A Bit More Detail

Me, my guilty pleasure is Star Trek tie-in novels, most specifically the ones that have been written in a shared continuity over the past fifteen or so years.

What can I say? Well, not only do I like reading but I am a Star Trek fan. I do like revisiting many of the characters and settings of the television series and movies in print. The novels written in a shared continuity explore, with an enjoyable degree of consistency and at least a minimal level of skill, a universe that’s fleshed out, and in many cases given considerably greater and more plausible detail than any of the canonical productions ever have or are likely to go into. There’s even an active online community: I know at least four people on my Livejournal friends list through Trek literature, either as readers or (in at least one case) as a writer. (The TrekBBS Trek literature forum can be a fun place to hang out.)

Is this high literature? No, but I don’t think everything I read has to be high literature. Is it the only literature I read? No. (The only fiction? No.) So, what’s the harm?

And you?

• Dan Hirschman at A (Budding) Sociologist’s Commonplace Book distinguishes between the economic measurements GDP and GDP.
• James Bow mourns the death, via cutbacks and falling passengers, of Ontario’s Northlands railway.
• Centauri Dreams considers the question, inspired by evidence that Alpha Centauri is significantly older than Sol, and speculation that habitable planets are likely to be considerably older than Earth, of where the aliens are.
• Daniel Drezner is somewhat surprised that he is optimistic about the spread of liberal-democratic ideals worldwide, at least relative to others in a recent issue of The National Interest.
• Geocurrents’ Asya Pereltsvaig considers the similar Russian-based contact pidgins in Siberia and along Russia’s Arctic coast as the product not of contact with a single language area but rather as consequence of a mindset of how to talk to non-Russians.
• Marginal Revolution notes a New York Times article noting the culture shock experienced by trained professionals migrating to Germany from southern Europe.
• Registan notes that the International Labour Organization’s demand to inspect Uzbekistan’s cotton plantations to verify that forced and child labour is not used there, likely to be rejected because (among other things) Uzbekistan does use forced and child labour, is likely to lead to worsened relations with the United States.
• I’m late on this one, but Slap Upside the Head notes the retraction of the only credible study on ex-gays by the paper’s author.
• Towleroad notes the hysterical anger of Islamic clerics and the usual in Iran at the rumour–not the reality–of a gay pride parade in neighbouring Azerbaijan.

Tonight’s [FORUM] question is simple enough: How do you cultivate your hobbies, your recreational activities?

Do you work on them solo or in groups? Do you seek out new activities alongside the old–supplements, replacements–or do you work on what you’ve been doing?

Discuss.

Today’s [PHOTO] post, to the extent that it had a theme, was about things which seemed like good ideas but eventually came apart. At one point someone thought that building an Italian sandwich shop with a sideline in catering on that northern perimeter of the Annex which is Dupont Street was a good idea. Maybe it was a good idea for a time. The name change and the empty storefront leave me thinking that, eventually, it stopped being a good idea.

That’s a story of one sandwich shop in one neighbourhood. On the same scale, there are many other restaurants–and shops, and sundry other attractions–in many other neighbourhoods that had similar fates. On smaller scales, there are individual projects; on larger scales, there are great endeavours. My friend Stephen has argued that the 1960s-era dream of manned space travel might be such a project.

You? What do you have in mind?

Discuss.

I’d like to think that last year’s reaction to Mayor Ford’s non-participation in Pride festivities, a combination of pointed humour and explicit identification of the issues at stake, is a model that deserves to be followed.

This isn’t only in the case of GLBT issues in Toronto–Ford has received an official invitation from the Pride Toronto festivities, if you’re curious. The humour can disarm, the explicit identification of the issues relating to the initial complaint penetrates to the heart of the issue. Does Mayor Ford choose not to have anything to do with Pride festivities last year because he doesn’t like–as he’s indicated–non-heterosexuals? Then pointedly play that Lily Allen song, make it clear that his excuses are feeble, and make it clear that there are ways that he can escape this.

I’d like to think that this strategy can be adapted to deal with many different scenarios. What say you?

I like many things about my photo of a plush elephant in a downtown Toronto park.

I like taking and sharing photos, I like extended exploratory walks, I like coming across pleasantly unexpected things: the process leading to this photo was fulfilling. It was fun, perhaps all the more so for being unexpected. I wasn’t planning to commute to a park by Yonge and Wellesley to take a picture of a plush animal that happened to be poised by a fence (and that, I was later told by Jerry, had migrated a bit around that part of town); it just happened.

What unexpected fun have you encountered recently? Was it something you did, something you saw, something that was done to you? Were you trying to do anything new? If none of these questions works for you, what are you trying to do now?

Discuss.

Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell expanded on a post of his regarding the careful political training of China’s People’s Liberation Army. (I’d suggested it was being depoliticized, he corrected me in pointing out that China operates by non-Western paradigms.)

Great efforts are being made to keep them politicised, so long as the politics inculcated in them is what the Party wants it to be. It’s a very important point that the Chinese army doesn’t exist in the same context of civil-military relations that a Western army does, and not even in the same way an army in a Western authoritarian state does. Specifically, they reject the idea that the military is “above politics”. They do, very much, believe that the army must serve the civilian power – but the nature of that power is different.

The Communist Party is a party. It also at least believes itself to be Communist, even if it’s not obvious how it isn’t capitalist. Rather than maintaining a status quo, the point of a Communist Party is to change things, to wage the revolution and re-shape society. In the context of Chinese history, even if the nation seems indestructible, the state has been fragile, has been contested, its borders have moved, its sovereignty has been variable in quality. At the moment, there are two of them, and there have been many more in the past.

In that sense, the People’s Liberation Army (the name is significant – it’s not called the Chinese Army) is one of the instruments with which the Party intervenes in Chinese society to create the kind of state it wants. The link between the propaganda/media-management plan, the army recruitment cycle, and the National People’s Congress process, should be seen in this light. Conscription played a very similar role in French and German history, so this shouldn’t be surprising. Rather than permanent revolution, permanent statebuilding is going on – given the uncertainty of the future, and the strangeness of a Communist Party with Maoist intellectual heritage in charge of a capitalist superpower, it’s probably much more useful to think in terms of process rather than of an end-state.

Curiously, elsewhere in the blogosphere Charlie Stross wondered which systems of government haven’t been tried yet, maybe because the technology needed wasn’t available, perhaps for want of imagination.

What do you think of Chinese governance? Is this Party-led model of power a viable model? I’ve suggested here that China might be set to undergo a transformation to something closer to the model of the Western democracy (whatever that is, precisely). Then again, it might not.

Jim Belshaw’s eyecatchingly-titled Sunday essay, “Is the internet drowning in it’s own excreta?” makes the interesting argument that the proliferation of content on the Internet–in the blogosphere, on Twitter, via search engines–is expanding to the point

I have noticed the same pattern as the constant increase in ephemera makes it harder and harder to find the material I want. There is another problem as well. The constant rise in the use of the internet for transactions purposes, itself something of value, adds to the overall content and indeed confusion.

[. . .]

When the internet began, it was rather like shopping in a small town. You knew the street layout, you knew where the stores were. Now the internet has became a mega global city in which no person can even attempt to follow the overall pattern, let alone understand the detailed intricacies.

You shop or eat in that local area directly related to your needs, the things that you are interested in or need to do, putting the rest aside. Even then you have a problem, for the map changes everyday even in your local area. Nothing is stable.

Just as none of us can understand the tax acts in any country or indeed the full scope of the road rules, now we cannot understand the internet. Then, as always happens with increased systemic complexity, we start to simplify, looking just at the things we most need. In my case, for example, I am going to unfollow certain news outlets on Twitter so that I can better focus on those things, mainly people, that I do wish to follow.

[. . .]

This process is still in its early days, but the broad patterns are becoming clear.

People will still use the broad internet, but increasingly they will focus on slices most directly relevant to them. One internet will be replaced by many internets. The internet you know will be different from that I know. The look will be different, the mode of operations different, the language different, the information displayed different.

This fragmentation will come at a cost, including at least the partial unifying element provided by the broad internet. Yet it is, I think, inevitable.

Thoughts? I’m inclined to think of the rapid expansion of Internet content as a good thing, particularly as content grows in language zones and geographic areas that haven’t been included in the online world. Does it matter if you can’t grasp Australian tax law, for instance, if your own country’s tax laws (et cetera) are available? Has there ever been a single Internet in the sense Belshaw described? I have my doubts.

Discuss.

My country of Canada is synonymous with snow, yet scenes like the one depicted below were passingly rare.

The below picture shows how much snow Toronto got for Christmas; that encrustment of snow by the foot of a light post at Dupont and Bartlett was actually it.

Meanwhile, the picture below was taken in February.

My previous [FORUM] question on the seasons was posted in a winter that was doubly exceptional, in North America for its warmth and in Europe for its coldness. Winter ended almost two weeks ago, and now we face the prospect of a spring coming after a snowless winter (still a decent amount of precipitation, mind) and unknown prospects this summer (will it be warmer still?).

How freaked out do you feel about this? Why? Do you think it’s the harbinger of a shift? Do you think it’s isolated? What has happened in your area of the world, weather-wise, this previous season?

Discuss.

Me, I plan to go to work and catch a movie with friends. You?

(Yes, it’s a light [FORUM] post. There’s space for these.)