2751 – China History BBC documentary (2016)

What is remarkable about this documentary, imho, is the fact that it aired before the actual sabre rattling, overcapacity, decoupling, China derisking, and Sinophobia Sinophilia wave (please read this truly excellent article about this here). You can see how historically contingent these times are and what changed (clue= from a rising power China graduated to global power status). It is from a time, not so far ago, when China was seen as a rising economic partner and world power, a truly singular fact in world history, if not the very culmination of full modernity, and where Western modernisation was just a preface or a preamble (in Adam Tooze’s and Kaiser Guo’s words). Myself, I have been trying to view past the whole gradual demonization of mainland China since the COVID pandemic, as we entered some kind of new cold war lunacy.

“This is the material dethroning of the West as the central driver of world history. This is really what the provincialization of the West looks like.” (Tooze)

In the same strain, Isabella Weber (an expert in Chinese modern macroeconomics) also urged China watchers from Europe and war hawks everywhere to accept European ‘peripheralization’ and a joining of forces with the Global South rather than relapsing atavistically into imperialist showoff. That this did not happen and that these words and encouragement fell on deaf ears comes as no surprise, considering the role European powers and US imperialism played in Asia and the world at large.

Accepting European peripheralization is the only way. Europe has to finally join forces with the Global South instead of relapsing into imperialist gesturing.

In a world of super power blocs, you are no more super power, Europe, and that is your chance.

— Isabella M Weber (@IsabellaMWeber) January 20, 2026

This series is truly remarkable because it goes to the very origins of the Chinese civilisation and minces no words about the importance and the importance of China in the 21st century. There is due role given to ritual, writing, cosmic orientation, divination, ancestor cult, the Mandate of Heaven, and family played in its constant formation and reformation, centralization, and decentralization. One could say that the British infatuation with the royals, with tradition, with family (that Thatcherite foundation of capitalism and free market) colors some sections of Michael Wood’s Chinese BBC 2 trip. One should maybe temper that with the excellent lecture of Professor Roger T. Ames about “zoethological thinking” and his perception and Sinological life work on how interdependence characterizes Chinese philosophy and how “Dao” is to be “interpreted as a dynamic process of symbiosis and co-becoming between humans and the world”.

These are just two of the episodes – one of the golden age of the 960 to 1279960 to 1279 (where some of the most significant inventions associated with China spread and appear, mainly porcelain and movable print) and theYuan and Ming (which is also truly remarkable in its own way). They are stories of incredible resilience of the Chinese nation, of incredible cities and the reality (that only then dawned on the European mind) that the center of the world was elsewhere, namely to the East, where vast civilized cities with fast foods (yes that is right), libraries, bookshops, and sophisticated poetry and gardens abounded. It helps you imagine Kaifeng and all the other capitals of China at their most resplendent. Another thing that I love is that Wood goes everywhere to schools, institutes, private houses, talks to various people, and in general has very lively exchanges with a variety of local characters.

Anyway, I wish anyone could contrast these documentaries and compare it with today’s endless charade of ‘threats’, anti-CPC venom, tariff wars, geostrategic scheming, jingoism, boycotts, and supply chain gasps.

2750 – The Eyes Of Tammy Faye (2000 documentary)

directed by Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey

Narrated by RuPaul Charles this an excellent documentary that I totally missed. It got mentioned by Hellen Rollins in this Emancipation video. It is about a very rare case – a televangelist power couple and in particular the life of Tammy Faye, that together with Jimmy Bakker established some of the pioneering Christian TV programs in the US (and probably in the world). The documentary is really intersting for several reasons, none the least that the Bakker couple and Fanny in particular was not demonizing queer people and was one of the first to not consider HIV/AIDS virus as a God-sent scourge (as the vast majority of charismatic pastors and conservative personalities did at the time causing much damage and suffering to the queer and AIDS patient community as a whole). It is therefore a rather quirky, zany and sympathetical documentary about televangelists and fundamentalist Christians in the US (who let’s not forget constitute a powerful Trump base and a powerful glue for Christian Zionists as well as Christofascist and Christian nationalist and Dominionist strains)

Secondly, I think one can follow the role of Christian faith under capitalism and in particular its US American arena. I do not say they are innocent in any way, but regarding the type of ultra-competitive and profit-oriented faith, the US was basically a piranha pool for faith healers, preachers of the prosperity gospel, and ideological entrepreneurs in the 1970s. The Bakkers, almost at each moment of their media carreer end up the victims of mergers, debt, tax evasion, and sex scandals. Is this really new? Does anyone expect anything else from the richest country in the world or from something that has now been labeled somewhat unfairly “Epstein regime”(unfairly not to the victims bc for them this regime war was very catastrophic and real), but because it seems like it was widely spread. From the beginning, the Bakker couple came up with a lot of ideas involving making Christianity cool again, of making conservatism “not seem conservative”(? ), altough this seems a dead end, since for us everything appears unbearably cringy, garish, and stuck up, it did strike a chord back then. It might sound absolutely outragous but the couple actually built Heritage USA, one of the first Christian-themed parks. They had puppets, they were on The 700 Club and established the PRAISE THE LORD (what else) CLUB aka the PTL network. If you are into movies like Network, you should also definitely watch this documentary. They basically established the televangelist mould.

