Flaneur Musings by Teodor Mitew
It’s Christmas around the corner, and to top it up we are moving across Australia – from Perth to Wollongong (just south of Sydney), so the posts here will be far and in between until we are settled, which should hopefully happen by mid January.
Happy holidays!
There is a theory that once the Universe is figured out, it will instantly transform into something even more bizarrely inexplicable. There is a second theory that this indeed has already happened!
Douglas Adams
Today, Julian Assange was arrested and then refused bail – even though an anonymous donor offered 60,000 pounds as surety – ostensibly for having committed the crime of using a condom which broke midway through coitus. To make this an even bigger show trial, his defense was not given access to the case documents. Whatever happens next, WikiLeaks have managed another scoop – this time exposing the total hypocrisy of the judicial system of Western democracies.
Way too much has been written on the motives and modus operandi of WikiLeaks, based solely on their image in the media. Arguably a better way to approach their actions and motives is through the two key theoretical essays of Julian Assange – State and Terrorist Conspiracies, and Conspiracy as Governance. I am attaching them below – my commentary to follow.
Plenty has been happening while I was immersed in the joys of fatherhood. WikiLeaks, and the whole theater of deception surrounding it, has been the most thought-provoking flow of events by far. Plenty to write about, but for now this quote from Raffi Khatchadourian’s excellent piece on Assange:
“He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled “Conspiracy as Governance,” which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare. These ideas soon evolved into WikiLeaks.”
I am now the proud, relieved, worried, and very tired father of a baby boy! Little Baian was born on the 21st of October. My son,
Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito, quam tua te Fortuna sinet.
“There is no subtler, or surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debase the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which only one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
–John Maynard Keynes
Here’s the problem with ad hominem attacks during arguments: those who deserve them are not worth the time, and those who are worth the time do not deserve them.
It’s that magical time of the year again, when every flaneur celebrates the marriage of Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria and Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen, also known as the Oktoberfest. Happy Oktoberfest, and may your beer taste good!
I’ve been meaning to write a longer piece on my trip to Mount Emei, one of the holiest mountains in China and home among others to the Bao Guo Si. Alas, this will have to wait for a while. However, the following quote expresses well the spirit of the place.
‘The supreme aristocrat is not the feudal lord in his castle but the contemplative monk in his cell.’Nicolas Gomez Davila
