No more Avatars, bring on the real movies!

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“The cultural commodities of the industry are governed, as Brecht and Suhrkamp expressed it thirty years ago, by the principle of their  realization as value, and not by their own specific content and  harmonious formation. The entire practice of the culture industry  transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms. Ever since these  cultural forms first began to earn a living for their creators as commodities  in the market-place they had already possessed something of this  quality. But then they sought after profit only indirectly, over and above  their autonomous essence. New on the part of the culture industry is  the direct and undisguised primacy of a precisely and thoroughly calculated  efficacy in its most typical products. The autonomy of works of  art, which of course rarely ever predominated in an entirely pure form,  and was always permeated by a constellation of effects, is tendentially  eliminated by the culture industry, with or without the conscious will  of those in control.” Adorno T., The Culture Industry Reconsidered, on Bernstein M. (ed), Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, Selected Essays on Mass Culture, Routledge, London, 1991, p. 99.

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A note on Adam Smith

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One thing that always bothered me as a student of Economics is how we economists tend to restrict the thought of social thinkers, simply to their work on economics. One might argue that this is the consequence of scientific specialization, if one wants to study a certain scientific discipline in depth, he has to cut down his material, we are only human, we can not consume whole libraries. Granted, there is much truth to that claim but the problem that arises quite often is that the need for specialization is portrayed and perceived by students and professors as the only natural way to study something. They forget that the real world, the problems social scientists have to deal with, are in their nature, interdisciplinary, thus too specialized explanations fail to appreciate the whole image of a problem and as a consequence they produce inadequate solutions. Example? Adam Smith him self. What does a student of economics learn about Mr. Smith? That he was the founder of the economics as an independent scientific discipline with his magnus opus, The Wealth of Nations, that he analyzed perfect competition, international trade and that he formulated a theory that could explain how people while perusing their own selfish interests can at the same time promote the welfare of the society as a whole as well. Ask any student of economics and he will mumble the same answer, that’s Smith’s contribution to Economics. But was that everything that Smith said? If you ask that question, they might pause and think for a moment and even if there is an element of a doubt in their eyes, the answer will be that, well even if he didn’t say only that, that’s the reason we remember Smith and study him. Alas, i have labeled the Wealth of Nations, his magnus opus my self!

Paul Samuelson dies.

One of the greatest economists of our century died. I guess Levi-Strauss needed company in  academic heaven.

On Obama’s Nobel Peace prize

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The denunciation of scandal always pays homage to the law. And Watergate above all succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal – in this sense it was an extraordinary operation of intoxication: the reinjection of a large dose of political morality on a global scale. It could be said along with Bourdieu that: "The specific character of every relation of force is to dissimulate itself as such, and to acquire all its force only because it is so dissimulated"; understood as follows: capital, which is immoral and unscrupulous, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever regenerates this public morality (by indignation, denunciation, etc.) spontaneously furthers the order of capital, as did the Washington Post journalists.
But this is still only the formula of ideology, and when Bourdieu enunciates it, he takes "relation of force" to mean the truth of capitalist domination, and he denounces this relation of force as itself a scandal: he therefore occupies the same deterministic and moralistic position as the Washington Post journalists. He does the same job of purging and reviving moral order, an order of truth wherein the genuine symbolic violence of the social order is engendered, well beyond all relations of force, which are only elements of its indifferent and shifting configuration in the moral and political consciousnesses of people.
All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of rationality, to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality. For they are identical, meaning they can be read another way: before, the task was to dissimulate scandal; today, the task is to conceal the fact that there is none.
Watergate is not a scandal: this is what must be said at all cost, for this is what everyone is concerned to conceal, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, a moral panic as we approach the primal (mise-en-)scene of capital: its instantaneous cruelty; its incomprehensible ferocity; its fundamental immorality — these are what are scandalous, unaccountable for in that system of moral and economic equivalence which remains the axiom of leftist thought, from Enlightenment theory to communism. – Poster M. (ed), Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, Polity Press, p. 173.

 

Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is not a scandal diminishing the prestige of a meaningful international institution. It is, business as usual.

The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008

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Paul Krugman needs no introduction. Professor of Economics in Princeton University, notorious columnist and blogger in the New York Times, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics, he has established him self as a quite  public persona. Admirer and defender of John Maynard Keynes and advocate of Keynesian ideas, when he thinks that they are of some relevance to our modern economic problems, vitriolic critic of the G. W. Bush’s administration and of the Republican party of the USA in general, he has emerged as the kind of public intellectual, the one who isn’t hesitant to take a public stand and get mixed with public affairs in order to defend his ideas. Europe would love him. I’m far from being a liberal my self but i have come to respect Krugman more in the recent years, mainly because it seems that he isn’t a political hack, not at all, just a honest liberal who holds him self accountable only against his own liberal conscience and. His reserved support and constructive criticism of the Obama administration is a fact hinting, at least, that my assessment of his role as a public intellectual is correct.

Movies: No more Twilight pls?

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Lot’s of different kinds of movies this time. I haven’t been blogging much lately but at least i haven’t been completely lazy. Winter has kicked in for good and my movie obsession followed on her toes, taking over a great portion of my free time. I was thinking actually to make a long post regarding my snobbish approach to contemporary cinema, usually i bash most films as Hollywood or Hollywood-wanabe garbages, justifying my attitude with an aesthetics theory based on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory but…i got bored. It seems you, my loyal readers however few you may be, were saved by the bell. Anyway, I’m ranting, so lets at least rant about movies!

Nea Dhmokratia elects new president.

“Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.

We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.”
Sigmund Freud

Veterans Day

UN General Assembly endorses Goldstone report.

“In war, truth is the first casualty.” ~Aeschylus

Primary Health care in the United States

And while the conservative lunatics continue to make extremely intelligent arguments against Obama’s healthcare reform, speaking about Nazi policies, death tolls, the big bad government which is taking over their lives and things like that, another study illustrates very clearly some of the fundamental problems of the American health care system. It’s a comparative study covering 11 countries. The results?

A study of more than 10,000 primary care physicians in 11 countries finds the United States lags far behind in terms of access to care, the use of financial incentives to improve the quality of care, and the use of health information technology. In other countries, national policies have sped the adoption of such innovations.

The advanced health information technology and extensive use of quality incentives and care teams reported by Australian, Dutch, and New Zealand doctors reflect national payment and information system policies focused on primary care. Lacking such policies, the U.S. lags far behind its peers in these areas—even as it spends far more on health care overall. In addition, insurance coverage restrictions make it difficult for many U.S. physicians to provide their patients with timely access to care.

Despite spending more on health care than other countries, an international survey finds the United States lags behind on important measures of access, quality, and use of health information technology. There are opportunities to learn as other countries move ahead to enhance the primary care foundations of their health care systems.

Source

Though the health care systems of couple of the other surveyed countries are far from perfect as well, in Italy for example it takes quite a long time to see a specialist when needed, this study too verifies that both the cost and the access to primary heath care services are harsh realities that many USA citizens have to endure  quite often. And in a country that has the capacity to wage two wars abroad, at the same time, the whole health care reform debate, when the Nazi card is dropped and an effort for a “serious” public dialogue is established, focuses around how much it’s going to cost. Isn’t it at least ironic? Don’t you think?

Claude Levi-Strauss dies.

Without doubt, one of the most important anthropologists of our century and one of the fathers of the theoretical tradition of structuralism, in contemporary social sciences. A good summary of his work from wikipedia and the New York Times.

Movies: Bombs, duty, hackers and technophobic clichés.

I was watching an interview with Francis Ford Coppola the other day during which the famous director was talking about his latest film, Tetro and he was explaining how he now chooses more and more to make movies in a way and effort that allows him to take some distance Hollywood’s movie industry and what said industry acknowledges as a “good” film today. Basically he was complaining about how the movie industry limits the freedom of directors, forcing them to repeat in their movies the same old good patterns that will guarantee, first above all, one thing, financial success. “That’s old news”, someone could say, but what perhaps should be underlined here is that it was the Francis Ford Coppola who was complaining about this status quo and not some new, promising director, bitching about how the Hollywood industry is destroying his revolutionary artistic ideas about cinema. If a famous and well respected director like Coppola is struggling with the norms the industry is imposing, if a guy like him feels the need for some extra space to breathe, one would have to wonder, how realistic are the chances of success, for a director who could share, possibly,  Coppola’s vision but not his status? I’ v been making these thoughts more and more frequently recently, as all the movies i’v been watching lately seem so friggin familiar. It’s like i have seen then before, more than a thousand times each. Anyway, maybe it’s my choices, maybe it’s the film industry, maybe it’s both.

Measuring Prosperity

I was reading in a Greek newspaper about a prosperity index, published by Legatum Institute, the other day and i thought i would share it. The Legatum Institute, the latest prosperity report in pdf format and some individual reports, a quick glance, for specific countries.

• The United States
• United Kingdom
• France
• Germany
• Greece

Though prosperity and especially the measuring of prosperity is a controversial and debatable subject, i think the Legatum Institute Index provides a useful, multilevel assessment of the political and socioeconomic status quo of each country. I especially liked the comparison, between countries, tool. Enjoy.

Windows 7 are finally…dead.

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It served me well for 28 months, my laptop HP Pavilion 9312ea that is. Now all that is left from it is the above screen. GPU is toasted, isn’t worth repairing, oh well.

Windows 7 are finally here.

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I’ve been using, as my main OS, Windows 7 RC (build 7100) for more than 7-8 months now and i couldn’t wait to get my hands on the final release. I had actually pre-ordered Windows 7 Premium, from Amazon.co.uk, for a very descent price, around 60 €, but the other day iv learned that i could actually get em for free through the MSDN Academic Alliance program. Isn’t public education cool or what? And no, i wasn’t disappointed by the final release, which managed to live up to the expectations and the hype which were instigated by the release candidate. Actually, it is the first Windows OS i really like and the reason is rather simple. “It just works”, right out of the box, without any problems.