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Naeem Mohaiemen | 1 Dec 05:24
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Balaka Storks Dodge A Bullet

Images of the statues are at the URL:
http://unheardvoice.net/blog/2008/11/30/balaka-statue/

To read about the previous statue incident, go here:
http://unheardvoice.net/blog/2008/11/02/smash-palace/

Balaka Storks Dodge A Bullet
by Naeem Mohaiemen
NEW AGE, December 1, 2008

Unlike the Baul statue circus a month ago, the group that came to
smash Balaka Chattar/Biman Office statues (storks, also by Mrinal
Haque) came near midnight. This time, no government officials, no
advance "protest" in media, no advance anything. They worked quickly,
with hammers. Other reports said "ramda", but I tend to think that's
fear shorthand.

Then the police arrived. According to BdNews24, for the first fifteen
minutes they did nothing. Then I suppose the "higher ups" decided
whether to stop or allow, impede or accelerate. And then the police
"swung into action." Or, as Shamokal reports it, dhawa palta dhawa.
Police wounded, attackers in custody, conveniently wearing white
robes. Almost ready for their photo-op.

The hammers managed to get through the plaster legs, but stopped at iron rods.

I arrived after midnight. Lot of police vans. My CNG driver knew about
it: "Ektu agei hangama hoise, oidike jaiben". Helpful tour guide.

Al Jazeera camera crew were there. Video camera nicely set on tripod.
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Alan Sondheim | 2 Dec 13:51
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sondheimogram x4 [2x thought, greatest fears 2x, k-h clouds]

               [digested @ nettime --mod(tb)]

Alan Sondheim <sondheim@...>
     The double thought experiment of Wittgenstein (also known as the
     My greatest fears 
     My greatest fears* second part plus a vision 
     Kelvin-Helmholtz Clouds and a unique event 

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Date: Sat, 29 Nov 2008 03:07:22 -0500 (EST)
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@...>
Subject: The double thought experiment of Wittgenstein (also known as the

The double thought experiment of Wittgenstein (also known as the double
earth experiment)

Imagine, says Wittgenstein, there is another earth, another thought. That
this is correlative with what you conceive of as your earth, your thought.
But there is a modicum of control from the other earth, other thought. It
may be of the order of full control, or nothing more than the slightest
influence. It is as if a door has opened between the other earth, other
thought, into what you think of as your earth, your thought. As if it were
a matter of scale. But that something you think, you might think as a
result of the other earth, other thought, has been taken from you. That it
is not as it was or might have been. There is the matter of free will, you
think, if there is such an other earth, other thought. But the correlative
or influence may well depend on free will, may be integrative with free
will, that perhaps free will has shifted to the other earth, other
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Domenico Quaranta | 2 Dec 17:25
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Pixxelpoint 2008 - For God's Sake! Essay


FOR GOD'S SAKE!
Domenico Quaranta

“God Always Uses the Latest Technology.”

In the little town in northern Italy where I live, which is  
economically prosperous, culturally sleepy, religiously bigotted and  
politically conservative, there is a small but interesting “Museum of  
Art and Spirituality”. It presents part of the collection of  
contemporary art that belonged to Giovanni Battista Montini, a.k.a.  
Pope Paul VI, an illustrious local man and possibly the last Catholic  
pope to believe that contemporary art could convey a religious  
message. After a brief look at the collection, it is easy to agree  
that Pope Paul’s faith in art, was, as they say, blind. While  
alongside a few daubs, he managed to collect a number of undisputed  
masterpieces, by artists including Sironi, Morandi, De Chirico,  
Chagall, Kokoschka, Dalì, Matisse, Manzù and Giacometti, in this art  
it is difficult to find the populace-educating power of Medieval and  
Renaissance art, or the astounding emotional impact of Baroque art.  
None of these works has the catalyzing power of an icon. Contemporary  
art alters the rhetoric of religious art, learns its stylistic  
approaches and tackles it from a secular point of view. At times it  
conveys a private form of spirituality, not necessarily linked to any  
religion. And often, when it tackles official religions, it does so in  
a provocative, iconoclastic way: take Martin Kippenberger’s crucified  
frog, for instance, or the cross submerged in the urine of Andres  
Serrano, or Maurizio Cattelan’s Nona ora, or the Virgin Mary blackened  
with elephant dung by Chris Ofili, or Vanessa Beecroft’s recent  
Madonnas. All of these works are undoubtedly imbued with their own
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Patrice Riemens | 3 Dec 09:15
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Philip Stephens (FT): The police, and the state, are out of control


After the recent incidents in France ("the Tarnac 9" - 7 released now, but
Julien C. and compagnon still in jail - the affair with the gendarmerie
and their sniffer dogs barging into secondary school classes, and earlier
instances (think Andrej Holm) a welcome opinion piece in the 'pink paper'.
(Meanwhile in France, the scandal has errupted and the government is
backtracking ... for how long?)

