Special consultant and voodoo huntress. Does more work than all the soldiers combined.
It’s a little like constructing a train engine without designing in the wheels: why bother? Lost Brigade (1993, aka The Grey Knight, The Ghost Brigade, The Killing Box) has many of the accoutrements of good movie, but in the end the plot does it in.
Captain Harling, aching to be dismissed from the Union Army, is assigned as a tracker for an assignment involving the apparent survival of a group of Confederate soldiers thought massacred early in the Civil War. His commanding officer permits him to interview the captive Colonel and only known survivor of the Alabama 51st, Colonel Strayn, and Harling persuades Strayn to accompany the mission.
Behind enemy lines, they come to the area of the massacre, where Strayn disappears into the creek and, impossibly, discovers his young nephew, the drummer boy of the 51st, alive in an underwater cave. The boy won’t leave and gives Strayn a dire warning and a bite on the hand. Returning to the mission, Strayn falls ill and is nursed by a young former slave who happens to be a mute. His former object of disdain becomes his best friend as the healing commences.
Soon, the detachment commander, Colonel Thalman, thinks they’ve discovered the location of the survivors of the 51st, and the he leaves to break through the lines and bring the Union forces in to finish the job. Strange incidents occur and then Thalman returns in the night … changed. He attacks the Union forces and seems invulnerable to their weapons, but they luck into disabling him. As he lays dying, he reveals all: the 51st, and in fact other dead soldiers of both sides, have been raised from the dead by African voodoo powers inadvertently transported to America by slavers. They are invulnerable to most weapons, but “pale metal” is deadly. The Union detachment arms itself appropriately with some stolen silver and awaits the 51st’s attack.
The attack comes, and it’s appalling, but the Union wins the day.
The movie seems well-made technically speaking, showing acceptable special effects when necessary, and well-chosen occlusion when possible. The acting is acceptable, cinematography is fine.
But … why? If there is interesting thematic material here, I don’t see it. Maybe it ended up on the cutting room floor. Characters run through actions that are logical, yet fairly lifeless. The supernatural pokes in, but for no particular reason.
My Arts Editor said she didn’t care about any of the characters, and, in the end, we shrugged and moved on.
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In the continuing drive to stop the development of autonomous weapons, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots (which I’ll just call “the Campaign” in this post) has released a video which is a bit of fake reality. It explores the spectrum of results, none exclusive of the other, that they believe would come with the development of autonomous weapons combined with swarming drone technology. It’s effectively done, and finishes with a note from Professor Stuart Russell, University of California-Berkeley, Computer Science, which is a plea that this is a road we shouldn’t walk down. Here’s the video:
The one avenue they didn’t really explore was counter-measures, which is understandable in that counter-measures are often hard to predict. In this scenario, many counter-measures would take a toll on those so-defended, such as an electronic counter-measure that not only disables the drones, but everyone’s smart devices (communications, medical, etc) as well, to physical defenses which may result in collateral damage, as they called it in Vietnam.
I think it communicates its message quite well.
But do you know what brought this to my attention? I received an MP4 in my email, which unfortunately WordPress doesn’t let me usefully embed in a post. (Mail me if you want a copy, using the mail link up on the right.)
If you’ve already viewed the first video, you know it starts with a faux-TED talk, and follows it with realistic fake news coverage of attacks on various institutions, and finally the cautionary message from Professor Russell. The second video consists only of the faux-TED talk, and thus no real context. It’s distributed without explanation or commentary.
Why and who? Viral marketing by the Campaign? Someone just decided to edit and distribute this for their own reasons? It’s quite curious.
Moving onwards, it strikes me that this is a vivid example of how the cost of goods continues to drop, with the usual hard to predict consequences. The drop in the price of computer power, once only within the grasp of the United States government and certain very large corporations following the end of World War II, and now so cheap that smartphones sit in your pocket, has been bloody well huge, if you think about it, and has enabled personal power and autonomy to a degree unseen in human history. This has also been true of powerful weapons, by which I mean weapons for which counter-measures are difficult. Anyone can pick up a rock and pitch at someone. A machine-gun is a lot harder to evade. Not coincidentally, the United States bans the individual’s ownership of machine guns, which is generally the goal of the Campain.
But now we may be on the cusp of a magnitude jump in individual firepower, and a concomitant increase in difficulty of counter-measures. Because software is trivial to reproduce once it is developed, drones are consumer-level cheap, and development continues with few, if any, legal constraints in the areas of drones or Artificial Intelligence, once someone (singular or plural) actually develops the software that can do these sorts of things, and (if necessary) it leaks out, then we may see personal or small group firepower leap to an entirely new level.
