Jurriaan Bendien wrote: "What I realized was, that conferencing has been turned into a reified commodity, delivered assembly-line style with an emphasis on visuals. You might as well show a prepared video of the talks, and discuss the video a bit afterwards. It was really unnecessary to have the speakers there, since they were merely an appendage of their powerpoint slides - except for answering queries, but you could set up a helpline for that."
Don't worry Jurriaan, at least you didn't see/hear John Weeks at the "Keynes's Conference" in Izmir last week. I fortunately didn't either, but a friend who was there told me he gave an opening speech in which he spent around 5 minutes praising Ataturk as a great anti-fascist leader (weeks has written about this before) while praising protesters "all over Turkey" who are following him with basically everyone there applauding... I guess Weeks belongs to those whose opinions got reflected in an article published in The Guardian some weeks ago in which a black and white analysis of secularism vs islam was deployed to explain what is happening here (i'm currently in Turkey). I guess that after Ataturk, Weeks' favorite turk must be Sabiha Gökçen,also a "heroe" because she was the first turkish female pilot and now her name adorns one of Istanbul's airports. This heroe that bombarded Dersim in the late 30s was simply an extension of the "anti-fascist" impulses that Weeks celebrated with his talk in front of many so-called "heterodox economists". This is simply perplexing... _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
