pernickety
rebuff

watch number 17 obey my extra-sensory perceptions
he grinned wolfishly
perfunctory
parabola
forlornness

good heavens vesper, you look absolutely splendid, you must thrive on disaster
quizzically

russia - for them it was always safer to advance then to retreat

Fate rebuked him with terrifying swiftness
- Ian Fleming, Casino Royale

"Never stand when you can sit, never sit when you can lie down."

- Winston Churchill

Are you prepared for the void?

- Magus, Chrono Trigger

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 

- Ulysses, Lord Alfred Tennyson

борітеся - поборете, Вам бог помагає

 Boritesia - Poborete, Vam Boh pomahaie! Za vas pravda, za vas syla I volia sviataia!

In the middle of the journey of our life

I found myself astray in a dark wood

where the straight road had been lost.

- Dante

Struggle, and ye shall overcome the foe:

For God shall succor you in battle's throe;

His strength is on your side, and freedom stands

With justice on the threshold of your lands!

- Taras Shevchenko

Whos the show for? Why is international diplomacy so pussy?

social cmapaigns, obama china
china dissidents

This will be more of an angry rant than a critical insight into anything really. For the love of God, why is international diplomacy and relations so boring? Why are countries that are obviously being exploited fail to articulate their frustrations? Why doesn't Haiti just say, publicly: "United States, please leave us the fuck alone!". Every body know US us exploiting Haiti, Haiti knows it, Canada knows it and participates in it along with France, so why is it so boring?

Aren't you tired of the news? It seems to be the same thing over and over, polite statements being exchanged but nothing really ever comes to fruition. Some countries do speak out but then are immediately shunned by the international community or declared conspiracy theorist, rouge regimes or the like. This was clearly the case with Che and his talks at the UN. His ideologies and methods aside, Che had a very strong and most importantly accurate point. US was and still acts as an Imperial power in the Northern hemisphere and abroad. Yet no one took him seriously. Why is this? Doesn't this ultimately damage the discourse and debate around key international issues. By narrowing them down to polite acknowledgements and exchanges limits the developments of countries themselves.

Is this really because we have evolved in to a civilized international community or are countries just afraid to speak out?

public opinion

What goes into a term? Unpacking Nazi Germany

Upon attending class in Germany, someone threw out the term Nazi Germany during our discussions. Obviously I heard this term before but for some reason this time was so interesting to me that I had a dozen questions for it. Why do we refer to Germany during WWII as Nazi Germany? There doesn't seem any real reason for it apart from its descriptive properties as being under the Nazi regime, but even then why Nazi? If we are referring to a period in time we can just as easily call it WWII Germany, Hitler's Germany, Third Reich Germany etc. Furthermore I;m sure that German's during the war did not cal themselves Nazi Germans, they called themselves Germans. Why specifically do we identify it with its ideological prescription? We should first try to unpack this term because it is so loaded its just crazy.

So much goes into this term that it is staggering and I have a feeling a very good paper can be written about it. First lets look at its spatial qualities and for me most interesting quality. Nazi Germany not only refers to a time in the past, defined by its ideology, but also very clearly a break from it. The term it self implies a break in German identity from the Nazi past and "normal' present. For if it did not there would not be a need to distinguish on such a basis. Then indeed one would be able to identify Germany on a historic basis as WWII Germany. However, this is interesting because defining Germany in such a was signals a deliberate break that must be made between its past and present. This deliberate juxtaposition is made between the self and other on a spatial level. But this also contains a lot historic and ideological conitation as well - this is unseprable

How to think about international relations

Intro

There are a lot of angles and ways of conceptualizing international relations, how and why states behave the way they do with each other. To say that one is more correct than the other carries the possibility of one omitting and or ignoring or just plainly overlooking a point that is essential to this analysis. Because there is no golden bullet for this question we must consider it holistically - as best we can and built from bottom up our understanding and conceptualization of what states are and how they interact. For the sake of this particular post we will concentrate on the international arena, and visit the idea of states in a second posting, revisiting the concepts we discuss today.

