guyn-O-mer

Petitions are legion on the world wide web. Demands of worldwide citizenship and worldwide minimum wage are circulating since Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt wrote their Empire. Here is another one. The difference: this one is appealing individuals to reduce their wage or limit its proportion at not more than 20 to one. We have till 2050 to apply the rule. And "high wages" will even decrease more beyond this date. By who and how, great mystery. And what to do with the rest?
Finally the problem still is the same: how can we create the political, social and ecomical conditions for a radical transformation? Certainly not by metaphorical aims being worth the type of fomal declarations in a pure american style.

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Title of on article of Gérard Granel, great philosopher, which was written in the nineties of the last century, can be a guideline for actual social and political problems. But he wouldn't tell that history is repeating itself, only that the ignorance of establishment about the populist mouvement of the thirties could teach us something.
So it's impossible to compare the fascisms of the thirties with the ongoing increase of extremism today, no comparison between the phantomatic german parliament of the thirties and the kind of actuel french government's bringing in legislation, no similarity between signaling certain populations as undesirable and unworthy of living (Jews, gipsies, homosexuals, mentally deranged and other handicapped people) and the actual exclusion of all who don't fit in the social order of western democracies (illegal immigrants, unemployed people, beggars, outlaws, aids-infected people, supposed terrorists ...).
But the actual naivety about the increasing populism, even the tendancy to play with it, seems to have a lot in commun with the thirties.

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A knife might be used not only to peel an apple but also to kill someone, so there is a possibility of illegal action. As the knife sellers know this, they have to be sued and taken responsible for the fact that knife users could be criminals.
Why not prohibit the business with knives?

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Opposition gets his power by a clearly defined enemy. According to Carl Schmitt it isn't enough to say that there is an opposition between friends and enemies. As they have the same appearence, you have to make an artificial distinction in order to indicate the enemies.
The Jews, the communists, the capitalists, the fondamentalists, it has not to be too precise, just enough to put the maximum in it. So you can on the other side have the idea of union against someone even if this union may be very heterogeneous.
They know that's fragile and not lasting, but every time the union is working till the instant when there's no enemy any more, when they won and have to construct something new.
And then jokes have come to an end.

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Walter Benjamin spent a lot of time to save some idealists of the nineteenth century, of those who according to him belonged to the missing occasions or encounters of history. Carl Gustav Jochmann was one of these. Russian and german native speaker, he was known for his accurate aphorisms and his reflexions about language.
Read one of them here ...

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Till now I had only taken a glance at the trailer of this film that is supposed to tell the last days of Hitler. The recent construction of a brand new cinema complex had driven another classic cinema in the city to broadcast more and more movies in their original version. So I could see The Fall in its "original" subtitled version.
I wasn't expecting very much and my sense of foreboding had been confirmed. You're not believing a second that Bruno Ganz is Hitler. It's a real comedy where you can see a crazy schmuck and a lot of dumb sheep. No character has some depth, Goebbels seems even have a french accent. The fiction embedded in the testimony of the "real" Traudl Junge, joung (as his name) and naive secretary of Hitler throughout idiot orders and last will, doesn't do anything other than try to liberate Germans from their guilt to have sustained this government till its final agony.
Good try of general acquittal.

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"Narrative Journalism does away with the inverted pyramid model of traditional journalism, which arranges who, what, where, when, and why from the most important to the least important. Narrative Journalism breathes life into the five W's."
Mark Kramer, the director of Nieman program on Narrative Journalism, wants to make journalism more real and get it nearer to every day life. Even if he is right to say that so-called objectivity doesn't exist in journalism it makes a difference when you give up this deontology. At the end information telling becomes emotion creating, the same thing is already introduced in actual journalistic routines: the dog crushed next door is more important than a human catastrophy a thousand miles away. I'm quite sceptic that Cramers methods improve journalism.

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