Dialogic Cinephilia: Dialogic Cinephilia

Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Dialogic Cinephilia - January 14, 2020

Bacevich, Andrew. "The U.S. Needs to Abandon 'Militarized Approach' to Middle East and Build Peace." Democracy Now (January 9, 2020) ["We continue our conversation with Andrew Bacevich, president and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is a retired colonel, Vietnam War veteran and author of, most recently, of “The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.” Bacevich says the crisis with Iran, sparked by President Trump’s assassination of top general Qassem Soleimani, is just the latest in a long series of ill-advised American actions in the Middle East. “The only conceivable way for us to begin to extricate ourselves from this terrible mess in the region … is to abandon this militarized approach and to take a more balanced position with regard to the rivalries in the region,” Bacevich says."]

Clarke, Cheryl, et al. "The Fire This Time." Public Seminar (April 3, 2019) ["Violence against African American people creates pain and outrage, but policy makers offer us few solutions. In this episode, we ask: how can the fight for racial justice be accelerated, even as racism remains as persistent today as it was before the modern Civil Rights movement? In the spirit of writer James Baldwin’s vehement call for black liberation, this Exiles on 12th Street episode, the second in our series, gives voice to local activists and artists fighting for change. Come think with us about civil rights with our guests: civil rights lawyer Douglas White, community organizer Cidra Sebastien, the Reverend Marcus McCullough, and poet Cheryl Clarke. The episode is presented by your host, historian Claire Potter, executive editor of Public Seminar."]

Fife, Carol and Dominique Walker. "Moms 4 Housing: Meet the Oakland Mothers Facing Eviction After Two Months Occupying Vacant House." Democracy Now (January 14, 2020) ["In Oakland, California, a group of mothers fighting homelessness is waging a battle against real estate speculators and demanding permanent solutions to the Bay Area housing crisis by occupying a vacant house with their children. The struggle began in November, when working mothers in West Oakland moved into 2928 Magnolia Street, a vacant house owned by real estate investment firm Wedgewood Properties. The firm tried to evict them, claiming they were illegally squatting on private property, but the mothers went to court and filed a “right to possession” claim, saying housing is a human right. Their name is Moms 4 Housing. The battle for the house came to a head last week when an Alameda County judge ruled in favor of Wedgewood Properties and ordered the mothers to vacate the house. But Moms 4 Housing has stayed to fight eviction. Monday night, hundreds of protesters gathered at the house after receiving a tip that the Sheriff’s Office was coming to evict the families — a show of support that led the sheriff to abandon the eviction attempt. We speak with Carroll Fife, director of the Oakland office for the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, and Dominique Walker, a member of Moms 4 Housing who has been living at the house with her family."]

I Am Not Your Negro (France/USA: Raoul Peck, 2016) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Archive)

Morozov, Evgeny. "Tech-Master Disaster: Part One." Open Source (September 12, 2019) ["Techno-capitalism's moral and intellectual calamities. ... There’s trouble in the magic Kingdom of Advanced Computation, and the late Jeffrey Epstein leads us to it. This hour is one man’s critical overview of the kingdom and its landscape. Silicon is its valley, its production center out west. The Media Lab at MIT has been high ground of ideas on the east coast. WIRED is the magazine of the realm; TED talks are its showcase. It’s a kingdom of masterful men—names like Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, and Kurzweil. And it has its own code of intelligence, called AI, A for Artificial. It has its high priests like Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Media Lab in 1985 and of WIRED magazine in 1993. Linkages are tight and loyalty is firm to some central ideas, above all that technology is good for everybody. If it can’t fix a problem, it can transform it—even ultimate challenges of life and death. This kingdom of computation has had it rogue financiers, like the late Jeffrey Epstein. And it has its dissenters, too. Our guest this hour is eminent among those critical insiders: the writer-historian Evgeny Morozov."]