Mickey 17

Ethical, theological, and political issues are salient in the film, Mickey 17 (2025), which is about Mickey Barnes, a character who is repeatedly cloned on a space-ship and on a distant planet. The one-way trip alone takes over four years, during which time Mickey is tasked with dangerous tasks because when he dies, another clone is simply made. A mistake is made when the 18^th clone of Mickey is made even though the 17^th is still alive; they are “multiples,” which is a crime for a theological reason. I contend that reason is erroneous, as is the political, ethical, and theological regime that undergirds clones being expendable. 

In a flashback to back on Earth, a man who represents an evangelical Christian perspective urges lawmakers to criminalize multiples even on other planets because a soul cannot have two bodies. Such a claim turns the soul into something imaginary—an abstraction only. In the movie, that no two clones of a person have the same personality suggests that they do not have the same soul. They make different choices and can even have different values, as when Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 are at odds on whether to kill Timo, a pilot who had been in business with the original Mickey. Both clones have the memories of the original Mickey, yet the two clones have very different attitudes towards Timo. Mickey 18 is more aggressive than Mickey 17, and yet the former decides in the end to sacrifice his life to kill Kenneth Marshall, an autocrat who fixes elections by the Assembly in order to stay in power on the mission. Furthermore, that Kai Katz prefers Mickey 17 romantically while Nasha is really turned on sexually by Mickey 18, and even that Nasha wants both clones for herself as a three-some sexually implies that the two clones are different people. In effect, they are identical twins, and even such twins do not share the same soul. Although not clones by any means, my brothers and I could not be more different from each other. That the clones of Mickey differ suggests that the cloning “printing” doesn’t replicate the DNA exactly. That Mickey 18 is so different than Mickey 17 immediately after being “printed” means that the differences cannot be due to environmental factors. Therefore, the theological argument that two clones should not be alive simultaneously because they share the same soul fails.

The argument that multiples is against the “natural order” also fails because cloning itself is not natural. So if multiples are objectionable theologically for this reason, then cloning should be illegal not only on Earth, but also on colonies on other planets. Furthermore, the argument used that human cloning is a sin, but it can be sued by humans on spacecrafts and on other planets is a non-starter, for a sin is a sin, no matter where it is being committed.  The argument seems to be that if the sin takes place far away from the rest of us, and if the sin has unintentional beneficial consequences, which Augustine claimed of sin in general (for otherwise, our species would have self-destructed), then consequentialism trumps the duty not to sin. In the utilitarian ethical principle of the greatest pleasure to the most people, the suffering of the clones of Mickey can be said to be ethical because the clones’ dangerous tasks make it possible for everyone on the ship to survive. That the same rationale could ethically justify the Nazi’s concentration camps and eastward expansion strongly suggests that utilitarianism fails if the distribution of suffering is concentrated within a collective.

Just as the ethics of cloning for use in dangerous tasks is ultimately answered by blowing up the cloning machine at the end of the film, so too is organized religion eschewed. It is very significant that Kenneth Marshall accidently lets out the secret that the company behind the mission is in fact a church, and that the point of the colony is to create “the one and only pure colony planet,” meaning that the human inhabitants are genetically pure.

The religious auspices make use of political autocracy disguised as democracy. It is no accident that at one point, Kenneth and the audience of his show give each other the Nazi raised-arm salute. Kenneth’s religious hypocrisy extends to his willingness to have the clones suffer even apart from in performing dangerous tasks, such as breathing in a virus in the planet’s air so a vaccine could be made so everyone could venture outside without dying. The callousness of the “church, I mean company,” towards suffering is matched by Kenneth’s willingness to subvert elections to keep himself in power on the planet. That political resistance develops suggests that it is a natural consequence of unchecked power being exercised on a captive population that cannot leave. In the end, Mickey 18 blows himself up because Kenneth would also die. Kenneth had strapped bombs to Mickey 18 with impunity, even though the Assembly was in theory democratic rather than autocratic. It is significant that after Kenneth, legitimate trials began and even Nasha, whom Kenneth unilaterally declared to be a criminal, is elected to the Assembly.

The republic wins in the end, whereas the church and its prelate/dictator are discredited. Although in this respect the film has a happy ending, for the good guys win in the climax, what the film says about the hostility and even aggression that is in human nature even under the auspices of religion is a severe indictment of the species. This indictment is perhaps most revealed in the severe suffering that many of the Mikey clones must endure on the orders of other humans.

Empirically, the Milgrim experiment at Yale in 1968 found that 40 percent of the people in the study thought they were giving severe electric shocks on other people even though those people had been screaming at the previous level of shock, and just for being wrong in answering questions! Ironically, at the same university nearly 60 years later, and fifteen years after I had finished my studies there, two police departments, one under a city government and the other under the non-profit Yale Corporation, plus Yale’s proto-police security guards, kept up constant and overlapping “presence” on and around campus; in fact, by 2025, Yale’s police unit had accepted the FBI’s invitation to Yale to participate in counter-terrorism tactics used on students. The risk of autocratic passive-aggression even just to intimidate by an overwhelming “presence” as a deterrent was real where the film was screened (and where the director, Bong Joon Ho, would speak on May 5, 2025). The tactic itself evinces not only a very negative assumption about the human nature of Yalies (and local residents), but also reveals the sordid nature of those people using the tactics. In fact, the “overkill” in “presence,” which compromised the otherwise relaxed atmosphere on a college campus, can itself be viewed as hostile and autocratic, not to mention disrespectful of students and academia more generally. Turning around, and, as I had to do quite unexpectedly, having to walk off a sidewalk on campus while talking with students and faculty because a Yale police car was driving on the sidewalk on a weekday morning with red and blue lights on, and even headlights blaring, even though the car was only on a patrol, is at the very least uncomfortable and definitely antithetical to an academic atmosphere, where shows of the threat of might does not make right.

Yale security and police stationed outside of the classroom building where the film was screened.

With lights glaring, a Yale police presence "screens" outside after the screening of the film.

