Normal stuff + musings on torchwood :o)
Diary: Week of 06/07: Computer games, movies, and Dungeon :o)
Between leaving work (no walking home, too hot for it anyway), my holiday in Scotland (with too much bad food) and my birthday (with appropriate cake consumption) it seems my weight has swung back up to twelve and a half stone :oP Seems to be where it wants to be really... efforts to go below it take ages and the slightest lapse puts it back again. Ahh well, not the end of the world :o)
Someone I know distantly posted a status message on facebook saying 'Vote BNP'. I'd hoped they were kidding but it appears not, seemingly there was some kind of immigrant/ethnic minority targeted hate because 'some of them take the piss'. A few people (myself chimed in, saying how overtly racist they are) and a few people on his friends list (no one I know) tried arguing the point. Apparently it's judgemental and intolerant to oppose political beleifs even when those beliefs are that people with dark skin shouldn't live in the UK He eventually deleted the status message but then IMed me saying that his status messages are not a 'debuting place' (sic). I said that if he posts racist filth then that's the reaction he will get. He apparently sticks by his belief.
I deleted him and told him I don't ever want to communicate with him again.
That's pretty much my attitude across the board, certainly for people I don't know well in the first place. Unrepentant support for overtly racist parties is the sort of thing that will make me no longer want to be around someone, let alone be their friend.
On a much more positive mode, on Tuesday I learnt that there is (apparently) a special edition of Secret of Monkey Island coming out. Basically, the exact same game but with the graphics and music redone and with speech acting instead of text. Looked at a trailer and it looks all very similar to the new game (just updated) except the Guybrush seems to be more inspired by the later games.
I'm conflicted. As a child, I really liked the way the game looked and played and it almost seems wrong to redo it. Fortunately I still have an original copy of the game anyway so can always play it the old way :oP (have replayed it fairly recently in fact). Better yet, I hear rumour that the original version will be packaged at it so you can switch between the two mid-play! I think I'll definitely be looking into getting a copy anyway :oP
I watched the director's cut of THX 1138. It was made in the 1970s and altered for a modern audience but it seems like the plot was left alone so I'm more or less okay with that (reading up on some of the changes, I do think they work). I can definitely see why people say that Equilibrium was based/inspired by it, it is the same concept. That being said, they're very different in atmosphere, for one thing THX 1138 is not trying to borrow the Matrix aesthetic and lacks the same sort of action, which is probably a good thing really. It does feel much more like what a drug-based society might like to and comes of as being much more believable, although the pacing is much slower (ironically appropriate for a film about mass consumption of sedatives!)
Also watched Torchwood through the week. The five-episode season with one being aired each day worked very well I think. It may have been shorter but I liked how it allowed them to do a much longer story. I tend to prefer that to the short storylines that they had been doing previously. Will talk about some of the interesting moral issues in it separately :o)
Through Friday to Sunday me and Lacuna_Raze watched a fair bit of Heroes S3, which is also very good. It often doesn't seem as polished as some series and the plot lines go in odd and unexpected ways but that can be a refreshing change so I don't mind. Still eager to see how it all finishes at the end of the season in any case :oD
We did go down to Dungeon on Saturday but it was disappointingly empty, perhaps because of the cold and rain or perhaps just because everyone is still skint, sucks!
Review: Morality in Torchwood S3 (Spoilers!)
Brilliant season just for the fact that they developed a storyline across five episodes but the really interesting thing is how much they looked into mucky moral decisions, which are what I want to scan through quickly :oP (or maybe not so quickly, will see how it goes!) :o)
One of the first is the decision to execute a number of people, without trial, in order to preserve a government secret. That's dubious enough even if done in the interest's of state security and the protection of the people but in this case it was to protect the government from criticism. I'm not sure much need be said about that, blatantly immoral and corrupt.
Carrying on with that theme, even when the main issue with the children is being discussed, people are still expressing concern about how to pull it off with their careers intact and how to appease the voters. Given the enormity of the decision, it just seems entirely the wrong time to be worrying about your career. What it all comes down to is that all these decisions are based in self-interest and have nothing to do with these people's roles as government or morality.
Then of course we have the big issues, the children.
The first choice shown was the decision to give twelve children to the 456 in exchange for the cure to a new virus. It's not made clear whether or not the 456 engineered the virus however. All we know is the expected death toll without the cure was expected to be huge and certainly more than 12 children would have died. I suppose the maths of that would be clear if only we knew the children were going to die rather than going to have an unknown fate.
