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I've said this before, but: many political discussions are heavily informed by who the person speaking identifies as the relevant agent in some situation. For instance, consider this dialogue:

Person 1: The US needs to institute policy X.

Person 2: That's impossible, all the Republicans in congress would just vote against it. What we really need is for the Democrats to push for policy Y, which they might be able to get bipartisan agreement on.

Person 3: That's not possible either, the Democrats are too beholden to corporate interests to support policy Y. What we really need is for the president to institute executive order Z.

Person 2: Oh come on, the president would never issue execute order Z, policy Y is much more feasible than that.

And so on and so forth ad nauseam.

I don't think these people are really arguing about politics, and I don't know if they even have any substantive disagreement with each other.

In general, when people talk about "what should be done", they are always implicitly thinking of some agent, they are speaking of "what should be done by someone". And of course when we speak about different agents, we will come to different conclusions about what they should do. This is not least because different agents have different options in front of them. For instance, if you were to give me suggestions about what I could do to make the world better, they would probably not be the same as the suggestions you would give to Bill Gates about what he could do to make the world better, or the suggestions you would give to Vladimir Putin.

Normative claims presuppose an agent, and the content of normative claims will vary by the agent that is supposed. It would be useless to suggest to me "end the war in Ukraine", or to suggest to Putin "be more selective about the discourse posts you reblog", or whatever.

The problem is that when we are discussing politics, there are many different agents that we can identify with and whose behavior we can present normative claims about, and we often do not specify which one we are referring to. Furthermore, political agents can be institutions instead of just individuals, making possible the existence of sub-agents with varying agendas, and so on. Individuals might conceivably be modeled as having these too, but that's a philosophical can of worms I won't open.

Anyway, this imprecision about what agents we are prescribing actions to leads to scenarios like the discourse above, where people who substantively disagree about very little might argue vociferously against each other because in truth they are prescribing behavior for different agents altogether. Person 1 is prescribing behavior for the US government as a whole, Person 2 for the Democratic party, and Person 3 for the president. They only disagree in that each imagines the other's agent as an object of nature governed by mechanistic processes and their own agent as possessing (practically speaking) free will. None of them are really per se correct or incorrect, I don't think.

My suggested solution to this is: specify clearly the agent you are referring to, and admit that for normative discussion to make sense at all you must model that agent as "being able to choose its action" even if deeper analysis of its internal processes reveals it to in fact be deterministic. When in doubt, recall that the only agent whose actions you can really chose (if you can choose any actions at all) are your own, and thus in a certain sense any discussion of what an agent other than you yourself should do is idle philosophizing.

Ethics (I claim) are in and of themselves only a system for selecting your own actions; their use in evaluating the actions of others is secondary at best.

[glasshalftrue]

best picture

For the first time in a long time, I watched all of the movies nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars this year. Partly on a whim, partly for a piece I’ve been working on for a while about what is going wrong in contemporary artmarking. I cannot say that the experience made me feel any better or worse about contemporary movies than I already felt, which was pretty bad. But sometimes to write about a hot stove, you gotta put your hand on one. So. The nominees for coldest stove are:

Poor Things. Did not like enough to finish. I always want to like something that is making an effort at originality, strangeness, or style. Unfortunately, the execution of those things in this movie felt somehow dull and thin. Hard to explain how. Maybe the movie’s motif of things mashed together (baby-woman, duck-dog, etc) is representative. People have been mashing things together since griffins, medleys, Avatar the Last Airbender’s animals, Nickelodeon’s Catdog, etc. Thing + thing is elementary-level weird. And while there’s nothing wrong with a simple, or well-worn premise, there is a greater burden on an artist to do something interesting with it, if they go that route. And Poor Things does not. Its themes are obvious and belabored (the difficulty of self-actualization in a world that violently infantilizes you) and do not elevate the premise. There’s a fine line between the archetypal and the hackish, and this movie falls on the wrong side of it. It made me miss Crimes of the Future (2022), a recent Cronenberg that was authentically original and strange, with the execution to match.

Anatomy of a Fall. Solid, but not stunning. The baseline level of what a ‘good’ movie should be. It was written coherently and economically, despite its length. It told a story that drew you along. I wanted to know what happened, which is the least you can ask from storytelling. It had some compelling scenes that required a command of character and drama to write—particularly the big argument scene. The cinematography was not interesting, but it was not annoying either. It did its job. This was not, however, a transcendent movie.