More yellow, blue, and red lit-up stationary "patrols" nearby after the film on April 19, 2025

It is interesting, in terms of the theological-political nexus in the film, that Yale was founded by Christian Calvinist ministers who had been at Harvard but would not tolerate the Unitarians having any influence. The dichotomy of the elect (saved) and the rest of humanity in Calvinism can easily result in repression of the latter, as if the rest of us were sub-human and thus needing to be constantly watched (which is a form of passive aggression). In the film, clones are viewed as such by the elite of the “church,” who are not bothered by their respective consciences for inflicting much suffering on the Mickeys even beyond that which results from the dangerous tasks for the good of the whole. Whether in the fictional film or on the ground at Yale, where the movie was screened and the director would soon thereafter give a talk, power without being checked can easily be used by human nature in very unethical and anti-spiritual ways.

The question from the movie is not whether each clone has his own soul, for in choosing to sacrifice his life, even Mickey 18 has a good soul, but, rather, whether Kenneth and his wife have souls, and even whether their “church” is at all religious or spiritual rather than a basis for autocracy being used to conduct medical experiments on clones and construct a genetically pure colony, although presumably with an underclass of servants who obviously would not be treated well, as they would not be among a Calvinist elect.

Return to Haifa

Return to Haifa (1982) is a film in which the political element of international relations is translated into personal terms on the levels of family and individual people. The establishment of Israel by the UN is depicted in the film as being accomplished not only incompetently, but in negligence of likely human suffering. In fact, the suffering of the indigenous population may have been intended, given the operative attitude towards those people as animals. That the human being can be so dehumanizing in action as well as belief ultimately makes victims of all of us, even across artificial divides. This is precisely what the film depicts, with the victims being the active characters while the real culprits remain for the most part off-camera. The viewer is left with a sense of futility that can be undone by widening one’s view to include the antagonists, who are not passive. It is not as if fate inexorably brought about the Nakba (or even the scale of the atrocities in Gaza in the next century, which, as the film was made in 1982, cannot be said to be anticipated by the filmmaker—though perhaps it could have been).

In the film, Saeed and Safiyya, a Palestianian couple expelled from Haifa in the Nakba that took place in 1948, return in 1967 to what had been their house in Haifa. Recognizing that furniture does not make a home, Saeed and Safiyya are particularly interested in whether their now-grown son, Khaldun, whom they abandoned when they fled from their house in the Nakba, would now want to live with them in the occupied territory or remain with Miriam, the Israeli who lives in the house and adopted Khaldun. To the twenty-year-old Khadun, whom Miriam had named Dov, Saeed and Safiyya are strangers. All of them are victims.

That Miriam had survived the Holocaust and is empathetic to the Palestinian couple having lost their house keeps her from being the film’s antagonist. That, in a flashback, she criticizes the Israeli soldiers for throwing a dead Palestinian boy like a piece of wood into a truck during the Nakba also goes to her character, especially given that, in a flashback further back, she witnesses Nazi troops shooting her own son. Moreover, not only is it inappropriate to blame her for leaving Europe to live in the Jewish state after the Holocaust and even for moving into the empty house in 1948, she is worthy of praise for adopting an infant and raising him. To be sure, she is blameworthy for having lied for years to Dov about the circumstances of his infancy, and Saeed rightly makes this point. Even so, Saeed, Safiyya, and Miriam, and even Khadun/Dov, share the experience of victimhood even if the son is not aware of his own and he lacks empathy for his birth parents, who had lost not only their house, but their son too. In fact, he blames them for having abandoned him in the house when they (and everyone else in the town) was fleeing gun-fire without notice. Lest it be thought that he, or even Nazi Germany is the prime antagonist, I submit that squalid role goes to the nascent state of Israel, with the UN as the negligent accomplice.

With home, belong, and return arguably being the three concepts that underlie the film’s narrative, the thesis can be described in the following terms: Macro-political decisions and resulting societal-level events have social and psychological impacts that are destructive and even ruinous to individuals and families. The film’s thesis resonates with Israel’s disproportionate reprisals against Palestinians in Gaza—rendering over a million homeless and short of food for months on end as of early 2025, when I saw the film. It is one thing to read that 55,000 Gaza residents were dead or missing and to look at photographs of the demolition of cities in the occupied enclave, and quite another to be there and see the horrendous impact on individuals there. Put another way, it is one thing to read of Israel’s president claiming that every resident of Gaza was guilty (and thus deserved to suffer) after Hamas’ foray into Israel proper in October of 2023, and quite another to comprehend the scale of the subsequent devastation in Gaza. Upon assuming office in 2025, U.S. President Trump characterized Gaza as a demolition zone. Relative to that, the Nakba that is portrayed in the film can be regarded as tame.

In the film, Saeed and Safiyya arrive by ship with other European Jews in 1948. In spite of having suffered atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, the human beings arriving in the new state of Israel felt empathy for strangers. “All we know,” one migrant says, “is that we are going to homes owned by others.” Not even having suffered in Nazi Germany gives those new arrivals any presumption. I submit that this attitude is in start contrast to Israel in how it needlessly aggressively managed the Nakba in 1948. Even the UN, which left it to the Israelis to uproot the indigenous residents, can be blamed, especially considering the reference in the film to the Israeli attitude in which Palestinians are regarded as though animals to serve the Jews. From such an utterly dehumanizing attitude, not only the Nakba, but also the huge atrocities in Nazi Germany, almost a century later, in Gaza, are all to easy for the aggressors to justify to themselves. Furthermore, if indeed the attitude was held by the new government of Israel in 1948 and its military, the UN can be reasonably judged as woefully negligent in failing to supervise on the ground the transfer of land in the process of the creation of the state.

Such a momentous political decision as creating a state in a territory which is already populated and the indigenous population has not consented has the potential for abuse against families and individuals, as the results of the Milgram and Stanford psychological experiments confirm; humans given power have an excessive inclination to harm others. This fact is hardly limited to the Nazi and Israeli governments, and international governmental infrastructure should be up to the task of being able to safeguard our questionable species from its own nature. Return to Haifa can be viewed as making the point through narrative that people across divides can all be regarded as victims from political decisions being taken without considering the possibility (or probability) that one group might view another as consisting of service animals rather than as other human beings, who having a rational nature (Kant) and sentiments (Shaftsbury), are worthy of being treated as not merely means, but also ends in themselves.

