Sam Kitonyi's Profile

I heartily agreed with the Church about the world, yet I was ready to agree with the world about the Church; and I breathed more easily in the atmosphere of religion than in that of business, precisely because religion, like poetry, was more ideal, more freely imaginary, and in a material sense, falser.

Santayana was not, in a technical or scientific sense, a philosopher at all. He was a poet reflecting and commenting on life in the universe as it appeared to him.

Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,        235Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile madeThe tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.

Debord developed a notion of the spectacle that ran directly parallel to Marx's notion of the commodity; for Debord, the spectacle made relations among people seem like relations among images (and vice versa). The spectacle is the form taken by society once the instruments of cultural production have become wholly commoditized and exposed to circulation.

"One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows. The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and, if she does not like it, asks her to return his letters. The older man
tries it on his nephew, and alters his will accordingly. The book is a test of character. We can't criticize it, because it is criticizing us. But I must give you one word of warning.
When you sit down to it, don't be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, or on the art of Kenneth Grahame. You are merely sitting in judgment on
yourself. You may be worthy: I don't know. But it is you who are on trial."

--A. A. Milne

The Matrix is half a good idea (inspired one way or another by PKD?). The irony is that its rendering is too flat. It feeds off the conceit of its audience: playing off the idea of their 'knowledge' that reality is an illusion. What the audience fails to see is that actually their 'real' condition as proposed by the film is intensified rather than alleviated or solved by watching it. (Pods in a gigantic illusion machine.) 

It inducts them into its illusory world, for the purposes of making gigantic amounts of money out of nothing - just as the people in the pods exist purely for the purposes of generating energy for the machine. 

It is a machine in which humanity is denatured; but not replaced by anything. 

An action film in which there is characterisation and a meaningful story is Crouching Tiger. I felt that there was a genuine sober sadness in it.

I agree about Crouching Tiger, MJP. 

Re Matrix and Greg Benford. I think he's spot on, Cheryl, about it being a gung-ho reprise of the New Testament, but equating Neo with Jesus is pitiful and disgusting and bankrupt, though the responsibility is the W. brothers' and not Benford's. A few pietas and nods to some theological names doesn't make Neo a human saviour. The entire film is a hard-bloke fantasy and the hard-bloke is the enemy of compassion. 

OK, you have warrior folk in theology like Arjuna hanging back until Krishna points out that the battlefield is that of the self and the kinsmen he's killing are his own inner demons but this isn't the story of the Matrix. Here it's a bunch of machines vs humans, there's no hint of inner conflict or awareness of the real problem, as MJP points to it, of the inner/outer world. 

Also, the enlightenment never happens, whatever they say. If it did Neo would realise that it doesn't matter whether you live inside or outside of the Matrix.

the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

Several online communities, including the official Jericho forums, launched campaigns in an effort to revive the show. Fans also sent just over 20 tons of nuts to CBS headquarters; this referred to a scene from the season one finale Why We Fight where Jake Green repeats General Anthony McAuliffe's historic phrase "Nuts!" from the Battle of Bastogne.^[15]

Several online communities, including the official Jericho forums, launched campaigns in an effort to revive the show. Fans also sent just over 20 tons of nuts to CBS headquarters; this referred to a scene from the season one finale Why We Fight where Jake Green repeats General Anthony McAuliffe's historic phrase "Nuts!" from the Battle of Bastogne.^[15] The peanuts and other proceeds from the donations have been donated to charities,^[16] including the rebuilding effort in Greensburg, Kansas,^[17] a real-life town that was largely destroyed by a tornado in 2007.

The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is
evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic
alternatives to Western liberalism.

this phenomenon extends beyond high
politics and it can be seen also in the ineluctable spread of
consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as the peasants'
markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout China,
the cooperative restaurants and clothing stores opened in the past
year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into Japanese department stores,
and the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran.