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“Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

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Re: “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

#121

Post by smallnamespace »

stephengillie wrote: post #118
skrebbel wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the answer, but I'm curious. I have never experienced poverty. I can relate that you want nothing to do with it anymore, but there's a hidden connotation that the poor want nothing to do with the non-poor. That that grocery store owner wouldn't want help with picking up the heavy box, because the helper happens to be better off. Can you explain that emotion to me? Why is walking through a relatively poor dist…

It's a way of teaching helplessness, while inflating your own ego. That grocery store owner wouldn't want help with picking up the heavy box, because he is an able-bodied man. Doing this for him is belittling him, saying he's not an able-bodied man. It's like receiving unrequested advice or assistance on a project. Having grown up in poverty, been homeless for a summer, walked home past homeless people every day for…

> direct charity prevents or delays people from finding a better solution

What about something like this instead?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2016/08...

Re: “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

#122

Post by onion2k »

stephengillie wrote: post #113
knz wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet fertility rates are declining in many nations. Science fiction often takes current events to their extreme outcome for the sake of social commentary (Black Mirror being the latest example).

Human fertility itself isn't in decline. Fertility and human births are conflated in the US government definition, implying that we are somehow losing the physical ability to reproduce. What's actually happening is that our society is getting so complex that our agency of reproduction is impaired. It's entirely social; it's all in our heads.

If the premise of the film actually happened and the birth rate were to reach zero, I doubt the fact it was psychological rather than physical would be much comfort.

Sometimes the technical reason is less important than the outcome.

Re: “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

#123

Post by [deleted] »

lacampbell wrote: post #108
w-ll wrote: post #76

Slightly OT but pertains to "Children of Men" The scenes where main character Theo Faron (Clive Owen) is on the really nice buses, and there is classical music playing in the background, while outside the window there is so much poverty really resonated with me. I've lived in SF going on 6 years now. My apt complex has private buses that run from here to FDi in the morning and evening. The route sometimes changes but…

I am curious, have you experienced poverty? I mean "first world poverty", like the kind you bus drives through? I have, and I want nothing to do with it. I certainly wouldn't choose to walk through it again. Have you stopped to consider you're being a bit of a slum tourist, or maybe you have a saviour complex?

[deleted]

Re: “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

#124

Post by lacampbell »

skrebbel wrote: post #115
lacampbell wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious, have you experienced poverty? I mean "first world poverty", like the kind you bus drives through? I have, and I want nothing to do with it. I certainly wouldn't choose to walk through it again. Have you stopped to consider you're being a bit of a slum tourist, or maybe you have a saviour complex?

I'm not the answer, but I'm curious. I have never experienced poverty. I can relate that you want nothing to do with it anymore, but there's a hidden connotation that the poor want nothing to do with the non-poor. That that grocery store owner wouldn't want help with picking up the heavy box, because the helper happens to be better off. Can you explain that emotion to me? Why is walking through a relatively poor dist…

Well I would never think of refusing a nice comfortable company bus to walk to work through a shitty neighbourhood. That's just insane to me. I think only someone who hadn't lived that reality would do it for some kind of 'experience'. I could be horribly wrong, but I am curious anyway.

Re: “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

#125

Post by SamReidHughes »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #86
cwp wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the worst (best) bit of future-past in Neuromancer is that it starts with the main character trying to fence "three megabytes of hot RAM". That seemed like a ludicrously large amount when it was written.

I think we can give Gibson the benefit of the doubt here and say the point was not the size, but the fact that it was hot RAM -- the contents was valuable. The price of 3MB, even as early as in 1984, was not so high as to make it that impressive even by the standards of the day.

Hey, 3 megs of RAM is nothing to sneeze at: http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP48-2MB-RAM-memory-card-for-HP48GX-...

