I am a journalist and documentary filmmaker doing research on pills like Lybrel and Seasonale. I’m trying to find out more about how women decide to go on one of these pills and what their experiences have been. I’d love to speak to you if possible… my email address is emilytaguchi@mac.com, will you let me know if you wouldn’t mind me contacting you? Thank you! Emily

But all things being equal, I think I would also argue that given the message of conflict resolution vs. the kind of perpetual bathroom humor and objectification of girls that characterizes so much American-made kids media, I’ll take Thomas any day.

Trains that smile vs. green ogres that fart? I’ll choose the former.

I would fuck Fatone, Ali, and the Hough chick too.

The Flight 93 memorial site states the same passenger figures heard everywhere else: “All 33 passengers and seven crew members were killed.”
http://www.honorflight93.org/story/

Thirty-three passengers? We aren’t talking about a small business jet but a Boeing 757 airliner. It isn’t as if a Boeing 757 will only hold fifty or so passengers either. The website Airliners.net which gives specifications on commercial airliner types tells us that: “Typical passenger arrangements vary from 178 two class (16 first & 162 economy), or 202 (12 first & 190 economy) or 208 (12 first and 196 economy) or 214 to 239 in all economy class.”
http://www.airliners.net/aircraft-data/stats.main?id=101

So we are talking about at minimum a Boeing 757 being able to carry one hundred and seventy-eight passengers. Let’s assume Flight 93 was of the configuration to carry “only” 178 passengers. Meaning a hundred and forty-five seats were empty. I’m sorry but NO AIRLINE IN THE WORLD is going to have an airliner take off almost empty to ferry 33 ticket holding passengers from one coast of the U.S. to the other. It just doesn’t happen in the real world and here’s why: It would be catastrophically unprofitable. Remember that airline companies are a business and nothing more. They aren’t a charity or a government-sponsored free ride service. They are in business to make a profit for their shareholders and it would be absolutely LUDICROUS for them to waste enormous amounts of money on the fuel, on the salaries of their ground crew maintenance technicians and on the wear and tear on the airframe to be in the habit of flying a handful of people all over the place in a practically empty jet. Instead they would cancel the flight and have the ticket holders assigned to different flights going to the same destination so they can put full or almost full airliners into the air. If they were so stupid as to fly tiny amounts of passengers across the country they would have gone out of business decades ago.

This by no means is the only glaring hole in the official story of 9/11 but it’s one of them. I’m sorry but the official story just doesn’t pass the smell test. In fact it stinks to high heaven. If you really want to honor the victims of 9/11 then the only meaningful way to do so requires first figuring out that what really happened that awful morning is about 180 degrees away from the official myth you’ve been fed.

WALL-E is not anti-leisure at all. I think, rather, that it teaches us what leisure *actually is*. There’s a critical distinction between leisure and laziness. These people who gave up on earth settled for life as a mere program, they settled for automation as an end in itself. WALL-E showed us that life is not programmed, it is not mechanical or scheduled. To be human is not to find comfort and just settle on that. What they found was not leisure, it wasn’t even life, it was ’survival’, like being vegetative on a life-support machine. Aboard the ‘luxury liner’ all the robots and humans had paths they were forced onto like trains on tracks, they lived not as humans but as computers programmed to a schedule, like puppets.

By settling for this routine they gave up being human. Nearly all evidence of what is truly human had been lost. True humanity and true leisure is not to be comatose – I’m sure Josef Pieper would agree that leisure is to be open to life – the way a child is open to all that is around him, to learn and receive from what surrounds them – it’s that moment that we let everything in, instead of pushing everything out. It’s a moment of true love and of grace.

WALL-E teaches us that humanity IS in leisure, it’s in the leisure of appreciating nature. It’s in letting nature in without imposing or manipulation, of dancing, empathizing, of loving. WALL-E the robot was seemingly impregnated with all that remained of this innate human desire to learn, to find things in freedom (in his collecting hobby) and to love. In his little job of cleaning away the mess caused by man who had stopped being human – a consumer-driven, mechanized society – he was making way for nature itself, to let in the awe and wonder of life itself, of the ’stars in the sky’. Ultimately the strength of his humanity prevailed, and it proved to be merely dormant as society broke free from its vegetative state.

The theme of the movie is not leisure vs. work at all, it’s knowing what leisure, and ultimately what humanity, really is. As a movie I think it’s a fantastic work of art.

Not to be egotistical, but the way I think about race can accommodate for that. But maybe I’m just fooling myself and I’m actually one of those people who is retheorizing and going to pretend that’s what I thought all along.

I don’t really follow your discussion about symbols. Baudrillard makes no distinction in his analysis between “symbols” and images”, so I think that’s preventing me from seeing your point. My point is that symbols function discursively and therefore ideologically. Thus they can give an illusion of, oh say, “change” without actually producing any. Meanwhile we all go on with our lives thinking we live in a drastically different world when the only thing that has changed is the rhetoric.

p.s./fyi I’m also really immersed in posthuman stuff right now which is weirdly bringing back a lot of dualism. so maybe that explains my obsession over the symbol/material split. i would say i am a radical materialist though.

If you thought race was not a problem before the election, you probably still think so. I’ve not seen someone say racism was a huge problem prior to 4 November, now it isn’t.

But what I want to see, and have nearly zero faith that I will, is intellectuals taking this seriously as a counter-case to so many theories of race and racism. From now on, a theory of racism has to account for Obama’s election. I don’t think most operative notions of racism can actually accommodate his election. That’s not only a problem, it is immanent critique and has to be taken seriously, lest your theorizing become a decorative item, rather than a description of the world. So, you have folks saying a year ago “no black man, especially with that name, could be elected president in the U.S.” who are now saying “it’s not really a big deal.” That concerns me. Time will press the case, though, as very few people actually say “I need to rethink this stuff” on the spot. Most prefer (ha!) to retheorize, then pretend that’s what s/he thought all along!

For the record, I know that I have to rethink some stuff.

(I tend to be more concerned about people on my side of things. Not so concerned with the Bennetts of the world, who are and always will be haters. Maybe I’m part of the left that eats its own? Not sure.)

RE: symbols, now we have an interesting discussion. I think symbols, especially when freighted with such historical violence like slavery and the Middle Passage, are actually just as material as anything. And certainly counter to the hyperreal. The hyperreal is the play of images. Symbols tell a story about material suffering or ecstasy, so I see symbols as completely interruptive of the hyperreal. To put it concretely: I don’t think all those black (and other colored) people weeping at the acceptance speech were responding to an image. I think it was real human catharsis, through a symbol of struggle, in the same way – now inverted – that rioting after M.L.K., Jr.’s assassination was not a response to an image, but a catharsis of another sort.

The relationship between image and symbol suddenly becomes something deeply social, cultural, and political, eh? Suddenly philosophy is NOT just for the classroom or dorm room. And that’s a good thing.