| January 18th, 2008 |
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Another thing about slavery: slavery is just a particular and highly institutionalized instance of treating human beings as property. Human beings can be and often are treated as property without a formal institution of slavery, which doesn't stop being evil simply in the jettisoning of its institutional character. And of course treating human beings as property is itself a species of treating human beings as things rather than persons. The servant-slave distinction as we understand it today hinges on exactly this: that the servant is treated as a person subject to a contingent earthly authority, while the slave is treated as nothing but an object the sole purpose of which is to provide utility.
I've argued (or at least asserted) in the past that even property shouldn't be treated as property: that is, that our concept of property has become damaged by modern philosophy, which treats property as things subject to arbitrary will as opposed to things falling under legitimate jurisdiction in carrying out a mandate of stewardship. Modern people detest this idea, because modern people detest the idea that they cannot be God, and they especially detest the idea that they cannot be God even in little circumscribed "personal" domains - Zippy Catholic
Treating human beings as things instead of persons is the root of many sins. The unborn child inside the womb is not a person, the pro-abortion logic goes, but rather a thing such as a tumor or parasite. Employees are not human beings, but rather "human resources" who have unfortunate tendencies to get sick, have families, and always be demanding raises and benefits. The prisoner in Guantanamo is not a human being, so it becomes ok to torture him to save the lives of actual American human beings. Ours might be called the Age of Dehumanization.
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I just got back from Cloverfield. I found it disappointing, though I'm willing to chalk it up to the impossible hype. I don't think the first person camcorder perspective worked as well here as it did with the Blair Witch Project. With Blair Witch, we only had three characters in the middle of the woods; it was a much more quiet and intimate setting. Here we have all of Manhattan. As the movie went on, I cared less about the main characters than I did about the monster and the world outside of Manhattan. What was that thing? Where did it come from? Why is it attacking? How did that big a military detachment get into New York City so quickly? Was the government anticipating the attack? What, exactly, happens to people who are bitten by the monster droppings? With Blair Witch, less was more. With Cloverfield, I think more would have been more. There was a totally badass scene where the main characters are caught in the crossfire between the military and the creature, and it had some suspenseful episodes (scary would be too strong a word), particularly in the subway tunnel.
Overall I thought the movie was just ok. I understand it's meant to be less about the monster than about how average people deal with extreme circumstances, but I can think of plenty of others that do it much better. If you plan on seeing it, catch a matinee. And definitely skip it if you're prone to motion sickness.
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