Daily Archives: March 1, 2017

13 Feb 2017, 12:34 p.m.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has condemned the Western Australian Liberal Party's unprecedented decision to preference One Nation ahead of the Nationals at the upcoming state election, a deal that has been defended by Mr Joyce's federal Liberal partners.

Prime Minister and Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull with Nationals leader and Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop. Photo: Andrew Meares

Trade Minister Steven Ciobo has defended One Nation's record defending the government, while Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has warned the deal could cost the Liberal Party government in WA. Photo: Andrew Meares

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has condemned the Western Australian Liberal Party's unprecedented decision to preference One Nation ahead of the Nationals at the upcoming state election, a deal that is splitting opinion in the federal Coalition ranks.

Striking a different note to Liberal colleagues, former prime minister Tony Abbott agreed with the argument that One Nation leader Pauline Hanson was a "better person" today than when she was previously in Parliament but said the Nationals should be preferenced above all other parties.

While Mr Joyce described the deal as "disappointing", cabinet colleague and Trade Minister Steve Ciobosaidthe Liberal Party should put itself in the best position to govern and talked up Ms Hanson's right-wing populist party as displaying a "certain amount of economic rationalism" and support for government policy.

Mr Joyce said the conclusion "that the next best people to govern Western Australia after the Liberal Party are One Nation" needed to be reconsideredand the most successful governments in Australia were ones based on partnerships between the Liberals and Nationals.

"When you step away from that, there's one thing you can absolutely be assured of is that we are going to be in opposition," he told reporterson Monday morning.

"[WA Premier] Colin Barnett has been around thepoliticalgame a long while and he should seriously consider whether he thinks that this is a good idea or whether he's flirting with a concept that would put his own side and Liberal colleagues in opposition."

The deal will see Liberals preference One Nation above the Nationals in the upper house country regions in return for the party's support in all lower house seats at the March 11 election.

The alliance between the more independent WA branch of the Nationals and the Liberals is reportedly at breaking point over the deal, which could cost the smaller rural party a handful of seats.

"Pauline Hanson is a different and, I would say, better person today than she was 20 years ago. Certainly she's got a more, I think, nuanced approach to politics today," Mr Abbott told Sydney radio station 2GB.

"It's not up to me to decide where preference should go but, if it was, I'd certainly be putting One Nation ahead of Labor and I'd be putting the National Party ahead of everyone. Because the National Party are our Coalition partnersin Canberra and in most states and they are our alliance partners in Western Australia."

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull declined to criticise the deal, stating that preference deals in the state election were a matter for the relevant division who "have got make their judgment based on their assessment of their electoral priorities".

Mr Ciobo joined the Prime Minister and other federal Liberal colleagues in defending the WA division's right to make its own decisions.

"What we've got to do is make decisions that put us in the best possible position to govern," he told ABC radio of the motivations of his own branch in Queensland.

After Industry Minister Arthur Sinodinos called the modern One Nation more "sophisticated" now, Mr Ciobo also praised the resurgent party.

"If you look at, for example, how Pauline Hanson's gone about putting her support in the Senate, you'll see that she's often voting in favour of government legislation.There's a certain amount of economic rationalism, a certain amount of approach that's reflective of what it is we are trying to do to govern Australia in a fiscally responsible way.One Nation has certainly signed up to that much more than Labor."

When in government, former Liberal prime minister John Howard declared that One Nation would always be put last on how-to-vote cards.

Follow us on Facebook

The story Barnaby Joyce condemns WA Liberals' preference deal with One Nation first appeared on The Sydney Morning Herald.

View original post here:

Barnaby Joyce condemns WA Liberals' preference deal with One Nation - Eyre Peninsula Tribune

Architectures biggest award has gone not to a star, but to a group of three Spanish designers deeply committed to creating a sense ofplace.

The Hyatt Foundation announced Wednesday that Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta, who lead the Catalan firm RCR Arquitectes, had won the $100,000 (U.S.) Pritzker Architecture Prize. Often called architectures Nobel Prize, it has previously gone to many leading figures in architecture, among them Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano and the late ZahaHadid.

Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and RamonVilalta.

