Friday, February 24, 2023

John Bellamy Foster: Sociology/Political Economy/Ecology/Editor of Monthly Review (Shooting Azimuths)



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Foster, John Bellamy.  "Education and the Structural Crisis of Capital: The U.S. Case." Monthly Review (July 1, 2011)

---. "The New Irrationalism." Monthly Review (February 1, 2023) ["More than a century after the commencement of the Great Crisis of 1914–1945, represented by the First World War, the Great Depression, and Second World War, we are seeing a sudden resurgence of war and fascism across the globe. The capitalist world economy as a whole is now characterized by deepening stagnation, financialization, and soaring inequality. All of this is accompanied by the prospect of planetary omnicide in the dual forms of nuclear holocaust and climate destabilization. In this dangerous context, the very notion of human reason is frequently being called into question. It is therefore necessary to address once again the question of the relation of imperialism or monopoly capitalism to the destruction of reason and the ramifications of this for contemporary class and anti-imperialist struggles."]

Foster, John Bellamy, interviewed by C.J. Polychroniou. "Climate change is the product of how capitalism 'values' nature." Monthly Review (November 18, 2018) ["Climate change is the greatest existential crisis facing humanity today. Capitalist industrialization has led us to the edge of the precipice, and avoiding the end of civilization as we know it may require the development of a view in direct opposition to the way in which capitalism “values” nature, according to John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of the socialist magazine Monthly Review."]

Foster, John Bellamy and Robert W. McChesney. "The Internet's Unholy Marriage to Capitalism" Monthly Review (March 2011)

Foster, John Bellamy, Robert W. McChesney and R. Jamil Jonna. "The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism." Monthly Review 63.6 (November 2011)

---. "The Internationalization of Monopoly Capital." Monthly Review (June 1, 2011)

---. "Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism." Monthly Review (April 1, 2011)

Noam Chomsky: Political Theory/Media Literacy/Political Economy/Linguist (Shooting Azimuths)






Chomsky Info (Website)


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Chomsky, Noam. "Activism, Anarchism and Power." Conversations with History (March 2002)

---. "Anarchism." (1976 interview with Peter Jay posted on YouTube)

---. "A Propaganda Model." (Excerpt from Manufacturing Consent: 1988)

---. Class Warfare. Pluto Press, 1996: 19-23, 27-31.

---. "Concision in the Media." Manufacturing Consent (1992: reposted on YouTube January 26, 2007)

---. "Condemns Israel’s Shift to Far Right & New 'Jewish Nation-State' Law." Democracy Now (July 30, 2018) ["Israel has passed a widely-condemned law that defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and gives Jews the sole right to self-determination. It also declares Hebrew the country’s only official language and encourages the building of Jewish-only settlements on occupied territory as a “national value.” The law has drawn international condemnation and accusations that Israel has legalized apartheid. For more we speak with world-renowned political dissident, author, and linguist Noam Chomsky. He is a laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for more than 50 years."]

---. "Democracy and Education"/Language and Politics. Dialogic [Excerpts posted November 29, 2009)

---. "The Emerging World Order." Unwelcome Guests #622 (September 22, 2012)

---. "Excerpt from The Kingdom of Survival." (Posted on Youtube: Slowboat Films, 2011)

---. "The Global Economic Crisis, Healthcare, US Foreign Policy and Resistance to American Empire." Democracy Now (April 13, 2009)

---. "In U.N. Speech, Noam Chomsky Blasts United States for Supporting Israel, Blocking Palestinian State." Democracy Now (October 22, 2014)

---. Language and Politics. AK Press, 2004. ["An enormous chronological collection of over fifty interviews conducted with Chomsky from 1968 to present day. Many of the pieces have never appeared in any other collection, some have never appeared in English, and more than one has been suppressed. This expanded edition contains fifty pages of brand new interviews. The interviews add a personal dimension to the full breadth of Chomsky's impressive written canon--equally covering his analysis in linguistics, philosophy, and politics. This updated, annotated, fully indexed new edition contains an extensive bibliography, as well as an intro-duction by editor Carlos Otero on the relationship between Chomsky's language and politics."]

---. "Language, Politics, and Composition." Journal of Advanced Composition 11.1 (1991)

---. Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (Canada/Australia/Finland/Norway: Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick, 1992: 167 mins)

---. "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media."
(Speech  at University of Wisconsin – Madison, March 15, 1989)

---. Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. Seven Stories Press, 1997.

---. "Noam Chomsky at United Nations: It Would Be Nice if the United States Lived up to International Law." Democracy Now ((October 22, 2014)

---. "Nuclear Weapons, Climate Change & the Undermining of Democracy Threaten Future of Planet." Democracy Now (April 12, 2019) ["As President Trump pulls out of key nuclear agreements with Russia and moves to expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal, Noam Chomsky looks at how the threat of nuclear war remains one of the most pressing issues facing mankind. In a speech at the Old South Church in Boston, Chomsky also discusses the threat of climate change and the undermining of democracy across the globe."]

---. "Occupy Wall Street "Has Created Something That Didn’t Really Exist" in U.S. — Solidarity." Democracy Now (May 14, 2012)

---. "On Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 'Spectacular' Victory & Growing Split in Democratic Party." Democracy Now (July 27, 2018) ["The 2018 midterm election season has been roiled by the internal divisions between the Democratic Party’s growing progressive base and the more conservative party establishment. In New York City, this division came to a head with the most shocking upset of the election season so far, when 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez handily defeated 10-term incumbent Representative Joe Crowley, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House. Ocasio-Cortez ran a progressive grassroots campaign as a Democratic Socialist advocating for “Medicare for All” and the abolition of ICE. For more on her victory and what it means for the Democratic Party, we speak with Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political dissident, linguist."]

---. "On BDS and How the Israeli Occupation is 'Much Worse Than Apartheid.'" Democracy Now (August 11, 2014)

---. "On Corporate Personhood." (8 minute video in which he answers a question at a public presentation on April 22, 2011)

---. "On Education & How Manufacturing Consent Brought Attention to East Timor Massacres." Democracy Now (December 3, 2013)

---. "On Media’s "Shameful Moment" in Gaza & How a U.S. Shift Could End the Occupation." Democracy Now (August 11, 2014)

---. "On the Basic Role of (Non-Participatory) Sports." Dialogic (Excerpts of Chomsky quote published in Robert F. Barsky's The Chomsky Effect: November 5, 2009)

---. "On Trump’s Disastrous Coronavirus Response, Bernie Sanders & What Gives Him Hope." Democracy Now (April 10, 2020) ["How did the United States — the richest country in the world — become the worldwide epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, with one person dying of COVID-19 every 47 seconds? We spend the hour with Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author, discussing this unprecedented moment in history, and its political implications, as Senator Bernie Sanders announces he is suspending his campaign for the presidency. Chomsky also describes how frontline medical workers and progressive organizing are giving him hope."]

---. "On WikiLeaks, Obama’s Targeted Assassinations and Latin America’s Break from the U.S." Democracy Now (May 14, 2012)

---. "Palestinian Hunger Strike a Protest Against "Violations of Elementary Human Rights." Democracy Now (May 14, 2012)

---. "The Propaganda Model." Chomsky' Philosophy (Posted on Youtube: 2015)

---. "The Purpose of Education." (Video posted on YouTube: February 1, 2012)

---. "'Sadistic & Grotesque': ... on How Israel Limits Food & Medicine in Occupied Gaza." Democracy Now (August 11, 2014)

"The State-Corporate Complex: A Threat to Freedom and Survival." Chomsky Info (April 7, 2011)

---. “This is the Most Remarkable Regional Uprising that I Can Remember” Democracy Now (February 2, 2011)

---. "Trump Radically Interfered with Israel’s Election to Help Re-elect Netanyahu." Democracy Now (April 12, 2019) ["Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is headed to a record fifth term in office after narrowing defeating former military chief Benny Gantz. In a discussion with Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky talks about how President Trump directly interfered with the Israel election by repeatedly helping Netanyahu, from moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem to recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights in defiance of international law."]

---. "The United States, Not Iran, Poses Greatest Threat to World Peace." Democracy Now (September 22, 2015)

---. "US Expansion of Afghan Occupation, the Uses of NATO, and What Obama Should Do in Israel-Palestine." Democracy Now (April 3, 2009)

---. "We Must Confront the 'Ultranationalist, Reactionary' Movements Growing Across Globe."Democracy Now (April 12, 2019)

Chomsky, Noam and Glenn Greenwald. "No Place to Hide." (Posted on Youtube: August 10, 2014)

Chomsky, Noam and Robert Trivers. "The anti-war activist and MIT linguist meets the Rutgers evolutionary biologist in the Seed Salon to discuss deceit." (September 6, 2006)

Crowmwell, David and David Edwards. "Snowden, Surveillance And The Secret State." Media Lens (June 28, 2013)

Fisk, Robert. "On the CIA 'Torture Report': Once again language is distorted in order to hide US state wrongdoing." The Independent (December 14, 2014)

Gondry, Michel. "Animating Noam Chomsky: French Director Michel Gondry on New Film Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?" Democracy Now (December 3, 2013)

Hasan, Mehdi. "The Noam Chomsky Interview." Deconstructed (October 31, 2019) ["Legendary linguist, activist, and political theorist Noam Chomsky has been speaking out against U.S. interventionism from Vietnam to Latin America to the Middle East since the 1960s. He’s the most cited author alive, but you won’t see him on the nightly news or in the pages of most major newspapers. On this week’s Deconstructed, Chomsky sits down with Mehdi Hasan to discuss the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, the 2020 Democratic field, and why he opposed Trump’s Syria troop withdrawal."]

Jaggi, Maya. "Conscience of a Nation." The Guardian (January 20, 2001) ["The child of working-class immigrants to America, [Noam Chomsky] has become one of the 10 most quoted sources in the humanities - along with Shakespeare and the Bible. Maya Jaggi on the founding father of linguistic philosophy and tireless scourge of US imperialism."]

Marshall, Colin. "Filmmaker Michel Gondry Presents an Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky." Open Culture (November 25, 2013)

Requiem for the American Dream (USA: Peter Hutchison, Kelly Nyks and Jared Scott, 2015: 72 mins) ["In Requiem for the American Dream, renowned intellectual figure Noam Chomsky deliberates on the defining characteristics of our time—the colossal concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few and fewer, with the rise of a rapacious individualism and complete collapse of class consciousness. Chomsky does this by discussing some of the key principles that have brought this culture to the pinnacle of historically unprecedented inequality by tracing a half century of policies designed to favour the most wealthy at the expense of the majority, while also looking back on his own life of activism and political participation. The film serves to provide insights into how we got here, and culminates as a reminder that these problems are not inevitable. Once we remember those who came before and those who will come after, we see that we can, and should, fight back."]

