The expected response to videos like this (be warned that this is graphic) is how violence should affect humans. It should be a shocking awakening of violence both without and within. Violence should not be glorified but rather be horrifying–in the purest sense of that word.
Archive for the 'Current Events' Category
Page 2 of 6
The debate about healthcare in the US has provoked my thinking about politics in general. I’ll be upfront in case my point gets lost in the mix: political ideologies are consumer products that are marketed, purchased, and consumed like any ‘trendy’ clothing line.
Right after 9/11, the ‘trendy’ thing was to be conservative and ‘patriotic’. When the Dixie Chicks spoke their opinions about President Bush, they wound up committing public suicide because, from one perspective, they were out-of-sync with the ‘trendy’ political stance. At this point, conservatism was marketed as the minority fighting against the overwhelming liberal majority. They were the sane part of the government who were thankfully in power at the time. In the Autumn of 2008, these conservatives joined with their ‘liberal’ counterparts and pumped millions of dollars into large corporations to keep them afloat. Yes, at that moment in time, ‘socialism’ was the trendy thing. It was happening throughout developed nations. Now, as Obama and the Democrats (NB: that would be a cool band name) are trying to reform healthcare, the trendy product has been to reject that healthcare because it is ‘socialist’ (ignoring that other ‘socialist’ thing that happened before the election even took place). Right now, the hot, trendy political ideology is right-wing Republicanism (both traditional conservatism and neoconservatism), probably in part to the consumption of right-wing leaning products such as FoxNews, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Times (two of which are owned by Rupert Murdoch).
With ideologies being consumed like products, there is no independent thought even though most would agree one of the hallmarks of modernity was thought independent of any overbearing institution (be it king or church). Perhaps that should read ‘there has never been independent thought’. We have deluded ourselves into thinking that our thoughts are truly independent, even if they reverberate clearly with the marketed political products. These products have been so successful at fading into the background that we have long forgotten they ever existed as products and accept them as our own core beliefs. I am deliberately echoing Nietzsche’s definition of ‘Truth’ here because we take our political products as things based on some unshakeable Truth. We no longer see ourselves as members of a political party towing the party line but as independent observers who happen to agree with the party lines. We’ll argue that if the party were to change a particular set of beliefs, we would disagree with them, but so far no action in any party has been sufficiently large to really provoke this. Even Arlen Specter’s jumping ship to another party was, for all intents, a non-event.
We have succumbed to the siren song of truth in politics. Even politics has its own advertisements–not just for candidates during election but for every ‘major’ issue. These advertisements succeed in the same way Wikipedia does: cite something, give a source, and hope that nobody reads it well enough. The problem with this comparison, however, is that people on Wikipedia do (sometimes) read things well enough to see the forest for the trees and change it. That doesn’t happen in politics. At best, we get more non-events (like David Cameron publicly rebuking Daniel Hannan while also drumming up support for the same things he’s rebuking Hannan) that are always void of substance. That’s because the substance was never there to begin. It’s always been an empty façade hiding an empty void. The ‘Truth’ in politics is that there is no Truth beyond that which is fabricated for the product…and we all have purchased it.
I’m getting really excited about my upcoming British Isles tours. In one and a half weeks, the madness games begin. First up in July is my wife’s friend from uni is coming to do her own tour of the British Isles. She arrives on a Thursday and will be switching planes here in Glasgow for a weekend trip to Ireland. We’ll be centering ourselves around Belfast on the recommendation of some colleagues here. I’ve planned two separate day trips, one to Giant’s Causeway and another to Newgrange and Knowth. We return to Glasgow late on Monday. Then, our friend takes a trip to England for a few days in the week and returns for the weekend (while my wife and I work). The second weekend of July, we’ll be traveling to see a few castles (possibilities include Scone, Stirling, and Glamis). Then, our first visitor leaves on the following Monday.
Our second set of visitors is my wife’s mother and youngest sister. They arrive on the Friday of that same week (giving us a few days to finish off work, clean up, and tie up any loose ends). It also happens that our anniversary (has it only been four years??) falls between these two visits, so I hope to do something for that in the in-between time. Their first weekend will be a little tamer than our first visitor’s, as we’ll be staying around Glasgow for that weekend. However, once the weekend’s over, we’re heading up north into the Scottish Highlands. We’ll spend a night in Carbisdale Castle, followed by a run through Loch Ness, Skye, Oban (with a photo stop at Castle Stalker), Iona, and Loch Lomond before returning to Glasgow a few days later. We’ll spend the weekend recovering from that run, but it won’t last long.
