The Producers

Eight hours ago Steve Shaviro wrote the following on Twitter:

The great Jewish film about the Holocaust is not Schindler’s List, but rather The Producers (original version).

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. At first it didn’t make any sense, but the more I think about it, the more brilliant it seems.

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Terror in Mumbai Leaves 102 Children Dead

Bernard Chazelle:

The terrorist killers who took 102 innocent lives, all under the age of 1, have been identified. They are called malnutrition, dysentery, and respiratory infections. Indian authorities expect more deadly attacks in the days ahead. About 700 children are born every day in Mumbai: 34 of them will die in their first year — only 2 of them if they lived in France. “Which only shows,” said Friedman, “that India is 17 times flatter than France.”

Globalization has worked wonders for India: child mortality is on the rise and still higher than in that other economic powerhouse: Bangladesh. Despite economic growth averaging 9%, four in every 10 children in India are malnourished.

The comments section for the post is kind of annoying, but abb1 makes a good point, too:

Why, terrorism is a symptom of something, and high infant mortality is definitely a symptom of something. And they are probably symptoms of the same thing, except that nobody seems to care about the infant mortality. And what’s wrong with pointing this out?

—Bryan Klausmeyer

The Deadly Jester

The New Republic has a great essay on Zizek:

The cover of his book The Parallax View reproduces a Socialist Realist portrait of “Lenin at the Smolny Institute,” in the ironically unironic fashion made familiar by the pseudo-iconoclastic work of Komar and Melamid, Cai Guo-Jiang, and other post-Soviet, post-Mao artists. He, too, expects you to be in on the joke. But there is a difference between Zizek and the other jokesters. It is that he is not really joking.

It’s great to finally see someone decrying the threat Zizek poses to liberalism. All too frequently he slips by the radar under the guise of ironic postmodern humor. This distracts many vigilant liberals—but not Adam Kirsch—from understanding Zizek’s true—deadly—purpose. But it may be too late.

Of course Kirsch is right, but not for any of the reasons he thinks he is.

Via Adam Kotsko.

—Bryan Klausmeyer

The Assault on Mumbai

Tariq Ali on the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai:

Why should it be such a surprise if the perpetrators are themselves Indian Muslims? Its hardly a secret that there has been much anger within the poorest sections of the Muslim community against the systematic discrimination and acts of violence carried out against them of which the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in shining Gujarat was only the most blatant and the most investigated episode, supported by the Chief Minister of the State and the local state apparatuses.

Add to this the continuing sore of Kashmir which has for decades been treated as a colony by Indian troops with random arrests, torture and rape of Kashmiris an everyday occurrence. Conditions have been much worse than in Tibet, but have aroused little sympathy in the West where the defense of human rights is heavily instrumentalised.

On that note, too, the action-packed coverage in the media (particularly, CNN’s “Terrorism in India!”/Quantum of Solace coverage) is completely preposterous. Not to say that acts of terrorism ought to be celebrated or anything like that, but it’s unfortunate that the kind of coverage we’re subjected to is listening to ex-FBI consultants ramble on about what the proper procedure is for securing evidence in a crime scene, all as a thinly veiled effort to promote their various private defense consulting firms.

Decrying the media for promoting broad, unintelligent, half-assed coverage is something of a common place on the blogosphere, but would it really be that difficult for a network to, you know, do some real journalism? This might entail, for example, focusing on how the terrorist attack impacts the structure of wealthy, urban “space,” of which the Taj Hotel functioned as the epitome of, against public/poor space directly outside the area surrounding Mumbai. Instead we get an endless repeat of the hostage count and how many U.S. nationals may or may not be impacted by the attack, which then allows the media to conveniently segue into a pathetic series of human interests stories.

Via Matthew Yglesias.

—Bryan Klausmeyer

$7.7 trillion dollars

Remember that old post comparing the bailout cost, then projected at $4.28tn, to various other large financial undertakings? Well, it was wrong, but not because the estimated costs were too high, but because they were too low. Bloomberg reports that the latest figure is just under $8tn! (Via Lenin.)

—Bryan Klausmeyer 1 Comment

Criterion Collection Streaming Festival

You can watch several ad supported movies from the Criterion Collection for free online if you sign up at The Auteurs. Extremely cool, and you don’t even have to worry about ruining your upload ratio…

—Mark Elliot Cullen

Sean Penn Talks to Chavez and Castro

Paddling all the way across the Gulf Coast and North Atlantic Ocean to single-handedly rescue the benighted masses from tyranny and oppression with drunken sidekick Christopher Hitchens and some other guy, wily Liberal Activist Sean Penn chronicles his recent trips to Venezuela and Cuba in The Nation.

I thought this was a great quote from his conversation with Fidel Castro:

With our dinner finished, I walk with the president through the sliding glass doors onto a greenhouse-like terrace with tropical plants and birds. As we sip more wine, he says, “There is an American movie—the elite are sitting around a table, trying to decide who will be their next president. They look outside the window, where they see the gardener. Do you know the movie I’m talking about?” “Being There,” I say. “Yes!” Castro responds excitedly, “Being There. I like this movie very much. With the United States, every objective possibility exists. The Chinese say: ‘On the longest path, you start with the first step.’ The US president should take this step on his own, but with no threat to our sovereignty. That is not negotiable. We can make demands without telling each other what to do within our borders.”

Anyone taking any bets on how long it will take the National Review’s “The Corner” blog to post a thorough and scholarly “deconstruction” of Hal Ashby’s film—ghost-written by the Sandanistas! All of them!

—Bryan Klausmeyer 2 Comments

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

Terry Pinkard has the complete copy of his new translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit available online. Check out the double-sided version (English on the left, German on the right). (Via Larval Subjects.)

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Frightening Joe the Plumber Video Urges You to Switch to Digital

Joe says it best:

America, we’ve never had a transition of this magnitude in the United States. The DTV transition affects the public safety of the United States, so it’s imperative that all Americans come together and learn all we can about the DTV transition…

It’s time to throw away that analog TV you’ve been clutching on to for the past three decades in order to defend the homeland. This is change all of America can believe in! (Via Wonkette.)

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Paul McCartney Defends Experimentation

A short response article to a recent Guardian critique of McCartney. In the first piece, the author wondered why McCartney had a need to prove to the audience that he was experimental by releasing an electronic album and a sideways sounding Beatles jam. McCartney replies:

The thing about experimenting is that it’s good fun. It’s interesting to do something you don’t do normally. It takes you into places you didn’t plan to go to. That’s quite an interesting aspect. Linda always liked to go for a drive and try and get lost. Most drivers don’t want to get lost - but she’d like it. And that idea of losing your bearings, as long as it’s not in deepest Africa, is something I like. I’ve always liked it. Because when you don’t always know what’s going on, that’s when you can really surprise yourself.

—Mark Elliot Cullen 2 Comments

Hugo Chávez: Stalinist Totalitarian Part IV

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez faces setbacks after yesterday’s regional elections (he won 17 out of 22, although it should be noted that two of the regions that voted against him contain roughly half of the country’s population), as the New York Times bravely chronicles through its stunningly even-handed prose. But clearly this must all be part of a grand, elaborate plan to usurp democracy in the name of his Evolving Revolutionary Ideology.

I wonder, too, how much of the Venezuelan tax-payers’ money has recently gone toward bailing out wealthy speculators and large financial institutions.

—Bryan Klausmeyer