Robinson, Andrew. "Anarchism, War and the State." CeaseFire (August 6, 2010) ["This article summarises how a number of anarchist and anarchistic authors view the relationship between the state and war."]

Singham, Mano. "Sam Harris gets schooled by Noam Chomsky." Free Thought Blogs (May 6, 2015)

Wall, Richard. "Who's Afraid of Noam Chomsky?" Lew Rockwell (2004)

West, Stephen. "On Media: Manufacturing Consent, Pt. 1." Philosophize This (December 17, 2020) [On Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman's landmark book Media Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.]


Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Like Stories of Old: Stories/Narratives/Mythology/Philosophy (Shooting Azimuths)

[Tom van der Linden is the author of these video essays. Also check out his podcast with Thomas Flight Cinema of Meaning. Support him and get subscriber only videos here.]

Like Stories of Old. "The Absurdist Philosophy of Synechdoche, New York." (Posted on Youtube: May 20, 2018) [An examination of existentialist philosopher Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus and the absurdist philosophy of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York.]

---. "A Mythology of Hope – The Lord of the Rings (part 2)." (Posted on Youtube: August 31, 2018) ["An extensive exploration into the deeper meanings of The Lord of the Rings. This second and final part examines the presence and purpose of higher forces in Middle-earth, and the essential role of hope in Tolkien's mythology." Books discussed: Matthew Dickerson – Following Gandalf: Epic Battles and Moral Victory in The Lord of the Rings; Bradley Birzer – J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth; Peter Kreeft – The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings.]


---. "The Archetype of the Warrior - How Film Helps Empower Us All." (Posted on Youtube: January 15, 2018) ["Exploring the Archetype of the Warrior in films, based on Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s King, Warrior, Magician, Lover and Carol S. Pearson’s The Hero Within."]

---. "Arrival: Facing the Fear of Existence." (Posted on Youtube: 2018) ["

---. "Baby Driver: Introversion Done Right." (Posted on Youtube: October 13, 2017) ["An examination of introversion in Baby Driver and how Edgar Wright subverts the stereotypical introvert in an extroverted society." Uses Laurie Helgoe's Introvert Power – Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden Strength in the analysis of the characterization of Baby in the film.]

---. "The Before Trilogy: Performing a Real Relationship." (Posted on Youtube: November 10, 2017) [I would easily include this trilogy in my best of cinema. The first time I saw Before Sunrise I was floored because I had never seen a film that captured the magic, mystery and mood of unplanned romance (I won't ruin the end for those that haven't seen it) in such a realistic way. The second and third film, made 9 years later each time, continues to defy the Hollywood/Hallmark co-optation of our romantic ideas. The collaboration of Richard Linklater (director/writer), Kim Krizan (co-writer), Ethan Hawke (actor/collaborator), and Julie Delpy (actor/collaborator), is a major achievement in collaborative filmmaking and escapes the stunt feel of the later unrelated Linklater film Boyhood. I've been dreaming of my film class next semester and how I could explore B. Ruby Rich's call to move past Hollywood's/America's singular focus on individualistic experience and maybe this could be the start from a masterpiece on an evolving dyad experience that avoids privileging one perspective and moving outward to more fully collective depictions. "A video essay exploring how Richard Linklater created one of the most unique portrayals of a real relationship in his Before Trilogy; consisting of Before SunriseBefore Sunset and Before Midnight."]

---. "Capturing the Intuitive Wisdom of Children: Children of Heaven." (Posted on Youtube: October 31, 2018) 



---. "The Essence of Faith – What Signs Was Really About." (Posted on Youtube: December 29, 2018) ["Exploring the essence of faith in M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs." Books discussed: Jerome Bruner – Acts of Meaning: Four Lecture on Mind and Culture; Viktor Frankl – Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning.]

---. "Everyday Virtue: Paterson and David Foster Wallace." (Posted on Youtube: May 26, 2017)

---. "The Fantasy of Ultimate Purpose – How Our Entertainment Reveals Our Deepest Desire." (Posted on Youtube: July 31, 2018) ["Explores the anatomy of purpose in films, television series and video games, how it differs from finding meaning in our own lives, and the importance of discussing our escapes into these fictional worlds. Book used: Viktor Frankl – Man’s Search for Meaning."]

---. "Fight Club: How (Not) to Become a Space Monkey." (Posted on Youtube: November 16, 2019) ["Video essay on Fight Club; examining how charismatic leaders like Tyler Durden turn men into Space Monkeys." Ernest Becker book The Denial of Death is used to formulate the critique/interpretation.]

---"First Man: A Sobering Look at Human Greatness." (Posted on Youtube: January 30, 2019)

---. "Get Out: White Fragility as a Movie Trope." (Posted on Youtube: May 19, 2017)

---. "Gladiator: Turning Spectacle Into Meaningful Story." (Posted on Youtube: 2019) ["

---. "Heroism and Morality - The Lord of the Rings, Part 1." (Posted on Youtube: August 24, 2018) ["An extensive exploration into the deeper meanings of The Lord of the Rings. This first part examines Tolkien’s sanctification of pagan virtues, and the role of heroism and moral victory in Middle-earth." Books discussed: Matthew Dickerson – Following Gandalf: Epic Battles and Moral Victory in The Lord of the Rings; Bradley Birzer – J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth; Peter Kreeft – The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings.]

---. "Hostiles and Wind River – America's Unresolved Grief." (Posted on Youtube: June 30, 2018)

---. "How Ken Burns Changed the Way We Look at History." (Posted on Youtube: September 15, 2017) ["An exploration of the academic validity and public value of the work of renowned documentarian Ken Burns. Content: 0:00 Introduction; 1:34 What is History?; 4:57 The Ken Burns Approach; 9:22 Bringing History to Life."  Uses two books in its analysis: Ways of Knowing by Jonathan W. Moses and Torbjorn L. Knutsen, and What is History? by E.H. Carr.]

---. "In Search of Absolute Beauty." (Posted on Youtube: March 26, 2021)

---. "In Search of the Distinctively Human: The Philosophy of Blade Runner 2049." (Posted on Youtube: Jan 29, 2018) [Uses Ernest Becker's The Birth and Death of Meaning and Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.]

---. "Into the Dark Depths of Humanity – Understanding Denis Villeneuve." (Posted on Youtube: October 31, 2021) ["A deep dive analysis of the filmmaking philosophy of Denis Villeneuve, and of the themes and meanings found in his work."]




---. "Lies of Heroism - Redefining the Anti-War Film." (Posted on Youtube: August 31, 2020)


---. "The Lover Within: How Moonlight Relates to ALL Men." (Posted on Youtube: April 9, 2017)

---. "The Myth of Heroic Masculine Purpose." (Posted on Youtube: February 28, 2022) ["A critical analysis of the myth of heroic masculine purpose, and its effect on men’s perception of manhood, and on their connection to others and to the world."]

---. "The New World: The Lost Art of Grief." (Posted on Youtube: September 29, 2017) ["An examination of sorrow and grief in Terrence Malick’s The New World based on Francis Weller’ The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. North Atlantic Books: "The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and be stretched large by them. Noted psychotherapist Francis Weller provides an essential guide for navigating the deep waters of sorrow and loss in this lyrical yet practical handbook for mastering the art of grieving. Describing how Western patterns of amnesia and anesthesia affect our capacity to cope with personal and collective sorrows, Weller reveals the new vitality we may encounter when we welcome, rather than fear, the pain of loss. Through moving personal stories, poetry, and insightful reflections he leads us into the central energy of sorrow, and to the profound healing and heightened communion with each other and our planet that reside alongside it. The Wild Edge of Sorrow explains that grief has always been communal and illustrates how we need the healing touch of others, an atmosphere of compassion, and the comfort of ritual in order to fully metabolize our grief. Weller describes how we often hide our pain from the world, wrapping it in a secret mantle of shame. This causes sorrow to linger unexpressed in our bodies, weighing us down and pulling us into the territory of depression and death. We have come to fear grief and feel too alone to face an encounter with the powerful energies of sorrow. Those who work with people in grief, who have experienced the loss of a loved one, who mourn the ongoing destruction of our planet, or who suffer the accumulated traumas of a lifetime will appreciate the discussion of obstacles to successful grief work such as privatized pain, lack of communal rituals, a pervasive feeling of fear, and a culturally restrictive range of emotion. Weller highlights the intimate bond between grief and gratitude, sorrow and intimacy. In addition to showing us that the greatest gifts are often hidden in the things we avoid, he offers powerful tools and rituals and a list of resources to help us transform grief into a force that allows us to live and love more fully."]

---. "Okja: Understanding the (Im)Morality of Animal Consumption." (Posted on Youtube: August 4, 2017)

---. "The Perilous Journey of a Truly Beautiful Soul – Hacksaw Ridge." (Posted on Youtube: October 15, 2018) ["In the 19th century, Dostoevsky wrote The Idiot to explore the perilous journey of the truly beautiful soul. With Hacksaw Ridge, Mel Gibson set out to portray a similar journey; that of Desmond Doss, the first conscientious objector to win a medal of honor. This video dives deeper into this incredible story, examines its narrative structure, the qualities of its main character and reflects on the place of goodness and innocence in a violent world. Sources: K.M. Weiland – Creating Character Arcs"]

---. "The Philosophy of Cloud Atlas: How Beauty Will Save the World." (Posted on Youtube: February 14, 2018) ["The philosophy of Cloud Atlas through the lens of Fyodor DostoevskyJose Saramago, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn."]

---. "The Philosophy of Sense8: Emotion and Connection." (Posted on Youtube: July 7, 2017)

---. "The Philosophy of The Fountain – Escaping Our Mental Prisons." (Posted on Youtube: November 28, 2018) ["Revisiting The Fountain; this video essay pushes beyond the various interpretations of the plot to explore the deeper themes at the heart of Darren Aronofsky’s ambitious film." Books discussed: Ernest Becker – The Denial of Death; Eckhart Tolle – The Power of Now.]

