How much like the prelude to WWI is the last two years of diplomacy and war around Ukraine? With Bosnia == Ukraine, treaties that oblige the “great powers” to leap to each other’s defense, shuttle diplomacy amongst them to decide how and when to escalate, Germany flicking the US’ nose over Mexico … I am feeling less than optimistic on this, the inaugural day of the Buffoon.
Author Archives: Robert Marsanyi
From the days of techno-optimism
www.technoccult.net/wp-content/uploads/library/headmap-manifesto.pdf
turning the pessimism of the AR vision on its head.
Trump wins, the wishes of American people are clear. Germany and Austria next.
See “Wow”
Nietsche says:
If two people are going to get married, they ought above all to be able to talk well to one another. Because everything else disappears.
China as a model
https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/08/13/china-as-a-model/index.html
Long read, but counterintuitive and worth it.
Wow
Oh, right
Legal analyst Keith Boykin listed the many excuses and arguments Trump enablers have made over the years. “He can’t be prosecuted in office,” Boykin wrote. “He can’t be impeached because the courts should decide. He’s immune from prosecution after office. He can’t be prosecuted by Biden’s DOJ because that’s ‘lawfare.’ And he can’t be prosecuted by a special counsel. We have created a dictator.”
Israel
I heard this Israeli citizen on the radio this morning. She had lost an aunt and uncle to Hamas. She said she was okay with using humanitarian aid as a “card” in the war and that withdrawal of aid might impose “just enough suffering to make the Palestinians reject Hamas”.
What aspect of the experience of the Jews in the last several thousand years could possibly make her think this? A culture that’s been persecuted for thousands of years by the larger societies within which they’ve been embedded, and that has not lost its essential jewishness. In fact, Judaism has been strengthened by persecution.
The absolute inhumanity of what she was saying infuriating
Here comes the Muybridge camera moment but for text. Photoshop too
https://interconnected.org/home/2024/05/31/camera
Mind-blowing speculation
Dave Winer laments the forgetting of COVID victims
Scripting News: Monday, April 8, 2024
— Read on scripting.com/2024/04/08.html
In London last year we went for a walk on the south bank of Thames. A good part of that walk in the most touristy section between two of the bridges is devoted to a wall of remembrance for victims of COVID; names, with stenciled hearts. Many of the stencils had hand painted links to adjacent hearts representing related family members who had died.
The scale of the exhibit, probably over a mile long, counterposed with the tiny size of each painted heart and name, is very moving. It led me to wonder if there were something similar here in the US; I couldn’t recall hearing about such a thing. I determined to make a local wall for Whidbey Island. But of course I forgot about it, until I read Dave’s comment.