Pit Bull

I doubt there are many people who need to be convinced that dog fighting is barbaric, however this film gives a rare glimpse into how people can convince themselves that something so obviously cruel is acceptable.

We see a man from Tucson carefully rearing a Pit Bull puppy, chained next to an infant seat (i.e. he has a family) for it to be built up into a good fighter, a noble warrior. In other words, it is much more complicated than saying that he hates dogs and wants to torture them. He does not perceive his persona to be much different from someone who would have any other member of their family deliberately raised as a fighter. I suspect he fancies himself as a gladiatorial trainer, rather than a someone with a deep inferiority complex. And I would argue that this is exactly how the chain of torture does extend to humans.

The second issue is what is to be done about Pit Bulls. There is a cultural difference between the UK and the US here. In the UK all Pit Bulls were killed (rightly so, in my opinion), and yet in the US it would seem that the public outcry would prevent it. Pit Bulls are often owned by the same types of people that nurse spent Greyhounds, other poor animals, but ones that haven’t been known to eat your children (that’s what eventually provoked their slaughter in the UK). The argument is that even if Pit Bulls have been bred (or nurtured) to be monsters, they had no choice in the matter and therefore we should let the innocent live until found guilty.

The logic of this seems strange. When we raise and breed animals such as dogs, which are carnivores, many more animals will die to feed the dog. We are therefore prioritizing the monster over the cute, whether we like it or not.

50 min 53 sec Nov 16, 2007

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4 comments society

Kick Ass Miracles – Mind and Body (yes that really is the title)

This is a another great example of FEBL media. Compulsive viewing: travelogue; mysticism; jazz beards; toothless 300 year old Thai shamen.

A Chip Shop owner from Birmingham, England, who has spent six years living with Kung Fu monks after seeing a Tarantino movie, guides you through the mysteries of the mystical Orient. The title alone, ‘Kick Ass Miracles’ is worthy of an entire social anthropology conference.

Suggested conference panel topics:

1. Kick Arse or Kick Ass, the use of contemporary American slang in British youth TV.
2. Exorcising Noddy Holder. How presenters hide Birmingham accents when presenting British youth TV while pretending to be hip to American jive and concealing salary handicapping regional dialects by reverting to mockney (fake Cockney).
3. An ornithology of miniature Jazz Beards, Soul Patches and facial hair amongst presenters of British youth TV.
4. The clash of civilizations. 2000 year old dangerously poisonous herbal remedies and skateboard culture as exemplified by British youth TV.
5. Where Ali G gets his material.

“So ere we ah in Souf Eeeeest Aishah, wheh we gunna check aht some KNARLY two fowsand yeea owd ‘erbuw remedy. Innit.”

Enjoy.

27 min 44 sec May 7, 2007
peety-passion.com

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2 comments comedy, FEBL, religion, society

Zeitgeist – the greatest lie ever told

If you spend time poring through Google Video, as I do, you have to develop a filter for the endless sea of Religious, New Age or Conspiracy Theorist crap. Zeitgeist is the latest addition to this fecal tide, but I am linking to it because its an interesting example of a media phenomenon. A bad phenomenon but an interesting one.

There are a finite set of actors for conspiracy theory plots: Christians, Merovingians, the Illuminati, Freemasons, Jews, the Federal Reserve, and the most recent catastrophe that is closest to home (JFK assassination, 911 etc.). From the anti-semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to Dan Brown’s the Da Vinci code, Alex Jones’ 911 rantings and now Zeitgeist. They are all part of the same genus – the Fucking Entertaining Big Lie (FEBL).

You can usually spot a FEBL film from the outset because they often use cheap graphic effects with bad rendering and metaphors. In Zeitgeist we have the earth surrounded by a pixelated metal cage. Zeitgeist comes in three parts and an Overture (and not much of a Coda). The Overture shows a series of powerful archive imagery of violent acts, historically relevant to an American audience. The images of violence are treated seriously, but they are basically entertainment.

