There is much less difference between the Democrats and the Republicans than the polarization of voters would suggest. They both sit to the right relative to most other Western economies, and both are hostage to jingoism and superstition which again registers higher than in other wealthy nations. My main beef with Bush Jnr. was that he showed no intellectual curiosity, a fundamental trait that differentiates us from beasts. But the Obama administration may be less hostile to knowledge, or science, as it is termed from the Latin.
This program imagines a briefing for the new president (it was made just before the election) and asks some well known scientists what they would teach the President.
The first episode from the mammoth 14 hour documentary about America’s Civil Rights Movement. Further parts here.
I don’t like politics, patriotism or politicians, but just once in a while something happens that renders me cynicismless.
Who would have thought that less than a lifetime after American apartheid, less than a decade after someone called Osama became America’s most feared individual and 5 years after America went to war against someone called Hussein, a black man called Barack Hussein Obama would claim the White House? As a marketing challenge, it would have seemed impossible and that is why this is a triumph of truth over fiction.
But it is much more than that, not since Rome, when racism was traditionally directed against Northern Europeans, has someone of African decent been the most powerful person in the world (Rome had a Libyan Emperor).
The tragic news is that poor people in America, in places like Detroit, where the median house price is less than $10,000 are about to feel the devastating affects of a brutal recession. Just when there seemed to be hope, some people might turn to hopelessness and then to anger. The recession had nothing to do with Barack Hussein Obama. I suspect that will be an even bigger challenge for the truth.
This film is interesting because it has all the superficial appeal of FEBL conspiracy theory junk, but is actually pretty good. The charts are genuinely illustrative and the infomation density reasonable and logical. The premise – that debt is America’s biggest problem is plausible, and logically argued.
It took me ages to figure out what the nagging problem I have with it is, and unfortunately I can’t sum it up in a sound bite. The train of objection goes something like this:
Film says: America has culture which creates debt.
Film says: America’s debt burden will reach levels where it has no control over its destiny.
Film says: America’s creditors are not natural allies.
Film says: US creditors can dictate what America does by threatening to dump dollar.
Film says: America dumped pound to dictate what UK and France did in Suez.
Film says: America needs leadership.
The last point is the fallacy. I would argue that ironically what America actually needs is weak leadership.
Here is the problem.
Like a scientific experiment which seeks a particular outcome, there will always be a train of thought that leads, seemingly rationally to an apocalyptic scenario if you look for it.
America’s creditors will not let it run up a $50 trillion debt – the margin call will happen sooner, and may already have happened.
Decline of Empire tends to be long and drawn out, and quite often the society left is tolerable and intact.
America will likely be the cultural center of the world for a while after it has ceased to be the economic one (It will all be over before while fat lady still sings, if you like).
In other words it will be bad, but not that bad, unless…
America ends up in a large conflict.
History suggests America will go to war, jingoistically and come back capitulated. This is what happened to Europe in WW1 and WW2. This would have to be a much larger war than Iraq and Afghanistan, although if it happens, it will undoubtedly take place in the Middle East.
I would argue, that strong leadership will more likely lead America into war, what America needs is weak leadership so that it can naturally decentralize and the more successful areas survive while it transitions into a different country. America’s biggest danger is not the people or the place, but the idea.
Films like this assume that all that a country has to do is find a sustainable model of existence and everything will work out fine. Empires do not need to be sustainable – they profit from other poorer parts of the world. You cannot have the kind of lifestyle that America has and it be sustainable, it is pointless to look for it. The distribution of wealth will never be flat, but a bell curve and what will happen is that someone else will sit on the right of the bell curve.
Interestingly this implies that China will never have the kind of dominant middle class culture that America has, unless it is geographically specific, because there are too many Chinese to fit into the right hand of the bell curve.
“The amazing life – and disturbing death – of an extraordinary woman who successfully challenged the place of God in American life for 30 notorious years.
Madalyn Murray O’Hair had come to occupy a special place in the American psyche since her 1963 campaign which ended compulsory prayer in US schools after a Supreme Court action on behalf of her son William. O’Hair’s campaign succeeded, but she became the most hated woman in America (her own label), as she fought to take the name of God off the dollar bill – and her son became a born-again Christian.
Then, on a summer’s day in 1995 , she suddenly disappeared, leaving her breakfast dishes on the table – and half a million dollars missing from her organisation’s bank account.”
I have previously posted links to almost all of Adam Curtis’ superlative documentary series apart from this, which examines how the memory of the Second World War was manipulated and changed during the Cold War, in various countries and to suit political ends.
Curtis’ documentaries are always worth watching, they fulfill the instinctive craving that humans have for conspiratorial drama while remaining intelligent, a patently difficult task considering the paucity of other examples. To be fair, Curtis’ pieces are less about secretive cabals than unabashed manipulation through political spin, in an era of manufactured consent.
