Sometimes, I just want to be riding a bike through the souks of Marakesh.

Now, Mike Meginnis used a period instead. Silly man. Now I [...]]]> See what I did there? By putting a question mark at the end of my post title, I make it clear I’m just a curious fellow, and in no way insulting the character of that lovable blogger “of no party or clique.”

Now, Mike Meginnis used a period instead. Silly man. Now I have to offer a qualified defense of Sullivan.

It is certainly is nonsense to, as Mike says, “draw a lesson about ‘Arab culture’ and (what Sully would call) its many shortcomings from the time we blew up their country without their consent and then stuck around to remake it in our own image.” However, in that it’s acceptable to make generalizations about Arab culture based on empirical data, arriving at bad conclusions based on outliers isn’t racist…it’s just wrong.

The bright line between acceptable cultural criticism and unacceptable racism is essentialism — you can condemn a social construct, but not the traits of a people. I think Mike too recognizes this distinction since he claims Andrew is trying to “prove some sort of congenital flaw in the so-called ‘Arab character.’” However, this is a leap, as Sullivan’s commentary never moves into a discussion of the nature of Arabs.

What Sullivan does is argue that (present-day, mainstream) Arab culture offers only pessimistic prospects for (western) democracy (and that this is a bad thing). The parenthetical statements being implicit in the piece, and me lacking sufficient exposure to the Sullivan oeuvre, it’s possible I’m misjudging his meaning and he means something worse than this. But on the surface, this statement’s fine, even if the Iraq experience is a lousy basis for it.

UPDATE: So, I’m not ready to throw around ‘racist,’ but after Meginnis’s response offering more examples of Sullivan’s ethnic criticism, I would suggest to Andrew that less time spent discussing the behavior of the brown & black brethren might be a good idea.

To my knowledge, there [...]]]> Reading Klein’s and Meginnis’s posts on the US & Co. giving away other people’s land for a Jewish state, I wanted to note that it seems likely that Holocaust survivors themselves would have preferred American to Palestinian land. An extended footnote in Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle (pg. 92) lays out the evidence:

To my knowledge, there has been no serious study of this question. For conflicting opinions, see Lieut.-General Morgan, British Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander, 1943-44, and Chief of UNRRA (the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) Operations in Germany, 1945-46; and Yehuda Bauer, a well known Israeli historian.

Morgan believes that what “was represented as being a spontaneous surge of tortured and persecuted people toward their long-lost homeland” was in fact the result of superb Zionist organization and “iron discipline” in the camps, misrepresented by “the skill of the Zionist propaganda campaign.” “I fancy that, in reality, there were few among the travelers [Jewish refugees from Easterm Europe] who, of their own free will, would have gone elsewhere than to the U.S.A.”

…

Bauer, in contrast, concludes that the vast majority of the refugees preferred to go to Palestine, citing a UNRRA questionnaire indicating that 96.8% preferred to go to Palestine with only 393 of 19,311 wanting to go to the U.S.

…

He also concludes that by late 1947 about half would have preferred to go to the U.S., though after establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948 “most Jews chose it” — no alternative was in fact available.

The Report to President Truman by his envoy Earl G. Harrison on the conditions and needs of displaced persons concluded that Palestine was the first choice of the Jewish DPs, noting however that many want to go there “because they realize that their opportunity to be admitted into the United States or into other countries in the Western hemisphere is limited, if not impossible.”

I also like how well this recaptures the spirit of the Emancipation Proclamation, this time ceding uncontrolled land rather than out-of-jurisdiction slaves.Brilliant!

This is the CCTV Tower by OMA and is currently under construction in Beijing. This is one of my favorite new projects, not because of its anatomical references, but because the density of the diagonal [...]]]> I’d like to take a break from my phallic series to bring you the cutting edge of skyscraper design: Vaginas.

This is the CCTV Tower by OMA and is currently under construction in Beijing. This is one of my favorite new projects, not because of its anatomical references, but because the density of the diagonal steel lattice was determined by the stresses experienced by the various regions of the structure. So the pattern of the building directly expressed what’s going on structurally. Plus it’s shaped like a mobius strip, and that’s just cool.

Then we have the Opus by Zaha Hadid, to be built in — wait for it — Dubai. I hope it’s sited so you can see the Borj Dubai threw the void, though I’m not sure humanity could survive symbolism on that scale. Anyway, this building’s less cool from an expressing structural engineering standpoint, but making it work will certainly be challenging. And I’m very much a fan of the free-form void; very sculptural.

(Update: Sorry for messing up Hadid’s name, though I do wish she were named Zaza.)

*Until they build Next Big Thing next year.

Above is the Burj Dubai, the biggest building in the world.  I’m glad the profits of petroleum resource exploitation are being well spent.  I mean, the tower’s obviously a bargain at $800 billion.

Of interest to me (if no one else), it appears to use a bundled tube structural [...]]]>

*Until they build Next Big Thing next year.

Above is the Burj Dubai, the biggest building in the world.  I’m glad the profits of petroleum resource exploitation are being well spent.  I mean, the tower’s obviously a bargain at $800 billion.

Of interest to me (if no one else), it appears to use a bundled tube structural system (think Sears tower), and they’re getting impressive mileage out of that old standby.  There are newer systems (such as the Mega-Structure system used in the Shanghai World Financial Center (pdf link)), that many professionals believe will produce the biggest buildings in the next few decades.  So, we’ll see what happens, maybe skyhooks aren’t that far off…