The book was better

I had an argument a few days ago about a film that came out last year, of Dumas’ classic book The Three Musketeers. If you haven’t seen it… Don’t. It’s absolutely awful, and I don’t think anyone would argue much with that. It's not only not worth the price (any price), it's not worth the time taken to watch it. The argument was more over why it was terrible – specifically, over the ahistorical aspects of the film. Like airships. I was actually defending this part – I always get a little annoyed about the idea of someone defending the purity of literature and not allowing anything to get in its way. The concept of adding supernatural elements to a previously mundane story is one that goes back to Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Well, actually, it goes back a lot further than Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but the point is that Shakespeare did it in Hamlet. The number one rule of English Literature is ‘If Shakespeare did it, it’s OK’*.  And some of the most beloved tales of the English Language have come from the steady addition of fantastic elements to stories. By which I mean the King Arthur Mythos, even if he was originally a Welsh story.

Hell, whilst I’m going on with this, Dumas himself wasn’t exactly married to historical accuracy. I’m not going to try to give you a shopping list, but if memory serves, D’Artigan didn’t actually join the Musketeers until about ten years after the novel takes pace. The purpose of the storyteller, regardless of medium, is to entertain the audience. If I want to read The Three Musketeers, I have a copy. Even if I didn’t, there’s one in the library, and if it has been lent out, lost, or eaten by a tribe of hungry pigmies, the book also appears on Project Gutenberg. So I can read the original story, thank you very much. Now, that’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with the adaptation of books to film. Doing so can expose stories to a wider audience, and themes can become clearer and more comprehensible to the audience than they were in the original book – but that means that what makes it worthwhile is that it is to some extent changed from the original novel.

True, there is something to be said for sticking as close as possible to the original – if you’re adapting to film a brilliant and beloved novel which is universally agreed to be a work of true genius, then there’s a good chance that whatever changes you make are going to be for the worse**. But when something’s been adapted to film as often as The Three Musketeers has, you’re going to have to come up with something better than improved graphics and new actors to make the thing interesting. That’s why you have things like Muppet Treasure Island, The Wiz and Snow White Blood Red. It’s why the last time I went to see Macbeth, Patrick Stewart was carrying automatic weaponry. So frankly, some flashy new visual effects – which have significantly less actual effect on the plot than the fact that d’Artigan didn’t actually join the musketeers for about ten years after the beginning of the novel, don’t really do much except add some much needed perceived innovation to a film which would otherwhise have been about as interesting and well attended as last time I threw a party. Plus, it let us show off the one thing that’s inarguably gotten better since the last time someone made a Musketeer film, the graphics. There is nothing sacred about the works of previous authors. They made stuff up, and you can make stuff up that you think will improve their work*****. It’s admirably like natural selection – the good stuff survives, and the bad stuff dies out (oh hey, look, I made a biologist cry).

The only other thing I could mention is the conversion from ‘fiction’ to ‘fantasy’. A lot of people who wouldn’t demand slavish devotion to the books, will complain when said book changes genre. I understand that one. I probably wouldn’t go to see a Sherlock Holmes Rom-Com. Actually, I might, but I’d be seriously iffy about the quality of the thing. I don’t think that this applies to fantasy, because fantasy doesn’t actually dictate anything about the plot. The requirement of fiction is that it is that which is not. The requirement of fantasy is that it is that which could not be. There are far more ‘fantasy’ possibilities than non-fantasy ones, and you can write literally anything under the umbrella of the fantasy genre – there are whole genres that are possible in fantasy which can’t possibly be done outside of it. Which means that fantasy is kinda stupid as a genre in the first place. Plus, unless you’re omniscient, you actually can’t tell the difference between ‘fantasy’ and ‘not-fantasy’ anyway.

I must remind myself at some point to spend much too long ranting about Tolkein’s influence on the entire fantasy genre. But I’m pretty sure that I’ve made my point on this particular line. Bye bye.

*Actually, that’s untrue. There are certain things that Shakespeare did that you can’t do today, either because it’s a product of his time, like the sexism of Taming of the Shrew, the racism of The Merchant of Venice, and the constant writing in Iambic pentameter, or because he’s Shakespeare, and has the literary talent to pull off things that would make anyone else look like a complete idiot. The addition of fantasy elements to existing tales is not in either category.

