Brave New World

With the focus of my project being how governments that completely subjugate their people work and why they work and why the people do not overthrow the government the first outside source that came to mind was Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I read Brave New World last year and it immediately became one of my favorite books of all time. The way the government works in Brave New World is very exact and systematic about everything. Every single person's life is chosen for them before they're even born through genetic modification and manipulating the fetus' predispositions towards what they like and don't like. When they're young the people are trained through twisted exercises that, for example, make them hate books and flowers. There is a rigid class systems based upon intelligence, this class system is absolute; once you're in a class you're set and can't change, not that you had a choice in the first place. Everyone is provided with food and shelter and a job so there isn't much sadness (especially in the lower classes) but any sadness that does show up is dealt with using a drug called soma which is known as the ultimate pleasure drug with all the benefits of many modern drugs with no side effects. Anyone who is smart enough to see through all the soma infused fog and see the actual problems with the world like how art and religion and science have been sacrificed to keep everyone nice and subjugated. Essentially, the reason that the government in Brave New World (which goes across the entire world (without this the government may be likely to fail)) is so successful is because they don't let people think and they use happiness to control the fragile social structure instead of fear like in Nineteen Eighty-Four. When everyone on Earth is ignorant of art, science, religion, traversable social classes, pain, sadness, fear, anger, and jealousy then how would anyone except those who weren't manipulated very much as fetuses/children and given incredible intelligence ever be anything but happy. They've never even felt emotions that aren't happiness.

Puns

I'm not going to lie, I love puns. 99% of the time they are amazing. What got me thinking about puns is that I watched the Evil Dead II today, and man-oh-man are there a lot of puns. My favorite one from the movie was when Ash had to try to keep his Deadite hand at bay he put a bucket over it and stacked some books on top. The very top most book on the stack was A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. Needless to say, I was rolling. So then I started thinking about other fantastic puns from other sources. Like the movie Face/Off existing, or practically any one-liner in a James Bond film. But what's the point of puns? Of course they're there for comedic effect, that's what makes them great, but the best ones are always the subtle ones. The small ones that you only catch after seeing them multiple times, that's when you realize how clever a good pun is. For example, Shakespeare loved puns, he used them in almost everyone one of his plays, my favorite of his being from Romeo and Juliet when Mercutio says "Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.", the pun being that he's about to die, but if he's alive tomorrow he will be in a very solemn/sad mood. It's not exactly funny, especially not in the context, but it sure is clever. The problem with puns comes in when that one percent takes over. When the one percent runs the show people start to really loathe what's happening. Like both of those. Those puns were terrible, they barely made sense, and they were a huge stretch. The puns that fall into that one percent really are terrible. They're in your face, annoying, and not really funny. Puns like "Broken pencils are pointless" or "Jokes about German sausage are the wurst". Those are two of the dullest and worst puns I could find. That was also a terrible pun.

This pun is straight up awesome, though.

The Grand Perspective

So far this year my favorite game has definitely been Grand Theft Auto V, so I figured I might as well make a blog post about it. For reference, Grand Theft Auto V is a game about stealing things, you play as three very different characters who all want the same thing; fat stacks. The three characters are: Franklin, a young guy from the ghetto who desperately wants to make enough money to get out of the ghetto, Michael, a bored and nostalgic middle aged guy who is in the witness protection program because he robbed banks when he was younger, and Trevor, Michael's psychotic best friend who is also a meth lord in the desert. The most interesting thing about Grand Theft Auto V is how you actually start to think like the characters while you're playing them. For example, if I'm playing as Franklin and someone bumps into me I'll flip them the bird and move on, if someone bumps into me as Trevor I'll either blow their car up or murder them as they sit in it. This is all accomplished by carefully showing the player the inner workings of each character's mind through their actions during cut scenes, some of the best I've ever seen in a video game. While the game is careful about exposing the characters, it doesn't much bother with character development. At all. By the end of the game (depending on the ending you choose) Franklin is still a thug at heart, Michael is still an angry old man, and Trevor is still crazy. Some people think that the reason that there is virtually no development of the main characters is that each one is supposed to represent one of the Freudian concepts of id, ego, and superego. Trevor is the id of the bunch, Michael is the ego, and Franklin is the superego. These concepts help the player connect to the character even easier; when you want to be crazy, you play Trevor, nice, Michael, and obsessively nice, Franklin. In literature I notice a lot of egos, and a lot of superegos, but not a lot of ids. Most forms of literature shun ids, like American Psycho, or Clockwork Orange. Grand Theft Auto V is somewhat unique in that you sympathize greatly with the id, Trevor's had a rough life, and that makes me like him even more.

