Author: AppalledBC
Politics and Entertainment: Economic Forecast: Canada To See Years Of Stagnation, BMO Report Predicts
Economic Forecast: Canada To See Years Of Stagnation, BMO Report Predicts Deeply, dangerously indebted “consumers” (aka Canadian citizens) at a 156% debt to income ratio aggressively imposed upon us by banksters motivated by bottom line greed, an overpriced (by at least 10%) declining housing market with a potential bubble waiting to burst,
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Economic Reality
#nogrowth #cdnecon – let me reiterate – for the foreseeable future with no more than a relative 2% forever Even if one were a true believer worshipping daily at the altar of neoliberalism and its side altars the Dow and TSX, how can a mere 0.7% growth of the Canadian
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Economic Reality
#nogrowth #cdnecon – let me reiterate – for the foreseeable future with no more than a relative 2% foreverEven if one were a true believer worshipping daily at the altar of neoliberalism and its side altars the Dow and TSX, how can a mere 0.7% growth of the Canadian economy
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Economic Reality
#nogrowth #cdnecon – let me reiterate – for the foreseeable future with no more than a relative 2% forever
Even if one were a true believer worshipping daily at the altar of neoliberalism and its side altars the Dow and TSX, how can a mere 0.7% growth of the Canadian economy in the last half of 2012 be remotely considered acceptable? Isn’t such a distressing figure an index of failing economic policy – of a failure to encourage and develop a diversified domestic economy instead of the weighted “natural resources” (read oil and mining) export economy we have? One can only take blaming appalling global economic conditions so far since it is the same neoliberal agenda responsible for those dire conditions. The global neoliberal agenda with its “market-based solutions” is slowly but surely imploding – which, with peak oil, may lead to a forced but desirable shift to local economies.
“Sustainable Economy” an Oxymoron
All this talk of a “sustainable economy” swirling around the tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline lately should remind us of just how oxymoronic such a concept is in the context of a non-renewable ”natural resources” based Canadian economy. For such a deep exploitative capitalist agenda is destructive at its core and even its perpetrators know this is so. With the exception of the wilfully ignorant, the world knows that the damage done to the land, to nature, to the environment and the social and political radiating effects of that evil can never be repaired. And for what is this destruction wrought? To feed the bottom line of corporations, the 1%, the investor class, the plutocracy and those who gleefully serve it such as the Obama administration and the Harper Regime. Time perhaps for something beyond petitions, rallies, marches, and social media.
Politics and Entertainment: Economic Reality
#nogrowth #cdnecon – let me reiterate – for the foreseeable future with no more than a relative 2% forever Even if one were a true believer worshipping daily at the altar of #neoliberalism & its side altars the Dow and TSX, how can a mere 0.07% #cdnecon growth in the last half of 2012 be remotely
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Why a completely unremarkable film called Argo won the Oscar
How ironically fitting that Michelle Obama announced the Oscar for the winning picture. Argo is a putative “true” story from the not too distant U.S. past – a past to which American viewers can easily relate – a feel good story of American&nb…
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Why a completely unremarkable film called Argo won the Oscar
How ironically fitting that Michelle Obama announced the Oscar for the winning picture. Argo is a putative “true” story from the not too distant U.S. past – a past to which American viewers can easily relate – a feel good story of American perseverance, ingenuity, courage, an inspiring version of U. S. exceptionalism resulting
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Why a completely unremarkable film called Argo won the Oscar
How ironically fitting that Michelle Obama announced the Oscar for the winning picture. Argo is a putative “true” story from the not too distant U.S. past – a past to which American viewers can easily relate – a feel good story of American perseverance, ingenuity, courage, an inspiring version of U. S. exceptionalism resulting
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Zero Dark Thirty Leaves Plenty of Space for Viewer’s Moral Judgment
Spoiler alert: The U.S. Navy SEALS murder Osama Bin Laden and several others in his Pakistani compound without mercy and with vengeful malice. Most of the controversy swirling round the film revolves around whether the filmmaker, Kathryn Bigelow – positioned as auteur by most commentators – endorses torture or whether the film’s narrative
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Zero Dark Thirty Leaves Plenty of Space for Viewer’s Moral Judgment
Spoiler alert: The U.S. Navy SEALS murder Osama Bin Laden and several others in his Pakistani compound without mercy and with vengeful malice. Most of the controversy swirling round the film revolves around whether the filmmaker, Kathryn Bigelow – positioned as auteur by most commentators – endorses torture or whether the film’s narrative
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Zero Dark Thirty Leaves Plenty of Space for Viewer’s Moral Judgment
Representations of torture are recessed in the second half of the film, it should be noted, not because of a moral awakening by any given character but only because of a policy decision by a new administration. The Obama TV moment presented in the background in the context of a CIA war or situation room makes this crystal clear. Even Dan’s warning to Maya – relatively early in the film – about the possible repercussions of “enhanced” methods of detainee interrogations comes in the form of a political warning about saving her CIA ass, not moral reprehension.
The devastating loss of American lives on 9/11 is the initiating narrative event that rolls out a straightforward revenge structure ending in the murder of Bin Laden and several of his domestic companions. Before the film proper begins in earnest, however, we are exposed to an introductory screen text informing us that the representations we are about to watch are based on “firsthand accounts of actual event.” There is an implicit moral distancing in this textual strategy – “I’m just showing you the way it was” – but certainly one of its other effects is to suggest that what we are about to see carries the weight of authenticity and is therefore important if not “real.” The now conventional use of handheld cameras is meant to reinforce this effect with a documentary-like style of shooting. In other words, the “realism” of the film is not an allegiance to “truth” or reality,” whatever those may be since neither is a given, but a filmic effect resulting from a well-established set of film conventions creating an illusion, a fiction, of “what really happened.” It seems appropriate to evaluate the film as such.
