Amistad

Note: This article first appeared in Stud.Jur nr. 5, 2011.

Exposition
            The year is 1840, and we are to be found in the United States of America. The Civil War is 20 years in the future, peanut butter has not yet been invented and some forty slaves of unknown origin are fighting for their freedom in American courts.
            The slaves were brought to the American coastline on the Spanish ship La Amistad. One of the them broke free from his chains and managed to liberate his compatriots. In the following mutiny, the slaves managed to take over the ship; with the loss of the cook, the captain and a few of the slaves. After having been tricked by the surviving Spaniards, they brought the ship to the coast of Long Island, where they were discovered and caught by the American cutter, USCR Washington.
            The following case was complicated and comprised of no less than five different parties, which included the Kingdom of Spain, the surviving Spaniards, the captain and some of the crew Washington and the State of Connecticut (where the case was made) - in addition to the slaves themselves. In a welter of accusations and falsified evidence, and tension between anti- and pro-slavery movements, the slaves were able to win their freedom. But, alas, the President at the time, Martin Van Buren, appealed the case directly to the federal Supreme Court - in fear of the symbolic value the case had acquired.

Brief
            The film is directed by Steven Spielberg - and that is easy to see! When it comes to the production itself, there is little to complain about. It is well filmed and put together nicely. The music is well chosen, and the dialogues are well written and performed by well-trained and capable actors, which includes amongst others Morgan Freeman, Matthew McConaughey and Anthony Hopkins.
            Unfortunately, there are certain elements that pull it a few notches. As in almost every Hollywoodian film "based on true events", the director takes several artistic liberties. This would normally be all-right, but when the proceedings are portrayed as one of the main causes of the American Civil War - two decades before it happened - it gets more than any reviewer with a shred of self-respect can handle. In addition to this, there is little focus on the actual legal disputes (which are quite exceptional), and the procedure itself boils down to an overly pompous game of rhetoric. For an aspiring student of law, this is gets quite difficult to swallow.

Ruling
            The result is good, but could have been much better. A big plus for Anthony Hopkins' inspiring performance. Four out of six stars.

Waiting for Faith: A Propos Pascal's Wager

          When I was searching for a diagram to illustrate Pascal's Wager, a lot of unexpected, and most welcome! results turned up. I enjoyed myself a lot and would like to share that (some of the pictures are small, so just click on them to get a better view). With my two or three readers......... Sources will be given in the post scriptum.

I do like this one, though it does not really capture the essence of my critique of the Wager. As I've already said, I do not believe that God rewards cynical faith-based calculations. And which God should one gamble on anyway? Which brings us to the next one:

As the lady says, something Blaise (Pascal) overlooked, how to know which God to gamble on? There are literally thousands of different religious views out there, so how does one now which one is correct? Christianity wasn't even the first major religion; one might as well believe in Greek or Norse mythology (or in the Flying Spaghetti Monster! though that one is contemporary)! I do love the way Richard Dawkins arguments. But now, let's look at some motivational posters:

Whomever made the one to the left, and for that matter the one to the right, is right (and hello confusing sentence!): It is inspiring! Oh! and I love the way I can now reread some cartoons and understanding the pretty deep and smart reference to the Gambit. Calvin and Hobbes, and XKCD ftW(!):

I also found some that might seem a bit offensive to Christians (and atheists, for that matter). I will let the curious search out the most offensive for themselves, though I do believe these two seem innocent enough:

And then a little bit of good-old criticism of bigotry:

And I simply adore this one ("Publie, je ne le hais point!"):

Myth busted! I will terminate this article with what I believe is what Pascal's Wager should have been, if Blaise had been better versed in religious views. It is really brilliantly thought of, and though it is amusing, it should also be lauded for its verity. I realise now that I should have included this in my previous article:

Ps. My sources cited chronologically:

