Not just coincidence: As ISIS flourished on Obama’s watch so will the Taliban on Biden’s

August 14, 2021

Correlation is not necessarily causation — but is a very strong indicator of a causal connection. What is not in doubt is that the obsession with trying to depose Assad in Syria led to some very strange terrorist bedfellows for the US, France, the UK and Turkey. Of course, the Russian insight that Assad was the least of many evils led to their support of equally vicious groups opposed to the barbarian allies that the West supported.

Barack Obama was President from 2009 till 2017. The timeline of the ISIS virulence is entirely contemporary. Allowing ISIS to grow was certainly not intentional but it was a foreseeable consequence which unfolded due to indecision and default. The ISIS threat was not recognised very well during Obama’s first term. Since they were opposed to Assad, they were considered good guys. Their growth was encouraged and fuelled by the funnelling of funds and weapons, not only from the the US and the West but also from fundamentalist sources in Saudi Arabia. The tacit Russian support for Assad developed into major air strikes against ISIS in Syria in late 2015.  That crucially turned the tide, both for Assad and against ISIS. Now the US followed the Russian lead. By the end of 2019, ISIS no longer controlled any geographical territory and was no longer a significant threat as a geopolitical force. Of course, it still remains, even today, as a fundamentalist group capable of sporadic terrorist actions.

Wilson Center: ISIS Timeline

The Islamic State – also known as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh – emerged from the remnants of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), a local offshoot of al Qaeda founded by Abu Musab al Zarqawi in 2004. It faded into obscurity for several years after the surge of U.S. troops to Iraq in 2007. But it began to reemerge in 2011. Over the next few years, it took advantage of growing instability in Iraq and Syria to carry out attacks and bolster its ranks.

The group changed its name to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2013. ISIS launched an offensive on Mosul and Tikrit in June 2014. On June 29, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi announced the formation of a caliphate stretching from Aleppo in Syria to Diyala in Iraq, and renamed the group the Islamic State. ….. The Baghdadi era of ISIS ended on October 26, 2019, when the leader was killed in a U.S. raid in northern Syria. 

The rise and spread of ISIS was to a large extent due to the West’s obsession with effecting regime change in Syria by any means and whatever cost. Even when the time came to deal with the ISIS monster that had been allowed to grow (around 2015-16), the Obama risk-aversion and indecisiveness continued until the US began to follow the lead of the Russian intervention.

Not just coincidence I think.

And now Biden, it would seem, is by cowardice and by default, allowing the space for a new monster Taliban to take over Afghanistan and then spread its tentacles. Kabul is surrounded. The evacuations from Kabul bring images of the evacuation of Saigon to mind. And Biden is washing his hands off the whole thing. “They’ve got to fight for themselves, fight for their nation”. And a new debacle beckons.

Not just coincidence. 

It is not a coincidence either that the Taliban, like ISIS, are based on a hard-line, Sunni, ideological strain of virulence emanating from Saudi Arabia.

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Selective memories: Both Carl Lewis and Ben Johnson were doped to their eyeballs but only Johnson is demonised

August 9, 2021

So another Olympic Games is over. A year late and with no spectators but pretty well organised (with a few minor hiccups). It confirmed my experience of superb Japanese planning and meticulous implementation as long as the plan is in force. It is when circumstances (accidents, weather) disturb the plan that the Japanese are not at their best. But the disturbances were relatively minor.

I suppose I am getting blase and cynical. The opening and closing ceremonies did not move me as they used to do in my youth. In fact I fell asleep watching the closing ceremony. (In my defense, it was after Sunday lunch).

Most of what I watched had Swedish commentary on the Swedish TV channels or English commentary on a well-known sports channel. The commentators did not distinguish themselves. The proportion of inane comments was very high and the proportion of ignorant comments was unfortunately even higher. Clearly they were sticking to their pre-prepared notes and had not the wherewithal to think on the fly and describe real events which deviated from their scripts.

