Theodore Dalrymple ponders terrorism, its apologists, and those most readily drawn to it:

Although I am not an historian, it has long seemed to me that some acquaintance with the history of Nineteenth Century Russia is absolutely crucial to understanding the modern world, for it was there that the various forms of modern revolutionary terrorism, and politics as the pursuit of an ideological end, first developed. And the first terrorists were certainly not downtrodden peasants brainwashed by religious or other leaders: they were either aristocrats suffering angst at their own privilege in the midst of poverty, or members of the newly-emerged middle classes, angry that their education had not resulted in the influence in society to which they thought themselves entitled by virtue of their intelligence, idealism and knowledge.

This pattern has been repeated over and over again. Latin America is a very good example. Castro was the spoilt son of a self-made millionaire who had a personal grudge against society because he was illegitimate and sometimes humiliated for it; in other words, he was both highly privileged, with a sense of entitlement, and deeply resentful, always a dreadful combination. Ernesto Guevara was of partially aristocratic descent, whose upbringing was that of a bohemian bourgeois, who was too egotistical and lacking in compassion for individual human beings to accept the humdrum discipline of medical practice.

The leaders of the guerrilla movement in Guatemala (a country, oddly, with many parallels to Nineteenth Century Russia) were of bourgeois and educated origin; one of them was the son of a Nobel-prize winner, not exactly a true social representative of the population. The leader and founder of Sendero Luminoso of Peru, a movement of the Pol Pot tendency (and Pol Pot himself, of course, studied in Paris), was a professor of philosophy, and his followers were the first educated generation of the peasantry, not the peasants themselves. Peasants are capable of uprisings, no doubt, even very bloody ones, but they do not elaborate ideologies or undergo training for attacks on distant targets.

The rest.

Real-time global map of distress calls and disasters. // G-Speak spatial interface. // Space station bachelor pad. // The world of washing machines. // The museum of art museum toilets. (h/t, Mick) // Art museum guards. (h/t, Coudal) // The collected Jonathan Meades. (h/t, Georges) // Irony. // Clever Monkeys. // When birds flock. // Underwater robot rescues fish. // Bioluminescent fungi. // Transmogrifier. // Vintage pop-up books. // Mannequin moustaches. // Art cars. // Concept cars. // Honda’s V4 concept bike. // Groovy antique scooter. // Knitted motorcycle cosy. (h/t, Wild Slutty Womens) // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Mr Burl Ives.

Further to this, here’s a little something for at least one of our regulars. Some of you may spot a theme in these vintage comic covers. 

I should perhaps point out it wasn’t just Wonder Woman.

Adam Kirsch runs a rhetorical knife across the ridiculous Slavoj Žižek:

The curious thing about the Zizek phenomenon is that the louder he applauds violence and terror – especially the terror of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, whose “lost causes” Zizek takes up in another new book, In Defense of Lost Causes – the more indulgently he is received by the academic left, which has elevated him into a celebrity and the centre of a cult. A glance at the blurbs on his books provides a vivid illustration of the power of repressive tolerance. In Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Zizek claims, “Better the worst Stalinist terror than the most liberal capitalist democracy”; but on the back cover of the book we are told that Zizek is “a stimulating writer” who “will entertain and offend, but never bore.” In The Fragile Absolute, he writes that “the way to fight ethnic hatred effectively is not through its immediate counterpart, ethnic tolerance; on the contrary, what we need is even more hatred, but proper political hatred”; but this is an example of his “typical brio and boldness.” And In Defense of Lost Causes, where Zizek remarks that “Heidegger is ‘great’ not in spite of, but because of his Nazi engagement,” and that “crazy, tasteless even, as it may sound, the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough, that his violence was not ‘essential’ enough”; but this book, its publisher informs us, is “a witty, adrenalin-fuelled manifesto for universal values.”

In the same witty book Zizek laments that “this is how the establishment likes its ‘subversive’ theorists: harmless gadflies who sting us and thus awaken us to the inconsistencies and imperfections of our democratic enterprise – God forbid that they might take the project seriously and try to live it.” How is it, then, that Slavoj Zizek, who wants not to correct democracy but to destroy it, has been turned into one of the establishment’s pet subversives, who “tries to live” the revolution most completely as a jet-setting professor at the European Graduate School, a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana’s Institute of Sociology, and the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities?

Christopher Hitchens on fashionable bigotry:

Here’s a thought experiment: you get an email telling you that all the Anglo-Saxons left the World Trade Center just an hour before the planes hit (not having merely stayed away with all the benefit of their advance warning, but having actually gone to all the trouble of turning up at 8am and trustingly assuming that the terror-strike would take place just on schedule and thus give them time to check their Rolexes for an orderly and early departure). See what I mean? It’s just not such a thrilling hypothesis. When directed at the Jews, however, it at least adds insult to injury, and the true bigot knows that every little helps.

Eamonn McDonagh on The Guardian Position™, dutifully assumed: 

[Guardian writer, William] Dalrymple’s portrait of the killers, as well as the sections of Muslim opinion he sees as supporting them, is based on a profound failure to treat them as morally autonomous and equal to himself. They are boiling with rage, they can’t be expected to reason or to have any respect for the lives of bystanders. When it all gets a bit too much, well, it’s the most natural, though regrettable, thing in the world for them to set out on a Jew hunt or mow down commuters in a railway station. Under no circumstances should we, rational Westerners, seek to apply the same critical standards to the Mumbai murderers and their supporters as we do – haltingly and insufficiently – to our own actions and those of our leaders. What we have to do is understand and empathize with their feelings and, as we can’t expect them to dilute their rage with reason or to seek methods to vindicate their claims that don’t involve hand grenades or AK 47s, we must make ourselves constantly ready to indulge their homicidal tantrums. Above all, we must never, ever treat them as our equals. It’s a pretty pass that certain elements of liberal cultivated opinion have come to.

