Sixteen Volts

Of the summer movie releases, I think that me and my wife go see X3 together and I'll go see Miami Vice on my own, but that's pretty much it for me at least. There just aren't very many movies that I would actually pay money to see. I also know that United 93 is a serious and important movie, but even so, I don't think that I will be seeing it until it plays on the Movie Network or something. But surely we can take a look at the fellow bloggers' reactions to it, since those don't cost anything. On the right, Monstera Deliciosa expresses his views in the post "United 93". On the left, Professor Kurgman has a very different view in "Movie Review: United 93". This movie has clearly made both men angry, but for very different reasons.

The post "I'm Mad As Hell And I'm Not Going to Take It Anymore" at Reappropriate asks:

I wonder if the ninja knew, when they took to rebelling against the samurai, that their true impact on history would not be guerilla warfare, political statements, money or power, but the birth of a long, icky tradition of pimple-faced White boys living a continent away wrapping themselves in black bedsheets, twirling fake-jewel-encrusted and elaborately decorated steel sai, and trying to scale the brick wall of their college dorm building.

I similarly once wondered what the real historical Pocahontas would have thought if somebody had described the Disney movie of the same name to her. Similarly, I have to wonder what groups of our era will be remembered a century or two in the future, and what kind of strange goals, manners and behaviours they will be depicted having.

The news article "Toddlers may already be racists, nurseries told" seems to be making rounds. See, for example, Dennis Dale's post "Telebubbas" that points out the montypythonesque job title "early-years equality adviser" of the expert quoted in the article. Frankly, I am not surprised of the phenomenon described in the article. For all their innocence and beauty and spontaneity, of all people small children are perhaps the most intolerant towards any kind of diversity. Children have a strong inborn trait of recognizing, rejecting and torturing anybody who is significantly different from the group norm, and this unacceptable habit must be weeded out of them with stern and merciless corrective upbringing. The sociobiological explanation for this tendency in children is obvious: during the human history, children who grew together were related, and therefore children who were noticably different also had the overwhelming odds of being significantly defective or sick.

The post "Youthful Exuberance" at Mahalanobis points us to a young man who obviously knows how to spend his money wisely.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Wednesday, May 10, 2006 at 4:31 PM