Žižek Blames the US Government Shutdown on Ayn Rand’s Acolytes Who Caused the 2008 Collapse

in Current Affairs, Philosophy | October 14th, 2013

zizek-rand2

Images via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The gov­ern­ment shut­down and the rais­ing of the debt ceil­ing — such things are not usu­al­ly grist for our cul­tur­al mill. But all of that changes when a cul­tur­al the­o­rist pins the blame for Wash­ing­ton’s dys­func­tion on the acolytes of a pseu­do-philoso­pher. Writ­ing in The Guardian last Fri­day, in sim­ple, straight­for­ward prose, Slove­ni­a’s favorite the­o­rist Slavoj Žižek asks and answers a ques­tion in the title of his op-ed: “Who is respon­si­ble for the US shut­down? The same idiots respon­si­ble for the 2008 melt­down”. And who are those “idiots,” you might won­der? Let me spare you the sus­pense and jump you down to the last two para­graphs of his piece:

One of the weird con­se­quences of the 2008 finan­cial melt­down and the mea­sures tak­en to coun­ter­act it (enor­mous sums of mon­ey to help banks) was the revival of the work of Ayn Rand, the clos­est one can get to an ide­ol­o­gist of the “greed is good” rad­i­cal cap­i­tal­ism. The sales of her opus Atlas Shrugged explod­ed. Accord­ing to some reports, there are already signs that the sce­nario described in Atlas Shrugged – the cre­ative cap­i­tal­ists them­selves going on strike – is com­ing to pass in the form of a pop­ulist right. How­ev­er, this mis­reads the sit­u­a­tion: what is effec­tive­ly tak­ing place today is almost the exact oppo­site. Most of the bailout mon­ey is going pre­cise­ly to the Ran­di­an “titans”, the bankers who failed in their “cre­ative” schemes and there­by brought about the finan­cial melt­down. It is not the “cre­ative genius­es” who are now help­ing ordi­nary peo­ple, it is the ordi­nary peo­ple who are help­ing the failed “cre­ative genius­es”.

John Galt, the cen­tral char­ac­ter in Atlas Shrugged, is not named until near the end of the nov­el. Before his iden­ti­ty is revealed, the ques­tion is repeat­ed­ly asked, “Who is John Galt”. Now we know pre­cise­ly who he is: John Galt is the idiot respon­si­ble for the 2008 finan­cial melt­down, and for the ongo­ing fed­er­al gov­ern­ment shut­down in the US.

We’re not say­ing it’s the most tren­chant analy­sis, but we do like to take note of intel­lec­tu­al dus­tups. Speak­ing of, did you miss the Chom­sky-Žižek spat from the sum­mer? It went four rounds. Round 1. Round 2. Round 3. Round 4. And end­ed in a draw.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ayn Rand Adamant­ly Defends Her Athe­ism on The Phil Don­ahue Show (Cir­ca 1979)

William F. Buck­ley Flogged Him­self to Get Through Atlas Shrugged

Mike Wal­lace Inter­views Ayn Rand (1959)

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The Hunger Strikes at Guantánamo Bay Prison Revealed in Poignant Animated Video

in Animation, Current Affairs | October 13th, 2013

In late Sep­tem­ber, the US mil­i­tary declared the hunger strikes at Guan­tá­namo Bay over. “At its peak,” writes Char­lie Sav­age in The New York Times, “106 of the 166 pris­on­ers … were list­ed as par­tic­i­pants” in the strike. That num­ber has now dropped to 19, they say, and they’re all being giv­en “the appro­pri­ate lev­el of care.” What exact­ly does that mean? You can get an idea from this ani­mat­ed video cre­at­ed by The Guardian. In 6 min­utes, you’ll get intro­duced to the world of peo­ple who have spent years in prison. They’ve nev­er been charged with a crime nor giv­en access to the legal sys­tem. Despite being cleared for release, many remain stuck in lim­bo year after year. When they lose hope and go on hunger strike, they have tubes and food crammed down their noses. Poignant as it may be, the col­or­ful ani­ma­tion may dull your reac­tion to what’s actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing in Guan­tá­namo. Per­haps it’s bet­ter to look at these col­or pho­tos to ful­ly appre­ci­ate the Kafkaesque sys­tem the gov­ern­ment has put in place.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Odd Col­lec­tion of Books in the Guan­tanamo Prison Library