Gooseberries, Oil, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Warning: spoilers for There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood is about an advantageous capitalist during America's oil boom. Gooseberries (the story inside the frame story) is about a ruthless man who does everything in his power to get a farm with gooseberry bushes. 

One loves dirty liquid that can be set on fire, one can't get enough of his own sour grapes. So what do they have in common? In short, pretty much everything. The parallels that can be drawn between There Will Be Blood and Gooseberries are surprisingly numerous. 

Both stories feature a person who has a single fixed idea of what they want, and nothing shall stop them from getting it. All Daniel Plainview wants in life is to be unfathomable rich. All Nicholai Ivanich wanted was a small farm beside a river. 

Both stories feature the main character (Nicholai will be the main character of Gooseberries for all intensive purposes because Ivan is merely the narrator) trampling people in their way to get what they want. Daniel Plainview uses a child as a pretty face to make deals easier, beats a preacher boy (honestly, he deserved it, though), and makes deals with land owners that he has no intention of keeping. Nicholai Ivanich marries a widow for her money and proceeds to watch her die without feeling a hint of remorse. 

In the end, both characters have an extremely distorted view of the world and consider themselves to be great men. Daniel Plainview disowns his "son" after his "son" tells Daniel that he wants to start an oil business all because Daniel only saw his "son" as a competitor at that point, and beats the same preacher boy to death after the preacher boy has the guile to try to sell land he has no control over all because Daniel had hated the preacher boy from the minute the preacher boy acted superior to Daniel. Nicholai Ivanich owns a crummy little farm with a lousy dog yet he feels like he's a great man because his serfs love him for providing them with gallons of vodka. 

Even the endings are similar in that Daniel fulfills one of his life dreams (getting the preacher boy to admit that he's a false prophet), and Nicholai fulfills his life dream of being able to eat home grown gooseberries on his own farm.

A story about a government worker turned gooseberry farmer and a story about a ruthless capitalist making his mark on the world in the early 20th century may not seem to have much in common, but they totally do. The main difference is that one likes gooseberries, and the other likes milkshakes.

One of the best parts of the movie

Plot holes

Warning: Major spoilers for Splinter Cell Blacklist, and Fallout 3

In my mind, there's not much that makes a story fall apart faster than plot holes. Recently I finished played the new Splinter Cell game (Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Blacklist), in which you play as Sam Fisher, special-ops-spy-dude extraordinaire. Sam Fisher gets shot at a lot (actually just dependent on how good you are at the game, I'm not that good so I got shot at a lot), and sometimes Sam Fisher actually gets shot. Getting shot isn't that big of a deal; you go find some cover, chill for a bit, and then you're good to go. fisher's movement speed isn't even affected that much, he can still climb things, jump, shoot a gun, beat a guy to death with his bare hands, you name it. The plot hole comes in during the final scene of the game. Fisher has finally cornered the bad guy and he's set to take him out, but Fisher messes up when disarming the gun and doesn't knock the bad guy out (big surprise). Fisher does manage to shoot the bad guy, but only in the shoulder (because feigning tension is a lot easier than actually making it happen). Now, even though this guy just got shot in the shoulder at point blank range, he still manages to knee Fisher in the stomach a few times then run off. My immediate reaction was something along the lines of "psssshhh, a few kicks? Is that it? I'll just chase him down and beat to death with my face or something." But no, Fisher starts clutching his stomach and limping away. Up until this point I thought this game was really good, but endings matter to me and the ending to this game was really lackluster, so I was severely disappointed.

Seriously? A few kicks to the stomach stopped this dude?

So now that I've rambled plenty about the game, time to go back to plot holes. In general, they are terrible, so why do people still let them happen? They are almost always noticeable, and they almost always hurt a story's reputation. Another example is the whole sword deal in Pacific Rim. Why didn't they just always use the sword? Why even bother trying to punch giant demon monsters when you have a sword that can rip anyone of them in two? Or the vanilla ending to Fallout 3, where you can't send your radiation resistant friend into the highly irradiated pit of death because it's supposed to be your destiny or some other stupid reason like that.

Really? I've sent you to fight off countless Deathclaws, which you happily did, yet you can't just hit a button to save my life?