Oppenheimer. Did not like enough to finish. But later forced myself to, just so no one could accuse me of not knowing what I was talking about when I said I disliked it. I felt like I was being pranked. The Marvel idea of what a prestige biopic should be. Like Poor Things, it telegraphed its artsiness and themes and has raked in accolades for its trouble. But obviousness is not the same as goodness and this movie is not good. The imagery is painfully literal. A character mentions something? Cut to a shot of it! No irony or nuance added by such images—just the artistry of a book report. The dialogue pathologically tells instead of shows. It constantly, cutely references things you might have heard of, the kind of desperate audience fellation you see in soulless franchise movies. Which is a particularly jarring choice given the movie’s subject matter. ‘Why didn’t you get Einstein for the Manhattan project’ Strauss asks, as if he’s saying ‘Why didn’t you get Superman for the Avengers?’ If any of this referentiality was an attempt to say something about mythologization, it failed—badly. The movie is stuffed with famous and talented actors, but it might as well not have been, given how fake every word out of their mouths sounded. Every scene felt like it had been written to sound good in a trailer, rather than to tell a damn story. All climax and no cattle.

Barbie. Did not like enough to finish. It had slightly more solidity in its execution than I was afraid it would have, so I will give it that. If people want this to be their entertainment I will let them have it. But if they want this to be their high cinema I will have to kill myself. Barbie being on this list reminds me of the midcentury decades of annual movie musical nominations for Best Picture. Sometimes deservingly. Other times, less so. The Music Man is great, but it’s not better than 8 1/2  or The Great Escape, neither of which were nominated in 1963. Musicals tend to appeal to more popular emotions, which ticket-buyers and award-givers tend to like, and critics tend to dislike. I remember how much Pauline Kael and Joan Didion hated The Sound of Music (which won in 1966), and have to ask myself if in twenty years I’ll think of my reaction to Barbie the same way that I think of those reviews: justified, but perhaps beside the point of other merits. Thing is. Say what you want about musicals, but that genre was alive back then. It was vital. Bursting with creativity. For all Kael’s bile, even she acknowledged that The Sound of Music was “well done for what it is.” [1] Contemporary cinema lacks such vitality, and Barbie is laden with symptoms of the malaise. It repeatedly falls back on references to past aesthetic successes (2001: A Space Odyssey, Singin’ in the Rain, etc) in order to have aesthetic heft. It has a car commercial in the middle. It’s about a toy from 60 years ago and politics from 10 years ago. It tries to wring some energy and meaning from all of that but not enough to cover the stench of death. I’d prefer an old musical any day.

American Fiction. Was okay. It tried to be clever about politics, but ended up being clomping about politics. At the end of the day, it just wasn’t any more interesting than any other ‘intellectual has a mid-life crisis’ story, even with the ‘twist’ of it being from a black American perspective. Even with it being somewhat self-aware of this. But it could have been a worse mid-life crisis story. The cinematography was terrible. It was shot like a sitcom. Much of the dialogue was sitcom-y too. I liked the soundtrack, what I could hear of it. The attempts at style and meta (the characters coming to life, the multiple endings) felt underdeveloped. Mostly because they were only used a couple times. In all, it felt like a first draft of a potentially more interesting movie. 

The Zone of Interest.Wanted to like it more than I did. Unfortunately, you get the point within about five minutes. If you’ve seen the promotional image of the people in the garden, backgrounded by the walls of Auschwitz, then you’ve already seen the movie. Which means that all the rest of the movie ends up feeling like pretentious excess instead of moving elaboration. It seemed very aware of itself as an Important Movie and rested on those laurels, cinematically speaking, in a frustrating way. It reminded me of video art. I felt like I had stepped through a black velvet drape into the side room of a gallery, wondering at what point the video started over. And video art has its place, but it is a different medium. Moreover video art at its best, like a movie at its best, takes only the time it needs to say what it needs to say. 

