Something positive for #democracy and #modernity... in #Turkey / #Turkiye
Congratulations to all in the cities and country which has been taken back decades in terms of rights and freedoms under Erdogan.
I spent some time in Istanbul especially, back when women were celebrating newfound freedoms and all enjoyed freedoms of speech and blossoming "new" music and arts.
At last - common sense:
The word modern, first recorded in 1585 in the sense “of present or recent times,” has traveled through the centuries designating things that inevitably must become old-fashioned as the word itself goes on to the next modern thing. We have now invented the word postmodern, as if we could finally fix modern in time, but even postmodern (first recorded in 1949) will seem fusty in the end, perhaps sooner than modern will. Going back to Late Latin modernus, “modern,” which is derived from Latin modo in the sense “just now,” the English word modern (first recorded at the beginning of the 16th century) was not originally concerned with anything that could later be considered old-fashioned. It simply meant “being at this time, now existing,” an obsolete sense today. In the later 16th century, however, we begin to see the word contrasted with the word ancient and also used of technology in a way that is clearly related to our own modern way of using the word. Modern was being applied specifically to what pertained to present times and also to what was new and not old-fashioned. Thus in the 19th and 20th centuries the word could be used to designate a movement in art, modernism, which is now being followed by postmodernism. — https://web.archive.org/web/20080622132303/http://www.bartleby.com/61/28/M0362800.html
#smartphone #purchase #modernity #ohbondageupyours
I want/have to buy my first since...goodness...2015?
Would anyone care to recommend something?
Ideally my smartphone would follow the 3 s's...
Thanks!
Of course, Suslov is just one man, and he was never a political dissident. But his presence at #HSE is emblematic of the uncomfortable affinity between Russian #liberalism and #Kremlin #imperialism, underscoring the former’s limits as a politically transformative force. Just as HSE’s decline is the result of the structures and principles on which it was founded, so too are the limitations of Russian liberalism—now brought into painfully sharp relief by #Russia’s invasion of #Ukraine—a result of assumptions that have been inherent to this intellectual and political trend for the past 200 years. As authors like Susanna Rabow-Edling have argued, liberalism in the Russian #Empire was deeply intertwined with #nationalism and the imperial project, with proponents of the movement believing that liberalizing the empire was the only way to preserve its existence. In this sense, it was not dissimilar to liberalism in other colonial metropoles that posited Western #Europe as the epitome of #modernity and its imperial possessions as passive recipients of its supposedly progressive #policy.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/08/29/russian-liberal-universities-hse-ukraine-war/ #war #education #usa #biden #opposition
"Articles may not be exchanged. We are forgetting how to give presents. Violation of the exchange principle has something nonsensical and implausible about it; here and there even children eye the giver suspiciously, as if the gift were merely a trick to sell them brushes or soap. Instead we have charity, administered beneficence, the planned plastering-over of society’s visible sores. In its organized operations there is no longer room for human impulses, indeed, the gift is necessarily accompanied by humiliation through its distribution, its just allocation, in short through treatment of the recipient as an object. Even private giving of presents has degenerated to a social function exercised with rational bad grace, careful adherence to the prescribed budget, sceptical appraisal of the other and the least possible effort. Real giving had its joy in imagining the joy of the receiver. It means choosing, expending time, going out of one’s way, thinking of the other as a subject: the opposite of distraction. Just this hardly anyone is now able to do. At the best they give what they would have liked themselves, only a few degrees worse. The decay of giving is mirrored in the distressing invention of gift-articles, based on the assumption that one does not know what to give because one really does not want to. This merchandise is unrelated like its buyers. It was a drug in the market from the first day. Likewise, the right to exchange the article, which signifies to the recipient: take this, it’s all yours, do what you like with it; if you don’t want it, that’s all the same to me, get something else instead. Moreover, by comparison with the embarrassment caused by ordinary presents this pure fungibility represents the more human alternative, because it at least allows the receiver to give himself a present, which is admittedly in absolute contradiction to the gift.
Beside the greater abundance of goods within reach even of the poor, the decline of present-giving might seem immaterial, reflection on it sentimental. However, even if amidst superfluity the gift were superflous - and this is a lie, privately as much as socially, for there is no-one today for whom imagination could not discover what would delight him utterly - people who no longer gave would still be in need of giving. In them wither the irreplaceable faculties which cannot flourish in the isolated cell of pure inwardness, but only in live contact with the warmth of things. A chill descends on all they do, the kind word that remains unspoken, the consideration unexercised. This chill finally recoils on those from whom it emanates. Every undistorted relationship, perhaps indeed the conciliation that is part of organic life itself, is a gift. He who through consequential logic becomes incapable of it, makes himself a thing and freezes."
Text: Theodor W. #Adorno, Minima Moralia
Image: Ronald Sanderson - Broadlooms christmas window (1965)
