Film, media and art links
The Toronto Star has an acts of kindness column.
Great images of shooting the “big VB ad”.
About being goth.
Mainstream media in the US are starting to find Obama, particularly his healthcare pitch, funny.
Quentin Tarantino lists his favourite 20 movies since 1992 (i.e. since he became a director). The pro-gun dialogue from Death Proof in a blog with a great title and cover still.
A review of The Hurt Locker: Finally - a movie that takes place in post-Saddam Iraq that is entirely devoid of politics. I have no interest whatsoever is watching either a left-wing or a right-wing movie about the war in Iraq. When I'm in Iraq, American domestic politics, and all the baggage that comes with it, is the last thing I even think about let alone care about. The same seems to be true for most people over there. Hollywood's politics simply do not exist in Iraq, and it's about time the industry put out a movie by people who understand that.
Various media folk seem to be rather bothered by a TV series which tracks down folk wanted for jihadi activity.
Hitch treats Yale University Press publishing a book on the “Danish cartoons” with the contempt it deserves. Then there is the rampant hypocrisy involved. The US association of university Professors is officially contemptuous: "We do not negotiate with terrorists. We just accede to their anticipated demands.” That is effectively the new policy position at Yale University Press
The White House was asking for help keeping track of the online debate on healthcare. (Or perhaps not anymore.)
The Rudd Government wants to extend copyright protection to internet use. Dan Rather wants a Presidential Commission to look at the problems of the news media. The online Long War Journal is soliciting for funds. Journalism online has its own business model.
Rush Limbaugh has fun doing an episode of Family Guy: On the way out another guy comes up, "I'm the only conservative in the building and I just wanted to say hi, and I wanted to see you before you left." And I said, "No, no, no, no, there's another. There are actually two of you." "There are?" I didn't tell him who, I didn't identify him, his secret is safe with me, but I said there's another guy in here that came up and he said he's conservative, too
The US National Endowment for the Arts wants to mobilise art and artists to help Administration initiatives. On the Obama-as-Joker outrage as showing only certain sorts of art-as-transgression are ok. About attempts to justify the double-standard. The image was done by a 20-year old Chicogoan student whose political sympathies are left-of-centre.
A guy turns up at an Obama rally with lots of weapons: the MSNBC reporting (transcript here) is all about sensationalist framing rather than inconvenient facts. Disgust on left and on right ensues. An expatriate American woman who has lived in the UK for thirty years deeply resents the rabid use of the accusation “racist!”.
Blatant bias, even by the BBC’s standards: It simply edited UKIP out of its coverage. On the one o’clock news, a little bar chart came up to represent the results: blue for the Conservatives, red for Labour, yellow for the LibDems and, er, green for the fifth-placed Greens. The party that had come fourth, and been just 800 votes behind the LibDems, wasn’t represented. Nor was UKIP mentioned on the contemporaneous radio news.
Like everyone else, I’m habituated to a measure of one-sidedness from the BBC. … This, though, goes beyond the general Leftiness which we’ve come to expect in drama, comedy and consumer affairs programmes. It is an issue of measurable bias between political parties, of empirically identifiable partisanship.
I hold no brief for UKIP, but this dispute transcends party loyalties. It is one engagement in a wider Kulturkampf. The BBC simply can’t bring itself to be fair to to those it regards as being outside the Left-liberal comity. On the other hand, at least one BBC reporter is prepared to give the retiring head of Greenpeace a hard time over their inaccuracies. Greenpeace’s response.
Peter Costello says the bleeding obvious about the ABC: It was one of those curious occasions when the truth popped out and hung there on the airwaves. I was doing an ABC radio interview last week. A listener sent in a text message - which was read out - suggesting the ABC should engage me as a radio host. I said: "I don't think I have the right political views for the ABC." It was not said with any malice, just an observation of an obvious fact.
… I am not now at the mercy of the media so I can afford to say what everyone on the conservative side of politics knows: the ABC is hostile territory.
… With the ABC, the line of questioning is always predictable. It always comes from the Labor/Green perspective.
