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Ed Webb

BBC News - Can battlefield robots take the place of soldiers? - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8495946.stm

robots soldiers battlefield technology military sci-fi

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Feb 10 - Cached
  • it has a menu
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 08 Feb 10
       
      Pun intended?
Ed Webb

Virginia 4th-grade textbook criticized over claims on black Confederate soldiers - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2010101907974.html

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Masoff defended her work. "As controversial as it is, I stand by what I write," she said. "I am a fairly respected writer."
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 20 Oct 10
       
      Because, clearly, reputation of the author is a substitute for actual evidence. Writing history is deeply political...
  • When Masoff began work on the textbook, she said she consulted a variety of sources -- history books, experts and the Internet. But when it came to one of the Civil War's most controversial themes -- the role of African Americans in the Confederacy -- she relied primarily on an Internet search. The book's publisher, Five Ponds Press, based in Weston, Conn., sent a Post reporter three of the links Masoff found on the Internet. Each referred to work by Sons of the Confederate Veterans or others who contend that the fight over slavery was not the main cause of the Civil War.
  • . Five Ponds Press has published 14 books that are used in the Virginia public school system, all of them written by Masoff. Masoff also wrote "Oh Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty" and "Oh Yikes! History's Grossest Moments."
Ed Webb

Elise Armani with Piotr Szyhalski - The Brooklyn Rail - 0 views

brooklynrail.org/...se-Armani-with-Piotr-Szyhalski

media politics US USA policing pandemics art propaganda

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • During the entire history of America, the US has not been at war for 17 years. That's incredible, mainly because if you talk to people who maybe aren't that much that interested in history, they would say, “That’s crazy. What are you talking about? There’s no war.”
  • Our relationship with war and how our country functions in the world is so warped and twisted. Every time the word “war” is introduced into the cultural discourse, you know that it is already corrupted. That's why it’s paired here with “back to normal,” because it's another combination of phrases that stood out…Everybody keeps talking about things getting back to normal. Then the pronouncements that this is a war and we’re fighting an invisible enemy. It just seems so disturbing really because what that means is that we're about to start doing things that are ethically questionable. To me, what was happening is that the pronouncement was made so that anything goes, and there's no culpability, nobody will be held responsible for making any decisions whatsoever because it was war and things had to be done.
  • if I think about how “war” has been used strategically in this context of COVID-19, it doesn’t feel like rhetoric that was raised to be alarmist, but almost to be comforting. That this is a familiar experience. We have a handle on it. We are attacking it like a war. War is our normal.
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  • The funny thing about history is that you always look back from the luxury of time and you can see these massive events taking place, you can understand the dynamics. We don't have that perspective when we are in it, so my idea of studying history was to remap the past onto the present, so that we might gain insight into what’s happening now.
  • This weird concept that we have developed, essential, non-essential work, this arbitrary division of what will matter and what will not matter. It wasn't until I was swept up in the uprising and really asking myself what's happening—there was this amazing video of this silent moment of people with their fists up, thousands of people on their knees, and it was just incredibly moving—I had this realization that this was the essential work, the work that we need to be doing.
  • I think we all lack a historical distance right now to make sense of this moment. But art can provide us with an abstracted or a historical lens, that gives us distance or a sense of a time bigger than the moment we're in.
  • When you were describing this 1990s utopian idea of the internet as public space, I was struck by the contrast with how things turned out. In both our physical and digital reality, we have lost the commons. Is Instagram a public space?
  • there's something virus-like about social media anyway, in the way that it operates, in the way that it taps into our physiology on a chemical level in our brain. It’s designed to function that way. And combining that kind of functionality with our addiction to or the dominance of visual culture, it's just sort of like a deadly combination. We get addicted and we just consume incredible amounts of visual information every day.
  • It really is true that very rarely you will see a photograph of a dead body in the printed newspaper. It reminds me, for example, of the absence of the flag-draped coffins that come when soldiers return from war. Because we're taught to think about COVID-19 as a kind of war, maybe it makes sense to really think about that.
  • If you don't see the picture of the dead body, there's no dead body. It's the reason why if I teach a foundation class, I always show the students this famous Stan Brakhage film, The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1971). It’s a half hour silent film of multiple autopsies. We have this extended conversation about just how completely absent images of our bodies like that are from our cultural experience.
  • those are the images that people wanted to see. They were widely distributed; you could buy postcards of lynched men and women because people wanted to celebrate that. There is a completely different attitude at work. One could say they're doing the work of the same ideology, but in opposite directions. It would be hard to talk about a history of photography in this country and not talk about lynching photographs.
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