openDemocracy

There is no denying this, and Gitlin, to his credit, does not try. Indeed, this self-imposed restriction and its malign consequences are the deep subject of the book. He provides an honest account of the reasons for his generation's disenchantment with patriotism—an account that helps explain why, even now, the term almost never escapes the lips even of mainstream liberal Democrats without being prefaced by the indignant words "impugning" and "my." For Gitlin's generation, the "generation for whom ‘the war' meant Vietnam and perhaps always will," it could be said that the "most powerful public emotion in our lives was rejecting patriotism." Patriotism became viewed as, at best, a pretext, and at worst, an abandonment of thought itself. It became of interest only in so far as it entered into calculations of political advantage. Far from being a sentiment that one might feel with genuine warmth and intelligent affection, it was merely a talisman, which, if used at all, served chiefly to neutralize its usefulness as a weapon in the hands of others, by making it into a strictly personal preference that others were forbidden to question: "my" patriotism.

Perhaps the most dramatic – and revealing – recent move was to hire a handful of well-known journalists to do old-fashioned reporting. “Our goal,” Ms Huffington says, “is basically to become an online newspaper”.

Welcome to a SPECIAL EDITION of Markets Live, FT Alphaville’s daily mooch around London stocks. PM: Neil Hume is with me. PM: But just because this is a special edition doesn’t mean he’s got his tech sorted PM: PM: Afternoon james and rose - and others PM: He can’t se you yet James

Mr Roh will also visit the Pyeonghwa car factory near Pyongyang, a joint venture with the Unification Church led by Reverend Moon Sun-myung and he will also go to the Kaesong industrial complex, a group of Southern factories on the northern side of the border.

Andrew Puddephatt on media reform from a human rights perspective This morning I attended a very broad and interesting side-event on “Global Information and Communication Policy” organized by Consumer’s Union.  The event featured an international panel of speakers including : Luiz Fernando Marrey Moncau, Instituto Brasileiro de Defesa do Consumidor, Brazil Rosemary Okello-Orlale, African Woman and Child Feature Service, Kenya Bjarne Pedersen, Consumers International Andrew Puddephatt, Global Partners UK Jamie Love, CPTech Andrew issued a provocative challenge to the media reform community to show the evidence of their claims. 

We are interested in moving toward a curating model of information.  Information needs to be curated in  a way that shows the information that you want similar to how a museum curates a large body of information into discrete exhibits and presentations that people can understand and digest.

who is doing the curating?  Is it going to be bottom-up or done by Bill Gates and Google.

In 1988, NLR Editorial Board member Anthony Barnett distracted a disappointed left into the desert of Constitutional Reform to complete the bourgeois revolution with the organisation Charter 88; in 1995 Will Hutton retailed a version of the Nairn-Anderson thesis in his book The State We’re In effectively drafting Tony Blair’s apolitical modernisation agenda.

Far from being too theoretical the Review was not theoretical enough. The tendency to manufacture deep sociological explanations for transient events certainly showed literary productivity, but it would be wrong to see that as necessarily representing theoretical work. ‘Theories’ were produced that in the end only echoed contemporary trends, without really criticising them. So between them Anderson and Tom Nairn manufactured the theory that Britain’s political revolution was, unlike its Continental counterparts, incomplete; an argument that became known as the Nairn-Anderson thesis. The idea was that the emerging capitalist class in Britain had done a deal with the old aristocracy to gain influence, leaving the old pre-democratic power structures in place; the inordinate influence of the City of London over the British economy, with its old-Etonian clubbishness, Nairn and Anderson thought, was evidence of the persistence of a ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism’.

NLR is financially buoyant because of the library subscriptions from American colleges.

L'alliance des people et des capuches

A. Finkielkraut. - J'ai gardé de très beaux souvenirs de Mai-68 : les rues libérées des voitures, la présence électrisante des femmes dans les manifestations, la décrispation de la sexualité. Mais cette émancipation s'est accompagnée d'une attaque généralisée - dont nous payons encore le prix aujourd'hui - contre la bienséance. Pour preuve cette phrase récente de Daniel Cohn-Bendit : «Ségolène Royal est une soixante-huitarde. Elle dit : «Quand je me fais chier, je m'en vais.»» En ce sens-là, je ne suis plus soixante-huitard. Moi, je ne «me fais jamais chier», je m'ennuie parfois, c'est déjà assez éprouvant. Et quand je m'ennuie, par courtoisie, par égard, j'essaie de prendre mon mal en patience... 68 a voulu supprimer la honte. Eh bien, la honte, c'est la prise de conscience d'autrui. Et son absence, c'est le triomphe de la muflerie.

Michel Foucault l'a très bien dit, à ce moment-là, dans vos colonnes : «Jusqu'à présent on se demandait si la révolution était possible. Aujourd'hui la question, c'est : est-elle désirable ? Et la réponse, c'est non »...

About Journa-list Why journa-list? Have you ever read an article and thought, I'd really like to know more about the journalist who wrote this? Maybe you want to read previous things the journalist has written, or find out more about their experience in a particular subject area, or get in contact with them. Or perhaps you want to find out who else is writing about a particular subject - say 'Bluetongue' - and compare one journalist's articles with those written by other journalists from different publications. Or, you might want to build your own newsroom of journalists - science journalists for example - and have all their articles emailed directly to you each morning. You can do all of this on journa-list. It's our attempt to make news a bit more transparent and journalists a bit more accountable - on behalf of the public.

