thing to hit bottom at some point.

Wouldn't it be more sensible to revive the dying planet you're on than to go to another galaxy looking for an already completely barren planet? Why did nobody think of that? Blight is perhaps a fine way to avoid making the dreaded, Republicans and/or Democrats Did The Apocalypse metaphor, which is fine, but Nolan hand-waves it like it just doesn't matter that this idea that interstellar exploration motivated by a global crisis that science and technology could more easily resolve by staying put makes no sense. Rather, it just seems that he wanted to evoke the Depression Era dust-bowl for stylistic purposes. This is not how you engage Big Ideas.

The education community in Interstellar is focused on the pragmatic concern of training kids in agriculture. The principal at the school our hero's son and daughter attend astutely puts it, "The world didn't run out of [gadgets], it ran out of food." He's right. A Professor adds that it's morally wrong to encourage kids to look to the stars when everyone's survival depends on this and several successive generations devoting themselves to tending to their soil and to one another. She's right. But our hero is angered by the idea that the world needs more farmers than explorers. "We used to look up and try to find our place in the stars," but now, "we look down to find our place in the dirt."

Somewhere in the middle of the film, the idea is proposed that love is or is like a physical force analogous to gravity, in that it can freely pass through time and space in ways which are mysterious to us, but the idea isn't developed enough to rate. It roughly mixes in with the Our Place in the Stars vs. the Our Place in the Dirt metaphor towards the thematic climax where all these half-chewed ideas clash into a paradox of meaning. The action at the climax seems to vindicate our hero's conceits about exploratory risk while simultaneously saying something like, "yea, but we only went out to the stars to discover ourselves". Why, we must wonder, did we undertake this journey in the first place if we could have discovered ourselves and saved the planet without the harrowing and extravagant trip to a distant galaxy?

I've spoiled about three fifths of Interstellar for you. Another fifth is good stuff and the remaining fifth is more of that half-chewed stuff that doesn't quite get over to the audience. How did the wormhole get there? How does our hero survive his trip through the event horizon of a black hole? What was that double-cross Michael Caine perpetrated all about? How do they justify knocking back beers on the front porch when wheat is supposedly extinct?

Whatever potentially decent ideas made it into Interstellar were poorly handled. The ideas of space-time relativity are big, powerful ideas, but Nolan failed to draw meaning from them. The plot objective is recursive. And yet the film didn't feel like a waste because it was so strongly crafted. Nolan's films are like this: intricate puzzle-boxes that unlock to reveal nothing but the creator's admiration for his own methods.

I Spend A Great Deal Of Time Engaged In Remote, Anonymous Aggression Online Because It Almost Feels Like Creating

 I  Spend  A Great  Deal Of  Time  Engaged  In  Remote, Anonymous  A ggression Online

 Because  It Almost Feels Like Creating

    

National Journal: The Case For Protesting Commencement Speakers

So, the case for protesting commencement speakers is that the protesters aren't silencing debate, but rather sparking one. The article then goes on to argue that the debate the protesting students are sparking is of whether there should be any debate.

If it's no longer a safe assumption that overt assertions of antipluralism are self-discrediting, has the sort of circular reasoning exhibited in this item become worthy of consideration as well now? I understand that liberalism is not the only social philosophy under the sun, but due to its practice-proven superiority over its reactionary and radical challengers, it had always at least been the clothing that these challengers garbed themselves in when asserting themselves. I suppose that's the meaning of this ludicrous conceit that attacking the podium is the same thing as having a debate.

This season's string of incidents have some limiting qualities in common - they are all commencement ceremonies, the speakers are all ranged around the political center, and they each chose to side-step the fracas the protesters promised to greet them with. But the phenomenon of campus activists silencing the dais goes back many years and we can know from previous incidents that these are not essential properties of the phenomenon. Often the occasion has been a standard lecture or panel discussion followed by a Q&A period. Sometimes the invited speakers have been the sort of public figures who invite controversy or are further from the center than the center-left commentariat are inclined to defend. Sometimes the speaker makes his scheduled appearance in spite of the threatened protest.