Part 1. is a loosely plagiarized version of the God Who Wasn’t There, complete with much of the same archive footage. The premise is that Christianity is based upon previous religions. Fair enough, apart from the plagiarism. Part 2 and 3 show 911 and then talk about the Federal Reserve and how, you know, like everything is linked man. 911 seems to be used in the same way as the Overture – as violent pornography, a real life Die Hard, but under the guise of polemic. The argument about the Federal Reserve as a government conspiracy, begs the question – why would a conspiratorial public body setup a private central bank? In Zeitgeist, anti-Semitism has been replaced by jingoist libertarianism – somehow the idea of American income tax is un-American, and free trade within North America shows Lou Dobbs as a patriot fighting against dark forces, rather than an armchair racist.

Here is the problem, FEBL media usually means nothing and is patently false but incredibly seductive. It is the perfect scaffold to hang propaganda and acts like a bit-borne, pernicious narcotic. Although films like Zeitgeist are mildly entertaining, due to their unbelievable popularity (more than 5 Million people have watched it on YouTube), they must be taken seriously. I suspect they might actually be dangerous, and therefore, as someone who does not believe in censorship it is important to make fun of Zeitgeist as the tired piece of po-faced, visually illiterate, polemically challenged, pornographic bullshit that it is.

36 min 51 sec Nov 5, 2007 www.zeitgeistmovie.com

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320 comments religion, society

Planet of The Arabs

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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5 comments politics, society, world

Frat House

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

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8 comments society

Tales From The Jungle: Margaret Mead

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

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3 comments biography, science, society, world

Steve Jones Interview – (in light of the Watson controversy)

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

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2 comments interviews, politics, science, society

Jonathan Meades – On The Brandwagon

Jonathan Meades looks at the branding and regeneration of inner cities through spectacular, but ultimately vacuous, signature buildings such as Bilbao’s “museum with nothing in it” – Gehry’s Guggenheim, and through loft style modernism light – rather like the ridiculous and vapid Phillipe Stark or Armani Casa condos being built in Wall Street, where I live.

The case is put with great wit and erudition, complete with sarcastic marketing doublespeak, throughout. The conclusion is that the end result of this insincere, marketing driven, regeneration is that the once diseased inner cities have merely relocated their problems to the areas beyond the ring roads. The places where they burn cars nightly in the Banlieus, but its not just in France.

This is the trend that was identified years ago by Mike Davis in city of quartz, but the difference is that Davis realized it is a phenomenon independent of the brand of politics, social libertarianism (read Blairism), that Meades sees as the culprit. But its worth seeing Meades do his bit because he says it so well. He understands architecture so much better than a Frank Gehry or Daniel Libeskind, who have become glorified window dressers able to plonk a building anywhere in the word, to rapturous acclaim, without actually having ever been there.

Play all parts.

3 comments architecture, smashing telly top 10 documentaries, society, world

Crumpet – A Very British Sex Symbol

58 min 10 sec Sep 22, 2007

popperslist.blogspot.com

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Tony Livesey is a former UK tabloid editor. Here he takes a look at sexy women in retro British popular culture, suggesting the slang term for cute, ‘crumpet’ embraces something fun and Vaudeville that we no longer have (I’d beg to differ – we still have it in spades).

In case you think this is too specific or too sexist, he also did a show called beefcake, about guys. And if you want to tap into the particular tabloid style that many successful weblogs are adopting, this UK tabloid, tits and arse meets fox news style is a better precedent than anything in the US. I have never had a problem with the booby and ass bit, its fun, but the tabloid political stance is repulsive. This show is about the former and is smashing telly.

1 comment nostalgia, society

The Winstons

59 min 28 sec Sep 18, 2007

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I don’t agree with the simplistic conclusions of this nevertheless well researched documentary which looks at Winston Churchill, and Winston Smith’s creator, George Orwell.

The conclusion is that for all their differences, Orwell and Churchill knew that sometimes you had to fight. But I would argue that Churchill enjoyed it. Orwell was complex, Churchill, simple, patriotic, jingoistic, the type of person that sent in troops to shoot poor people – in his own country.

2 comments history, society