1. http://www.freethoughtpedia.com/wiki/Pascal's_Wager
2. http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2008/09/25/pascals-wager-in-cartoon-terms/
3. http://thethinkable.com/home.php/2009/01/27/gambling-with-god
4. http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/okay-athiest-wouldnt-you-rather-live-a-good-life-doing-what-god-says-to-do-and-believe-in-him-and/question-535535/?page=4
5. http://unreasonablefaith.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/ch090204.gif
6. http://xkcd.com/525/
7. http://www.smbc-comics.com/
8. http://fleasnobbery.blogspot.com/2009/02/pascals-wager.html
9. http://www.thadguy.com/comic/godless-atheists/251/
10. http://abstrusegoose.com/258
11.  http://thechaoscosmos.com/

Waiting for Faith: On Arpeggios

          I never thought I would post something where I'd excuse myself for not posting more often - so I won't. I do, however, feel the need to explain that, though I try to write something every two weeks, there has been a hiatus due to the fact that the PC on which I wrote the draft for "Faith - Part II" went 'bye-bye'. I have not been able to access it for around two weeks, but I can now, so the next post will be published in a few days.

          While I have your attention, I feel the need to remark that, as a pianist, I really abhor arpeggios. They sound nice, but they are really difficult to master, and they are everywhere. They exist in a million variations too, so one has to learn them all over. Every. Single. Time. I thought I had had the worst of it, but that was until I decide to partake "Lugia's Song", a really beautiful piece from the second Pokémon movie. They seem simple enough, but they are divinely awful to play.
          I might exaggerate, but I do not like, to learn, arpeggios. I will master these too eventually, but in the meantime, they are my worst enemy.

American History X - An Analyse of Blame and Social Decline

                I just saw American History X again - I can hear the end-music in the background as I write this, and I realised that this might actually be one of my favourite films. It might be that I am touched by the cinematography I just witnessed, as it is very well made, but for me, at least in this case, it gives me all the more reason to embrace that feeling. As I said, it is very well made. It is a non-linear film; there is a main dynamic to the film, of course, but it uses retrospectives frequently and varies much in what past it shows. Other than what the film tells, it also varies in the way it tells it. There is a narrator, but he is non-dominant and is only used at certain, as I see it, strategic points, where it gives necessary distance and perspective to what is happening. I find this to be important, as an overuse of a narrator can quickly cause irritation to the viewer. I will use Titanic as an example of this, for the record not one of my favourite films, where I find its use of the story-teller to ruin the dynamic of the story, pulling the public violently away from the scenes they immerse themselves into, as the film is quite adept at invoking emotional attention (as are all Hollywood blockbusters). Other than that, the film fulfils the one criterion I have to recognise a film as important: it takes up (social) issues, in this case, racial hatred, anti-Semitism and social inequality. And I have only one word to describe the way it tells its story and brings forth its message: Powerful. The film is extremely powerful.

                I have two scenes in the film that I like particularly well, and that I believe are very well written. I will not explain the context of the scenes, nor introduce the characters, as I am writing this for people who have already seen the film. The first one is about one and a half hour into it, towards the end of a half-hour long retrospective, telling the story of Derrick’s time in prison. It is where he talks to Sweeney, the principal of Daniel’s school, and where he realises the reality of what his life’s work has been. Now, one would expect a Hollywood film to have the principal give Derrick some sort of speech - preaching the wrongness of what he has been doing, making him see and acknowledge the facts through a faultless argumentation; inspiring him and the audience with him. But it was that sort of thing that got him to where he was in the first place. Inspiring, convincing and persuasive speeches manipulated him to embrace the hatred he was originally happily oblivious to. What reaches Derrick in the end is but a simple question. And by reflecting over it, it forces him to see, and for the first time, regret what he has been doing: “Has anything you’ve done made your life better?” The anger had been consuming him, making him blame everyone and everything for what had happened to him and his family, and forcing him to take his anger out on African Americans and Jews, as were those he was holding his personal vendetta against. In the words of Sweeney, describing himself having gone through a similar situation: “There was a moment when I used to blame everything and everyone for all the pain and suffering and vile things that happened to me; that I saw happen to my people. I used to blame everybody, blame white people, blame society, blame God! I didn’t get no answers because I was asking the wrong questions. You have to ask the right question”.
                The tirade of Sweeney goes well with the main theme of the film, at least with how I see it. It seems to be about who is to be blame for what, following the protagonists through their war against whom and what they choose to blame for their problems. When society is in decline, it is much easier to single out ethnic groups and minorities and blame them, thus having a focus point for all the anger and frustration one might feel. A scapegoat can be useful, but in the end, it helps only  in making us ignore and forget the complexity by which a society really works, making everyone except those in power mere  pawns in the great game of society (though in the end, they too are only products of the same world). The trick is, as I believe it, to break free from the determinism of the game by gaining social and personal conscience, as Derrick does in the scene described in the preceding paragraph. But in the end, can we ever truly be the masters of our own fates? This leads us to my other favourite scene: the last one. In this scene, Daniel is killed by the very same type of blind hatred and violence that he has just gained conscience of and broken free from, but not by the hands of anyone of his former peers. His killer is a black gang-member he stood up to in the beginning of the film by, literally, standing up to him without swaying, without saying anything. All he did was to stare at him until he went away. In a way, he is killed by himself, or by the incarnation of his former self. The black kid is subjugated to the same hate and frustration the Daniel himself used to cultivate, though in his case culminating in him killing another human being for not having showed him the respect and fear he felt he was entitled to, and that he needed to gain the respect of his peers. The killing thus acquires two symbolic meanings: The first one being the “autocide” of Derrick - his symbolic former self having become his bane; the second one being that whatever we do, our fates will always be subjected to the randomness of society.

