Reclaiming Slurs: The Rules of Rude Language

With the news that a version of Huckleberry Finn is being published with the redaction of the word "injun" and the replacement of "nigger" with "slave" there has been a lot of discussion regarding the contextual use of slurs and offensive language. Though not so much in the media, I have seen a number of conversations dealing with when or even if it's acceptable to use slurs in context. And one of the big topics is of groups "reclaiming" slurs; whether this is OK, when other people can use them and when other people can change the meaning of these words.

It took me a while to figure out exactly how to break down the subject. It's a sensitive topic with complicated and nuanced rules and layers. Luckily I was talking to a friend and had an "ah-ha" moment.

Slurs are like a kick me sign. This probably seems like a odd statement but I think it applies. Imagine a situation in high school. Someone is an outcast. A bully places a kick me sign on their back as an attack. That kick me sign is the slur. In this situation I'll use the term "heeb" as I feel comfortable with it but feel free to substitute fag or nigger. The thesis should remain the same. So this victim now technically owns the kick me sign. Many people would question whether this is a desirable item to own but it was given to them. They now own it.

The first step in reclaiming this word, this slur, this kick me sign, is to take away the power it gave the bully. So they use this sign among their friends. They put it on and some of their close friends, who have also had this sign or similar signs stuck to them, joke around and give light taps on the person's rear. At this point this group using the word within themselves takes meaning power away. They're no longer being victimized by it. They are using it to make fun of the bully.

So far in this example we have a group of Jews reclaiming the term heeb. They make fun of anti-Semites by using the word internally, perhaps even creating a magazine. So what are the implications at this point? That it's OK to use this among friends if you are part of the group. If that bully comes back and actually kicks the person in the ass (an anti-Semite calls a Jew a heeb) then that kick would be assault. Looking at it that way one would be hard pressed to misinterpret a bully hitting someone else. Let's find a greyer area. Let's say that someone the victim knows casually sees the kick me sign. They believe that they are close enough friends to give a light tap but the person with the sign doesn't feel that way. After getting kicked it's up to the kicker to explain his or herself and for the kicked to then choose whether that was really an assault or a misunderstanding.

I think this analogy holds pretty well and can serve as a general guide. Is it fair that certain groups will be able to claim more rights to words under this system? Not really but if things were fair in the first place then they wouldn't have been called those slurs at all. This unequal system is a result of unequal treatment. The bullies, racists, anti-Semites and homophobes introduce this uneven balance of power. Reclaiming words is simply a redistribution of the imbalance.

But this is only one step. It takes power away from the bully. What if the person with the kick me sign wants to gain power through this term. Essentially that would be like them getting a jacket that has "kick me" embroidered or silk screened onto the back. At this point it's part of their fashion, their outward identification. This is how they want to be seen. And it's not actually telling anyone to hit them. This is the step where "black" became the term of choice to identify African Americans rather than "negro". This is where "queer" became a movement rather than a slur. It doesn't happen with every term and it's up to the victimized group to take this step.

I recently saw an episode of South Park where the town ends up re-purposing the word "fag" to mean "a biker that makes a nuisance of theirself". I understand that the point South Park was trying to make is that words change meaning and that they are not permanent. That's true but their mistake is taking an active slur and having an outside group redefine it. That's not really acceptable. The term fag is still in use as a pejorative for homosexual. In continuing to use it as an insulting term but for another group that new definition incorporates the original meaning. It's an insult built on the foundation that "fag is bad", and since fag is still used for gay then it also means "gay is bad". It would be exactly the same for white people to suddenly claim the term "towel head" means bad driver. Since it's currently an insult any time it's used it still contains the implication that you're insulting Arabic people. It would be up to Arabs to first reclaim and then repurpose this term. In the kick me analogy this would be like the bully demanding that a nerd hand the sign back so they can put it on a gay person. The bully has already giving the sign to the nerd. It is now the nerd's property.


I hope that the above clears up a bit of the mystery that some people perceive around the complicated and sometimes controversial process of groups reclaiming or "owning" words that have been used against them. As with anything this complicated and has the possibility of cutting to the quick every case to to be looked at individually. It's worth noting that "taking back" a word or "owning" it does not mean actual ownership. After all, this whole thing was sparked by how stupid and wrong it is to remove the word nigger from a book written by a white man.

In The Gay Marriage Debate, Stop Playing The Bigot

Many of the news blogs and podcasts I take in have been addressing the topic of gay marriage as the next step in the “gay agenda” now that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has been repealed. Beside the rather ominous use of “gay agenda” rather than “desegregation” I have seen a troubling trend: the complete lack of understanding of what marriage is. So let’s look at that.

Many of the people that argue against gay marriage make the same points. They say marriage is a religious contract and so the state should go no further than making civil unions, that marriage is between a man and a woman, that marriage is about procreation, that it’s not a civil rights issue. Some of these can be simply addressed with a look at basic facts. Others require a little bit of context and history.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post Matthew Franck tries to make a case that using the term “hate” (as in hate speech) against those who argue against gay marriage as w right. This isn’t inherently correct but it can be. Not everyone who stands against gay marriage is spouting hate speech. Not everyone who fights for a definition of marriage as “one man, one woman” is doing so out of hate. However, that is the kindest thing I can say because if they are not fueled by hate then they are fueled by ignorance, and in either case it is still bigotry.

Marriage is a religious institution

It is not. At least, it is not exclusively. In fact, the United States won’t recognize a religious marriage. In most religious marriage the couple is actually getting two ceremonies performed at the same time. The clergy member who performs the marriage is creating the religious and civil marriage. If a clergy member is not registered as a state officiant with the United States then any marriage they perform will not be legally binding. Similarly, if a couple has a Jewish wedding and then a purely civil divorce they are still married under Jewish law. I had a purely civil marriage and that means I don’t need a Jewish divorce if my marriage ever fails since I don’t have a Jewish marriage.

So anyone who claims that the government should stop at civil unions for gay couples is in the wrong on this point. Heterosexuals can have state sanctioned marriages and so should homosexual couples. No clergy will have to perform them so keep your church out of my state.

Traditional marriage is between a man and a woman

Let’s talk about traditional marriage according to the bible. Because that’s the traditional marriage they are talking about.

A traditional marriage is an ownership contract that a man enters into regarding a woman. The class of property that the woman is is called “chattel”. It is a complicated status but can be boiled down to “property with rights”. In a traditional marriage a man signs documents that contractually obligate him to all of, but not limited to, the following:

• provide food, shelter and other necessities
• sexually pleasure her a on a schedule that is dictated according to his occupation
• It is work noting that he is obligated to her. She is not obligated to have sex with him. It is strictly the wife’s right.
• Another fun sex fact: sex was part of the engagement process in biblical times. There was no separate “engaged but not married” status for couples back then.
• Christmas tie-in: That means that Joseph and Mary were having sex before Jesus was born since they are referred to as already married in the bible
• A settled upon amount to be paid to the woman in the case of divorce. This was usually in the range of an amount that could be lived on for 5 years I believe
• According to a biblical marriage there is no such thing as a valid prenuptial

This was all in exchange for obtaining land and estate rights from the wife’s keeper. This was usually her father, sometimes a brother.

It is worth noting that this was not looked at as an exclusive contract. A woman could only be owned by one man but as long as the man could fulfill the contractual obligations he could take as many wives as he wanted. That does mean sexually pleasuring them according to biblical law.

