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I love the title of this movie, from the director of ‘Super Size Me’.. Watching this is certainly better than trying to study for my exam tomorrow, for which I don’t know what to do as my lecturer is the worst I’ve managed to have in the three years of my college career. Anyway, enjoy the clips & I love that the trailer has Gogol Bordello’s ‘Wanderlust King’ as the soundtrack:
I remember this video as being one of the first times I was ever exposed to politics in a meaningful sense. While its probably an odd thing to say, this was one of the first times that politics became ‘real’ for me and remains one of the best ‘take-downs’ of the Bush Administration I have seen. What’s impressive (and kind of horrifying) is that a large number of the comments made by Colbert still apply…
This video is absolutely insane but is quite entertaining – love the ‘military-industrial complex’ speech bit at the end too.. It seems to be quite legit given that Gravel has it on his webpage:
Ideologically rather corrupt and shallow, this film doesn’t really make much of a point beyond ‘extremists are bad’ which one would imagine is rather self-apparent. While it has some impact, mainly through using footage from some real-life executions, any person with a brain should be able to see through the blatant racism and short-sightedness of Geert Wilder’s film. There’s an intersting article about it on the BBC here and it certainly shows what the BBC is talking about in terms of his ability to generate interest – as I write this, the film has been seen 410,211 times on the host website alone. And that doesn’t take into account other language variations.
Just to be clear, I’m posting this out of interest in the topic and the controversy it has generated. Not out of any belief in Mr.Wilder’s ideas. I’m also doing this because I think that silencing talk becuase religious extremists don’t like the content of a video is a bad thing and should be opposed on principle if nothing else.
Cian’s already talked about this, but Obama does it funnier (sorry Cian) (Also, I apologise for the fact that ‘funnier’ isn’t correct English)
This is so accurate and evil:
It’s kind of creepy the way that ‘fake’ news like The Daily Show, the Onion and the Colbert Report are actually more realistic than most of the ‘real’ coverage of this election:
Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters
Interesting article here and while I’m not sure that it’s all completely accurate, it does strike me as being somewhat likely:
After the 2003 US invasion, amid the chaos and looting that followed the collapse of Saddam’s regime, SCIRI and Badr forces flooded across the Iranian border into Iraq. “Border control was nonexistent,” says Wayne White, who in 2003 headed the Iraq team at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. “The Iranians could just drive across…. They would come in convoys, ten trucks at a time.” Ali Allawi, a postwar Iraqi defense minister and author of The Occupation of Iraq, wrote, “About 10,000 trained and disciplined Badr fighters entered Iraq, either unarmed or armed only with light weapons, and reassembled in various towns and cities as the fighting arm of SCIRI.” (Other estimates involve significantly higher numbers.) Lavishly financed by Iran, SCIRI and Badr installed their leaders within days in ad hoc posts in Baquba, Kut and other key junctions in the south. Wary of Iran, but seeing little alternative to the turban-wearing clerics of SCIRI and Badr, US and British occupation authorities put the party’s officials into top positions. From the early, US-selected Iraqi Governing Council in 2003 onward, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim was named to a succession of key leadership posts, and top SCIRI officials were installed in various ministries, the police and the army. In the Shiite-dominated south SCIRI officials were named to run provincial authorities, cities and towns. They were viewed by the United States and Britain as natural allies in the struggle against remnants of the Baath Party and the burgeoning Sunni resistance — precisely the forces that Iran, too, saw as its deadliest foes.
Virtually en masse, Badr officers were recruited to the fledgling Iraqi police and army that were being assembled by the United States. According to Raed Jarrar, the Iraq consultant for the American Friends Service Committee, Badr officers maintained their same ranks when they were inducted into the Iraqi security forces. A particularly nasty part of Badr’s work in Iraq from 2003 to the present has been the operation of death squads. Often, such units were run directly by Iraq’s Interior Ministry, whose Badr-controlled police were blamed for assassinating hundreds of former government officials, ex-military and intelligence officers, and civilian professionals, according to widespread media reports. “I was told in the summer of 2003 in Tehran that the change in regime in Baghdad had allowed Iranian intelligence to identify every single individual who had worked in the Iran section of the Iraqi intelligence service,” says Mahan Abedin, director of research at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism in London. “They were able to get as much detail as possible about their person, their movement, their connections, their mobile number. All that information was collected.” They were eradicated, Abedin says, in a “hidden war.”
It’s a pretty good interview and you can see the whole thing here.
Just a few things that I found interesting -Bush has a very utilitarian ‘end’s justify the means’ view of a lot of his policies. It just comes across in a lot of the things he says and the language he uses, especially relating to Iraq but also to Africa. There’s also the oddest echoes of Jimmy Carter in terms of how he talks about the ‘higher realism of helping Africa’ in the sense that securing African well-being safeguards America’s national interest. What’s also interesting to see is how surprisingly affable Bush is. Nearly too much at times such as when he off-handedly refers to the ‘Dali Lama crowd’ & uses the word ‘suicider’ which is just .. awkward. Anyway, I still think he’s a horrible excuse for a President but it’s worth a look.
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