**Let us take, for example, the 2011 edition of The Three Musketeers. Ignoring the fantastic elements, it was actually pretty close to Dumas’ original novel. Which is good thing, because most of the changes they did make were for the worse – the heroes were boring in pretty much every way, the fights were uninteresting and tension-free***, the level of inter-heroic conflict made my social skills look… extant, anyway.  Seriously, you had to make Athos give the whole ‘love is awesome’ speech. Bloody Athos? I know I said that I don’t mind changes to the source, but you’re throwing away a source of conflict, removing depth and complexity from a character, and not improving the film in any way above if Aramis had said it – which would have given the guy some much needed development. And the presumably conventionally attractive female turns out not to be too bad right at the end. Give me a break. In the atmosphere of Dumas’ novel, that might’ve helped create an interesting and somewhat morally ambiguous character****. In an atmosphere so black and white it makes a zebra look uniform, it’s just a stupid out of place ‘beauty equals goodness’. Plus, it was so predictable I spontaneously developed clairvoyance. I could go on, but you get the point.

***Which can be fine, or even good. Just not in a film where the entire focus is on the fight scenes. It means that everything is basically visuals. Again, not necessarily bad. I will willingly defend Avatar purely as a kind of three-hour long moving painting. The visuals, unfortunately were not those of Avatar.

****Actually, I might be wrong, but if memory serves, Milady is actually probably one of the least morally ambiguous of the characters in the entire series – beaten out only by d’Artagnan himself.

***** No, I’m not missing the word fictional up there.

Worldpride 2012

I went to London’s Worldpride parade on Saturday. There were problems with it*, but it was fun. So here's my first post on it.

There are people who think we should stop doing Pride. For two reasons: Firstly, because there are people who don’t think aces fit under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. Personally, I’m of the opinion that, regardless of whether we technically fit (I think we do), links to LGBT can be helpful. Asexuality was recently added to the training of the Trevor Project in America. That’s a good thing, and it comes from the association.

The other thing is more interesting. There is an argument that Pride is actually a negative thing – this Onion article is a good illustration – I know it’s the same publication which published the articles ‘Ann Romney Says Husband Has Deeply Principled Side Noone Ever Sees In Pubic’ and ‘Study: Red Meat Takes Years Off Of Cow’s Life’, but that doesn’t mean that the argument isn’t seriously made. Now, asexuals have a pretty good way of avoiding that one, since one of our main concerns at this point is visibility, on the basis that an asexual surrounded by sexuals who doesn’t know what ‘asexual’ means can quite often feel broken and alone. That’s why we’re included on a suicide prevention hotline. Pride is a good thing for us to take part in because, regardless of what else you say about it, it’s pretty hard to be completely ignorant of someone who’s marching down the street blocking traffic and singing ‘Asexy and I know it’. This argument, however, is less effective for other parts of the LGBTAQA+ spectrum, as quite a lot of people do seem to know what being gay is. Indeed, this could be seen as being part of the problem. So if it’s not about raising awareness, what is Pride for?

Well first off, it’s for raising awareness. The thing that’s generally known about gay people is that they exist, and what they are. One of the big purposes of Pride is raising awareness of other things – like the tendency of some countries to have gay people beaten up, imprisoned and/or executed**. Pride exists as a protest march against that kind of thing. It’s also a giant ‘fuck you’ to the people who do that kind of thing in the first place – being proud because there are people who’d like us to be ashamed.

It’s also a symbol of respect to the people who allowed us to do that kind of thing. They worked hard so that LGBT people could just be themselves, and even though we might not be there yet, getting together and doing this kind of thing as hard as possible is to some extent a mark of respect to the people who worked and suffered so that we could.

It’s also fun. Seriously, it’s a great sense of community, with everyone getting together, marching together, talking together, standing around for an hour and a bloody half doing nothing… no, I will not let that go. And you get to meet people like you. I’ve written before about why sexuality is so important to someone’s identity, but it’s still true. And at a pride parade, you’re surrounded by people like you, who’ve been through similar experiences to you, who you can sit around with eating cake and telling stories about how silly straight people are (OK, we didn’t actually do that – though we did eat cake).

