My journey to Open Tech was largely uneventful, except most of the underground was closed and I got from Paddington to Barons Court by a very long route (Paddington to Embankment, Embankment to Barons Court — about 40 minutes in total) and a few times I noticed a marked level of nervousness amongst fellow passengers when someone arrived with a parcel, small backpack or bag.
On and of 7 July, Momus posted: 'The delights of the high density city are displaced by the stresses and (still largely imagined) dangers of the high density city. The high density city is always poised delicately between heaven and hell; this tips things over to the hell side. And yet I still believe in the utopian potential of big cities'. And he concluded the same post with, 'The precarious delights of the city tip over into some kind of Hieronymus Bosch hell scene, and suspicion attaches with tedious inevitability to otherness.' Today, he has an interesting mini-essay on "Israelization":
Israelization is a theme that's been hanging in the air for a while now. Last March I did a Click Opera entry called Anger in Angrael. Angrael is the name I give to the strategic alliance between the US, UK and Israel following the second Gulf War. Angrael is a cultural bloc and a military bloc. … The countries of the alliance will inevitably become "security states" and will be forced to adopt the extreme security measures seen in Israel: road blocks, constant states of alert, security perimeter fences, the sequestration in camps of "the Other", an internal Other increasingly seen, in the wake of suicide bombs and other terrorist incidents, as an enemy. … The main result of Israelization is a militarization of civilian space, or rather the dissolution of boundaries between the military and the civilian. A woman on the BBC News the other day described how the police had taken over her flat in Brixton, forcing her to camp in a back bedroom. They told her it was because bombs were being made in a neighbour's flat. Witnesses of the shooting of a man at Stockwell station yesterday spoke of their horror at seeing plain-clothed policemen with guns running onto a train and slaying a suspect with five shots. The sight of policemen armed with submachineguns has now become commonplace in London. The extraordinary has become ordinary. … In my essay Double Density I spoke about the refreshing sense of tranquility and trust that reigns in Tokyo, despite the fact that it's the world's largest city with some of the world's highest urban density levels.
He concludes this post saying that Israelization 'is how the world must not become. Today, it's looking more and more like an inevitable future, at least for the residents of "Angrael". The question is, how can we avoid Israelization, when both to live in fear and to carry on regardless take us straight to Israel?'
