Background Resources for Véronique Pin-Fat's "How Do We Begin to Think About the World?"

Ethics and politics look at both how we should regard and accomodate each other and what kind of things make it possible to, for example, treat each other with respect and what kinds of things don't. That I might view you as "weird" or even "inhuman" (politics) may very much dictate how I then treat you (ethics). When we examine more closely how we think about the world, it turns out that ethics and politics are inseperable.

(Pin-Fat, 23)

Ethics and Politics

Joseph Rotblat: "Ethics and Politics"

Duncan Bell: "Ethics and World Politics"

Language is Public

Michael Benton: Notes on H.L. Goodall: Writing the New Ethnography; Allan Irving/Ken Moffatt: "Carnival Classrooms"; Gary Snyder: The Etiquette of Freedom

Martin Irvine: "Semiotics, Communication, and Cultural Theory: Basic Assumptions."

We formulate and communicate ideas and thoughts by means of language. Language is public. It consists of shared rules and vocabularies... .
The thoughts we have about the world reveal a number of things: the types of things that we believe are in the world, the kinds of people that we think we live amongst, what we think is important, what we think is possible, and even how we believe we should think about the world. These thoughts are all attempts to make sense of the world and our place in it. So, the questions that we are going to look at here are:

1 How do we begin to think about the world and make sense of it?
2 Does the world exist independently of any thoughts we might have about it?
3 Is the way we think about the world simply a representation of what is?

... what we are going to explore in this chapter is how what we think about the world actually impacts on the world: it changes the world. We also examine how, if we ignore the impact our ways of thinking have on the world, we can find ourselves complicit in what happens in ways we might not wish to be.

(Pin-Fat, 23-24)

Urszula Clark: War Words -- Language, History and the Disciplining of English

Chimamanda Adichie: "The Danger of a Single Story"

Mikhail Bakhtin: Speech Genres

Mikhail Bakhtin: "The Dialogic Nature of Consciousness"


Thinking About Torture

Michael Benton: Supplement for Studying Torture and Terror (Peace Studies)

Michael Benton: After Watching Taxi To the Dark Side and Thinking About the Bush Administration's Torture Policies

Taxi to the Dark Side (USA: Alex Gibney, 2007: 106 mins) [Available in BCTC Library]



Errol Morris: Synopsis of Standard Operating Procedure

David Andrews: "Reframing Standard Operating Procedure: Errol Morris and the creative treatment of Abu Ghraib"

Linda Williams: “'Cluster fuck': the forcible frame in Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure"

Standard Operating Procedure (USA: Errol Morris, 2008: 116 mins) [Available in BCTC Library]



Ghosts of Abu Ghraib [HBO Documentary: Rory Kennedy, 2007: 78 mins]



Chuck Kleinhans: "Imagining Torture"

Chuck Kleinhans, John Hess and Julia Lesage: "The Last Word -- Torture and the National Imagination."

Mark Danner and Amy Goodman: "Stripping Bare the Body -- Politics Violence War"

Glenn Greenwald: "Criminal convictions of 22 CIA agents in Italy"

Noam Chomsky: "The Torture Memos: Torture has been routine practice from the early days of the Republic."

Lisa Hajjar: "Omar Suleiman, the CIA’s Man in Cairo and Egypt’s Torturer-in-Chief."

Center on Law and Security: "24: Torture and Televised."

Gabrielle Murray: "Images of Torture, Images of Terror: Post 9/11 and the Escalation of Screen Violence"

Michael Benton: Researching Theories Regarding Military Camps/Prisons

Mark Benjamin: "Waterboarding for dummies: Internal CIA documents reveal a meticulous protocol that was far more brutal than Dick Cheney's "dunk in the water"

Amy Goodman: "Trial Begins for Ex-Chicago Police Lt. Accused of Torturing More than 100 African American Men"

Jameel Jaffer: "As Gibbs Attacks Progressive Critics, ACLU Says Obama White House Enshrining Bush-Era Policies"

Evangelos Tziallas: "Torture porn and surveillance culture"

Kristian Williams: "American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination."

Martin Robbins: Does Torture Work? Debates about the ethics of torture are all very well, but does it even work in the first place?"

John Conroy: A Torture Story Without End; Waterboarding and Torture; Neal Desai: Newspapers and "Waterboarding"

Maximilian Forte: "Torturing Democracy"

Michael Ratner: "Obama's National Security State"

Robert Parry: "Ronald Reagan, Enabler of Atrocities"

Bill Qiugley: "Bush’s Shrinking World -- George W. Bush Cancels Europe Trip as Human Rights Lawyers Threaten Legal Action over Torture"

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and Alfonso Cuaron


Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Videos of Naomi Klein discussing The Shock Doctrine



Z Magazine: "Alberto Gonzalez and the Third Reich"