Post by hibernicus on Feb 25, 2014 20:08:23 GMT
The reference is to the style of trousers which all the male characters wear in the film (it also features a near-future Los Angeles which has acquired a light rail system and where large numbers of middle-class professionals live in classy apartment blocks downtown, whereas present-day Los Angeles is the poster child for urban sprawl - i.e. building outwards not upwards).
It is not in principle impossible for a machine to be a person, though it is technically unlikely. There is a famous 1951 short story by the Catholic science-fiction writer Anthony Boucher in which a robot ends up being martyred and canonised. (Apparently it was intended as a rejoinder to an Isaac Asimov story which implicitly advocates atheism by depicting a robot who comes to believe that a robot-god must have created him in his own image and it is impossible that he should have been created by humans.)
Link to the text is below - I'll leave you to see how it works out for yourself. (Note by the way the assumption that a persecuted church in a post-nuclear wilderness would still be saying the Leonine prayers at the end of the Tridentine-rite Mass, which is where the reference to "the liberty and exaltation of our holy mother the Church" comes from):
facstaff.uww.edu/carlberj/aquin.htm
The oddity of our present-day attitude to the body is partly explained when it is realised that it is presented not as something given but as something that we can remake and reshape at will. (In that sense it is not that odd that there should be websites which defend and promote anorexia and bulimia by claiming they are not illnesses but lifestyles.) I remember a cranky right-wing American columnist (in some respects a very evil man) writing about MAD MEN and saying something which made a lot of sense - that the form of dandyism reflected in the snappy suits of the late 1950s (one of the features of that series which attracted attention) had not gone away with the sixties shift to informal dressing - instead, the focus of dandyism/snobbery had shifted to the body underneath the clothes. (Think of the scorn openly expressed for fat plebeian Americans by the well-cut well-to-do, and you will see what he meant.)
It is not in principle impossible for a machine to be a person, though it is technically unlikely. There is a famous 1951 short story by the Catholic science-fiction writer Anthony Boucher in which a robot ends up being martyred and canonised. (Apparently it was intended as a rejoinder to an Isaac Asimov story which implicitly advocates atheism by depicting a robot who comes to believe that a robot-god must have created him in his own image and it is impossible that he should have been created by humans.)
Link to the text is below - I'll leave you to see how it works out for yourself. (Note by the way the assumption that a persecuted church in a post-nuclear wilderness would still be saying the Leonine prayers at the end of the Tridentine-rite Mass, which is where the reference to "the liberty and exaltation of our holy mother the Church" comes from):
facstaff.uww.edu/carlberj/aquin.htm
The oddity of our present-day attitude to the body is partly explained when it is realised that it is presented not as something given but as something that we can remake and reshape at will. (In that sense it is not that odd that there should be websites which defend and promote anorexia and bulimia by claiming they are not illnesses but lifestyles.) I remember a cranky right-wing American columnist (in some respects a very evil man) writing about MAD MEN and saying something which made a lot of sense - that the form of dandyism reflected in the snappy suits of the late 1950s (one of the features of that series which attracted attention) had not gone away with the sixties shift to informal dressing - instead, the focus of dandyism/snobbery had shifted to the body underneath the clothes. (Think of the scorn openly expressed for fat plebeian Americans by the well-cut well-to-do, and you will see what he meant.)