Passive Observers: November 2010

Monday, 29 November 2010

Short Film: Validation (2007)

A wonderful & positive short film :) Won a lot of awards.

"A cheerful parking attendant considers it his job to do more than validate parking. He wants to validate the customers themselves, delivering compliments about their appearances and the inner qualities behind them. Everyone who comes up to him with a ticket walks away validated as a worthwhile human being. Soon, the parking attendant becomes so popular that people line up for validation. He appears on news broadcasts and even ends up validating George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein. His life hits a roadblock when he goes to the DMV to get his driver's license photo taken and is met with a beautiful photographer whom he can't get to smile. (IMDB Storyline by J. Spurlin )

"Validation" is a fable about the magic of free parking. Starring TJ Thyne & Vicki Davis. Writer/Director/Composer - Kurt Kuenne.

Speech (RSA Animate): Crises of Capitalism

A very good and easy to understand speech about the crises of capitalism. Great analysis of the different causes very nicely organised and presented.

Amazing animation too :)

Note:

There was much criticism by "youtubers" on the comments section who wrote that we do not have capitalism at all, and that in fact actual capitalism is not even legal especially in the USA. While browsing in this chaos of comments I noticed that the majority of constructive and worth reading answers argued that we actually suffer from lack of capitalism and that instead we get "corporatism", "mercantilism" and so on. Basically what they say is that governments and/or corporations are mainly responsible for corrupting the system and creating the crisis. It did make some sense.

Some of them quoted thinkers, others linked websites and videos or mentioned books and articles to make their thesis stronger (yes, all that on the youtube comment section!) and there was one book that grabbed my attention. It's called "The case for legalizing Capitalism", by Kel Kelly and it seems to elaborate more or less on what all those angry youtubers were trying to say. Amazon's description was quite interesting and

Speech: Matthew Taylor - 21st century enlightenment

Matthew Taylor's lecture "21st century Enlightenment"
(Full edit with the audience Q&A session)

A very interesting lecture about people changing the way they think in order for us to prosper in the future, about self awareness and finding what actually makes each of us happy.
Analysis of the middle ages enlightenment in order to understand how it happened and how long it took for it to happen in order to help us create the 21st century enlightenment.
A quite positive view on human nature adequately justified through examples of experiments as well as through the theory of evolution.
Those are just a few of the very interesting points discussed by Matthew Taylor in this lecture.

I was actually lucky enough to watch an almost identical lecture by Matthew live at my university :)

Enjoy!
/od

Friday, 19 November 2010

Article: Tiny little thoughts

by ligesskepsis.blogspot.com

Sometimes I think of this classic story that companies selling antivirus software, have first created the virus itself and then have the ''antidote'' ready for the customers to buy! How many times have we felt that somehow the antivirus came first? How many times have we been told to be careful of a new virus, we bought the software to be ready and sure but in the end we never got ''ill''? They were sometimes though that we heard of someone that did get ''infected'' because he didnt have the ''antibiotic''..

Speech: Noam Chomsky - Distorted Morality (2003)

Very interesting speech by Noam Chonmsky, who explains why we are all hypocrites and how obvious it is that there cannot be a war on terror.

"Whatever has been happening for the past several months and is going on now, and however you evaluate it, like it, hate it, or whatever, its pretty clear that there cannot be a war on terror."

Noam Chomsky, Distorted Morality