---. "The Problem of Other Minds – How Cinema Explores Consciousness." (Posted on Youtube: May 31, 2018) ["How have films engaged the problem of other minds? In this video essay, I discuss cinematic explorations into consciousness in the context of the cognitive revolution that has challenged many of the basic assumptions about what was for a long time believed to be a uniquely human trait." Uses Frans de Waal's book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?"Hailed as a classic, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? explores the oddities and complexities of animal cognition--in crows, dolphins, parrots, sheep, wasps, bats, chimpanzees, and bonobos--to reveal how smart animals really are, and how we've underestimated their abilities for too long. Did you know that octopuses use coconut shells as tools, that elephants classify humans by gender and language, and that there is a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University whose flash memory puts that of humans to shame? Fascinating, entertaining, and deeply informed, de Waal's landmark work will convince you to rethink everything you thought you knew about animal--and human--intelligence."]

---. "Prometheus & Covenant: Building a Mythos of Savage Creation." (Posted on Youtube: October 27, 2017) ["On the road towards Alien: Awakening; this in-depth analysis explores how Prometheus and Covenant built a mythos of savage creation around one of the most iconic movie monsters."]


---. "Stoicism in the Shawshank Redemption." (Posted on Youtube 2019) ["The Stoic Philosophy of The Shawshank Redemption, presented in a few brief meditations based on the writings by Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus and Chrysippus."]

---. "Sunshine – A Visceral Experience of Life, Death and Meaning." (Posted on Youtube: September 28, 2018) ["An examination of Sunshine and its visceral presentation of themes of life, death and meaning." Book discussed: Carl Sagan – Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.]


---. "The Tree of Life: Crafting an Existential Masterpiece." (Posted on Youtube: May 7, 2017)

---. "The Ultimate Antidote for Cynicism: It’s a Wonderful Life." (Posted on Youtube: December 21, 2017) ["A video essay looking at It’s a Wonderful Life and its discussion on individualism that is arguably more relevant than ever."]


---. "Venturing into Sacred Space | Archetype of the Magician." (Posted on Youtube: April 21, 2018) ["In this conclusion of my Archetype Series based on the book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, I examine the archetype of the Magician and explore some related concepts such as initiation, ritual process and sacred space." Other sources discussed:  Carol S. Pearson – The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By; Robert Moore – The Archetype of Initiation: Sacred Space, Ritual Process and Personal Transformation; Mircea Eliade - The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion; Victor Turner – The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure.]

---. "What Makes a Great King? Exploring the Archetype of the King in Movies and Television." (Posted on Youtube: August 18, 2017) [MB: I think this has a great message about the leader role/archetype (not comfortable with the king thing, but I recognize it is an archetype) and only wish that it wasn't limited to just a discussion of masculine archetypes. Easily beats the ocean of facile business leadership books. From the author: "... Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s archetypes" in their book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine  "are a very interesting way to analyze media and provide personal insights, similarly to Joseph Campbell’s related concept of the Hero’s Journey."]

---. "Why Apocalypse Stories Feel Different Now." (Posted on Youtube: February 21, 2023) ["An exploration of the evolution of apocalypse stories, and of how The Last of Us, Station Eleven, and The Leftovers are shifting the emphasis of the genre towards a more hopeful and humanistic tone."]

Monday, February 20, 2023

Happening (France: Audrey Diwan, 2021)





 Happening (France: Audrey Diwan, 2021: 100 mins)

Blackhurst, Alice. "On Audrey Diwan’s ‘Happening’ (‘L’événement’)." Another Gaze (April 19, 2022) ["Hearing about a new film adaptation of an Annie Ernaux book always makes me nervous. Her texts are so committed to the act of writing itself, what only writing can reveal, that to translate them into images carries risks of misfire. Pairing intimate, personal details with devices from more sociological or anthropological traditions (lists, observations, cataloguing, collation), her work presents sizeable challenges to adaptation. In the case of L’événement (literally, ‘The Event’, translated as Happening for both book and film versions), the text Ernaux wrote in 2000 about the illegal abortion she had as a student in France in the sixties, the imperative is not so much to “tell the story” of an unwanted pregnancy as to, years later, achieve neutral distance from it via the deliberate and retrospective process of prose composition. It is about saying – to make use of the English title – that yes, this happened, but that the flow of reflections and sense-memories inspired by its writing might in the end be more interesting than the procedure itself."]

Cotton, Jess. "Happening Is an Abortion Story About Working-Class Women." Jacobin (May 25, 2022)

Diwan, Audrey and Anamaria Vartolomei. "On Happening." Film at Lincoln Center Podcast #396 (May 2022) ["Winner of the Venice International Film Festival’s prestigious Golden Lion, Audrey Diwan’s exceptionally well-observed breakthrough is an unsparing, gripping portrait of a young woman’s attempts to secure an illegal abortion in 1960s France. A student of ambition and promise, hoping to leave her small town and embark on a professional life of the mind, Anne Duchesne (Anamaria Vartolomei in a brave, overwhelming performance) finds her entire future thrown into doubt upon discovering that she’s pregnant. Sure to be one of the most talked-about movies of the year, Happening, based on the semi-autobiographical novel by acclaimed author Annie Ernaux, is a drama that incrementally builds in power, showing the step-by-step process by which an ordinary young woman attempts to establish her freedom and ownership of her body."]

Eggert, Brian. "Happening (2022)." Deep Focus Review (May 11, 2022)

Haas, Lidija. "In Happening, Unwanted Pregnancy Derails a Life." The New Republic (May 12, 2022)

Ide, Wendy. "Happening director Audrey Diwan on confronting abortion taboos." Financial Times (April 16, 2022)

Laffly, Tomris. "Happening." Roger Ebert (May 6, 2022) 

Lane, Anthony. "Happening and the Solitary Woe of An Illegal Abortion." The New Yorker (May 16, 2022)

Marso, Lori. "Feeling Like a Feminist with Audrey Diwan’s Happening." Los Angeles Review of Books (June 30, 2022) ["

Scherffig, Clara Miranda. "Interview: Audrey Diwan’s Happening." Screen Slate (May 3, 2022)








Mark Blyth: International Political Economy (Shooting Azimuths)

Personal Website Pages:

Center for European Studies at Harvard University

The Guardian

Watson Institute International and Public Affairs

Writings/Discussions/Videos:

Baccarro, Lucio, Mark Blyth, and Jonas Potusson. "Beyond Varieties of Capitalism: A Growth Model Approach." UK in a Changing Europe (November 21, 2022) ["Mark Blyth, Lucio Baccaro and Jonas Pontusson explain the concept of national ‘growth models’, drawn from their recent book Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation, highlighting how the concept can help us make sense of recent UK economic and political developments."]

Blyth, Mark.  Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford University Press, 2013. ["Selected as a Financial Times Best Book of 2013. Governments today in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. In contrast, they have advanced a policy of draconian budget cuts--austerity--to solve the financial crisis. We are told that we have all lived beyond our means and now need to tighten our belts. This view conveniently forgets where all that debt came from. Not from an orgy of government spending, but as the direct result of bailing out, recapitalizing, and adding liquidity to the broken banking system. Through these actions private debt was rechristened as government debt while those responsible for generating it walked away scot free, placing the blame on the state, and the burden on the taxpayer. That burden now takes the form of a global turn to austerity, the policy of reducing domestic wages and prices to restore competitiveness and balance the budget. The problem, according to political economist Mark Blyth, is that austerity is a very dangerous idea. First of all, it doesn't work. As the past four years and countless historical examples from the last 100 years show, while it makes sense for any one state to try and cut its way to growth, it simply cannot work when all states try it simultaneously: all we do is shrink the economy. In the worst case, austerity policies worsened the Great Depression and created the conditions for seizures of power by the forces responsible for the Second World War: the Nazis and the Japanese military establishment. As Blyth amply demonstrates, the arguments for austerity are tenuous and the evidence thin. Rather than expanding growth and opportunity, the repeated revival of this dead economic idea has almost always led to low growth along with increases in wealth and income inequality. Austerity demolishes the conventional wisdom, marshaling an army of facts to demand that we see austerity for what it is, and what it costs us."]

---. "Eternal Austerity Makes Perfect Sense If You are Rich." The Guardian (November 15, 2013)

---. "Global Markets are No Longer Obeying Economic Common Sense." The Guardian (February 9, 2016)

---. "Global Trumpism." Foreign Affairs (November 15, 2016)

---. Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press, 2002. ["Mark Blyth argues that economic ideas are powerful political tools as used by domestic groups in order to effect change since whoever defines what the economy is, what is wrong with it, and what would improve it, has a profound political resource in their possession. Blyth analyzes the 1930s and 1970s, two periods of deep-seated institutional change that characterized the twentieth century. Viewing both periods of change as part of the same dynamic, Blyth argues that the 1930s labor reacted against the exigencies of the market and demanded state action to mitigate the market's effects by "embedding liberalism" and the 1970s, those who benefited least from such "embedding" institutions, namely business, reacted against these constraints and sought to overturn that institutional order. In Great Transformations, Blyth demonstrates the critical role economic ideas played in making institutional change possible and he rethinks the relationship between uncertainty, ideas, and interests on how, and under what conditions, institutional change takes place. Mark Blyth is an assistant professor of political science at the Johns Hopkins University specializing in comparative political economy. He has taught at Columbia University, and at the University of Birmingham, UK. Blyth is a member of the editorial board of the Review of International Political Economy."]

---. "Sovereigns, Citizens and Suckers." Open Source (September 6, 2011)

---. "State of the Union." Open Source (January 4, 2018) ["The people’s economist Mark Blyth is a perpetual fan favorite for Open Source listeners. The Brown University professor, who never left behind his working-class Scottish roots, brings a vernacular wisdom and wit to his deep analysis of inequality, austerity, and popular unrest. He also often sees what the rest of us tend to miss. In 2016, he predicted both of the year’s major upset victories: the American election of Donald J. Trump as well the British vote for Brexit. You can listen to our own shell-shocked phone call with Blyth just after the Brexit vote here:"]

---. "Whether it’s homes or jobs, our dreams are moving further out of reach every year." The Guardian (September 22, 2021)

Blyth, Mark and Bill Maurer. "Money, Then and Now." On the Media (October 12, 2018) ["Most schoolchildren learn that money arose when barter proved insufficient for meeting everyday trade needs. People required more complex transactions, so they invented currency: a medium of exchange, unit of account and store of value. It's a compelling story...but a false one. Instead, most evidence suggests that money arose from recordkeeping — or, as UC Irvine professor Bill Maurer explains to Bob, "in the beginning was not the coin... in the beginning was the receipt." In this segment, Bob speaks with Maurer and Brown University's Mark Blyth about past and present myths about money, and what the history of money might suggest about its future."]