Re: “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

#126

Post by bboreham »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #23
Laforet wrote: post #20

On a lighter note, I had a good chuckle when the article mentioned that the director deliberately avoided depiction of cellphones to avoid creating an unintentional period piece[0]. The last movie I watched in the treatre is Clint Eastwood's "Sully" and I distinctly remember the main character using a chronologically appropoaite Samsung flip phone and that single prop instantly dates the movie to the first decade of…

Conversely, in William Gibson's Neuromancer, there are no cell phones, despite being set decades into the future. Gibson knows a thing or two about seeing their scifi becoming dated, of course. The famous opening line, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" no longer resonates with anyone born the last 20 years or so (although for a number of years, many digital TVs would displa…

> fun stuff about people physically carrying information

This is a thing, though. https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/

Or if you have 100PB: https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/

Re: “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

#127

Post by riffraff »

smallnamespace wrote: post #121
stephengillie wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a way of teaching helplessness, while inflating your own ego. That grocery store owner wouldn't want help with picking up the heavy box, because he is an able-bodied man. Doing this for him is belittling him, saying he's not an able-bodied man. It's like receiving unrequested advice or assistance on a project. Having grown up in poverty, been homeless for a summer, walked home past homeless people every day for…

> direct charity prevents or delays people from finding a better solution What about something like this instead? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2016/08...

somewhat related, I live un Budapest which is quite full of homeless people.

There is a program by which they distribute a magazine[0], mainly about the homeless life, and in theory with articles written by them.

It's still a begging of sort, so not as good as a proper job, but I've always felt it was much more dignified than panhandling. And from the other side, it gives you the idea that people handing out the newspaper are at least putting in some effort rather than just sitting on the corner (not saying they'd do, just talking fo perception).

[0] http://www.fedelnelkul.hu/news.php

Re: “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

#128

Post by fredsir »

lacampbell wrote: post #108
w-ll wrote: post #76

Slightly OT but pertains to "Children of Men" The scenes where main character Theo Faron (Clive Owen) is on the really nice buses, and there is classical music playing in the background, while outside the window there is so much poverty really resonated with me. I've lived in SF going on 6 years now. My apt complex has private buses that run from here to FDi in the morning and evening. The route sometimes changes but…

I am curious, have you experienced poverty? I mean "first world poverty", like the kind you bus drives through? I have, and I want nothing to do with it. I certainly wouldn't choose to walk through it again. Have you stopped to consider you're being a bit of a slum tourist, or maybe you have a saviour complex?

It would be dangerous if everybody not poor wanted nothing to do with poor areas and poor people. All kinds of poverty counted. That is the direct route to segregated communities and cultures of poor and rich, as seen already many places, except that right now, in 2016, most know that there is "lesser" communities and cultures next to theirs, having experienced them themself. If the fortunate communities would shield themself from the "truth beyond the wall" for a long enough time, kids would grow up only hearing tales of these other cultures, and at last, not even hearing the tales anymore. Rich communities - or modern, as the would be called - would be tight bound around themself, governments would work to shield the truth from their citizens. A future that has been depicted by many a movie, many a tv show, for many a year.

It's horrible future, but a future to come if people dont "want nothing to do with it", it being the very reality that they have diced a 6 on, and somebody lesser fortunate being born beyond the wall has diced a 1 on, only guilty of having another mother and father.

Some say it's a future only distant in the eyes of the rich. I think that is, sadly, very much true.

Re: “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

#129

Post by stephengillie »

riffraff wrote: post #127
smallnamespace wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> direct charity prevents or delays people from finding a better solution What about something like this instead? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2016/08...

somewhat related, I live un Budapest which is quite full of homeless people. There is a program by which they distribute a magazine[0], mainly about the homeless life, and in theory with articles written by them. It's still a begging of sort, so not as good as a proper job, but I've always felt it was much more dignified than panhandling. And from the other side, it gives you the idea that people handing out the news…

Seattle has a similar newspaper. The newspaper has licensed vendors, who buy the newspapers at a rate around $1 (I think it's $1.15) and sell for $2. The articles are written and edited by and for the homeless community, and cover all sorts of city business and activities from a unique perspective.

http://www.realchangenews.org/

Re: “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

#130

Post by legulere »

labster wrote: post #91
Laforet wrote: post #20

On a lighter note, I had a good chuckle when the article mentioned that the director deliberately avoided depiction of cellphones to avoid creating an unintentional period piece[0]. The last movie I watched in the treatre is Clint Eastwood's "Sully" and I distinctly remember the main character using a chronologically appropoaite Samsung flip phone and that single prop instantly dates the movie to the first decade of…

Just a reminder to people, All The Tropes is a fork of TV Tropes, but everything is under a free license and has no advertising. TV Tropes uses a nonfree license.[1] The same page is available here: https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Unintentional_Period_Piece [1]: At least under Stallman's definition of nonfree: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Creati...

Why bring in ideology when you can simply state that TV Tropes is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licensed, while allthetropes is Attribution-ShareAlike licensed?
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