I can remember driving around the countryside in the mid-nineties, long before the days of content-on-demand and in a region whose FM stations did not match my tastes in music exactly with a lot of Country-Western and white-people Gospel, and discovering the wilds of AM radio, who devoted swaths of the programming-day to conservative then liberal tirades—sometimes confusing liberal with libertine.
I found it formative to be exposed to all sorts of alternative points of view—that sometimes retreated to conspiracy-mongering. Everything was open to dissent, however, and like a canon of nostalgic music to draw on, I wondered really what it means nowadays to have entertainment on demand for material that one has not been exposed to before—since we are getting worse, I think, at being very original or anything but derivative. Regardless of how dogmatic or admitting of disagreement these shows really were, I do remember how they characterised the opposition, especially avid followers of one figure in particular—as Ditto Heads. That seemed particularly fitting, and though of course the phenomena still exists, that term has fallen out of favour—because, perhaps, that's what the Medium (another term those shows used for the monolithic main-stream) has become, a media-echo of re-blogging and without much endurance to keep up a rally and when there's only flitting narcissism and everything true becomes a nice back-drop to frame it in.
Sunday 3 August 2014
idem or a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido
catagories: ๐ถ, ๐ง , networking and blogging, revolution
trip-wire
Just after Israel asserted its independence from American hand-wringing and revealing itself as not another fawning lap-dog, telling the US never to second-guess its handling of security—an internal affair—again, it has been revealed that the intelligence apparatus of Israel closely monitored the communications and negotiations between the US foreign minister as he tried to help broker last year a peace settlement between Palestine and Israel, soliciting support from various regional players.
Of course, the US has gotten many bitter tastes of its own medicine, polling parties for willingness to cooperate with their policies and corporate dictates—or knowing the price of success and how cheaply others may be bought, or whether, by this intelligence algorithm, other measures will have to be introduced. Toppling tragedy could only follow, because naturally any such enlightened, knowing how political sentiment will bear out, that materiel-support will continue, and timing aggressions when America is too overcome by other events, would choose such a moment to prosecute its aims.
catagories: ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, ๐ฅธ, foreign policy
arm-chair coaching or ARG:GER
Saturday 2 August 2014
francofollies
kettling
Laughing Squid shares the opening of a special, long-running exhibit in the Victoria and Albert Museum on the history of so called Disobedient Objects, providing a virtual tour that includes instructions on how to make (hack) ones own gear of resistance, a bit ironic (or appeasing) for Her Majesty's Constabulary. The special-showing addresses social movements, protests and uprising through the artefacts of shanks, propaganda, personal protective equipment and other make-shift items from all over the world.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, labour, lifestyle, revolution
insatsu bunka
Friday 1 August 2014
croatia week: linguistic landmark
The written word, however, did not succeed in standising the Croatian language. Today, a Latin system of writing is employed, devised by Ljudevit Gaj who based his script off of the special letter forms and diacritical marks invented for Czech and Polish, and the language has, bolstered by national and literary identity, taken on a lexical standard, though much mutual-intelligibility is retained among neighbouring languages and dialects. I tried to learn a little bit and I think it accorded us some special attention for the effort, and would like to pick up some more for a return visit. Aside from the usually pleasantries and politely saying I want something, I remember the fun word for waterfall—Slap—and the term for feedback (Fragenbogen)—Upitnik, which sounds like something one would not want to solicit, being all up in another’s business.