Humanlight TV




Last December, Current TV aired a 6 minute documentary on cable and online about the humanist Christmas and Hanukkah ripoff winter holiday Humanlight. It shows a good slice of the New York/New Jersey humanist culture, and portrays sympathetically humanists' attempt to carve out a space for their worldview. Equal Time for Freethought radio host Neil Murphy is shown in action at the studio, being amusingly described as a "talk show host" at a "liberal" network (which I can wish would actually show awareness of classical liberalism). Other prominent local humanists featured include ETFF staff Tim and Lisa Ridge (with a personal look at their holiday customs) and Humanlight co-creator Joe Fox.

The video diverts a good deal to cover the pointless "war on Christmas" pseudo-controversy, with some suitably obnoxious ranting from the Catholic League's William Donohue, who has also recently blustered against The Da Vinci Code and the South Park episode "Bloody Mary". The video shows very little about the content of humanism (or even what its beef is with Christianity), and in particular doesn't come off as all that different from the Jewish experience of marginalization from the larger culture — although one could argue that humanists' exclusion is compounded and taken further (especially among the contingent of lapsed Jewish humanists). And I'm pretty ambivalent towards the new-media model of Current TV itself: there have been good critiques of the network by Douglas Rushkoff and Jesse Walker, and the explosion of truly decentralized media has been utilized by the likes of Brian Flemming. (The online video also has one of the most obnoxious features of the TV medium: the ad, with motion no less, superimposed on the corner of the screen.)

These caveats aside, the video is well done and a small victory for publicizing humanism.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Announcing the Carl Sagan memorial blog-a-thon

Next month, December 20, 2006 will mark the tenth anniversary Carl Sagan's passing. In his honor, I am organizing a special memorial "blog-a-thon" among Sagan's fans throughout the blogosphere. If you're a Sagan fan with a blog, you can participate by posting something related to him on or near that date. Read or reread a Sagan book and review it; discuss cool things that you've done that's been influenced by him; pontificate on one of the many topics he treated (SETI, astronomy, critical thinking, the history of science, human intelligence....), or post about something completely surprising. Contact me by email or by leaving a comment, and then when the date approaches, I will create a meta-post that links to all the stuff people are doing, providing a network of the participating bloggers. A list of Sagan stuff online that may be a source of ideas. Carl's son Nick Sagan on the blog-a-thon . Publicity for the blog-a-thon includes Cornell Univer
Read more

AOL Hometown shutting down, and taking a bit of bronze with it

Well, with the announcement that AOL's Hometown service is shutting down by October 31, one of the truly old school web hosting sites from the early days of the Web, up there with GeoCities and Tripod, and all of the websites hosted at URLs "hometown.aol.com", "members.aol.com" and "users.aol.com", will be going the way of Xoom into the land of dead bits. The shutdown is pretty abrupt; the formal announcement was only posted on September 30, and according to it, if webmasters don't back up their website files by the 31st, they'll simply be gone. All Hometown pages have one of two prominently placed banners atop the pages announcing the shutdown, one of which says "AOL Hometown is Closing its Doors. Find out how to BACK UP AND SAVE YOUR FILES before we say goodbye for good." and the other stating that "A Blogger is Always Prepared. DON'T GET LEFT BEHIND. Learn how to BACK UP & SAVE YOUR INFORMATION now." (desp
Read more

Early animated feature "The Adventures of Prince Achmed" screening in NYC

On November 11 and November 15, the Museum of Modern Art will screen , with live piano accompaniment, one of the earliest animated features ever made (and made by one of the earliest female animators), Lotte Reiniger's 1926 Arabian Nights fantasy The Adventures of Prince Achmed . Reiniger made films by painstakingly animating intricate silhouette cutouts, and the results are gorgeous to behold. The screening is part of a series on film preservation, and so I assume it's a restored version; I haven't been able to find out exactly how (or if) this differs from the version that has been available on DVD for a while, but the runtime given is 8 minutes longer than the DVD's.
Read more