Do NOT Give Up in Early Part–The Ending is Riveting, April 26, 2010
Do NOT give up on this movie in the first third. I stayed with it because a very experienced global law enforcement officer with anti-terrorism experience told me the movie was worth seeing through to the end, and he was absolutely right.
This is a fine depiction of how gangs and religious and political conflicts get started, it is a superb depiction of the “collateral damage” that affects “bystanders” to the end of their days, and it ends absolutely brilliantly with a typically strong but never-the-less very moving closure by BOTH of the main actors.
Highly recommended to those who wish to think about cause and effect and the psychological dimensions of intra-community violence.
I cannot improve on the lead review, this review is primarily for those who follow my reviews, and the sub-set within my reviews, DVDs for intelligent people.
This is certainly a top-notch film with great acting, what I liked about it was the depiction of one lone person's ability to get to the bottom of a government conspiracy against the public interest. While things happen that are arguably improbable for the average person, this film is both a revelation of just how much government can do that is NOT in the public interest (but assuredly at the public expense) and an inspiration on how possible it might be to stop such high crimes and misdemeanors by demanding integrity at all times.
Possibly a Seminal Work with Infinite Variations, April 26, 2010
Bertrand De Speville
This book was brought to my attention by a media article, “Tunku Abdul Aziz to give anti-corruption primer to PM, ministers,” in The Malaysian Insider of 26 April 2010 (today). I am in the process of getting a copy, and wish to note my high regard for the firm publishing the book in that they listed it on Amazon. If they were to offer it free online with no-cost translation Creative Commons license, this could help spread the work.
The book as distributed in Malaysia has a Foreword by Tunku Abdul Aziz, so I am inspired to imagine the translation of this book into multiple languages, each with a Foreword by an appropriate local leader–Spanish, Chinese, Russian, etcetera.
What sets this movie apart, in my view, are the nuanced facial expressions and the deep sincerity that the two main actors bring to the screen. I certainly regard the actor playing the hero of this film, the adopted son, to be in line for best supporting actor, or the other way around. Every time I watch this movie I find something I missed before, and I simply do not tire of that pleasure.
It troubles me that a movie as rich as this, telling a true story that is representative of what can be the best of America in a single individual doing the right thing for the right reasons, seems to bring little minds out of the crevices where they have been hiding. This is not a Christian movie, an anti-Christian movie, a bi-racial movie, or anything else. It is an American Story in the grandest possible manner. In no way does that excuse the continuing segregation and abuse of people of color, the really rotten education system for all, the two-party tyranny, the corruption of the US government at all levels–but in one small very real time and space, one family–one mother–got it right.
Outrageously Priced, Rotten Provision of Information, April 16, 2010
Luis de Sousa, Barry Hindess, Peter Larmour
This is probably a very important book, but it will never be bought by most because it is outrageously priced (272 pages, this should be selling for $27.20 at most), and the publisher has been grievously irresponsible in failing to use the free Amazon tools to provide a sufficiency of information. The authors and the content are without question superb. How this book has been offered is itself a study in corruption.
5.0 out of 5 stars Innovative and courageous social science
June 8, 2009
Eric Wilson and Tim Lindsey (eds)
In this recent volume by Pluto Press, Eric Wilson (Monash University) has assembled an all-stars team of politologists with the objective of changing the face of social analysis. This effort stems from the urgency to redefine the conceptual spaces within which we perforce corral our daily experience as citizens of what has become, in fact, an international polity of overwhelming, as well as highly disquieting, complexity. This is not at all to say, however, that the project limits itself to adding “epicycles,” as it were, to the Ptolemaic vulgate of British constitutionalism–i.e., the standard model of the “Liberal State”–which has imposed itself as the sole lens through which one is to contemplate the social dynamics for every single political reality of this world.
Government of the Shadows (GOS) represents in this regard an honest and brave swerve away from the mainstream in two fundamental respects.
First, it wishes to rethink political science entirely, by rejecting definitively the puritanical dichotomization of society into its predominant and “clean” edifice versus the latter's more or less corrupt “covert netherworld” (p. 228)–the prescriptive implication of conventional analysis being that delinquents need only be jailed, and their activities repressed, as the given regime is in the meantime steered (hopefully) toward the eventual and complete assimilation of Liberal institutions, which will naturally cure it of the criminal deviancy.
Second, and no less important, this project seeks to re-endow the movement for social justice of a unity of intent and of thought, which has lately been shattered by an excessive methodological preoccupation with multiplicity and diversity. By denouncing with reason and cogency the inequities suffered by a majority of innocents–throughout our recent history and all over the world–at the hands of identifiable, responsible parties within the power apparatuses in connivance with the world's mafias, and by ordering all such phenomenological mass into theory, this book, as a collective endeavor, acts as a vigorous reminder that realistic sociological analysis is also very much an instrument of pacific dissent. In this sense, GOS stands as a first and decisive installment of a modern anti-oligarchic theory.
To compass the reality of modern power games in its full spectrum, GOS innovates by proposing the new discipline of “parapolitics,” defined in Robert Cribb's introductory as “the study of criminal sovereignty, of criminals and sovereigns behaving as criminals in a systematic way” (p. 8).
Absolutely a Core Work for the Region and the UN Role in Enabling Peace–Future Oriented as Well
April 3, 2010
Susanne Jonas
I am stunned not to find numerous reviews of this excellent work, a fleshing out of the author's highly-regarded (within the United Nations and global peace-process circles) “The Mined Road to Peace in Guatemala,” (North-South Agenda Paper #38, September 1999. As of today, 3 April 2010, her paper and her book are still the core references for those who seek to extend the model elsewhere in Central and Latin America.
This author was at least a decade if not two decades ahead of her peers and the conventional idiocy in Washington, D.C.Ā Ā Everything she has ever thought, particularly with respect to migrating the process of peace toward a process of prosperity, is relevant right this minute.
The quality of this work overcomes what would normally be a one-star deduction for a lazy unprofessional publisher failing to list the table of contents and provide a sample chapter or even better, assuring Inside the Book information including the Index, one of Amazon's best offerings.
Do NOT Give Up in Early Part–The Ending is Riveting, April 26, 2010
Possibly a Seminal Work with Infinite Variations, April 26, 2010
Outrageously Priced, Rotten Provision of Information, April 16, 2010
