Author Archives: Bryan Arroyo-Lopez

A Strange Love for Distrust

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A perfectly executed satire, “Dr. Strangelove” offers an all too necessary reflection in political modes and thoughts of countries and generations. By following three separate stories before the mutual destruction of the world’s greatest superpowers, and as a consequence the destruction of the world, we see how political correctness of the president coupled with the war-crazed nature of the generals allow the world to come to an end. Every party seems so determined to fulfilling their role, even down to the Russian who continues spying as bombs are dropping, that we begin to see how nonsensical the nature of our actions in real life can be when we too adhere more to a role than common sense.

It might be overdone and a little too easy a target to relate Kubrick’s political satire to current events, but I believe it is necessary for change even if futile. From the Red Scare of the 50’s to today’s fear of Russian electoral sabotage, it seems people crave conflict despite the consequences. “Dr. Strangelove” showed a more extreme consequence of distrust, but a very possible reality for that time. In our times, the fear of destruction has subsided, but still existent is an opposition to working with possible allies. It seems both political parties are too busy again filling their roles instead of objectively looking at facts and acting on them. When it comes to cyber infiltration, Democrats may be correct and if they are then Republicans and any supporters of democratic systems should oppose Russian meddling. Similarly, a large body of proof is needed to support their claims before we begin blaming a possible ally and again putting ourselves in a position of political distrust just so one can appease their constituents. For the most parts these fears are nonsensical, no crazier than the idea that people are trying to steal “our precious bodily fluids.”

Our world is so filled with violent interactions between people and countries, that it becomes hard to imagine what we could achieve if we all worked towards common goals we can agree upon. Certain universal goals that all people could strive for like a cleaner planet or pushing space exploration. Instead we’re stuck dumping money into defense in fear that people with different ideas are trying to kill us when at the base level people just want to live and let live.

The State of the Net with Dr. Jeff Prince

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The Rose Cafe featuring Indiana University economics professor Jeff Prince was my first experience with Rose Cafes and I was honestly surprised at the thought provoking nature of the discussion we had regarding internet adoption, marketing, and neutrality of the internet. Dr. Jeff Prince is an experienced economist who has had the opportunity to research and experience the growth of the internet to its current state and brought interesting case studies and insight into the future of the market. His background in marketing allowed for a more nuanced discussion concerning the popular topic of net neutrality that I highly appreciated.

When net neutrality is discussed in media, think comedy shows and magazines, the debate is pretty one sided with the opposition bringing up very valid arguments against the idea of placing the internet in a more free market environment. The common argument that has been the foundation for current regulation was the opposition towards innovation stifling by larger companies who could dominate the free-market of the internet should net neutrality end. The Rose Cafe helped discuss what proponents of ceasing net neutrality don’t often get to communicate to customers. In essence, ending net neutrality could theoretically aid everyone from business to consumers by allowing the usual benefits of the free market, which would be competition leading to better products for lower prices. The idea of ending net neutrality never really entered my mind, but when put into a market perspective, I am a supporter of competition and relaxing regulations for certain businesses and this Rose Cafe helped me see the internet more as a business waiting to flourish. It’s a lot to trust companies with serving consumers if net neutrality is ended which is why I still side with net neutrality, but there are definitely arguments to be made against that shouldn’t be overlooked just because supporting net neutrality is popular.

Also in the discussion was some good dialogue concerning certain internet terms and how exactly the internet is priced. The very necessary distinction between the supply and demand side of the internet in the net neutrality debate was also mentioned and possibly soothed some misplaced worries that some people may have had when imagining the end of net neutrality. Consuming information from the media has helped in understanding the broader details, but I definitely believe some type of internet literacy course that touches on regulations is necessary for everyone considering that this age is defined by the connectivity of the internet.