The international arena

First thing first, we must start in the situation that states find themselves in. Ground zero of any states development and analysis must begin at its geographic core. Geography is the cards the state has been dealt. It dictates foreign and internal policy, trade, economic development and cultural and ethnic rifts and traditions. Geography is the hand the state has been dealt. The state in this sens must be understood in its basic form of monopoly of power over a certain predefined geographic region.

It is at geography that we find the conditions and the opportunities for our state to develop. We will revisit geography throughout our development to see how it influences the state. 

The modern notion of a 3D chess board that explains international relations would be our second step in development although a little modified. The 3D chess board purports to explain international relations on 3 different levels. Imagine a chessboard, and below it there are two more signifying the tools the state has at its disposal in the international arena. The first level is military strength. The state can exercise its power through military might. In today's world the United States is unmatched in its military might. The second board signifies economic strength. The country can choose to exert its strength to exports, tariffs, bartering etc. On this level the modern world is more populated with Europe and China amongst others competing strongly with the US. The third floor is diplomatic strength, or soft power. This floor is by far the most populated and is exercised through multinational institutions, diplomatic missions, etc. However, there is also a fourth floor and this is the information front. Bluntly put its the control of and the ability to influence others through information. Propaganda. An example of this is the disillusioned German public that could not understand why it lost WW1 after being led to believe by their own state that they were wining all along. This chessboard ultimately combines most major theories into a holistic package. Realism which rests so heavily on military strength, Liberalism which rests on economic integration wind up in this chess board. The extent to which a country is able to implement any of these tools, largely depends on its geography. A large country with little arable land cannot sustain a large population required for trade and military. Your placement on the world map can alter your direction as well as your neighbors come into focus - which is what we will look at next.

Clients vs Service Providers or Subjects vs Objects

A state can be one of the two. It is either a seller to smaller less powerful states, or a client of a larger and more powerful state. Because all countries engage in both of these activities there is no clear line to distinguish the two. All countries are really both. But there is an underlying tendency and movement that udnerpins the states real status in the world. Ukraine is a client country of Russia, through gas contracts, geopolitical tensions, and economic trade. Russia can ecxerciseamount of power over Ukraine over multiple levels of our 3D chess board. In this sense Ukraine is an object and not a subject of its own affairs. The world is alrgley broken up between these two types with varying degrees of coutries raning from complete clients to compleley selfsustaining sellers - but most are a complicated mix in the middle.

If all elements are present the duty follows.

To be continued...

Sales People Keep Our System Going

Over the weekend I came across an interesting thought experiment with my friends. It started out with a simple claim; that some jobs are surely higher in their value than others. A doctor, for instance, is much more valuable to society than a garbage man is. For reasons I'm not sure of (perhaps I just really wanted to argue with some one) I chose to challenge this claim, backing the complete polar opposite in arguing that no, every job in a society must be as equally important as any other. I had simple reasoning for this. Every job performs a certain function of a society.  This does not assume that societies must be inherently efficient, waste can and does occur, but because every job performs a certain function for a society, and because every job performs a different task from each other (otherwise there would be no need to distinguish between or invent different jobs) every job must be indispensable to that society until that time when the function that job was aimed at to perform is no longer required. And because every job is aimed at fulfilling a required function of the society every function must be treated as an equal one and hence as equally important. But I can hear you saying are not some functions more important than others? Surely a president is a much more important job than that of a garbage man. The answer is no. The important thing to distinguish between the two jobs is the value of their functions on the one hand and their ability and speed to influence their society on the other. In this way we are able to isolate value from power of their professions merely by acknowledged that value should not be treated in this situation as a holistic and ambiguous measurement tool, but rather value is the importance of a given career to the survival (or rather reproduction and continuation) of that society (and its identity).

