SysyphusNI

Time for the meek to organize, and re-take the earth.

elledark:

Superman Was an Illegal Immigrant

‘Illegal immigration’ is a hot topic in American politics today, an emotionally charged subject where politicians are cynically trying to score points and boost their popularity. Its one of the issues that will characterize the 2012 election and bitterly polarized positions often seem to owe as much to belief as to reason.

It’s interesting, therefore,  to reflect that one of America’s greatest fictional heroes, Superman, was an illegal immigrant. Yes indeed. He entered the USA covertly from the planet Krypton as a baby, bypassing legal border controls. The kindly Kents took him in and brought him up as their own but the true circumstances of his entry to the USA were not reported to the authorities.

Superman  grew up leading a double life, wearing disguises, and hiding his true identity from officialdom in a way that today would have made Homeland Security very twitchy and might even have resulted in him ending up wrongly on some terrorist watch list as many innocent people do. Put bluntly, from the point of view of our modern surveillance state, Superman behaved suspiciously.

Of course there wasn’t really an option to repatriate Superman anyway because his home planet of Krypton had exploded so he’s pretty safe I think. Which is just as well because there’s certainly no shortage today of evil-doers and criminals to fight, although unfortunately many of them seem to be active in American politics.

Former president Andrew Jackson once said .. “Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.” Those on the far right who want border fences with Mexico, families split up, and draconian expulsions might usefully reflect on those words. Mr Jackson probably wouldn’t have minded Superman at all. 

elledark:

Plato, Shadows, and the Internet

So what do they have in common ? Well probably not a lot really but its a boring, rainy Thursday so maybe you’ll indulge me for a few minutes ? One little story I’m quite fond of is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. It goes something like this.

A group of people have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. They watch shadows projected onto the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. The shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality. Plato then goes on to mutter a bit about how philosophers (like him) are better able to discern reality but then he would say that, wouldn’t he ? Leave that for the minute though and stick with the image of the prisoners in the cave trying to discern reality from shadows.

To me the internet seems a lot like Plato’s cave. Here we sit, chained to our computers and peering at the shadows. Its not reality we see. Its just a representation of reality and one that’s often quite opaque or distorted. Very little can be taken at face-value and much needs to be interpreted. That’s true of the news we read, the images we see and the people we meet online. It’s all shadows we turn into a reality that makes sense to us but isn’t necessarily true. Whether philosophers fare better on the interwebz than the rest of us is unclear. Somehow I doubt it although I’m sure they manage to be more philosophical about it all.

Or is this just me being a bit whimsical again ? Probably. Still, it whiled away a few minutes on a rainy Thursday ..:)

Ellie