Marriage is about procreation 

Go back to the section above. It was about tribal property. This could only be passed down through a male offspring. Really, this point only applies if you look at women as chattel, marriage as a property contract regarding the wife and her father’s lands. This hasn’t applied for a long time.

Also you would have to argue that infertile couples could not wed and that a married heterosexual couple that remained childless for a certain number of years would have to annul their union.

The bible is against gay marriage as well as homosexuality 

Wrong wrong wrong. While the bible certainly doesn’t condone either the people that wrote it don’t think about sexuality in the same way you do. So this one needs to be put into historical context.

A lot of the bible laws regarding sexuality were written in response to contemporary Greek practices. You know how the Greeks are know for homosexuality? Well, they weren’t. Back then there was no concept of homosexuality. A man having sex with another man was, while obviously sexual to some degree, more about status. The sexual taking of a man back then was akin to calling him chattel, proving that he was in a class below you. It was strictly a gay thing.

To separate themselves from the heathen Greeks all status shifting sex between men was banned. This kept the levels of status set at men over women and elder over younger. One could not prove they were of a higher status than what the existing Jewish culture dictated by screwing your way up the ladder.

The same way that same sex intercourse was a status issue, so was marriage. How could a man own another man when men aren’t chattel? A similar idea would be to ban whites from owning white slaves but still allowing black slaves. Well, biblical Jews could own women but were banned from owning men. It wasn’t that the marriage would have been sick or wrong from a societal standpoint. It’s that a same sex marriage wasn’t legally conceivable from an ownership perspective. And women marrying women? Women weren’t at the status level where they could hold contractual obligations like that over someone else.

Biblical slaves were another story. Slaves in the bible are a level above objects but below women. In fact, biblical slaves hover around the same level as important farm animals. Women could own animals but certainly not other women and absolutely not men.

All of this may seem like a lot of information to take in. Their way of life in bible times were so different from ours. It’s almost like they were an entirely different civilization, right? Weird.

It’s not a civil right 

Then what is it? Taking away biblical precedent (which are constitutionally invalid arguments) there’s really not a lot to point at as far as reasons to stop gay marriage. Both people entering into a same sex marriage have to be of a certain age and legally able to enter into a contract. Actually, that’s a lot like the method for entering into a “traditional” marriage. The biggest difference is now we don’t have a tribal antipathy for ancient Greek culture and accept that women are legally equal in status to men. With those issues already revised it seems that a traditional marriage is possible between two people of the same sex.

So what’s stopping it? Bigotry. It’s a (now we see baseless) hostility towards people with a different set of preferences than someone else. And since there’s no logical reason to ban same sex marriage (we’ve taken care of the bible, procreation and sacred institution arguments) it comes down to bigotry. Whether this bigotry is built on fear of change or “the other”, hatred or religion it is still bigotry. Even arguing up to, and stopping at, civil unions is a form of “Separate But Equal” legislation.

Feel free to leave an argument that I missed. I can’t conceive of a logical reason to stop same sex marriages. The best I’ve heard is to abolish all state marriages and establish hetero and homosexual civil unions as the only state sanctioned unions. I would vote for it but it’s an unfeasible goal. First of all, there is no way the government and citizens would agree to a social shift that huge. In addition, it would have to dissolve all existing marriages and I can’t see that happening either. So it’s really a pipe dream option.

Oh, and try to keep it to something that can be brought up in constitutionally abiding law. Say “God doesn’t like that” isn’t something that fits the criteria.

Christopher Nolan has an existential thesis, not a crisis

I just finished a Christopher Nolan movie in which a man accidentally becomes responsible for his wife's suicide. To deal with the grief and guilt he builds a world made of real, false and modified memories. He then progressively falls deeper into this absolution fantasy until he can no longer tell reality from his personal fiction. This movie is called Memento.

There's been some writing on how Inception is similar to The Prestige in that the main characters act out various functions in a trick or con that closely parallel the creation of a film. While this is true, Inception is not really a spiritual twin to The Prestige. Rather, it is a philosophical continuation to Memento. Both Inception and Memento are existential exercises in what makes a person's perceptions real, how real are they and does fact matter as much as how we comprehend it. In both of these films the main character creates their own reality which is built upon a foundation of meaning rather than fact. What's interesting is that in both cases this is revealed to us. Granted, in Inception it is done in a much more circumspect way but both movies clearly state at the end (and in the case of Memento the beginning as well) choosing to live within a falsehood may distance one from reality but it will ground one in their own drive to survive. The character of Teddy in Memento says that everyone lies to themselves to be happy. Nolan's repeated thesis is one step further; that some people lie to themselves to survive, even if it takes one away from happiness.

What's really interesting is after paring Nolan's existential perspective down to this concept we see it manifested more in Dark Knight than we do in The Prestige. At the end of Dark Knight the audience sees that Batman is faced with a dilemma. After Harvey Dent turns to murder and then dies, Batman has to choose how to present this to the people of Gotham City. He can give them the truth, that their near saint of a DA has turned to murder and tried to kill children, or present them with a lie, that Batman is a killer and Harvey Dent died in the pursuit of justice. The truth would devastate the community while the lie would strengthen their convictions about good people in power and therefore add stability to a shaky metropolis. As Leonard does in Memento and Cobb in Inception, Batman chooses to preserve the lie that gives purpose over the truth that would destroy.

Taking this concept back to The Prestige we see a bit of this peeking out, but only in shards. Hugh Jackman's character is never able to figure out what is the truth (whether it was a difficult knot that led to his wife's death or simply her inability to perform the trick) and without truth he can never face the existential crisis of purpose or truth. It seems that it is this situation that makes Jackman's character turn outwardly destructive. In the other three films the characters choose lies and turn it into purpose but also self destruction. Their choices to build their world on falsehood adds fuel to their fire, making them burn stronger rather than sputtering out but also burn faster. The obsession that comes out of not being able to choose in The Prestige leads to an outward feud, to a life of external destruction. Both of these situations lead to erosive lives but only when faced with a choice to deal with the truth and make a voluntary choice to live within a lie does the character find any fulfillment in their existence.

The situation I'd like to see Nolan tackle next is making a character face the choice between truth or purpose and choose truth. Purpose over truth shows a materialist pragmatism but what would people inside of a world created by Nolan do if they took the philosophically ideal path?

Toy Story 3 - Both Dynamic and Flat

The other day I was thinking about Toy Story 3 and the Toy Story series in general.  I'm not a huge fan of them, though I did enjoy the 3rd one.  I tried to figure out what about the movies didn't really work for me and it occurred to me that while (some of) the characters are three dimensional their world view is too flat for me.

What do I mean by that?  Well, we see how the toys grow and learn from each other.  Buzz goes from a tool to one of the gang. Yay.  What we don't see is any of the toys actually thinking beyond the set of roles they are presented with.  They are told that they are supposed to function as entertainment for children and they follow this role with dogmatic adherence.  Even in the 3rd film, in the midst their fears of being rejected possibly coming to fruition they stick to that same role in all their choices: stick with Andy or move on to other children.  At no time to they think that after being thrown out the then have complete control over their lives and movement.  They are free not only to entertain other children but they can also venture out on their own.  While they do derive pleasure from making kids happy we know that they can find emotional fulfillment in other ways.  Just look at the happily married Potato Heads.