............................

The police, and the state, are out of control
By Philip Stephens
Monday Dec 1 2008 14:25
Financial Times, London.

The police are out of control. So is the government. We can only
conjecture as to what possessed the senior officers who raided the homes
and parliamentary office of Damian Green, the Conservative immigration
spokesman. Yet their disdain for political process spoke eloquently to the
authoritarian culture of our times.

In this respect, regardless of whether ministers played a direct role in
Mr Green's arrest, the blame rests squarely with the government. The
police must be held to account for their heavy-handed intimidation, but
ministers nurtured the climate in which such madness flourishes.

The absurdities of the incident are self-evident. A score of officers from
the Metropolitan police's "special operations directorate" barged into Mr
Green's London and constituency homes, hauled him off to the cells and
stripped his office of computers and files. The alleged offence? To have
(Continue reading)

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Patrice Riemens | 3 Dec 15:25
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Saskia Sassen: Cities and new wars: after Mumbai

The attacks on India's commercial capital belong to a global frontline of
asymmetric urban warfare, says Saskia Sassen.

Cities and new wars: after Mumbai
Saskia Sassen
29 - 11 - 2008

<http://tinyurl.com/6yr98k>

The Mumbai attacks of 26-29 November 2008 are part of an emerging type of
urban violence. These were organised, simultaneous frontal assaults with
grenades and machine-guns on ten high-profile sites in or near the central
business and tourism district

This has affinities with the asymmetric street warfare waged by the gangs
in Rio de Janeiro that every now and then announce they will take over a
major central area of the city from (say) 9am to 5pm: the result is
shuttered shops and empty streets. If the police try to respond, it is
open warfare, and the police rarely win - this is a challenge for which
the police are not trained. After 5pm the gangs withdraw. It is often said
that all of this results from inadequate policing or crime waves.

But that is too simple. There is a deeper transformation afoot. It is
still rare but it is more frequently becoming visible. It is as if the
centre no longer holds. Cities seem to be losing the capacity they have
long had to triage conflict - through commerce, through civic activity.
The national state, confronted with a similar conflict, has historically
chosen to go to war. In my new research project - on cities and war - I am
studying whether cities are losing this capacity and are becoming sites
for a range of new types of violence.
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Keith Hart | 3 Dec 14:45
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Re: Pixxelpoint 2008 - For God's Sake! Essay

Domenico,

Thanks for this brilliant and timely essay. It provoked me to dig up
something I wrote a while back:

Modern knowledge, as organized by the universities, falls into three broad
classes: the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. This
is to say that the academic division of labor in our day is concerned with
nature, society and humanity, of which the first two are thought to be
governed by objective laws, but knowledge of the last requires the exercise
of subjectivity or critical judgment. Whereas nature and society may be
known by means of impersonal disciplines, human experience is communicated
between persons, between individual artists and their audiences. Nature and
humanity are represented conventionally through science and art, but the
best way of approaching society is moot, since social science is a recent
(and, in my view, failed) attempt to bring the methods of the natural
sciences to bear on a task that previously had fallen to religion. If
science is the commitment to know the world objectively and art the means of
expressing oneself subjectively, religion was and is a bridge between
subject and object, a way of making meaningful connection between something
inside oneself and the world outside.  For a time it seemed that science had
driven religion from the government of modern societies, but the search is
on now for new forms of religion capable of reconciling scientific laws with
personal experience.

Kant's cosmopolitan moral politics offer one vision of the course such a
religious renewal might take. It is not hard to find other candidates,
notably market fundamentalism and its likely replacement, ecothink.

Beyond this, I still think that Emile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of the
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mazzetta | 3 Dec 20:57
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Re: Report on Facebook desk democracy


from BBC today

Croatia web arrests spark furore

*Croatia's prime minister has ordered an inquiry following arrests of 
several opposition activists who made plans via the social networking 
website Facebook.*

"This is not about this or that government or party, but about freedom," 
Croatian PM Ivo Sanader said.

Police in Zagreb questioned a Facebook activist who had put up posters 
ahead of an anti-government protest planned for Friday, Croatian TV 
reported.

Last week a man who had set up an anti-Sanader forum was held in Dubrovnik.

In a statement on Wednesday, Mr Sanader said he had asked Interior 
Minister Tomislav Karamarko and Police Director Vladimir Faber "to 
submit a report today on the latest events and arrests in Zagreb and 
Dubrovnik and to take appropriate steps if police did not respect 
regulations".

He said "no-one should be detained or arrested in Croatia for expressing 
different views".

