[social studies] The Zombie fascination in century 20.1

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: [social studies] The Zombie fascination in century 20.1

Postby justdrew » Fri Sep 04, 2015 1:46 pm

Nothing new, there were reports of this ten years or so ago covered in Fortean Times, this is approximately an every 5 years scare story. Also, "gypsies" using hypnosis.
By 1964 there were 1.5 million mobile phone users in the US
User avatar
justdrew
 
Posts: 11966
Joined: Tue May 24, 2005 7:57 pm
Location: unknown
Blog: View Blog (11)

Re: [social studies] The Zombie fascination in century 20.1

Postby Twyla LaSarc » Wed Sep 09, 2015 12:12 pm

Perhaps the zombie virus won't come from space. What about it being revived in a lab from a 25,000 year old sample of our permafrost? :zomg ...

http://siberiantimes.com/science/others ... ermafrost/


'A few viral particles that are still infectious may be enough, in the presence of a vulnerable host, to revive potentially pathogenic viruses,' warned researcher Jean-Michel Claverie.

Exploitation of oil or other mineral resources in these regions could unleash ancient viruses long dormant in the frozen permafrost, now melting due to climate change.
“The Radium Water Worked Fine until His Jaw Came Off”
User avatar
Twyla LaSarc
 
Posts: 1040
Joined: Mon Jun 07, 2010 2:50 pm
Location: On the 8th hole
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: [social studies] The Zombie fascination in century 20.1

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 27, 2015 1:13 pm

Zombie Broadcast Notebook

Image


By Garth Mullins Oct 29th

Today at 9pm our documentary “The Coming Zombie Apocalypse” goes to air on CBC Radio One. The final edits are just about done.

In the show, zombies are allegory for climate change, economic collapse and the dismembering of social fabric by austerity governments. But there’s also a little brain eating.

We made the documentary because many people we knew who dreamed of changing the world have started to focus on just surviving its end. Pop culture's obsession with the apocalypse eclipses revolutionary ideas that might help avoid one. And the proposed political and policy solutions are so wildly out of scale with the size of the problems. I needed to find some way to survive the nauseating oscillation between feeling politically defeated and cautiously optimistic. I wanted to know why it’s so much easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.

Besides, I’m a legally blind sociologist. What am I supposed to do after the apocalypse? Wander the charred landscape, going from campfire to campfire, offering to do a little policy analysis?

There is something about ongoing impacts Thatcherism and the demise of social democracy that underlines this doomed feeling. She famously quipped that there is no such thing as society. And in the decades since, austerity governments have been doing their best to make her right. She haunts us still. The charred landscapes of our imagination are her legacy.

Major cutbacks at CBC meant that it took us over a year to get the project finished. There were three rounds of deep cuts during that time. Hundreds lost their jobs. In Montreal, David Gutnick showed us around: abandoned studios, empty newsrooms, shuttered workshops: zombie broadcaster.

This apocalyptic obsession grows as wages stagnate, pensions vanish, shelter becomes a luxury, nature becomes a commodity and work becomes a precarious privilege. Its every-man-for-himself capitalism, without promise of anything better. At “decade zero” of the climate crisis, the most optimistic vision of the future is holding global warming to an average two-degree temperature rise.

And our built world is hyper-gentrifying into shining, unaffordable shopping malls. The CBC buildings are on the auction block. They’ll probably be replaced by some kind of luxury housing towers, with faux antenna on the top to harken back to the site’s previous life, as so many developments now do.

People have always proclaimed the end-of-the world. Y2K was supposed to throw us back into the Stone Age with planes falling out of the sky. Cold war nukes and Mutually Assured Destruction brought us close several times. I went to the Diefenbunker to see how the state thought it would survive the bomb. There was a little musy PMO five stories underground. I sat behind my desk and chastised my imaginary cabinet. There was also little office for Fisheries and for Transport. Weirdly, there was even one for the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation. I guess they wanted to look after property values during the long nuclear winter.

But for Native American studies scholar, Dr. Cutcha Risling the apocalypse is nothing new. She knows its happened before: “As a culture we become obsessed with this end of the world as if nobody has ever had that experience,” she said in an interview from California. “But there’s lots of Native people who can speak to an experience where they lose everything in these massive waves of destruction.” Dr. Risling Baldy watches The Walking Dead on TV, and writes about how the trauma of that imagined zombie apocalypse parallels the very real trauma echoing through Indigenous nations after generations of colonization.

I also spoke to Caribbean-Canadian sci-fi writer Nalo Hopkinson. She says that it already feels like the end of the world for people of colour living in of Baltimore, Ferguson or other hollowed out inner cities. Mass unemployment, crumbing infrastructure and deadly police violence are normal. “It’s not the apocalypse,” she told me, “its just Tuesday.”


