Category Archives: New Utopia

Arturo Duclos El fantasma de la utopa Utopias Ghost June 8August 20, 2017

MAVI Museum of Visual Arts Mulato Gil de Castro Square Jos Victorino Lastarria 307 Santiago Chile

http://www.mavi.cl Twitter

Arturo Duclos: el fantasma de la utopa [Utopias Ghost] Curator: Paco Barragn

Is the idea of utopia still necessary, let alone possible? Is utopia still valid as aspiration for a better or even perfect society? Or has utopia simply turned into nostalgia and a kind of new kitsch?

The exhibition Arturo Duclos: el fantasma de la utopia [Utopias Ghost]at the Museo de Artes Visuales (MAVI) in Santiago de Chile tackles these fascinating issues by reflecting on the major revolutionary movements of Latin America that tried to impose by force a more just society: Tupamaros, EZLN, FARC, Sendero Luminoso, M-19, MIR, 26 de Julio, FPMR, MRTA and FSLN.

Utopia as nostalgia Arturo Duclos, one of the younger members of the Chilean avant-garde, the so-called Escena de Avanzada, has always been interested in the idea of utopia and, particularly, in the inherent ambiguity that underlies the construction of utopia by Thomas Moore, and how this ambiguity has been sufficiently strong to accelerate history by means of battles, movements and revolutions.

Departing from the symbolism and iconography of the flags of these revolutionary movements, Duclos confronts the spectator in a thought-provoking way not only with ideals associated to the spirit of liberation, messianism and social utopia, but the exhibition also establishes fruitful connections with the fate of the many recent leftist populist governments that have existed in Latin America during the last 20 years: from Chvez, Kirchner, Morales, Correa and Lula to Mujica.

Never has mankind known such a period of stability and prosperity, but at the same timeas Thomas Piketty has keenly shown usnever has there been so much inequality in the world. So, if the unpredictable future is no longer a place for utopia then it seems to be safe to look into the malleable past for possible answers. It also allows us to conclude that todays utopian spirit is imbued with great dosis of nostalgia.

Utopia as kitsch With an interdisciplinary approach that covers diverse forms, from sculpture, drawing, installation and painting to video and performance, Arturo Duclos: el fantasma de la utopia [Utopias Ghost] presents five thematic constellationsBanderas/Flags, Caporales, Escudos de armas/Coats of Arms, Memorabilia and Machina Anemicaas well as Cuartel General/Headquarters, a public tent that will function as a mediation point for the public during the length of the exhibit.

Utopia as the new kitsch? Kitsch as utopian? These seemingly contradicting concepts run into each other more than we are willing to admit. And in this sense, in many of these works Duclos interacts and challenges, both from a conceptual and a formal point of view, the idea of kitsch understood as a saturation of concepts, colors and forms.

I was always interested, affirms Arturo Duclos, in reading these configurations that proceed from the popular culture unconscious and that take the place in these paramilitary groups with a hierarchic regime based upon the religious dance groups.

With regards to the conceptualization and design of the exhibition, curator Paco Barragn explains that We are very well aware of the tenacious Alfred Barrs ideology that persists in modern and contemporary art museums, and for this reason we conceived several Stimmungsrume in order to create a more challenging context for the spectator than the aseptic and anemic white-cube walls would allow.

Both avant-gardes and revolutions have become parodies subjected to postcapitalism.

Now, the question, according to Arturo Duclos, would be: What can we do in order to reanimate utopia?

This exhibition has been generously sponsored by the Chilean National Fund for the Development of Culture and the Arts-FONDART through its 2017 open call.

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MAVI Museum of Visual Arts - E-Flux

The Principality of New Utopia is a meanwhile discontinued and abandonedvision of the artificial creation of a new city-state in the middle of the Caribbean. The spiritual father of the micronation was Prince Lazarus Long who passed away in 2012.The new territory had been intended to be an English speaking constitutional monarchy.The throne should be inherited by the descendants of Prince Lazarus, the monarch, and ruler of the principality.

The venture had the vision to be The Venice of the Caribbean and to base on the principles of freedom and liberty with an ultra business friendly climate. The draft legal and regulatory environment provided for a free trade zone, near zero taxation, including import and export of products and services, minimal regulations, and zero subsidies. Privacy, integrity, liberty and freedom have been only limited by zero tolerance for international crime and drug industry.

Theenvisagednational territory is located on the submergedMistiriosa Bank 160 nautical miles WSW of the Cayman and had been claimed as the area of the Caribbean Seabound on

It is located on a submergedisland, which until 1995 has been located outside the jurisdiction of any other country and has been legally claimed byPrince Lazarus in a series of actions, which included letters of notification to the UN and The Hague, as well as physical claims by planting a buoy in the territory and others.

Since this part of the Caribbean is rather 60 feetunderwater, the technical challenge would be to find ways and means for land reclamation and property development. The founders had been confident that it is technologically possible, to raise the island from the waves and create an upperhigher layer of land and develop the territory thereon. Such technology has been tested and successfully and commercially implemented in various parts of the world, such as the Palm Island and World Island in Dubai, as well as in other jurisdictions.