Javier LorenzoDomnguez

RCR are little-known outside of Spain; much of their work is in Catalonia, concentrated on their small hometown of Olot, where they set up shop in 1988. While several recent winners of the Pritzker have focused on humanitarian issues designing social housing or temporary shelters RCRs win signals a turn back to interests in craft and, in particular, site and culture. It is a victory for slowarchitecture.

All their works have a strong sense of place and are powerfully connected to the surrounding landscape, the award jury said in a statement. This connection comes from understanding history, the natural topography, customs and cultures, among other things and observing and experiencing light, shade, colours and theseasons.

Bell-Lloc Winery, Palams, Girona,Spain.

Hisao Suzuki

The Pritzker jury cited specific projects, including outdoor space at Les Cols Restaurant in Olot and the firms own office in a former foundry. These projects use the local volcanic rock; at the restaurant, it is in dialogue with pristine glass cubes that evoke minimalist sculpture and Japanese modern architecture, and berms of earth. The space is quite literally rooted in theground.

Similarly, their most recognized work, the Soulages Museum, is carved into the crest of a hill and forms a sort of sculpture in dialogue with landscape. The museum, in the southern French town of Rodez, is devoted to the work of the painter Pierre Soulages. It is a line of blocks clad in weathering steel, the material made famous by the artist Richard Serra. Yet it articulates the local geography, turning a face of glass towards a park and the historic centre of the town, while presenting a tougher, impermeable face toward modern commercialdevelopments.

La Lira Theater Public Open Space in Ripoll, Girona, Spain.(2011)

Hisao Suzuki

We are used to reading the site as of it had its own alphabet, Pigem says in documentary video produced by the Pritzker. And she says elsewhere, A great motivating force is to be able to discover the treasure of each place, or where the magicresides.

These traditional concerns of architecture were sometimes set aside by the Modernist movement of the 20th century in its push for rationalism and efficiency. The past three decades in architecture have been a dialogue between work that is driven by more personal agendas like Frank Gehrys and work that draws from its place. The latter tendency is a strength in Canada, where firms such as Shim-Sutcliffe, Mackay-Lyons Sweetapple and Patkau Architects have developed strong bodies of work that are somewhat local in theirapproaches.

Sant Antoni-Joan Oliver Library, Senior Citizens Center and Candida Perez Gardens in Barcelona, Spain.(2007)

Eugeni Pons

And then, more recently, architecture has taken a turn toward social concerns. The Pritzker has reflected that, beginning with the 2014 choice of the architect Shigeru Ban, whose work has bridged high design and humanitarian concerns. Last years award went to the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, best known for social housing that allows residents to contribute their own labour to the process. In social housing, there is no time for whats not strictly necessary, he told me. There is no arbitrariness. Aravenas win seemed to cement a shift in values for the prize to a type of design that aimed to change the world. It was an award for a set of values rather than pureaccomplishment.

Aranda, Pigem and Vilalta represent a gesture the other way, back toward architecture as a medium for subtle and slowcraft.

Row House in Olot, Girona, Spain(2012)

Hisao Suzuki

Their win also breaks ground in that there are three of them, and that one is a woman. Since its beginnings in 1979, the award has almost always gone to an individual, with only two exceptions, and only two winners have been women, which has generated contentious debate within a profession where women are underrepresented in many professional roles. In 1991, the Pritzker went to Robert Venturi, the American architect and theorist but not to Denise Scott Brown, who has been his lifelong collaborator in the office Venturi Scott Brown Associates. In 2013, a group of students at Harvard University organized a petition; they proposed that Venturis Pritzker should retroactively be shared with Scott Brown. The prizes organizers shot that ideadown.

Yet this years award recognizes the value ofcollaboration.

Ideas arrive from dialogue and collaboration by more than one person, says Vilalta in another video. Its almost a reaction against the contemporary world, which has promoted, in an exaggerated way, the value of theindividual.

Indeed architecture is, now more than ever, a collaborative art. And the Pritzkers newest laureates seem ready to confirm that in an atomized and globalized age, there is power in working together, and going slowly, and stayinghome.

