Here is the latest webcomic from our friend Jason Laning, who wrote the post on anarchism earlier this week. As always, visit his site to see it in its original size or check out his other work.

• British graffiti artist Banksy popped up with 4 new murals on the Regent’s Canal in London last week, one of which was this protest of global warming denialism.

• More than 1,000 people marched in Islamabad on Friday as part of a nationwide campaign that took place in 53 other Pakistani cities and towns to protest both Taliban bombings and the American drone strikes.

• Hundreds of demonstrators rallied on opposite sides of an Israeli-Gaza border crossing on Thursday to protest at the blockade of the strip imposed by Egypt and Israel. In Gaza, about 100 international activists staged a rally with some 500 Gazans, chanting and carrying signs denouncing the blockade. A small number of anti-Zionist, Orthodox Jews were among them.

• Hundreds of relatives of prisoners in a Mexican jail protested the expected transfer of inmates to make way for a film shoot with director Mel Gibson next year.

• Internally displaced people at a campsite in Nakuru, Kenya demonstrated along a highway to protest their poor living conditions following the onset of rains and demanded building materials.

• Dozens of Jordanians held a sit-in near the Egyptian embassy in the Jordanian capital on Sunday to protest Egypt’s plan to construct a steel wall along its borders with the besieged Gaza Strip.

• Thousands of people in Hong Kong took to the streets on New Year’s Day to demand full democracy in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory. The Chinese government ruled in 2007 that the territory cannot directly elect its leader until 2017 and its legislature until 2020.

• Police detained dozens of people at an anti-Kremlin protest on Thursday, including 82-year-old Lyudmila Alexeyeva, one of Russia’s most respected rights activists.

Here is the latest biting comic from our good friend Jason Laning. For those that can’t read it, Bush is saying to Obama: “You know, you almost had us worried, for a minute there.” Again to get the full experience, check out the original on his site. There will be more on the escalation of the war in Afghanistan and resistance to it here soon.

The International Day of Climate Action on October 24th was so eventful that new and interesting photos from the more than 5,200 actions that took place around the world keep popping up. This one is from the flood-plagued shores of Borth, Mid Wales. According to Britain’s conservative tabloid The Daily Express, activists staged a photo of “domestic bliss” that gets “shattered by an uninvited guest – the Irish Sea.”

Hundreds of locals – who claim half their village could vanish by the end of this century – helped stage the event in which a living room, complete with walls and furniture, slowly disappeared as the tide came in.

Event organiser John Howarth said: “Much of Borth is very close to sea level and already suffers flood damage in high tides and stormy conditions.

“Unchecked climate change could be disastrous in our lifetimes.”

There are a lot of debates about whether violent video games contribute to causing violence in the world. They do. To remedy that, some have tried to develop nonviolent video games, notably A Force More Powerful, which we have but have yet to try out fully because Jasmine’s PC is so phenomenally slow. Violence in video games is so dangerous, in part, because it misrepresents violence in reality; there is no cost and no real effect.

Now, artist Zach Gage has created Lose/Lose, a simple arcade game that takes a small step toward changing that. When an object in the game gets destroyed, so does an actual file on your computer. Here’s his statement:

Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted.

Although touching aliens will cause the player to lose the game, and killing aliens awards points, the aliens will never actually fire at the player. This calls into question the player’s mission, which is never explicitly stated, only hinted at through classic game mechanics. Is the player supposed to be an aggressor? Or merely an observer, traversing through a dangerous land?

Why do we assume that because we are given a weapon an awarded for using it, that doing so is right?

By way of exploring what it means to kill in a video-game, Lose/Lose broaches bigger questions. As technology grows, our understanding of it diminishes, yet, at the same time, it becomes increasingly important in our lives. At what point does our virtual data become as important to us as physical possessions? If we have reached that point already, what real objects do we value less than our data? What implications does trusting something so important to something we understand so poorly have?

Following Lose/Lose, maybe it’s time for a new rule: violent video games must have violent consequences. I cringe, though, at the thought that people would probably play them anyway, just as they continue to get into real fights.

At the very least, it is time for a real warning on video game packages. Not just the current system of labels which even seem to make a violent game look more enticing, but truly substantive warnings, as on cigarettes. The research exists to support it. Still, that’s pretty pedantic. Do grown-ups really need to be told that they shouldn’t fantasize for hours about going on killing sprees? We should know better.

(h/t Joel Dietz)

Correction: A previous version of this post stated that the game only deletes files internal to itself. Zach Gage wrote in to clarify that, indeed, the game can delete any file on a user’s computer.

