Because Vancouver Moose asked for it:
Category: movie
4 Free speech vs… yo mamma!
5 Movie Friday: Hardcore Pornography!
Since their first album Mass Romantic dropped almost 10 years ago, I have been a fan of The New Pornographers. They’re an amazing and unique-sounding band that uses unusual combinations of instrumentation and composition to create a musical motif that is not easily classified. Their use of several songwriters and lead singers is something that I’ve co-opted into my own band, which fans seem to enjoy a lot.
(Incidentally, pause it at 3:12 – those of you in Vancouver will probably recognize where this video was shot)
There’s a second reason why I thought I would highlight this particular band today (besides the fact that they’re amazing). Just like the Bare Naked Ladies had to deal with back in the 90s, some puritanical morons in the United States have canceled a performance by the band because of their spikiness over the name:
A Christian college in Grand Rapids, Mich., has cancelled a scheduled concert by Canadian indie band The New Pornographers because of the band’s name. The Vancouver-based band’s website announced the cancellation Wednesday. Calvin College rescinded an invitation to the band to play on Oct. 15 after weeks of discussion, the college said in a statement. The statement said the college found it difficult to explain the band’s name.
Yes, God forbid (pun intended) that anyone mistake the venerable name of Calvin College with anything so revolting as pornography. No, they’d much rather be associated with:
- Rampant anti-Semitism;
- Original sin (a disgusting doctrine which preaches that a mythical ancestor ate an apple, and as a result you are doomed to an eternity of torture);
- Censorship of musical expression (shock! surprise!)
- Southern Baptist churches (hi Fred!)
- And of course, Puritanism
Just so long as nobody thinks they’re cool with pictures of nekkid ladies. I felt today’s video was particularly appropriate.
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3 Movie Friday: Neil DeGrasse Tyson on UFOs
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is probably my favourite public figure in the sciences. No disrespect to Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Bill Nye, Lawrence Krauss, or any of the other multitude of famous scientists out there fighting the good fight for public education in science and skepticism, but I will always carry a torch for Neil. He’s a charismatic, animated, and engaging speaker who is happy to be in the limelight, without being so academic as to turn non-scientists away from the information.
Since I talked about the argument from ignorance earlier this week, I thought I’d share with you Dr. Tyson’s thoughts:
Whoops, wrong video… here it is:
This guy should be teaching science in every classroom in the world. He tears down the mystique about the scientific method and why it works better than the other ways we try to discern truth (divine revelation, hunches, common sense…).
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0 Movie Friday: Tim Minchin – Prejudice
This song really isn’t what you think it’s about:
I love Tim Minchin.
0 Movie Friday: Peter Chao
Sometimes ridicule is a powerful weapon. Peter Chao seems to recognize this:
While I am definitely not a fan of blackface, especially when it is divorced from its historical context, I actually laughed watching this video. Not because it’s funny to make light of black stereotypes, but because those same stereotypes are being held up to ridicule here. It also pokes fun at the “I’m not racist” meme, showing that merely saying it does not make it so.
Of course, not everyone gets the satirical element…
Of course, the meta-joke in all of this, is that “Peter Chao” is not the guy’s actual name. He is New Brunswick-born Davin Tong, speaks with unaccented (or Canadian-accented if you prefer) English, and plays this character on YouTube specifically to highlight the absurdity of racism. While his take on things isn’t exactly my own, I am glad to see that race is making its way into popular discussion.
Enjoy!
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0 Movie Friday: James Randi at TED
There’s maybe 5 of you who read this blog who don’t know who James Randi is. This explanation is for those of you who think he’s just a guy with really high pants (really high pants… WTF James?) James “The Amazing” Randi is a former magician who has devoted his life to promoting rationality and exposing claims of supernatural ability. He has an educational foundation that, among many other things, offers a $1,000,000 prize to anyone who can demonstrate their supernatural abilities under controlled conditions. So far, no takers.
But since I talked about what we did with John Edward, pseudo-psychic vampire ghoul fraud, when he visited Vancouver last week, I thought I’d show you some of James:
For fun, he also takes on homeopathy. CFI Vancouver is starting to talk about how we can address the issue of homeopathy being sold as real medicine in the coming weeks.
So there you go, you 5 people. The Amazing Randi.
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Okay, okay, okay, let’s see Randi bust some asshole in front of a live studio audience:
0 Movie Friday: President Bartlet gets Biblical on her ass
Have I said that I’m a big fan of The West Wing? Yes, yes I have, but I’ll say it again.
Using the Bible to justify anything is the beginning of the end for your argument. There’s so much evil shit in that book it chills the blood. It was written at a time when science didn’t really exist, when free inquiry was treason, and where superstition reigned. In the above clip, President Bartlet (played masterfully by Martin Sheen) decides to call out a bigoted radio show host by showing her the inconsistencies in her own argument – if you’re going to use the Bible to justify your hatred of homosexuals, you have to follow it all the way.
