John Pilger (1939-2023)

The Australian journalist and documentarian died last week at the age of 83. He was tireless in his efforts to expose the crimes of the powerful against the powerless.

I first became aware of him in 1979 when I was in graduate school in the US. The film The Deer Hunter that dealt with the story of three friends form rural Pennsylvania who get sent to Vietnam during that brutal invasion of that country by the US that saw millions of Vietnamese killed and their country ruined by massive bombardment and the deliberate destruction of villages and the countryside. The film came out to great acclaim and went on to win five Academy Awards including best picture, best director (Michael Cimino) and best supporting actor (Christopher Walken) with further nominations for best actor (Robert De Niro) and best actress (Meryl Streep).

I went to see it and was appalled at the utterly racist way that the Vietnamese were portrayed, like bloodthirsty savages who delighted in torturing and killing. It was clear to me that the film was trying to make Americans feel good about the war that they had humiliatingly lost just four years earlier despite throwing their sophisticated weaponry (short of nuclear weapons) at a much poorer country.
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Annoying article headers

I spends quite a bit of time on the internet, frequenting many news and opinion sites. Most of these are in a magazine format where the home page has a whole lot of headlines that contain links to articles. Since these sites depend upon traffic to get advertising revenues, they necessarily try to use headers to get readers curious and thus lure readers to click on the link and read the article. That is fine, as long as the header provides some information that gives me a reasonable expectation of what the article contains. But not all of them do. Over time, I have developed a kind of filtering reflex that tells me whether I should click or not.
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Susanna Gibson speaks out

Just before the elections in November, I posted about Susanna Gibson, a nurse practitioner running for a seat in the Virginia House of Representatives. She and her husband had in the past live-streamed sex acts. It was all perfectly legal but some Republican operative had obtained the video and shopped it around to media outlets and the Washington Post had published it. Then flyers with that information were mailed out by the Republican party to voters in that district. To their credit, most of the Democratic party rallied around her but in the end she lost a close race 17,878 to 16,912, a margin of just 966 or 2.8%. The fact that it was so close means that she might well have won otherwise.

Gibson has given an interview about the whole affair and about what people need to realize about the whole online experience.

I think a big underlying factor that really needs to be addressed, and our society needs to start being educated on, is there is this devaluation and misunderstanding of consent, especially when we’re talking about digital privacy. Content that is initially made in a consensual context, which is then distributed in a non-consensual context digitally, is a crime. Just because someone consented to share something in one particular context doesn’t mean that it is or should be fair game for the whole world to see.

Choosing to share content, online or in whatever medium, with select people with the understanding that it will disappear and can only be seen by those present at the time — when we’re talking live streaming, webcamming and Skype — that is a far cry from consenting for that content to be recorded and then broadly disseminated. And there is case law precedent confirming this.

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How dangerous are deepfakes?

We have got used to the existence of ‘deepfakes’, computer generated images and videos that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing. This has caused some serious concerns about the possibility of deepfakes becoming a powerful tool for disinformation and mischief, especially in the political arena, since it is possible to have people seem to say and do things that are damaging to themselves with the viewer being none the wiser that they have been conned.

But how dangerous is this?

In the November 20, 2023 issue ofThe New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr reviews some recent books that look at the dangers posed by deepfakes and concludes that the fears may be overblown, and that even when deepfakes are explicitly political, most of it is used for parody and otherwise humorous purposes, and not meant to convince us that we are watching the real thing,

Fakery in the visual realm goes back to the earliest days of photography, where a lot of editing was done in darkroooms to get the effect sought.

In “Faking It” (2012), Mia Fineman, a photography curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, explains that early cameras had a hard time capturing landscapes—either the sky was washed out or the ground was hard to see. To compensate, photographers added clouds by hand, or they combined the sky from one negative with the land from another (which might be of a different location).
…

From our vantage point, such manipulation seems audacious. Mathew Brady, the renowned Civil War photographer, inserted an extra officer into a portrait of William Tecumseh Sherman and his generals. Two haunting Civil War photos of men killed in action were, in fact, the same soldier—the photographer, Alexander Gardner, had lugged the decomposing corpse from one spot to another. Such expedients do not appear to have burdened many consciences. In 1904, the critic Sadakichi Hartmann noted that nearly every professional photographer employed the “trickeries of elimination, generalization, accentuation, or augmentation.” It wasn’t until the twentieth century that what Hartmann called “straight photography” became an ideal to strive for.

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The puzzle of why Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox

The defamation case filed by the Dominion voting machine company against Fox News was settled on Tuesday, April 18, 2023, the day when the trial was supposed to begin, for a whopping $787 million. That Fox wanted and needed to settle the case was evident since the discovery process had revealed all manner of highly damaging information that the upper echelons at Fox knew the serial sex abuser Donald Trump’s (SSAT) claims of election fraud and of Dominion’s involvement were without merit even as they publicly supported them.

