Well, this is just a wonderful confluence. Slavoj Žižek spoke at Occupy Wall Street on Sunday, October 9th, 2011, at noon. Here is the YouTube video of it in two parts. The human amplification makes for slow going. Thanks to 600euros for transcribing, which I cleaned up below. Thanks also to visitordesign for posting the videos.
Year: 2011
Book Review: Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes
Daniel Everett went to Brazil as a missionary to convert the Pirahã, a tiny (<400 members) Amazonian tribe. Instead, the tribe effectively converted him into an atheist. He then became a professional linguist and anthropologist, and has continued to study the tribe.
Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes is fascinating for its description of the Pirahã culture/language, which is so dramatically different from ours as to radically challenge our notions of language and even what it means to be human. They lack numbers, words for colors, Gods, and creation myths. They don’t have words for “right” or “left” – instead, they might refer to your “upriver” leg. Their tonal language has three vowels and eight consonants (seven for women), although they can whistle and hum the language, useful for hunting and talking while your mouth is full, respectively.
Their language has no recursion, which makes Noam Chomsky cry. One can only legitimately talk about things one has directly experienced, or things that someone who directly experienced them told one. This made Everett’s proselytizing very difficult, since he had never met anyone who had seen Jesus. Because they don’t have numbers, they can’t do arithmetic. At all. They have the simplest kinship system known, no war, and like many hunter-gatherers, no system of private property.
The book also includes some very lively anecdotes about river traders, malaria, etc., but for me the overwhelming value was as an ethnography that made me marvel at the diversity of human culture.
The Post-Post-9/11 Post
It’s over. The long national nightmare of navel-gazing, self-pity, self-indulgence, and excuse-making has at last come to an end.
This is your official notice: effectively immediately, the phrase “post-9/11 world” is obsolete. It has been permanently retired.
It had a good run. A full decade. I have even given you an extra day or so of leeway. But “post-9/11” must now go. For to keep it around, whether out of laziness, convenience, or just force of habit, would be to cheapen and debase it (further). We don’t refer to a “post-Berlin Wall” world, do we? Or “post-JFK”? History is too far advanced for us to still be “post-Civil War” or even “post-World War Two”.
Should you find someone still using the phrase “post-9/11 world”, please remind them: We are now officially in a “post-post-9/11 world”. The use of the phrase “post-9/11” is no longer acceptable.
My email to the BART Board
Hello, my name is Martin MacKerel. I spoke at the special BART Board meeting about the phone service cutoff on August 11th.
First of all, I want to thank you for listening. A few times I have spoken at public meetings of other bodies, and usually the public participation seems just for show. Your meeting seemed genuine.
I have a couple of responses to statements at the meeting. I agree strongly with Edward Hasbrouck’s point that it is not appropriate for BART staff or the Board to have the sole power to temporarily shut off service; instead, the staff should get an injunction from a judge. This is in keeping with the long-standing American idea of checks and balances.
Special BART Board Meeting on Mobile Phone Service Interruption of August 11th
I spoke at a special BART Board meeting this morning about their cutting of cellphone service during a protest. I thought that the board actually seemed open and interested in public input, in contrast to most public hearings I’ve been to. The President of the Board, Bob Franklin, actually came up to me briefly afterwards and thanked me for my attitude – I had said in my comment that I was taking the Board at their word and meeting in this “appropriate” forum for dialogue before engaging in protest. The meeting did, actually, feel like part of a dialogue.
I came out strongly against the action and in favor of free speech, and pointed out that it took a riot in January 2009 to get Mehserle arrested. One might blame the immaturity of the rioters, but it would be more instructive to consider the deafness of the power structure.
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Book Review: Emergence by Steven Johnson
Both my experience reading this book and my experience writing this review were quite interesting. I loved both Where Good Ideas Come From and The Invention of Air, also by Steven Johnson, and read each in a short period of time. I expected the same from this book, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.
‘Twas not to be, however. I read about halfway through the book, got fed up, and left it for a few weeks before finishing it. It took me a couple weeks to start writing the book review. I wrote most of one, then threw it out. Now, several weeks later, I am starting over.
Movie Review: The Tree of Life
Insufferably boring.
Against the Balkanization of "History"
Yesterday was Alan Turing‘s birthday, and this weekend is LGBT “Pride” weekend. And never the twain shall meet, it seems.
Turing played a huge role in laying the theoretical foundation for computing. His life is considered computer history, and for some reason, this means it can’t be part of queer history, even though he was gay, he was persecuted and prosecuted for being gay, and he killed himself after receiving the humiliation of chemical castration by estrogen “treatments”. In the same way that black history is given its own month and treated as separate from other history, LGBT history is segregated from other history as well. If it doesn’t specifically pertain to the history of LGBT civil rights, apparently it doesn’t count.
Needless to say, I think this is ridiculous. I also think it’s incredibly self-defeating for the LGBT movement not to make more of the overlapping history it does have. Turing is a clear case of a genius whose life was cut short by homophobia. Some of the graybeards who were instrumental in the early Unix days of the 1970s are still making huge contributions to computer science – inventing the Go language and the widely-used UTF-8 encoding system for Unicode characters, for example. Turing died at the age of 41; he could easily have lived to see the beginning of the Unix epoch and made even more amazing contributions. He might also have had more insights into biology, especially developmental biology.
I think it’s important that we make clear these connections: that the world lost a brilliant mathematician and scientist to the bigotry of the day. It’s great that the British government apologized in 2009 for what it did six decades ago, but even better would be to tackle today’s discriminations – against trans people and Muslims to name two groups – that unfairly cut short the potential of both individuals and of the societies of which they are a part.
Movie Review: Taqwacore
I was really anticipating the movie Taqwacore, about “the North American Muslim punk movement”. What’s not to love right there?
The trailer is enticing. Unfortunately, the movie did not provide much more than the trailer did. Watch the trailer below, then read the rest of my comments, and save yourself the 80 minutes of the movie.
The San Francisco Sit/Lie Law and the Hypocrisies of History
Harvey
Yesterday, May 22nd, would have been Harvey Milk‘s 81st birthday. In San Francisco people held rallies and celebrations.
I and other activists against the recently passed “Sit/Lie” law held another Sidewalks are for People day. The Sit/Lie law makes it illegal to sit or lie on any public sidewalk between 7am and 11pm. It’s illegal to sit on the curb while waiting for the bus, it’s illegal to put a folding chair on the sidewalk to enjoy the sun and greet your neighbors, and it’s illegal to sit down if you’re holding a sidewalk sale, even if you’re a child running a little lemonade stand.
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Fish Rock Road 