The sight of men pretending to be women and competing against women in a few instances was not pretty.

I was particularly irritated by some of the hushed and reverent comments about Carl Lewis. Maybe they should have done their homework a little better. Like all history, Olympic history is just a story. What is generally forgotten by the predominant narrative today is that during the 1970s and 1980s the US cheated just as much as the Russians or East Germans did. Or as the Chinese did in the 1990s and later.

Carl Lewis was not quite the hero he was, and still is, made out to be. He was just as much a cheater as Ben Johnson ever was. 

Whether then, or even now where healthy athletes are provided exemptions from their home sports bodies and are allowed to take asthma medicines, cheating is always acceptable as long as it is not discovered.

This is an article from 2003.

 

Lewis joins Hall of Shame

ATHLETICS/US drugs scandal: The shocking revelation that Carl Lewis won two Olympic gold medals in 1988 when he should have been serving a drugs ban means the first three men who crossed the line in that 100 metres race in Seoul have now been implicated in major doping scandals.

The world knows Canada’s Ben Johnson, the first to break the tape, failed a drugs test. What has only now emerged is that, when the gold medal went to the second-place finisher Lewis, the American should not have been there because he had tested positive for banned stimulants at the US Olympic trials two months earlier. It means that the rightful winner should have been Britain’s Linford Christie, a man who himself had a narrow escape in Seoul and has a colourful doping history.

They were not the only runners in that race with drug-tainted histories. Dennis Mitchell, who would also have benefited if Lewis had not been there, by finishing third instead of fourth, had problems with the dope-busters.

But I like sports and watching sports. And I remain in my delusional narrative that Olympic victors are largely clean.

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Trivia I cannot forget

July 31, 2021

I was going through my hard disk and deleting a mass of useless and temporary files which were cluttering up my computer and slowing it down. Of particular concern was the accumulated rubbish. I was quite ashamed of the atrocious quality of many of the video and image files that were stored for no good reason.

If only, I thought, I could clean out my mind and delete all the rubbish stored there for no good reason. It always amazes me that stuff I have no use for, and which has no redeeming features, is stored permanently in my memory whereas important and useful stuff I would like to remember is stored nowhere. 

Just during the time it has taken to write this, the following indelible trivia rises, unbidden, unforgettable, into the forefront of my memory:

  1. A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
  2. If a woodchuck could chuck wood, how much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could, and would, chuck wood.
  3. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble. Fillet of a fenny snake, In the caldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
  4. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep,
  5. Double double toil and trouble but which witch is which?
  6. 1729 is the smallest number which can be the sum of two different cubes in two different ways – 10 and 9 and 12 and 1.
  7. To be, or not to be not, are pretty much the same.
  8. The boy stood on the burning deck, and perished like an idiot.

The longer I sit here, the more trivia bubbles up. But I cannot recall my children’s telephone numbers. Of course I don’t need to – but I cannot if I try. 

When it comes to deleting memories I certainly have no free will.

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Wimp-worship (a la Biles and Osaka) is sick

July 29, 2021

A wimp is a weak and cowardly or unadventurous person and the etymology of the word probably derives from one who whines and whinges and whimpers. 

A wimp may sometimes be an object of sympathy but wimpy behaviour is a clear indication of a deficiency and is something to be avoided.

The decadence of snowflake culture becomes apparent when wimpy behaviour and wimps are idolised at the French Open and the Olympics. Instead of admiring all those who struggle and do not give up, those who break under pressure and give up are idolised. Giving up has become something to be more admired than struggling on. A gross disservice to the the majority who – in all walks of life –  do not give up in spite of everything.

That wimp-worship which glorifies giving up is contemptible.

 

Twitter

“So, to sum up today’s big Simone Biles debate, snowflake Twitter is 100% adamant that walking out on teammates at work is brave, strong, inspiring and iconic – and anyone who does it should be celebrated as one of the world’s great heroes…. Good to know”. 

It is not the fault of the wimps. But the snowflake media who worship wimpy behaviour are contemptible.

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Always mish before the mash and never the tock before the tick

July 18, 2021

Mish-mash, tick tock, ping pong, King Kong, chit-chat and clip-clop trip off the tongue. But reverse the order and the tongue protests. Bing bong is fine but bong bing just does not work. English is replete with examples. Tip top, flip flop, shilly shally, hip hop, pitter patter, sing song and flim flam among many others. It is even acceptable to create such duplications for rhetorical effect even if the meanings are not defined as long as the unwritten rule is followed. You could write kling klang but not klang kling. Frippery-frappery, hee haw, pish posh, tip tap, Kit Kat, or flik flak would all be okay but none of the reverse. Invent new and unusual combinations and the unwritten rule still applies. Mish-mosh not mosh mish. Clip clap but not clap clip.

Reduplication is the label for creating new words by the repeating of some or all of a word for rhetorical effect. Almost all languages use reduplication. The simplest form of reduplication is with just an exact repetition of a sound which has its origins, I would guess, in the babble of infants. It creates rhythm. The rhythm of language would seem to be a cognitive trait. Mama, papa, dada, tata, and nana all originate in infancy and have all become words with specific meanings. There are three kinds of reduplication:

  1. Exact reduplication, (ma ma, pa pa, bang bang, …)
  2. Rhyming reduplication (super-duper, hoity-toity, hanky-panky, ….), and
  3. Ablaut reduplication

The pattern by which vowels change in reduplication to form a new word or phrase with a specific meaning is called ablaut reduplication. In English the discovered rule is i before a or o. It is not a a rule which has been imposed but is one created by usage and discovered to hold. There are almost no examples in English of ablaut reduplication where the first vowel is not an i. The second word is nearly always with a or o. There are a very few examples of usage with three words in sequence, but where they do occur the i before a before o still applies (bing bang bong, sing sang sung). 

It is not just a simple matter of following vowel classification. Vowels are usually classified according to the position of the tongue in the mouth from high to low and from front to back. High to low gives (i, u, e, o and a) while front to back gives us (a, e, i, o and u). 

Brittanica:

Vowel, in human speech, sound in which the flow of air from the lungs passes through the mouth, which functions as a resonance chamber, with minimal obstruction and without audible friction; e.g., the i in “fit,” and the a in “pack.” Although usually produced with vibrating vocal cords, vowels may be pronounced without such vibration, resulting in a voiceless, or whispered, sound. From the viewpoint of articulatory phonetics, vowels are classified according to the position of the tongue and lips and, sometimes, according to whether or not the air is released through the nose.

A high vowel (such as i in “machine” and u in “rule”) is pronounced with the tongue arched toward the roof of the mouth. A low vowel (such as a in “father” or “had”) is produced with the tongue relatively flat and low in the mouth and with the mouth open a little wider than for high vowels. Midvowels (such as e in “bed” and o in “pole”) have a tongue position between the extremes of high and low.

High, middle, and low vowels are also classified according to a front-to-back dimension. A front vowel is pronounced with the highest part of the tongue pushed forward in the mouth and somewhat arched. The a in “had,” the e in “bed,” and the i in “fit” are front vowels. A back vowel—e.g., the u in “rule” and the o in “pole”—is produced with the back part of the tongue raised toward the soft palate (velum).

Ablaut theory has an explanation (sort of) for why the i, a, o rule applies.

How does Ablaut reduplication work?

In Indo-European languages, the primary, inherent vowel of most syllables is a short e. Ablaut is the name of the process whereby the core vowel, which is almost always an e as mentioned above, would either be lengthened, altered to an o, altered and lengthened, or completely removed, known as the zero grade (an example of a zero grade: does not – doesn’t). These alterations on the way e sounds are what is known as Ablaut grades. This results in five ablaut grades overall: full grade (e), altered grade (o), lengthened grade (ee), altered length grade (oo), and zero grade (nothing). The first vowel is almost always a high vowel. This is then followed by the repetition of a lower vowel in relation to the first vowel. This is why the order is I, A, O.

Ultimately it is human physiology, ease of production and our sense of rhythm (cognition) which creates the sequences our tongues follow. It is physiology first and then cognition which determine the sequences of sounds we produce. The (i, a, o) rule is a discovered rule and only describes what comes naturally. It is not a rule that is invented and imposed.

And Spike Milligan’s Ning Nang Nong (in the style of Edward Lear) complies with the rule – how not?
 
On the Ning Nang Nong
 
On the Ning Nang Nong
Where the Cows go Bong!
and the monkeys all say BOO!
There’s a Nong Nang Ning
Where the trees go Ping!
And the tea pots jibber jabber joo.
On the Nong Ning Nang
All the mice go Clang
And you just can’t catch ’em when they do!
So its Ning Nang Nong

Cows go Bong!
Nong Nang Ning
Trees go ping
Nong Ning Nang
The mice go Clang
What a noisy place to belong
is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!!
 
Spike Milligan (1959)
 
 

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“Most beautiful words in English”

July 6, 2021

The beauty of a word lies both in the meaning and in the sound, the rhythm and the music of the word itself.

Re-blogged from Atkins Bookshelf

The Top Ten Most Beautiful Words in the English Language

The English language is vast, containing more than a million words and growing at a rate of several thousand words each year. However, most English speakers have a vocabulary that is substantially smaller: generally between 20,000 to 35,000. Every once in a while, through reading or conversation, you come across a word that stands out; you think to yourself “that is such a beautiful word.” Many logophiles keep lists of what they consider to be beautiful words. For example, in 1932, to publicize the publication of one of Funk & Wagnalls new dictionaries, founder Wilfred Funk published a list of what he considered, after a “thorough sifting of thousands of words” the ten most beautiful words (in his words, “beautiful in meaning and in the musical arrangement of their letter”) in the English language. (Incidentally, there is a word for that: euphonious — a euphonious word is a beautifully-sounding word; interestingly, euphonious is itself… euphonious.) Here is Funk’s list of the top ten most beautiful words in the English language:

chimes
dawn
golden
hush
lullaby
luminous
melody
mist
murmuring
tranquil

More recently, the editors of BuzzFeed cast their net into the vast ocean of the Twitterverse to find out what people considered the most beautiful words in the English words. They came up with a great list of “32 of the most beautiful words in the English language.” The list should be published with some caveats. One of the words, hiraeth, is actually Welsh. A few are actually neologisms (relatively new words that are in the process of entering common use) and will not be found in traditional dictionaries. Here are the top ten most beautiful English words from that list:

aquiver
mellifluous
ineffable
hiraeth
nefarious
somnambulist
epoch
sonorous
serendipity
limerence

To celebrate United Nations English Language Day (April 23), the editors of KBLOG, the blog of Kaplan International Languages, published their own  list of the top 10 most beautiful English words:

sequoia
euphoria
pluviophile
clinomania
idyllic
aurora
solitude
supine
petrichor
serendipity

Any list would be entirely subjective and arguing against a list makes no sense. All one can do is suggest alternatives. I have chosen a list where I like the word but where the meaning is not necessarily beautiful. They all have at least 3 syllables and I suspect that at least 3 is needed for the word itself to have an inherent rhythm.

surreptitious

sublime

liberation

salamander 

mysterious

mellifluous

palpitation

calamitous

infinity, and, of course,

forty-two.

 

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Why don’t dogs do philosophy?

June 30, 2021

Philosophy is a product of idle minds.

First and foremost, minds are concerned with survival and the basic necessities of staying alive. Breathing, escaping predators, food and shelter – in that order. Having experienced severe asthma attacks many years ago, I put breathing unequivocally first. When struggling for breath there is no other thing, no pain, no emotion, no other higher-order need which can, or does, occupy the mind. The entire focus of the brain and the body is solely on getting the next gulp of air. It is only after the basic physiological need are satisfactorily met that the mind has the time over to be idle. It is only then, and providing that the body is not so exhausted or under physical stress such that the mind does not embrace sleep, that the mind feels free to wander down non-essential – but interesting – paths. And that leads to philosophy.