The only character to question this role is Lotso, the sinister and unredeemed bastard bear who rejects children.  But putting this up as the alternative lifestyle against the forever devoted Woody is a bit of a thin and pathetic dichotomy.  If children are seen as gods then this is the equivalent of portraying all people as devout fundamentalists or self-assigned anti-Christs.  Woody has pure and ultimate faith in Andy and any child who he serves.  Bringing them joy, no matter how neglected he becomes, is his only purpose in life.  Lotso, alternatively, actively distrusts and hates the capricious children and essentially makes his goal in life to live a completely hedonistic lifestyle while punishing believers.

I understand that this is ostensibly a children's series but it's Pixar.  We're allowed to expect more from them.  That combined with the fact that this is the third installment means that there's a reasonable expectation that these characters could grow to question the world they've inhabited since 1995.

To be fair, Pixar still brings the Toy Story characters to a level above that of most kid's movies.  But they rarely do sequels to by installment number three I'm going to expect new levels of the story and the world to be exposed and played with.  With Up we have a relationship blossom in just a few minutes and it's strong enough to fuel the whole movie.  In The Incredibles we see a family fighting against society, their nature and see that sometimes not all people are equal.  Ratatouille essentially took a bunch of things that should have bored the pants of kids and made them enticing and joyfully appealing.  WALL-E was... well, it was WALL-E.  That movie was constructed not as a children's film but as an experiment in classical direction but with robots in a post-apocalyptic landscape.

With all that under their belt it's not beyond reason to expect Pixar to push out a bit in the third Toy Story movie and make the characters think beyond raging fundamentalism by both sides of the plot.  What was there was good. Don't get me wrong.  I liked it.  But the series falls flat for me because I expect the world to be a bit deeper.  Instead they stop short of any sort of breakthrough.  They may push the edges of their roles but they never quite become as self aware as an autonomous, growing character should.

"Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" is nearly upon us!

It's May 20th for those who want to participate.  I know I will and I'll probably be posting my amateur art.

I'd like to address is some negative reaction that this has received.  I found a well written response by Ann Althouse, a law blogger.  She argues that while anyone is well within their rights to draw Mohammed but that doesn't make it a good idea.  I agree that not everything legal is a good idea.  She claims that it will do nothing but incite anger by being disrespectful and this is where I part company with her.

While it may not be respectful of Islamic law that is the very point.  Anyone who is not Muslim should not be expected to follow Islamic law.  Althouse then likens the act of drawing Mohammed to the art piece entitled "Piss Christ" in which a crucifix was photographed submerged in a jar of urine.  These are not comparable acts, though both are legal and valid.  With "Piss Christ" the artist did something that was not specifically breaking a religious law but was intended to be controversial by going against social graces.  Submerging any symbol in urine shows disrespect to the subject.  A drawing of Mohammed is almost the opposite.  It breaks a specific religious decree but does not violate social graces.  Simply drawing a symbol or person is not normally a sign of disrespect.

It is this point that "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" is supposed to express.  Doing something that is not normally rude and is not forbidden by someone's beliefs shouldn't be a problem simply because someone else doesn't want to do it.  A much more applicable comparison would be how Jews should react to the crucifix itself.

Assuming that Jesus is actually god then it counts as a a graven image of god, which is forbidden.  If Jesus is not god then it's idolatry which is forbidden.  Simply from a historical perspective Jews see people hanging up and wearing crucifixes as a group of non-Jews parading around the image of a murdered Jew.  That's pretty tasteless and cruel from a non-Christian perspective.

And yet when is the last time you heard of a group of Jews protesting the very existence of the crucifix.  I  can't think of an instance.  Why?  Because the people that wear this symbol are not Jews.  They are not bound by Jewish law.  If a Jew were to start wearing a crucifix they would surely be confronted about it.  If a Muslim were to being drawing images of Mohammed I would assume that their community would confront them.  But I would not expect a rabbi to give a Catholic a stern talking to nor do I expect an Imam to tell me that I'm breaking a law that binds me.

To be fair there are portions of every religious population that will turn to violence to get their point across.  Fundamentalism from any source will act violently to opposition.  Orthodox Jews in Israel (and New York or really anywhere for that matter) have been known to stone cars and people for violating the Sabbath.  Christians have been killing others for not being Christian or Christian enough since there was such a thing as Christians; from the inquisition to George Tiller.  Even some Buddhist monks have led mobs to destroy property and attack people.  In general if you piss off Jews you'd expect letters and protests.  Piss off Christians and you expect sponsorships pulled and protests and bitching on Fox news.  Piss off Buddhists and, well, no one really worries about that much.  Piss of Muslims and people get scared.  And attacked.

There was just a post on American Atheists that makes this point.  In the same South Park episode they portray Jesus watching porn and Buddha snorting cocaine.  And yet there's been no Christian or Buddhist backlash.   The only response that's feared is an Islamic one.  I know, there are violent Christian groups that aim to hurt and kill.  I also know that not all Muslims are violent.  It's not even a majority.  What I am getting at is that people keep fighting back when Christians kill doctors or counter-protest when the Phelps folks show up somewhere but there's a pre-emptive censorship when dealing with Mohammed and other Islamic content.  That is what needs to stop.  It's not the people making commentary and criticism that should be curbed.  It's the violent reactionaries who push their holy symbols as universally untouchable.

Which brings it all back to "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day".  I've personally done a web comic where "Christ-ee the cross" was a reoccurring minor character.  So I'm following, well...  That is interesting as well.  Molly Norris drew the original cartoon that's over at The Stranger's page but has since gotten cold feet and has pulled her cartoon from her own site.  So now it's really just rolling on its own.  I completely understand why she would get scared.  After all, if there ends up being some sort of response it's easier to attack one woman that the internet.  The ironic (real irony!) thing is that she's scared over her own protestation of the media being scared.

Rebecca Watson puts it very nicely in video form over here.

My perspective is that people should gauge how they control their speech based on respect, not by fear or force.  You can't make a decision to be respectful until you have the freedom to choose your actions.  So who's in on this?

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day
Thursday, May 20th, 2010

VERSUS: Atheism and Agnosticism

I am an atheist. Most people know this. What they might not know is what an atheist actually means. In fact, I'd say most non-atheists don't have an accurate meaning in mind when they think about atheism so I'm going to clear this up. To be fair I also think a large portion of atheists are confused about the term as well. To clear this up I'll be clarifying a few terms but the main focus in this post will be Atheism Vs. Agnosticism. Don't be scared.

The first step is to break these words down to see what they really mean, not what some people assume them to be.

• Atheism – without a belief in gods
• 'a' – no or absence
• 'theo' – god or divine
• 'ism' – a practice of, belief in, condition of

• Agnosticism – without enough knowledge to know. And in this case “know” is in terms of scientific thought so it needs certainty.
  
  • 'a' – no or absence
  • 'gnostic' – know, learn, discern
  • 'ism' – a practice of, belief in, condition of

Most people have a sort of scale in regard to belief in gods. From what people say and from what I've personally experienced it generally looks like this:

atheist → agnostic → deist → theist

This is actually being generous as I find fewer and fewer people who are aware of deism. Deism is a belief in a creator who has, since creation, not interacted with the universe in any personal way. Deists don't believe in any sort of revelation from a god and tend to think of their creator as a sort of watchmaker who created the universe and then took a step back to observe. Theists believe in (at least one) god and that it/they have, since creation, interacted with the universe and communicated with humans in some way.

There are many more branches than this but I wanted to get out just the basics.

