Plei and Fay, you really are determined to make an old girl blush aren't you, (you mean that contemplating joining a nunnery might be a slightly pre-emptive solution for getting-on-a-while-now singularity/NGA)

Canned snow peas?! That's a crime in itself!

You are so right Ms. H.

I'm using a lot of shorthand for bigger arguments ... The problem with shorthand, like with any code, is always the frame of reference, and each of us has a unique one of those, so I'll shoot for a bit more specificity for general consumption.

Basically this, (sorry Betsy, Nutty & all). Another reason why it is often more comfortable to talk from an academic perspective on these ideas/theories/topics is that it leaves less room for miscommunication errors or problems with people taking offense. Because of the whole 'Communism = evil' thing it can sometimes be difficult to discuss this stuff without people assuming that you are advocating socialism/communism/anti-capitalism sorts of things, so it becomes easier to use other theoreticians work to discuss the concepts rather than committing into your own words.

This unfortunately means that these subjects often become circular, self-perpetuating, academic discourses. IOW because academics insist on discussing purely in theoretical terms this creates the situation where this sort of stuff is not discussed by ordinary people. BUT IT SHOULD BE because it is the fabric of everyday life and also because our 'mostly much less educated and experienced' ancestors had no problems understanding many of these concepts, and acting on them. The concepts are not difficult, the baggage that they carry with them can make them almost impossible.

just as an aside: one of the special dispensations that was allowed me in my honours degree was the freedom to pursue interdisciplinary research, not only using my majors of politics and history but also using my minors of sociology and philosophy, and even my 'know very little about' interests of cosmology and economics. My speciality seems to lie in the ability to synthesize theoretical conceptual stuff from many different angles, to link it all together and to spit it back out as it applies to the world in my lifetime. It makes for a very busy head sometimes.

So allowing that simplifying things can sometimes lead to over-generalisations as shorthand and miss-assumptions from the baggage, just jump on me if I say something that comes out the wrong way. I won't mean offense because I just don't. I mean if I was anti-murricans I'd likely not be found conversing with mostly murricans on a murrican based board based on an absolutely fantabulous murrican television show. I'd be somewhere else I'd reckon.

After studying correlations in Bohr & Heisenburg's different takes on the meaning of their science with the philosophies of phenomenologists through history, I agree that Bohr was a Hume-follower.

Hayden, you are so there with me boy it is almost freaky. This is the line that I deleted out before posting last night...
Great physicists of the last century, such as Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg, demonstrated new conceptions of matter, space and time, where the world is a complex tissue of events, in which connections of various types alternate or overlap or combine, thereby determining the texture of the whole. And also ... These changed scientific concepts show similarities to a fundamental idea expressed in many religious philosophies – the unity of all things. This holds that all things perceived by the senses are interrelated, connected and are different aspects of a larger or deeper reality, which cannot be directly experienced, understood or even described. More recent work in Chaos Theory also argues that all things are sensitive to all other things, that the smallest particle determines the whole. From this perspective, the world has no separate and distinct parts, global means ‘belonging to the globe’. In fact, if cosmologists are on the right track, all of this may be only comprehensible from a ‘universal’ perspective, where ‘universal’ means ‘belonging to the universe’.

From dust to dust...

and Hayden,

I'm not familiar with Connell, but I think that your approach of using these models of behavior to describe globalization sounds fascinating.

Especially necessary when you are examining the 'inevitability' of something that almost everyone admits is major, affecting almost everybody, but nobody can actually explain what it is. The impact of globalisation is like the impact of a 'portuguese man-o-war', amazing to behold, spectacular with lots of pretty lights, frightening in its capacity to fatally sting far-away innocent passers-by, with a multitude of incredibly long tentacles that spread out in a multitude of directions. Unlike a man-o-war however, its tentacles operate not only independently of each other and the main body, but also often in direct contradictory fashion, uncaring of the detrimental results, even to itself.

Also unlike a man-o-war, it is thought of and sold as a natural part of progress, not only good for us, but necessary if we are to go on developing as a human civilisation.

Now I'm not saying that it's not but what I am saying is that something that is so goddam important, inevitable, vital, life shattering, should be understood a great deal better than it currently is, and that includes academia as well. I'm saying that many of the assumptions and pre-conceptions that have spread as part of the 'church of globalisation' have already been debunked, demythologised, and outright exposed as lies and wrong, so why are they still being preached as if they were gospel. See Gramsci for the answer.

...which leads me to suspect not.

Oh ye of little faith. They talked with Kubrick's widow, plus Donald Rumsfield, Alexander Haig, Richard Helms, Henry Kissinger, Buzz Aldrin and others. Are you saying these distinguished people would be party to an April Fool's prank? Moreover, it was made by French people and we all know French people have no sense of humour!

I'm wondering if we aren't so freaking sure Saddam has weapons of mass destruction because we sold them to him... (by "we" I mean "President Reagan")

Angus I thought the same thing especially considering it was French, but the doc was dated 2002.

