The Fatal Flaw

I've been reading Liberal Fascism recently. I read a passage in it that got me back on this particular tangent I had a while back. I thought at the time it was a bit TOO much related to video games and game design theory, but this book has put it into context for me.

"The conservative or classical liberal vision understands that life is unfair, that man is flawed, and that the only perfect society, the only real utopia, waits for us in the next life."

Socialism and Communism are always touted as "progressive" or "humane", whenever you can find someone who is shameless enough to say so. And if you remove absolutely every form of humanity and spirituality in me and place these two political ideologies before me, so that I can review them with a completely objective viewpoint, I would probably agree. Communism is all about throwing off oppression, uniting as one, and working together to a better tomorrow, right?

But you know what the fatal flaw in Communism, Socialism, Modern Liberalism, Progressivism, and anything related to them such as universal healthcare is?

People.

It reminds me of a video game I used to play with a friend that demonstrates this problem perfectly. In this particular game, players are divided into two teams. Each player has a commander and a number of officers. The commander is elected by the team, and the officers are appointed by the commander after the elections. The rest of the games become squad members of one of the officers. The purpose of this hierarchy is to create order and teamwork during the match.

The commander takes the role of the omnipotent general. He views the battlefield from above, placing buildings and issuing orders to the officers, who, with their troops, fight on the ground. When everyone sticks together, and the officers listen to the commander and relay the orders to their troops, a team can be a serious force to be reckoned with. It's very gratifying to watch your team work efficiently together, pushing across the map and defeating the enemy with their superior teamwork.

But of the dozens of matches I played, I only encountered a team that could do this maybe once. More often, everyone would grab whatever character they wanted, spawned on the map as soon as they could, and run for the hills. The commander is left to impotently issue orders that are ignored, construct buildings that have no protection, and, in short, sit on their butt and watch their team get slaughtered. There isn't anything wrong with the game design, the interface, or the command structure. The only mistake the game makes is relying on the goodness of the players to make a great gaming experience.

This is the case in pretty much every game you can play online. You play Halo, everyone jumps like idiots. You play Call of Duty, everyone is a sniper. You play Battlefield, and some jerk jumps in a fighter plane just so he can parachute out of it and single handedly get himself shot by the opposing team, wasting a perfectly good plane and injuring his team's ability to compete. In Left 4 Dead, you're more likely to die at the hands of your teammates, who apparently think the point is getting the most kills, than having your brains eaten by the zombies.

When it comes to political ideology, if someone is advocating a plan that relies on the inherent goodness of human beings, you can rest assured that that idea will fail, and will fail quickly. Universal Healthcare might seem human on the outside, but it relies on the goodness of the very people we demonize. The enemy is the greedy fat-cat CEO, right? The richest 1% of the country are the big enemies of our times, and to solve our healthcare problem we will increase the taxes of ONLY the richest 1%.

But....if the rich are greedy and horrible, what insanity in your head makes you think they will allow increased taxing on their precious wealth? Penny grubbing Scrooges are supposed to sit back and passively let us pilfer their coffers? What is so wrong with your reasoning that you can't see they will take their wealth overseas? They will leave the country and take their money with them. And when the richest 1% are gone? Who will be the rich then? Who will pay for healthcare after that?

Communism and Socialism fails because you place a very small group of people in complete power and expect them to only have the people's interest at heart.

Capitalism and our Democratic Republic has succeeded (so far) because we don't expect people to be inherently good. If you own a business and you start gouging prices, people will shop elsewhere. If you rob a bank, those whose money you sold will persecute you in court. If you work in government, you should (in theory, but not practice at the moment) reap what you sow. And not that many of these examples require a law be passed in congress, it's just how things work.

And that is why Capitalism is always going to be better than Communism. It doesn't have The Fatal Flaw. Though, now that I think of it, our current nation actually does have the Fatal Flaw. It's in Washington.