Let us say that there is a button. There is a group of people who think pushing this button is the right thing to do. There is also a group that thinks pushing it is the wrong thing to do. But not everyone falls into this dichotomy. Some people aren't completely sure. They say they currently don't know whether pushing the button is right or wrong. If you take that undecided group and look at them right now they actually fall into the non-pushing group. While undecided it would be stupid to push the button. It could do something great. It could do something terrible. But either way no one is going to push it if they're not sure.

Pulling this back over to atheism you can see that people who are agnostic are not fulfilling any sort of belief. They are not being theists. Someone who is unsure of whether to press that button is not a button-pusher. Someone who is abstaining from belief in a god because of lack of knowledge is not currently believing in any sort of god. That means they are being atheists. Agnostics are a subgroup of atheists.

Here's another way of thinking about it. Let's take a hobby, say, stamp collecting. Some people are stamp collectors. They collect stamps. I do not collect stamps. I really don't care about stamps one way or another. If I learned more I might either feel strongly that they are a good investment and become a stamp collector, or that it's a huge waste of time and become an anti-stamp collector. As it stands, stamp collecting is just something I don't do. Now replace “stamp collecting” with “believe in god”.

An agnostic isn't 100% set in either direction in regard to belief. This means that they are in a subcategory of non-believers since they are not actively believing. They could have a leaning (Richard Dawkins ranks himself at 6.5 on a scale of 1-7 where 1 is complete faith in god and 7 is complete rejection) but since even someone leaning towards belief still hasn't gotten there they are still an atheist. In fact, as long as there's any percent of uncertainty then that person is still uncertain. Inside of the term 'atheist' an anti-theist would be 100% sure and an agnostic would be 99%-50% sure that there are no gods (50% being an estimated tipping point of doubt. Actual tipping point between belief and doubt may vary). If you decide that you want to go out and buy a set of stamps to collect you're not actually a stamp collector until you do it. If you choose to press a button you're not a button pusher until your finger pushes down on that button. If someone doesn't think there's enough evidence either way to make an educated decision regarding the existence of a deity then they are an atheist.

One note on the above is that there's actually a much more complicated aspect to doubt than I put in. There is the possibility of harboring doubt and still being a theist. An example is someone who takes up Pascal's Wager, that if there is no god but you worship him then you still get into heaven but if there is no god and you don't then you go to hell. That means Pascal finds it a better bet to pointlessly worship than possibly damn one's self. Since the person might fulfill the acts of worship but not truly believe then there's the whole question of whether following the actions commanded by a religion is enough to fulfill that religion. Whether it is enough differs from faith to faith so the result of doubter being or not being a button abstainer/atheist is different from religion to religion. In most forms of Judaism the action is more important than the motivation. In Catholicism the opposite is true. So in the spirit of openness I am admitting that this post is written with the assumption that doubt stops one from pressing the god button, as this is true for the Christian majority.

Since most atheists are Skeptics you'll actually find that the large majority of atheists are technically agnostics. Skeptics use reason and the scientific method in refining their world views. This means that since the god concept has been set up to be unfalsifiable at least recognition of this has to be acknowledged. For those who don't know, unfalsifiable means "not capable of being proven false". This does not mean it is true but only that the concept has some built in self defense mechanism to negate any investigation as to its existence or not. The idea that a god created the world in 7 days but made everything to look as if it were billions of years old is unfalsifiable since the concept negates any test results showing the universe to be older The standard skeptic's atheism says “There is not enough evidence to believe in any gods, however if proof was ever found then it would have to be acknowledged and atheist belief reconsidered”.

A lot of people think of anti-theists when they hear the word atheist. The idea behind anti-theism is “against believing in a god”, usually because they think it's detrimental to the mental well being of the believers and society in general. Similarly, but different enough to make a note of, are anti-religionists. The idefa behind anti-religionism is obviously "being against religion".

Belief is an active state. If an agnostic has not taken the action to believe then they are without belief, without god, a-theist.

Since “a theism” means “without god” and all of this is without god. “With god” is JUST deism and theism. Another differentiation I have been seeing a lot recently is the term "non-theist". Often times I see it used when the author thinks that atheist is too strong a word and agnostic will open up, well, this whole can of worms that I'm addressing now. But there is already a word that means non-theist. It's "atheist".

VERSUS: A New Take on 'Science Fiction vs. Fantasy'

Recently I’ve noticed that there’s been a lot of writing regarding science fiction.  As a genre dear to my heart I took notice.  Topics included whether sci-fi and speculative fiction should embrace a post-genre view, rules of reading that differ when it comes to sci-fi and so on.  Some of these articles were wonderful but the tendency was to move away from genre and towards a more inclusive literary view.  Even in the rules of reading sci-fi there were comparisons to using the casual acceptance of certain points and trying that perspective with literary fiction.  That’s all fine.  I have no problem with sci-fi/spec fiction moving away from strong genre and towards a wider audience.  But I want to touch on something that travels in the opposite direction, delving deeper into the genre rifts.

Science Fiction vs. Fantasy

How this will diverge from the usual argument of literary value between the two types of writing is that I will address the problems that come up between sci-fi and fantasy audiences, mainly being that I’m seeing more and more people not know the difference.  So here’s a cheat sheet to distinguish the two by way of the worlds created for their settings:

• Science Fiction/Speculative Fiction: If advanced science plays a large part in the world or plot then it is science fiction.
• Fantasy: If magic exists in the world it is fantasy.

NOTE: Fantasy supersedes science fiction.

“Why?” You may ask.  That’s simple.  The reason is that magic is a bigger world shift than advanced science.  The leap between the present and any new technology will be a much smaller, more likely shift than one to magic.  In short, magic is more of a world shift than new science discoveries; the change in worlds between our world and that of Star Trek is more minor and feasible than the change between our world and that of Harry Potter.  While we are 70% of the way to tricorders since the ‘60s and now we are 0% of the way to harnessing magic since, well, ever.  And in case you want to argue that we do have access to magic/vampires/transworld wardrobes then I invite you to write your own essay and support it with real world examples.  I can show you an iPhone, the aforementioned 70% tricorder.

Let’s take a little quiz and see how you do.  Name That Genre:

• Harry Potter – fantasy
• Star Trek – sci-fi
• Chronicles of Narnia – fantasy
• Planet of the Apes – sci-fi
• Star Wars – sci-fi?  WRONG.  This one is fantasy.

And this gets to my point.  Star Wars is fantasy.  You may cry out about hyperspace, fleets of starships, interplanetary commerce, lightsabers!  Cry all you wants but you’re forgetting one thing: The Force.  The force is a mystical energy that permeates all living things (and apparently rocks and robots as well).  You can call it ‘sci-fi fantasy’ but the core of the Star Wars universe, the biggest divergence from our world is this mystical, magical Force.  We can travel to other planets and we may one day create a hyperdrive, or not if it necessitates some fictional but physical element (unobtainium, dilithium, etc) but as of now our world doesn’t seem any closer to divulging evidence of The Force than it was millions of years ago.

To pull in another genre to illustrate the difference between these two, let us look at the Pirates of the Caribbean movies for a moment.  They take place in the past, have pirates, use magic, have sea monsters and zombie/ghost/damned people, Aztec curses.  Are these fantasy movies?  Yes.  Are they historical fiction?  Only by the most liberal definition of historical fiction.  In the same way, Star Wars is very much fantasy and only science fiction by a very generous classification.

