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Pakistani attorney and author Rafia Zakaria wrote an op-ed in Al Jazeera America about the Islamic extremists' war on fun, including sports, music, even dining in a fine restaurant. Zakaria points out that this apparent obsession predates the existence of ISIS by several decades (at least); he suspects this is a big reason why the attackers chose Paris, renowned worldwide for its brilliant culture and joie de vivre.
Terrorism’s targeting of the merry is universal and indiscriminate, a division of the world between those who wish to live and laugh and hope and those who kill and destroy. The latter are deadly and relentless, and they have already squeezed out the mirth from too many of the world’s cities, from Karachi, Kabul and Baghdad to Nairobi and Beirut.
Zakaria experienced this aspect of terror firsthand. A high school friend had just passed a big exam, and was out celebrating with his family at a restaurant in Karachi, Pakistan, when terrorists struck.
Al Jazeera America provides a separate analysis warning that military action alone cannot defeat ISIS (aka ISIL), which of course is not a "nation" in the traditional sense, but more of a guerilla outfit like Al Qaeda, that opportunistically seized a stronghold in chaotic regions of Syria and Iraq. The piece's author, political scientist Rami G. Khouri, recommends that both the West and Muslim nations of the Middle East spend more resources on addressing economic and political problems facing impoverished youths who are potentially attracted by the ISIS' recruiting pitch:
If the underlying threats to ordinary citizens’ lives in autocratic Arab-Islamic societies remain unaddressed — from jobs, water and health insurance, to free elections, a credible justice system and corruption — the flow of recruits to movements like ISIL or something even worse will persist and even accelerate.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 16 2015, @02:59PM
Legal distribution of TPON seems to be black-holed, no DVDs for sale, no legit streaming sources. There is a low-quality version on youtube uploaded in september.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl0hVH2y0Hg [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk3tFlDLYJg [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kiHCObCcF8 [youtube.com]
There is a much higher quality xvid version with this hash: 34b6aa8322f6205f31026a8bc34cbaa101e500b7
Adam Curtis, the film maker, has done more docus since TPON. His latest is Bitter Lake about Afghanistan which is available in two parts on youtube in 720p.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQt3uxp5i3s [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j4JATgwiD4 [youtube.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by MrNemesis on Monday November 16 2015, @04:15PM
For what it's worth you can download the videos directly from archive.org, albeit cribbed from youtube by the looks of it:
https://archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares-AdamCurtis [archive.org]
Bitter Lake is also available in iplayer for those of you with access to it (and if you're a get-iplayer user [with a working VPN outside of the UK] then you're quids in):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02gyz6b/adam-curtis-bitter-lake [bbc.co.uk]
There was a bunch of bootleg DVDs kicking around amazon.co.uk a few years back as well, but they appear to have gone away now too.
Much of Curtis' work is completely unpublishable, since the way he makes his films means he cribs archive footage from all sorts of unrelated sources (for instance, Bitter Lake makes heavy reliance on the symbolism from Tarkovsky's Solaris) and a highly eclectic soundtrack such that getting DVD publishing rights is practically impossible; it's mostly due to the BBC having a blanket license for almost anything that any of his work is broadcastable at all. He's got a very strong body of work and my particular favourite to recommend to Soylentils to track down would be:
The Century of the Self [wikipedia.org] - how the Freud family helped sell consumer capitalism in the 20th century and its knock-on effects in the world of politics
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace [wikipedia.org] - how the utopian dream of a work-free world for humans completely failed to appear. Contains a much-needed apocryphal longobowman's salute to Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan in the first episode and a glorious segment on TMOAD [wikipedia.org] in the second.
A good excuse to aptitude install youtube-dl if ever I saw one. Don't expect to agree with every point he puts forward but he spins a fascinating narrative.
"To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday November 16 2015, @07:27PM
I've just been watching "The Trap What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom", which is torrentable, and he covers many interesting turning points in many countries' histories. Alas, his underlying thesis, and logic, which he rolls out only in part 3, I disagree with. He claims things like the USA forcing Yeltsin's hand in Russia, and their deliberate devaluation of the currency, was an example of "Negative Liberty" (an idealistic form), when I consider it to be a perfect example of "Positive Liberty" (one with the newly found liberty being delivered by fiat, and under a new controlling group's terms). He's confusing "fucking stupid capitalists who who can't foresee the consequences of their actions" with "idealists".
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 17 2015, @06:18AM
iirc, his argument is specifically that the west (with USA and Blair run UK in the lead) turned from Negative to Positive liberty somewhere around the Bosnian civil war. This in that Blair had this out there idea about being able to bring about Negative liberty by force, or somehow mix aspects of the two liberties.