My TV and me
Really enjoying my rewatch of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, though a bit afraid I’ll be on some watch list because of my absolute favorite line so far, “Whoever said [you can’t fight city hall] didn’t have as much plastique as we do.” And then Sarah says, “You can't blow up City Hall,” and Derek responds, delivering the line as if she’s just raised an engineering objection, “It's really not that hard.” Squee!
Homeland: Claire Danes's character really is good at her job. Her approach to Damian Lewis's character--teasing, then leaving him wanting more, making him think they shared a secret--was masterful. You can see why she wouldn't want to get kicked out!
Jennie Erin Smith, Stolen World: A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skulduggery: This is a book about terrible people. Their love literally kills: they are so obsessed with exotic reptiles, and selling exotic reptiles to people in developed countries, that they smuggle hundreds and thousands of the animals in ways that ensure that many will die, often horribly. As if that wasn’t enough, they are also constantly cheating and stealing from their customers, their suppliers, and everyone else who gets in the way-even each other. But the reptile obsession keeps them dealing with each other, amazingly. One of Smith’s chief informants, who somehow she was charmed by, makes his rationale explicit: everyone is a cheat and a liar, he says, so he’s just getting there first. I guess the book shows that terrible people love stuff too, but I already knew that. The book also illustrates that overworked governments aren’t often concerned with animal smuggling, despite its nominal illegality, and that American zoos remained complicit in the smuggling long after their public positions changed.
Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History: This short book is hard to evaluate because it contains a lot of inside baseball/score-settling with other historians, which only serves to reinforce the author’s point that Americans know virtually nothing about the Korean War, generally misperceiving it as being about the Cold War when it was and remains primarily a civil war and the outside country of most importance is probably Japan, whose occupation set the stage for rebellion against former collaborators (who made up a big chunk of the political class of South Korea until very recently). Cumings emphasizes the atrocities committed by South Koreans and occasionally Americans, while acknowledging that North Koreans also did plenty of harm which has yet to be exposed via a truth and reconciliation commission as in the South. There are meditations on the nature of history and memory that strive for poetry, but don’t quite get there; still, I did learn something about the intractability of the conflict and the ridiculousness of seeing Korea as simply a stage on which the West-Communist Bloc struggle played out.
Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil: This book by the guy who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment-and who was the warden, and got sucked into abusing his power-is about half a detailed account of what actually happened in the SPE, blow by blow. There’s a really detailed website for the SPE with a lot of extra material, including video. The rest of the book is about other situations in which people abuse their power-and the parallels between the SPE and Abu Ghraib really are striking, down to the guards’ invention of sexual humiliations as a way to control and dehumanize their captives. Zimbardo strikingly illustrates how humans tend to blame the degraded for their own degradation-both in the SPE and at Abu Ghraib, the prisoners smelled bad, having been denied access to real toilet facilities, and this led the guards to think of them as dirty and unworthy. He argues that we too readily attribute bad behavior to individual disposition (rotten apples) rather than situational and structural factors (the construction of the barrel). This fundamental attribution error pervasively distracts us from the need to build better systems. At the end, he spends some time on heroism: the qualities that lead people to resist situational forces and stand up for what’s right. A disturbing but worthwhile book.
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Homeland: Claire Danes's character really is good at her job. Her approach to Damian Lewis's character--teasing, then leaving him wanting more, making him think they shared a secret--was masterful. You can see why she wouldn't want to get kicked out!
Jennie Erin Smith, Stolen World: A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skulduggery: This is a book about terrible people. Their love literally kills: they are so obsessed with exotic reptiles, and selling exotic reptiles to people in developed countries, that they smuggle hundreds and thousands of the animals in ways that ensure that many will die, often horribly. As if that wasn’t enough, they are also constantly cheating and stealing from their customers, their suppliers, and everyone else who gets in the way-even each other. But the reptile obsession keeps them dealing with each other, amazingly. One of Smith’s chief informants, who somehow she was charmed by, makes his rationale explicit: everyone is a cheat and a liar, he says, so he’s just getting there first. I guess the book shows that terrible people love stuff too, but I already knew that. The book also illustrates that overworked governments aren’t often concerned with animal smuggling, despite its nominal illegality, and that American zoos remained complicit in the smuggling long after their public positions changed.
Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History: This short book is hard to evaluate because it contains a lot of inside baseball/score-settling with other historians, which only serves to reinforce the author’s point that Americans know virtually nothing about the Korean War, generally misperceiving it as being about the Cold War when it was and remains primarily a civil war and the outside country of most importance is probably Japan, whose occupation set the stage for rebellion against former collaborators (who made up a big chunk of the political class of South Korea until very recently). Cumings emphasizes the atrocities committed by South Koreans and occasionally Americans, while acknowledging that North Koreans also did plenty of harm which has yet to be exposed via a truth and reconciliation commission as in the South. There are meditations on the nature of history and memory that strive for poetry, but don’t quite get there; still, I did learn something about the intractability of the conflict and the ridiculousness of seeing Korea as simply a stage on which the West-Communist Bloc struggle played out.
Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil: This book by the guy who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment-and who was the warden, and got sucked into abusing his power-is about half a detailed account of what actually happened in the SPE, blow by blow. There’s a really detailed website for the SPE with a lot of extra material, including video. The rest of the book is about other situations in which people abuse their power-and the parallels between the SPE and Abu Ghraib really are striking, down to the guards’ invention of sexual humiliations as a way to control and dehumanize their captives. Zimbardo strikingly illustrates how humans tend to blame the degraded for their own degradation-both in the SPE and at Abu Ghraib, the prisoners smelled bad, having been denied access to real toilet facilities, and this led the guards to think of them as dirty and unworthy. He argues that we too readily attribute bad behavior to individual disposition (rotten apples) rather than situational and structural factors (the construction of the barrel). This fundamental attribution error pervasively distracts us from the need to build better systems. At the end, he spends some time on heroism: the qualities that lead people to resist situational forces and stand up for what’s right. A disturbing but worthwhile book.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.