Past Lives. I’m a human being, and I respond to romance. I appreciate the pathos of sweet yearning and missed chances. And I understand how the romance in this movie is a synecdoche for ambivalent feelings about many kinds of life choices, particularly the choice to be an immigrant and choose one culture over another. The immigrant experience framing literalizes the way any choice can make one foreign to a past version of oneself, or the people one used to know, even if in another sense one is still the same person. So, I appreciate the emotional core of what (I believe) this movie was going for, and do think it succeeded in some respects. And yet…I was very irritated by most of its artistic choices. I found the three principal characters bland and therefore difficult to care about, sketched with only basic traits besides things like Striving and Being In Love. Why care who they’d be in another life if they have no personalities in this one? It’s fine to make characters symbols instead of humans if the symbolic tapestry of a movie is interesting and rich, but the symbolic tapestry of this movie was quite simple and straightforward. Not that that last sentence even matters much, since the movie clearly wanted you to feel for the characters as human beings, not just symbols. Visually, the cinematography was dull and diffuse, with composition that was either boring or as subtle as a hammer to the head.

Maestro. Did not like enough to finish. Something strange and wrong about this movie. It attempts to perform aesthetic mimicry with impressive precision—age makeup, accents, period cinematography—but this does not make the movie a better movie. At most it creates spectacle, at worst it creates uncanny valleys. It puts one on the lookout for irregularities, instead of allowing one to disappear into whatever the movie is doing. Something amateurishly pretentious in the execution. And not in the fun, respectable way, like a good student film. (My go-to example for a movie that has an art-school vibe in a pleasant way is The Reflecting Skin). There’s something desperate about it instead. It has the same disease as Oppenheimer, of attempting to do a biopic in a ‘stylish’ way without working on the basics first. Fat Man and Little Boy is a less overtly stylish rendition of the same subject as Oppenheimer, but far more cinematically successful to me, because it understands those basics. I would prefer to see the Fat Man and Little Boy of Leonard Bernstein’s life unless a filmmaker proves that they can do something with style beyond mimicry and flash.

The Holdovers. Did not like enough to finish. It tries to be vintage, but outside of a few moments, it does not succeed either at capturing what was good about the aesthetic it references, or at using the aesthetic in some other interesting way. The cinematography apes the tropes of movies and TV from the story’s time period, but doesn't have interesting composition in its own right. It lacks the solidity that comes from original seeing. (Contrast with something like Planet Terror, in which joyous pastiche complements the original elements.) The acting is badly directed. Too much actorliness is permitted. Much fakeness in general between the acting, writing, and visual language. If a movie with this same premise was made in the UK in the 60’s or 70's it would probably be good. As-is the movie just serves to make me sad that the ability to make such movies is apparently lost and can only be hollowly gestured at. That said, the woman who won best supporting actress did a good job. She was the only one who seemed to be actually acting.

Killers of the Flower Moon. The only possible winner. It is not my favorite of Scorsese’s movies, but compared to the rest of the lineup it wins simply by virtue of being a movie at all. How to define ‘being a movie’? Lots of things I could say that Killers of the Flower Moon has and does would also be superficially true of other movies in this cohort. Things like: it tells a story, with developed characters who drive that story. Or: it uses its medium (visuals, sound) to support its story and its themes. The difference comes down to richness, specificity, control, and a je ne sais quois that is beyond me to describe at the moment. Compare the way Killers of the Flower Moon uses a bygone cinematic style (the silent movie) to the way that Maestro and The Holdovers do. Killers of the Flower Moon uses a newsreel in its opening briefly and specifically. The sequence sets the scene historically, and gives you the necessary background with the added panache of confident cuts and music. It’s useful to the story and it’s satisfying to watch. Basics. But the movie doesn’t limit itself to that, because it’s a good movie. The sequence also sets up ideas that will be continuously developed over the course of the movie.* And here’s the kicker—the movie doesn’t linger on this sequence. You get the idea, and it moves on to even more ideas. Also compare this kind of ideating to American Fiction’s. When I said that American Fiction’s moments of style felt underdeveloped, I was thinking of movies like Killers of the Flower Moon, which weave and evolve their stylistic ideas throughout the entire runtime.

*(Visually, it places the Osage within a historical medium that the audience probably does not associate with Native Americans, or the Osage in particular. Which has a couple of different effects. First, it acts as a continuation of the gushing oil from the previous scene. It’s an interruption. A false promise. Seeming belonging and power, but framed all the while by a foreign culture. Meanwhile potentially from the perspective of that culture, it’s an intrusion on ‘their’ medium. And of course, this promise quickly decays into tragedy and death. The energy of the sequence isn’t just for its own sake—it sets up a contrast. But on a second, meta level it establishes the movie’s complicated relationship to media and storytelling. Newsreels, photos, myths, histories, police interviews, and a radio play all occur over the course of the movie. And there’s the movie Killers of the Flower Moon itself. Other people’s frames are contrasted with Mollie’s narration. There’s a repeated tension between communication as a method of knowing others and a method of controlling them—or the narrative of them—which plays out in both history and personal relationships.)

