News: Can Religious Groups Exclude Non-Believers?

News: Can Religious Groups Exclude Non-Believers?: "Yale Law School professor Robert Post said the cases will help describe the purpose of public education, such as whether schools should teach ecumenism. The cases could turn on whether teaching non-discrimination is a legitimate educational purpose for government, Post said.

Christian groups are relying on two Supreme Court decisions from 2000 to make their case. In one, the court held 5-4 that the Boy Scouts of America had a 1st Amendment right to exclude homosexuals. Whether that case applies to groups that accept public funds, as Christian groups are arguing, has not been resolved."
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.../... But Ruth Colker, an OSU law professor who circulated a petition against the school's ruling signed by a majority of law school faculty, said, "I don't see how we promote tolerance by a policy of exclusion."

Complete Story

#6 Syriana and propaganda [ & Interview @Cinematical ]

Alex Halavais ? Blog Archive ? Syriana and propaganda from below: "Lazarsfeld and Merton, among many others, worried about how the mass media could be used to guide through guile, to herd masses toward social action subtly. They worried because the mass media seemed largely and inevitably to be shaped by entrenched business and government interests. Here we have an example of the media industry creating strange new wealth that may be used to undo these entrenched powers. Even if the shift is subtle (perhaps especially) it is important."

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Interview: Stephen Gaghan, director and writer of Syriana

Posted Dec 2, 2005, 9:08 AM ET by James Rocchi
http://www.cinematical.com/2005/12/02/interview-stephen-gaghan-director-and-writer-of-syriana/

... and I’d noticed some times when you could be in somebody’s house, and it could be a totally genteel type of drug dealer, or it could be a more gangster-y drug dealer, but whatever – there was often something similar about them, which is they have children, and the children are staring at violent television, cartoons or some shit, and they’re eating sugar-coated breakfast cereal and they look malnourished, there’s a handgun on the table – there’s always a handgun on the table, like on a coffee table or a table, and it’s so unsettling, .../... "you could use some advice on parenting " But you don’t say that – because that would be breaking an unwritten code. And the unwritten code is the guy has something you need, and you really need it, and you’re not going to fscking bum him out.

In America, in the West, we have this producer-consumer nation paradigm, and it works like this: 50 years of sort of a bi-lateral, multi-lateral maintenance of the status quo in the Middle East, which involved turning a bad eye to some really bad parenting. Whether it was a repressive regime, extermination of the Kurds, Saudi Arabia with women shrouded, walking 10 feet behind the men, etcetera, etcetera. But we weren’t going to say anything. Why? Because the producer nation, the dealer, has... or true lifeblood>

...my access point was through a CIA officer (See No Evil author Robert Baer) who had been our Iraqi bureau chief early on in the mid-‘90s – speaks Arabic, speaks Farsi, speaks Russian, speaks French, 21 years in the Middle East...

… later, you’d meet somebody else and he would tell you how the world works, and they were so convincing, too. And the problem was that their worldviews were a hundred and eighty degrees from each other, and this is really unsettling. ... Could it be that all these people who have this fsking talk – this often ideological talk – are masking some self-interest? That all these people who are posturing like Talleyrand -- they don’t have the whole picture? The Talleyrands are rare; a Talleyrand comes along once in a hundred years, and we’re in a Talleyrand free-zone, with a bunch of discount Talleyrands that are truly just looking to feather their own nest, and they’re gonna put in their time riding the ideological gravy train for just the minimum amount of time necessary before they can jump out and really score big. And they tell themselves, when they are making these morally compromised decisions, that it’s really about their family, that they have a wife and kids to support. It’s not just them: ‘God, if it was just me, I could buck the system, I could do what feel right in my gut, but I havemy family to think about.'

I’ll give you an example: (G.H.W. Bush's National Security Advisor) Brent Scowcroft. His last point (in a recent New Yorker profile): '... If human beings can mess up something, they will. You can hope for the best, but you gotta expect the worst.' I find that quite compelling. (World Bank President and ex-Deputy Secretary of Defnese under Donald Rumsfeld) Paul Wolfowitz; ... anyway. Wolfowitz’s point – which they touch on in the New Yorker article, it’s the most cursory examination of what the Neo-Con philosophy was, but anyway – Wolfowitz’s point is: 'No, we’re in a civilizational conflict; America’s only as good as the ideas we’re exporting. What are we exporting? What do we stand for in the country? ... Do we believe in representational government, do we believe in women’s rights, do we believe in minority representation in government? If we do, then we can’t stay in business with these people; we can’t keep turning a blind eye to these repressive regimes, to people gassing their own citizens. We have to take a stand; we have to stand for something; otherwise, this other force that we’re up against is just going to swallow us whole while we’re sleeping.' That’s a compelling argument; they’re a hundred and eighty degrees apart from each other. And what’s interesting is that both of these men have had a really high hand in running the United States government in the last 15 years.

( “ at a certain point, the music’s going to stop, and everyone’s going to look around and say ‘Uhhhhh, where’s my chair?” ; if there’s a civilian authority on these matters, it’s you. So, how long is the music going to keep going for oil?")

... I think that what we were seeing, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it felt like the trailer of coming attractions, it felt like a preview. Like, holy cow – we are looking into Mad Max. Like, God, that is what it’s going to look like. It’s going to be racial; 'Us fat White people, we got all the sheet we need; fsck you, poor people who happen to be Black or Mexican'; it really felt like you were looking at this Hobbsean future; it was just like he laid out. ... predictions; oddly, everybody I talked to in 2001, 2002, would have said for sure that Saudi Arabia was going to topple by now, ... they’re like so loaded. Imagine if you could triple your Gross National Product overnight. They’re like ‘Go Bush! Go baby! Go Iraq, go Syria, go Iran! Keep it rollin! Let’s see if we can quintuple it, sextuple it!’