Daybreakers: World Commentary

Well, I was told that The Soapbox was being boring, so I thought I'd make a post on a tangent I just got off on with a friend of mine. I hope you all find it rather entertaining. Have a jolly good larf! :P



So, continuing the movie rants, Daybreakers! I haven't seen this movie, and what I've heard of it has mostly been good, but I have a couple of bones to pick with it.

The first is the quickest: why can't anyone get vampires right? Seriously, either they sparkle and refrain from drinking blood, or they're civilized, but turn into bat monsters when they don't get enough blood. Okay, no on both accounts, and no, they do NOT burn up when they are in the sunlight! THEY CAN FREAKIN GO OUT DURING THE DAYTIME!

Okay, back to the actual premise of the movie. Apparently the vast majority of the human race are vampires, which I think in this movie is the result of some kind of virus and isn't a supernatural condition. Way to go guys, breaking everything down into science and ruining one of the things that make vampires so creepy. But it fits in perfectly with the rest of the very poorly concealed dogma that just oozes out of the movie.

So, most of the humans have become vampires, and the rest have been captured and are being used to feed the vampires ala The Matrix. The blood supply is controlled by a company who sells it to the rest of the population, thus keeping everyone fed and prevents them from becoming the aforementioned bat monsters. But, of course, the important plot-point here is that the blood is running out. Enter the resistance group who wants to either cure the others of their vampirism, or provide another, scientifically produces supply of blood that doesn't require the farming of humans. One or the other, I'm not entirely sure. Course, this doesn't sit well with the vampires who control the blood, they'd rather just sell it. Begin action-packed extravaganza.

So, let me put it into simpler terms:

The oil supply is running out and the "resisting humans" in this example are fighting heroically against the evil corporate vampires who just want to make a buck on a dwindling energy source and trying to crush anyone who would suggest an alternative, sustainable energy solution.

I know people who would dismiss all of my political opinions out of hand because the Fox News propaganda machine has brainwashed me into believing that the alternative energy movement has been hijacked by corrupt public authorities and is being used to tighten the financial noose around our necks... and yet would probably go see this movie and enjoy it, not realizing just how much propaganda exists in its story.

And for crying out loud, could we please have a vampire who isn't scientifically explained and can go out in the sunlight without burning up?

Avatar - Hypocrisy in action

Let's get the obvious out of the way first. I loved this movie. It was fun and action-packed, made me care about the protagonists, and was a technical masterpiece, in my humble opinion. The entire thing got me interested in the story and feeling rather inadequate as an artist. Most of the things they did were flawless and the imagination that went into the universe was more than a little evident. I got to see it on an IMax screen with 3D glasses, and if you want to see this movie, that's the best possible way to.

Well, with all that said, I have one thing I'd like to point out about his movie. It's freakin Dances with Wolves in space and has the same environmentalist agenda that Dances with Wolves has. In several scenes, the natives literally have tears streaking down their faces as the evil industrialists bulldoze their way through the forest. A few different things occur to me about the complicated hypocrisy present in the movie.

First off, if human beings have cryo-stasis technology and can digitally transport a person's consciousness to an alien avatar, then I think they could most likely harvest the ore they're after without major destruction to the planet or the natives. Our technology of today is such that we can harvest our "earth-killing" oil with very little impact on the surrounding environment. A reservoir of oil that lies under several dozen square miles of land can be harvested by a rig that takes up maybe a couple thousand square feet. Considering that this movie takes place hundreds if not thousands of years in the future, wouldn't you say that we'd gotten even better at stuff like that?

No, says James Cameron, these are evil corporate types who only care about making a profit, and we all know how much cheaper it is to get hundreds of mercenaries to wage full-scale war on the natives while another few hundred workers carve a rough path through the forest.


