I love Bowie’s series of I-can’t-believe-you’re-giving-me-this-bullshit expressions as MTV representative Mark Goodman tries to explain, in a 1983 interview, why they don’t play more black artists and also totally are playing them and also black artists are scary and introducing black artists has to be done glacially slowly and anyway radio stations are worse:
Archive | March, 2019
Free Comic Book Website Day
Heads up: on March 30th, DC Universe, the DC Comics* streaming service, will be free for one day. It features newer DC shows like Titans, Doom Patrol, and the new season of Young Justice, plus a bunch of older movies and tv shows, both live-action and animated, including favourites like Batman: The Animated Series and not-so-favourites like the 1970s Shazam! live-action tv show. There are lots of popular DC offerings it doesn’t have (yet), but if you like comic-book shows at all, you’ll find something to binge on (and March 30th is, happily, on a weekend).
I won’t be bingeing DC on March 30th, because I’ll be hanging out in one of my favourite cities with some of my favourite people. But if you’re not equivalently fortunate, catching up on some DC shows might be an acceptable alternative.
* “DC Comics” stands for “Detective Comics Comics.” Or possibly for rhis rhis koilē.
Logic Is a Little Tweeting Bird … From the Future!!!
On tonight’s episode of Star Trek: Discovery, Spock says: “The one variable we cannot predict is the future.”
I’d love to learn what non-future variables we can “predict.”
Hyperbolic Clickbait Headlines Are Destroying America!
Hi.
Mislocating Disjunctivism
I recently re-read Srinivasa Rao’s Perceptual Error: The Indian Theories, which I don’t especially recommend. (A much better book on the same subject is B. K. Matilal’s Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge.)
But one thing that especially puzzled me this time around is Rao’s treatment of perceptual disjunctivism. (For what I mean by perceptual disjunctivism, see pp. 15-18 of this). Rao does not actually use the term “disjunctivism,” but that’s what he seems to be talking about in his Introduction, and what he says about it is that it’s the prevailing view in modern western epistemology, but is generally rejected in traditional Indian philosophy, including Nyaya.
That struck me as doubly odd. First of all, we disjunctivists are all too aware that we’ve been decidedly in the minority in western thought ever since Descartes. Second, the Nyaya school’s approach has always struck me as disjunctivist in spirit. If I’m right, then Rao has gotten things precisely reversed.
Hence I’m pleased to find an article that supports my impression of Nyaya: “Parasitism and Disjunctivism in Nyaya Epistemology” by Matthew R. Dasti.
Lockwood Turner Overman
So Ben Lockwood (Agent Liberty) on Supergirl, Jace Turner on The Gifted, and Orlin Dwyer (Cicada) on The Flash are all different versions of the same character arc, right?
In all three cases, someone starts out a decent-seeming guy who initially has no problem with superhumans (be they aliens, mutants, or metahumans, depending on the show); but after his family suffers as a result of a conflict between two different groups of superhumans, he devotes himself to a campaign against them, drawing no distinction between the good and the bad, thereby becoming a partly sympathetic albeit mostly infuriating antagonist.
From left to right: Lockwood, Turner, Dwyer
There are some differences, of course. For example: Lockwood becomes the leader of the anti-superhuman campaign; Turner is just one member among many; and Dwyer works (mostly) solo. Also: Lockwood’s story is a clear – indeed heavy-handed – metaphor for anti-immigrant hysteria and alt-right media manipulation in the Age of Trump; Turner is a vaguer symbol for various kinds of bigotry and police overreach; and Dwyer’s character doesn’t seem to be intended to make any particular political point.
I’d also say that of the three, Lockwood is the most interesting – partly because Sam Witwer is the most talented of the three actors involved, partly because he gets more clever dialogue. Lockwood’s a less sympathetic antagonist than Turner because he’s slimier and more self-aware, while Turner is sort of perpetually befuddled; but Witwer gives Lockwood a kind of goofy, smarmy charm that’s creepily engaging, while Turner is as bland as a slab of beef. But the most boring and single-note of all is Dwyer, who seems to be of the school of thought that Christian Bale’s Batman voice was too soft and subtle. (Flash is lucky to have the best villain of the three shows this year, but it ain’t Dwyer.)
In related news: on tonight’s Supergirl, Lex Luthor refers to a quotation from Epicurus as being 230 years old. Off by a factor of ten, dude! If you’re that sloppy with measurement, no wonder your superhero-killing devices keep failing.
(I also have a hard time making sense of Manchester Black’s motivations in this episode. What was up with that? SPOILER ALERT: I’ll say more in the comments section below.)