Tuesday, June 7, 2011

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Anything?

Everything?







Fascinating.

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Some notes: It really is a fascinating exploration of how we got where we are and who and what had such an influential impact on the course of events. It's similar to what James Burke did with "Connections" all those years ago, but with a harder edge -- because everything Curtis gets into is recent or relatively so.

This series is an incomplete exploration, of course, and it is approached from a decidedly British point of view, but it does help us to see how thinkers and actors on the world stage actually do have an effect on what happens and how.

Some of Curtis's startling observations include the resemblance between what Asian economies went through in the 90's and what we in the west are going through now. His observations about the World Computing Machines (as Edward Teller called them) would enable -- and what sort of strange and pitiless philosophy and ideology would go with them -- need quite a bit of expansion, but I think he's mostly on the mark. Underlying much of Adam Curtis's work -- which I really appreciate -- is the idea that a great deal of what we believe is wrong, and it is wrong because those who brought those beliefs forth, whatever their realm, were deep in error.

But "Truth" is never a finality. It is an ongoing and changing discovery. I like that a lot.

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