Secondly, I know just a little bit about what it takes to do 3D modeling. So, let me explain how this movie shoots its own message in the foot. 3D modeling takes place almost entirely on the computer. The characters are built, and set up for animation on the computer, the computers are used when capturing the movements of the actors, computers are used for setting up the scenes, editing the footage, and rendering the whole thing out. Assuming that the 3D is present throughout the movie (which it pretty much is) and the footage runs at 30 frames a second, then we're talking about 288,000 frames for the entire movie. Taking into account all the special effects, particles, and the sheer number of 3D assets on screen at any one time, coupled with the lighting effects, textures, and MASSIVE polygon count, rendering a single frame would no doubt take days for even a high end computer.

Naturally, a big production like this wouldn't skimp on the hardware. They probably had massive servers of computers working round the clock rendering everything out. If it didn't take the better part of two years to render, it certainly took many months. And that's not even taking into account the amount of time spent to put everything together. Also, what about all the real sets that had to be built? Most of the foliage is no doubt stock footage or composited on a set, so plenty of sets had to be built, which would require trucks, rigs, and whatever machinery they would need to get that to happen.

And don't forget the actors! They had to be housed, fed, transported probably across the country if not the world. Everyone had to have a place to sleep, plenty of food to sustain them, warmth, etc etc.


So you might ask, "Ben, what are you getting at?". Well, where the heck does all that power come from? The electricity for the computers, the gas for the trucks and planes and cars? What about the gas for warming all the workers? How about all the power needed to make all the phone calls they no doubt had to make? Paperwork?

James Cameron has us in awe of the 3D visuals on screen, then attempts to "subtly" send a message on how evil industry is while the environment-loving people are saintly, and yet the carbon footprint he made while making the movie has probably made hundreds of baby seals cry.

I'm not sure whether to go crazy at how insanely hypocritical the whole thing is or die laughing at the delicious irony!

Oh, how wide

I've been attacked by some of my close friends in the past because I apparently give the impression that I expect everyone to believe I'm right and to fall on their faces in praise to my intellectual or religious prowess. Being the kind of person who gets scared of himself when nasty descriptions like this take on a credible appearance, I've spent plenty of time trying to deconstruct and analyze this aspect of myself. What I've found is that I demand some kind of explanation for people's opinions. I may not be a genius, but I can usually wrap my brain around an idea, no matter how strange, stupid, or foreign it is to me. But I find that the issues of the day are extraordinarily irrational, and I have no way of understanding them.

It's why I'm constantly saying to myself "how wide the divide".

For instance, this whole fad of hating on Sarah Palin. I certainly know that she might have given a bad interview or two or said weird things that weren't very politician-like, but I kinda like that about her. I'm also not convinced that she's the perfect John Galt choice for America right now, but I still don't understand how all that leads to lynching her on public television. I mean...what did she do? I know she said Maverick WAY too many times, but I get the sneaking suspicion that that was mainly McCain's doing. Did she say something about Joe six-pack? So what? Just because she's going to run for government, she has to say everything that's expected of her? Oh, and by the way, you actually CAN see Russia from Alaska. He saying she can see it from her house is what us pointy headed intellectuals call hyperbole.

Is it that she's religious? I know hating religion is also a big fad these days, but I thought we weren't looking into the practices of politician's churches. I know we were told very clearly that we weren't to investigate or point out Obama's churches. Talking about his crazy racist black liberation church meetings was complete taboo, but now it's okay to crucify (oh the irony) Palin for other people's interpretation of her religion?

Or could it be the whole thing with her daughter? Yeah, she got pregnant before she got married and it's unfortunate. But wait, aren't you Democrats in favor of things like that? Or, to be more fair, tolerant of them? I thought the Democratic party was all about freedom of choice and freedom to abort unwanted children. Isn't it rather hypocritical of you to be chewing her out for that? So what if her family life is *GASP* normal, statistically speaking? At least her daughter and her boyfriend are trying to make up for it by getting married.

