Derron Brown is my favorite magician. He manges to be traditional and flamboyant without being cheesy and modern without looking like he’s trying too hard to be street cred. A sort of dapper, younger, Sherlock Holmes, with cards up his sleeve.
23 min 48 sec Dec 25, 2006
What’s most interesting about this documentary is not just the subject, but how representative it is of a particular 60s French style. In other words a very 60s French documentary about a Spaniard who worked in France and made timeless movies. The interviewees include Max Ernst.
Office de Radiodiffusion Television Francaise 37 min 25 sec Dec 30, 2006
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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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“The kind of weight he must have carried on his conscience cannot be understated. His courage and conviction for his country will not be forgotten and, I pray, will live on in those of us left behind. Thank you for your bravery, courage and sacrifice.”
Tibbets was someone to feel truly sorry for, someone who was asked to do an extremely bestial thing, to choose who to sacrifice. My problem is that he never gave any indication that what he was asked to do was a difficult choice. Whether you are morally right or wrong cannot based upon the ultimate judgment of the virtue or depravity of others, i.e. what side you happen to be on.
50 min 1 sec Apr 14, 2007
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One of the things I have noticed about aggressively macho environments is how spectacularly unsuccessful they are at attracting women. When I was at University in the UK, I remember watching the members of the Rugby team stand around in a circle, chugging beer till they regurgitated and then drinking the vomit, as a dare. Girls wretched at the sight of them and fled, and yet these people considered themselves successful in terms of their sexual prowess, rather like builders who whistle at passing skirts with zero chance of reciprocated approval.
If a wolf whistle is still a signal to other guys that you are a player while it is universally unsuccessful in terms of attracting the opposite sex, then
stereotypical Frat-Boy antics are actually about attracting men rather than women. Despite the logic of this argument, which is re-enforced by the evidence in this fascinating documentary, it is Taboo to suggest to adherants. Perhaps the strength of this taboo indicates that Fraternities are indeed a window into primitive culture, without having to travel very far.
59 min 8 sec Oct 29, 2007
Margaret Mead was one of the world’s most celebrated anthropologists. After living with a small Samoan tribe, in the 20s, she published research which suggested nurture was more important than nature, a view shared by her supervisor at Columbia but few others.
This lead to one of the most famous controversies in science, after it was strongly refuted by another anthropologist, Derek Freeman. It’s a controversy that is still unresolved, although a dramatic documentary made in 1987 proved that her evidence was flawed.
Mead argued that the passage from childhood to adulthood in Samoa was a smooth and not marked by the angst and stress seen in the United States. One possible reason: Samoan women deferred marriage for many years while enjoying casual sex, but eventually married, settled down, and successfully reared their own children. Not the kind of society that had values that many Americans shared, in the 20s when it was assumed that less developed societies were primitive in all aspects.
Its very funny that the principal controversy perfectly describes most Western societies today, and yet the debate seems to have pushed this fact, that the initial conditions are now synchronized, into the background. There was no word for teenager in the 20s. Our societies seem to have more rite of passage angst and later settling down – or at least people singing about it. Without our Samoan style society there would be no Emo bands from Brooklyn, or double-wide strollers containing the result of fertility-enhanced, older-couple, pregnancies.
It is a classic case of where politics and science collide, and one that could surely be studied as an anthropological phenomenon in itself. The ‘meta’ nature of it is what appeals to me.
58 min 53 sec Feb 15, 2007
James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, is in a lot of hot water after claiming that black people are less intelligent.
I was dismayed to see how many commenters on websites like Digg were saying things like ‘at least someone has the guts to say it’. It was equally worrying that there was a patronizing undercurrent of ‘perhaps this is true and we should censure science’.
Science may indeed create moral dilemmas – it has already with Darwinism. (Many apologists ignore the fact that Darwinism does in fact create an absolute moral dilemma for the religious. Darwinian creation is cruel, each perfected element being the result of the suffering of others, therefore, you cannot believe in a truly benign creator and the fact of Darwinism). It could have been true that some people are more stupid genetically. This would have been a moral dilemma, had it not been for the fact that the premise is wrong making it not worth examining the conclusion.
The statement ‘black people are more stupid genetically’ is meaningless, for the following reasons:
1. Black does not mean much genetically. Humans migrated out of Africa more than once. In other words, Non Africans are closer related to some Africans than those Africans are to other Africans. Even diseases like Sickle Cell Anemia are not black diseases, per se, just diseases that were inherited with a cultural grouping, having been predominant in malarial regions (thanks Tom).
2. It hasn’t always been black people that were looked down upon. The Romans, for example, had an African emperor and viewed Northern Europeans as being an inferior race.
3. Statistics that correlated lower intelligence with color, had that correlation removed if class were taken into account. I.e. being poor makes you less likely to do well in an IQ test. People who are looked down upon tend to be poorer, like Germans in the Roman Empire.
If accusation of lower intelligence just happens to correspond exactly to prejudice which is due to an irrational grouping of people, then its probably the grouping that is wrong and therefore it not worth looking into whether black people are less intelligent – no dilemma, stupid and biased premise.
Here Steve Jones, a sensible person, talks about genetics, the day after the author of the infamous ‘Bell Curve’ appeared on Charlie Rose.
Charlie Rose Inc. 57 min 47 sec Feb 20, 2007
www.charlierose.com
Child prodigies, as exemplified by Marc Yu, a seven-year-old concert pianist.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” the child psychologist asks. “A psychiatrist” says Marc, adding “only joking”.
I particularly like the scene where he looks bored and turns away from the psychologist, rocking back and forth on a stool in a very ordinary childlike manner, except that he is playing Mary Had a Little Lamb, backwards, behind his back, on the piano. A song he picked out when he was two.
46 min 57 sec Aug 26, 2007
There are three things that people seem to believe in which can’t possibly be true: The Bible; Pro Wrestling and Hypnosis.
I’m not so sure about the last one, so am posting this episode of Myth Busters that looks at hypnosis, before I’ve watched it.
Discovery Channel 43 min 5 sec Jun 13, 2007
I have never liked people who cannot laugh at themselves. I was to have to choose a single trait to measure someone’s humanity, it would be that. Laughter is a powerful weapon for those who take themselves too seriously. This documentary looks at the gradual elimination of that weapon during the Third Reich.
58 min 28 sec Oct 17, 2007 popperslist.blogspot.com