Please feel free to poke about in the archives and peruse the greatest hits. 

While this site has much to offer readers with an interest in music, psychodrama and abandoned mental hospitals, it’s possible I’ve neglected any engineers and physicists among us. To remedy this mortifying oversight, here’s a little thought experiment, courtesy of Sam Hughes: 

A plane is standing on a runway that can move (like a giant conveyor belt). This conveyor has a control system that tracks the plane’s speed and tunes the speed of the conveyor, relative to the Earth, to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction).

Now comes the question.

Will the plane be able to take off?

The answer isn’t quite as obvious as one might assume. Needless to say, a detailed pondering ensues.

Update: Because you know you secretly want to, How to Destroy the Earth. 

I have no idea what, if anything, this piece of CG art by Zeitguised is meant to convey. The obligatory written guff is mercifully short, but guff nonetheless, with references to “six imaginations of disoriented systems” and “the installation of an irreversible axis on a dynamic timeline.” Pseudo-explanations aside, the film itself is worth a squint. It doesn’t seem particularly organised or finished, but some of the animation is dreamlike and oddly suggestive, as though the rendered objects don’t quite fit in the usual three dimensions. 

Peripetics by ZEITGUISED from NotForPaper on Vimeo

A high resolution version can be downloaded here and there’s also a “making of” in which very little is explained. (Via Shape + Colour)

Enhance the moment with a vibrating toilet seat. // Beefcake. Mostly cake. // Knitted frog dissection. (h/t, Coudal) // Biology videos of note. Tissue generation, shrimp on a treadmill. // Robot camera meets magnapinna squid. // When pandas sneeze. // Impressive hair. // Crosswind. // Ships with very large cargo. // Robotuna. // Your very own HAL 9000. // Bit Blob. Hours of fun. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus) // Miniscule revisited. // More microphotography. // Nanofilament fibre doesn’t get wet. // BAM, the ceramic alloy. // Meteor filmed over Edmonton, Canada. // Zeus: the directed energy weapon. // Base jumping in Dubai. (h/t, AC1) // And, via The Thin Man, the return of Ms Valaida Snow.

Readers with an interest in mental hospitals may recall an ephemera item on the Danvers State Insane Asylum, with its decayed interiors and elaborate underground tunnel system.

In a similar vein, Lisa Rinzler has catalogued and photographed items found in the attic of the abandoned Willard Psychiatric Centre in New York’s Finger Lakes. Among the items found are hundreds of suitcases belonging to former residents, with photographs, drawings and notes by staff. One note, regarding a patient named Ethel, reads:

She is a manic of rather neurotic type, who is inclined to pout and grumble and find fault. It was discovered yesterday that she and Miss ___, another patient, had been in the habit of getting into bed together, probably at night, but they were found in bed together in the daytime and said to be having a jolly time. When discovered by Miss McMahon, charge attendant of the ward, they giggled and chuckled and told her there was a place for her if she would like to get in.

The site also includes recordings of recollections by former staff and inmates, spanning the 1940s through to the 1980s, with graphic descriptions of the facilities, treatments and the experience of a typical night shift. If the psychiatry of yore is a subject that intrigues, it’s worth a visit. Though you wouldn’t want to stay.

This is oddly charming. James May meets an upgraded ASIMO robot – one being trained in object recognition. What struck me about the clip isn’t so much the robot’s ability to discern types of object and note their similarities, though its abilities are impressive. It’s the fact that watching ASIMO in action elicits a distinct urge to treat it as a child. 

(h/t, The Thin Man)

Further to recent comments on Queen’s University’s “dialogue facilitators,” this may be of interest. The university’s Intergroup Dialogue Programme is outlined here in marvellously woolly and tendentious terms. The preoccupation with “groups,” “social justice” and “social identities” is quite striking, as is the potential for contradiction with “fostering critical knowledge” and “authentic dialogue”. Given the opaquely technocratic language and its numerous assumptions, it’s difficult to be sure what the actual objective is: 

IGD theory and practice has been influenced by both the human relations approach and the social re-constructionist approach, striking a balance between emphasizing positive intergroup relations and critical understanding of social inequalities. Using critical social pedagogies and social justice education theory and practice, IGD integrates content and process in teaching and learning about social justice issues.

Perhaps it’s imagined that “critical knowledge” and “authentic dialogue” are synonymous with deference to some leftist formulation of “social justice” – a term used continually but never quite defined. Sceptics among us may wonder if the objective really is to inhibit the shouting of racist epithets, etc – behaviour quite rare on university campuses and doubtless covered by existing codes of conduct. Some may even suspect that the purpose of the exercise is simply the opportunist propagation of “social justice theory.” Either way, “dialogue facilitators” will be trained in “issues of social identity, power and privilege and social justice” and will “facilitate proactive opportunities” for students to “reflect on intergroup issues.” “Positive spaces and mindsets” will, of course, be created.