I’ve been looking for comprehensive videos on hate speech for a while and thought this one was pretty good. I think the problem of hate speech is probably the best argument against the BBC putting Nick Griffin on Question time. Whether what Griffin said can be classed as hate speech isn’t too difficult to work out, especially once you watch this video, and that realisation just really scares me. I was having a conversation with a friend on facebook about this a couple of weeks ago, and back then I think I was at a point when maybe I didn’t want to admit to myself the full extent of damage it could cause having the BNP on QT. Hopefully with my friend’s permission, I can recount our conversation in this post soon…
This nub operates on the cynical assumption that people are much more inclined to do the right thing if there’s something in it for them. Neat piece of electronics they’ve got going there though. It’s the sort of thing I would love to spend hours taking apart, to then end up staring at the metallic entrails with a vague sense of sadness at the fact that I will never be able to put these pieces back together in the same way again.
Here’s one of the 20 entries to make Obama’s Health reform video challenge final selection. You can now watch and rate each one by clicking here. There’s some quality nubbage definitely worth checking out there. If you don’t want to vote and want to just watch a few, just keep refreshing the page and a new video should come up each time.
This has to be the best guide to wing chun kung fu I have seen yet! And the seventies-ness clearly adds to the value. Not many people know that wing chun was invented by a woman, the Buddhist nun Ng Mui…if anyone wants to go on a little-known kung fu pilgrimage, I know where you can find Yip Man’s tomb. It is at the top of an overgrown hill behind a large Taoist temple by Fanling station, right on the outskirts of the New Territories, Hong Kong. You have to climb quite a lot so make sure you wear the right shoes and just be careful of the snakes…
Video artist Lincoln Schatz’s vision of a better world would be one where we could SHARE BRAINS. Trippy. In ‘The self and the future’ philosopher Bernard Williams looks at whether having the same body is enough to be the same person when your personality has been transplanted with someone else’s. If ever it did become possible to swap brains, I wonder exactly how much of a correlation there would be between our memory and personality and our physical brain. But what bothers me the most about all of this is the question as to whether Nick Griffin would still be a racist mofo if we swapped his brain with Nelson Mandela’s for a while. And what would happen to poor Nelson…
Some super slick hype here from TED here who are gearing up for the global launch of the Charter for Human Compassion on November 12th which asserts ‘The Golden Rule’ – that we should treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves.
I’ve added a movienub category to the nub categories for this one. It’s a sort of device for explaining an idea and rallying large groups of people around it which obviously works well for the TED prize. See also Pangea Day.
This video was made to mark World Press Freedom day back in May 2009. Am starting to think that there is nothing left on Vimeo now that can remotely qualify as a nub.
By the way: this nub contains full frontal nudity. I like the video but in terms of the idea itself, it’s not really saying much more than “women are becoming more like men and men are becoming more like women” – something that I don’t think is really that new. But at the same time, it is not a mainstream idea or something that is seen as particularly acceptable to most, so I think it is a nub in so far as it does challenge current gender regimentation/stereotypes/roles.
I’m slightly delusional after 24 hours in Amsterdam at the Stranger Festival. Not entirely sure what this means… Our workshop has been hard work but after the first day of three I think we’re getting there. We’re trying to get participants to make videos that can make a difference to an issue that they care about, which is proving really hard for them and for us. I think there is a bit of a disagreement amongst as to whether the best way to enact change is to describe the world as you see it, or to accept that people in the world probably already see that world and therefore the best thing to do as a ‘motivated film-maker’ is to tell people how to change their behaviour. I don’t event know if I know the answer sometimes.
Last night we had to pitch the workshop to all the people at the festival in a minute. We made the video above in the station before we left. It played behind me as I ranted at them about how video can save us.
