Pop Bioethics » History

Humanity

Kyle Munkittrick — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:14:31 +0000

Warning, NSFW. Click to embiggen:

Done in 23 panes (as in the # of chromosomes). The artist takes to the Three Fs school of history: fighting, fashion, and fucking. Ladies are there to be ogled and make babies, non-Western cultures are static, and science and tech are there to enable the three Fs. via reddit.

Perfecte Ye Olden Lady

Kyle Munkittrick — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:44:06 +0000

J. Hughes sends along an interesting addendum to yesterday’s post:

She’s the perfect woman, distilled from 40 other women, in 1898.

The Revolution At Our Thumbtips

Kyle Munkittrick — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 14:10:34 +0000

R.U. Sirius’ best of 2009 list, I felt, was missing one critical piece: the Iranian Green Revolution. It isn’t over yet and it may not be a success in its current iteration, but remains one of the best proofs of the power of communication technology to undermine a brutal regime. The beauty of the situation is that it is 1984 in reverse, the digital panopticon being hijacked and used against itself.

Twitter, digital cameras, YouTube, MMS, blogs, email, VoIP, and IM are being used to expose the open fascism of the Iranian coup. All of these technologies are available on most modern cellphones, at our thumb-tips. The Iranians, no strangers to tech or the web, are fighting back against their oppressors by doing the most vicious thing possible: exposing them. Every day waves of citizen-journalists, chronicling their own lives as evidence of tyranny, send their stories into cyberspace. A few good websites are working to aggregate and articulate these stories into a coherent narrative.

With the power of a simple device in their pockets – a device developed by capitalism and popularized by a materialist, consumer culture obsessed with gadgetry and the next-big-thing – the Iranian people trying to take their republic back. That, in my mind, is a great thing.

1468-88

Kyle Munkittrick — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 19:06:07 +0000

The Renaissance was so awesome. I mean that in the OED version of “awesome:” terrifying and almost impossible to process in terms of scale, grandeur, and importance; sublime. A quotation from Richard Tarnas’ The Passion of the Western Mind:

The same two decades (1468-88) that saw the Florentine Academy’s Neoplatonic revival at its height during the reign of Lorenzo the Magnificent also saw the births of Copernicus, Luther, Castiglione, Raphael, Durer, Michelangelo, Giorgione, Machiavelli, Cesare Borgia, Zwingli, Pizarro, Magellan, and More. In the same period … Leonardo began his artistic career with his painting of the angel in Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ, then his own Adoration of the Magi, Botticelli panted Primavera and the Birth of Venus … Erasmus received his early Humanist education in Holland and Pico della Mirandola composed the manifesto of Renaissance Humanism, the Oration on the Dignity of Man.

Oh, and those ellipses are filled with even more stuff that happened that I just didn’t feel like typing. That was in two decades.