And, obviously, it’s a protest march. We do it in countries where homosexuality is legal, because it was long ago discovered that large public gatherings of gay people in countries where being gay is punishable by death, whilst effective in raising public sympathy, tend to be poorly attended –at least the second time. But it’s a way of telling people, even those that are already aware of what the issues are, that we’re not very happy about things. Everyone knows that gay marriage is illegal in this country – even if you happen to be in a church that wants to perform the ceremony for you. But it’s got a pretty good chance of being dismissed as a minority issue if we don’t have people making it clear that they do actually care about it… actually, scratch that, it’s got a pretty good chance of being dismissed as a minority issue that noone really cares about anyway, if the current government of the UK is much to go by. With international issues, too, it’s a way of putting pressure on whoever’s nearby to try and encourage countries in which homosexuality’s still illegal or stigmatised to bloody well get over it already.

OK, maybe that was the tiniest bit soap-boxy, but it’s all true. And you might think that a lot of that has little to do with asexuality. Asexual stigma certainly exists, but I have yet to find a country in which it’s illegal. And, of course, guys who show no interest in women don’t open themselves up to any misunderstandings at all. Mostly, our work is on public opinion, so pride is an opportunity for visibility and to hand out leaflets. Though it might be nice to get rid of that bloody bit of law that lets you say that marriage totally doesn’t count if your partner refuses to have sex with you. But honestly, there’s a massive debate among ignorant people as to whether asexuals are ‘pure’ or ‘broken’***. Which rather suggests that it might be a rather good idea to get rid of as much homophobia as possible before we become public knowledge, out of enlightened self-interest, if nothing else (and yes, there are a hell of a lot of other reasons to want to get rid of homophobia). Minorities have been protecting themselves by allying with slightly smaller minorities since the dawn of time.

*Mainly the fact that 11AM and 12:30 are not the same bloody thing.

**Presumably to avoid the unfairness of the British system, where gay people are beaten up, imprisoned and/or executed completely at random, in an incredibly disorganised fashion.

***The answer is neither. 

Theology and fallacy

OK then, you know how I said that it wouldn’t be so long until my next post? Well it wasn’t. Except that I kinda forgot to post the damn thing. So I updated it a little, and here’s the thing you should’ve had several weeks ago. You should get today’s thing tomorrow.

OK then. In any theological discussion, a lot of time and effort goes towards deciding whether or not God exists. Some Catholic saint came up with five ways of proving that He did. So because I want to prove that I’m smarter than any mere world famous brilliant philosopher-saint, I came up with six. Granted, mine are all horribly flawed as actual reasons for believing, so they’re closer to logic puzzles than actual proof. But hideously flawed logic is the best kind! So, in rough order from least to most logical:

1: The argument from motion.

It is, quite obviously, totally impossible to move. Because before you can move any given distance, you must first move half that distance. But before you can move half the distance, you have to move a quarter of that distance. Following this reasoning to its logical conclusion reveals two things: Firstly, for even the most infinitesimal movement an infinite chain of actions must first be performed – one must first move a half, a quarter, and eighth, and so on. So clearly, you will never actually reach a point where you’re actually moving the desired amount – no matter how small that amount. Secondly, there is no first distance – any distance you move can be divided in half, and so if not the first action that must be performed on the infinite journey over to the fridge in the next room. So there is no first action on your journey. Since it is quite clear that it’s impossible to start something without having something to start with, that means that not only can you never get to a point where  you’ve finished your movement, you can never even begin it. But quite clearly, it is indeed possible to move. The only explanation is some kind of interference that allows us to break the strict laws of logic. But any being that is capable of breaking the laws of logic must be omnipotent – and thus, we must conclude that it is God.

OK, before I move onto the second way, I thought you might have wanted a brief account of my reaction on first seeing and advertisement for the Fifty Shades of Grey books: ‘Oh hey, that looks interesting. The title sounds good, and I have a mask just like the one on that cover. I’ll look it up on Amazon whn I get home… OK then, I’m home now. So let’s see what this series is… Oh God my eyes. Why, why?’

I don’t have anything against the books, but it would be nice if they were a bit more obvious about the subject.

2: The argument from infinity.

There are three possible explanations for the universe. Either it was created, or it is part of in infinit chain of events, or it has always exited. If it was created, this is generally considered sufficient to establish the existence of a God, thanks to Occam’s razor. If either of the other explanations are true, then the universe is infinite in four dimensions. Since it is not a complete impossibility that a being should come to exist with enough of the characteristics of God to be referred to as such, it is a logical certainty that such a being should have, at some point in the past, come to exist. Thus, whatever explanation for the Universe is chose, we end up with God.

