Category: Uncategorised

This [via CT] is a good overview of the state of play on the Lisbon treaty:

But some diplomats say it is the foreign policy high representative who may emerge as the strongest figure in the new set-up.

….

The foreign policy chief will be powerful because he or she will not only speak on behalf of EU national governments but will also hold the title of Commission vice-president. The holder will oversee the EU’s multi-billion euro foreign aid budget and control a diplomatic service that will ultimately employ up to 3,000 officials.

[from a comment posted elsewhere]

There’s a goth club listing at http://etoile.de/; Berlin is in the section ‘PLZ-Bereich 1′. You can probably read through the genre descriptions and club addresses without needing much German.

The Kit Kat Club is — well, if you’ve had it recommended, you probably have an idea. I like it, although I’ve not been since a couple of years ago, when it was in a different venue. [I stopped going after seeing a page on their site seemingly saying that they don’t want Turks or feminists in the club. Probably it’s just an unfortunately-worded page, but it didn’t make me want to go back]

Also on the sex end of the spectrum, check out Insomnia. It’s a fetish club, with a monthly goth night called ‘angel in bondage’.

K17 is the largest and most regular goth club, with a big dose of metal and industrial. On a Friday or Saturday, they generally have four floors: one trad goth and 80s, one electro/industrial, and two small ones for metal. The venue is ugly as hell, but also huge.

If you fancy going out on a Monday night, Duncker is a lovely smallish club, with a lot of regulars and a friendly atmosphere. They (always?) have some kind of barbeque-type food in their back courtyard, and will keep going until Tuesday morning. I think there’s also a small goth market there every other sunday afternoon (http://www.darkmarket.de/).

Other places: Kato is more rock-oriented, and has lots of smallish live gigs. ACUD and Sama-Cafe are squats (perhaps legalised; I’m not sure), which do goth/wave nights. They’re incredibly cheap (to make them accessible to everybody; do pay a bit more if you can!). Expect plenty of shabby-looking punks and people out of their heads on (cheap) Sternberg beer.

This is a notes-to-myself entry, in which I try to figure out the best online sources for Spanish news in English. There doesn’t seem to be much, which I guess is useful encouragement to learn Spanish

• Guardian
• New York Times
• Google News
• Of sources aimed at expats, Typically Spanish seems to be the only one with any content at all. Euro Weekly News is low-volume and looks like repackaged wire copy.
• Barcelona: Barcelona Reporter has the most news (not much). Barcelona Metropolitan is an entertainment/lifestyle magazine; Barcelona Connect is mainly classifieds.

Le Figaro poll on whether Obama deserves the Nobel peace prize currently at 29% yes, 71% no.

Der Spiegel also pretty sceptical. Global Voices rounds up similarly bemused reactions from the rest of the world.

Turkey and Armenia are set to normalize relations today. They’re setting up a commission to establish the history of the Armenian Genocide (doubtless carefully skirting that term). Boy, that’s going to be one of the most scarily politicised pieces of work going!

Hillary Clinton is witnessing the signing. Wonder if she’s bringing with her Samanta Power, author of A Problem From Hell and once-and-future Obama advisor.

I’ve just arrived back at my mother’s place in Oakham, with the plan of spending a couple of weeks quietly working. And now, I realise, also leafing through the piles of books that have accumulated here. Books once read and forgotten; books I’ve been itching to look at gain for months or years; reference books I never have in the right place to refer to them.

I’m very much looking forward to getting to know them again.

Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize? I can only add to the chorus of WTF. Looking back over previous winners, I see a lot of unexciting, so-so awards, but not that many out-and-out fuckups. Dare I say it, I think this is even worse than Kissenger. With Kissenger (also Arafat/Rabin/Peres), at least they were recognizing a warmonger belatedly trying to wind down a war. The Obama nomination doesn’t even have that excuse.

The connection between psychology and society is the kind of topic that gets batted endlessly around among pundits, but never makes a dent in practical politics. Currently, it’s in the form of a “greed is stressful” meme, whether in Oliver James’ Affluenza and Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety.

That shape doesn’t much interest me, perhaps because I’m not directly affected by it. I prefer the brute statistical case made by The Spirit Level, a recent book on “why more equal societies almost do better”. This takes the prevalence of mental illness as the key figure (see the radical psychiatrists shudder), and plots it against income inequality:



It all seems horribly deracinated, considering how much attention has been given to similar topics over the decades. We had Lacan and then Guattari in France, treating madness as a rational response to society, and schizophrenia as the model for deconstructing it. Or Marcuse in America, or Laing in Britain, an army of radical psychiatrists, anti-psychiatrists, critical psychiatrists, patients’ movements….There’s plenty worth abandoning from each approach, but surely there’s some scope for cherry-picking?

[PS: out of Paris. Have my mind back. More frequent posts likely, hopefully at least some more coherent than this jumble]

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

On the never-vanishing topic of Islam in France, this article in the FT is pretty good.

Farhad Khosrokhavar, director of research at France’s Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, estimates that 15 to 20 per cent of French Muslims do not practise Islam at all. Fasting during Ramadan is considered a basic duty of the religion, yet only about 70 per cent of French ­Muslims even claim to do it. In short, European Islam has many of the same problems as European Christianity.

Via Art Goldhammer, unsurprisingly