Subscribe to RSSArchive for the ‘link posts’ Category:
On the nature of friendship
There’s a trio of excellent posts on the nature of friendship posted by Tariq Nelson (What is Friendship?), Margari Hill (There For You) and Sunni Sister (As Far As You Are Unsettled).
Good reading. I need to remember to draft a post on my thoughts if and when I get back to regular blogging.
Peace.
about the Bukit Ho Swee fire
The subject of my doctoral research is a watershed event, being the greatest fire in Singapore’s history, burning down a massive urban kampong (’village’ in Malay) and rendering 15,694 people, mostly low-income Chinese, homeless. In the aftermath, the fire victims were swiftly rehoused in emergency flats built on the fire site by the Housing and Development Board. I examine the inferno as a case study of the social transformation of Singapore in the first decade of the People’s Action Party (PAP) government. The Bukit Ho Swee disaster is officially depicted as a ‘blessing in disguise’ in clearing what was allegedly ‘an insanitary, congested and dangerous squatter area’ and enabling the ‘emergence of Bukit Ho Swee Estate: from desolation to progress’. Such an account of the fire indicates, as James Scott contended, the ’self-confidence about scientific and technical progress’ which typified ‘high modernism’; what is emphasised is the progress which came afterward, not what was lost in the flames. My thesis sought to establish what the fire meant to the fire victims and to the government which responded vigorously to the disaster. This involved research into the official archives and interviews with former kampong dwellers, many of whom still live in or visit Bukit Ho Swee, now a graying estate close to the town area.
To be born after the fire in present-day Singapore is to be ‘young’. There are several historical frames defining the ‘old’ and ‘young’ – the Japanese Occupation, the ‘trials and tribulations’ of political development in the 1950s and early 1960s and the unforeseen independence of the nation in 1965 – but all share the one requirement of having experienced the landmark events in recent history. ‘Young Singaporeans’, also labelled ‘post-1965ers’ in the press, are purportedly ‘without history’, having been born in the supposedly rosy phase of Singapore’s development after 1965. A generation ago, then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew defined this divide by stating that while his generation ‘faced Japanese Occupation, conquest, hardships, brutalities’, the younger generation ‘have had relatively quiet and placid a life.
There’s a really good piece on sg_ljers positing the Bukit Ho Swee fire as the turning point in modern Singapore history. It’s apparently part of PhD research by this LJ user who has a number of excellent posts in a similar vein.
Lagos, Nigeria
From Current
Doing post-colonial literature I think we covered a little bit regarding Nigeria through the works of Chinua Achebe, and the reason why I enjoyed taking my course is that as far as the humanities are concerned literature covers a lot of ground. Unfortunately a lot of us (myself included) don’t take the time to follow up the study of art with the study of life.
I still believe that an urban environment can be the best choice for humanity ecologically and economically speaking, but this particular mini-documentary shows some of the problems that humanity faces in actually translating an ideal city into a functioning reality. And to keep things local, Lagos is the fastest growing mega-city in the world, referring to urban areas with more than ten million people. Granted the fastidious nature of the Singaporean administration means we’re unlikely to have slums on the level that Nigeria does, but I hope awareness of the situation of other cities in managing their populations means we tread more cautiously towards the goal of a population of more than six million.
wait… what?
Local research shows shopping can stave off dementia
The title seems to make an awfully huge jump of logic from the actual findings and is probably a not so secret attempt at boosting the economy.
“I’m not wasting money, I’m preventing myself from going senile!”
18 Two wheels of justice
Montreal wants Paris style bike-sharing
The city is planning a bike-sharing project that could make stations available by fall of 2008, and could cover the city in 300 stations by fall of 2009…The idea is to encourage Montrealers and tourists to use the public bicycles instead of cars for short, inner-city trips. Users will be able to pick up a bike at one station, use it, then drop it off at any station of their choice.
Big cities try to ease way for bicyclists
Google Reader
I’ve been using Google Reader to go through my list of regular reads, although I find using an RSS reader doesn’t actually save you much on the internet. You’re still pretty much going through your bookmarks, just that they’re all now in one place and I don’t really regularly visit blogs that don’t have feeds of some kind. Things like Digg, Videosift or the news feeds I subscribe to are particularly frustrating since they update very regularly and you don’t always get a chance to actually go through all the posts. In any case, between Google Reader and Facebook(the genuine crack cocaine of social networking sites), that’s how I’m spending my internet time these days.
So here’s some stuff I got off the feeds.
Blog recommendation: The Head Heeb
An exceedingly well written blog dealing with political matters I’d like to recommend is The Head Heeb. Written by Jonathan Edelstein, a Jewish American lawyer, it doesn’t deal with the issues you might expect, and one reason why I like it is because he follows developments in two regions that rarely get any air time or print space in traditional media: Africa and the Pacific Islands. I haven’t read it in awhile, but I recently added its feed to my Google Reader. Recent posts include the growth of Islam in Melanasia, intellectual property rights with regards to coffee in Ethiopia and Sudanese refugees taking asylum in Israel. While posts are often lengthy, they’re also intelligent and well-written and well worth reading for anybody who gives a damn.
culture and venerealism
The Interpreter - John Colapinto
The New Yorker has a really fascinating albeit lengthy article about what appears to be the unique linguistic nature of the Pirahã culture in the Amazon, which has apparently created some controversy among linguists. I respect Noam Chomsky for some of the stances he’s taken politically, but I think as I’ve grown older I’ve had to revise and reconsider certain opinions about certain ideas and this article throws a lot of what Chomsky theorised about linguistics, which had early in the twentieth century helped it progress as a science, into doubt.
Thanks to That’s How It Happened for the link, and kottke also has links to the same topic, with some additional links of interest.
***
Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching - Terry Eagleton
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.
For some reason I’d always expected Marxist critics to be dry and humourless. Terry Eagleton on the other hand makes for wonderfully entertaining reading that is intelligent without ever being dull. The above is his review of Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion and it addresses a lot of the problems I have with texts like this, among them that atheists and religious fundamentalists appear to have the same problem; they both apparently have nothing better to do than talk about God.
***
Slate has an interesting series called Blogging the Bible by David Plotz, covering the entirety of the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh). It’s by no means theologically indepth, but as a layJew’s experience of reading the books in their entirety it makes for fairly interesting reading.
Technorati Tags: linguistics, terry eagleton, richard dawkins, judaism