Review of “A Beautiful Mind”

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The film “A Beautiful Mind” follows the life of John Nash, a genius mathematician and economist, who lives a high stakes life code breaking and escaping soviets during  the Cold War era only to realize his life is a collection of schizophrenic thoughts that he must try and overcome. John Nash’s life offers an inspiring story of willpower and a terrifying glimpse into the reality of mental illness. John’s life as portrayed in film invites a deeper inspection into just how strange the brain is and how we perceive the world around us.

After viewing the film, I had to question just how accurately the hallucinations were depicted as John’s behavior was noticeably out of the ordinary, yet it seems he was only stopped very late in his illness. He had an imaginary roommate that any friend would have noticed as a the beginning of his condition, yet he was able to go through college and work for what seemed to be a good amount of time for an imaginary task force before finally being diagnosed. While I’m certain his life was portrayed in this manner for good cinema and a more serious reading into this would give a more accurate timeline, it definitely makes you question how long certain symptoms can go unnoticed. It’s a horrifying thought that what you believe to be true could be a fabrication and, even worse, that fabrication may seem so real that you refuse to believe it’s in your head. I’m not exactly certain how a regular person would be able to overcome this affliction and that’s perhaps why Nash’s battle with the disease is so inspiring. John Nash had to give up what he thought was part of his life, a courageous decision that I wouldn’t want to ever have to make.

I was also surprised and saddened to find out Nash had just recently passed away. I am glad his struggle was told to a wide audience and I am always reminded after viewing “A Beautiful Mind” to be grateful for good health and be more conscious of diseases that others struggle to combat.

Utility of Martial Arts

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The film “The Professor: Tai Chi’s Journey West” provided some insightful information concerning the practice of Tai Chi and spread of the art. The professor, Cheng Man-Ching, managed to overcome certain barriers required to spread his ideas beyond China and into America during a time where the U.S was more receptive to spiritual learning. Cheng Man-Ching’s impact on his pupils was impressive as many of them continued the school even after his passing and would relate stories of his teachings or lessons. The film managed to capture this growing society of Tai Chi practitioners and the bonds created, which is really the essence of art, but also gave some considerably distorted views of the capabilities Tai Chi.

I don’t expect everyone who viewed the film to believe the small, aging  Professor was able to launch grown men and women 4 or 5  feet, and even in the film it was stated that the participants in Tai Chi sparring didn’t resist losing, but even then it was exaggerated. I don’t particularly agree with portraying Tai Chi or any martial arts as bestowing some sort of super-human capabilities. I’m reminded of a recent bout in China between an MMA fighter and a Wu Shu master practicing the “Thunder Style” Tai Chi which ended in roughly ten seconds. The result of the fight was as expected and shown in numerous fights before where the brutal form of mixed martial arts with its ground combat aspect typically beats out the grace of martial arts. What was more revealing in that fight was the nation’s response to the display. Multiple news outlets and citizens through social media lambasted the MMA fighter, calling him crazy and denouncing the fight. The picture of the aggressive young fighter ground pounding the master deeply offended the Chinese people because Tai Chi and other martial arts are essential to Chinese culture. This sort of recognition of the historical significance and the respect for the artistic style is what I believe should be the emphasis when discussing martial arts that the film could have focused on.

The film explained the spiritual purpose of Tai Chi as a way to relax and act as a sort of guiding lifestyle where you flow past adversity instead of directly opposing it. If the film could have made more of a mention as to the significance of Tai Chi and martial arts beyond a sort of yoga without implying that it was physically empowering, I believe the film could have steered away from the overly devout clan vibe it was giving off when hippies were being thrown an unreasonable distance.

Our Mad World

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Being a huge fan of the lore in Mad Max: Fury Road, I could appreciate the underlying messages concerning gender hierarchies and preservation, but I admit I expected the older films to be pure entertainment with outrageous cars and wild shoot-em-up scenes. For what I thought would be a solely adrenaline-rush film, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome tackled large overarching systemic problems inherent in society from the dawn of civilization. Civilization itself is the main target of Mad Max: Beyond Thuderdome as it lambastes man’s systems of control and capability for self-destruction.

