Chasing Dragons

Where Can You Watch Movies For Free (and Legally) Online?

Openculture has the inside scoop of where to find movies on-line that are free to watch without any legal repercussions.

Along with links to individual films (some of which are geographically limited), they also provide a good list of on-line film depositories. 

So whether you're looking for something to do on a rainy summer day or merely killing time while traveling, there are myriad options across the range of the cinematic arts to enjoy on-line.

Photo credit: mag3737

David Harvey's Crisis of Capitalism

In this presentation, David Harvey demonstrates how current discussions of the financial crisis neglect to account for the internal contradiction within capitalism--first identified by Marx, history's greatest liberal economist*- between wages and demand. He then illustrates how the rapid extension of credit over the past three decades was used as a means to prop up demand as real wages fell. And we all know what happened next...

With the Con-Dem coalition rolling out punitive 'workfare' style reforms, one begins to wonder about the longer-term macro-economic effects of this extension in the reserve pool of labour?

* I refer to Marx in this way because he understood how capitalism and the liberal economic theory underpinning it (dis)function better than any of their proponents.

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 61

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Why We Talk to Terrorists' by Scott Altran and Robert Axelrod (on the latest US Supreme Court decision that will stunt terrorism research and jeopardize conflict resolution through track two diplomacy) at edge.org

• 'What Work is Really Worth' by Pierre Rimbert at mondediplo.com

• 'What was Cricket Australia Thinking?' by Mukul Kesavan at cricinfo.com

• 'Why Paywalls Will Fail: An Interview with Clay Shirky' by Decca Aitkenhead at guardian.co.uk

Have a good weekend!

Photo credit: Davic

Precision Targets: GPS and the Militarization of Everyday Life

Precision Targets: GPS and the Militarization of Everyday Life is a collaborative multi-media piece created by Caren Kaplan, Erik Loyer, and Ezra Clayton Daniels. Through a series of vignettes, it explores the ways that dual use technologies like GPS are used in military and civilian spheres and how these technologies increasingly blur the distinction between these spheres. As she argues:

• the circulation of GPS between military and civilian use is instructive if we want to understand better the ways in which government and business cooperate not only to make war but to create consumers. Most importantly, in this way, people who have no particular interest in military projects or nationalism may find themselves through their use of technology in everyday life participating in the culture of war: through ways of seeing, forms of entertainment, and modes of communication.

The argument is provocative and compelling. And what I particularly like is that Kaplan is able to demonstrate a nuance put forward by David Campbell and Michael J. Shapiro more broadly with respect to visual cultures. That is, rather than getting stuck in an 'either-or' understanding of technologies like GPS, it is important to understand how they underpin contemporary military practices while potentially offering a means of critically engaging with them.

Moreover, the format is engaging and accessible to an extent that traditional methods of presenting arguments are not. Thus,  Precision Targets is also a catalyst for people like myself to think about how we go about presenting our research and the sorts of platforms that might convey our messages better than traditional publishing outlets.

The Price of Peer Review

There is a lot that can be said about universities in the digital age. There is also a lot that can be said about current models for scholarly publishing and the ridiculousness of holding on to analogue products trapped behind barriers in a digital age as the output of choice.

But, if one needed any more evidence of the pathologies of contemporary academic publishing, one need go no further than the quick analysis undertaken by Prof. Martin Weller of the Open University at The Ed Techie blog (thanks to Cory Doctrow at boingboing.net for the link).

His estimate of the total labour cost of peer-reviewing in any given year is £209,976,000. This is quite a conservative estimate with other calculations placing the global total at £1.9 billion!

And it's not just that these labour costs go uncompensated by the private publishers who rely on peer-review to ensure that their journals are publishing academically 'rigorous' research. Rather, they then turnaround and sell access to these journals for a tidy sum to the very institutions whose employees have been a source of unpaid labour. And in most cases, these are public institutions whose primary source of funding is from the government. 

At a time of fiscal retrenchment, the continuation of this massive subsidy seems imprudent. Moreover, if there weren't already enough reasons, the barricading of most academic journals behind pay-walls can now add economic double-dealing into its calculus of moral dubiousness.

Given that keeping publicly funded knowledge behind barriers is socially irresponsible and that  higher education budgets are going to be slashed in the UK, our disciplinary associations ought to be leading the charge for open access to all publicly subsidized academic outputs. Unfortunately, based on previous experiences, I'm not going to hold my breath....

