rssAir Guitar Nation
May 17th, 2008 · comment or link to (permalink)
This could so easily have been nothing more than a five second joke based on the title. Instead its absolutely mesmerising.
Hippies
May 17th, 2008 · 1 comment or link to (permalink)
Ignore the ridiculous commentary and enjoy the footage.
time: 90 mins.
The Curse of Oil
May 14th, 2008 · comment or link to (permalink)
There are seemingly hundreds of awful documentaries about oil, so its refreshing to see a large budget 3 part, 3 hour long (1st part here), produced by people who are not nutcases, for the UK’s Channel 4.
How The Chinese See Us
May 12th, 2008 · comment or link to (permalink)
It has become such customary practice for politicians to criticize other regimes as if they could only possibly rule without the will of the people that this was even trotted out when the Chinese government waded into China. Which is why this clip found by Charles Firth is so interesting - it gives us a glimpse of popular Chinese nationalism and for reasons Charles explains convincingly.
comment » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: politics world
The Terror of Zimbabwe
May 7th, 2008 · 2 comments or link to (permalink)
A solid documentary on the tragic Failed State of Zimbabwe and the responsibility for it that one man, Mugabe, bears. Watching this made me wonder if failed states were not the result of monsters, but that monsters were the result of failed states.
If Mugabe were assassinated, there is a strong chance that many innocent lives would be saved and huge number of people would suffer less. Unlike many leaders Mugabe does not have the resources to make himself safe, and a single Cruise Missile would perhaps have a chance of success. Yet this outcome is unlikely, leaders rarely get assassinated outside of war, by a foreign state. There are reasons for this: Zimbabwe has no strategic benefit to others - no oil, and it is ‘illegal’ under UN law to assassinate a leader of a foreign state etc. But what if these reasons were actually an inevitable result of the way that countries evolve collectively?
What if the institutions of states evolve over time so that they self calibrate towards the stability of rule rather than the well being of the largest number of people? The natural equilibrium of politics is such that decision paths that allow for attacking the head of an organization or society will be rarer than war which requires bottom up confrontation with lots of individuals when evaluating the chance of a net reduction in suffering.
In other words, like the Selfish Gene perhaps there is a Selfish Meme, a naturally selected macro organization where people are expendable if the rules and institutions and nationalistic ideas (extended-genotype?) that create countries (extended-phenotype) survive. Perhaps what looks like the result of corrupt humans in government, is in fact the nature of government itself.
2 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: politics world