Click image for full size version

click image for full size version

A thousand human-shaped ice sculptures melted away in a Berlin square yesterday, as part of an effort by the World Wildlife Fund to draw attention to melting ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica.

• Twenty activists wearing flippers and goggles sat in kayaks outside the Department of Energy and Climate Change in London to mark the end of the Climate Camp protest “false solutions” to climate change.

• Six climate change activists entered the headquarters of a construction contractor in Britain that is bidding to build a coal-fired power station. They spoke to staff and handed out leaflets, while another group scaled the building and hung a banner reading Don’t Build Kingsnorth.

• Groups of Climate Campers in London marched towards the head offices of BP and Shell on Tuesday to protest the mining of tar sands in Canada. They were led by indigenous Canadian activists chanting: “When I say BP, you say criminal”. See a photo-set from the various actions.

• Teachers have shut down schools in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca this week, seizing government offices and blocking roads to protest the shooting death of a colleague.

• Hundreds of Asian laborers in Dubai have ended their two-day strike and returned to work after the company’s management promised to address their complaints and include overtime pay in their next salary.

• Residents of Denton, Texas demonstrated in front of City Hall on Tuesday to protest nearby natural gas drilling, which they say is endangering the environment and their health.
  

That was the question posed last week to Howard Zinn, Bernardine Dohrn and several others by Stephen Dubner on the New York Times’ Freakonomics blog. Their responses were affirmative and generally quite good, especially for those who are not already very knowledgeable on the subject.

Before giving a useful, but very brief recap of some of the different nonviolent social movements in our history that have concretely affected the direction of this country for the better, Howard Zinn makes an important point, especially for activists currently struggling to make our systems a little more humane:

Do protests work? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Sometimes very soon, sometimes there is a long-term effect. Sometimes you can see a direct connection between the protest and the result, and sometimes it’s difficult to trace.

What this means is that you must not desist from protesting because you don’t see an immediate result. What immediately looks like a failure may turn out to be a success.

Bernardine Dohrn, a leader of the Weather Underground during the Vietnam War, who is now a clinical associate professor of law and director of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern Law, makes a similar observation:

Looking backward, it seems obvious that sitting down to strike at Flint, and sitting in at Greensboro lunch counters, and standing up to enter school in Little Rock were obvious sparks to larger social movements. At the time, no one could know.

Read the rest of this article »

A couple of interesting political graphic novels drew attention in the New York Times this week. One is a reworked online version of the 2003 award-winning graphic novel Persepolis, while the other is an updated reincarnation of the old DC Comics superhero Unknown Soldier. Both raise some serious questions in regards to nonviolence.

Persepolis 2.0, as it’s called, reshuffles the black and white drawings of the original book (which is about the 1979 Iranian Revolution) to tell the story of the mass protests that took place in Iran this year, following the disputed presidential elections. It’s an interesting concept given that the new authors (who have taken on pseudonyms) were able take images meant to depict events from 30 years ago and apply them to current events.

While it seems that much of the storyline focuses on the very legitimate protests against the repressive Ahmadinejad regime, there is also a major focus on the elections being rigged, despite there being no concrete evidence of this. Futhermore, Persepolis 2.0, does a good deal of propagandizing to make Moussavi out as the hero, when, as discussed on this blog, his corporate/upper class interests need to be challenged as well. Finally, Twitter and Facebook are referred to as providers of the “real info,” when in fact, though undeniably valuable, they have led to a great deal of misreporting and confusion.

All of this is not surprising, considering the authors, like most of us, “experienced the election and its aftermath from afar.” Much like Western media coverage of these events, which lacked on the ground reporting, their authority is rather suspect. While we all sympathize with and commend the bravery of the protesters fighting repression, there are still many questions about this so-called “Green Revolution” that need to be answered. Read the rest of this article »

Residents of New Zealand’s capital city were caught off-guard earlier this week when an iceberg was spotted floating in Wellington Harbour. As speculation began to mount regarding its authenticity, a group of anonymous artists claimed responsibility via email, saying:

We are not affiliated with any formal group. We’re just people who care, people who have children. This is an appeal to every New Zealander who sees this artwork to stand up and take action. It’s time to really do something about climate change, before it’s too late. We didn’t just talk, we did something. What are you going to do?