All in all, it makes no sense to me. I tried to talk to a friend I respect about this, and she couldn't explain it to me either. The best she could do was some weird thing about Palin making women look bad. And really, all of it comes down to a few possibilities, the first being that her opponents were scared of her, so they ruined her. The second is a subtle and mostly ignored sexism rampant in politics and the american people in general. Third and last, I guess, is that the entire thing demonstrates our unfortunate slavery to "public opinion" by which I mean the propaganda presented on the boob tube. (yes, you heard me)

And since I mentioned it before, what about Obama? I know we were required to elect him because of the whole first black president thing, but now that he's in, why does it feel like everyone is getting some kind of drug slipped to them through the tap? Wasn't it just a year or so ago that the government was definitely not to be trusted? What happened to all the "Bush lied, people died" malarkey that was being tossed around? Were we really graced by the presence of our lord and savior and everyone but me knows it?

I don't understand it really. He's not a good speaker, he's a good reader. He's not moral, just ambivalent. He's not intelligent, just narcissistic. I don't even entirely buy that he's any kind of leader. I'm more inclined to think he's just a figurehead. And yet everyone looks on me with disdain whenever I try to explain my misgivings about him. He goes to a church where the pastor says extraordinarily racist things, he surrounds himself with radicals, he even talks about the radical marxists he hob knobbed with in college, but I'm crazy to suggest he might be marxist?! I'm insane to suggest that it might not be a good idea to allow the law-making body to directly compete with the private healthcare industry? I'm nuts for thinking government is inherently evil and anybody who comes into contact with it for any extended period of time will be corrupted by it's influence?

The world has gone absolutely insane.

Oh how wide the divide.

Religion and Education

I'd like to talk about the feud between religion and education. I've encountered people who seem to believe that if someone is religious at all and has even a small distrust of professors and universities, that they are automatically zealots who hate intelligence and secular education.

Let me start off by submitting a hypothesis of mine. There is no such thing as secular education. No such thing as secular anything! No matter how open minded a professor is, they are still human beings with their own set of beliefs and morals, ie their own religion. They can work as hard as they can to try and make their classes as objective and "secular" as they can, but it will nevertheless have just a little bit of a slant in the direction of their own religion.

This is not necessarily saying that all professors should be disregarded, nor am I saying that universities should never be trusted. I myself am going to college, and I (and the rest of the LDS church, incidentally) strongly support education in all it's forms! However, people are people, so why should it be that I am required to fall on my face whenever a professor with a diploma opens his mouth? (see what I did there?) Yes, it's very impressive that you went through all those years of college and you got that piece of paper that says you're qualified to teach. But doesn't anyone feel just a bit wary when you stop to consider just how arbitrary that diploma is? Who decided what you had to learn to get it? Who decided what the curriculum would be? Who is the faceless mastermind behind all the accreditations for all these colleges? Furthermore, isn't it strange that some defend brick and mortar education with such religious zeal?

I'm a firm believer in practical education. For all the classes I have taken in college to learn 3D modeling, none of them thus far have been very useful to me. Why? Because I had already spent a couple of years just tinkering around with modeling as a hobby, and I knew more about the process than my own professor did, and he's the qualified one! When I enter the video game industry, I won't be hired on the merits of my diploma alone. I'll have to show that I can do the artwork they need to get hired! Couldn't I have that without the diploma?

I'm getting off topic here, so let me come back to it. The point is that a distrust of professors isn't bad. Conversely, a distrust of religious leaders isn't bad. However, both those statements come with a very important clause: it's bad to not use your head. I can attend a class with a professor who has all the credibility they could want, but I'm not going to trust them without first discovering for myself if they can be trusted. The same goes for any church or religious leader. Good men, good credibility, but the truth of what they say is entirely up to me to verify.

Ironically enough, it's the professors that are given the faith in our society. Don't insult a teacher, because that's sacrilegious! But insult religion and anyone who believes in it or leads a church, that's noble and openminded, how very COOL you are!