This is my challenge to any religious person who considers themselves a follower of the Bible – if there is a single Biblical law or prescription (even the ones that contradict the other ones) that you don’t follow (wearing cotton blended clothes, touching a pig skin, eating shellfish, sitting on the same couch as someone who’s on her period… just to name a few), please tell me how you decide which ones are worth following and which aren’t? By the way, I will not be swayed by the argument that the New Testament makes the Old Testament obsolescent – not only is that not Biblically-based, it is inconsistently applied (anyone who has ever invoked the Ten Commandments or Leviticus is apparently guilty of violating their own religious beliefs). If you apply some external standard of right and wrong to the Bible, you recognize that you are a better judge of right and wrong than the authors of the Bible, and that some of what they say can be ignored. If some, why not all of it? Where exactly is the line?
Wait a minute… bigoted radio show host? Gosh, where have we seen that before?
Yep, the character Jenna Jacobs is based on the real-life fraud (and racist harpy bitch) Laura Schlessinger. I thought that since we ran into her yesterday, it was a good time to show this most excellent clip.
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0 Movie Friday: Anotherآجر in the دیوار
I don’t often talk about my musical side (I actually had to create a new “music” tag for this post). I’ve been playing since I was a little kid, and I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t banging pots and pans, or singing, or doing something else musical. Music is, quite literally, an integral part of my entire life. I guess I’m lucky I don’t live in Iran, where rock music is banned (and for about a gojillion other reasons). Music isn’t just music. Anyone who knows about Dmitri Shostakovich, or Bob Dylan, or Chuck D knows that music can be, in addition to social commentary, fuel for a revolution. Hip-hop is being picked up by Inuit youth in Northern Canada as protest music against social injustices. Reggae, as many people forget, was equal parts smooth grooves and calls for uprising (think of Bob Marley’s Get Up, Stand Up or Desmond Dekker’s Israelites). As hip-hop is to disenfranchised North American youth, and reggae is to oppressed Caribbeans and Africans, rock and roll is to a generation of Middle-Eastern youth, growing up in a war zone they had no part in building.
Enter Blurred Vision, a Toronto band fronted by two Iranian brothers, who use rock to comment on what is happening in their homeland of Iran. Right now, a single of theirs (a re-imagining of Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall (pt. II), is reaching an international audience. Because this is right up my alley, I thought I’d share it with you.
Okay, I’ll be the first to admit it – it’s not Mozart. The thing that struck me about this song is that 30 years after The Wall was released, this song can be perfectly applied, almost unedited, to a country that didn’t exist (in its present, oppressive, theocratic form) at the time. There are themes in music that are timeless, and good music can reach out through the veil of history and resonate within our psyche. So to anyone who brands any type of music as “just noise” or “not really music”, remember that Philistines said the same thing about Pink Floyd back in 1979.
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2 Movie Friday – postitive thinking
Psst… do you want to hear something amazing? There’s an unbelievably simple trick you can use to get everything you’ve ever wanted, without having to work for it, put any effort at all into bettering yourself or your life, or kill off your rich uncle.
It’s called THE SECRET
Anyone’s who’s taken any type of eastern philosophy course knows about the law of attraction. Basically, the theory is that if you put positive energy out into the world, you will reap the benefits of that energy. Hindus call it karma, Taoists call it the Tao, and skeptics call it a heaping pile of steamy bullshit.
Like prayer, or ‘remote viewing’, or psychics, mediums, Tarot and horoscopes, the law of attraction (karma) relies on some fundamental cognitive heuristics our brains use. The first and most important is called confirmation bias – our brains selectively attend to those events that fit assumptions we’ve already made. The second is a logical fallacy called ‘post hoc, ergo propter hoc‘ or, ‘after it, therefore because of it’ – we see two events and infer that the first causes the second.
For an example of this, think of what happens when you’re waiting for a bus. How many times have you waited for a bus, got fed up and decided to walk, only to have the bus show up a minute after you leave? Have you ever said “of course, as soon as I leave, the bus arrives.” Your leaving has nothing to do with the bus arriving – the two events are independent, but after it happens 2 or 3 times, your mammal brain puts them together.
So when you send out positive vibes and something good happens, the two aren’t necessarily causally related – indeed, there’s no mechanism by which they could be related. The “Secret” is just an appeal to your mammalian brain and the cognitive shortcuts we all use to get by.
“So what?” you might be saying. “It doesn’t hurt anyone to think positively.” Despite evidence that it absolutely CAN hurt people to have unrealistically positive outlooks, it also leads to victim blaming. People assume that if you can think your way to happiness and wealth, then anyone who is poor just has a bad attitude.
Let’s let Dave Chappelle have the last word here…
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0 Movie Friday – What up, Ninja?
Seeing as the topic came up on Monday, I thought it would be fun to play this video
I really liked this video. While I’m not sure if the authors “get it”, they do expose some of the risible and arbitrary rules around the use of a word, and explore it using humour. Even if it was offensive, it’s funny enough to be excused.
My favourite part is the last scene, where they seem to have a quick debate to see if the non-eastern Asian guy can use the term without offence. “He counts,” apparently. Hilarious.
Enjoy!
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Crommunist 