In short, plot holes are terrible, they destroy realism, they hurt reputations, and they make me mad. Not mad that they hurt the story but mad that the creators of whatever the plot hole is in let the plot hole happen. It's lazy, is all it is. The creators decided to slack on story depth just because they were lazy, not because it was too hard. To fix the Blacklist one, all they had to do was make sure Fisher was shot before even getting to fight the bad guy. There were armed guards pretty much everywhere so why not? I'm only just coming to realize this, but, there's two plot holes at that point. Before leaving the bad guy's compound he says to stick close to the captives because there are snipers itching to shoot them from all angles, then he proceeds to lose his captive and stand in the middle of a field with no protection. Why didn't any of the snipers just shoot him? to fix the Fallout 3 one the developers could have just prevented followers from coming with you by having the place where your character is supposed to die be surrounded by bad guys, so you have your followers fall back to defend you.

To recap (again); plot holes shouldn't exist, they ruin stories, and they're not very hard to fix. Therefor the reason they exist can be blamed on laziness.

Syria's Situations

         In early March of 2011, Syria was still considered to be a "kingdom of silence" compared to the rest of the Middle East thanks to strict security measures, a popular president, and religious diversity. Like most people in the Middle East at the time, Syrians were protesting. Syrian protests in particular started up after some students who were putting up anti-government graffiti got arrested and tortured. Then people across Syria decided to have large protests in the city of Daraa. The president, Assad, retaliated by having military forces, including aircraft and tanks, attack towns where protests were common. Now, after years of the Syrian government killing and torturing its own citizens and protesters fighting back, various superpowers around the world are trying to decide whether or not they should help the rebels. You may be asking yourself "But what does any of this have to do with an English class?" Well I'll tell you. Basically news providers are trying to tell you one of two things: Syrian rebels are bad, this is fact because we're ignorant or Syrian rebels are good, this is fact because we're ignorant. What these have in common, though, is that the Syrian rebels are all normal people, like you and me. The problem with that statement is that it's not true, there are various reports that show the Syrian rebels are backed by America's number one enemy Al Qaeda. So, that shows that the Syrian rebels are victims of the single story. The average American only hears that the poor Syrian rebels are being killed constantly, not that they may be teaming up with known terrorist groups. What I find the most interesting about all this nonsense going on in Syria and various superpowers' decisions is who supports what. Normally, Republicans are all for military intervention and Democrats aren't, but (as shown by the links above) known Democrat John Kerry supports intervention in Syria (he was a big player in Vietnam War protests) while known Republican John McCain is against intervention in Syria. Granted, everyone has their own opinion and what not, and just because you identify with one of the two major parties in a flawed system doesn't mean that you believe in all the ideals of who you identify with. Another interesting little tidbit is that the House of Commons recently rejected Prime Minister David Cameron's proposal to aide the United States in Syrian intervention. The last time the House of Commons and the Prime Minister/King/Queen disagreed on a declaration of war or peace was 231 years ago when King George III wanted to keep fighting the Americans.

Photograph of a Syrian protest

North Korea

          Generally speaking, any place that still uses anything but Democracy is going to be a pretty crazy place, North Korea (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) is no exception. Over the Summer I read the Orphan Master's Son, which got me interested in learning about North Korea. As it turns out, the place is just as bonkers as the book makes it seem. A prime example is the loudspeakers, I thought the book made them up to make North Korea sound even crazier, but no, they're real. In everyone's home, in every apartment, in every hotel room, you name it, there is a loudspeaker affixed to the wall. All day, every day propaganda blares out of it. Not even stuff like "North Korea is the best!", more like "The Dear Leader scored 18 holes in one this morning after playing for only 20 minutes!". Absolutely absurd stuff. On top of the loud speakers, the book talks about how Kim Jong Il set up this massive show type thing to impress the American visitors that were going to be there for only a few minutes. That actually happens. There is this massive play called the Arirang Games (Grand Mass Gymnastics and Artistic Performance Arirang) where thousands of performers put on a show about Korea's past. Basically, this exists because Kim Jong Il really really likes musical theatre. Here is part one of six that show the Arirang Games of 2013. The only reason I know about this is because of a VICE documentary titled Inside North Korea (part one of three). Also, North Koreans apparently love karaoke. Like, a lot. That is also shown in the documentary. Overall, the Orphan Master's Son easily made it onto my list of favorite books. If you haven't read it, go read it. It's really good. Here's some pictures of the dear leaders:

Kim Jong-Un, current leader.

Kim Jong-Il, late leader.

Kim Il-Sung, original leader.

Fun Fact! North Korea no longer recognizes itself as a communist/socialist nation and now as a "Juche" nation, run only by the Kim bloodline.