All of this started to form in my mind when one of my friends saw the Shane Acker film 9.  He said he felt betrayed because the whole film established for him a science fiction world and then at the end (SPOILERS) the story suddenly focuses on the existence of a fantasy element, a soul.  The problem I had with that criticism is the rag doll characters are animated in these burlap bodies without any sort of mechanical elements to move them.  From the beginning I saw 9 as a fantasy film, and indeed the plot seemed like a mini version of Lord of the Rings.

What I took from this perceived betrayal was the importance of discerning the two genres.  I realize that a lot of people must have the same confusion at times.  It’s evident as even in book stores the two types of books get lumped into one section despite the fact that there’s the easy test one can put to any item to figure out its proper classification.

There are a few  other instances of this confusion that has led to issues with the audience between these two genres.  One is the famous Star Wars vs. Star Trek debate.  There are many aspects of the two that can be debated, respectively: character vs. plot, romance vs. drama, archetypes vs. contemporary cultural and political deconstruction.  The one that people don’t really look at this in light of, but should, is fantasy vs. science fiction.  People sometimes get a little bothered when you say that one of these franchises is better than the other (by people I mean nerds and geeks).  You don’t really find the same irritation if you claim either fantasy or sci-fi to be better than the other.  Instead you usually get either agreement or simple disagreement, but the divide on that preference is so large and fundamental (magic vs. science) that it rarely goes any farther than agreement or acknowledgment.  The irritation really comes when people feel that Star Wars vs. Star Trek is a value judgment  within a treasured genre and it’s not.

The other example where this creates trouble, and this one has perhaps come to eclipse the Star Wars vs. Star Trek debate, is the Star Wars vs. Star Wars debate.  I’m talking about the Original Trilogy verse the prequels.  IV-VI vs. 1-3.  The same problem occurs here as it does in the previous example because a false dichotomy is created; people start arguing about the value of two genres without realizing it.  The original movies have The Force, a mystical energy that flows through all living things and binds them together.  Jedis and Sith are warring factions of an ancient religion.  When we get to the prequels the force is actually a manifestation of blood parasites called midichlorians.  These are measured and studied by the Jedi Council, a political collective that is fighting against the totalitarian Sith.  Arguing between the originals and the prequels isn’t like arguing between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.  In the latter the argument is within the same fantasy setting, but told differently.  In the former the argument is really between two nearly unrelated worlds where one is a fantasy adventure and the other a political science-fiction drama.  A lot of the points people clash actually puts them on the same side; both sides saying the weakest aspect is the awkward connecting of these two barely related trilogies.

More recently Battlestar Galactica has suffered from this muddled distinction.  I was lucky enough to start the show after it completed its full run, with only the half-spoiler that the finale didn’t fit the hard science fiction of the previous episodes.

(For readers not familiar with ‘hard sci-fi’ it is a sub-genre recognized but a focus on realistic and usually well explained speculative scientific developments.  The lack of lasers and realistic plotting of battles, along with the lack of multiple faster than light travel speeds pushed this series closer towards ‘hard sci-fi’ than most television.  The lack of sound in space in the show Firefly is another example of this realistic approach.)

I went in knowing that it was like Star Wars, a fantasy world full of technology.  Knowing this the finale of the show was much more in line with the world I perceived the series to take place in.  While religious beliefs were often a discussion point in the show knowing that the actual religion played a part in their reality helped ground my watching in something somewhat closer to their “reality” and farther from the “reality” that people expecting science fiction assumed to be true.

I’m not coming out to say that between fantasy and science fiction there is a better genre, though I do have my preference.  The point I want to make is that even recognizing the difference between the two is an oft missed aspect in the genre debates.  And seeing this split early on simplifies a great deal when looking at these two uncomfortable siblings.  Being aware of the fundamental differences can even help outside of head to head issues.  Take the current Steampunk trend.  The reason I think it’s so widespread among both sets of fans is that a fictionalized Victorian setting has the potential to grow into either, or both) genres.  Coal powered automatons have just as much potential to exists as do the Ancient Ones, perhaps even to both show up and battle.  In addition, the science of brass pressure tanks and steam power have already been surpassed so any retroactively advanced technology becomes just as indistinguishable from magic as sufficiently advanced technology would.  The suspension of disbelief required for Steampunk is much more akin to that required for fantasy than science fiction.  Could a Terminator ever be built?  Possibly, and that’s science fiction.  Could a steam-powered Terminator be built?  Infeasible and it is closer in likelihood to a Golem than a cyborg, thus pushing closer to the realm of fantasy.

The Conceit of Christianity

Now that the holiday season is over I actually have a bit of time to sit down and reflect on things that have happened and what they mean. It's been a bit of an awkward time, between my mixed marriage which lands me in church, my atheism and dealing with the public, my Judaism and dealing with the public, as well as being very aware of the minority position I'm in. And I've learned quite a bit this year.

Those that follow my twittering will know that I've been reading up on the pre-Christian origins of the December 25th celebrations (and here's a nice article with religious stories and at least 12 pre-Christian gods born on December 25th). I've also been reasoning out exactly what is meant by holiday greetings. But something interesting I have learned about this year is something I could never put my finger on until now. It's the conceit that lays at the heart of modern Christianity. I'm not using conceit in a pejorative way but rather pointing out that current members seem to all share an inflated sense of importance and universality.

What triggered this Yuletide realization was a discussion that occurred at my job. I'm out as an atheist and that means that some of the more conservative people I work with come to me as their friendly unbeliever. Christmas came up and I told them that to me Christmas was simply "Chinese food and a movie day". They replied that it was sad as it is a day about family. I replied "That's true. If you celebrate Christmas." They went on to say that it's really one of the few days off that are celebrated, as opposed to Veterans Day, Memorial Day, Presidents Day, etc. I, once again, agreed stipulating that it's only true if that person should celebrate Christmas.


And then it dawned on me. There was something deeper to their assumptions about the holiday of Christmas and how people celebrated it. To them it was a family day without much religion. But that was still coming from within their Christianity. Their view of my atheism is not that I reject all gods but rather I rejected the Christian god. Their view of the Judaism I was raised with, likewise, accepted a god and therefore the Christian god in some way, though without Jesus. This is probably a shock to most Christians but the Jewish god is not the same deity as the Christian god. Assuming so is part of the conceit of Christianity. Were that true then Christians would be expected to believe in Allah but I'm guessing you'd be hard-pressed to find a Jesus follower who would claim that is true. The best way to visualize this is to put the "big three" in a line:

Judaism-----------------Christianity-----------------Islam

That is a simple time-line. Now, here's how Christians see it:

Judaism----------------->Christianity-----------------Islam

And here's how Muslims see it:

Judaism----------------->Christianity----------------->Islam

Each successive religion sees the previous ones as part of the foundation of their own religion. That's because the older a religion is the more readily people will respect it as a belief system, though Scientology is not more ridiculous than a literal reading of any of those major religions listed above. But by building on an ancient heritage and history they can claim some sort of legitimacy by lineage. The twist is that those previous foundational religions don't accept the spin-off faiths in any capacity. Christians don't accept Allah as their god nor Mohamed as a major prophet. Jews, similarly, don't accept the Christian god or Jesus. There is one ancient rabbinic text that may mention the same Jesus of Christian fame, though it writes him off as a poorly read scholar and therefore finds his religious exegesis moot and invalid. While I can't speak on the details separating the belief systems between Christianity and Islam I can point out some incredibly vast fundamental leaps between Judaism and Christianity. So here are some key facts about how the religion works according to Judaism

• God does not care about belief. One does not need to believe in god in order to be a good Jew.
• It is not written anywhere in the Hebrew Bible that a messiah will be born of a virgin.
• Messiah, in Hebrew, means king rather than embodiment of god. Think savior as in saving someone, not Saving someone.
• There is no heaven or hell in Judaism and to live one's life with the afterlife in mind is forbidden.
• The letter of the laws does not completely exclude the idea of other gods, simply the worshiping of them.

