Fairly recently I read a few articles about anime and escapism. Since I’m far from being satisfied with the current state of some of my posts, here’s some quick filler

I see what you did there!

Anime is and always will be an escape for its occidental viewers. I can only speak for America, but western cartoons are primarily aimed strictly at children. America has always had this godawful habit of denying true philosophical ideas, and any maturity (sexual or otherwise) as “difficult” or “unmanly”. So we dumb down our children and teach them that patriotism and blindly feeding off the teat of America go hand in hand. Children are never taught to actively think themselves. They are taught that TV is good and reading esoteric books are bad. Get a job and fund the american economy. Marry a woman and have as many damn kids as you want. Tithe! Pay your taxes! Vote Republican! America has become an obscene joke upon itself.

However, there is a small cadre of believers who attempt to learn and attempt to teach. It’s almost a war between those that preach enlightenment and those that shove patriotic propaganda down our throats. It is through this friction(synthesis) between knowledge(thesis) and stupidity(anti-thesis) we arrive at our escapist nature.

Yeah I threw in a little Hegelian dialectic..for funsies

Hobbies are the escape between this ensuing feud. We try to avoid both learning and being stupid by doing a relatively mindless thing to ourselves that helps release the stress put on us by both sides. Some fish, some become trekkies, and some watch anime. Blame it on the cartoons we watched in our youth, blame it on America idolizing Japan for its technology, something inside some of us just ignore the world we live in and get lost in whatever anime we happen to be watching. The people that fish probably had parents that idealized the outside ie camping, swimming, or exercise. The people that become trekkies probably had absentee parents and took to watching fantastic space adventures to escape from the pressures of school and the pressures of an american government successfully getting them addicted to whatever they can tax heavily.

So we escape. We avoid reality. What’s that you’re thinking? what about slice-of-life shows? No matter how neatly defined how to the letter how perfectly real any given show may be, thats all it is. A show. There’s one thing that separates the real from the realistic….how the thing being viewed is viewed. If I go outside and watch two squirrels humping I am watching and living in the real. If I download a porn with two squirrels humping no matter how realistic, no matter how good the graphics are, it is still only realistic. Not real.

So why bother escaping when you already lead a slice of life life anyways? Because real life is not interesting enough. We feel this constant pressure on us from both sides of intellect and stupidity so we feel the need to get out of our own heads for a while. We may lead a life like in Lucky Star exactly to the letter. But we as humans feel that constant struggle to escape.

This still doesn’t explain mecha series though. Perhaps due to the phallic nature of the weapons and the ships, or the regressed need to exhibit male dominance through oversized gundams.

In the future expect an actual philosophy book review since I am about to finish Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature have been thoroughly mindfucked by it. In the mean time here’s a Hume joke I’m fairly certain only Michael and Daniel will get.

Clearly he didn’t understand the necessary connection betwixt overeating and being overweight.

‘Beauttocks’ is a perfect nickname. I second it Iknight.

Well since this is my first truly mecha-related post, i suppose I should fill you in. I have always feared to tread into the depths of mechadom. I suppose early in my life I watched Gundam Wing and just didn’t like it(not true, at one point I made my mom buy me enough hair gel so that I could slick my hair back like Chang Wufei). My loathing for all things mecha ran deep into my soul. I loved Fumoffu,but had to force myself to watch the first season of Full metal Panic. The action never really appealed to me I suppose. “How much talent is required to let a mecha fight for you” is how I used to think. Cut to me at the star of my senior year(fall 2007),my loathing of mecha had almost made me miss 2 brilliant shows(Gurren Lagann and Code Geass) simply because they involved mecha and I was being contrary to my friends recommendations. I decided to get over my hatred of the mecha genre by watching all of the Gundam franchise in chronological order. So here I am through 4 OVAs and 1 regular season(I am disregarding my previously watched seasons for times sake) and I’ve come to understand the love for the art of the mecha show. Massive humanoids annihilating each other in space with phallic guns and swords. Fighting for whats right or for whats wrong, being an utter badass(Char Aznable) or being utter faggots (anyone in the Zabi family rings a bell). Mecha seems to separate the /m/en from the /b/oys.

