Or at least the debate over it. Scott Malcomson, a former advisor to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has a review essay on two new books on humanitarian intervention. Remember that phrase? Speak the words, and they shall become real again; and after the last 8 years of silence, a relief to see more of this in print. Malcomson piece reviews Conor Foley’s The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War (Verso), and Gareth Evans’ The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All (Brookings Institution Press).

In general:

It is hard to date exactly when humanitarianism got decisively bound up with making war, although many would point to Colin Powell’s 2001 endorsement of relief workers in Afghanistan as a “force multiplier for us . . . an important part of our combat team.” In these two very different books, Conor Foley, an experienced relief worker, laments the transformation of humanitarianism into an aspect of politics, while Gareth Evans, a doughty Australian politician and head of the International Crisis Group, argues for something like its institutionalization. Both books are poised to influence debate as we make the turn into a post-Bush world.

Not sure I agree with Malcomson’s triangulation here, since humanitarianism was but one of many fields securitized in what one might, for lack of a better term, call the “war effort”. In this, he might be missing the larger debate on the role of neutrality in international relations, and the kicking it’s been receiving since the early 1990s.

On Bush:

Foley and Evans both end their books with rather unexpected salvoes of anti-Bush feeling, which I take to be backhanded adieus to a man who, by enabling the international community to unite against Washington, has provided it with a coherence it might not otherwise have had. It will be fascinating to see what the community does when it no longer has George W. Bush to kick around — or to hold it together.

Ooookaayyy… I concede that the outgoing administration’s policies and actions repolarized domestic and global politics, which may have had a cohering effect in certain sectors. But I wonder if humanitarianism was one of them, or whether we actually know to what extent it was coherent or not in the years prior to Bush Jr. After close to a decade spent quivering in the shade of warfighting, at least part of the debate should now turn to the hows and whys of humanitarian consciousness that sprouted in the 1990s (where’s Peter Novick when you need him?), how it compares to the last eight years’ interpretation of the issues, and how underlying problems of intermediacy and indeterminacy have shaped the landscape throughout.

We’ve been fine tuning a few things around the CTlab site recently, basically doing some house cleaning, restacking the shelves, and generally trying to impose a bit of common sense ordering to the architecture and content.

You’ll notice a brand new layout (yes, that makes this about the fourth or fifth since we started in Dec 2007), including separate sections for symposia, a support page where CTlab fans and readers, if they’re so inclined, can find out about ways to get involved, keep us interesting, and keep us solvent. It’s not quite done, and you can look forward to some whizbang results of professional web design to take effect before the end of the year.

There’s a new “datastreams” section [Ed’s Note: section and RSS hastily renamed “Academic News”] which is for news and information on academic issues, calls for papers, conferences, new publications, funding opportunities, etc. Some of this is in response to the feedback we received in our audience survey –  judging from the inputs we’ve read so far, there’s a gap here that needs to be filled.

The blog feed is the same as it always was, but readers will need to subscribe separately to the new features, since the changes are based on newly created blog modules. Don’t forget to stop by the subscriptions page for the new RSS feeds on your way out, and keep an eye on that page – we’ll be installing a few additional items over the coming weeks as a way of keeping things smart around here.

Alternate title: On the True Nature of Feral Cities.

Another one for the serious news category, this one from The Economist, which apparently has a sense of humor (or its layout editors are smoking crack, you pick). On the Brussels-London Eurostar, I was thumbing through the 6-12 December issue, when I almost fell out of my seat. On the same two pages, 56 and 57, I found the following three articles, all lined up like daffy ducks in a psychotropic row:

• The Worm Turns: A Cyber Attack Alarms the Pentagon
• Feral Hogs: If You Go Down to the Woods Today
• City of the Future: A Rare Opportunity to Build an Urban Centre From Scratch

Read singly, not a big deal. Read three in a row, and there’s an unmistakable suggestion at work connecting a virtual viral infection that’s spread throughout the national security cyber infrastructure, the proliferation of millions – MILLIONS – of giant, hairy, tusked porkers, and a small town in the middle of nowhere looking to more or less spontaneously self-generate.

Now, I’m not going to suggest that The Economist gets its story ideas and inspiration from CTlab, but… if there’s a meme-god out there, he’s reading CTlab, looking around at all the mainstream media, and with a slight chuckle and mischievous gleam in his eye, infusing some of the latter with a sense of the former. I suppose that wouldn’t really be a meme thing, exactly; more like predestinarianism, but whatever.

There’s a Hogtown joke in here somewhere…

Crysis Mass Physics HD By ÂLÐÒ•Ó from Ald0o0 on Vimeo.

Gaming. It subverts serious, sober scholarship and makes it hip by tapping into my backbrain with good tunes and wild interactive graphics, bypassing my conscious, professional concerns about ethics in research: I don’t want to like it; I just do.

I’ve been flipping through some of the latest entries at Andrew Hudson-Smith’s Digital Urban, and pasting some of the video here at CTlab. The interest, as always, is in the applied spatial research. In this case, the thread is based on the Crysis gaming engine:

The Crysis engine has an inbuilt physics system that supports vehicles, rigid bodies, liquid, rag doll, cloth and soft body effects. The movies in this post provide a glimpse of the physics engine in action, the first clip above demonstrates the ‘Lego’ modification running in real-time.

Andrew’s pulled all sorts of video demos of the system, which are pretty slick, from a Vimeo series. An online tutorial entitled “How to Render High Quality Videos of Destruction” explains it all; catchy digital hellfire and brimstone, that.

Crysis LEGO map from Robert on Vimeo.

Something very insidious about this… yet strangely satisfying. When I was a kid, I had to content myself with being able to make an Uzi (non-functioning) out of Lego. Now, you can destroy entire Lego worlds!

H/T Digital Urban