Viktor Orban and the new centralism

Is he so hungry for more and more power?

The disposable academic - The Economist

Do we really need a PhD? Why?

http://www.economist.com/node/17723223

Bosnia, Albania Celebrate EU Visa Lifting

Call for Papers - Community of Knowledge

As in the last post we addressed the issue of different content assigned to images and words, varying from a culture to another, you have the occasion now to share your experience, by applying to the Call for Papers for the Community of Knowledge. Speaking each other's language - also in terms of the words we are using - is a human business.

Good luck subscribers!

Mister Wong and Europe

Image via CrunchBase//The current logo

Mister Wong is a social bookmarking site created in 2006 and covering the German speaking realm. Recently, it got the Russian and Chinese variants. A very interesting and succesful idea.

But...not enjoying universal acceptance. The problem: the logo of the website - a Chinese man, with suite and glasses, in his 50s - was considered discriminatory by the American-Asian users. An aspect not familiar for the German/European public it was basically addressed. The creator of the site, Kai Tietjen, apologized for this inconvenience and replaced the logo with a very schematic - a kind of abstract African art representation, in my opinion - icon.

Different sensibilities, different worlds, but at the end, we have to take them into account, mostly when we are talking about businesses.

Nixon tapes

"The Nixon Library makes available almost 50 million pages of documents, over 300,000 photographs, thousands of motion pictures and videos, and the Nixon White House Tapes."

Communism sells/in East Berlin

Most part of the visitors from Berlin were interested in places and events connected with the Wall. And to do not forget that 2009 was the year when there were celebrated 20 years since the fall of the separation fence between East and West Berlin.

A lonely man's life

Since I finished my work in the area of intellectuals from Central and Eastern Europe I took a break from reading too much about the latest public discussions. But as I am preparing to start writing a serious book about this, I reentered little by little my too familiar environment.

My week-end lecture was the thematic diary of the Romanian intellectual - Adrian Marino, whose posthum memories - at his request - confirmed both from the point of view of the content and of the reception the dramatic situation of the intellectual debate.

Adrian Marino was among the few Romanians published abroad during communism, with studies and books in the area of comparative literature. Avant-la-lettre he was among the very few cases of freelancer researcher, being - after the period spent in the communist prisons - disconnected of the official layer of the culture communist bureaucrats.

With a lot of sadness, he is describing his alienation in a world hungry to win benefits and prestige - the international intellectual stage - the marginal condition of the intellectual belonging to a minor culture - predominantly focused on the production of journalism and poetry - and fighting with the hunger for acquiring a pseudo-intellectual status in the world of reversed values during communism. A situation continued in post-communism. Not the quality of work prevails but the laudatio to the VIP of the time, hence the over production of works without real value. Those political compromises are the red line of the Romanian culture, from the supporters of the right wing during the inter-war period to the communist ideologues and their post-communist re conversions.

From the point of view of the reception of this book, the debate was focused on persons and not on the situation of the Romanian intellectuals. Another missed opportunity for coming to terms with the past and for starting the discussion about the European values and reliable concepts of a different intellectual atmosphere.

Many some of his descriptions are too severe and personal, based on personal interactions and subjective reasons. What I appreciated in his book is the risk of assuming his opinions, even it was transmitted when he was no more present. In a way, probably he predicted the reactions and chose to better be the big absent of the media shows.

Roma or Gypsy - the Romanians' problem

Image via Wikipedia/Meeting between the Romanian president (middle, left) and representatives of Roma organisations

A new round in the semantic clash from Romania regarding the Roma minority, was consumed a couple of days ago after the Government from Bucharest asked the MPs to accept changing the name of the community from Roma to Gypsy/Țigan. For the main Roma organizations, the name is having depreciative connotations. Other representatives of the community might consider it "normal". The main reason for the change - introduced in Romania at the beginning of 90s - is the possibility of a confusion between the name of the country - Romania - and the name of the community - Roma. (What about the capital city of Italy? Did anybody ask Berlusconi? Maybe not.) At the level of the authorities, the confusion was considered having negative impact on the country's image abroad, as the Roma are associated with a high level of infractionality. This linguistic make-up, dictated from up, will not change anything. At the end of the day, all are citizens of the same country, Romania. And not the name will change the image, but the behavior and the coherence in actions and the respect towards the international obligations assumed.

Propaganda and Cold War: The mystery of the Colorado beetle

On the right, an image during the Cold War, from East Germany, protesting against the so-called dropping of Colorado beetle by the Americans. It is hard to imagine how the country was back then: poor people, hardly finding food in the middle of a destroyed country. And, instead on focusing on reconstruction, they were arming the media against the Americans and the West. A desperate try to build consensus.

Related articles

• The US-Soviet Cyber Cold War (news.slashdot.org)
• The Cold War in Popular Culture (gonintendo.com)

Modern art as CIA weapon

New revelations about the Cold War labyrinth - How modern art was part of a bigger plan to promote Western culture in the East. And, whatever the initial aim, the final outcome leaded to a positive effect for arts and culture.