Perhaps the NRA will be foolish enough to argue that everyone should have these killer drones and then everyone will be safe, but I think that’s both naive and shallow thinking. A first strike may be undetectable and completely effective, thus making your ownership of a retaliatory force useless. And such a technology would render guns refreshingly … quaint.
But more importantly is the hidden assumption that we are a rational species. As science has discovered, this is not true. We are a species that is capable of being rational, it’s true, but we often are not rational. We formulate rules which help us survive, and then rely on them without applying our intellects. An innocuous example is the rustling in the bushes. It might seem most rational to investigate to see if it’s a tiger or not, thus permitting you to expend precious calories in running away only when necessary, but the general rule is just run. You can see this in many things we do, from driving cars to our voting habits. Some of us examine the issues and the candidates and make a decision based on what we perceive – and some of us are dyed in the wool Democrats. Maybe it’ll be rational to simply vote Democrat next time around – but how about the time after that? Or will you just vote Democrat, because you perceive that as the safe default choice, and you can now spend your time and precious intellectual bandwidth on subjects that truly interest you?
Rather than continue down the prose path of this discussion, let me toss this in your lap.
Oh, Lord, thank you, Lord, for this gift of power, that blesses us to smite our enemies and bring them low, all in Your Name, oh Lord, for you are the Creator, and we are the Chosen, who thank you now for your blessed weapon and child, the Drone of Death!
Yeah. Generally, the irrationality of religion can be seen to have a certain survival utility, but there’s little to keep its adherents from wandering into the territory of xenophobia, backed with the arrogant belief that the Divine is in their corner. Can you imagine Jim Jones equipped with this technology? Or David Koresh?
One sect against another. Perhaps that’s how we’ll de-populate the world. I wonder how the elephants are betting tonight.
I’ve been meaning to mention this important article in The New York Times from a few weeks ago by Aaron E. Carroll regarding the use of private sector mechanisms to protect the future profits of private sector corporations from the findings of science sector entities.
That is, corporations whose products are found to be ineffective – or worse – suing scientific researchers for publishing findings that negatively impact the prospects of corporations’ products:
We have a dispiriting shortage of high-quality health research for many reasons, including the fact that it’s expensive, difficult and time-intensive. But one reason is more insidious: Sometimes groups seek to intimidate and threaten scientists, scaring them off promising work.
By the time I wrote about the health effects of lead almost two years ago, few were questioning the science on this issue. But that has not always been the case. In the 1980s, various interests tried to suppress the work of Dr. Herbert Needleman and his colleagues on the effects of lead exposure. Not happy with Dr. Needleman’s findings, the lead industry got both the federal Office for Scientific Integrity and the University of Pittsburgh to conduct intrusive investigations into his work and character. He was eventually vindicated — and his discoveries would go on to improve the lives of children all over the country — but it was a terrible experience for him.
I often complain about a lack of solid evidence on guns’ relationship to public health. There’s a reason for that deficiency. In the 1990s, when health services researchers produced work on the dangers posed by firearms, those who disagreed with the results tried to have the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control shut down. They failed, but getting such work funded became nearly impossible after that.
In case it’s not apparent, the problem here is that the goal of the researchers is knowledge, while the goal of the corporations is profit. These goals need not always clash, but they often do, and when the morality of the corporation – to the extent that it can have a morality – conforms to the popular, if incorrect, idea that profits are all, then there’s going to be problems.
I view it as a problem of making truth a secondary item, which is always disappointing for me, and I think is a primary cause of many problems American society experiences.
So what to do about it? Aaron mentions anti-SLAPP laws, but in at least one case …
But in Dr. Cohen’s case, the court refused to give full weight to Massachusetts’ anti-Slapp statute on the ground that dismissing the case would undermine the supplement company’s constitutional right to a jury trial.
Perhaps rather than preventing lawsuits, they should impose a penalty on the entity bringing the lawsuit if it’s found to be specious, or if the entity does not show a sufficient loyalty to the idea of a proper scientific conclusion and its willingness to abandon a product which is ineffectual or may even result in harm to the consumer.
I dunno. I can’t imagine that an effective law could really be constructed around such an idea, to be honest. It’s one thing to have an intuitive notion of a good law, and quite another to construct such a law that would withstand constitutional challenge. Part of the problem is the difficulty of constructing an objective definition of the various concepts involved, and along with that is the problem that society doesn’t really recognize our various sectors very well. You can see it a little bit, such as the tax-sheltered status of non-profit organizations, but it’s not well developed, and I have no idea how to develop it more thoroughly, even if I was in a position to do so.
