To be honest, I find he talked a lot and didn’t say much. The topic of his speech was that we, as Canadians, shouldn’t think we are without blood on our hands, and then he went on to list about 40 minutes worth of contemporary examples of oppression, both internally and externally, domestic and abroad, that “Canada” (I didn’t understand if he was talking about Canada the society or Canada the government, or both) is actively involved in. And, that was basically the end, with no theory, no philosophy, no plan of action, except the standard Michael Moore type complaining, without any form of positive plans.

Which is not to say I didn’t agree with him. I don’t know if such simplistic labels as “Socialist” or “Anarchist”–or even “theist” or “atheist”–should be used by intelligent people, who are always free for forge their own path. Yet, however much this man is famous in activist circles, I thought he didn’t tell me anything I (or most of the group that was assembled) already knew. Governments are bad?? What a shock. The history lesson I could have got from reading Indymedia, Noam Chomsky and Wikipedia.

However, what I did find shocking was his so-called opposition to violence, which was only an opposition to the violence of the oppressor, not the oppressed. At an even whose fliers demanded an end uniquivicol to violence at the university (not just one type of violence), I found that calling US and Canadian oppressors “murderers” and those who retaliate with violence, such as the leaders of the Haitian revolution, “unequivocal”.(Jaggi called Toussaint L’Ouverture a hero).

I got up and tried to point out the slight hypocrisy in that statement. I made the point that some theorists would argue that violence, in all its forms, is the problem, and not who wields it. Despite what the Wikipedia article says about him, he is not a pacifist, and he admitted that he supported the use of violence when it is necessary in conflict against oppression.

I hope that one day we can reach a point where only thinkers and humanitarians can be thought of as heroes. It takes more bravery to be Gandhi or Dr. King that a violent military commander, regardless of what side he shed blood for–blood is blood. Later I discussed a wonderful Derrida essay with a member of the audience, “The Force of Law”, which, in short, says that all critique, all revolution, begins with a kind of Divine violence that does away with law, but that same movement of violence eventually sets up and enforces new law, defeating its original purpose.

The end of violence, Derrida writes, exists in this messianic time (not a specific messianism) that is always in the future, but it never arrives. The ideal is always betrayed.

I guess I didn’t agree with his ideas of the role of violence.

In a decision hailed by free-speech advocates, the Delaware Supreme Court on Wednesday reversed a lower court decision requiring an Internet service provider to disclose the identity of an anonymous blogger who targeted a local elected official.

Of course, when entering the public sphere, the people are legally entitled to critique. The judge of the superior court wrote that the internet is a “unique democratizing medium unlike anything that has come before,” and argued that setting the bar too low would stop people from their given right to communicate and critique anonymously. And, he also says what I have been thinking for a long time, that blogs and chatrooms serve the same function as early democratic pamphleteering.

The nature of such a zone of freedom as the internet (Siva calls it anarchistic) is that we shouldn’t resort to legal means to combat ideas which we don’t like. In an academic’s dream, what we have to do is make a better blog with better arguments than those we dislike. Ideally, in such decentralized networks, it is all about survival of the fittest, which, in this instance, is a movement of freedom. And this judge agreed:

Steele noted in his opinion that plaintiffs in such cases can use the Internet to respond to character attacks and “generally set the record straight,” and that, as in Cahill’s case, blogs and chatrooms tend to be vehicles for people to express opinions, not facts.

It is going to happen, in the not too distant future, when it won’t be the cultural norm to fight what we don’t like with legal means, if it is in the realm of ideas. Sure, we are still going to call the cops for murder and arson, but if someone we don’t like is making arguments, which are the hight of non-violence, we won’t respond with an agent of violence, i.e. the State, but with an attack of non-violence, our words.

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Today I listened to Fred Kent on CBC radio (welcome back CBC, we missed you). He is a member of the Project for Public Spaces, a group into urban revitalization and the building of communities. I encourage everyone to look at their website, which is very interesting as well as informative, and not dry at all: it is filled with lists of great and horrible spaces, as well as pictures of cities and their wonderful city life not only here in North America, but world wide.

Their idea is that cities, specially car-driven North American ones, should return to this livable and public life of town squares, markets and urban diversity (as exemplified by Kensington Market:

The areaÕs mixed uses have the streets occupied at all times of the day. Murals on shops and local stores, layers of posters, low-rise buildings and a central park space create an oasis within the city. The mixed diversity of living spaces, independent restaurants, bars, clubs, grocery shops, coffee shops give the place a real local feel. There is a high level of neighbourhood involvement in issues surrounding Kensington market and have worked to maintain the local identity of the neighbourhood.

However, what if this applies not only to our physical space, but our mental or media based space as well. This struck me because I realized that I was listening to the radio, a medium which is slowly being eradicated (like market places or local shops): wiped out all together, or replaced with large, corporate, bland replacements of top-40 hits and sports stations (think the local mall).

I hate the term “Virtual Reality”–it reminds me of too many bad mid-90’s movies. However, our life in the media is somewhat of a “virtual space”. Small, independent booksellers are like little markets or stores, fighting against the large corporations for survival, and they give you some thing extra in that fight: a different perspective, where you can get thing you can’t get in the mainstream places. The web, originally a dynamic and bustling place, like a market place, which the PPS calls “the original meeting place”, is being dominated by government and corporate control, which is as we speak turning the web into a mall.

However, I think that the web will fare much better than the destruction of urban centres, or even of more traditional media like the radio. That is it costs nothing, or next to nothing, to start a website. And now, with the prices of hardware coming down, it costs nothing to start a web radio show–a podcast–and get it out to your listeners. Right now, it is just becoming cheap enough to produce video content, although I don’t think that video content is completely compatible with the way we interact with the internet, which is a whole other topic.

We can have this lively debate between healthy and organic spaces of information very easily: how much easier is it to make an socialist and anarchist website, then go through the rigour to make a physical anarchist bookstore, especially when it is the bank granting you a loan, the same bank you are looking to do away with.

As someone currently beginning to apply for a degree in the Faculty of Information Studies, I am slowly realizing that it is not one particular genre of book that I enjoy, but all genres together, and in fact the book itself. When first coming to Toronto, which has the second largest book collection after Harvard in North America, I got this classic feeling of Angst that I would not be able, even in a thousand lifetimes, to read all the books at Robarts Library. Robarts itself reminds me of “The Library of Babel“, its shape at least. Also, I got very happy this week reading Boing Boing about this Information Scientist, Eugene Garfield, compiled the most cited works of 1976-1983. This list affirms my believe that I cannot specialize in any one genre, as shown by the top ten:

1. T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 1962

2. J. Joyce, Ulysses. 1922

3. N. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957

4. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

5. N. Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. 1965

6. M. Foucault, The Order of Things. 1966

7. J. Derrida, Of Grammatology

8. R. Barthes, S/Z. 1970

9. M. Heidegger, Being and Time. 1927

10. E.R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. 1948

I love books themselves, information itself, regardless of the truth of falsehood of what is proposed. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a beautiful book, with a highly suspect thesis. Does it matter? What I want to defend and fight for is the propagation of ideas themselves, in order for us to be able to make comments and judgements for ourselves. Like Borges, I see books and library with touches of mysticism and religiousness, and for me this religiousness transcends East, West, analytic, literary, poetry, prose, fiction.

In the future, I would love for this list to include some non-Western books, but as it stands it makes me very excited, to an unhealthy degree. Why should we privilege Anglo-American philosophy over Continental, or even Philosophy over Literature–I’m sure some would argue there is no distinction. I would add, why privilege academic works over religious ones, modern over ancient, etc etc. I like that I’ve read quite a few of them myself.