Words normally go here, but they would ruin the picture.

Now that the past is out of the way, let’s move onto the now. I’ve just watched Eureka Seven, and am catching up in Code Geass season 2. Which is what this post is about. In the first episode of Code Geass, when Lelouch is at his old chess playing against rich adult ways. He seems to share what Daniel has already posted as a Machiavellian syndrome. while it is true that Lelouch does display the tendencies of a machiavellian megalomaniac the man he faces of against in this particular game of chess displays a much more intriguing philosophy.

Slightly-limited GAR works

In book one of Plato’s republic, therien lies a discussion in the house of the wealthy aristocrat Cephalus(yes lol Syphilis) between Socrates, Cephalus, and a belligerent Sophist named Thrasymachus. In which Thrasymachus argues that “might is right”, and that”justice is in the interest of the stronger”. Interestingly enough 1500 2300 some odd years later these same philosophies are being spouted to show just how evil the main character of an anime actually is. Sure it came from the mouth of Lelouch’s opponent, but it seems to be a way for the creators to remind the audience how in spite of a recent mindwashing “arc”, Lelouch is an evil bastard. Just last season he was saying things just like this, and later in the same episode he says very similar things.

I needed a picture somewhere in this post just to show how much if a pussy Rollo is.

Why would the creators feel the need to maintain Lelouch’s asshole image? At first the episode felt a parallel universe. Lelouch has a brother? He’s a warm cuddly teddybear? It appears they want us to see how Lelouch could have turned out. The slightest little difference completely rewrites who we are.

A play about a convict murderer in which the narrator is also the dead brother of the woman who is chastising the convict.

Itsubun fairly recently posted about Hiroki Endo’s manga short “Hang”. The post blew me away with its striking conclusions, and then I read the manga and was fairly impressed. What really got my attention was “For Those Of Us Who Don’t Believe In God.”

“Don’t believe” is about a play being put on by a student theater troupe, and while the main theological enquiries come about through the play, the human perspective is well played out in the side stories of the characters. The theater troupe puts on a play written by one of its own, and the play is about a woman confronting the convict who killed her brother just before his execution. The play carries on as one would expect, the sister no longer believes in God or heaven while the convict is portrayed as an intelligent man who knows of his transgressions, but refuses to believe in heaven or hell.

This isn’t very surprising to me, often those who suffer heavy tragedies don’t believe in or care about God, but the way Endo attributes every last fallacy of his characters as products of child abuse or molestation,is a bit disconcerting. Surely if a child is abused he or she won’t grow into a sadist who writes plays about serial killers (the author of the play) or the masochist who continues to return for more beatings (the author’s girlfriend). The rest of Endo’s characters in his other short stories meet similar depressing fates. It reeks of Bokurano’s vantage point of the human condition.

But in the end we experience catharsis as the dead brother asks his sister to no longer hate the convict as the convict will soon be coming to the brother’s side of “nothingness”. This request seems to be Endo reaching through the page/screen and asking us to forgive one another. He shows us our human drama in the form of the side stroies of the cast and crew of the play, and then he tells us to just forget. There is no heaven of hell there is only nothingness after we die. So we can’t waste our time on hating people no longer around.

Humans constantly define their lives by their knowledge or lack thereof of the next stage of life. We are born we live for a while we die. In that short time we die most of us are exposed to some sort of philosophy or religion which attempts to explain what comes next. we duel and we fight as to who is right and who is wrong. Some people need the crutch of religion and some don’t. We as humans are too busy looking forward and trying to settle our cosmic debts before we get to wherever it is we are going, that we can’t just stop and observe the natural beauty that is on the earth regardless of atheist or christian.