Continues at: http://www.garthmullins.com/2015/10/zom ... ebook.html
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: [social studies] The Zombie fascination in century 20.1

Postby kool maudit » Wed Oct 28, 2015 4:22 am

I have this intuition that zombies are the horror of an overpopulated world, a world at seven billion.
kool maudit
 
Posts: 608
Joined: Sat Jan 20, 2007 4:48 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: [social studies] The Zombie fascination in century 20.1

Postby 82_28 » Wed Oct 28, 2015 5:20 am

kool maudit » Wed Oct 28, 2015 12:22 am wrote:I have this intuition that zombies are the horror of an overpopulated world, a world at seven billion.


It would have to be subconscious though, right? I only say so because I think it's stupid. I was down at the grocery store and some guy was walking around in zombie regalia and out of the corner of my eye I thought he was hurt and then I just realized it was just a zombie idiot. Yet at first, my instincts were to help him without even looking at him. It took a second, just a second, but I detected something injured and then cerebrally I just said to myself -- I've seen this shit before and moved on. What if it was real? In a crowd of thousands sometimes, I think it would be difficult to identify a real threat for the people and police in these gatherings. You could stage a motherfucking slaughter and everyone jumps up and says we were just enacting and it was a joke.

There have to be nodes of getting the zombie walks and shit off the ground and everyone gathered at the same time. As in someone somewhere feeds off the attention this stupidity gets. What and who is getting this attention of mindlessness? There has to be a culture that wants to scare, is bored etc.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
User avatar
82_28
 
Posts: 11194
Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2007 4:34 am
Location: North of Queen Anne
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: [social studies] The Zombie fascination in century 20.1

Postby kool maudit » Wed Oct 28, 2015 6:59 am

Yeah, absolutely subconscious. I mean, the zombie has been around for a while as a stock character, even apart from its Haitian history. But it has this wide appeal now, and in a very specific form, this mindless wounded hungry crowd.

There are other aspects of the zombie that could be emphasized; I think the spiritual horror of its undead condition was probably the signature element in other times. But the current 21st century zombie is more a sort of supernaturalized plague-vision... somehow this is speaking to us.
kool maudit
 
Posts: 608
Joined: Sat Jan 20, 2007 4:48 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: [social studies] The Zombie fascination in century 20.1

Postby Searcher08 » Wed Oct 28, 2015 9:15 am

I only caught The Walking Dead since the summer. It is relatively little about zombies - and more an unflinching study in rule removal, culture disintegration, what makes a person human, what makes a life worth living for, the role of trust, the effect of extreme stress on both decent people and psychopaths, the placing of revenge in human experience, the need to dominate and rule by violence and it's attendant consequences and more than anything, how important both hope and clear thinking are, and that sometimes one just has to take extraordinary betting the barn risks for those one loves.

The ending of the first series (written by Shawshank Redmption's Frank Darabont) is perfection.
User avatar
Searcher08
 
Posts: 5887
Joined: Thu Dec 20, 2007 10:21 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: [social studies] The Zombie fascination in century 20.1

Postby elfismiles » Sun Nov 22, 2015 10:18 am

Austin’s Charles Maund Toyota Using Zombie Meme for Black Friday Advertising
Image
Source: Seen on the KEYEtv website.
https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/simga ... 2321237536
Charles Maund Toyota | New Toyota dealership in Austin, TX 78758
http://www.charlesmaundtoyota.com/holidays-sale.htm
User avatar
elfismiles
 
Posts: 8511
Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:46 pm
Blog: View Blog (4)

Re: [social studies] The Zombie fascination in century 20.1

Postby elfismiles » Fri Aug 19, 2016 9:07 am

Image

Could we survive a ZOMBIE outbreak? Scientists discuss the chilling ways we might stop the spread
One strategy is to quarantine infected people, possibly with the hope of developing a cure or vaccine
Scientists may choose to eradicate the infected area, with little to no concern for who is destroyed
Another option is a selective cull to remove the infected individuals from the population permanently
Looking at a zombie scenario can tell about how a genuine highly infectious condition might spread
By Joanna Verran And Matthew Crossley For The Conversation
Published: 04:47 EST, 18 August 2016 | Updated: 05:54 EST, 18 August 2016
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... pread.html
User avatar
elfismiles
 
Posts: 8511
Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:46 pm
Blog: View Blog (4)

Re: [social studies] The Zombie fascination in century 20.1

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Aug 19, 2016 3:11 pm

Don't forget the poll thread (but post comments here).

