Rhian Jones is always great, doubly so when it gets to feminism and culture and politics:

[Thatcher’s image on

The Iron Lady

adverts is] like being repeatedly sideswiped by the 1980s, which is something the last UK election had already made me thoroughly sick of.

Thatcher, according to an article Jones links, “

had what it takes to become a modern icon: big hair, high foreheads and a face that would allow you to project your own fears and desires on to it

“

And while the image of Thatcher as

Liberty Leading the People

makes my skin crawl, I can’t disagree with this:

the images of both women are used in a cultural tradition in which the female figure in particular becomes a canvas for the expression of abstract ideas (think justice, liberty, victory). The abstract embodiment of multiple meanings, and the strategic performance of traditional ideas of femininity, constitute sources of power which Thatcher and her political and media allies exploited to the hilt in their harnessing of support for the policies she promoted.

Owen Hatherley picks up on the veneration of industry over services, as a political cliche which unites Labour and the Conservatives:

For Ed Miliband, it’s a question of rewarding the ‘producers’ in industry rather than the ‘predators’ of finance capitalism; for George Osborne, ‘we need to start making things again’….What does it mean, this apparent divide between producer and predator, industrialist and speculator, this apparent desire to turn the long-defunct workshop of the world back into a workshop of some sort?

Despite appearances, this is not a modernist argument. It’s romantic nostalgia. Industry is old-fashioned, honest, straightforward, comprehensible. It’s what gave Britain the identity it has lost in these confusing times.

In other words, industry is taking on the role you would expect to see played by the countryside. And, as with today’s industrial nostalgia, rural nostalgia came from both left and right. Hatherley again:

Whether ostensibly conservative, like the Gothic architect Augustus Welsby Pugin, or Marxist, like William Morris, opinion formers in the second half of the nineteenth century agreed that industry had deformed the United Kingdom, that its cities and its architecture were horrifying, that its factories were infernal, and that it should be replaced with a return to older, preferably medieval certainties.

It’s a neat step through sectors of the economy: the prisoner of finance pines for industry; the prisoner of industry pines for farming. Go back far enough, and I’m sure you’d find Mercian villagers longing for the good old days of nomadic hunting

Rem Koolhaas claims to now be more interested in countryside than in cities. As he says, rural areas are “changing more radically than our cities”:

Millions have moved to cities from the countryside. They have left behind a weird territory for genetic experimentation, intermittent immigration [and] vast property transactions. It’s truly amazing when you look closely.

via bldgblog, the grim idea that the best way of preserving natural landscapes might be through making them too dangerous for humans to venture into.

The post carries pictures of beautiful landscapes — and of the landmines which were once buried there. Remove the mines, and will the landscape in turn be destroyed?

It’s not dissimilar to the allure of the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. Again, a certain deadliness suits nature just as it keeps us out.

It can be entertaining, if grim, to see which bits of cultural history get adopted by extremists. The Larouche followers are my favourite case, with their mishmash of Leibnitz, and with being relatively harmless. But there’s this case of a racist murderer, part of a group passionate about Ezra Pound.

Laurie Penny is now, annoyingly, writing good things in print that aren’t available on the internet:

youth services are the first to go when cuts are imposed, because they have few measurable outcomes — by the time the damage done can be tallied, the political careers of the current administration will be beyond scrutiny

Nobody is investing in young people, in the environment, in frastructure, in education, in any of the things that might make us – to use an adddictive little phrase I picked up at Occupy Wall Street – “good ancestors”.

Instead, allt he current crop of politicians seems to be able to do is beg and bullyu the young and disenfranchised into giving them respect…I can think of few historical moments when respect for our elders has been less appropriate

B&T has an interesting point on the differences between officially-sponsored political movements in Russia vs. China. Briefly: only in China do the local candidates put in the work:

Your pan-democrat is the fellow with the big words about democracy; your DAB candidate is known in the neighbourhood for spending years ladling soup into grannies and talking ‘common sense’. That’s not how Nashi rolls.

I do wonder, though,

why

Nashi don’t do more of the local service provision. It’s the most reliable route to political support, and United Russia have the cash. Maybe they just don’t feel they need to put in that much effort.

There’s no huge revelation in this BusinessWeek account of the

ISS World

surveillance-technology conference, but they go to town on the atmosphere:

Employees of Munich-based Trovicor are easy to pick out: each is dressed identically, in a dark suit and a red necktie, which is custom made, marketing director Birgitt Fischer-Harrow says.

“It is a Trovicor corporate identity. The company colors are black, white and Pantone 202c red,” she says, referring to the precise shade of burgundy.

Oh, the ways I find to faff in my lunch-break. Today, translations of

Mullet

; apparently every country wants to blame them on foreigners and/or sportsmen. So Sweden (similar to Norway and Canada) has the lovely-sounding

Hockeyfrilla

(“Hockey hair”). The Danes (“

Svenskerhår

) blame it on the Swedes. Poland goes all the way with

Czeski piłkarz

(“Czech footballer”) — sports and abroad all in one.

All this from reading the blog of Amelia Andersdotter, who managed to win an election with the slogan “

Vote for me because I know a lot about European cooperation, or because I have a mullet

“.

Bruce Sterling:

*Tomi Ahonen is my favorite industry analyst. Studying the mobile business is like Kremlinology; it’s boring on the face of it, and most of the heavy operators are evil people who lie all the time, even to each other and themselves. And then, by sparkling contrast, there’s this Ahonen guy. He’s such a committed and relentless contrarian that he comes across like Solzhenitsyn.

*Here he is weeping for an entire half-hour about Nokia. And he’s right, y’know; the fate of Nokia really is a fantastic business story. A gigantic story of Gothic High-Tech collapse.

[

I’ve no idea who Tomi Ahonen is, I just adore the description

]