The post-apocalyptic civilizations present in the movie are the base-instinct driven Bartertown and the pious youth of the oasis. Bartertown for its part is a slum laid in filth where man live beside beast as they are ruled over by resource controlling elites who keep the inhabitants preoccupied with pleasures to the senses. Even the name of the town reveals man’s first intent after bringing himself to ruin, to once again begin reconstructing the market to gather resources that support their self-indulging life styles. As a stark juxtaposition, the only other civilization to develop is that of lost boys who live off the oasis. The band of innocent youth are meant to be portrayed as untouched by knowledge and greed filled desires that drive Bartertown, and instead devoting their lives to a belief-system which revolves around “the knowing” and a promise of great technological treasures. The setting immediately invites analogies of Hell and Eden, as man with all his knowledge of machinery and harnessing methane must live in a brutal, unclean hole while the children who have yet to been enlightened by “the knowing” live in perpetual youth in harmony with the Earth. Avoiding any further reading into Biblical-lessons that an interpretation of this story with the Moses-like Mad Max could invite, I believe the depicted communities exemplifies the film’s critiques of control systems and harmful tendencies.

Both groups show a part of our world to reveal underlying influences on our lives. In the community of the children, they build elaborate myths founded on their idealistic interpretation of Viewmaster images. These legends are purported as fact when Max fulfills their prognostication, creating the foundation for a civilization similar to many modern systems in belief and values.  Bartertown portrays the less moralistic side to our society, exposing our lust for self-indulgence. The largest and most important example demonstrating this is the Thunderdome. The rules that govern the Thunderdome are barbaric, nonsensical, and base, yet serve as the only system of order to control the population. It’s the only set of rules all participants in this community agree to since it fills their need for viewing violence and perpetuating the persistent rule of “might makes right.” Bartertown and Thunderdome draw comparison to our world through their economic system and technology, but reveal the unpleasant side of our civilization. In the same way that religious lies control the community of children, the world of adults is controlled by elites who satiate our ignoble needs. Adults are given a code of law written by Aunty Entity and promoted  by hidden figures interested in distracting society. These figures present themselves as the announcer who represents secretive interests at play controlling our attention while working against us. His allegiance to secret societies is exposed as he bares the masonic square and compass while coaxing denizens to have faith in the entrapping system. Mad Max 3 serves to warn viewers how the systems that dictate our actions are man-made constructs vulnerable to lies and abuse.

In the world of Mad Max there still exists hope when the children, though they were convinced into staying ignorant and confined to the oasis, finally make it to their promised land to start a new society with passing settlers. To prosper as humans, the goal is then to go beyond the Thunderdome, to in some spiritual sense go beyond the systems that control us and avoid the self-destructiveness invited by the corrupting nature of man.

Building Better Humans

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Gattaca provides a necessary inspection into a problem that we will eventually have to face, which is the decision to apply genetic modifications to humans. The arguments against revolve around the consequences if we “tamper” with nature and the arguments in support tend to focus on the “perfect” human. The extremes are irreconcilable, but it is obvious that if we look at specific points of both sides there will be some middle ground resulting in minor modifications to the humane gene.

While speaking with two students who were vastly more informed on the subject than I was, I got a good grasp of the full range of concerns of the opposition. For one, there’s the fear of another Nazi-esque eugenics movement, which is rooted in the reasonable concern over who decides what gene mutations are superior. Whoever this arbiter figure would be decides the fate of human evolution. Doubtless, there would be backlash over every decision stemming from each protester’s sense of what needs to be preserved in the gene pool. This is without taking into the account the more spiritual side of tampering with nature, as in some sense we’ve already done a good deal of this with the more spiritual disputants unknowingly enjoying the reaped benefits and human modifications would only serve to benefit everyone if done correctly. Done correctly is the second point of contention, as it implies avoiding all the frightening eugenics and focuses on improving human intelligence and physical capability, but avoids how to account for the unknown. I’m unprepared to argue against this point as I was oblivious to the fact that, at this moment there apparently already exists differences in blood types that may be considered unfit, but help survival rates in Africa against disease. How to plan and foresee what changes to the work nature has carefully handcrafted over millennia would likely become a huge topic of study. The third point, which I find a little less troublesome if strong privacy ethics are upheld or enough generations take up genetic modifications, is the fear of social genetic stratification. That is to say, some people’s genes are better because they have more of X and Y or a person is inferior for a position because they carry the Z gene. All points carry merit, but they all have solutions, however difficult these may be to apply.