That's just a sampling of differences which really split Judaism from Christianity on the god level. Christianity is based on faith, belief and worship while Judaism is based on practice and adherence (and lineage). Since these are essentially opposing sets of metaphysics their entire world-views are incompatible.


That was a lot to take in, but there's a second part to the Christian conceit I want to get to and that is the idea that Christmas can be a secular holiday. This is false. The confusion comes from the fact that it is currently a federal holiday and therefore observed by the state with the closing of the post office, municipal services and banks. This does not mean it's secular. George W. Bush made "Jesus Day" (June 10th) a state holiday in Texas but if you think that's secular then you're delusional. The truth is the state makes mistakes and this is one of those cases. Christmas, the celebration of Jesus' birth, can never be a secular holiday as long as Jesus is involved in it. And for those who argue that he's not an longer then I must disagree. While the reason for the season is Earth's tilt away from the sun the reason for Christmas is to put a Christian mask over pagan holidays in order to win converts. Christmas is, at its very core, a holiday to celebrate a Mass for Christ. The fact that it's a federal holiday does not make it secular, but it does drive home the... incredible conceit of Christianity ever year to non-Christians. I'm not trying to be rude by calling Christianity conceited; I'm jut trying to point out a fundamental problem with how Christians view the world in relation to their one, elected, narrow world view. However, when's the last time you heard a Jew, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, Jain or Zoroastrian claim that Christmas is a secular holiday? While it's not a rare view it is held as an elusively Christian sentiment. Hell, Hannukah is actually a military victory remembrance celebrated in a specifically Greek style and has no religious roots to it and I've never heard anyone say that Hannukah should be a secular American holiday.

Is Christianity alone in this conceit? Not really. I'm sure that most people that are part of a religion believe their world-view to be correct. Who would choose to believe in something they know to be false? The issue that comes up with Christianity is its sheer number of followers. Jews are only about 2% of the population, albeit a vocal 2%. Christians clock in at just over 75%. What is important to remember is that being a majority does not make a religious practice secular. While being a majority does make it easier to bend the US legal system to turn a religious holiday into a nationally recognized federal holiday it does nothing to lessen the purely Christian concepts that Christmas consists of. With a 78% majority Christians cannot vote away logic. They can only vote to ignore it.

For all my Christian friends: I do not mean offense to you. Even if you see bits of yourself in this post does not negate the fact that I'm still your friend. If this single aspect was all I saw in you then I'd be letting the air out of your tires rather than cheerily returning your phone calls. I'm also not arguing against Christmas and pushing an atheist world-view. Celebrate Christmas. All I ask is that Christians (and the mainly non-religious who were raised Christian) recognize that Christmas is still part of the Christian religion and culture, and that is is completely separate and in some cases antithetical to the ideas of other groups. To deny this is to deny the views of others and that would mean actively wrapping one's self in Christian majority arrogance.

Leia: Who's your daddy?

NOTE: Credit where credit is due. This is actually co-written with my wife. We totally geeked out and this was born.

Return of the Jedi has been on twice today and it raises a shitload of questions about continuity. Actually, it doesn't raise them. It brings up inconsistencies between the original trilogy (the real Star Wars movies) and episodes 1,2 and 3 (glorified, and sloppily written fan-fic). The one point that we'll be focusing on is Leia and her actual lineage.

In the original trilogy we are told a great many details about the Skywalker family tree

• Luke is Vader's son
• Luke is Leia's sister
• Luke an Leia are twins
  (I was doubtful that this was in the original trilogy but both Obi-wan and Vader mention it briefly)

What strikes out as strange is that there are multiple instances where Leia and Vader are emotionally distant to each other despite expectations. Leia meets Vader face to face after he ship is captures in A New Hope and there is not emotional recognition. This seems odd since we know that both are strong in the force and that Vader's relation to Luke let them sense each other later in the series. But we'll come back to the "Force paternity test" later.

The second thing that seems strange between Vader and Leia is that Vader searches the force and feels that Luke has a twin sister: Leia. He then goes on to refer to her as "your twin sister" and "your sister" (to Luke). Never once does he even acknowledge her as his own daughter.

Third, Leia doesn't attend the ritual burning of Vader's body on the forest moon of Endor after the destruction of the second Death Star. At this point Luke as told her that they are sibling and that Vader is his father. He never says Vader is her father and she isn't shaken by the fact that he seemingly is hers as well. Shes doesn't feel the need for closure with Vader, either for the destruction of her home planet Alderaan or to deal with the death of her possible father, by attending his funeral.

From all of this is seems that Luke and Leia, while twins, do not share the same father. And this is a point that has bothered me for a while now. There is absolutely no connection between Leia and Vader but there is between Leia and Luke. How can this be? And it becomes even more evident when the "Force paternity test" is brought up.

What is the Force paternity test? It is the ability of one strong with the Force to simply know biological relationships between people. We see Luke use it to tell whether Vader is being truthful about their father/son relationship. Luke feels that it is true. We see Leia use something similar to verify that she and Luke are siblings in Return of the Jedi. We possibly see Vader use it to tell that Luke has a twin sister (though it could just be him pulling out the memory of Obi-wan telling Luke) and furthermore we may see it in the fact that Vader seemingly refuses to call Leia his daughter. The last instance I'll postulate this occurs is when the family tree is revealed to Leia. She searches the Force and sees that she and Luke are related but never even hints at a suspicion of being related to Vader.

At this point I need to note that I will not be accepting the Episode 3 events as fact. If anyone doubts that Episodes 1-3 are in a different continuity than 4-6 all one has to do is look at the fact that Luke asks Leia :

"Do you remember your mother? Your real mother?"
She replies: "She was very beautiful. Kind, but...sad."

And if you're going to tell me that Leia remembers that from her birth (that's ridiculous) and Luke does not (that's doubly ridiculous) you're a fool. And if you need more proof, how is it that Obi-wan doesn't know of Leia's existence until Yoda tells him about her, though he was present at her birth in Revenge of the Sith?

So without the actions that take place in episode 3 we don't know that Luke and Leia share the same father. From all evidence in A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi it truly seems as if they only share a mother. And that's possible.

There is a medical term "hetero-paternal superfecundation" or bi-paternal twinning. This refers to an event when a mother carries two children at the same time from two different fathers. Most often this is when the mother releases two eggs (dizygotic) and has intercourse multiple times, leading to each egg being fertilized by different fathers. It is also possibly that an egg can be released during an already existing pregnancy and that egg can be fertilized by a second person, though this is much rarer. This is all true and it really does happen.

Theory: Luke and Leia are a result of bi-paternal twinning. According to the original trilogy this answers every question raised about the family of Vader, Luke and Leia.