See the rest here:

Architecture's Pritzker Prize lauds Spanish trio for 'a strong sense of place' - The Globe and Mail

MARCH 1, 2017

IN HIS FINAL YEARS, the late historian Tony Judt spilled much ink lamenting the decline of Western social democracy. In a series of articles and talks that culminated in his final book Ill Fares the Land (2010), he argued that in an age of market fundamentalism, the achievements of the European welfare state had been vastly understated. Not only did its social safety nets underpin the long economic boom of the decades after 1950, but by promoting equitable growth, they also foreclosed the return of extremist politics to Europe, ushering its industrialized western half into a halcyon era of prosperous security.

Consequently, Judt viewed the eclipse of the welfare state by privatization and free market economics in the late 20th century with great consternation. In his last public speech in late 2009, he expressed concern that the embrace of the market faith was pushing Europe and North America toward a new age of insecurity one foreshadowed by the financial catastrophe of 2008. Few in the West are old enough to know just what it means to watch our world collapse, he said. Why have we been in such a hurry to tear down the dikes laboriously set in place by our predecessors? Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?

Well, the deluge is here. In the United States, a wave of populist nativism has swept Donald Trump into the White House. Across the Atlantic, the ghosts of nationalism have returned, casting shadows over the future of the European Union. The same, and worse, is happening in places that never enjoyed the benefits of European-style social democracy in the first place. Cultural chauvinism is resurgent in Russia, India, and Turkey, while large parts of the Middle East are in the grip of chaos and a horrifying extremism. Everywhere, Pankaj Mishra argues in his new book Age of Anger, the driving force is the same: a deep disillusionment with economic globalization and its beneficiaries, which, far from spreading prosperity and universal civilization around the globe, have created dislocation and inequality on an unprecedented scale.

At the same time, this provocative book argues, our current malaise is nothing new. The worlds present turmoil from the rise of ISIS in the Middle East to the populist forces reshaping global politics echoes the Wests own violent transition to modernity two centuries ago. If Western pundits persist in seeing these changes as unprecedented, it is because they cling to a faith that under the influence of modernization, the world is slowly converging toward a benevolent Enlightenment tradition of rationalism, humanism, and liberal democracy. But as Mishra argues, these assumptions overlook both the contingency of the current liberal order what Tony Judt came to recognize as a late 20th-century parenthesis and the Wests own extraordinarily brutal initiation into political and economic modernity. In simplifying history, he writes, we have adopted a dangerous illusion.

Mishra may well be the ideal writer to diagnose our current moment. For more than two decades, the Indian essayist has grappled with the epochal question of what it means to be modern. His first book Butter Chicken in Ludhiana (1995) chronicled the effects of the global free market on the rhythms of small-town India. In From the Ruins of Empire (2012), he documented how Asian intellectuals grappled with the challenge of Western imperialism, responding with a mixture of resentful mimicry, cultural humiliation, and reactionary nationalism. Like the British philosopher John Gray, Mishra has become one of the most interesting public intellectuals in the West: a sort of anti-Thomas Friedman who tears down the reigning clichs of our political and intellectual elites.

Written after Narendra Modis election in India and completed right before the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, Age of Anger offers a scathing broadside against the historical provincialism of our current moment. Since 1989, Mishra writes, we have lived in an Age of No Alternatives, in which all the key questions about human affairs are deemed to have been settled. Francis Fukuyama famously argued the collapse of the Soviet Union had led us to the end of history, a world in which the prosperity and liberal democracy of postwar Western Europe and North America was seen not as a hard-won contingency, but as something like the resting state of humanity. These bland fanatics of Western civilization, as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr termed them, posited a self-reinforcing pattern of global convergence: as economic growth accelerated, national borders would melt away and societies in Asia, Latin America, and Africa would become, like Europe and North America, more secular and rational.

These dangerously misleading ideas, Mishra argues, not only elided the carnage and bedlam that accompanied the Wests own transition to modernity; they have also made us spectacularly ill-equipped to explain the current global turmoil. Trying to account for the rise of al-Qaeda and the spectacular violence of ISIS, Western pundits have fallen back on cultural explanations, many positing a worldwide clash of civilizations in which Islam is pitted against the West, and religion against reason.