Blyth, Mark and Simon Tilford. "How the Eurozone Might Split." Foreign Affairs (January 11, 2018)

Blyth, Mark and Sylvia Maxfield. "A New Financial Politics?: Introduction." Foreign Affairs (January 22, 2018)

Blyth, Mark, David Kaiser and Vanessa Williamson. "The French Sensation: Income Inequality in 700 Pages and a Hundred Graphs." Radio Open Source (May 1, 2014) ["The hottest book everybody is talking about, that no one has read and no can get their hands on, is a giant, data-packed tome on income inequality covering three hundred years of history by the French economist Thomas Piketty. Is there a reason he’s getting the rock star treatment? Is it the symptoms that resonate (our drift into oligarchy), or is it the cure (a progressive tax on wealth)? Capital in the 21st Century is expected to sell 200,000 copies in the first month. Both The New Yorker and New York have covered the book’s success and Piketty’s whirlwind tour of the States, which is surprising everyone. It’s being praised as a ‘watershed’ entry in economic thought by Paul Krugman."]





















Thursday, February 9, 2023

Wade Davis: Anthropology/Ethnobotany/Explorer (Shooting Azimuths)



----------------------------------------------------------------

Davis, Wade. "Anthropologist Wade Davis Discusses His Life and Work." New Books in Anthropology (May 5, 2021) ["Of the three major influences on Wade Davis’ life and work one of the most important is the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gary Snyder, and in this interview the professor shares how foundational that connection remains. This is just one highlight of many he shares about his thinking and writing as Wade indulges my interest in his ‘craft of culture’ on his path to becoming a renowned storyteller. This professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, former Explorer-in-Residence for the National Geographic Society, and award-winning author, Davis shares the interesting back stories of his best-selling first book, The Serpent and The Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey Into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic, about his research into Haitian ‘zombie poison’, how his hypothesis was publically challenged, and how the Hollywood movie version was just the kind of cultural distortion he was trying to overcome with his book. In the course of talking about this first book which helped launch his writing career he shares thoughts about academic writing more generally and in particular how his PhD thesis, Passage of Darkness, is really a sterile version of the richer and more textured narrative of the first book even though the latter is preferred by academics. For that matter, Wade has something to say about academic objectivity before we move on to talk about his influential One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest, his CBC lectures-inspired The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, and his award-winning Into The Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest. He also speaks at length about the influence of his Harvard mentors – the British anthropologist David May Ray Lewis, and the botanist and plant explorer Richard Evan Schultes, and how he and the late botanical explorer Tim Plowman made up the ‘coca project’ and the significance of ‘the divine leaf of immortality’."]

---. "Dreams From Endangered Cultures." TED Talks (January 2007) ["With stunning photos and stories, National Geographic Explorer Wade Davis celebrates the extraordinary diversity of the world's indigenous cultures, which are disappearing from the planet at an alarming rate."]

---. "Famed Explorer Wade Davis — How to Become the Architect of Your Life, The Divine Leaf of Immortality, Rites of Passage, Voodoo Demystified, Optimism as the Purpose of Life, How to Be a Prolific Writer, Psychedelics, ..." The Tim Ferris Show #652 (January 27, 2023) ["Wade Davis (@wadedavisofficial, daviswade.com) is Professor of Anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. Between 2000 and 2013, he served as Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. Named by the NGS as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet, and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.” An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, Wade holds degrees in anthropology and biology and a PhD in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups while making some 6000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing The Serpent and the Rainbow, an international bestseller, later released by Universal as a motion picture. In recent years, his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Australia, Colombia, Vanuatu, Mongolia, and the high Arctic of Nunavut and Greenland."]

---. "Indigenous cultures hold the keys to sustaining our planet. At COP15, will we finally be listening?" The Globe and Mail (December 10, 2022) ["For these societies, the land is alive, a dynamic force to be embraced and transformed by the human imagination. Reciprocity, as opposed to extraction, is the norm."]

---. "Notes from an author: Wade Davis on Colombia's Magdalena River." National Geographic (February 18, 2021) ["A journey along the Río Magdalena reveals a sacred tributary, the Río Claro — a repository of stories that paints a unique picture of the country."]

---. The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World. Anansi, 2009. ["Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? In The Wayfinders, renowned anthropologist, winner of the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize, and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis leads us on a thrilling journey to celebrate the wisdom of the world's indigenous cultures. In Polynesia we set sail with navigators whose ancestors settled the Pacific ten centuries before Christ. In the Amazon we meet the descendants of a true lost civilization, the Peoples of the Anaconda. In the Andes we discover that the earth really is alive, while in Australia we experience Dreamtime, the all-embracing philosophy of the first humans to walk out of Africa. We then travel to Nepal, where we encounter a wisdom hero, a Bodhisattva, who emerges from forty-five years of Buddhist retreat and solitude. And finally we settle in Borneo, where the last rainforest nomads struggle to survive. Understanding the lessons of this journey will be our mission for the next century. For at risk is the human legacy -- a vast archive of knowledge and expertise, a catalogue of the imagination. Rediscovering a new appreciation for the diversity of the human spirit, as expressed by culture, is among the central challenges of our time."]

---. "The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World." (Posted on Youtube: June 20, 2013) ["Presenting at a plenary session of the 2013 Climate, Mind, & Behavior Symposium, anthropologist Wade Davis illuminates the need to embrace and celebrate the cultural and intellectual diversity that constitutes the totality of human experience, especially when considering fundamental questions of how we are to relate to our environment." Based on his book: The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World]

---. "The Worldwide Web of Belief and Ritual." TED Talks (January 2008) ["Anthropologist Wade Davis muses on the worldwide web of belief and ritual that makes us human. He shares breathtaking photos and stories of the Elder Brothers, a group of Sierra Nevada indians whose spiritual practice holds the world in balance."]




Tuesday, February 7, 2023

Aftersun (UK/USA: Charlotte Wells, 2022)





 Aftersun (UK/USA: Charlotte Wells, 2022: 101 mins)

Eggert, Brian. "Aftersun." Deep Focus Review (November 2, 2022)

Flight, Thomas and Tom van der Linden. "Aftersun." Cinema of Meaning #48 (February 2, 2023) ["Thomas Flight and Tom van der Linden explore cinema as memory, and discuss the complex emotions that arise when trying to put together the fragmented pieces of one’s past, in Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun."]


Hudson, David. "Charlotte Wells' Aftersun." Current (October 19, 2022)

Lemercier, Fabien. "Aftersun." Cineuropa (May 5, 2022) ["Charlotte Wells demonstrates her potential as a filmmaker with a subtle, sensitive and highly controlled first feature about the holidays of a divorced father and his 11-year-old daughter."]

















Monday, February 6, 2023

Bryan Stevenson: Lawyer/Equal Justice Initiative/The National Memorial for Peace and Justice (Shooting Azimuths)

 Biography:

New York University - School of Law

Website

Bryan Stevenson's Books

Activism/Work/Writings:

Adams, Tim. "Bryan Stevenson: America's Mandela." The Guardian (February 1, 2015) ["Bryan Stevenson has devoted his life to exposing racial bias in the US penal system, with cases including a 13-year-old boy sentenced to life and numerous wrongful death row convictions. Tim Adams meets him at his Alabama HQ."]

Capeheart, Jonathan. "Bryan Stevenson wants us to confront our country’s racial terrorism and then say, ‘Never again.’" Washington Post (April 24, 2018)

Equal Justice Initiative ["The Equal Justice Initiative is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society."]

Evans, Richard and Bryan Stevenson. "How Germany Can Help America Remember." On the Media (July 3, 2020) ["It’s often said the North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative. That’s why the battle still rages, and still takes casualties, every single day. To chronicle the opening of a new front in the war over the Civil War, Brooke and OTM producer Alana Casanova Burgess went to Montgomery, the first capital of the Confederacy, to speak with public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson about his new civil rights museum and memorial. When it comes to honoring and learning from our historical ills, Stevenson says America should look to another conflicted capital city, Berlin, Germany. In this piece, Brooke also speaks with historian Sir Richard Evans, author of The Third Reich in History and Memory, about how vestiges of the Nazi regime have been carefully curated to remember the victims of the Holocaust without reverence for their oppressors."]

Lacy, Claudia and Jacqueline Olive. "A Modern-Day Lynching?: Always in Season Looks at 2014 Hanging in NC & Legacy of Racial Terrorism." Democracy Now (February 1, 2019) ["As we mark the beginning of Black History Month, we look at “Always in Season,” a disturbing new documentary that examines lynching in the United States both past and present. It interviews Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, which built the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery to remember the more than 4,000 African Americans lynched in the United States. It also looks closely at the case of Lennon Lacy, a 17-year-old African-American high school student who, on August 29, 2014, was found hanging from two belts attached to a wooden swing set in a largely white trailer park in Bladenboro, North Carolina. At the time of his death, Lacy was dating an older white woman. Local authorities quickly determined his death to be a suicide, but Lacy’s family and local civil rights activists feared authorities may have been covering up a lynching. We speak with Lacy’s mother, Claudia Lacy, and Jacqueline Olive, the director of “Always in Season.”"]

Landrieu, Mitch, et al. "Confronting the Legacy of the Confederacy." Best of the Left #1186 (May 29, 2018) ["Today we take a look at the legacy of the Confederacy, the monuments and white supremacy it left behind and the racial terror institutionalized in America based on upholding its values."]

"Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror." 3rd ed. Equal Justice Initiative (2017)

McWilliams, James. " Bryan Stevenson on What Well-Meaning White People Need to Know About Race." Pacific Standard (February 6, 2018)

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice ["More than 4400 African American men, women, and children were hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, and beaten to death by white mobs between 1877 and 1950. Millions more fled the South as refugees from racial terrorism, profoundly impacting the entire nation. Until now, there has been no national memorial acknowledging the victims of racial terror lynchings. On a six-acre site atop a rise overlooking Montgomery, the national lynching memorial is a sacred space for truth-telling and reflection about racial terror in America and its legacy."]

Okeowo, Alexis. "A Devastating, Overdue National Memorial to Lynching Victims." The New Yorker (April 26, 2018)

Ramsey, Joseph. "Beyond Condemnation." Against the Grain (February 1, 2023) ["Throwing away the key is what the criminal punishment system – and, by extension, the U.S. public – does to tens of thousands of people behind bars. Why does the acclaimed public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson attend to and represent those serving extreme sentences? What does Joseph G. Ramsey mean by Stevenson’s “compassionate radicalism”? Ramsey talks about Stevenson’s transformative ideas, and his own."]