Farha

The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, being in the wake of the Nazi atrocities, was arguably viewed generally then as something that the world owed to the Jewish people. Perhaps for this reason, the UN did not take adequate measures on the ground to safeguard the Palestinian residents. In retrospect, the possibility, even likelihood, that people who group-identify with (or even as) victims consciously decide to become victimizers should have been better considered. The film, Farha, made in 2021, illustrates the sheer indeterminacy, and thus arbitrariness, of human volition when it issues orders to the body to be violent against other rational beings. Channeling Kant, it can be argued that the decision to shoot a family that poses absolutely no threat impurely out of hatred based on group-identity fails even to treat other rational beings as means—to say nothing of as ends in themselves. The unadulterated deplorability in being unwilling even to use another person as a means to some selfish goal, preferring instead to kill rather than respect the otherness of another person, grounds the verdict of the culprit being less than nothing. In another film, The Brutalist (2024), Laszio, the Jewish protagonist, erroneously concludes that Jews must surely be less than nothing, given how they were treated not only in Nazi Germany, but also in Pennsylvania even after the news of the Holocaust had reached the other shore. Whether brutality or passive-aggressive prejudice is suffered, however, turning one’s victimhood into victimizing is ethically invalid, for such a callous reaction fails to treat other rational beings as ends in themselves, and may even be so severe as to fail to treat them even as means.

Near the beginning of Farha, an Islamic teacher of girls looks on approvingly as one of the girls reads that the words of an unbeliever are the lowest. I submit that this line sets the tone for the film, and underlies how the Israelis and Palestinians have treated each other as groups historically, and most egregiously in how the Israeli government killed and decimated in Gaza in 2023-2024, interestingly just after Farha had been made. The unprovoked willfulness, or volition, that the film depicts of an Israeli commander deciding to have two of his subordinates shoot an unarmed Palestinian family and leave the just-born infant to die because a Palestinian baby is not “worth a bullet,” can be interpreted as the prima causa that, aggregated, lead to Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023, which in turn led to the disproportionate Israeli decimation of Gaza, with as many as 55,000 killed and over a million residents rendered homeless and suffering a famine. In other words, the pivotal incident of the film can be heard has the proverbial first shot. As it was not heard around the world, the filmmaker of Farha performed that service for the world.

Myopia circling self-identification based on groups perpetuates cycles of hatred and violence. In Farha, the Islamic teacher objects to Farha’s father, who decides to allow his daughter to attend school in the city. She already knows the Koran, the teacher says. “What else is there to learn?” Closing the loop, as it were, can lock in antagonism based on group-identity, for the Koran not only states that the words of the unbeliever are lowest, but also that if a nonbeliever living in the same village refuses thrice to convert, it is better that that person be killed than risk that one’s false beliefs pollute the believers. I read this line while I was spending a Spring Break at Yale reading the Koran for a term paper. In Christianity, the Apostle Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 6:14-18 that Christians should avoid close contact with people who do not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. To be sure, merely avoiding contact is ethically superior to killing, but an Islamicist could point ironically to the story of Abraham as teaching that divine commands (and thus revelation) trump even universally-accessible moral principles.[1]

In Farha, the Israeli group-commander is not following a divine command when he uses his free will to give the order to shoot the Palestinian family; he is thus culpable. He even knowingly breaks the promise he made to Farha’s uncle, who was anonymously helping the Israeli commander, that women and children would not be harmed. Even though the commander’s group-identification-saturated paradigm backs up his volition, he is blameworthy as an individual, for his volition is his alone and so, as the Americans say of the U.S. President, the buck stops with him.

Coming away from the film, a viewer might wonder why it is that the village had to be evacuated immediately. The loud-speakers repeatedly threaten that any (Palestinian) villagers who do not leave the village immediately will be shot. Why such a hurry?  Ironically, the Israeli military could cite Paul’s no-contact dictum; the possibility of sharing the village is never brought up in the film. The dire urgency is undercut visually in the last scene, as Farha sits on a swing next to that which her friend had sat—that other swing is now broken. The village is deserted—no Israelis have moved in. Flies swarm the dead baby in the courtyard—the corps not having been worth even a bullet.

Is it such an Augustinian, Hobbesian, Pascalian, and Machiavellian world that peace is only possible once all humans have been removed from the equation?  For only finally, at the end of the film, is the village at peace; Farha walks away in silence and no one is left. She leaves the village in desolate peace. If the Age of Reason did indeed fall to the Holocaust and Gott ist tot as Nietzsche claimed, such that all we have left is human subjectivity, as the decimated philosophical phenomenologists of the decadent twentieth-century erroneously concluded, how will humanity pull itself together, especially if group-identification is permitted to continue to have such staying power in human consciousness?  Until her world was needlessly turned upside down, Farha just wanted to be a teacher; she wanted to break through constrained knowledge and help others to do so too. She ends up just trying to survive long enough in a small pantry-room to escape the arbitrariness of an antagonistic human will. Perhaps a little Buddhism might be helpful in dissolving the grip of group-identification; a group’s name can be understood as just a label, rather than as corresponding to an actual group-self, which does not really exist. In other words, “Israeli” and “Palestinian” may be interpreted as labels in a nominal rather than a realist way in terms of whether anything existent corresponds.  

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1. See Soren Kierkegaard’s book, Fear and Trembling, on this point: namely, the divine command to sacrifice Isaac trumps the ethical charge of murder even though only Abraham knows of the command whereas the ethical principle not to murder is accessible to anyone.

The Lion in the Desert

In 1929, after nearly 20 years of facing resistance in Libya, Benito Mussolini, the Fascist ruler of Italy, appointed General Graziani as colonial governor to put down the military resistance of Libyan nationalists led by Omar Mukhtar. Graziani was ruthless, and fortunately he was arrested when Mussolini was toppled. His foremost atrocity was putting over a million Libyan civilians in a camp in a desert, with the intent to starve them in retaliation for the guerilla fighters objecting to the Italian occupation. The film, The Lion of the Desert (1980), faithfully depicts the historical events that took place in Libya from 1920 to 1931. The sheer arbitrariness other than from brute force in the occupation and the impotence of the League of Nations are salient themes in the film.