One can also see the hostile takeover of a Christian ministry, Jerry Falwell – a powerful televangelist and leader of the so-called “moral majority”, a truly despicable figure and one of the main reasons Reagan came to power.

2749 – Vectors (Pierdere de Vreme #4)

Probably because I was a total zero in math at school, I kind of developed some slow learner curiosity and admiration for it. Do not think I got better meanwhile, altough I recently found a DATAMAN educational toy calculator manufactured by Texas Instruments in the late 1970s that works absolutely perfect and should (in theory) help practice my mathematical tables, train my slowly decaying brain to guess numbers, and practice arithmetics. But truly my first introduction to how a mathematician sees the world (and it was an amazing opportunity) was via a book by Ian Stewart called Nature’s Number, published in 1995 and available at the local British Council library. Read it just before applying at the Art History department in Bucharest, and oh boy, was it a treat.

Other than that it was just mathematical puzzles and games via the collected column by Martin Gardner (to whom I think I owe it to actually being able to listen to videos like the one above – besides the valuable fact that Alin Rautoiu makes it an incredibly entertaining introduction into both math and coding and drawing!). This talk is great because it shows you in real time what you can do with vectors and how helpful and manipulable they are.

What is a vector? How do you formalize it? What is a vector geometrically vs arithmetically?

Anyway, for me or anyone interested in these things will probably feel much more at ease when encountering them in a rather abstruse philosophical or metaphysical jargon and context – namely, taken out of its initial mathematical or even physicalist background, the“vector character” (as opposed to the scalar quantities) has a really important role to play in AN Whiteahead event-based processual thinking and cosmology, when prehensions are mentioned, etc. A prehension (for Whitehead) is not self-contained; it is always tendential, always refers to an external world and thus has “vector character”. ANW also makes a point that the scalar was dominant in Newtonian physics, while the vector (for him) is closer to our lived reality (he was always combating the bifurcation of nature – the split btw clorphyle molecules inside the leaf and their green color perception by our eyes – for short altough his most important work evolved about the bifurcation of Nature).

2748 – Hyperreality Is Dead: Baudrillard, the Age of Trump, and ‘The Gulf War Did Not Take Place’ Revisited (Acid Horizon podcast)

As the US hyperimperialism gets overextended with US Israeli attacks in Iran and the assasination of its supreme leader (as well as numerous civilian victims) with the aquiescence of the majority of EU, and we are seeing the effects of both the imperial boomerang at home (ICE raids), the so-called Rules-Based Order turns out to be nothing else than an experssion of unilateral hegemonic rule, with various kidnappings in Venezuela, the siege of Cuba, shouts for “regime change”, it is high time we return to Baudrillard and his analysis of the war as a simulacrum during the first Gulf War. I remember distinctly that period, being still a teenager, just one year after the Romanian televised revolution (check Ujica’s and Harun Farocki’s Videograms of a A Revolution for a very apt take on that) you are glued to the screen for the night vision almost like old terminal greens and rockets without any connection to the actual events. This disconnect was already anticipated in the anti-terrorist craze during the 1989 revolution where everyone was suspecting either loyal securitate or arab/friendly Arab nations “terrorists” protecting Ceaușescu from the wrath of the people and the army that switched sides. All the alliances with Saddam or other ex Socialist connections with the Arab world seemed suddenly forgotten in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And this was just the aperitif for the Shock and Awe.

These terrorists were mostly invisible, or some kind of scapegoats being nearly lynched or killed in friendly fire. So when US retaliated after Saddam’s bungled and sincerly self-defeating attack on Kuwait, Romania was already dreaming to be a base for the US army, seen as a liberatory democratic force back then, ideologically propped by lots of Rambo and Chuck Norris movies and the vision, before Orange Revolutions became a thing and ‘peaceful’ CIA coups sounded just what Eastern Europe needed. If you do not live on the moon you realize you and your family and your friends, and your friends friends and countless others are at the disposal, arbitrary violence and whim of one single element: the 800+ US bases around the globe and their trigger happy. And nothing can protect you.

I recommend listening to the discussion that revisits that controversial text and compares it with today’s ridiculous and cringe Dubai US influencer and troll-led reporting, as well as the constant feed of wilful destruction and blatant abandonment at any pretense of international rules. Adam Tooze also wrote in the Chartbook substack about the hyperreality of the US presidency, while (as some in the comments section sharply observed), there is no rupture with the previous brutal regime change style of the US hegemony. Whether you call it hyperimperialism or hyperreal, the hyper is hard to get rid of. The LIVE feed, the cine-verite is even more accute – when even the allies or the actual members of the public nor the staff were in the loop, no one gets notification of the last military campaign till the last minute or the “target” is eliminated.

