[PHOTO] Looking south from Queen's Park at the Ontario Power Building

Looking south from Queen's Park at the Ontario Power Building.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• blogTO notes that the Global Village Backpackers building on the northeast corner of King and Spadina is up for sale.


• Centauri Dreams and the Planetary Society Blog both comment on the almost last-minute search by the Hubble space telescope for Kuiper belt objects to be targets for the New Horizons probe after it passes Pluto.


• Crooked Timber's Corey Robin speculates that the alleged boredom of Obama in office might be taken as a marker for imminent revolutionary sentiment.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes that the protoplanetary disk of protostar IRAS 16293-2422 is composed of two segments, both rotating in opposite directions.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money approves of Mattherw Yglesias' argument that some wars, like a proposed intervention in Iraq, are unwinnable.


• Marginal Revolution has more on the court decision against Argentina for the benefit of its creditors.


• Registan describes what the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is doing in Pakistan. (Putting down roots.)


• Savage Minds features a post by a pair of anthropologists advocating that the discipline take part in a boycott of Israel.


• Torontoist profiles the #parkdalelove Twitter campaign mounted after Mammoliti's ridiculous statements.


• The Volokh Conspiracy reports on a lawsuit by a convert to the church that converted him, alleging that because they publicized his conversion from Islam contrary to his request his life was threatened in Syria.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that Russia annexed Crimea because it thought alternative separatist movements in Ukraine were budding.

[LINK] "Putinization of not only Balkans, but Europe as well"

Bosnian writer and diplomat Hajrudin Somun's essay in Today's Zaman makes the argument, looking at France and Hungary and Italy and Turkey and elsewhere, that right-wing authoritarianism--near-fascism, even--is doing well in Europe outside of Russia. These things can spread.

Something strange is happening with the good old lady Europe. It seems as though it is returning to the previous century, to the outbreak of World War I, which will be commemorated with pomp in Sarajevo at the end of June. Has she already become saturated with neoliberal dogma, or will she be occupied by galloping corporate neoliberalism? Such gloomy conclusions could be heard after the recent elections in which 28 European countries brought a wave of far-right politics, unseen in the old continent since World War II, to the European Parliament (EP).

Aside from that trend, which is being widely analyzed, there is a simultaneous phenomenon that has drawn my attention even more. It is a warning of the merger between this xenophobic and racist offensive on the European west and the authoritarian “managed democracies” to its east, in and around Russia. Regardless of the political temperature's drop to Cold War levels between Moscow and the West, particularly due to the Ukrainian crisis, the Russian influence in rightist European circles has become almost equal to that which communist Russia had over Western socialist and leftist movements. “While the European Union has joined Washington in denouncing Russia's annexation of Crimea and the chaos stirred by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, Europe's right-wing populists have been gripped by a contrarian fever of enthusiasm for Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin,” Andrew Higgins wrote in The New York Times.

Here we are coming to the original source, the real cause of and accurate term for this phenomenon -- Putinization. It has already entered Wiktionary, which found that it was first used in 2010 to mean the conversion of a democracy into a one-party state. The Georgian media wrote about the “Putinization of Georgia" after the “Rose Revolution.” The anti-Barack Obama American media have mentioned “the Putinization of American Politics” as well. Hans Küng, the controversial Swiss Catholic theologian and head of the Tübingen-based Global Ethic institute, criticizing former Pope Benedict XVI in Der Spiegel, said: "In the past, the Roman system was compared with the communist system, one in which one person had all the say. Today I wonder if we are not perhaps in a phase of 'Putinization' of the Catholic Church."

It is no wonder why former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi praises Putin, because they belong to similar Machiavellian schools of rule. The French National Front's (FN) leader, Marine Le Pen, has even pleaded for the creation of a strategic alliance with the Kremlin in the form of a new “pan-European union.” Despite Europe's dependence on Russian energy and the interdependence between the European and Russian economies -- about 6,000 German companies are working in or for Russia -- it is unlikely that such a political union would be possible. Pro-Russian feelings in Western Europe are part of a tactical populist rhetoric to gather anti-American and euroskeptic voters. Alain de Benoist, a French “rightist” philosopher, has said Russia “is now obviously the principal alternative to American hegemony.”

[LINK] "The Man Who Was Immune to AIDS"

A Mike on Facebook linked to Jesse Green's New York Magazine article on the life of Stephen Crohn. One of the first people discovered to be immune to HIV infection due to a specific mutation preventing the virus from infecting white blood cells, Crohn was nonetheless devastated by being a rare survivor of his group. A powerful article.

Steve Crohn seemed almost euphoric, as if relieved to be checking off items on a list that had grown overwhelmingly long. In July, he flew to London to install one of his paintings in the home of the friends who’d commissioned it. Back in New York, he caught up with emails, left messages on machines, never mentioning or exhibiting any despair. Over lunch with the dean of his alma mater, he offered to provide photos he’d taken in the ’60s for an exhibition on the civil-rights movement. To his younger sister he mailed a birthday card featuring a tabby cat, apparently knowing full well the circumstances under which it would later arrive. He made lists of his bank accounts and passwords. Check, check, check.

And he finished his maps. For his entire life as an artist—he was now 66—he’d had to support himself and give structure to his existence with various day jobs: copyediting, magazine production, interior design, social work. But proofreading for Fodor’s was his longest-running gig, and perhaps the most congenial. He could do it from home, or what now passed as home. And for a punctilious person, it could be oddly satisfying. He would carefully read the manuscripts of travel books the publisher was preparing, compare the texts to the maps, and make sure everything mentioned in one was accurately pictured in the other. This time, this last time, he saw that the restaurant 2 Fools and a Bull was missing from the Oranjestad detail. The Tropicana Aruba resort on Eagle Beach had also gone missing. He neatly noted these mistakes, then brought the completed work to the Random House building, leaving it at the lobby desk. This was last August, Thursday the 15th, 1:30 in the afternoon.

Perhaps you saw him that pleasant day: one of those friendly-looking gay New Yorkers, aging but not old, thick but not fat, six-footish, with blue eyes and a slight dusting of ginger in the white fuzz haloing his face. Beefy worker’s hands, yet with a fine gold band on the right ring finger. Busy like someone with lots of work and places to be—though this was a front. He was freelance in the largest sense: unattached, perhaps unattachable. Most of all he was a survivor, which to him meant not just being but being special. He smoked Dunhills. Brushed his teeth with Vade­mecum. Was hearty with strangers, dapper at cocktails, cultivating the air of a wealthy eccentric despite his Social Security check. He dressed just so: often a neckerchief jauntily affixed, a beanie or a bolo tie, a popped collar, interesting socks. He had the verbal flair of Oscar Wilde if Wilde had 12-stepped. “Darling!” he’d call anyone. Or, an encouragement: “Go you!”

The obituaries got a lot wrong, but this much was right: Stephen Lyon Crohn didn’t die of AIDS. Not dying of AIDS was in fact the reason he got obituaries at all. Certainly it wasn’t because of his hundreds of artworks, however beautiful; few people had seen them. Being the great-nephew of the great Burrill Crohn—the doctor who described and gave his name to the chronic inflammatory disorder—was a piquant detail but not the point. No, it was Steve’s own medical description that earned him inches in the Daily News: “ ‘The Man Who Can’t Catch AIDS’ commits suicide at age of 66.” Or, as the Los Angeles Times put it: “Immune to HIV but not its tragedy.”

It was true: Steve was one of a surpassingly small number of people on Earth whose bodies essentially ignored HIV. And he was one of an even smaller subset who had occasion to find out. Back in the early 1980s, at a time when thousands of gay men, including dozens Steve knew and loved, began dying, he kept on living. Surely he’d been multiply exposed, and yet as he waited a year, and then many, to join those he’d lost, he came to realize that his body would not give him the chance. Frantic to find out why, he went from doctor to doctor, all but begging someone to study him; when eventually someone did, a great discovery was made. Not only had he inherited a genetic mutation that spared him, but that knowledge would lead to the development of a drug that even now helps sustain the lives of people not as lucky as he. “He realized that he could provide a piece of the jigsaw,” one researcher said, “and he was right.”

[LINK] David Kopel on Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia

Libertarian David Kopel posted a review at the group blog The Volokh Conspiracy of Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia, a documentary on the life of Gore Vidal that I'd seen this February. Kopel quite approves of the man and the documentary both.

Many people first saw Vidal in 1968, when Vidal and Buckley were commentators for ABC News during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The scene outside the convention hall looked like the last days of the Roman Republic. Abbie Hoffman and other “Yippies” successfully carried out their plan to turn peaceful protests against the Vietnam War into a riot; Mayor Richard Daley and his Chicago police department reciprocated by staging, in effect, a counter-riot, beating rioters, law-abiding protesters, the media, and others indiscriminately. On ABC, Buckley expressed his disgust with people who were expressly supporting the killing of American troops in Vietnam; Vidal then called Buckley a “crypto-fascist,” and Buckley fired back, “Listen, you queer.” Vidal was an early and ardent advocate of gay liberation, but he had not yet revealed his own personal sexual identity to the public.

Vidal delighted in acerbic criticism of anyone who disagreed with him, so Amnesia is filled with his barbs–some of them brilliant, some of them self-indulgent.

From the Truman administration to the present one, Vidal was a relentless critics of the national security state. He called himself an “anti-anti-communist,” and spoke forcefully against the mass surveillance society which has been created in the name of national security. My only contact with Vidal involved a November 1998 article he wrote for Vanity Fair, “The War at Home.” As the summary of the article states, “The U.S. Bill of Rights is being steadily eroded, with two million telephone calls tapped, 30 million workers under electronic surveillance, and, says the author, countless Americans harassed by a government that wages spurious wars against drugs and terrorism.” Compared to now, those were the good old days for privacy.

According to Vidal, my co-author Paul Blackman and I had “written the best and most detailed account of the American government’s current war on its unhappy citizenry in No More Wacos: What’s Wrong with Federal Law Enforcement and How to Fix It.” Vidal even sent me a nice letter. For me, that was a good lesson in how it’s possible to find common ground with someone whom you disagree with on many other issues. So when you think that somebody is wrong about nearly everything, it’s best to argue against their ideas, rather than anathematizing them personally.

[LINK] "‘I never took anything for granted.’ Kathleen Wynne in conversation"

The MacLean's interview conducted by Jonathon Gatehouse with Kathleen Wynne touches the basic points about the newly-elected premier of Ontario. (Questions about her sexual orientation and her wife are at the end, if you're curious.)

You underestimate Kathleen Wynne at your peril. Since taking over as Ontario premier from Dalton McGuinty 16 months ago, she has rejuvenated a scandal-ridden Liberal government by making big promises and tacking hard to the left. On June 12, voters rewarded her activist vision with a majority that few pundits or pollsters saw coming. She spoke with Maclean’s about what lies ahead for the country’s biggest province.

Q: You seemed surprised by your majority win. Why? Were your pollsters wrong too?

A: I think I was more pleased than surprised. We hadn’t known where we were going to land. There were polls all over the place: we were going to lose, or we had a majority, and everything in between. So I never counted on anything. I never took anything for granted.

Q: It was a campaign of stark choices: You were promising a lot of government stimulus; the Tories were promising austerity. So what message do you take away from this majority?

A: I think that people looked at some very clear differences and they chose the plan that was going to invest in them. Whether it’s the transit and transportation infrastructure they need in their communities, or whether it’s in a retirement pension plan that they, or their children or grandchildren need. They saw themselves reflected in the concerns and the investments we were talking about. That is what they want to see implemented.

[URBAN NOTE] On Nuit Rose at World Pride, 21 and 22 June 2014

blogTO's Natalia Manzocco let readers know about Nuit Rose, an all-night public art festival this coming weekend that's part of the upcoming World Pride Toronto event. (The name intentionally evokes Toronto's successful Nuit Blanche.)

This Saturday, June 21, a late-night queer art crawl [. . .] will be taking over Church-Wellesley Village and West Queen West. The aptly titled Nuit Rose features a sizeable lineup of visual art, performances and installations - ranging from the heartbreaking to the campy and everything in between.

Among the 50-plus events: the Grindr-powered portrait exhibit Tryst Pic, massive portraits of fixtures of New York's queer nightlife by Xtra photog John Simone, and manicures from an artist dressed up as a watermelon. After it's all over, the Gladstone will be hosting an afterparty that's set to rage on until 4am.

The best part: unlike Nuit Blanche, you could concievably see everything you want to see in one night, and a bus will shuttle revellers from the 519 Community Centre to the Gladstone Hotel, bridging the gap even further. Start making your schedule over at the Nuit Rose website.

Notes taken.