Photo credit: cinocino

Newcastle University Launches World Politics and Popular Culture MA Degree

I am pleased to announce that Politics at Newcastle University will be launching a new MA degree in World Politics and Popular Culture for the 2010-11 academic year. Here is the course description:

• World Politics and Popular Culture is a distinctive interdisciplinary degree programme that examines the changing dynamics of contemporary international relations in the context of the politics of the various forces shaping and shaped by popular culture. The programme focuses on key theories, policies, and events in world politics in relation to both traditional and new media. You will learn not only how to think critically about how world politics is reflected or reproduced in popular culture, but also how the politics of popular culture shape the dynamics of world politics...

The programme entails three core modules in Politics (World Politics and Popular Culture, Theories and Approaches to the Study of Politics, and a Dissertation in World Politics and Popular Culture) with 4 optional modules that can be taken from politics, cultural studies, media studies, and film.

Admission requirements are an undergraduate degree from an accredited university with at least a 2.i result--the rough equivalent in North American systems would be a B average.

Please note that 'other qualifications or relevant professional experience may also satisfy the entrance requirements. Applicants whose first language is not English require IELTS 6.5, TOEFL 575 (paper-based) or 233 (computer-based), or equivalent.'

Information on how to apply can be found here. There is no formal deadline--apart from the start of classes at the end of September--but if you are applying from overseas, securing a student visa can take several weeks depending on your circumstances.

If you'd like to talk to someone to find out more about the World Politics and Popular Culture MA, you can contact  Matt Davies, whose tremendous efforts and vision saw this through from design to implementation.

I'm also happy to field any inquiries that you may have about the programme or pursuing a MA in politics in the UK.

Disclaimer: If there are any differences between information provided here and that contained on official Newcastle University web-pages, the latter should be viewed as the authoritative source.

Collage and photo credit: DerrickT (work displayed under a Creative Commons attribution license)

The Other Front: The Israeli Gaza Flotilla Raid as a Battle of Narrative

The shocking raid by Israeli commandos on the Free Gaza Movement convoy has sent waves of shock, anger, and disbelief around the world. There is a lot that can be said and speculated upon as to why the Israeli government would have pursued this high-risk/low reward course of action when there were other options available (e.g., anything from letting the ships go through to sabotaging them before they left Cyprus). And the increasingly erratic and high profile actions of the Israeli security services signal to me that either Binyamin Netanyahu--always a fairly shrewd political operator in the real politik tradition whatever else one might want to say about him--has begun to rapidly lose the plot himself or that he has completely lost control of the military. If one is interested in the peace process moving forward, neither is a particularly welcome development.

But beyond these issues, what strikes me as interesting about the raid is the battle that is being fought to control the narrative that emerges, that is the way that the raid becomes understood within a complex pastiche of related incidents and events in the region.

What is important here is that unlike many of the debates and disagreements that are sources of political friction in the region, this is one where many of the 'facts' of the incident are shared. Everyone agrees that Gaza is a space of conflict and contestation within a larger thematic of (geo)political conflict.  Everyone agrees that the flotilla was attempting to break the Israeli blockade. Everyone agrees that the ship was carrying humanitarian materials bound for Gaza. Everyone agrees that Israeli commandos attempted to board the Mavi Marmara in international waters. Everyone agrees that civilians were killed and injured during the attempted raid. For the most part then, commentators, the Israeli government, and the Free Gaza Movement are in relative agreement over the characters involved, the backdrop, the plot-line, and the theme of the story. Thus, the areas of the narrative open to contestation are in terms of who gets to play the narrator and what will count as the acteme, that is the aesthetically significant decision that propels the story forward. In the aftermath, the Israeli government has understood quite astutely where it has room to maneuver and focused its efforts accordingly.

What we see is the Israeli government exercising a two pronged media offensive. The first has been to be proactive and to seek out media engagement. This is a longer-standing part of Israeli statecraft. Israel has always been adept at seizing the role of the narrator in order to shape the narrative conveyed in major mainstream media outlets in order to cast reasonable doubt and/or plausible deniability, and/or convey a sense of victim-hood as required depending on the actions it has undertaken in any given situation. And the detention of flotilla participants was--and is-- a part of this strategy. It is not so much about punishment, debriefing, or deterrence. Rather,  detention is a crucial part of limiting as much as possible eye-witness testimony as to what transpired on the Mavi Marmara to Israeli approved sources  for 24-48 hours following the raid.

The second prong of the media offensive is that the Israeli government is now targeting new media through the immediate release of footage of the alleged events via You-tube. The release of footage compliments the attempt to monopolize the role of the narrator by attempting to shift the acteme from the action of raiding the Mavi Marmara to what individuals on the Mavi Marmara allegedly did when they were boarded with hostile intent in international waters. What makes this shift particularly powerful--if successful--is that unlike claiming that the cargo contains weapons or that some members of the Free Gaza Movement are Al Qa-eda agents, it is non-falsifiable now and into the future. That is, it would be difficult--though not impossible-- for conclusive evidence to the contrary to emerge that would fatally undermine this narrative structure once established.