Age of Anger argues that the roots of our current turmoil lie much deeper: in the contradictions of modernity itself. Since its origins in 18th-century Western Europe, Mishra argues, secular modernity has held out the promise of freedom, equality, and the transcendence of history only to repeatedly fall short of the mark. Everywhere, the creation of a modern commercial society has been experienced as both a dizzying excitement and a wrenching dislocation. Disrupting old religious and social structures, but often failing to fulfill its own promises of emancipation, it has created powerful countercurrents of what Nietzsche termed ressentiment, an existential resentment of other peoples being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness.

Mishra traces this contradiction back to the 18th-century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the first Enlightenment thinkers to take aim at its shortcomings. A gruff outsider once described by Isaiah Berlin as the greatest militant lowbrow in history, Rousseau repeatedly faced off against Voltaire and the philosophes, staunch advocates of secular rationality and the commercial society then emerging in Britain and France. Rousseau argued that the urbane philosophes forerunners of todays TED-talkers and networked elites had deposed superstition and religion only to replace it with an alienating new world of wealth, privilege, vanity, and endless striving. In its place, Rousseau tried to articulate a social order in which virtue and human character rather than commerce and money were central to politics, a community in which the tension between mans inner life and his social nature could be resolved, even if this part of his argument remained somewhat vague.

While Rousseaus existential yearning had its own dark side Mishra shows how it would inspire future generations of exclusionary nationalists in Germany and elsewhere he was the first person to think seriously about the problems of the new secular, commercial society. He saw the deep contradictions in a predominantly materialist ethic and a society founded on individuals enviously emulating the rich and craving their privileges. Conducting a swift tour through the work of key 18th- and 19th-century thinkers from Diderot and Dostoyevsky to Rimbaud and Tocqueville Mishra charts the march of commercial society as it migrated eastward to Germany and Russia, and then, at the point of a Western gun, to societies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. As he shows, ressentiment was never far behind.

It is this, Mishra writes, that connects todays terrorists from lone-wolf operators like Timothy McVeigh to the bearded scions of al-Qaeda and ISIS to the generation of anarchists and messianic revolutionaries that emerged from the maelstrom of modernizing Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These include half-forgotten figures like Giuseppe Mazzini, who promoted militant nationalism as a replacement for religion, and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who saw history as a blank slate on which the visionary individual could inscribe his own destiny through theatrical acts of violence.

Mishra depicts the smartphone-toting fighters of ISIS as radically modern figures, the canniest and most resourceful of all traders in the flourishing international economy of disaffection. Poorly versed in Koranic scripture, they resemble less the flock of the seventh-century Prophet than the followers of Gabriele DAnnunzio, the Italian nationalist poet, who, in 1919, took over the Adriatic town of Fiume and proclaimed a proto-fascist free state, complete with black uniforms and the raised-arm salute a comic opera preview of the real fascisms to come.

Today, as powers center of gravity shifts east, Mishra argues that the Wests own fateful experience of modernity is playing out globally. From Egypt and Syria and the slums of Mumbai, hundreds of millions of people herded by capitalism and technology into a common present have become marginal to the workings of global capital, creating powerful new vectors of ressentiment. It has also returned with a vengeance to the West, the homeland of secular modernity, where the mythic Volk Make America Great Again has reappeared as a spur to solidarity and action against real and imagined enemies.

We live in revolutionary times. In Age of Anger, Mishra has produced an urgent analysis of a moment in which the forgotten and dispossessed are rising up to challenge everything we thought we knew about the state of the world. It will be a time of blunt reckonings, Mishra writes, one calling for some truly transformative thinking, about both the self and the world. Beyond this, he offers little in the way of solutions. But the wisest response may be to accept that the modern contradiction is unsolvable, and get to work erecting bulwarks against the deluges to come.

Sebastian Strangiois a journalist and author focusing on Southeast Asia. He is also the author of the bookHun Sens Cambodia(Yale University Press, 2014).

See the original post here:

Pankaj Mishra on the Violent Transition to Modernity - lareviewofbooks