Stevenson, Bryan. "A Presumption of Guilt." The New York Review of Books (July 13, 2017)

---. "'Death Penalty is Lynching's Stepson': On Slavery, White Supremacy, Prisons & More." Democracy Now (May 1, 2018) ["Extended conversation with Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit behind the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the country’s first-ever memorial to the victims of lynching in the United States. The memorial opened last week in Montgomery, Alabama. Its centerpiece is a walkway with 800 weathered steel pillars overhead, each of them naming a U.S. county and the people who were lynched there by white mobs. The memorial’s partner site, the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, also opened last week. For more, we speak with Bryan Stevenson, who says that acknowledging history is crucial to facing racism today. “Everybody wants to think that if they were alive during slavery, they’d be an abolitionist,” Stevenson says. “If we’re not prepared to act today, then I don’t think we can claim that we would have acted any differently during slavery and lynching and segregation.”"]

---. "On Challenging the Legacy of Racial Inequality in America: the Work of the Equal Justice Initiative." Slavery and Its Legacies (February 6, 2017) ["Bryan Stevenson is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. Mr. Stevenson is a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer who has dedicated his career to helping the poor, the incarcerated and the condemned. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill and aiding children prosecuted as adults. Mr. Stevenson has successfully argued several cases in the United States Supreme Court and recently won an historic ruling that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger are unconstitutional. Mr. Stevenson and his staff have won reversals, relief or release for over 115 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row. Mr. Stevenson has initiated major new anti-poverty and anti-discrimination efforts that challenge the legacy of racial inequality in America, including major projects to educate communities about slavery, lynching and racial segregation. Mr. Stevenson is also a Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law."]

---. "One Lawyer's Fight For Young Blacks And 'Just Mercy.'" Fresh Air (October 20, 2014)

---. "'Talking History is Way We Liberate America': : New Memorial Honors Victims of White Supremacy." Democracy Now (May 1, 2018) ["The National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened last week in Montgomery, Alabama—a monument to victims of white supremacy in the United States. The memorial’s centerpiece is a walkway with 800 weathered steel pillars overhead, each of them naming a U.S. county and the people who were lynched there by white mobs. In addition to the memorial dedicated to the victims of lynching, its partner site, the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, also opened last week. For more, we speak with Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit behind the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the country’s first-ever memorial to the victims of lynching in the United States."]

Teutsch, Matthew. "The Problem with Confederate Monuments in Public Spaces." Black Perspectives (July 26, 2017)

Toobin, Jeffrey. "The Legacy of Lynching on Death Row." The New Yorker (August 22, 2016) ["In Alabama, Bryan Stevenson is saving inmates from execution and memorializing the darkest episodes of America’s past."]









Friday, February 3, 2023

M.J. Dorian: Arts/Creativity/History (Shooting Azimuths)

Dorian, M.J. "Carl Jung • The Red Book (Part 1)." Creative Codex #11 (November 18, 2019) ["On this episode we dive into one of the strangest and most enigmatic books ever written: The Red Book. This is a book so infamous that it was kept locked away for fifty years after Carl Jung's death, raising concerns that it might prove that the world renowned psychologist was actually insane. Is it a work of visionary creativity or divine madness? Let's find out."]

---. "Carl Jung • The Red Book (Part 2)." Creative Codex #12 (February 3, 2020) ["In this episode we join Carl Jung as he meets Death, Satan, and his own soul. Join the journey as we deep dive with soundscape simulations of Jung’s visions, exploring the Archetypes, the Mundus Imaginalis, and Active Imagination."]

---. "Frida Kahlo (Pain Becomes Art)." Creative Codex #3 (February 25, 2019) ["Is creativity linked with emotion? Can life's tragedies and heartbreaks be resolved through creating art? In this episode we try to answer those questions with the help of one of the most iconic artists of all time: Frida Kahlo."]

---. "H.R. Giger: A Beautiful Darkness." Creative Codex #9 (September 2, 2019) ["H.R. Giger is considered by many to be the most evil artist in history. Join us as we take a deep dive into the abyss where Giger's strange ideas are born. In this episode we also explore: how did Giger create a style so distinct that people see it as 'out of this world'?"]

---. "Leonardo Da Vinci's Secret." Creative Codex #2 (September 3, 2018 ["What made Leonardo da Vinci so consistently inspired? What was his secret?"]

---. "Leonor Fini • Mirrors of the Dark Sublime (Part I)." Creative Codex (April 22, 2022) ["Leonor Fini was one of the most prolific and mysterious artists of the 20th century. Her career spans an impressive 67 years, she completed over 1,100 oil paintings, and her art was featured in over 350 international gallery exhibitions during her lifetime. Yet she is virtually unknown to us today. Her art and career are shrouded with the mystery of a sphinx's riddle. This is the story of Leonor Fini, one of the 20th century's great creative geniuses." Part 2: "Leonor Fini • The Dark Masquerade."]

---. "Listener Q&A." Creative Codex #10 (September 2019) ["Our first Listener Q&A episode!!! So many compelling questions including: Are left handed people more creative? Was Nikola Tesla spiritual? How do you quiet the doubting voices in your mind? What was Frida Kahlo's life like after the accident? Is creativity a supernatural force? What is the nature of evil?"]

---. "Listener Q&A 🎉 5 Year Anniversary Special 🎉." Creative Codex #43 (December 7, 2023)

---. "Marina Abramović • IMMATERIAL • Part 1: Life or Death." Creative Codex #36 (February 2, 2023) ["This is Part 1 of a three part series about the legend of performance art: Marina Abramović. On this episode, we explore her childhood, Marina's first forays into art, and her controversial Rhythm series. In a first for podcasting, we explore her performance art through sonic simulations of the works as they are discussed."]

---. "Marina Abramović • IMMATERIAL • Part II: Conjunction." Creative Codex #37 (March 3, 2023) ["This is Part 2 of a three part series about the legend of performance art: Marina Abramović. On this episode, we explore her intense relationship and art partnership with Ulay. The narrative weaves its way through their thirteen year collaboration, focusing on their early years, first performances together, and their Art Vital manifesto which encapsulated their life and art."]

---. "Nikola Tesla & the Paradox of Genius." Creative Codex #5 (May 9, 2019) ["Nikola Tesla's unique genius is the stuff of fantasy; he electrified the world, feuded with Thomas Edison, invented a death ray, and caused an earthquake in Manhattan. In this episode we try to untangle the paradox of Nikola Tesla's life: how can a man of unrivaled genius change the world but die a hermit with no money to his name?"]

---. "The Origin of Art." Creative Codex #1 (August 18, 2018) ["Travel back 40,000 years to the first known art made by human hands. How did creativity begin? Why does 'art' exist?"]

---. "Salvador Dali (Saint of Delusion)." Creative Codex #7 (July 3, 2019) ["Salvador Dali is one of the most successful artists of all time. Join us as we find the origin of his unmistakable style, discover the secret to his creative process, and unravel the lies of the enigmatic: Dali."]

---. "The Subtle Art of Mirroring." Creative Codex (December 6, 2022) ["Have you ever noticed that you mirror your closest friend's habits and interests? Have you ever wondered: 'how do I think like Leonardo da Vinci or Albert Einstein?' On this creativity tip, we are going to explore something we all do naturally: mirroring. And how we can use to inspire our creative work in new and unexpected directions."]

--- . "Vincent van Gogh • A Strange Boy (Madness, Genius, & Tragedy: Part 1)." Creative Codex #22 (May 26, 2021) ["Can madness and genius be contained in one individual? Can psychosis and the rarest artistry be contained in one mind? These contradictions pervade the story of Vincent van Gogh. And in the final three years of his life, they culminate in a whirlwind. You may think you know Vincent, you may have heard about him on a TV show or a podcast. But not like this. Over the next three episodes, we will explore Van Gogh’s personal letters, doctor’s reports, police reports, and family letters, to paint a vivid picture of Vincent in his three final years, these are the years that produced his most famous and beloved works, and the years in which Vincent’s final tragic descent begins. Was he actually psychotic or just misunderstood? Did he really cut off his ear and commit suicide? Was he actually a creative genius or is it all just hype? Let’s find out."]

---. "Vincent van Gogh • The Ear Incident (Madness, Genius, & Tragedy: Part 2)." Creative Codex #23 (June 11, 2021) ["On this special episode, we dive into the full truth about the most infamous event in art history: Vincent van Gogh's ear incident. The 'ear incident' serves as a catalyst event, which signals the onset of a mental affliction which will torment Vincent van Gogh for his final three years. Paradoxically, at the same time his mental health is in decline, his paintings are showing the signs of a creative genius. "]

---.  "Vincent van Gogh • The Asylum (Madness, Genius, & Tragedy: Part 3)." Creative Codex #24 (July 29, 2021) [MB: I was just listening to this on a stroll in the morning sun and I was struck at the incredible love & support of Theo van Gogh for his tortured brother Vincent. MJ Dorian's exploration of it literally brought me to tears and I marveled at how important the sibling relation is (blood or otherwise). Here's to all the equally supportive & loving brothers and sisters out there - much love and gratitude to you all :) Episode description: "On May 8th, 1889, Vincent van Gogh checks in to a mental asylum. What begins as a three month stay extends into a year. A period of time during which Vincent paints 141 masterpieces in between bouts of debilitating psychotic attacks. On this episode, we dive into Vincent and Theo's letters to finally uncover all of the details about Vincent's yearlong stay in the asylum."]

---. "Vincent van Gogh • At Eternity's Gate (Madness, Genius, & Tragedy: Part 4)." Creative Codex #25 (August 26, 2021)  [MB: "Working around the household this afternoon, I finished Pt. 4 of MJ Dorian's 4 part Creative Codex series on Vincent van Gogh. It is one of the most impressive podcasts I have listened to: providing the intellectual & artistic biography of Vincent's early years, the inspiring story of his relationship with his brother Theo, Vincent's battles with mental illness, serious myth busting of the misconceptions of his illness & art, a riveting true crime investigation of Vincent's death, Theo's ultimate fate, and the unfairly ignored Johanna van Gogh-Bonger's pivotal, tireless role of rescuing Vincent van Gogh from the dustbin of history, through posthumously exhibiting Vincent's art and building his legacy, translating the brothers hundreds of letters into multiple languages, and literally being the reason we know Vincent van Gogh as an artistic giant, rather than as a tragic footnote. I was left breathless :) Episode description: "On this episode we explore the tragic death of Vincent van Gogh. We seek to answer, once and for all, was it: suicide or homicide? In the process we discover that the two popular theories explaining Vincent's death are deeply flawed, and a new theory emerges. This episode follows the events of that fateful day through Theo's perspective. After a thorough investigation, we explore the aftermath, and meet the woman who made Vincent van Gogh a household name: Johanna van Gogh-Bonger."]