Labor will tell you sometimes it gets a hard time on the ABC - and sometimes it does if it is perceived to be betraying ''true Labor principles'' or being too "pro-business" or being insensitive to the environment. But Labor will never be criticised for entrenching union power, or going soft on law enforcement, or spending money it doesn't have.
… When I dropped my inconvenient truth in last week's interview it didn't provoke any outrage or comment. It just hung there. There was a mild effort by my interlocutor to defend the corporation. He pointed out there is a Liberal employed on ABC local radio in Perth. Which says it all. It is quite an oddity that they know about this man in Melbourne. Out of the 4500 ABC employees, they know there is one Liberal.
Economist Paul Krugman and SF writer Charlie Stross discuss stuff at WorldCon. The SF writer says the more interesting things: You go back to 1809 and to get across the English Home Counties, the areas around London, you go via stagecoach and it would take you a couple of days to cross them, it would cost you probably about a month’s wages and cause you considerable discomfort. 2009, it costs about the same amount of money, it takes about the same time and the same amount of discomfort to get from here to New Zealand. The whole world has shrunk to the scale of the English Home Counties in 1809 over about two centuries. …
My working hypothesis is that we are living in a future shocked civilization in fact the future shocked globe. There is a lot of evidence of it all around. The ascendancy of religious fundamentalism in all sorts of cultures is one particular response. People don’t like rapid change when it’s applied to them against their will, when it’s coercive, and when people don’t like something, an external stimulus, they tend to kick back against it. Religious fundamentalism boils down very largely to one thing: certainty in life. It’s one thing, someone will tell you how things are and this is the one way to live. And to people who are disoriented and distressed by the way the world around them is changing that’s got to be a source of … a very attractive offer of mental stability. …
I’ve seen various organizations on different scales and they all seem prey to one form of dysfunction or another. The American software company, we always knew when the executives were going to come visiting the London development office because our managers would go around the morning before, taking down all the Dilbert cartoons that had been stapled to the cubicle walls. (laughter) All of these organizations have interesting dysfunctional approaches to passing information from low down the chain to high up the chain. It’s information flow again.
Great images of shooting the “big VB ad”.
About being goth.
Mainstream media in the US are starting to find Obama, particularly his healthcare pitch, funny.
Quentin Tarantino lists his favourite 20 movies since 1992 (i.e. since he became a director). The pro-gun dialogue from Death Proof in a blog with a great title and cover still.
A review of The Hurt Locker: Finally - a movie that takes place in post-Saddam Iraq that is entirely devoid of politics. I have no interest whatsoever is watching either a left-wing or a right-wing movie about the war in Iraq. When I'm in Iraq, American domestic politics, and all the baggage that comes with it, is the last thing I even think about let alone care about. The same seems to be true for most people over there. Hollywood's politics simply do not exist in Iraq, and it's about time the industry put out a movie by people who understand that.
Various media folk seem to be rather bothered by a TV series which tracks down folk wanted for jihadi activity.
Hitch treats Yale University Press publishing a book on the “Danish cartoons” with the contempt it deserves. Then there is the rampant hypocrisy involved. The US association of university Professors is officially contemptuous: "We do not negotiate with terrorists. We just accede to their anticipated demands.” That is effectively the new policy position at Yale University Press
The White House was asking for help keeping track of the online debate on healthcare. (Or perhaps not anymore.)
The Rudd Government wants to extend copyright protection to internet use. Dan Rather wants a Presidential Commission to look at the problems of the news media. The online Long War Journal is soliciting for funds. Journalism online has its own business model.
Rush Limbaugh has fun doing an episode of Family Guy: On the way out another guy comes up, "I'm the only conservative in the building and I just wanted to say hi, and I wanted to see you before you left." And I said, "No, no, no, no, there's another. There are actually two of you." "There are?" I didn't tell him who, I didn't identify him, his secret is safe with me, but I said there's another guy in here that came up and he said he's conservative, too
The US National Endowment for the Arts wants to mobilise art and artists to help Administration initiatives. On the Obama-as-Joker outrage as showing only certain sorts of art-as-transgression are ok. About attempts to justify the double-standard. The image was done by a 20-year old Chicogoan student whose political sympathies are left-of-centre.