The word philosophy originates from the Greek meaning for love of wisdom. In practice, it is the formulation of fundamental, unnecessary, unanswerable questions about life, existence, reality and everything. Having formulated the unanswerable question, philosophy then spends hours of thought, circular arguments, a mountain of verbiage, a flood of circumlocution and reams of paper in proposing unsatisfactory answers. The greater the number of paradoxes that can be introduced into an argument, the deeper and more profound is the philosophy. (Metaphysics is merely a particularly obscure – but not necessarily more obtuse – part of philosophy). There is no philosophical question which can not be put off till another time; which cannot be interrupted for more important survival tasks; which cannot be abandoned for a glass of wine. However, a glass or two can aid the production of even deeper, more incomprehensible answers to the unanswerable questions. There is no answer which needs an action to be taken. There is no philosophy which cannot be replaced by another. Philosophical questions may be about the fundamental nature of life but they are not questions which need answers for day-to-day living. There is no urgency or deadline for finding answers. A professional philosopher has no deliverables – or at least none which need to make sense. Philosophy is an occupation for minds which are free from the burden of resolving the basic physiological needs of the bodies they inhabit. Philosophy is an occupation for idle minds.

But this raises another philosophical question. (Unanswerable of course).

Domesticated dogs have found a sustainable solution for their basic physiological needs. They are protected from predatory threats, have food provided at regular intervals and are well sheltered from the elements. They are not used by their human master-slaves as food (except in Korea). They are generally well respected by their master-slaves in sickeness and in health. The solution does not come free. They have to accept the curtailment of many freedoms. Their human master-slaves control their movement, their diet, their friends and their breeding partners. Nevertheless, their minds are entirely and wonderfully free from the burdens of meeting their fundamental physiological needs. Their idle minds have all the time they could possibly need for unnecessary, unanswerable questions.

So why don’t dogs do philosophy?

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How do I know I know what I know?

June 28, 2021

Most of what I say I know is actually what I only believe I know. It is only what I know by my own experience or reasoning or argument or calculation that has a higher status  – in my mind – than a belief. When I say I know the Earth is an oblate spheroid, it is not from my own experience but from that of others who I believe. In reality I believe I know that the Earth is an oblate spheroid. All that I know that is within my own experience is – at least in my own mind – a higher level of knowing than all that I believe I know from the experience of others.

It has always been a little, irritating niggle at the back of my brain that I can never know that what I interpret and experience as red in my mind may be what somebody else experiences in the same way as I experience brown. What I can communicate with another person are the labels red or brown. My brain has no other means of communicating what I experience as red except by the labels that language allows. What exactly does knowing mean? 

When a tree falls in a forest and there is nobody to hear, there is no sound.

A sound is an interpretation by a brain of electrical signals generated by an organ for the detection of pressure fluctuations (vibrations) in air. When the tree falls it generates air pressure fluctuations. If there is no ear to detect the signals, there is no sound. If a deaf person is in the forest there are vibrations but there is no sound. If the vibrations are detected, but there is no brain to interpret the signals, there is no sound. A recording device detects air vibrations and converts them into something else which can be stored. The stored signals can later be used to reproduce those air vibrations through another device, which can then be interpreted as sound by a brain which has an ear to hear. But the recording device does not detect or record sound. A tape recording replayed on the moon’s surface has no atmosphere to vibrate and would create no sound, even if an intrepid astronaut with both an ear and a brain was standing next to it. Sound is in the brain and is both enabled and constrained by the physical capabilities of the hearing organ connected to that brain. The same pressure fluctuations may generate different interpretations of sound in different human brains. Cacophony to me is what is called modern music by others. The connection between the human ear and the human brain are similar to, but not the same as, the connection between a canine ear and a canine brain. My inability to fully appreciate a wolf’s howl is the same type of inability as of a wolf listening to Beethoven. Who knows what the other hears?

