Drive is disturbing. We debated afterwards: is the hyperviolence unnecessary? Should such depictions be censored to ward off further glorification of violence? Is the film art? What are the ethics of recommendation? Whose responsibility is it to consider the possible effects of viewing this film?
Drive is disturbing. We debated afterwards: is the hyperviolence unnecessary? Should such depictions be censored to ward off further glorification of violence? Is the film art? What are the ethics of recommendation? Whose responsibility is it to consider the possible effects of viewing this film?
The new UMass Journalism Department weblog documents the disturbing trend in hard news staffing/investigative journalism, linking to an article that contexts the decline of trained journalistic staffing in the age of technological expansion. The embedded example of the linked reference source is powerful and poignant, but while an individual Palestinian enacted terror in Jerusalem, the Israeli military held an entire … Read more...
Godwin this
Posted by Eric Rauchway
Steph’s notes at bottom; lettered in [bold].
On this day in 1945, only three days after the occupation of their city by French troops, the remaining full professors of the University of Freiburg assembled to elect new officers and to restore the customs under which they had operated before 1933, when their faculty,
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Imagine the Angels of Bread
Change is always resisted. At the cellular level patterns of survival screech to continue unaltered. It is we, the thinking aggregate of living cells composed into consciousnesses with conscience who must impose a break with violence and the talk that spurs it on.… Read more...
Israel and Palestine may be the world’s best example. News media repeats the fiction of “the Palestinians” as if Hamas and Fatah represent something in common. Hamas follows the breach of the Gaza Strip wall with Egypt with increased suicide bombings in Israel, and Israelis initiate attacks on Palestinian neighborhoods that are disturbingly like pogroms.
What happened to the peacemakers?… Read more...
UMass will host an extraordinary event in early April: Landscapes of Violence. I approach it with two trajectories, one from the Dialogue under Occupation conferences (DUO 1 in Chicago, 2006; DUO 2 in the West Bank, 2007). The “dialogue” of the DUO conferences is still
“young” (as in, “new” for us in conversation with each other), but I … Read more...
Palestinians burst from the confinement of the Gaza Strip and what’s the first thing those Muslims do?
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I have two images in mind. 🙁
One is a poster I came across in Palestine calling for a boycott of Israel. The image is a hand dropping a coin into a helmet that is already full of money.
The other one is a photo of a small boy urinating on the helmet of a soldier.
So, Hamas pissed on … Read more...
Friends of my friend were kidnapped in Colombia over the weekend.
Maria Claudia popped up in chat Monday, “Today is a weird day,” she wrote.
“Why?”
“Two of my best friends were kidnapped last night.”
“Oh my god.”
It is real. Violence creeps closer, no matter how hard we try to keep it at bay, no matter how thickly we … Read more...
“Obama received Secret Service protection early in the campaign after unspecified threats. It is not a subject his wife likes to talk about. “She doesn’t allow herself to go there,” says Valerie Jarrett, Michelle Obama’s close friend, who says Michelle has not raised the subject with her. “It would paralyze her to think like that.” Michelle’s brother, Craig Robinson, who
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