Then they come back and this time demand 10% of the children or all humanity will be wiped out. The math is still as obvious but the sacrifice is so big that you'd have to worry about the sort of person that could agree without pause. The emotional issues that are involved with being the person to make that decision are huge.
The last is Jack's decision to sacrifice his grandson to stop the 10% being sent to the aliens. Mathematically, this is a much better option and ought to be an easier sacrifice but it's doubtlessly much easier to sacrifice 10% of children, whose names and faces you don't know, that one child you do know and care about as an individual.
In all cases, we would want to be looking for other options. That's part of the failing of the government, they considered what seemed to be the options and made a decision and stuck by it. There didn't feel like there was much time spent looking for other options. Even if we decide to give over the 10%, it would still seem to make sense to have a team looking for other options.
Of course, that team ought to have been Torchwood, but the government had already screwed that one up. If they hadn't, they could have told Torchwood what they were doing and how much time Torchwood had to come up with other options. Preferably options that were better-formed than march up to the 456 and tell them 'No' and just hope it all works out okay (which turned out great of course!).
But the main decision still seems to be 'Say no and let humanity die' and 'Give up 10% of children'.
The argument for the former would be that we might die but we haven't betrayed our values. One of the arguments raised in the show was 'Okay, we live, but what sort of world are we leaving behind?', which I take to mean something like 'If we do this, do we even deserve to live anyway?'. That's a sensible question, 'What needs to be true for humanity to even be worth saving?'
I don't think it works that well though. Even if we are pressed to do terrible things in extreme circumstances, does that really mean we're not worth being about and better off dead? Also, given that such decisions are made by a small number of people, should everyone die for the fact that they are able to make that kind of decision? I don't tend to think so.
The real problem is the 'killing people to save people' issue. If the dilemma was that Earth was dying and we could only send 90% of people off to a new world to stay and 10% of people had to be left behind then I don't think we'd have the same issue. We may deeply regret leaving people behind and some people may even feel quite guilty about it but not in the same way as if we were actively killing them ourselves. The end effect is the same of course; they're still dead because of our choices.
So, deeply unpleasant but true, I still say that sending of the 10% was the best of the two not good options.
That being said, it is important that it's deeply unpleasant. When Jack gave up one child to save millions he was doing a foul and unpleasant act for the greater good and he clearly knew it and felt it, which is what I'd expect of a person of agreeable values. Just because you've decided that it's the best of the bad options shouldn't make the task any less repugnant or soul-destroying to perform.
And that was the problem with the politicians, not the decision, but the ease of making it. Despite making a decision that ought to be soul-destroying they (the PM in particular) didn't seem to be having as much of an issue with it as they should be. In fact, they were still very worried about their careers and what people would think of them.
Jack, meanwhile, felt like he did a bad thing and accepted the consequences of his actions, his daughter now hating him. He didn't make excuses or try to hide it, he accepted it. You get a sense that he was haunted by it, which shows that he took the issue very seriously in a moral sense and felt the burden of his decision.
The other big issue was the selection of the 10%.
The first thing to come up was excluding their own children. An understandable emotional reaction but clearly based in personal interests, which is an abuse of their power. It's hard to maintain they were making moral decisions for the good of everyone when they start of with a proposal that is clearly about them and not us in general. It is still understandable of course, even Jack changed his mind and told the 456 that they could have the 10% when Ianto was dying. It's easier to be sympathetic to this then the worrying about their careers because the conflict is between morality and our attachment to other people rather than just ourselves. I still don't think it's right however.
The next choice was selection at random or selection by criteria.
In the sense of fairness as in 'without bias or favouritism', random is the safest shot. In fact, the people speaking out for it seemed to recommend it on the basis that it protects them from such accusations (safe-guarding their careers). It's still very unfair in the sense that they didn't 'deserve it' and that it was irrespective of merit or performance.
Of course, the only option for selection by criteria that seemed practical was to take the children from the schools at the bottom of the league table. This at least has the seeming of being connected to merit and performance but that obviously isn't really the case because (a) it judges individual children by the performance of their schools, (b) it judges them in a very narrow way (academics) and (C) ignores that the low-performance may be due to other facts than potential.
In short, being sent to the aliens because you were chosen by lottery or because you were born into a non-privileged background isn't fair.
I don't think that was how they made their decision anyway. Fairness seems to have gone out of the window. They'd gotten their hands mucky by making the decision to sacrifice the children anyway so they were about to go further down the mucky avenue of consequentialist morality.
What selection criteria would be for the greater good?