Both in peace negotiations, which Gaziani posed merely to given him more time with which to build up his army in Libya, and after Mukhtar’s capture, the direct refusal of Mukhtar to accept the legitimacy of the presence of the Italians on Libyan soil combined with the inability of the Italian brass to furnish a legitimate justification for the occupation leaves the viewers with the sense that overwhelming modern military power was the reason in search of justification. At one point, Graziani admits to Mukhtar that the fact that Italy is there is what justifies the presence. The Libyan’s guns and horses are no match for the Italian metal tanks and machine guns. The result is a foregone conclusion. Yet Mukhtar holds to his principles rather than accepts bribes to turn on his cause.

The want of any international constraint on the fascists was also clear. At one point, the Italian delegation to the peace talks remind Mukhtar that the Libya is not a nation and thus the fighters don’t even have a voice in the League of Nations. No one would care, anyway. Yet even if a world does care, such as in the case of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza in 2023-2024, not even the World Court’s verdict and the United Nations itself had any teeth. At one point, Israel’s ambassador to the UN shredded the UN charter document in front of the General Assembly. That it had created Israel apparently made no difference to the Israeli government. As a concurrent case in point, Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine triggered resistance from the E.U. and U.S., but pushing back the aggressor was difficult. Russia’s bully-threat of using nuclear bombs just showed how dangerous it is for the world being unable to provide a check against aggressors.

General Graziani’s mass camp for Libyan civilians is eerily similar to Israel’s camps for Gazans nearly a century later. In both cases, the world was not able to defend even such numbers of innocent civilians. In the film, an Italian military man admits that the Geneva Convention is not being followed. The same could be said of Israel in Gaza. The 9000 Palestinian hostages being held in Israel and the reports of the torture of at least some of them did not dissuade the U.S. from passing $24 billion in aid to Israel. Clearly, having the U.S. as the “global policeman” was not an effective basis for a peaceful global order. Similarly, the League of Nations is depicted as impotent in the film.

From the vantage point of more than 40 years since the release of the film, viewers could be excused for feeling utter frustration at the lack of political development since 1929. The advent of nuclear bombs just makes the lack of international political development all the more striking. At some point, humanity will likely pay dearly for its refusal to cede any governmental sovereignty to an international force with teeth. To be sure, back in the eighteenth century, Kant claimed that world peace would only be possible, rather than probable, if a world federation exists. But his notion of such a federation we would call confederal, rather than a case of modern federalism, as he makes no mention of ceding some sovereignty to the federal level. The UN, rather than the E.U. and U.S., is akin to Kant’s federation. I contend that the shift from confederal to (modern) federal would be decisive in shifting the chances of world peace from possible to probable.

In short, a film can indeed be useful in terms of depicting the need for further development in political theory. With all the advances in technology and medicine during the twentieth century, the lack of any international political development is all the more perplexing, especially given the brazen military atrocities against even civilians in Ukraine and Gaza. A look back to 1929 just shows how static the international system has been.

Medium Cool

In Medium Cool (1969), John Cassellis, a cameraman, maintains a medium-cool level of emotion even in the midst of the socio-political turmoil in Chicago during 1968 until he learns that his station manager had been allowing the FBI access to the news footage. The film can be interpreted as providing a justification for his lack of trust in American law enforcement even as the need for law and order is made clear from the ubiquity of the human instinctual urge of aggression. For the film shows not only the extent of violence, but also its engrained nature in our species. By implication, the viewer is left to conclude that that law enforcement is necessary in a civilized society.  Yet this can only be a necessary evil, for the last few scenes of the film show just how likely discretion is to be abused. The atrocious and one-sided police violence during the peaceful protests outside of the Democratic National Convention make it clear that if given the legal authority to use weapons, human beings may abuse such discretion if too weak to restrain their own personal passions and, albeit less common, even their psychological pathologies.

The film opens with a small protest in a rural area in Illinois. Of immediate concern is the involvement of Illinois’s military in a domestic matter. The disproportionate heavy machinery of official force seems out of place. That the soldiers’ knives at the end of the guns are so close to the necks of the peaceful protesters also points to bad judgment. A journalist recalls police roughing up cameramen so they won’t show untriggered police brutality. The implicit conclusion is that the excessive means of force together with an aggressive mentality among soldiers and police is a dangerous cocktail.

The film moves to a scene at a rollerball game in which individual players are beating each other up even off the track. The crowd enjoys it, just as the viewers of local news like watching violence. Later in the film, we see Cassellis practicing at boxing—again illustrating the human need or penchant for violence. He explains to his girlfriend’s son, “The object is to knock the other guy’s brains out.” At one point in the film, a manager of a media company says on the phone, “We do not manufacture violence.” This is true enough, for, given the human aggressive instinctual urge, violence can be expected to be around plenty enough to fill the time-slots on the local evening news.

The propensity for violence interpersonally is made very clear as Cassillis and his sound man, Peter Bonerz, contend with hostility from several black people in an apartment in spite of the fact that the two journalists had interviewed one of the people and thus provided a mouthpiece for the racial grievances. Even though the Black woman is being verbally hostile to one of the journalists, a Black man insult to injury by angrily demanding, “You got to respect our women!” The journalists were respecting her, and, ironically, she had not been respecting them. Conflating societal phenomena and the two journalists in the apartment, the Black man insults them by calling them arrogant and exploiters. That the journalists provided a societal mouthpiece for one of the men contradicts the accusation of exploitation. But reasoning is often wan up against anger: hence the need for law enforcement.

Violence is also on the societal stage. Watching a television program on John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, all of whom had been assassinated, the teacher whom John is dating remarks, “It seems like no one’s life is worth anything anymore.” We hear King’s “I have a Dream” speech, which we can juxtaposition against the propensity towards violence in the apartment of the Black man whom the journalists had (thanklessly) interviewed. The ideal is one thing; extant human nature on the ground is quite another.