“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.” Henry David Thoreau (my italics)

Sheet Music and Music Blog

        I have been playing a lot of piano lately, and while being fed up with deciphering Zelda songs on my own, I happened to stumble upon an amazing blog by a Californian musician, Aivi Tran. According to herself, she is a self-taught, school-refined and freelance composer, who has "soft spot for video game music". She is a great pianist, who is adept at transcribing music to sheet. I found in her blog a real treasure of sheet music from some of my favourite video games, such as Zelda, Super Mario Galaxy and Final Fantasy. She's also added demonstrative videos for most of it, and I must say that her level is far above mine (though that does not say much, as I have never pretended to have more than an acceptable level). It is just a shame that most of it is a bit above my level, so even after an eight-hour marathon of Piano playing, I still have a long way to go before mastering pieces such as "Castle" and "Zora's Domain", both from Zelda.
       I have taken the liberty of adding the first page of "Zora's Domain", just to show how amazingly complicated it turned out to be. For the rest, I highly recommend visiting her blog, Waltz for Luma (I intend to ask her what it means).



Ps. I found out what Luma means" Beside being a plant and a species of tree, it is the star-shaped thingies from Super Mario Galaxy. You can see one flying to the right of Mario by exploring the latter link.

A qui la Faute?

I removed the poem I had put in the left corner, so I'll just add it here as a post:

Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
(recueil : L’Année Terrible)

-  Tu viens d’incendier la Bibliothèque?

- Oui.
J’ai mis le feu là.

