Boycott Christmas—End Compulsory Consumption
Now these guys know how do design slogans. Welcome to The Christmas Resistance Movement. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, five-star hotels seem to be bent on celebrating Christmas safely, which is why they arm Santas with metal detectors, with machine-gun-wielding policemen standing by.
Toegristle studios, the author of the digital image mutation blog, has launched a new website for collaborative image creation—kollabor8. The idea behind kollabor8 is very simple. Johannes Grenzfurthner over at monochom writes: Register, download an image, add to it, then re-upload. [kollabor8 is] the online successor to mail art, exquisite corpse, or Rauschenberg's ROCI.
The image shown is from the kollabor8 website. The story was found via monochrom.
More on The World
Victor S, in his commentary on the events in Uzbekistan, paraphrases a recent article by a Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid:
Rashid also notes that when Karimov, petrified of a domestic people power revolution on the Georgian model, cracked down on N.G.O.s, in particular George Soros’ Open Society Institute, the U.S. and U.K. said nothing. This suggests that, far from being any co-ordinated effort on the part of the American government, [O.S.I.’s] ‘democracy promotion’ is as haphazard an affair as any other government programme.
According to many sources, Soros’ Open Society Institute played an important role in the collapses of repressive goverments that struck Post-Soviet space over the last few years. The original article, as well as the photo of Karimov and Bush shaking hands, appeared in the Prague-based Transitions Online.
What do you put on the Internet?
Since the reason why people put personal information on the internet has always amused me as not really being that reason, I’m glad I came across this alternative explanation by monochrom: How does the Internet work?
The World
- Magnum Photos on Kyrgyz Revolution
- Wikipedia article on same subject
According to the Magnum memo, the student movement behind the events in Bishkek was called KEREK (Kyrg. “away”). If the memo is correct, this becomes a sixth such movement in the post-Soviet space after OTPOR (Serbian for “resistance”), MJAFT (Albanian for “enough”), KMARA (Ossetian for “enough”), PORA (Ukrainian for “it's time”), and ZUBR (Belorussian word for a species of bison). KEREK is not to be confused with the language Kerek (which is spoken only by two people somewhere in Chukotka and is a whole different thing altogether ;) Notably, all of those movements except KEREK have or have had very informative internet sites.