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Salem's Lot 1979 and Salem's Lot 2024
Happy Halloween everybody! Julie's working late and the boy doesn't have school tomorrow so he's heading to one of those crazy f...
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(2007) * First of all let me say that as far as I could tell there are absolutely no dead teenagers in this entire film. Every year just ...
4 comments:
Wow.
Just a spoiler alert here, in case you didn't see the finale.
I thought it was interesting that John Locke changes his name to Jeremy Bentham for his off island visits. If you do a quick Wikipedia read, you'll see they were both philosophers. Jeremy Bentham had this neato but scary idea for a prison called the Panopticon. The panopticon prison never was built, but later Michel Foucoult wrote all about how our entire society and every bureaucratic, hierarchical institution is a panopticon, of sorts. The Panopticon is basically a prison in which the prisoners are observed, but not all the time. But believing they might be observed all the time is enough to keep them in line.
Draw your own conclusions. There's a lot more to both philosophers, but that was the thing that jumped out at me when I heard that name.
Damn, I must have missed that part. My HD channels were doing some weird glitchy thing, and I was DVRing it on the HD channels. Luckily, I started to watch about 45 minutes in, so I was able to watch in real time in SD.
The Locke/Bentham thing is pretty cool. Both have pretty well developed ethical philosophies, and the show is very much a show about moral choices.
When I first realized Locke the character was named after the philosopher, I just figured it was a nod to the concept of tabula rasa--that we're all born as blank slates, since that's what basically happens to the character in the crash. But now that Bentham is in play, it points to a more interesting reading of morality and ethics.
Locke was a big "state of nature" guy and theorized about why people give up some personal liberties to reap the benefits of political society. (Security, labor, etc.)
Bentham was all about deciding right/wrong based on the "utility" of the action, meaning how much pleasure or pain might result from it. It was either him or one of his followers, the Mills, who tried to come up with an actual formula that humans could use for deciding what to do in moral dilemmas--the Hedonistic Calculus.
Awesome. Apparently Bentham was also an early supporter of animal rights and the decriminalization of homosexuality. I'm sure that doesn't mean much, but I still thought it was cool.
"Hedonistic Calculus" is my new favorite oxymoron.
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