The Lost/Animated Inter­view with Fidel Cas­tro: If the Rev­o­lu­tion Fails, Cuba Will be “Hell Itself” (1959)

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Jurassic Park Tells You Everything You Need to Know About the Dangers of Global Capitalism

in Comedy, Current Affairs, Economics, Film, Philosophy | August 6th, 2013

For­get putting a bird on it. Put on a dinosaur on it for a sure­fire hit in our mar­ket-dri­ven econ­o­my. Direc­tor Stephen Spiel­berg cer­tain­ly did­n’t skimp on the “ter­ri­ble lizards” when adapt­ing Michael Crich­ton’s Juras­sic Park for the screen, and things turned out pret­ty well for him.

Mike Rugnetta, the fast-talk­ing host of PBS’s Idea Chan­nel, the­o­rizes that the 20-year-old film is a great, pos­si­bly inad­ver­tent com­men­tary on the dan­gers of glob­al mar­ket cap­i­tal­ism. His mer­ry spoil­er-packed video touch­es on such phe­nom­e­na as risky invest­ments, the sub­prime mort­gage cri­sis, and the hav­oc that can be wreaked by a dis­grun­tled employ­ee. He hales both Richard Atten­bor­ough’s park own­er char­ac­ter and Direc­tor Spiel­berg as ego­tis­ti­cal mad­men chas­ing mon­strous prof­its. His kitchen sink approach inevitably leads to appear­ances by both Bar­ney and Sloven­ian philoso­pher and cul­tur­al crit­ic Slavoj Žižek.

Rugnetta is quick (of course) to point out that he could come up with sim­i­lar hypothe­ses for such com­par­a­tive­ly fresh releas­es as World War Z (wage slav­ery), Iron Man (glo­ry be to the world-sav­ing entre­pre­neur), and Pacif­ic Rim (the glob­al mar­ket will unite us all)… but why, when Juras­sic Park’s got endur­ing, mar­ket-test­ed crowd-pleasers?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Does Math Objec­tive­ly Exist, or Is It a Human Cre­ation? A New PBS Video Explores a Time­less Ques­tion

Hen­ry Rollins: Edu­ca­tion is the Cure to “Dis­as­ter Cap­i­tal­ism”

Intel­li­gent YouTube Chan­nels

Ayun Hal­l­i­day final­ly got around to see­ing this movie last spring. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday 

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Henry Rollins: Education is the Cure to “Disaster Capitalism”

in Current Affairs, Education, Politics | July 23rd, 2013

We’ve already fea­tured for­mer Black Flag front­man and cur­rent spo­ken-word artist Hen­ry Rollins explain­ing why, to his mind, only edu­ca­tion can restore democ­ra­cy. He also believes it can cure some­thing he calls “dis­as­ter cap­i­tal­ism,” and you can hear more from him about it in the Big Think video above. He address­es, in his char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly straight­for­ward man­ner, the ques­tions of what exact­ly ails the Amer­i­can econ­o­my, how that ail­ment might have come about, and how the coun­try can edu­cate itself back to health. We may indi­vid­u­al­ly get our edu­ca­tions now, he grants, but “how long will it be until Amer­i­ca fis­cal­ly turns itself around” to the point of repay­ing “the risk of the invest­ment on that stu­dent loan to get a per­son through four years of col­lege? Will that per­son get a job where pay­ing off that loan and get­ting a house and afford­ing a fam­i­ly, will that be a pos­si­bil­i­ty? In the present Amer­i­ca, it doesn’t look like it is.”

See­ing a dire nation­al sit­u­a­tion, Rollins rec­om­mends doing like Chi­na, but not in the way you might assume. He sug­gests look­ing “500 years at a time,” much far­ther up the road than we have of late. “I’d be look­ing up the road so far my eyes would fall out of my head.” He wants the coun­try to become “like Europe, where they’ll edu­cate your kid until his head explodes,” pro­duc­ing “three doc­tors per floor of every apart­ment build­ing” and doing so by mak­ing “col­lege tuition either free or real­ly low.” Gen­er­al­ly thought of as lib­er­al, Rollins sums this up in a way that might appeal to his ide­o­log­i­cal oppo­nents: “If you have a coun­try full of whip-crack smart peo­ple, you have a coun­try the rest of the world will fear. They will not invade a coun­try of edu­cat­ed peo­ple because we are so smart we’ll build a laser that will burn you, the ene­my, in your sleep before you can even mobi­lize your air force to kill us. We will kill you so fast because we are so smart and we will have for­eign pol­i­cy that will not piss you off to the point to where you have to attack us.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hen­ry Rollins Pitch­es Edu­ca­tion as the Key to Restor­ing Democ­ra­cy

