Sixty-eight per cent of Italians, want to see all of the country’s 150,000 Gypsies, many of them Italian citizens, expelled, according to an opinion poll. Lega Nord (Northern league) plans an autonomous Northern Italy. And Naples is turning into something close to Mad Max.
When Time, the magazine writes on Future Revolutions, bringing up issues like common wealth, geoengineering, and reverersed radicalism as ideas that will change the world you somehow feel that “ok, science fiction and even Utopia is slowly becoming mainstream.” But actually there are some very interesting thoughts presented here, of which some remind very much of Buckminster Fullers ideas of a spaceship earth while others offer new insights on communities. In a chapter on reverersed radicalism the Zamira Loebis/Jakarta reports: that “experts have now begun to ask, is, Why do people leave terrorist groups? John Horgan, a Penn State psychologist, has interviewed 28 former terrorists. His subjects have spanned 13 organizations, including five Islamic extremist groups. The men have told him strikingly similar stories of disenchantment. “I was stunned by the common denominators between members of the ira and members of Jemaah Islamiah [a militant Islamist group in Southeast Asia with ties to al-Qaeda].”
Many said they’d been disappointed by the terrorist life. “The reality didn’t live up to the fantasy,” says Horgan. “The reality is depressing, stressful and generally not what people expect.” And in that disconnect lies opportunity. Nearly a dozen countries, including the U.S. in Iraq, have recently started programs to educate radicals about the gap between their religious ideals and the groups they follow—to essentially force the disenchantment process with the help of clerics and ex-terrorists. “We’ve been fighting the wrong battle,” says Frank Cilluffo, a former White House Homeland Security official who is researching deradicalization at George Washington University. “The real center of gravity of the enemy is their narrative. It is ideologically bankrupt.”
According to Thomas Philips since the time of Columbus’s arrival in 1492 the America’s have been a fertile terrain for locating utopias, and as one of the most politically and geographically isolated of American states Paraguay has come to act as a privileged topos for locating both utopias and dystopias. The works studied in Philips text “Heaven and Hell: The representation of Paraguay as a Utopian space” all demonstrate this longing for an ideal society, even if it is as the perfection of evil in a dystopia. As times change and people’s concerns change through history Paraguay has come to represent different things. For Southey it represented the noble savage and a state of pre-industrial innocence. Paraguay contributed to Joseph Conrad’s composite country that would help in his attempt to outline the flaws of the colonial project, even if it was to claim that the project should take a different form. For Graham Greene Paraguay simultaneously represented a blank space where Pulling could escape from the bland conformity of suburbia and reinvent himself as an individual and a dystopian non-space that would destroy Plarr. However, by the time of The Mission we return to the period of Jesuit rule as Joffe denounces the political violence that swept Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. According to Philips, again Paraguay is made to function as a non-space. In this case instead of being part of a universal Latin American location, as in Nostromo, it is all of Latin America, and in so being it becomes even more of a non-existent space. And yet in order for Paraguay to function as this blank space it is necessary to disregard those who already live there, thereby silencing them, and so almost all of these works concentrates on Europeans. As Marlow complained, the blank spaces of the Earth are filling up.
In April 5.4 YKON joins forces with Big Picture Small World in a Earth Game a.k.a. Worldgame.
Here is one description of the game:
“Imagine the leaders of the world convening to strategize about peace instead of war, uniting to battle the common enemies of disease, hunger. pollution, and illiteracy. R. Buck-minster Fuller–the architect, philosopher, and visionary–conceived of such a “world peace game” in the 1960s, hoping to conduct the first sessions at the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal. Fuller proposed that the U.S. Pavilion he designed–a giant geodesic dome–be devoted to the solution of global problems and hold a vast computer, a so-called “world brain,” crammed with all the necessary data.
The U.S. Information Agency rejected the idea, considering it inappropriate for a world’s fair. Fuller persisted, nevertheless, hosting the first “World Game” workshop in 1969, and the World Game Institute (WGI), founded in 1972, has brought Fuller’s dream to fruition since his death in 1983. WGI has conducted about 1,000 workshops or simulations in 48 states and 21 countries. Some 90,000 people have participated, including members of Congress and the United Nations.
In the World Game, players representing different regions and international agencies barter and negotiate in the hope of resolving conflicts and meeting the needs of their constituents. The simulations are designed to give players an appreciation of the complexities facing world leaders, while demonstrating the need for cooperation among nations. “In some ways, it’s like a flight simulator where you can learn how to fly without killing all the passengers each time you make a mistake,” explains WGI executive director Medard Gabel.”
Kosovo declared independence on February 17th. They came up with a new flag design, coat of arms and an anthem - that’s all what you need.
The World, a series of man made private islands in the shape of a world map off of Dubai has finally been completed. The islands are for sale starting at $10 million USD. Created and developed by Nakheel. http://www.theworld.ae/
Stockmann has declared itself as the Kingdom of Shopping, it already has its own Herald http://www.stockmann.ru/portal/640/portal/4648/ and everyone who wants to become a citizen may fill in a form to show how “loyal” they are and in return you get your own ID card: in GOLD.
It is only a matter of time before the US and most European countries recognize Kosovan independence. Writing in Le Monde diplomatique, Jean-Arnault Dérens asks what such a move would achieve. In Vojvodina, the autonomous region in the north of Serbia that represents almost half the country’s population, the majority is Hungarian-speaking. Should it therefore become part of Hungary? Dérens warns that the endeavour to regulate problems in the Balkans by introducing new territorial divisions would be dangerous for the whole of Europe. Other solutions need to be sought that meet the requirements of the ethnic groups involved.
source: http://www.eurozine.com
“Together, joined in effort by the burden, they stag gered up the last steep of the mountain. Together, they chanted One! Two! Three! and crashed the log on to the great pile. Then they stepped back, laughing with triumphant pleasure…”
- William Golding, from Lord of the Flies
Hey this is absolutely marvelous stuff, more quotes on collaboration in the link. http://www.temporaryservices.org/group_quotes.pdf Temporary Services and brett bloom: potential candidates for top summit paricipants?
In the article “The Classless Utopia Of Reality TV”, Alessandra Stanley offer some interesting opinions on reality television programs. The author examines programs such as “The Hills,” which claim to present persons in a real life environment. It is noted that the programs are usually set in the affluent communities portrayed in fictional television programs, often in some branch of the entertainment industry itself.
Reality TV could actually function as interesting analogies in YKONs analyzis of micronationalisms.