January 2010

There are only a few things to say, but you have to watch the video first. Now, having seen that, let me translate:Pat Robertson is saying that the Haitian slaves who revolted against the French colonists all those years back made a deal with the devil to do just that, which means that Robertson is perfectly fine with slavery and colonialism. That’s right. Robertson thinks both of those things are perfectly acceptable conditions by which people can exist, and that the idea of violently opposing a system that violently oppresses people based on skin color is the same as being in collusion with the devil (i.e. Satan). And, no, it does not matter one bit whether he’s talking about the original slave revolt, or the brutal Haitian defense against France some years later. It’s all the same thing: Pat Robertson is a-ok with slavery and colonialism. Now I leave the floor to you.

I have a few quick things to say about some experiences I had today (one of them was actually from earlier in the week, but it was too small to devote a post to). First — The NookI had the opportunity to fiddle with Barnes and Noble’s Nook today while I was running errands. I have a few impressions: The Good–It’s exceptionally light (about the weight of an average trade paperback), making for a reading experience that doesn’t break your wrist.–It looks lovely. The design is fantastic, though I would prefer it came in different colors.–Text actually looks good on the screen. It’s readable, easily changeable to other fonts or sizes, and I can see myself reading from such a machine at some point in the future without losing the reading experience. Immersion is possible.–The touchscreen and buttons are pretty easy to figure out without reading a manual (I had it down in about a minute). The Bad–It’s not as fast as it should be. This criticism is something many others have said about the Nook and other eReaders, and is probably simply a problem with e-ink technology that will have to be overcome in the next few years. I do know B&N is planning to upgrade the software for the Nook, which should alleviate some of the sluggishness. I should clarify that when I say slow, I mean it has a very slight, but noticeable lag when turning pages. If you’re the kind of person who often flips back and forth between pages (like me), it might be irritating. For anyone who tends to read “simpler” texts, it likely won’t be a problem.–It still costs more than I’m willing to spend for a product that isn’t quite as good as it could be. At $259 it’s still one of the cheapest and best eReaders out there, but I find it hard to justify spending that kind of money for something that has less computing power than one of those mini laptops. Overall, it has potential (and B&N is far less evil than Amazon has been in the last year), but they’ve still got a long way to go. Second — Taco BellApparently Taco Bell has been running a series of health ads on television in the same vein as those Subway commercials we’re all familiar with (you know, the ones with the guy who lost weight eating Subway and what not). The reasons are clear enough: they want to sell food (particularly their “healthy” food). I’m actually surprised by this, because when I first saw the commercials some time ago, I thought they were a joke. I laughed and thought, “I have to give Taco Bell props for turning a somewhat goofy, but appealing story into a joke for the purposes of selling food that induces cardiac arrest.” But, then it came to my attention that the woman in the commercials is real, and so is her story. Am I the only one that has a hard time taking the whole thing seriously? I can’t stop myself from laughing at what seems to be an outright mockery of everything Subway has stood for over the last decade. But that’s me. Third — Google Smacks ChinaI heard the news from Tobias S. Buckell and the first thing I thought was: “Way to go, Google.” You can’t ignore the rampant institutionalization of Orwellian-style politics in communist China, from their desperate desire to control information to their disturbing thought police who patrol the Interwebs in search of anti-Communist bloggers and the like in order to incarcerate them indefinitely. And now Google is saying, “Yeah, we’ve kind of had it, jackasses.” Okay, so they’re not really saying that (they’ll likely play the whole thing fairly safely, if not a-politically), but they might as well be. And that’s all I have for today. Thoughts?

Some time back I talked about why Avatar would suck, and yet it would still be one of the biggest movies in years. Thus far, it seems to be exactly that. Most of the people who love the movie point out that the story is horribly cliché, but that the visuals are stunning; those who dislike it point out that it’s either a crazy liberal fantasy (it probably is) or a visual stunt (considering that it’s in 3D, that’s not far off the mark). Probably the worst part of this is that I’ve seen Avatar recommended not for being a good movie, per se, but because one can’t miss the visual revolution it will likely start. And now, having seen all that is said about the movie, good and bad, I have come to love it. No, I haven’t seen the movie (I don’t have to in order to understand what the film entails), but I have come to love the film for the same reasons that I and others “hate” it. Here are a few of those reasons: It comments upon numerous American fantasies, particularly a nostalgic desire for an unattainable British-style empire (fueled, perhaps, by what Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. refers to as the “British imperial nostalgia displaced onto the American heirs” in his essay “Cyberpunk and Empire”) in an exceptionally obvious and unrelenting way. This makes for interesting analysis when one tries to consider how the vision Avatar gives us comments upon both the creators and the world we live in. What can only be said to be a remarkable ability on the part of the writers to reduce racial or ethnic subjects (or, for the purposes of this discussion, the “Other,” or the more apt term, “Subaltern”) to caricature, thinly veiled and served with a side of American-guilt masqueraded as White-guilt (I refuse to reduce problems of genocide to racial stereotypes when we live in a world beset with the perpetuation of this practice by people of all races). A uniquely anti-capitalist, anti-military, and anti-imperialist fictionalization that is and probably always will be mistaken for something it is not (i.e. some liberal critique of the U.S. militaristic state in need of refutation via indefensible positions. Such positions are, unfortunately, taken as legitimate critiques in this world–to put it more plainly, the use of the “this is an evil liberal movie” argument to reduce the term “liberal” into something derogatory while both ignoring and inviting others to ignore the truth underneath whatever is being said; we might call this the “head in the sand” mentality, which exist in all stripes of politics, no matter how right or left leaning). I’m sure there’s much more I could add to this, but these seem to be the three most important points to make. Avatar’s story is still trite; it’s character are still cardboard cutouts; it’s ideas are still representative of yesterday’s greatest hits; and no matter how hard you try, you can’t make it into anything more than a technology stunt worthy of the praise it has received (namely, that it is visually stunning, and nothing else). Whatever revolutionary power it will have will, thus, be reduced to the technological. I don’t think fans of the film, however, should be put off by this, because many great movies have influenced filmmaking while being terrible or mediocre or “just okay.” Influence is influence.