MADE OF WIN

So we’ve got this whole entire subspecies that may or may not exist in our empirical human minds. They apparently exist in our world, but on this separate plane of existence altogether. Assuming they do exist what’s next? Well if you’re berkles the only clear solution is to determine our code of meta-ethics in dealing with them. Meta-ethics is a fairly recent trend in philosophy, which concerns itself with understanding the very nature of moral questions themselves. Ethics asks what is right or wrong, while meta-ethics asks what do right or wrong even mean at all. It is highly confusing, and most people could live their whole lives without ever encountering it.

I feel like this man when I pontificate so verbosely

These creatures which may or may not exist, may or may not exist to harm us, and so we must make decisions as to whether or not they are good or evil. So we can do one of two things. We can all get together and spend a lot of time deliberating over how to define evil to us and then deciding to label these creatures as good or evil(moral realism). Or we can choose to deny any sort of objectivity and think independently by applying subjective values to these theories(moral anti-realism).

Moral realism is a system that has been in effect for quite some time. Generally America is a nation traditionally run by Christians. That does not mean we are all under the rule of the Christians, that merely mean we do not constantly question everything about the current system of morals based on Christianity. Well we do, but the media is run by the religious right so it’s not portrayed nearly enough in an objective light.

Before asking whether or not the mushi must abide by the human ethical code(which they really do not) we must affirm what the human ethical code is. A method frequently used against moral realists is moral relativism. Moral relativism states that objective moral truths cannot be universally true, but objective moral truths are relative to their culture. Take the notion that in some deep in the jungle tribe might murder one another for seemingly trivial reason, but they do it to protect their honor which is more important than anything in their eyes. In the USA people would get jailed and killed for that. Thus there can be no universal moral code because each moral code is specifically relative to each culture.

So in one culture the mushi would be revered as gods, while in another they would be called demons and exterminated. I suppose that according to moral relativism they are both right and wrong.

This is one brilliant man.

Mushishi is a polarizing show. Most people loved it for its poignant description of the human description and slow moving dramatics. The others hated it for the same reasons; it had some pacing problems, and was admittedly depressing in the way it portrayed every other human besides Ginko. It encompassed a wide variety of the spectrum of human emotion; Greed(ep 6) Love for those long gone(ep 8,16,17, 22) Unrequited love/lust/schoolgirl crush(ep 20) A womans love for a child not technically her own(ep 21) Hatred and fear of the unknown(ep 24) Acceptance of fate (ep 25).

Granted some of these aren’t exactly pedestrian, but they do cover what humans can go through and it subtly depicts them at their worst, but unlike my Bokurano musings I’m not here to bitch about how fucked up humans are. I’m here to discuss the concept in Mushishi of the Mushi. Creatures too basic, too pure of life to be seen by most humans almost beg to be argued about in terms of Rationalism vs. Empiricism.

In Epistemology there are two hotly contested theories about how humans perceive knowledge in life. These are not the only epistemic theories about such things, but they are the only ones I will discuss.

Rationalism is the notion that humans have an innate sense of things going on, and that “truth is not sensory, but intellectual and deductive.” This is often heavily contrasted with Empiricism which claims that humans only have their knowledge through their senses. Locke called it the tabula rasa (clean slate), and denied the possibility of innate knowledge without sensory experience.

The existence of the mushi seems incredulous. Things that exist, but only a select few can see them? They affect some people but not all of them? It almost begs to be a story about crazy people who are insanely deluded into blaming their problems on seemingly non-existent critters.

Empiricism would say that the mushi don’t exist until they affect you in some way, while rationalism would say that the mushi do exist without personally affecting you. The only question is which theory is correct in this aspect. If someone see a lower species and has no empirical proof then how do we believe it happened. Either since it didn’t happen to us, we can assume it never happened or they don’t exist (Empiricism), or we can deduce that the person that experienced it has changed a great deal and deduce that perhaps they do exist(rationalism).

Far too often do we humans forget that we exist as a holon of the larger system the earth. We become egotistical and never think of this plane of existence without humans to define it. Whether the mushi exist or not they pose a fundamental philosophical question about the existence of anything.

