"When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall."

- Mahatma Gandhi

The Corporation (2003)

Below are all three parts of the award-winning 2003 documentary THE CORPORATION - as originally broadcasted on TV Ontario.

I think this film is very appropriate given the recent U.S Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money in support of their favorite presidential candidate. The ‘bottomline’ with this decision is that in the U.S politicians will be forced to adopt pro-corporate, pro-capitalist agendas to gain favor from major corporations in order to compete with each other for advertising and overall cultural influence.

This documentary outlines the historical conditions and decisions that have led up to corporations being legally declared “persons” in the U.S – thereby ensuring the full human rights to these profit-obsessed conglomerated organizations.

I will have much more to say on this topic in the future, but this documentary is a good place to start gaining perspective. Enjoy:

Part One /

Part Two /

Part Three/

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Visualizing Empires Decline

Watch this amazing visual representation of the rise and decline of major empires created by Pedro M Cruz:

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

Unfortunately their is no representation in this visual of the current dominant empire: The U.S-corporate-military establishment.

Bonobos, Culture and Human Uniqueness

In the TED Talk below Susan Savage-Rumbaugh argues that biology isn't what makes humans so different from other nonhuman apes, but rather it is our cultural developments and social learning which makes us so unique. Savage-Rumbaugh shows us bonobos who have been taught to communicate using pictographs, and points out how, in comparison, humans are uniquely endowed with ability to engage in symbolic cultural activity.

This insight is nothing new. For decades, anthropologists have clearly documented how our ability to use, learn and communicate using abstract symbols and complex language has given us a high degree of uniqueness in relation to other primates. It is our elaborate symbolic capacities that quite literally define what it means to be human.

However, there are also significant biological differences between our species and the bonobos: although only 1% of our genes differ, some of the differences are key in coding for proteins important for brain formation, and specifically the neocortex – the part of the brain that allows us to even have complex symbolic capacities. We are creatures forged by evolution - biological in every way.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the old debates about ‘nature v. nurture’ are clearly confused. Modern genetic science and detailed observation of human life clearly suggest that nature unfolds via nurture, and that nurture is in our nature. The various dichotomies at play in several mainstream and academic discourses – e.g., of biology opposed to psychology, mind and matter, nature and culture – are becoming so utterly inappropriate to the task of understanding the human condition that their continual use will only serve to obscure and confuse. We need a new discourse – we need a new vocabulary.



We are creatures who are part of the same immanent world of flow and force as every living thing on this planet. But does this mean we are not still, in some unique way, something... special?

“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people."

- Martin Luther King Jr

Hage on Anthropology and the Passion of the Political

Ghassan Hage is an internationally acclaimed anthropologist, both as an academic and an arresting public intellectual. Below is his December 2009 Inaugural Distinguished Lecture for the Australian Anthropological Society, where he talks about the function of the anthropological project today. Hage asks, what is the discipline's potential to help us understand, and be, 'other than what we are'?

Anthropology and the Passion of the Political

Part 1




Ghassan Hage has held many prestigious visiting professorships including at Harvard University, L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the University of Copenhagen and the American University of Beirut. He is now based at the University of Melbourne.

Part 2

The Ways God is Dead - The Four Horsemen

On the 30th of September 2007, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens sat down for a first-of-its-kind, unmoderated 2-hour discussion about theism, atheism and role of religion in a rationalistic world.

All four authors have received a large amount of media attention for their writings against religion - some positive, and some negative. In this conversation the group trades stories of the public’s reaction to their recent books, their unexpected successes, criticisms and common misrepresentations. They discuss the tough questions about religion that face to world today, and propose new strategies for going forward.

Both hours of this conversation are presented below:

Protevi on Deleuze and the Biological

Larval Subjects, Autonomous Systems and E. coli Chemotaxis

By John Protevi

Upon first reading, the beginning of Chapter 2 of Difference and Repetition, with its talk of “contemplative souls” and “larval subjects,” seems something of a bizarre biological panpsychism. Actually it does defend a sort of biological panpsychism, but by defining the kind of psyche Deleuze is talking about, I’ll show here how we can remove the bizarreness from that concept. First, I will sketch Deleuze’s treatment of “larval subjects,” then show how Deleuze’s discourse can be articulated with Evan Thompson’s biologically based intervention into cognitive science, the “mind in life” or “enaction” position. Then I will then show how each in turn fits with contemporary biological work on E. coli chemotaxis (movement in response to changes in environment).