The film proper opens with a black screen over which we hear the dying voices of only American victims of the twin towers, a restriction thus positioning us emotionally if not ideologically as American viewers. Immediately after this audio text, we are treated to roughly forty-five minutes of extensive torture sequences, including several instances of the infamous water-boarding technique. Juxtaposing the first visual torture scene of al-Qaeda’s No. 3 leader, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, with the voices of the twin tower Americans who are about to die creates a structural effect implying a retaliatory cause-effect relationship – “I am torturing you because of 9/11” – and that effect is sustained throughout the entire 45 minutes of multiple scenes of torture and implied throughout the entire film.
These kind of scenes are gradually recessed as we move in the second half of the film towards interrogations without torture – but nonetheless grounded in bribes or threats – and sequences of CIA group intelligence analysis: the so-called “hard work” some critics want to see as the reason for discovering Bin Laden. But the dialogue reveals on several occasions that the analysis – the “hard work” – really results from information received from interrogated detainees, on screen and off, and those detainees, we know, were abused in some form or other if not overtly tortured. “Does our treatment of detainees work? You bet.”
Inter-cut with these intelligence analysis scenes is a revenge justifying history of major terrorist attacks against westerners since 9/11, but especially against Americans, each successfully gaining more screen time and thus significance until the final, climactic suicide bombing in Afghanistan of one of Maya’s closest colleagues, Jessica, who has been betrayed by her al-Qaeda connections. Now it’s “personal” is the implication as we move towards the final bloody revengeful act of murder in Pakistan.
But, in truth there has been little if anything personal in the film – no character development for anyone let alone Maya who has been merely the driving agent of revenge. We know little more about her by the end of the film than we do at the beginning, and the final scene of Maya in a giant U.S. army transport plane alone, isolated, and small is telling in its ambiguity. “Where do you want to go?” asks a crew member, his question unanswered. And what do we read on her face? Relief? Satisfaction? Sadness? An unwinding? Anxiety now that her obsessive-compulsive revenge narrative has come to its end? Plenty of room for the the viewer’s meaning.
Following that final character scene is another screen text rounding out the ideological thrust of the film in its acknowledgement of the victims of 9/11 once again and all those who serve the American exceptionalist project. Closure is provided by that framing text confirming the essence of the film as an apologia of sorts, a justification of policy, of strategy: “Revenge and all that that entails, including torture, are okay because they drove us to get Bin Laden, and we did that for you.” Whether this is a impaired moral justification is the viewer’s decision.
In the end, it matters little what the filmmaker or commentators say about Zero Dark Thirty. You are the site of meaning: it’s your reading of the film conditioned though it may be by your cultural, moral, and social inscription that matters. Like any text, film texts are unstable, dynamic, their meaning put in motion by your engagement with them. In a sense there is no film without you.Zero Dark Thirty is provocatively open enough – disturbing in so many ways – to allow for a variety of ways to read it, and that makes it a challenging, ideologically complex film well worth viewing – far more exciting than some of its straightforward conventional Oscar challengers.
Politics and Entertainment: The Unintended Consequences of Military Intervention:
The Roots of Mali and Algeria Crisis in Libya. And let’s not forget Canada’s gung-ho involvement in Libya – which might partially explain the interest in Mali now. what was unleashed in Libya is coming home to roost.
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: The Unintended Consequences of Military Intervention:
The Roots of Mali and Algeria Crisis in Libya. And let’s not forget Canada’s gung-ho involvement in Libya – which might partially explain the interest in Mali now. what was unleashed in Libya is coming home to roost.
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: The Unintended Consequences of Military Intervention:
The Roots of Mali and Algeria Crisis in Libya. And let’s not forget Canada’s gung-ho involvement in Libya – which might partially explain the interest in Mali now. what was unleashed in Libya is coming home to roost.
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Bill McKibben on #IdleNoMore | The stakes couldn’t be higher, for Canada and for the world
“The stakes couldn’t be higher, for Canada and for the world. Much of this uprising began when Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper rammed through Parliament an omnibus bill gutting environmental reviews and protections. He had no choice if he wanted to keep developing Canada’s tar sands, because there’s no possible way to
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Bill McKibben on #IdleNoMore | The stakes couldn’t be higher, for Canada and for the world
Politics and Entertainment: Bill McKibben on #IdleNoMore | The stakes couldn’t be higher, for Canada and for the world
“The stakes couldn’t be higher, for Canada and for the world. Much of this uprising began when Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper rammed through Parliament an omnibus bill gutting environmental reviews and protections. He had no choice if he wanted to keep developing Canada’s tar sands, because there’s no possible way to
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Mission Accomplished for the shrewd person who decided on the Deloitte Audit Release
Politics and Entertainment: Mission Accomplished for the shrewd person who decided on the Deloitte Audit Release
It’s difficult not to think that the timing of the release of the Deloitte financial audit of Atawapiskat was calculated in its anticipation of a potential backlash against Spence and, by association, #idlenomore. The audit prompted Spence to shut down media relations, a closed door thus leading to the media’s usual
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