The documentary-like scenes of the anti-Vietnam War protests of chants of “No more war” again demonstrate the ubiquity of untriggered violence even among people who are hired to prevent violence. Against the song, “Happy Days are Here Again,” we see Mayor Daly’s “police state terror” playing out in the streets of Chicago as police attack non-violent protestors. The excessive response of Illinois’ army being present just renders the danger all the more of hiring people with criminal mentalities to enforce the law. On the radio, we hear, “The policemen are beating everyone in sight.” Another reporter states that the police are targeting a specific political group—the anarchists. Appropriately, onlookers were chanting, Zeig Heil! As a reference back to the Nazi thugs in uniform. The overwhelming, excessive machinery of force, including that of a military, combined with the fact that the police mentality was criminal inflicting severe injury on innocent victims—and the fact that the criminals got away with it—is the emotional-image that the audience is left with. But there is neither remedy nor solution proffered.

The toxic American dynamic is just there, and as the Black Lives Matter movement would attest, Americans would be well justified in approaching police employees as dangerous even as they enforce the law. I contend that given the salience of the aggressive instinct in human nature, the power (discretion) enjoyed by police employees (and departments) is dangerous. Internal affairs offices within police departments suffer from an institutional conflict of interest (e.g., being part of the “brotherhood”) and thus should not be relied on, and the hands-off attitude of many city governments in favor of “citizen police commissions” is tantamount to aiding and abetting police brutality. Given this dangerous cocktail, the erroneous (and passive-aggressive) assumption/tactic that intimidation by an overwhelming, police-state, police presence should not be permitted. Simply put, there is simply too many police employees abusing their discretion for residents to have to be presented with a constant police-presence. The says that children should be seen but not heard is too charitable to police; they should not be seen or heard, but, due to the human inclination towards violence, present behind the scenes. This is the uncomfortable position that the film provides. Law enforcement is necessary, but, given the urge that some people feel to abuse power by instigating violence if given the chance, democratic, municipal accountability that does not rely at all on “internal checks” within police departments is vital.

The legitimacy of police to use force is limited to enforcing law. Hence, physically attacking people, such as in punching them with clenched fists and kicking them, which go beyond restraining people, are exogenous to the job function. Police with a penchant for attacking people may have a warped perspective justifying in their own minds, psychologically, beating someone up as a legitimate tactic. In 2023 in Ohio, for example, in an attempt to justify a police employee who kicked a man repeatedly in the ribs and hit him 30 times (and used a stun-gun), the deputy chief stated, “sometimes you do have to throw punches.” Even though his subordinates had use of a stun gun, he tried to justify their resort to street-fighting, saying “This wasn’t blows to the face or blows to the throat.”[1] This excuse fails, however, given that one police employee had straddled the victim’s legs and punched him “at least 30 times with both fists.”[2]

I contend that in going on the offence in violence rather than merely restraining and protecting oneself from violence, a police employee should be regarded as only another citizen. As Hobbes claims in Leviathan, self-preservation is a natural right that is not contingent on law. If anyone is kicking or punching a person, one has the natural right to defend oneself. Although this does not depend on law, city governments should encase this natural right because of the extent of discretion given to police employees by cities—an extent that is easily hyperextended. By no means should resisting getting kicked and hit be considered a criminal offence; rather, the “off duty” city employee should be charged criminally.

An obvious example of when a police employee should be considered a mere citizen concerns an employee who held a supervisory position in the New York City police department. Working as a private investigator for the government of China, he “threatened, harassed, surveilled and intimidated” a Chinese man “between 2016 and 2019.”[3] In 2023, he was convicted by a federal jury in New York of conspiracy and stalking charges. It made no difference that he was a police employee (and supervisor!) because his aggressive intimidation and harassment rendered him as a mere resident when he was engaged in that activity.

Even the language that a police employee uses along with unprovoked violence can indicate that the individual is no longer acting within the purview of one’s job in law enforcement. In Alabama in 2023, for instance, a state trooper felt justified in inflicting violence on a man who was not resisting arrest simply because he had joked “Oh, yeah” when she asked him if he felt tip of the stun-gun she had stuck into his back as he laid on the hood of a car. In saying, “Shut your bitch ass up,” and “Shut the fuck up. You was big and bad,” she was clearly not acting in a law-enforcement capacity. Her language is not professional, and thus it points to a state of mind that is outside of acting in her official capacity, which alone justifies the use of the stun-gun. That she ignored his pleas for her to stop using her stun-gun means that her desire to inflict pain was immune to any sense of compassion.

In his text, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith, who went on to write on competitive markets, claims that sympathy, aided by the imagination (in being in someone else’s place), is something that is normal to feel for others, especially if they are in pain. We don’t have to feel the pain in order to empathize. If someone who has been hired for a job in which deadly weapons can be used does not have compassion, then they are not the sort of psychology that should be hired for such a job. That such people have been hired suggests that the hiring processes of police departments are not yet advanced enough to be relied on, and so external accountability should receive more resources and attention.

Anger such that eviscerates natural sympathy can be immune even from the pleas of other police employees. Also in 2023, a Black man “was attacked by a police dog in Ohio after surrendering” to police employees “following a high-speed chase.”[4] That the truck driver had “refused to pull over, and was chased for about 25 minutes before spiked bars placed across the highway brought the rig to a stop” does not justify releasing an attack dog on the man when he was standing with his hands above his head, having clearly surrendered to the police.[5] Hence the police employee who released the dog was no longer acting in his capacity as an employee of the police department when he released the dog and could be charged criminally. 

The man's hands were up when the "SS (Nazi)" policeman released the attack dog. 

That the predator (i.e., the police employee) ignored his coworker’s demand, Do not “release the dog with [the black man’s] hands up. Do not release the dog with his hands up,” demonstrates just how flawed the hiring process of a police department can be, and thus how important external, municipality accountability is on police departments. The attacker shouted at the man, “Get your ass on the ground or you’re going to get bit!” which indicates not only extremely flawed judgment, which in turn likely points to underlying psychological problems, but that the guy was on a “power-trip” enabled by the discretion given to him as a police employee. That one of the police employees had aimed a machine gun on the truck driver can also be flagged in terms of flawed judgment. It is very significant that the employee had been hired for a position that includes use of a deadly weapon even though he had a penchant for violence.