The Energy Department's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy funds research at national labs and private companies, and recently offered $4 billion in loan guarantees to 16 clean-tech companies, including three in or near Silicon Valley. It also helps sponsor trade missions to China and India that have included energy start-ups, such as MiaSole, a Santa Clara solar-cell maker.

Or, a branded mashup (e.g. taking the time to figure out how to conduct the right filters against sources like Technorati, and others)?

we mused over the perceived legitimacy you can create via a nice website, concluding that in effect, without a solid online presence you don’t exist in today’s media environment. You may not have a definite physical location, but not to worry, a nice website is more or less a substitute. The location is becoming more and more peripheral to the website. Not to say location isn’t important.. it is a nice feather in an organization’s online cap.

In The Public and its Problems (p. 365), he admitted that "it is not necessary that the many should have the knowledge and skill to carry on the needed investigations; what is required is that they have the ability to judge of the bearing of the knowledge supplied by others upon common concerns."

Futurists Envision the Newspaper in 2020

Most Europeans wouldn't know it, but 400 citizens from across the EU are gathered at the European Parliament in Brussels this weekend to participate in Tomorrow's Europe, a Deliberative Poll exercise in the parliamentary chamber. A prepoll of a larger random sample of Europeans has already taken place, but this group will answer some big questions about the future of Europe. It's a massive logistical undertaken by Jacques Delors' pro-EU Notre Europe think-tank with the blessing of the European Union itself. Unfortunately, it seems to have gotten little media attention. I'm getting information from the dLiberation blog at openDemocracy. Only a handful of bloggers in Europe have mentioned it this week.

The crucial test is whether one’s pet theory can distinguish between selection for trait A and selection for trait B when A and B are coextensive: were polar bears selected for being white or for matching their environment? Search me; and search any kind of adaptationism I’ve heard of. Nor am I holding my breath till one comes along.

Lacking arches, domes fall down; so arches are selected for supporting domes. But arches are linked to spandrels for reasons of geometry; so spandrels aren’t selected for, they are ‘free riders’ on selection for arches. The moral is that phenotypic traits can carry information about linkages among the mechanisms that produce them. Free-riding is always suggestive of such linkages, and free-riding is ubiquitous in evolution.

When you ask Darwin’s question – why are phenotypes often similar? – you do indeed get Darwin’s answer. But if you ask instead why it is that some phenotypes don’t occur, an adaptationist explanation often sounds somewhere between implausible and preposterous. For example, nobody, not even the most ravening of adaptationists, would seek to explain the absence of winged pigs by claiming that, though there used to be some, the wings proved to be a liability so nature selected against them. Nobody expects to find fossils of a species of winged pig that has now gone extinct. Rather, pigs lack wings because there’s no place on pigs to put them. To add wings to a pig, you’d also have to tinker with lots of other things. In fact, you’d have to rebuild the pig whole hog: less weight, appropriate musculature, an appropriate metabolism, an apparatus for navigating in three dimensions, a streamlined silhouette and god only knows what else; not to mention feathers. The moral is that if you want them to have wings, you will have to redesign pigs radically. But natural selection, since it is incremental and cumulative, can’t do that sort of thing. Evolution by natural selection is inherently a conservative process, and once you’re well along the evolutionary route to being a pig, your further options are considerably constrained; you can’t, for example, go back and retrofit feathers.

Even if times ahead are troubled, the long run is likely to look much more settled. In the short run, a housing slump could well make private investors and central banks outside the U.S. less eager to hold dollars. A survey by the U.S. Treasury Department last year indicates that about third foreign-held U.S. corporate debt consisted by asset-backed securities and about half of that was mortgage-related. Petro-dollars held in the Middle East and Russia are particularly mobile. Once foreign money leaves the U.S., the dollar would fall. In the longer run, U.S. exports would rise, shrinking the huge U.S. trade deficit. Moreover, recession in the U.S. would lead to lower imports, further reducing the trade deficit. At the same time, China may well let the yuan rise against the dollar, leading to a rise in its domestic spending relative to its exports. Once U.S. consumers spend less and Chinese consumers spend more, the large global imbalances, which have cast a shadow on the world economy for the past decade, would begin to disappear.

Pogue wrote what the company told him to. This is the trouble with exclusives. Pogue wrote a glowing review, ahead of the product's launch, and then looked like a fool when the company's website -- which Pogue hadn't seen, since it was scheduled to launch the same day as his exclusive review came out -- posted very different prices than were in print.

Creating a wider conversation really means expanding our love. Thinking harder really means building trust. It is an economy of exchange and a performance whose purpose is to reveal something transforming. Unlike Rousseau at openDemocracy, I am not interested in generating agreement and discovering the "General Will." Rather, it is discovering the fact that we are all sharing a room together and we have to learn how to get along.

Mute finance After running on a mixed economy of barter, grant and private monies since its inception in 1994, Mute started receiving revenue funding from the Arts Council of England in 1999. The grant is now set at £65,000 per annum, having significantly increased in the past couple of years, and goes towards the core costs of staff, premises and production. ACE's 'core funding' is supplemented by project funds allocated to new initiatives; in recent years Mute has received nearly £100,000 from ACE for such projects. Grants were awarded for White Cube, Blue Sky (a book now renamed Proud to be Flesh: a Mute Anthology on network cultures); web tools resource OpenMute; business development, FLOSS migration and new online art commissions as well as an OpenMute national workshop tour, UserLand. Approximately £40,000 has also been received from creative-industries agencies London Innovations and CIDA for technology projects centred on wireless networking (YouAreHere) and software development (TNS).