Internet and politics

Diasporas and why they cant assimilate: why multiculturalism cannot actually work

Lets Start with this quote. What Fukuyama describes and assumes is that the world is divided into two parts. The unchallenged liberal democracies of the west, and the rest of the world - inferior in ideology. If we assume this argument we must then assume and construct in juxtaposition liberalism vs the rest of the world - the rest of the world ideologies - whatever they might be for we cannot limit or attempt to define them because there are too many that we know of and that we do not know of and we could not do so objectively without running into problems. So what our world looks like is something like this:

If we talk about globalization, and the Rest moving into the West then what we are essentially talking about, including immigrants and migrants, is the third world crossing not only geographical boundaries but also ideological ones when they move. This crossing of an ideological border is the essential part that we must pay special attention to. Here I mean ideology in its broadest sense; and invisible and institutionalized frame work which guides individuals choices and and lives.

Because we already said that we cannot not possibly know all of other ideologies that might exist outside of liberalism means that we cannot analyze them properly which means we must concentrate on liberalism. This is where the above quote comes in. What Weber is saying about Fukuyama's arguments is that liberalism at its most basic level can be reduced to its promise to the individuals of unbound freedom. In other words liberalism promises everything to the individual without actually being able to satisfy them. Having realized this individuals attempt to over come this problem with economic consumption - however they obviously cannot. Thus, we are then stuck in an endless cycle of deference through economic consumption. 

So what does this mean for immigrants? and why does this mean they can never truly assimilate? Given the above quote it becomes very simple. Immigrants cannot assimilate into their host countries because ultimately they cannot shed their past experiences with their home ideologies and adopt the new ones of liberalism. They are able to try and do their best, but they cannot completely erase their minds of past ideologies and adopt liberal policies of endless deterrence. For what it means then to fit into the western world is not so much cultural or historical differences but ideological ones. If one adopts this or is active in this policy of eternal deterrence then one is ideologically liberal and western. This can be best seen with 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants - who are much more westernized then their parents could ever be. But this present us with a problem. 

Immigrants who come to western world from third world countries find them selves in trouble because they cannot get used to and adopt to this liberal system. What this means is that they ultimately don't belong to the liberal system even thought they try and find themselves in it. What we have then is something like this:

Individuals immigrate from "Rest of the world" to "liberalism" crossing the first juxtaposition which divides them. However after their failure to adopt and assimilate into liberal society they are then found in the realm of liberalism, but never at its center. In this way this creates a second point of tensions. Some immigrants after going through this experience might feel that they do not belong and wish to go home however here too we find a similar problem. Immigrants that have experienced liberal ideology cannot assimilate back into their home country because they have come in contact with liberal system which have in turn altered their own ideology. They are no longer the pure version of themselves prior to their migration. As a result we now have the same group of migrants not quite belonging to their home country any more either and something which looks like this:

This is where it gets interesting, because we have a group of people, who do not have a fixed identity and ultimately cannot identify with either home or host country. This group then - contrary to our graph so far - doe not exist in the realm of liberalism of the Rest, but instead in a third realm in between then 2nd and 3rd point of tensions. Because it does not fit in either it must exist between them. And because it does not belong to either this group experiences true exile - the inability to find a fixed point on either side. This group exists between two world belong to neither. This is why - if one extends Fukuyama's theory into the Diasporic realm - immigrants and diasporas cannot assimilate into society. This is why diasporas make up strong origin myths and why current multicultural policies cannot accommodate for differences in ideologies.

Geopolitics of the United States

A very great read that talks about the US, and its developments in terms of its geography from Stratfor.

Source: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Reason-Famous-Synths/415556578494959

Like nearly all of the peoples of North and South America, most Americans are not originally from the territory that became the United States. They are a diverse collection of peoples primarily from a dozen different Western European states, mixed in with smaller groups from a hundred more. All of the New World entities struggled to carve a modern nation and state out of the American continents. Brazil is an excellent case of how that struggle can be a difficult one. The United States falls on the opposite end of the spectrum.

