China vs the US – The Battle for Oil

January 5th, 2008 · 1 comment or link to (permalink)

China is perhaps too different from the US culturally and not different enough ideologically for there to be an immediate threat of actual war, however history shows that competition for natural resources tends to cause conflict.

For now, its more natural to secure a beachhead for access to oil resources by fighting against people who are both close enough and just different enough for there to be natural animosity. We fight people who believe in another branch of the Abrahamic religion, Islam rather than Christianity. In the global scheme of things, this is a hair splitting difference not dissimilar from Shia vs Sunni. These people have the resources that the US may eventually end up at war with China over.

Places that have wealth built on natural resources favor bullies who can grab it rather than the educated who have an upper hand when wealth needs to be created rather than mined. Places rich in natural resources: The Democratic Republic of the Congo; Saudi Arabia and Texas are therefore inherently pugnacious and anti-intellectual. From these places fighting springs naturally.

The battle in the subject of this movie is metaphorical. It could very well be figurative.
50 min 6 sec Jan 4, 2008

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Death in Rome

December 22nd, 2007 · 1 comment or link to (permalink)

A film about the murder of former Italian Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, by the Red Brigades in 1978. This was a seminal moment in Italy’s history, comparable to the assassination of JFK. Its also been the subject of so much fiction that its good to watch a documentary on the subject.
45 min 0 sec Dec 15, 2007

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Athens – The truth about Democracy

December 15th, 2007 · 1 comment or link to (permalink)

Don’t be put off by the title, this is not a conspiracy theory piece, but a very interesting (if rather pedestrian in format) re-examination of 5th Century BCE Athens ‘ democracy. This hundred year period two and a half millennia ago, is the model for all Western democracy, yet the reality of its mechanism and outcome is not what has become commonly accepted.

Its a great premise for learning from history, both literally and by analogy.

(These documentaries are wrongly labeled on Google – Part 2 is part one and part 2 is unlabeled)
48 min 4 sec Nov 30, 2007

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Clash of the Worlds: Mutiny

November 29th, 2007 · 1 comment or link to (permalink)

The first in a three part series (the others are in the sidebar after the link, although I haven’t watched them yet) which examines three clashes with the Muslim world during the British Empire: in Sudan, Palestine and India, in order to better understand what is happening now. Sadly, while there are excellent books written on this subject from an American perspective, such as Michael B.Oren’s ‘Power, Faith and Fantasy’, there are no documentaries of any substance.

BBC 2 58 min 14 sec Nov 25, 2007

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Planet of The Arabs

November 2nd, 2007 · 5 comments or link to (permalink)

Planet of the Arabs is a very powerful 9 minute collage of racist stereotyping of Arabs in movies. What’s not at issue for me is the idea that an Arab volunteer from non-Arab Afghanistan might be portrayed (by an Indian) as Kalashnikov wielding, guerrilla fighter, opium trader, rather than a lefty apologist’s flower-growing, freedom fighter. What’s unnerving is the tone and the pattern of racist tradition, i.e. the number of appearances of unattractive, gormless, hook-nosed, brown people with twisted, toothy grins and bar-joke accents. All ominously reminiscent of historic, racist depictions, such as Dickens’ Fagin.

The utterly depressing thing about this film, however, is the context in which it has been received, as a conduit for those who foster both anti-semitism and anti-arabism.

The easiest way to recognize the veracity of a racist claim is to imagine the purported victim belonging to any other group of people and to not confuse equality with similarity or differentiation with prejudice. That thought experiment leads me to think the claim of racism against Arabs may have merit.
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