Hen­ry Rollins Tells Young Peo­ple to Avoid Resent­ment and to Pur­sue Suc­cess with a “Monas­tic Obses­sion”

Hen­ry Rollins Remem­bers the Life-Chang­ing Deci­sion That Brought Him From Häa­gen-Dazs to Black Flag

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Pussy Riot Releases First Video in a Year, Taking on Russian Oil Profits and Other High-Profile Targets

in Current Affairs, Music, Politics | July 17th, 2013

Russ­ian punk per­for­mance art col­lec­tive Pussy Riot will not be deterred. Despite two of their mem­bers still lan­guish­ing in prison labor camps for a musi­cal protest in Moscow’s Cathe­dral of Christ the Sav­ior, the band con­tin­ues to rail against its country’s cor­rup­tion and abus­es. This time, in their first music video in almost a year, they take on the Russ­ian oil indus­try and oth­er tar­gets in the song above called “Like in a Red Prison.” The Wall Street Jour­nal writes:

The con­fus­ing and caus­tic lyrics to the hard-to-lis­ten-to song decry sex­ism, “homo­pho­bic ver­min,” actor Ger­ard Depar­dieu (a recent recip­i­ent of Russ­ian cit­i­zen­ship cour­tesy of Mr. Putin), and likens Russia’s pres­i­dent to the Aya­tol­lah of Iran.

I don’t find the song hard to lis­ten to at all—quite the contrary—and the video’s pret­ty exhil­a­rat­ing too, with the band mem­bers, in trade­mark mul­ti-col­ored bal­a­clavas, clam­ber­ing atop an oil der­rick and defac­ing a por­trait of oil exec­u­tive Igor Sechin and a head of the Inves­tiga­tive Com­mit­tee (Russia’s FBI). Def­i­nite­ly a lot going on here, but the cen­tral focus is the cri­tique of Russ­ian big oil. The band explains on their site that “Russia’s rev­enues from the oil indus­try amount­ed to 7 tril­lion rubles ($216 bil­lion), but only Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin and ‘sev­er­al of his friend see this’” [sic].  The new song’s lyrics were part­ly writ­ten by one of the still-impris­oned mem­bers, Nadezh­da Tolokon­niko­va.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Russ­ian Punk Band, Sen­tenced to Two Years in Prison for Derid­ing Putin, Releas­es New Sin­gle

Fear of a Female Plan­et: Kim Gor­don (Son­ic Youth) on Why Rus­sia and the US Need a Pussy Riot

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Amanda Palmer’s Tips for Being an Artist in the Rough-and-Tumble Digital Age

in Current Affairs, Life, Music | May 24th, 2013

Aman­da Palmer is an artist who total­ly gets the pow­er of the Inter­net. Encour­ag­ing fans to freely share pay-what-you-wish down­loads of her music has endeared her to a cer­tain per­cent­age of the 99%, while anoth­er per­cent­age (there may be some over­lap here, folks) drubs her for lever­ag­ing her fame to crowd­source back­ing musi­cians will­ing to work for hugs, merch, and beer.

Her appetite for dig­i­tal dia­logue with admir­ers and accusers alike calls to mind fel­low shrink­ing vio­let Court­ney Love. Her refusal to let any­one but Aman­da Palmer speak for Aman­da Fuck­ing Palmer has giv­en rise to an army of trolls, who glee­ful­ly find proof of mon­strous ego in her most innocu­ous of moves. It’s the price of allow­ing the pub­lic com­plete access to “Do It With a Rock­star,” if you will.

