nasty, brutish and short

Building off of a long tradition of social contracts and utilitarianism, philosopher John Rawls developed his original position hypothesis as a thought experiment in order to temper our thinking towards discourse and a way from a savage state of nature as the impetus for the polis and social conventions, introducing the heuristic tool of a “veil of ignorance” in order to gauge the morality and empathy of policy decisions.
Perhaps we do slide into anarchy but order and concord are not the consequence of chaos necessarily. Politicians and decision-makers, donning this veil, become blind to their place in the hierarchy and don’t know if they will fall into the category of haves or have-nots, until the veil is lifted, and would in theory make equitable decisions that maximises welfare for all, regardless of where they fall on the spectrum. One can immediately appreciate the urgency of justice and equanimity should one be weighing decisions with the insight of ignorance that disfavours or privileges the rights of the enslaved over slave-owners and vice versa.

throw-away society

Via Boing Boing, we learn that Collins Dictionary—edging out other runners-up including the complimentary plogging—has selected single-use as their word of the year (“WotY”), noting a four-fold increase in the frequency of the term applied to consumable, disposable products, usually plastic, whose unchecked proliferation are wrecking ecosystems and working their way up the food-chain since 2013. Hopefully that increase in print correlates with an increased public understanding and acknowledgement of how we’re rubbishing the planet. Stay tuned for more lexical superlatives as they are announced.

turizam

Rummaging through the archives—which is an always advisable activity—Things Magazine directs our attention to the Haludovo Palace hotel, an abandoned resort on the island of Krk. This swank, swinging Penthouse Adriatic Club casino was built in 1971 with the investment of the adult magazine founder Bob Guccione and maintained by a Yugoslav holding-company due to restrictions on foreign-ownership in the country. The magnate saw an opportunity to create a new, untrammelled playground for the jet-set but attendance was precipitously lower than expected and the venture went bankrupt the next year.
During the ethnic conflicts and wars for independence with the dissolution of the state, the hotel became a refugee camp and subsequently went through many owners until being fully left to wrack and ruin in 2001. Just last month, there was an announcement that a private investor would restore and revitalise the resort (samo na hrvatskom jeziku) which has a whole fresh set of comparison pictures from then and now.

der bürgerbräu-putsch

Inspired by Benito Mussolini’s successful March on Rome of October of the previous year, on this night in 1923 Adolf Hitler, former quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff and members of the Kampfbund (a patriotic, rather revanchistic society crafted by Hitler a month prior in Nuremberg) and a sizable paramilitary detachment (Sturmabteilung) massed at the Bürgerbräukeller, a vast drinking hall in Munich where the state commissioner and ombudsman of the Weimar Republic was addressing an assembly of some three thousand.
After witnessing the rabid ferocity that the disaffected veterans could summon from the crowd, the same commissar had banned the Kampfbund from organising such assemblies by reason of public menace and in response, Hitler commandeered the platform and took the entire crowd hostage with machine guns, proclaiming a coup d’état. Having felt he won the sympathy of the captive audience, the plotters were emboldened and advanced to capture government ministries and ransom members of the city council. Their progress was thwarted by the state police and many participants were arrested on the following day. Hitler had been delivered to the countryside where he managed to allude authorities for two days until he was captured, jailed and stood trial in a broadly publicised case of sedition along with fellow co-conspirators. His subsequent prison sentence—after capitalising on media coverage of his trial—gave Hitler the forum to radicalise others to his cause and develop a strategy of propaganda as a path to power, rather than violent insurrection.