For me, it is incredibly telling that the situation at the UN had a total reversal (who was the aggressor during the Cold War era Korean War) is today the one upholding these crumbling international rules, while in new institutions such as the so- called Board of Peace seem to make a total mockery of peace negotiations and the idea of diplomatic solutions.

So the war did take place but the constant race btw war reporting, media collusion and advertising, at the moment of complete US dominance, evacuated all the dirty and horrific side of it, transforming it into a sort of infomercial. Today with US the biggest military superpower bringing havoc, destabilizing, and uncertainty around the world – one can feel that this lack of plan is the plan. The only result seems to be further upping of speculative bets, rising oil prices and crypto profits in plain sight.

The war on Iran likely brings a new oil price shock and windfall profits.

So, who stands to win?

Our research shows: Last time around (2022), the US reaped the largest fossil fuel profits of any country ($377bn). 50% went to the top 1%, only 1% to the bottom 50%. A🧵 pic.twitter.com/WPNmm0l3Hu

— Isabella M Weber (@IsabellaMWeber) March 1, 2026

“In this episode, we revisit Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991), a text that diagnosed the emergence of war as media event, non-event, and managed spectacle. Joining us is friend and returning guest Cameron Carsten, a graduate student in continental philosophy whose work explores the state, power, and the production of reality across Baudrillard and Deleuze. Rather than treating Baudrillard’s claims as prophetic or obsolete, the conversation puts them to work against the present—testing the fate of hyperreality in the age of Trump, AI-mediated images, and escalating political violence. What emerges is a question that now presses harder than ever: has the simulacrum collapsed, or has the real returned with a vengeance?”

And just in case you had any residual doubts of what the Board of Peace stands for.

— Stefan Tiron (@tironstefan.bsky.social) 2026-03-02T10:26:21.856Z

2747 – PSYCHOCINEMA: A Universal Theory of Cinema feat. Helen Rollins (Emancipations)

My understanding of psychoanalysis is really rudimentary – but, as many of you (I imagine), thoroughly enjoyed Slavoj Žižek ride through ideological critique, Lacanian psychoanalysis, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012), directed by Sophie Fiennes. One does not have to agree with the Slovenian philosopher and analyst, or consider him a “clownish thinker”, the perfect example of all the bourgeois liberal favorite philosopher, maybe (I guess what Germans would call „Salonfähig“) – to actually appreciate the incredible symbolical and allegorical treasure trove he finds in all sorts of movies. Dear reader, we do not look lightly on cultural conservatism on this movie blog.

Daniel Tutt is a former student of Zizek, but as his own ideological and critical Marxist toolbox has been expanding (in his own words), he keeps a constant flow of interviews with invited guests, recommendation videos on Emancipations, and one can always support his efforts through either Patreon or a Paypal one time donation. One can be a total nuub with Lacanian theory – and still appreciate how productive and generative the application of the Lacanian conceptual apparatus to film and what an incredible and engaging interlocutor Helen Rollins is.

In spite of the total domination of capitalism and the entire autophagic festival movie industrial complex, one can still find surprising movies (she mentionsPIG with Nicholas Cage as one of those miracles). Watch Daniel and Helen Rollins discuss Citizen Kane, universal “lack”, the role of capitalism in directing and shaping desire and structuring subjectivity, go into why movies by Jordan Peele such asUs (2019) about the black middle class in the US or The Hunt (2020) are so remarkable, or why John Cassavetes is the quintessential anti-Hollywoodian film director or indeed why directors like Spielberg are mostly unintentionally such remarkable carriers of symbolism and US fears (such as JAWS – “US falic fear of communism”). I fully agree that ideological critique can fall flat, or making a political movie can be tied with the kind of proggy liberal politics that has such a short shelf life bc it is mostly tied in the US with the politics and myopic tactics of the Democratic party.

Really liked the point about cinema being the pervert’s experience par excellence, leading and shaping under capitalism desire something that we are familiar with from the advertising industry and Century of the Self – in presenting as a commodified utopia, that isn’t a utopia actually. Rollin’s work is also interesting since she treats cinema as a totality returning to a sort of universalist core of both cinema and subjectivity. She also argues that it is rather watching movies in the cinema than your usual theoretical readings that can generate true (unconscious) political change. Even if it were too good to be true, it is still an arresting thought.

>>I’m joined by filmmaker and theorist Helen Rollins for a discussion on her new book on psychoanalysis and cinema, “Psychocinema.” In this work Helen argues there is a fundamental relationship between the structure of psychoanalysis and that of cinema. Cinema acts upon the viewer like psychoanalysis upon the analysand and can expose them to the universal lack inherent in their desire. This process undermines the unconscious logic of capitalism, which relies on a promise in fulfillment. We also discuss Helen’s experiences in the film industry, her many film projects (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm7184276) in addition to the theoretical topics raised in Psychocinema.<< (YT channel)

Get a copy of Psychocinema: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Psychocinema-p-9781509561155

And read some reviews on Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/218450499-psychocinema