Goddess Artemis
Month: March 2012
Another factor is job insecurity, what economists like to call “flexibility in the labour markets,” which is a good thing under the reigning academic theology, but a pretty rotten thing for human beings, whose fate doesn’t enter into the calculations of sober thinking. Flexibility means you better work extra hours or else. There are no contracts and no rights. That’s flexibility. We’ve got to get rid of market rigidities. Economists can explain it.
Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)
Weighing in on Kony
About Magick and Change, that’s the tagline for this blog and I like to keep it on topic. The Kony campaign as an interesting vehicle of change fits the bill. It’s a complex issue that deserves some attention.
The Good
I’m starting with the good because I see a lot more positive impact than negative. To all you folks out there nay saying the campaign I say – good work, you’ve brought some interesting and important facts to light. But this is a gotcha moment. Would you even be talking about these things if not for the Kony campaign?
I’ve had Gandhi on the mind lately. He wrote articles and published journals his entire life and believed strongly that influencing the press was a vital component to civil disobedience. If the people of England knew nothing of India’s plight, change would have been much slower. They exerted pressure on their government to change their policies.
If the Kony campaign has done anything, it has given us some, if not new, extremely effective ways of using the internet. It has shown how to make a social justice issue go viral in a big way. This is a good thing.
To all those out there saying that changing your Facebook picture or re-posting this video does nothing, you’re plain wrong. Awareness is vital in any campaign. If all you did was get someone else to question what was going on in Africa, you’ve done a good thing. Maybe that video reached someone with time and resources to enact larger changes. Don’t write off arm chair activism. It has its purpose.
Most importantly, the Kony campaign has gotten a lot of people to ask, what the fuck is going on in Africa? A question rarely asked here. You may not agree with the stance taken by Invisible Children, I don’t, but it’s in the realm of public debate now. A lot of people said the same thing about Occupy Wall Street. They say it didn’t accomplish anything. Except now, even politicians are framing debates in terms of 99 and 1 percent. Before, income inequality and class war weren’t even on the radar.
Maybe, just maybe, because of the Kony campaign, people may realize the problems in Africa are huge, way bigger than Kony and the LRA. Maybe we will have a discussion about economic colonialism. At least this time it’s mostly not our (US) fault, as Africa was given over to Europe’s zone of control after WWII, and they have done most of the fuckery there.
Last, on a personal note, the video uses music from Trent Reznor, so it can’t be totally evil 😉
The Bad
Anything that seeks a military solution to a problem automatically sets off my bullshit detector. Yes, this guy does need to get arrested. Do we need to be involved in that? Going on a head hunt for Kony is only taking care of the symptoms, not the disease. We all know what the cure is, less poverty, less guns, less corruption, less exploitation by foreign powers, less influence by religious leaders, more education. Do this, and guys like Kony will dry up and go away. Yet the Kony video only makes passing references to these problems and solutions.
I’m not saying stop looking for him. I’m not saying that his arrest would not alleviate some suffering, but it will be negligible and temporary. There’s a hundred guys ready to step in and take his place. There are already a hundred guys doing the exact same thing all over Africa. It is not our place to send more guns, that will only add to the problems. It is up to the people of Sudan or Uganda, or wherever this asshole is hiding, to bring him in. It is up to us to own up to what we are responsible for: supporting dictators, economic exploitation, manufacture and distribution of arms.
Last, don’t make the Hitler reference, just don’t. It cheapens any argument you make.
Here’s my challenge to everyone who wants to get involved in the Kony campaign. First, educate yourself on what is going on in the region. Find out why it is the way it is. If you agree with the solutions put forth by the campaign, go for it. But at least learn something while you’re doing it.
My challenge to Invisible Children. How about on April 20 you release a video showing how colonial influence has fucked up Africa, and made guys like Kony possible to begin with.
A symbolic expression of this disaster is that when Hewlett wrote her book a year ago, 146 countries had ratified the international convention on the rights of the child, but one had not: the U.S. That’s a standard pattern for international conventions on human rights. However, just for fairness, it’s only proper to add that Reaganite conservatism is catholic in its anti-child, anti-family spirit, so the World Health Organization voted to condemn the Nestle Corporation for aggressive marketing of infant formula, which kills plenty of children. The vote was 118 to 1. I’ll leave you to guess the one. However, this is quite minor compared with what the World Health Organization calls the “silent genocide” that’s killing millions of children every year as a result of the freemarket policies for the poor and the refusal of the rich to give any aid. Again, the U.S. has one of the worst and most miserly records among the rich societies.
Another symbolic expression of this disaster is a new line of greeting cards by the Hallmark Corporation. One of them says, “Have a super day at school.” That one, they tell you, is to be put under a box of cereal in the morning, so that when the children go off to school it says, Have a super day at school. Another one says, “I wish I had more time to tuck you in.” That’s one that you stick under the pillow at night when the kid goes to sleep alone. [laughter] There are other such examples.
In part this disaster for children and families is the result simply of falling wages. State corporate policy has been designed for the last years, especially under the Reaganites and Thatcher, to enrich small sectors and to impoverish the majority, and it succeeded. It’s had exactly the intended effect. That means that people have to work much longer hours to survive. For much of the population both parents have to work maybe fifty to sixty hours merely to provide necessities. Meanwhile, incidentally, corporate profits are zooming. Fortune magazine talks about the “dazzling” profits reaching new heights for the Fortune 500 even though sales are stagnating.
Noam Chomsky – Mellon Lecture, Loyola University, Chicago, 1994 (via noam-chomsky)
The process of creating and entrenching highly selective, reshaped or completely fabricated memories of the past is what we call “indoctrination” or “propaganda” when it is conducted by oficial enemies, and “education,” “moral instruction” or “character building,” when we do it ourselves. It is a valuable mechanism of control, since it selectively blocks any understanding of what is happening in the world.
One crucial goal of successful education is to deflect attention elsewhere —say, to Vietnam, or Central America, or the Middle East, where our problems allegedly lie—and away from our own institutions and their systematic functioning and behavior, the real source of a great deal of the violence and suffering in the world. It is crucially important to prevent understanding and to divert attention from the sources of our own conduct, so that elite groups can act without popular constraints to achieve their goals—which are called “the national interest” in
academic theology.
Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)
Visualizing Internal Conflict
article by @easymoviemaking
#screenwriting #film #screenplay
“Your main character gazes forlornly into the distance… thinking of his lost love. Or maybe he’s just hungry. Or maybe he’s just trying to remember what he was supposed to pick up at the store. Or…
How the heck do you show what he’s thinking?……”
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I don’t know, but this is one of the most powerful moments in film ever.
But she’s caught in a narrow little routine. Business-profit.” He shook his head. “A mind like that, a warped, miserable flea-sized mind …
Philip K. Dick, Captive Market (via swimmingunder)