A watershed moment for modern history is the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, better known as Versailles, for the name of the treaty which set the terms for peace with Germany. It is widely accepted this peace lay the ground work for the Nazi rise to power and World War II. It is also not far-fetched to see in the peace treaties in Paris 1919 the origins of the Cold War.
Australia's ABC Rear Vision took on the peace conference and went even a step further to show how this conference drew the national borders we know today and triggered many of the international tensions, hot spots and wars we have today, including Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel/Palestine. While the top dogs of the conference, Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson did the high level setting of terms, a series of subcommittees had numerous specialists working on the new borders, sometimes with plenty of knowledge of the real situation on the ground, sometimes with very little. Invariably they set borders where they had never been before setting aside older, cultural and natural boundaries, attempting to create spheres for nation states - the high ideal of the time.
The tragedy as it comes out in the podcast is that while the spirits were high and the hopes were for ever-lasting peace, the enterprise was bound to fail. The gap between what was politically necessary for France and Britain especially, acceptable for Germany, but also for 'winners' such as Japan and Italy was impossible to bridge. And the idea of imposing a grid for nation states in realms where no such creature had ever existed, seemed laudable, but was unfeasible. Failed states were created before we coined the term.
Het is nog altijd mogelijk om oude interviews van Martin Simek op te halen op het internet, maar het is verre van makkelijk. De RVU heeft de homepage van het programma Simek 's Nachts min of meer gedeactiveerd en wie de oude feed nog in iTunes heeft, kan maar een beperkt deel van het archief bereiken. Niettemin zijn er nog zo'n 90 uitzendingen te downloaden via de omroep. Deze files hebben geen duidelijke naam en je zal ze dus allemaal moeten afspelen om erachter te komen of ertussen zit wat je zoekt.
Op mijn bescheiden wijze heb ik geprobeerd hier iets aan te doen door dat gedeelte van de RVU feed, die nog wel werkt, maar niet meer in iTunes te zien is, om te leiden via mijn Google Reader. Dit resulteert in een feed waarin nog 44 oudere interviews van Simek met naam en toenaam herkenbaar en downloadbaar worden. Een paar tests hebben uitgewezen dat ook hier niet onder alle omstandigheden alle files door iTunes aangeleverd worden. Er lijkt een maximum te zitten op de lengte van de lijst en om dat weer te omzeilen heb ik de 44 interviews over drie feeds verdeeld. Op deze feeds kan je je abonneren en naar hartelust oude Simek interviews terugluisteren.
Feed 1, heet AIAM Simek1 en omvat de interviews met Daniel Lohues, Wim van Ophem, Fabienne, Jan Slagter, Rita Verdonk, Loek Kessels, Simon de Waal, Professor Wagenaar, Frans Lomans, Jeroen Willems, Marlies Dekkers, Stella Braam, Seth Gaaikema, Robbert Dijkgraaf en Elena Simons. Kopieer de link en via iTunes > Advanced > Subscribe to podcast... het inplakken van de link en OK, abonneer je je op deze feed.
Feed 2, heet AIAM Simek2 en omvat de interviews met Jan Rot, Thomas von der Dunk, Maya Lievegoed, Helmert Woudenberg (2 uur), Roos Rebergen, Christine van Broeckhoven, Arthur Japin, Dirk van de Wijngaard, Sophie van der Stap, Geert Jan Knoops, Meryem Kilic-Karaaslan, Hugo Verbrugh, Ben Mak en Raphael Creemers. Kopieer de link en via iTunes > Advanced > Subscribe to podcast... het inplakken van de link en OK, abonneer je je op deze feed.
UPDATE: er is nu ook een 4e feed en die is nog steeds groeiende.
Feed 4 is op Huffduffer: Simek op Hufduffer met Xander de Buisonjé, Ward Teunissen, Mohammed Jabri (2), Naema Tahir, Sjoerd Kooistra, Jan Lenferink, Pieter Winsemius, Anne-Mei The. Kopieer de link en via iTunes > Advanced > Subscribe to podcast... het inplakken van de link en OK, abonneer je je op deze feed.
Opmerkelijk is dat langs deze weg het interview met Rita Verdonk beschikbaar is. Dit gesprek, in de aanloop van de verkiezingen in 2006, leverde een onverkwikkelijke clash tussen Verdonk en Simek op. Simek kwam met emotionele kritiek op Verdonks vluchtelingenbeleid en Verdonk kon er niet met de air van een kalme politica op reageren. Simek raakte van zijn stuk en Verdonk ook. Hoewel het tenenkrommende radio opleverde, vond ik het persoonlijk heel fascinerend en veelzeggend, zowel wat betreft Verdonk als Simek. De RVU schaamde zich er teveel voor en heeft al een paar dagen na de uitzending de file afgeschermd in de eigen feed. Tot mijn eigen verbazing staat deze file nog wel op de server en is via AIAM Simek1 gewoon te beluisteren. Om het nog makkelijker te maken, heb ik dit interview hieronder embedded.
