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Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

Cape Wind’s next-gen ecology

Posted in Eco-culture, Politics on May 8, 2010 | 1 Comment »

How refreshing to be finally moving into the era of green-green conflicts — ecological controversies in which both sides claim to be defending what we used to call “nature” (or “the ecology”) and both actually make a good case for it. The Cape Wind energy project presages the kind of ecological conflict we will hopefully […]

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Earth Day 40

Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics, tagged , , , on April 23, 2010 | 4 Comments »

I’ve been posting links to Earth Day news in the shadow blog (which you can follow in the column to your right on the Immanence main page). The most interesting news, to my mind, was the initiative for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth and the calls to establish an international climate […]

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climate intelligence

Posted in Climate change, Politics on April 2, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Greenpeace has done a nice (counter) intelligence report on Koch Industries’ funding of the climate denial machine. According to the report, the Kansas-based petroleum and chemical industry conglomerate funded a network of lobbyists, think tanks, and front groups including the Mercatus Center, the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and others, […]

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morsels

Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Politics, tagged , , , , on February 25, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

First, for anyone living in a JonStewartless alternate universe… Stewart (and Samantha Bee) giving Glenn Beck a history lesson (about progressivism) was pretty funny. Beck may be a cheap target, but it’s also a cheap (free) history lesson. Take this country back, Glenn, way back… www.thedailyshow.com Next, Denmark’s new tourist ad campaign by Lars von […]

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authoritarian body politics

Posted in Cinema, Politics, tagged , , , , on February 23, 2010 | 1 Comment »

(This post has been sitting in my Drafts folder for several days, but since it mentions The White Ribbon, which I just named 2009’s best film, I thought I might as well share it.) I just got around to reading Timothy Snyder’s brilliantly lucid article Holocaust: The ignored reality, fittingly after recently seeing Michael Haneke’s […]

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Swift/climate/boating the media

Posted in Climate change, Media ecology, Politics, tagged , on February 11, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Having published the results of its 12-part investigation into the leaked/hacked climate scientist e-mails at the University of East Anglia, the Guardian is now inviting “web users to annotate the manuscript to help us in our aim of creating the definitive account of the controversy.” It’s a kind of public version of peer review for […]

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“clean” coal

Posted in Eco-culture, Music & soundscape, Politics, tagged , , , on January 28, 2010 | 3 Comments »

Today is National Coal Ash Action Day, as MountainJustice.org reminds us — see the information there on what you can do about it. Meanwhile, Climate Ground Zero reports on a fascinating case unfolding in West Virginia’s coal country, where tree sitters have halted blasting of a mountaintop by Massey Coal company. Climate justice folks have […]

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one of these (ambiguous & contradictory) mornings

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , on January 24, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Valery Lyman’s 16-minute film, One of These Mornings, captures the pain, the joy, the happiness, and the excitement embodied in the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. Now, a year and a couple of months after that election, Ben Ehrenreich’s Slate piece on the dramatic failures (already!) of the international, but especially US, response […]

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exquisite corpse

Posted in Politics, tagged on January 22, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Michael Bérubé’s In praise of humility is so good I can’t resist posting a link to it. Why, indeed, has the Obama revolution lost its steam? I think Bérubé must be aiming for Andrei Codrescu‘s job as NPR’s occasional commentator extraordinaire. Read it and weep (at least until you realize what’s going on). Incidentally, Bérubé’s […]

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Hell, nature, & justice in Haiti

Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged , , on January 14, 2010 | 2 Comments »

What do we do in the aftermath of such a disaster, except to express profound sadness, shock, and sympathy, and to send donations to aid and relief organizations working in the affected areas? How do we even portray it in a way that respects the victims? Citizen media, according to Media Nation blogger Dan Kennedy, […]

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Invictus & the politics of affect

Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Politics, Visual culture, tagged , , , on January 2, 2010 | 14 Comments »

There are many things one can say about Invictus: about Freeman’s portrayal of Mandela, Eastwood’s directorial prowess and editorial conceits (e.g., masculinity and its transformation through individual experience), the film’s characterization of post-Apartheid South Africa, and the accuracy or inaccuracy of its portrayal of the actual story of the South African national rugby team’s, the Springboks’, stunning rise to victory in the 1995 World Cup. What interests me most, though, is its depiction of mass affect and collective emotion, which are portrayed in two of the main variants these take in today’s world: sports and politics. [. . .]

The film’s crystal moments, those affect-carrying plateaus or peak moments embodying its main tensions, are those surrounding the combat on the field and its emanation into the crowd: slowed down crunches of bodies against bodies (unprotected, unlike in American football), sweat leaping between them out of their crushing impact, rapid cuts between on-field plays that occur too quickly to be followed and can only be enjoyed as sheer spectacle, and crowds leaping for joy, singing, applauding, and dancing, their emotions spreading like waves across the stadium, the streets, and the nation. [. . .]

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two democracies… (& planet compost)

Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Media ecology, Politics, tagged , , on December 19, 2009 | 3 Comments »

The responses to the final COP-15 “deal” from the environmental and social justice communities seem, at this point, to be largely negative. It’s a start, some acknowledge, but it’s pretty late to be starting, and it’s really pretty vacuous — a lost opportunity. My last post tried to put a positive spin on things by arguing that the events in Copenhagen reflect the tension between two models of democracy, and that there is hope for the future in the very crystallization of the second model. Let me expand on that a little.

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