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Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

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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Copenhagen: changing the climate of democracy

Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics, tagged , , , on December 17, 2009 | 7 Comments »

What makes COP-15 a turning point is that a new set of connections are being forged in the heat of the confrontation of active citizens from around the world with the reality of global political-economic power structures. Paul Hawken’s “largest movement in the world,” the movement of movements made up of environmental, social justice, and indigenous rights civil society organizations — which isn’t a movement yet until it begins to move and act in a coordinated manner — and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s “multitude” — the multiple and internally differentiated force that is, or that can become, capable of acting in common toward a global democracy — are both being born today, in the stark meeting of global justice activism with ecological reality.

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radical orthodoxies, left & right. . .

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , , on November 13, 2009 | 5 Comments »

Slavoj Zizek’s engagement with theologians like radical orthodoxist John Milbank continues to perplex me a little bit, but having heard him speak a few days ago with death-of-God theologian Thomas Altizer at the American Academy of Religion meeting in Montreal left me reassured me that Zizek is far from the wildest (and zaniest) mind out […]

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on politics & ontology

Posted in Philosophy, Politics, tagged , , , on November 2, 2009 | 7 Comments »

(For some reason, this didn’t go out over Google Reader, so I’m re-posting it…) The Speculative Realist blogosphere has been abuzz over the relationship between ontology and politics. Nick Srnicek’s post at Speculative Heresy – and the many comments on it – provide a good entry point to this discussion. Nick has wisely redrawn his […]

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