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Category: opinion

06/30/05 10:35 - ID#32066

In 2010 we will have freedom

NEW YORK - New York officials on Wednesday unveiled a new plan for the Freedom Tower at Ground Zero, saying the 1,776-foot-tall skyscraper had been redesigned to meet security concerns and would be even more elegant than originally envisioned.

Police had refused to sign off on the building's design two months ago, voicing concerns that its base was too close to the sidewalk and could not be adequately protected against a truck bomb attack.

Because of the changes, the 20-ton granite cornerstone that was laid with great fanfare by New York Gov. George Pataki last Fourth of July will have to be moved.

Quoted from: HoustonChronicle.com - Freedom Tower design tweaked for security



That thing is so gonna get blown up. I hate to sound callous but if anyone dies it in, I honestly won't even feel bad for them - unless it is (e:hodown) and even then it will only last about 5 minutes. After the original towers were bombed and then blown up, who would ever set foot in the new even more groteque "freedom tower." It's just screaming bring me down. I can almost here George Bush's texas twang when I say freedom in my head now. That word has become so perverted at this point.

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Category: opinion

08/18/04 04:44 - ID#31165

Misunderstanding

Holly - [inlink]holly,87[/inlink]
Ajay - [inlink]ajay,89[/inlink]

You all could not have read my whole journal because it never says that I want google to take stuff down or censor it. It states multiple times that I am against internet censorship. It was just mentioning that the issue brings up lots of questions about ethics and responsibility.

I did, however, say the people hosting the information on their server are a bit responsible for the information. It is on their computers after all. They are not just cataloging as google is! They are actively distributing this type of information.

If you are refering to this :
"Do you think America should declare war on Google(just before their Stock Market launch), as well as, on the country that is serving this document to google? "

I was simply being sarcastic and saying that it was in line with current government policies and last two wars that we fought. I don't even know how you could take it seriously as it mentions America starting a war with an American corporations. Sorry if you misunderstood what I was saying. The osama picture was part of the joke.

[size=m]What is this about?[/size]
Holly, what is this part supposed to mean, " . . on what Paul considers unsavory or even dangerous information on the internet." You make it sound like I have this weird fringe opinion that the Terroist Handbook is both dangerous and unsavory. Or are you trying to say you find the Terrorist Handbook both savory and harmless?
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Category: opinion

12/22/03 05:20 - ID#30651

The Typewriter, Emancipation and Slavery

Kittler's discourse on the typewriter in his book "Gramophone Film Typewriter" is an informative piece concerning the development and influence of the typewriter. In “Typewriter”, Kittler discusses the many influences the typewriter has had on our society, from acting as an emancipating mechanism for women, to affording the blind the ability to write, to changing the way our entire global society conceptualizes and communicates. Seen as one of the of the major emancipating agents for women, the typewriter, a word meaning both the machine and the woman who operated it, aided in tearing down the "walls" of educational institutions that previously barred them from enrollment.

For the blind, the typewriter tore down the walls of silence in a world full of written expression. The most obvious example being Nietzsche, who suffered a form of blindness which ultimately forced him to give up his position as a professor at the university of Basal, as he no longer could control the medium of his creation, the written word. Nietzsche was one of the first adopters of the typewriter, as the typewriter bridged this gap, allowing the philosopher to literally feel the words come out of his hand and be pressed onto the paper. At the mercy of the machine as messenger for his word, Nietzsche was seriously set back when it malfunctioned only months after he first began to use it, thus destroying the fragile link between the author and the medium that the typewriter had offered. Because Nietzsche was wealthy enough to afford a subordinate to take his dictation, this may seem insignificant. However, this separation between author and work rendered allowed room for intellectual manipulation so extreme, by his sister and her pro-nazi agenda, that for the first half of the twentieth century Nietzsche was thought of as the primary philosopher of Nazism although it was well known that he had a
hatred for German Nationalism and antisemitism, as demonstrated in many of his earlier works.

While I agree that the typewriter was an emancipating force in many ways as demonstrated above, it cannot be overlooked that it also enslaved our society as a primary vehicle to the current state of technical dependence.

The typewriter was the first personal machine that began the trend toward our dependence on brain enhancing machinery, which has been nearly perfected with the advent of its evolutionary great grand child, the computer. This technological wonder, shooting forth from the military production facilities of the west, moved us toward our greater goal of increased efficiency and mass production. Once we reached this goal our society could not ever turn back without being completely destroyed, thus enslaving us in this cycle of endless technological innovation in terms of machines that allow us to rapidly disseminate information. From the brain of the master to the eyes of the subordinate in the shortest time possible, who ever gives up in this race loses all power.

The typewriter itself as a medium can also physically enslave the intellectual. As with the example of Henry James (Kittler, 216). The typewriter, a master product born out of a capitalist society, alters our ability to think by forcing a certain stimulus, in this case the typewriter clank, to be associated with intellectual production in a Pavlovian way. Kittler quotes James, “Soon a reflex loop was created: only the clanking of the typewriter induced sentences in the writer.” In this way the typewriter itself asserts a form of control over the user and demands to be purchased and worshiped.

While it is obvious that the typewriter has affected the way that we think and write, it must also be asserted that the typewriter itself is a product of the society through which it lives. A cycle which means that as far as technology can change us as a society it is ultimately only a reflection of our society's desire.
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Lastly, the typewriter has also be
en
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ajor source of governmental and religious propaganda, a theme which cannot be overlooked when speaking of it as an emancipating machine. Even more important than propaganda is the fact that the typewriter allowed, for the first time, true governmental efficiency; directly leading to the ultimate submission of the global masses to capitalist agencies. With both governmental and business issues, words became far more powerful than guns.
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Category: opinion

09/13/03 12:07 - ID#30548

I am convinced

No art is about the medium or asthetic but about your response. While at the Rough and Ready thing at Fusion, I thought I was losing sight with the artists vision and then I realized whatever visions I was having was the artists vision.
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