If Genetically Modified Humans were to come into existence, I believe much of the rational concerns from the opposition could be quelled by judicious application of the technology. Assuming we only focus on what I imagine are shared “absolute qualities” by all societies, such as increased intelligence and genetic health of muscle and other tissue. These qualities are things that the GMH’s could decide to fully utilize or not, meaning no one forces a more physically capable human to run more or the more intelligent people to study. Addressing the opposition point of who decides the measure for intelligence, I mean in the sense of absolute intelligence such as faster chemical neuron signals and better memory which has served to benefit, as far as I’m aware, every human and past civilization. As for capability to understand abstract ideas and an appreciation for art, I believe those are subjective and modification should be avoided. I am no geneticist and I have no clue how one would pinpoint these beneficial modifications, but as a thought experiment to say if we ever could, if the route taken was highly cautious of past human-failures, I do not see a viable argument for purposely halting progress towards building a better human.

While this may all be easy to say, it is likely near impossible to perfectly apply this system and man will inevitably lapse back to repeat some atrocity from history, but maybe a modified human wouldn’t.

Despair in the City of God

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While watching City of God, I was overcome with the feeling of hopelessness of life that the less fortunate might bare. Beyond just the conditions that residents endure in a favela, Brazilian slums where gangsters and drugs define the social order, the actions of nearly all the characters did not contribute to progress in their own life or impact in the lives of others and seemed ultimately meaningless. Perhaps it’s the fact that the story crosses multiple generations stretching back to the 60’s, which has given time the opportunity to erode the memories of the events and our ability to sense their impact. Or it could be that stories that unfold on another continent don’t easily find their way into the lives of others. The cycle of power and content of Brazilian authorities served to compound these issues as I felt the film gave an oddly nihilistic impression concerning the lives of the poor in a land without law.

One big way the movie conveys the low regard for life in the favela is the amount of death portrayed in the film. During the turf war, countless numbers of gangsters from both factions are murdered as the film jumps from scene to scene of the bloody dispute. While the life of a gangster who terrorized the town and took part in murders might seem less important, the span of time covered by the film allows viewers to watch the transformation of children to mobsters. Since youth, these children dream of owning a gun and being a successful gangster, perfectly demonstrating how dreams or even hopes of greater accomplishments are non-existent in the favela. The most blatant show of disrespect for the value of life comes from Li’l Z, a pathological killer who revels in the stardom of being the most powerful boss. As a child, L’il Z is capable of killing tourist, friends, and children. He plays games with the lives of children who have never brought him harm and feels obligated to return to the house of a man whose wife he killed in order to finish the husband as well. As he is arguably the centerpiece of the movie, Li’l Z’s brutal actions perhaps reveals the indifference the film has regarding life.

Though death may be common in the favela, there is still a chance to make a change with one’s short, hard life, but as City of God shows, residents are trapped and even lured into playing the cycle of power inherent in slums. Even if the countless gangsters avoided a turf war and Li’l Z’s propensity for killing was quelled, the residents of the town follow the same cycle across all three generations. There will be a younger generation who overthrow the old in order to build a brief empire of drugs and weapons, only to be toppled by a more ruthless youth. With the exception of Rocket, a reporter who narrates the repeating generational struggle, every child from the favela followed this cycle while never bringing any change or aspiring to be something above the unfortunate life they were born into. Again the film hints that the lives of children in the favela are doomed to be inconsequential and live out the unchanging cycle.