Alle nieuwere interviews van Simek zijn op te halen in de officiele feeds van RVU en Elsevier.
This post is in some ways a follow up of the previous one, Helprin on Copyright. In my review I already expressed my idea: even if Helprin is right that copyright needs extension and that the modern information age is taking a huge toll on writing, I have a feeling it can't be helped. Our world has changed and our solutions to problems such as the protection of writings need to change accordingly.
This radically changing world of hours is called the Fourth Revolution by Luciano Floridi on Philosophy Bites. He sees the fundamentally different way in which we handle information these days as a major revolution in humanity, one that decidedly changes the way we experience ourselves and our environment. By these terms Helprin seems to voice not only a concern but also a mind set of a gone age.
Our access to information is nearly instantaneous. We communicate with people all over the world, we have a significant electronic identity and cross traditional borders with an ease that was previously unimaginable. This goes for the digitally versatile. Next to them a new subclass emerges of those are not taking part in this rapid exchange, either by choice or for lack of ability. Listen to Floridi how this, in his mind, changes our selves, our sense of community and our sense of environment.
On EconTalk Russ Roberts hosted the writer Mark Helprin to talk about copyright. In this era of information technology we hear many voices plead for a reduction to copyrights. Helprin however, pleads for an extension.
An important part of Helprin's argument is that the writer needs to be able to leave his capital to his off spring, just like any other entrepreneur. And I find this the strongest argument. Helprin makes an attempt to defend copyright also in the name of democracy and here, it seems to me, his statements are too much filled with examples of what went wrong or what can go wrong in specific cases.
I agree that each of these cases are showing a problem, but for one it is not certain whether an extended copyright will necessarily solve the problem, neither is it certain whether a world with shorter copyright necessarily will not be able to find ways to address the problems Helprin mentions. His ideas are stemming from a view on society where there is just the individual (who needs protection of his copyright) and the large, rather undefined general public and nation state. That, I think, is a world view from an old world. The current world is changing to a new world, just like the information technology changes so radically, copyrights may no longer be tenable, even if Helprin is right.
BBC's Reith Lectures 2009 have come to an end with the last lecture and it has been a wonderful ride. Except for the second lecture, that had wee too many examples to support the point, it was pretty persistently an outstanding series. The returning point, to be rounded off in the last lecture (transcript), was that we have been giving too much freedom to the market, resulting in a situation where real policies and real debates are no longer part of the public discourse, but rather left to be decided by market forces. Sandel's plea to let fundamental issues to be decided politically and publicly is therefore a plea for firm democracy and involved citizenship.
He even calls it a new citizenship, though I think it has always been there and needs, as he rightfully points out, be reinforced. To this point, in the last lecture, he looks at policy making itself and shows how the reduction of decision making to cost-benefit analyses, leads to absurd consequences. Some issues have value beyond the monetary and therefore, making a real decision demands of policy makers and the public debate to go beyond cost benefit considerations. He gives a couple of examples, that triggered my own example: noone has suggested we should kill off all citizens beyond the age of 75, even though it almost surely means a huge benefit in cut costs of health and welfare spendings. It is just immoral as everybody knows.
The real problem is to accept that this means we must be ready and be able to hold political and public debate over real issues, over values, over morality. We have developed a sense that values and morality are totally subjective, or part of beliefs and therefore are not open for debate. But in reality we have simple been evading real issues by allowing market forces to decide or rely on cost benefit analyses. To reverse that culture and bring values back into the realm of debatable issues, require a new citizenship and Sandel goes into describing this citizenship. I feel that he does a very good job, but am nagged by the thought we have maybe lost the language and logic to talk about these. As I see it, Sandel makes a point against the consequentialism, the utilitarialism, that have come to dominate our thinking and have monopolized public debate. We need to steer away from that logic and I hope we can.
A regular reader of this blog is Ronald van den Boogaard, a Dutch radio maker of the much admired VPRO. On the basis of my reviews he discovered Ersatz TV and wrote an enthusiastic piece on its maker Annik Rubens or Larissa Vassilian as Van den Boogaard reveals in his blog is Annik's real name.
It is all nice and charming that I love Ersatz TV and many of the other podcasts I review at this blog, but I am basically an amateur. The fact that Ronald van den Boogaard agrees with me on this particular point is most of all the achievement of Annik Rubens, but I am willing to admit I feel flattered myself no small amount.
In the mean time Ersatz TV has a new video out, which I love to embed here.
Australia's ABC Rear Vision took on the peace conference and went even a step further to show how this conference drew the national borders we know today and triggered many of the international tensions, hot spots and wars we have today, including Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel/Palestine. While the top dogs of the conference, Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson did the high level setting of terms, a series of subcommittees had numerous specialists working on the new borders, sometimes with plenty of knowledge of the real situation on the ground, sometimes with very little. Invariably they set borders where they had never been before setting aside older, cultural and natural boundaries, attempting to create spheres for nation states - the high ideal of the time.