Despite being a fan of Curtis’ films, I have a problem with the core intellectual premise than envelopes almost everything that he has done. Not only are there few of the secret cabals of the conspiracy theorists that Curtis outshines, which would be like trying to herd tigers (its difficult enough to organize ordinary people, let alone powerful ones with large egos), there is no need for manufactured consent on the scale of what Curtis alleges.
Curtis’ argument is by design, that people are manipulated deliberately. This is something that I would argue is an example of teleological illusion, the hardwiring of human brains to see a creator in everything. If we turn the chain of cause and effect around the other way, then consent isn’t so much fabricated by others, but self-emergent, fabricated by personal desire. Since this requires far less effort, it is more likely to happen most of the time.
The counter argument is that manipulation clearly exists in the real word, from totalitarian propaganda to the seemingly banal world of advertising. The rebuttal is therefore a bit more subtle: that the evolutionary niche that allows for the survival of such things as advertising in a society, and the subsequent manipulation of instinct and desire is actually a product of that desire and driven by it.
This has different implications. Unlike undesirable political manipulation, if the marketplace for distortion of reality is created by us, and if we overcome our irrational desires through reason, it will go away.
We create a fiction to feed our desires and this is a more powerful force than the standalone manipulation comprising manufactured consent, which in turn is more likely than active conspiracy.
In other words, the real world is controlled by Self-delusional Consent.
The interesting thing about this film from the 50s is that it was an era where science was perceived quite differently from now. Science was held in high esteem in the US, but for cultural rather than rational reasons. This was the post war era of scientific spectacle that stretched from the Atom Bomb to the Apollo Program.
The quack medicine in this clip is more stylistically modern than today’s, being based on science itself and machinery and terminology from the atomic age. Today’s quackery is more often based on a reaction against the clinical aspects of science and is more likely to use rustic, ‘natural’ terminology. However, with this fashion, comes a rejection of reason itself, everything becomes relative and expressions like ‘proven treatment’ are taken to be a matter of opinion rather than evidence. This often makes today’s pseudo medical practitioners very difficult to pin down.
Today reason is unfashionable. But it shouldn’t be a matter of fashion, either way. We have regressed, by mistake.
After WWII, which Britain had fought with American weapons while being supplied with American food, the UK was heavily in debt and on the brink of bankruptcy while the US economy was booming. The US demanded repayment for the wartime loans and so John Maynard Keynes went to Washington to ask for an $8billion bailout. He was refused, but given a loan of half the amount on condition that made the US dollar the new reserve currency. This loan was only paid off in 2006.
What does this have to teach us about today? In the details, not very much, but in the big picture view, it says a lot about how we might expect creditors such as China and Japan to behave towards the US, now that dollar priced hegemony may be ending. The current strength of the dollar is a panic move and prefaces an increasingly likely collapse, during which the US will be at the mercy of Asia.
If you want to get really spooked consider this:
“Victor Shih, a specialist in Chinese central banking at Northwestern University, said that when he visited the People’s Bank of China for a series of meetings this summer, he was surprised by how many officials resented the institution’s losses [on dollar assets].
He said the officials blamed the United States and believed the controversial assertions set forth in the book “Currency War,” a Chinese best seller published a year ago. The book suggests that the United States deliberately lured China into buying its securities knowing that they would later plunge in value.”
A documentary about Iran’s nascent contemporary art scene which started to re-emerge 20 years after the revolution. This was largely due to Iran’s baby boomers growing up, creating one of the youngest adult populations on Earth.
The fact that Iran has a very young population is very often overlooked. It gives hope for a more progressive secular culture as suggested by the odd fact that Iran was the third biggest country after the US and Brazil, on Google’s social networking service, Orkut.
Today is FEBL day, and our last example is this from Gary Null. Null communicates all manner of nonsense about health and has a huge axe to grind against doctors. His ideas are widely accused of being very dangerous.
Null speaks in a a very soft, unnaturally calm voice, which scares me, and runs a class on anger management which we show at the top.
In the clip below, we see him becoming very angry and losing his shit altogether. The anger is directed against vaccination, something that individuals undertake for the welfare of the community, an act which has saved the lives of millions.
Null has a problem with the astronomical amount of evidence about the benefit vaccinations which seems oddly personal, and his rage seems to point to a slight flaw in his anger management teaching. Like many of the people in the FEBL category, however, he doesn’t seem to have a sense of irony or humor.
This for me sums up Null as an extremely unstable charlatan. He goes into the FEBL hall of shame.
From the laughing instructor in the video “the laughter does not need to be sincere, it can be faked or simulated”.
In other words, laughter yoga is like a comedy for people with no sense of humor. Anne Coulter fans will be right at home.
[Update – someone kindly dug up an example of this preposterous crap in action, I’ve added the clip below the original]