Have you ever wondered why I write this blog. One reason is so I can randomly talk about stuff that I’m sure noone else would be interested in in speech, without forcing other people to listen to me.  So I write it all down and publish it somewhere out of the way…

That was a little depressing. Onto number 3:

3: The argument from knowledge.

Omniscience is not an impossibility – by which I mean that there is nothing that it is totally impossible to know. But if nothing is impossible to know, then were there anything that it were possible to know which was not known, then it would be possible to know that the thing which was not known was true but not known. But it is impossible to know that something is true but not known without knowing that it is true – in which case it is known. So it is a logical impossibility to know that something is true but not known, so if everything is knowable, then everything must be known. Occam’s razor says that we should not multiply entities beyond necessity, so it is clear that the simplest way of fulfilling this knowledge is by a single omniscient entity, which we may call God.

OK then, I’m kinda running out of things to say in the breaks between incredibly fallacious arguments so I’m going to have to give you number four whilst I think about what else to say.

4: The argument from omnipotence

God is defined as an omnipotent being. That means that He should be able to do anything. Which means that He should be able to create Himself from nothing. So… yeah. Not sure what more I can say.

Blast, that one wasn’t nearly long enough. I swear, these just keep getting shorter. There must be something interesting I can talk about. Hmmm… I can’t remember if I’ve ever told you about my memory problems. Seriously, I once forgot to breathe.

5: The argument from contradiction.

Schrödinger’s cat is both dead and alive at the same time. As everyone knows. So we can say that either God exists, or Schrodinger’s cat is alive. That’s perfectly true, since Schrodinger’s cat is alive, so the statement is true regardless of God’s existence. But Schrodinger’s cat is dead. So we now have two completely true statements – Schrodinger’s cat is dead, and either Schrodinger’s cat is alive, or God exists. From those two statements, the conclusion is clear – God must logically exist.

Now, it would be perfectly possible to object to the use of Schrodinger’s cat in that argument. Since I wouldn’t want to make things too easy for you, you can replace ‘Schrodinger’s cat is dead and alive,’ with ‘light is a wave and a particle’, or even the lesser known cousin of ‘this statement is a lie’, ‘this statement is true’ – which is clearly both true and false simultaneously.

Back to my memory problems. I’ve actually done the ‘forgetting to breathe thing’ more than once. Though I’ve never actually quite managed to actually pass out. So the point is, you should totally forgive me for forgetting to post this. And now let’s do number six. This one gets long, and is a bit tricky to explain.

6: The argument from logic.

Let us take, ‘if, then’ statements – statements like ‘If it rains, then I’m going to wear a coat’. Clearly, if the statement is true or not is totally dependent on the ‘if’ part – if the if part isn’t true, then you can’t say anything about the statement as a whole, regardless of the truth of the ‘then’ part of the statement. For example, the statement ‘if it is green then it is a lizard’ cannot be disproved by finding something red, regardless of whether or not the red thing is a lizard. Similarly, the statement ‘if the sky is green, then the sky is green’ is absolutely true, regardless of the actual colour of the sky. Thus, the way to determine whether or not an ‘if, then’ statement is deductively true is to say ‘if the ‘if’ part is true, does the ‘then’ part necessarily follow from it?’ If it does, then the statement is necessarily true, regardless of whether or not the ‘if’ part of the statement is actually true. So let us take the statement ‘if this statement is true, then God exists.’ Following the steps outlined above, regardless of the actual truth value of the ‘if’ part of the statement, we can determine the truth value of the entire statement by saying, ‘if the ‘if’ part is true, does the ‘then’ part follow from it?’ So if the statement ‘if this statement is true then God exists’ is true (which is what is stated in the ‘if’ part of the statement), does it follow that God exists? Clearly, it does. Which means that the entire statement is true. But then it follows that the statement that the statement is true is true. Which means that the ‘if’ part of the statement (if this statement is true) is true, and that if the if part is true, then the then part follows from it. Thus, by saying ‘if this statement is true then God exists’, we can logically show that God must exist. So did I explain that one OK?

Right then. Six ways of proving that God exists. Or that logic doesn’t work. Whichever. And because I don’t like the idea of posting two things today, I’ll post the thing I was going to post today tomorrow. Or I’ll forget. It’s about 50/50 really.