“assaulting the embassy”

“Patiño preceded his announcement with a lengthy argument against any British action against Ecuador’s embassy in London. In remarks Wednesday, he said the Ecuadorian government had received a written notice from British authorities that they would ‘assault’ the country’s embassy in London if Ecuadorian officials failed to hand over Assange to British authorities.”

This is both wrong, and a stupid way for the British government to play it. I don’t see how they can be forced to give Assange safe passage out of the country, but if they feel that strongly about it, they can always play the game of making him live in the Ecuadorian Embassy forever.

But “assaulting” an embassy? There may be some precedents for this, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head. The sanctity of embassies is well-known to be one of the pillars of international relations. And for the British government to do it to Ecuador would amount to an act of bullying contempt for a small South American nation.

Also, it’s not like they’d be storming an embassy to capture Osama bin Laden or some lethal mafia kingpin. Assange has been charged with unsafe sex without permission. Bad if true. But does it really warrant the invasion of an embassy? It simply makes Assange look all the more sympathetic here.

I have little patience with the reflexive tendency simply to oppose the United States on every issue no matter what. That’s just robo-politics; the desire always to be in a position of opposition to power is the “beautiful soul” move par excellence. But I have the strong sense that my country is very much in the wrong in this case. I don’t know what Assange really did in Sweden, of course, but he is obviously being treated in a way that goes well beyond the stated charges. And as far as I can tell, he simply did what journalists are supposed to do. Wikileaks is a great read. The U.S. can go after Manning (though they’re doing it a bit brutally), but I don’t see how they can legitimately go after Assange.

crowdsourcing a citation

Never mind, I was able to find pagination for the same passage in THIS book instead.

I don’t have my copy of Paul Feyerabend’s Farewell to Reason nearby, nor is there a complete version available online. But I need the page number(s) for the following passage:

“The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, Boltzmann, Mach and so on. But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth…”

If anyone has the book and can send the page number(s) to me at gharman@aucegypt.edu, I would be grateful. (And I will strike through these words as soon as someone sends me the information, so unless the entire post is struck through, I haven’t heard from anyone yet.)

I already have the city and publisher, the date, and all that. I just need the page number(s), which for some reason I forgot to record when the book and I were last in the same place.

Feyerabend is so fun to read. Add him to your “playlist” if you haven’t done so already.

Earth in the Martian sky

This is going around Facebook. I can’t vouch for it because I don’t know the real source, but it looks plausible enough at first glance. [ADDENDUM: The Austrian artist Ralo Mayer wrote to say that this image comes from a desktop astronomy program. So no, it’s not a real image from Curiosity. Too bad.]

still amazed that he got away with it

I was just checking the dates again. Morsi was declared the winner in Egypt on June 24, and don’t forget how tense it was, and how possible it seemed that Shafik would simply be declared the winner against all evidence. (But had that happened, I think we would have seen explosive violence, and the Army must have known it.)

On August 12, Morsi cashiered the entire top leadership of SCAF. That’s just 49 days, or 7 weeks.

How on earth did he get away with it? There were no overt signs that SCAF had become this weak. There must be an untold story here, and I suppose it must have something to do with the deft exploitation of rifts between older and younger Army officers. I’m not sure how else it could have happened. I would say “someday the story will come out,” but in Egypt there are generally several parallel stories about everything, and you can never quite figure out which one is the right one. Perhaps we will never know in this case what happened.

3-D panorama shot of Mars

You’ll love this.

HERE.

during the actual lecture

I was hoping for a straight-on shot with the “Museu Oscar Niemeyer” podium clearly visible, but they didn’t send one of those yet.

Instead of having simultaneous translation for this lecture, they projected a Portuguese version of my text on screen in real time. It seemed to work pretty well for those who may have struggled with the English.

photo from Curitiba, August 10

Here I am flanked by (from the viewer’s left) Gustavo Utrabo, Hugo Loss, Pedro Duschenes, and Juliano Monteiro.

Hugo is an anthropologist, the others are all architects.

Rachel de Joode’s show in Dallas

Berlin artist Rachel de Joode has a show up right now at the Oliver Francis Gallery in Dallas, entitled “Real Things.”

I have an essay in the catalog entitled “All Space is Real, All Time is Sensual.”

Click HERE for a review of the show.

Below: “A Peanut, Half a Horse, a Chicken Foot, a Burning Cigarette and a Black Hole,” 2011

Perhaps the “Latour Litany” approach to visual art.

new issue of New Literary History now available

It is HERE.

You can read my piece, Tim Morton’s piece, and Jane Bennett’s response.

I read Morton’s in draft form, but we weren’t sent Bennett’s response ahead of time, and I won’t be able to read it until a bit later today. Knowing Jane, it is probably warm and fair, but also tough on a few points. She is pro-holism and my article (and Tim’s work as a whole) is ardently anti-holist, so I would anticipate that this would be one of the points of dispute.

Gothenburg in October

Prior to the “Matter Matters” conference in Lund, Sweden in October (Lund is close enough to Copenhagen that you can take the commuter train between the two places) I’ll be headed up to Gothenburg further north to give some lectures and seminars on October 11-12.

In 1991, as a graduate student tourist, I passed through Gothenburg twice by train, but didn’t have the chance to get out and look. I’m looking forward to seeign the city itself.

It’s been a very busy year presenting object-oriented philosophy. In 2011 there were 14 lectures, which felt like a lot. But in 2012 there will be a minimum of 41 keynotes, invited lectures, and seminars– probably not quite Žižek territory, but still a busy year.