In the Zagreb case, an opposition Facebook group with nearly 60,000 
members included volunteers who had downloaded posters over the 
internet, Croatian TV reported.
(Continue reading)

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Michael H Goldhaber | 4 Dec 00:49
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Re: Saskia Sassen: Cities and new wars: after Mumbai

Though I have long been an admirer of Saskia Sassen, I don't find this  
particular piece to be very well thought out. Cities by their very  
nature contain large numbers of people in close proximity and always  
have. This makes and has always made them both possible centers of  
insurrection and difficult to control or conquer from without. An  
enemy entering a city either must come close to destroying it and its  
population or is likely to face endless surprise, sabotage and  
reprisal from within. That is why, historically, enemies often  
besieged cities for years (Granada, Leningrad) in attempts to starve  
them into submission or destroyed them instead of occupying them (as  
did the Crusaders and Tamerlane) or  in advance of occupation as the  
Soviets did Berlin near the end of World War II and the US did Tokyo..  
Cities have also been frequent sites of insurrection, from the Boston  
Tea party to the Paris Commune, to the Poznan riots, to Budapest in  
'56, etc. , etc. .

One thing newish about Iraq, which Sassen cites as an example of new  
forms is that with current levels of public awareness is  it is no  
longer possible to get away with inflicting the human suffering of a  
siege or near total destruction of a great city. Also the US invaders  
paid no attention to the well-known difficulties of conquest, instead  
expecting to be met with flowers. In the first Gulf war, Bush p?re  
knew or was advised that Baghdad could not be subdued without giant  
and presumably unacceptable numbers of casualties. Bush fils would  
have none of that and plunged in.

Cities today not only have crowds that assure that large numbers can  
be killed even by a few terrorists but have media to make sure the  
terrorist attack gets noticed far more widely than would a similar  
kind of attack in some more isolated locale. The Mumbai attack was
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Saskia Sassen | 4 Dec 03:45
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Re: Saskia Sassen: Cities and new wars: after Mumbai

hi, thanks for the comments. very helpful! and here two comments that  
might help clarify.(please excuse the allthe typos. i wrote this at  
great speed becasue i wanted to get it out right aftr i read  
M.Goldhaber's comments. I agre with much of what Michael says re  
history of cities, and i accept his scepticism about my new study. it  
is a bit experimental indeed. but eachone of my porjects has entailed  
going out on a wing a bit.

1) I am mostly interested in the modern period, and specifically in  
the notion of the growth of asymmetric armed conflict and global  
warming. I wish I could deal with older histories of cities, and  
city-states. but I can't/ I am not a historian etc.. Further I am  
particularly interested in how the civic in this modern period was  
constructed  (the civic is ocnstructed differently in different  
periods and places).

We might use public infrastructures and the welfare state as a standin  
for hta fuzzy concept "the civic." A working public health or  
transport system has to override the little and bid differences that  
feed racisms, intolerances etc. So it can be a sort of model. My  
question then is: does that stil work todya?  and my second question  
is: are there challenges today that are larger than our differences   
of religion, race, and the hatreds these can produce. (For instance,   
global warming will hit coastal cities hard and if we are going to be  
serious about reducing the damage, we wil have to work at it together,  
no matter our differences; or, a kind of denationalized culture we see  
emerge in larger cities is allowing young people to experience life  
and their surroundings in far less racializing and gednered ways than  
older generations. this may not be  amajority culture, but it is an  
emergent powerful trend.
(Continue reading)

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t byfield | 4 Dec 08:16
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Re: Saskia Sassen: Cities and new wars: after Mumbai

Interesting.

It isn't hard to see how and why it's tempting to hypostatize concepts 
like "war" and "city," but it'd be wise to treat each one skeptically,
and even more so in relation to each other. And one needn't reach very
far back in history at all to come up with absolute contrasts. These 
contrasts have many origins: the actual and theorized relationships 
between cities and their surroundings, the need for invading forces to
establish strongholds close enough to support command and logistics
needs, the various technical capacities of forces in conflict (of which 
there are, as often as not, many), styles of warfare that are much more 
complex than the simplistic dichotomy of a/symmetrical warfare, efforts 
to manipulate media (regional, global, sympathetic, etc), and so on.

Take, for example, the Vietnam War. Films of American bombers dropping
bombs in pairs seemingly at random across the Viet countryside have 
become a generic symbol of a futile effort to "bomb them back into the
stone age" or "turn the country into a parking lot" -- two strikingly
different historical vectors, yes? But this bombing wasn't random in 
some euphemistic sense of the term akin to "random violence," rather, 
it was *systematically random*: the purpose of this approach to bombing,
which left deep craters, was to disrupt rural water tables and thereby 
drain rice paddies. This, in conjunction with chemical warfare (Agent 
Orange is well-known, Agent Blue, Agent White and others less so) and 
armored bulldozers formed the doctrine of "Landscape Management": an 
effort to deny the Viet Cong any and every form of cover -- physical, 
social, nutritional -- *in order to urbanize them*. (If you're doing 
serious research on this, I recommend reading the pithy works of Viet 
strategists, like Vo Nguyen Giap's _People's War Against U.S. Aeronaval 
War_, which the Viets, being communists, thoughtfully translated into
(Continue reading)

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