Category: Uncategorised

The Independent reports on plans for the re-establishment of Nalanda. It has all the markers of a ‘flagship’ project that will mainly serve to fluff politicians’ egos and divert large amounts of money towards elites. Still, I can’t bring myself to be

entirely

grudging about it.

Peter Thiel, Paypal co-founder and early Facebook investor, on politics and women:

Thiel announced: “

I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible

.” The public, he says, doesn’t support unregulated, winner-take-all capitalism and so he doesn’t support the public making decisions. This anti-democratic proclamation comes with some curious historical analysis. Thiel says that the Roaring 20s were the last period when it was possible for supporters of freedom like him to be optimistic about politics. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the

extension of the franchise to women

—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have

rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron

,” he writes.

[from a delightfully vicious Slate profile]

It’s scary to think that this guy’s wealth and power are orders of magnitude above anything I could ever come close to attaining.

Another piece of regressive crisis-response, this time by the German government. They’re reducing the eco-tax, and in place increasing cigarette taxes (TAZ. In other words, tax the poor and let polluting big business get away unaffected.

Tiger Beatdown:

One of the things that’s really important in this life, and in any form of political engagement, is to be aware that no-one is actually “one of ours.” Which is to say: The instinct you have to protect someone who seems to side with you, and to gloss over their crimes, is a bad one.

LRB on Blair’s memoirs

He faced two serious and determined enemies during his time in Downing Street: al-Qaida and Gordon Brown. One, he concluded, represented a force so strong and rooted that it had to be uprooted and destroyed, since confrontation was inevitable; the only question was when and how. The other had to be contained, because stepping over the line would have been crazy and made war inevitable. But why on earth did he think that al-Qaida was an example of the first, and Gordon Brown of the second, rather than the other way round?

Cute Cthulhu is the scariest Cthulhu of all:

Part of this horrible obscenity lies in the ability of cute to undermine human reason and agency. The return of the Great Old Ones will reduce every human being unlucky enough to be alive to utter helplessness. But so too do we all become drooling sock-puppets of mammalian algorithms when confronted with furry exteriors, chirpy voices, disproportionately large eyes and heads, charming reductions of scale, and goofy facial expressions.

What I don’t understand about this, is why Chomsky chose such a lousy phrase to make his point. Only somebody who’s never had a nightmare could deny the possibility of sleeping furiously, while you could easily describe the output of some environmental think-tank as ‘colorless green ideas’. On another tack: what is Cthulhu, if not a ‘green idea sleeping furiously’?

A python gotcha I never knew of before:

Python 2.6.5 (release26-maint, Aug 20 2010, 17:50:24)
[GCC 4.4.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 0 is 0 + 0
True
>>> 256 is 256 + 0
True
>>> 257 is 257 + 0
False
>>>

This month I began working in a little place called Atelier Überall, which pretty close to my concept of the ideal place to live and work. I’m writing this as people gradually arrive for a video/dance/performance-art party that’s promising to multiply nervous influxes to over-saturate and over-load me. i.e. just about the right level of creative shamelessness* for me.

The rest of the week there’s also almost always _something_ else happening: gatherings of VJs, flamenco classes, video filming, artists using it as a studio, musicians practising in basement, in addition to the Berlin-standard assemblage of designers, writers, illustrators and the occasional geek. It’s possibly the

busiest

place I’ve ever worked — but somehow in a non-distracting way. It’s pretty wonderful being able to spent a couple of hours focussed on work, and know that when you look up _somehing_ interesting will be happening. Doesn’t hurt that, by and large, they’re

good

at what they do, or at least seriously dedicated to it, which all works together to make it a place I totally trust.

* I’m tempted to write ‘pretentiousness’, because that’s the only word I can think of in the vicinity. But I hate the implications of dishonesty or social climbing. What I really mean is people being sufficiently self-confident and true-to-themselves to create things regardless of the likelihood that some people will snigger. There doesn’t seem to be a word for that.