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.
La jouissance du pouvoir
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Now Some Old News
I stumbled upon the web log of an author Richard Webster (who's written books such as A Brief History of Blasphemy, and Why Freud Was Wrong—no, I haven't read any of them). In a blog entry from half a year ago, he mentions that last year or so (even further back in time!) he was browsing through newspaper style guides for notes on capitalisation that he would adopt in his own book. In a style guide of the Guardian, he had found:
Mr, Ms, Mrs, Miss
use after first mention on news and comment (but not sport) pages, unless you are writing about an artist, author, journalist, musician, criminal or dead person; defendants keep their honorifics unless they are convicted.
Mr. Webster (heh) then goes on to say: I still haven't grasped what it is about artists, authors and journalists which seems to put them on a level with those who are dead. But it was the final phrase that I found most stark and most disturbing…
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.
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.