Sound is a cognitive thing. It is of the brain and necessarily subjective. 

And so it is with knowing. To know is a cognitive thing. It is of the brain and necessarily subjective.

My best, considered definition of knowledge goes like this: Knowledge is anything and everything, but only those things, that a brain can comprehend to be knowledge. 

This is a somewhat circular definition and is a little unsatisfactory because it does not say very much more than that knowledge is what knowledge is. But it is still the best that all our 10,000 years of philosophy and metaphysics has been able to come up with. Knowledge and knowing are not quite the same thing. As a noun knowledge is difficult enough but as a verb, to know is even more elusive. Knowing in philosophy is generally classified into three kinds of knowing:

  1. Knowing that – some proposition is true,
  2. Knowing how – to do something, and
  3. Knowing by acquaintance – by personal experience

I note that I cannot share my knowing. I can share a piece of knowledge (and that encompasses whatever my brain tells me I know) but another brain has to judge for itself whether it knows that piece of knowledge. How does my brain know that it knows? How do I know if what I know is true? Ultimately it seems to come down to what my brain believes that it knows and what it believes to be true.

The whole branch of epistemology is concerned mainly with the first kind of knowing where a brain knows that some proposition is true.  Knowing cannot, in itself, be conflated with being true. Many people once knew that the earth was flat. A brain may know what it knows but that knowing does not confer truth. Any such knowing is, no doubt, a piece of knowledge for that brain. Even if a certain knowing (say that the earth was flat) is shared by multitudes of people, that multiplicity of knowing is no less subjective and carries no greater truth value. Any brain may know many things which are, in fact, false. Many brains, because they are so similar, may know the same false things. The fact of knowing does not carry a truth-value, but it does carry a belief of truth for that particular brain. And that leads me to conclude that no truth can exist except as a subjective belief in a brain.

Knowing and truth are both subjective. They are both beliefs.

I had forgotten that I had written this about belief a few years ago:

Primordial Belief:

Most of what we therefore consider to be “our” knowledge is actually somebody else’s knowledge and not “known” to ourselves. However our belief in these persons leads to us claiming that knowledge as our own as being part of the body of knowledge available to humanity. The longer some statement has been within the body of knowledge, the stronger is our belief in that statement. Most of our actions are based then, not on our own personal knowledge, but on the belief that whatever lies within the body of knowledge of humanity is true.

But it strikes me that there is an assumption, a belief, which underlies every thought, every perception. This “primordial belief” is in fact implicit in every living thing. In fact it is so intrinsically intertwined with life that it may well be a part of the definition of what life is. This “primordial belief” is that the flow of time is unhindered and that a future exists. I breathe because there is future to breathe for. I cannot know when I take a breath that there will not be another one. Every living thing – a cell, a microbe, a virus, a tree or a human –  does what it does because there is a future (explicitly or implicitly) it believes it can live in. Even the very last breath I take will be taken in the belief that there will be another one to come. A belief in my future is existential.

A belief in a future is inherent in life. There can be a future without life (and there probably will be), but there is no form of life which does not have an implicit belief in its own future.

So every conscious mind (and that includes atheists, agnostics, religious fanatics, scientists and even economists) has this primordial, fundamental belief that a future exists. That, that future exists, can not be within the space of knowledge. All religions exist in the space of ignorance. But long before any of the “beliefs” they adopt comes the primordial belief that every living thing has  – that it has a future.

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The G7 rule by the minority

June 13, 2021

The G7 nations are meeting in Cornwall. Several terms come to mind:

  • Minority rule
  • Oppression by the minority
  • Redefining democracy
  • Undemocratic
  • Realpolitik
  • Non-violent, economic coercion

Source: Nationmaster.com

Oppression by the minority is self-evident. But we can rest easy since they are a virtuous lot. And we can be sure of that since virtually every press statement is about what good guys they are!

