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Showing posts from May 10, 2009

Lynn White's thesis

There is a standard environmental history that takes it for granted that anthropocentrism is at the center of the Judeo-Christian story. This notion goes back to Lynn White’s 1967 essay on the “Roots of Our Ecological Crisis”, which does, in my view correctly, understand that the Artificial Paradise is not something that popped out of the minds of Baconian natural philosophers in the 17th century, but a fact about the Industrial system in the 19th century: “The emergence in widespread practice of the Baconian creed that scientific knowledge means technological power over nature can scarcely be dated before about 1850, save in the chemical industries, where it is anticipated in the 18th century. Its accept- anceas a normal pattern of action may mark the greatest event in human his- tory since the invention of agriculture, and perhaps in nonhuman terrestrial history as well. “ However, if this is the material history of the Artificial Paradise, it is preceded, in White’s view, by a sort

Free the Miami Five

Free the Miami five. This is bullshit. There isn't a word to express my disgust at this vile and stupid action. A bunch of greenhorns were lead by an FBI informer to "pledge allegiance" to Al Quaeda and blow up the Sears Tower, of whose very existence, as has been amply shown by courtroom testimony, they had a dim or non-existent idea. Meanwhile, Andrew Moonan, the blackwater guard who murdered an Iraqi bodyguard of one of Iraq's vice president's for kicks is still free to do what he wants in the U.S. And the state department employee, Margaret Scobey, his accomplice, the woman who, as acting ambassador, packed Moonan off on a flight to the U.S., has not been charged with accomplice to murder. The leader of the Miami five, meanwhile, is going to jail for seventy years because the Bush administration, overflowing with racist twats, decided to stir up a terrorist/black scare to garner the KKK/retired vote in the state. What a disgrace. What a rotten day.

you are it

Brian Sutton-Smith, a psychologist, made important studies of childhood games, play, riddles, jokes and dreams in the sixties and seventies – and he left his mark on a lot of game studies folk. He used both anthropological and psychological perspectives. In a 1971 article, he applied Kenneth Burke’s dramaturgical narrative theory to a corpus of twenty 5 year old children’s dreams, collected by Beverly Elkan: “A Burkian grammatical analysis of the twenty dreams of twenty five-year-olds in Elkan's collection gives us the following results. While the subject is in the dream on all occasions and while there are occasionally other actors (parents = five; siblings = six; peers = one; relatives = one), the predominant counter-actor is a monster figure in seventeen out of twenty dreams (lion, ghost, tiger, witch, animal, murderer, monster). Where sex is attributed to these figures, females pre- dominate over males, seven to two. In fifteen out of twenty dreams the dreamer is the passive r