Posted by Sean on March 19, 2007
The political culture of blogging is almost as interesting as the blogs themselves. All one has to do to get a glimpse of this is to glance at a blog’s comments section. There the reader will be exposed to a rhetorical world of augmentative maneuvers that range from the thoughtful to the mundane; from the engaging to the slanderous. There is something about internet discourse that is far less restricted than face to face discussions. The internet provides a measure of anonymity that seems to grease the tongue. Denunciations and insults are common. Charges of ignorance and idiocy abound. Most people wouldn’t say half the things they do online if a real person was standing in front of them. For some this makes the internet a bastion of free speech; for others a cesspool of incivility that undercuts any notion of democratic political ..read more
Posted by Sean on March 19, 2007
Most assume that utopianism had all but vanished from the Soviet landscape by the time Brezhnev’s walking corpse stumbled down the Kremlin halls. After all, socialism was all but ossified in content and form. Brezhnev’s speeches sounded like cobbled together phrases lifted from his past speeches. Still among some among the USSR’s aspiring engineers, utopian innovation still stirred the imagination. Take, for example, Viktor K. Gordeyev’s gas powered boots. One day they would, in his words, “become a device for moving humanity.”
Well they didn’t. And though Gordeyev and his colleagues at Ufa State Aviation Technical University showcased the boots to the Soviet Army, which caused them to be classified as a military secret until 1994, in the epoch of Russian capitalism, they found that there is just no market for gas powered boots. Thus, for the NY ..read more