Ah well!

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“Fakery” whether in art or documentaries is the norm but meaningless

June 12, 2021

It has become almost a cliche to say that half of all the art in circulation is fake.

Of course this is about art forgery where some painting or sculpture is attributed to some famous (but usually dead) artist. It applies in the main to paintings (and sometimes to sculptures).  But value and artistic merit are quite different things. The value of a painting may differ by many orders of magnitude depending upon the artist or the attribution of the artist. But artistic merit is entirely subjective. There is no intrinsic artistic merit in anything other than that perceived in the mind of an observer.

Art Forgery:

Fake artworks are not unique to collectors and buyers. Museums and art galleries have fallen victim to this problem with some cases being on an epic scale. For instance, the Étienne Terrus Museum discovered that 82 pieces of art were fake! The museum held a dedicated showing for Étienne Terrus with 140 pieces of his art up for viewing. It was unveiled that almost 60% were fake. 

Cinema can be an art form. Cinema documentaries though are always about telling a story purporting to be the truth. But documentaries in cinema are faked and have always been faked.

The New Yorker: Documentaries have always been fake

Already in 1895, the primordial documentary, the Lumière brothers’ film of employees leaving the company’s factory, was staged by the filmmakers. And the film that turned their invention, the “cinématographe,” into a terrifying spectacle, “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat,” contains the definitive and enduring gesture of acknowledged mutual implication, the glance at the lens of the camera. ..

Rouch became the exemplary reflexive filmmaker, and his view of the cinema began with the notion of performance. In “Les Maîtres Fous” (The Mad Masters), from 1955, he filmed members of a Ghanaian sect whose rites involved elaborate, politically influenced play-acting. Soon thereafter, in his seminal feature, “Moi, Un Noir” (Me, a Black Man), from 1958, he recruited a group of Abidjan residents, who had emigrated from Niger, to act out scenes from their own lives—which they did not merely under pseudonyms but in the guise of movie actors and character (named Edward G. Robinson, Eddie Constantine, Dorothy Lamour, and Tarzan). Filming with lightweight equipment and no synch sound, he then brought them into a studio to add dialogue that, with the lapse of time, also became a retrospective commentary on their own lives.

All TV documentaries are story-telling for entertainment or for an agenda. They lie on the borderline of claiming to be art. They are all faked in that images are chosen or manipulated to fit a narrative. There is no wildlife documentary which is not in fact faked in this way. (It is worth noting that much as I may like the David Attenborough documentaries there is not a single one where the narrative is not determined long before the images and audio are stitched together to bolster the narrative).

 

How Nature Documentaries Are Fake from DSLRguide on Vimeo.

Fake art is not generally used to describe pieces of music or literature though fake attributions to famous writers or composers (usually dead) are not unknown. Plagiarism is quite prevalent in producing new works of music or writing. Photoshopping or manipulating of images and then passing of the image as unmanipulated is also a way of faking art. Faked cinema is not so common. Advertising and fake reviews of cinema are the norm but they do not constitute faking of art. Of course, fakery is sometimes involved in cinema purporting to be art but that applies to anything claiming to be art rather than being perceived as art.

I take the simple view that what art is lies in the mind of the observer and is entirely subjective. Fake art then is about deceiving an observer into thinking that what he is purchasing – or merely admiring – is something other than what it is. But that too is a subjective perception. Fakery and art are both subjective value judgements but they lie on entirely different axes. A perception of being art always implies a judgement of admiration.

If an individual perceives something to be art then whether it is fake or not is irrelevant. An individual who perceives something to be fake may still perceive it to be art and may even perceive the fakery to be art. Perception of value is an entirely different thing.

An individual whose perception of artistic merit lies in whether something is fake or not is an idiot.

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Posted in Art | Comments Off on “Fakery” whether in art or documentaries is the norm but meaningless

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