Jimi, I was a bit suspect that at no time did the camera pan back and give a group shot of all the major players, who it appeared to show all having a big group drink and reminisce session. Each was given individual frames when they were speaking, and also I'm pretty sure that none of them ever actually used each others names or Kubrick's name in any sentence that on its own said anything controversial. IOW, much of it could have been very skilfully culled answers, questions and interviews put together very cleverly. However it was very convincing.

The basic story Angus was not disputing the actual lunar landing (although that is a natural follow-on) but saying that the filming of the landing and all the moon photos were a hollywood style production handled by Stanley Kubrick and using the 2001 A Space Odyssey set.

What seemed to be pretty much beyond doubt was that Kubrick and the film crew were heavily involved in many aspects of the space program, even down to re-designing rocket shapes and applying gold leaf to the fins and stuff. All the big wigs were basically as impressed as all get-out with Kubrick's film and so contracted him to make the space program/moon mission as spectacular for public propaganda purposes as he could.

The film guys had unprecedented access to everything down to writing the 'first step for man...' speech. In return, years later, Kubrick called in the favour and called NASA to demand to be allowed to borrow their super-dooper one-of-a-kind camera lens (worth $20,000 or something huge for those days anyway) to film Barry Lyndon.

not only using my majors of politics and history but also using my minors of sociology and philosophy, and even my 'know very little about' interests of cosmology and economics. [...] My speciality seems to lie in the ability to synthesize theoretical conceptual stuff from many different angles, to link it all together and to spit it back out as it applies to the world in my lifetime. It makes for a very busy head sometimes.

I want to be moonlit when I grow up. And hayden. But cooking (?do I have that right)is not my forte and neither is music. But I'll take the rest. I got my BS in physics(astro thesis) and political science, a little by accident. I'm in astro now, but when I leave it, it wil be for a masters program in the international field, by gum.

moonlit ... I'm pretty sure they were all filmed specifically for this and were very much in on the joke.

It had me fooled right up until they said one of the hitherto unseen rolls of film (can't recall if it was still or moving) had a shot of a photograph of Kubrick, lying discarded on the "moon's surface". I don't know why but something suddenly clicked and I realised I was watching one of those April 1st shows. Of course, from then on, it got so ridiculous that only a complete ninny would continue to believe it but prior to that it was very convincing.

The basic story Angus was not disputing the actual lunar landing (although that is a natural follow-on) but saying that the filming of the landing and all the moon photos were a hollywood style production handled by Stanley Kubrick and using the 2001 A Space Odyssey set.

Exactly, moonlit and that's why it had me going in the beginning. To elaborate on what you said; Nixon and Co. feared the Apollo 11 crew might not be able to get back to Earth and because of the amount of money spent, it would be a huge public relations disaster and devastating blow to public morale. To counter any possible problems, they decided to photograph and film fake footage as a back-up measure. They asked to use Kubrick's 2001 moon set but Stanley was not supposed to have anything further to do with it. However, he was so disgusted by the amateurs they had putting on the show, that he ended up directing it for them.

Now, here's where it gets even more elaborate. Even though the Apollo 11 crew made it safely back to Earth, they claim the camera equipment used was inadequate and they returned with no usable footage. Thus, the fake footage was used anyway and that is what we've all been seeing for the last 30 years.

Ms. H, when in doubt, blame Reagan. I'm all about demystifying "national heroes", especially ones who get by on charm.

Another reason why it is often more comfortable to talk from an academic perspective on these ideas/theories/topics is that it leaves less room for miscommunication errors or problems with people taking offense

I dig this. It's like talking in lawyerese: lawyers aren't intentionally obfuscating; they're just being really, really specific about which word means which thing. I'm reasonably following along, except for the part where I feel like I should be jotting down notes.

the whole 'Communism = evil' thing

Oh my lord. You're suddenly reminding me of a classmate I had in a post-colonial literature class. we were reading Ngugi wa Thionggo, who for the record is a very genial -- angry, but genial about it -- Kenyan socialist. And this classmate, who is 3rd generation Cuban (i.e., grandparents fled Castro, grew up in the Cuban areas of Miami, completely brainwashed by her family and/or ethnic enclave-itis *), kept coming back to "How can America possibly be bad?" And finally, after much Socratic dialogue, out comes this winner: "But America is good, and Communism is just evil." Everyone else in the class was just polite enough not to laugh and laugh, but the upshot was that she could not be convinced that political theories have no inherent moral bias.

[*] Cuban-Americans in Miami are somewhat notorious, as a community, for knee-jerk "Communists drink the blood of babies!" sentiment. I thought this was a stereotype, until I met this woman. I really wanted to refer her to the Cuban-American novelist Achy Obejas, who has written a lot about the issue, but I suspect she's the sort who also knee-jerk thinks "Lesbian feminists drink the blood of babies!", so really, she should have just dropped the class at the beginning of the semester.

99% of my formal training in politics is from analysis of nationalist (fictive) literature. Which is a way of saying, I have no formal training at all.

I was only partially watching the first part but at some stage it just clicked that the sentences on their own read very differently to the whole. That was when I starting getting suspicious.

I just really loved the bit about applying the gold leaf to the fins of the rocket for a huge amount, even though it had absolutely no effect on anything but to make it look more expensive.