So they opted to try to use this situation to take care of a social problem, that of poverty.
I've noticed some people (in the context of this discussion) suddenly going into denial that people's achievements and contributions to society are related to their background; I may not have been in a Socialist party since I was a teenager but I'm still too left-wing to think anything else.
Being born in a privileged background does confer benefits that help you achieve a more valuable position in society. Being born without it leaves you without those benefits: you're more likely to be replaceable in the market-place as well as well as involve you in social problems such as violent crime.
That's not fair of course, but it's true. Also, whilst I might support various progressive and left-wind solutions to these problems, the chances are they won't be implemented and it's a problem that's not going to go away and will continue to affect children currently going to under-performing schools for the rest of their lives.
So these politicians were likely to never try to seriously address these problems (not in a successful way anyway) and are now presented with a muddy and unsavoury way to take advantage of the current situation to solve the problem. Give away those people afflicted with (relative) poverty and thus more likely to end up in bad positions in the market and be involved with social problems. Awful to contemplated, but given that they were already involved in an unsavoury and horrible decision, doesn't surprise me that they considered it and opted for it.
It's a close parallel with the more used hypothetical situation of having a gun pointed at your head and being told to kill one of two people or else all three of you die. Do you choose randomly or do you try (as best as you can) to choose by criteria? If you know one is a criminal and the other is working on a cure for cancer, do you shoot the criminal in place of the scientist?
Despite being very far away from the ideal solution to class issues I still can't judge the politicians for making that decision. I don't really judge any of their decisions, just the way they mad them; there was not enough guilt and shame. If a person with agreeable values had a gun to their head (as above) and made unpleasant choices about killing someone to save lives then I might not condemn the decision but I'd be a bit wary if it had no negative emotional consequences. It would take a person of very dubious character to be okay emotionally afterwards and to still be thinking of themselves.
One of the really fortunate things about these kinds of moral issues are that they're mostly hypothetical. The chances of them really being explored in real life are very slim, certainly not on the scale shown in the television show. Most of us are very unlikely to have to choose who gets to live and die so our stances on how to act in such a situation hopefully will never matter.
Link: Protect yourself from aids (cute video) - linky (Stolen from Lacuna_Raze)
Link: Nick Griffin suggests sinking immigrants at sea - linky
Link: 'Babes of the BNP' interviews - linky
Between leaving work (no walking home, too hot for it anyway), my holiday in Scotland (with too much bad food) and my birthday (with appropriate cake consumption) it seems my weight has swung back up to twelve and a half stone :oP Seems to be where it wants to be really... efforts to go below it take ages and the slightest lapse puts it back again. Ahh well, not the end of the world :o)
Someone I know distantly posted a status message on facebook saying 'Vote BNP'. I'd hoped they were kidding but it appears not, seemingly there was some kind of immigrant/ethnic minority targeted hate because 'some of them take the piss'. A few people (myself chimed in, saying how overtly racist they are) and a few people on his friends list (no one I know) tried arguing the point. Apparently it's judgemental and intolerant to oppose political beleifs even when those beliefs are that people with dark skin shouldn't live in the UK He eventually deleted the status message but then IMed me saying that his status messages are not a 'debuting place' (sic). I said that if he posts racist filth then that's the reaction he will get. He apparently sticks by his belief.
I deleted him and told him I don't ever want to communicate with him again.
That's pretty much my attitude across the board, certainly for people I don't know well in the first place. Unrepentant support for overtly racist parties is the sort of thing that will make me no longer want to be around someone, let alone be their friend.
On a much more positive mode, on Tuesday I learnt that there is (apparently) a special edition of Secret of Monkey Island coming out. Basically, the exact same game but with the graphics and music redone and with speech acting instead of text. Looked at a trailer and it looks all very similar to the new game (just updated) except the Guybrush seems to be more inspired by the later games.
I'm conflicted. As a child, I really liked the way the game looked and played and it almost seems wrong to redo it. Fortunately I still have an original copy of the game anyway so can always play it the old way :oP (have replayed it fairly recently in fact). Better yet, I hear rumour that the original version will be packaged at it so you can switch between the two mid-play! I think I'll definitely be looking into getting a copy anyway :oP
I watched the director's cut of THX 1138. It was made in the 1970s and altered for a modern audience but it seems like the plot was left alone so I'm more or less okay with that (reading up on some of the changes, I do think they work). I can definitely see why people say that Equilibrium was based/inspired by it, it is the same concept. That being said, they're very different in atmosphere, for one thing THX 1138 is not trying to borrow the Matrix aesthetic and lacks the same sort of action, which is probably a good thing really. It does feel much more like what a drug-based society might like to and comes of as being much more believable, although the pacing is much slower (ironically appropriate for a film about mass consumption of sedatives!)
