Dialogic Cinephilia - January 19, 2020

In arguing against a position you should not rely on attacking the integrity, competence, personal morality or sanity of the holders of that position; nor should you argue against the weakest, most flawed version of the position that you can find. You should argue against the strongest version you can find. You should even try to help your opponents to formulate an even better version of their argument and then argue against it. This way, if you win the argument anyway, your victory will be all the more glorious. And if you end up being convinced by the argument that you were opposing; well that is good too. -- Rick Lewis "Into the Cauldron!" Philosophy Now #135 (January 2020)

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. Those truths are well established. They are read in every page which records the progression from a less arbitrary to a more arbitrary government, or the transition from a popular government to an aristocracy or a monarchy. — James Madison, Political Observations, 1795

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
-- Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 4 (1971)

Amer, Karim, Emma Briant and Brittany Kaiser. "The Weaponization of Data: Cambridge Analytica, Information Warfare & the 2016 Election of Trump." Democracy Now (January 10, 2020) ["We continue our conversation with the directors of “The Great Hack,” Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, as well as former Cambridge Analytica employee Brittany Kaiser and propaganda researcher Emma Briant, about Cambridge Analytica’s parent company SCL Group’s history as a defense contractor. “We’re in a state of global information warfare now,” Briant says. “How do we know if our militaries develop technologies and the data that it has gathered on people, for instance, across the Middle East … how do we know when that is turning up in Yemen or when that is being utilized by an authoritarian regime against the human rights of its people or against us? How do we know that it’s not being manipulated by Russia, by Iran, by anybody who’s an enemy, by Saudi Arabia, for example, who SCL were also working with? We have no way of knowing, unless we open up this industry and hold these people properly accountable for what they’re doing.”"]

Benton, Michael. "The Work of Propaganda." North of Center (January 15, 2020)

Schönecker, Dieter. "Protecting Academic Freedom: Five Arguments for Freedom of Expression." Philosophy Now #135 (January 2020)

Excerpt from Tim Maugham's novel Infinite Detail (one of the best of the 21st Century)




If I tell you my dream, you might forget it; If I act on my dream, perhaps you will remember it; But if I involve you, it becomes your dream too." -- Tibetan Proverb

JINPA - TRAILER - TIFF 2019 from Tromsø Int. Film Festival on Vimeo.