---. "Why Do Humans Need Art." Creative Codex #14 (April 26, 2020) ["Why do humans need art? Hidden within the answer to that question is a profound truth about the human experience. Join me as we travel around the world to narrow down three primary reasons why humans need art. In our quest for the answer we will explore Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, the Game of Thrones TV show, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Carl Jung's art therapy methods, Mozart's Requiem, and the visionary art of Alex Gray. Get your thinking caps on, this one's a bonafide deep dive."]

Thursday, February 2, 2023

Stephen West: Philosophy/History/Critical Theory (Shooting Azimuths)

 


West, Stephen. "A Basic Look at Post-Modernism." Philosophize This (May 21, 2018)

---. "Achievement Society and the rise of narcissism, depression and anxiety - Byung-Chul Han." Philosophize This! (September 6, 2023) ["Today we talk about positive power, neoliberalism, narcissism as a reaction to modern life, how technology makes isolation easier, and some tactics to find peace in the digital panopticon."]

---. "Adam Smith Part 1 - Specialization." Philosophize This!  #48 (January 17, 2015)  ["... we begin our discussion of Adam Smith and how specialization has enabled each of us to live like a king, whether we realize it or not. First, we find out why Stephen is that weird guy who sits alone in the bar smiling to himself. Next, we take a look at what an hour of work buys today versus 200 years ago, and consider how this changes our ideas about wealth. Finally, we find out how pursuing our own self-interests ultimately benefits society and allows us to accomplish more together."]

---. "Antonio Gramsci on Cultural Hegemony." Philosophize This! #131 (May 23, 2019) ["Gramsci begins his explanation by evoking and repurposing a word that had been thrown around all throughout human history but it was a word that he thought in recent years was starting to take on an entirely new meaning. The thing that was responsible for allowing a particular social class to ascend to power and then maintain a privileged status…was what he called Cultural Hegemony. This concept of hegemony is going to become massively important to the political conversation of the 20th and 21st centuries and by the end of this arc of the show we’re going to have looked at it from a lot of different perspectives. Maybe we should start from the origins of the word…the word hegemony originates in ancient Greece…the root of the word comes from the greek word meaning “to lead”, some translators say it’s closer to “to rule over”…but either way during antiquity there were things called hegemons…now in the context of ancient Greece a hegemon was typically a state that had a significant military advantage over another state…the arrangement being that if the weaker state didn’t comply with certain demands from the hegemon they would be annexed or dominated militarily or burned to the ground, take your pick. The term hegemony implied the threat of physical dominance over a population of people…this was the case all throughout human history. But Gramsci is going to say that in our modern world the definition of the word hegemony needs to evolve with the political reality we are living in. We are no longer living in a world where most political control is exercised by military dominance over a population of people. Since the advent of mass media people in positions of power have realized that a much more effective way of controlling populations is by manipulating the cultural parameters that citizens have to navigate. The general idea is this: to be a human being living a life in our modern world…you always HAVE to be living that life immersed within a particular culture. But what IS a culture other than an elaborate collection of norms, rules, structures, mores, taboos, rituals, values, symbolic gestures…these things are not exactly abstract concepts…they are acute. They are visible. This is the cultural custom of a handshake to pay deference to someone else. This is not talking with your mouth full. This is the sum total of every ritual we engage in on a daily basis that all come together to create a cohesive society. But what Gramsci is going to ask is: who exactly created all of these norms and taboos that we abide by?"]

---. "Are we heading for a digital prison? - Panopticon (Foucault, Bentham, Cave)." Philosophize This! #186 (August 23, 2023) ["Today we talk about Jeremy Bentham's concept of the Panopticon. Michel Foucault's comparison to society in 1975. The historical role of intelligence as a justification for dominance. The anatomy of free will, and how a digital world may systematically limit our free will without us knowing it."]

---. "Are You Left or Right?" Philosophize This! #50 (February 6, 2015) ["On this episode of the podcast, we discuss the contrasting political philosophies of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. First, we find out the origin of the terms “left” and “right” in relation to politics, and find out that the meanings of these terms are not as simple as they may first seem. Next, we discuss the opposing viewpoints of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine on how society should progress and implement change. Finally, we think about how their ideas relate to modern issues and consider whether or not their positions are mutually exclusive."]

---. "The Buddha." Philosophize This! #9 (November 10, 2013) ["... the life of Siddhartha Gautama and his Heisenberg-esque transformation into Buddha. We learn how Buddha left a lifestyle of being fed grapes and being fanned with palm leaves to pursue a life of celibacy, starvation, and sleep deprivation. We also learn about how Buddha reached enlightenment while sitting beneath a fruit tree à la Isaac Newton, and about the four noble truths which he believed were the key to ending human suffering once and for all. "]

---. "Capitalism vs Communism." Philosophize This #81 (May 10, 2016)

---. "Carl Schmitt on Liberalism, Part 1." Philosophize This! (July 1, 2019) ["When John Dewey and Antonio Gramsci show up with their lunchbox the first day at the new job…this is the first order of business that people like them are going to have to deal with. Now, it’s right here that we can understand why the two of them went in the respective directions they did…because like we talked about the beginning of the 20th century can be broadly understood in terms of three major branches of political discussion, three primary conversations…that are going on…we’ve already talked about two of them and understanding all three of them is absolutely crucial because the contents OF these conversations is going to go on to dictate the direction of almost all subsequent political philosophy all the way up to the present day…when a philosopher sets out to contribute something to the political discussion of the 20th century they are almost without exception doing so in consideration to one of these three major critiques of the way we’ve done things in the past. Once again, what we’ve done in the past is Liberal Capitalist Democracy…the three major critiques are going to be John Dewey and his critique of traditional Democracy…Antonio Gramsci and his critique of Capitalism…and the guy we’re going to be talking about today…the philosopher Carl Schmitt and his critique of Liberalism."]

---. "Carl Schmitt on Liberalism, Part 2." Philosophize This! (July 1, 2019) ["So maybe the best place to begin our discussion today is just to say that the fact that the sovereign still exists at some level in our Liberal societies shouldn’t come as an enormous surprise to people. I mean, after all what exactly are systems of norms like the constitution trying to normalize? Carl Schmitt would ask if the constitution is a regulatory document…what exactly is it regulating? He would say that what it is regulating is the more fundamental, underlying political process that has been going on since the dawn of civilization. Liberalism’s been tacked on after the fact…makes us feel good…helps us feel like the world is a lot more peaceful and tolerant than its ever been…but once again, the reality of the world to Carl Schmitt, the reason we haven’t seen a respite from dictatorships, bloodshed and political instability is because we are still engaged in the exact same political process we’ve always been engaged in…one rooted in intolerance…to Carl Schmitt the foundation of the political lies in a distinction between friend and enemy."]

---. "Confucianism." Philosophize This! #8 (October 29, 2013) ["On this episode of the podcast, we learn about Confucius, a man whose ideas impacted China and eastern philosophy for thousands of years after his death. We find out how Confucius went from being the poor, friendless son of an ancient Chinese 'Teen Mom' to becoming one of the most quoted people in history, as well as how he was reduced to selling his philosophy door-to-door after a brief career as a politician which ended in conspiracy and bribery."]

---. "Consequences of Reason." Philosophize This! #134 (August 7, 2019)

---. "Daoism." Philosophize This! #7 (August 9, 2013) ["So, this demand to find strategies and guidelines to follow in an attempt to rule more efficiently and masterfully caused these officials to spread out and sort of innovate and teach their own versions of what the most effective way to rule people was. There were a lot of them, and a lot of great wisdom comes from their teachings. A few of these stood out from the rest, the best of which still affect Chinese and Asian culture to this day. But all of their ideas collectively became known as the One Hundred Schools of Thought. Daoism and Confucianism are two of these hundred. So, philosophy in the East arose by means of necessity."]

---. "David Hume, Part 1." Philosophize This! #51 (February 24, 2015) ["On this episode of the podcast, we talk about David Hume! First, we learn about Hume’s ‘is’ versus ‘ought’ distinction and how not being mindful of this pitfall can lead us down a dangerous path. Next, we discuss the limitations of science and learn what Hume thought should fill in the gaps it leaves (spoiler alert: it’s not religion). Finally, we discuss Hume’s thoughts on causality and ensure that you’ll never think about playing pool the same way again."]

---. "David Hume, Part 2." Philosophize This! #52 (March 4, 2015) ["On this episode of the podcast, we continue our discussion of David Hume. This time, we focus on Hume's response to the Teleological Argument, which goes a little something like this: “Look at how perfectly everything works! All of this must have been designed by God.” We also learn about Hume’s view on miracles, and find out how unimpressed he is that Bruce Willis was the sole survivor of that train accident. "]

---. "Derrida and Words." Philosophize This (June 25, 2018) ["To put this point another way, there are stable, authentic meanings to words and statements out there somewhere, the same way an Enlightenment thinker might think there is a stable, authentic reality out there that we’re all accessing or a stable, authentic self-identity that can be accessed, and that if only we reason about the meanings of things in the Athenian Agora long enough and are careful and precise enough with our word usage, we can arrive at the stable, authentic meaning of these words that we can then use to communicate in a more objective way. To a thinker like Jacques Derrida, this way of thinking would be naïve, outdated, and it’s based on some pretty fundamental misconceptions about how language works and what words are when you look at them under a microscope. And probably the best place to start explaining this is to talk about two things that every word carries beneath a surface level examination: diachronic and synchronic meaning."]

---. "Dewey and Lippman on DemocracyPhilosophize This #130 (May 23, 2019)

---. "Everything that connects us is slowly disappearing. - Byung Chul Han pt. 2." Philosophize This! #189 (October 3, 2023) ["Today we talk about the disappearance of rituals, truth, community, communication, public spaces and talk about the importance sometimes of being an idiot."]

---. "The Frankfurt School - Introduction." Philosophize This #108 (August 17, 2017) ["The Frankfurt School, also known as the Institute of Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), is a social and political philosophical movement of thought located in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It is the original source of what is known as Critical Theory. The Institute was founded, thanks to a donation by Felix Weil in 1923, with the aim of developing Marxist studies in Germany. The Institute eventually generated a specific school of thought after 1933 when the Nazis forced it to close and move to the United States, where it found hospitality at Columbia University, New York."]