Although negotiations had beenstarted with Honduras, the legitimacyof New Utopia had never been acknowledgedby any jurisdiction.Ownership and sovereignty are obviously the first and paramount hurdles for the realization of the city-state project. Given the geopolitical uncertainty in all parts of the world, the vision of New Utopia was found to be a pure utopian idea.

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New Utopia - pugnatorius.com

New York Times

Paperback Row New York Times Pressures of life outside that technological utopia become acute when Jeff becomes involved with a woman and her Ukrainian child, with political ramifications to follow. As our reviewer, Joshua Ferris, put it, Just as his characters plunge through ...

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Paperback Row - New York Times

President Trump dares to question whether globalization is an unmitigated good, and for this he is roundly criticized by the Left. But we should question it.

For people like Tom Friedman it is an article of faith that globalization is going to lead to a utopia in which people of different countries, religions, ethnicities and cultures freely and openly interact. Like the pieces of many-colored glass in a kaleidoscope, theyll create, through their interactions, ever-changing mosaics of beauty and harmony. The pieces will retain their distinctive shapes and colors, but the gestalt they form will be infinitely more interesting than the sum of its parts.

Sometimes that works. All culture is hybrid, and American culture more so than others. Nowhere is this more evident than in the arts. Visit the African-American museum in Washington, D.C., and listen to the music. Youll hear the soul of everything that constitutes America and its history.

Only it doesnt always work out so nicely. Borrowing from other cultures used to be a good thing. Now, its cultural appropriation, a major sin for the moral imbeciles on the left. W.E.B. Du Bois said: I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. But now Shakespeare is supposed to wince, when a person whos not English reads him.

Then theres the way bad ideas get globalized. Consider the cultural boycotts that are organized against Israel by the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement. BDS was founded by Qatari-born Omar Barghouti, a liar, a tax dodger, and an outspoken advocate of the destruction of the Jewish state. We are witnessing the rapid demise of Zionism, and nothing can be done to save itI, for one, support euthanasia, he said in 2013.

The very left-leaning rock group Radiohead ran up against BDS, when it scheduled a Tel Aviv gig for next July, and BDS rounded up more than 50 artists to sign an incendiary petition to pressure the group to cancel. The public way in which the artists chose to communicate with one of their peers, who chose not to follow their lead, was meant to name, shame and blame, to create a lynch-mob mentality where rational discourse is bypassed in favor of mass hysteria.

Its deeply distressing that they choose to, rather than engage with us personally, throw sh** at us in public, said Radioheads Thom York in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. But engaging with people who disagree with them is not the way the left operates. Engaging is intellectually difficult, and you might end up changing your mind. Better to bully, intimidate and humiliate. Arouse passions, not minds!

When you try to persuade someone using rational discourse, you are making certain assumptions about them. You assume that they are informed and that they are intelligent and, above all, that they are moral agents. Thats what bothered York so much about the petition signed by his peers. Its deeply disrespectful to assume that were either being misinformed or that were so retarded we cant make these decisions ourselves, he said. I thought it was patronizing in the extreme. Actually, its more than patronizing; its dehumanizing.

In his Genealogy of Morals,Nietzsche describesvaluation making moral choices rather than reason as the trait that defines humanity. But allowing people to make choices is antithetical to the left, because it implies that it doesnt have a monopoly on truth. For the left, people are vessels, limited to receiving truths established by a consensus of elites. Thats how teachers treat their students, and thats how the elites treat everyone else. Witness the climate scientists who anathemize those who wont believe in their consensus truths about the weather.

And heres where globalism presents the greatest danger. In universities across the world, the same tactics are being used, the same messages propounded as absolute truth. Intellectual discussion is a shining artifact of the past. It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? a Yale student shouts at a professor who tries to reason with her. Its about creating a home here! If he disagrees with her, the professor should step down. And step down he was forced to do.

York cant wrap his mind around the idea that diversity of opinion isnt permitted in academia. The university thing is more of a head f**k for me. Its like,really? You cant go talk to other people who want to learn stuff in another country? Really? The one place where you need to be free to express everything you possibly can. You want to tell these people you cant do that? His incredulity is refreshing, as more and more we become inured to this sort of thing.

The globalization is good folks would be more persuasive, if we were all saints and only benign ideas were shared across cultures. Instead, were seeing bad ideas being propagated across borders and cultures on the web, in social media. New internet mobs have arisen to persecute people whose ideas they dont share. Rational discourse has nothing to do with it, but only smash and grab and silence anyone with whom you disagree. Its what we used to see on television, when Muslims across the Middle East rioted when they perceived that Islam had been dissed. Its what we see today in America, at Yale and on other college campuses, and its the dark side of globalization.

President Trump is right, then, to be skeptical about the effects of globalization, when its the wrong values that are being globalized. American openness to new ideas, tolerance for different beliefs, and the rigors of Western scientific inquiry are being discarded. In their place, were importing the third worlds strictures on liberty.

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The Dark Side of Globalization - American Spectator

Spoiler warning: There are spoilers including discussion of the plot of the Wonder Woman movie here in this post.

One of the biggest revelations in Wonder Woman is tucked into the end of the film. Diana confronts Ares, the god of war, about the nature of man and mankinds goodness. The two mythic beings have the character-defining philosophical battle of the movie, and then he slips in a declaration that makes Diana question everything she was ever taught: She is the daughter of Zeus, the king of the gods.

Up until this point, Diana believed what her mother had told her that she was made out of clay and Zeus had given her life. By way of magic and myth, Zeus has symbolically been a father to her. But Ares implies something a bit more sordid: that Zeus had a relationship with her mother, Hippolyta, and created a child. And if thats the case, then its not clear what else the Amazons lied to Diana about.

The movie leaves the final interpretation of Dianas origin to its audience, and in doing so reflects a debate over Dianas origin thats been going on in Wonder Woman comic books over the past several years.

The original creator of Wonder Woman is a man named William Moulton Marston, who was, among other things, credited with inventing the lie-detector machine (which brings to light why Diana uses a lasso that compels people to tell the truth). He also had progressive, complex, and intertwining views about gender, relationships, and sex. Marston wrote about women being to be superior to men in some aspects, but was also intrigued by the dynamic between the dominant and submissive hence why so many Wonder Woman comics portrayed the heroine bound and blindfolded.

Marstons origin story reflected these ideas. In his version, Diana was born on a paradise island that was home to Amazons, women who were enslaved by mankind they were kept in chains but eventually broke free. On their island, they developed physical and mental strength and raised Diana, who was born out of clay and did not need a father. Diana, in Marstons eyes, was raised in this perfect world, on this perfect island, inhabited solely by women a deliberate decision.

Marston borrowed Wonder Womans origin story from feminist utopian fiction, which always involved women living on an island, and what happens when a man or a group of men is shipwrecked there, Jill Lepore, a Harvard professor and author of The Secret History of Wonder Woman, told me over email. It was a thought experiment, designed to ask readers to think about how all political orders are man-made. The point was that there werent men. Marston hitched this tale to the legend of the Amazons.

There is no Zeus in Marstons story, and its strictly a world without men. Men were the source of pain and evil for the Amazons, and Marston wanted to explore what it would be like to have a hero like Diana, a woman raised solely by women, completely aware of what men are capable of at their worst. Philosophically, Marston believed that women were capable of showing humanity a different way of life, a peaceful and loving one, in contrast to the ways of man and the patriarchy. Diana was the embodiment of this philosophy.

Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power, Marston wrote in a 1943 issue of The American Scholar. Womens strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.

Marstons story was tweaked in 1959 in Wonder Woman No. 105 (written by Robert Kanigher and drawn by Ross Andru), where Diana is given gifts from the gods and goddesses, like Athenas wisdom, Aphrodites beauty, strength from Demeter that rivals Herculess, and Hermess speed.

This wasnt the first tweak to Dianas origin, or the last: Some stories rewrote and reinterpreted the reason Diana came to the world of man, or how she got her name, or why she carries a sword. But its really the change that came to the comics in 2011, the Zeus-you-are-the-father reveal we see in the movie, that fundamentally redefines Wonder Woman.

In 2011, DC Comics instituted a relaunch of 52 of its titles called the The New 52, which essentially undid those titles previous storylines and reset them at a new starting point; it was characterized at the time as a way to make the comics more accessible to new readers. In writer Brian Azzarello and artist Cliff Chiangs New 52 run, Wonder Womans origin is changed: Diana learns she was never made out of clay, and like what the movie implies with Ares the clay story was used as a cover by Wonder Womans mother to hide that she and Zeus had had a relationship. Further, Ares teaches Diana how to fight.

Along with all this, the new origin credits men with how powerful and formidable Diana is, Alan Kistler wrote for the Mary Sue in 2014. Whereas before she had learned all her training from the Amazon women, her greatest teacher is now Ares.

The Azzarello-Chiang run also includes a story in which the Amazons reproduce by finding sailors, raping them, killing them, and then selling male babies into Hephaestuss slavery in exchange for weapons (this editorial decision was critically maligned, despite general praise for the book).

Adding Zeus to the story, and in particular adding Zeus as Dianas father, undermines the basic plot, Lepore told me. It turns the story of Wonder Woman into something much closer to the story of Thor it makes her story less distinctive.

Essentially, the New 52 reboot inserts men into Marstons story and significantly alters the territory Marston wanted to explore by having Diana raised in a female utopia. In the new telling, Wonder Womans powers dont come from goddesses or other Amazons, but rather from Zeus and Ares. Her mother, the woman who loves her most in life and the epitome of Amazon glory, is refashioned as a betrayer and deceiver. Paradise Island, instead of being a place that lives separately and peacefully from the world of man, now becomes a place where men like Zeus wield power and Amazons are vindictive.

Its hard to reconcile this new origin story with Marstons vision and intent for the character. It also changes the way one might interpret the origin story presented in the movie.

To be clear, Im not here to bury the Azzarello-Chiang run there have been plenty of articles written about how good their story was. Im a fan of how the two explored Dianas psychology and interiority, and how the comic really felt like her own. Furthermore, Marstons view of women and feminism wasnt entirely pristine: As Lepore wrote in her book, Marstons portrayal often veers into feminism as fetish territory.

Marston, as near as I can tell, from reading his letters and diaries, wanted kids to see her as a hero, a very strong woman, who would do whatever she set her mind to do, Lepore told me. He liked that adult men might find her especially alluring, and the scenes of her emancipation (from bondage) thrilling. He didnt think there was a contradiction there.

Essentially, Wonder Woman is a figure of feminism that has been historically written and drawn by men (like a lot of the characters who exist in the comic book universe). So perhaps its better to think of the character as someone who, throughout the years, has reflected what men believe powerful women to be.

The Wonder Woman film made me want to reread Azzarello and Chiangs issues again, and explore the relationships they portray between love and violence, between physical strength and gender, and between Diana and her family. It doesnt feel like a search for answers, but more of an appreciation for where authors, writers, and artists have taken the character in both the comic books and the movie.

To its credit, Wonder Woman slyly doesnt pick one view of Dianas origin, and what it means for the character, over the other. Ares is an unreliable character, and he could be deceiving Diana, but its also clear that Hippolyta kept secrets from her daughter in an attempt to protect her.

The finales portrayal of Wonder Woman finding strength in love seems closer to Marstons ideal, while the annihilation of Ares seems more in line with her New 52 characterization. But the film, and those who worked on it, seems to understand that perhaps the greatest thing you can do for a character like Diana and those mighty Amazons isnt to choose Marston over Azzarello, but rather to inspire fans to form their own ideas about what strong women mean to them.

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Wonder Woman's dueling origin stories, and their effect on the hero's feminism, explained - Vox

To this day, Frank Lloyd Wright endures as maybe the most iconic architect of the 20th century a starchitect, before such a term existed.

All this year, fans of the prolific and contradictory figure, who gave the world Fallingwater (and by extension, the Fallingwater LEGO model), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the School of Architecture at Taliesin, the Broadacre City model for suburban living (and gave Ayn Rand the inspiration for The Fountainhead protagonist Howard Roark), can celebrate the architects sesquicentennial with events, symposia, exhibitions and public viewings of his buildings some of which have been newlyrestored.

In on the hoopla, but honouring the architects legacy in its own way, New Yorks Museum of Modern Art has mounted an ambitious exhibition of materials, ephemera and interpretations from Wrights extensive archive. Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive opened June 8, Wrights 150th birthday, and positions the architect as a consummate innovator not outside of history, but very much of his time, with ideas that resonatestill.

Fallingwater

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, the Museum of ModernArt

Structured as an anthology rather than a monographic presentation, the show is divided into 12 sections that interrogate select objects from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, recently consolidated and transferred to MoMA and the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University. MoMA curator and exhibition organizer Barry Bergdoll says the exhibition points to a new direction in showcasingWright.

If you look at the scores of books that come out about Wright every year, theyre almost always just about Wright. Theyre not about him in relationship to other practitioners, larger movements or questions of the day, be they architectural, political, economic or social, despite the fact that he had very trenchant views on all of these, Bergdollsays.

The exhibition invites people with interesting perspectives to begin to use the archive, says Bergdoll, and tackles themes that are pressing within a contemporary context, including ecology, race relations, urban density, DIY-building systems and the celebrity status of architects (Frank Lloyd Wright was famously famous in his day, appearing on game shows and the cover of Time magazine in1938).

Among the approximately 450 architectural drawings, models, building fragments, films, television broadcasts and photos that make up the exhibition, visitors can delight at pencil-crayon-on-trace renders of iconic, obscure and international projects, painstakingly annotated planting plans, remarkable ornamental pattern details and a carefully restored presentation model of St. Marks towers, stocked with tiny mint-coloured pianos, decorative screens and furniture designed by Wright for the glass skyscraper residence that was commissioned in 1927 but neverbuilt.

Visitors will miss the monumentally scaled Broadacre City model, but happily, it will be on view in September as part of a sibling exhibition at the new Renzo Piano-designed Lenfest Center for the Arts at Columbia Universitys new West Harlem campus setting Wrights decentralized utopia against contemporaneous public housingprojects.

Exhibiting and experiencing architecture in a museum environment can be a challenge, but the MoMA exhibition and the themes explored therein are a worthwhile companion to experiencing Wrights spaces. You could call it an owners manual for a future visit, says Bergdoll. And of course, visitors who come here to the see the exhibition can see a major Wright building very rapidly. The Guggenheim Museum is only about a 20-minute walkaway.

The MoMA exhibition and nearby Guggenheim are just two of many must-sees for Wright enthusiasts this year. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation is organizing festivities at properties across the United States, including tours of the newly restored Unity Temple in Chicago, Buffalos Darwin Martin House Complex and Taliesin and Taliesin West, the original homes and sites of Wrights educational institute, in Spring Green, Wis. and Scottsdale,Ariz.

Solomon R. GuggenheimMuseum

Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, ColumbiaUniversity

Aaron Betsky, dean of the School of Architecture at Taliesin, the apprenticeship-based experiment in architectural education and communal living that Wright established in 1932, says that to experience Wright is to understand how architecture can frame your relationship to other human beings and the world around you. In his proposals to deal with sprawl, engage with landscape and create organic architecture he was certainly the most important and most experimental architect in America, he adds. [Wright] set forth models and created types that reverberate through American and world architecture to an astonishingdegree.

Even in his personal bathroom at Taliesin West, which Betsky invites visitors to have a look at the architect redesigned it before his death in 1959 to resemble an air-stream trailer, aluminum panelling, slick detailing and all. That was Frank Lloyd Wright, says Betsky. He was innovating all the way until hedied.

Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City until Oct. 1, 2017. Living in America: Frank Lloyd Wright, Harlem, and Modern Housing will be on view at the The Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia Universitys Manhattanville campus from Sept. 8 to Dec. 17, 2017. Other Frank Lloyd Wright sesquicentennial events can be found at http://www.FLW150.com.

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Mr James Mattis didn't wear a badge or uniform in Singapore over the weekend. There was zero doubt, though, that his role at the Shangri-La security forum was to play the good lieutenant to President Donald Trump's bad cop.

Mr Trump's abandonment of the Paris climate accord reminded world leaders there's a new sheriff in Washington, one who puts testosterone before evidence, bluster before reality.

The IISS Shangri-La Dialogue - named after its venue at the Singapore hotel, not the fictional utopia - trades in both hard security and soft reassurances. On Saturday in Singapore, US Defence Secretary Mattis sought to reassure a region reeling from "America first" policy moves.

"The United States," Mr Mattis said, "will continue to adapt and continue to expand its ability to work with others to secure a peaceful, prosperous and free Asia, with respect for all nations upholding international law."

What about when bad-cop Trump doesn't respect the international community? Before scrapping the Paris agreement, Mr Trump spent a week in Europe shooting from the hip and alienating Germany, France and even tiny Montenegro. Nato partners are aghast at Mr Trump seeming to divide an alliance that has safeguarded peace for generations.

But here's the question Asia should be asking: What happens when the gunslinger/sheriff starts shooting in this direction?

And the shots could be both figurative and literal. On the campaign trail, remember, one of Mr Trump's biggest applause lines was threatening a trade war. For now, he talks less about China "raping" America or creating a climate-change "hoax", and more about cooperating on North Korea. But markets are never more than one early-morning @realDonaldTrump rant away from chaos. Mr Trump could easily tank currencies with a couple of foul-mood tweets on currency manipulation, 45 per cent tariffs or broader US travel bans.

Policymakers from Singapore to Seoul should brace themselves for the moment economic data starts to disappoint and an embattled president plays the blame game.

The US' trade surplus with Singapore may keep the latter out of the direct line of fire. Yet any actions against China and Japan would send shockwaves South-east Asia's way. And on a more basic trust level, Singapore is wise to be cagey with a president who arbitrarily scrapped a Trans-Pacific Partnership that the US initiated.

Actual shooting cannot be ruled out. Asia is awash with potential flashpoints: Beijing building military outposts on disputed islands; South Korea's Terminal High Altitude Area Defence missile defence system; the increasingly frequent North Korean missile tests; a drug war in the Philippines trying neighbours' patience; and confusion about Taiwan and the "one China" policy, among other issues.

And then there's Mr Trump.

Mr Mattis' speech was carefully parsed for hints of what a Trump doctrine might look like. Good-cop Mattis walked his beat with caution. The US welcomes Beijing's cooperation on North Korea, he said, but "friction" is a possibility. "While competition between the US and China, the world's two largest economies, is bound to occur," Mr Mattis said, "conflict is not inevitable."

Mr Mattis didn't say Mr Trump could just as easily be the aggressor, though it was written between the lines in bold font. The high point of Mr Trump's presidency so far was April 6, when he fired 59 Tomahawk missiles at Syria. It won him widespread applause and knocked the intensifying domestic probes into links between his campaign and Russia from the headlines.

Might Mr Trump wag the proverbial dog at Pyongyang to divert attention anew? Or perhaps face off with Chinese naval vessels in the South China Sea?

Sound fanciful? Last year, chief Trump strategist Steve Bannon said "there's no doubt" the US and China will go to war over the South China Sea within five to 10 years. Mr Bannon was removed from his National Security Council post in April but remains influential. Is it so far-fetched that a far-rightwinger with the ear of a thin-skinned president might accelerate the timetable?

Consider, too, that adviser Peter Navarro, author of the paranoid tome, Death By China, has Mr Trump's other ear.

Mr Trump's first budget proposal, meanwhile, requests US$54 billion (S$74.5 billion) of new defence spending, much of which will add US vessels and aircraft to Asia's increasingly crowded seas. That's on top of an already booming Asian arms race in China, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Australia and beyond. So much military hardware in such close proximity is inherently dangerous. Chinese and Japanese fighter pilots are facing off in the North Asian seas with bewildering frequency, while North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Mr Trump seek to out-troll each other. What could go wrong?

So much for the utopian ideal of Shangri-La, eh?

William Pesek, a Tokyo-based journalist, is a former columnist for Bloomberg and author of Japanization: What The World Can Learn From Japan's Lost Decades.

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Asia encounters America's new sheriff - The Straits Times

At his recent Harvard commencement ceremony, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg addressed the issue of universal basic income. In his speech he articulated the underlying premise of basic income as a way of redefining our relationship with work and society. Every generation expands its definition of equality. Now its time for our generation to define a new social contract, Zuckerberg said. We should have a society that measures progress not by economic metrics like GDP but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to give everyone a cushion to try new things.

The idea is bound up with concerns about the growing use of automation and concerns that more people will become not only unemployed but unemployable in the traditional sense. While this has yet to be proved in any way, and ignores the fact that major economic and social upheavals have always resulted in new jobs emerging, there seems little doubt that governments will have to address the issue very soon. In fact experiments in basic income have taken place in Kenya, the Netherlands, Finland, Canada, the US and elsewhere. Some of them took place decades ago, because the idea has been with us for quite some time even if it has acquired momentum in the new era of automation.

Not everybody is as convinced of the benefits and practicalities as its advocates. A new study by the jobs and income division of the OECD, claims that any basic income at socially and politically meaningful levels would require additional spending on benefits and therefore higher tax to finance this. It modelled the effects of a basic income on four countries: Finland, France, Italy and Britain. The study found that although there would be more winners than losers among low-income groups, a basic income would not prove to be an effective tool for reducing poverty. In all countries, a reduction in poverty among those currently not covered by social protection system would be offset by some of those who are covered by existing social protection systems and who lose out from the introduction of a [basic income] moving into poverty.

Many of the ethical and practical implications of a basic income are explored in this fascinating RSA talk and debate by Rutger Bregman, a Dutch advocate of the policy and a man likely to become central to the emerging debate.

Image: Basic Income Switzerland

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Podcast: Is universal basic income a Utopia for realists? - Workplace Insight (press release) (registration) (blog)

Everyone seems to have an opinion on 'tokens' of late.

As if there weren't enough things to worry about in the world, the idea that a limited set of cryptographically unique data can be created and sold by anyone with an internet connection has emerged as a divisive issue, with everyone from the Financial Timesto Reddit trolls weighing in.

How bad (you mean good?!) is it?

Well, let's just say people who generally decry the intervention of government are practically screaming for the regulators to be involved, and 'sensible' people are falling over chairs to distance 'blockchain'from the whole thing (and those are the more sane parts of the conversation).

What do I have to add? Just that it seems to mark a change that perhaps should be considered more dispassionately. Sorry, but tokens just aren't the end of the world (or the beginning of some new utopia).

Both sides have logical conclusions. Both are over-reaching to prove a point: Tokens are bad woe the poor granny investor! Tokens are good end to the Silicon Valley elites! (Written in true Silicon Valley style, of course.)

The better questions are:Should centuries of sensible regulation be discarded because of technology? (No.) Should tokens be demolished in infancy because of their threat to ahighly risk-tolerant sub-population bent on 1,000% returns? (Also, probably no.)

In the words of Shooter McGavin, sometimes you have to play the ball as it lies. Sometimes that's off Frankenstein's fat foot...

It does! Who needs a token? Not really anyone knows. (As with bitcoin, we should probably be OK with that.)

Maybe the guys at Polychain Capital know. They talk like reasonable people who know something that's too weird to discuss in much detail. (When your local Teslas need a protocol for a robotic union, then you'll know!)

Where to start? Bitcoin is a protocol. And in the words of Tom Ding (who ran a token sale platform that was VC funded, operational and closedbefore the term 'ICO' ever existed), it's a limited data set for a specific software instance.

As we've seen with bitcoin, this lets us send (increasingly expensive) bitcoins between parties around the world (sometimes to criminals!). What is that good for? Who knows? Payments? Maybe more things, maybe not.

What other software protocols need to behave like that? Leaderless and broadly usable? Got me there.But ethereum has made it super easy for us to find out. (Is this a use case? OK, let's forget it.)

Are any of these things good? Maybe. Tokens are likely this year's 'accepting bitcoin'a way to appear trendy by using technology in a way that seems smart, but probably isn't a good intended use case.

If that's true, then this is ethereum's 2013 expect more oddball brands to turn to the concept with little luck.

The common thread of both sides is there's a tendency to wrap these arguments in some kind of moral cloth.

As I'm writing this, I'm walking in the woods, typing on a little phone screen. Some timeago, I'd have useda pen and paper. Manycenturiesbefore that, a stone tablet and a big mallet.

I'd have to go somewhere to send this to you. Or maybe I wouldn't be able to send it at all. But I never really wanted to send you aletter (or a stone tablet). It's because of convenience I'm lazy and largely apathetic that I use a phone (or write this) at all.

Remember, I don't want to buy a record, I want to hear a song. I don't want to buy a stock, just exposure to some idea that makes my money go up or down (but preferably up). (Disclosure: I have never bought a stock and probably won't. It sounds terrible.)

Point being that technology very rarely ever seems to have a moral bent.

Like rock 'n' roll, it does, though, have an ingrained cultural posturing that sometimes, occasionally, but not really that often, has a real impact that propagates the myth.

(Wasn't part of this supposed to be positive? I'm getting there!)

As someone who stares at Coinmarketcap for hours, sure, it can be confusing. We have new things that look like other things, but kind of, sort of aren't. When token markets pump before an announcement...Insider trading?! Maybe, sort of. Moral outrage seems like an easy knee-jerk.

Tokens are often called a new kind of digital asset, but they're probably more like a digital invention.

If I invent the wheel and tell people about it, am I 'pumping'? If I did invent the wheel, you'd probably want to invent a wheel store. (That just seems like good advice.)

But 'Hey, only 130 people were in on the Brave sale!' Sure, but eight people invested 2 ETH (about $400) or less... See?Disrupting venture capital! Well, people need a lot of free income to invest in things, I hear.

Maybe we should focus on convenience and delivery. That seems like all we end up with anyway.

As Wences Casares reminded us at a Coin Center dinner last week: "We have no chance, we're all up against infinite time".

Tokens, in this context it seems, are likely to outlast us all.

Parking meterimage viaCaribbean Trakker

Read more:

A Dispassionate Defense of ICOs as an OK Thing - CoinDesk

The new Wonder Woman film has most of what Wonder Woman fans would expect from a cinematic adaptation of her comics. There's Paradise Island, the distant utopia where women warriors live and fight together, sans men. There's the magic golden lasso which compels people to tell the truth. There are the magical bracelets that deflect bullets (and the occasional World War I shell, since the film is set in that era). Steve Trevor, brave airman in need of rescue? Yep. Etta Candy, jovial sidekick? She's there. Improbable CGI superfeats? Of course.

Fans of the classic comics may miss a few iconic bits of the Wonder Woman mythos, though. Wonder Woman has some funny repartee, falling in line with Marvel Cinematic Universe films: at one point, Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman archly explains to Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) that men are necessary for biological reproduction, but not for pleasure. But while there are jokes, the comics more whimsical elements have been shelved. There's no invisible plane. (At least not as far as audiences can tell.). And the Amazons in the film ride normal, everyday horses, rather than giant battle kangaroos.

Battle kangaroos haven't been part of the Wonder Woman mythos for some 65 years. But in the original 1940s comics, written by William Marston and drawn with elegant stiffness by Harry G. Peter, kangas were one of the most visually distinctive not to mention gloriously silly aspects of life on Paradise Island. Amazons rode kangas in their Paradise Island military contests, and they even had special giant sky kangas that could take them to other planets.

Marston and Peter even had an origin issue for the giant kangaroos. In 1947, Wonder Woman #23 revealed that the kangaroos were brought to Paradise Island by cat-headed male aliens when Wonder Woman was a child. After some fighting, it turned out that the aliens were actually human-looking women. They joined the Amazons, and their giant kangaroos replaced the Amazons former mounts giant bunnies. (Marston and Peter never got around to an origin issue for the bunnies.)

It's clear enough why Wonder Woman 2017 doesn't have giant kangas or bunnies: space-hopping kangaroos are silly. They're a fun concept for kids, but the movie is aimed at an older, more serious and sophisticated audience. Adults want a tormented Wonder Woman grieving for fallen comrades, not a cheerful Wonder Woman using her magic lasso to make dignified Amazon doctors stand on their heads. (The magic lasso was originally a lasso of command much more broadly useful than the lasso of truth.)

The film's revamping of Wonder Woman's origin helps underline the difference in audience and tone. In the comic, Wonder Woman's mother crafts a child out of clay, and Aphrodite grants it life.

That's a child's story about how babies are made, the fantasy of an awkward parent who isnt ready to get into the birds and the bees and the kangaroos. The film is mature enough to know better. In the movie version, the Amazon Hippolyta claims she crafted Diana the future Wonder Woman from clay, and Zeus animated her. But eventually, a character pointedly suggests that Hippolyta and Zeus made Diana the old-fashioned, biological way. Kids love kangaroos and don't know where babies come from. Wonder Woman 2017 is smarter than that.