And while the shift in narrative won't convince anyone already opposed to the occupation or blockade, this isn't the audience that Israel is trying to reach. Rather, their media offensive is aimed at convincing their soft supporters to continue to accept Israeli policy--and the government's perspective-- in the region. It is also aimed at  making condemnation from close allies--such as the governments of the UK, the United States, and Canada--difficult to articulate publicly without getting uncomfortably drawn into a discussion of the minutiae of the incident.

So, as tragic, problematic, imprudent, and miscalculated as the raid may have been, Israel is conducting a far more reasoned media campaign in response. Thus, those who wish to question the moral, legal, or political legitimacy of Israel's actions in this incident better devote some effort to contesting the structure of the Israeli narrative that is beginning to take root as the de facto starting point in the media-scape.

What Makes Political Campaigns Go Viral? Five Lessons from the Founder of MyDavidCameron.com

Clifford Singer, founder of Bubblewrapped, the Other TaxPayers' Alliance, and MyDavidCameron.com has published a concise audit of the factors that made some of these endeavors successful and others--in the words of Borat-- not so much.

With on-line political campaigns that rely on 'word-of-mouth' for promotion, social networking for distribution, and crowd-sourcing for content becoming more common, he provides an interesting set of observations about the positives and negatives of this nascent form of political activism. You can read his comments here.

The unanswered question for me is what kind of effect do these campaigns have on election outcomes? Do they amplify lingering suspicions in the minds of the doubtful? Do they convert the potentially convertible? Or, are they a means of promoting group solidarity in situations where mainstream forms of media are largely under the control of opposing political forces? 

But this also raises the issue of whether immediate electoral results should be the litmus test of success for these kinds of campaigns? Might it be that the power of something like MyDavidCameron.com derives from the ability to contribute to the process of repositioning the terms of political discourse during the Con-Dem reign so that privilege, class, and structural inequality are once again recognized as problems facing the United Kingdom? Time will only tell...

Image credits: David Rosenberg and Ian Cuthbert at MyDavidCameron.com

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 53

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'The Little Pill that could cure alcoholism' by James Medd at guardian.co.uk

• Craig Endler's insider's perspective on television production: 'A dozen reasons TV shows get made BESIDES ratings', 'Canceling a TV show: the network's POV', and 'Explaining 12 things Networks do that appear crazy': here, here, and here from boingboing.net

• 'IPL Scandal Exposes Dark Side of Neoliberal Dream' by Mike Marqusee at guardian.co.uk

• 'How to get paid for free content' by David Campbell at fastmediamagazine.com

• 'The Dunning-Kruger Effect' from the Science Show at abc.net (another find from boingboing.net!)

Enjoy your weekend and for all of the Antipodean T20 supporters, best of luck in the T20 final this afternoon!

Art and Photo Credit: 'La-Lis and a Cool Breeze' (Embroidery on Felt) by Ray_chel

Happy Anniversary Chasing Dragons! One Year On and Growing...

The Chasing Dragons blog celebrates its first anniversary today! In terms of numbers, Chasing Dragons has:

• published over 200 posts

• been visited by over 6,000 unique visitors from 96 countries

• attracted nearly 12,000 page views in total (and rising!)

In the blogosphere, this is very very very small fry. However, in comparison to the audience sizes--and the immediacy of these audiences--provided by traditional means of academic communication, I'm really pleased with how things are progressing. It's really nice to have an outlet to share ideas in progress and short commentaries that would otherwise go unwritten with the knowledge that there are others who think that there is something interesting--or some cases fundamentally wrong--about your viewpoints. 

While I initially approached this project with some trepidation and angst, I'm really glad that I took this step forward. None of this would have been possible without the support--both personal and technical--of my wife Denise--design wiz and fashion blogger extraordinaire at theswellelife-- who encouraged me to make the leap into the great unknown of the blogosphere.  

I'd also like to thank my colleagues who have provided support and encouragement, particularly David Campbell, Martin Coward, Matt Davies, and Simon Philpott.

Last but not least, I'd like to express my gratitude to everyone who has visited, commented, and/or linked to Chasing Dragons over the past year. It's been a lot of fun for me and I look forward to building upon recent momentum in the months to come.

And if you are at all interested in how this started, you can see my first post--on military recruitment and video games--here.

Photo credit: dawn m. armfield