Last time in this segment we discussed what determinism is and what free-will is…basically. One of the most interesting facets to this argument is God. The concept of a higher being seems to either irk or tickle our respective fancies more than most topics. God is a polarizing issue. The existence of/morality of God in concept is a topic that splits us into believers or unbelievers.

If god exists, and he is omnipotent, then I believe it is safe to assume that we have no true free-will. Even if we have some moderate free-will in our decisions, if God can see the future we are to assume a determinist faith. Not that theres anything wrong with that, but I like to feel in charge of myself from time to time. If God exists, and he is not omnipotent then I think its only reasonable we assume that he doesn’t already know what we are going to do, therefore we are free to make our own decisions.

Personally speaking I do believe in some sort of Higher being, but certainly not the Judeo-Christian God(far too many holes in the theory). I like to take a deist faith. The thought that God made us and doesn’t mess with us. The greatest gift God gave us was the ability to reason, so I like to stick with the religion that allows me to assert this truth.

So what does all this mean? If God is all-knowing, then what I do matters not? Should I just kill myself to end the cruel joke I’ve been living. No. No one knows if any of this is true or not. What if all our philosophy was wrong, what if the Muslims were right all along? We absolutely have no way to know anything about the afterlife till we get there. Thats the point. We can conjecture and experiment all we want, but in the end all we need to do is pass the time till we die, where either we will be greeted by hell/heave, or nothingness.

next in this series:Causal Determinism, and the monism/dualism/pluralism debate

Since I haven’t even been watching anime lately(save for gunbuster) I figure I should update on the less mainstream reason any visitor comes here. I’m about to leave for a week long ski-trip with my class as a final hurrah before we graduate and go on to better and brighter futures.

I recently overheard a discussion on the matters of free-will vs. determinism, and was too bashful to enter the discourse. As it turns out I’m rather bashful of speaking in public on things that are important to me or pertain to my interests. So I figured I would talk about it here.

Determinism(particularly Causal Determinism) states that “future events are necessitated by past and present events combined with the laws of nature”(1). This means that somehow everything that has led up to this exact moment can be used somehow to predict the future. This completely nullifies the concept of free-will. How can I choose what to eat for lunch if it has already been decided?

Free-will on the other hand states that we have choices all around us and as Sartre put it “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. ” We make choices everyday i.e. whether or not I choose to breath right now is entirely up to me. Thats not to say that outside obligations don’t matter(would your kind dear old mother want you to stop breathing?), but in the end it is my choice whether or not i live or die(at least part of the time).

This entire argument can’t be proven empirically if the mind is a separate non-physical being. If the mind is entirely belonging to the physical brain then the laws of nature apply to the mind. If the laws of nature apply to the mind, then the future of any individual can be predicted, and free will is nullified. If, however, the mind is pertaining to the soul which is a part of the non-physical world, then determinism must be ruled out. If the laws of nature do not apply to the non-physical world, then the mind or soul or spirit is free to think or act or choose as it pleases.

Source: (1)=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism

The next post will be how all this applies to theological determinism.

Bokurano is a manga about kids that will die trying to save the 10 billion people on the earth. This concept is nothing new, and is quite often quoted in the dialogue. It does pose some interesting questions on the darker side of the human condition.

Bokurano is essentially nauseating. The author is blatantly abusive to his characters, as is evident by his previous work Shadow Star. It features; incestuous close-calls(between a daughter whoring herself out for cash and her unwitting “lover” who may or may not be her father), genocide, rape, child pornography and child prostitution, violence, hate, boredom, lust, fear, and cowardice all in the first 19 chapters. It’s an encyclopedia in how to hurt. All of these awful events happen to these little kids, and their actions decide the fates of billions of lives.

Bokurano is about these 14 kids that get tricked into operating a giant mecha, and they must fight for the continuation of earth. Right off the bat none of the characters are likeable, all of the children have their own very adult problems. From the elder brother who routinely beats his sister which “helps him sleep”, to the child who fell in love with her teacher, let him videotape them having sex, then got blackmailed by the teacher into a prostitution ring. It begs the question, “If I hate all these characters, why should I read this manga?”. Well if you’re a masochist, you’ll be fapfapfapping all the way to the bank, but beneath all the human drama there lies a warm nougat-y philosophical center.

