Author: old_wp_importer

This is a good case of why I’m occasionally uncomfortable with novels of ideas. Calvino’s summary of logic vs. empiricism is neat — but this is something I can read argued much more closely in textbooks and journal articles. Without the plot, what’s the point.

[I’m aware that, between this and the last post, I seem to be arguing that thrillers are the only books worth reading. Maybe I should follow that…]

Penny Red starts her column in the morning star. Notable mainly for looking back to the 80s as a heyday of counter-culture. Given enough time, all things start to look good.

After

grumbling

for ages about the lack of a usable interface to the out-of-copyright first edition of the OED, I’ve finally got round to putting together the most basic imaginable

interface

to the djvu files from archive.org. It ain’t much, but it’s better than paying $200/year for the official version.

Things I’ve been listening to:

• Bruce Sterling on Augmented Reality [50m] — not much shocking content, by his Sterling’s standards, but pleasantly upbeat
• Lots of TED Talks. I’ve been unexpectedly disappointed by most of the recent ones. Possibly, as with OReilly conferences, my expectations are now so high that reality can only disappoint. Also, as John Robb speculates, corporate/financial backing may have steered them away from decent thinking on this year’s Collapse Of Capitalism. [or perhaps, since we’re currently in a hype-bubble of financial apocalypse, treating this as Just Another Recession
  
  is
  
  the forward-looking thing to do

The Yorkshire Ranter:

I occasionally make the point that after the Left invented post-modernism, the Right operationalised it and rolled it out as a coherent political-media-aesthetic package. If your politics depends on disagreeing with objective reality, and persuading people to vote against their interests, there is a huge opportunity in the realisation that it’s possible to have multiple competing truths. Setting the limits of debate, and controlling the language in which it is carried out, is a valid and proven strategy for power.

Similarly it’s not entirely bogus to link the collapse of the centre-left today to the collapse of the far left in the 90s (which in turn came about from the collapse of the USSR). Eurocommunists, as well as being useful idiots for the Kremlin, were crucially also outriders for the social democrats. The Trots may have been loathed by the moderates, and may have lost them numerous elections one way or another, but they also forced them to confront serious issues. Here’s hoping the pirates, the greens, and the non-party activists can fulfill the same purpose today.

The inane, paranoid meme that Europe is about to be overrun by evil Muslims has somehow managed to burst out of the right-wing cul-de-sac in which it deserves to be confined, and spreading tentacles far more dangerously than is its purported target.

Of the resistance against obnoxious stupidity, this dissection of a recent book on the subject has deservedly got a lot of links. But the one I’m really enjoying is this article from the Guardian. It steps back slightly from the neverending claims and counter-claims, and gets a better view of the whole picture:

Ordinary Muslims in Europe, who suffer from the demoralisation caused by living as perennial objects of suspicion and contempt, are far from thinking of themselves as a politically powerful, or even cohesive, community, not to speak of conquerors of Europe. So what explains the rash of bestsellers with histrionic titles – While Europe Slept, America Alone, The Last Days of Europe?

It also raises a historical angle on the French veil debate which I hadn’t previously been aware of:

The veil, fixed in the 19th century by the French as a symbol of Islam’s primitive backwardness, was used to justify the brutal pacification of north African Muslims and to exclude them from full citizenship.

Embargoes in journalism are dying, according to Owni — various outlets including the Wall Street Journal have decided to ignore them. Blame internet-time.

Jim Jay has an impressively wide reading list; he’s always pointing out interesting articles I’d never have found otherwise.

A recent link from Jim Jay’s impressively wide reading-list: violent slum clearance in an area of Sao Paulo called ‘Capao Redondo’*.

This kind of thing is doubtless happening all the time; there’s a general bubble that I almost always ignore. I only notice it now because I’m midway through Mike Davis’ book ‘planet of slums’. Davis does a particularly good job of taking slum settlement and clearances out of the falsely clear-cut world of legal vs. illegal, and pointing out the nexus of power and money — tolerance of ‘illegal’ slums either because they are inevitable (the people have nowhere else to go) or even because squatters help prepare land which can then be developed privately.

*Not knowing anything about Brazil, I’m flummoxed the details. Wikipedia claims the population of Capåo Redondo as 300,000, but the eviction seems to be only of a far smaller area within that.