Veljko's Blog

Yesterday, the BBC portal carried a most interesting story, revolving around the new joint Harvard/MIT programme for online education ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18191589 ). The gist is that, after more than a decade of various experiments with “online” or “long-distance” learning by "lesser" universities, the heavyweights of the higher education world are throwing their hats in to the ring, in what is likely to be a huge gamechanger. The Harvard/MIT gamechanger is the following: once these and similar universities enter the online education business, this will no longer be the province of shady, letterbox universities or decent university “cash cows.” Online teaching will include the best of the best and, once the best of the best become available to the world, the world will not settle for less. The masses will be able to watch star professors previously available only to a select few, for little or no money. What are the implications for the rest of higher ...

As regards yesterday's individuality, one must limit the argument, at this point, to Western or quasi-Western democracies. Though we like to think that we are oppressed, mankind has more opportunities for individual expression than ever before! Just twenty years ago, there was NO internet. Accordingly, there was NO Facebook and NO YouTube-no outlet where we could express ourselves for all the world to see. Today, we have all of the artistic tools at our disposal that we had twenty years ago-PLUS some that we did not. If we speak about the oppression of government, twenty years ago, could we just “log on” to a web site and download the text of the budget of our country? Could we read the annual report of any major company in the world? Could we access libraries halfway around the world at the click of a mouse or the touch of a screen? Granted, there are several social groups that suffer unabated oppression in many countries. I have in mind, first and foremost, the LGBT p...

From the No-Globals, through the Occupy Wall Street Movement, on to the Stop ACTA Movement, the revolutionaries of our time are not linked by a common thread. They are linked by a common rope, off of which only a few individual threads succeed in peeling off. The slogans and the publicly manifested roots of today's mass protests are well-known. There is a struggle. A struggle against a faceless, nameless, new world order (although the New World Order is a name, it is not the name of any actual order, much less a definition or description thereof, novelty not being, in and of itself, substance).  According to revolutionary legend, that new world order (or New World Order) seeks to dominate and enslave the human race. It aims to crush hard-earned and battle-won human rights. It desires the elimination of privacy and individuality. Just like Huxley's nightmarish Brave New World, it wants to make us all the same or, at best, all the same within a given social class....