Most of Bokurano is divided into two sections;The Human Drama and The Subjective Drama. The Human Drama takes place off of the battlefield. The characters that can’t get past the insecurities bestowed on them by society are the characters that break down in the cockpit of the “Zearth”. Love, Lust, Hate, and Fear are all parts of what make us human. Many times we wonder what defines a human. Is it a soul? Is it blood? Is it the ability to question what we’re told, and decide what we think about anything? No one can answer for sure, but Bokurano poses the thought that humans are defined by their ability to take other lives and use them to support their own. Are we defined by our ability to define weaker beings lives?

Spoilers ahead beware!

One of the great twists to the Bokurano manga is that these kids aren’t fighting weird evil aliens, or nazi motherfuckers. They are fighting themselves, but in parallel universes. If our heroes don’t win every battle their universe is annihilated out of existence and the epic war continues. Its hard to imagine the universe we exist in not being there anymore. If the humanity we know ceases to be does all existence cease to be? So the kids trudge on in hopes of saving their universe, but even as they do so they wonder why? Why save the universe that produces the pain they have felt their whole lives.

The Subjective Drama is where these kids check their morals and their ethics and decide is it worth it to continue to live, let alone save these people. Some of them can’t handle it, and one has a psychotic breakdown. Wherein he refuses to fight, so another one of the kids cuts his throat and commandeers the mecha. To me this is an outstanding portrayal of the duality of man. Some men will show extreme cowardice in great situations, but some will pick up the knife and trudge onward to save humanity. This also begs the question “What right do you have to take another persons life?” but thats a question I will be discussing on the Gundam Post.

I guess in the long run I have no answers to anything in this post, consider this me thinking out loud and on a wordpress. All in all Bokurano is an interesting if depressing manga. I’m told the anime sucks, so I doubt I will revisit it on the blog, but who knows maybe I’ll do a top 10 mindfuck manga list or something.

Baccano and Kant:Relating Immortals that murder haphazardly to the Godfather of German Idealism

Baccano is anime for a film nerd. It’s anime for the Pulp Fiction fan in all of us. It convulses and twists through stories, years, and genres. The story refuses to be tied down to drama/mystery/light comedy. The setting goes from prohibition era new york to a ship in the 1700’s. It’s about alchemists, wait no its about immortals, no wait its about this train accident. Baccano is all of the above. The story starts out in 1711 when a bunch of alchemists summon some kind of demon, and they gain immortality through this drink. They can only die if another immortal absorbs them into his right hand, also when speaking to each other they can only use their real names. The story follows a multitude of characters and depending on how you define a main character(according to bateszi its 18 so i’ll go with that) you get about 18. It’s a hell of a ride, whether we are following Firo in his badass-ery, or Isaac and Miria as they dig for gold in a mountain. The story is simply too large to be detailed here, but one thing that does remain the same throughout is the violence.

The immortals throughout the duration of the show generally don’t partake in the hardcore violence(except for Chane). The “normal” humans are portrayed as always fighting. Mafia violence, robbery, turf wars are all there, but is it truly necessary? I suppose it shows the immorality of humans versus immortals, but the immortals are generally just as violent.

One of the first things I noticed with this show was how it made me think about what I would do if I were immortal. Do the same rules apply to those that can’t be killed through normal means? Is murder alright if in 100 years you’re the only one that remembers it? Heres the part of the post where I teach all of you a little philosophy and relate it to the anime i’m reviewing right?

Well I was trying to think of a topic of either politics or philosophy to relate to Baccano, since Immortals can outlast politics I suppose Philosophy is an inevitable choice. Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher who greatly influenced both Epistemology(theories on knowledge, what it is and how do we obtain it?), and Ethics. One of his most popular thoughts on Ethics, was the theory of the innate “Good Will”.

