Hello everyone,

These are some of the documentaries I used to attain information. I have posted them here and the sites where they are available for anyone that is interested in the topic. Thank you all for your attention in class today!

 

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib: HBO documentary on Abu Ghraib and interviews with the soldiers who were part of it and were sentenced to jail.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/ghosts-of-abu-ghraib/

Taxi to the Dark Side: documentary on the famous taxi driver that was taken into custody at Abu Ghraib. He is mentioned in Ghosts of Abu Ghraib

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/taxi-to-the-dark-side/

Road to Guantanamo: documentary on the “Tipton Three.” Three Arabic men from England that were captured in an American military raid while visiting Afghanistan and were tortured and sentenced to Guantanamo Bay for 2yrs before they were found innocent.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-road-to-guantanamo/

Documentaries on Abu Ghraib

Hello everyone,

These are some documentaries that I watched to get information for my presentation. If anyone is interested in watching the documentaries and attaining more information on the subject, here are the links to some of the documentaries.

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib: HBO documentary on the prison and interviews with the soldiers who were stationed there and were sentenced to jail time.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/ghosts-of-abu-ghraib/

Road to Guantanamo:

 

This Week and Next Week’s Classes

Hi everyone,

Just so we’re all on the same page, the line-up of presentations for this Wednesday is as follows, though not necessarily in this order:

Bryce
Kelly
Juan and Steven
Rosa (tentative)
Phil (tentative)

The line-up for next Wednesday (the final exam schedule has us meeting from 5:00 – 7:30), again in no particular order, is:

Cory
Zeus and Sean
Cecilia and Ollie
Joella

Please let me know if I’ve left anyone out.

Also, if anyone has a CLEAN copy of the course text that they’d like to sell to me, please name your price and bring the book to class this Wednesday or next.

Thanks,
JS

Wikileaks

I am sure everyone or almost everyone has heard about the new leaks that have been released.  If not, just google it and there is tons of information.  From the bits I have read reviewing the leaks it seems to be a very positive thing.  The leaks enable our leaders and people in charge to be held accountable for their actions, something which I feel is a vital part of democracy.  How can people vote on issues if half of what goes on is not even known.  I really am interested in others’ views on this event?  I don’t imagine many people would object once they see all that has happened.  If so I would especially like to understand that viewpoint.

The art of imposition

I would like to share with you all the subject of conversation discussed between my friend and I. My friend is a painter and is a lover of the aesthetics. He is a student at Pratt Institute in New York. We spoke of commercials. He is one who hates commercials and finds them very imposing.  I tried to defend it as a mainstream form of modern art (I personally hate commercials also). He agreed that they might be art, but he speaks of the as art of criminals. See, commercials are really the first pieces of art whos creators so stronly study the viewers. I was trying to find a documentary I had seen on the science and process of making commercials, unfortunatly I couldn’t find it as it is a couple years old. Commercials go through the process of intricatly analyzing their medium to a science. They hand out questionnaires which have people choose their prefrence of words used. For an example, do people prefer dogs to be called happy or playful? 76% of people prefer to have dogs as playful so when we refer to the in our commercials playful is the word we will used. They also use subconscious imagery. Comapnies that sell alcoholic beverages post women with red lipstick on their covers. Women are seen as beautiful and desireable. They have shown that when the color red is added to a picture it becomes more appealing to the majority of people. If you now remember Sean’s presentation on cognitive Schema’s, you will understand now that commercials fool you into desiring an alcoholic beverage because you now associate it with something desirable.

Human rights not necessarily women’s rights.

Though the reading “War on Women” wasn’t a very good one an affirmation made within the article still resonates within me daily. “Women’s rights are not necessarily human rights.” To be clear I will speak on a specific issue, let’s say abortion. When questioned about my feelings toward abortion I always brushed it off by saying, “People are going to do what they want and justify it by any means they find convenient, or they will rely on someone else to tell them what to do.” I realized that this answer was no longer valid. This was not because it was untrue, but because it doesn’t answer the question. This is a question of Ethics, something I never quite understood. It is not what people do and do not do, but what they ought and ought not do. It is a question of responsibility.

The argument most often justifying abortion in a moral perspective is, “It’s my body and I can do what I want with it.” Yea, it is my body and I can turn it into a weapon, become a misanthrope and commit mass genocide, ’cause it’s my mind, my body and I can do what I want. Right, so this is not O.K. with some people, I’m sure. This, in the same way, is not O.K. with a women being irresponsible, having a child who she cannot provide for, and leaving for him to fend for himself most likely committing violent acts out of desperation. So, would it therefore be okay to have an abortion and letting your ends justify your means bringing us to the next ethical issue.

The sanctity of human life and human life is intrinsically good, therefore we should not kill; and we should not kill because I certainty don’t want anybody to kill me… so as long as I can’t identify with it (say a fetus) I can kill it… principle. This is a silly argument. If I can somehow prove that it isn’t alive I can’t kill it. This leads to the when is the fetus alive argument, which is a trivial tangent argument that in my belief is a way of avoiding the issue. This is because it isn’t about killing. When you scratch a mosquito bite you’re killing cells, in the process of ejaculation you’re killing millions of cells and when you walk down the street and kill ants and pollute you’re killing. You kill all the time so don’t pretend that’s the issue. The real issue here is, “If the means justify the ends is it okay and what is the criteria if so.” I think if we focused on that rather than being specific, we could resolve many human rights issues. This is the ethical question.

esoteric identity

I want to, for a second, take Identity to a level I wasn’t able to take it in class ( maybe that’s a good thing). Some of this may be offensive, so read at your own risk. When my friend spoke of Buddhist monks he said, “they were so unattached from their minds and bodies. They said the mind and the body as if realizing it was not theirs to command but an entity to be respected.” So, when Joyce said she identified with being a women I wondered how. I personally do not identify myself with my gender, I do not identify with my thoughts I really do not identify with anything tangible. I do not think this body is mine and I do not think this mind is under any control. I do not identify with “I.” The word does not make sense to me. When we say I and you, who are we referring to? Thoughts we might have had, actions that are bodies committed, or words me have spoken? As if that somehow defined who it is we are. I’m sure it is convenient to label others and ourselves for the purpose of having some security and idea as to what’s really going on, but I (my brain) ultimately find it delusional. The argument usually made against this is free will I suppose, which I find hilarious that it is made by Western culture. How is it that Western culture can claim that people have free will when those very people don’t find anything valid that can not be contained, controlled and reproduced. We do it to animals, we do it with math, we do it with subatomic particles, food and the list continues on to everything. Yet, people somehow have this remarkable ability to do what we want. I think the only reason we say this is to comfort ourselves because we cannot bare the fact that everything is completely out of our control and we are just subject to cause and effect. I mean ideas, thoughts are just rearrangements of what is, has happened, our experience. Why is it so hard for people to say, “Hey, it’s a joyride and I’m just observing it.” Just because you’re observing the most intimate processes through your senses does not mean you are in control. All the evidence points away from free will and to prove this to yourselves all you have to do is look for an action that cannot be rationalized; I assure you this does not exist. All every choice you have every made was an unconscious scale weighing decisions for you. The only thing I do identify is with senses; the “I” certainty does observe as far as I can tell.