As not­ed in her keynote speech (above) at the recent Muse and the Mar­ket­place lit­er­ary con­fer­ence, “with the inter­net you do not get to choose.” This applies whether one is gen­er­at­ing con­tent or leav­ing nasty com­ments. Her remarks touch upon her most recent firestorm, a direct trail lead­ing back to “A Poem for Dzhokar,” a hasti­ly com­posed and post­ed attempt to put her­self in the shoes of the sus­pect­ed Boston Marathon bomber as he lay in a boat, await­ing cap­ture.

Clear­ly, some­one with her expe­ri­ence does not slap such a hot pota­to online inno­cent of the con­se­quences. She got plen­ty of lumps, and whether or not the major­i­ty of them were deserved is a mat­ter of per­son­al opin­ion. More than 2300 peo­ple quick­ly logged on to voice these afore­men­tioned opin­ions, some sup­port­ive, some tak­ing the form of mock­ing haikus, which Palmer appre­ci­at­ed, espe­cial­ly since it was, at the time, Nation­al Poet­ry Month.

It seems to me that any time her ass is hang­ing out her giant heart’s not far behind. Lis­ten to her speech, and see if you don’t find her atti­tude ulti­mate­ly inspir­ing, espe­cial­ly for those artists inter­est­ed in con­nect­ing with a larg­er audi­ence. (The pre­sen­ta­tion’s so restrained, you can turn your back on the screen, turn your atten­tion to some pedes­tri­an task, and enjoy her thoughts pod­cast-style. )

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil Gaiman Launch­es New Crowd­sourced Sto­ry­telling Project (Spon­sored by the New Black­Ber­ry)

The Black Cab Ses­sions: One Song, One Take, One Cab

Ayun Hal­l­i­day will glad­ly wrap her­self in Aman­da Palmer’s “Ukelele Anthem”

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Three University Projects Use Twitter to Understand Happiness, Hate and Other Emotions in America

in Current Affairs, Life, Twitter | May 22nd, 2013

It turns out that the fleet­ing pro­nounce­ments we post on Twit­ter are cat­nip for aca­d­e­mics and oth­ers eager to find the elu­sive pulse of Amer­i­can soci­ety. Since Twit­ter launched in 2006, researchers have been hard at work fig­ur­ing out how to turn those 140-char­ac­ter mus­ings into tea leaves with some­thing mean­ing­ful to say about us all.

Here come three new projects that claim to pro­vide a win­dow into the Amer­i­can soul through Twit­ter. Whether they suc­ceed or not, well, that’s still unclear. (And, by the way, you can start fol­low­ing Open Cul­ture on Twit­ter here.)

Most fever­ish­ly excit­ed about its work are the team behind the Glob­al Twit­ter Heart­beat, which so far focus­es most­ly on the Unit­ed States. With the help of a huge SGI proces­sor to process a live feed of pub­lic social media data, a team of researchers from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois at Urbana-Cham­paign has made a heat map to show how peo­ple react (through Twit­ter) to big events.

They looked at two things: Hur­ri­cane Sandy (top) and the 2012 Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion (above). Using Twitter’s “gar­den hose feed”—a ran­dom sam­pling of 10 per­cent of the rough­ly 500 mil­lion tweets sent every day—researchers col­or-cod­ed tweets red for neg­a­tive tone and blue for pos­i­tive and showed the shift­ing con­cen­tra­tions of Twit­ter activ­i­ty across the coun­try. It looks like a map of a talk­ing weath­er sys­tem as occa­sion­al dia­logue box­es open up to show rep­re­sen­ta­tive tweets. Researcher Kalev Lee­taru argues that track­ing Twit­ter activ­i­ty gives us the poten­tial to track the heart­beat of soci­ety.

geographyofhate

Two oth­er projects look in an on-going way at tweet “tone,” or the negativity/positivity of mes­sages. One spin on this research is the Geo­graph­ic Hate Map (sam­ple map above), a project by Dr. Mon­i­ca Stephens of Hum­boldt State Uni­ver­si­ty in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia. To begin their work, Stephens and her team accessed a mas­sive data­base of geo­graph­i­cal­ly tagged tweets sent between June, 2012  and April, 2013.

They used only tweets that con­tained any of ten “hate words.” They read each tweet to be sure the words were used in a neg­a­tive way and built a map based on where the tweets came from. Then they aggre­gat­ed to the coun­ty lev­el and nor­mal­ized for the amount of twit­ter traf­fic in that area so that dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed areas don’t look more racist or homo­pho­bic by default.