• It answers why Leia remembers her real mother.
  Because she is kept by her real mother and Luke is sent away in order to protect Leia if Vader ever comes looking for his son.
• It answers why Leia feels no connection to Vader though she does feel a conncetion to Luke.
• It answers why Vader never aknowledges any relation to Leia, even when searching the Force on the second Death Star.

And this makes the most sense to me. The fact that I went out to hunt down this information (my wife actually mentioned the medical phenomina from it's inclusion in a One Life to Live plot line) rather than accept the story fed to me by Revenge of the Sith just goes to show how terrible a movie Episode 3 really is. And with that I close my case.

What follows is pure speculation. I would guess, without knowledge of episodes 1-3, that Obi-wan is Leia's father. It seems that she does have a conncetion with him the way Luke does with Vader. When she is captured by Vader and the fate of the rebellion is in jeopardy she trusts her gut instincts and sends a message to Obi-wan, a man she has never met before. It also fits that she has been told of Obi-wan, though not enough to make her think that they are related. Also, when Alderaan is destroyed not only would Obi-wan feel the destruction of the planet but the emotion that he experiences would seem to be shared between he and Leia. He is visibly shaken by the even even though he has never been to that planet to our knowledge. He seems to be feeling it through Leia.

Is it crazy to think that Luke and Leia's mother was involved with Obi-wan and that Anakin raped her after he turned to the dark side? It fits into original trilogy continuity. However it is just a theory. And while it fits it is not hinted at to nearly the degree that the other theory is; That Luke and Leia are twins that share only a mother.

Some genres defy categorization.

I’m currently working on a personal project: to rip and organize all of my music to make it easily accessible. Not only am I talking about “artist\album\track” format but also accurate tagging. At first I thought it was going to be the album art that would be the trouble but between Media Monkey, Tag & Rename and Songbird I’ve got a pretty smooth work flow down. No, it’s the simple “genre” tag that’s getting me down.

The problem is that genres, after existing for some time, become obsolete. I realized this when I finished giving everything currently ripped a basic genre. Other than a few tricky artists (I’m looking at you, Bowie) it was fairly simply. But looking at my collection afterward I saw something shocking: most of my music was in a very few number of genres. Mainly “pop” and “indie”. In fact, that’s the incredible majority of my collection right there. And the reason for that is these genres are no longer accurate descriptors for the music.

Pop is the most obvious. When “pop” was first used it wasn’t so much a genre as a market or even an industry. You had classical, jazz, maybe country and pop. Popular music. But then everything people talked about was pop so pop had to be subdivided. Today the genre “pop” is actually a sub-genre of the original pop which makes it all the more confusing. But pop was spun off into the sub-genre pop with the advent of “alternative” as a genre. It was originally an alternative to mainstream pop. So then there was pop\pop and pop\alternative. But in the 90s almost everything turned to pop\alternative. So then we end up with things like indie. Indie used to stand for independent and was used to describe unsigned bands. You could have indie\punk, indie\pop, indie\country, etc. But pretty soon that became inaccurate as well. Indie itself became a genre instead of a market description so pop\indie was born.

This means that indie\pop is a very different sounding genre than pop\indie. The first is an unsigned pop band while the latter is a signed (and most likely expensively produced) indie band. The difference becomes more pronounced the deeper the sub-genre is before it’s appropriated into standard pop. Take “emo” for instance. Originally emo would have mapped (pop or indie)\punk\hardcore\emo. That would be a band like anything from Glassjaw to At The Drive-In. That band sounds nothing like pop\emo which would be something more akin to Fall Out Boy or My Chemical Romance.

It looks like with a constantly shifting music system the only classification that will keep working is one based on context, hence the full lineage system of “genre\sub-genre\sub-sub-genre\etc…”. However, since I can’t work that into current ID3 tags I’m stuck. Now the question is how far to subdivide the single genre tag I’m given. And that I am still unsure of.

So how do you cut up your music collections, in terms of storage and classification?

The Future of Movie Theatres

Movies and the theatres they are shown in are in for a change. It's a silly jump to say they are in trouble, though that's what the entertainment industry loves to cry. It is fair to say they are in trouble if they don't recognize and adapt to the coming shift.

I am a bit of an arm chair futurist. I read up on and write about a lot of technical and social trends. At this point I think it's as safe to say for me as for anyone that I'm good at calling upcoming technological trends. Copyright and copyleft are of particular interest to me as I see this as the coming battleground for how ideas are to be regarded in the future.

I have a friend who makes no budget independent films. I thought he would be happy when I told him my prediction for movies and film. I told him that higher quality movies would be made for less money, that with the rising interest in home theatres and consumer level high definition (both in terms of viewing and producing) theatres would become less and less relevant to film distribution. I also feel that motion picture film, as with still film now, will never stop being used but will become more of a niche production market than the standard it represents today. To my surprise he did not agree with or look favourably on these ideas.

But all that seems to be the way the movie industry is headed. People are noticing the strong trends of remakes, reboots and adaptations. But instead of actually thinking about the “why” of this trend they resort to the lazy English major's brushoff off “There are no originals ideas anymore” which, to be frank, is bullshit. Anyone who looks for new contemporary writers will find new ideas every few novels or so. And looking for new writers doesn't mean picking up the best seller list for names. It takes hunting, but saying that there are no new ideas is crap. There are tons of new ideas and concepts being explored in the medium of the written word and this does not exclude that of film scripts. But none of that answers the question of “why” for all of these rehashed ideas in Hollywood. The reason for that is simple: return on investment.

Film studios are taking the same amount of money and channelling it into few numbers of films. That's not to say they are putting out a fewer number of total films but rather the money is strongly skewed to a smaller number. Small budget films get smaller budgets and large budget films get larger budgets. The problem is the budget is now the method for profit prediction. “The more expensive a film the more it should make” is not just the general rule; it is now the law of film. If you real it again you'll notice that law makes no mention of quality. Which is fine since it doesn't have to. Wolverine was recently released and while critics and fans generally gave it the thumbs down it did very well the opening weekend. As a creative adaptation and character piece it was a failure. As a movie put out by Fox Studios it was a success. It might not have been “good” but it certainly proved to be “good enough”.

And that's fine. There has always been a place in film for the spectacle along side the character study and the brooding drama. It is a perfectly valid movie type to make. And, like more artistically eyed and (usually) less commercially viable movies, those films should be accepted for the types of success they strive for.

Back to issue. Putting all of the money in theses select blockbusters means that studios are specializing. The problem is they don't realize it yet. Big name studios are now excelling at large budget spectacle works that push the edge of technology. And for the first time we are seeing a system where trickle-down theory works. Lucas championed HD digital for the Star Wars prequels and already we have hand held video cameras that record with broadcast television quality. And it is precisely this level of technology that is opening the door for smaller film makers to produce professional looking films. Theses people are able to make films that look like “real” movies, though not the spectacles that still require huge budgets. So now big studios take comfort in making remakes since a movie that's been made once has already proven itself and, in the cases of franchises, already has a fan base which is guaranteed cash for at least the first instalment. But because of camera technology these no and low budget film makers now have the ability to step into the gap in films that has come with this specialization.

So what have we covered?

• Movies with big budgets are less risky because huge profit, rather than good profit, is a necessity.

• Studios are focusing on the “spectacle” genre more and more, leaving other types of film off their lists.

• Small budget film makers have the ability to produce professional looking movies that large studios aren't making.

