I chuckled to myself while checking my inbox this morning:
The second was sent out less than two hours after the first. Very silly indeed.
A List of Film Lists: Feb 17 2008
Last May I compiled a short list of greatest film lists to calculate the total number of films I’d seen on each, including: the IMDb Top 250, AFI’s 100 Years: 100 Movies, and FilmSite.org’s 100 Greatest. Well, I’ve seen quite a few films since then, so I thought I’d update the list for my own purposes.
IMDb Top 250
In my May 2007 count, I had seen 79 of the 250 films on the list as it existed at the time. However, as the list is compiled through votes online it happens to change somewhat over time. In any case, my current count of films seen on this list: ▲ 91.
AFI’s 100 Years: 100 Movies
Evidently this is a list in flux as well. When I originally went through the list in May, the AFI had yet to release its 10th Anniversary Edition, which broadly affected both the specific films which comprised the list and their positioning within it. In any case, in my first count I had seen 25 of the films on the list. This total has now increased ever so slightly to ▲ 27 on the 1998 version, and ▲ 33 on the 10th Anniversary edition.
FilmSite.org’s 100 Greatest
As far as I can tell, this list hasn’t changed. It also happens to be full of films I’ve never seen. Well, at least now I’ve seen one more, increasing to ▲ 18 from a previous 17.
Illiberal Parenting
There are few things that are as vile and as deserving of our utmost contempt than the exploitation of a young mind. It is the young mind that is the most porous, the most adventurous, and it ought to be guarded against irrational thought at every possible venture. With this in mind, I’ve always been rather skeptical of the intent of those who bring their children to political rallies and things of that sort. Apparently this scourge has only increased its presence as of late: Parents are ‘party-training’ kids.
“Sure, we cringe when we see a child wear an anti-choice shirt,” Kaplan says. “And I am sure conservatives may do the same when they see David wearing our family’s politics on his chest. But we all want our children to share our values, and these shirts are one of the ways we get to express that.”
And these fools fancy themselves liberal-minded. If liberalism is to mean anything, and I suspect it retains some value, it is this: to ardently defend the possibility of an open mind. To so senselessly impart partisan politics upon a child is nothing less than a complete negation of precisely that which defines liberalism in its most basic sense.
lintbox.com
Some comrades of mine: lintbox.com.
I’ve been thinking about skepticism rather frequently as of late, actually. It appears as though it is an unavoidable topic of conversation these days. From the pseudo-skepticism that permeates conspiracy theories, to the latest quip in a spate of anti-evolution comments from whomever fancies themselves a people’s politician.
In any case, all of this reminded me of a fantastic example of applied skepticism in the case of James Randi’s exposing of James Hydrick, a young man who claimed to be able to perform telekinesis in moving a pencil and flipping the pages of a telephone directory. Of course, the hack was full of hot air - quite literally, in fact, as he moved both items simply by blowing on them:
Kierkegaarding It Up
Writing about Philosophical Fragments, and it’s giving me a wee bit of a headache. The problem is that Kierkegaard is just insane. Yes, I’ve committed a horrible fallacy, but at this point I don’t really care a great deal for rigorous argument. Then again, neither does Kierkegaard. To illustrate, he begins the ‘pamphlet’ by asking a rather profound question: “Can a historical point of departure be given for an eternal consciousness?”
There’s a damn good reason why one might well answer clearly and distinctly, no! It’s a bloody paradox. It violates the law of non-contradiction. For example:
Can history ground eternity?
History: an occurrence (not being –> being / possibility –> actuality)
Eternity: Actuality, being. Never possibility, never not being.
History, in becoming cannot be a point of departure for an eternal consciousness. In ‘not being’, history is divorced from eternity. This can be rephrased as a dichotomy between contingency and necessity:
Can contingency ground necessity?
Contingency: Not being –> being
Necessity: being always.
Of course, Kierkegaard, being the insane bastard he is, argues just the opposite.
For Kierkegaard, the paradox of Christianity is that it is “the only historical phenomenon despite the historical – indeed, precisely be means of the historical – has wanted to be the single individual’s point of departure for his eternal consciousness.” God, in becoming man, becomes historical. Incarnated as man, God is the historical point of departure for eternal consciousness - he offers the condition by which truth and salvation are achieved. Thus, the Moment (in which truth is revealed), “must have a decisive significance, so that I will never be able to forget it either in time or eternity; because the Eternal, which hitherto did not exist, came into existence in this moment.”
But if this moment is eternal how does it come into existence? It can’t - yet it does. At some point, untruth prevailed. Then the moment happened and the truth was revealed. This is becoming, and therefore cannot be eternal.
Oh well, at least Leibniz has been mildly fruitful.
Everything is Shit
George Orwell:
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never understand such a thing unless driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
Thanks George.
Some stuff that doesn’t suck:
No Country for Old Men
The Flashbulb - Soundtrack to a Vacant Life
John Murphy - Sunshine
Stuff that does suck:
Kierkegaard - Philosophical Fragments