Fox News’s most high-profile personality Tucker Carlson was abruptly fired on Monday, April 24, just six days later, reportedly on the direct orders of Rupert Murdoch, even though Murdoch reportedly liked Carlson and got on well with him on a personal level and he brought in good ratings and revenue for the network.
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Not the greatest idea in counter-programming

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) seems to take great pleasure in tormenting the Republican party, the very organization that he seeks to become the presidential nominee of. He refuses to commit to attending the first Republican National Committee (RNC) debate debate among the primary contenders to he held this coming Wednesday the 23rd from 9:00pm-11:00pm Eastern time on Fox News or whether, if he does decide to take part, whether he will sign the pledge to support the eventual nominee, whoever that is. At present, eight people have met the donor and polls threshold (Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Doug Burgum, SSAT, Mike Pence, and Chris Christie) and only the first five have signed the pledge. Late news has businessman Perry Johnson (who?) also qualifying for the debate.

It is clear that SSAT has nothing but contempt for the GOP as am independent political entity and thinks that he, as an individual, is the only one that matters and that the GOP’s role is to merely support him. He may well be right in that judgment.

There has been speculation that he will skip the debate but since he is loath to give up the spotlight, yesterday comes reports that he may agree to an interview with Tucker Carlson at the same time as the debate, as a form of counter-programming. Typically, he just drops this as a possibility, not really committing to it, and is likely to be ambivalent right up until almost the last moment, thus keeping everyone off-balance.
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The other GOP primary

The Republican primary race is heating up even though the first actual contest in Iowa is still six months away. The first debate among the candidates is scheduled for August but which members of the already crowded field will meet the criteria set by the. Republican National Committee is still unknown.

Another big unknown is whether serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) will take part in the debates. Typically, a candidate who is far ahead in the polls (like SSAT is) will try to avoid taking part in debates, and those who are far behind are eager to do so. The low-ranking candidates seek to raise their national profile by appearing on a national stage on an equal footing with their competitors while the high ranking ones want to deny them that opportunity.
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Justice Alito and the Wall Street Journal

While much of liberal ire with some of the decisions of the US Supreme.Court has focused on justice Clarence Thomas’s opinions, I have long felt that justice Samuel Alito is the most reactionary member of the court, the one most likely to offer tortured reasoning to justify what seems like pre-ordained conclusions based on his extremely conservative ideology.

Both Thomas and Alito have been the targets of investigative reports by ProPublica about the gifts and lavish vacations that they have been given, including travel on private jets, by wealthy individuals who, directly or indirectly, have had cases before the court. They did not disclose these trips and the private jet travel in their financial disclosure forms.

In the case of Alito, though, he went one step further than Thomas. As is customary with good journalistic outfits, prior to publishing their story, ProPublica informed Alito that they were preparing a story and sent him a list of questions to make sure they were being fair and accurate. What was unusual was that Alito used that to publish a ‘prebuttal’ in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal the day before the ProPublica piece even appeared.
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Jesse Watters to replace Tucker Carlson

Fox News has announced that Jesse Watters will be the permanent host occupying the time slot formerly held by the fired Tucker Carlson, the reasons for whose abrupt departure remain a mystery. Watters has been with Fox News for a long time. He has a juvenile sense of humor and no compunction about saying stupid, bigoted, and incendiary things.

The key question for Fox is whether he can get back the ratings that Carlson used to get and which have slumped since his departure. This will be a test of the model developed by the late Roger Ailes that their shows are based on a template and that the personalities who front them are just types who have specific roles and know they must follow the template because they can and will be replaced by another would-be clone if they fall short.

The template for the Carlson slot is the same as that of most other shows on Fox and that is to promote conspiratorial fear mongering with racist overtones. It is not clear if Watters can suppress and conceal his sophomoric frat-boy personality sufficiently, as Carlson was able to do, so that the dark vision will taken seriously by the typical Fox viewer.

Film review: Russian Ark (2002)

I recently watched this extraordinary film by Alexander Sokurov. It is set in the magnificent Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and the entire film lasting 1 hour and 39 minutes was done in a single take, even though it has a massive cast of about 1,000 actors and 1,000 extras dressed in elaborate costumes and three orchestras, and moves though 33 rooms of the museum, making it not only the longest shot in film history, but also the first feature film ever created in a single take.

If that was not enough of a challenge, the museum would only close for 36 hours for the making of the film so everything had to be set up, filming done, and then removed within that time. Postponements were out of the question. Filming was begun on the afternoon of December 23, 2001. They had only a few hours of daylight in the Russian winter to complete the film. The first three takes had to be abandoned within the first 20 minutes or so due to glitches and that left them with just one final chance to do it. Furthermore, the camera batteries were also running low. But they managed to complete the last take just in time. There was just one cameraman Tilman Büttner to do the whole film and he had to lug around about 35 kg (over 70 lbs) of Steadicam equipment while walking through the vast museum and up and down stairs. He deserves a huge amount of credit for making it seem so smooth.

And yet the final product is a lush and opulent extravaganza that looks like it was filmed over months.
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