---. "The Frankfurt School (Part 2) - The Enlightenment." Philosophize This #109 (August 26, 2017)

---. "The Frankfurt School (Part 3) - The Culture Industry." Philosophize This #110 (September 7, 2017)

---. "The Frankfurt School (Part 4) - Eros." Philosophize This #111 (October 20, 2017)

---. "The Frankfurt School (Part 5) - Civilization." Philosophize This #112 (November 6, 2017)

---. "The Frankfurt School (Part 6) - Art As a Tool for Liberation." Philosophize This (December 2, 2017)

---. "The Frankfurt School (Part 7): The Great Refusal." Philosophize This (December 23, 2017)

---. "The Frankfurt School: Erich Fromm on Love." Philosophize This! #150 (January 30, 2021) [A discussion of Erich Fromm and his book The Art of Loving.]

---. "The Frankfurt School - Walter Benjamin, Part 1." Philosophize This! (March 19, 2021) [With a focus on "The Task of the Translator."]

---. "Frederick Hayek - The Road to Serfdom." Philosophy This! #139 (February 11, 2020)

---. "Guy Debord: The Society of the Spectacle." Philosophize This! #171 (November 1, 2022) ["... if you were lost in a city…right now in 2022…what would you do to find your way back home? I don’t know about you, but I would pull out my phone, and I would map my way back to wherever I wanted to go. Back in the 90’s though…maybe you’d pull out your Thomas Guide to find your way home. Back in the 70’s maybe you’d ask someone for directions. In the 1800’s maybe you’d pull out a compass and a map. 20,000 years ago maybe you’d look at your relative position to the sun and trace your steps back to where you came from. Point is: the technology available to you, changes how you live your life. And if the technology available to you is an elaborate spectacle … that perpetuates a religious obsession with appearances, alienates you from other people, keeps you hypnotized never really knowing what’s going on in reality, commodifies your relationships, personal information, even where your eyes are pointing…if this is what technology is doing to us… we can’t look at this stuff as just disinterested technology anymore…to Guy Debord this is a clear degradation of human life and relationships. Not to mention the fact that you face a situation with this technology that no other human generation has ever had to deal with. You can’t just choose to abstain, from the economic system like someone can just walk out of a Catholic mass if they think it’s all nonsense. You have to be a part of it in some way. And as you do that…there are literally teams of people working in close correlation with algorithms… super smart people…where their entire job …is to look at your tendencies on these screens…and find any way they can to get you to spend more time contemplating the spectacle instead of living."]

---. "Hannah Arendt - The Banality of Evil." Philosophize This! (November 2, 2019) ["To not be engaged in the “active life” is a mistake to Hannah Arendt. But she’d want us to understand that not living the “active life” can take on many different forms. You could surrender your responsibility to think, fall into an identity given to you by someone else, the mistake made by people like Adolf Eichmann. But you could just as easily become an accessory to evil being carried out in the world by sitting around, thinking about stuff all day, like so many traditional philosophers have done in the past. This is why she doesn’t want to be thought of as a political philosopher, because so many philosophers she’s seen lead by the example of sitting quietly in an academic institution, theorizing about abstract concepts all day long, but never taking action on anything. She’d want us to realize that this “contemplative lifestyle” has real consequences in the world. You can’t innocently and benignly theorize about things by yourself and just expect things to end there. The sad reality of living the contemplative life is that this passive, inactive approach almost always leads to your ideas being coopted and used by people that are actually engaging in the “active life.” Philosophy and politics will always be closely connected to each other, and to deny that fact is to be willfully complacent so that you can sit in a tower alone where it’s safe. Safe at least for now, she would say."]

---. "The Hellenistic Age Pt. 5: Race to the Dark Ages." Philosophize This! #14 (January 18, 2014) ["On this episode of the podcast, we discuss Middle Platonism and the Race to the Dark Ages. We learn how Philo of Alexandria reconciled Judaism with Plato's vision of God as a master craftsman, and find out how this relates to building an IKEA bookcase. We also discuss the important distinction Plutarch made between a flatterer and a friend, and why he would have absolutely hated Facebook. "]

---. "How much freedom would you trade for security? (Foucault, Hobbes, Mill, Agamben)." Philosophize This! #187 (August 31, 2023) ["On today's episode we talk about the upsides of a surveillance state. The ongoing social dilemma of freedom vs security. The value of privacy. States of exception. And Deleuze's Postscript on Societies of Control."]

---. "The Improbable Slavoj Zizek - Pt. 1." Philosophize This! #196 (February 26, 2024) ["Complexity of Zizek's Ideas: The episode discusses Slavoj Zizek's philosophy, highlighting the challenge of making his complex ideas accessible to a broad audience. Zizek's provocative style is not mere trolling but aims to disorient and awaken people from ideological complacency. Zizek's Philosophical Influences: Zizek's philosophical framework is deeply influenced by Hegel, Marx, and Lacan. This combination allows Zizek to offer unique interpretations of culture and society, particularly in critiquing global capitalism and exploring human subjectivity. Ideology and Subjectivity: The episode emphasizes Zizek's view on ideology. Zizek argues that everyone is influenced by ideology, and it's crucial to be aware of this in our pursuit of truth. This perspective challenges the simplistic view of ideology as something only others possess, highlighting its universal impact on human subjectivity. Analyzing Zizek's Communication Style: Zizek's method of delivering his philosophy is analyzed. He often starts with a progressive position, makes it appealing, then flips it to show its contradictions. This disorienting style is intentional, designed to reveal the limitations of ideology and encourage deeper critical thinking."]

---. "John Rawls - A Theory of Justice." Philosophize This! (January 2, 2020) ["But another way to think about the answer to this question is to say that every, great philosopher in their own way... questioned the fundamental assumptions that were present in the thinking of their time. That is a hallmark of a great philosopher...because when seeking solutions to philosophical problems...casting aside the cultural or linguistic assumptions of a particular snapshot in time...very often leads philosophers of the next generation to understand how those assumptions have been limiting our ways of thinking about things. The philosopher we're going to talk about today falls into this category...and he's going to question an assumption that seemed to others as radical as it was dangerous. His name was John Rawls...and this was the assumption that he questioned: Can human beings actually live and flourish for any extended period of time in liberal democratic societies? The political paradigm of the Enlightenment...liberal democratic societies. A government BY the many. Democracy. Liberal in the sense that there is a strong focus on rational discourse, the acceptance of outside ideas... the legitimacy of political ideas being decided by having conversations between competing ideas, let the best ideas rise to the top and direct the future of society for the time being, and if those prevailing ideas don't happen to be the ones you believe in, you're supposed to accept those ideas as part of the greater political process and work to defend your positions better the next time we're having a conversation."]
 
---. "Jürgen Habermas – The Public Sphere." Philosophize This! #143 (May 1, 2020) ["When transnational corporations with very specific ends they’re trying to achieve OWN major media outlets. When there is so much power in controlling people’s values…Habermas thinks the economic/governmental system COLONIZES the lifeworld. Where we used to sit around the dinner table and have discussions to determine our thoughts about the world…we now turn on a screen and are SOLD ways to think about things. The further we got from the origins of the public sphere in those coffee houses back in France …the further we got away from communicative rationality. We got so far away from it we could barely SEE it anymore…to the point where brilliant thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer wrote an entire book about rationality and didn’t even consider its existence! But for any chains we were supposedly wrapped in by the Enlightenment, Habermas thought the key to get us out of them was built into the Enlightenment all along. We just lost sight of it. The emancipatory potential of reason…reason’s ability to direct us AWAY from treating people as a means to an end…the type of reason GROUNDED in communication…GROUNDED in the pursuit of genuinely trying to understand the other person’s perspective and then working towards agreement…the type of reason that can allow us to make our decisions about things not by buying into an endless sales pitch, but by talking to our fellow citizens in the lifeworld comparing our individual perspecitives… True democracy, to Habermas, is when the lifeworld controls the system. Not the system controlling the lifeworld."]

---. "Leo Strauss: Moderns vs Ancients." Philosophize This! (October 9, 2019)

---. "Michel Foucault (Part 1)." Philosophize This (August 15, 2018) ["Foucault himself would never describe [Discipline and Punish] as a 'history' of anything. Foucault hated the word history and almost never used it in his writing. He used words to describe this book more like, a geneology of the way we’ve treated criminals, or an archaeology of how criminals have been punished over the years. He hates the word history…because so often the word history brings with it a connotation… that we exist in our modern world at the end of this long historical timeline of events that have led to near constant progress. This idea that, hey, we used to be these barbaric savages that followed the playbook of Machievelli, the ends justify the means, we used to believe that it was morally acceptable for the king or the people in power to brutally torture and kill someone that was guilty of a heinous crime…but then HISTORY happened. Time went on…progress was made. Great political theorists came along…great leaders, great ethical philosophers did their work and we all realized the error of our ways and brought into existence a more modern world where everyone is much more free…the people in power inhibiting the lives of the average citizen far less than they used to . Foucault is going to call this assumption about history into question and really dig deeper into the idea of: how much has really changed when it comes to the fundamental relationship between those in power and the citizens?"]

---. "Michel Foucault Pt. 2 - The Order of Things." Philosophize This! #122 (September 24, 2018)

---. "Michel Foucault Pt. 3 - Power." Philosophize This (September 24, 2018)

---. "On Media: Manufacturing Consent, Pt. 1." Philosophize This (December 17, 2020) [On Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman's landmark book Media Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.]

---. "On Media Pt. 2: Marshall McLuhan." Philosophize This! #149 (January 5, 2021) ["Regardless of where you stand on McLuhan’s media theory, he’s responsible for an entire branch of contemporary media theory that honestly wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for him. Some say his ideas are nostalgic and old. Some say they were far ahead of their time and that the longer technology develops the more we’ll see how many things he got right. For me personally, I don’t really care either way. The value of Marshall McLuhan to me, the true takeaway after reading his work that I think he would have been most happy if people left him with, is that we should pay attention. Be aware of the things that are going on around you. Try to be aware of media and the effects they’re having on human affairs. Don’t just cling to the ship and ride the vortex down into the blackness. Look at the details. Try to make connections. Try to find patterns. Because it’s only by paying attention that we can ever hope to step outside of the landscape we inherited at birth against our will. In the immortal words of Marshall McLuhan, 'A fish doesn’t know what water is until it’s been beached.'"]

---. "The modern day concentration camp and the failure of human rights: Giorgio Agamben." Philosophize This! #191 (December 4, 2023) ["Today we talk about the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. Human rights, a political tactic to dehumanize groups that has been growing in popularity, governments declaring states of emergency and how the concept of potential may in fact be a unifying force."]

