Anti-Citizen X lays waste to the idea that morality is divinely inspired. Shorter video – God is unnecessary for moral behaviour. Filed under: Housekeeping Tagged: Anti-Citizen X, Morality, Religion, The Immorality of Christianity
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Politics, Re-Spun: PTSD Service Dogs: Not Widely Known, But Critical
Lots of stores, places, etc. have “no pets” signs up. That’s fine, but there are usually exceptions for service dogs. Preventing a visually-impaired person from entering a restaurant except without their service dog would be mean and generally intolerable. A long time ago, however, it was quite common to deem
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: PTSD: No Room for Denial
What if NO ONE knows your name? Belonging? It’s pretty important. We don’t always have to go where EVERYone knows our name, but we do need to have people. People who know, understand and affirm us. People with mental health issues, however, are often made to feel not so normal,
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Kate, Robin and Stewart’s Challenge To Us All About PTSD
I will be doing regular updates on two events to increase awareness about PTSD, particularly as the Canadian Forces spends too little on treatment of its members and PTSD. Regardless of all the ways we could improve our military or the Canadian government’s often imperialistic foreign policy, the real human
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Untangling the Temporary Foreign Worker Knot
Banks as predators? Surely, no! Temporary foreign workers have become a lightning-rod topic in Canadian labour in recent months with the high-profile news of the Royal Bank of Canada replacing staff with TFWs. But the issue is not about RBC, which is merely the latest flashpoint. The temporary foreign worker
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Men: Never 100% Responsible for Rape?
I have no words, at least I thought I didn’t. It’s bad enough that men rape women, then modern culture shames women for wearing anything but a burlap sack. I do not condone rape or sexual assault, but I think the male teens often so accused are not wholly to
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: New Prime Minister Tells Canadians- No War With Syria
What should military service actually be for? Wouldn’t it be amazing if Canada were Canada again? Wouldn’t it be even better if Canada would step up and be a better Canada than we had ever been in the past? Wouldn’t it be just spectacular if we could step up and
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: The Occupy Movement Vs. Maquiladoras
Workplace justice: a pipe dream, or something to build solidarity to fight for? I had the distinct, and creepy, pleasure of sitting in front of a group of fellows yesterday in, ironically, the cheap seats at the Seattle Mariners game. They were discussing business. One fellow, who of course may
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Why We Must #HonourTheApology to Residential School Survivors [#INM]
I don’t know why we still have to do this kind of thing, but here goes. The federal government “apologized” to survivors of residential schools 5 years ago. It is clearly quite empty, considering how much neglect, abuse, victimization and racism has spewed forth from Stephen Harper’s government since then.
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: It’s 12 O’Clock, Have You Boycotted IKEA Yet Today?
$3.85 billion in profit is just not enough. Union busting and global greed now! Gratitude, then and now. It used to include a t-shirt and more, for all employees around the world. Now, union busting. The best part of the Teamster Local 213 rally in Richmond on Saturday was the
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Stephen Harper Visits Lac Megantic
Mourning the senseless tragedy. Today I was very impressed when Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada, broke with his almost long-held position of not visiting Lac Megantic. While he and his wife took the opportunity to participate in staged political photo ops helping out with the Calgary floods, he has
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Zimmerman and Alexander: Racism and Sexism in America
Can you handle the contradictions? I’ve been seen things in twitter for the last few days that puts some grotesque perspective on the American culture. I’m actually quite speechless: Two Florida towns, 125 miles apart. Two people firing weapons at unarmed aggressors, purportedly in self-defense. George Zimmerman, the 29-year-old neighborhood-watch
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Fearing Kate MacEachern: The Latest Canadian Military Blunder
Kate MacEachern and helping others: not on the DND agenda, yet. Canada’s continued neglect and abuse of our military personnel and veterans continues to enrage me. An epidemic of untreated PTSD has become a new normal. And until citizens compel the government to take responsibility for this neglect–and fix it–they
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: 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, Re-Spun: Aaron Swartz, Intellectual Property and the Public Good
Should academic work be locked up like Disney[tm] artifacts? I’ve been quite inspired by this very good analysis of the context surrounding Aaron Swartz’s suicide. As news spread last week that digital rights activist Aaron Swartz had killed himself ahead of a federal trial on charges that he illegally downloaded
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Morality is a Choice, Not A Church
How can you be moral with god? The real question should be, how can you be moral with god. Filed under: Atheism Tagged: Atheism, Christianity, Good Without god, How Religion Poisons Everything, Morality, Why I hate religion
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: What If We Treated Harper Like We Treated Haiti’s Aristide?
Supporters of former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide chant and display signs outside the courthouse in Port au Prince on Wednesday, Jan. 9. When they learned that the prosecutor, Lucmane Delille, had gone to Aristide’s home to question him, a river of tens if not hundreds of thousands of people marched
Continue readingDeath By Trolley: The Etymology of “Death By Trolley”: Explaining The Name
Death By Trolley gets its name from The Trolley Problem, a philosophical thought experiment within the domain of morality and ethics. There are multiple formulations of The Trolley Problem. One of the most well-known versions invites the hearer to imagine that a trolley is on its way to running over
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