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... =8&t=35944
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: [social studies] The Zombie fascination in century 20.1

Postby brekin » Fri Aug 19, 2016 6:41 pm

Have been on a Holocaust reading kick lately and realized a lot of zombie iconography seems to be holocaust related. Emaciated dead/but not dead "parasitic" skeletal people in masses trying to stay alive, shuffling around in rags, the rest of society trying to contain them and waging genocide against them to prevent the spread of "their kind" through their unpure blood which will/does bring civilizations end. 99.9% of the films there is no reasoning with zombies, no dialogue, no cure, just straight out extermination. Goes without saying this thin screen metaphor's popularity doesn't say much about the level of humanity right now.

Google Zombie and then google Holocaust victim.
If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
User avatar
brekin
 
Posts: 3229
Joined: Tue Oct 09, 2007 5:21 pm
Blog: View Blog (1)


Re: [social studies] The Zombie fascination in century 20.1

Postby semper occultus » Fri Dec 02, 2016 5:18 am

Shipping early 2017

In 1929 the explorer William Seabrook published The Magic Island, a questionable travelogue that portrayed the Caribbean state of Haiti as a menacing hinterland of ecstatic ritual, voodoo possession, zombie labourers and meddling spirits.

Despite the sensational nature of Seabrook’s book, the image of Haiti as a mysterious domain stricken by dark forces has come to characterise western pop-cultural impressions of the country ever since, from Graham Greene’s novelistic evocation of state-terrorism The Comedians, to the lurid depictions of ‘voodoo nations’ in Ian Fleming’s Live and Let Die and Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow.

Pursuing the figure of the zombie from folk bogey to cinematic icon, artist and writer John Cussans asks how myth and reality and have come to find themselves so entangled in Haitian history, and how voodoo beliefs have informed both Haitian politics and the superstitious diplomacy of foreign nations.

Cussans’ book is a richly researched and original exploration of the mythical life of Haiti, tracing its stories through mesmerism, Surrealism, imaginative literature and the nightmare images of Hollywood. At once a thorough survey of colonial racism and a philosophical provocation, Undead Uprising traces the feedback loops that occur between fantasy and reality, and asks how myth has worked both for and against this fascinating country in its quest for independence.

About the author:

Dr John Cussans is an artist, writer and researcher with an academic background in graphic design, illustration and art theory. Since 2009 he has been involved with the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, often working with the Haitian video collective Tele Geto. He currently teaches at the Ruskin School of Art.



Image
User avatar
semper occultus
 
Posts: 2974
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2006 2:01 pm
Location: London,England
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: [social studies] The Zombie fascination in century 20.1

Postby elfismiles » Tue May 22, 2018 5:13 pm

Florida city sends out fake ‘zombie’ alert during power outage
By Morgan Gstalter - 05/22/18 07:17 AM EDT

The city of Lake Worth, Fla., sent out a false “zombie alert” to residents during a power outage.

The Palm Beach Post reports that the message was sent around 1:45 a.m. on Sunday and read “zombie alert for Lake Worth and Terminus.”

Terminus is a city in the popular zombie television show “The Walking Dead.”

“There are now far less than seven-thousand-three-hundred-eighty customers involved due to extreme zombie activity,” the alert read.

The city’s public information officer said in a statement that they’re looking into how zombies were mentioned in the report.

“I want to reiterate that Lake Worth does not have any zombie activity currently and apologize for the system message,” Ben Kerr said.

Power was out for 27 minutes for about 7,880 customers, Kerr said.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- ... wer-outage


Hawaii! H-bomb in 15 minutes! Run! Hide!
Post by JackRiddler » 15 Jan 2018
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40821

elfismiles » 06 Jun 2012 13:54 wrote:Don't wanna keep the zombie avatar for very long so am switching.

[social studies] The Zombie fascination in century 20.1
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30465

Image

Image
<snip>
User avatar
elfismiles
 
Posts: 8511
Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:46 pm
Blog: View Blog (4)

Re: [social studies] The Zombie fascination in century 20.1

Postby JackRiddler » Wed May 23, 2018 11:01 pm

.

"Could we survive a zombie outbreak?" This question always weighs so heavily on my mind. It really puts the threat of nuclear wars among the obsolescent human nations and the ongoing accelerating planetary biospheric extinction event that promises to cause a global human die-off and collapse of civilization into perspective. Let alone the highly graduated circles-of-hell daily life of late-post-eternal TINA Capitalism. Why worry about those? The think-tank funds are better spent elsewhere, amirite? Let's solve some problems, people!

(End of movie twist, spoiler alert: WE are the zombie outbreak! OMG!)

Okay, it's not worrying me quite as much as the really big question: "Are our consciousnesses and experienced reality actually the computer simulation of a post-transhuman society, and can we calculate the precise odds of this being the case?" If anything is more essential to consider, then that.

.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 40 guests