For instance, when immigration restrictionist, Jim Gilchrist was invited to speak at Columbia University in 2006, he knew his appearance would be protested, but he chose to appear nonetheless. The protesters took this as a call for enhanced measures. In the hours leading up to the event, the protesters assembled a gauntlet along the path to the lecture hall entrance, jabbing accusing fingers and shouting rebukes at unrecognized passers-through. Consequently, when the hour arrived, the seats were mainly filled from the protester's ranks. Gilchrist had barely finished a single sentence over the shouting when the one phalanx of protesters rushed in from backstage and unfurled a banner. Simultaneously, a second phalanx of protesters situated in the front row rushed onstage and attacked the podium, pushing Gilchrist away from the microphone. Ninety seconds later, the curtain came down and celebratory cheers roared through the crowd.

This is what Hirsi Ali, Rice, LaGarde and Birgeneau tastefully and considerately sought to avoid by turning down their invitations to speak. When campus activists announce their disapproval of a scheduled speaker, we needn't question whether their intention is to open a debate or to defeat open discourse. In the moments after the curtain fell on the Columbia event, an adult coordinator of the student protesters announced the event's closure to the protesters assembled outside:

Okay, so we just got word from the inside...we have collectively shut him up like he deserves to be shut up! Because it's not about his free speech. It's about our free speech!

Perhaps the most audacious expression of this new antipluralism is the idea that it is the scheduled speakers themselves, rather than the protesters, who defeat the open expression of ideas by opting to leave the podium. This conceit as expressed above and elsewhere in reference to this season's incidents was also asserted by the Columbia protesters in the public statement released amid their vainglorious braying about shutting a speaker up by force. I'm not a fan of Gilchrist and one needn't be to oppose the bellicose posture of antipluralism that saturates university culture.

All things are not equal, however, and it wouldn't be intellectually honest to pretend they are. A commencement ceremony speech is a monologue, not a debate. If not through protest, it is asked, where is the opportunity to speak truth to power? Well, a lot of things in the campus environment are not forums for debate. A professor's lecture is not a debate. A Q&A session is not a proper debate. Indeed, a protest demonstration is not a debate (in actual fact, an "Occupy"-style protest demonstration is no more participatory with a campus population than is the real thing). Chasing a speaker away from the dais does not effect an exchange of ideas any more than it is the case that the protesters and the scheduled speaker are the only people in the auditorium. When considering this phenomenon, we shouldn't ignore the actual mechanics of what is happening: Adult professors and administrators, who would never allow their own presentations to be disrupted in similar fashion, provide encouragement and support to student protesters, and in concert they enforce the boundaries of allowable discourse they define for the entire campus environment.

Condoleeza Rice indeed loses no part of her say in things by being chased away from the a college campus. The ones who have been robbed are the entire remainder of the campus population whose minds have not yet hardened around a rigid, binary system defining "good" ideas and "evil" ideas that is itself exempt from interrogation. That is the objective, of course, to forestall critical thinking and proscribe all but the "correct" thoughts available for the entire campus population's consideration.

Tragedy and Tastelessness

The thing which makes this murder a tragedy is that Maren Sanchez appears to have been the sort of young person destined to lead a successful life. Apart from her recognized academic achievements, the class project she had featured on her YouTube channel reveals her as an innately talented leader and collaborator. She was an athlete. She sung competently and soulfully and she could comp herself. Who knows what might have been? 

The painting of the stone purple in her honor is a fitting, permanent memorial. It was a spontaneous act of devotion from those who knew Sanchez well enough to know her favorite color. I think it was beautiful, and now I am going to complain. In the wake of tragedies such as the one which befell Sanchez, a second offence - more distasteful than tragic - emerges from the loss. 

It begins when the microphone gets passed around. Not to the people who actually experienced the tragedy. The people who actually experienced the tragedy are grieving in a way we would feel uncomfortable gazing at. They are discussing ugly and painful business with policemen. They're not thinking of us the way we're thinking of them. We're the ones left out here while the news vans are pulling up and the podium from the all-purpose room is being set up out on the lawn. We're the audience. The microphone is an invitation to rise up from the audience and become a participant. From there it's a steep slope from forced insincerity through expressions of vanity and on down to exploitation of the tragedy. 