The key concept shared by all these discourses is that cognition is fundamentally biological, that it is founded in organic life. In fact and in essence, cognition is founded in metabolism. Thus fully conceptual recollection and recognition, the active intellectual relation to past and future – what Deleuze will call the dominant “image of thought” – is itself founded in metabolism as an organic process. This founding of cognition in metabolism can be read in an empirical sense, for just as a matter of fact you will not find cognition without a living organism supporting itself metabolically. But it can also be read in a transcendental sense: for our thinkers, metabolism is a new transcendental aesthetic, the a priori form of organic time and space. The essential temporal structure of any metabolism is the rhythmic production of a living present synthesizing retentions and protentions, conserved conditions and expected needs. The essential spatiality of metabolism comes from the necessity of a membrane to found the relation of an organism to its environment; there is an essential foundation of an inside and outside by the membrane, just as there is an essential foundation of past and future by the living present.

We thus see the necessity of a notion of biological panpsychism: every organism has a subjective position, quite literally a “here and now” created by its metabolic founding of organic time and space; on the basis of this subjective position an evaluative sense is produced which orients the organism in relation to relevant aspects of its environment.

Read More @ Protevi.Com

Colin McGinn on New Mysterianism

Colin McGinn is a British philosopher currently working at the University of Miami. McGinn has also held major teaching positions at Oxford University and Rutgers University. Although McGinn has written dozens of articles in philosophical logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language, he is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind.

Below is an interview with McGinn about competing theories of mind:

Two Papers on Cross-Cultural Knowing

Shaun Nichols, Stephen Stich and Jonathan M. Weinberg, (2003). Metaskepticism: Meditations in Ethno-Epistemology In S. Luper (ed.), The Skeptics (Ashgate), pp. 227-247.

Throughout the twentieth century, an enormous amount of intellectual fuel was spent debating the merits of a class of skeptical arguments which purport to show that knowledge of the external world is not possible. These arguments, whose origins can be traced back to Descartes, played an important role in the work of some of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, including Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein, and they continue to engage the interest of contemporary philosophers (for example Cohen 1999; DeRose 1995; Hill 1996; Klein 1981; Lewis 1996; McGinn 1993; Nozick 1981; Schiffer 1996; Unger 1975; Williams 1991). Typically, these arguments make use of one or more premises which the philosophers proposing them take to be intuitively obvious. Beyond an appeal to intuition, little or no defence is offered, and in many cases it is hard to see what else could be said in support of these premises...

Jonathan Weinberg, (2006). What's Epistemology For? The Case for Neopragmatism in Normative Epistemology. In Epistemological Futures, ed. S. Hetherington, (Oxford University Press) pp. 26-47.

How ought we to go about forming and revising our beliefs, arguing and debating our reasons, and investigating our world? If those questions constitute normative epistemology, then I am interested here in normative metaepistemology: the investigation into how we ought to go about forming and revising our beliefs about how we ought to go about forming and revising our beliefs -- how we ought to argue about how we ought to argue.

Antonio Damasio: This Time With Feeling

Below Antonio Damasio, noted researcher and professor of neuroscience at USC, talks with The New York Times' David Brooks about emotions and the science of being human. He describes the difference between emotions and feelings, and explains why emotions are one of humanity's most important survival mechanisms.

This event took place April 7, 2009 at the Aspen Institute, in Aspen, CO:.

Slavoj Žižek on the BBC’s Hardtalk

Slavoj Zizek is one of the world's most controversial political philosophers. From the 9/11 attacks to the global financial meltdown, he portrays a liberal capitalist system in crisis.

He still calls himself a Communist but describes its 20th Century version as a total failure. But how seriously should we take a man who sees the good in Stalin?

Chomsky on the Culture of Imperialism

On Thursday, December 3, 2009 Noam Chomsky delivered the 5th Annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture: The Unipolar Moment and the Culture of Imperialism at Columbia University School for International Affairs. Watch that lecture in its entirety below: