Propaganda

At the beginning of the video " Kerry's Coalition of the Wild-eyed", produced by Maverick Media the following message appears:

"The following video contains remarks made by and images from ads sponsored by Kerry Supporters.

John Kerry has denounced our use of these ads attacking our President.

He has not denounced liberal supporters like Al Gore, George Soros and many others who have made speeches comparing the president to Adolf Hitler."

How could he? You see, there is a difference between "to compare to", and "to compare with" that may escape many people, but it is less than subtle. "to compare to", is to describe resemblances between unlike things, "to compare with", is examining two like things in order to discern their similarities or differences, "to liken to another".

Soros, of course, did neither, when he said: "When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,' it reminds me of the Germans."

Of course it reminded him of Nazi propaganda: "Der Feind Hört mit", "Nun, Volk, steh auf und Sturm brich los", or "Alle Kraft gespannt! Totaler Krieg - Kürzester Krieg!"

That is hardly the same thing as equating Bush to Hitler.

Hitler's 25 point program was very different from Bush's program, who doesn't really seem to have one. The GOP's website is very vague about what they really want, the closest thing to a program appears to be the Republican Oath.

Here's an interesting comparison: Matthew Shepard Online Resources - Religious Right Hate Speech - Nazi Propaganda vs. Religious Right Anti-gay Rhetoric

Dirty old man

I went to a couple of open houses this weekend to look for a new home for my family, and took my 15-year old daughter along. All the real estate agents thought we were husband and wife. And not just the agents. Only an elderly couple we met a a garage sale dared to inquire how much we differ. (it's 26 years). The husband seemed quite pleased with the idea of a 26 years younger wife. His wife less so. They all must have been thinking that I am much younger than I really am, or they think that it's totally OK to marry a girl who's young enough to be your own child, and they won't raise an eybrow at the idea. That's odd, because most real estate agents appear to be women in my demographic who aren't very likely to approve of men marrying 20 year younger women.

On cluelessness

Can't they get anything right on the web? I posted about the mondriaan site a while ago, but things haven't been improving lately.

via foreword, where Kiran was reminded of John Maeda. Brilliant. Maeda was't even born when Max Bill did "verdichtung zu caput mortuum".

Max Bill

Please, someone give me one, just one, good site dedicated to an important modern artist. Please don't mention that Duchamp flash site. Or the Picasso site for that matter.

For some reason, no matter who I look for, Pollock, Kandinski, Malewich, Nauman, Rothko, Alberts, all that google can come up with are these three:

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/
http://www.the-artists.org/

I might seem appropriate that both http://www.the-artists.org/ and http://www.abstract-art.com use Herbert Bayer's Universal font, but it just doesn't work there.

House for Sale

We're looking for a home in Toronto.

Digital Rights Management

Digital Rights Management is the control that the copyright holder, (sometimes the artist) has control over how the art he created is viewed. They shouldn't have that. Here's why:

around the world in 89 days

From London to Suez via Mont Cenis and Brindisi, 
by rail and steamboats.............................. 7  days 
From Suez to Bombay, by steamer .................... 13 "  
From Bombay to Calcutta, by rail ................... 3  " 
From Calcutta to Hong Kong, by steamer ............. 13 "
From Hong Kong to Yokohama (Japan), by steamer ..... 6  "
From Yokohama to San Francisco, by steamer ......... 22 "
From San Francisco to New York, by rail ............ 7  "
From New York to London, by steamer and rail ....... 9  "
Total .............................................. 80 days

OK, not quite. The package left the Netherlands on March 17, to Arrive in Toronto today, 89 days later. Yes, it did get stuck in customs, as I expected, not in Canada, but in Kobe, Japan. It contained books, of course, and among them was a new translation of Jules Verne's Le tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours. We lost the bet.

sex with conservatives

Stephen Harper, Canada's "Conservative Leader" likes Edmund Burke a lot. Harper advocates "banning child pornography, raising the age of sexual consent, providing choice in education and strengthening the institution of marriage". I haven't heard him on the topic of bestiality, but his mentor had a few things to say that are, well... remarkable.

"Men are carried to the sex in general, as it is the sex, and by the common law of nature; but they are attached to particulars by personal beauty. I call beauty a social quality; for where women and men, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them, (and there are many that do so,) they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affection towards their persons; we like to have them near us, and we enter willingly into a kind of relation with them, unless we should have strong reasons to the contrary."

Of Beauty. Burke, Edmund. 1909-14. On the Sublime and Beautiful. The Harvard Classics

Body and Soul

Descartes is commonly held responsable for our problematic distinction between the res cogitans and the res extensa, and maybe in some derived sense, for the distinction between form and content as well.

An interesting problem arises when viewing things like the CGU Descartes Web Project.

I find reading Les Passions de L'Ame (The Passions of the Soul) very difficult when it is presented to us in this way. The irony of reading Descarte's texts on-line is that there really is no physical form anymore, and here the separation of form and content disintegrates into a monade from webdesign hell.

More Tufte

It's nowhere near my birthday, but I already know what I want: Edward Tufte: Ask E.T. forum

Somewhere in mysterious customs warehouse is a present that I was given for my last one: De Natuurkunde van het Vrije Veld, a series of three books by Jozef Minnaert, of which only one has been translated into english as Light and Colour In The Open Air.

stupid book

Here's one book I would have liked to write, an encyclopedia:

Enjoyment

Sapere aude!

Foucault wrote his article 200 years after Kant wrote his article for the Berlinischen Monatsschrift the 30th of September 1784. Twenty years later, it seems a good time to have a look at them again. I find Kant funnier.

Kant: Was ist Aufklärung? (in english)

Foucault: Qu'est-ce que les Lumières ? (in english)

Ask Michiel

One of the technical support forums that I moderate is called "Ask Alias". Customers can ask us pretty much anything about the software that we support. Since I aswer most of the questions, some customers have jokingly started calling it "Ask Michiel" instead. And sometimes an error in the webpage catches up with reality.