Then there’s the glass half full. The Hedo­nome­ter mea­sures hap­pi­ness, or lack there­of, as expressed by tweets, cal­cu­lat­ing aver­ages based on what the researchers call “word shifts” (watch an expla­na­tion above). This research project, put togeth­er by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ver­mont Com­plex Sys­tems Cen­ter, uses the same gar­den hose feed as the Glob­al Twit­ter Heart­beat. This project search­es for fre­quent­ly used words to mea­sure how good a day Twit­ter users are hav­ing. Since 2008 the Hedo­nome­ter has kept track of how often words like “hap­py,” “yes,” and “love” pop up in tweets, as opposed to “hate,” “no,” and “unhap­py.” The sad­dest day on Hedo­nome­ter record so far is April 15, 2013, the day bombs explod­ed at the Boston Marathon fin­ish line. Christ­mas Day tends to rank as the hap­pi­est day of the year.

To be sure, any tool that uses tweets for data is mea­sur­ing a very young and spe­cif­ic sub­group of peo­ple. Tweets are not a reli­able mea­sure of any­thing, real­ly, but maybe with some tweak­ing, these research mod­els will come up with some­thing inter­est­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Data Visu­al­iza­tion: How to Tell Com­plex Sto­ries Through Smart Design

Watch a Cool and Creepy Visu­al­iza­tion of U.S. Births & Deaths in Real-Time

An Ani­mat­ed Visu­al­iza­tion of Every Observed Mete­orite That Has Hit Earth Since 861 AD

Kate Rix writes about edu­ca­tion and dig­i­tal media. Fol­low dai­ly ups and downs on Twit­ter @mskaterix.

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23 Cartoonists Unite to Demand Action to Reduce Gun Violence: Watch the Result

in Animation, Current Affairs, Politics | May 1st, 2013

The Unit­ed States has only five per­cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion, but some­where between 35 and 50 per­cent of the world’s pri­vate­ly owned guns. Is it a sur­prise, then, that we have sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er rates of gun vio­lence?

Accord­ing to research pub­lished by the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health, homi­cide rates in the U.S. are 6.9 times high­er than they are in oth­er high-income nations. For 15- to 24-year-olds, the homi­cide rate is 42.7 times high­er. Firearm sui­cide rates are 5.8 times high­er in Amer­i­ca than in oth­er coun­tries, even though the over­all sui­cide rates are 30 per­cent low­er.

A suc­ces­sion of high-pro­file massacres–Columbine, Vir­ginia Tech, Sandy Hook–has tak­en place against a base­line of dai­ly gun deaths that rarely make the nation­al head­lines: mur­ders, sui­cides, acci­den­tal killings. Since the Decem­ber 14 mass mur­der at Sandy Hook Ele­men­tary School in New­town, Con­necti­cut, in which 20 chil­dren and six adults were gunned down by a heav­i­ly armed man, there have been well over 3,300 gun-relat­ed deaths in Amer­i­ca. If cur­rent trends con­tin­ue, gun deaths are pro­ject­ed to exceed traf­fic deaths for the first time by the year 2015.

So what is being done? At the fed­er­al lev­el, noth­ing.

Ear­li­er this month the Sen­ate not only struck down leg­is­la­tion to ban assault weapons and high-capac­i­ty gun mag­a­zines, it also struck down–at the will of a 45-mem­ber minority–a bipar­ti­son com­pro­mise to expand back­ground checks for gun buy­ers, a mea­sure sup­port­ed by 90 per­cent of the Amer­i­can peo­ple.

In response to the paral­y­sis (some would say cow­ardice) on Capi­tol Hill, a group of 23 promi­nent car­toon­ists, includ­ing Gar­ry Trudeau, Ruben Bolling, Art Spiegel­man and Tom Tomor­row, have joined forces to fight back against the gun lob­by. The car­toon (above) was orga­nized by May­ors Against Ille­gal Guns, and is nar­rat­ed by actors Julianne Moore and Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man.

“Enough. Demand action,” say Moore and Hoff­man. “As a dad, as a mom, as a hus­band, as a wife, as a fam­i­ly, as a friend. As an Amer­i­can. It’s time. We can’t back down. It’s time for our lead­ers to act right now. Demand action”

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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