By popular request, I just added a discussion board over at sarahmasen.com for those wanting to talk about issues arising from David Dark’s just published second book, The Gospel According To America: A Meditation On A God-Blessed, Christ-Haunted Idea.
From what I’ve read so far, I’d have to say David’s onto another winner, and you can find out for yourself by reading a sample chapter courtesy of Books and Culture
Back when the Oscar nominees were announced I lamented the difficulty of tracking down the various short nominees. It seems the fine people at salon.com agreed, and yesterday they put five of them (3 animated shorts, 2 live action) on their site. There are some real gems amongst them, and when you consider that all five will take well under an hour to watch, it’s well worth a look.
My personal favourites are “Ryan” (further proof that documentaries come in many guises) and “Little Terrorist” (the best political gestures don’t claim to be anything of the sort) but they’re all deserving of more attention.
The Six Apart Professional Network blog makes mention of a Moveable Type-powered project called Musicblog. Using blogging to break down barriers between artists and audience seems a good (if obvious) idea, so I quickly headed over to check it out. On the main site I saw:
“Musicblog is a joint project between EMI Music and Pixelfury. We utilise the best social software applications to provide easy communication between music-lovers and artists.”
But checking out the featured Musicblog, that of The Doves, was a disappointment. So far, it looks rather as if it were written by a publicist and consists largely of the sort of news artists have always carried on their websites. Hopefully it’ll move beyond window dressing, and develop more of an identity (like that of, say, The Decemberists) but I can’t help but feel that once again the music industry just doesn’t get it.
Not having read many reviews, I wasn’t expecting The Story Of The Weeping Camel to be nearly so moving as it turned out to be. Part documentary, part drama (as I understand it the characters were acting, but were playing a story built from their real lives) it draws a picture of life on the fringes of the Gobi desert that becomes quite breathtaking.
It’s difficult to work out whether the event that forms the film’s culmination is a true record, but whether or not it really happened, the portrayal of the melding of lifestyle, music and ritual it conveys is more than worth the rental fee. Whether it is rightly nominated for Best Documentary may be difficult to say, but probably isn’t worth too sustained a debate.
Responses to the debt initiative launched at the G7 Finance Ministers’ meeting last week are finally becoming easier to come by. The general tone is a cautious welcome for the announcement, but continuing concern at the lack of specifics. The Jubilee Debt Campaign (UK) response notes that:
the communique did not commit to any specific actions, or offer any new money for debt cancellation. Nor did it address the crucial issue of the strings often attached to debt relief. Jubilee Debt Campaign and other organisations are demanding that creditors must stop making debt cancellation conditional on impoverished countries implementing economic policy reforms – such as enforced privatisations or cuts in public spending, which can harm the populations of poor countries as much as the original debts.
JDC are running an email campaign for supporters to contact G7 finance ministers and ask for decisive action on debt relief. The text offered there has yet to be updated to reflect recent announcements, so if taking part you may want to bear that in mind. The action can be found here.
Oneworld.net were, unsurprisingly, the first major NGO news organisation to get an article out. Their piece provides a good summary of the current situation, particularly regarding the US government’s current response. Jubilee USA, whose coordinator Neil Watkins is quoted in the Oneworld.net piece, had strong wording in their statement released during the meeting and remain critical of the lack of detail in proposals released so far, though they do note that:
We recently celebrated a small step forward during the early February G-7 Finance Ministers meeting — for the first time, the G-7 as a group officially indicated the need for “as much as 100% multilateral debt relief.”
Jubilee USA’s main focus at present is on the JUBILEE Act which is to be re-introduced to congress next month. The Act would require the US treasury to work actively for debt cancellation for 50 highly indebted countries. More details of the act, including details to pass on to US representatives, can be found at this page.
Those who scan the comments of this blog from time to time may have noticed that an online publication called CCM Buzz picked up on the whole Christian Music Makeover debacle. It’s good to see more attention coming to critiques of that particular initiative, but I’m hoping that it will not focus attention too much on one very particular concern rather than casting a spotlight on broader issues with that industry.
Kate‘s latest column at Catapult “Unsound Rock” is a good read for those wanting to think more about the peculiar cultural phenomenon called CCM. She was also good enough to write some kind words and publish the full text of an email interview with me over at Evangelical Expat.
Warning: This entry contains comments that could be construed as ‘spoilers’ (thanks to Colin for the reminder)
The blog world is awash with conversation about last night’s West Wing, due in part to the portrayal of noted lawyer Larry Lessig by Christpher Lloyd. Joi Ito was the first I saw with the news that Lessig’s role in the story was connected with real life events, and now Larry has chimed in himself with some reflections on the experience.
So yes, we still watch West Wing. With each episode of this season my inclination to turn the television back on the following week has been slightly reduced and I very much doubt we’ll make it into the next season. The latter half of season four and the majority of season five lacked the sharpness that originally drew me to the show but were still watchable, but now… There was, however, one good reason for me to watch last night.
The intrigue largely revolved round a confrontation with Iran, and in a bizarre role reversal we saw the US administration acting as proverbial doves to a European (and specifically, British) hawk. The story clearly made its point that the West is far more likely to get its way with Iran through tact rather than bullishness, but as so often in recent West Wing the telling was lacking. In early seasons, a lot was conveyed in very few words, now it feels like little is conveyed through several times as many words. Sloppy mistakes seriously reduce the show’s credibility (why, for example, would a British Prime Minister describe a largely British tragedy as an outrage against the United States?). Right now, a West Wing episode of the calibre of its first few seasons could be a powerful contribution to the debate of the moment. This one probably did little more than pique the interest of a few hardened viewers.