The American geography is an impressive one. The Greater Mississippi Basin together with the Intracoastal Waterway has more kilometers of navigable internal waterways than the rest of the world combined. The American Midwest is both overlaid by this waterway and is the world's largest contiguous piece of farmland. The U.S. Atlantic Coast possesses more major ports than the rest of the Western Hemisphere combined. Two vast oceans insulated the United States from Asian and European powers, deserts separate the United States from Mexico to the south, while lakes and forests separate the population centers in Canada from those in the United States. The United States has capital, food surpluses and physical insulation in excess of every other country in the world by an exceedingly large margin. So like the Turks, the Americans are not important because of who they are, but because of where they live.

The North American Core

North America is a triangle-shaped continent centered in the temperate portions of the Northern Hemisphere. It is of sufficient size that its northern reaches are fully Arctic and its southern reaches are fully tropical. Predominant wind currents carry moisture from west to east across the continent.

Climatically, the continent consists of a series of wide north-south precipitation bands largely shaped by the landmass' longitudinal topography. The Rocky Mountains dominate the Western third of the northern and central parts of North America, generating a rain-shadow effect just east of the mountain range -- an area known colloquially as the Great Plains. Farther east of this semiarid region are the well-watered plains of the prairie provinces of Canada and the American Midwest. This zone comprises both the most productive and the largest contiguous acreage of arable land on the planet.

East of this premier arable zone lies a second mountain chain known as the Appalachians. While this chain is far lower and thinner than the Rockies, it still constitutes a notable barrier to movement and economic development. However, the lower elevation of the mountains combined with the wide coastal plain of the East Coast does not result in the rain-shadow effect of the Great Plains. Consequently, the coastal plain of the East Coast is well-watered throughout.

Capitalism With A Socialist Face

This is a post my friend made to a blog which I found very interesting, let me first break down the argument: the claim was that capitalism is better then socialism on the basis that socialism unfairly rewards individuals that are not exceptional or working as hard as others. This is the response:

talking about capitalism vs socialism i hate how students always dismiss it immediately, you talk about it in too abstract of terms. Have you been to Scandinavian countries? where in Denmark there exists the lowest gap between the rich and the poor, where in Norway the biggest problem is the state having too much money (literally), and the happiness index being the highest in the world.so I have to ask, this is bad? to me this socialism doesn't seem so crazy, compared to where in the US the gap between the rich and the poor is larger than that in India! your problem is that you talk about rewards for being exceptional but you exaggerated this claim so greatly, there's is a difference between the state providing a basic living standard for all of its citizens and giving them a free ferrari. Lets take Denmark - for all intensive purposes its still a capitalist state with a consumer based economy the only difference is its state has an advanced welfare program - every one still gets rewarded for what they do and what skills they poses. for instance we all go to school in canada so we can find a good job that can guarantee us a good income - i dont care who are if your the exception to the rule but most people in north america go to uni to get a degree - this is not so in denmark. because of taxes and the low gap between the rich and the poor - the pressure for people to land a high paying job JUST for the money is much lower and this gives them a sort of freedom to pursue studies which they are ACTUALLY passionate about - sorry but i have never met anyone who passionately wanted to be an accountant since they were a child. a journalist which is a low paying and dying job in NA is a high paying and incredibly respectable job in Denmark. So, so far we established that ppl do get reward for exceptional skills, so again i have to ask what is so bad about this? if you want to be so critical you can say that this is not socialism but capitalism with a socialist face - which probably is as close as we will get to it. and on the environmental argument - i have to disagree too, it might not be the sole factor for success but its a major one, just look at school in toronto in "good" areas and "bad" ones and compare their post secondary rates - because if you talk about Foucault and defining in juxtapositions you simply cant ignore environment - otherwise you should have mentioned them. Lastly i do think capitalism is the best sys we had of the ones we tried - but this capitalism with a socialist face is by far better.

