Νότια Αφρική - Cecil Rhodes

"I contend that we are the first race in the world, and the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. I cintend that every acre added to our territory means the birth of more of the English race who otherwise would not have been brought into existence."

Αυτές ήταν το 1877 οι σκέψεις - που έγιναν και πράξεις - του Cecil Rhodes, ο οποίος, πριν γίνει ο πρώτος Πρωθυπουργός της Αποικίας του Ακρωτηρίου (Cape Colony), το 1890, είχε ιδρύσει μια από τις πλέον κερδοφόρες και εκμεταλλευτικές εταιρίες εξόρυξης πολυτίμων λίθων στον κόσμο. Ως Πρωθυπουργός, εξέδωσε μια σειρά νόμων οι οποίοι στερούσαν τους ιθαγενείς Νοτιοαφρικανούς από δικαιώματα κυριότητας στη γη τους και τους έβαζαν να δουλέψουν σε Ευρωπαίους μεγαλοκτηματίες.

Την άνοιξη του 2015, το Πανεπιστήμιο του Κέηπ Τάουν έγινε πεδίο ταραχών/διαμαρτυριών, διότι οι φοιτητές ζητούσαν από τη διοίκηση να απομακρύνει το άγαλμα του Cecil Rhodes από το campus. Αρχικά, αποφασίσθηκε να παραμείνει το άγαλμα ως υπενθύμιση του ότι η διαδικασία αποαποικιοποίησης παρέμενε ανολοκλήρωτη. Εν τέλει απομακρύνθηκε την 9η Απριλίου 2016.

Νότια Αφρική: Αγαπημένη χώρα, αγαπημένο κομμάτι των μαθημάτων Συγκριτικού Δικαίου

Η οικολογία του δικαίου

         "During the past three decades, a radically new paradigm has emerged at the forefront of science. At the heart of paradigms from a mechanisticv to a holistic and ecological worldview we find a change of metaphor: from seeing the world as a machine to understanding it as a network. Networks, of course, are patterns of relationships; hence, understanding life in terms of networks requires an ability to think in terms of relationships and patterns. In s...cience, this new way of thinking is known as "systems thinking" or systemic thinking. We have also realized that nature sustains life through a set of ecological principles that are generative rather than extractive.
        A corresponding paradigm shift has not het happened either in jurisprudence or in the public understanding of law. Such a shift is now urgently needed, since the major problems of our time are systemic problems - all interconnected and interdependent - and our global crisis is an ecological crisis in the broadest sense of the term.
             In this book, we call for a profound change of legal paradigms, leading to a new "ecology of law". At the heart of this new ecological legal order lies a view of social reality not as being an aggregate of individual "building blocs" but rather as being composed of social networks and communities. Law, in this view, is not an objective structure, but emerges from actively engaged citizen and legal communities as the legal embodiment of their self-organization."

Aπό ένα από τα πιο ενδιαφέροντα νομικά βιβλία που έχουν γραφεί τα τελευταία χρόνια:


Fritjof Carpa and Ugo Mattei, "The Ecology of Law. Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community", 2015, pp. 3-4

Language and Music and Mathematics

"Of the technical terminologies that intimidate the lay theorist or amateur philosopher, surely the two most effective and frightening are the musical and the mathematical; and this is no accident, inasmuch as they count among the most abstract languages the human mind is able to handle, and Jacques Attali has indeed on that very basis demonstrated their kinship in his argument, not merely for the kinship of musical innovation with economic structure, but even (in Noise) for the ways in which the former has tended historically to anticipate the latter, so that the music of one moment of the mode of production is often prophetic of the infrastructural development to come in the next.

"Still, from the insertion of musical examples into the text in visual form, to the reading of scores, the assessment of keys and their intrinsic relationships to each other as tonic, dominant, and the like, the role of the modes (major and minor), all the way through to the foreign words that originally designated this or that tempo and later on became the names for kinds of movement or structure (allegro, andante, etc.), ending up with notations to the conductor, such as prestissimo or stürmisch bewegt, we do witness a gradual anthropomorphization of these technical notations, in such a way that proto-narratives seem to emerge, at first visible merely as emotional tonality or mood."

Τα αποσπάσματα είναι από:

Fredric Jameson, The Ancients and the Postmoderns. On the Historicity of Forms, Verso, London - New York 2017 (first published: 2015), p. 114-115.

Οι φωτογραφίες είναι από μέρη στη Μαύρη Θάλασσα, το 1997.