The role of dysfunctional judgment is, I submit, a major problem in police departments. In 2023, two Los Angeles sheriff employees attacked an elderly Black couple in the parking lot of a grocery store because they had taken a cake (which could have been only a mistake). The employee attacking the man ignored the woman’s pleas that her husband was ill. Just for saying so, she was slammed to the ground by the other sheriff-department aggressor. Ignoring the woman’s pleas and shoving both people to the ground evinces utter disrespect, as if people deemed to be criminals by criminal police were not people. In actuality, such aggressors are not worthy of respect.

In yet another case, Los Angeles Sheriff deputies repeatedly punched a woman who was holding her 3-month-old baby simply because her maternal instinct would not allow her to release her baby to such aggressors. 

The aggressor's arm is circled as he repeatedly hits the mother as if in a street fight. There should be a special place in hell for men who slug women holding their infants. 

Interestingly, cities might consider enacting a “Good Samaritan” law protecting onlookers who stop attackers whether they happen to be city employees or not, for it is easy to tell if someone is resisting arrest or being pummeled with kicks and punches while passive. I contend that onlookers are ethically obligated to pull attackers off their passive victims, and, furthermore, that the criminal attackers should be criminally charged.

Because police hiring cannot be relied on, given the discretion with deadly force that police are given, the discretion should not include being able to turn off body-cams and cameras mounted on police cars. In 2023, internal documents showed that the police employee in Memphis, Tennessee who killed a man without cause didn’t turn on the body camera.[6] Just as Internal Affairs “internal accountability” within police departments should not be relied on, for police regard themselves in a brotherhood of sorts, so too is it a fatal flaw to presume that police employees can resist the temptation to turn off any cameras by which accountability could be aided.

We are all flawed, finite beings, human, all too human. Societies should thus be keen to check the power that is likely to be abused, and those with lawful physical power should be subject to psychological assessments that go beyond surveys and proforma interviews. Indications of “street” talk, bad (i.e., disproportional) judgment, and “street” fighting should be sufficient for terminations and criminal charges in cases involving violence, for the line between enforcing law and going on the attack is clear. Lastly, police employees should have more humility (i.e., a recognition of fallibility) in dealing with people assumed to be less, or lower, for every human being is worthy of respect as a human being. Being a city employee is conditional, rather than an entitlement. City governments should not only hold employees accountable, but also castigate police departments for policies allowing disproportionate force, such as aiming a machine gun at a truck simply because the trucker did not pull over. Retaliation is extrinsic to law enforcement. As the film demonstrates, accountability may be needed even on a mayor, such as Mayor Daly of Chicago, who astonishingly refused to stop the unprovoked violent attacks by his police even after his complicity was made public at the Democratic Convention. Even then, he evinced the Biblical pharaoh’s hardened heart. Similarly, the police predators discussed above demonstrated such stubbornness, in some cases even dismissing pleas for humanity from their fellow police employees.

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1. Dominique Mosbergen, “Police in Ohio Under Scrutiny after Video Shows Officers Punching Face-Down Man,” The Huffington Post, October 24, 2023.
2. Ibid.
3. Hannah Rabinowitz and Emma Tucker, “Former NYC Police Officer, 2 Others Convicted of Stalking New Jersey Family on Behalf of Chinese Government,” CNN.com, June 20, 2023 (accessed December 30, 2023).
4. Nick Visser, “Video Shows Police Allowing Dog to Attack Black Man Surrendering After Truck Chase” The Huffington Post, July 24, 2023 (accessed December 30, 2023).
5. Ibid.
6. Phillip Jackson, “Memphis Cop Who Fatally Shot Jaylin McKenzie Didn’t Turn On Body Camera, Internal Documents Show,” The Huffington Post, August 4, 2023.

The Screen Actors Guild Strike: American Capitalism Is Inherently Unbalanced

On July 14, 2023, Hollywood actors joined the writers in going on strike against the studios, which had changed the business model in ways, according to the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), that were leaving the vast majority of actors out financially. At the time, AI (artificial intelligence) was the red-hot buzzword, promising unheard of advances but also baleful clouds on the horizon. The president of SAG sounded the alarm on not only the threat of AI given the studios' new business models predicated on ubiquitous streaming and digital technology, but also the more long-standing and ingrained American corporate system of Capitalism wherein upper managements get away with not sharing the surplus of corporate wealth due to an inherent or institutional conflict of interest. Indeed, Fran Drescher, the president of SAG, was not far from calling into question the taken-for-granted assumption in Capitalism that residual profits should go to stockholders exclusive. Questioning that default (as well as claiming that CEOs get to set their own compensation by controlling their respective boards of directors) would have made Drescher's announcement of a strike truly revolutionary. She was so close. 

The full essay is at "SAG Strike."

Inside Job

Documentaries can admittedly be rather boring, particularly if technical details comprise most of the content. This applies also to a film of historical fiction based on true events, such as The Challenger Disaster (2019), which focuses so much on technical details (albeit set in arguments) that the narrative itself may not be strong enough to hold an audience's attention or interest. In contrast, the documentary, Inside Job (2010), provides such alluring "inside the beltway" (i.e., known only to U.S. Government insiders and their outside partners) information that the details themselves can capture and hold interest.  

The full essay is at "President Obama and Goldman Sachs."

The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz

To Aaron Swartz, the subject of the documentary, The Internet’s Own Boy (2014), the major concern in his day regarding the internet was not the ability of a person to create a blog or use social media; rather, the problem was in the trend of the power of the gate-keepers, who tell you were on the internet you want to go, concentrating. In other words, the issue concerned what commands our attention. More specifically, who gets access to the ways people find things on the internet. “Now everyone has a license to speak; it’s a question of who gets heard,” he said.  Although he was a computer wiz, he also had political aspirations; both of which were on display as he lobbied against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was introduced in Congress in October of 2011. Unfortunately, the combination of his computer and political skills got the attention of the FBI, which engaged in a relentless pursuit of him until, under the pressure, he committed suicide at the age of 26. His short life was one of idealism that should not have been squashed by an unstoppable criminal-justice system, especially when influenced by political pressure from corporations and politicians. Lest the overzealousness of law enforcement obscure a vision of Aaron’s idealism, it can be viewed as public access being restored to the public domain in terms of the internet.

