Eduard Grebe
Pics, links and brief thoughts
3 January 2012
Phylicia Oppelt: When ‘blackness’ defines the politics of identity
Some intelligent comments on race. A rarity in South Africa.
It is precisely here where we run into a minefield of the politics of identity, belonging and outsider status.
Source: Times LIVE.
3 January 2012
Samir Chopra disagrees with Katha Pollitt
…about whether essayists necessarily need to write substantial fiction if they are not to pass into obscurity.
Source: Katha Pollitt, George Orwell, Essayists and Posterity « Samir Chopra.
2 January 2012
Dave Winer: The Un-Internet
This time around, Apple has been the leader in the push to control users. They say they’re protecting users, and to some extent that is true. I can download software onto my iPad feeling fairly sure that it’s not going to harm the computer. I wouldn’t mind what Apple was doing if that’s all they did, keep the nasty bits off my computer. But of course, that’s not all they do. Nor could it be all they do. Once they took the power to decide what software could be distributed on their platform, it was inevitable that speech would be restricted too. I think of the iPad platform as Disneyfied. You wouldn’t see anything there that you wouldn’t see in a Disney theme park or in a Pixar movie.
Source: Scripting News
1 January 2012
Indefinite detention
The ACLU: “Any hope that the Obama administration would roll back the constitutional excesses of George Bush in the war on terror was extinguished today.”
Source: ACLU (via Glenn Greenwald)
31 December 2011
The Right Fit
Rosten Woo on Nicholas de Monchaux’s Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo.
Spacesuit, architect Nicholas de Monchaux’s wonderful material history, is mostly about these membranes. The book begins with that iconic photograph of Buzz Aldrin’s figure against the surface of the moon — along with a simple question: “Why is this spacesuit soft?” For an answer, de Monchaux finds it necessary to look as far back as 1783, pulling in examples from fields as far-flung as computer simulation, psychopharmacology, haute couture, and the work of Gil Scott-Heron.
31 December 2011
Spacesuit: An Interview with Nicholas de Monchaux
What I find nearly as fascinating as the substance of de Monchaux’s answers is the very French way in which he goes about making an argument. I often find French intellectuals more interesting than convincing.
One of the things I find most fascinating about the idea of the spacesuit is that space is actually a very complex and subtle idea. On the one hand, there is space as an environment outside of the earthly realm, which is inherently hostile to human occupation—and it was actually John Milton who first coined the term space in that context.
On the other hand, you have the space of the architect—and the space of outer space is actually the opposite of the space of the architect, because it is a space that humans cannot actually encounter without dying, and so must enter exclusively through a dependence on technological mediation.
via BLDGBLOG: Spacesuit: An Interview with Nicholas de Monchaux.
30 December 2011
Joseph Nye Jr: The Dialectics of Rise and Decline
No matter how compelling the structural factors driving history, individual personality and human agency remain relevant.
That still leaves the question, “Why 1989? Why under this leader?” To some extent, Gorbachev was an accident of history. In the early 1980s, three old Soviet leaders died, one soon after the other. It was not until 1985 that the younger generation, the people who had come up under Khrushchev, the so-called generation of 1956, had their chance. But if the members of the Communist Party Politburo had chosen one of Gorbachev’s hard-line competitors in 1985, it is quite plausible that the declining Soviet Union could have held on for another decade. It did not have to collapse so quickly. Gorbachev’s personality explains much of the timing.
Source: Russia in Global Affairs.
30 December 2011
Obama’s abysmal record on civil liberties
Obama is not a disappointment. He is a travesty.
President Barack Obama is about to sign into law the National Defence Authorisation Act, which authorises indefinite detention in military custody of ‘terror’ suspects.
Source: The Guardian
