Tag: religion

Slumdog Millionaire Protests

The current Room for Debate article on the New York Times website is a set of three opinions concerning the recent protests in India over the popularity and offensive nature (at least in some eyes) of the Oscar-nominated film, Slumdog Millionaire.

Responding to the calls of some that the film is essentially Western “poverty porn” Sadia Shepard writes that:

In the film, the director Danny Boyle uses a grab bag of recognizable Indian symbols — the Taj Mahal, cricket, Amitabh Bachchan — with which to make his film accessible and entertaining to Westerners. The Dharavi slum as depicted in the film, indeed the very notion of poverty itself, is merely one of these tropes. Choosing to represent squalor as colorful scenery may be in questionable taste, but it’s hardly pornography.

To me this seems to be a very important point to make about the film and it’s potential to be offensive. The reality is that Danny Boyle used the aspects of the slums simply as one more theme in his movie to convey the story. If you have seen the movie then it is pretty apparent that he was not intending to be offensive or derogatory toward the real inhabitants of the slums.

There is an important distinction between what is offensive and what is not that somehow got lost in these protests over the film. A film that was not intentionally offensive and was by no means derogatory to slum residents somehow got re-appropriated as a political catalyst. A more fitting use of political energy for those who are protesting would have been to take the real exploitation that is occurring in the slums and to have used that to provoke protests and political action. Instead, people have simply resorted to using fictional films as a reason to feel compassionate about social issues. It’s time that the real conditions sparked protests and fictional films simply remained as what they are: fictional entertainment.

The Courage Campaign for California

It would have been nice to see moving video compositions like this one put together when Proposition 8 was actually on the ballot. As much as I support gay marriage and gay equality I find myself a little bit conflicted as to how much I support the repeal of a ballot measure. Part of living in a Democracy is abiding by the decisions of elections. The pro-gay marriage activists had their chance at stirring up mass support against the passage of Prop 8 and the reality is that they didn’t and the proposition won with close to 60% of the vote. However, now that Kenneth Star is involved in trying to annul the marriages that took place before the passage of the proposition the activists are out in force and doing far more to publicly appeal for support than I saw happening before the election. Anyway, here’s the video:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3089746&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1
“Fidelity”: Don’t Divorce… from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

Also, from the campaign’s website is this letter that they are trying to submit in opposition to Star’s efforts:

We, the undersigned, share President Barack Obama’s view that “for too long, issues of LGBT rights have been exploited by those seeking to divide us. It’s time to move beyond polarization and live up to our founding promise of equality by treating all our citizens with dignity and respect.”

Yet, on December 19, 2008, Ken Starr and the Prop 8 Legal Defense Fund filed legal briefs defending the constitutionality of Prop 8 and seeking to nullify the 18,000 same-sex marriages conducted between May and November of 2008.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in this case on March 5, 2009, with a decision expected within the next 90 days. We, the undersigned, ask that the Court invalidate Prop 8 and recognize the marriage rights of these 18,000 couples — and all loving, committed couples in California — under our state’s constitution.

As Americans who believe in the rule of law and fundamental civil rights, we know that Ken Starr and the Prop 8 Legal Defense Fund’s shameful attempt to nullify these unions will not be vindicated in the eyes of history. We know that, ultimately, love will prevail, no matter how hard they try to fight it.

Israel’s Wars

Juan Cole, President of the Global Americana Institute, has an interesting article/essay (warning, its very long so be committed to reading it) about the conflict raging in the Gaza strip. What his piece does is look at the types of wars that Israel has fought with its Arab neighbors over time. In the opening he writes that:

With regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict, we have entered the age of micro-wars.

This is an interesting characterization to me for many reasons. Cole’s article made me think (in a somewhat unrelated tangent to this article) about the current conflict.

I agree with the term “micro-war” because it does seem that these wars are significantly different from conventional warfare. While these wars are different in the sense that they don’t necessarily involve the “infantry, artillery, armor and air forces [that] played central roles” in earlier conflicts their seriousness is still conventional. What I’m worried about is that by characterizing these conflicts as “micro-wars” the press (assuming that this term gets spread in mainstream media) may be creating a situation in which the public begins to believe that these are simply small conflicts that aren’t lasting and that if we just give them time they will resolve themselves. I know this is a little different from what Cole means by micro-wars, but this is just how I see the majority of the public interpreting this term.

Furthermore, I have become concerned that in this age countries have begun to think that wars that they engage in will be resolved quickly (i.e. U.S. in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.). What worries me is what happens if a “micro-war” that doesn’t necessarily have the full commitment of a nation’s military force becomes a much larger conflict that cannot be resolved quickly? We saw in Iraq what can happen when a country undertakes military force without a contingency plan for after the fighting. So long as Israel, and other countries for that matter, enter into these conflicts with plans for getting out and for stabilization then the problems can be mitigated. If they begin to enter into conflicts over religion, territory, etc. without thinking past getting what they want then these “micro-wars” could become “macro-wars” pretty quickly.

Link to Juan Cole article.

Richard Dawkins and “psychics”

Last week Boing Boing published an article that has video links to a 6-part interview between Richard Dawkins and Derren Brown, a magician and illusionist who has become increasingly known for his “mind-reading abilities.” The interview is interesting in that Brown gives a pretty clear explanation of what code reading is and how psychics are able to appear as though they know the most intimate of details about you when they are really just reading you’re expressions and reactions.

Here’s the link to the Boing Boing article and here’s a direct YouTube link.

Religion and Fertility

The always interesting Andrew Sullivan has a great post up today in which he quotes Anthony Gottlieb on the correlation between religion and fertility. Part of the quote reads:

Conventional wisdom says that female education, urbanisation, falling infant mortality, and the switch from agriculture to industry and services all tend to cause declines in both religiosity and birth rates. In other words, secularisation and smaller families are caused by the same things. Also, many religions enjoin believers to marry early, abjure abortion and sometimes even contraception, all of which leads to larger families. But there may be a quite different factor at work as well. Having a large family might itself sometimes make people more religious, or make them less likely to lose their religion. Perhaps religion and fertility are linked in several ways at the same time.

It seems to me that what Gottlieb defines here as “conventional wisdom” would simply be repudiated through the events of the last few decades. With the growth of the technology industry many aspects of business have become more and more industrialized and yet since the 1970s much of the nation has seen a religious revival.

The link to fertility is also interesting from a personal background. It does seem to me (despite the fact that I grew up in a very conservative and very religious area) that my friends who came from backgrounds of large families were more religious. Furthermore, even those that weren’t religious in a traditional sense were what many would call “spiritual.”

Here’s the link to Sullivan’s article and the link to the original Gottlieb piece.