The lesson a better written episode could have more convincingly imparted is that the leaders of Iran, like the leaders of most countries, trade in credibility.
When I wrote yesterday’s entry I hadn’t expected quite such quick news out of Tehran, but by mid-afternoon the BBC were reporting that “Iranian President Mohammad Khatami has said Tehran will never give up nuclear technology” (he also said he meant nuclear power, not weapons) and in today’s coverage of a rally to mark 26 years since the revolution he is reported as stating that “Iran would become a ‘burning hell’ for any country that invaded it.”
When the US (and the UK, to a worryingly growing extent) ramp up the rhetoric, the leaders of Iran are forced to ramp up theirs in response, or risk looking ineffectual against a historic enemy. If the US were to focus its efforts on helping Palestine and Israel make a go of the recent peace accord, and allow the Europeans to engage in the next round of negotiations, we might have a hope of hearing more constructive statements.
For a few weeks I’ve been meaning to mention Call That News, an entertaining overview of British news reporting written by a character named Franz. I’ve been enjoying reading these reports since they launched.
And for those that might be interested, I’ve just launched a new blog. a work in process is a space to write about the work I’m doing building web sites and experimenting with web technologies. It won’t entirely displace thinking about the web from this blog, but it’ll allow me to keep the thoughts here more focussed on social implications.
UPDATE: Naturally an email arrived just after I posted this with news of yet another blog. Nick is travelling around Latin America and blogging the process. That seems to be a theme.
It’ll come as no surprise to anyone who knows me or who has read this blog with any regularity that I wasn’t a fan of the choice of Condoleeza Rice for the new US Secretary of State. On top of her many failings around the Iraq war, her very clear partiality and lack of fans overseas don’t mark her out as someone who’d make for a good diplomat. It’s not come as much surprise to see her quickly demonstrating her knack for double-speak on that new stage.
According to the BBC, the latest comments she’s made have been to warn Iran of possible UN sanctions. It’s the latest in a string of jibes at Iran perhaps best summed up by her call for Europe to share common purpose with the US on the issue. True to form, she didn’t call for discussions resulting in a common purpose based on concensus, she called for the rest of the world to share her purpose. Similarly having joined her administration buddies in dismissing UN sanctions as ineffective in the case of Iraq, and being hyper-critical of the UN in general, she’s now invoking them as her pawn and promoting them as a serious threat.
It’s a familar fundamentalist refrain to suggest that anyone who doesn’t respond to an issue in your preferred manner doesn’t care about that issue. Just like we were told that anyone who opposed war with Iraq didn’t really care about human rights abuses, it now seems we’re expected to buy the idea that the European governments who entered into dialogue with Iran last year clearly don’t care about Iran having nuclear weapons because they’re not simply condemning the Iranian government and issuing threats.
Clearly the West can’t simply ignore the possibility of Iran becoming nuclear capable, but the last thing we need is to shut down the conversation. The way Rice is approaching the issue is certainly not going to promote conversation, and my expectation is it will simply raise the tone of the rhetoric coming back from the Iranian regime. Rice has unsurprisingly squandered an opportunity to join Europe in dialogue (to share a common purpose) and may just have made the European nations’ task harder.
On a related note, it’s clear that many are already gearing up to try and prevent a US-led war on Iran. Notes of an Iranian Boy looks like it could be interesting, and Another Irani Online links to two anti-war group blogs: No War On Iran and Iranians for Peace.
Tags: Iran Rice Europe UN
The initial reports emerging from this week’s meeting of G7 finance ministers were unsurprising but a little worrying for those of us eager to see the growth of momentum from the Make Poverty History rally and the World Economic Forum meeting. The US delegation seems to have refused to entertain the suggestions of a tax on (currently entirely untaxed) airline fuel to provide more funding for international development initiatives, selling of bonds, or of revaluing IMF gold reserves to provide funding for debt cancellation.
Today the Guardian is reporting that Gordon Brown has won support within the G7 for 100% cancellation of the multi-lateral debt (that owed through organisations such as the IMF, World Bank, and various regional development banks) of the countries engaged in the HIPC process. This is a huge breakthrough and one that will certainly be greeted as a victory by campaigners, though not without provisos.
There are still no speeches on this issue available at the UK Treasury website or at the website for this year’s G8 Summit in Perthshire so details of conditionality are not forthcoming, but early indications would seem to suggest that the cancellation will be within the existing HIPC process, a process which is slow, cumbersome, intent on imposing western economic models, and thus far ineffective. At their meeting in Cologne in 1999 the G8 promised $100 billion of debt cancellation and according to Jubilee Debt Campaign figures only $46 billion of that has been delivered so far
100% cancellation, rather than the current programme of reductions, will certainly improve matters. At present, it is possible for countries to slip back into unsustainable levels of debt while their cases are being considered, rendering the process redundant, and 100% cancellation would significantly reduce that danger. Nevertheless, it is to be hoped that this change of financing will become linked with a reworking of the debt cancellation process. A process is needed that is fast, flexible and transparent.
There’s also some coverage of this at businessinafrica.net
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