The Corporation – now there’s a good documentary. I saw this at the Schonell Theatre this evening. What a pity it’s showing at only a handful of cinemas around the country. Everyone concerned about their future should go and see this film (yes, the whole 2 hours and 20 minutes of it). This film examines the inner workings of the entity that has come to be known as the corporation. Startlingly, corporations in the US have been granted many of the same rights as human beings. Strangely, corporations assert these rights under the 14th amendment – an amendment to the US constitution intended to bestow rights upon the slaves freed by the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Over time, for whatever reason, corporations came to be viewed as persons, and were thus accorded the same rights as persons. Yet, corporations do not have a sense of ethics, they have no moral conscience. In fact, and as the documentary so skillfully demonstrates, corporations have the mindset of a psychopath. They have no regard for anything, except their duty to their shareholders and to the bottom line. One thing I found immensely pleasing about this documentary is that the makers were so sure of their convictions and so confident about the message they were seeking to put across that they were not afraid to interview proponents on both sides of the fence. Nobody could accuse this film of being biased. For me, this is one of the things that makes it a much better documentary than Michael Moore’s recent films (Michael Moore is interviewed in The Corporation, however, and it could be said that his comments in this film are rather more poignant than most of his commentary in his own films). In short, I cannot emphasize the importance of this film enough. Just do yourself a favour and see this film.
Meanwhile, my brother’s watching Mary Poppins. That’s a pretty long movie too. All the spoonfuls of sugar and chim chim cherees add up to three hours (including ads, too).
I wrote a little bit more of my thesis. I spent a lot of time trying to explain how I’d derived an equation which describes the way a resource description spreads through the network. I’m not sure that what I’ve written is very clear. The approach to take from now on, I think, is to just write everything down, and then come back and fix it later. Seeing the pages of writing pile up provides an incentive to keep writing, so I reckon I should just write while I’m in the mood for it, and worry about trying to improve the quality later. This policy would seem to concur with expert advice I’ve received from my thesis writing consultant. :)