Tell me what you guys think about this it would be a great debate, I am thinking of later updating this thread with questions from Qoura.  

internet isolation vs economic?

realist
libs
critical



online vs offline

revolution will be degitized

situationin the future will be very dynamic

these isue lend the event a sort of coloring

lend a particular coloring to these issue or five diaspoiras
prototypical

right now thep roblem only seems to be in the peripheral

when your in the throes of a story
no magic bullet to kill all enemies

Slavoj Zizek On The World Tomorrow

Slavoj Zizek recently appeared on Julian Assange's "The World Tomorrow". This was a pretty mediocre episode and completely polluted by David Horowitz. However in the brief moments that Horowitz lets him speak, Zizek brings up some interesting points. Mostly how US's hegemony had deteriorated during the two terms of its last presidency. That it lost its hold in Latin America, Middle East and pretty much the rest of the world - and that its hegemony would not be coming back. Which leaves us with a power vacuum for new countries to fill. In the future it will not be a uni polar world anymore, that ship has sailed. Most obvious new power include China, India and Brazil -the rest of the BRICS countries - Russia and South Africa - are far behind the leading three and should not yet be considered. But where their new gained power becomes critical is in their ability to break away from Western dominated globalization and institutions. There has been some talk for the creation of a joint bank between the BRICS countries.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia/2012/03/2012328121225841826.html

Such a bank would directly challenge the World Bank which is a western dominated institution, and decrease reliance of the Global South on Western aid and loans by providing an alternative. This is where the real danger lies. The movement of power away from the Western World to the developing one. It is not a mere movements of power within the western borders - as it has often been historically, but completely outside of it. Are we prepared in the western world to live outside our comfort zone, dominated by powers which are not ours?

Two Worlds: The Digital Divide And Our Expectations

It seems to me that we currently live in a state of two worlds where our expectations, morals and judgement diverge to opposite poles. The first is the tangible and material real world where we expect justice, safety, some form of well-fare, regulation and accountability from the state. The second is the online world. Here our expectations could not be more different. As Eric Schmidt observed pointed out, our digital world must be free from any interference from the government - access to it must ubiquitous and fast, and completely unregulated in so far is it cannot be dominated by one single entity. This is what we expect and demand, the existence of a free space outside of society where one can escape to with out the interference with the state. It is the ultimate supranational institution that cannot be dominated by one party. I encourage you to watch one of Eric Schmidt's  speeches to get a grasp of these ideas.

This is what we expect in the West - which is a Western idea. However once we start to look at how governments approach this issue we start to see that western governments are more active in censorship and regulation of the internet than closed societies. One of the reason for this could be low penetration rates in underdeveloped countries but this is not always trues as in the case of China and Iran. Another reason could be far from political but more of an economic nature, such as intellectual property as in the case of the FBI's seizure of Megaupload. I also would encourage you to watch Megaupload's owner first interview after his arrest for some insight. 

Click here for video and transcript.

Google has released a very helpful tool for us to use to measure this phenomenon that showcases the number of take down requests Google receives from each country that it operates in - or pretty much the whole world. I will post the link below but what is of most interests is that the beacon of western liberty (yes I am aware of how ridiculous this sounds but non the less) - the United States ranks at the very top. So what does this mean? Let us consider what governments might when they weigh the benefits vs the costs that come along with internet.

Google Transparency Report Link

Looking at the map above, why is it that open and democratic governments are more prone to censorship and take down requests? One factor that one must recognize is that Google's service isn't entirely accurate - for instance in the case of China the data is misrepresented because Google does not operate in China - it operates in Hong Kong, and so the Chinese government is misrepresented and in reality we actually do not know how much take down requests happen or how the logistics of the matter work. This doesn't take away from our claims however, instead we can ask why are there so many requests in Western countries?

Since the Cold War US has almost exclusively conducted its foreign policy on the basis of realists ideals. These ideals argue that the world is in a state of conflict between states - or international anarchy. Its worth pointing out that anarchy does not suggest chaos but instead the absence of a governing body - in international relations there is no world government or any other such institution  that exists that polices the world .This conflict never disappears but all states must look out for their self interests first and seek to grow their power relative to other states in order to secure them selves from potential aggressors. In this sense power is only important in terms of relative power between the self and other states and foreign policy, international institutions and treaties and diplomacy are only as important as they allow the state to secure more power.