Let me extend the subject and include science. Science is NOT religion's enemy! If any church decries any investigation into the workings of the universe, then you can rest assured that it is a false religion. Actually, that might be unfair, it could just be a false church. Either way, science is the act of studying and deconstructing the mind and methods of our Heavenly Father. Learning how things work, gaining wisdom and experience, it's the entire POINT. And yet a distrust of the conclusions and interpretations of scientists, for the purpose of verification (i'm thinking evolution right now) is also sacrilegious!

Again, the faith is firmly planted in "secular" science, and any lack of open mindedness towards religion is praised.

Recycling and Evidence

Let me start right off by giving you my 2 cents about recycling and the "green" movement...

I have nothing against the green movement. I have nothing against recycling or picking up litter or looking for alternative energy sources. I have nothing against a general progression towards cleaner everything and the reuse of everything. I, in fact, recycle quite a bit. At home, our family reuses soda bottles to store water should the world end or the tap run out. At work, I reuse anything I can. Old plastic tape spindle that's been used up? WRONG, that is a paper-folding aid. The top of a box that is about to go into the trash? NOPE, that is a convenient lunch tray. I suppose I would qualify what I do as repurposing rather than recycling, but to me they're synonymous.

Recycling, like anything green, is a perfectly acceptable idea in theory. I hold reservations about it because of how extensively it's been politicized and how vehemently the debate over it gets. (of course, by "debate" I mean "argument", by which I mean "muck raking") That's my general feeling towards anyone who wants to talk about global climate change or alternative energy. Neither is a BAD topic in and of itself, but when you've thrown all the bias, all the propaganda, all the politics, and all the CRAP into it, it BECOMES negative.

To continue on, I listen to a podcast called Stuff You Should Know. If anyone listens to podcasts, I recommend it. I like the topics usually and I like the hosts, but I definitely do not agree with them all the time. In fact, I've switched the pod off out of disgust for some of the things they've said. Recycling was one of them, and why I did it is the whole point of this post.

They were explaining how recycling works (the podcast being produced by howstuffworks.com) and they mentioned an economist who had done a study and concluded that recycling was actually MORE harmful to the environment than the landfill. They, being the environmentalists that they are, disregarded it as having no doubt been refuted by someone.

"Okay, hold up" I say to myself as I pause the ipod. "WHO has refuted it? What evidence do you have that says it DOESN'T hurt the environment more?"

And this is the point of the post. If you want to defeat a point of view, you bring evidence to bear. These two guys pride themselves on the extensive research they do on every topic, but you can't point to even ONE study that refutes this economist's findings? You don't bother to do the work because you assume he's wrong? Are you truth seeking, objective researchers/writers, or are you simply environmentalists afraid not only to lose the argument, but to lose your credibility?

This is the same rant I've been having in my head about Glenn Beck for the past few weeks. If he's so wrong, why haven't I seen the evidence? All I hear from anyone is that he's a fear-monger and fake-cries on TV. That's it?! That's all you have on the guy? It's like a judge sentencing a suspect to a month in jail for a traffic misdemeanor while at the same time ignoring all the corpses in his closet. Glenn Beck is talking about GIANT UNION CONSPIRACIES. What he talks about sounds completely insane! It sounds like something you should be reading on some poorly made online website, not on any news network. And all people can do is mock him for crying on TV? To quote Keith Olbermann (I got this from autotune) "Are we so heartless?"

Both of these are pathetic examples. Glenn Beck's rhetoric is FILLED with ideas and evidence that's just WAITING to be challenged. You've got CNN, you've got NBC, you've got the freaking GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES saying he's a nut job, but nobody can prove it? Mocking him for crying doesn't hurt him. Ignoring his arguments gives him more credibility, and the same goes for this economist.

Let's get one thing straight. I don't want to believe Glenn Beck, and I don't want to believe that recycling hurts the environment more than landfills. But I'm supposed to ignore them based solely on...what, faith? Call it ignorance on my part, but waving people off without respecting them enough to challenge their ideas with evidence of your own sounds like you just don't have any ammunition at all. And really, how objective, open minded, understanding, or empathetic are you if you're so closed to these ideas?