---. "Plato." Philosophize This! #4 (June 20, 2013) ["In this week's episode, we learn about Plato's "Symposium", which you might think of as philosophy's version of fan fiction. We also learn about Plato's "Theory of Forms" and ask ourselves what makes a tree, well, a tree. This leads to discussion of Plato's famous "Allegory of the Cave" and calls into question whether or not everything we see is merely a shadow of its true self. Finally, we learn about Plato's views on society and government and why he thought democracy was one of the worst forms of government, second only to tyranny."]

---. "Richard Rorty." Philosophize This! 142 (May 1, 2020) ["Some people called Rorty a postmodernist…which would usually place him in staunch opposition to anything that even sounds like the word Enlightenment. Like excitement! But let me tell ya…Rorty was a very exciting man. He rejected the title of postmodernist and most titles for that matter. He operated in a very unique realm for a thinker where like a typical post-structuralist he didn’t believe in any sort of grand narrative that could explain away the universe…but yet he was still…a die hard, card carrying fan…of the project of the Enlightenment overall. See in a world where there are so many 20th century thinkers hating on the Enlightenment…here is a guy some viewed as a post-structuralist, coming to its defense. Let me explain why he would do something like this."]

---. "Robert Nozick - The Minimal State."  Philosophize This! #138 (January 21, 2020) ["Robert Nozick and the book of his we're going to be talking about today is titled Anarchy, State and Utopia. Now, just to give the following conversation a little preliminary structure...that title, Anarchy, State and Utopia is referencing the three major sections that the book is divided into. The first section would be Anarchy...where Nozick spends a considerable portion of time being understanding of the Anarchist's aversion to government, but ultimately making a case that they go too far. The middle portion of the book, State, has Nozick laying out the TYPE of state that HE thinks is best...and in the Utopia section is where he describes WHY his version of a state is the best...Utopia is a sort of tongue in cheek musing by Nozick..he by NO MEANS thinks his system is an actual Utopia...but he thinks it's FAR BETTER than other systems that have been tried and he argues for why he thinks that is.See, Nozick is not a fan of there being a BIG state, with a lot of responsibilities...he's not a fan of there being no state...so what is he a fan of? How big should the government be and what exactly should it do? Nozick is a fan of what he would call "the minimal state". The best way to start understanding what he means by this is probably to contrast him with both the work of Rawls and the Anarchists of his time..."]

---. "Rousseau pt. 2 - Democracy, Aristocracy or Monarchy?" Philosophize This! (January 1, 2015) ["On this episode of the podcast, we continue last week's thought experiment about creating a society from scratch on a deserted island. First, we find out how building a society is similar to making cupcakes, in the sense that every ingredient contributes something important and interacts with the other ingredients in a unique way. Next, we discuss “human nature” and consider how our perception of it may be unfairly influenced by a small handful of people. Finally, we compare the three categories into which Rousseau believes all governments can be classified (democracy, monarchy, and aristocracy), and analyze the pros and cons of each structure."]

---. "Rousseau pt. 3 - The General Will." Philosophize This! #47 (January 9, 2015) ["On this episode of the podcast, we continue our desert island thought experiment, this time focusing on the general will of the people. First, we examine several interpretations of what "the general will of the people" actually means. Next, we take an in-depth look at Rousseau's interpretation, and discuss the difference between democratic and transcendental will. Finally, we explore the multitude of complications that arise when a government tries to enact the general will after it's (somewhat) agreed upon."]

---. "Should we overthrow the government tomorrow? - Anarchism pt. 1 (Chomsky, Malatesta)." Philosophize This #192 (December 27, 2023) ["Today we talk about some common misconceptions about Anarchism, the weaknesses of traditional government structures, a possible alternative way of cooperating and whether or not the government is the hierarchy we should be focusing on."]

---. "Should we prepare for an AI revolution?" Philosophize This! #185 (August 10, 2022) ["Today we talk about the revolutionary potential of generative AI. For better or worse."]

---. "Simone Weil - Attention." Philosophize This! #172 (November 21, 2022) ["If you’re Simone Weil around this time in her life we’ve been talking about…and you’re looking at the world around you and trying to diagnose what the problems are that maybe we can improve upon…this psychological and spiritual crisis that she calls Affliction… this is going to be at the top of her list. This dehumanized state of learned helplessness, has infected millions and millions of people around the globe…which is also to say…that you don’t just find Affliction in factory workers that are being treated like a means to some economic end. Or in soldiers on the front line being treated as a means to a political end. You will find affliction, Simone Weil says, where ever you find people being transformed from human beings into things…and then those things being grouped into collectives that are easier to control…and then through various different strategies those people are rendered incapable of thinking their way out of the stuck place that they exist in. And all of this… mediated… by a sort of organizing principle of human political movement, that Simone Weil is going to refer to throughout her writing as Force."]

---. "Simone Weil - The Mathematician." Philosophize This! #174 (February 2, 2023) ["So in one of her earlier journals Simone Weil writes about a moral dilemma that ends up being a metaphor, for a situation that a lot of people might find themselves in while living in the modern world. She says to imagine a man…who lives in a society…where he is forced to solve complex math problems all day long…but the catch is that when he solves one of these math problems…any time he arrives at an answer, and that answer is an even number…he gets beaten with a stick…by the powers that be. They tell em we don’t take too kindly to even numbers round here son. Now go on…solve another one of them math problems, as he twirls the stick smiling with his dirty hands. The moral dilemma for Simone Weil was this: what should the mathematician do when he finds himself in this situation? Should he resist and fight back? Should he just refuse to solve any more of their math problems? Should he make a sign and protest about how upset he is? By the end of these two episodes released here today we’ll understand why Simone Weil came up with the particular solution that she did to this moral dilemma…and also why as the years went on…she grew in her thinking enough to realize that the answer…. might not be as simple as the one she originally came up with."]

---. "Simone Weil - Vessels of God." Philosophize This! #175 (February 2, 2023) ["Courage and moderation. Maybe the two virtues that most closely resemble moral obligation and thinking clearly. Two things I don’t know if I’ve ever seen another philosopher more committed to than Simone Weil."]

---. "Socrates and the Sophists." Philosophize This! #3 (June 23, 2013) ["This week we talk about the prosperity of Athens and how it led to the rise and ideas of a group of philosopher teachers called the Sophists, we tied up some loose ends and helped put all that we've learned in the last two episodes into context with a graph of the Presocratics, and we ended by talking about a man named Socrates."]

---. "Structuralism and Context." Philosophize This (January 28, 2018) ["On this episode, we talk about the origins of Structuralism. Included is a discussion on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, (born Nov. 26, 1857, Geneva, Switz.—died Feb. 22, 1913, Vufflens-le-Château), Swiss linguist whose ideas on structure in language laid the foundation for much of the approach to and progress of the linguistic sciences in the 20th century."]

---. "Structuralism and Mythology (Part 1)." Philosophize This! (March 18, 2018) ["On this episode, we talk about the mythology that underlies the media we consume and how it serves as an access point to the structures of culture."]

---. "Structuralism and Mythology (Part 2)." Philosophize This! (March 18, 2018)

---. "Susan Sontag - Do you criticize yourself the way you criticize a movie?" Philosophy This! #176 (March 1, 2023) [A discussion of Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation." "This is the basis of what made her start to think that every truth needs to have a martyr associated with it. Because in a world where critics are always trying to moderate and understand and link everything to some normative theory … critics are not people indulging in the margins of society. These are people that take the margins of society, and spend their career trying to silence the margins for fear that they might call into question the normative, reasonable middle… of the way things are for most people. These are people…that generally speaking that have never had to sacrifice anything to be able to get to what they call the truth. But to Susan Sontag…if we’re truly committed to progess as a society…then the voices we need to hear the most, are the ones that have been marginalized. She says Simone Weil … to be one of these voices…if you think about it…simply… marginalized herself to try to access these perspectives. She’d say: In a world dominated by people that claim to bring a voice of reason to public discourse…what we need, are the voices that at first might seem, a little unreasonable. Because there’s nothing more boring to Susan Sontag…nothing more committed to keeping things exactly how they are…than the type of non-critical critics that hide behind what she calls the impersonal tones of sanity. And to tie this back to her thoughts on art…i’ll leave you with one of my favorite lines from her. She says: “I never trust novels which fully satisfy my passion to understand.”"]

---. "Susan Sontag - Do You Speak the Language of Images and Videos." Philosophize This! #177 (March 22, 2023) ["Fact is: pictures and videos don't have to come with a disclaimer on them that says everything we’ve already said in this episode…as Susan Sontag says a picture doesn't need to come with a caption on it that says: This is the truth. The people looking at the picture or the video just assume that it’s the truth, on a level they never did with paintings or the written word. And if you say back to this well… not me. Not me, I’m not one of these morons that just accepts things as the truth. Well, to use one of Sontag’s own rebuttals to this kind of person…she’d probably say back to them: hey, so…when you watch a video or see a picture of something that you think is really cool…and then afterwards you find out that it was completely fake or staged. Are you disappointed when you hear that? Little bit? Well why are you disappointed? If you’re not bringing to the image a stamp of legitimacy that it probably doesn’t deserve yet. I mean knowing as much as we do in 2023 about how images are used to get you to feel a certain way…why would everyone not be taking every image they see with a grain of salt at first? And that’s part of her larger point here. You know, if any portion of this episode so far has come off like its obvious to you, of course images always have an agenda behind them…then why do so many intelligent people continue living their lives, consuming content every day, giving images a free pass on any level? When you’re shopping for a car and a used car salesman comes up to you and starts telling you about how the car you’re looking at is perfect for you…you’re thinking oh really? Is that what the car is? The car is perfect for me huh…hmm you’re always looking for what his angle is…and rightfully so be cause he’s trying to sell you something. When an advertisement comes on you’re thinking what are they trying to sell me and how are they trying to sell it? This is a healthy way of thinking about these interactions. Well, whenever a picture or a video is presented to you…to Susan Sontag you should be putting those images through a similar type of critical analysis. The default orientation towards anything that’s claiming to represent complex reality in the two dimensional image form, should BE one where you’re asking follow up questions…you should at least be asking: who is giving me this image? why are they giving me this image? What do they want me to feel having seen this image? How is this image being presented? How is it edited? Knowing that a picture is always obscuring something…what might be obscured about reality if I took this picture to be the gospel truth? Human beings… have learned to adapt and survive in a lot of different environments over the course of history…we’ve learned to survive from the Serengeti all the way to the arctic tundra. Well the environment you have to survive in now is one where you are saturated by images that are trying to get you to feel a certain way. And if you don’t develop and practice this critical thinking about the images that you’re consuming, and then bring those skills to every moment…you’re going to always be at the mercy of the person that’s giving you your images."]