These are, imho, fricking hilarious. Perfectly scripted, acted, and really helpful too. I am only aware of five - if you know of others, lemme know... Now, in no particular order The missing hikers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5ROoNT7-ZI The funeral for the victim of a stray-bullet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx5WJjXmuQI The dead Americans and dead Taliban https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb5rHthCXoA Man hit by train... Continue Reading →
Masculinity, coal and… Weetabix. I kid you not
This from the early 1970s. Back when coal-mining was a suitable analogy for masculinity, and was used to sell... breakfast cereal. Somebody could probably squeeze a Master's thesis, taking historical, cultural, energy humanities, Freudian and environmental humanities perspectives on all this. Throw in some Haraway, some Merchant, Jung, etc. Whatever, life is too short.
“Two kinds of people” – fundamental attribution errors, shaping the rules and “the clap clinic”
Okay, so this cartoon below is amusing, but also limited. It's limited because it assumes that behaviour is mostly shaped by "what kind of person you are" (this is known in the trade as the fundamental attribution error). The problem with the FAE (or one of them) is that it leads to fatalism/shoulder-shrugging by people... Continue Reading →
“Fascism simply burst like a soap bubble” – what not to say when your boss is Hitler… or “Doing a Jodl”
One of the many MANY skills I have never mastered (1) is saying the right thing to people who can make life easier or harder. I think making "unhelpful" (career or life-limiting) observations about sensitive topics should be called "doing a Jodl." That above is from Albert Speer's "Inside the Third Reich." According to Groser... Continue Reading →
Where does this come from, who is to blame, what is to be done? The usual questions
Those people in the hotel in Rotherham must have been absolutely terrified. Sure, there may well be "economic migrants" among them, but I bet you a bunch have fled war zones, survived all sorts of horrors on the journey that cost the lives of many others. And they arrive in the Civilized West (1) and... Continue Reading →
Headshots, “humour” and Priming us?
The "hypodermic" model of media is sooooooooooo 1970s. Nobody serious believes that monkey see, monkey do. The whole thing is dodgy, and rendered politically unpalatable by those who try to use it for nefarious (CENSORSHIP!!!) purposes. And of course, the historians and sociologists will point - with some plausibility - to previous moral panics around... Continue Reading →
Gotta learn to think in wheels, not lines…
Found this in my downloads folder. I liked it at the time and I like it now. It makes me think of how bad I am at thinking in wheels/spokes rather than lines. We need to think in wheels and "pies" and so on. The planetary limits dashboard people do a decent job, but there... Continue Reading →
We don’t wanna talk about it, how we broke our hearts: climate, failure, “democracy” and all that jizz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwTP9AJObSY Ever get the feeling nobody wants to talk about what you want to talk about? (1) Ever get the feeling that there are herds of elephants in the room, and everyone is studiously ignoring their trumpetting, as you would if your boss/king/Prime Minister had just let rip with with a loud and evil-smelling fart?... Continue Reading →
Meetings, Gatherings or… “Fodderings”?
In this repetitive and defeated rant I look in despair at the “meetings” and "argue" that we need another word to distinguish incidences of people gathering/being gathered in one place from actual meetings where people meet. Being in the same room is not “meeting.” It’s a gathering in of people. It’s the creation of the... Continue Reading →
Election maunderings and “what it means?” brain vomit (why are you READING this, there’s so few tolerable years left!)
The plan was to go to bed as soon as the Exit Poll (all hail the Mighty Exit Poll!) came through. But an hour after the 410 vs 120 figure came out, I was still up, pottering around on various academic article databases for Another Project. Ho-hum. Set the alarm for 3am, by which time... Continue Reading →
marchudson.net 