Kant claimed that its not the desired effects of our actions that determine whether or not our actions are “good”, but it is the will behind it. If I am being nice to someone to look good for instance, my actions are flawed. If I am being honest because its how I was raised to be, then I am not thinking according to my Good Will and am flawed. It’s not the decision to do or even the how to do, its the motivation behind the action that determines if its good or bad. If I normally lie, cheat or steal to get by and suddenly begin to act honestly because its what I feel is the right thing to do, then I am acting according to the Good Will

So what does this have to do with Baccano? Everything. All the actions, or murders, or tortures of Baccano all had different motivations behind them. For the mafia gangsters it was about duty and family. They murdered because to them the family was more important than anything. Whether that was motivated through the Good Will or not, you decide.

Even when Eve was searching for her brother. Was she searching because she genuinely loved him and wanted him back, or because she was raised up believe she should love her brother and chase after him. Quite frankly Dallas Genoard was a dick, and its hard to see why she searched so hard, so was it because she genuinely loved him, or because thats what she was raised to do? This philosophy raises more questions than it answers, what predetermines what makes things good/bad or right/wrong? If I exist and the good Will to me means that murder is right, and inherent goodness is wrong, who’s to say I’m wrong and they are right? In acts of God is the Good Will suspended? Just what are the Morals of Murder?

As for Baccano! it was one of my favorites of the year, and I give it a 96 out of 100.

Denno Coil is a series about kids with glasses. Thats about it…If the series was shot from the perspective of someone without the magical glasses, the series wouldn’t have lasted beyond the first few episodes. What makes Denno Coil so special is the glasses. The glasses allow people to see a sort of cyber-world that exists in real time and affects everyone with the glasses. Take one of the episodes in which Daichi (one of the characters) gets an Illegal which is not allowed to exist in the Actual space(space without the glasses) unless the cyber space is obsolete. Well he decides to take the Illegal in as a pet and feed it Obsolete textiles from the cyber-space. Eventually it grows into this-

It would be easy to write off Denno Coil off as kids messing around with cyber-reality…until thir actions begin to physically harm them when they try to contact the dead through the Obsolete space.

The first half of the series is leading up to all the secrets that get revealed in the second half. Attempting to relate this to philosophy seems a perfect job for a solipsist. According to Metaphysical Solipsism the only thing that I know for sure exists is my mind. Everything else is just what my mind can come up with. A rock, a computer, a prostitute, those are all things that exist solely in my mind. We can never know what other peoples minds are thinking so therefore they don’t exist, according to solipsism. This seems unlikely and selfish, as it claims that all the great ideas thought up were all mine, and so were all the terrible murderous ones as well. So we’ve got this world and maybe others exist and maybe they don’t when all of a sudden these magical glasses come along and a whole new reality is created. All of these glasses are interconnected, and so when something happens in the cyber world, everyone after that with the glasses is able to see it for themselves. To me that is saying that others can and do exist. Of course does that mean that those without the glasses don’t exist?
Another interesting facet to Denno Coil is its terminology. Terminology in anime is nothing new, from the first time i heard the word Angel as a bad thing in Neon Genesis Evangelion, to the rampant confusion offered by Darker than Black’s misused “Messier’s codes”. Denno Coil completely revamps the concept of terminology to destroy the viewers fragile psyche, from the epic Meta-tags to the title of the show itself. Anything that even sounds remotely computer related is fodder for the name of something else on Denno. Whether this is a good or bad thing is up to the viewer, but as for me I loved the show but they could’ve toned this aspect down a few notches.

All in all I give Denno Coil a 10 out of 10. For such a small scale its perfect. Out of a hundred its about a 95. SO WATCH IT!

also i had to share this picture-

its from when a certain type of illegal grows on the kids’ faces. the tiny illegals then gains consciousness and begins to question everything. they make up religion, and makes yasako into a goddess. They then declare war on the other side of her face and declare that “yasako is dead”. That is almost a direct quote from Nietzsche. A stunning foray into the human condition…all on a show about kids with glasses

Comeback soon my next post will be a discussion on Kemonozume and the problem with anonymity