Also watched Torchwood through the week. The five-episode season with one being aired each day worked very well I think. It may have been shorter but I liked how it allowed them to do a much longer story. I tend to prefer that to the short storylines that they had been doing previously. Will talk about some of the interesting moral issues in it separately :o)
Through Friday to Sunday me and Lacuna_Raze watched a fair bit of Heroes S3, which is also very good. It often doesn't seem as polished as some series and the plot lines go in odd and unexpected ways but that can be a refreshing change so I don't mind. Still eager to see how it all finishes at the end of the season in any case :oD
We did go down to Dungeon on Saturday but it was disappointingly empty, perhaps because of the cold and rain or perhaps just because everyone is still skint, sucks!
Review: Morality in Torchwood S3 (Spoilers!)
Brilliant season just for the fact that they developed a storyline across five episodes but the really interesting thing is how much they looked into mucky moral decisions, which are what I want to scan through quickly :oP (or maybe not so quickly, will see how it goes!) :o)
One of the first is the decision to execute a number of people, without trial, in order to preserve a government secret. That's dubious enough even if done in the interest's of state security and the protection of the people but in this case it was to protect the government from criticism. I'm not sure much need be said about that, blatantly immoral and corrupt.
Carrying on with that theme, even when the main issue with the children is being discussed, people are still expressing concern about how to pull it off with their careers intact and how to appease the voters. Given the enormity of the decision, it just seems entirely the wrong time to be worrying about your career. What it all comes down to is that all these decisions are based in self-interest and have nothing to do with these people's roles as government or morality.
Then of course we have the big issues, the children.
The first choice shown was the decision to give twelve children to the 456 in exchange for the cure to a new virus. It's not made clear whether or not the 456 engineered the virus however. All we know is the expected death toll without the cure was expected to be huge and certainly more than 12 children would have died. I suppose the maths of that would be clear if only we knew the children were going to die rather than going to have an unknown fate.
Then they come back and this time demand 10% of the children or all humanity will be wiped out. The math is still as obvious but the sacrifice is so big that you'd have to worry about the sort of person that could agree without pause. The emotional issues that are involved with being the person to make that decision are huge.
The last is Jack's decision to sacrifice his grandson to stop the 10% being sent to the aliens. Mathematically, this is a much better option and ought to be an easier sacrifice but it's doubtlessly much easier to sacrifice 10% of children, whose names and faces you don't know, that one child you do know and care about as an individual.
In all cases, we would want to be looking for other options. That's part of the failing of the government, they considered what seemed to be the options and made a decision and stuck by it. There didn't feel like there was much time spent looking for other options. Even if we decide to give over the 10%, it would still seem to make sense to have a team looking for other options.
Of course, that team ought to have been Torchwood, but the government had already screwed that one up. If they hadn't, they could have told Torchwood what they were doing and how much time Torchwood had to come up with other options. Preferably options that were better-formed than march up to the 456 and tell them 'No' and just hope it all works out okay (which turned out great of course!).
But the main decision still seems to be 'Say no and let humanity die' and 'Give up 10% of children'.
The argument for the former would be that we might die but we haven't betrayed our values. One of the arguments raised in the show was 'Okay, we live, but what sort of world are we leaving behind?', which I take to mean something like 'If we do this, do we even deserve to live anyway?'. That's a sensible question, 'What needs to be true for humanity to even be worth saving?'
I don't think it works that well though. Even if we are pressed to do terrible things in extreme circumstances, does that really mean we're not worth being about and better off dead? Also, given that such decisions are made by a small number of people, should everyone die for the fact that they are able to make that kind of decision? I don't tend to think so.
The real problem is the 'killing people to save people' issue. If the dilemma was that Earth was dying and we could only send 90% of people off to a new world to stay and 10% of people had to be left behind then I don't think we'd have the same issue. We may deeply regret leaving people behind and some people may even feel quite guilty about it but not in the same way as if we were actively killing them ourselves. The end effect is the same of course; they're still dead because of our choices.
So, deeply unpleasant but true, I still say that sending of the 10% was the best of the two not good options.
That being said, it is important that it's deeply unpleasant. When Jack gave up one child to save millions he was doing a foul and unpleasant act for the greater good and he clearly knew it and felt it, which is what I'd expect of a person of agreeable values. Just because you've decided that it's the best of the bad options shouldn't make the task any less repugnant or soul-destroying to perform.