Or here’s another example: When Mollie and Ernest meet and he drives her home for the first time, we see their conversation via the car’s rearview mirrors. This is a bit of cinematic language that has its origins in mystery and paranoia. You see it in things like Hitchcock or The X-Files or film noir. By framing the scene with this convention, the movie turns what is superficially a romantic meet-cute (to quote a friend) into something bubbling with uneasiness and dread. This is not nostalgia—this is just using visuals to create effects. It doesn’t matter if you’ve seen anything that uses the convention before, although knowing the pedigree might add to your enjoyment. The watchfulness suggested by the mirrors and Ernest’s cut-off face will still add an ominous effect. It works for the same reason it works in those other things. Like the newsreel, it is a specific and concise stylistic choice, and it results in a scene that is doing more than just one thing.

In general, the common thread I noticed as I watched these nominees, was the tendency to have the ‘idea’ of theme or style, and then stop there. It’s not that the movies had nothing in them. There were ideas, there was use of the medium, there was meaning to extract. There were lots of individually good moments. But they tended to feel singular, or repetitive, or tacked on. Meanwhile contemporary viewers are apparently so impressed by the mere existence of theme or style, that being able to identify it in a movie is enough to convince many that the movie is also good at those things. The problem with this tendency—in both artists and audiences—is that theme and style are not actually some extra, remarkable, inherently rarifying property of art. Theme emerges naturally from a story with any kind of coherence or perspective. And style emerges naturally from any kind of artistic attitude. They are as native as script, or narrative, or character. A movie’s theme and style might not be interesting, just like its story or dialogue might not be interesting, but if the movie is at all decent, they should exist. What makes a movie good or bad, then, is how it executes its component parts—including theme and style—in service of the whole. When theme is well-executed it is well-developed. Contemporary movies, unfortunately, seem to have confused ‘well-developed’ with ‘screamingly obvious.’ A theme does not become well-developed by repetition. It becomes well-developed by iterationand integration. Theme is like a melody. Simply repeating a single melody over and over does not result in the song becoming more interesting or entertaining. It becomes tedious. However, if you modify the melody each time you play it, or diverge from the melody and then return to it, that can get exciting. It results in different angles on the same idea, such that the idea becomes more complex over time, instead of simply louder.

Oppenheimer wasprobably the worst offender in this regard. Just repeat your water drops, crescendoing noise, or a line about ‘destroying the world’, and that’s the same as nuance, right? Split scenes into color and black and white and that’s the same as structure, right? That’s the same as actually conveying a difference between objectivity and interiority (or another dichotomy) via the drama or visual composition contained in the scenes, right? When I watched many of these movies, I kept thinking of a behind-the-scenes story from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The story goes that Joss Whedon was directing Sarah Michelle Gellar in some scene, and when the take was over he told her how great she was, and that he could see right where the music would come in. And Gellar replied that if he was thinking about the music, he clearly wasn’t getting enough from her acting alone. This conversation then supposedly informed Whedon’s approach to “The Body,” a depiction of the immediate aftermath of death that is considered one of the best episodes of television ever made, and which has no non-diegetic music whatsoever. Not to imply that music is necessarily a crutch, or to pretend that “The Body” is lacking in other forms of stylization (it is a very style-ish episode). But more to illustrate the way that it is easy to forget to make the most of all aspects of a medium, particularly the most fundamental ones, once one has gotten used to what a final product is supposed to feel like. 

And that’s why most of these movies don’t feel like movies. They create the gestalt of a movie or a ‘cinematic’ moment—often literally through direct vintage imitation—without a sense of the first principles. Or demonstrating a sense of them, anyway. Who needs AI when the supposedly highest level of human filmmakers are already cannibalistically cargo-culting the medium just fine.

[1] “The Sound of Money (The Sound of Music and The Singing Nun).” The Pauline Kael Reader. (This book contains the full text of the original review, rather than the abbreviated review that I linked earlier.) 