To the outside world, whether the residents of the favela were alive or dead seems to have no impact, reinforcing the mood of nihilism. The journey of the characters would only live on in print of forgotten newspaper headlines or the single memory of Rocket. It’s less a concern of whether the events actually occurred, it’s about the fact the events could very well have occurred and life would carry on for everyone else as if they never happened. To live a life where no impact was made, even towards improving the system you were unfortunately born into, is a tragedy.

The Matrix, but Without Going Full Plato

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An ingenious way of introducing possibly life-changing perceptions of reality, The Matrix pushes one to explore philosophical questions challenging ideas of fate and the “self” all the while entertaining the viewer with crazy action sequences and visual effects. I believe this is one of the reasons The Matrix stands as a movie favorite. Without being a complete esoteric arthouse snooze-fest, The Matrix tackles the whole “Is this the real life… Is this just fantasy?” with some snazzy characters and exciting narrative following the storied “chosen one.” As for what to particularly think or focus on while performing the mental gymnastics of grappling with the film’s philosophical side I can’t say as I believe one benefits the most from these types of experiences when they develop their own thoughts and understanding of how ideas they encounter impact their own life.

So ignoring all metaphysical ramblings that bringing up the phrase “the matrix” inevitably invites, let’s talk about the awesome experience of the other eighty percent of the film that even put this thing on the radar in the first place. Assuming you can get past Keanu Reeves’ signature acting style, The Matrix is beyond exciting as it’s first and foremost an escapist film for viewers. Any engaged viewer would take pleasure imagining themselves in the position of the hero who fights against the system in a world with no consequences and infinite possibility. No really—imagine that. You can fly, dodge bullets, resurrect yourself, and actually rock tight leather. Dream world if a movie could ever capture one. The movie creates a sandbox world that only the exceptional “free-willed” individual can fully enjoy, where all is permissible and nothing impossible. The ability to live outside certain physical and social confines delineated by the world we live in strongly appeals to the idea of independence and self-determination. A sort of rebellion against the dreaded status-quo, the film allows one to celebrate their eccentricities as identity defining and declares it our individual “superpower.” Even a programmer in his cubicle has a special, even empowering, uniqueness to him.

The Matrix is the type of movie where anyone can enjoy the cinematic mass marketing points as well as the underlying implications of the plot. You’re told being different is good and to resist against assimilating is to achieve some higher form of existence. At the same time you can enjoy the film that popularized “bullet-time,” featured, creative combat choreography, and displayed some high quality visual effects all to a pretty sick soundtrack. The plot and cinematography allow the film to stand on its own, and with the complexity introduced by the film’s invitation to more serious introspection The Matrix becomes a complete film that deserves to be called a classic.

Navigating all Facets of Applications

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The last couple months have kept me busy with preparing applications, reviewing my resume and editing my cover letter. Given that I only created my cover letter a few weeks ago, I was curious if there was more to applications or any advice that I was missing. I had approached the process on my own, and thought receiving advice from two veterans would be the best way to find out.

Both Magdala and Dr. Hill have gone through the application process many times with great success and had tips and tricks as well as interesting personal stories to share. Admittedly, I assumed a personal statement was the equivalent of a cover letter before listening to what Magdala and Dr. Hill had to say. In their words, a cover letter was more of a response to an advertised position while a personal statement consisted of a discussion of experiences that prove your ability to contribute to the community you apply. But there’s also more. Dr. Hill informed us that the statement is different for where you apply, and the expectations from different organizations are not always advertised. For those interested in joining a European academic community, the statement must be more similar to an abstract with a certain outline of your academic mission and plan to accomplish this goal. Another strange and also funny application quirk for European countries is the information they require, like religion and, in some countries, a picture.

The discussion with Magdala and Dr. Hill illuminated just how particular and pedantic some application readers can  be, especially when the only thing that may differentiate two applicants is the written portion of an application like a personal statement or cover letter. Not many people are privy to all the peculiarities of different applications and I am grateful to have gleaned a clearer of image of how to present myself in application going forward.