Chris Hedges

is a Pullitzer-winning journalist who resigned from The NYT when he was told he could not keep his job there while publicly opposing the Iraq war (more at Wikipedia).

The video below is long but well worth the time. Don't stop watching after Hedges stops speaking the first time; I found the other speakers worthwhile, plus Hedges delivers additional brilliant stuff during subsequent Q&A.

A couple of Hedges' many insights:

[W]e forgot that the question is NOT, how do we get good people into power. The question is, how do we limit the damage the powerful can do to us?

Most people attracted to power are at best mediocre, and . . . often [are] venal. The true correctives of American democracy never achieved formal political power [e.g., those who fought slavery, the suffragettes, the labor movement, the civil rights movement -- none of these ever attained formal political power]. By 1968 Martin Luther King was the most important President this country [n]ever had . . . .

71-Year-Old in Wheelchair Robs Bank

Peter Barry Lawrence . . . . made his getaway in his wheelchair, with $2,000 in cash on his lap. He was headed back to his rented room at the nearby San Diego Downtown Lodge . . . police caught up with him five minutes later.

. . . . But that was all part of the plan.

The way Lawrence tells it, Monday’s robbery of a Chase Bank was just a desperate ploy to get back behind bars, where he believes he will receive better medical care than he has been able to obtain on his own.

I suppose some will respond that we need to stop coddling prisoners.

More at The San Diego Union-Tribune (if you liked this post, you might also enjoy this one.)

Rave Toilet

(Thanks, Ben!)

Big Brothers Are Ganging Up on Us

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

* * * * *

“We’re right there as it happens,” Ahlberg told [Wired,] as he clicked through a demonstration. “We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”

This is particularly disturbing if you've kept up with this.

PS: Why is Nineteen Eighty-Four not available through Netflix?

"What I Learned from the Army": Killology

What I learned from the army about language and dehumanization

It's hard to get people to shoot other people when they aren't in imminent danger. People have the unfortunate habit of seeing other people as fellow humans. They hesitate, they start questioning the ethics of what they are doing. It eats them up and ruins them for battle.

We do two things in basic training to compensate for that. We work on instincts, training people to shoot faster and view their targets as a video game or a measure of our own skill, rather than personalizing them. Silhouettes pop up and down so fast, and they look like people but they are paper with aiming circles printed on them. We start categorizing our targets as not fully human. Colonel Grossman is somewhat of an expert on that [http://www.killology.com].

The other thing we do in basic, in military culture in general, but it's very specifically started in basic training, is we use language to normalize the dehumanization of others and assert our own supremacy. We use slurs against whoever is the enemy de jour, and we do this because normalizing their characterization as lesser than fully human, based on their group identity, is an important step in making violence against them more acceptable.

Haji, the word when it's owned by the people who truly own it, it's nothing offensive. It's people on a pilgrimage. But we use it in the army do identify them as The Other. Commanders understand the importance of Othering the enemy. When Mattis said "It's fun to shoot some people," that wasn't an accident. It's part of normalizing the enjoyment of violence because the people committing that violence need to believe it's normal, in order to stay sane while doing it.

He went on to add: “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil,” Mattis said. “You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”

That's a great statement if you know your men are going to be killing Afghan civilians in the course of their normal business. It uses language to mark them as different because they are muslim, and it marks them as Lesser Than Real Men. They don't have any manhood, so they are lesser than fully human, in the default (male) sense.

It's genius, really, because he can claim it's about defending women even as he's upholding and appealing to male supremacy.

And it's genius because it shows he understands dehumanizing language as a sort of gateway drug to violence without remorse.

(Thanks, noamnety!)

David O'Reilly's "Please Say Something"

"[A] 10 minute short . . . contain[ing] 23 episodes of exactly 25 seconds each." O'Reilly's "TAGS: 30 Second Breakneck Heartbreak Uncut Turbodrama. Fatfree Ultraviolent Freezedried Shrinkwrapped Antiballet Timeline Easyopen Modern Unpunctuated Crass Clean Crisp High Definition Subversive Absurd Arrogant Loud Pretentious Sugarcoated Sincere Authentic Stories. Please Say Something, any answer will do." It's brilliant.

Please Say Something by David OReilly.

(Thanks again, Video Association!)

The Bechdel Test

(Thanks, Video Association!)

X20+ @ The M.A.C.

(Dallas), Sat., Aug. 7. The second exhibition organized by artist Mary Benedicto under the "X20+" rubric. I'll be presenting a recent video/interactive piece, probably some time after 8:30PM. (The piece at right is not mine, but I like it -- ripped it off the invite; not certain whose it is.)

More info on the exhibition here.