- Mais c’est un crime inouï !
Crime commis par toi-même, infâme !
Mais tu viens de tuer le rayon de ton âme !
C’est ton propre flambeau que tu viens de souffler !
Ce que ta rage impie et folle ose brûler,
C’est ton bien, ton trésor, ta dot, ton héritage
Le livre, hostile au maître, est à ton avantage.
Le livre a toujours pris fait et cause pour toi.
Une bibliothèque est un acte de foi
Des générations ténébreuses encore
Qui rendent dans la nuit témoignage à l’aurore.
Quoi ! dans ce vénérable amas  des vérités,
Dans ces chefs-d’œuvre plains de foudre et de clartés,
Dans ce tombeau des temps devenu répertoire,
Dans les siècles, dans l’homme antique, dans l’histoire,
Dans le passé, leçon qu’épelle l’avenir,
Dans ce qui commença pour ne jamais finir,
Dans les poètes ! quoi, dans ce gouffre des bibles,
Dans le divin monceau des Eschyles terribles,
Des Homères, des  jobs, debout sur l’horizon,
Dans Molière, Voltaire et Kant, dans la raison,
Tu jettes, misérable, une torche enflammée !
De tout l’esprit humain tu fais de la fumée !
As-tu donc oublié que ton libérateur,
C’est le livre ? Le livre est là sur la hauteur ;
Il luit ; Parce qu’il brille et qu’il les illumine,
Il détruit l’échafaud, la guerre, la famine
Il parle, plus d’esclave et plus de paria.
Ouvre un livre. Platon, Milton, Beccaria.
Lis ces prophètes, Dante, ou Shakespeare, ou Corneille
L’âme immense qu’ils ont en eux, en toi s’éveille ;
Ébloui, tu te sens le même homme qu’eux tous ;
Tu deviens en lisant grave, pensif et doux ;
Tu sens dans ton esprit tous ces grands hommes croître,
Ils t’enseignent ainsi que l’aube éclaire un cloître,
À mesure qu’il plonge en ton cœur plus avant ,
Leur chaud rayon t’apaise et te fait plus vivant ;
Ton âme interrogée est prête à leur répondre ;
Tu te reconnais bon, puis meilleur, tu sens fondre,
Comme la neige au feu, ton orgueil, tes fureurs,
Le mal, les préjuges, les rois, les empereurs !
Car la science en l’homme arrive la première.
Puis vient la liberté. Toute cette lumière,
C’est à toi comprends donc, et s’est toi qui l’éteins !
Les buts rêvés par toi sont par le livre atteints.
Le livre en ta pansée entre, il défait en elle
Les liens que l’erreur à la vérité mêle,
Car toute conscience est un nœud gordien.
Il est ton médecin, ton guide, ton gardien.
Ta haine, il la guérit ; ta démence, il te l’ôte.
Voilà ce que tu perds, hélas, et par ta faute !
Le livre est ta richesse à toi ! C’est le savoir,
Le droit, la vérité, la vertu, le devoir,
Le progrès, la raison dissipant tout délire.
Et tu détruis cela, toi !

- Je ne sais pas lire.

A Qui la Faute

        "A Qui la Faute?" is a poem written by Victor Hugo, one of the greatest authors and intellectuals of France. It is also one of my favorite poems, and that is why I have decided to put it here in my blog.
        The poem is a part of the Collection L'Année Terrible which basically translates as "the terrible year". The collection itself retraces the events of 1870 in France, a year where the country was ravaged by a war against Prussia, as well as a civil war in Paris. Hugo himself also lost a son this year.
        The poem in itself, apart from its XIX century French, is not a very complex poem. The title of the poem could be translated as "who is to blame?" and is a sort of a response to a revolt that resulted in the burning of the public library of Paris, in which thousands of books where lost. It is written as a sort of a dialog between the narrator and an imaginary rebel, and it opens with the former asking the latter if he was the one that started the fire. When the rebel confirms, the narrator launches a long tirade, in which he claims the book, to which the library is the guardian, to be his "treasure, dowry and heritage" that makes of the night the "testimony of the dawn" and that "destroys the scaffold, war and famine". The book is the light that illuminates the past and the future. Alas, when he finishes his tirade by "... and you want to destroy all that!", the rebel simply responds by "I can't read".
        There are several reasons as to why I like this poem. Firstly, it was the poem that made me discover Victor Hugo, who has later become one of my favorite authors. I like his way of writing - his descriptions are among the best - and I like his way of forming his phrases. When I study French, I tend to fancy a rich and very precise language, and such a language is unfortunately rare in today's France. In addition, the subject treated is one that I find interesting. If asked to sum up the "plot" in one phrase, I would say that it dealt with the problems of ignorance, and who is to blame for it (as the title indicates). Is it the rebel's fault, whose actions were behind the fire, or is it the ignorance which in a way was behind the actions that is to blame? And in the case of the latter, who is to blame for the ignorance? I believe that one is to be made responsible for one's own actions, as one is the person that decides whether to carry them out or not. But I also know and believe that the society, incarnated by the government, is responsible of the forming, teaching its citizens, something it has clearly failed to do in this poem. The criticism of the French society of the time is thus strong in V. Hugo's poem, and he reminds us that there are other forces then ourselves that can be said to be behind our actions.