Tim Lee, the founder of the internet who notably did not cash out but rather kept the web open, influenced Aaron. Although he bristled at the constraints in working at an internet company, he was also not primarily motivated by money. Instead, he was motivated by fairness as it applies to the public good. Whereas high-tech firms are oriented to their own private good, the public good implies public access—something about which Arron felt strongly. In other words, he detested the privatization of the public internet by private gate-keepers. “The public domain should be free to all, but it is often locked up” by corporations, said Brewster Kahle of The Internet Archive. Aaron’s motivation and activity hinged on the question of how public access could be brought to the public domain. This was “one of the things that got him in so much trouble,” said Kahle.

Pacer, a company that made about $120 million a year charging for access to the public records of courts, caught Aaron’s attention. By law, the courts could charge only what is necessary to run Pacer. As that company was interested in charging “customers” much more, hence narrowing the public’s access, Aaron downloaded 20 million pages of court documents. This was not illegal, and yet the FBI began staking out his parents’ house. Once able to analyze the documents, he discovered “massive privacy violations.” Yet is was the restricted public access, caused by wealth disparity, that really caught his attention. As Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media asked rhetorically in the film, “The law is the operating system of our democracy and you have to pay to see it?” Put another way, the privatization of the public domain can be viewed as the onslaught of plutocracy, the rule by wealth, over democracy.

Besides access to common law, knowledge is vital to a republic. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson agreed on this point. Aaron looked at the gatekeepers of academic articles—private companies like Jstor—which were charging substantial fees for public access (whereas scholars working for universities could access the articles for free). Such gatekeepers can be distinguished from the journals/publishers of the articles. Although a journal rightfully charges for a copy, if a public library (or government-sponsored university) has purchased one, shouldn’t the public have access to the issue? Should libraries have to pay substantial fees to the gatekeepers?

At MIT, Aaron downloaded articles on Jstor. It is not clear what he would have done with them. He had downloaded databases simply to analyze their content rather than make it public. MIT found his computer in a computer closet and gathered evidence to build a case. At the time, he was working at Harvard. If he didn’t have a status at MIT and thus had to hack into the system, MIT had a case. After all, people should not be allowed to unilaterally plug their laptops directly into computer systems. Even so, that police assaulted him on his way home and that U.S. Secret Service, which under the Patriot’s Act, can investigate “schemes using new technology,” took over smacks as going too far, especially if the police were MIT’s own. This would suggest too much power having been given to the university administration whether by its board or the government of Massachusetts. Having its own police power, a university administration can find itself charged with the taint of abuse of power sans accountability. After all, a university is more like a business than a government, hence democratic safeguards are not necessarily in place.

Looking at Aaron’s downloading itself, Carmen Ortesz of Massachusetts’ district attorney’s office says in the film, “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data, or dollars.” Aaron’s attorney retorts, He wasn’t stealing; he wasn’t selling what he got or giving it away.” When he had been a student at Stanford, Aaron had downloaded the Westlaw database to find relationships between sponsoring organizations and favorable research results. He didn’t release the documents. So the criminal prosecution of Aaron for downloading Jstor articles was as a commercial violation yet no evidence of motive existed; it could not be assumed that he would sell or otherwise make the articles available to the public. The problem was that he had put his name to a blog post, “Gorilla Manifesto,” in which open access is advocated.

For his part, Aaron points out that sharing knowledge with friends is not stealing; rather, doing so is a moral imperative because corporations act as gatekeepers to make money—essentially clipping away at the public domain. This is none other than “theft of public culture,” he says in the film. It is interesting the police felt the need to assault him and yet the thefts by the powerful gatekeepers were somehow legal. He told his girlfriend, “I’ve been arrested for downloading too many academic journals,” as if acquiring knowledge were a crime worthy of the perpetrator being held in solitary confinement as he was. Even Jstor must have viewed the criminal justice system as going too far, for the company dropped the case, saying it had been the government’s decision to prosecute. In fact, Stephen Jeymann, the politically-aspiring assistant district attorney of Massachusetts who interestingly kept the case for himself, told Aaron that he still could face 35 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million. This raises the ethical question of whether an individual should be made to suffer inordinately to serve as a deterrent.

If the public good is the reason why, then what then of the for-profit companies that were essentially privatizing parts of the public domain? MIT, which had moral authority, was mute when the defense asked for assistance. The university characterized this stance as neutral, but Aaron’s lawyer said it was actually pro-prosecutor.

In the film, David Sirota points to the problem of selective deterrence from political ideology. He points out that the Obama administration did not prosecute the financial institutions and individuals for crimes that led to the financial crisis of 2008, yet while devoting resources to prosecuting selective deterrents, including Aaron’s case. It is no coincidence, Sirota claims, that Obama left office as a billionaire, which he had not been when he was a legislator in Illinois’ government and law instructor at the University of Chicago. I would add that Goldman Sachs’ $1 million contribution to Obama’s ’08 presidential campaign is also relevant. Clearly, Obama’s “Wall Street Government” was doing the bidding of the powerful rather than standing up for public access of knowledge.

Aaron hit his stride in spite of his pending trial when he put his computer skills to use in lobbying against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which initially had many co-sponsors in the U.S. Senate. Specifically, he wrote software making it easier for people to contact Congress. The bill was ostensibly against online piracy of music and movies, but, according to Aaron, the legislation was really about the freedom to connect. A company could cut off a website from the internet or force Google to cut links to the site; a claim of copyright infringement, without due process (i.e., a trial), would be all that would be necessary. In the film, U.S. Senator Wyden of Oregon says the bill poses a threat to freedom of speech and civil liberties. “It makes no sense to destroy the architecture of the internet to combat piracy,” he points out. In a particularly revealing “macro” comment, the senator points to the power of private powers in the American democratic system. “Typically, the legislative fights in Washington are fights between different sets of corporate moneyed interests—all duking it out to pass legislation. The fights that are the closest are when you have one set of corporate interests against another set of corporate interests and they are generally financially matched in campaign contributions and lobbying. The ones that aren’t even fights typically are those where all the money is on one side—all the corporations are on one side—and millions of people are on the other.” In other words, under the rubric of popular sovereignty (i.e., representatives representing their respective constituents as a group), the interests of private concentrations of wealth (i.e., corporations) essentially own the Congress and the White House.