Regulation of the internet can then be seen as a means to retain or seek further power for sovereign states. A states can use its power to use internet as a political tool to achieve its goals internationally such as the promotion and encouragement of propaganda on the ground in transitioning or unstable states. This argument has been made towards social media and protests during the Arab Spring, speculating that some movements were heavily supported and escalated by Western governments. Furthermore, tight control of this information channel can spread a state's own agenda to other areas without physically infiltrating them. There have been reports of the US developing its own mobile internet beacon which would provides access to the internet from anywhere in the world in a device the size of a suitcase - rightfully called "internet in a suitcase."

NY Times Article Link

This would easily combat a state's attempts at controlling or shutting down the internet - making any state's interfere useless. In this case China would not be able to properly regulate its internet and Iran would not be able to implement its own future internal internet network which is cut off from the rest world.

In this sense it would be in the state's best interest to control their own domestic internet because a strong hold on internet at home can provide a strong reach to the rest of the world. Of course this is a complex issue and more than one explanation and scenarios arise. In my next blog I will talk about liberal and critical perspectives and what they mean for international relations and the future of our physical and digital worlds. After which I would like to start the debate between the effects of economic vs digital isolation.

The World of the Future: What is the problem today?

Internet is changing everything. The worlds collective knowledge - nay humanities collective  knowledge since almost the beginning of time - is available to every one at their finger tips - any time. More information is being produced in 2 days on the internet than in the whole history of human kind. This is absolutely mind blowing and exhilarating. Everything is changing at such a rapid pace - so why shouldn't politics as well? In this blogging series I want to tackle and concentrate on the issues facing the world today and ways that they might pan out while paying special attention to the information revolution and its influence on the field.  This is interesting for several reasons that I will tackle and explore throughout this series but here is a basic run down - which is most definitely to grow.

                “Every two days we create as much information as we did up to 2003”

                                                                        -Eric Schmidt – 2008 (this is old news).

“60 hours of video are uploaded every minute, or one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second.”

                                                                -YouTube Press Blog, 2012.

First - and quite obviously - access to information is available to everyone now - this shifts the whole social hierarchy upside down. There is no more privileged few who know something that you don't - no intellectual elite with a hold over information - it is available to everyone. However inequalities of course do not disappear and even in this new class of actively informed citizens new divides arise - between the ultra-connected and those of primitive connection. This can most clearly be seen between the super-fast networks and extremely high internet penetration rates of Scandinavians and the newly connecting third-world developing countries. The gap between speeds and access to the internet is great - but in no way does it belittle the importance of connectivity.

Secondly - in a very brief and oversimplified account of Marx's distribution of labor - means of productions begin to shift from the bourgeois elite to the proletarians - I will discuss this further in the future but I believe that information technologies is the key and most likely the closest utility available that can ever accomplish or seek to deliver what Marx envisioned without the radical revolutions he described. The distinction between the owners of production and the producers do not disappear but their relations change greatly. Owners of production have less control over their producers on the internet. EG, Google has no hold over its users they come as they please and it is incredibly easy for them to change search engines which are only a mouse click away. On the flip side users have such powerful publishing tools which are now considered ubiquitous and which are mostly free – because producers try to attract users to use their means of production – that the line between them starts to blur. Overall there is much to be said about economics and the internet.

Third - we must of course tackle the issue of the liberalized world order and Fukuyama's End of History that the world has so eagerly accepted. More specifically we must see how the emptiness of liberalism plays out in our real world and what this means for our future.

& we can go on and on and on there is just a myriad of issues out there. But what is the problem with the world today? The problem is that there is no outlets that seek to combine theory with social media and information technologies - which just so happens to be the aim of this blogger.

There are just so many interesting issues popping up all over the place - Wikileeks, anonymous, China's propaganda centers, online polls which ask citizens which government websites they want to see taken down, social movements and dissent utilities, "balkanisation" of the internet, complete isolation and control, creation and recreation of the internet such as in Iran, Obama’s Google+ page being flooded with Chinese citizen's pleas for democracy, and the most charming and loveable rants of the rock star political science philosopher Slavoj Zizek makes this the most existing time to live in. What will the world look like the years to come? Let’s try to find out!