It seems as though the stunt has been met with favorable reaction from the city, which plans to let the iceberg remain until the end of the week. The public reaction, however, is somewhat inconclusive. The only published opinion I’ve seen is by a blogger for New Zealand’s Dominion Post, who—despite claiming to be a fan of public art (a la Banksy) and a supporter of climate science—said he liked the stunt, but was a bit turned off by the artists’ email:

It was all so holier-than-thou… There was no concept of nuance, no sense that some people might be more worried about paying the rent right now than keeping the Arctic shelf together. There was no feeling that the best solutions for this complicated problem were probably larger, more structural, than an individual light switch. And there was definitely no thought that the message might be undermining the artwork, which was message enough on its own.

Perhaps he has a point. Most public art is so direct as to not require an explanation. If it’s done right, the work should inspire or elicit the desired reaction. There’s a reason these artists chose a visual form. They clearly believed it to be the most powerful medium for their message. It probably would have been best to stick with it. Nevertheless, they deserve points for style.

Three-quarters of the way through his masterpiece Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee takes a pause in his account of a summer spent living among Depression-era, cotton-picking tenant farmers for an “Intermission,” subtitled “Conversation in the Lobby.” The overall thrust of this portion, phrased as a furious response to questions posed to writers by the Partisan Review in May, 1939, is to defend the radicalism of the artist’s vocation.

A good artist is a deadly enemy of society; and the most dangerous thing that can happen to an enemy, no matter how cynical, is to become a beneficiary. No society, no matter how good, could be mature enough to support a real artist without mortal danger to that artist.

The Partisan Review’s final question concerned the “the next world war.” It asked, “What do you think the responsibilities of writers in general are when and if war comes?” Of all his answers, here Agee replies the most directly, the most earnestly, and the least aggressively toward the askers. He says he has thought much about the matter—“first glibly … later with more and more perplexity, distress, and immediate interest, fascination, and fear”—and several possibilities have come to him.

1. Enlist in that part of the war which seemed most dangerous, least glamorous, least relevant to any choice I might have through “education,” “class,” “connections,” or personal craftiness. This either for personal-“religious” reasons or out of an “artist’s” curiosity, or more likely both.
2. Join the stalinist party and do as I was told or Bore from Within it. [A page earlier he writes, “‘I find, in retrospect,’ that I have felt forms of allegiance or part-allegiance to catholicism and to the communist party. I felt less and less at ease with them and am done with them.”]
3. Stay wherever I happened to be, mind my own business, refuse every order, and take the consequences.
4. Stay wherever I happened to be, and write what I thought of the War, the Pacifists, etc., wherever I could get it printed.
5. Escape from it by whatever means possible and by the same means continue to do my own work.

For those of us hoping to plant Agee in a particular position or camp, either for or against this war or war in the abstract, he is evasive. Even the pacifist crowd, so radical in its way, he considers also a “society” into which an artist cannot afford to blend. Answer 1 offers a very Christ-like self-sacrifice, venturing among the least to reveal the truth for all. But, unlike number 3, and possibly numbers 2 and 4, it seems a perfectly anti-political position to take. So also is number 5. Taken together, though, the options offer little assurance to the partisan.

A footnote appended later seems to be some encouragement for radical nonviolence:

I would now (fall of 1940) have to add to this belief in non-resistence to evil as the only possible means of conquering evil.

Only to equivocate in the very next sentence:

I am in serious uncertainty about this belief; still more so, of my ability to stand by it.

If you’re tempted to dismiss Agee as simply a political weakling, a dilettante making games out of serious business, the last sentences of this section are worth hearing out. They spell out a cosmic reversal, an insistence that The War everyone talks about is in fact a game, an absurdity when viewed from the truly serious business of making art and meaning for the human race.

Or, in other words, I consider myself to have been continuously at war for some years, and can imagine no form of armistice. In that war I feel “responsible.” I doubt any other form of war could make me more so.

This artist, he insists, cannot be the partisan that the Review wants to drum out concerning the coming war. He refuses to accept the war being declared by politicians and generals—and all manner of those who consider themselves informed—as the real war most worthy of his attention. Especially when no one else does, the artist can look past her or his society’s present means of mass suicide and murder, into the deathless questions that, by being ignored, so provoke the rest of us.

During World War II, Agee devoted himself to reviewing films for Time and The Nation. The draft board passed him over. He had a son who died soon after being born, and he married his third wife.

Here is the latest from our good friend Jason Laning. While it is definitely rough, I think he makes a good point. Any thoughts?

To see this webcomic in its original size or check out more of his work, stop by his new site. It’s one to keep an eye on.