Tag Archives: deepwater horizon

The Deepwater Horizon Film Reminds us That Hollywood is Still a Propaganda Machine

I’m kinda furious about this:

When first watching the trailer, I tried to remind myself that it was just a movie.

But it’s never just a movie, is it?

Given enough time, I’m sure I could list hundreds of films that changed my perspective on the world. The Hours was the first time I felt challenged on my once very black-and-white perspective on LGBT rights. Hotel Rwandadespite being called “revisionist junk” by then UN peacekeeper/now senator Romeo Dallaire, was the first movie to open my eyes to the role of politics in preventing, or allowing, genocide and devastation. There are just so many movies that moved me to reconsider my stance or opinion by challenging me to see the world through someone else’s eyes. Movies do affect us, often more than we’d like to admit. Heck, that’s exactly why we talk so much about representation in movies here on the blog.

So I am a movie fan who believes that movies impact their viewers. That’s why I’m furious that there is about to be a major blockbuster that will hero-wash “the worst oil spill in U.S. History” a spill that polluted the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days and leaked approximately 3.19 million barrels of oil. Continue reading

Why I’m Not A Liberal

…and yeah, that’s from the point of me speaking as a rabid Marxist.

And speaking as a Marxist, this has always been a peeve of mine. With the way politics often gets portrayed, plenty of folks (both liberal and conservative alike) get the misconception that Socialism is just a ‘roided up version of Liberalism and Communism is just a ‘roided of up version of that, with the state getting more and more powerful, larger in size, and more invasive in scope as you progress along that line.

That’s absolutely not how it works, and while that picture’s wrong, I’m not really here today to correct that.

(Though just for the record, this’d be a more accurate picture of the political spectrum…)

I’ve been playing around with this post for a while now, and it’s coming from more than just a desire to clear up my own stance. I truly do think that of the two major forces in American politics and culture, Liberalism is actually the more insidious (I’m not saying that Conservatism is better, but it does seem a lot easier to confront). I’m writing not to just talk about why I’m not a liberal, but why I don’t think you should be one either.

That said, let’s bring up the obvious:

I’m not going to try to address all Liberalism- that’d be a tough task for a book, let alone some blog post. I’m not going to try to attack hypocrisy either, those accusations can always be dismissed with the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. Instead, I’m going to try to hit what I think are the core flaws and paradoxes that the ideology rests on. Continue reading

Fame Day: Co-Ops

In our weekly discussion yesterday, Evan made mention of “‘It’s Not Easy Being Red’ Gordon,” a reference to the political blog and comic strip I used to write. For anyone who might not be aware by now, yours truly is a Marxist.

And yeah, here’s the obligatory “no, Stalin was to Communism what the Spanish Inquisition was to Christianity; no, we’re about dismantling the state, not expanding it, and no, we don’t like Obama either so please stop saying he’s one of us.”

While I try to keep my admittedly extreme Anarcho-Trotskyist views out of the blog, there’s really no denying that they affect my value system, and while most of the time this means I’m frothing at the mouth at whatever new abomination consumerism spits out, every once in a great while, it means something really catches my attention and admiration.

For this Fame Day, that thing is the co-op. Continue reading