The microphones come out while little is known or understood - when there are a few answers floating around amid a dense fog of questions - and impels the audience to assemble and deliver a meaningful narrative of what has happened. Consequently, the tragedy that occurred is only incidental to the language used to discuss it. The names of the victims are blanks that are filled in while delivering a monologue of palliative jargon. 

In the dozen or so hours since Maren Sanchez was murdered, I've heard or seen the word "senseless" invoked meaninglessly three dozen times. "A Senseless Tragedy." A tragedy is never anything other than "senseless", is it? But we can make perfect sense of this tragedy. I don't just mean that the perpetrator is in police custody. We also have a good enough idea of what happened: The killer was in love with the victim, the victim was not in love with him. The killer could not bear rejection and was driven to murder. That's the extent of it, and that's enough. There isn't some larger significance that includes the rest of us and there doesn't need to be. 

Except that the microphone being thrust in our faces, or the one set up on the lawn for us to "share" into, requires us to manufacture one. We are loathe, of course, to think of ourselves as rubberneckers. We squirm uncomfortably in this straitjacket of mandatory insincerity. So we blurt out the trivia that we had been in the same stairwell where the murder happened recently. We assert, implausibly, that we now question whether our own life isn't in danger. We refer to Sanchez by her first name whether we pretend to have known her or not.

Now we are the story. The story is about this thing that happened to us. It's a pageant of standers-by exploiting a tragedy to make themselves feel significant. One woman speaking to the news cameras Friday stood out for me. Under cover of politically-safe language of concern for the children and their safety, she griped that the murder of Marin Sanchez proves that the Student Resource Officers program had been a waste of her tax dollars. You see? This woman is a victim too, you know. We all are, or at least we are all invited to act as if we are when the microphone is passed our way. The complete transformation of a coffin into a soapbox is the inevitable consequence of this culture of forced sharing. 

All of it is tacky. In the post-tragedy assembly, before the news cameras, all over  Facebook, in the comments sections and  call-in shows, we are encouraged to spew synthetic empathy where simple condolences are all we actually have to give and all that is called for.  

Atlantic Monthly: Antonin Scalia Totally Gets Net Neutrality

I didn't read the entire article, but the thing we're meant to respond to appears to be this assessment of "Net Neutrality" from Justice Scalia:

“It would be odd to say that a car dealer is in the business of selling steel or carpets because the cars he sells include both steel frames and carpeting."

It evidences a lack of understanding and an impatience to pursue one. Bandwidth is not pure abstraction. It is "wires and cables" and a multitude of other things large and small from satellites to switching algorithms. Heavier draw costs more of this stuff. This has been acknowledged from the beginning. In fact, bandwidth service has always been tiered. You could always lease a T1 line, for instance.

 Upon this infrastructure, all industries have established themselves, as have industries peculiar to the internet. Amazon wants to stream you video at a competitive price. Google wants your web-based computing to be as seamless as the old paradigm so you'll locate your computing where their advertising and data-mining clients can access you.

 The typical user will never feel the faintest ripple from the event of Bandwidth Providers charging Content Providers more for the amount of infrastructure used to support them, They may pass the cost down to you. Or not, since, in many cases, your rather modest digital footprint is the the thing they're delivering to their actual clients. They want bandwidth providers to deliver you to them for less.

A similar disposition animates the agitation for "Net Neutrality" from below. The grass roots of the movement emerged from the P2P sharing community. P2P was addictive to some people. These people were angry to discover that their cable company, naturally, had been throttling the pipeline to their homes in order to maintain consistent delivery within costs. They wanted that huge burst of bandwidth at the beginning of the month to stay with them all month long, essentially so they could keep Kazaa open 24/7 downloading ripped DVDs, scanned comics and cracked software.

 Just as stalactites and stalagmites reach toward one another in the darkness, "Net Neutrality" is advanced from high and demanded from below. It is, however, only about getting something from somebody else for nothing.

 It is not about getting a unit of bandwidth for nothing more than the cost of the preceding and following unit of bandwidth any more than a car dealer sells a uniform unit of car. I would challenge Justice Scalia to find me ten car dealers who would testify that they don't sell carpet, if you catch my meaning.