Is Boris Yeltsin A Mean Drunk? Does The Russian Bear Shit In The McDonalds Dumpster?
I read recently that nearly a billion people, nearly one sixth of the world, will view this year’s Super Bowl between the Carolina Panthers and the New England Patriots. And while we’re on the topic of ‘patriots’, with the U.S.’s recent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, a new litany of commentary has arrived plugging the superiority of Western culture, technologically and politically, to justify acts of raw, violent appropriation. We are told through the cracked lens of the media that ‘western democracy’ is not only a less violent political system, all evidence to the contrary, but inevitably leads to material prosperity by reason of its advanced technology: the implication being that it is material prosperity that brings about spiritual prosperity, a Madison Avenue staple for many decades. If this is the case, as the pundits insist, then technology and its fundament, the hard sciences, are central to our way of knowing the world, especially as science and technology have shaped and p