... our children are going to have very different lives. The carbon economy is going to shift; I don’t know if it’s a hydrogen economy, a sunlight economy; you’re not going to be flying around on jet planes the way you are now, probably; there are going to be changes. ... I don’t know; I’m not a futurist. But I did enough research into human nature, figuring out this one, that I’m absolutely certain that until it’s really dire, nothing’s going to change.

(The energy crisis of the '70s comes up; specifically, how we didn't seem to learn anything from that.)

It’s the same fsckers, man! It’s all the same Nixon guys; they got tossed out of office for a while with Carter. ... they hang upside down like vampire bats when they’re out of power and they wait around. It’s the same guys: ‘Hey, don’t conserve energy! There’s no problem! Party on!’

(Part Two of this interview include Gaghan's thoughts on if defending Syrania will be harder than making it, comedy as tragedy, and more.)

Syriana (2005) [esoteria / tuxedo ]

http://esoteria.typepad.com/tuxedo/2005/11/review_syriana.html

The storytelling is nearly impenetrable, fine. It's obviously made by people who know a great deal about their subject, and are uninterested in spoon-feeding us a "Politics of the Global Oil Business for Dummies." I don't have a problem with that. Syriana expects its viewers to keep up, and that's defensible. But it doesn't help that the film is littered with half-baked tangents and unpursued threads. In this case, it's not interestingly dense, just frustrating and possibly annoying.

But I'd even be able to forgive that, if only there were some emotional or visceral connection to be made. There is only the suggestion of such key cinematic elements, frustratingly. We don't really have enough time with any one character to make a deep connection, and the filmmaking style is decidedly cool to the touch. The subject matter demands some level of detachment, sure, but if only there were some flash of heat, some deeper and truer hook of the rampant and multiple tragedies splashed all over the screen. It is a movie, after all, and not an article in The Economist.

And I haven't even mentioned the underlying politics of the movie, which are something of a mess. The film is NOT, to be sure, a lefty diatribe. There is no mention of any character's party affiliation, and it's not even clear what kind of Presidential administration the story takes place under. There is no mention of any war or military action in the Middle East, and virtually everyone in the film is steeped in moral shades of gray, no matter their corporate, national, or political affiliations. The only real villains, in fact, are the men behind the curtain at the oil company. And, really, who feels much sympathy for oil companies these days?

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Syriana (2005): "21 out of 33 people found the following comment useful:-
Taut - but convoluted - political thriller,
17 November 2005 7/10 Author: Greg Eichelberger from San Diego

Here's a quick thumbnail sketch of the many plots of the new Focus Features release, 'Syriana,' starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Christopher Plumber and Chris Cooper:

Story 1) Bob Barnes (Clooney) is a CIA covert operative in the Middle East. An expert in this region, he speaks Farsi, is tight with Hezbollah and even infiltrated al-Qeada.

Story 2) Energy expert and financial consultant, Bryan Woodman (Damon) lives a great life in Geneva with his lovely wife, Julie (Amanda Peet, 'The Whole 10 Yards') and his two adorable little boys.

Story 3) Attorney Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright, 'Broken Flowers') is hired by a Connex Oil Co. bigwig (Christopher Plummer, 'The Insider') to find out any dirt on Connex's proposed merger with the small Kemmer Corporation before the Feds do. It seems that Kemmer has procured a deal with the vast oil fields of Kasakistan while Connex has just lost a big Saudi contract to the Chinese.

Story 4) A young Arab (Olivier Yglesias), despondent and unemployed because of the merger, is recruited into a radical Muslim terrorist organization.

And Story 5) A Saudi king passes up his oldest son, Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig) - a reformer and visionary who desires to bring progress and civil rights to his country - in favor of his less-qualified younger brother (Sam Georges said) who, conveniently, supports keeping US troops in his country.

That's basically the plot setup. Now the wheels begin to turn. Barnes is assigned by the CIA to arrange the assassination of Nasir; instead he is subjected to brutal torture by a rogue terrorists, led by Mussawi (Mark Strong, 'Oliver Twist'). Woodman becomes Nasir's chief financial adviser after his son's tragic death. Holiday, working with Kemmer honcho Jimmy Pope, finds a crooked connection in that company's big deal, and offers to cut a deal with the US Attorney's office. Later, after some bungling, the agency distances itself from Barnes, who heads to Saudi Arabi in an attempt to stop another plot against Nasir.

Competently written and directed by Stephan Gaghan (who won a screenplay Oscar in 2000 for 'Traffic,' another complex, multi-layered film, this time about the drug trade), 'Syriana' can be seen as either a cerebral, thoughtful, intelligent, complex motion picture, or a convoluted, confusing mishmash of a movie.

To me, it's a little bit of both, with the overriding message that oil ruins everything it touches and the United States, with its secret dealings, underhanded alliances and shady involvement in other governments, is pretty much evil. Many people, however, may run out of patience before the movie ends (which seems to be almost glacial at times).

Evidently, Gaghan did a lot of research here, especially with Saudi royalty, and the intricate plots show this; likewise, the many location shots give a true, gritty feel to the picture. Use of Arabic and Farsi (along with English subtitles) also gives the movie a realistic look.

The acting, on the other hand, leaves something to be desired. Damon is his usual cute boy self; Peet is non-descript; Plummer is menacingly devious; and Clooney (bloated and bearded for the role) seems to sleepwalk through the role. It is a huge contrast to his dynamic work in the terrific 'Good Night And Good Luck.'

I cannot say I enjoyed the film; but it was a decent effort which deserves a look. Whether that mild recommendation means anything, I can't say. I have a feeling, though, that it will not translate into very big box office."

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