But being smarter in this case feels a lot like being staid. The whimsical childrens version of Diana's birth is much more adventurous than the movie version. In Marston and Peter's comic, Aphrodite and Hippolyte make a child together, in an intentional vision of lesbian parthenogenesis. Marston lived in a polyamorous relationship with his wife, Elizabeth and their lover, Olive Byrne. He had children with both women. Elizabeth and Olive lived together for decades after Marston died; they were almost certainly bisexual. Marston was attuned to the possibility of unconventional family structures. He created a Wonder Woman origin story that cut out men, and refused the logic of patriarchy, whereby power travels from father to child. The film, in asserting that the facts of life must be the facts of life, and in attributing Wonder Woman's specialness to Zeus power as a god, dismisses Marstons politics in order to tell a more conventional story. Its supposedly more adult, but Marston might have considered it nave.

Marston wasn't just a polyamorist, he was an academic psychologist and sexual theorist whose ideas seem daring even in 2017, and were more so in the 1940s. Marston's Emotions of Normal People (1928) argued, contra Freud, that children's erotic bonds with their mothers were normal and awesome, and if cultivated could save the world. He believed that everyone's erotic life was bound up (as it were) in dominance and submission, and he believed that female love leaders could use their erotic oomph to direct men and women alike to a utopia of peace, love, and bondage games.

The original Wonder Woman comics were whimsical and playful because they were for children but also because they were sexual. Instead of massive CGI battles and explosions, the original Wonder Woman comics mostly featured stories where Wonder Woman and the villains alternated tying each other up and ordering each other around. Everyone got to top from the bottom and bottom from the top.

Marston very much intended for his playfulness to appeal to childish sensibilities and adult ones at the same time. He even wrote a comic about it: Sensation Comics #31, from 1944. In that story, Wonder Woman travels to Grown-Down Land, where children rule and force adults to take grown down medicine to make them children, too. Along the way, Wonder Woman is compelled to obey the dictatorial children, and she receives a sound spanking from toddlers while a mob of babies cheers. Its pretty tough being a grown down ladys slave! Wonder Woman exclaims. All in good fun, of course.

Sensation Comics #31 is pretty shocking even to the most jaded modern reader. Eroticized material involving toddlers, much less infants, remains taboo for most audiences. But Marston's comics arent out of line with other early children's literature. Peter Pan's innocence is so aggressive precisely because the sexual tension of a boy flying into a girls bedroom window is so overt. In her monograph Between Women, Sharon Marcus writes about Victorian doll stories for children, which often involved children spanking, beating, and tying up sentient animate dolls.

When people read such stories from a contemporary perspective, they tend to talk about repression and perversion. But Marston's goal was to encourage children not to be repressed. He wanted his readers (young and old) to embrace their imaginations, whether it took them to sky kangas or ritualized spankings. In Wonder Woman 2017, the Amazon games are all oriented toward battle preparation and the serious work of war. In Marston and Peters Paradise Island, the Amazons train for battle and athletic contests. But they also have a game where some Amazons dress up in deer skins while others hunt them, capture them, and pretend to eat them. Fighting and competing are fun, but so is goofy flirtation with your sisters. And if children got the message that lesbianism was acceptable, normal, and fun well, Marston, Elizabeth, and Byrne would certainly approve.

Wonder Woman 2017 does occasionally channel the childish spirit of the original comics. Many superheroines on-screen, from Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow to Sarah Michelle Geller as Buffy, find their powers a burden and pine for normality. But Gal Gadot seems to genuinely enjoy her superfeats. In one scene, when she leaps across a ravine and grasps onto a ledge, she smiles gleefully, as if to say, "I am more awesome than I even knew!" Marston would approve; his Wonder Woman also really enjoyed her powers.

But in general, the more adult Wonder Woman is a more conventional superhero than Marston and Peters version. Gadot's Wonder Woman talks vaguely about the power of love, but mostly, her adventure involves beating the tar out of bad guys, and eventually slicing them apart with her sword a phallic weapon added to her repertoire long after Marston died. Wonder Woman doesnt lead Etta Candy and her sorority sisters to the stars to fight the evil Pluto. Instead, she and Steve recruit a pallid A-team of stock male mercenaries to fight, while Etta stays behind in London. Realism means that only Amazons and men have the adventures. Real women hang back at headquarters, and answer the phones.

Granted, few viewers would really want a fully Marston-derived Wonder Woman film, whatever that would look like. (Some sort of combination of Barbarella and Caged Heat?) Mainstream audience Wonder Woman fans, and moviegoers in general, want a heroine who overcomes personal tragedy, trades quips, and fights for rights in sequences packed with lots of special effects.

I don't begrudge anyone their successful, badass Wonder Woman movie. But I think it's worth remembering that something is lost when you trade in the kangas for horses, and the whimsy for angst. Playfulness opens up possibilities for children of all ages. Marston and Peter were hopping about on distant planets decades ago. The new Wonder Woman, whatever its virtues, suggests we still haven't caught up with them.

Noah Berlatsky is the author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics.

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The new Wonder Woman film loses the comic's playfulness so don't expect space kangaroos - The Verge