Part three of our month will be a raid into English territory (finally). We’ll first make a run to London through the eastern part of England, passing through Leeds and Nottingham to see Fountains Abbey, Herriot country, and Nottingham Castle (with the Sherwood Forest). After a few days in London, we’ll begin our journey back through the western part of England (sorry, no Wales this trip), passing through Stonehenge, Avebury, Bath, Manchester, Carlisle (and the Lake District), Hadrian’s Wall, and possibly Edinburgh before returning to Glasgow. With July over, our visitors will return to the New World and leave us to hibernate in the quickly growing night that is winter in the north (we’ll lose two hours of daylight between now and the time they leave in August).
Needless to say, I’ll be very sparse in July.
http://www.oban.org.uk/index.php
I recently watched Bill Maher’s documentary Religulous. I had been interested in it for a while because I have a good deal of respect for Maher and both of his TV series (Politically Incorrect and Real Time). In one aspect, this show did a great analysis of the fundamentalist variety of religion. However, Maher also extends this analysis to all varieties of religion; and this argument follows the same reasoning that he criticises.
I take the main focus of the film to be that religious faith and objective science is incompatible. In fact, religious faith is now an absurdity in these modern times. Maher travels quite a bit throughout the US, Europe, and Israel interviewing people who would generally be classified as fundamentalists in their approaches to theology. At one point, he is interviewing Ken Ham (of Answers in Genesis and its Creation Museum fame). He takes Ham to task in resolving huge differences between scientific evidence and the “common sense” literal reading of creation espoused by young Earth creationism. From my perspective, Ham’s creationism here has already lost its sense of direction by adopting the language and system of scienctific observation that negates the teleological goal of creationism. In oversimplified terms, Ham’s creation science is much like trying to raise freshwater fish in salt water; the freshwater fish behave at the cellular/organic level differently than saltwater fish. The language and goals of the creation story in Genesis, much like the stories of Christ in the Gospels, are not meant to adhere to modern-day scientific (or biographical) literature. In this respect, Maher is spot on with his critique of faith. If one holds religious faith to be coterminal with empirical science, faith will always lose because it centers on phenomena that exceed the bounds empirical science has made for itself.
On the other hand, Maher’s critique is the the “atheist version” of the very thing he critiques. In one segment, he is asking a few Muslims (including an imam) about the Qur’an. His questions fall along the lines of “the Qur’an says to kill infidels, is this true?” Every Muslim asked answers the question along the lines of “that is not how we interpret that text because it was linked to a particular historical context that no longer exists.” Maher pushes his point by denying the possibility of interpretation, setting himself up as the more accurate interpreter than the believers who study the text! This is the same thing that he critiques people such as Ken Ham (and others). In other words, Maher wants religious/theological hermeneutics to be a closed event ripped from any context and made into an absolute ideological framework in order to reject religion. He then rationalises his work by claiming its standpoint of doubt is the best position.
Ironically, it is here that Maher again falls prey to the very thing he criticises. If doubt is the best place to stand, he hasn’t doubted enough! The “true” sceptic is the one that doubts everything, not just what one is prejudiced against. Maher emphasis empirical science as the strongest evidence for his position, yet he never doubts the framework of assumptions that undergird the empirical sciences. He never suggests that empirical evidence itself may be already tainted by a predisposition to certain beliefs (namely, that an external world exists and is discernable). Obviously, then, Maher should insist that some kind of belief is “acceptable” without entering into fundamentalism or scepticism. It seems, then, that the rational position is somewhere between the fundamentalism he decries while using and the scepticism he touts while evading.
One last thing of interesting note is that Maher suggests in his film that science has discovered a gene that is linked to belief in God. Ironically, the original researcher said that it was linked to spirituality and “feeling God’s presense” and not to simple belief in God. Further, these findings were never published in peer-reviewed literature. Even more striking is that this gene can also be associated with the feeling of beloning to a political party. In other words, it isn’t a very strong theory and it doesn’t suggest that belief in God is a genetic trait. Perhaps if Maher had utilised more of his “scepticism,” he would have noticed that.
I thought I should update everyone with information on upcoming conferences which I plan to attend:
24 April 2009: Speculative Materialism and Speculative Realism in Bristol. Conferees include Ray Brassier, Graham Harman, and Iain Hamilton Grant. Quentin Meillassoux was originally scheduled for the conference but is unable to attend in person; however, he will still be sending his paper. This is highly recommended for anyone who has a blog reading list that is similar to mine on the side ( –>).
3 – 7 August 2009: Deleuze Camp. This is a warm-up to…
10-12 August 2009: CONNECTDeleuze. Both are in Köln, Germany (Cologne). This is the annual Deleuze Studies conference and features a mostly “who’s who” of Deleuze scholarship (minus John Protevi?). Highly recommended for anyone interested in Deleuzian thought. The CFP for the conference is open through April.
22-24 April 2010: Resonance(s) in Istanbul. This conference’s focus is on philosophy, arts, and politics. While not as huge as the above conference, it will be headlining a healthy dosage of Deleuzians. The CFP is open through August.