And that was the problem with the politicians, not the decision, but the ease of making it. Despite making a decision that ought to be soul-destroying they (the PM in particular) didn't seem to be having as much of an issue with it as they should be. In fact, they were still very worried about their careers and what people would think of them.
Jack, meanwhile, felt like he did a bad thing and accepted the consequences of his actions, his daughter now hating him. He didn't make excuses or try to hide it, he accepted it. You get a sense that he was haunted by it, which shows that he took the issue very seriously in a moral sense and felt the burden of his decision.
The other big issue was the selection of the 10%.
The first thing to come up was excluding their own children. An understandable emotional reaction but clearly based in personal interests, which is an abuse of their power. It's hard to maintain they were making moral decisions for the good of everyone when they start of with a proposal that is clearly about them and not us in general. It is still understandable of course, even Jack changed his mind and told the 456 that they could have the 10% when Ianto was dying. It's easier to be sympathetic to this then the worrying about their careers because the conflict is between morality and our attachment to other people rather than just ourselves. I still don't think it's right however.
The next choice was selection at random or selection by criteria.
In the sense of fairness as in 'without bias or favouritism', random is the safest shot. In fact, the people speaking out for it seemed to recommend it on the basis that it protects them from such accusations (safe-guarding their careers). It's still very unfair in the sense that they didn't 'deserve it' and that it was irrespective of merit or performance.
Of course, the only option for selection by criteria that seemed practical was to take the children from the schools at the bottom of the league table. This at least has the seeming of being connected to merit and performance but that obviously isn't really the case because (a) it judges individual children by the performance of their schools, (b) it judges them in a very narrow way (academics) and (C) ignores that the low-performance may be due to other facts than potential.
In short, being sent to the aliens because you were chosen by lottery or because you were born into a non-privileged background isn't fair.
I don't think that was how they made their decision anyway. Fairness seems to have gone out of the window. They'd gotten their hands mucky by making the decision to sacrifice the children anyway so they were about to go further down the mucky avenue of consequentialist morality.
What selection criteria would be for the greater good?
So they opted to try to use this situation to take care of a social problem, that of poverty.
I've noticed some people (in the context of this discussion) suddenly going into denial that people's achievements and contributions to society are related to their background; I may not have been in a Socialist party since I was a teenager but I'm still too left-wing to think anything else.
Being born in a privileged background does confer benefits that help you achieve a more valuable position in society. Being born without it leaves you without those benefits: you're more likely to be replaceable in the market-place as well as well as involve you in social problems such as violent crime.
That's not fair of course, but it's true. Also, whilst I might support various progressive and left-wind solutions to these problems, the chances are they won't be implemented and it's a problem that's not going to go away and will continue to affect children currently going to under-performing schools for the rest of their lives.
So these politicians were likely to never try to seriously address these problems (not in a successful way anyway) and are now presented with a muddy and unsavoury way to take advantage of the current situation to solve the problem. Give away those people afflicted with (relative) poverty and thus more likely to end up in bad positions in the market and be involved with social problems. Awful to contemplated, but given that they were already involved in an unsavoury and horrible decision, doesn't surprise me that they considered it and opted for it.
It's a close parallel with the more used hypothetical situation of having a gun pointed at your head and being told to kill one of two people or else all three of you die. Do you choose randomly or do you try (as best as you can) to choose by criteria? If you know one is a criminal and the other is working on a cure for cancer, do you shoot the criminal in place of the scientist?
Despite being very far away from the ideal solution to class issues I still can't judge the politicians for making that decision. I don't really judge any of their decisions, just the way they mad them; there was not enough guilt and shame. If a person with agreeable values had a gun to their head (as above) and made unpleasant choices about killing someone to save lives then I might not condemn the decision but I'd be a bit wary if it had no negative emotional consequences. It would take a person of very dubious character to be okay emotionally afterwards and to still be thinking of themselves.
One of the really fortunate things about these kinds of moral issues are that they're mostly hypothetical. The chances of them really being explored in real life are very slim, certainly not on the scale shown in the television show. Most of us are very unlikely to have to choose who gets to live and die so our stances on how to act in such a situation hopefully will never matter.
Link: Protect yourself from aids (cute video) - linky (Stolen from Lacuna_Raze)
Link: Nick Griffin suggests sinking immigrants at sea - linky
Link: 'Babes of the BNP' interviews - linky