[glasshalftrue]

How do you have so many things to say? You’re a such a prolific shitposter and it mystifies me. Like how do you have that many thoughts in your head? And you’re able to put them into words. This is a serious question btw. I’m asking because I feel like my head is mostly full of incoherent things in the places that it’s not empty, and it seems like you’re just the complete opposite of that.

a serious question deserves a serious answer -- it usually doesn’t get a serious answer but it deserves one -- so let’s see.

someone once said (Feynman maybe? Hamming? I can’t remember) that as you walk around you keep a bunch of ideas in your head, maybe things you’ve been thinking about or techniques you like to use or ways of processing the world or whatever, and then when you spot something new you immediately reach for this mental toolbox and see if it fits anything that you’ve been chewing on for a while or if any of the tools you’ve been waiting to use are suitable.

taken to extremes this can lead to predictable, repetitious output (god forbid), the “cached thoughts” as Yudkowsky terms them, where instead of thinking you just react the same way to every new stimulus; we see that a fair bit in the political sphere where people have their preferred explanation for everything that goes wrong (hint: it’s the government’s fault) and wheel it out ad infinitum.

but ideally if you’ve been thinking about something more interesting, like mathematics, and I confess that I personally rarely get the chance to do this, then every time you see something new there is the chance that it will click with the topic you were just thinking about and you may obtain an Insight, and that’s very cool.

so I guess read about interesting and complex things and give some of them free reign in your head and play with them there and then carry them around when you go out into the world and look at other things.

for me though it’s mostly “words funny, what if swap one word with other word make more funny”.

[glasshalftrue]

[glasshalftrue]

"crescendo" – a poem by me

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i’m going to kdxjdhdjhddjjdhs

[glasshalftrue]

from what i've gathered, it seems like the problem with the question is that, in many cases, it's indeed indicative of the fact that their partner either already wants to sleep with someone or is already doing so and is looking for a way to retro-actively "cover it up". obviously this is not always the case, but i guess it's sort of like a dog whistle of sorts, where in isolation there's nothing wrong with it, but the context can indicate something more sinister, and it's used often enough in that context (or at least perceived as doing so) that it automatically gets one's defenses up. i think it really does depend on the level of seriousness of the question as well. my partner and i have asked each other this before and it's been totally fine, but i think it's because we're both very secure in our relationship and monogamy, so it was just out of curiosity and a fun little thought exercise, and even if either of us were hypothetically interested in it we respect each other enough that any desire to do so would be far outweighed by the desire to stay in a mutually enjoyable monogamous relationship with one another. if she was actually seriously considering it, i think it could mean there was a values difference that could be difficult to reconcile.

One of the wildest ideas that bounces around the Reddit relationship advice echo chamber is the idea that merely asking your partner if they would go for an open relationship is perfectly reasonable grounds for divorce.

[glasshalftrue]

Y'know, for all the talk of porn acceleration and the way aspirational content is raising many people's standards for partners way above anyone who would actually date them, I pretty strongly suspect that porn is only a small factor in all that.

If anything, porn is rather less picky about body type than Hollywood and popular non-pornographic media more generally. There's definitely still an element of idealization, but you can see the same process going on even more intensively on netflix and instagram.

[glasshalftrue]

[glasshalftrue]

what do they mean by this

[glasshalftrue]

Ok but like. What the fuck is there to do on the internet anymore?

Idk when I was younger, you could just go and go and find exciting new websites full of whatever cool things you wanted to explore. An overabundance of ways to occupy your time online.

Now, it’s just… Social media. That’s it. Social media and news sites. And I’m tired of social media and I’m tired of the news.

Am I just like completely inept at finding new things or has the internet just fallen apart that much with the problems of SEO and web 3.0 turning everything into a same-site prison?

[glasshalftrue]

i have no interest in policing how ppl act to be clear, ppl can do whatever they want. i just think that if u think these are spiritually important rules to follow given by the creator himself it's sort of odd to try to find loopholes, as if God will just be like oh damn u got me I guess u can eat during the eclipse. like obviously that's not in line w the spirit of the law. seems to me to indicate that u don't take the rule that seriously in the first place. which again is totally fine, maybe u really do treat these particular rules the way u treat a diet in that u can have a cheat day now and then.

on reflection though i change my mind abt ramadan specifically, because it seems like (based on a cursory Google search I am no expert) it's more about the principle of self-discipline, empathy for the needy, etc. so one special outlier case like this doesn't really violate the general spirit of the thing. it just reminded me of like how some christians have anal sex to technically preserve their virginity or stuff like that

LMFAO

[glasshalftrue]

do ppl like this actually believe in their own religion or are they just treating it like a fun little gane

LMFAO

[glasshalftrue]

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