In this case, constituents spoke up and their representatives in Congress noticed. Suddenly all but a few of the myriad co-sponsors (sponsored in turn by powerful private interests) dropped their support. People boycotted GoDaddy for its pro-SOPA support. Obama reversed his support, which interestingly suggests that he had been siding with the corporate interests rather than the People even though he was purportedly for “real change,” including greater democracy. Obama was going after Arron’s community, including not only hackers, but also democracy activists because they are able to make trouble for those who are already in power, corporate and governmentally. Obama’s administration went after Aaron in order to scare as many in his community as possible so they would not make trouble. Secrecy serves those who are already in power. Aaron was a threat because he was working toward open access to the public square even though reasonable people can disagree as to what rightly goes in there. Interestingly, Aaron had warned of the inordinate NSA spying.

SOPA didn’t pass. In fact, it was withdrawn. Aaron’s community won. Interestingly, the federal government charged Aaron with nine additional counts. Eleven of the thirteen total charges were for violating the terms of service of sites. Orin Kerr, a  lawyer, says in the film that such a type of indictment is unfair. Bryan Stevenson of Equal Right Initiative laments the excessiveness that had taken hold in the American criminal-justice system such that by Aaron’s day, “Anything we are angry about instinctively triggers a criminal justice intervention.” Even looking at a security guard the wrong way can trigger his “need” to call the local police, who have come to be prone to “overkill” in over-estimating degrees of threat. The impulse to “observe,” intimidate, threaten, indict, and prosecute has come to be triggered by people who are merely mad at something. The impulse, in other words, had become too sensitive even by Aaron’s time. Unfortunately, countervailing accountability on the occupants of that system has been hard to come by. The People en masse can pressure governments to contain even the passive aggression inflicted on citizens—particularly those who object. Though this is unlikely, considering how much energy it takes to stimulate a large number of people such that their elected representatives take notice. With regard to the People squeezing in where the corporate-governmental axis is dominant (hegemonic), the corporate lobbyists and the beneficiaries of corporate campaign contributions depend on the illusion of public accountability even as publicly they pay homage to the strong American democracy for and by the People. 

The Post

In Spielberg’s The Post (2017), the fateful decision to publish portions of the Pentagon Papers centers on Katharine Graham’s being willing to rebuff her newspaper’s lawyers, who represent the company’s financial interests, in favor of Ben Bradlee’s argument that free speech of the press as a check on government in a viable democracy—the company’s mission—is of overriding importance. As important as this critical decision was historically, I submit that the film allots too much attention to the decision and even the relationship between Graham and Bradlee at the expense of other deserving matters.

The film gives scant attention to Daniel Ellsberg, the former Marine and military analyst who “brought the Pentagon Papers to The Times, and later to The Post, motivated by an all-American notion that the nation’s citizen’s had the right to know more about what was going on half a world away in a war financed by their tax dollars and fought by so many of their children.”[1] The script does not include, for example, his statement, “Taking an oath as a public servant does not mean keeping secrets or obeying the president—it’s respecting the Constitution.”[2] The viewer sees little if any of the internal struggle that must have led to his conclusion.

Secondly, that Ellsberg first brought portions of the Pentagon’s study to The New York Times is shown in the film mainly through Ben Bradlee’s competitive disappointment rather than showing more of what was going on at The Times. In fact, whereas Bradlee and Graham could look to The Times as a precedent, Arthur O. Sulzberger, publisher of The Times, had no forerunner and thus “took on far more risk,” James Goodale, the paper’s in-house counsel at the time, has written.[3] “It’s as though Hollywood had made a movie about the Times’s triumphant role in Watergate,” he added.[4] Neil Sheehan, the lead reporter on the story, has said in retirement that Sulzberger “was absolutely heroic in publishing the Pentagon Papers. . . . He was all alone in making his decision.”[5]

Thirdly, and most importantly, although the film gives viewers the “important lesson . . . that, in both cases, family-led newspapers placed their journalistic missions ahead of business imperatives. And they did so under intense governmental pressure,” scant attention is allotted to the contents of the articles themselves.[6] Little is revealed other than that administrations going back to Truman’s lied to the American people regarding American involvement and prospects in Vietnam. The film highlights the lying by showing Nixon’s Secretary of State blatantly lie to the press on his view of the prospects for winning the war. The viewer is left with the image of a misled public that is nonetheless supposed to hold its government accountable. Even so, the film does not convey much of what the Pentagon study found. The scattered, cryptic references made at Bradlee’s house are not sufficient, given the potential for informing the viewers, and thus a sizable portion of the American people, on just how bad the lies were by spelling them out.

The medium of film, as well as its popular situs in modern society, can handle making “deep” philosophical issues transparent. In the case of The Post, the increasing power of the American presidency, referred to academically as the imperial presidency, could have received attention, as could have the particular cover-ups by Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon—each lie specified rather than glided over. It was not just Richard Nixon, who can be easily relegated as the crook who occupied the White House for a term and a half. That several presidents successively lied points to something systemic getting in the way of democratic accountability in the U.S. Besides the growing power of the presidency since World War II, the ease by which administrations can insulate themselves from the public, rather than being accountable to it, would have come through more in the film.

In short, more substance on the main character, the Pentagon Papers, as well as the initial roles of Ellsberg and The New York Times, could have come in by not giving so much screen time to the Bradlee-Graham relationship and even the competing interests within The Washington Post. The result would have been more of a multi-level film.  

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[1] Jim Rutenberg, “Spielberg’s ‘The Post’ Provides Fitting End to Turbulent Year for the Media,” The New York Times, December 24, 2017.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.