I think they take issue with how it was ultimately okay to do to catch the Joker as long as Batman didn't use it and gave power to Luscious who resigned, instead of just calling it out as terrible and not doing it. That's how I read their comment anyway. "apologia"
Batman is a vigilante using brutal violence to pursue his goals outside of any legal system. The whole concept of the comics, movies, etc. is predicated on him being a virtuous guy that you can trust will always do the right thing (mostly, I'm sure he's a villain or anti-hero in some of them). The surveillance system really isn't anything different and it was ridiculous that Luscious had a problem with it in the first place.
There's real media illiteracy in watching a character in a film do a thing and assume that means the filmmaker is endorsing that thing. This has the same vibe as the Hays Code[1] which mandated that the bad guys in film must always get their comeuppance.
> All criminal action had to be punished, and neither the crime nor the criminal could elicit sympathy from the audience, or the audience must at least be aware that such behavior is wrong, usually through "compensating moral value".
Modern cinema and cinematic critique has been so flattened by the constant accusations of filmmakers supporting some "-ism" or another by failing to have their characters directly speak out against it. It's ridiculous.
A major defect with the Hays Code is that it assumes everything illegal is unethical.
But when you have Hollywood producing this Jack Bauer trash where the protagonist is doing everything that should never be done and is still painted as our hero and champion, that's rightfully criticized as propaganda.
The problem isn't when the bad guys are seen to get away with it, the problem is when the bad guys are made out to be the good guys. If they get away with it and it doesn't leave you feeling uncomfortable then it better be because the point was that they were never really the bad guys, because the alternative is to make you sympathize with the wicked.
Most (all?) of Batman is based on the idea that sometimes you need a good guy who operates outside of the law. Given that Batman isn't real but the problems he encounters often are real, the natural conclusion is that we should make up for our low Batman levels by letting law enforcement off the chain.
But this is hardly unique to Nolan. Probably 90% of Hollywood movies that involve crime have this message in some form.
Well, a lot of Batman also expressly questions whether Batman is really good and emphasizes the point that he became Batman because of the trauma of seeing his parents murdered. Given that most of the villains he fights also have a tragic backstory, the suggestion is that he isn't really all that different from them.
The fact that Batman is an ultra wealthy 1 % which dishes out justice with his expensive toys while hiding from most of the authorities is also quite a message.
The popular ones with extra-human abilities - Flash, Superman, Spiderman, Captain America, etc, have more normal backgrounds.
Boys with toys though - Batman, Ironman, The Atom, are the 1%. Ant Man I guess is more normal, but he stole his suit (but Hank Pym was reasonably normal too)
What's wrong with SVG? Notebooks have their issues but are kinda this conceptually. I guess FLAs and Flash too. But you say we never developed a "client-side multimedia file format". Is that not exactly what html + js are for?
I mean the equivalent of a Word document: a file I can reasonably edit, including editing the multimedia and interactive/dynamic content, save, email, put on a thumb drive or Dropbox, etc.
I'd say that html+js suggestion of GP still holds, but with caveats. After all these years, HTML has everything needed for this, including images that can be embedded via the data URI scheme [1].
For example, I once adjusted an Object Pascal interactive program (target: Windows/Win32) for the browser target (FreePascal compiler has the JS target). An intermediate result was a bunch of files that worked locally on desktop but struggled on mobile. With a little help from the SingleFile extension [2], I ended up with a single HTML file containing all functionality and content. It worked great, for example, in MiXplorer's internal HTML viewer. I can't recall the exact details, but the file:/// protocol still had issues in Chrome, Firefox, or both. Anyway, preparing a local address correctly with a keyboard is a challenge so let's just assume that having capable file managers running local html files is enough
Sure, to make this manageable, you need good tools that handle all sides of the task. But at least in theory, the format is fully capable. My only global issue was that the state for locally run HTML files is a kind of ephemeral entity, but for interactive multimedia files, you may consider this obstacle small.
In essence you're describing epub, which is HTML, and I agree. It has great potential but nobody seems to see it as more than a cheap ebook format, and even that is underdeveloped in terms of capabilities: presentation quality and annotation are nowhere near PDF, for example.
Most of all it needs usable editors, and editors which integrate multimedia and dynamic content editing. End users can't turn to a different editor for each media and then integrate the output into the epub document, like a web developer does (e.g., for an image use Photoshop, save the jpg, copy to the proper directory, reference appropriately in the html).
I think HTML is exactly the "client-side multimedia file format" you want. I guess what we don't have is an established editor UI. You have to create it yourself.
It's if we had the .docx format but MS Word was read-only. You would have to create the XML and zip it yourself, to be then rendered by Word. That's effectively how I see HTML+js in browsers.
I don’t think that’s the right way to think about it. It’s not like they were Latinizing Turkish with ASCII in mind. They wanted a one-to-one mapping between letters and sounds. The dot versus no dot marks where in your mouth or throat the vowel is formed. They didn’t have this concept that capital I automatically pairs with lowercase i. The dot was always part of the letter itself. The reform wasn’t trying to fit existing Western conventions, it was trying to map the Turkish sounds to symbols.
They switched from Arabic script to Latin script. They literally did latinize Turkish, but they ditched the convention of 1 to 1 correspondence between lowercase and uppercase letters that is invariant across all languages that use Latin script except for German script, Turkish script and its offspring Azerbaijani script.
I don't recall the exact language but it was rather flame-war-esque in a comment full of otherwise benign discourse. The issue isn't liberals or conservatives being mentioned. In what way do you think I broke the rules? That it wasn't a substantive comment on its own? I didn't feel the pull to silently flag and hoped for GP to elaborate.
reply