And all of that brings us to the other half of the film ecosystem: the theatre. Well, other half for now. The key to this section is to remember that with new technology comes new markets. This is the pay-off so pay attention. Movie theatres aren't dead (if they adapt) but they are no longer the only viable path for success. It used to be that a movie came out in theatres to do well and on home video to make a small profit, if a profit at all. If not now then soon, this will no longer be the case! And home video isn't the only alternative path.

Right now I'd like to explicitly state that there is a coming split in how movies can be looked at. Completely independent of quality the split is “big budget” and “no budget”. Low budget is in there too since budget is a gradient rather than on/off qualifier but let's put that in with the big budget/studio side for now. So big and no budget it is. That's the production side of things. Now we're getting in the other half of the paradigm shift and that is distribution. This side is no less important to so don't write if off as such.

As I said, the old split used to be film release verse home video release and there was a stigma against the latter. It was like a class system with film being the affluent 2%ers. Now let's look at distribution in light of all the options people have now and will have in the very near future. Key points to pay attention to:

• HD at home is becoming the standard

• Media computers attached to TVs is becoming more and more prevelant (PS3, Xbox 360, Apple TV in addition to media center PCs)

• The big names are now doing home distribution through this method via streaming websites like NBC.com, Fox.com, ABC.com, Hulu.com, etc.

• Film or TV release is fast becoming an optional path to success rather than the only path

That last one might make you wonder if I'm more optimist than realist but I assure you it's true. Like most trends this starts where the money is and trickles down when price drops. The problem is self release is a boon mainly to the no budget people but has to start with the high budget people, who have less to gain from it. However, look to the music industry. They have been hitting the snags that all media is or will face but faster since the turnover rate of both pop-culture trends and technology move so much faster in the music industry. Their big studios are facing distribution problems and rather than adapt chose to fight it. Where did it get them? Why, bigger names are shifting over to, not dropping down to, self publication. REM, Nine Inch Nails, Madonna, Radiohead... the list goes on and on and will only get larger. Now these people are distributing on the same networks as any old shmoe on Myspace or with their own dot com. And we're seeing this same shift in other media like movies, TV and print.

Now let's look at the film industry. We are already seeing big names look to alternative pricution and distribution. Both Zoe Bell and Rosario Dawson have internet only series out. And if you want one that epitomizes success in a new medium then look at Dr. Horrible. Self produced on all levels, self distributed and both a commercial and critical success. Now, self made movies have been around for a long time but with the internet self distribution is a completely feasible alternative. Granted, it's still new territory so it will most likely need to be cleared by those people with more money than the average no budget film maker, but the land is there soon it will be ready to be settled.

Which brings me to my second split. So far we have big/no budgets with low falling somewhere between. Traditionally neither one has been more or less valid of a movie type. Each has its own pros and cons. Big budget tend to look more polished but have less artistic content. Low/no budget tend to make less but get better critical review. The second dichotomy is in terms of release. Soon there will be a theatre/self release split. And like the budget ranking, both of these will have ups and downs. Theatre will have more of a guaranteed audience but will take a much larger investment to make happen and will therefore require a larger return to break even. Self release will be much cheaper and therefore have a much better possible profit with a small audience but marketing will be much more difficult and the audience will most likely not reach theatre numbers.

The obvious match up is big budget to theatres and low/no budget to self release but there will be crossovers. Imagine something like the Blair Witch Project except without the restrictions of working in a cheap looking medium. That's a no budget/theatre pairing. Web series and no budget HD is still a newborn form but I assure you that there will be a few breakout money makers from the no budget/self release as well. And then once that happens things will get interesting.

Imagine a trend of high budget/self releases. Viral only, big name projects. It's being tested now and Dr. Horrible walks the line, being a low budget but big name production. There's also the fact that once a production proves itself in a low budget form it is ripe for the spectacle pick-up. Something made cheap and put out there for the world to see, if successful, can guarantee quality and/or audience. Want an example of that? How about the upcoming Peter Jackson production Sector 9. It was a short film that was made from the low/no budget side of film making that so impressed people that it was picked up to be a big film. So while it's technically a remake it is still completely new to more than 99% of viewers.

There's a big split coming. Hollywood and theatres have been driving up prices because they are making a fatal flaw. They are still viewing themselves as the sole valid means of film success. But they are unarguably specializing in pure money makers more and more. Their big problem is that they are cutting out markets that still have demand and then wondering why their business is suffering. They are cutting out quality as a standard and quality is a big market. The spectacle cash cow is valid too, but money does not always equate quality so people are looking elsewhere as well as feeling less obliged to follow traditional consumer methods. Piracy may be up but it's a logical argument to say that a lot of spectacle movies aren't worth the ticket price. To people brought up on technology there's not a huge difference between pirating a crappy movie and renting it. The studio doesn't see much money from rentals (they tried to make that illegal once too) so what's the difference to the consumer? Cash in their pocket and little else.

Should Hollywood get out of the quality business all together and leave that to the no/low budget film makers out there? No. But they do need to recognize that they need to evolve in a changing market and actually have, by specializing. They need to realize that internet releases and distribution through DVD only sources like Netflix is not the second tier home video market it used to be. The real thesis is that there are new methods of production and distribution in the film world and the only people ignoring them so far are the big studios and the theatre chains. Is there a reason why a movie made for less should be regarded as lower quality? Then why should a movie made available through a web site be any less valid than a theatrical release. Hell, why are non-theatre releases not looked at for second runs on the big screen? Is it any question that Dr. Horrible would make some sort of profit it put out in theatres?

The world of film is changing. Hollywood is changing. Home video releases are changing. Does this mean that the age of the theatre and big budgets and big names is over? No but the market that feeds them is not locked in anymore. One way or another Hollywood will realize this, though whether it's while they are growing and developing more efficient techniques or while they watch their consumer base shift to home theatres and rampant piracy is up to them. And that's only half of the equation. No/low budget producers and directors better start analysing their options to get in on the new markets early. And while both sides will need to embrace the coming changes out of necessity it's Hollywood that has the handicap of assuming it can ignore it longer than the amateur film maker. Their money has created a complacency that they really can't afford any longer

Appendix

And that's about it. There are still many other factors that can be looked at for a more accurate prediction and examples out there to learn from. Creative commons will eventually have a huge impact in film and music. Also, different methods of releasing physical media will play a huge role in all types of viewing. For example, I can give you two examples of movies that you can hold viewings for yourself without paying the makers a cent and legally collecting 100% of the ticket money.

• RiP: Remix – a documentary about Creative Commons and music, focusing on Girl Talk as a dynamic example.

• Sita Sings the Blues – A great independent animated movie. What's amazing about her business model is that through her you can order digial tapes, a DVD, 35mm prints or even a hard drive with the digital versions of all those formats. Or you can download the digital version of any of those formats for free. Read up on her page to see why.
  
  

• Hunt For Gollum – While this might not be groundbreaking as a film in its own right, watch this 40 minute, $6,000 fan film and just compare the quality with the budget. With the budget twice that of Clerks it looks, visually, much more than twice as impressive. Now imagine if these guys made something for $12,000 that was based on an original concept. It's not this film so much as the possibilities it represents in for the shifting budget to visual quality ratio. Not to mention it's already had exposure in not only nerd-circles but also on NPR.

• Dr. Horrible – If you haven't seen this yet then... just do.

• Countless documentaries on Netflix have been made with more love than budget but still do a great job at showing people a world they never knew about. Hunt around for some.