A guy turns up at an Obama rally with lots of weapons: the MSNBC reporting (transcript here) is all about sensationalist framing rather than inconvenient facts. Disgust on left and on right ensues. An expatriate American woman who has lived in the UK for thirty years deeply resents the rabid use of the accusation “racist!”.
Blatant bias, even by the BBC’s standards: It simply edited UKIP out of its coverage. On the one o’clock news, a little bar chart came up to represent the results: blue for the Conservatives, red for Labour, yellow for the LibDems and, er, green for the fifth-placed Greens. The party that had come fourth, and been just 800 votes behind the LibDems, wasn’t represented. Nor was UKIP mentioned on the contemporaneous radio news.
Like everyone else, I’m habituated to a measure of one-sidedness from the BBC. … This, though, goes beyond the general Leftiness which we’ve come to expect in drama, comedy and consumer affairs programmes. It is an issue of measurable bias between political parties, of empirically identifiable partisanship.
I hold no brief for UKIP, but this dispute transcends party loyalties. It is one engagement in a wider Kulturkampf. The BBC simply can’t bring itself to be fair to to those it regards as being outside the Left-liberal comity. On the other hand, at least one BBC reporter is prepared to give the retiring head of Greenpeace a hard time over their inaccuracies. Greenpeace’s response.
Peter Costello says the bleeding obvious about the ABC: It was one of those curious occasions when the truth popped out and hung there on the airwaves. I was doing an ABC radio interview last week. A listener sent in a text message - which was read out - suggesting the ABC should engage me as a radio host. I said: "I don't think I have the right political views for the ABC." It was not said with any malice, just an observation of an obvious fact.
… I am not now at the mercy of the media so I can afford to say what everyone on the conservative side of politics knows: the ABC is hostile territory.
… With the ABC, the line of questioning is always predictable. It always comes from the Labor/Green perspective.
Labor will tell you sometimes it gets a hard time on the ABC - and sometimes it does if it is perceived to be betraying ''true Labor principles'' or being too "pro-business" or being insensitive to the environment. But Labor will never be criticised for entrenching union power, or going soft on law enforcement, or spending money it doesn't have.
… When I dropped my inconvenient truth in last week's interview it didn't provoke any outrage or comment. It just hung there. There was a mild effort by my interlocutor to defend the corporation. He pointed out there is a Liberal employed on ABC local radio in Perth. Which says it all. It is quite an oddity that they know about this man in Melbourne. Out of the 4500 ABC employees, they know there is one Liberal.
Economist Paul Krugman and SF writer Charlie Stross discuss stuff at WorldCon. The SF writer says the more interesting things: You go back to 1809 and to get across the English Home Counties, the areas around London, you go via stagecoach and it would take you a couple of days to cross them, it would cost you probably about a month’s wages and cause you considerable discomfort. 2009, it costs about the same amount of money, it takes about the same time and the same amount of discomfort to get from here to New Zealand. The whole world has shrunk to the scale of the English Home Counties in 1809 over about two centuries. …
My working hypothesis is that we are living in a future shocked civilization in fact the future shocked globe. There is a lot of evidence of it all around. The ascendancy of religious fundamentalism in all sorts of cultures is one particular response. People don’t like rapid change when it’s applied to them against their will, when it’s coercive, and when people don’t like something, an external stimulus, they tend to kick back against it. Religious fundamentalism boils down very largely to one thing: certainty in life. It’s one thing, someone will tell you how things are and this is the one way to live. And to people who are disoriented and distressed by the way the world around them is changing that’s got to be a source of … a very attractive offer of mental stability. …
I’ve seen various organizations on different scales and they all seem prey to one form of dysfunction or another. The American software company, we always knew when the executives were going to come visiting the London development office because our managers would go around the morning before, taking down all the Dilbert cartoons that had been stapled to the cubicle walls. (laughter) All of these organizations have interesting dysfunctional approaches to passing information from low down the chain to high up the chain. It’s information flow again.