IPO Statement

This weekly blog is intended (like most people’s) to be a space where I can talk about the things I’m interested in. I’ll be using it to post critical reviews of movies, books and whatever else I might want to unload my mind about. In general, I’m going to keep things as positive as I can because there’s already enough negativity out there and I would rather spend time focusing on the things I like rather than the things that upset me.

I am a rational anarchist. I believe nobody has any right to tell anyone else what to do, but that the limits of anarchy make it unworkable in groups larger than a hundred or so individuals. I think with this many people around, impersonal rules are an unfortunate necessity, but I will only respect the ones that seem fair, in my mind. There is no excuse for injustice or abuse of power and as people and populations change, so must the rules that govern us, meaning they should always be challenged or at least suspected.

Art and culture are my passions, from the highest heights of literature to the deepest depths of pornography. I think there is an objective reality we all share but each of us has our own highly subjective point of view of it. As Obi-Wan Kenobi once said, “many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view” and so, for me, the more points of view I can understand and appreciate, the more able I am to make sense of our shared reality. Art, literature, music and all the forms of human creativity and expression are, to me, windows into other points of view that can help broaden my horizons.

As a skeptical agnostic humanist, my inclinations go against many of the claims of religion which so often seem arbitrarily self-serving of the institutions putting them forward. If there is a being who created absolutely everything that we know of and have yet to discover then I think there is no way a human mind can possibly conceive what it wants from us, if indeed anything. It’s as likely to me that god is an absentee father as he is a non-existent figment of the imagination, or anything else you want to ascribe to the term. I believe we should be responsible for our actions and not pass the buck to an entity of superstition.

Those are my prejudices and they inform how I interpret anything human beings do, from art to politics to religion to science. I must admit to a preference for fantasy and science-fiction in the stories I respond to, but a good story well told is all that really matters. When it comes to the fantastic, I will allow for one big leap of disbelief but everything else has to play by the rules as I understand them, otherwise nothing really matters, and I absolutely object to killing characters and then bringing them back to life. If death has no stake then I can’t imagine what does.  

Film is probably my biggest passion. I love movies. Visual storytelling is my favourite method of ingesting tales, though I’ll be the first to say that most movies are crap. I think it’s because of the collaborative nature of the medium that makes it so difficult to have a unified storytelling experience. There are so many egos and talents at work on any given project that it’s amazing anything intelligible emerges from the process, though with more than a century of practice certain formulae have been identified and can be put to reliable use. However, for something truly great (that is, unproven, original and inspired), the odds are even higher, mainly because the people putting up the money don’t like taking chances on not making it back. That is why I marvel at really excellent movies and detest lazy ones.

So, welcome to the Anarchist Rationale blog, where I will critique the creative output of my fellow humans. I admit, I will be more favourable to science-fiction and fantasy than most other genres, but that’s because I want to talk about what I like. All I want is quality entertainment that can occasionally illuminate new ways of thinking. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.